“Is just the two of us,” said Essie, and waited for me to speak.
But I didn’t speak. I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know what to ask. If it had been just Essie there, perhaps I could have managed to tell Dolly Walthers what Klara had meant to me and ask for her help-any kind of help. Or if it had been just the ensign, I could have ignored him like any other piece of furniture. Or I think I could-but they were both there, and I stood tongue-tied while Dolly Walthers gazed at me curiously, and Essie expectantly, and even the ensign turned to stare.
Essie sighed, an exasperated and compassionate sound, and made her decision. She took charge. She turned to Dolly Walthers. “Dolly,” she said briskly, “must excuse my husband. Is quite traumatic for him, for reasons too complex to explain just now. Must excuse me also, please, for allowing MPs to take you away; I also have some trauma for related reasons. Important thing is what we do now. That will be as follows:
First we secure your release from this place. Second we invite your company and help in voyage to locate Wan and Gelle-Klara Moynlin. You agree?”
It was all happening too fast for Dolly Walthers, too. “Well,” she said,
“I-“
“Good,” said Essie, nodding. “We go to arrange this. You, Ensign! Take us back to our ship, True Love, at once, please.”
The ensign opened his mouth, scandalized, but I got in ahead of him.
“Essie, shouldn’t we see the brigadier about that?”
She squeezed my hand and gazed at me. The gaze was compassionate. The squeeze was a shut-silly-mouth-Robin! warning that nearly broke my knuckles. “Poor lamb,” she said apologetically to the officer, “has just had major surgery. Is confused. To ship for his medicine, and quickly!”
When my wife Essie is determined to do something, the way to get along with her is to let her do it. What she had in mind I did not know, but what I should do about it was very clear. I assumed the demeanor of an elderly man dazed by recent surgery, and let her guide me in the wake of the ensign down the corridors of the Pentagon.
We didn’t move very fast, because the corridors of the Pentagon were pretty busy. The ensign halted us at an intersection while a party of prisoners marched past. For some reason they were clearing out an entire block of cells. Essie nudged me and pointed to the monitors on the wall.
One set of them were no more than signposts, Commissary Z Enlisted Personnel Latrines Docking V, and so on. But the other- The other showed the docking area, and there was something big coming in. Great, hulking, human-built; you could tell it was Earth-built rather than Heechee at the first glance. It wasn’t just the lines, or the fact that it was constructed of gray steel rather than Heechee-metal blue. The proof lay in the mean-looking projectile weapons that poked their snouts out of its smooth exterior.
The Pentagon, I knew, had lost six of those ships in a row, trying to adapt the Heechee faster-than-light drive to human ships. I couldn’t complain about that; it was from their mistakes that the design for the True Love had benefited. But the weapons were not pleasant to see. You never saw one on a Heechee vessel.
“Come on,” snapped the ensign, glaring at us. “You’re not supposed to be here. Let’s move it.” He started along a relatively empty corridor, but Essie slowed him down.
“Is faster this way,” she said, pointing to the Docking sign.
“Off limits!” he snapped.
“Not for good friend of Pentagon who is unwell,” she replied, and tugged at my arm, and we headed for the densest, noisiest knots of people. There are secrets within secrets in Essie, but this one clarified itself in a moment. The commotion had been the captured terrorists being brought in from the cruiser, and Essie had just wanted to get a look at them.
The cruiser had intercepted their stolen ship just as it was coming out of FTL. They shot it up. Apparently there had been eight terrorists on board-eight, in a Heechee ship that five persons crowded! Three of them had survived to become prisoners. One was comatose. One was missing a leg, but conscious. The third one was mad.
It was the mad one that was attracting all the attention. She was a young black girl-from Sierra Leone, they said-and she was screaming incessantly. She wore a straitjacket. By the look of it she had been kept in it for a very long time, for the fabric was stained and stinking, her hair was matted, her face was cadaverous. Somebody was calling my name, but I pressed forward along with Essie to get a better look. “Is Russian she is saying,” said Essie, her brows furrowing, “but is not very good. Georgia accent. Very strong. Says she hates us.”
“I could have figured that out,” I said. I had seen enough. When the ensign got through the crowd, yelling furious orders for people to get out of the way, I let him tug me back, and then I heard my name called again.
So it wasn’t the ensign? In fact, it wasn’t a man’s voice at all. It came from the knot of prisoners being moved out of their cells, and I saw who it was. The Chinese girl. Janie something. “Good God,” I said to the ensign, “what have you arrested her for?”
He rasped, “That is a military matter and none of your business, Broadhead. Come on! You don’t belong here!”
There was no point in arguing with a man who had made up his mind. I didn’t ask him again. I just walked over to the line and asked Janie. The other prisoners were all female, all military personnel, no doubt in for overstaying a furlough or punching somebody like the ensign in the mouth-all good people, I was sure. They were quiet, listening. “Audee wanted to come up here because they had his wife, “she said, with a look on her face as though she were saying “his case of tertiary syphilis.” “So we took a shuttle up, and as soon as we got here they stuck us in. the brig.”
“Now, Broadhead,” the ensign shouted, “that’s the last straw. You come on out of there or you’re under arrest yourself!” And his hand was on the holster that once more contained a sidearm. Essie sailed by, smiling politely.
“Is now no more need for concern, Ensign,” she said, “for there is True Love waiting for us. So we are out of hair now. Remains only to fetch brigadier here to settle remaining questions.”
The ensign goggled. “Ma’am,” he stuttered, “ma’am, you can’t get the brigadier here!”
“Of course can! Husband requires medical treatment, therefore must be here to receive. Brigadier Cassata is courteous man, right? West Point? Many courses in deportment, courtesy, covering coughs and sneezes?
And also please tell brigadier is excellent bourbon here which poor sick husband requires assistance to dispose of.”
The ensign stumbled away hopelessly. Essie looked at me and I looked at Essie. “Now what?” I asked.
She smiled and patted my head. “First I instruct Albert about bourbon and other things,” she said, turning to deliver a couple of quick sentences in Russian, “and then we wait for brigadier to show up.”
It didn’t take long for the brigadier to arrive, but by the time he had gotten there I had almost forgotten him. Essie was engaged in a lively chat with the guard the ensign had left, and I was thinking. What I was thinking about mostly, for a change, was not Klara but the mad African woman and her almost as mad associates. They scared me. Terrorists scared me. In the old days there was a PLO and an IRA and Puerto Rican nationalists and Serbian secessionists and German and Italian and American rich kids asserting their contempt for their daddies-oh, lots of terrorists, all sizes, all kinds-but they were all separate. The fact that they had got together scared me. The poor and the furious had learned to join their rages and resources, and there was no question at all that they could make the world listen. Capturing one ship would not stop them; it would only make their efforts bearable for a while-or almost bearable. But to solve their problem-to ease their rage and supply their needs- more was needed. The colonization of worlds like Peggy’s Planet was the best and maybe the only answer, but it was slow. The transport could take three thousand eight hundred poor people to a better life each month. But each month something like a quarter of a million new poor people were being born, and the fatal arithmetic was easy to do:
250,000
3,800
246,200
new poor people to deal with each month. The only hope was new and bigger transports, hundreds or thousands of them. A hundred would keep us even with the present level of misery. A thousand would cure it once and for all-but where were the thousand big ships to come from? It had taken eight months to build the True Love, and a lot more of my money than I had really intended. What would it cost to build something a thousand times as big?