Chapter IV: Earth trembled

She shook like a palsied animal, and great fissures rent her thick hide as tidal waves lashed like gigantic hammers at the coastlines of her continents and mercilessly overran a host of the jewel-like islets that studded her vast oceans.

Her artificial satellites had long since come crashing down, and her natural moon teetered threateningly in its age-old course. Great, jagged chunks broke loose as the barren mass of rock circled perilously close to de Roche's Limit.

Some of the lower, sturdier buildings in the cities which dotted her wide continents were yet intact, and in the largest, the capital city itself, a number of the broad, deep-laid malls and thoroughfares were still at least partially passable.

But Senator Martin Stine, Conservative Socialist representing the state of Penn-York, had trouble keeping his temper in check nonetheless. It was temper aroused as much from the anxiety of deep rooted fear as from the irritation of trying to guide his pneumo-car through the debris-littered avenue leading to the capitol, and the thought jittered again through his mind that he should have taken one of the overheads even though some of them were sagging dangerously in places.

But he hadn't taken one, and there was less than a quarter-mile to go. If he hadn't been adding so indiscriminately of late to his normally 195-pound, six-foot two-inch frame he could've parked the damn car and run the rest of the way. Only a block or so yet.

And at this session, the fur was going to fly for sure if the planet hung together long enough for it to even get underway. He'd warned them the last time about the Tinkers. Deaf. Everybody.

His heavy face was red when he at length arrived in front of the capitol mainramp. He didn't wait for a robotparker to come and take over, but simply stopped his vehicle in its tracks and abandoned it where it stood. And despite the extra pounds he'd recently put on, he moved with an almost feline grace up the broad, inclining ramp, the anger steadily mounting in him.

He entered the vast chamber and took his seat, just as the muted roar of private, nervous conversation was broken by the tri-diannouncer.

"Gentlemen, the President-General of the United Earth Republics!"

Silence. Then the crashing noise of a thousand men getting to their feet. A small, gray-looking man with a prematurely bald head crossed the front of the great chamber flanked by his Secretaries of State and Defense, then mounted the podium alone.

And the emergency session of the Senior Congress of the United Earth Republics was begun.

* * * * *

Senator Martin Stine was the tenth man to be recognized.

He rose quickly and plucked the jeepmike from its recessed spot in his desktop.

"So far," he began, omitting even to begin his remarks with the traditional salutation to the President and the group as a whole, "I have heard ten recommendations for procedure in the present crisis, and each one has been about as jelly-kneed as the one before it! There's one solution to this thing and only one. If we don't want this planet to be scattered to the four corners of Space within the next 72 hours we must get Project AA underway and damn quick! I've been informed that there is a Tinker ship within thirty hours' flight of this system. If we act now, and call them in as we should've, on an ESR, five years ago, we still might be able to get out of this one with whole skins. Some of us, anyway. Gentlemen, the casualty lists as of an hour ago weren't very encouraging."

"Will the Senator from Penn-York yield for a question?"

Stine's cold blue eyes snapped. "Yield for one minute to the Senator from Texamerica."

"The ITA effected a Project AA for this system about eleven years ago, did they not? And have answered exactly seven Emergency Service Requests in the last one hundred twenty years, have they not? In view of such frequent assistance, it would seem--"

"What the Senator from Texamerica really means is that if the ITA had to do a double-A for the second time in eleven years, the reflection on their prestige would make things a little gummy in some quarters--isn't it?" A gavel rapped sharply. Stine threw a quick glance at the section reserved for native Earth political representatives of the ITA, and he saw that one was already on his feet demanding recognition.

"I yield for all the time you need! Go ahead!" Stine sat down, his youthful looking face mottled with tension.

