“Now you’re talking. And what is that for me, under the CAC?”
“You understand,” Sal said, “that the more you actually call upon such persons to coerce, the less power you have, in a way. It is an admission of failure.”
“Sal,” Markus said, “how long have you been up here?”
“Two hundred and some days.”
“How many hours have we spent talking about the CAC?”
“I have no idea, probably a hundred hours over that time.”
“And of that, how much time have we spent talking about this one thing?”
Sal checked his own watch. “Maybe fifteen minutes.”
“So, based on that allocation of time,” Markus said, “maybe you can see that this is not all that important to me in the big scheme of things. But it is important, Sal. When the moment comes when I have to arrest a criminal who is being protected by his comrades, I must have an answer. I must know what to do. I must be prepared. This is what I do. This is why I have this job.”
Someone was knocking on the door to Markus’s office, which was unusual. Markus ignored it for now.
“Under PSAPS you can deputize specific people to enforce your decisions using appropriate levels of physical coercion. Once we get out of PSAPS . . .”
“How soon do you think that is going to happen?” Markus’s tone of voice suggested he had his own opinions on the matter.
“If we are lucky enough to survive? It will be years,” Sal said.
“So we must confine ourselves to PSAPS for this discussion,” Markus said. Then he hollered at the door, “Just a minute!” Then, back to Sal: “Appropriate levels of physical coercion, what does that mean? Who decides?”
“Well,” Sal said, “if you make me attorney general, head prosecutor, justice of the peace, and chief justice of the supreme court, I guess I do.”
“If someone gets Tased, and his heart stops, and he dies, is that appropriate?”
“Jesus Christ, Markus, what has gotten into you?”
“I am war-gaming,” Markus said. “Trying to be prepared. You should do it too. Not with hypothetical rape cases but with what is likely to start happening soon.” He held Sal’s gaze until Sal answered with a nod. Then he aimed his voice at the door. “All right! Come in!”
“Door” was a landlubber term for what, on a boat or a spaceship, would be called a hatch. A convention had developed where, in a part of Izzy that had simulated gravity, it was referred to as a door. In the floaty bits, it was called a hatch.
The door opened to reveal Dubois Jerome Xavier Harris. The look on his face, combined with the mere fact that he had interrupted Markus during a meeting in his private office, suggested that something serious was happening. Markus’s mind jumped straight to the most obvious explanation: “Is the president nuking people again?”
Dr. Harris looked startled by the suggestion, then shook it off. No, it wasn’t that.
“Does this meeting require privacy?” Markus asked, with a look at Sal. Sal stood up, volunteering to make himself scarce. But Dr. Harris just got a bemused look. “It concerns the least private thing that ever happened, or ever will,” he said. “So no thank you. I have reason to believe that the timetable has just been pushed up very significantly. There is a chance that the White Sky could happen as soon as six hours from now.” He checked his watch. “Call it five.”
Markus’s eye flicked to a display on the wall. “I see no uptick in the BFR.”
“It will be triggered by the passage of an asteroid through the cloud.”
“Does anyone on the ground know?”
“It depends on to what extent this office is under surveillance.”
“So, your information does not come from the ground.”
“No. It comes from deep space.”
“Via encrypted Morse code?” Markus inquired casually. He and Sal exchanged a look. Their conversation had begun, an hour ago, with reading a memo from J.B.F. complaining about such transmissions and demanding that action be taken. It was in discussing how to take such action, and whether the White House had any authority in the matter, that Markus and Sal had wandered into their more general discussion of power. Which was how Markus liked it, for now. Because if someone was sending mysterious encrypted Morse code transmissions from Izzy, it had to be his girlfriend. And he wasn’t going to arrest her. People would howl about conflict of interest: people who would be dead soon, people who had no way to enforce their authority here.
Unless they had planted, among the Arkies or the General Population, fifth columnists with orders to execute a coup d’état if necessary.
“Markus?” Dr. Harris asked. “Are you hearing me? Do you understand what I just said?”
“I beg your pardon, Dr. Harris, I just got distracted thinking about the kind of things that Sal is supposed to think about.”
“Feel free to delegate some of that,” Sal said. “I know it’s not your strong suit, but—”
“Close the door, please,” Markus said.
Dr. Harris did.
“I am reasonably sure of no surveillance in here.”