“Keep in touch,” Theroux said.
“Depend on it,” Larwood said, trying for ‘casual’ as he walked away, but looking clumsily uncontrolled in the odd gravity.
“Water in a hip flask and brandy in his bag?” Devis asked.
“A subtle double bluff, in his book,” explained Theroux.
“I hate to seem picky, but in our book, the brandy was a violation.”
“He was a friend, once,” Theroux said. “I don’t want to see him go blind on drive fuel.”
“You serious? The Scotch they make out in shuttle repair is better than the real thing.”
“Does it seem like a good idea to have a thirsty journo find that out?”
“Is that the sort of story he’ll be looking for?” Devis frowned, though in fact he was almost amused. “Our leader will be chuffed.”
Theroux shook his head. “Daniel Larwood doesn’t look for stories any more,” he said. “He’s got a big rep, and he acts strictly on information received. Something’s coming down, Colin. Something big and ugly.”
Devis yawned again. “Sounds like my third wife’s divorce settlement,” he said.
It had taken the crew of the freighter Pohl Star most of the long haul back from Mars to persuade themselves that they could get away with it. The pilot had a reputation as something of a chancer and a bit of a crook, but it was the co-pilot and navigator who was the keener of the two. She badly wanted to see what a Martian looked like. And once they’d opened the case, they were already in the worst kind of trouble – so there wasn’t much point in being coy about a picture of the thing…
Nathan was not in the mood for this. He was sorely tempted to use the control-hopping that he had at last mastered and shake off Jiang Li Ho. But that would have been rude – and courtesy, he knew, was extraordinarily important to the Moonbase Co-ordinator. He supposed it must be a Chinese cultural thing. “I’m sorry, Jiang Li,” he said, lengthening his stride a little, but not to the full looping hop. “You of all people should know I haven’t got the authority to expel this Larwood character.”
Ho matched his pace. “A police charge of any kind,” he suggested, “would… work the oracle.” He spoke the last phrase with a slight flourish, as he always did when he felt he had mastered a colloquialism.
“He hasn’t done anything to warrant a charge,” Nathan said, deliberately misunderstanding.
“Why is he here?” Ho persisted.
“Ask him.”
“We are not comfortable to have reporters nosing around at this time.”
“Why not? We’ve got nothing to hide,” Nathan said, thinking except that you obviously have.
Ho said, “I have an important guest.” It was by way of an admission.
“I don’t think we were notified of that,” Nathan said, with a show of polite surprise.
“Dr. Philpot is here by diplomatic invitation,” Ho said gravely.
Nathan nodded. “I see.” He wondered whether Jiang Li Ho really thought that because his visitor had bypassed the normal entry procedures, he had slipped in unnoticed.
“I do not wish him to be harassed.”
“What exactly do you wish, Jiang Li?”
Ho stopped, forcing Nathan to stop as well, and turn back to face him. He beamed the broad, cheerful smile which had eased so many difficult negotiations. “We are friends, is this not so, Nathan? You trust me? You trust my good purposes… my good intentions.”
“The road to hell is paved with those,” Nathan said.
“You will deal with this journalist for me?” Ho urged.
Nathan smiled. “Of course,” he agreed. Adding, “If he breaks the law,” as he finally gave in to the impulse, and strode off in long looping hops towards the Star Cop offices.
Everything about Dr. Andrew Philpot was smooth and tasteful: from his perfectly uniform tan to his expensively tailored clothes; from the streaks of grey hair at his temples to his carefully manicured fingernails. Even his annoyance was languidly elegant. “I took it for granted that the local constabulary would co-operate more readily,” he said, managing to combine boredom with just a hint of menace.
“I fear no-one is ready to be taken for granted, Dr. Philpot,” Ho said thoughtfully. “Least of all, perhaps, Commander Spring.”
“Confidentiality is the sine qua non. Without it…” Philpot left a threat unspoken.
Ho said, “We have the cover story, if it is needed.”
“And if the press believe it.”
“Why should they not?” Ho beamed.
Philpot raised a sceptical eyebrow. “Why should your policeman not do as he was told?” he said.
Nathan got the coffees from the General Mess dispensing machine and brought them across to where Daniel Larwood sat waiting at a corner table. “Since you declined my invitation, I’m afraid you’ll have to put up with this stuff.”
“Nothing personal, Commander,” Larwood said. “I prefer to meet policemen on neutral ground, whenever possible.”
“I do my best not to take things personally, Mr. Larwood. I know some people find police offices uncomfortable.”
Larwood smiled. “Oppressive, even.”
Nathan sipped his coffee, thinking – as he knew he always did at this moment – that it tasted lousy, but at least it was in a cup and not in a sealed pack with integral straw. “Drinks machines never change, do they?” he said with a grimace.
“Nice to have something to rely on,” Larwood said and poured a generous slug of brandy into his own cup. “Sweetener?” He offered the hip flask.
Nathan took the flask and sniffed the contents. “Nice,” he said. “But no thanks.”
