CHAPTER TWENTY  For Want of a Nail

Captain Felipe Henrique Marquez sat in the captain’s chair of the Dom Pedro IVs command center and glared menacingly at the message screen, as if scowling at the words presented there could scare them into revealing more information.

Friendly contact made with local officials. Departing for groundside meeting with Planetary Executive, scheduled for 0900 hours tomorrow, Solace City time.

Intended contents of secured container appear to have been deliberately removed prior to DP-IV’s departure from Solar System, motive and perpetrator unknown.

Local situation difficult but peaceful, local officials cooperative. Estimate of danger to DP-IV in event that ship reveals itself: minimal. Estimate of general situation: short-term stable, estimate approx level four to five on Drachma pol-mil-econ stability scale. No immediate political, military crisis pending. Long-term prospects poor.

Koffield badly shaken by learning of item (2) when container opened. His mental state could be of vital importance in discussions with PlanEx.

Re: agenda: safety of ship and cargo. Estimate: low/acceptable risk of approaching inner system.

Re: agenda: legal status of ship under current Solace law. Library search and legal services Artlnt referral confirm ownership and property rights undisturbed by DP-IVs mishap.

Re: agenda: market for goods. Unable to perform useful research thus far. Many items in manifest may have antique value. Your large-scale hardware likely to be quite valuable. Koffield speculates there may be need for rapid spaceside habitat construction.

All systems nominal aboard Lighter Cruzeiro do Sul. Lighter docked and secured inside SCO Station, with result onboard comm systems are blocked by station itself. This message transmitted as omnidirectional radio blip patched through SCO Station Services. Estimate local crypto capability highly advanced. Must therefore assume this transmission monitored. Secure comm impossible at this time.

Events moving fast. Will report as developments merit and opportunity allows.

Chandray

Damn the woman! A very nice, professional signal, sent in the standard top-down prioritized format, and yet she had still managed to fill the message with absurd melodrama and cryptic details that produced more questions than answers. What, precisely, were they talking about with the PlanEx? And how was it that Koffield’s state of mind was so important? Marquez did not wish the man ill, but surely there were more important things in the world than what mood Koffield was in.

Or had Chandray learned something from Koffield, something Koffield had not seen fit to reveal to Marquez? Something that magnified Koffield’s importance?

And how in God’s name had they managed to get a meeting with the Planetary Executive so fast? Marquez checked the timestamp on the message. It had come in hours ago, while he was asleep. By now, if he had worked out the time zones properly, she and Koffield were already in their meeting with the PlanEx.

What were they doing there? Marquez felt frustrated, cut off—and it did his mood no good to remind himself that he had been the one who decided to have the Dom Pedro IV lie low and hide on the outskirts of the Solacian system.

And what of Koffield’s secured container? Who the devil had pilfered its contents, and why? Marquez now had direct evidence of two separate acts of sabotage against his ship. Were they connected? Were more surprises going to jump out at them? Who had done these things, and why?

He needed to know more, a great deal more—but it was plain he wasn’t going to find it out sitting where he was. And even if Chandray hadn’t been clear on many subjects, it was plain she felt it at least reasonably safe to bring the ship in. It was time to start readying the Dom Pedro IV for a trip to the inner system. Marquez had known before Chandray’s message that the ship would have to head in sooner or later, or else be permanently marooned where she was. But he was a merchant captain, not an explorer. He had no desire to venture into the unknown world of the future that waited in the inner system. Still, it was plain he had no other choice.

There was something else that had him agitated as he set about the job of ordering the ship made ready for the trip. Agendas. Chandray had mentioned several in her message, and all of them were Marquez’s, things he had told her to look out for, and check on.

• But which of those agendas, if any of them, were hers? What was on the top of her list, her priority? Marquez felt sure it was no longer the ship. That much was plain from the way she had ordered the paragraphs of the message.

So. what was most important to her now?

When the, time came for action, what, precisely, would Norla Chandray decide to do? And whom would she be working for?

“Next!” The clerk looked up from her desk to take a cursory glance at yet another freeloading gluefoot looking to leave SCO Station and run back home to dirtside, to the planet Solace. Policy was to send ‘em back as soon as possible and give the tickets free. Much as the clerk wanted to get rid of all the gluefeet, making things that easy didn’t sit right with her. They had messed up SCO Station—her station, her home. They ought to be made to pay for that, somehow.

The gluefoot taking his seat in front of her desk smiled at her. “Hello,” he said. He was a young-looking man, and the gluefeet were nearly all farmers who aged fast. He couldn’t be much more than a kid. His clothes were worn-out and shabby, but someone had made an effort to patch them up and clean them. His face had gotten a good scrubbing, and his hair had been more or less combed into place. He had tried. That counted for something.

