Chapter 2 — NYORK

As gawky as any tourist, I looked at the large screen in the dayroom of the passenger ship. Spirit, beside me, was similarly fascinated. All the others watching were children. Normal adults, jaded by experience, were reading, sleeping, watching entertainment holos or indulging in other pursuits or appetites in private chambers.

Of course, the approach to mighty Jupiter required several hours if I disregard the fact that the entire journey from Leda was an approach. No one could sit and watch the orange Colossus constantly without losing the edge of excitement. But my sister and I tried!

We had never before been closer than the orbit of Amalthea, and that had been a bitter occasion: the Jupiter authorities had towed our refugee bubble back out to space rather than accept us as immigrants. That action had cost me my mother Charity, my fiancée Helse, and the rest of my companions. The mighty Colossus had not cared! I had been fifteen years old then, and Spirit had been twelve; now we were thirty and twenty-seven, our military careers abruptly behind us, and we were returning. How much better it would have been if we had made it the first time!

"Say, aren't you Captain Hubris, the Hero of the Belt?" a gangling Saxon boy abruptly inquired of me.

Startled by this recognition, I smiled. "I suppose I am."

"Gee! That's great!" he exclaimed, and wandered away, his attention span and interest exhausted.

The phenomenal bands of Jupiter fuzzed as we came close. We had first seen the planet as a kind of giant face, with white eyeballs crossing from west to east in the north, and the Red Spot gaping like a mouth in the south. Now we were spiraling down above the great equatorial band that was occupied by the United States of Jupiter, the most powerful political entity in the Solar System. None of the giant city-bubbles was visible yet; they were on a plane at the five-bar level of atmospheric pressure; that is, five times the pressure of Earth's atmosphere at Earth's surface where the ambient temperature was a comfortable eighty degrees Fahrenheit, and clouds of water droplets precipitated from the gases there.

I should explain that there is no human development on the surface of Jupiter, or on any of the gas giant planets, for a number of reasons. First, there is no surface in the Earth sense, merely a series of somewhat arbitrary boundary levels, such as the translation from molecular to metallic hydrogen. We know hydrogen, which composes ninety percent of Jupiter's atmosphere, as a gas; but as the depth and pressure increase it becomes a kind of liquid and then a kind of solid, stripped of its electrons. The pressure of that metallic stage is about three million bars, and the temperature there is about ten thousand degrees Kelvin. These extremes would not be comfortable for human beings, to understate the matter significantly. Jupiter has been considered, historically, as a cold planet; in fact, it is a hot one. Had it been larger, the internal temperature might have triggered nuclear fusion, making a third star in our System. As it is, Jupiter has more mass than the combined mass of everything else in the Solar System, excluding Nemesis and the Sun itself. Not for nothing is Jupiter called the Colossus.

It is a colossus economically and politically, too. The Jupiter Navy, from which I had just been released, dominates space from the Belt almost to the orbit of Saturn, and the planet is the richest in resources of any in the System. The government of the United States of Jupiter hauls other governments about as arrogantly as the planet hauls other matter in the vicinity. The Jupiter standard of living is the highest in the System. This, of course, makes it the planet of choice for refugees throughout the System, refugees it repels with increasing determination that at times borders on savagery. Spirit and I were now being admitted—after a fifteen-year apprenticeship in the Jupiter Ecliptic region of space. We were now legal citizens of Jupiter, entitled to all prerogatives of citizenship, thanks to certain hardnosed negotiations and the intercession of a special agency, QYV.

But it was not primarily the dream of sanctuary, power, or wealth that brought me here. It was Megan.

I had one true love at age fifteen, the refugee girl Helse, then sixteen. We were to marry, but she died in her wedding dress, so that I could live. There could be no complete love for me thereafter, until I encountered the one other woman my heart could accept: Megan. I had never met her, indeed had only seen her picture as she was at age sixteen, bearing a haunting similarity to Helse. It had been a false similarity, for the picture had been five years out of date; Helse had been only eleven when it was made. In addition, Megan was Saxon, while Helse was Hispanic. Those were, perhaps, the least of the differences between them, and this I have always known.

