The Venus Belt

by L. Neil Smith

  He screamed, scrabbling for the cross-draw holster on his hip. Desperate, I recovered, lunged. The Rezin disappeared into his body, his blood bubbling and boiling around it with a thick cloud of oily smoke. I wrenched the blade out as he fell, then snatched his medallion, crushing it on the rail with the pommel of my knife.

  Lucy gathered up her senses in an instant, grabbed the guy’s uninjured arm, half carrying him to the air-lock. I wasn’t much help: the exertion had about finished me off—and not a little smoke was rising from my own sleeve now. I slapped a palm across the tear and stumped along behind her, blind with pain and exhaustion. The assassin died as we were cycling the door.

  ***

  Decontamination hurt. Half the little telltales on my arm were blinking hysterically as my exposed flesh, scalded by the caustic spray—and probably infected with a billion voracious artificial microbes—was screaming for attention. Maybe even amputation.

  Finally I passed some psychological limit; when I woke up, Lucy had stashed my assailant in stasis—just in case we’d diagnosed wrong—and peeled a portion of my suit to examine my injured forearm. She spent fully as much time on the goddamned damaged sleeve. “Best thing for it, Winnie. If we can hurry th’ repairs along, it’ll repair you. Hold still!”

  “Jesus X. Bushman! Try keeping your fingers out of the hamburger, please! Damn near killed me out there, now you’re trying to finish the job.” To make things worse, I’d broken three cigars I was carrying. I trimmed and lit a reasonably undamaged half, dribbling sparks and ashes all over my lap.

  “Least I crashed th’ opposition, too—can’t say I ain’t fair.” She sprayed on tissue-sealant—the kind that’s illegal, Stateside—from the shelter’s copious materia medica, and returned her attention to my suit. Apparently our late host had actually lived down here in the slime: we were sitting in a comfortable, well-appointed living room.

  “Yeah, well, you’re supposed to be on my side.”

  “Which I am, when I’m m’self. Thanks fer smashin’ that medallion, Win. One more go-round, I’da ended up in th’ swamp. Ugly way t’die.” She put my sleeve aside. “Guess you’ll mend now. Soon’s yer pressure-tight agin, we can get on outa here.”

  I grunted. “We sure won’t be interviewing Ed’s former client, will we? I shouldn’t have called ahead, Lucy. You suppose I’ve killed the others I Telecommed, too?”

  “Don’t be a ninny. That hatcheteer was after us. We must be gettin’ close t’somethin’. Sure wish I knew what th’ plague it is. Seal yer suit an’ let’s make like a hockey team.”

  I looked down at the sleeve, which hung there good as new—more than I could say for my plastic-coated arm. “I want a look around, first. The Civil Liberties Association is going to love us—we’re starting to leave a trail.” Something else occurred to me: “Lucy, about this bugranch business—how come I haven’t come down with acute Andromeditis or something?”

  “ ‘Cause them microcritters ain’t designed t’chew on people. It’s their metabolic byproducts does th’ damage. An’ we ain’t callin’ no Civil Libertines—time we got discreet. That feller in th’ lock ain’t gonna mind none, an’ th’ one in stasis, she’s fixed up as well as anyone can fix her.”

  “She? A brain-bore victim, I presume.” Lucy nodded. “At least the other side’s consistent—a highly overrated virtue, if you ask me. Say, how come the medallion around her neck didn’t scramble her own circuitry?”

  “It was all done with mirrors, Winnie. That suit of hers had an extra layer of shielding. That’s why I said they’re after us, specific-like. Otherwise—”

  “Right—why the extra medallion? You win, but let’s at least leave a message for the Patrol.” I slid my arm back into the suit, braced for even greater agony. Surprisingly, the pain completely vanished. I tried the limb out every whichway, and it seemed all right. “You rustic types certainly pioneer in style,” I commented as I poked around the room. “Don’t think they had a piano as big as this one, even aboard the—Sonofabitch!”

  Lucy turned. “Thought you came out here aboard th’ Bonaventura. Whatcha got there, son?”

  I turned the holoframe so she could see it. A hand-written inscription floated in the air below the double portrait: TO DADDY WITH LOVE, HIS GIRLS.

  “Ain’t it th’ one on th’ right tried t’steal yer luggage on Ceres?”