“Name,” she snapped, shoving all such gentle thoughts from her mind. No point in being sympathetic.

“Elber,” he said. “Elber Malloon.”

Her desktop Artlnt popped up his file on her screen. “Traveling with wife Jassa and daughter Zari?”

“That’s right.”

“And you want to go back now?” she asked, echoing the words she had heard a dozen dozen times that morning from the endless parade of gluefoot refugees. “As soon as possible, transport to spaceport closest to your home village?”

“No,” said Malloon. “No, thank you, but that’s not it.”

The clerk- looked at him sharply. “What? Why not? Why are you here then?”

“Well,” said Malloon, “I want to stay, stay here on SCO. I want to see if there’s a way to do that.”

“We can’t keep you here for free forever,” she said.

“No. I know that,” he said. “I’d work. Anywhere, at anything. Jassa and me, we’ve talked it over. Staying here has got to be better than going back home. Home isn’t there anymore. And if we built a new farm, again—what about the next flood, and the next drought?”

“So you want to stay here,” said the clerk, staring at him in wonderment. None of them wanted to stay. Home, home, home was all she ever heard. She wasn’t used to finding one who asked to stay, let alone work. She wasn’t even sure she had the right forms where she could get at them.As for work—the gluefoot crisis had left SCO Station a shambles, and the labor shortage was bad, much as her department was unwilling to admit it. It was going to take a lot of work to clean it up again. Enough work for this fellow, and his wife, and his daughter, once she was old enough. “Any job you could get here wouldn’t be pretty or easy. You know that, don’t you?”

“I was a farmer,” Malloon said calmly. “That’s about as hard a job as there is. I can do your work.”

Was a farmer. They all came through saying “I am a farmer,” or “I am a grain shipper,” refusing to let go of what they no longer had, no longer were. But this fellow said was. That counted for something too. Her sympathies were floating back up toward the surface, and this time she made little effort to force them back down. “If you get a work contract, it will be for two years at least,” she warned. “You’ll have to remain on the station until the contract is over. No changing your mind and deciding you just have to go home six months from now.”

“I won’t,” said Elber Malloon. “That’s why I’m here right now. Because I won’t do that. Because I can’t.”

“Why can’t you?” the clerk demanded.

“Because my home’s not there anymore,” he said quietly. “Even where it was isn’t there anymore. It’s washed away, a meter under water. We checked on the info-feeds. The waters never drained. They’re never going to.” He looked at her face, reading her expression. “You don’t understand,” he said. “We don’t have a home anymore, and I don’t think the uppers will let us settle anyplace good enough for me to start over. I’m not sure there are any places left on Solace that are good enough. So that’s why we need to stay. For our daughter.”

“Your daughter.”

“Well, her old home is gone, and it’s not coming back. So it’s simple.” Elber Malloon gestured at the clerk’s office, at all of SCO Station. “We need to build Zari a new home,” he said. “And not on the planet. Out here, where it’s safe.”

The planet is going to die. The words echoed in Neshobe’s head, and in the quiet that filled the room. There was no sound except for the muffled drumming of rain on the transparent roof of the Diamond Room.

The planet is going to die. She had known it before Koffield had spoken, of course. In a sense, she had known it for quite a long time, deep inside. It had been so long since anything had gone right, since any victory had been anything other than brief, or transitory. But she had never dared speak the words, or even think them, until now. The planet is going to die. Now the words had been spoken. It was no longer possible to hide from them. Now her only choices were to deny the reality of those words, or else to deal with their consequences. “How long have we got?” she asked, her voice barely a whisper. “How soon until the planet is uninhabitable?”

She did not know Koffield at all. But his motionlessness was as expressive as any gesture could have been. He sat there, silent and unmoving as a tomb, as he considered his answer.

“No one knows, Madam Executive,” he said at last. “My mathematical model is not wholly my own, as you know. The parts that deal with endgame chaos, the final dissolution of a system, and the unraveling of balances— those are based almost entirely on previous work. What I can say about them is that they are extremely sensitive to initial conditions—and the initial conditions will be wildly unpredictable. It is far easier to predict the behavior of a stable system. What you’re asking for is the behavior of a system as it is becoming unstable, chaotic. The slightest change in any of a dozen variables now could have dramatic and unpredictable effects years from now.”

“Don’t just leave it at that,” Neshobe said. “You’ve come here to tell me the planet is doomed. You’ve got to have some sort of idea, some gut feeling. Give me something.”