But man is not a rational creature, and the Latin temperament may be less stable than others, and I less stable and rational than most Latins. I say this with a certain bemused pride. Megan was the niece of a kindly old scientist who had helped Helse and me when we were desperate; my gratitude to him overflowed the boundaries of rationality and found a partial focus on his niece. When Helse died, that focus strengthened. I explain this objectively, but it has more power than that. Only through Megan could I recover any part of either Helse or the scientist—and I had to have that part. In Megan I might recreate my One True Love in her moment of greatest beauty and joy.

My eyesight blurred as I stared at the savage maelstrom that was the face of Jupiter. The turbulence between the bands was at once more vast and violent than any effort of man, and more measured and lovely in its slow motion. Huge and ruthless currents played across those fringes in their gargantuan rituals. Only the surface of that three-dimensional flux was visible, yet all of it would manifest in its own time and fashion. Nothing man could do would change this progression; we could only watch and wonder, trying to glimpse at least a fraction of our own ignorance of the phenomenon. Even so was my feeling for Megan, the woman I had never met. The submerged currents of my being had been progressing for fifteen years in their slow, but inevitable, pattern, and now they were bringing me to her at last. A spectator might protest that it was foolish of me to pursue such a dream so late, but the spectator could not see the deeper imperatives that drove me, like the massive coriolis forces of Jupiter. Megan! As moth to candle, I was coming to her.

In the long interim my sister Spirit had sustained me; she was my strength in adversity, and my most intimate companion and friend. Without her I could not have gotten through. Spirit was the only one who truly understood. Oh, there had been other women along the way, good women, and I had interacted with them to the extent I was able. But I had been able to leave any and all of them, as indeed I was doing now. They had been wonderful, but they had become part of my past.

Down we moved, following the planet around to the east, matching its velocity of rotation. The giant bands alternated colors; there were shades of blue, brown, and orange, demarked by lines of black and yellow and spots both bright and dark. In general the white spots were high-pressure cells that had risen from the depths and were converting their heat to rotary motion, which motion was greedily sucked at by the zonal jets. The zonal jets drew their energy from the rising eddies they consumed, not vice versa; the newcomers were consumed by the hungry, established powers. There, too, perhaps, was a lesson for me.

The white spots spun counterclockwise in the southern hemisphere, and the cold low-pressure spots should have spun clockwise, but the Great Red Spot, politically known as the Nation of Redspot, was anticyclonic, spinning counterclockwise, too, and enduring eternally despite the hunger of the bands. Perhaps that was the example I should follow: to maintain my own orientation, to endure regardless, even if others were destroyed by the environment.

We touched the thin fringe of atmosphere and glided down toward our destination. I am of course contracting this; in the hours of descent we paused to eat and eliminate and sleep. But always we returned to view the tapestry of the Colossus, mesmerized by it. The twenty-thousand-mile broad orange band fuzzed farther, for we were technically in it now, and the separate currents and spots of it fogged out with proximity. We phased in more precisely to the velocity of the band. Jupiter rotated a full turn in about ten hours, and the winds of this band moved faster than the planet by about two hundred miles per hour, and we exceeded that by about three hundred miles per hour so that we could use vanes to plane down through the thickening atmosphere.

We passed through the ammonia-ice clouds of the one-hundred-millibar level; now the ship shook as the atmosphere took hold. The screen showed only reddish haze; imagination had to fill in now. Then it cleared, the flight smoothed out, and vision cleared—until we encountered another layer, twenty miles below, this time of brownish clouds, and experienced more turbulence. Finally we came to the bluish layer, with gray and white clouds. We were at the water-precipitation level at last.

I looked down through a rift in that layer and suddenly saw a panorama of the whole of populated Jupiter—thousands of city-bubbles floating at the five-bar level, glowing like baubles in the band about the globe of Jupiter, a scintillating network of civilization ranged along the most extravagant geography extant. How paltry the land-bound cities of old Earth must have been, compared to this!

But it was illusion, a mere passing vision of the sort I am subject to. The bubbles were there, of course, but I could not see them. They were ranged one hundred, two hundred thousand miles around the planet, masked by the cloud layer; there was no way for anyone to see the entire array at one glance. Only in imagination, as I had done. But what a sight for the mind's eye!