“Aren’t you going to tell me how dangerous that is out here, not to mention illegal?”
Nathan closed the flask and handed it back. “You already know that and we don’t want to waste each other’s time. After all, you’re a famous man and I’m a busy one.”
“Everyone’s famous in their head,” Larwood said. “Don’t you think?”
“I’m just a simple plod,” Nathan said, with a perfectly straight face. “Tell me, what’s your interest in Dr. Philpot?”
“Have I got one?”
Wrong answer, Nathan thought, you should’ve said: ‘Philpot, who he?’. “There’s been a suggestion that you might have.”
Larwood sipped his coffee. “Paranoia. There’s a lot of it about.”
Nathan shrugged. “He is an important man, though. A man with serious clout.”
Larwood looked amused and a bit smug. “If you say so.”
Nathan thought, okay, let’s see how vain you are, and said, “But obviously you do know who he is. Don’t you?” It was too late to deny it now without looking foolish, and just admitting it without comment would be almost as bad. Silence would have been his best option.
Larwood said, “He works at the Holdy Museum in Southern California.”
Well, well, Nathan thought, so what else will you tell me? “Is that the one that’s got more money than God?” he prompted, smiling.
“Story is, their accounts system crashed trying to keep up. Just before it went down, the computer suggested they give up counting and try weighing the money from time to time instead”
Nathan chuckled appropriately, and then put on a more or less earnest expression. “No wonder they can afford to hire people like Dr. Philpot.”
“He’s not exactly a major talent,” Larwood said, unable to keep the scorn out of his voice.
“No?”
“They’ve got a hundred curators just like him. They’re known as ‘the bumbling herd’. Philpot’s distinguished himself from the rest of them in no way whatsoever.” And that, Larwood’s expression finally said, was as far as he was going on the subject.
“Not just paranoia, then,” Nathan suggested.
Larwood shrugged. “Routine information. Readily available.”
“The sort of background you’d have on anybody and everybody you’re not in any way interested in.”
“I have a good memory. And, as it happens, I’ve been doing some stuff on the Holdy.”
“Well,” Nathan said, “what are the odds? Small world. Unless you’ve got the contract to paint it, of course.”
Larwood drank some of his coffee. For a moment, he seemed tempted to top up the space he had made in the cup with more brandy, but then he smiled the rumpled smile and put the flask back in his pocket. “A joke,” he said. “It’s been my experience that a sense of humour is not that common among policemen.” Across the mess, the wallzac began to change. The white beach, palm trees and clear blue ocean which was playing on the picture wall slowly dissolved, and reformed into an avenue of magnificent beech trees, bright with the first flush of spring leaves.
“I was under the impression you found most coppers funny,” Nathan said. “What was that series you did for Global News?”
“Cops and Robbers: A Plain Man’s Guide To The Difference?” Larwood smiled warmly. “I was at the top of my game then. Didn’t you think so?”
“I’m not really qualified to judge,” Nathan said.
Larwood’s smile became more studied. “Quite a number of your colleagues felt qualified to judge. Several of them volunteered to be jury and executioner too. I took to carrying a gun.”
Nathan shook his head. “Never an answer,” he said.
“Depends on the question,” Larwood said.
Nathan shrugged. “People get carried away.”
“In body bags. That was a thought that kept bothering me.”
“Not something you need worry about out here.”
“You’ll protect me. You being just a simple plod.”
“You, and everyone else who stays within the law.”
“That sounds like it might be a warning.”
“Paranoia,” Nathan said, and smiled his best smile. “There’s a lot of it about.”
Theroux could see that his enthusiasm had carried him away and he was being boring, but he couldn’t resist the urge to finish the argument he was making. “And he looks at her and he says something like: You can ask me this one thing. And she asks him did he kill them, and he tells her a flat lie. Right there, the ground shifts and you know there is no such thing as truth.”
Devis, who had not made much of an effort to look like he was listening, said, “It’s just an old movie, for God’s sake.” The freight elevator stopped at the main cargo level and he thumbed the access request. As they waited for the computer to check the atmosphere balance, Theroux said, “Yeah, well, Crime and Punishment’s just an old book.”
With no pressure differences registering in its control zone, the computer arrived at a low probability of environmental failure and opened the airtight doors. “Exactly,” said Devis, as the two men stepped out into the vast warehouse.
For some reason of his own, Larwood now wanted to talk. It seemed to Nathan as if the man was deliberately trying to keep him at the table.
“Not just journalists like me,” he was saying, “that’s a cop-out, you should pardon the expression. Everyone has that responsibility.”
But why does he want me here? Nathan wondered. “You’re not suggesting everyone should tell the truth?”
“I’m suggesting that whatever you say starts to be true. Not truth, but true.”
“The difference being?”
“Truth is an objective thing, true is just what people believe. And if you say it, you open the possibility of it being true. Say it often enough, and the possibility becomes a probability. Get enough people to say it often enough…”
Nathan smiled. “I take it you don’t like politicians much.”
