by Larry Niven
The place was much changed.
I remembered a couple of hundred bottles in the hologram bar display. Now the display was twice as large and seemed more realistic — better equipment, maybe — but only a score of bottles in the middle were liquors. The rest were flavored or carbonated water, high-energy drinks, electrolytes, a thousand kinds of tea; there was also food to match: raw vegetables and fruits kept fresh by high-tech means, arrayed with low-cholesterol dips, bran in every conceivable form short of injections.
The Monobloc had swallowed its neighbors. It was bigger, with curtained alcoves and a small gym upstairs for working out or for dating.
Herbert and Tina Schroeder still owned the place. Their marriage had been open in the 2330s. They'd aged since. So had their clientele. Some of us had married or drifted away or died of alcoholism, but word of mouth and the Velvet Net had maintained a continuous tradition. Twenty-eight years later they looked better than ever... wrinkled, of course, but lean and muscular, both ready for the Gray Olympics. Tina let me know before I could ask: she and Herb were lockstepped now.
To me it was like coming home.
For the next twelve years the Monobloc was an intermittent part of my life.
I would find a lady or she would find me, and we'd drop out. Or we'd visit the Monobloc and sometimes trade partners, and one evening we'd go together and leave separately. I was not evading marriage. Every woman I found worth knowing ultimately seemed to want to know someone else.
I was nearly bald even then. Thick white hair covered my arms and legs and torso, as if my head hairs had migrated. Twelve years of running construction robots had turned me burly. From time to time some muscular lady would look me over and claim me. I had no trouble finding company.
But company never stayed. Had I become dull? The notion struck me as funny.
I had settled myself alone at a table for two early on a Thursday evening in 2375. The Monobloc was half-empty. The earlies were all keeping one eye on the door when Anton Brillov came in.
Anton was shorter than me and much narrower, with a face like an ax. I hadn't seen him in thirteen years. Still, I'd mentioned the Monobloc once or twice; he must have remembered.
I semaphored my arms. Anton squinted, then came over, exaggeratedly cautious until he saw who it was.
"Jack Strather!"
"Hi, Anton. So you decided to try the place."
"Yah." He sat. "You look good." He looked a moment longer and said, "Relaxed. Placid. How's Charlotte?"
"Left me after I retired. Just under a year after. There was too much of me around, and I... maybe I was too placid? Anyway. How are you?"
"Fine."
Twitchy. Anton looked twitchy. I was amused. "Still with the Holy Office?"
"Only citizens call it that, Jack."
"I'm a citizen now. Still gives me a kick. How's your chemistry?"
Anton knew what I meant and didn't pretend otherwise. "I'm okay. I'm down."
"Kid, you're looking over both shoulders at once."
Anton managed a credible laugh. "I'm not the kid anymore. I'm a weekly."
The ARM had made me a weekly at forty-eight. They couldn't turn me loose at the end of the day anymore because my body chemistry couldn't shift fast enough. So they kept me in the ARM building Monday through Thursday and gave me all of Thursday afternoon to shed the schitz madness. Another twenty years of that and I was even less flexible, so they retired me.
I said, "You do have to remember. When you're in the ARM building, you're a paranoid schizophrenic. You have to be able to file that when you're outside."
"Hah. How can anyone — "
"You get used to the schitz. After I quit, the difference was amazing. No fears, no tension, no ambition."
"No Charlotte?"
"Well... I turned boring. And what are you doing here?"
Anton looked around. "Much the same thing you are, I guess. lack, am I the youngest one here?"
"Maybe." I looked around, double-checking. A woman was distracting me, though I could see only her back and a flash — of a laughing profile. Her back was slender and strong, and a thick white braid ran down her spine, two and a half feet of clean, thick white hair. She was in an animated conversation with a blond companion of Anton's age plus a few.
But they were at a table for two: they weren't inviting company. I forced my attention back. "We're gray singles, Anton. The young ones tend to get the message quick. We're slower than we used to be. We date. You want to order?"