Below us now, the view was relatively clear, but the sheer mass of the thickening atmosphere caused my gaze to fog out. There simply wasn't anything to see there! For a moment I felt uneasy, exposed, fearing a fall to the awesome depths of the planet. But, of course, no fall was possible; we were using gravity shielding now, as the planetary gee was over twice Earth-normal at this level.

Gravity shielding does not eliminate the force of gravity, of course, any more than a magnifying glass eliminates light, since gravity is really a deformation of space by matter, which cannot be negated. Shielding merely focuses or diffuses it, so that an object in that field is affected to a greater or lesser extent. The force of gravity is conveyed by gravitrons; when their normal pattern of flow is altered, so is their effect. Gravitrons influence everything, including others of their kind; that means that gravitrons can be used to deflect other gravitrons, at least temporarily. Then the gravitrons bend back, recovering their original configuration, like the resilient surface of a sponge, no permanent damage done. Gravity deflected for the moment, not negated: the breakthrough of the millennium.

The ship homed in on the metropolitan bubble of Nyork, one of the major cities of the Solar System. In the distance, as it floated beneath the cloud layer, it looked like a marble, then like a boulder, then like a planetoid. It floated beneath us, grandly rotating, a stream of tiny bubbles feeding into its nether hub, the local commuter traffic. We, as a shuttle ship from space, warranted the apex hub.

"It floats but it spins," Spirit murmured appreciatively.

I knew what she meant. One might have supposed that a floating city would not need centrifugal gee, as it would feel the planetary gee that was over twice Earth-normal. After all, the occupants of a boat floating on water experience full gee, and those of an airplane in flight, and those riding a balloon do, too. But the city-bubbles are, overall, more dense than water, while the Jupiter atmosphere at this level is about one-fifth the density of Earthly air. Such a bubble would plummet until it reached its level of density—down around the metallic-hydrogen translation zone. The overwhelming pressure would implode the bubbles long before they achieved that equilibrium. So they have to use gravity shielding to make them light enough to float in hydrogen gas, and therefore it is necessary to restore internal gee through rotation, exactly as in space. Only extremely diffuse bubbles could float naturally, and even those employ gee shielding to reduce their internal gee to Earth-norm or below. Gravity shielding is absolutely essential to man's existence in the wider Solar System. We might as well call this the age of the gee-shield, displacing the prior nuclear power age.

So the city floated and it spun. Nyork had a diameter of approximately eight thousand feet, or about one and a half miles. That was just about as big as any city got; larger bubbles were possible, but they lost cohesion and were unsafe. This one completed a full turn every six and a half minutes, which might seem slow, but that meant that its equator was traveling at about fifty miles an hour. That velocity was evident as we descended to it. Of course there was little velocity at the hub, which was why this was the point of access.

I had envisioned the cities glowing. That turned out to be false. Nyork had running lights and a beacon, but no portholes; it was basically an opaque shell, with the action all confined within. From a distance it would be no more than a dark hulk, hardly visible except in pulsar fashion, as the beacon swung brightly by. That really did not detract from its grandeur; what counts is usually what is inside, in cities as well as in men.

Tugships came out to latch on to us, and we landed, dropping vertically, the tugs employing maneuvering jets to effect contact. We descended into a circular hanger, and a panel slid over, sealing us in. The hanger was pressured in a moment, and we debarked, floating carefully out. It was all null-gee here in the hub.

We were guided along a tube-conduit to a transport chamber and elevator, where there was a routine bottleneck as the passengers had to wait their turns. I tried to look around, but there really wasn't much to see—just the machinery of baggage handling, refueling, supplies, and maintenance. I suppose it might have been much the same when a passenger ship docked at an oceanside city of old Earth; experienced travelers would not have craned their necks to glimpse the routine procedures of ship servicing. But Spirit and I had never been to Jupiter-planet before or to a city of this magnitude, and it was all wondrously new to us.