Koffield frowned deeply, then shook his head. “It’s impossible to be definite. We did a quick estimate this morning, plugging Dr. Vandar’s new data into my old model. It suggests that we’ll start to see the partial pressure of oxygen decline rapidly. There will be a linked, though not precisely proportionate, increase in the partial pressure of carbon dioxide. The baseline projection is that it will start in something like ten Solacian years. That’s an extremely uncertain number. It might start to happen in five years, or might not start for fifteen, or even twenty. Perhaps the process has already started, but we haven’t detected it yet. We should be able to refine the estimate with better data. I can’t give you a better answer than that.”

Neshobe looked steadily at him. “Try,” she said. “I’m not looking for absolute precision. I want a general idea. A drop in oxygen levels is bad, but how bad? Should we measure the time we have left in centuries? Decades? Years?” Or months? she asked herself. Perhaps days, if word gets out and the exodus riots start up again.

Koffield shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “The planet will certainly become increasingly inhospitable in the coming few years, and the process will snowball, feeding on itself and accelerating. That much is certain. What we don’t know is how fast it will snowball. As to when the planet will become officially uninhabitable—well, it almost certainly will happen in our lifetime, and probably happen much sooner than that. In my opinion—and that’s all it is, opinion—the planet will become unsuitable for unprotected human life within a few tens of years at most, under the most generous possible estimate—and perhaps far sooner than that.”

“A lot of it depends on what definition of uninhabitable you use,” Vandar said.

“I don’t understand,” said Officer Chandray. “It seems to me that either a planet is or is not inhabitable.”

Vandar smiled slightly. “There are definitions for planetary habitability under which Earth herself doesn’t qualify as habitable, because there are places a human could not survive, ah, I think the phrase is, without the aid of technology. You’d drown in the ocean, or freeze to death in the Arctic, or die of thirst in the desert. If you’re willing to use technological means to build a robust enough life-support system, people can live just about anywhere. By that definition, just about any planet with a solid surface could be called inhabitable.”

“It’s not a time to be cute-or clever,” Chandray said sharply. “We all know what we mean by inhabitable.”

“Forgive me,” said Vandar. “I wasn’t trying to be clever. My point is that we all think we know what we mean by inhabitable. If—if the worst-case scenario of Admiral Koffield’s model plays out, the current trend of a very slight decrease in the levels of atmospheric oxygen will start to accelerate in the near future. Or maybe the drop won’t speed up for a decade or more. But once the drop does accelerate, within about five years’ time of that event, oxygen levels will be low enough, and carbon dioxide levels will be high enough, that humans will not be able to breathe the open atmosphere without some sort of respirator. Does that make the planet uninhabitable?

“Shortly thereafter, the greenhouse effect will reach the runaway stage, and it will become too hot for unprotected humans in most regions. We’ll need cooling suits and respirators, but we could still extract oxygen from the air and find water to drink. Is that uninhabitable? About five to ten years after that, my hunch is that the weather patterns will have become so violent that only reinforced structures will survive for any length of time. But, inside such a shelter, people could live and work quite comfortably. Is that uninhabitable? You could define any of those stages as uninhabitable. Choose which one you will.

“We could maintain a human presence on the planet even if all the oxygen came out of the atmosphere,” Vandar went on. “We could build reinforced domes over the cities and dig underground warrens. We’d certainly have to call the planet uninhabitable by then, but people could still inhabit this world.”

“There’s no way we can build enough domed cities in time,” said Neshobe. “And even if we did, it would be bloody hell maintaining their internal environments.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Vandar said mildly. “I quite agree. Sealed domes and underwarrens are not sustainable unless they are very carefully managed. They are difficult to establish and maintain even under the best circumstances— and we will not have the best of circumstances by any means.”

“Where do you make your last stand?” Koffield asked. “How long and how hard will you fight against an unbeatable enemy? And how much effort do you put into the final redoubt that might survive, and how much into the outer defenses that will certainly fall?”

“You talk as if we are going into a war, Admiral Koffield.”

“You—we—are in a war, Madam Kalzant. A war against a planet that was forced to support life against its will. It is counterattacking, and it will, eventually, win, though it might allow you to retain small enclaves, reinforced sealed domes and warrens, here and there—if you decide it is worth fighting hard enough, and intelligently enough, merely to win such a limited and qualified victory.”

“Madam Kalzant,” said Parrige, “I think I see the point that these gentlemen are trying to make. It is a question of resource management and allocation.”

Neshobe glared at Parrige, then back toward Koffield and Vandar, both of whom were nodding their agreement. They had gone mad. All of them had gone mad and decided to gang up on her. Oxygen levels, war, management and allocation theory—it was all so much gibberish.

Ashdin cleared her throat timidly and spoke. “Madam— Madam Kalzant, if I might?”

