Exile-and Glory Read online

  "No, of course not," I said, and went off to my own room. I had a lot to think about, and I didn't want Judy's company just then. I wasn't sure I wanted my own.

  They put me through a week of training before they'd let me take a deep dive to the mine sites. It was another week after that before the surgeons would let Hank go with me.

  We went down in a concrete shaft that contained a series of elevators. Every hundred feet we'd have to get out and pass through a pressure tight door. Not only did the pressures change at each depth, but the gas mixtures as well, and at the third we had to put on our hearing aids.

  They weren't really hearing aids, of course. They were tiny computers and electronic speech-filtering devices. The gas mixtures used to let men live at the lower depths and higher pressures contained a lot of helium, and a man talking in a helium-oxygen mixture sounds like Donald Duck. Some of the old-timers could understand each other without hearing aids, or claimed to, but most people can't make out a word.

  The hearing aids take that gobble-gobble and suppress some of the frequencies while amplifying others, so that the result sounds like normal speech in a flat monotone. It's impossible to get much expression into a voice, but you can be intelligible.

  We went on down until we were at the lowest level, 780 feet below the surface. There was a large structure there, with laboratories and quarters for the workmen, mostly Navy people.

  It was also cold. They heated the structures, and they had plenty of power to do it with, but helium conducts heat better than normal air. You feel heat losses and feel them fast. When we went outside we'd need heated wet suits too. The water at that depth is quite cold.

  The first couple of days we took it easy, going out with a gang of Navy men to watch the mining operations. They were just getting started good, sinking shafts into the sides of the Seamount, taking samples for the scientists as they dug. Everybody was excited about what they were learning. This was the United States' first chance to catch up with the big international corporations who had a big edge in undersea mining technology.

  On the third day we went out alone. It was dark and gloomy except where our lights pointed, and there were ghastly streaks of phosphorescence everywhere. It reminded me of some big city, deserted at night, and it had the same air of indefinable menace. The dolphins couldn't come with us, although Jumbo and Fonso were overhead, and once in a while one or the other would dive down to our level, chatter at Hank for a second and get a reply from his belt call-box, then head back topside. The depth was extreme for dolphins, Hank said, and although they were breathing surface air rather than high-pressure stuff as we did, so they could go up and down without decompression problems, at that depth nitrogen will go into solution quite rapidly; the dolphins had to watch out for embolisms and bends themselves.

  It wasn't quiet down there, and we weren't alone. There were hundreds of tiny clicking sounds, which I didn't understand until Hank took me to the Seamount itself and I saw little shrimp, or things that looked like them, scuttling along on the bottom. They made snapping noises with their pincers.

  There were also things like eels, not very large, and strange-looking fish, also small. The real deep-bottom monsters are much farther down, of course, down where men can't get to them without bathyscaphes and protective equipment; but these were strange enough. There was one thing about seven inches long, dark blue in the yellow-glaring lights, and it seemed to be all teeth and eyes. I'm told it can swallow fish larger than itself. Nothing seemed interested in us one way or another.

  We could get quite close to the fish—not that I'd want to touch any of them. It was a fascinating scene, but a little scary, and the knowledge that anything going wrong with the gear would kill us instantly didn't help. I don't like situations where I have to rely on equipment some unknown tech has made.

  We swam around the bottom until we were out of sight of the lights of the station and mining operations. The top of the Seamount was fairly flat, and rocky, scoured clean of mud, with small pebbles between the larger rocks. Even down this far were anemones and barnacles with feathery flowers waving gently in the current. Once in a while larger fish up to a couple of feet long would cruise by. I kept watching for squid or octopus, but I didn't see any.

  There was a light far ahead of us and Hank waved me toward it. We cruised gently along, conserving energy. The rebreather apparatus didn't even leave bubbles behind, and despite our lights nothing paid much attention to us; I began to feel like a ghostly intruder, unable to affect anything, an observer in a plane of existence I didn't belong to.

  The light turned out to be a shelter. It was a hemispheric dome held up from the bottom on stilts. The hatchway underneath swung upward and opened at a touch. We came up inside a space about thirty feet in diameter and fifteen high. Cabinets lined the walls, and there were more lockers under low benches. Plexiglas windows looked out onto the Seamount and its surprising inhabitants.

  The shelter was heated, and we could disconnect our batteries. I took a seat, and gratefully removed the scuba gear with Hank's help. Then he was taking off his own, his back toward me, and I had the long shark dart, safety still on because I didn't want him to float. I aimed it just under the diaphragm and my hand wouldn't move.

  He finished taking off his gear and sat across from me. We didn't say anything for a long time.

  "It's not going to do either one of us any good," he said finally. "Why the hell don't you get it over?"

  "Get what over?"

  "I've had you made since you came here. Gideon Starr. Science reporter, able to move around and interview almost anybody—Great cover, Gideon. I knew about you before I left the Agency."

  "I see. They don't know that, back at Langley." I watched him warily now. We couldn't just leave here and go swimming again, not with it out in the open like this.