I could see that there were real advantages to handling baggage in free-fall; one little shove and it floated right across to its hamper. As it got to the edge of the chamber it seemed to curve. That was our perspective, of course; we were already at the edge, benefiting from the trace gee there, and thought of ourselves as fixed in place. Actually we were moving with the city's rotation while the baggage was going straight. I had seen the effect aboard ships, but here the scale was larger, making it seem like a novelty.

Then it was our turn for the elevator. We got in the cage, and it slid down the gradual curve of the bubble-shell. The cage was suspended by the top, so that as it moved outward from the pole region, it oriented to the increasing gee. The velocity was slow, but we knew why: If we were simply allowed to drop we would have fallen in an apparent spiral and crashed into something. Descent within a rotating frame is actually a matter of lateral acceleration, and it can be disastrous when uncontrolled.

After five or six minutes we stopped at a landing. We were now at full gee. We stepped out into the processing center. Most of the passengers were regular Nyork city residents with badges that let them pass without hindrance, but Spirit and I were first-time arrivals to this city and to this planet. We had to run the bureaucratic gantlet. We had to show our new citizenship papers and official releases from the Jupiter Navy and certificates of inoculation against sundry contagious maladies. It seemed that the planetary environment was not considered to be as sanitary as that of space.

"Where will you be establishing residence?" the official inquired.

I didn't know; for fifteen years in the Navy I had always gone where assigned. But Spirit was more practical about such details. "Ybor," she said. "In Sunshine."

"Ybor, Sunshine," he repeated, entering it in the proper sequence. "Nice country down there." He completed the entries and got a printout, which he handed to me. "This will clear things when you board that bubble. Now I suggest you freshen up for the ceremony."

"Ceremony?" I asked blankly.

He only smiled, perhaps assuming I was being coy.

We cleaned up and were conducted to another elevator that took us up to the top of the residential band. The general design of Nyork was standard; the apartments of the residents—one thousand cubic feet of space allotted per person, or a chamber ten feet on each side—were arranged in a cylinder within the bubble. The width of that residential band was four thousand feet, and the length of it about twenty-four thousand feet, theoretically providing space for 960,000 apartments per floor. Actually a lot of space was used for other purposes, such as hallways, public sanitary facilities, business and entertainment structures, storage, and the like, so that perhaps only four to five hundred thousand residential cells were there. Since there were twenty such floors on the strip, this put the total city capacity at eight to ten million people. Of course there could be more; in the slum sections large families crowded into cells meant for small ones, and some people had no established address. I knew this only from my childhood study of geography but was sure it remained true. At any rate, the rated capacity of the city was in the range of ten million, and there were a number of adjacent cities that swelled the metropolitan population to several times that figure. There were many people on Jupiter, as there were on Saturn, Uranus, and the lesser planets, such as Earth itself.

When we emerged at the top of the band, Spirit and I paused with renewed wonder. The entire center of the bubble, a space about a mile and a half across, was open, except for the mock-sun sphere in the center. By shielding our eyes from the concentrated brightness of that sun—for Earth-orbit radiation is twenty-seven times as intense as Jupiter-orbit radiation—we could look right across to the far side. There were a few fleecy clouds in the null-gee center, which made it appear as if we were peering down from above. Again I had seen similar effects before but never on this grand a scale. I simply stared, and so did Spirit.

"This way, please, Captain Hubris," someone said. Bemusedly I went where directed and found myself sitting in a strange, four-wheeled, open vehicle with a uniformed chauffeur in front.

"A car!" Spirit exclaimed beside me. "A genuine antique automobile!"

Now I recognized it. This was a replica of the kind of vehicle once used on old Earth for transportation. Of course this one lacked the pollutive combustion motor, but in other respects it seemed authentic.

A well-dressed man took the front seat. He turned momentarily to face us. "Welcome to Nyork, Captain Hubris and Commander Hubris," he said to us. "I am Mayor Jones." He reached back a chubby hand, and each of us took it in turn. "I hope you enjoy the parade."

"Parade?"

"We have to give you your hero's welcome to the city—and to Jupiter, Captain," he explained. "Just smile and wave every so often; it's a necessary event."

