6
In Jersey City, lying on a rank bed with a filthy mattress, Thomas Hoban stirred uneasily in his sleep. The dreams didn’t come so often, but they still came. And always the same…
Captain Thomas Hoban was seated in the big command chair, viewscreens above him, clear-steel glass canopy in front. Not that you get to see much in space, not even in the Asteroid Belt. But even the biggest spaceship is small in terms of space for humans, and you get to appreciate even a view of nothingness. It’s better than being sealed up in a duralloy cocoon without any vision except for what the TV monitors can offer.
The Dolomite—a good ship with an old but reliable atomic drive, but also recently fitted with tachyonic gear for multiparsec jumps—was currently on a local run within the solar system, tooling around doing a job here, a job there, trying to pick up some money for the owners. Then they got the signal that took them to Lea II in the asteroids.
Lea was a fueling base, owned by Universal Obsidian but open to all ships. It was a refueling spot. It even had a kind of café, only a dozen seats and a menu like you’d expect at a place that hired their cooks by how little they would steal and cut costs by never bringing in fresh provisions. Not that fresh produce comes easy in the asteroids. It costs too much to make special runs with your iceberg lettuce.
After leaving Lea, Hoban had taken the Dolomite to Position A23 in the asteroids. That was the location for the Ayngell Works, a refinery on its own slab of rock, where a robot work crew purified metals and rare earths mined elsewhere in the asteroids. A23 was located in one of the densest parts of the cluster. You had to navigate at slow speeds and with care, but who didn’t know that? And Hoban was a careful man. He didn’t let his second-in-command do the job for him. Even though Gill was an android and a top pilot and navigator, Hoban did it himself, and he did it well. In any event, no one had any complaints about him before he came to A23.
His job on A23 was to take a big metals hopper into tow and bring it to the Luna Reclamations Facility. Taking it up was no small job. It was a big mother, too big to fit into the Dolomite’s hold. But of course the asteroid it was perched on had negligible gravity, so there was no difficulty in pulling the hopper away from the surface once the magnetic clamps that held it to its massive base plate were released. Hoban’s crew, by all accounts, were trained men; it should have been a piece of cake.
The trouble was, they weren’t really a trained crew. There were three Malays aboard who spoke no English and only understood the simplest commands. That usually worked out all right, but not this time. It had never been proven, but one of those Malays must have gotten confused working in the lowest bay. Somehow he or someone had missed the towline entirely and had locked a fuel-line feeder into the coupling winch. The next thing Hoban knew, the feeding mechanism had been jerked out of the atomic pile, which had shut down automatically, leaving him floating in space without main power.
This wasn’t the first time a spacecraft had lost a main engine. Gill estimated six hours to repair it. Meantime the backup accumulators and the steering jets would provide enough propulsion to get back to A23 so they could pick up the five crewmen who had gone down to manhandle the cargo ties into position.
At least that’s what should have happened, or so it was claimed in the court inquiry later.
Instead, Hoban had turned the ship toward Luna and got away as fast as he could. He claimed afterward that there was a lot more wrong than just losing an engine. Down on A23, an inexperienced crew member had accidentally pulled the interlocks on the atomic pile that kept A23 running. The damned thing was going critical and there was no time to do anything but run for it…
Leaving the five crewmen on A23 to their fate.
Hoban had had to make a quick decision. He calculated that the pile was going to blow up in three minutes. If he stayed around or moved in closer, the blast would take him with it. Even a class-four duralloy hull wasn’t built for that kind of treatment. And anyhow, nonmilitary spacecraft were usually built of lighter gauge metal than the fighting ships.
It was pandemonium aboard the Dolomite. There was a crew of twenty aboard, and five of them were down at A23 with the blast coming up on them in minutes. Half of the remaining crew had wanted the captain to ignore the lapsed-time indicator, ignore the risk, and go back to pick up the men; the other half wanted him to blow off what remained of battery power and get out of there as fast as his jets would take him.
The crew had burst into the control room, hysterical and entirely out of order, and they had begun to come to blows right there while Hoban was trying to con the ship and Gill into attending to the navigation. Letting those men in there had been the captain’s first mistake.
Crewmen were not allowed in officer country except by specific invitation. When a crewman trespasses, shipboard code says he should be punished immediately. If Hoban had ordered Gill to seize the first man to come in and put him into the crowded little locker belowdecks that served as jail space, the others might have had second thoughts. Crews obey strong leadership, and Hoban’s leadership at this point was decidedly weak.
It was in the middle of that shouting writhing mass of people that Hoban had come to his decision.
“Open the accumulators! Get us out of here, Mr. Gill!”
That had shut everybody up, since the acceleration alarm had gone off and they had to get back to their own part of the ship and strap down while the faux gravity was still in operation. It was Hoban’s hesitation that had almost set off the men, but once he’d made up his mind, things were better.
The question was, had he made the right choice? The jury decided there was reason enough to believe that Hoban had panicked, had not thought through his position, had not properly calculated the risk. The jury’s report said that he had had more than enough time and could have gone in for the men without undue risk to the ship. It would have been cutting it a little fine, but in the atmosphere of the trial, men didn’t think about that. They didn’t really ask themselves what they would have done in Hoban’s shoes. They just knew that five crewmen were dead, and the company was liable.
