by Brian Daley
"I would say you're in dependable company, Citizen Floyt," Subutai observed.
Alacrity saw from the look on Floyt's face that he'd been as much taken by surprise as the breakabout.
Then, brows knit, the functionary faced Bear and Skinner. "That was a vicious, unnecessary thing to do." In his confusion and anger, he thought back to the woman who'd attacked him with the styrette. Another Earthservice ruse, a test? Of what?
For the first time, Bear's countenance grew troubled. Floyt's asserting himself, particularly for the offworlder, was no part of her scheme. The team was watching the functionary intently.
"Forget it," Alacrity said to Floyt in disgust. "We've got a ship to catch."
* * * *
Alacrity wanted their leavetaking to be inconspicuous—secret, if possible. However, that didn't dovetail with Bear's plan to make the pilot mission a shining achievement and propaganda victory.
And so the waiting room at Earth's last remaining spaceport, closed to the public, was filled with recording teams and their equipment. All material would be heavily edited later on, naturally. In the event that this mission came to a bad end too, the recordings could be disposed of. The first successful mission would be the one palmed off on Terrans at large as Project Shepherd's initial one.
"Make sure you have the letter of Free Import," Supervisor Bear reminded Floyt for the third time. "In fact, let me see it."
He sighed and extracted it. The Earthservice letter of Free Import was a rare document; few Terrans had even heard the term. The one-page form, bearing Floyt's name in glowing characters, cited regulations of which he was totally ignorant. It authorized him to return to his place of residence—presumably with his inheritance—without hindrance or interference from Earthservice customs officials or Peaceguardians. What with the many interbureaucratic rivalries and feuds, Bear was taking no chances on having to share Project Shepherd's thunder with anyone, or having the bequest or its proceeds diverted from her own budget.
He carefully resealed it into an inner pocket of the awkward anticontamination suit he wore. The suit, like almost everything he was to take, had been provided by Earthservice psychprop analysts. It was decked out with medical gear, urine and excreta reservoirs, decontamination kits, and testing paraphernalia. It was armored against radiation, and its cumbersome helmet, which Floyt carried under his arm, had arrangements for eating, drinking, regurgitation, and purging of nasal cavities and ears. Provision had even been made for keeping the wearer's eyes clear of discharge and the like.
The anticontamination suit had an airpack and heating and cooling equipment but, as Floyt had already discovered, no apparatus for dealing with an itch on the wearer's calf.
Just as Earthservice intended, Floyt looked as if he was bound for a radioactive wasteland teeming with demented plague carriers—which, Alacrity thought, looking at him, was exactly the way the breakabout felt about Earth.
Of course, Floyt's wife and daughter were present. Seduced by the luxuries and perquisites that she too could share in her father's absence, Reesa had set aside the tailoring of a pseudodeerskin wardrobe. Balensa wore her finest; Floyt found himself staring at her even though it hurt.
Reesa and Balensa's comments and responses had been composed for them by Bear and her psychprop director. They showed great affection for Floyt and profound concern for his safety; the audience had to be reminded that offworld travel was risky and uncomfortable. Mother and daughter made evident their pride and the fact that they couldn't wait to have Floyt home, a hero of Terra. They were modest about their own home-front courage.
Alacrity sat in a corner, much ignored, which was fine with him. Earthservice didn't want to make much of the offworlder's role in the mission.
"I'm going along in case he needs his excreta bag changed," he'd deadpanned to one pickup, and that had been that.
He looked different now from the young man Bear and Floyt were somewhat used to. Earthservice had reclaimed his warbag from a spaceport lockbox. He wore a blue-gray shipsuit, a bit faded and worn, its ship-patch and insignia mounts bare. It had numerous carry-loops and cargo pockets on hips, legs, arms, and chest. A high collar, worn open, concealed a hood. The full-body insert for heating and cooling was a compact bulge in his right hip pocket. Instead of soft ship's shoes, he wore a pair of pathfinder boots he'd bought on So Far, comfortable despite their knee guards and protective reinforcement.
