Oath of Fealty Read online

  Oath of Fealty

  Larry Niven

  and

  Jerry Pournelle

  Timescape Books

  Distributed by

  Simon and Schuster

  New York

  This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the authors' imaginations or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright (c) 1981 by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle

  All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form

  A Timescape Book

  Published by Pocket Books,

  A Simon & Schuster Division of Gulf & Western Corporation

  Simon & Schuster Building

  Rockefeller Center

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, New York 10020

  SIMON AND SCHUSTER and colophon are trademarks of Simon & Schuster Use of TIMESCAPE trademark under exclusive license from trademark owner

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  For Robert A. Heinlein, who showed us all how.

  DRAMATAS PERSONAE

  Prologue: THE INVADERS

  I. THE WATCHERS

  II. THE MANAGERS

  III. A TOUR OF TERMITE HILL

  IV. KINGS AND WIZARDS

  V. COMMAND DECISIONS

  VI. EYE OF THE STORM

  VII. NIGHT MEETINGS

  VIII. SERENDIPITY

  IX. THE FURIES

  X. JUDGMENT

  XI. CONSPIRACIES

  XII. VISITING HOURS

  XIII. SCHEMES

  XIV. PERCEPTIONS

  XV. SECRETS

  XVII. SAVE THE MINOTAUR!

  XVII. (AFTERMATH)

  XVIII. EXECUTIVE ACTION

  XIX. RETRIBUTION

  XX. PERSUASIONS

  XXI. DILEMMAS

  XXII. LAWS AND PROPHETS

  DRAMATAS PERSONAE

  Joe Dunhill Probationary Officer, Todos Santos Security

  Isaac Blake Lieutenant, Todos Santos Security

  Preston Sanders Deputy General Manager, Todos Santos Independency

  Tony Rand Chief Engineer, Todos Santos

  Arthur Bonner General Manager, Todos Santos

  Frank Mead Comptroller, Todos Santos

  Delores Martinez Executive Assistant to the General Manager, Todos Santos

  Barbara Churchward Director of Economic Development, Todos Santos

  MacLean Stevens Executive Assistant to the Mayor of the City of Los Angeles

  Sir George Reedy Deputy Minister of Internal Development, Canada

  Genevieve Rand Tony Rand's former wife

  Alice Marie Strahler Executive Assistant to Tony Rand

  Allan Thompson Student

  Sandra Wyatt Assistant General Manager, Todos Santos

  James Planchet City Councilman, Los Angeles

  Mrs. Eunice Planchet James Planchet's wife

  George Harris Businessman and convicted tax evader

  Thomas Lunan Newsman

  Amos Cross Chief, Todos Santos Security

  John Shapiro, LL.D. Counsel, Todos Santos

  Samuel Finder, M.D. Medical Resident, Todos Santos

  Hal Donovan Lieutenant, Robbery/Homicide, Los Angeles Police Department

  Cheryl Drinkwater Todos Santos resident Armand Drinkwater Waldo Operator

  Glenda Porter Tattoo Artist

  Sidney Blackman District Attorney, County of Los Angeles

  Penelope Norton Judge, Superior Court, State of California

  Phil Lowry Newsman

  Mark Levoy Publican; former Yippie

  Ronald Wolfe General, American Ecology Army

  Arnold Renn, Ph.D. Professor of Sociology, UCLA

  Rachael Lief Bulldozer operator

  Mrs. Carol Donovan Lt. Donovan's wife

  Vito Hamilton Captain, Todos Santos Security

  Vincent Thompson Subway mugger

  Prologue: THE INVADERS

  The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.

  -Edmund Burke

  Elsewhere in Los Angeles it was late afternoon, but here was only twilight. The three invaders peering out of the orange grove were deep in shadow. The sky blazed behind them and sent chinks of blue-white light through the trees to make the shadows darker.

  There was a fresh smell of fertilizers and crushed orange peel carried on the warm Santa Mia wind.

  Close ahead the eastern face of Todos Santos was a black wall across the world. Thousands of balconies and windows in neat array showed in this light as no more than a faceless void seen through gray leaves, a sharp-edged black rectangle blotting out the sky.

  The invaders blinked as they searched through uncertain light, and froze at the thunder of wings above. Nobody was about. They had watched the grounds tenders leave. They had seen no guards.

  "There." The girl pointed. Her voice was no louder than the leaves' rustle in the wind. "There."

  The two boys stared until they made out a square outline, barely visible, at the base of the towering wail. It seemed about man-sized. "The big door," she said. "We're still a good way away. It doesn't look it, but that door is thirty feet high. The little one is to the left of it."

  "I can't find it," said one of the boys. He giggled suddenly, and stopped as suddenly. He said, "Nervous? Me?"

  The other boy was lean and sketchily bearded, and he carried a black case on a strap. He stared at tiny lights set on its top, then said, "Run for the big door until you see the little one. On the count. Three, two, one, go."

