by Joe Haldeman
It was twenty-five double-kays, he said cheerfully, 2.8 hours. Might as well relax and enjoy it.
I wasn’t as good at calculations as Maria, but I could divide 25,000 by 125. At our top speed we would have covered the distance in 200 seconds. How the mighty have decelerated.
Maria woke up moaning and I put her back to sleep with the popper. Blinky spends a lot of time at 0.1 gee, so he has an actual floor with a rug and an Earth-style bunk, which he offered to us. I said I didn’t think I could sleep, so he said fine: wake me up in an hour and ten minutes. He’d been up for more than a day. He let her have the bunk and curled up on the rug.
Maria had thrown off her blanket and didn’t look good. All of her skin was swollen, angry red, and there were blisters on her cheeks and breasts. The doctor had said to expect blisters and leave them alone. Her skin felt hot, so I didn’t replace the blanket.
With an hour to kill, I turned on the monitor and started flipping through menus. Novysibirsk News was refreshingly empty: notices of financial transactions; shuttle schedules; a cranky letter-to-the-editor column. Nik Morenski complained that Ceres had become unlivably crowded and we ought to start getting together about an immigration policy. Feedback was 18 percent for, 73 percent against, 9 percent who gives a shit. The editor said that Morenski was a second-generation native, so don’t pay any attention to him. Cosmic rays had rotted his brain.
In the classified advertisements, under “Announcements,” was a notice that the Stileman Foundation would pay a million pounds for the capture and Earthside delivery of Dallas Barr. Nice to feel wanted. At least it didn’t say “dead or alive.”
Which brought me back to wondering what we were going to do. If it were only me in the equation, I would say hole up and wait, at least for a few years. Briskin seemed too unstable to keep a complicated enterprise going for long; surely not everyone on the Steering Committee was a homicidal megalomaniac; once it was generally known what lengths he had gone to, he’d be out.
But I still had hopes of converting Maria back to life. That meant we only had a couple of years, tops.
Our letter accusing Briskin of murder went to all forty-seven members of the foundation’s Board of Governors. None of them had done anything, except Briskin, who got his hands on a copy and presented it as evidence of my paranoia. Possibilities:
1.The governors all are members of the Steering Committee, and we’re dead meat.
2.The Steering Committee got to them before we did, warning them that I’d gone berserk and so forth. Briskin is one of them, after all; he’s been on the board since the thirties.
Besides, news of the Yugoslavia murders would have gotten to them before the letter, along with the supposition that I had murdered two or three people in cold blood. It could be that even without any intervention from the Steering Committee, the board members would dismiss the letter as the raving of a madman.
(Of course, there was always the possibility that not just Briskin, not just the Steering Committee, but everyone on the board as well—they were all crazy! Maybe there was a time bomb in the Stileman Process that unhinged you after a certain number of years. So where did that leave me?)
Maybe I did sound like a lunatic in that letter. I wanted to check it. Eric could have pulled it out of his memory instantly; but he was over next to Maria, and I didn’t want to disturb her. Some news journal had printed the text of the letter, I remembered, probably NorthAm NewsChex. I started sorting through its last few weeks’ editions, checking everything that had “Dallas Barr” in the text.
I turned up in the oddest places, including a food column. This was after they “discovered” I had poisoned all those people. A columnist with a warped sense of propriety had contacted Alenka Zor’s caterer, and reproduced a last-meal menu.
A Sports Illustrated writer had had herself dropped at the spot where the taxi sank, along with a spotter in a boat, and had swum to shore. She reported that it would have been an easy job for a person with my athletic background. Since she had done the swim naked, she earned a picture and paragraph in NorthAm.
Eventually I found the letter. I had to admit its tone could be interpreted as paranoid. If you already knew I was a dangerous psychopath, it wouldn’t do anything to change your mind.