“Oh, please, go ahead.” Neshobe slumped back in her chair. If they were looking toward Ashdin as the voice of reason, then things were becoming dire indeed.

“I know I’m not much at policy or strategy or any of that,” Ashdin said. “I get fascinated by old stories, people out of the past, that sort of thing. Oskar DeSilvo is one of my interests. Another is the fall of Glister, the real story behind all the legends and myths.” She turned to Koffield. “I doubt you’ve had the chance to learn much about what happened on Glister. It happened decades after your disappearance. The long and the short of it was that Glister came up against the same sort of climatic crisis we are facing here today. They had bad weather, extinctions of species, algae blooms, air-quality deterioration, oxygen levels dropping. So they worked hard to stabilize the situation, as we have, investing a lot of time and money. Things kept getting worse. The planetary government announced a crash program, top priority, to provide respirators for every citizen, and sealant and partial-pressure-oxygen injectors for every building and residence, a stopgap until the atmospheric reoxygenation project could be brought on-line.

“But the reoxygenation program never worked very well. It slowed the decline in oxygen levels for a while, but never was able to stop the decline, let alone reverse it.

“So the government decided to build temporary domes over the largest cities and provide what they called enhanced sealing for outlying houses. And of course people weren’t willing to wait for the government to do the job while the air itself was going bad—there were all sorts of private projects as well—all of them top priority, all of them rush jobs. Then the weather turned worse, and all sorts of corrosive compounds started precipitating out of the air, raining down on the domes, damaging them.

“There were unprecedented extremes of cold and heat, the weather patterns became completely unpredictable, and the storms grew more and more violent as the whole planet fell out of equilibrium. There were all sorts of plans put forward to build reinforced domes and underground habitats, all sorts of brilliant evacuation schemes worked out—but nothing could be done. The other, earlier crash programs and rush projects had used up all the money, time, and resources. They had expended all their energies before the real crisis hit.”

“And we’re in the first stages of doing the same thing,” said Neshobe. “So what do we do? Yesterday we were trying to get through a spell of bad weather. This morning the planet is doomed. Yesterday we were going to have to work hard if we were going to get the climate back the way we want it. Now it turns out we can’t repair the ecosphere no matter how hard we try. Even if we make an all-out effort, the best we can hope is to maintain the unsatisfactory status quo, at the cost of making the end come faster.”

“Yes, ma’am. Those are the essentials of the situation,” Koffield said.

“Then what?” Neshobe demanded. “What do we do?”

“Evacuate the planet,” Norla Chandray suggested.

Neshobe looked at Chandray in irritated astonishment. How long had Chandray been on Solace? Twelve hours at most? Easy enough for her to suggest planetary evacuation. It wouldn’t be her world, wouldn’t be her family uprooted after a hundred or more years, wouldn’t be her forced to abandon all her possessions without a chance to—

But then Neshobe remembered just how much Chandray and Koffield had been forced to give up, how much had been stolen from them. Not just their worlds, but their times. Their homes had ceased to exist, just as surely as the homes of the Glisterns had been destroyed.

Still and all, even if Norla Chandray was due a bit of respect, and even sympathy, that did not mean her idea had any merit. “Evacuate them to where?” she asked.

“To orbiting habitats, or maybe to Greenhouse,” Chandray replied.

“All the orbital habitats are at or beyond their preferred population points,” Raenau said. “Several are refusing all new arrivals. You’ve just seen what it’s like on SCO Station.”

“The habitats are at their preferred population points,” Vandar put in, rapidly working his scriber over his data-page. But that’s not the same as their carrying capacity. Let’s see.” He brought up the data he wanted on his page and read it over. “According to this, there are just about three-point-two million people on the planet, and roughly the same number—about three-point-one-five million—in the various habitats throughout the Solacian system. They’re the ones orbiting the planet, the asteroid miners, the free-stellar-orbit habs, everything. The combined certified carrying capacity of the various habitats is slightly over four million.”

“That sounds as if there’s at least some room for an orderly initial evacuation,” said Parrige.

“And we can always build more habs,” said Ashdin.

Neshobe struggled to control her temper. Parrige and Ashdin were the two persons at the table least qualified on the subject of space habitats. Ashdin she could almost excuse, but Jorl Parrige should have known better. “It’s not quite that simple,” she said.

“Obviously it would not be simple or easy,” Parrige said, “but if we have excess capacity there, and people who need new homes here, surely it makes sense to match them up.”

“No, it doesn’t,” said Raenau.

“Indeed?” Parrige asked, bristling a bit at the station commander’s insolence.