"I may remind the Senator from Penn-York that the ITA has some one hundred twelve other worlds in addition to this planet to look after! And as far as it is concerned, nuisance planets are better off dead! If our torsion screens were inoperable; if there were no other way to hold the planet together until the next scheduled visit nine years from now, then perhaps an ESR would be in order. But since it is obvious that this system's Gravity-Justifier is only in temporary disorder, and was designed to be self repairing, an ESR for a double-A is simply out of the question. I repeat. As far as the ITA is concerned, a nuisance planet--"

"Yes, and that's just the stranglehold you've got on all of your hundred and thirteen worlds!" Stine had leapt to his feet, and the President-General's gavel banged furiously, but he paid it no heed at all. "'Be good boys and do what we tell you and leave us alone while we're busy playing God or we'll let you go back to stone axes and caves'--that's what you're trying to say, isn't it?" The gavel clamored deafeningly through the President-General's lectern-mike, and the gray, bald man was now standing himself. But there was a sudden surge of voices and a scattered applause throughout the entire chamber that had begun quickly to swell, drowning out even Stine's own voice. Then died slowly, so that his words could be heard again. "Playing God might be all right if you can prove all the time to all the people that you've got all the answers to all the problems! But it might not be so easy if you begin to lose your touch; lose some of the answers! I hope the ITA representative isn't trying to tell us that the organization for which he works is no longer capable of repairing a Gravity-Justifier so that it will keep the planets in their orbits where they belong! Or am I right?"

"That is a preposterous accusation and--" The gavel thundered. "--and I demand its retraction immediately!"

"Friend, I was born on this planet the same as you were but I work for it. I'm not standing idly by to see it destroyed because your buddies are afraid to admit they might be slipping a little and don't want it to show! I--" Thunderous applause. Half the chamber was on its feet, now, and even without the jeepmikes the cheers would have been deafening. "I say, Mr. President, if we're to believe the ITA is what it pretends to be--a technological service organization dedicated to the galactic welfare--it be called in immediately for a Project AA, and, if it refuses, that it be publicly denounced by this government as no longer competent in that capacity!"

When Stine sat down this time, the ovation that followed his words left the chief executive little choice.

A vote was called, and Stine realized that somehow, his laborious weeks and months of propagandizing and mass proselytization had at last taken root.

It had been comforting to know, at least, that had he failed, there was a well-appointed, powerful space-cruiser waiting for him at a secret place in the mountains to the north. It was still comforting to know. Because the Tinkers would have to come, now, if only to save face. And, of course, they wouldn't be able to deliver.

And then--

He stirred restlessly in his seat as the vote was being tallied, was nearly thrown from it once as a great tremor shook the massive building; excited knots of men who had begun crowding the aisles were bowled in scrambled confusion to the floor. And Stine smiled a tight, small smile to himself. Even Nature was doing her bit.

A hurrying page boy brushed past his desk in the crowded aisle, and he suddenly felt something small and hard pressed into his palm. He knew what it was by the feel of it, but it would have to wait until he could leave.

He did not have to wait long. The President-General himself announced the result of the vote, and within the next half hour an ESR would be on its way to the nearest Tinker ship. There were a few cries of "Railroad!" and "--demand a recount!" amid the noisy babble of the adjourning session, but Stine was already on his way.

A second tremor brought him to his knees at the main exit of the great chamber; it stopped the post-mortems cold, and sent the august body of Senior Congressmen scurrying for other exits themselves, and Stine's early departure went unnoticed, even by waiting newsmen who had themselves been scattered unceremoniously half the length of the wide exit corridor.

The pressurelift lowered him quickly to his basement offices.

A panel slid silently from his impressive Martian drokii-wood desk. Then it was but a matter of slipping the tiny microfilm spool from the flat, coin-sized container that the page boy had so carefully delivered to him and inserting it in the compact projector long enough to completely memorize the coded symbols.

Then he destroyed the strip and container together.

Almost casually he plucked the comphone from its cradle, but nicked a tiny stud that would keep the televideo blank.

He dialed, waited.

"Newton? For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. The answer is yes."

He hung up.