  “Yeah—now in stasis at Dr. Scott’s.” I consulted Ed’s notes. “Disappeared shortly after staking claim with her sister—guess where. Maybe we should skip the rest of the interviews and go directly to the heart of the matter.”

  “Th’ Cluster?”

  “Wherever that Broach-noise was coming from. Ed seemed to think—”

  “But not often enough. One thing, though: how’m I gonna keep from gettin’ poleaxed by ever Tom, Dick, an’ Alex got one of them medallions? It’s getting downright monotonous!”

  “I just stomp ‘em, Lucy. You’re the technician.”

  ***

  “Stop foolin’ with that antique. Gonna ventilate us both fer sure.” We’d just finished turnover on the first leg of our journey. I was examining the weapon she’d taken from the knife-happy hit-lady.

  “Lucy, this could be important: Olongo was assaulted with an American .22; I nearly got shot with an American .25. . .”

  “An’ Trayle blown away with an American .38. There’s yer pattern—it’s them pest-ridden countrymen of yers!”

  “Countrywomen. That’s what I thought, but, Lucy, CDM is a Mexican headstamp—Cartouchos Deportivos, or something like that, and the .38 Super Automatic is a hell of a lot more popular there and in Central America than it is Stateside. Now there’s this—”

  “Another little bitty beanshooter. So what?”

  “So it’s a Russian beanshooter, to be specific, a 9-millimeter Makarov, and to get one, you have to have the right initials: KGB. That’d be a hell of an alliance, my world’s Soviets, and your very own Hamiltonians!”

  “Smile when y’say that. We fought two wars provin’ it ain’t so. Mebbe it’s just somebody collects little tiny guns. Don’t like t’hurt folks too much.” She patted the monstrous Gabbet Fairfax safely reinstalled at her side.

  “Be serious! This means there’s a second secret channel to my world, somebody who uses brain-bores and makes people disappear. Somebody—”

  “Stupid enough t’plant a Broach out here where nobody in your System’s reached yet. Winnie, yer deducin’ yerself right over th’ brink. Wait’ll we see what’s what ‘fore y’start theorizin.”

  “Oh, yeah? Well, tell me, Lucy, what did they get you with? What caliber?”

  A long pause. Then: “I been afraid you’d ask that, son, it’s downright humiliatin’: .309 diameter, 71-grain copper jacket. In other words...“

  “A .32 ACP—the only machine gun I know of that uses it is a Czechoslovakian antique, the Model 60 Scorpion. Lucy, I’m going to go right on ‘theorizin’ ‘ all I like. Clarissa’s missing, and I keep thinking about her with a brain-bore fastened on her head, being used.” Neither of us spoke for a while.

  “Winnie, how about findin’ us a movie on that Gigglycom of yours. One of them East Clintwood things y’keep tellin’ me about.”

  ***

  Friday, March 19, 223 A.L.

  Twenty hours later, we stopped to take on more reaction mass and life-support supplies at another puffed-up asteroid similar to Navigation Rock. Instead of just one explosion, thousands had been set off at the right stage of plasticity, creating a vast, complicated “apartment house” of foamy rock, a myriad of interconnected bubbles.

  Inside the planetoid, in addition to fuel-storage and reservoirs for air and water, there were artificial environments as varied as the many Earth provides—plus many more invented simply to please and amaze (and collect hard money from) the passing traveler. The last couple of thousand miles, the proprietors of this astroknott’s berry-farm had beamed their Telecom brochure our way: forests, jungles, deserts, icecaps, Martian ril
ls and crater bottoms, depths and shallows suited to marine voyagers.

  Lucy had noodled with the flivver’s transponder on the theory that we didn’t want to advertise. She paid for our supplies in blessedly anonymous cash. I didn’t hear any complaints from the management. We hadn’t any choice, however, about deflivvering while the cabin was being serviced. We went inside, determined to maintain as low a profile as we could.

  Some trick with Lucy dressed up like a big paisley mailbox.

  “Somethin’ I been meanin’ t’check on anyway,” she told me. “Wanna see a genuine prehistorical critter ‘fore we take off again?” We floated at the intersection of a dozen tubular tunnels in the rock, each one color-coded to avoid confusion. Theoretically.

  “What are you talking about?” I looked nervously over my shoulder, imagining Hamiltonians, CIA agents, and Communists at every bend in the tunnel. There were a lot of bends. This wasn’t any time for sightseeing, though I confess I’d grabbed the opportunity to replenish my own life-support: a box of native-grown cigars securely tucked beneath my arm.

