Exile-and Glory Page 11

  "I see." And he did see. She had always been as certain that she was right as he'd been convinced that her way was wrong; and his way had fallen. He had no duties. The thought broke over him like one of the great grey curling rollers from the Pacific. I have no duties. It made him feel alone and uneasy. "I promise. Your secrets are safe."

  "No matter what you see? And no matter what you decide?"

  "Yes." And that was that, as they both knew. Aeneas cursed himself for allowing his emotions to betray him . . . but she was Laurie Jo, and she couldn't have changed that much. She couldn't.

  God, let me be able to join her. Let it always be like this. Because the last two hours have been the happiest I've had in sixteen years.

  The tower overlooked a valley ringed by low hills. A forest of cardones, the great sentinel cactus, marched down the sides of the hills to the leveled plain below. Rail lines and huge electric cables snaked through at either end; the plain was filled with concrete blockhouses where the power cables terminated. At the end of each blockhouse was a flat mirror a meter in diameter, and they all pointed toward the installation below them where streamlined cylinders squatted on railroad cars.

  The spacecraft were two meters in diameter and five times that tall, and as they waited in neat lines for their turn they reminded Aeneas of machine gun ammunition grown swollen and pregnant; but their progeny was not war.

  Everyone in the tower had been politely respectful, but harried; now they had no time for visitors. Hansen Enterprises carried no dead weight. There were no explainers, not even when the owner came to watch the operations; perhaps especially when Laurie Jo Hansen was present. Aeneas and Laurie Jo were alone in a small, glass-enclosed room, while below a dozen hard-eyed young men sat at consoles.

  A clock ticked off the seconds. "We have to be very precise," she told him. "The MHD engines give us half the power we need, but we have to draw the rest directly from the line. There'll be dimouts all over Baja."

  "And it costs," Aeneas said.

  "Yes. Three thousand megawatts for an hour. At twenty cents a kilowatt hour."

  "But you get part of the power directly."

  "From burning hydrogen in old rocket engines and sending it through an MHD system. Yes. But the hydrogen and oxygen have to be made. That part of the operation is less efficient than just taking the power from the line, but we have to do it. We can't take everything off the line when we launch." She looked fondly at the capsules below. "We get a lot for my six hundred thousand dollars, Aeneas. Eighty tons go into orbit in the next hour."

  The first of the capsules moved over the embankment enclosing the launch area. A roar from beyond the low hills signaled the beginning of the rocket engines: giant engines, but they lay on their sides, their exhaust directed down ceramic tubes protecting copper coils that drew power directly from the hot gasses.

  Aeneas couldn't see the launching mirror below the capsule, but suddenly the spacecraft rose and there was a blinding green beam, a solid rod of light over a meter thick extending from the capsule to the ground. The sound rolled past: two hundred and fifty explosions each second as the laser expanded the air in the parabolic chamber below the capsule, and the air rushed out to propel it upward. The two hundred and fifty-cycle note was oddly musical, but very loud at first, then dying away. The spacecraft soon vanished, but the light stayed on for half a minute, tracking the capsule; then it vanished as well.

  The mirrors at each blockhouse pivoted slightly, and a second capsule rose from another launch station. The green light tore through roiled air, and there was a humming roar that vibrated the glass of the observation room until the spacecraft was gone and there was only the silent power of the green light. In the half minute that the second capsule absorbed power, a new spacecraft had been placed on the first launch station. The mirrors pivoted again, and it rose; then another, and another.

  The laser launchings had been impressive on TV; live they were unbelievable. The long lines of capsules moved toward the earth and concrete emplacements protecting the launching mirror; they reached them; and seconds later, each capsule vanished at 300 gees, shoved upward by a meter-thick column that was nothing more than light, but which looked like a great green growing plant.

  "About a thousand kilograms each?" Aeneas asked.

  "Exactly a thousand kilos total weight," she said. "We lose fifty kilos of ablating material. The rest goes into orbit, and that's all payload. Any mass is payload. That's what we need up there, Aeneas, mass, any mass—metal, fuel, gases, tankage, even human wastes. We can convert and modify if we have something to start with."

  "And you can launch eighty thousand kilos in one hour . . ."

  "Yes. We lose some. Each one of those capsules has to be picked up, somehow. That costs mass. We guide some into rendezvous with Heimdall, but they have to go after most. Still it's cheaper this way—once we start launching, the power scheduling's such that it's better to go on for a full hour."

  The lines of capsules had ended; now new ones were brought up. These were longer and slimmer than the others; and when they took their places over the launching mirrors, they rose more slowly.

  "Ten gees," she said. "Crew capsules. Ten gees for a minute and a half."

  "Isn't that close to human tolerance?"

  "Not really." Her voice was cold and distant. "I took it. And if I can—"

  He finished the thought for her. "Hansen Enterprises employees will damn well have to. Or starve."

  "I want no one who goes only for the money."

