The Ophiuchi Hotline

Now he faced the nearly impossible struggle to reestablish himself as a data-banked citizen with a right of life. He could no longer be Boss Tweed. He had to fit himself into the cracks between the integrated circuits, the very task he had set for a dozen condemned criminals as their only alternative to working for him. It could be done—party members were in key positions in many of the most powerful computers—but it would take time.

"It's just a setback," Tweed said again.

But did it have to be? His/her new face frowned deeply as once more the facts were reviewed. There was still time to countermand the orders to Vaffa, but it was ru

Tweed had always known, down deep, that with the kind of chances he/she was taking it was inevitable that one day someone would make it to freedom. Then, a few months ago, that call from Pluto. Lilo, dictating through Vaffa, telling Tweed what he had to do. It had galled him, but he really had no choice. Now this final blow, and again it came from Lilo. But which one? The teacher, Cathay, had dropped the pilot of the tug close to Poseidon after he took possession of the ship. The man had said Cathay was alone in the ship, that Lilo had fallen into the hole, or into Jupiter. How had she come back to do this?

Tweed remembered now that Lilo had a base in the Ring. It had to be that one. The other one was dead. She took a vicious satisfaction in the thought. The communicator was in her hand, ready to link with the relay station and tell Vaffa to kill them all. She stopped with her thumb on the button.

Two hours. That's how long there would be if the order was given. In two hours Lilo would be telling everything, and all the police in the system would be after Tweed. Could it be done? She had tricks Lilo had never heard of; the sex change alone would leave a false trail that might confuse the authorities for as long as three or four hours.

But that assumed no one was looking for her yet. If she gave the order to Vaffa now, the pursuit would start in two hours. And it would be literally snapping at her heels. She ran her thumbnail around the transmit button.

No. She needed a few days to get far ahead of them. In four days—in two, with luck—she would be someone else, with a personal history going back seventy years and all properly logged in the data banks. Boss Tweed was dead, and the new woman he had become yearned to avenge him. But it would be too costly. She must always think of the long term. In two or three years she would be back. She would be someone else this time, but it would not be like starting from scratch. The Free Earth Party would go on, and she would lead it.

The communicator fell to the floor and the elevator door opened. The nude woman stepped out and hurried down the corridor. There was much to do.

The cafeteria was filled to capacity and a little beyond the safe limits, though Lilo found it hard to believe. The place didn't look crowded.

There was no large meeting area in Poseidon. Vaffa had discouraged groups of more than ten people at a time. There were large areas in the dead spaces but there had not yet been time to reclaim them. One meeting had been tried in an abandoned room, but no one liked it with everyone's suit turned on. It was impossible to read faces.

So the cafeteria had been chosen, but it was almost as disconcerting. People had to be evenly spaced around the rotating cylinder, and they had to sit all around its i

"But I was promised two weeks," Vejay was saying. "I've done the best I can. If you can just give me another four days, even three days, I—"

"We all understand your desire to give us the best possible drive, Vejay," Cathay said. "But you just told us that what you have will function—"

"But I can only guarantee a couple months, at best, then I'll have to—"

"—if you'll just listen to me—"

"I still have the floor, don't I?"

Lilo slumped further down into her chair. Meetings bored her. Why couldn't Cathay just tell him to pipe down and set a time for the burn? But then, she conceded, that's why he was a better president than she would have been. She recognized it; when her name was put into nomination she had quickly withdrawn it. And Cathay had handled it well. So far he had been able to do just what his advisors had said must be done if they were to have a chance, and had made it seem as if it was fair to everyone. If that wasn't the definition of a good leader, Lilo did not know what was.

But she had never expected that getting a group of eighty people to agree on anything would be tougher than beating Tweed in the first place.

The drive was ready, no matter what Vejay said. He was a lover of fine machinery, and the thing he had cobbled together on the other side of Poseidon offended his sense of beauty. But it would work. It would work long enough to get them beyond any possible pursuit. And that was the critical thing, as Cathay was pointing out once more.

"Tweed must have known that if we gave him a month, we'd give him two months, and forever for that matter. We have no advantage to gain by exposing him. I know there's a minority who want to do just that, but I'll remind you again that we're not out of the woods. You people who hate him that much should be the very ones to know that if there's a way he can get to us by treachery, out of sheer spite, he'll do it. That's why we pla

Lilo let her attention wander again. She sca

Sitting in front of her, in a tight group, were the Vaffas. There were eight of them; not as many as had been feared, but more than anyone was comfortable with. There had been nine. The death of one of them at the hands of what had to be called a lynch mob was the first crisis the community had faced. The other Vaffas, already fearful, had occupied a room and vowed to fight to the death. It had taken careful work by Cathay to get them out again. They had stuck to their end of the bargain, not raising a hand against anyone. It remained to be seen how they would fare in the long run. There were many long-standing grudges to settle. Already they were regarded as second-class citizens, which they did not seem to mind as long as people left them alone. But they were going to be a problem.

"Now we'll hear from the ecology committee," Cathay said. "Krista, will you report?"

Krista was one of the few people Lilo knew well. With work going on around the clock to get Poseidon ready to move, Lilo had been with her for marathon sessions devoted to repairing damage to the hydroponic gardens caused by the crash. Krista was a hard worker, one of the kidnapped scientists Tweed had put on the station when he couldn't find what he wanted in prison. Lilo liked her, except for the tendency she displayed to be interested in what Lilo had done to land in jail.

"I wish I could offer more solid guarantees," Krista said. "Tweed deliberately tried to keep us dependent on the monthly shipments. He knew what he was doing, I guess. We're short on some trace elements that are being lost in the secondary recyclers. Lilo and I are working on a tertiary system to recover what we have, but unless we can find larger amounts by mining the rocks, we could be in trouble in a few years."