by Paul Preuss
He returned his gaze to the inspector. She was definitely unhappy about something; her thick black brows were knitted together in a fearsome scowl.
“Very happy to meet you, Inspector Sharansky,” he said.
“Da,” she said. “These for you.” She thrust a bundle of smelly clothes at him. “Please put them on now.”
He was glad to comply, since he was wearing nothing at all, and if he was in hell, hell felt like it was freezing over.
It occurred to him that Sharansky’s disapproval had to do with confronting a naked man; for all their political progress in the past century, the Soviets had never lost a certain puritanical streak. When he finally finished pulling on the grease-stiffened black pants and heavy black sweatshirt and black boots–no simple task in weightlessness–he oriented himself toward her and tried another smile. “They’ll never see me coming on a moonless night.”
“Is no moonless nights on Mars,” said Sharansky.
“A joke,” he said.
“No joke,” she said, shaking her head vigorously.
“Right,” he said, clearing his throat, “and it’s not funny, either.”
“Is other clothes,” she said, shoving a duffle bag in his direction. He took it without comment and waited for her to make the next move. She consulted her noteplate, then held out a tiny sliver. “Is I.D. sliver and job record. You are Canadian. Your name is Michael Mycroft.”
“No doubt I’m known as Mike,” he said brightly.
“That is correct,” she said, nodding briskly. She continued to consult the noteplate. “You were dismissed from Mars Station Central Administration Bureau of Community Works. You were grade six-point-three-three plumber. . . .”
“Why?”
She glanced up. “Why?”
“Why was I fired?”
She stared at him a moment before she said, “Insubordination.”
He grinned. “I’ll bet you just made that up.”
She colored slightly and bent her head closer to her noteplate, peering as if she were nearsighted. “You want to go home but have not enough credits. No one on Mars Station will hire you. You have only enough credits to get to Mars surface. If you do not get employment there . . . work shelter for you.” She looked up then, and he suspected that she was perversely satisfied at the prospect of work shelter for him. “Your passage to Labyrinth City is reserved and paid.”
“I don’t know the first thing about plumbing,” Blake said. “Does it have something to do with pipes?”
Sharansky handed him another sliver. “Learn from this. Contains all details of your covering story. Earpiece in shirt pocket. Learn fast, data self-erases in one hour–sliver becomes popular-music library, latest hits. Questions?”
“Uh, no point in asking . . . just steer me out of here.”
Dressed in the greasy coveralls that seemed to be the lot of workers at the bottom of the pile, even in socialist utopias, Blake followed Sharansky’s directions and got himself out of Q sector without being challenged or, he hoped, observed. He had sixteen hours to catch the shuttle at the far end of the station; Sharansky had firmly suggested that he report directly to the planetside shuttle port, but he thought it would be a good idea to become as familiar with Mars Station as he could without drawing attention to himself.
He wasted no time in the starside docking area, where a grade six plumber would have had little to do, but instead headed for the living areas. He rode one of the three wide, slow escalators from the starside hub, the one marked 270 DEGREES in Russian, English, Japanese, and Arabic. He got on the thing weightless, grabbed a moving handrail, found gentle footing after a few dozen meters of descent, and walked off the telescoping steps at the bottom weighing what he would have weighed on Earth.
The ride had taken him down the long slope of faceted glass window-rings that refocused the rays of the distant sun, like the Fresnel lens of a 19th-century lighthouse turned inside out. He moved past built-up terraces where passengers lately arrived from other gravitational environments–Earth’s moon, the asteroids, the surface of Mars, or any long journey through space–could spend time adjusting to heavier gee forces. Blake was already adjusted; most of the cutter’s trip from Earth orbit had been at one gee, the first half accelerating, the second half decelerating.
