Man-Kzin Wars III Page 3

  “I could get more, but I thought I’d better show you this first,” Anton said.

  I said, “Don’t bother.”

  “What? Jack?”

  “It only took us a week! Why risk our necks to do work that can be duplicated that fast?”

  Anton looked lost. “We need to do something!”

  “Well, maybe we don’t. Maybe the ARM is doing it all for us.”

  Phoebe gripped Anton’s wrist hard, and he swallowed some bitter retort. She said, “Maybe we’re missing something. Maybe we’re not looking at it right.”

  “What’s on your mind?”

  “Let’s find a way to look at it differently.” She was looking straight at me.

  I said, “Stoned? Drunk? Fizzed? Wired?”

  Phoebe shook her head. “We need the schitz view.”

  “Dangerous, love. Also, the chemicals you’re talking about are massively illegal. I can’t get them, and Anton would be caught for sure—” I saw the way she was smiling at me. “Anton, I’ll break your scrawny neck.”

  “Huh? Jack?”

  “No, no, he didn’t tell me,” Phoebe said hastily, “though frankly I’d think either of you might have trusted me that much, Jack! I remembered you in the ’doc that morning, and Anton coming down from that twitchy state on a Thursday night, and it all clicked.”

  “Okay.”

  “You’re a schitz, Jack. But it’s been a long time, hasn’t it?”

  “Thirteen years of peace,” I said. “They pick us for it, you know. Paranoid schizophrenics, born with our chemistry screwed up, hair trigger temper and a skewed view of the universe. Most schitzies never have to feel that. We use the ’docs more regularly than you do and that’s that. But some of us go into the ARM . . . Phoebe, your suggestion is still silly. Anton’s crazy four days out of the week, just like I used to be. Anton’s all you need.”

  “Phoebe, he’s right.”

  “No. The ARM used to be all schitzies, right? The genes have thinned out over three hundred years.”

  Anton nodded. “They tell us in training. The ones who could be Hitler or Napoleon or Castro, they’re the ones the ARM wants. They’re the ones you can send on a mother hunt, the ones with no social sense . . . but the Fertility Board doesn’t let them breed either, unless they’ve got something special. Jack, you were special, high intelligence or something—”

  “Perfect teeth, and I don’t get sick in free fall, and Charlotte’s people never develop back problems. That helped. Yah . . . but every century there are less of us. So they hire some Antons too, and make you crazy—”

  “But carefully,” Phoebe said. “Anton’s not evolved from paranoia, Jack. You are. When they juice Anton up they don’t make him too crazy, just enough to get the viewpoint they want. I bet they leave the top management boringly sane. But you, Jack—”

  “I see it.” Centuries of ARM tradition were squarely on her side.

  “You can go as crazy as you like. It’s all natural, and medics have known how to handle it since Only One Earth. We need the schitz viewpoint, and we don’t have to steal the chemicals.”

  “Stet. When do we start?”

  Anton looked at Phoebe. Phoebe said, “Now?”

  * * *

  We played Anton’s tape all the way through, to a running theme of graveyard humor.

  “I took only what I thought we could use,” Anton said. “You should have seen some of the rest. Agent Orange. Napalm. Murder stuff.”

  Phoebe said, “Isn’t this murder?”

  That remark might have been unfair. We were watching this bizarre chunky rotary-blade flyer. Fire leaped from underneath it, once and again . . . weapons of some kind.

  Anton said, “Aircraft design isn’t the same when you use it for murder. It changes when you expect to be shot at. Here—” The picture had changed. “That’s another weapons platform. It’s not just fast, it’s supposed to hide in the sky. Jack, are you all right?”

  “I’m scared green. I haven’t felt any effects yet.”

  Phoebe said, “You need to relax. Anton delivers a terrific massage. I never learned.”

  She wasn’t kidding. Anton didn’t have my muscle, but he had big strangler’s hands. I relaxed into it, talking as he worked, liking the way my voice wavered as his hands pounded my back.