  He ran holding the case in front of himself to cushion against shock. The others lagged behind. They were carrying a much larger box between them. The leader was already taking things Out of the case when they came puffing up.

  "This lousy light," he panted.

  "Bad for the guards, too," said the girl. "It's late afternoon everywhere but here. At night they'd know they couldn't see. They'd be watching harder."

  The other boy grinned. "We'll give 'em a hell of a shock." There was a sign on the door. Below a large death's head it said:

  IF YOU GO THROUGH THIS DOOR,

  YOU WILL BE KILLED.

  It was repeated in Spanish, Japanese, Chinese, and Korean. "Subtle, aren't they?" the girl said. She stiffened as the bearded boy pushed the door open. There was no sudden wail of alarms and they grinned at each other for a moment of triumph.

  They dodged through fast. The bearded boy closed the door behind them.

  I. THE WATCHERS

  Life in the state of nature is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

  -Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan

  Joe Dunhill polished his badge on his sleeve and plucked imaginary lint from the crisp blue of his uniform. The door was still there, still marked CENTRAL SECURITY: Authorized Personnel Only. He took a deep breath and reached for the small button at one side. Before his finger could touch it, there was a faint buzzing sound and the door opened.

  The room inside gleamed with steel and chrome and Formica. A policeman with metal sergeant's chevrons on his collar sat at a desk facing the door. There was nothing on the desk but a small TV screen. "Yeah?"

  "Officer Dunhill, reporting for duty."

  The older man raised an eyebrow. "Bit early for the evening shift."

  "Yes, sir. I thought there might be paper work, my first day and all."

  The sergeant smiled faintly. "Computers take care of that. Dunhill?" He frowned. "Oh, yeah, you're the new man from Seattle PD. Guess you had a pretty good record up there. Want some coffee?" He turned to a machine on one side of the room.

&nbs
p; "Uh, guess so. Light and sweet, please."

  The sergeant pushed buttons. The machine thought for a moment, then whined faintly. The sergeant held out a molded plastic mug. "Here you go."

  Joe tasted experimentally. "Hey. That's good." The surprise was obvious in his voice.

  "Well of course it's - Oh. You're new here. Look, all the coffee machines in Todos Santos make good coffee. We wouldn't have 'em here if they didn't. Boss lady bought a thousand of these."

  Even clichés die, Joe Dunhill thought.

  "Why'd you leave Seattle?"

  The question sounded casual, and maybe, Joe thought, maybe it is. And maybe not. "Todos Santos made me an offer I couldn't refuse."

  The sergeant's smile was friendly, but knowing. "Dunhill, I wasn't on the board that decided to hire you, but I've heard the story. I think you got a raw deal."

  "Thanks."

  "Yeah. But I wouldn't have hired you if it was left up to me."

  "Oh." Joe didn't know what to say to that.

  "Not because you shot that punk. I'd have done the same thing myself."

  "Then why not?"

  "Because I don't think you can do the job."

  "I was a damned good policeman," Joe said.

  "I know you were. And probably still are. And that's the trouble. We don't have police here." The sergeant laughed at Joe's blank stare. "We look like police, right? Badges. Uniforms. Guns, some of us. But we aren't police, Dunhill. We're security people, and there's a lot of difference." He came over to put his hand on Joe's shoulder. "Look, I hope you work out. Let's go."

  He led Joe out of the reception room and down a long hail to a closed door.

  "Did they tell you about the locking system we use here?" the sergeant asked.

  "Not really."

  "Well, everybody in Todos Santos has an ID badge. There's some kind of electronic magic-well, hell, it might as well be magic for all I know! It opens locks if you've got the right badge for it. Residents' badges open their own doors, that kind of thing. Security badges open a lot of doors." He waved his own badge at the door in front of them. Nothing happened. "But not this one. Security Central's kind of special. What happens is we alert the inside duty officer."

  They waited for a few moments, then the door opened into a small, dimly lit room the size of a closet. The door behind them closed, then another door in front of them opened onto a much larger and even more dimly lit room.

  There were TV screens around all four walls, banks of them, with uniformed men seated in front of each bank. In the center of the room was a huge circular console with dozens of dials and buttons. More TV screens were built into the console. A uniformed captain wearing a tiny telephone headset-microphone sprawled in a comfortable chair in the middle of the center console.

  "Dunhill, Captain," the sergeant said. "First day. Assigned to Blake."

  The captain nodded. "Thanks, Adler. Welcome aboard, Dunhill."

  Isaac Blake had a square face with roundness shaping under the square chin, a square body also turning round, black-and-white hair with the white winning. He lolled at ease before the bank of TV screens and sipped coffee. Every twenty seconds or so he touched a knob and the pictures shifted.

  There seemed no order to the flow of pictures. Now the camera looked down on the heads of hundreds of shoppers strolling along a Mall, bright-colored clothing that looked strange because the light was artificial but the scene was so large that you expected it to be sunlight. Now a view of a big dining hall. Now a view through the orange groves, looking up at Todos Santos standing a thousand feet tall.

