“What makes you think,” demanded Bertram Hardy, “that they’ll let us man the ship anyhow?”
“Bert,” Lazarus said coldly, “address the chair when you want to sound off. You’re not even a Family delegate. Last warning.”
“As I was saying,” Barstow continued, “there is an appropriateness in the long-lived exploring the stars. A mystic might call it our true vocation.” He pondered. “As for the ship Lazarus suggested; perhaps they will not let us have that . . . but the Families are rich. If we need a starship-or ships-we can build them, we can pay for them. I think we had better hope that they will let us do this . . . for it may be that there is no way, not another way of any sort, out of our dilemma which does not include our own extermination.”
Barstow spoke these last words softly and slowly, with great sadness. They bit into the company like damp chill. To most of them the problem was so new as not yet to be real; no one had voiced the possible consequence of failing to find a solution satisfactory to the short-lived majority. For their senior trustee to speak soberly of his fear that the Families might be exterminated-hunted down and killed-stirred up in each one the ghost they never mentioned.
“Well,” Lazarus said briskly when the silence had grown painful, “before we work this idea over, let’s hear what other plan anyone has to offer. Speak up.”
A messenger hurried in and spoke to Zaccur Barstow. He looked startled and seemed to ask to have the message repeated. He then hurried across the rostrum to Lazarus, whispered to him. Lazarus looked startled. Barstow hurried out.
Lazarus looked back at the crowd. “We’ll take a recess,” he announced. “Give you time to think about other plans and time for a stretch and a smoke.” He reached for his pouch.
“What’s up?” someone called out.
Lazarus struck a cigarette, took a long drag, let it drift out. “We’ll have to wait and see,” he said. “I don’t know. But at least half a dozen of the plans put forward tonight we won’t have to bother to vote on. The situation has changed again-how much, I couldn’t say.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well,” Lazarus drawled, “it seems the Federation Administrator wanted to talk to Zack Barstow right away. He asked for him by name . . . and he called over our secret Families’ circuit.”
“Huh? That’s impossible!”
“Yep. So is a baby, son.”
Chapter 4
ZACCUR BARSTOW TRIED to quiet himself down as he hurried into the phone booth.
At the other end of the same videophone circuit the Honorable Slayton Ford was doing the same thing-trying to calm his nerves. He did not underrate himself. A long and brilliant public career crowned by years as Administrator for the Council and under the Covenant of the Western Administration had made Ford aware of his own superior ability and unmatched experience; no ordinary man could possibly make him feel at a disadvantage in negotiation.
But this was different.
What would a man be like who had lived more than two ordinary lifetimes? Worse than that-a man who had had four or five times the adult experience that Ford himself had had? Slayton Ford knew that his own opinions had changed and changed again since his own boyhood; he knew that the boy he had been, or even the able young man he had been, would be no match for the mature man he had become. So what would this Barstow be like? Presumably he was the most able, the most astute, of a group all of whom had had much more experience than Ford could possibly have-how could he guess such a man’s evaluations, intentions, ways of thinking, his possible resources?
Ford was certain of only one thing: he did not intend to trade Manhattan Island for twenty-four dollars and a case of whisky, nor sell humanity’s birthright for a mess of pottage.
He studied Barstow’s face as the image appeared in his phone. A good face and strong . . . it would be useless to try to bully this man. And the man looked young-why, he looked younger than Ford himself! The subconscious image of the Administrator’s own stern and implacable grandfather faded out of his mind and his tension eased off. He said quietly, “You are Citizen Zaccur Barstow?”