“Love them,” Larwood said. “Couldn’t eat a whole one, mind. When do you leave for Mars, by the way?”
Nathan smiled more broadly. He hadn’t expected to have one of his own tricks used against him. Was that why Larwood had kept him there, to interrogate him? “More routine information?” he suggested.
Before Larwood could press the question, a young woman approached the table and interrupted him. “Excuse me,” she said. “You’re Daniel Larwood, aren’t you?”
“I was the last time I looked,” Larwood said pleasantly.
Less irritated than I would have been myself, Nathan thought, if a moment I had worked for had been stepped on like this. The woman had the close-cropped hair and pale complexion of regular space crew, and she was clutching a paper book-pad and ink stylus. “I’m a great admirer of your work,” she said.
“Thank you,” Larwood said, going into what looked and sounded like a standard routine, “And you don’t even look like my mother.”
“I do a little writing myself,” the woman said.
“Really?”
“I don’t suppose you’d read some of my stuff?”
Larwood smiled his rumpled smile, and shrugged his tired shrug. “You seem very friendly,” he said, “and I never read a friend’s work.”
“Why not?” Nathan asked, to cover the woman’s embarrassment.
“Suppose I didn’t like it?”
“Suppose you did?” the woman said.
“That would be worse. Much worse.”
The woman laughed, and to Nathan’s surprise she proffered the book-pad and stylus to Larwood and said, “Can I have your autograph, or is that too silly?”
“It’s not silly at all,” Larwood said taking them. “Who shall I make it to?”
“Jane,” she said.
Larwood examined the book-pad carefully, and when he had found a suitable page he began to inscribe a message on it. “Actually,” he said as he was writing, “I know why we collect autographs. If you think about it, someone’s signature seems such an arbitrary and odd thing to want and yet… When my father died, the only real thing which remained of him to me, the most direct link, the thing which proved he had existed, was his handwriting.” He finished and returned book-pad and stylus to the woman. “Thank you,” she said, and – talking to Nathan for the first time – added, “I’m sorry to have intruded.”
“No problem,” Nathan said, and wondered, as he admired the skill with which she moved back across the mess, why she hadn’t looked at the autograph.
“What happens here,” Larwood asked, “while you’re away bringing civilization to the Martian colony?”
“Nobody,” Nathan said, and then remembered that he hadn’t admitted he was going, and thought he was definitely getting careless, “is indispensable.”
“That’s usually a good reason for staying put,” Larwood said wryly.
Nathan swallowed the last of his coffee. “That’s something you’re not going to be doing if we should get any complaints. Harassing people, anything like that.”
“I never harass anyone,” Larwood protested mildly. “People come to me. I’m a lot like a policeman.”
Nathan shook his head. “Mostly, we have to go looking. You’re more like a journalist.”
Larwood raised an eyebrow. “More like?”
“You get things wrong,” Nathan said without smiling.
Main Cargo was the biggest structure on Moonbase. All the Earth-Moon freight, and most of the goods for the other colonies and bases, came there to be unpacked and distributed, or sorted and reloaded for onward consignment. Whatever the eventual destination, Customs and Contraband officers were required to check all incoming shipments for illegal products and controlled substances. Various scanners and detectors were operating, but the accepted wisdom was that nothing worked as effectively as experienced officers making random searches – especially i
f the searches were not completely random.
“It’s not exactly the major drugs haul you lot came to the Moon to intercept, is it?” Devis commented. “Or am I missing something here?”
Bod Kitson, one of the Customs Service’s most experienced field men, had recognized Devis as an old sweat like himself, and was not offended by the other man’s amused scorn. “Don’t be like that,” he said. “You know we can’t ignore a tip-off any more than you can.”
Theroux looked sceptical. “A major CCS task force shipped out on the strength of one Earthside tip-off?” he said. “Must have been a hell of a good source.”
“Ours not to reason why,” Kitson said casually, and returned to his painstaking search of the cargo to which he had been assigned.
“What the fuck is this?” Devis demanded, as he examined the small stone carving of a squat bird – or maybe a man in a bird mask.
“Beats the shit out of me,” Kitson said. “But it wasn’t on the cargo manifest, so it shouldn’t have been there.”
“So it’s contraband?” Theroux asked.
“Yes indeedy.” Kitson did not even bother to look up from his scanner. “That’s what it is all right.” Devis’s superior officer was too young and too obviously wet-behind-the-ears to be anything other than a minor irritation to him, and he made no effort to hide the fact.
“Where did you find it?” Theroux asked.
Devis shook the statuette vigorously, then scratched it with a fingernail. Kitson concentrated on adjusting the power on the handset a little, and said, “In one of the boxes.”
“Yeah, well, I’m glad you lads are holding the line against ugly statues,” Devis said. “It’s my view, that they are the principle threat to civilization as we know and love it.”
“Suit yourself,” said Kitson. “Your guv’nor told my guv’nor he wanted to be kept in touch with developments.”
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