  “It hasn’t been that long since a guy like me let his ’doc run out of beta-dammasomething. An indicator light ran out and he didn’t notice. He tried to kill his business partner by bombing his partner’s house, and got some family members instead.”

  “We’re on watch,” Phoebe said. “If you go berserk we can handle it. Do you want to see more of this?”

  “We’ve missed something. Children, I’m a registered schitz. If I don’t use my ’doc for three days, they’ll be trying to find me before I remember I’m the Marsport Strangler.”

  Anton said, “He’s right, love. Jack, give me your door codes. If I can get into your apt, I can fix the records.”

  “Keep talking. Finish the massage, at least. We might have other problems. Do we want fruit juice? Munchies? Foodlike substances?”

  When Anton came back with groceries, Phoebe and I barely noticed.

  Were the warcats real? Could we fight them with present tech? How long did Sol system have? And the other systems, the more sparsely settled colony worlds? Was it enough to make tapes and blueprints of the old murder machines, or must we set to building clandestine factories? Phoebe and I were spilling ideas past each other as fast as they came, and I had quite forgotten that I was doing something dangerous.

  I noticed myself noticing that I was thinking much faster than thoughts could spill from my lips. I remembered knowing that Phoebe was brighter than I was, and that didn’t matter either. But Anton was losing his Thursday edge.

  We slept. The old airbed was a big one. We woke to fruit and bread and dived back in.

  We re-invented the Navy using only what Anton had recorded of seagoing navies. We had to. There had never been space navies; the long peace had fallen first.

  I’m not sure when I slid into schitz mode. I’d spent four days out of seven without the ’doc, every week for forty-one years excluding vacations. You’d think I’d remember the feel of my brain chemistry changing. Sometimes I do; but it’s the central me that changes, and there’s no way to control that.

  Anton’s machines were long out of date, and none had been developed even for interplanetary war. Mankind had found peace too soon. Pity. But if the warcats’ gravity generators could be copied before the warcats arrived, that alone could save us!

  Then again, whatever the cats had for weapons, kinetic energy was likely to be the ultimate weapon, however the mass was moved. Energy considerations don’t lie . . . I stopped trying to anticipate individual war machines; what I needed was an overview.

  Anton was saying very little.

  I realized that I had been wasting my time making medical programs. Chemical enhancement was the most trivial of what we’d need to remake an army. Extensive testing would be needed, and then we might not get soldiers at all unless they retained some civil rights, or unless officers killed enough of them to impress the rest. Our limited pool of schitzies had better be trained as our officers. For that matter, we’d better start by taking over the ARM. They had all the brightest schitzies.

  As for Anton’s work in the ARM archives, the most powerful weapons had been entirely ignored. They were too obvious.

  I saw how Phoebe was staring at me, and Anton too, both gape-jawed.

  I tried to explain that our task was nothing less than the reorganization of humanity. Large numbers might have to die before the rest saw the wisdom in following our lead. The warcats would teach that lesson . . . but if we waited for them, we’d be too late. Time was breathing hot on our necks.

  Anton didn’t understand. Phoebe was following me, though not well, but Anton’s body language was pulling him back and closing him up while his face stayed blank. He feared me worse than
he feared warcats.

  I began to understand that I might have to kill Anton. I hated him for that.

  * * *

  We did not sleep Friday at all. By Saturday noon we should have been exhausted. I’d caught catnaps from time to time, we all had, but I was still blazing with ideas. In my mind the pattern of an interstellar invasion was shaping itself like a vast three-dimensional map.

  Earlier I might have killed Anton, because he knew too much or too little, because he would steal Phoebe from me. Now I saw that that was foolish. Phoebe wouldn’t follow him. He simply didn’t have the . . . the internal power. As for knowledge, he was our only access to the ARM!

  Saturday evening we ran out of food . . . and Anton and Phoebe saw the final flaw in their plan.

  I found it hugely amusing. My ’doc was halfway across Santa Maria. They had to get me there. Me, a schitz.

  We talked it around. Anton and Phoebe wanted to check my conclusions. Fine: we’d give them the schitz treatment. But for that we needed my disk (in my pocket) and my ’doc (at the apt). So we had to go to my apt.