  They watched the three personnel capsules rise; then the trains brought up more of the unmanned thirty-g cargo capsules, and the pregnant machine gun began again. "And this was what it was all for. Your crusade," he said.

  Her smile was wistful, full of triumph and regret. "Yes. I'm not proud of all I've done, Aeneas. You've seen La Paz. Todos Santos. Cabo. Ugly, changed, not what they were when we—not what they were. But the men in Cabo don't go to the mainland looking for work while their families starve. I've done that."

  "Yes. You've done that."

  "But it was all only fallout, Aeneas. This is what it was for. Heimdall. The rainbow bridge to the stars! And by God it was worth it! You haven't seen the station, Aeneas. And I want you to."

  He said nothing, but he looked out at the launching field. The lasers were off now. The great crippled rocket engines were silent. The power from the reactors was back on line, fed to the Baja industries, to Southern California; to the pumps even now cooling the laser installations. To the water-makers that made Baja fertile, for a while. But all that was incidental, because she hadn't lost the dream they'd shared, a dream she'd learned from him in his anger when America retreated from adventure . . . .

  She hadn't lost it. He thought he had, once. Not entirely; but he'd been willing to sacrifice it to a larger dream.

  Yet what dream was larger than a bridge to the stars?

  "And now what?" he asked.

  "You've seen what I've done. You don't know what I do to keep it."

  "And?"

  "And when you do—when you know everything that's happened in the last sixteen years—we'll talk. Not until then." And her eyes were on his, and he saw the hunger and the loneliness, and he prayed to a God he'd half forgotten that it wasn't just a reflection of his own.

  They flew high over the Pacific. There were no luxuries in this aircraft; Aeneas and Laurie Jo sat uncomfortably in bucket seats over the wing, and Miguel sat far behind them. Neither the pilot nor the air crew paid them any attention. The pilot was not pleased to have them aboard, no matter that the plane belonged to Laurie Jo Hansen.

  Two armed jets flew high above them. They bore the markings of Hansen Enterprises and were registered in Mexico; and the bribes required to keep permission for a private air force were as staggering as the cost of operating them.

  "Why?" Aeneas asked, pointing to the slim black delta shapes above.

  "Pirates," she said. "Each capsule holds a thousand kilos of cargo.
" She took papers from her briefcase and handed them to him. "Computer chips, four thousand dollars a kilo. Water-maker membranes, six thousand dollars a kilo if we'd sell them. We won't until we've enough for ourselves. Concentrated vitamins, forty-five hundred dollars a kilo. And other things. Chemicals, vaccines. Some not for sale at any price."

  The value of each capsule in the current drop was nearly seven million dollars. Even in these inflated times that was enough money to make a man wealthy for life. And there would be no problem selling the cargo . . . .

  "But how would pirates find them?" he asked. "You can bring them down anywhere in the world."

  "They can be tracked. So can my recovery planes. The NORAD radar system watches us very closely."

  "But they don't give information to pirates! Not anymore! I put a stop to that sort of thing!"

  "Did you, Aeneas? For a while, after Greg became President, the losses stopped; but they started again. Do you want proof?"

  "No." She'd never lied to him. "How long have you had proof? Why didn't you tell someone?"

  "Who'd listen? Greg Tolland is President of the United States."

  "Why didn't you tell me?"

  She was silent for a long time. There was only the thunder of the jet, and the chatter of the crew as they watched for the cargo capsules to parachute down from orbit. Finally: "What would I have been to you if I'd given you the proof about Greg, Aeneas? If I'd done that, I'd have lost you forever."

  And the White House itself had become the abattoir of his dreams . . . . "We fought you, Laurie Jo. I fought you. I think it gave Greg a perverted satisfaction to have me as his general against you. But—was he right? Laurie Jo, should power like yours exist?"

  "Without power, none of this would happen. You can't do anything without power."

  "Yes." They'd been through it before, endlessly. "But it must be responsible power! It must be directed for—"

  "For what, Aeneas? Something trite, like 'the betterment of mankind'? Who chooses the goals? And how do you see the choice is kept, once made? Responsible, Aeneas? To the people? You tried that."

  And that was the new thing in their eternal argument. Before, there had always been Greg Tolland and his People's Alliance. There had been the hope that power would be controlled. Could be controlled.

  "Greg was right, you know," she said. "Power like mine can't be neutral. It must be used or it dissipates. He assumed that because I wasn't with him, I was against him—and he was right."

  "Or made himself right—" The plane banked sharply and there were shouts. They ducked low to see out forward between the pilots; and far ahead was an orange billow in the sky.

  The plane moved swiftly. Hatches opened behind them, and a hook on a long cable trailed out. It caught the shrouds with a jolt perceptible even in that large ship; then the motors sang as the cable was reeled in.

  The plane banked onto a new course toward the next parachute. There would be five in all.

  "We don't dare miss," she said. "If one of them falls into the sea, there'll be swarms of ships and planes out to get it, and we can't do anything about it. Salvage, the courts call it."