Neshobe let out a weary sigh. Parrige was a valuable advisor, and a good friend, but the very traits that made him valuable often made him infuriating. When it came to policy, to big ideas, he thought in numbers, in theory, in absolutes. If the numbers said a thing could be done, he tended to assume not only that it could be done, but that it should be done—even to assume it would be done. But Raenau was out of line talking to a Grand Senyor that way. “Perhaps, Commander Raenau, you could be a bit less succinct,” she said. “Explain, please, why doesn’t it make sense.”

“Carrying capacity means the maximum possible number of people that could be supported in an emergency, if another hab was evacuated, or whatever,” he said. “It’s the absolute, worst-case, brick-wall limit. Carrying capacity assumes all systems are functioning—no accidents, no breakdowns. It’s how many people a habitat could sustain if everything worked perfectly and everyone went on short food rations, power rationing, water rationing, everything rationed. So you tell me, Senyor Parrige, how many habitats would be willing to take on their maximum possible population load in the form of half-starved, uneducated, indigent, disease-ridden dirtsiders who know nothing of habitat life and have no skills that are of much use in space? Could you force them if they refused? And if you used force on one hab, what would happen on all the others? And even if all the habitats did go along with you, how many would collapse because something did go wrong and there were no resources available to see the system through while repairs were made?”

“And there’s the minor matter of transporting three million people from the planetary surface to orbit,” Neshobe said. “Dr. Vandar, I expect you could pull up the figures the fastest of anyone here. What is the maximum daily capacity of our surface-to-orbit passenger fleet? Not the theoretical capacity, but the real numbers for the real ships that are operational and available.”

Vandar scribed over his datapage for a moment, then looked up. “Approximately six hundred fifty passengers, ma’am.”

“Well, then,” Neshobe said, figuring quickly. “Six-fifty a day, times four hundred twenty-one days a local year. Just over two hundred seventy thousand a year. Assuming the entire passenger fleet works around the clock with no accidents or breakdowns, it will take just over eleven local years to transport the entire planetary population. As, according to Dr. Vandar’s figures, the atmosphere might be getting close to unbreathable by that time, things could be a bit awkward for the last ones to get aboard.”

“We can build more transports,” Parrige said. “Enough to lift everyone—or nearly everyone—off the surface in time.”

“At the same time we’re working on an all-out crash program to build more habitat capacity?” Raenau asked. “If we commit resources to building ships, how can we take the same resources and commit them to habitat construction? And how long will it take to build more ships and habitats?”

“Ma’am, it will be difficult, and it will take time, and we will have to take great risks,” said Parrige. “But surely it can be done.”

“It is perhaps a minor point,” said Koffield, “but the Dom Pedro IV’s primary cargo consists of fifty Habitat Seeds.”

Raenau looked puzzled. “What’s a Habitat Seed?”

“Mmmm? Oh. Perhaps you don’t use them anymore. Habitat Seeds are habitat-making robots. Very large and sophisticated robotic machines that are programmed to mine the raw materials for a space habitat, process the materials, and construct the hab with little, or no human intervention. They’re one-shot items, and they don’t always work. Sometimes a circuit blows out or a subsystem wears out and you’re stuck with a half-built hab. But usually they do the job.”

“So that’s something close to fifty additional habitats that could be built,” said Vandar.

“Possibly fewer,” said Koffield. “And they won’t be large or grand habs, and they won’t be stocked with anything. Habitat Seeds produce just the bare bones. But they’ll help somewhat, I expect.”

“Every little bit is going to help,” said Vandar.

“But even fifty extra habitats won’t be help enough,” Raenau said, looking at Parrige. “That moves the line up the chart, but not by enough. And life is not all lines on charts.”

Parrige drew himself up in his chair and glared at Raenau, and then at Neshobe Kalzant. “I’m not a fool, Madam Executive. I realize there would be difficulties, immense ones. But all that is as it may be. It’s plain to see that if the planet is dying, expansion of the orbital habitats only makes sense. We could start at once to transport those in most need—those who have been hurt the worst by this slow-motion grand-scale disaster—to the spaceside habitats at once. We can build habitats for the rest in the years to come.”

“And the ones left behind will start to tell each other they’re being abandoned while the lifeboats are pulling away,” said Raenau. “How will you handle the panic that will start the second the evacuation begins? Go out to the next rumor riot with some charts and graphs and explain that everything is going to be fine?”

Parrige’s eyes flashed at Raenau. “There will be difficulties, but—”

“Difficulties!” Neshobe half shouted. “You make itsound as if the difficulties are nothing but minor inconveniences. Thirty-one people died in the last spaceport riot. We probably lost two or three times that many in ground-side accidents caused by the panic at other ports. Space and stars know how many casualties there were in orbit. What sort of mob are we going to get at the spaceport when we announce that we have to evacuate the planet’s surface?”