Next to him, his warbag held just about everything he owned. Reesa appraised him from across the room, noticing the slim build and broad shoulders and his height. The strange hair and tawny, wide, oblique eyes interested her. She wondered how he would look in a deerskin loincloth. She began to drift his way, but was intercepted by a vigilant psychprop assistant director.
Alacrity had been keeping an attentive eye on Bear. Now, seeing her alone, he walked over to her purposefully, the pathfinder boots making little sound on the glossy floor.
"What about my other things—you know? When do I get them back?"
"They've been given to the shuttle crew. They will be returned to you on Luna."
Alacrity swore. "Listen, do you want me to keep your boy safe or not?"
"Those are the rules!" She walked off, leaving him scowling.
A warning hooter indicated that the lunar shuttle was about to lift. Recording crews were ready to immortalize the moment. Reesa and Balensa were suddenly and bravely holding back tears. There would be little coverage of the vessel's actual liftoff; such things were considered vulgar.
Alacrity shouldered aside the lackey who was reaching for his warbag. He grabbed it and led the way with wide strides, focusing on no one. He trod heavily, making the boarding tube resound hollowly. The white-painted lock gaped, its rescue and safety stencils in red.
A bored crewchief leaned on the lock. He had the soft, pallid, gravity-beset look common to Lunarians. No charming attendants or luxury class on the Earth run; Terra was lucky that the Lunies kept the route open.
The crewchief ticked off Alacrity's name against a passenger manifest on his hand-held screen. Floyt was still embroiled in his leavetaking, the sound of it echoing down the boarding tube.
She was a superannuated vessel, a headboarded ship called Mindframe. The passenger compartment was drab and sparse. There were only two or three other passengers, unremarkable and quiet, apparently content to tend to their own business. Alacrity secured his warbag and glanced through a viewport.
Earth's last spaceport. It was a sad, mostly abandoned place of empty gantries and decaying hangars, neglected and moribund. Beyond the perimeter he could see the plains of Nazca, suitably vacant and forbidding.
Only a once-weekly shuttle and occasional freighters connected Terra to the rest of the universe. No starship was permitted to make planetfall.
Alacrity walked back to the lock. At the opposite end of the boarding tube stood Floyt with Bear and his family crowded around him. The recording teams were in a feeding frenzy, circling and angling for good shots, doing their best to miss nothing. Mindframe was near liftoff time, and the Lunies were in no mood to hang around the Terran gravity they so disliked for another take. Alacrity watched the happy scene, arms folded across his chest.
"Our hopes and prayers go with you, Citizen Floyt. A grateful Terra looks forward to your return." Supervisor Bear showed her profile to best advantage.
Floyt was unmoving, gaping down the tube. He hadn't taken his cue, so Bear pushed tentatively against his shoulder. He didn't budge. The recorders were still running.
"We thank you for your selfless devotion to the cause of Terran well-being," she improvised. In her mind, the music that would accompany this part of the documentary and psychprop spots was reaching a crescendo. She urged him on with her hand again, harder.
Floyt dug in his heels. Alacrity watched with interest. Balensa and Reesa ad-libbed an endearment or two, but they were plainly distressed. The medical equipment and other gadgetry attached to the anticontamination suit rattled as
the supervisor tried to shove the functionary along without appearing to.
Balensa and Reesa had relapsed into silence. The struggle at the head of the tube was becoming more energetic. Without breaking her profile, Bear made a minute hand signal.
The crews stopped recording and someone acknowledged, "Clear!" Supervisor Bear placed both hands on Floyt's shoulders, pushing. Still silent and expressionless, he braced one hand against the tube's entrance and refused to move. The psychprop director and his assistant rushed to help, setting their shoulders against Floyt's back while Bear, teeth gritted, pried at his fingers.
With a mighty, concerted effort, the three bulled Floyt loose from his position and, legs churning, propelled him down the tubeway. They stopped one another halfway. Floyt, arms windmilling, equipment clattering, flailed onward in a barely controlled stumble, his helmet bouncing along behind him.
Alacrity was obliged to catch him as the Terran collided with him in the shuttle's lock. The Lunie crewchief yawned and duly noted Floyt's arrival. Floyt shook off Alacrity's hands, eyeing the breakabout and shaking his head fatalistically. "There's two born every minute."