  "My doing. It seemed right at the time. I—The enemy was Hansen Enterprises, not you. But why the fighters?"

  "To keep this plane from being shot down. There's too little time for the Equity people to get to the capsules before we do. They don't know when and where they're coming down until the retros fire. But there's enough time to intercept my recovery planes."

  Her voice was without drama, but Aeneas was startled. "Who flies the interceptors, Laurie Jo?"

  "They don't have any markings. Somehow the ships that salvage my wrecked planes always belong to Equity or one of their dummies; but the interceptors are unmarked. I doubt they'll bother this time. We're close to Mexico, and the cargo's only worth thirty-five million dollars."

  Only thirty-five million. Not so very much to Hansen Enterprises. But more than enough to buy souls. Most had a far lower price. "And NORAD tells them where to look?"

  "Sometimes. Other governments too. Greg Tolland will help any enemy of mine. Look at the situation with Peru and Ecuador. They steal my cargoes with the help of the United States." She was bitter now. The national claims to space above and water beyond the small countries her satellites and cargo drops passed through had been rejected by every international authority: until Greg Tolland had used the power of the United States. "It would have been different if I'd stayed with you."

  How different, he wondered. Sixteen years ago: she'd been Laurie Jo Preston, then. An orphan girl, with memories of her mother living far beyond the income she made as a night-club entertainer. And her mother had died, and Laurie Jo knew only a succession of governesses paid by bankers; and a trust fund that dictated what schools she would attend, what courses she would take. At first the bankers ruled her life; but they interfered with her very little after she was sixteen. They'd met at UCLA, the shy girl with her mysterious bankers and no parentage; Aeneas, already consumed with the daemon that drove him to change the world; and Greg Tolland, a young California Congressman with a political heritage that might someday take him to the White House, if he could keep his seat in Congress.

  At first, Greg Tolland had worked very hard for his election; but after Aeneas MacKenzie became his field deputy and manager, Tolland did not need to campaign any longer. They had won their second election together when Laurie Jo came into Aeneas's life.

  Two years. Two years she'd lived with Aeneas. The bankers didn't care. No one did. They traveled, and sang, and drank too much, and made love too little, and one day the bankers came to say that her name was Hansen, not Preston, and to tell her she had inherited control of the greatest fiscal empire on earth.

  Aeneas had gasped at the size of her fortune. All through the day they'd sat at the battered kitchen table of his apartment and looked at the marvels she owned. Greg Tolland flew back from Washington to join them: and came the disaster.

  "It must be broken up, of course," Aeneas had said. "It's exactly what's wrong with the world—irresponsible power like that. Economic imperialism."

  "I'm not so sure," Greg Tolland had said. "Think of what we can do with a fortune like that. What the People's Alliance can do. Aeneas is right, it's too much power; but we shouldn't be too hasty in deciding."

  "I won't be," Laurie Jo said. They looked at her in surprise. "I don't understand what power like this means; but before I use it, I will."

  That was the beginning. Greg Tolland saw her fortune as the ladder to short-cut the long road to the White House. Aeneas saw it as the kind of power no person should have. Laurie Jo Preston had no opinions. She'd always agreed with Aeneas. But Laurie Jo Hansen was otherwise.

  "Greg only despises power he can't control," she said later. "He'll let me keep mine to use for him. No. I won't break up Hansen Enterprises, and I won't help Greg Tolland gather all power into government."

  "Where it will be used for the people!" Aeneas protested.

  "Where it will be used. How is not as obvious as that it would exist."

  "What do you mean?"

  "You want to build something so powerful that nothing can oppose it and hand it over to Greg Tolland. Aeneas, I've always thought you could do that. I've never laughed at your abilities. And I've been terrified every day that you'd succeed."

  "You've helped me!"

  "Yes. I love you. And I've told myself that by staying with you, I'd have some control over what you two will do when you've won. Now I've got something more substantial."

  "You'll fight Greg?"

  "No. Unless he deserves it. But I won't help him, either."

  And then had come the terrible words. That she saw things differently now that she was rich. That she'd got hers, and to hell with their dreams . . .

  The plane banked sharply, bringing him from his reverie. "You chose Greg Tolland," she said. "I couldn't."

  He shook his head. "I chose—what? My country? I always thought so." And how
must the true knights have felt when their crusade succeeded, and they saw the actuality, not the dreams? Was it true that some went to the Saracens because they had no place else to go?

  * * *

  When the plane landed near Cabo San Lucas, Miguel drove them to the Hansen hacienda. He seemed to go everywhere with Laurie Jo. Inside she said, "Miguel is nearly the only man I trust. He guards me well."

  "Con mi vida, Doña Laura."

  "You will protect this man the same way."

  "Si, Doña Laura."

  She left, and they stood in the low-ceilinged library, Aeneas and Miguel, and Aeneas looked at him for the first time. He seemed vaguely familiar, but he looked like any Baja rancher with an ageless, lined face that could be forty or sixty.