“Surely mob panic has no place in determining planetary policy,” Parrige said snappishly.

Neshobe restrained herself, fighting off the impulse to stand up, cross around the table, grab her old advisor by the shoulders, and give him a good hard shaking. Instead, she held her voice in rigid control and spoke in words as cold and flat as she could find. “Senyor Parrige,” she said, “it is time and past time for you, and everyone else here, to understand that we are dangerously close to the point where mob panic is planetary policy. People are frightened now. When this news gets out, they’ll be terrified, and angry.”

“Of course they will be!” Parrige half shouted. “I’m terrified, here and now. But as Dr. Ashdin and Admiral Koffield have just gotten through pointing out, if we approach things in a cautious, gradualist way, we are doomed.” Parrige paused a moment, and took a deep breath before starting to speak again, in lower, calmer tones. “We will squander our time and resources on laudable but ultimately futile efforts like stabilizing Lake Virtue. Commander Raenau is right. We can’t go to the ragged edge of carrying capacity on the habs. Admiral Koffield and Dr. Ashdin are right to say we can’t proceed in a gradualist way. And you are right, Madam Kalzant, when you say that I am casually suggesting that we do the impossible.

“But I’m right too.” Parrige frowned and shook his head. “I know how bad the orbital-habitat situation is. I know the risks of using all available carrying capacity. But we are growing weaker, not stronger. We are expending our resources, not marshaling them. If it is difficult to act decisively now, it will only become more difficult later on, and then more difficult still, until action becomes utterly impossible.”

Neshobe looked at Parrige in surprise. It was nothing like him to express himself so emphatically.

Admiral Koffield cleared his throat and spoke in a quiet voice. “I’ve heard that politics was the art of the possible. But evacuating the planetary population is politically impossible. The people on the ground will panic. The more they understand they have to leave, the worse the situation will become. Panic, rumor, riot, profiteering, corruption— there will be no end to it. The people in the space habs won’t want to let them in. But, even if evacuation isn’t possible, it is absolutely necessary.”

Neshobe let out a deep breath. “Then we must make it possible. Maybe, just maybe, if we educate the public, convince them that the situation is bad, but that if there is time, there will be a chance for an orderly evacuation.”

“Yes,” said Parrige. “That is the way.”

“But before we start pointing the way,” Neshobe said, “we must be sure we are convincing. We have to show them something we don’t have. Proof.”

“But, Madam Executive,” said Vandar, “we have Admiral Koffield’s preliminary work and my mathematical analysis of it.”

“That’s a start, yes, so far as it goes,” Neshobe said, “but it is by no means enough. A crackpot admiral from a hundred years back—and one whose very name is, forgive my bluntness, a curse word for many of our citizens— appears from out of nowhere telling some crazy story about how his magical formula proves We’re all doomed. No. I’m sorry, Admiral Koffield. We can’t even begin to let the news out with your name attached to it. Our Glistern refugees and descendants would reject it out of hand.”

Koffield shook his head sorrowfully. “It’s incredible. I must admit that I thought the one bright spot in my being marooned was that people would have forgotten by now. A century and a quarter later, I’m still a monster to them because of Circum Central? Even after their planet died?”Vandar looked at Koffield in surprise. “But don’t you— no, of course, you’ve only been here a brief time, and it’s not the sort of thing someone would tell you in casual conversation. The Glisterns blame you for the death of their planet.”

Koffield stared at Vandar in astonishment. “But that’s absurd! How could anything I did have caused the collapse of their climate?’’

Vandar turned his hands palms up and gestured hopelessly. “You’re quite right that it’s absurd—but they blame you all the same. Someone on Glister dug up an old saying, a proverb, from near-ancient Earth: ‘For want of a nail the shoe was lost. For want of the shoe, the horse was lost. For want of a horse, the battle was lost. For want of the battle, the kingdom was lost. All for the want of a nail.’ The legend says that the ships you stranded were carrying vital supplies, special equipment, powerful terra-forming technology that would have stabilized the climate and prevented the collapse. What, exactly, was aboard changes from one version of the story to the next. They call you the man who stole the nail.”

It was plain to Neshobe that Koffield was struggling to calm himself. “I did—what I had to do,” he said. “What I was ordered to do. I did what I did to defend against the very thing my garrison—and the whole of the Chronologic Patrol—were established to protect against—a violation of causality. There were people aboard those ships, colonists and their equipment. I had no intention of harming any of those people, and I will regret it to the end of my days. What I did will haunt me to the end of my days. Those people died as a consequence of my actions. If the Glisterns wish to hate me for that, then—then they do no more than I do myself, many a sleepless night.

