The Venus Belt

by L. Neil Smith

  Which growled again like a qualifying-lap at Indy. After maybe an hour and a half of this, I cranked myself to my feet, excruciatingly particular not to lose adhesion with the floor. I needed another bump on my head like—well, like I needed another bump on my head. I didn’t quite have the guts to touch it, not wanting to find out what brains feel like.

  This room was originally intended as an outsize janitorium of some kind, about the height of two tall men in every direction, stark, fluorescent-coated metal, utterly featureless save for the sink and four thousand seven hundred and sixty-two rivets. Don’t bother checking; I know.

  Every running inch of the imitation submarine-type door frame had been carefully beaded shut, a job old Karyl Hetzer would’ve been proud to call his own. It was a mystery how I’d survived this long without suffocating. Maybe air was coming up the sink trap. There certainly wasn’t any surplus of it; every few hours, especially if I was fairly active, I had to zip my hood again and let the suit do my breathing. After some indeterminate while, the telltales on my arm would go green again and I could take my hat off. It was a break in the routine. Like a good Boy Scout, one of the first things I did was inventory my meager possessions. My captors hadn’t been very thorough, but then again, they didn’t really need to be. There was the suit, of course, with its considerable talents, and, sure enough, tucked down inside my uncolletage, the little stainless steel Bauer, capable of hurling a massive fifty-grain slug at 810 feet per second, generating a full 73 foot/pounds at the muzzle. Just about enough to chip the paint off the walls, perhaps a little too lively for playing handball.

  Besides the artillery, I had four cigars, each and every one of them unbroken, thanks to Murphy’s Law (I’d save them until I didn’t care how much oxygen I had left), a pocketful of smallish gold and silver pieces, the keys to my luggage, which was undoubtedly vaporized by now on its return trip through the meteor defenses, and a Bic lighter.

  Finally, in my right thigh-pocket, I encountered a minor miracle and knew at least I wouldn’t pass from this vale of tears unentertained: Clarissa’s thoughtful present, my goddamn noisy wonderful Gigacom. I once heard a Denver disc jockey maintain that the world would be measurably improved if all clock radios played jugband music. Hard staying depressed to Kweskin’s “Sadie Green, the Vamp of New Orleans,” which opus I put on and immediately felt better, possibly even ready for that drink.

  This I obtained fastidiously through a pseudocellophane cigar peeling held against one of the outsize drops collecting on the tap. Flat and metallic-tasting, but it shut my stomach up for a while. Kweskin’s final kazoo chorus came crashing to a halt, I punched up a rare Mike Morrison flick where there aren’t any horses (didn’t want to be reminded of food just now), the detective thriller, O’R.

  Now what the hell would Mike do in a pickle like this? Bash through the walls with his bare fists? Try finding out how bad he was hurt so he could stoically ignore it? Well now, if this suit could broadcast my image to another suit’s receptors, why couldn’t I kid it into transmitting me to myself? It took half an hour, and I missed the usual Morrison-movie barfight, but I finally turned the inside of my hood into a nanoelectronic mirror.

  And promptly turned it off.

  Funny, I hadn’t recalled being thrown down seventeen miles of industrial-grade staircase at three or four gees, nor even realized my left eye was swollen shut.

  And I was really going to miss those three teeth. Shit, nearly sixty years so far, I’d avoided needing dentures. For that matter, I was probably still going to avoid them.

  I slept as much as I could, then found my smartsuit’s medical overrides and helped myself to sleep some more. It filled the time, as did experimentally determining that I could burn precisely three-eighths of an inch of cigar before I had to put it out, more from pollution than anoxia (although there was that, too). I also found that even smartsuit waste-containers have to be emptied after a while, and felt grateful for the sink drain—and the water to wash up afterward.

  Another interesting discovery was that the waistline of my suit contracted all by itself, about a quarter of an inch per day slower than I did. Some technology—couldn’t even tighten my belt by myself.

  On the third day it occurred dimly that perhaps I wasn’t alone in this predicament; I felt stupid for not thinking of it sooner. Maybe it was all the sapping. Or maybe it was just the sap, himself. There’d been a lot of missing persons recently; though I couldn’t figure out why Malaise was preserving my remains for posterity this way, maybe there were others in the same condition.