But the question was, under which clause of the insurance contract was the company liable? If what had happened was beyond anyone’s power to change, that was one thing. But if it was due to pilot error or poor judgment, then the company had less direct liability. Guess which the jury went for?
Spaceship pilots were important men, like star athletes, and most of them had, in addition to solid abilities, good-to-excellent connections. Hoban didn’t have any of that. Just top marks in his class throughout the university and Space School after that. He was the corps’ token poor boy; proof that anyone could make it in the corps if he was smart and diligent. But when it came right down to it, after the accident, the company didn’t want to pay out on the higher figure of the insurance and Hoban didn’t have any friends in high places to keep a watch over his interests. Juries had been known to be bribed, and Bio-Pharm had been known to bribe them.
The case had faded quickly from the news. There were lots of other things to get excited about. No one was even interested in doing a vid special on the Hoban case. But if they’d looked into it, they might have been surprised.
7
Callahan’s Sporting Club near Delancey Street was an illegal club. The authorities were always closing it down, but Callahan’s always managed to open again in a day or two. Many city mayors and police commissioners had sworn to close the place once and for all, but somehow they never got around to it. Too much money changed hands. It was nice to know that some things, like the power of bribery, never changed.
A panel slid open in a reinforced door, and a face looked out. “Whaddyaa want?”
“I want to gamble,” Julie said.
“Who do you know?”
“Luigi.”
“Then come on in.”
After they were inside, Stan whispered to her, “Who’s Luigi?”
“I have no idea,” Julie said. �
��In a place like this, looking like you know someone is worth almost as much as really knowing.”
Callahan’s was filled with well-dressed, prosperous-looking people, most of them crowded three deep around the horseshoe-shaped bar. The general depression and malaise that seemed to grip so much of America didn’t operate here. Here, things were booming. Stan could see people sitting in the adjoining dining room, eating as though there were no food shortages. It looked like they were eating real steaks, too. From beyond the dining room he could hear the excited sounds of people betting. The gaming rooms would be right down there, and that was where Julie led him.
“What game are you going to play?” he asked.
“I’ll try Whorgle,” she said.
She pushed her way into the circle, and they made way for her. There were a dozen men and three women betting on the action. They waited while she set out her cash. Then the game went on.
Stan found he couldn’t figure out how Whorgle was played. There were cards, of course, and a small ivory marker, and something made it spin and jump between the numbers painted on the table. How long it resided in a square seemed to decide who won, but the cards had something to do with it, too. There were also disk-shaped markers with odd symbols on one side. The money, thrown down on the painted stake lines, passed back and forth too quickly for Stan to figure out what was happening. He knew he could work it all out if he just applied his mind, but right now he was feeling light-headed. It had been quite a while since his last shot of Xeno-Zip. The artificial fire that had enlivened his nerves and dulled his senses was fading out of his system. He was beginning to feel very bad. The pain was simply too hard to handle without something to help it like essence of royal jelly.
At last the pain became too much for him. He had to go into a nearby room and lie down on a couch.
After a while he fell into a troubled sleep and dreamed of grinning skulls dancing and bobbing in front of him.
After a while Julie came and woke him. She was smiling.
“How did you do?” Stan asked her.
“Nobody beats me at Whorgle,” she said, riffling through a stack of greenbacks. “Let’s go home and get some sleep. Then I need to see Gibberman.”
8
Gibberman was a small man who wore a tweed cap pulled low on his forehead and crouched behind his Plexiglas-protected desk in his Canal Street pawnbroker’s office, looking for all the world like an inflated toad. He wore a jeweler’s loupe on a black ribbon around his neck and spoke with some indefinable Eastern European accent.
“Julie! Good to see you, darling.”
“I told you I’d come,” Julie said. “I’d like you to meet a friend of mine.”
“Delighted,” said Gibberman. “But no names, please.” He shook Stan’s hand, then offered Julie a drink from a half-empty bottle of bourbon beside him.
“No, nothing,” she said. “Look, I’m going to get right to the point. I need plans for a job, and I need them quickly.”
“Everybody’s always in a hurry,” Gibberman said.
“I’ve got places to go and things to do,” Julie said.
“Rushing around is the curse of this modem age.”
“Sure,” Julie said. “You got anything for me or not?”
Gibberman smiled. “A good job is going to cost, you know.”
“Of course,” Julie said. “Here, check this out.”
She took an envelope from her purse and put it down on the desk in front of Gibberman. He opened it, looked inside, riffled the bills, then closed the envelope again.
“You got it there, Julie. All you’ve got, that’s the price.”
“Fine,” Julie said. “Now what do you have?”
“A piece of luck for you,” Gibberman said. “Not only have I got a first-class job, probably worth a million or more, but you could do it tonight if you want to move that fast.”
“Fast is just what I want,” Julie said. “You’re sure this is a good one?”
“Of course I’m sure,” Gibberman said. “There’s an element of risk in all these matters, as you well know. But with your well-known talents, you should have no particular difficulty.”
