• • •
So. A waste of time. He wasn’t surprised; unlike those who had advised him to come, he had had no faith in the idea of Phyllis being rational. As with many religious fundamentalists, business for her was part of the religion; the two dogmas were mutually reinforcing, part of the same system. Reason had nothing to do with it. And while she might still believe in America’s power, she certainly didn’t believe in Frank’s ability to wield it. Fair enough. He would prove her wrong.
On the trip back down the cable, he scheduled video appointments on the half hour, for fifteen hours a day. His messages to Washington quickly got him into complex, transmission-delayed conversations with his people in the State and Commerce departments, and with the various cabinet heads who mattered. Soon the new President would give him a meeting as well. Meanwhile message after message, back and forth, leapfrogging around in the various arguments, replying to whichever correspondent got back to him first. It was complicated, exhausting. The case down on Earth had to be built like a house of cards, and a lot of them were bent.
Near the end, with the cable visible all the way down into the Sheffield socket, he suddenly felt really odd— it was a physical wave that passed through him. The sensation passed, and after a bit of thought he decided it must have been that the decelerating car had passed momentarily through one g. An image came to him, of running out a long pier, wet uneven boards splashed with silver fish scales; he could even smell the salt fish stink. One g. Funny how the body remembered it.
Once resettled in Sheffield, he went back to the continuous round of recording messages and analyzing the incoming replies, dealing with old cronies and with upcoming powers, all the talk patched together into a crazy quilt of arguments proceeding at different rates. At one point, late in the northern autumn, he was engaged in about fifty conferences simultaneously; it was like those people who play chess blind with a room full of opponents. Three weeks of this, however, and it began to come around, basically because President Incaviglia himself was extremely interested in getting any leverage he could over Amex and Mitsubishi and Armscor. He was more than willing to leak to the media his intent to look into allegations of treaty violations.
He did that, and stocks fell sharply in the relevant quarters. And two days later, the elevator consortium announced that enthusiasm for Martian opportunities had been so great that demand had exceeded supply for the time being. They would raise prices, of course, as their creed required; but they would also have to slow down emigration temporarily, until more towns and robotic townbuilders had been constructed.
Frank first heard this on a bar TV news report, one evening in a café over his solitary dinner. He grinned wolfishly as he chewed. “So we see who’s better at wrestling in quicksand, you bitch.” He finished eating and went for a walk along the rim concourse. It was only one battle, he knew. And it was going to be a bitter long war. But still, it was nice.
• • •
Then in the northern middle winter the occupants of the oldest American tent on the east slope rioted, and threw out all the UNOMA police inside, and locked themselves in. The Russians next door did the same.
A quick conference with Slusinski gave Frank the background. Apparently both groups were employed by the road-building subdivision of Armscor, and both tents had been invaded and attacked in the middle of the night by Asian toughs, who had slashed the tent fabric and killed three men in each tent, and knifed a bunch of others. The Americans and Russians both claimed the attackers were yakuza on a race rage, although it sounded to Frank like Subarashii’s security force, a small army that was mostly Korean. In any case, UNOMA police teams had arrived on the scene and found the attackers gone, and the tents in a turmoil. They had sealed the two tents, then denied permission for those inside to leave. The inhabitants had concluded they were prisoners, and enraged by this injustice they had burst out of their locks and destroyed the piste running through their stations with welders, and several people on both sides had been killed. The UNOMA police had sent in massive reinforcements, and the workers inside the two tents were more trapped than ever.
Enraged and disgusted, Frank went down again to deal with it in person. He had to ignore not only the standard objections of his staff, but also the new factor’s prohibition (Helmut had been called back to Earth). Once at the station he also had to face down the UNOMA police head, no easy task. Never before had he tried to rely so heavily on the charisma of the first hundred, and it made him furious. In the end he had to simply walk through the policemen, a crazy old man striding through all civilized restraint. And no one there cared to stop him, not this time.