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  "The President—just this morning—sent down orders to start building three more Nike-class ships," Jensen growled. "We can get them functional before anyone else can assemble even one equivalent ship up there, and I can assure you—"

  "Yes, yes, they'll be armed to the teeth. And—again—so what? Do you really propose to start a new world war over this?"

  He turned his head back to look at Jensen. "Well. Do you?"

  "Don't be absurd!"

  "I'm not being absurd. 'Absurd' is a word you apply to a threat that everyone knows is empty. Which that threat is—and the Europeans and the Chinese will say so openly. The Europeans will probably be polite about it. Formally speaking, at least."

  His hand started moving through the pile of papers on his desk, looking for one of them. "It's a done deal, George. My own recommendation—yes, I know it's out of my area—is that you recommend to the President that we be Mr. Nice Guy about the whole thing. Offer to set up a joint space program. In the real world, once their feathers get unruffled, the Europeans and Chinese will let us basically manage it. If for no other reason, because they won't want to sink the money into creating their own full-scale alternative. So we wind up with a messy compromise but still one that isn't out of control."

  He found the paper he was looking for and took it in his hand. Then, waited.

  Jensen gave the innocent wall the benefit of his glare for another minute or so. "Very well. But whatever else—I want that woman fired. Fired, do you hear?"

  The Jensens of the world were so predictable. Hughes grunted, a bit amused, and held up the paper in his hand.

  "Don't need to fire her. This is her offer of resignation. She sent that as a coda to the main transmission."

  Jensen stared at him. "She resigned?"

  "I didn't say that. I said she offered to resign." He glanced down at the paper. "To quote her exact words: . . . in the event that would prove helpful to either you or the administration. I would, of course, respect the terms of my confidentiality agreement.'"

  Jensen's narrow face looked almost like a blade. "She knew. How else explain that offer? This was no innocent girl fumbling a job too big for her."

  "Of course, she knew. I told you she was one of my three top agents. I don't pick 'em—sure as hell don't promote 'em as fast as I promoted her—unless they're smart as a whip. And Fathom is something of a real genius at this work."

  "'Genius.'" Jensen's lip curled. "You have a strange definition of the term, Andy."

  He unfolded his body and rose to his feet. "Very well. Tell her the resignation is accepted—make sure you stress the penalties attached to violating the confidentiality agreement—and we'll let it go at that. I'll so recommend to the President. In the meantime, we'll want you—"

  He broke off, seeing Hughes shaking his head.

  "Not 'me,' George. Whatever it is you want, you'll need to discuss it with my successor."

  The Director of the HIA leaned back in his chair, clasping his hands over his belly. "You can inform the President he'll have my resignation on his desk tomorrow as well."

  Jensen stared at him. As the seconds passed, his eyes grew wider and wider. So did his mouth.

  "I will, of course, respect my confidentiality agreement also. But I do remind you—sorry, George, but it's the law—that any such agreement is superceded in the event Congress launches an investigation. Which"—he smiled, very thinly—"I imagine they probably will."

  Jensen shook his head abruptly, as if to clear it of fuzziness. "Andy . . . nobody is asking you—"

  "Be quiet," Hughes said. All the simmering anger he'd felt at the current administration since it came into office finally surfaced, although his tone of voice remained soft-spoken. "I am sick and tired of people who think the phrase 'national security' is just another way of saying 'what suits us, because it's politically convenient at the moment.' I didn't survive more than twenty years in this office because I let whoever the current occupant of the White House was dictate to me my responsibilities. That's the reason Congress and the public have put up with me for so long. I'm the anti-J. Edgar Hoover, if you will, in that respect. Everybody makes jokes about the President's legal plumbers and the buck vanishing here, but nobody takes it all that seriously—because they trust me, enough at least, not to allow the HIA to get pulled into those games. I've proved it before, in a crunch, and I'm quite willing to prove it again."

  He unfolded his hands and pointed a forefinger at the Security Advisor. It was a very short, stubby finger, to be sure. But it still bore an uncanny resemblance to a cannon.

  "The real problem here isn't Fathom. It's that—as usual—you people insisted on having your cake and eating it too. If you wanted Fathom to clamp down full and tight security, you only had to instruct her to do so. Of course, that would have produced a political firestorm, once the word got out publicly. Even here at home, much less abroad. So, instead, you relied on her to interpret your inner desires properly. So that if something went wrong, you could—as usual—blame the flunky in the field for whatever mess you found in your lap."

  He returned his hand to its comfortable clasp over his belly. "Clean up your own messes. I do not and have never allowed one of my agents to serve as a sacrificial lamb or a scapegoat for an administration's convenience. You fucked it up, you fix it."

