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Ebook has 198 lines and 9988 words, and 4 pages

Down Went McGinty

I guess you could say I hated Kolomar. Not with the same hatred I had for the Comrades, but I hated him. There were the obvious reasons--he'd beat me out of my general's star, and got the top job with Security that I'd been promised for the last five years. It was because of him that I was still stuck with the command of a second-rate satellite. But there was an even more obvious reason, and it was the same one everybody else had.

There are a lot of ways of handling authority.

You could be human. Or you could be like Kolomar. And if you were like him, you never made any mistakes: you'd go to the end of the Universe if you had to, and when you wound up a case, the front office would always have a gold star waiting for your report card. The only thing good anybody else would have to say for you was that at least, you were on the right side and not pitching on the Comrades' team.

He was towering over me now as I knelt in front of the wrecked safe; he couldn't have missed the look in my eyes, but it was like shooting a pistol at an atomic screen. I might as well have kept looking at the thing in my hand that I'd just picked up off the deck.

He towered over me, that sour face of his hard as rock, and only the cold blue eyes showing that he was two jumps ahead of me; that he understood all about the thing in my hand, and that I wasn't as innocent about it as I was trying to make him think.

"Mark it Exhibit 1," he rattled, "and add the name of the man to whom it belongs."

I straightened up. I tossed the good luck piece to my desk; it was like any ordinary good luck charm--a century-old 1900 50-cent piece--and under the satellite's one-third G it just floated down to the desk top like a leaf falling off a tree.

"How do I know whose it is?" I bluffed. "I'm boss of sixty men here, Kolomar. Besides the twenty that come up every week on the supply shuttle. And they're a different twenty each time at that--"

He stared me straight down.

"How long have you been here, Colonel Kenton? Ten years, isn't it?"

I didn't answer him. He knew. He'd been a shuttle-lieutenant when I'd first arrived on the satellite. He had a brother who was floor leader of the Senate. It was ten years later, and now he was Director-General of the Federal Bureau of Space Investigation. I was still a colonel. My brother was a schoolteacher.

"The crews here still have to sign contracts for five-year tricks. You've known two full crews, and whoever did this--" he turned his close-cropped head and nodded at the gaping Top Secret file in the blown safe "--is obviously a member of the crew you've got now. You know it; I know it. You've got a reputation, Kenton, for getting to know your men. They say you know 'em as if they were your own brothers in six months' time."

He didn't bother making it a verbal accusation.

"I could only--I couldn't even make a bad guess as to whose it is, sir."

"You've got twenty-four hours to make a good one. I want him by 1700, Earth-Standard, tomorrow. That's an order."

Then he just turned around, the light of the cold cathodes glittering off his shoulder insignia and the silver trim on his black leatherite space tunic, and left my office cubicle the way he'd come. Fast. Murderous. Accusing.

If he had to go to Hell and back to win, he would.

I waited until Control signalled that he'd got back aboard his official shuttle and blasted into a return orbit, and then I buzzed for my execs, Haliburton, Knight and Loftus.

Even a second rate satellite of a second rate power has three execs, although I guess a lot of people back home think it's a one man show, putting in time to save national face while the grade A job--the one with the big red star on the side--circles Earth five hundred miles further out doing all the "important" work. The one that beat us up here by ten years. The one owned by the government which said we could put up a satellite of our own if we wanted to, but suggested just how big it would be, just what equipment it would and wouldn't carry, how far up it'd circle, how big a crew it would have.

Suggested, you know, the way they do when treaties are drawn up around the New-U.N. conference tables. It never says in the treaties what will happen if certain agreements aren't adhered to. It doesn't say who has "the edge," as McGinty calls it; it doesn't carefully point out who was firstest with the mostest. It doesn't have to.

This is peace, Comrade. Just don't get egg on your face.

It was a couple of minutes before my execs walked in. I was still standing, still looking down at the ancient good luck piece on my desk when they did. Major Haliburton, Meteorology detail; Major Knight, Astronomical; Lieutenant Loftus, Records and Research.

Military?

Only the personnel. Nothing else of a military nature ever found its way into the treaty. Strangely enough, it had somehow never even been mentioned.

Short, stocky, red-headed Loftus, the youngest of the three was the first to open up. Haliburton had his tall, starved-looking frame still half in and half out of his plasti-foam chair; Knight's beefy face was still kind of blank, as though he hadn't quite yet taken it all in. Well, they knew me. I was short and sweet, always answered questions, and tried never to bore people. Too lax, some people liked to say. But still here after ten years.