Chapter 6
The Sockwallet Lashup
Buckled into his wide, deeply cushioned acceleration chair, Alacrity went to sleep right after Mindframe raised ship. The brutal Earthservice conditioning had taken more out of him than he'd let himself show on Terra. Besides, he hadn't yet riddled out the conflicting feelings of protectiveness, resentment, and forbearance he felt toward Floyt.
The plains of Nazca dropped away beneath them, allowing Floyt his first aerial view of the Nazca Lines, made by Terrans millennia before the recorded beginnings of human flight. The lines formed enormous totemic symbols, but only for an observer flying high overhead. The Lines were one of the reasons the Nazca spaceport had been selected to be the planet's last functioning one.
Like all Earthers, Floyt was a member of the Church of the Terran Spirit, at least nominally. But he found himself too distracted by his difficulties to meditate very much upon the Lines.
Mindframe climbed quickly through the atmosphere. The headboarded skipper lost no time in adjusting the ship's gravity to the accustomed lunar one-sixth Standard. Floyt shifted uncomfortably in the bulky anticontamination suit. He was still trying to deal with the dread and apprehension threatening to overwhelm him, when he too fell asleep.
* * * *
Alpha Bureaucrat Stemp had titular superiors in the Earthservice organization, but they existed for cosmetic purposes, mere figureheads. He had in truth only a handful of peers, and the Alphas were answerable only to themselves as a group.
It was generally assumed that the Alpha prefix stood for exalted rank, talent, and achievements. But for Stemp and his circle, it represented their position as Earthservice's apex-predators.
Stemp had disposed of several minor matters: reallocation of protein distribution, suppression of certain fundamentalist tracts, and denial of permission for a 1960s revivicist festival due to the antiauthoritarian sentiments of that era. He had also taken his nap.
Just then he was attending to a very low priority issue, condescending to permit Supervisor Bear to enter the vaulted vastness of his office, that she might deliver her progress report.
She showed him a strained smile and wore a much different air from the one she'd employed with Floyt and the others. Stemp's whim had kept her waiting for more than two hours, but she was all sweetness and light.
Her most attractive feature, her long, burnished brown hair, shone. Stemp braced himself for another dose of her effusiveness. Bear didn't fail him.
She spoke too quickly, too animatedly, too ingratiatingly. Project Shepherd was entirely her venture at this point, of course; Stemp didn't want to be too closely identified with it, in case it should end in failure. If it succeeded, she would naturally receive a portion of the credit and praise he would garner, and he would reward her. That was the order of things.
But there'd been that first-mission fiasco, so Stemp was still keeping himself distanced from Shepherd. No Alpha forgot for a moment the fact that the predators occasionally fed on one another.
Onward plowed Bear, fairly glowing. She'd come to Stemp's attention and been permitted her very brief, vague glimpse of the sweep and majesty of the Alphas' power. She lived only for the time when she would join them. She was one of many aspirants.
It took only a few mild proddings from Stemp to get her to abbreviate her report. She told of Alacrity's recruitment—scrupulously avoiding any mention of her own part in it, though Stemp would almost certainly have an inkling of that. She went on to Floyt and the mysterious offworld inheritance—
"Weir?" Stemp burst out, suddenly sitting upright, coming out of a half doze, eyes bulging. "Great Holy Terra! Weir?"
Supervisor Bear's stomach did a fancy change-step, and her heart threatened to fibrillate. "Was your research team asleep?" Stemp demanded. "Weir has never been anything but a vexation to us!"
Bear swallowed. "I was aware of a certain lack of cordiality between Weir and Terra's offworld reps and contacts. There didn't appear to be anything else prejudicial." She saw her entire career being cycled down the sanitary conduit.
Stemp had regained mastery of himself, half closing his eyes. "How high was the clearance level on your project?"
"B-Beta clearance, sir." What could she have missed, she wondered—unless it was Alpha-access material? "Your study group approved it, Alpha Bureaucrat Stemp. And it was passed by the Overview Board." Approved, Project Shepherd had become Bear's own bailiwick; she'd lost no time insulating it from outside scrutiny and interference.