  Hughes used profanity even more rarely than Jensen did. And Jensen knew that, since he wasn't actually stupid.

  "What . . ."

  "I suggest you recommend to the President that he take Fathom's fait accompli as established and preexisting policy—the thought of doing otherwise never occurred to him once and you can practically see the butter not melting in his mouth—and we go from there. I'll send her a private message making clear that she stretched it as far as she could. Coming from me, she'll accept that. Thereafter—"

  He shrugged. "It ain't the end of the world, George. Just another complicated situation that we live with from one day to the next. Like we've been doing for a long time now. The world gets a reasonably open space program that they feel part of, and don't feel too threatened by, and we can still buy ourselves a year or two—won't ever be longer than that, don't kid yourself—in the event the people at Melas Chasma ever do turn up any real military secrets. 'C'est la vie,' as our off-and-on French friends say."

  Jensen was trying to glare at Hughes, but . . . was obviously finding the task difficult. As several of his predecessors had discovered over the years, the country boy from Mississippi was impervious to such efforts. Mississippi was ancient history. Hughes had been in Washington and survived its feuds longer than just about anyone. One of the other common jokes in the capital was his nickname. Devil Anse Hughes.

  "All right, then, keep her if you insist. But send out a replacement as soon as—what? You won't even give me that much?"

  Hughes stopped shaking his head. "George, for Pete's sake. Think. Or if you won't, then trust my assessment of the situation. Now that Fathom's gotten what she wanted—"

  "Which was what? What did that bitch—" he broke off, seeing the Director's glare. Andy Hughes glared even less often than he used cuss words.

  "Not in this room, George. Not ever. Way I was brought up, we don't call a lady a bitch. Sure as hell not a lady like Madeline Fathom. She's been places and done things that would have—"

  He broke off himself. Pearls before swine, and all that.

  He leaned forward, putting his hands on the desk. "What did she want? Exactly what she's going to get. You still don't understand, do you?"

  Then, wearily: "Ah, never mind. My recommendation to the President is that we leave the existing agent in place. Seeing as how— this is not rocket science—one of the other side effects of her transmission is that she'll now have all those cantankerous scientists out there eating out of her hand. Thirty percent of whom, I remind you, are foreign nationals—and one hundred percent of whom are among the top scientists in the world and will be about as easy to keep squelched as herding cats.
Genius-grade cats, to make things worse. If there's anyone who can do it—well enough, anyway—it'll be Madeline Fathom."

  "Oh."

  "Yeah. 'Oh.' Live with it, George. Just live with it." He looked at his watch. "You'd best get back, since you'll be having a new crisis coming down the pike."

  "What are you talking about?"

  "Oh, I figure right around . . ." He glanced at the watch again. "Now, I'd say, it will finally be registering on every CEO of every major aerospace, oil and auto company—probably the railroads, too—that a reactionless drive might upset their applecarts. They'll be flooding the President with calls demanding to know what he intends to do about that dire threat to national security."

  He managed to say it without a trace of sarcasm. A waste of effort, really, since by the time he was finished the National Security Advisor was already out the door.

  Chapter 54

  Three days later, after watching the latest news transmission sent down from Nike, A.J. shook his head. "Jeez, who woulda guessed? It never occurred to me that transmission of yours would stir up such a hornet's nest. Honestly, I thought you and Joe were joking about taking it on the lam."

  By then, Helen and Bruce had finished clearing the table of the dining ware and cleaning it. That was always an obnoxious chore, given the water regimen in Thoat, and thus one that was scrupulously and fairly rotated. The task done, they returned to the table.

  "What is your situation?" Helen asked quietly. "I mean . . .?"

  Madeline waggled her hand back and forth. "Not too bad, all things considered. Think of me as skating on very thin ice—but I'm an excellent skater, if I say so myself, and I've got a great pair of skates." She reached out and patted the interior wall of the rover. "Bless Thoat. And all the rest. It's just awfully hard—especially in Washington—to skin alive Ye Heroine of Ye Day. Even if half of them are sharpening the knives and would like nothing better."

  She lowered the hand and patted the table with it. "Anyway. Here I am and here I'll stay. For a veddy veddy long time, I imagine. The director made it pretty clear that as long as I stayed out here he could cover my ass—even keep me in charge—but if I ever returned . . ."

  She shrugged. "That's fine with me. This is the best assignment I've ever had or could hope to have. The work is fascinating and important, I like almost all the people around me—boy, is that a change from my usual situation—and . . ."

  She lifted her hand, admiring the ring. Across from her, as if by involuntary reflex, Helen held up her own hand, which had an identical one on the ring finger. Except that no Fairy Dust ring would ever be identical, the way the motes shimmered and shifted their colors.