"The--microstats, Ken?" Loftus was half-asking, half-saying.

"Yeah. And this." I picked up the good luck piece, tossed it to him. He took one look, passed it to the others. "Kolomar gives me twenty-four hours to give him the man who owns it. It was dropped in front of the safe. The only clue, if you can call it a clue. But to Kolomar's traffic-ticket mind, it's automatic evidence of guilt. And he'd fly clear to Aldebaran to prove it. O.K., questions."

It was silent in the little cubicle for a second or so. I didn't hurry them; I wanted it to sink in, and they'd need some time. I audioed my orderly room, told the sergeant on duty to black the office out to the rest of the installation for the next ten minutes.

Then after a minute or so Knight looked up from the good luck piece, and a soft voice that didn't match his beefy build simply said, "McGinty's," in that half-statement, half-question way Loftus had used.

"Nuts," Haliburton said. And "nuts" from Haliburton was like "god-damn nonsense" from anybody else who wasn't quite the scholarly type Haliburton was. He didn't look like a Spaceman or have the breezy talk of one, but he sure knew his meteorology. The Comrades at least let us figure out weather reports.

"Doesn't make sense; I second the nuts," Loftus said. "What the hell would McGinty, McGinty of all people, do with stuff like--like that? Unless--"

"Eight years and still a maintenance-tech third. They don't get much beer money," Knight said half to the rest of us and half to the plastalloy deck. "He--"

Haliburton laughed a funny, halting little chuckle. "That's ridiculous. McGinty likes his beer, his accordion, his science-fiction and hates cheap women. If possible, he hates the very sight of a Comrade to an even greater extent. We all know McGinty. Our 21st Century Gunga Din, gentlemen. Not a latter-day Quisling."

There was a quiet second. Then Loftus said,

"We've all seen him walk that thing across his knuckles a thousand times."

"Maybe a plant," Knight said.

"He'd say that, of course," Loftus answered. "But--"

"Hold it a minute," Haliburton broke in again. "Question, Ken."

"Now we're getting places," I said. "Shoot."

"Granting for the moment that that big Irishman, unhappy and moody as he sometimes gets when he recalls his failure to qualify for a degree in science, might have the sudden desire to take it out on the world, to sell us out. Might even have, at the moment, the spark of genius it would take to make off with those microstats. Only how the devil would he know they even existed, much less were even in duplicate copy and on file here?"

That was the nub of it, of course. Aside from myself and the three men before me, it was impossible that any other man in the station, or any man crewing a shuttle could know of the Pentagon's plan to get a full-sized, full-rigged satellite into Space, with real Military, which would leave the Comrades screaming about a busted treaty, but powerless to do anything about it. No, it wouldn't give us the edge, but at least it would put us on a par, and after twenty years of being second-rate, that at least would be some thing.

The political end I didn't know much about, conference table double-talk that would invalidate a treaty that hadn't been morally valid in the first place, but had been agreed to by interests instead of by the people they allegedly represented. It had always been a shade too fast for me to follow. All I knew was that even though first-rate powers could command more resources to do a job than second-rate ones, intellectually free scientists could always come up with smarter answers than those whose inventiveness had been stifled by the demands and limitations of a police state, however all-powerful militarily and politically.

Brains are brains; both sides have 'em. It's what you're motivated to do with them that counts. That, and the importance attached by people to the product of those brains.

Twenty years ago, the Comrades had really gotten motivated. After they got what they wanted, they forgot about motivation and sat back to let the newest Hundred-Year Plan take care of the rest.

Twenty years ago, somebody on our side was short four billion bucks' worth of preventive medicine.

Now, after a couple of decades second-besting it, our side wanted to make up for lost time.

As topkick on the Space end of it I was supposed to know what was going on; me, and my execs, down to the day, the hour and the split second. But only the four of us. And none of us, studying those damned plans night after night for the last two months, had ever let the things further than arm's reach away from the safe in my office. They'd never been out of it except in our collective presence.

While I was gone the door to my office was automatically sono-sealed. And I had the key.

When I came back it was gaping open, and the safe was still smoking. My orderly room duty sergeant was sprawled across his desk, a nasty bluish lump on his forehead. When I finally brought him around he could hardly remember his name, let alone who or what had hit him.

Loftus' young, impatient voice snapped me out of my back tracking.

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