Now Lalouette took off the headband and looked around. Both Artois and Chadwick were unconscious on the floor. They had succumbed to the G forces. Salmon was conscious, however, strapped into one of the seats. He looked grimly at Lalouette.
Jean-Paul snorted and shook his head, then donned the headband again. He looked up at the earth, which was merely a black spot against the sunlit sky.
Pierre Artois thought he was the emperor of the earth, but oh, how little he knew!
Jean-Paul dumped the saucer's nose and let it accelerate down the slope. It accelerated slowly, pulled by the weak lunar gravity, as if life were being lived in slow motion.
On the crest of a lower ridge he saw a sharp promontory, a spire of rock that had stood upright since the ridge was made. Even as the thought crossed his mind, the crosshairs of the antimatter weapon appeared on the canopy before him. The saucer turned slightly, pointing precisely at that rock finger, superimposing the crosshairs over it.
Flashes from the rock. Shards and dust flew off as antipro-tons found protons and the particles obliterated each other in bursts of pure energy.
The spire was obscured in an opaque cloud of rock fragments when he stopped shooting at the last instant and pulled the saucer up just enough to avoid smashing into it. Accelerating downward toward the lava sea, the saucer quickly left the shattered spire behind.
Lalouette's face wore a terrible grin.
15
The moon was just above the western horizon the next morning when the sun rose in North America. The weather was magnificent across most of the continent on this autumn day. As the earth spun in the sky over his head, Pierre Artois used his antigravity beam on the White House, then the arch in St. Louis, and finally, the Rose Bowl in Pasadena.
Some California sports fans became positively giddy when the Rose Bowl was reduced to rubble. Perhaps, they thought, the feds could be induced to build a new stadium to replace it, one that might attract an NFL team.
Pierre could have zapped a lot more places — the weather was perfect, the sunlight at a low angle gave the telescopic picture excellent contrast, and Julie was urging him to — but he refrained, preferring to pretend he had been forced to violence by a recalcitrant president who refused to listen to reason.
The president of the United States had problems of a different sort. Millions of Americans watched the White House being reduced to splinters as they ate their breakfast. It was not a pretty sight, and the reaction was immediate. A delegation of infuriated senators and representatives called upon the chief executive at 'an undisclosed location' and urged war on France.
'That idiot Artois is the emperor of France, according to the French government, and he is waging war on us,' Senator Blohardt said forcefully. 'We must deliver an ultimatum to the frogs — renounce Artois or suffer the consequences.'
'And the consequences would be…?'
'Nuclear war,' said a senator from the Deep South, smacking a fist into his palm.
'No, not that,' a California congressman replied. 'Conventional explosives only. Surgical strikes. Radioactivity would poison the water and spread through the food chain.'
'A blockade of all French ports,' another urged. 'We'll shut down their industry.'
'I might support a boycott of French products,' the secretary of state said tentatively. 'We might be able to get the UN to go along with a boycott, as long as there was a wine-for-food provision so that the French wouldn't starve.'
'Hmm,' said the president, and sent the delegation off with the secretary of state to argue the issue.
'So what
'Nothing,' said the president, 'until we hear from Rip and Charley.'
'The latest polls say the public wants action,' O'Reilly reminded him. He gestured toward the television, which was replaying a video of the destruction of the executive mansion one more time. 'You're sitting on a volcano of outraged voters. You cannot remain passive.'
'If you have any suggestions, trot them out.'
O'Reilly thought hard, but he couldn't come up with any-
thing. The president couldn't either, so he went to the gym to work out.
'Why can't we see the saucer that is coming toward us?' Pierre demanded of Claudine Courbet. He was standing at the telescope controls staring at the computer-enhanced image as he scanned the scope slowly back and forth, trying to find a single tiny dot of light that moved in relation to the background stars.
'You are looking for one grain of sand on a very large beach, monsieur,' Courbet said respectfully.
'If only we had a decent radar!' Pierre declared. A radar unit that they could use to aim the antigravity beam or scan the sky for incoming spaceplanes would have been impossible to justify to the French politicians; Pierre had used all the excess lift capacity he had transporting unmanifested items that he absolutely had to have. Now that he was emperor he could get anything he wanted on a manifest, if only he had a way to get it here.
He gave up on the telescope and glanced over his shoulder at Egg Cantrell, who stood between Henri Salmon and Fry One against a wall. Pierre had had Egg brought here to watch the recalcitrant Americans being zapped in the hope that he would be suitably impressed. A videotaped appeal from a humbled Egg might be useful at some point.
'So, you see how futile is the American resistance, eh?'
'Did the thought ever occur to you that you might have killed people in those buildings you destroyed?'
'Your president has chosen to sacrifice American lives rather than doing the proper, honorable thing, which is to submit. I do what I must in the interest of all mankind. If lives have been lost, it is his responsibility, not mine.'
Pierre was a megalomaniac so far around the bend he was out of sight, Egg concluded. Reasoning with him was a waste of time.
Egg looked through the thick, bulletproof glass, if that was what it was, at the chamber beyond, with the antigravity beam generator in the center and the telescope and capacitor slightly offset, at the scaffolding against the wall, at the plates and hydraulic rams that could seal the chamber from the vacuum of space. The chamber was lit by brilliant sunlight, which was not streaming straight down through the hole in the roof but was coming in at a slight angle. Yet through the opening one could see stars in the dark sky.
A remarkable engineering triumph, Egg thought. Quite remarkable.
As Pierre chattered on about his plans for the people of earth, for the future of the species in the Utopia that he would build, Egg thought about Rip and Charley, who were coming to the moon in Rip's old saucer… to rescue him.
Finally Pierre tired of Egg's monosyllabic answers and turned to Claudine. 'How is the weather over Japan?'
'Clear enough, I think. The sun will not be up for hours but I believe Tokyo is very well lit. Perhaps we can see it. Clouds will obscure the islands tomorrow.'
Pierre rubbed his hands together. 'Then we must discipline them now,' he said, and turned to the control console.
Egg's thoughts shot down the road Pierre had inadvertently suggested. God rest you, Sigmund Freud. Julie Artois was standing at the console monitoring the reactor's output and checking computer readouts. She would enjoy wielding the whip, Egg decided. A bit embarrassed at the mental image, he flushed slightly.
So there it was. A megalomaniac and his dominatrix, shattering lives all over the globe because they knew what was best for everyone.
Egg closed his eyes and concentrated fiercely.