Alcohol wasn't popular there. Anton must have noticed, but he ordered guava juice and vodka and drank as if he needed it. This looked worse than Thursday jitters. I let him half finish, then said, "Assuming you can tell me — "
"I don't know anything."
"I know the feeling. What should you know?"
The tension eased behind Anton's eyes. "There was a message from the Angel's Pencil."
"Pencil... oh." My mental reflexes had slowed down. The Angel's Pencil had departed twenty years earlier for... was it Epsilon Eridani? "Come on, kid, it'll be in the boob cubes before you have quite finished speaking. Anything from deep space is public property."
"Hah! No. It's restricted. I haven't seen it myself. Only a reference, and it must be more than ten years old."
That was peculiar. And if the Belt stations hadn't spread the news through the solar system, that was peculiar. No wonder Anton was antsy. ARMs react that way to puzzles.
Anton seemed to jerk himself back to the here and now, back to the gray singles regime. "Am I cramping your style?"
"No problem. Nobody hurries in the Monobloc. If you see someone you like —" My fingers danced over lighted symbols on the rim of the table. "This gets you a map. Locate where she's sitting, put the cursor on it. That gets you a display... hmm."
I'd set the cursor on the white-haired lady. I liked the readout. "Phoebe Garrison, seventy-nine, eleven or twelve years older than you. Straight. Won a second in the Gray Jumps last year... that's the Americas skiing matches for seventy and over. She could kick your tail if you don't watch your manners. It says she's smarter than we are, too.
"Point is, she can check you out the same way. Or me. And she probably found this place through the Velvet Net, which is the computer network for unlocked lifestyles."
"So. Two males sitting together — "
"Anyone who thinks we're bent can check if she cares enough. Bends don't come to the Monobloc, anyway. But if we want company, we should move to a bigger table."
We did that. I caught Phoebe Garrison's companion's eye. They played with their table controls, discussed, and presently wandered over.
Dinner turned into a carouse. Alcohol was involved, but we'd left the Monobloc by then. When we split up, Anton was with Michiko. I went home with Phoebe.
Phoebe had fine legs, as I'd anticipated, though both knees were Teflon and plastic. Her face was lovely even in morning sunlight. Wrinkled, of course. She was two weeks short of eighty and wincing in anticipation. She ate with a cross-country skier's appetite. We spoke of our lives as we ate.
She'd come to Santa Maria to visit her oldest grandson. In her youth she'd done critical work in nanoengineering. The Board had allowed her four children. (I'd known I was outclassed.) All were married, scattered across the Earth, and so were the grandkids.
My two sons had emigrated to the Belt while still in their twenties. I'd visited them once during an investigation trip paid for by the United Nations
"You were an ARM? Really? How interesting! Tell me a story... if you can."
"That's the problem, all right."
The interesting tales were all classified. The ARM suppresses dangerous technology. What the ARM buries is supposed to stay buried. I remembered a kind of time compressor and a field that would catalyze combustion, both centuries old. Both were first used for murder. If turned loose or rediscovered, either would generate more interesting tales yet.
I said, "I don't know anything current. They bounced me
out when I got too old. Now I run construction robots at various spaceports."
"Interesting?"
"Mostly placid." She wanted a story? Okay. The ARM enforced more than the killer-tech laws, and some of those tales I could tell.
"We don't get many mother hunts these days. This one was wished on us by the Belt." And I told her about a lunie who'd sired two clones. One he'd raised on the moon, and one he'd left in the Saturn Conserve. He'd moved to Earth, where one clone is any normal citizen's entire birthright. When we found him, he was arranging to culture a third clone...
I dreamed a bloody dream.
It was one of those: I was able to take control, to defeat what had attacked me. In the black of an early Sunday morning the shreds of the dream dissolved before I could touch them, but the sensations remained. I felt strong, balanced, powerful, victorious.