  "Whew - this is one big city. Even on a TV screen."

  Blake nodded. "Yeah, it still gets to me, sometimes." His fingers moved, and the view shifted to look along one side wall. Seen from that angle, the two-mile length seemed to stretch on forever.

  The kaleidoscope continued. Sparse traffic in a subway. Interior halls, stretching far away; people on moving belts, people on escalators, people in elevators. A dizzying view down onto a balcony, where a nude hairy man sprawled in obscene comfort on an air mattress. Thirty men and women seated at a long bench soldering tiny electronic parts onto circuit boards, chatting gaily and working almost without looking at what they were doing.

  The camera switched to the greensward beyond Todos Santos's perimeter, where a dozen pickets lethargically marched about with signs. "END THE NEST BEFORE IT ENDS HUMAN1TY," said one. Blake sniffed and touched buttons. The scene jumped to a pretty girl in a miniskirt carrying a bag of groceries; the camera followed her down a long hall from an escalator, zooming along to keep her in close-up as she walked into a small alcove. When she took her badge out of her purse, the door opened, and she went inside, leaving the door standing open while she set the bag down on an Eames chair. For a moment the screen showed an expensive apartment, meticulously clean, thick rugs, paintings on the walls. The girl was unbuttoning her blouse as she came to the door and closed it.

  "Like to watch the rest of that show," Blake muttered. He turned a lazy smile toward Joe Dunhill.

  "Of course we aren't supposed to do that," Dunhill said.

  "Nope. Can't, either."

  "Oh. I've noticed you haven't shown up the inside of any apartment. I guess I wouldn't want cameras in my bathroom either."

  "Oh, we've got them there," Blake said. "But they don't go on without authorization -there's one now." He touched his headset. "Captain, I'll take that interior call."

  "Right."

  The TV screen flicked to show a kitchen. A small boy was pulling things out of cabinets, scattering flour on the floor and carefully mixing in salt preparatory to pouring a bottle of sherry across the mess. Blake reached forward to a button under the screen. He waited a moment, then said into the tiny headset microphone, "Ma'am, this is Central Security. Somebody pushed the panic button in the kitchen, and I think you'd better have a look out there. Yes, Ma'am, it's safe but you ought to hurry."

  He waited. On the screen above, a woman, mid-thirties, not very attractive at the moment because her hair was partly in curlers and partly in wet strings, came into the kitchen, looked down in horror, and shouted, "Peter!"

  Then she looked up with a smile and moved closer to the camera. "Thank you, Officer," she said. Blake smiled back, for no sane reason, and touched a dial. The picture faded.

  Joe Dunhill watched in concentration. Sergeant Adler had been right, this was no kind of police work he'd ever seen. He turned to Blake. "I don't get it. You just skip around."

  "Sort of. Of course there are exceptions, like when somebody asks us to keep an eye on things. But mostly we watch what we feel like. After a while you get some judgment about the feels."

  "But wouldn't it be better to have assigned places? Instead of jumping around-"

  "Bosses don't think so. They want us alert. Who can be alert just staring at one scene all the time? The math boys worked it out, how many of us, how many TV screens each, probability of trouble-over my head, but it seems to work."

  Joe digested that. "Uh-seems to me I'd be more valuable out on the streets. Responding to calls-"

  Blake laughed. "After you've been here a year maybe they'll put you where you interact with stockholders. If you work out." The kaleidoscope above continued. A moving beltway, with some kids walking on a balcony above it. Blake touched controls, and the camera zoomed in on the kids. After a moment the kaleidoscope started up again. "Think about it," Blake said. "In Seattle, you were a cop, and out among the civilians. You worried about making good arrests, right? Best way to get promoted."

  "Sure-"

  "Well, in here it's different." Blake suddenly frowned and set down his cup.

  It took Joe Dunhill a moment to realize that Blake was no longer interested in the conversation, and another to see why he was staring. It wasn't the screen at all. A blue light to the side had lit up.

  "On the roof," he said, with a question in his voice. Then, with more confidence, "Visitor. How did he get up there?"

  Bl
ake played with the controls. The screen jumped with disconnected pictures, flashing views of four square miles of roof: the curtained windows of the Sky Room night club; golfers on the golf course; a view down onto one of the inverted-pyramid shapes of an air well, plunging down in narrowing steps each one story high and lined with windows. Then a forest of skeletal structures; a children's playground, empty at the moment, then another jungle gym with a dozen kids hanging like bats. The Olympic swimming pool, with a wide, shallow children's wading pool just beyond. Baseball diamond. Football field. On the Todos Santos roof was every kind of playground for child or adult.

  Then beyond a low fence, an empty area, bags of concrete and piles of wood for forms, cement mixer idle at the moment. The camera zoomed to the mixer. "ID badge," Blake muttered. "Visitor badge, must be stuffed into the cement mixer. What the hell for? And what's he doing up there?" The TV screen flowed across the roof again, searching- "There," cried Joe Dunhill.