  With that in mind, we shaped plans for a farewell bacchanal.

  Anton ordered supplies. Phoebe got me into a taxi. When I thought of other destinations she was persuasive. And the party was waiting . . .

  We were a long time reaching the ’doc. There was beer to be dealt with, and a pizza the size of Arthur’s Round Table. We sang, though Phoebe couldn’t hold a tune. We took ourselves to bed. It had been years since my urge to rut ran so high, so deep, backed by a sadness that ran deeper yet and wouldn’t go away.

  When I was too relaxed to lift a finger, we staggered singing to the ’doc with me hanging limp between them. I produced my dime disk, but Anton took it away. What was this? They moved me onto the table and set it working. I tried to explain: they had to lie down, put the disk here . . . But the circuitry found my blood loaded with fatigue poisons, and put me to sleep.

  * * *

  Sunday noon:

  Anton and Phoebe seemed embarrassed in my presence. My own memories were bizarre, embarrassing. I’d been guilty of egotism, arrogance, self-centered lack of consideration. Three dark blue dots on Phoebe’s shoulder told me that I’d brushed the edge of violence. But the worst memory was of thinking like some red-handed conqueror, and out loud.

  They’d never love me again.

  But they could have brought me into the apt and straight to the ’doc. Why didn’t they?

  While Anton was out of the room I caught Phoebe’s smile in the corner of my eye, and saw it fade as I turned. An old suspicion surfaced and has never faded since.

  Suppose that the women I love are all attracted to Mad Jack. Somehow they recognize my schitz potential though they find my sane state dull. There must have been a place for madness throughout most of human history. So men and women seek in each other the capacity for madness . . .

  And so what? Schitzies kill. The real Jack Strather is too dangerous to be let loose.

  And yet . . . it had been worth doing. From that strange fifty-hour session I remembered one real insight. We spent the rest of Sunday discussing it, making plans, while my central nervous system returned to its accustomed, unnatural state. Sane Jack.

  * * *

  Anton Brillov and Phoebe Garrison held their wedding reception in the Monobloc. I stood as best man, bravely cheerful, running over with congratulations, staying carefully sober.

  A week later I was among the asteroids. At the Monobloc they said that Jack Strather had fled Earth after his favored lady deserted him for his best friend.

  Chapter III

  Things ran smoother for me because John Junior had made a place for himself in Ceres.

  Even so, they had to train me. Twenty years ago I’d spent a week in the Belt. It wasn’t enough. Training and a Belt citizen’s equipment used up most of my savings and two months of my time.

  Time brought me to Mercury, and the lasers, eight years ago.

  * * *

  Light-sails are rare in the inner solar system. Between Venus and Mercury there are still light-sail races, an expensive, uncomfortable, and dangerous sport. Cargo craft once sailed throughout the asteroid belt, until fusion motors became cheaper and more dependable.

  The last refuge of the light-sail is a huge, empty region: the cometary halo, Pluto and beyond. The light-sails are all cargo craft. So far from Sol, their thrust must be augmented by lasers, the same Mercury lasers that sometimes hurl an unmanned probe into interstellar space.

  These were different from the launch lasers I was familiar with. They were enormously larger. In Mercury’s lower gravity, in Mercury’s windless environment, they looked like crystals caught in spiderwebs. When the lasers fired, the fragile support structures wavered like a spiderweb in a wind.

  Each stood in a wide black pool of solar collector, as if tar paper had been scattered at random. A collector sheet that lost fifty percent of power was not removed. We would add another sheet, but continue to use all the available power.

  Their power output was dangerous to the point of fantasy. For safety’s sake the Mercury lasers must be continually linked to the rest of the solar system across a lightspeed delay of several hours. The newer solar collectors also picked up broadcasts from space, or from the control center in Challenger Crater. Mercury’s lasers must never lose contact. A beam that strayed where it wasn’t supposed to could do untold damage.