  And of course, Lucy. One of these cubicles would effectively protect her against even the most persuasive control impulses. Hell, she’d probably been herself again longer than me. I resisted the urge to rephrase that and concentrated my minimal intelligence on the problem at hand: this wasn’t any Chateau D’if, I’d never fingernail myself into the next cell, but maybe I could generate some companionship one steel wall removed. I shut off the Gigacom and shuffled over to a wall, my .25 in hand.

  Better unload it first—could be a slug in the guts was exactly what I needed most right now, but I’ve always been a sissy where gratuitous pain’s concerned, and it wouldn’t do my posthumous rep any good to be discovered accidentally finished off by my own pocket popgun. Like Lucy’d said: humiliatin’.

  On the other hand, maybe I never would be found. Then it wouldn’t matter. I realized this thought had cheered me, glanced at my oxygen warning lights, and sealed up again. I thumbed back the magazine release, pulled out the little clip, slid the safety off and jacked the chamber-round into my hand. Then I turned up my audioreceptors as loud as they’d go, draped myself artistically along the baseboard, and rapped the pistol sharply against the wall.

  My ears stopped ringing an hour and a half later.

  This time, I kept the sound off while I did the tapping, then boosted it. Nothing. I tried again, with the same results. Next, the opposite wall, with similar reward. Either I was here alone, or the walls were awfully thick. Or they’d kidnapped a bunch of deaf people. This left a third wall which I tried, and the one with the door, which seemed silly—ought to be a corridor out there—but I gave it a shot anyway. Also the floor at several locations: one thing I had plenty of was time.

  Finally, stretching my intestines to the limit of their fortitude, I stickied every suit-surface capable of it, reoriented what was left of my thinking, and crawled up the wall to the ceiling. It would have been a great way to escape—wait until the jailer brought my dinner and spring down on his back like the Scarlet Pumpernickel. Only my hosts weren’t cooperating in the cuisine department; just as likely they’d forgotten by now that I existed at all. And anyway, the upstairs neighbors weren’t at home, either.

  All this exercise must’ve gone to my head; in the odd moment now and then, I found myself imitating a detective again out of sheer perverse habit. I don’t know why Malaise had lied to me. Pure meanness, maybe. But a lot of what he’d told me—and a few items he’d left out—didn’t add up.

  Take that bit about the Broach, for instance, the one installed in his network trolleycar? If he’d had that at his disposal, then why the conspicuously monumental architecture mounted on the outside of this rock? Sure, he had a fleet now, but there was enough capacity here to transfer every ship that ever sailed any sea, and you could throw in a hundred years’ production from Detroit for good measure. Seemed uncharacteristically wasteful.

  And another thing: aside from the impostor who’d greased Ranger Trayle, there’d been exactly zero (count ‘em) other male—well, field-workers executing Voltaire’s dirty work. And, more significantly, an equal number of simians and cetaceans. This was entirely consistent; Hamiltonians have little use for our hairier or soggier citizens—they feel they’re being generous acknowledging the existence of folks with low albedos and foreign accents.

  But this left me with a couple of problems: just who the hell broke into my stateroom? There were friends of mine apparent
ly involved somehow with Aphrodite, Ltd. No matter how I stretched things, I just couldn’t see Ooloorie or Deejay, or even Freeman Bertram cooperating with the Federalists.

  Nor the one who hurt the most, Koko Featherstone-Turncoat.

  Here I’d had the goddamned cliché interview with the villain-in-chief already, and I was still a long way from unraveling the truth.

  And I was likely to die in that condition.

  ***

  Saturday, March 27, 223 A.L.

  “Listen t’me, kid, n’listen good. Ya won’t do yerself no good goin’ ta pieces every time y’fill some train robber fulla...holes. Ya didn’t decide he was gonna be no train robber. Y’didn’t make ‘im try fer this payroll. He decided all that fer hisself. Ya mighta shot ‘im, sure. But th’ way I lookit it, it was his finger on th’ trigger, all along. Look, kid, we’re th’ best guns Wells-Mulligan’s got—-anybody’d break inta our boxcar’s just plain committin’...suicide. An’ everybody’s got th’ right to commit suicide, ain’t they...kid?”