"But—"

"You are the bold officer who cleaned up the Belt, so long a blemish on the fair face of the System," he explained. "We of Jupiter want to demonstrate that we really appreciate that."

I shrugged, knowing that he gave me too much credit. I had been with a fine organization at the Belt, and even so, it had been a chancy thing, with necessary compromises and consequences. "That's over now."

The car started moving. "Well, Captain, we folk of Empire State just want you to know we're proud of you. Nyork has a sizable Hispanic element, in case you should want to settle here. The way you handled the refugee-robbing pirates of the Juclip did not go unnoticed! We're really glad to see a genuine Hispanic hero!"

A Hispanic hero. That was evidently what made me novel in this Saxon culture. Somehow I was not completely pleased. I knew without looking at her that Spirit shared my reserve.

"Why, you could run for President right now," the mayor continued exuberantly. "You'd pick up all the hero votes and the minorities votes, too, and that's a potent political base!"

I laughed as if this were humor, but Spirit gave me a significant nudge. An entry into politics had already been urged on me by a party whose knowledge of the situation was thorough. That was why I planned to settle in Sunshine; it had been targeted as the best locale for the rise of a Hispanic politician.

The car moved into a parklike region where deciduous trees lined the drive, and there were extended reaches of green lawn. Indeed, it would have been easy to believe that this was Earth itself, had it not been for the concave curve of the terrain. There was evidently an abiding longing in man for the things of Earth, evinced in the emulations of that planet that showed whenever feasible. Some of it was practical, such as the day-night cycle and standard gee, for the tides of man's chemistry could not be changed in mere centuries; but much of it was simple nostalgia for the old planet. I could not deride this; I felt it myself.

Then we came to the parade area. Crowds of people lined the road, waving and cheering as we came among them. Confetti flew up as they threw handfuls toward us.

"Wave, sir, wave!" the mayor muttered tersely.

I raised my right arm somewhat awkwardly and essayed a motion, not sure it was really me the crowd watched.

The noise jumped in magnitude. The crowd became frenzied. Then a chant began: "Hubris! Hubris! Hubris!"

I felt an odd surge in my chest, as if falling suddenly in love. They really were cheering me! I waved more vigorously, and the noise increased as if I were orchestrating it.

We continued along the winding road, passing a golf course and a small lake and a series of statues, and everywhere the people were crowded close and cheering. To my amazement the throng seemed to be getting thicker. But I realized that this probably represented a change of pace for the average citizen, a chance to go to the park and relax; I was merely the pretext. Any other man in my position would have received the same reception; it was really an impersonal thing.

Yet it certainly didn't seem impersonal! As I looked I could see men smiling at me, and women blowing kisses. All the time the beat of "Hubris, Hubris!" continued: It was intoxicating.

The mayor turned to speak to us again, his voice barely audible above the noise of the crowd. "Hang on to your hat, Captain! We're coming to the Hispanic district."

Sure enough, the complexion of the crowd changed, the paleness of Saxon visages giving way to the more swarthy Hispanics. The mass of people was thicker yet; now a cordon of helmeted policemen held it back, and even so it surged close to the car. The chant became monstrous. "Hubris! Hubris!" The car was pelted by flowers. I was impressed; decorative plants were expensive, even if they were imitation. Spirit picked up several that fell inside the car and made a bouquet that she set in her hair, and there was a deafening roar of approval. She made another, her nine fingers nimble enough, and put it in my hair, and the response was a storm tide that swept the policemen back until they collided with the car itself. Hands reached through the cordon, trying to touch the car or us. The mayor was beaming, but he looked nervous. I could appreciate why; it would be easy for people to be crushed by the moving car.

There was a siren. More police were coming, reinforcements. But the throng was so thick that the new police could not get through. Slowly we forged on—as it were, alone—plowing through a mass of humanity as if it were indeed a viscous pool.

A body hurtled over the cordon and fell onto the car. It was a woman, a girl—a teenage Hispanic maiden in a pretty summer dress. I tried to help her get upright, taking hold of her shoulders, fearing she had been injured, but she rolled right into me. "Hubris, I love you," she cried in Spanish, and flung her arms about me.

