He stumbled out of the park, following the beacon of the moving traffic lights on busy First Avenue.
Staring down at his hands, he slowly turned his right hand palm-downward to stare at the knuckles. There was no sign of damage. Even his fingernails were unbroken. He clenched his fingers, slowly let them unclench. An ordinary hand, surely. His hand, smooth and uncallused. The same hand he’d grown up with.
He was suddenly dizzy. Another drinking fountain stood nearby. The edges were smooth, green plastic, the copper spigot dull bronze in the evening streetlight.
Experimentally, he grasped the spigot and pulled hard. Nothing happened. The spigot did not move. Frowning, he took a deep breath and pulled with both hands. Nothing.
There was no threat, be decided. Nothing to make the adrenaline rush to his muscles (though there was no denying any more that something considerably more potent than adrenaline was involved).
After him. They were after him! He had to defend himself, had to save himself and Lisa. They were going to get him, put him away, do something terrible to him, and worse to her!
He pulled again. There was a crunch as cement crumbled and the spigot emerged from its socket, trailing copper pipe behind it. The pipe cut through the thin cement and plastic like a piano wire through flesh. Water began to dribble, then to spurt from strained sections of pipe.
He let it fall aside, stumbled away up the street.
What’s happening to me, he thought wildly? What’s happening to me? It was all crazy. He shouldn’t be able to do things like that. Memory conjured up an image of himself whirling a heavy riot suit and its operator over his head like a cowboy twirling a lariat. Impossible, impossible! Had they really happened, those impossibles, or had he dreamed them?
Methodically, he tried to reconstruct the past hour of his shattered life. He’d gone to see Lisa. Tarragon had confronted them. He’d fled, breaking away from everyone who’d tried to restrain him. No man should have been capable of engineering such an escape.
He wanted to scream for help then, sink to his knees there on the street and scream for the sky to help him, but he dared not risk the attention. Instead he kept walking, lifting his head and regulating his stride in an attempt to melt into the night crowds as he blended into the walkway that bordered the First Avenue corridor.
It was impossible. Therefore it hadn’t taken place. That was simple enough. He forced recent events to the back of his mind. He was reasonably confident of his sanity. Not mad, he told himself reassuringly. Just in love. A new hotel room, new clothes, some food and he’d feel much better. He pulled the opposing lapels tighter across his chest.
It was counterproductive to dwell on the implausible, not to mention the impossible. For the moment, therefore, he would assume they had not happened. Right away he felt his pulse slow. Take a while to concentrate on the basics: food, shelter, clothing. Later Lisa, somehow.
No one stared at the loosely clad figure as it made its way up the avenue. This was Nueva York, and far more badly dressed citizens walked its streets every night. There were some who might have remarked on the strange smile the man wore, but that sort of dazed, distant look was also common in the big city. At least he was walking purposefully and not stumbling inanely about.
The police cruiser that passed on patrol likewise ignored him. Why shouldn’t they? There was nothing to indicate they were ignoring the most dangerous man in the city.
Eric Abbott, of course, did not think of himself as dangerous. No, he was in love, and that was a thing of beauty. Nothing dangerous about being in love.
XI
It was a mission control room. That was self-evident. But it did not launch shuttles or probes to deep space. It only monitored information, shuttling bytes back and forth between components buried deep inside the Urirotstock and out to the world network. Satellite dishes fringing the mountain’s crest linked the room with Colligatarch relays in multiple overhead orbits. The operation spoke of smooth power, electrical and human.
Each console had been individualized according to the whims and taste of its operator. One boasted a tall maternal wood carving from the Central African Federation, another displayed shellacked blossoms from the Pacific Union, a third a string of handmade bells from the Inuit Republic. Each testified not only to the tastes but to the origin of each operator.
As he descended the ramp, Oristano felt a cool, quiet pride in the way the world’s most complex computer station functioned. Everything was as it should be. Backups rested behind their consoles, sleeping or reading optotext. They were rarely called upon for emergency work, so efficient had the system become.
Everything was as it should be, and yet it was not.
“CPO, sir?”
Oristano looked to his right. “What is it, Frontenac?”
The man thrust a handful of printouts under the Chief of Operation’s gaze. “It’s the Australians again, sir.”
“I see.” He scanned the printouts, his mind elsewhere. “;What is it this time?”
“They’re complaining about their share of the plankton harvest.”
Oristano sighed. He supposed some nationality had to claim the winner’s ribbon for most obstreperous.
“These figures look all right to me. What’s their complaint?”
“They say their harvest window doesn’t take predictions for an unusually severe Antarctic winter into account.”
“Gott im Himmel,” Oristano muttered to himself. Then, to the assistant, “Tell the Australian representative that we only predict the weather, we don’t control it. Not yet, anyway. Tell him that every other nation has to operate its krilling fleet under the same restrictions and that the catch is apportioned according to a thousand variables, of which weather is only one.”
“They won’t like that,” the assistant said dubiously. “They’ll say it shows a northerner bias as well as a failure to sympathize with a problem oceanic in origin.”
“They always say that,” Oristano responded tiredly. “They wouldn’t be happy unless we picked up and moved Colligatarch Center to Christchurch.”
“Is that what I should relay to them, sir?”
“No, of course not, Frontenac,” he said irritably, and hurried to soften his tone as he saw the other man react. “I just mean that you should reply with some common sense. Be diplomatic about it, as usual. Inform them that the Colligatarch will make a special study of this problem and render a further report based on additional research.”
“That will only mollify them for a little while, sir.” Oristano made pacifying gestures with one hand. “A little while is long enough. I’ve got other things on my mind these days. Just keep them off my neck for a month or so, will you, s’il vous plaît??”
“Oui, CPO.” He took back his printouts and left Oristano alone.
As if there wasn’t enough for him to worry about, he grumbled to himself as he returned to his office. The red light over his desk was pulsing silently. It was a toss-up as to who was the more demanding—the Colligatarch or his wife. Not to mention who was the more understanding. The comparison was unfair to Martha. He settled into his chair.
“All right, I’m here. You can shut that off now.” Instantly the light winked out. “What is it now? More thoughts on threats?”
The Colligatarch was immune to sarcasm. At least, it chose to give that appearance. It said politely, “No, Martin. It is the same threat that has troubled us all along.”
“All along is right. This has been going on for weeks.” He tried to conceal his impatience. It was all very well to announce some terrible menace and put everyone on alert to deal with it, quite another to expect everyone to maintain that state of readiness when day after day went by and nothing happened.