  “Don’t wanna hurry anybody loadin’ Single-H, Winnie. That stuff’s downright tempermental. You remember how I said I wanted livestock out on Bulfinch? Well, there’s more calories on th’ hoof in this place than you ever saw in yer life! Gonna stand there gawkin’ or come with me?”

  I shrugged and seized one of the cables snaking through a convoluted purple tunnel. Due to a modest spin and the varying composition of the asteroid, there were more gravitic anomalies here than on a roller coaster—something like being inside a loop of Salvador Dali’s intestines. At another complex intersection we took a sickeningly greenish fork, which dropped us at the entrance to one of the enormous bubbles that filled most of the volume of the asteroid.

  “Lucy, I think someone’s following us! Two of them, taking the same branches we did. Somebody in a red smartsuit, and a big, solid-looking guy.”

  “Aww, yer just nervous, Winnie. It’s th’ stimulatin’ environment. Now come on, an’ mind where y’step—they got meadow-muffins in here’d swallow up th’ Bonaventura!”

  PLEISTOCENE PLAZA. At least that’s what the sign said. It was chilly inside, and took a little while for my suit to adjust. An artificial sun was shining brightly, though, and beyond the transparent plastic tunnel we found ourselves in, it looked just like a prairie day in Colorado.

  Except for the glaciers.

  There they are, Winnie! Gimme ten years, I’ll have a herd of my own!” She pointed out over the rolling plains.

  “Elephants? Lucy, you should be ashamed! Who ever heard of eating elephants?”

  “What you think that burger was you had for lunch? They give milk, too, gallons an’ gallons of it—though y’have t’use a mighty long-legged stool! Better look again, Winnie, those ain’t elephants at all.”

  I held my hood in front of my face and stepped up the magnification. Great curving lengths of ivory, massive, heavy heads and bodies.

  Hairy heads and bodies. “Lucy, those are mastodons! Huge, woolly mastodons!” I couldn’t believe it. Had the Confederacy’s time-line diverged before I thought it had? Thousands of years before I thought it had?

  “Them’s mammoths, Winnie. Imperial mammoths, cloned from a little bitty test tube fulla tissue frozen in Siberia. Keepin’ ‘em here t’build up their immunities—there’s a lotta diseases developed on Earth since they went extinct.”

  I watched a group of half a dozen animals wandering slowly across the plain. “That’s why the plastic tunnel, then, although I wouldn’t want to be out there with them, under any circum—”

  “Wouldn’t be no problem, Winnie. Look close here, by th’ ground. See that plastic mesh about eighteen inches up in th’ tall grass? Plenty of foot-room, but it keeps ‘em from runnin’. Otherwise, they’d be practically flyin’ around in this weak a pull.”

  “Like Dumbo, huh? Mammoths—that’s really neat.”

  “Yeah, an’ let that be a lesson to ya. Here’s a critter th’ world woulda never seen agin, resurrected by the very science your United Statesians think is sooo nasty. Same science gonna give me back m’body in another few months.”

  “Your body? You mean you don’t have to go on like—”

  “Like Dorothy’s Tin Woodman? Not as long as there’s nice thick juicy elephant steaks t’gobble, an’ whiskey t’be drunk. Never, if we can find Eddie in one piece! I’m plannin’ on bein’ a person agin, steada comic relief!”

  I knew that tone of voice. Someday there’d be tears to go with it again. If only Clarissa—

  “Hey you!“ Down the tunnel a figure was running toward us, waving a long, deadly looking artifact. He shook it at us, hollering his lungs out. “Stop, I say! Stop!”

  “I told you we were being followed! See, there’s the other one, right behind him! I’m getting tired of this!” I went for my gun. Suddenly a metal arm clamped my wrist.

  “Not in here, Winnie. If you break th’ glass, it could kill all th’critters!”

  I hesitated a moment, then ran the other way, Lucy following. At the end of the plastic tunnel another well-sealed door awaited us. Lucy started pushing buttons while I drew my Rezin, standing guard. The assassins pounded down the tunnel a hundred yards away.

