Azadeh would go back to the unspoiled asteroid, and he would head for Terra, where he would meet Felix and the boy’s mother, lovely Flora, the enchantress who loathed Martian life. And furlough would include a survey of North America and the exchange of reminiscences with the aging Warlords.
That neither had included mention of that radiogram in their leave-taking prelude made it clear that each was aware of the pressures that could and might make his journey a one-way trip and a permanent vacation.
During the six years in which she had believed herself to be a space widow, Flora’s TV show, the Sudzo Detergent program, had made her wealthy, the darling of two and a half or three and a half continents. And but for her husband’s return, she would have married the man who became Imperator of North America. Dangerous bait, that fascinating Flora, the Number One Wife.
But watching Earthrise demanded a remedy, and being a superior person, Azadeh did not wait for the answer. She gave it. However she hoped to be right, she was not afraid to be wrong.
She began to appreciate the feelings of those North Americans who, sent into a grim war, had been forbidden to fight and win. Outwitting both enemy-loving government and the enemy, they had destroyed both.
Tough going for an army.
And it wouldn’t be much easier for one female Gook.
The hands of the clock had not been lagging. Two Simianoid security men in black uniform approached. Halting with military precision, each clicked lead-loaded baton to cap visor.
“Governor and Madame,” one began. “We hope you have not been annoyed. There was a disturbance.” He made a sweeping gesture. “Purely minor, but it took us away for a minute or two.”
“No problem, Higgins. No one tried to move in on us.”
“Governor, we hope you have a nice furlough.”
“Thank you, Higgins. Thank you, Edgewood.”
“And my thanks, too,” Azadeh added.
The P.A. system announced that only passengers were allowed in the passage leading to the boarding port. Azadeh went with Roderick David Garvin, Space Admiral and Governor-General of Mars, a far from imposing fellow when not wearing full-dress uniform, side arms, orders, and decorations—unless he had that 11.2-millimeter handgun at his hip and the man he faced needed killing.
The tailor had worked on the tweed jacket until the shoulder-holstered gun did not warp the garment’s drape. Having cut his teeth on a gun barrel and having learned at an early age that self-defense is the first law of nature, Garvin knew that in a dangerous era, only a fool goes abroad unarmed.
At the boarding exit they wormed out of the crowd and snuggled against the jamb.
“When do you think you’ll be heading for the Asteroid?” he asked inanely, falling back on typical leave-taking talk.
“Not until after you phone and I know you won’t be back till you’ve had your fill of old times and old friends, and they’re bubbling out of your ears,” Azadeh answered.
A final squeeze, a fanny pat, and, “See you when I get back.”
Garvin was going Earth and Sunward some 65 million kilometers. Azadeh, headed in more or less the opposite direction, her course depending upon the position with respect to Mars of that only known inhabited asteroid, would have an outbound voyage of 113,750,000 kilometers—provided, of course, that bureaucrats had not yet managed to repeal Bode’s law.
And according to the Warlords, Garvin cogitated as he looked astern to see the entirety of the Martian green area, the conniving sons of bitches are working on that.
Comparing the cultivated expanse with the remainder of the ruddy disc, he wondered whether his son would live long enough to see the complex of domes removed.
The consortium of scientists was working on an isotope of nitrogen, using solar or volcanic energy—or both—to produce the heavy form of the gas that made up eighty percent of Earth’s atmosphere and which, with its greater atomic weight, would not readily escape as had the original Martian atmosphere.
Meanwhile, biologists might team up with the physicists and dream up an even heavier inert gas, one that would blanket the planet. When this stage was reached, the low escape velocity of Mars would be offset.
“All green against red,” he mused. “Bit gaudy, but so is that painted desert in Arizona.”
And now that he was on his way, a thought that he had skillfully kept buried surfaced: Loathing Mars and space may not be hereditary, but you can bet Flora’s made a career of downgrading both. With a sigh, he grimaced. “Goddammit, a man can’t be everywhere!” Ignoring the licensed Kruise Konkubines who added so much to spacing, Garvin settled down to estimating roughly how many thermal installations would be needed to synthesize atmosphere in volume sufficient to make a significant accumulation.
And before he landed at the Paris airport, he had quit damning himself for not having pressured Flora to send Felix for a look at Mars. According to her letters and judging from the photos she had sent, the young devil did have a cussed and adventurous streak, and there might still be a chance.
Chapter 2
Among the North American survivors of the battle that routed Kuropatkin’s Army of Liberation were two notables, each still listed as unaccounted for. One was Lani, Imperatrix of the short-lived North American Democratic Empire: When her imperial consort, mortally wounded, had told her to hide out until the American-born lovers of the foreign enemy were exterminated, she had done so.
The other survivor was the Honorable Neville Ingerman, Minister of Defense, whose forged order had set in motion a troop movement that had almost given victory to the invaders. But for the arrival of an airborne Canadian division, treachery would have succeeded. Despite the price—100,000 pazors in gold—put on his head by the Warlords of the Provisional Government, Ingerman had loyal friends who had gotten him out of North America and to an island of the Lesser Antilles.
The tiny paradise of Sainte Veronique had never been surveyed; it was little more than a menace to navigation. Except for a girdle of alluvial plain, the island was a jungle-clad, steep volcanic structure. Until the War of Liberation, in which not a shot had been fired, it had gone unheeded and unknown except, of course, to the Coalition of Nations.
Once liberated, Sainte Veronique was welcomed as a member of the Marxist-dominated Coalition. The new nation had one vote, as did North America, which was outvoted by a majority of banana republics and the cannibal kingdoms of Africa.
Seeing themselves outvoted, the Warlords, once they had liquidated the Liberals, quit financing the Coalition, thus pushing that organization to the verge of bankruptcy.
The capitol of this new nation was built of coquina, using coral from a neighboring nonvolcanic island. Komissar Igor Petrovakovitch, Life President of the Republic, was also architect and engineer. He began with Modern Vauban, then tunneled from the fortress-capitol to bombproofs in the base of the long-extinct volcano. Skillfully camouflaged antennae near the crater rim fed their input to a communications system that was versatile out of all proportion to the nation it served.
Except for the white Liberators, the population of Sainte Veronique were the descendants of black Haitian refugees from French tyranny. These people raised sugarcane from which they distilled rum.
