2312

“But… if the attack on the sunshield had succeeded, wouldn’t the terrorists have killed themselves too?”

Genette said, “I think there would have been time for an evacuation. And the perpetrators could be off-planet by now. Also, if qubes made the decision, they might not have cared either way. Whoever the original programmers were, at that point they might not have been in control of the decisions being made. The qubes themselves might have been thinking, Well, it’s a loss, but there’s more of us where we came from. So they would get what they wanted whether the attack worked or failed.”

Wahram thought it over. “What about that killed terrarium out in the asteroid belt? The Yggdrasil?”

“I don’t know about that. Maybe it was meant to make people feel vulnerable. Maybe they were just testing their method. But it’s odd, I agree. It’s one of the reasons I want to see these qubanoids, and any people they’ve picked up here.”

A group of people emerged from the front door of the complex, and Genette made a beeline to them. Many were smalls; the attack on the building had apparently had a Trojan horse component to it, with a bunch of smalls cutting in through air ducts and firing gas canisters to start the attack.

“All right, come on,” Genette said when he returned to Wahram’s side, “let’s get out of here. We have to get these things off-planet as fast as we can.”

A line of about two dozen people, mostly standard size, but including a small and a tall, filed out the door, chained together by their security vests. Genette stopped them one by one as they passed, asking questions very politely, only detaining them for a few seconds each. Wahram inspected them also as they passed, and he noted their possibly too-smooth motion, and an intent glassy-eyed blankness to some of them; but he would not have put bets on his own ability to tell which ones were human and which manufactured. It was disconcerting, that was for sure. A little drop of dread seemed to have slid down his throat to his stomach, where it was spreading.

Genette stopped the last person in line: “Aha!”

“Who’s this?” Wahram asked.

“This is Swan’s lawn bowler, I believe.” Genette held up Passepartout and photographed the person, then nodded at the matched photos on the wristqube’s little screen. “And, as it turns out”-running a wand over the young person’s head-“a human being after all.”

The youth stared at them mutely.

Genette said, “Maybe this is our programmer, eh? We can investigate on our way out. I want to get off Venus as fast as we can.”

This meant another quick crossing of the city, and a tense passage through lock gates to their impromptu helicopter pad. More than once, officials who should have had reason to question such a large group instead let them pass, sometimes while chattering nervously on their headsets through the whole process.

When they were airborne again, Genette glanced at Wahram with a mime’s round-eyed wiping of the brow. Their helicopter headed for Colette, and at the spaceport there, they rushed onto a pad and got into a space plane, and rode it juddering up into lower orbit, there to be hauled in by an orbiting Interplan cruiser.

It was the Swift Justice; and when everyone was aboard, they set a course for Pluto.

I n the weeks of their trip out, they brought the lawn bowler in for questioning more than once; but he never said a word. He was definitely human. A young man, thirty-five years old. They were able to trace him back from Swan’s sighting in the Chateau Garden to one of the unaffiliateds, one that would not give its name to outsiders; Interplan had it listed, with accidental prescience, as U-238.