“Lookin’ for the million pounds?” Blinky was reading the screen over my shoulder. “He might be gettin’ here anytime.” He reached past me to open a cabinet door, and pulled out a glass bottle with a Wild Turkey label, but with a colorless fluid inside, not whiskey. “Couldn’t sleep.” He pulled the cork and tipped the bottle toward me. “Homemade vodka?”
“No thanks. Wonder why they think he’d come out here.”
He shook some vodka into a jigger glass and let the glass fall while he replaced the cork. I supposed his habits were geared for this tenth-gee, or for Ceres, at a thirtieth. Things do take their time falling. “They’re jus’ coverin’ bases. They don’ know where the hell he is.”
He had a funny way of drinking: jerk the glass away a couple of centimeters; lean forward to sip as the vodka creeps over the rim; then bring the glass back to its original position. Didn’t spill a drop.
“He’s probably still in the Conch Republic,” I said. “Safest place for him to be. No sense in leaving.”
“Novy’d be safe, too,” Blinky said. “Except for that million. Lotsa guys go after that. Lotsa guys sell their mother for that.”
“I guess.” Including Blinky, one assumed. “You know, we’ve been following it all the way out. We were in cislunar when it happened, the murders.”
“You’re Stilemans,” he said, and I nodded; most people who travel space for fun are. “Know the guy?”
“Met a few times. Didn’t seem like a maniac.” In for a penny, in for a pound. “We were drinking buddies for a week forty, fifty years ago, in Australia. Felt like I knew him pretty well, then. I just don’t buy it.”
“Me neither. Fuckin’ foundation. They want his ass, set him up. Don’t kid yourself. Between them an’ the Mafia, an’t a dime’s diff.” He took another three-step sip. “Every ten years I go down, give ’em my fuckin’ money, get the treatment. Hustle back here.” He made an economical gesture. “Don’ own this crate. Me an’ Big Dick, he’s a Stileman, too, an’ we’re five years outa phase with each other. Papers on the crate, it belongs to a third party who don’ exist. So I run it a couple years while Big Dick does the mike down at Flight Control. Then we switch. More money up here, more fun down there.”
“No trouble making your million?”
“Hell, no. Couple of years, then jus’ spend it. Lots to spend it on down there.”
“You like it up here, though.”
“Oh yeah.” He sat down, an odd contortion that involved gripping the Stiktite with the sides of his slippers. He had let go of the jigger and sat with his hand out, waiting for it to fall. He spoke carefully. “I like it. You meet the most interesting people.”
He looked at me, and didn’t blink. He knew. “Bet you do.”
He caught the glass and considered it. “While I was hookin’ up the winch, I took th’ liberty of checkin’ out yer stores. Didn’ take nothin’, you don’ mind.”
I nodded.
“You got that crowdpleaser, buncha shatterguns. I could get you real money for them.”
“Sure.”
“Good weapons for Novy. Do the job but don’t punch any holes in the wall. You make a hole, y’know—they push you through it.”
“That’s why I brought them.”
“I saw the pictures in the news, that Dallas guy used a shattergun on the … what do they call ’em? Woman who kills for a living.”
“Hit slit.”
“Right. Blew the door out. Blew it right across the fuckin’ parking lot. Wouldn’t happen here.” He blinked twice. “Every place people live here is a pressure vessel. You know engineering?”
“Some.”
“Tension, compression. Everything flexes. Didn’t flex, it’d leak. So sha
ttergun’s okay.”
“Thanks. I’ll remember that.”
He finished the jigger and licked the inside in a curiously delicate way. “If I was Dallas Barr, I’d be real careful. Ten percent of the people here are Stilemans, and some of them are really sweatin’ for their million. The others are all sweatin’.”
“Yeah. If I meet him, I’ll tell him not to wear a name tag.”
“You do that.” He flexed and stood up like a genie, floating, legs crossed, and put the jigger and the bottle back in the cabinet. “Little shuteye.”
“Get you at 1400.”
“Thanks.” He put a toe down to the floor, pushed off with a little Stiktite rip, then rose and fell in a graceful parabola toward the rug near where Maria was sleeping. He landed horizontally with his eyes closed.