  "I'm even getting a husband out of the deal." Sighing softly, happily, she leaned against Joe sitting next to her and nestled her head into his shoulder. His arm came around to hug her close.

  "Well, you've got guts, lady," A.J. said. "Of course, I've known that for a long time. But I have to admit I never expected you to go against the grain like that."

  Madeline raised her head a little and gave A.J. a serene smile. "What? You think I did it because I've gotten converted to your libertarian viewpoint? 'Information wanna be fwee' and all that twaddle. Ha! Dream on, Mr. Baker. I did it for the same reason I do everything professionally. I'm a security officer and I saw a major threat to national security. I grant you, that required me to meddle with issues of policy that I wouldn't normally stick my nose in. But . . . the situation was unusual. The threat involved was potentially the worst our nation has ever faced."

  "National security? Worst threat?" It was obvious from the expression on A.J.'s face that he had no idea what she was talking about.

  Madeline lifted herself up from the comfortable embrace. "Tell you what. How about we forego the usual word games after dinner—and the lousy jokes—and go outside a bit early? There's something I'd like to show you all out there, that I think would make what I did more sensible to you. Well, maybe. But we'd be putting on the damn suits anyway, before too long, to go to bed."

  "Suits me," said Helen. "I'm getting sick of playing Ghost and Botticelli anyway. Whatever possessed us not to tell Jackie to include a deck of cards in Care Package?"

  "Well, I thought of it," insisted Madeline. She gave Joe and A.J. the saccharine smile they so detested. "But I knew our engineers would get offended if I suggested they couldn't just make something that simple."

  Joe chuckled. "Hey, look. No wood, no paper. No paper, no cardboard. There are limits to ingenuity, when you run up against Grandpa and his stubborn ways. But Jackie says she'll include a deck in the next package."

  Rich Skibow had been unusually silent since the meal began. Now, he cleared his throat. "Uh . . . actually, I was going to ask all of you if you'd be willing to leave early, anyway. I, uh, have a personal communication I need to make."

  Everyone stared at him. The elderly linguist seemed to flush a little. "If you don't mind."

  "No, of course we don't," said Helen, using her boss-of-the-dig tone. "Everybody, up. Let's go outside and see whatever Madeline wants to show us, and give Rich some privacy."

  A few minutes later—putting on even those state-of-the-art spacesuits was never a quick affair—all five of them came out of the rover and took a few steps to get out onto open ground. Above them, with only the horizon blocked off by the dark mass of the cliffs of Valles Marineris, the Martian starblaze was its usual glory.

  "D'you think . . ." mused A.J.

  "Oh, I'd say so," Helen chuckled. "As you've pointed out yourself any number of times, they bicker like an old married couple anyway. So why not get all the benefits, too?" More briskly, in the boss-of-the-dig tone: "But it's none of our business, until and unless Rich wants to talk about it. So. What did you want to show us, Madeline?"

  "That." Madeline pointed up, to the stars. "I'd like each of you to tell me what you see there."

  That took another few minutes, once she got them going. The phrases used were sometimes prosaic, sometime poetical. The words "wonder" and "awe" came and went like people passing through the revolving door of a busy office.

  When they were done, Madeline nodded. "That's about what I thought. Not one of you—not once—used any of the words I'd use. Words like 'fear' and 'terror.'"

  She gazed up, silent for a moment. "You want to know what I see—and have seen, every time I've looked at the stars, since we arrived at Phobos and first learned the truth? I see a cold, frightening, hostile universe. A universe that once sent an alien species into our solar system, who, for whatever reasons—which we still don't know and may never—fought a war that almost destroyed our planet and did destroy most of its advanced life-forms."

  "Jeez, Madeline," A.J. started to protest, "that was—"

  "Sixty-five million years ago. Yes, I know—and don't think I haven't taken great comfort in the knowledge. Because what it means to me is that I think we've still got plenty of time to prepare, if we use the time wisely. But ask yourself, A.J.—or Helen, rather, since she's the expert—how long is sixty-five million years? Really? Measured on a geological scale, or a galactic one?"

  Helen pursed her lips. "Well . . . it's not short. Not even for paleontologists or geologists. Not even for astronomers, really, although for them it's starting to get into the small change area. Still . . . yes, I see your point. It's about one tenth of the time since complex life first began emerging on Earth in the Cambrian Explosion. And a still smaller portion of the time since the galaxy formed."

  "Right. So who's to say it can't happen again? In fact, is almost bound to happen again—hopefully later rather than sooner; but eventually, no matter what."

  The sight of everyone staring at her made Madeline chuckle. At night, in their suits, their eyes looked very beady indeed.

  "Yeah, sure, I know it's a paranoid way of looking at things. Folks, that's what I do. Security. In a way, I guess, you could say that's what I am."