  “Got it!” Lucy whisked me through the door and pushed it closed, punching in more numbers. Somewhere a siren started wailing, accompanied by slamming sounds on the other side of the door. “That’s th’ fire alarm. Tunnel’s sealed. I imagine they’re takin’ quite a bath in there by now. Let’s get back to th’ flivver.”

  ***

  Thus we were off again in a streak of light and a cloud of dust and a hearty “Hiyo, Sowbellies”—silver presently being on the skids, speculation-wise. Every now and again I gave Ed’s Broach-detector a look, and Lucy adjusted our course minutely to center the disturbance in our navigation sights.

  I took a shower and tried to nap and fixed some sandwiches and watched Lucy watching me eat them. We played tic-tac-toe and nim and Botticelli and watched Mike Morrison and Dirty Harry and Diana Rigg kill all the baddies. I thought about our own baddies and how close they’d come to getting us back at the mastodons, then cleaned my Rezin (the bugranch had dulled its finish noticeably—some bugs!) and played with the Makarov and bit my fingernails and argued with the pilot.

  Space travel could stand some improving.

  Finally, the Nomad Cluster swelled before our instruments. At an average of a thousand miles apart and a mile in diameter, there wasn’t much to eyeball through the windows. Lucy started trying to match one of the rocks with the paratronic screeching of the Broach.

  “That’s th’ one, Winnie. Gotta be.” She held up a ‘com pad in my face.

  “You mean that little one down in the corner?”

  “Naw, that’s just a crumb from that last sandwich of yers. This one here, Bester 9656, accordin’ to th’ registry. Biggest rock in th’ Cluster, if y’call a dozen miles big. I’m gonna do a little sneakin’, now—don’t wanna announce our arrival. Can y’stand buttonin’ up yer suit?”

  “Sure. How come?”

  “I’m gonna git us pointed right, then turn everything off, includin’ life-support. We’ll take a slow roll that’ll make us look like a natural hunka rock, an—”

  “Yeah? And what happens when whoever’s out there gives us a blast of his meteor-defense lasers?”

  “We’re gonna pass close, but clearly a miss. Be more trouble’n we’re worth t’pulverize us. I’m plannin’ t’walk th’ rest of th’ way—an’ lookie here: while you were snoozin’, I was knittin’.” She held up a clothlike copper wire mesh, with long dangling fringes.

  “Swell. Get yourself some steel wool and knit me a gun. What the hell is it?”

  “Sort of a Franklin cage. Ill drape this over me an’ let it trail to th’ ground. Oughta perteck me against them medallions.”

  “And make you one hell of a radar target. I’m zipping up, now; you can roll the windows down.” With the lig
hts out and control panels dead, I began to get an entirely different view of space travel, not at all the empty black loneliness I’d expected. The sky was awash with color, enough damn starlight to read by—although Lucy wouldn’t let me use the Gigacom—and the erratic wobble she encouraged in the car only served to make it a 360-degree panorama.

  Problems and all, I discovered I was liking it out here, and even if everything (by some miracle) came out all right, Laporte and the Confederacy—hell, even Earth—were going to seem mighty small from now on. Maybe if Clarissa was all right...

  “Okay now, Winnie, git ready t’jump! Don’t worry which direction, I’ll jet around and get us headed straight. I got th’ plumbin’ fer it, an’ you don’t—good thing we ain’t got power doors on this crate.”

  At her signal, I knelt on the upholstered seat and pushed myself through the open door into the starry void. We’d picked a spot a few moments after passing near the asteroid when the meteor watch (if any) would be letting out their breath in relief and going back to their chessboards and foldouts-of-the-month.

  I tumbled stupidly, hoping Lucy hadn’t lost control of herself again or something, then felt a firm manipulator on the rubbery nape of my neck. The universe swam around upright and I was looking down on the rugged darkened surface of an undeveloped asteroid.

  Except for the titanic machinery, labeled APHRODITE, LTD.

  Scattered over the surface were structures that made the Great Wall of China look like kindergarten blocks. If there was any order or purpose to the assemblage of enormous beams and girders, frameworks and metallic grids and coils, it defied me. For a moment I seriously wondered whether we were being invaded by extrasolar aliens after all, and this was their idea of House Beautiful.

  Then, as we drifted closer and I got the scale and angles straightened out, a pattern began to emerge, a familiarity my mind had rejected at first because it seemed so ridiculous.

  I’d once held a laboratory model of this thing in my hands.