A Saxon policeman climbed onto the car, and it shifted with his weight. "Shit," he exclaimed, grabbing at the maid. "Get out of there, girl!" He hauled at her sleeve, but it tore, leaving her arm and part of her torso bare. He repeated his expletive, which happens to be a Saxon term for excrement, and grabbed again, tearing away more.

"Why don't you take it all, gringo!" the girl cried, and began snatching off her clothing and throwing it at him. I think she was wearing one of those paper garments that are intended for single use before disposal.

Spirit interceded. "Let her stay, officer," she urged the policeman. "She will be no trouble, I'm sure." She put her arms around the girl protectively.

Sweating, the mayor grunted acquiescence, and the policeman got off the car, disgruntled. The girl took her seat between Spirit and me, smiling.

An observation saucer floated low above us, its holo lens orienting. I realized that a picture of our carful would make the day's news: two visiting heroes, one half-naked girl, one red-faced mayor. I had to smile to myself.

The crowd pulled back a little, as if satisfied with this intrusion, and our forward progress resumed at moderate speed. "This is getting out of hand," the mayor yelled over the continuous chanting. "Got to cut it short before somebody gets hurt."

But there was no way to cut it short, for the crowd blocked all potential exits. Every time the chauffeur tried to turn the car, the people surged in to block it off. We had to continue forward.

"I don't like this," the mayor muttered. "They're too hyper! Could be trouble in the blue-collar district."

"Oh, go jump out a lock!" the girl snapped in Spanish.

The mayor's neck reddened. Obviously he did not understand the language, but he understood the tone.

"You do not like the mayor?" I asked the girl in Spanish.

"He's a Saxon pig," she exclaimed. "Always poor services for our slums, graft for the rich white politicos." Then, realizing she had my attention, she snuggled closer to me. "Hero Hubris, why don't you stay here in Nyork and become mayor, and I will be your mistress!"

I was so surprised that I choked. The girl was obviously under the age of consent by a year or two, though her anatomy was fully formed. It had never occurred to me that such a person would proposition me in this fashion. But Spirit had better control. "My brother had already arranged to settle in Ybor, in Sunshine. He will get married."

"Married!" the girl cried, clutching me.

"He is not for you," Spirit said. "You would be too much woman for him. He is thirty years old."

"Thirty," the girl repeated, shocked that anyone could be such an age. Then she reconsidered. "Still, a married man needs a mistress, too, and May-December liaisons can work out. Sometimes an older man can be very considerate and not too demanding—"

"And he has been long in space," Spirit continued, keeping her face straight. "The radiation—"

"The radiation!" The girl glanced down at my crotch as if expecting to see crawling gangrene. It was a superstition that mysterious rays of space made men impotent or worse. She released her grip on me, her ardor chilled. "Poor man!"

Now we came to the blue-collar district, and the crowd changed complexion again. The chanting finally faded, and the spectators stood relatively quiet.

"Damn," the mayor said. "Looks like trouble."

The car accelerated, but that only seemed to trigger the response of the crowd. Now it was definitely ugly. "You spics—you take our jobs!" a man bellowed.

The girl let loose a torrent of Spanish expletives at him. She was evidently a fishwife of the old school.

Now the crowd started a new chant: "Jobs! Jobs! Jobs! Jobs!"

I had known there was an employment problem in the civilian sector, for some of my associates in the Navy had joined in order to obtain better work and job security. But this put a new and more personal face on it. The Hispanics blamed the Saxon management for poor services, and the Saxons blamed the Hispanics for taking employment away from them. I doubted this was true, but it was evident that the belief was widespread here.

Something flew through the air and crashed into the car. It was a brick.

"Damn!" the mayor swore. "They've been at the monuments again. Those are glazed decorative bricks. Cost the city a fortune!" He seemed more indignant at the vandalism than concerned about personal safety. "Damned agitators from outside, stirring up trouble!"

More bricks flew, denting the car. Now it looked serious. The people were surging closer, shaking their fists, cursing. For the first time I was aware of personal danger. These men were angry, and I had become the focus of their rage. There was no more justice in this than in the adulation of the Hispanics; I was merely a symbol. But they might very well kill me if they could. The police cordon had disappeared, overrun by the crowd.

