Hot Sky at Midnight

and he went tense at once, aware now that all of this must have been staged.

Or had it been? He heard Jolanda Bermudez gasp in consternation. She had drawn her hands back from Farkas’s, quickly, guiltily, at the first sound of the voice. Obviously she wasn’t expecting this intrusion and was upset by it. Farkas saw her emanations fluctuating wildly. She was making small brushing motions, as if telling the man to go away.

These two must be traveling together. Farkas remembered now that the woman had had a companion with her at her table the night before; but Farkas had seen no reason to give him any regard. Had the woman sought Farkas out on her own, though, or had the two of them carefully set him up?

“I know you,” Farkas told the man calmly, with his left hand resting on the spike in his pocket. The weapon was tuned to stun intensity, just one level down from lethal. That ought to be enough, he thought “You are—” Farkas reached deep into his memory. “Israeli?”

“Right. Right! Very good! Meshoram Enron. We met in South America, years ago. Bolivia, I think.”

“Caracas, actually.” It was coming back, now. The little man was a spy, of course. “The conference on seawater mineral extraction. —Victor Farkas.”

“Yes. I know. You are not easy to forget. Are you still with Kyocera?”

Farkas nodded. “And you? A news magazine, am I right?”

“Cosmos, yes. I am working on a feature now about the L-5 worlds.”

“What about you?” Farkas asked benignly, looking toward Jolanda. “You are assisting Mr. Enron with his magazine article, is that it?”

“Oh, no, I don’t have anything at all to do with magazines. Marty and I met just yesterday, on the shuttle coming up from Earth.”

“Ms. Bermudez makes friends very quickly,” Enron explained.

“So I have been discovering,” said Farkas.

Enron laughed. It was a precise, measured sort of laugh, Farkas decided, very carefully rehearsed for use on such occasions as this.

“Well,” said Enron. “I won’t disturb you two any further, then. But we must get together for a drink, eh, Farkas? How much longer are you likely to be staying up here?”

“I’m not sure. Several more days, at the least.”

“A holiday, is it?”

“A holiday, yes.”

“Wonderful place, isn’t it? Such a contrast to poor old sad Earth.” Enron began to move away. “Listen, you will give Jolanda the name of your hotel, yes? And then I’ll call you and we can set up a date.” To Jolanda he said, softly, proprietarily, “See you later, all right?”

So they are traveling together, Farkas thought The sculptress and the spy. That was worth thinking about. None of this had been any accident. Obviously Enron had seen him in the restaurant last night. This meeting today had been deliberately engineered by him. Using the woman as a cat’s-paw, though? Farkas wasn’t sure. They are traveling together, yes, but are they working together? And if so, on what?

Enron was gone. Farkas reached for Jolanda’s hand again, and she gave it.

“Now,” he said. “About this afternoon—about your taking the measurements you need for this sculpture, this portrait of me that you tell me you want to do—”

17

nakamura made a small but imperious gesture with two fingers of his hand and the brightly glinting image of what looked more or less like a gigantic steel-jacketed hornet without wings sprang into being in the air of the vast barren room where he and Rhodes were having their little talk. It nearly filled the entire space.

“This, Dr. Rhodes, is the prototype of our starship. I show it to you not because your work for us, if you were to cast your fortunes in with us, would pertain in any way to our starship program, but simply because I am eager to demonstrate to you the extent of our far-flung scientific endeavor. May I have the pleasure to offer you one more glass of cognac?”

“Well—” Rhodes said. But Nakamura was pouring already.

Rhodes suspected that he was getting a little tipsy. Nakamura dispensed the cognac with a free hand.

It seemed safe to be drinking this much, though. Rhodes had recognized from the beginning that he was out of his depth with a Level Three man; he expected to be outflanked and overwhelmed at every step, and that provided him with a certain armor. He had already resolved that he would agree to nothing at this first meeting, regardless of the acuity of Nakamura’s manipulative techniques. He was an experienced enough drinker to know that a little cognac, or even a great deal, wasn’t going to alter that resolution; and it did help him fend off the anxieties that arose in this challenging situation, here on this alien turf, in the presence of so formidable a corporate figure.

The conversation had been altogether one-sided. Rhodes knew that he was here to listen, not to try to make an impression. The impression had already been made. Kyocera-Merck probably knew more about him than he did himself.

At the beginning, Nakamura had asked a few bland, nonspecific questions about Rhodes’ current research projects. It was purely a courtesy: plainly Nakamura wasn’t trying to elicit corporate secrets from him. Rhodes told him what was already public knowledge about Samurai’s gene-splicing program, and Nakamura listened politely, prompting him now and then, guiding him through an account of the familiar and the obvious.

Then the focus shifted to Kyocera-Merck. “We too are deeply concerned about the fate of our species on this troubled planet, Dr. Rhodes,” Nakamura said, as gravely as any undergraduate about to launch into some environmental harangue. “Like you, we feel that some biological modification of the race will be necessary to equip us for the coming changes; but we have not, I think, made as much progress along that road as your great company has. As you surely are already well aware, that is why I have asked you to come here today: to explore with you the possibility that you might choose to transfer your extraordinary skills to our laboratories.” With a smile and a minute bowing gesture and a flick of his hand, Nakamura indicated that there was no need for Rhodes to reply just yet to this first explicit statement of the purpose of the meeting. “We have, however, made some remarkable strides toward an entirely different kind of solution. I speak of our attempts, of which you have probably heard rumors, to develop a faster-than-light spaceship that will be capable of conducting human colonists to suitable planets outside the solar system.”

It was then that Nakamura brought the model of the starship prototype to vivid life in front of them.

Rhodes took an involuntary step backward, as though fearing the thing would fall on him. But all it was, he knew, was a holographic image.

Nakamura said, “You have heard reports of our starship program?”

“Only the sketchiest outlines of it,” Rhodes said truthfully. “Essentially all I know is that there is such a program. And has been for several years.”

“Yes. As there is, also, at Samurai Industries. Were you aware of that, Dr. Rhodes?”

“To about the same degree. What we hear, though, is that Kyocera is much farther along the track than we are.”

“That is correct. We have made successful ground tests and are now almost on the verge of making our first experimental flight.” Nakamura’s eyes took on a brilliant sheen. He was offering Rhodes classified information, now: a small quid as down payment for the soon-to-be-requested quo. “A problem has developed, however, involving the nature of human perception under the extreme conditions of faster-than-light travel. And here is where our starship program and your own gene-splicing specialty overlap.”

Rhodes was taken off balance by that. Was Kyocera trying to hire him to do some kind of starship work for them?

“The difficulty,” Nakamura said smoothly, “is that the faster-than-light stardrive creates a variety of apparently unavoidable relativistic distortions. The occupants of the ship will travel in an altered space, in which, among other things, the visual signals reaching their optical nerves will be completely unfamiliar to them. Our eyes, of course, are designed to receive light in a particular segment of the spectrum and to decode the patterns