Between the Strokes of Night

The female figure swooped without warning down to the clear honeycombed plastic of the outer wall, kicked off hard from it, and surged upward toward Workwheel center. The other, taken by surprise, followed her a second later. He overtook her halfway to the axle and reached out to grasp her calf, but she wriggled away and headed off in a new direction, still slanting toward the surface. Again he pursued, and this time as he neared her he reached out to grasp both her ankles. His fingers closed, and at that instant the tableau suddenly froze. Two nude sculptures, their muscles tensed, hung in the water among the motionless fishes. Salter Wherry looked closely at the video display for a few seconds, then carefully moved it along several frames. It was difficult to see the expressions clearly in the recording, and he zoomed in on Judith Niles’ face for a high-mag close-up. Even with the mask on, her face contrasted with her taut muscles. She looked totally relaxed, though Hans Gibbs was gripping her firmly around the ankles. After a few moments of study Wherry skipped forward, a few frames at a time, watching the changing expressions as the nude bodies moved together, embraced, then slowly rose. Entwined, they moved to meet the broad concave meniscus of the water surface near the axle of the wheel.

Salter Wherry watched their actions calmly in the darkness of the control room. Always, regardless of the couple’s embraces, his attention rested on Judith Niles’ face. At last he leaned forward and pressed another key on the console in front of him. The scene changed to a brilliantly lit interior. Now it was Judith Niles standing alone in Wherry’s office on Spindletop, just next door from the hidden studio, waiting for her first meeting with him. Again his attention was on her face. One minute more, another press of a key, and Wherry was seeing her as she stood after their first meeting. He grunted in dissatisfaction. The hidden cameras were carefully placed, but they could not offer views from all angles, and this time a full-face view was denied him.

He moved on. The next shots had come from the inside of the Institute itself, down on earth. Preparations were under way for the move to Salter Station. The cameras showed experimental animals being carefully housed in well-ventilated crates for upward shipment. This time Salter Wherry seemed pleased. There was a hint of satisfaction in the blue eyes as he cut to the receiving network for his daily global status report.

Salter Station’s observing network tapped all open news channels around the globe, plus a number of sources that national governments would have been shocked to see so routinely cracked. Ground reports were supplemented and confirmed by the station’s spy satellite network, the hundred polar-orbiting spacecraft that permitted a constant detailed look at events anywhere on the globe.

Salter Wherry now began his daily routine, switching with long practice between different data sources. As the mood struck him, he cut back to earlier events of the past year, then moved forward again to the present. Patiently, he tacked his way to and fro across the face of the globe, sometimes a thousand miles above the surface, sometimes through a hand-held camera on an open street, occasionally with video taken inside government buildings or within private homes. The images flooded in.