The Come & Get was the first commercial establishment that most people saw in Novysibirsk, since its only competitors on the northern end of the corridor were a mining office and a general store with no windows. The Come & Get had windows.
“My goodness,” Maria said weakly. She had spent two days in the orbital aid station, and her skin was still burning from the frostbite. What she saw made it hotter, blushing. “This wasn’t here last time.”
“I heard they liked tattoos,” Dallas said. There were three naked women in three display windows. One was doing a crossword puzzle, one was watching the cube, and one was watching Dallas, intently, with a schoolgirl’s dimpled smile. Her legs were parted to expose the symmetrical tattoo of a black hairy spider, four jointed legs extending down either thigh, green jeweled eyes mounted somehow over the pink slit of the mouth.
The Come & Get
101 Tsiolkovski
Ceres
Novysibirsk
A Long Standing Sexual Establishment
If you’re sick enough to want it,
we’re sick enough to sell it to you
Basic Menu
American
R 100
French
50 (deetee 75)
Greek
125 (female 150)
British
150
Hydraulics
125
First aid*
200
Fist aid*
250
Bad boy*
150
Dress-up
add 10%
Extra partner
add 75% het, 50% home
Extra customer
add 125%
Watcher supplied
add 20% (cube R 75, quality guaranteed)
Just watch
varies
Zerogee
partner’s r/t plus 10% plus R 60/hr. prorated
Gravity
add 50%
Anything else by arrangement. Anything.
No Tipping!
* Liability release required, pervert.
“Is that sexy?” Maria asked.
“It’s … different.” The woman watching the cube uncrossed her legs and faced them, drawing up her knees so they could see that she had both male and female organs. “So is that.”
“I didn’t know people came like that,” Maria said. Dallas looked at her and decided she couldn’t have meant it as a joke. He took her arm gently and steered her on down the corridor, each careful step a slow glide of six or eight meters.
They had left most of their trade goods and the gold in a bonded warehouse in Ceres-synchronous orbit, next to the aid station and the repair facility where Fireball was being patched up and overhauled. Dallas carried a bag with weapons, the diamond, all their currency, and one precious bottle of Glenmorangie Scotch whisky. At his insistence, Maria wore a stinger clipped to her belt; he wore the holstered crowdpleaser. She carried the reader with Eric under her arm.
It was 0745, and the corridors were just starting to fill up with people on their way to this and that. Traffic along Tsiolkovski, the main avenue, sorted itself out into five narrow lanes. At both edges of the corridor was a strip of Stiktite; window-shoppers and cautious people tiptoed along there, putting one foot down before lifting the other. There was a center lane marked with red and white stripes, where people moved fast and took their chances, trying not to hit the ceiling four meters up, or the people coming from the opposite direction. Dallas and Maria had crept along the Stiktite at first, but now were loping down the moderate-speed lane next to the candy-striped one, feeling clumsy but looking graceful.
The main corridor, Tsiolkovski, displayed an interesting mix of residences and shops, the high-rent district. Entrances were ornately decorated and most of them featured ostentatious displays of elements imported from Earth: a large round antique stained glass window; a massive hand-carved door from Spain; a bonsai garden; a Vegas brothel holo. Most of these belonged to Stilemans who, like the Barons they’d met in adastra, made their money here but spent most of their time on Earth. Some of those places were for rent, which was going to be their first stop. A public hotel didn’t sound like a good idea for a person with a million-pound price on his head.
Dallas took a map card out of his breast pocket and checked it with one eye. “Second left up here.” They almost went down in a heap, trying to stop and turn, but managed, laughing. They turned down a side corridor, Seventh, that opened between a French- or New Orleans-style residence and a greengrocer who was setting out a display of hydroponic fruit, too large and too perfect.