The mayor nudged the chauffeur. "Call the riot police," he snapped. "Tell them to lob a gas grenade here!"

But as the chauffeur started to make the call, a brick smashed down the antenna. Suddenly we were unable to call out.

"Try to bull through them," the mayor cried in desperation. "They're really out for blood this time!"

"This time?" Spirit asked. "You have had similar riots?"

"It's the recession. Lot of local unemployment. Hard feelings. We rounded up the known troublemakers, but we must've missed some."

So things were not entirely rosy on Jupiter! Indeed, the man who had started this aggression was now barring the progress of the car with his body, buttressed by a dozen cohorts. He was shouting and gesturing toward us. It looked bad.

"Crowd control procedure," I said. "Cover me, Spirit."

She reached into her blouse and brought out a pencil-laser pistol. "Covered."

"Hey, you aren't supposed to be armed," the mayor protested. "Weapons are banned in—"

Spirit pointed the laser at his nose and he stopped talking.

I jumped out of the car and ran ahead. For a moment no one realized what I was doing; then a worker pointed at me and shouted.

But by that time I had reached the leader. I caught him by the right arm, spun him around, and applied a submission lock. "Walk quietly with me," I told him.

"Hey, what the—" he started, then cut off as I abruptly tightened the lock, putting him in pain. He was a big, muscular man, much larger than I, but he had never had combat training and was helpless in my grip.

"You can't do that!" another man cried, reaching for me.

From the car, a beam from Spirit's laser burned a hole in his shirt and stung his chest. It was only a momentary flash, just enough to make him jump. Jump he did, falling back, staring at the car.

"We're from the Navy, remember? We know how to shoot," I told him. "That was just a warning. Stand clear."

The others stood clear, realizing that we did indeed know how to conduct ourselves in a fighting situation, and that the presence of the weapon made us far from helpless. Most folk, even those in an enraged mob, are rendered uncertain when abruptly faced with superior will and power. We were exploiting that uncertainty, not giving them time to regroup.

A kind of hush descended on the crowd as I marched the labor leader to the car. Spirit's gaze remained on the crowd, not on me, and she fired again, stinging the hand of a man who was getting ready to throw another brick. She had acute reflexes and perfect marksmanship; with that confidence I was able to concentrate on my own job. I got the leader into the car.

"Sit there," I told him, indicating the seat I had vacated. "Put your arm around the young lady."

"That spic?" he demanded angrily. "I wouldn't touch her with—"

Spirit's laser tube swung around to bear on his nose.

"Uh, yeah, sure," he said, disgruntled. He took the seat and moved his left arm.

"Keep your filthy Saxon hands to yourself!" the girl snapped in Spanish.

"Suffer yourself to be touched by this man," I told her in the same language. "We want to show the crowd how tolerant their leader is."

Her eyes widened as she caught on. She smiled sweetly. "Come here, you Saxon tub of sewage," she said in dulcet Spanish tones. "Put your big fat stinking white paw on me, snotface." I have of course cleaned up her actual terminology somewhat.

Like the mayor, the leader couldn't understand the words but knew he was being mocked. "Listen, slut, I'd as soon hang that meat of yours up with the other pigs," he muttered, his gaze flicking across her bared breast.

I perched on the side of the car. "Say what you will, both of you, but keep smiling." I smiled, too, and waved to the crowd, and so did Spirit, but she did not conceal her laser weapon, still pointed at the leader's head.

The mayor forced a smile of his own. "Very good," he muttered fatalistically.

The car moved on, and the crowd reluctantly parted. We had taken a hostage and deprived the opposition of its leader; the riot was fizzling out.

The mayor nodded. "By damn, it's working," he said. Then he stood up, faced the crowd, and gestured expansively. "Hubris! Hubris!" he cried. "Hubris! Hubris! Hubris!"

After a moment some in the crowd picked up the cadence. "Hubris! Hubris!" Soon all were chanting. We continued to smile and wave, and the labor leader continued to embrace the Latin girl. The parade had resumed.