  "I thought they might not. I can't run, you know. Where could I go? And I'm sure your people are watching the transports."

  "Humph." I didn't say anything else, but he knew what I was thinking. Anybody as good as he was wouldn't have any trouble outwitting gate-watchers.

  "Yeah. OK, I'm tired of running. I like it here, Gideon. And what good does it do Judy? That how you spotted us? She's not too good at this game."

  "No, it was the dolphins," I said. "Turner. You remember Turner?"

  He grimaced. "Sure. Holier than thou. America for the Good Americans, whoever the hell they are. I think he likes termination orders. What's he got to do with this?"

  "He hates dolphins," I said. "Afraid they'll replace people or something. Reads everything he can find on them. Something he read made him wonder if you were out here at Dansworth. I don't know what it was, but he had Plans take a look. Then we spotted your wife."

  "I see. Yeah, there was a Science article that might have given me away, but I didn't think anybody in the Company would read it . . . ."

  "He did. And really got mad. Double traitor, he called you. Traitor to the Agency, and traitor to the whole human race. Not that the dolphins made any difference. Harold Braden. OK, you cut and ran. There's a few get away with that. But not when they warn their subject first. We can't allow that, Braden." I shifted the shark dart in my hand, turning it over and over, wondering what would happen if he decided to fight. He was nearly as big as I am, and he'd been a good man in his day. But he was out of training, and he seemed to have given up.

  I had to remember that a man hasn't really given up until he's dead. Not a real man.

  "Call me Hank," he said. "I killed Harold Braden five years ago. Did they tell you who the subject was? The man I warned?"

  "No."

  "Aeneas MacKenzie."

  I whistled. It didn't come out as much; the hearing aids weren't designed for that. The whole conversation had an eerie quality, as we talked of life and death in flat monotones. "MacKenzie. Greg Tolland's manager. If you'd got him, Tolland wouldn't have been President . . . ." I thought for a moment. Five years. "It was after the election! Tolland
's orders!" Again the exclamation points didn't come through. All Hank could have heard was another monotone.

  "Yeah. I know."

  But I'd believed the story. Tolland made Aeneas MacKenzie his Solicitor General, and MacKenzie found graft and corruption all through Tolland's People's Alliance. It had nearly destroyed President Tolland, but we all believed he hadn't known any of it until MacKenzie uncovered the mess.

  Only Tolland ordered MacKenzie terminated with extreme prejudice before he even started his investigations.

  "You know MacKenzie's gone over to Hansen Enterprises?" I asked.

  "You told me." Hank kept watching me, and every now and then he'd look away, out the windows, to watch the fish and shrimp cruising past; and when he'd look back again, he did it with surprise that he was still alive. "I guess it figures. Laurie Jo Hansen never had much use for Greg Tolland to begin with." He laughed. The hearing aids made it come out "Ha. Ha. Ha." And a snort. "Funny. We always thought the big corporations were the enemy."

  "They are. You know how they work."

  "Sure. How do we work?"

  "It's different. We've got no choices. We're soldiers. How else can the people fight that kind of power? Don't play games with my head, Shields. It won't work."

  "Didn't think it would. You can't admit you're wrong. You've spilled too much blood for the cause. Admit you're wrong and you're a monster. I know, Gideon. I know."

  We were quiet for a while. Finally I said, "Hansen's got a set-up like this in the Sea of Cortez. Experimental. Not full production scale."

  Hank nodded. "Pity I didn't run to her in the first place. You'd have had your problems getting to me. Too late now. Not even Hansen could keep your people away from me. Not forever. And I'd always come out in the open if the family was involved."

  Family. I thought about Judy. She'd be alone soon. And that was stupid, because I'd always be alone. "Nobody'd look for a dead man."

  I don't know why I said that. In my business you do your job and that's all. Hank was right, you can't question your orders. If the people at the top don't know what they're doing, if it isn't worth it, what are you? A goddam hired killer, a criminal, and I'm not that, I'm a patriot. A soldier.

  Hank gave me another funny look. "If you report me dead and I turn up again—"

  "Yeah." If that happened, I was meat, I should be. One day I'd find myself across a room from somebody like Gideon Starr. Get it over, my mind said. Hank was looking out the window again. One quick thrust. Or the right blow, and push him out without the SCUBA gear. Without the gear he'd go straight up, and nobody had ever survived a free ascent from those depths. He'd float, lungs ruptured, embolisms all through his blood and brain. Quick, painless, and easy to explain.

  And I knew I wasn't going to do it. "If a man bought it with his gear on down here, he'd go right to the bottom," I said. "No way ever to find a body."

  "But he'd have to leave Dansworth. You think I'd get past your people?" He turned to face me again, but this time he didn't look surprised. Just tired. "I told you, Gideon, I killed Harold Braden. Hank Shields doesn't let his friends trade their lives for him."

  "Friends?"

  "By me, yeah." He didn't say anything else, but I remembered how it was with the two of us swimming Jill to the surface, watching for sharks, waiting for the flash of pain in the head that signals embolism, or the crippling stab in the joint from bends . . . .