The address of the rental agent was – 141 Seventh, which meant his door was 141 meters down Seventh, to the west of Tsiolkovski. The entrances became less ostentatious as you went along, and the agent’s was next to last, ten meters from the grey slag wall that ended the corridor. The sign hanging over the entrance said PETER’S PIECE OF THE ROCK—0900–1700, but the door was open, so they went in. The place was completely devoid of decoration: white walls, green Stiktite floor, two hard chairs facing a desk with a keyboard. There was a vague mint smell, probably air freshener. A rear door opened: Peter Quinn.
“Goz Donato, Goza Vaughn. Come in, come in.” He was a small bent bald man, evidently in his late seventies. “Thought you might be on the first shuttle, so I opened a little early. Sit, sit.”
Sitting was not something you did spontaneously in a thirtieth of a gee. Rather than hover expectantly over the seat, they followed the agent’s example and grabbed their chair arms with both hands and forcefully inserted themselves.
“Sunburn, gozpoda?”
“No, Mr. Quinn. Frostbite; I had a suit malfunction.”
“Oh my. I suppose everybody tells you how lucky you are. To be alive. Isn’t that absurd?” He unlocked the keyboard and tapped one button; the wall to his left became a two-dimensional picture of a living room. The furnishings were simple but the view was interesting, a panorama of the asteroid’s surface.
“This is one thing I have; I have, oh, forty-eight properties you could rent for maybe up to a year, some of them for a few years. How long are you staying?”
“We don’t really know yet,” Dallas said. “We want to look around, check out some other rocks. We may be staying here; we may be using Ceres just as a home base while we explore. For how short a period of time can we rent?”
“Short is no problem. Short is expensive, but it’s no problem. Can I be direct?”
“Sure.”
“I’m in this business fifty years, here and dirtside. You learn to size people up, what they think they can afford, what they can afford. Let me guess.”
Dallas spread his hands.
“You’re both Stilemans. Believe me, you don’t have to be one to spot one.” He raised a finger. “But that does not mean you’re going to spend a lot of money. People don’t make money by spending it, not spending it on apartments. People make money by … well, to be polite, by driving a hard bargain.”
“By screwing other people,” Dallas said. “To be impolite.”
“Definitely. But like that verb, it works best if the other party also feels he or she has gotten a good deal. G
ood business, the kind of business I like to do, is when this is actually true: you get a bargain; I make an unseemly profit.”
“So what do you have in mind?” Maria said.
“Look at this place.” He tapped two numbers on the keyboard. “Is this nice, or what?” Like the previous one, it had a view of the glorious sky and bleak landscape, but the furnishings were plush, greys set against vibrant colors, pleasingly coordinated.
“Is that a holo view?” Maria asked.
“No, it’s a real window. Upstairs living room. No problem with solar flares; the bedroom, kitchen, and dining area are all under two meters of rock. Automatic alarm system, you got ten or fifteen minutes to walk downstairs.”
“So what makes it a great deal?” Dallas said.
“The woman who owns it is gone for five years, maybe seven. I’m supposed to close it up, shut down the life support. Put everything in storage that doesn’t like hard vacuum. That’s a fixed expense. You rent the place for five minutes or five years, it’s all profit to me.”
“What you mean is, she didn’t say you could rent it.”
He shrugged. “She didn’t say I couldn’t. You sign a bond saying everything will be the way she left it, or you pay through the nose.”
“I don’t know,” Dallas said. “Signing a bond doesn’t bother me; we aren’t going to damage anything. But it’s her property. It can’t be legal.”
“This is Novysibirsk.” He smiled a display of teeth much younger than he was. “What is this word ‘legal’?”
“That’s literally right,” Maria said. “If her bond with him didn’t forbid renting—”
“Even if it did,” he said, “and I didn’t get caught, there would be no problem. I wouldn’t do it, ethics, but if I did—no problem! This rock is either devoid of civilization or the pinnacle of it, depending on your point of view.”
“Which is your point of view?” Dallas asked, smiling.
“Devoid. But who needs civilization?”
“So you must have several properties like this,” Maria said.