The Cassandra Complex - Brian Stableford [86]
“Yes,” Lisa admitted, “but it’s a perfectly commonplace phrase.”
“Maybe it is,” Smith agreed, “but the Real Women were great enthusiasts for physical culture, weren’t they? Very militant too, I believe.”
“They weren’t Nazis,” Lisa said firmly. “I think you might be letting your imagination run away with you.”
Smith obviously resented that comment, perhaps because it had a little too much accuracy in it for comfort. “Why did Leland take you along with the two women?” he asked sharply. “Even if it hadn’t been obvious that you weren’t one of them, he had only to glance at your ID. Why didn’t he leave you behind with Ginny and me, to sleep it off in the parking lot?”
“I think he wanted to explain himself,” Lisa told him judiciously. “He wanted a quick word with the ambushers before turning them in, but he didn’t want us to think they might have been spirited away by their friends. He doesn’t want us chasing after him with the same fervor we’re devoting to the task of trying to find Morgan Miller. He’d rather we thought of him as an ally. He took me with him so I could bear witness to his good intentions. He might, of course, have fed me a complete pack of lies.”
“But you think he was on the level—or as near to it as a man of his type ever is?”
“Probably,” Lisa admitted, thinking that Smith was a pompous fool whose attitudes, instincts, and modes of expression were so twentieth-century as to be almost beyond belief. “While we’re still searching for Morgan, we can use all the help we can get, and whoever he’s working for, Leland does seem to be running a parallel investigation. If I’m right and this whole thing is some kind of silly mistake, it probably won’t matter who he reports to.”
“And if you’re wrong?”
Lisa looked away, feebly pretending that the view from the window had attracted her attention. The helicopter had already begun its descent and the lights of Swindon were displayed beneath her, their brightness and variety testifying that the town was booming, as it had been for half a century. It had owed its first spurt of growth to the fact that it was the halfway point between the original termini of the Great Western Railway, and it advertised itself nowadays as the bridge between the two great cityplexes of England—a claim that excited a certain amount of resentment and scorn in the Birmingham metropolitan area and United Manchester. At the moment, it looked more like an island than a bridge; the threads of illumination connecting it to Chippenham and Reading seemed as frail as spidersilk in comparison to the blaze emitted by the glittering hub where the leisure spots of the town’s twenty-four-hour society were clustered. Lisa blinked her eyes, fighting tiredness.
“If I’m wrong,” she said, as much to herself as to Peter Smith, “and Morgan really has stumbled onto the kind of technology that can create some kind of a New Order—without bothering to tell me about it—the government doesn’t stand much chance of keeping it secret from anyone Leland might be working for, although the reverse might be a different matter. I still think the Ice Age Elite is a silly myth, but if there really are people in the world who are anxious to set themselves up as inheritors of post-Crisis Earth, our job is to make sure they don’t get away with it, whoever they are. Isn’t it?”
“Of course it is,” Smith answered—as he would