The girl drank. “Don’t bother studying, it’s not like that, it’s why-do-you-bite-your-fingernails?”
Paula bit her fingernails. She closed her hands into fists.
“Who’s on the panel?”
“Sybil Jefferson. Richard Bunker. Three or four others. I didn’t recognize them all. Where did this water come from?”
The people around the water cooler moved away to let her reach the spigot. Paula sighed. She stared across the room at the split-sphere projection of the Earth on the far wall.
After a long while, Carlos Sahedi came out, Michalski behind him. “Paula Mendoza.”
She went after him into the corridor. The cooler air brushed her sweating face and neck. Michalski said, “Are you thirsty? I can bring you some coffee.”
“No, that’s all right,” she said. “Thanks.” Her voice sounded scratchy. He nodded to a door on her right. Voices came through it.
“Go on in,” Michalski said. He went down the corridor.
Paula stood still a moment, listening to the people inside the room argue. A woman’s voice said, “Why hasn’t anybody learned it?”
“Who could use it?” said a voice she thought she recognized. “They aren’t exactly the likely people to have an anarchist revolution, are they?” Paula pushed the door in and entered the room.
Ranged behind a shiny table, the six members of the panel turned to face her. She shut the door and went straight up toward them, itching with nerves.
“I’m Paula Mendoza,” she said.
The six faces stared blankly back at her. The fat woman in the middle was Sybil Jefferson, her cheeks powder-white. She flipped over a page in the loose-bound book before her.
“Your father was Akim Morgan, the behaviorist, wasn’t he?”
“Yes,” Paula said, startled.
“I met him once. He was very didactic.”
“He was strong-minded,” Paula said, angry. Her father was dead. “He wasn’t didactic.”
The slight dark man on Jefferson’s right leaned forward over the table. “Why do you want to work for the Committee?”
That was Richard Bunker, and it was his voice she had recognized. “I’m not sure I do,” she said.
“Sorry. I’ll rephrase it. Why did you apply?”
She made herself stare straight at him. “Because the Committee has forgotten its purpose. It was formed for the sake of revolution. Now it’s just a vestigial government. I wanted a chance to tell you you’ve failed.”
The six faces did not change. Nobody seemed outraged. Bunker leaned back. He was as dark as Tony, slight and short. His hands on the table were thin-boned like a woman’s. He said, “The general idea is that the Committee protects the condition of anarchy, and within the anarchy people have the freedom of their own lives. What do you think we should do—smuggle revolutionary propaganda to Mars and Venus? Form cadres? Blow up Crosby’s Planet?”
“No. I—”
At the other end of the table a man called, “Under what circumstances would you advocate the use of force?”
“Be brief,” someone else muttered. “Twenty-five hundred words or less.”
“Force is inefficient,” Paula said. A trickle of sweat ran down her side. She wished she had accepted Michalski’s offer of coffee. “I’ll reserve the remaining 2497 words.”
“You didn’t answer the question,” Sybil Jefferson said. She smiled at Paula. Her eyes were china-blue.
“It’s meaningless. If you’d rationalize force in one circumstance, you rationalize it all the time.”
Bunker said, “I still want to know how you’d promote the revolution.”
“Disband the Committee,” she said. “Any time there’s trouble, now, people just depend on you to negotiate it out. If you disbanded, people would have to find their own solutions.”
Michalski came in with a tray. She smelled coffee. He transferred the pot to the table in front of Bunker and a plate of sugar-nuts to the table in front of Jefferson, put two stacks of cups between them, and started out. Paula said, “Michalski, could I have some too, please?”
“There’s an extra cup.”
The six Committee members were clustered around the coffee pot. Jefferson bit into a sugar-nut. When she talked she sprayed white frosting across the table. “The anarchy has to have some means to defend itself. The rest of the system isn’t as advanced as you are.”
“Nobody can take anybody else’s freedom away,” Paula said. The other people were going back to their chairs. She poured coffee into the remaining cup. “Not unless you give it up.”
The broad breast of Jefferson’s red tunic was snowy with frosting. “I suppose you know about that. You were in prison once, weren’t you?”
“On Mars,” Paula said. “For six months.”
“What for?”
“For trying to take something out of Barsoom illegally.” Barsoom was the capital of Mars.
“A camera,” Jefferson said. “Did you forget about the export duty?”
“No. I didn’t think the Martian government had any right to charge me for taking my own camera with me.” She drank her coffee. They were watching her as if she were performing. She supposed she was. Bunker pushed his cup away across the table. He had a reputation for double-dealing; “Mitchell Wylie,” Michalski had called him once, behind his back, the folk name for Machiavelli.
Someone else said, “I thought you had connections on Mars, Mendoza?”
She put the cup down on the table. They did know everything about her. “I worked for Cam Savenia, when she ran for election to the Martian Senate, but when I was arrested, she fired me.”
“Cam Savenia.” Bunker’s head snapped up, wide-eyed. “Dr. Savenia? You worked in a Martian election?”
“I wanted to see what it was like.”
“That’s suspect.”
“It wasn’t my Planet.”
“Well, well, well.”
“What was it like?” asked the woman who had mentioned her connections.
“Hocus pocus,” Paula said, and the other people laughed. She looked at Bunker. “Why is that a well-well- well?”
“Dr. Savenia and R.B. do not get along,” Jefferson said. “You’re twenty-nine, Mendoza? You’ve never had a full-time job before?”
“Just with Dr. Savenia, that time.”
“But not on the Earth? How do you live?”
“I substitute with the university orchestra, I do a little pick-up work with the recording studios. That’s all the money I need.”
“What do you play?”
“Flute.”
“Oh, really?” The old man at the end of the table tilted himself forward over his fisted hands. “Do you like Alfide? Why didn’t you make a career out of that?”
“I’m not good enough. Alfide is my favorite composer. And Ibanov. And me.”
“What do you know about the Styths?” Jefferson said.
She drank the rest of her coffee. Obviously they had even discovered that. “They’re mutants. They live in artificial cities in the Gas Planets—Uranus and Saturn.”
“We all know that much.” The old woman pulled a sugar-nut apart with her hands. The edge of the table indented her fat stomach. “Don’t you know anything else?”
“Well,” she said, “I speak Styth.”
They all moved slightly, inclining toward her, their eyes intent. Bunker said smoothly, “So we’re told. You learned it in prison?”
“Yes. There were three Styths locked up in the men’s unit. The warden needed somebody to teach them the Common Speech.”