Nevertheless, Stemp was linked to the project. Although he was pretending to use his information displays, which were shielded from her view, he was lost in thought. Bear couldn't imagine what would make so petty and distant a potentate as Weir dangerous to Earthservice. She tried not to fidget as she waited.
At length, Stemp rapped, "Very well; I want an in-depth project report at once. And keep me informed of all developments. Communication, information, rumor, anything. Understood?"
She nodded vigorously, maintaining the prescribed eye contact throughout. "That's all." He pretended she was no longer there.
Bear slunk from the office, resisting the urge to run. When she was gone, the Alpha let out his breath in a sustained blast. He drummed his fingers in thought, head bowed. This Project Shepherd business could well put him in jeopardy.
And sometimes the apex-predators fed on one another.
* * * *
When Floyt awoke, he saw from the cabin displayer that safety harness was no longer required and passengers were free to move around the cabin. He'd heard that passengers were sometimes permitted to visit the cockpit of a spacecraft, and so he unbuckled himself clumsily, still encumbered by the anticontamination suit. In the light gravity, he rose with elaborate care, his equipment rattling.
Alacrity, still apparently asleep, said, "Ho?"
"Yes?"
"Would you please get rid of that ridiculous fart incubator? The Lunies will laugh themselves sick. Besides, it'd attract attention in Lunaport."
As Floyt struggled out of the suit, he looked at the other passengers. There was nothing remarkable about them. Earthservice investigators had run rigorous checks on them, as well as the crew, to minimize the chances of trouble. On Luna, things would be much riskier.
Stowing the suit, Floyt paused for a moment to look at the Earth. It was a broad blue-and-white arc astern, making him feel queasy; he continued forward.
The cockpit hatch was open. Floyt looked through and froze in mid-step. The pilot and copilot, a heavyset middle-aged woman and a barely postpubescent boy respectively, were strapped into safety recliners, seemingly asleep. They were headboarded, their implants relaying instructions to Mindframe.
There were manual controls as well, and these responded to the silent commands. It was as if ghosts were manipulating the touchpads and switches; monitors and ind
icators flashed in all colors, ignored. There was ceaseless, disembodied activity.
A surveillance monitor swung to focus on him. A synthesized voice asked politely, "Is there any problem?"
"No, I … no. Thank you." He retreated, flustered, from the haunted cockpit and its corpselike residents.
"Spooky, isn't it?" Alacrity said when Floyt returned to his seat. "I don't much care for headboarders either." He thought it better not to tell the Terran any of the gruesome tales about what happened if a headboarder became mentally unhinged.
"Here." Alacrity handed Floyt an elastic, pouchlike affair with a fastening strap.
"What's this?"
"Put your valuables in it—money and travel documents. Then put it on, between your calf and knee, pouch facing inward, under your pants." He smiled at Floyt's surprise. "Keep your eyes open and stick close, citizen. This is a starport we're headed for. If you don't know what that means, you will in about three hours."
* * * *
Studying Luna's cold, pockmarked face on their approach, Floyt saw that the final Srillan raid had left Earth's moon almost completely untouched.
"Anyway, almost everything's underground," Alacrity observed. "The surface is either empty or looks like a garbage dump."
Mindframe settled into a subsurface hangar, and a huge slab-door rolled closed overhead, while a debarkation tube stretched out to leech onto the shuttle's airlock.
The two had their minimal baggage in hand, and Alacrity insisted on presenting the anticontamination suit to the shuttle crewchief, since they had no further use for it. He didn't mention that he'd sold the suit. The cash was already in his upper left arm pocket.
The Terran followed the breakabout through the tube, shuffle-hopping in the fractional gravity, taking to it quite handily, delighting himself until he realized that he wasn't supposed to be enjoying any part of his assignment. Alacrity paused by the airlock at the tube's end, signaling for Floyt to hang back while the other passengers queued up at the customs chutes.
The Earther was content enough with waiting, testing his newfound skill with little bounces and skips. Carrying small cargo boxes and personal baggage, Mindframe's crew moved past them, graceful and free in its native gravity. The head-boarded pilot and her copilot greeted Floyt courteously, as if they'd met him while awake.