Zeigler looked at him sourly. In his eyes, Keene could see that behind the bold front, the strain was telling. “I suggest that you control your flippancy,” he snapped. “Antagonism is not going to help matters.”
“You accuse him of antagonism!” a Kronian woman protested.
Another waved despairingly in the direction of the window facing the pad area and the bleak scene of hilly desolation beyond. “Look outside. You have a world destroyed. The only task is to rebuild.”
“Which is exactly what we what to do,” another of Zeigler’s Terrans chimed in, maybe feeling that Zeigler needed some demonstration of solidarity.
“But you’re not. You’re starting again the ways that know only how to destroy.”
“Look what we built before,” the Terran countered.
“And it took, what, five thousand years? More? Look what we built at Kronia in fifty!”
“A few dugout towns and domes scattered across a handful of moons?” Zeigler said dismissively. “We have a whole world waiting here. You have no idea what real cities were like, a whole living planet. Just take it from me, your quaint debating-club methods won’t do it.”
“So you would introduce the methods of what? Of gangsters? Empires? Enslavement all over again? Is that what you want?”
“You don’t understand,” Zeigler said.
“Damn right! I don’t!”
“Will you consider the proposition I put to you?” Zeigler said, ignoring him and looking back at Keene. “As a rational man, you should appreciate that it’s in the best interests of everyone. I ask it to make a working compromise possible to best voice the interests of all parties.”
“I have considered it, and I already told you: You can go to hell. If you care about everyone’s interests, just climb down and get out of the way.”
“I’m disappointed, Dr. Keene. I had hoped for more.”
Sariena found her voice at last. “You have to be insane. . . . Do you think you can keep this up indefinitely? A minority like this? Lan already said, can’t any of you count?”
“Be quiet, you foolish woman,” Zeigler said tiredly. “Do you think there aren’t more of us on the way? Of course this was planned to be viable. Not only viable, but eventually impregnable.”
“Eventually,” Gallian repeated. “Some day in the future? Maybe?” His expression had hardened. He had clearly been angered by the way Zeigler had talked to Sariena. “And what of the reality in the meantime, Mr. Zeigler? Do you imagine that if you insist on bringing your methods back here, Kronians are incapable of adopting them too, if they must. Think about the numbers. Will you ever know who is behind your back? Will you fall asleep easily, knowing you might never awake again?” His voice became quieter, making it somehow more menacing, capturing all the attention in the room. He was advancing slowly, fixing Zeigler with a steady stare. “Will you trust any mouthful of food that you eat? Or where might the bomb be that takes you out, Mr. Zeigler? In your desk? Beneath your bed? Under the path on which you walk?” A guard stepped forward to bar the way, but Gallian pushed his weapon aside contemptuously. The guard looked back at Zeigler for direction. Gallian kept on moving. Zeigler licked his lips. “For that is the world you wish to re-create, isn’t it, Mr. Zeigler—your world? And you ask our cooperation? Very well, if you force us, we will cooperate totally in giving you precisely what you ask.” Gallian and Zeigler were almost face to face. The rest of the room had become motionless. Gallian continued moving. His hand came up in part of the same unhurried motion, reaching slowly but deliberately toward Zeigler’s pistol. “Enough of this, now, I think. Why don’t we all just—”
And Zeigler shot him three times, at point-blank range, full in the chest.
* * *
Far out in space, still beyond the orbit of Jupiter, the Trojan had completed a complicated maneuver that involved redirecting its course toward the inner Solar System. But it executed the change in such a way that in an intermediate phase, the vessel’s heading was aligned along a precisely calculated minimum-duration trajectory that would intercept the course of the transorbital Eskimo, coasting inward from the Saturn system at the best rate its limited design permitted. At this orientation, with the Trojan’s forward velocity adding its own maximum component, it launched a freight crate containing six of the boosters that had been brought up from the armory in the course of the SA training drills thoughtfully carried out earlier.