  They were spaced all along the planet’s equator. They were hundreds of years apart in design, size, technology. They fired while the sun was up and feeding their square miles of collectors, with a few fusion generators for backup. They flicked from target to target as the horizon moved. When the sun set, it set for thirty-odd Earth days, and that was plenty of time to make repairs—

  “In general, that is.” Kathry Perritt watched my eyes to be sure I was paying attention. I felt like a schoolboy again. “In general we can repair and update each laser station in turn and still keep ahead of the dawn. But come a quake, we work in broad daylight and like it.”

  “Scary,” I said, too cheerfully.

  She looked at me. “You feel nice and cool? That’s a million tons of soil, old man, and a layer cake of mirror sheeting on top of that, and these old heat exchangers are still the most powerful ever built. Daylight doesn’t scare you? You’ll get over that.”

  Kathry was a sixth generation Belter from Mercury, taller than me by seven inches, not very strong, but extremely dexterous. She was my boss. I’d be sharing a room with her . . . and yes, she rapidly let me know that she expected us to be bedmates.

  I was all for that. Two months in Ceres had showed me that Belters respond to social signals I don’t know. I had no idea how to seduce anyone.

  Sylvia and Myron had been born on Mars in an enclave of archeologists digging out the cities beneath the deserts. Companions from birth, they’d married at puberty. They were addicted to news broadcasts. News could get them arguing. Otherwise they behaved as if they could read each other’s minds; they hardly talked to each other or to anyone else.

  We’d sit around the duty room and wait, and polish our skills as storytellers. Then one of the lasers would go quiet, and a tractor the size of some old Chicago skyscraper would roll.

  Rarely was there much of a hurry. One laser would fill in for another until the Monster Bug arrived. Then the robots, riding the Monster Bug like one of Anton’s aircraft carriers, would scatter ahead of us and set to work.

  * * *

  Two years after my arrival, my first quake shook down six lasers in four different locations, and ripped a few more loose from the sunlight collectors. Landscape had been shaken into new shapes. The robots had some trouble. Sometimes Kathry could reprogram. Otherwise her team had to muscle them through, with Kathry to shout orders and me to supply most of the muscle.

  Of the six lasers, five survived. They seemed built to survive almost anything. The robots were equipped to spin new support structure and to lift the things int
o place, with a separate program for each design.

  Maybe John Junior hadn’t used influence in my behalf. Flatlander muscle was useful, when the robots couldn’t get over the dust pools or through the broken rock. For that matter, maybe it wasn’t some Belt tradition that made Kathry claim me on sight. Sylvia and Myron weren’t sharing; and I might have been female, or bent. Maybe she thought she was lucky.

  After we’d remounted the lasers that survived, Kathry said, “They’re all obsolete anyway. They’re not being replaced.”

  “That’s not good,” I said.

  “Well, good and bad. Light-sail cargos are slow. If the light wasn’t almost free, why bother? The interstellar probes haven’t sent much back yet, and we might as well wait. At least the Belt Speakers think so.”

  “Do I gather I’ve fallen into a kind of a blind alley?”

  She glared at me. “You’re an immigrant flatlander. What did you expect, First Speaker for the Belt? You thinking of moving on?”

  “Not really. But if the job’s about to fold—”

  “Another twenty years, maybe. Jack, I’d miss you. Those two—”

  “It’s all right, Kathry. I’m not going.” I waved both arms at the blazing dead landscape and said, “I like it here,” and smiled into her bellow of laughter.

  I beamed a tape to Anton when I got the chance.

  “If I was very angry, I got over it, as I hope you’ve forgotten anything I said or did while I was, let’s say, running on automatic. I’ve found another life in deep space, not much different from what I was doing on Earth . . . though that may not last. These light-sail pusher lasers are a blast from the past. Time gets them, the quakes get them, and they’re not being replaced. Kathry says twenty years.”

  “You said Phoebe left Earth, too. Working with an asteroid mining setup? If you’re still trading tapes, tell her I’m all right and I hope she is too. Her career choice was better than mine, I expect . . . ”

  I couldn’t think of anything else to do.

  * * *

  Three years after I expected it, Kathry asked. “Why did you come out here? It’s none of my business, of course—”