Mars Station was simple in design but impressive in its sheer size–an entire town curled up inside a kilometer-long cylinder, so that houses and public buildings climbed up the sides and hung down from the opposite wall far overhead. Each narrow street was lined with neat, modest town houses stacked side by side, each with its patch of grass and carefully trimmed trees and flowering shrubs–the whole lot looking like a prosperous Siberian suburb under the long summer’s midnight sun, but rolled up like a map. Sunlight entered the station from the angled reflectors at both ends of the cylinder, and some visitors had likened the effect to living on a planet with two small but rapidly rotating suns.
Mars Station lacked the contrasts of sprawling L-5, lacked that station’s huge farms or its raw-steel industry or the range of its living quarters, from the primitive to the opulent–nor was Mars Station as luxurious or as tasteful as Port Hesperus, with its great garden sphere. But it was home to 50,000 busy souls, half again as many people as lived on the surface of Mars itself.
Blake studied the view a few minutes, matching the reality to the maps he’d been given. The mythical Mike Mycroft had been employed in maintaining water mains and sewers; the datasliver provided by Sharansky included not only instructions on how to fix pipes, but a layout of Mars Station’s water recycling system.
The principles of municipal plumbing were simple enough, and Blake thought he could be persuasive on the subject if the need arose; he was more interested in the feel of everyday life on the station. He set out on a walking tour.
His first stop was on nearby Nevski Place at the base of the escalator, at the residential hotel which was supposedly Mycroft’s last address. Like many of the station’s larger buildings, the two-story hotel was sided and roofed with corrugated iron streaked with a thin wash of black paint; from a distance the effect was surprisingly delicate, almost like that of plaited bamboo.
Blake walked boldly past the front door and then returned to peer into the small lobby. On his first pass he’d seen an old woman in black dozing behind the counter, snoring profoundly. With quick, quiet steps he crossed the asphalt tiling to the narrow stairs. He climbed to the second floor and quickly located what was supposed to have been Mycroft’s room, which faced the building’s facade. He put an ear to its thin painted iron door and heard nothing.
It took him no time to force back the latch bolt, using as a lever the stiff datasliver Sharansky had given him. That act ruined the datasliver, but he’d already absorbed what it had to teach him, and he was not interested in the album of “latest hits” into which it was soon scheduled to transmogrify.
He looked around the closet-sized room with its bunk bed, wall-mounted videoplate, iron desk, and iron chair. It occurred to him that wood is necessarily a rare commodity when the best source of raw materials is a captured asteroid. The wall hooks had nothing hanging from them. It was apparent that the local Space Board office had done their homework–it was the sort of place a lone man like Mycroft would stay, and it appeared recently vacated.
The room had a single open window. Standing at it, Blake could see down into the crowded plaza. The grand escalator was full of people descending and ascending, like angels on Jacob’s ladder. Blake had never been to Russia; the potpourri at the bottom of the staircase reminded him of the tram terminal at the Manhattan end of the Fifty-ninth Street bridge, although here, in one corner of the square, a woman in a red velvet jacket was putting a dancing bear through its paces, and nearby a man was selling not bagels or franks but hot piroshkis from a wagon.
He leaned forward and peered out the window. From this angle–or to someone lying on the room’s bottom bunk–the window gave a view of the huge glass rings at
the starside end of the cylinder. The angle of the prisms which filled the circular “sky” had gradually adjusted so that now the incoming sunlight was halved; the blue street lights surrounding the plaza had begun to glow, and a stage-managed twilight was about to close upon the station.
Station time had been arranged to correspond to time at the prime meridian on Mars; because the normal Martian day, or sol, was twenty-four hours, thirty-nine minutes, and 35.208 seconds long, humans adjusted happily to the diurnal rhythms of Mars.
On Nevski Place, opposite his hotel window, there was a restaurant; the leafy ornamental trees of its “outdoor” patio were strung with festive colored bulbs that spelled out its name in several languages: Nevski Garden. The aroma of grilled sausages wafted to Blake, and he realized that not only was it the local dinner hour, but he had not eaten since gulping a prepackaged high-carbohydrate snack on the cutter, more than five hours ago. Surely Mike Mycroft would have been a frequent patron of that attractive place.