  Four days and twenty-seven Lone Star Republic Pictures later (I’d been doing as much sleeping as I could), I woke up barely able to move and guessed I’d finally reached the end of the trail. Hell, I’d thought you could go longer than a week without eating, provided you had air and plenty of water. So I lay there feeling sorry for myself. It didn’t seem fair: I’d been looking forward to those three or four extra centuries Confederate medicine kept promising me.

  Contrariwise, if my Clarissa was one of Malaise’s brain-bored breeding slaves by now, an extra three or four minutes would be too much burden for a single lifetime to bear. Odd, how someone else becomes your soul. Mustering every molecule of willpower, I keyed the Gigacom. If I was going to cash in, I’d do it with her image in my eyes—God, if I’d only thought to record her Telecom calls aboard the—

  “Have a good trip, darling, and hurry home.” There she was in that gorgeous outfit, lying sexily across our bed. ‘’While you’re gone, I hope this gadget keeps you entertained almost as well as I could!” I played it over and over trying not to cry, wondering why I bothered trying. The inside of my hood was plenty damp anyway, and I couldn’t even open up to wipe it out. Not enough air. In fact there hadn’t been enough for quite a while, and now I thought of it, wasn’t it rather hot? Look at the way the water drops were boiling on the tap.

  Boiling?

  Without my suit I’d probably be poached by now! Lying on my back, I placed a suited hand against the door—and jerked it back again! Why, after all this time, were they torturing me this way? Couldn’t they just let me die in peace? Or were they leaving in their starships, their interstellar exhaust consuming both the outpost and the prisoners they’d left behind?

  A sudden, reflex motion had launched me on a gentle, low-gravity trajectory across the floor. I didn’t have the gumption to fend off the impact with the opposite wall, but simply lay there confused, awaiting death.

  Karumph! The door exploded inward in a cascade of brilliant sparks and molten metal droplets, swirling me upward through the room like a leaf, my telltales flashing green again, a sudden flood of energy rushing through me like a can of Popeye’s spinach. I whipped out a hand and glued myself to the ceiling. In the shattered, twisted doorway below swayed a blocky figure, some kind of lethal burner hissing in his upthrust hand.

  I breached my smartsuit long enough to snag the « little .25. Let them do what they want, I was going to take a few of the bastards with me, starting with this one. He staggered in reaction to the implosion, shook his hooded head and passed with hesitation into the room. I flipped the tiny safety down and lined up the sights, rudimentary bumps of metal on the upper surface of the slide, slowly increasing pressure on the trigger.

  Abruptly, another scarlet-suited figure followed, weapon at the ready, and reached up to unzip her hood.

  “Clarissa!”

  18: Semper Fidelio

  “P

  ut away that toy, son—gonna poke somebody’s eye out!” Lucy trundled in behind Clarissa, looking like she’d gone fifteen rounds with a jackhammer.

  And lost.

  I fastened my eyes on my wife and let go of the ceiling, remembering in midair to scoot the tiny pistol’s safety lever up into its notch under the slide. I lighted fairly gracefully (okay, call it a seven-point landing), and wrapped myself around Clarissa while she was doing the same to me. After a while we Kleenexed each other’s eyes and I turned to the guy with the torch, Karyl Hetzer.

  “One hell of a firestick you’ve got there! You should’ve seen the blast from this side!” I described the door exploding into the room. Now it hung from its frame like the lid on a half-opened can of sardines. “If that thing’d come loose, it would’ve cut me right in half! Not that I’m complaining—it would have been preferable to—”

  “Win Bear!” Clarissa interrupted, “how could you say such a thing?”

  “Very easily, sweetheart, I’ll tell you about it sometime.” I sat on the floor, hoping dizzily that someone had brought me a roll of Life Savers—or a couple of mastodons.

  Karyl scratched his beard where a puzzled expression lay buried somewhere. “Kind of hard to figure. Anything explosive in this place?”

  “Hafta be out in th’ hall,” Lucy answered, saving me the trouble. “Lookit th’ way th’ door’s bent inward.” She rolled her bedraggled way back to the entrance, peering closer. I didn’t really give a damn; I held Clarissa, admiring her smile, and wondering, just a little, what seemed different about her. Maybe it was the dashing scarlet smartsuit she was wearing, or—

  “Hey!” Lucy and I shouted simultaneously.