It took me a few minutes to become suspicious of this particular flavor of wonderful, but I'd had practice. I eased out from under Phoebe's arm and leg and got out of bed. I lurched into the medical alcove, linked myself up, and fell asleep on the table.
Phoebe found me there in the morning. She asked, "Couldn't that wait till after breakfast?"
"I've got four years on you and I'm going for infinity. So I'm careful," I told her. Let her think the tube carried vitamins. It wasn't quite a lie... and she didn't quite believe me, either.
On Monday Phoebe went off to let her eldest grandson show her the local museums. I went back to work.
In Death Valley a semicircle of twenty lasers points at an axial array of mirrors. Tracks run across the desert to a platform that looks like strands of spun caramel. Every hour or so a spacecraft trundles along the tracks, poses above the mirrors, and rises into the sky on a blinding, searing pillar of light.
That was where I and three companions and twenty-eight robots worked between emergencies. Emergencies were common enough. From time to time Glenn and Skii and ten or twenty machines had to be shipped off to Outback Field or Baikonur, while I held the fort at Death Valley Field.
All the equipment was old. The original mirrors had all been slaved to one system and had been replaced again and again. Newer mirrors were independently mounted and had their own computers, but even they were up to fifty years old and losing their flexibility. The lasers had to be replaced somewhat more often. Nothing was ready to fall apart, quite.
But the mirrors have to adjust their shapes to match distorting air currents all the way up to vacuum, because the distortions themselves must focus the drive beam. A laser at 99.3 percent efficiency is keeping too much energy, getting too hot. At 99.1 percent something would melt, lost power would blow the laser into shrapnel, and a cargo would not reach orbit.
My team had been replacing mirrors and lasers long before I came on the scene. This circuit was nearly complete. We had already reconfigured some robots to begin replacing track.
The robots worked alone while we entertained ourselves in the monitor room. If the robots ran into anything unfamiliar, they stopped and beeped. Then a story or songfest or poker game would stop just as abruptly.
Usually the beep meant that the robot had found an acute angle, an uneven surface, a surface not strong enough to bear a loaded robot, a bend in a pipe, a pipe where it shouldn't be... a geometric problem. The robots couldn't navigate just anywhere. Sometimes we'd have to unload it and move the load to a cart by hand. Sometimes we had to pick it up with a crane and move it or turn it: Lots of it was muscle work.
Phoebe joined me for dinner Thursday evening.
She'd whipped her grandson at laser tag. They'd gone through the museum at Edwards AFB. They'd skied... he needed to get serious about that and maybe get some surgery, too...
I listened and smiled and presently tried to tell her about my work. She nodded; her eyes glazed. I tried to tell her how good it was, how restful, after all those years in the ARM.
The ARM: that got her interest back. Stet. I told her about the Henry program.
I'd been saving that. It was an embezzling system good enough to ruin the economy. It made Zachariah Henry rich. He might have stayed rich if he'd quit in time... and if his system hadn't been so good, so dangerous, he might have ended in prison. Instead... well, let his tongue whisper secrets to the ears in the organ banks.
I could speak of it because they'd changed the system. I didn't say that it had happened twenty years before I'd joined the ARM. But I was still running out of declassified stories. I told her, "If a lot of people know something can be done, somebody'll do it. We can suppress it and suppress it again —"
She pounced. "Like what?"
"Like... well, the usual example is the first cold fusion system. They did it with palladium and platinum, but half a dozen other metals work. And organic superconductors: the patents listed a wrong ingredient. Various grad students tried it wrong and still got it. If there's a way to do it, there's probably a lot of ways."
"That was before there was an ARM. Would you have suppressed superconductors?"
"No. What for?"
"Or cold fusion?"
"No."
"Cold fusion releases neutrons," she said. "Sheathe the generator with spent uranium, what do you get?"
"Plutonium, I think. So?"
"They used to make bombs out of plutonium."
"Bothers you?"