"Because you have been kind enough to join us," I said to the labor leader while I continued to watch the crowd, "and to help pacify the throng by your generous gesture of tolerance, I believe you should be rewarded." Spirit was watching the crowd on the other side, knowing I would alert her if anything needed her attention on my side. We both knew that we could not relax until we were beyond this section of the city.

"You mean I can let go of this Spanish sass?"

"Not yet," I said.

"God, my wife's going to kill me!"

"Tell your wife the truth: There was a laser at your head. It was duress."

"Yeah," he agreed, glancing again at the breast. It was a well-formed one, young and perky. "I'd never touch anything like that if there weren't a weapon on me."

Another camera-saucer floated near. "But there is a weapon on you, isn't there, you Saxon slob," the girl said in English, delighted. And, as the saucer-lens took it all in, she twisted about, plastered her anatomy against him, grabbed his head in both her hands, and kissed him wetly on the mouth.

"Gross," he muttered, but he did not seem totally displeased.

"What is it you desire most?" I asked.

He had to crack an honest smile. "You had to ask that right now, didn't you?"

"I mean you collectively—the workers in the street."

"No secret there, Navy boy. We want jobs."

I turned to the mayor, who was still woodenly beaming for crowd and camera. "Why don't you have jobs?"

"The recession," the mayor said. "Nyork's been hit bad. Twenty-five percent of our industrial capacity's dormant. Companies closed down, moved out. We passed preferential tax measures, allocated choice real estate, upgraded our educational program, and still can't get enough new business in to stop the slide. So it just gets worse, and the unemployment and welfare rolls are murdering us."

"We don't want welfare, we want jobs!" the leader exclaimed.

"So do we," the girl said.

"You? You've got our jobs!"

"Dishwashing? Maid work? Street cleaning?" she asked derisively. "My brother's a competent mechanic, and he's out of work, too. We don't like welfare any better than you do."

"Nobody likes welfare," the mayor said. "Especially the taxpayer who has to pay for it. But the jobs just aren't there."

"Where are the jobs?" I asked. I have a talent for reading people and knew that these people—labor leader, girl, and mayor—were speaking honestly now.

"Mostly down south, where you're going, and west. The companies get this will-o'-the-wisp gleam in their corporate eyes and take off for greener pastures. By the time they learn it's illusion, they're stuck. They'd be better off right here in Nyork, if they only knew it."

"Then someone should tell them," I said.

"We've been trying. We run ads, we make reports—it just doesn't register."

"Ads and reports are impersonal," I said. "Suppose two people like this man and this woman's brother—trained, competent workers who really do want to work—suppose they went to prospective companies and laid it on the line? Would that influence them to return?"

The mayor shrugged. "It couldn't do worse than we've done."

"Why not try it, then? Appoint a select committee of workers—Saxon, Black, Hispanic—and pay them to go out and brace those companies. Arm them with the best information you've got, so they can really make their case. You can be sure they'll put their hearts into it, because they really do want those jobs. If there's any way to get through, to make those company execs appreciate the excellent company climate you have here, they'll do it. All you need is to get their attention, get them to take you seriously; then wonderful things might follow."

The mayor frowned. "That's not standard procedure—"

"To hell with standard procedure!" the girl exclaimed. "My brother needs a job! He's got a silver tongue when he's hungry!"

"Don't we all," the labor leader agreed.

"You'd do it?" she asked him. "You'd go with my brother, to—"

"I'd go to hell with the devil for jobs for me and my crew," he said.

"You know, you don't seem so bad, for a Saxon cesspool."

He glanced once more at her anatomy. "I could say the same about a 'Spanic pig, but my wife—"

"Remember that laser," she said, and kissed him again, more lingeringly than before. She was young, but she had evidently had some practice.

I looked at the mayor. "Will you do it?"

He spread his hands. "I may be a fool, but it won't be the first time. I'll set up the committee and give it a year. If it produces—"

"It'll produce!" the leader and girl said together.

"Know something, Captain?" the mayor said to me. "You're a born politician."

"It's a necessary skill for a Hispanic officer," I said.

The parade continued, and it seemed happier now.