  “You’re not—” I added, but got cut off at the pass.

  “That makes sense,” said Karyl, I think to Lucy, even if it didn’t.

  “One at a time,” Clarissa finished for the three of us, “but first, let me take care of my slightly under-nourished husband.” She untangled herself, stepped out into the hall to retrieve her medikit and an armful of other junk. She extracted something that resembled a blood-pressure cuff, wrapped it around my arm, and plugged its cable into my suit controls. “Just as I suspected,” my personal Healer observed, “pretty close to empty—though not nearly enough to explain some of these symptoms.” She pushed a button on the wraparound. “We’ll pump nutrients directly into your system, and you’d better take these tablets—watch it, dear, they swell in the stomach.”

  She was right. They were swell in my stomach. I burped, washing them down with something from a flask that Karyl provided. Now I knew what was different about Clarissa, but wasn’t sure I wanted to ask about it.

  Not here, anyway.

  ”That’s what I was tryin’ t’say,” insisted Lucy, running an expert manipulator around the ragged doorframe. “Sounds more like anoxia, an’ I think I’ve figgered out why.”

  “Why?” in three-part harmony, yours truly off the pitch a little.

  Our semi-cybernetic sidekick pointed to the formerly molten seam along the door. It had been yanked inward, producing little horizontal steel icicles. “Y’used up all th’ air in here, dummy, that’s why! Musta been pret’near hard vacuum by th’ time we cut our way in.”

  Pretty impressive testimony to the smartsuit, creating that kind of vacuum, then protecting its wearer so it went unnoticed. “You’re right, I did use up all the air, several times, in fact. I just zipped up my suit and—”

  “An’ waited while it manufactured more? Lemme see yer status lights, boy—’swhat I thought, empty as a bureaucrat’s braincase. Winnie, even microtanks have bottoms, an’ it looks like you started scrapin’ ‘em two, mebbe three days ago.” She turned very slowly, surveying the cell, then pointed toward the sink. “That’s where yer oxy was comin’ from, that little drip of water, an’ yer own recycled sweat. But it never came in fast enough, so—”

  I interrupted with a brilliant thought: “So the leftover hydrogen is what explo— No, that blast was inward, damn it!”

  Karyl no
dded vigorously. “These walls never were hydrogen-proof—sloppiest metalwork I’ve seen in years. But it was tight enough to vacuum-boil water, and the door came crashing in as soon as it was soft around the edges.”

  I shook my head, only half hearing him. I was still confused about Clarissa. She caught me staring at her middle.

  Her lovely, slim, unpregnant middle.

  “Don’t worry, darling,” she told me, patting my hand, “I’m fine, and our daughter’s safely tucked away in stasis at Mulligan’s Bank and Grill. I’ll finish her as soon as we get home—which reminds me, you’d better take this—” She handed me my gunbelt, Webley, Rezin, spare ammunition, and all. “We found it in a sort of office, with Lucy’s and a lot of others. Then I knew for certain you were here.”

  Dead or alive.

  I checked the charge level and gave the rotor knob a twist, flipping a projectile into place behind the starter-coil. “And what was Voltaire Malaise doing while you were rummaging through his ill-gotten armory?” And hadn’t we better be moving along, I thought, before he found out he’d had visitors?

  “Voltaire Malaise the newsman? What’s he got to do with—”

  “Everything. I think he’s J.V. Tormount.” I strapped my weapons on and tucked the .25 away, explaining what I’d gone through in Malaise’s office.

  Lucy sputtered and fumed. “But Winnie, don’tcha remember? I was standin’ right behind ya while they worked y’over—paralyzed by a tenth-bit electronic thingummy!” Okay, so it hadn’t been a filing cabinet that thug was leaning against. I didn’t remember being beaten up in the office—hadn’t it all happened out in the hallway?—which goes to show you something. I’m not sure what.

  By the time I finished my story, Clarissa was having trouble controlling her lower lip. I think half of it was sheer outrage. “Well,” she finally managed after a couple of false starts, “the place seems deserted now, what we’ve seen of it. We heard Lucy from the office and came running.”