“But after the ships were lost, I studied the records of those ships, their manifests, their histories, all I could learn about them. But there was nothing, nothing aboard those ships that was not replaceable, and, as a matter of fact, soon replaced. I killed those crews, and many more died because those ships did not reach Glister—but I did not kill a world. Glister died of the same illness that is killing Solace, and not because a few shiploads of equipment were lost.”

The room went silent for a time. Even the rain spattering down on the roof faded away, and the people around the table sat, still as stone.

“That is-true,” Milos Vandar said at last, speaking quietly. “But what is true, and what people believe, are two very different things. I’d go so far as to say, what people know and what they believe are often two different things.”

“I’m—I’m sorry, Admiral Koffield,” Neshobe said. “From all I have ever read, and from all I have seen and heard here today, you are a man who did his duty and has suffered the torments of hell ever since as a consequence.”

“Yes,” Koffield said. “And neither you nor I nor anyone else can do the least thing about it. But—thank you, all the same. I killed Glister? Incredible.”

Koffield shook his head again. “As regards the matter at hand—I must confess that, in spite of all the endless hours I have spent on this problem, the political angle never crossed my mind. I have lived in the military, where you give or take the orders and the orders are obeyed. But of course you are right. You cannot simply order the planet’s population to do as you say.”

“I will order them about, and I’ll make my orders stick, if it comes to that,” Neshobe said. “I will do whatever it takes to protect my people, even if I have to protect them against their will. But it will be worse for everyone if it comes to that. I would prefer to persuade them. To do that, I need more and better proof.”

“It’s a hell of a shame the copies of your final report didn’t get here,” Raenau said to Koffield.

Neshobe looked at Raenau thoughtfully. Was there perhaps a slight hint of doubt, of accusation, in his voice? If Raenau did not completely trust or believe Koffield’s information, that confirmed all her worries. If a hard-edged, rational, well-informed man like Raenau could not trust in Koffield completely, was there the slightest hope the general populace would?”If you can offer up any sort of plausible story for why I would stage this whole catastrophe, what possible motive I might have for pretending to have proof of an imaginary disaster, why I might go to the incredible lengths that would have been required to fake the proof I have offered, I’d be glad to hear it,” Koffield replied sharply, responding more to Raenau’s tone than his words. “What possible reason would I have for stranding myself one hundred and twenty-seven years away from everyone and everything I know?”

“Escape,” Raenau said, in a surprisingly gentle voice. “You yourself have just finished agreeing with us that your life back there was something close to a hell. You were a villain. Why not send a real-sounding advance message on the Chrononaut VI, put a heap of compressed scrap into a secured container, sabotage your own ship, and arrive a century and a quarter in the future as a hero, a savior, a visionary? It’s obvious that your ship was sabotaged in a very precise way, and obvious that your tamperproof secured container was somehow tampered with—or else the tampering was staged. We have only your word that there was a final report, or that it was ever in that container.”

“How dare you—” Koffield began, coming half out of his seat.

“I do not say I believe any of this,” Raenau said in a firm, emphatic voice. “But you asked for a plausible story. I will not be the first, or last to think of it, or of many other variants. You could say the theory I’ve offered is impossible. So it is. But it’s plain that something implausible, something unlikely, has happened. I at least have offered a version of events, an explanation. You have not done so. You asked for a theory of how this could have happened. I have offered one.”

“If it’s a fraud, it’s one damned hell of a good one,” Vandar said. “I agree one preliminary report isn’t enough basis for deciding the fate of a planet, but this”—he patted the datapage that held his copy of the report—”is solid work. Good math, good science. It’s both self-consistent and consistent with the existing body of work. It’s more than that. It answers nagging questions, ties together loose ends.”

“Their being stranded in our time could have been staged, even if the report was not,” Raenau said.

“Maybe that’s true, but so what?” Vandar asked. “We can test the report, check it, take it apart, put it together again. We don’t have to take the admiral’s word for any of it. We can go see for ourselves.”

“Great,” Raenau said. “You go do that. I’ll want to hear about it. But even Admiral Koffield has got to admit there’s a problem when it tells me a big long story about how he’s moved heaven and Earth to get a report to me— and it just so happens the only copy of the report we can get at has vanished mysteriously.”

“It’s not the only copy.”

Neshobe had not heard the voice for so long that it took her a minute to realize who was speaking. “Officer Chandray? There’s another copy? Surely if you knew that, you should have spoken up before now.”

“There is,” Chandray said. “There must be.” She turned to Koffield. “You wouldn’t have traveled with the only copy. You would have made sure it was placed in the Grand Library, or the Permanent Physical Collection, or hidden with some trusted friend or another. Something. You probably did all of those things, and more.”