Gibberman twirled around in his chair and pushed a wall painting out of the way. Behind it was a small safe set into the wall. He twirled the combination, blocking Julie and Stan’s view with his body. Reaching in, he pulled out half a dozen envelopes, looked through them rapidly, selected one, put the rest back, then closed the safe.
“Here’s the job, my dear. Set for New York, and on a street not too far from where we are just now.”
“This had better be good,” Julie said. “That’s every cent we’ve got in the world.”
“You know how reliable I am,” Gibberman said. “Together with my accuracy goes my well-known discretion.”
9
“What is this?” Stan asked. They had gone back home and had opened the manila envelope that Gibberman had given her. Inside was a map, a floor plan of an apartment, several keys, and a half-dozen pages of notes neatly printed in a tiny handwriting.
“This, my dear, is what any successful thief needs—a plan.”
“That’s what you got from Gibberman?”
“I’ve used his plans for several years,” Julie said. “He’s very thorough.”
“So who are you going to rob?” Stan asked.
“A wealthy Saudi oilman named Khalil. He arrived in New York two days ago. He’s going to the Metropolitan Opera tomorrow night to watch a special performance of The Desert Song. While he’s away I’ll relieve him of certain items he usually keeps in his apartment.”
“Where is this to take place?”
“He’s staying at the Plaza.”
“Wow,” Stan said. “I never thought I’d be doing this.”
“You’re not,” Julie said. “I am. You’ll have to wait for me at home. I always work alone.”
“But we’re partners now. We do everything together.” He looked so crestfallen that Julie felt a pang of sorrow for him.
“Stan,” she said, “you know that robot you’ve built? Would you trust me to do micro-soldering on his interior circuits?”
“Of course not,” Stan said. “You haven’t had the training… Oh, I see what you mean. But it’s not really the same thing.”
“It’s the exact same thing,” Julie said.
“I just hate to see you going into this alone.”
“Don’t worry about me. Nothing ever goes wrong with my plans. And if it does, I can take care of it.”
10
The Plaza Hotel had suffered some damage during the recent time of the aliens, but had since regained at least a semblance of its former elegance. Julie went there that evening wearing a stunning red cocktail dress. She looked, if not exactly like a celebrity, then definitely like a celebrity’s girlfriend. The doorman opened the door for her, bowing deeply. She entered the big, brilliantly lit lobby. The reception desk was straight ahead. She didn’t want to get too close to it yet. She glanced at her watch as if she was expecting to meet somebody. All the time she was taking in the details.
People were very well dressed. This was a place where money was in very good supply.
To one side a small orchestra was playing a quaint song from olden times called “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.” People were coming in and out of the bar with its glowing mahogany paneling and its soft indirect lighting. She would have liked a drink now, but she had an unbreakable rule: no alcohol or any other kind of drug while she was on a job.
She looked around the bar and then the lobby. Her practiced eye picked out the security men, two of them near the potted palms. She could always tell who they were. They just didn’t look like the guests, no matter how well they dressed. She counted five of them. They gave her admiring glances but there was nothing suspicious in their looks. So far so good.
The big hotel was in full swing. There were lights everywhere, and elegant people, and the accouterments of success. You could smell it in th
e five-dollar cigars and the expensive perfume on the white shoulders of the women; in the aroma of roast beef, the real thing, wafting out from under silver servers as black-coated waiters brought the well-laden plates around; in the very carpet, permeated with expensive preservatives and subtle-smelling oils.
Julie went to the elevators. One was reserved for the penthouse suites. There was a man standing near it, rocking back and forth on his heels as he surveyed the passing crowds. Julie made him for a plainclothes cop, maybe somebody’s bodyguard. She walked on past and went through a set of corridors back into the main lobby. She was pretty sure the guy at the penthouse elevator hadn’t noticed her. She was also sure a frontal assault on the apartment wasn’t the best idea.
Gibberman had taken this possibility into account. Next door to the Plaza was the Hotel Van Dyke. Khalil’s apartment was a penthouse in the Plaza. If, for any reason, Julie didn’t want to use the elevator, Gibberman had indicated an ingenious alternate way of gaining entry. It involved swinging from an unoccupied top-floor apartment in the Van Dyke, and going in through Khalil’s window. A cat-burglar act, but that was one of Julie’s specialties. She wished Stan could be here to watch her. But it wouldn’t be safe, and it might distract her.
She had no trouble slipping into the Van Dyke with a group of people going to the top-floor restaurant. When they got off at the top floor, Julie got out with them, but instead of entering the restaurant, she ducked into the short flight of service stairs that led to the roof. From there she had a fine view of upper Manhattan, with the dark mass of Central Park directly in front of her and traffic crawling by a long way below on the street. A cutting wind blew her hair around, and she slipped on a knit cap to hold it in place. “Here we go!” she said aloud.
She fixed her ropes and swung over to the roof of the Plaza. From there she tied her rope to a cornice and, taking a deep breath, swung out again into space, bracing herself with one foot so as not to spin. The stars and the street seemed equally distant as she lowered herself to the level of the apartment windows.
The Complete Aliens Omnibus Page 25