"Jack, the fission bomb was it in the mass murder department. Like the crossbow. Like the Ayatollah's Asteroid." Phoebe's eyes held mine. Her voice had dropped; we didn't want to broadcast this all over the restaurant. "Don't you ever wonder just how much of human knowledge is lost in that... black limbo inside the ARM building? Things that could solve problems, warm the Earth again, ease us through the lightspeed wall."
"We don't suppress inventions unless they're dangerous," I said.
I could have backed out of the argument, but that, too, would have disappointed Phoebe. Phoebe liked a good argument. My problem was that what I gave her wasn't good enough. Maybe I couldn't get angry enough; maybe my most forceful arguments were classified.
Monday morning Phoebe left for Dallas and a granddaughter. There had been no war, no ultimatum, but it felt final.
Thursday evening I was back in the Monobloc.
So was Anton. "I've played it," he said. "Can't talk about it, of course.
He looked mildly bored. His hands looked like they were trying to break chunks off the edge of the table.
I nodded placidly.
Anton shouldn't have told me about the broadcast from the Angel's Pencil. But he had, and if the ARM had noticed, they'd better hear him mention it again.
Company joined us, sampled, and departed. Anton and I spoke to a pair of ladies who turned out to have other tastes. (Some bends like to bug the straights.) A younger woman joined us for a time. She couldn't have been over thirty and was lovely in the modern style, but hard, sharply defined muscle isn't my sole standard of beauty.
I remarked to Anton, "Sometimes the vibes just aren't right."
"Yeah. Look, Jack, I have carefully concealed a prehistoric Calvados in my apt at Maya. There isn't really enough for four — "
"Sounds nice. Eat first?"
Stet. There's sixteen restaurants in Maya."
A score of blazing rectangles meandered across the night, washing out the stars. The eye could still find a handful of other space artifacts, particularly around the moon.
Anton flashed the beeper that would summon a taxi. I said, "So you viewed the call. So why so tense?"
Security devices no bigger than a basketball rode the glowing sky, but the casual eye would not find them. One had to assume they were there. Patterns in their monitor chips would match the vision and sound patterns of a mugging, a rape, an injury, a cry for help. Those chips had gigabytes to spare for words and word patterns the ARM might find of interest.
So: no key words.
Anton said, "Jack, they tell a hell of a story. A... foreign vehicle pulled alongside Angela at four-fifths of legal max. It tri
ed to cook them."
I stared. A spacecraft matched course with the Angel's Pencil at eighty percent of lightspeed? Nothing man-built could do that. And warlike? Maybe I'd misinterpreted everything. That can happen when you make up your code as you go along.
But how could the Pencil have escaped? "How did Angela manage to phone home?"
A taxi dropped. Anton said, "She sliced' the bread with the, you know, motor. I said it's a hell of a story."
Anton's apartment was most of the way up the slope of Maya, the pyramidal arcology north of Santa Maria. Old wealth.
Anton led me through great doors, into an elevator, down corridors. He played tour guide: "The Fertility Board was just getting some real power about the time this place went up. It was built to house a million people. It's never been fully occupied."
So?
"So we're en route to the east face. Four restaurants, a dozen little bars. And here we stop."
"This your apt?"
"No. It's empty; it's always been empty. I sweep it for bugs, but the authorities... I think they've never noticed."
"Is that your mattress?"
"No. Kids. They've got a club that's two generations old. My son tipped me off to this."
"Could we be interrupted?"
"No. I'm monitoring them. I've got the security system set to let them in, but only when I'm not here. Now I'll set it to recognize you. Don't forget the number: Apt 23309."
"What is the ARM going to think we're doing?"
"Eating. We went to one of the restaurants, then came back and drank Calvados... which we will do later. I can fix the records at Buffalo Bill. Just don't argue about the credit charge, stet?"
"But — Yah, stet." Hope you won't be noticed; that's the real defense. I was thinking of bailing out, but curiosity is part of what gets you into the ARM. "Tell your story. You said she sliced the bread with the, you know, motor?"