Cities in Flight

“Quiet!” Paige shouted over them with the authentic parade-ground blare. He had never found any use for it in deep space, but it worked now. Both of them looked at him, their mouths still incongruously half-opened, their faces white as milk. “You act like a pair of hysterical chickens, both of you! I’m sorry if I got you into trouble—but I didn’t ask Anne to lie in my behalf—and I didn’t ask you to go along with it, either, Gunn! Maybe you’d best stop yelling accusations and try to think the thing through. I’ll try to help for whatever that’s worth—but not if you’re going to scream and weep at each other and at me!”

The girl bared her teeth at him in a real snarl, the first time he had ever seen a human being mount such an expression and mean it. She sat down, however, swiping at her patchily red cheeks with a piece of cleansing tissue. Gunn looked down at the carpet and just breathed noisily for a moment, putting the palms of his hands together solemnly before his white lips.

“I quite agree,” Gunn said after a moment, as calmly as if nothing had happened. “We’ll have to get to work and work fast. Anne, please tell me: why was it necessary for you to say that Colonel Paige was essential to the project? I’m not accusing you of anything, but we need to know the facts.”

“I went to dinner with Colonel Russell last night,” Anne said. “I was somewhat indiscreet about the project. At the end of the evening we had a quarrel which was probably overheard by at least two of MacHinery’s amateur informers in the restaurant. I had to lie for my own protection as well as Colonel Russell’s.”

“But you have an Eavesdropper! If you knew that you might be overheard—”

“I knew it well enough. But I lost my temper. You know how these things go.”

It all came out as emotionless as a tape recording. Told in these terms, the incident sounded to Paige like something that had happened to someone whom he had never met, whose name he could not even pronounce with certainty. Only the fact that Anne’s eyes were reddened with furious tears offered any bridge between the cold narrative and the charged memory.

“Yes; nasty,” Gunn said reflectively. “Colonel Russell, do you know the Bridge team?”

“I know some of them quite well, Charity Dillon in particular; after all, I was stationed in the Jovian system for a while. MacHinery’s check will show that I’ve no official connection with the Bridge, however.”

“Good, good,” Gunn said, beginning to brighten. “That widens MacHinery’s check to include the Bridge too, and dilutes it from Pfitzner’s point of view—gives us more time, though I’m sorry for the Bridge men. The Bridge and the Pfitzner project both suspect—yes, that’s a big mouthful even for MacHinery; it will take him months. And the Bridge is Senator Wagoner’s pet project, so he’ll have to go slowly; he can’t assassinate Wagoner’s reputation as rapidly as he could some other senator’s. Hmm. The question now is, just how are we going to use the time?”

“When you calm down, you calm right down to the bottom,” Paige said, grinning wryly.

“I’m a salesman,” Gunn said. “Maybe more creative than some, but at heart a salesman. In that profession you have to suit the mood to the occasion, just like actors do. Now about those samples—”

“I shouldn’t have thrown that in,” Anne said. “I’m afraid it was one good touch too many.”

“On the contrary, it may be the only out we have. MacHinery is a ‘practical’ man. Results are what counts with him. So suppose we take Colonel Russell’s samples out of the regular testing order and run them through right now, issuing special orders to the staff that they are to find something in them—anything that looks at all decent.”

“The staff won’t fake,” Anne said, frowning.

“My dear Anne, who said anything about faking? Nearly every batch of samples contains some organism of interest, even if it isn’t good enough to wind up among our choicest cultures. You see? MacHinery will be contented by results if we can show them to him, even though the results may have been made possible by an unauthorized person; otherwise he’d have to assemble a committee of experts to assess the evidence, and that costs money. All this, of course, is predicated on whether or not we have any results by the time MacHinery finds out Colonel Russell is an unauthorized person.”

“There’s just one other thing,” Anne said. “To make good on what I told MacHinery, we’re going to have to turn Colonel Russell into a convincing planetary ecologist— and tell him just what the Pfitzner project is.”

Gunn’s face fell momentarily. “Anne,” he said, “I want you to observe what a nasty situation that strong-arm man has gotten us into. In order to protect our legitimate interests from our own government, we’re about to commit a real, serious breach of security—which would never have happened if MacHinery hadn’t thrown his weight around.”