“I did,” Koffield said. “But, assuming those copies even survived this long, they are light-years from here, back in the Solar System. What good do they do us here?”

“None, unless someone goes to get them,” said Chandray. She turned to Neshobe. “You could send word back on the next timeshaft ship to Earth, and have a search performed.”

“I could, and I will,” said Neshobe. “But there are no timeshaft ships in-system—aside from the one you came in on.”

“When’s the next ship expected?” Chandray asked.

“I’m afraid that’s something else that’s changed from your day,” said Parrige. “Timeshaft ships rarely call at Solace anymore. Trade has dried up.”

“That’s a polite way of saying we don’t have anything they want, and we can’t afford much of what they have,” Raenau growled.”True enough,” Neshobe agreed. “But in any event, there’s no way we can get a message back to the Grand Library, or anyone else, just at the moment. There’s no ship to send it on.”

“Except the Dom Pedro IV,” said Chandray.

Aha, thought Neshobe. There it is at last. She had spent too many years in politics to be surprised by a show of self-interest masquerading as some sort of generous offer. It was a relief finally to have it show up. These two characters had seemed too good to be true. Neshobe had not the slightest doubt that Chandray had known ahead of time that there were no other ships in-system or expected. “You’re suggesting that we might use your ship?” Neshobe asked sweetly.

“It at least seems a reasonable enough notion that it ought to be considered,” Chandray said, offering an answer hedged in with qualifiers.

“According to what I’ve heard from you, that ship of yours is not in the best of shape,” Raenau objected. “And it is a hundred years or so out-of-date.”

“But it’s what you’ve got,” Chandray said, a bit too eagerly. She would never get far as a negotiator. “We need to get our ship checked over, and maybe repaired. And you need a ship.”

“You’ve suggested a reason we might need a ship,” Neshobe said.

“Officer Chandray’s ship was crippled while attempting to bring vital information to this world,” Koffield said. “None of her crew can ever return to their homes or their families. Two crew members died in cryosleep, apparently as an indirect result of the sabotage committed against the ship. Officer Chandray nearly died herself, and is only recently recovered. Precisely because the ship is an antique, it seems highly unlikely that there are any available qualified crew in this system, a fact which she knows perfectly well. If the Dom Pedro IV flies again, Officer Chandray will have to cross the starlanes on the ship that stranded her in your time, killed two of her friends, and almost killed her. She has no ownership stake in the ship, and won’t gain anything from the repairs. Nor is the ship hers to command. Only Captain Marquez can make such decisions. Under those circumstances, suggesting that the ship be sent off after a misplaced book hardly seems like the height of selfishness.

“Unless you people wish to accuse Officer Chandray or me of any other frauds, crimes, shady deals, or dishonest acts, I suggest we take her suggestion at face value.” Koffield glared around the table. “This isn’t our planet; If you wish to take everything we say or do as a trick, feel free to do so. It will make no particular difference to us.”

Neshobe spoke up before anyone else could, mostly to keep anyone else from speaking and making things worse. “Very well, Admiral. Point taken.” The tension in the room was getting out of hand. There was going to be a fistfight in another few minutes—but she was not at all sure who would be fighting whom. She had to defuse this, and fast.

At that moment, the solution came to her. A way to buy time and get something useful accomplished, all at once. “It seems to me that your ship needs refitting, and we need to do a great deal more research into the whole question of ecologic collapse. There’s a place where we can get both those things done. Officer Chandray, if you would be so kind as to contact your Captain Marquez, please invite him to bring his ship into Shadow-Spine Station. We will provide whatever service and repair the Dom Pedro IV needs at no charge. I would suggest you take your lighter, the Cruzeiro do Sul, and meet him there. It’s quite convenient to your own destination. And perhaps Vandar, and a couple of others, could accompany you.”

“To Shadow-Spine?” Vandar asked, and then smiled. “Ah, yes. That makes a great deal of sense.”

Chandray looked from Neshobe to Vandar, clearly puzzled. “Ah, well, very good, ma’am. That’s an extremely generous offer, and one that I’ll relay to Captain Marquez as soon as possible. But, ah, well . . . Could you tell me where Shadow-Spine Station is? What’s our destination?”

“Shadow-Spine Station in on the spine between Ballast and SunSpot, orbiting Greenhouse,” Vandar said.

“I’m sorry?” Chandray said.”Greenhouse,” Vandar said. “Executive Kalzant is absolutely right. It’s the center of terraforming and climate research for the whole Solacian system, and Shadow-Spine is our most advanced shipyard.

“Greenhouse,” he said. “That’s where you need to be.”