Then Blake noticed something else. Two men and a woman had stopped still in the crowd that swirled in front of the Nevski Garden and all three were staring up at him. One of the men pointed, and his shout carried easily across the bustle of the crowd to Blake’s ears.
“It’s him!”
The men and the woman started pushing their way through the crowd toward the hotel, shoving people out of their way, breaking into a run when spaces opened before them.
Blake jerked away from the window. What was going on? Three people were coming after him and they looked mad.
There were only two ways out that he’d noticed, the main stairs up which he’d come and the fire escape at the end of the hall. From half a block away it’s hard to make subtle judgments about people you’ve never met, but he doubted that his pursuers were stupid, even if they were making a big mistake. They surely would split up to cover both his escape routes.
That was about all the thought he had time for. He looked out the window again. The three weren’t in sight. A couple of them were probably already inside and coming up the stairs.
He threw the sash all the way up and climbed onto the windowsill. He stood there a moment looking up–the eaves were wide–and then down. He would survive a jump to the plaza below, but he could easily break an ankle. He turned around on the sill, facing the inside. Carefully he balanced himself, extending his arms and bending his knees like a diver on the edge of a high platform preparing to do a back flip. He let himself fall back–
–and a fraction of a second later jumped with all his strength.
He got his hands on the edge of the eaves. The corrugated iron dug into his palms, but he hardly noticed. He swung once, twice, his body straight as a pendulum, then up, thrusting his upper torso flat across the roof–the pitch was gentle, to match the programmed rains–and he got his right knee up, then his left, and he was on the roof and running.
He ran to the opposite end of the building, hoping to find another fire escape. No luck. There were no alleys in all of Mars Station; the sort of business that went on at the back doors of buildings on Earth–deliveries, recycling, and the like–was handled in the station’s sublevels, and most buildings were widely separated. Blake saw no neighboring roofs within handy jumping distance.
In the garden behind the hotel–an L-shaped patch of grass defined by the back of the hotel and two apartment buildings–an exhaust stack thrust up from the sublevels. With luck, he could leap across to the ladder rungs on the side of the stack. He hurled himself across three meters of plain air and hit the stack hard, slipped on a rung, wrenched his shoulder, and banged his ear against the side of the stack–
–but he was still mobile enough to climb down.
His feet hit ground level just as the two men tumbled through the back door of the hotel. For a second they all stared at each other. Then the men rushed him.
Blake was cornered in the little garden, hemmed in by walls of corrugated iron. The men–young, lean, hard, curiously slender–set on him with flailing fists. They had more enthusiasm than style. “Dirty scab,” one of them hissed, just before Blake discouraged his ardor with a savage kick to the groin.
That one was down, writhing in pained surprise on the ground, but the other man was a little quicker, a little warier. Blake easily parried a couple of his vigorous light-handed blows, but–feeling an awkward wrench in his shoulder from his slip on the ladder–fumbled the counterattack. Still Blake managed to roll out of the clench. He dashed for the corner of the hotel, hoping to reach the crowded plaza beyond.
From above, two booted feet slammed into his wounded shoulder–the woman, the third member of the trio, had climbed up the fire escape ladder but had turned around when she realized he’d gotten past her, getting back down in time to jump him as he ran under her–and he went sprawling under her weight. Blake’s bad landing slowed him, and he was on his knees when the woman kicked him again, her boot connecting with his ribs beneath his upraised left arm. She was strong for a skinny gal! He caught the shadow of the two men out of the corner of his eye and tried to hurl himself away, but he was too late; he was hit from behind by something blunt and heavy.
For a second–or maybe a minute, or maybe more–everything was black with whirling purple splotches. When Blake opened his eyes, the woman was walking away, looking back at him with undisguised venom, her pale complexion flushed and her brown hair streaked with sweat, but showing no apparent inclination to continue the fight. Behind her stumbled the two men, equally angry but oddly subdued. The one Blake had kicked was trying to disguise his limp; he spat on the ground in front of Blake as he passed, but said nothing.