  We sat there some more, thinking. "If you got to Hansen's outfit off the Baja coast, you'd be OK," I said finally. "Seven hundred miles. Open water. Don't dolphins go that far?"

  This time he really looked at me.

  "There are spare air bottles in here, aren't there?" I asked. "Air and helium-oxy? Enough to let you decompress? And you've got the call-box. Trust the dolphins to take you seven hundred miles?"

  He thought about it. "We'd make about ten knots. Three days. Warm water." He started rooting around in the lockers and came up with canteens. "Fresh water. I won't need food. The dolphins can catch fish, and a man can live a long time on fresh raw fish. How'll you explain the supplies missing from here?"

  "Who's to know we were ever here? I'll have good stories, for the Navy and for the Agency. You're down in that muck, in five hundred fathoms."

  "You're crazy. They'll watch Judy. I have to send for her, Gideon. When she comes to Hansen's outfit, they'll suspect. Then we've both had it."

  "They won't bother with her. Not if you're dead."

  "Why, Gideon?" he asked.

  "Get the hell out of here. Just do it." Please. Before I change my mind, before I get my sanity back. For God's sake, Hank, go, please, go.

  He put on the SCUBA gear and gathered up water bottles. Then he made a neat towing package of the other stuff, helium-oxy bottles, and some pure oxygen for when he got closer to the surface and wouldn't get oxygen poisoning. He could stay down a long time with those. Much longer than the decompression time he'd need. If there were storms, he'd just go under. The dolphins would take care of him.

  "Dr. Peterson's going to hate losing Jill and Sarah." He looked back at me for a second. "You'll tell Judy?"

  "She'll know. Not at First. Later."

  He winced. It was going to be tough on the family. His only other choice would be tougher. He waved, just a quick flash of the hand, and dropped through the bottom of the shelter.

  A long time after, as I swam alone back to the mining station, I saw a whole school of sharks. One was wounded, and the others were tearing him to pieces, eating him while he was still alive.

  I wondered if they'd see me, but I didn't really care.

  Consort

  The senator looked from the bureau with its chipped paint and cracked mirror to the expensive woman seated on the sagging bed. My God, he thought. What if one of my constituents could see me now? Or the press people got wind of this?

  He opened the leather attaché case and turned knobs on the console inside. Green lights winked reassuringly. He took a deep breath and turned to the girl.

  "Laurie Jo, would it surprise you to know I don't give a damn whether the President is a crook or not?" the senator asked.

  "Then why are you here?" Her voice was soft, with a note of confidence, almost triumphant.

  Senator Hayden shook his head. This is a hell of a thing. The Senate Majority Leader meets with the richest woman in the whole goddam world, and the only way we can trust each other is to come to a place like this. She picks the highway and I pick the motel. Both of us have scramblers goin', and we're still not sure nobody's makin' a tape. Hell of a thing.

  "Because you might be able to prove President Tolland's a crook. Maybe make a lot of people believe it," Hayden said. "I can."

  "Yeah." She sounds so damned confident, and if what she sent me's a good sample of what she's got, she can do it, all right. "That's what scares me, Laurie Jo. The country can't take it again."

  He drew in a lungful of air. It smelled faintly of gin. Hayden exhaled heavily and sank into the room's only chair. One of the springs was loose, and it jabbed him. "Christ Almighty!" he exploded.

  "First Watergate. No sooner'n we get over that, and we're in a depression. Inflation. Oil crisis. The Equity Trust business. One damn thing after another. And when the Party gets together a real reform wing and wins the election, Tolland's own Solicitor General finds the Equity people right next to the President!

  "So half the White House staff goes, and we get past that somehow and people still got something to believe in, and you're tellin' me you can prove the President was in on all of it. Laurie Jo, you just can't do that to the country!"

  She spread her skirts across her knees and wished she'd taken the chair. She never liked sitting without a backrest. The interview was distasteful, and she wished there were another way, but she didn't know one. We're so nearly out of all this, she thought. So very near.

  "DING."

  It was a sound in her mind, but not one the senator could hear. He was saying something about public confiden
ce. She half listened to him, while she thought, "I WAS NOT TO BE DISTURBED."

  "MISTER MC CARTNEY SAYS IT IS VERY IMPORTANT. SIGNOR ANTONELLI IS CONCERNED ABOUT HIS NEXT SHIPMENT."

  "WILL IT BE ON TIME?" she thought.

  "ONLY HALF. HIS BIOLOGICALS WILL BE TWO DAYS LATE," the computer link told her. The system was a luxury she sometimes regretted: not the cost, because a million dollars was very little to her; but although the implanted transceiver link gave her access to all of her holdings and allowed her to control the empire she owned, it gave her no peace.

  "TELL MC CARTNEY TO STALL. I WILL CALL ANTONELLI IN TWO HOURS," she thought.

  "MISTER MC CARTNEY SAYS ANTONELLI WILL NOT WAIT."