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capital out of points like this about trading Navy equipment to aliens. Would
you?"
"I suppose not," said Lily thoughtfully.
"I still say, ignore it or refuse them, flat," said Age harshly. "What can
they do about it, anyway?"
"Delay current trading sessions," said Jarl. "And they can afford to do that.
We can't I meanwe here at Abruzzi Fourteen. We need that heavy machinery now.
They're pinching us."
"No one ever promised them Mark," said Paul, from the end of the table.
Jarl looked down along the table at the young outposter with a hint of
exasperation.
"Mark promised them Mark," Jarl said. "I thought I'd got that through all
your heads. It was Mark who sent them the original agree-ment. Their
counteroffer was on its way here  and it was a counteroffer that agreed,
pro-vided Mark would surrender himself person-ally to Earth justice to answer
charges arising out of his actions. Then Mark took off from here "
"Mark and Ulla," interposed Paul quietly.
"Mark and Ulla, then.What difference does Ulla make?" said Jarl. "The point
is,Mark left here to give himself up to Earth. He even left a letter here for
us, saying that's what he intended to do, that he anticipated Earth ask-ing
for him. Consequently, Earth claims this constituted agreement to their
counterpro-posal, since Mark was the negotiating authority. And we can't deny
he was the negotiating authority, because it's to our ad-vantage to hold Earth
to Mark's original ver-sion of the agreement. In fact, we can't deny it if we
want to carry on trade and recruitment of special personnel from Earth without
interruption. The only fly in the ointment is the fact Mark made some kind of
shift error and got lost among the stars, before he could get to Earth."
"I suppose they really don't believe that," said Lily.
"They believe it all right," said Age. "Even if they don't, what's the
difference? The ship's been lost six months. Wherever in space it is, Mark and
Ulla would be dead from atmos-phere exhaustion. They won't come back to bother
Earth. And that's all Earth wants."
"In the large sense," said Jarl, "not the small. And it's the small I've been
trying to get into your heads..."
Brot stiffened suddenly, squinting out the window at the recolonization
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cruiser. What he had been watching for had arrived. A ground car was racing up
to it. Now it had halt-ed for checking by the guarding spacemen. A young but
bearded man wearing colonist clothes and a girl with the collar of her nurse's
jacket turned up so that it hid her face were showing papers. Barely glancing
at them, the spacemen waved them both to the fore air-lock ladder. As Brot
watched, they ran for it and made it. A moment later the lock closed and the
first rumble of the cruiser's warming engines sounded.
Brot sat back in his chair, letting out the sigh of relief he had been
holding, a sigh that had been waiting six months now for utter-ance. It was
one thing to trust a woman to keep her man from throwing his life away. It was
something else again to hope she could persuade him to scrap everything he had
be-lieved in while those who loved him set up an entire new life for him. Six
months was a long time for a natural leader to sit it out in the mountains
while his followers took over.
But the girl had done it. She had the one thing the boy lacked an
appreciation of the fact that in the end no one makes it to where he's headed
entirely alone. For the second time in his life (the first had been when he
had stood with Mark as a baby in his arms amid the ruins of the Ten Roos
station) Brot felt a fleeting twinge of loss for the wife he had never had.
But Brot was too much of a man of the immediate present to waste any emotion
on might-have-beens. He turned his attention back to the meeting, to see Lily,
Paul, and Maura Vols all with their eyes covertly and questioningly upon him.
He gave them a curt nod of assurance, un-seen by Age or Jarl. Jarl was still
talking. The other three relaxed, turning their own atten-tion back to what
the big man was saying.
'The other Colonies are voting in their own officers as fast as they can."
Jarl's words seemed to float and hang in the still air of the room. "But we
here at Abruzzi Fourteen are two years ahead of them, mainly because of the
work I've done. And because we're ahead, we've been able to cream off the best
of the available Navy ships and supplies at Navy Base for our own colony. Now,
Earth can af-ford to take its time. The other Colonies can take their time.
But we, Abruzzi Fourteen, can't afford to takeour time, because we want to
keep the natural lead we've got over the other hundred and forty-three
Independent Colonies. We're the ones who put us out ahead in the first place "
"Were we?" Paul interrupted softly. "I thought it was Mark."
Jarl looked at him.
"As Mark himself said at the outposter meeting the day he left," answered
Jarl, "he couldn't have done it without us. "Oh, don't jump to the notion I'm
trying to run down Mark's part in all this. If he needed us, we needed him,
too. But we've got to operate without his help now, and the way to do that is
to start off recognizing that it's us all of us around this table" his gaze
swung about over them all "who're the actual, present leaders for the
Colonies, and that the Colonies lead the human race. In short, we're
impor-tant people, and that means we've got a duty to our colonists to all the
colonists in general and the race as a whole to guard that importance and take
it into account in making decisions." [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]