“You are all right?” The man helping him sit up had a huge square face, chiseled in flat strokes as if it were a sculptor’s rough wooden model, deeply lined around his mouth and nose. He was wearing loose blue coveralls that like Blake’s might have been washed once within the past year or so.
“What . . . oww!” A searing pain shot through Blake’s side as he turned to look at the sullen trio, now arguing loudly among themselves as they disappeared into the crowd.
“You are sure you are not hurt?”
“Not really, just bruised,” said Blake, gingerly feeling his ribs. The bruises were psychological, too. After his bravado performance in the gym against Ellen, he’d flunked his first real test and had needed rescue by a stranger. “Thanks for helping.” He lifted himself slowly to his feet.
“Yevgeny Rostov,” said the man, thrusting out a callused and grease-blackened hand. “I convince them they make big mistake.”
“Mike . . . Mycroft,” Blake said, holding out his own right hand, suddenly conscious of how badly it matched his cover. Not that it was a soft hand–Blake exercised himself by climbing rocks, among other pursuits–but neither was it a plumber’s hand. Blake’s ordinary work, which he had not paid much attention to of late, was with rare books and manuscripts. Dusty work, not greasy work. “Who did they think I was? Who are they?”
“They are from Mars, like me. They think you are man living in that hotel room last week, but I stay in that hotel and I tell them nyet, that room is empty two days now, you are not him.”
“I wonder what he did to get them upset?”
“Something bad, who knows?” Yevgeny shrugged expressively. “You come with me, Mike. You don’t need clinic, maybe, but you need to restore your strength.”
A few minutes later Blake and his savior were seated under a gnarled Russian olive at one of the Nevski Garden’s outdoor tables, anticipating the arrival of a platter of the sausage of the day. The waiter slid a couple of foaming mugs of black beer onto the zinc tabletop and Yevgeny nodded at him, which was apparently good enough to settle the bill.
“Thanks. Next round’s on me,” said Blake.
Yevgeny raised his mug. “Tovarishch,” he growled.
“Comrade.” Blake raised his own. He sipped tentatively at the opaque brew and found its flavor strong but not unpleasant.
In the
busy plaza nearby, most people were hurrying home for the night. A few poor souls, possibly including a grade six plumber or two, were trudging to their night jobs. The inhabitants of Mars Station were less flamboyant than the hothouse crowd on Venus’s Port Hesperus, their clothes and hairstyles tending toward the sensibly dull–more overalls than shorts and miniskirts–but the racial and social mix was what Blake was beginning to think of as typical of space, mostly Euro-Americans, Japanese, and Chinese, with some Arabs. Most people were young to middle-aged; there were only a few children and first-generation oldsters in evidence. But Blake knew he shouldn’t generalize from his brief experience. Besides Port Hesperus, he had visited only Farside Base on the moon, and that briefly, and there were many other colonies in space, farther from the sun, where the odor of vegetable curry was more prominent than the odor of grilled meat.
“You are new to Mars Station,” Yevgeny said.
“Passing through. Going to Lab City on tomorrow’s shuttle,” said Blake, thinking that perhaps he should have taken Inspector Sharansky’s advice and gone to the shuttle dock right away.
“Thought I might take a hotel room for the night, but they ask a lot here. For what you get, I mean.”
Yevgeny’s thick brows lifted above his deep-set black eyes. “Not tourist, I think.”
“No, looking for work.”
“What kind of work?”
“What kind you got?” Blake said with a shrug. He didn’t want to be too mysterious, but he hoped he could curb Yevgeny’s bold curiosity.
The waiter arrived with their dinners. Blake sliced into a crisp brown sausage with enthusiasm as Yevgeny stabbed his and raised it whole toward his mouth. After a few minutes of relative silence Yevgeny emitted a satisfied belch. Blake said, “Good food.”