A Song Called Youth (65 page)

Russ wished he were there, in the Open, where you could see real, though reflected, sunlight; where you could see the grass wave in the air-conditioned wind . . . 

But he was sitting in his tomb of an office, drinking ersatz coffee that tasted like sawdust mixed with thrice-used coffee grounds, and frowning at his work-screen’s list of personnel for the day’s outer-hull repairs.

It was routine, since the sabotage had begun, for Russ to approve all personnel lists for in-space repair. And he recognized twelve—count ’em, twelve!—names on the morning’s list for Repair Module 17. They were all names from the Security Risk list. And they all belonged to blacks or Jews. And Praeger had already approved the list.

It didn’t add up. Praeger had made it clear to hiring agents that blacks, Jews, Arabs, and Pakistani/Indians were to be hired minimally, if at all. He claimed they were Security Risks who couldn’t be trusted on the outside. And now he’d approved a whole shipload of them. The only Caucasian personnel were people like Carl Zantello, an Italian . . . and a notorious radical.

Must be some mistake. Praeger’s assistant must have approved the list for him, without really looking at it. Something.

Unless . . . maybe Praeger had magically gotten himself some political savvy. Realized that he was only making trouble for himself by refusing work assignments to minority groups and radic technickis.

Forget it. No way. Praeger was too pigheaded to see that racism was counterproductive.

What was he up to?

Less than a quarter of a mile from Russ Parker’s office, Kitty Torrence was wondering more or less the same thing. She was thinking, What are they trying to do?

She and Lester were in the Open. They each had about forty minutes before they were to report for work, and they’d decided to use up one of their last passes to get into the park. It was much less crowded at this hour, and in the “mornings” the breeze, carried on the badly filtered ventilator systems, was only faintly tinged with putrefaction.

They stood on a low hill, looking up into the circumscribed sky, talking. Lester’s scowl surprised her; she’d expected him to be happy he’d gotten a work assignment that day.

But she understood when he told her about Billy Glass. A white co-worker.

“Billy didn’t know what it was,” Lester said. “They told him they were forming a new technicki union, and that if he went, he stood a better chance of getting some work. But they hassled him about how he felt about things, about the dark brothers and the radics. He wanted the work, so he played along. He felt bad about it. Anyway, he went to their meeting, and there was nobody there but white technickis except there were guys he figures are undercover for Security. The Security spies talked technicki. Said it was the radics who were screwing up for the rest of us. Said they were in league with the New-Soviets, and the New-Soviet blockade is what’s put us on half rations. Said the blacks and the Jews were working together to vandalize things. They pointed out that three of the prisoners in Detention for Life Support Endangerment are black. They asked Billy and the others to take a vow: If armed conflict comes up, they got to take up arms against the people of color and reformists. Billy got freaked out. Went out the back way, came looking to warn us . . . ”

Lester and Kitty stood in silence for a while after he finished his explanation. Lester sullenly watched a helmeted guard walking by on the path below the hill. Kitty looking up at the swirl of clouds, like a hurricane’s eye, at one end of the immense green-furred tube that was the Open, wondering if Admin was really doing what it seemed. “Well, anyway,” she said, glancing at her watch, “in ten minutes you’ll have some real work.”

“Yeah. I got RM17. Lot of my friends going out on this one. Guess this is the token nigger mission.”

“Mmm . . . what they got you doing?”

He shrugged. “Going out to repair meteor damage. Pinhole stuff. They got me maintaining video comm with Repair Central. Which is kind of weird, because Judy Forsythe is going, too, and she’s the same rating. I don’t know why they need two comm techs. I’m surprised they need one.” He reached over and patted her stomach. “They won’t let you work much longer. Maybe if my job works out, you can quit right away.”

“Lester, I . . . ”
No, don’t tell him.
But it came out on its own, all in a rush: “I’m scared to keep going to work. I’m afraid one of the supervisors’ll start thinking about the pregnancy and check to see if I’m on Parenthood Monitoring. They’ll make me go to PM, and PM’ll tell me the baby’s a risk from the radiation here or something and they have to abort it and . . . ” She broke off and looked at Lester a little sheepishly.

He was looking at her like he couldn’t believe it. “Christ—I never thought about that. But—they wouldn’t do
that
—not with a baby that far along! Would they?”

“They did it to Betty Carmitzian. Her husband’s Lebanese. A Muslim. They said the baby was deformed, but . . . ”

“But maybe they murdered it because its daddy was a wog?” Lester looked so grim, it scared her.

She touched his arm—and quickly withdrew her hand. He was trembling with repressed fury. “If they touch our kid . . . ” he said softly, his eyes, glassy with rage. “If they touch you . . . I’ll abort their fucking Praeger right out the fucking air locks.”

She threw her arms around him. “Don’t get all worked up, Lester,” she whispered. “You’ll get in a fight or something. They’ll throw you in Detention.”

She felt some of the tension draining out of him as he put his arms around her. “We’re gonna get out of this shit can, baby. I promise you. Safe and sound . . . ”

She nodded into his shoulder.

“Hey,” he said softly. “I got to go to work. You too. Don’t push it, huh? Take it easy when you can.”

They took one last look around at the trees, the grass, the half-finished condo housing in Rimpler Meadows, the mist of sky, and, beyond it, the curve of more of the inside-out land overhead.

Kitty stretched. It felt good on the hill. The gravity was less here, and it was easier on her pregnancy-burdened back. She sighed and took Lester’s hand. Together they walked back to the passageway that led to Hollywood Boulevard: Corridor A.

As she went, she got heavier; her belly hung ever so slightly lower; her back began to ache . . . 

Russ had been trying for thirty minutes, off and on, to get Praeger on the line so he could verify the RM17 worker list, and he just couldn’t get through. Have to step up to his office and see him in person, maybe.

Damn screen was fuzzing over. They were having near constant interference on the comm lines. Maybe it was the saboteur again . . . 

On an impulse Russ turned to his Security console and punched for Suspect Check, asked for the transcripts of the surveillance vid: The “Echelon-style” scans.

He scrolled through the transcripts for a while, scanning the highlighted stuff Praeger’s men felt indicated “incriminating conversation.” It was mostly ordinary grousing. Like, “Fuckin’ Admin’s playin’ games with us again; they’re moving us around. Kate and I got moved to a fucking lower deck unit, thing smells like the sewage recycler . . . ”

And another, “
Libish triguttusser sinker ginny—”

Russ punched
TFT
for translation from technicki. The computer translated,
“The Lying Bitch will try to get you to sink [i.e., betray] your own grandmother.”

Big deal. Russ shrugged and scrolled onward, stopped at the transcript of a conversation between Kitty Torrence and her husband Lester.

“Okay, we ought to stand up to them, but . . . but don’t you think it’d be more, um, powerful . . . that it’d give us, you know, a better chance, if you waited till the blockade was over? So they don’t just use it as an excuse to come down on you? They’ve got to lift the martial-law alert eventually . . . ”

“Maybe . . . maybe so.”

Russ frowned. He scrolled up, scanned through the parts he’d missed.

He stopped at a remark the marginal notation attributed to the woman. “If they’re fascists, they don’t have any conscience about hurting people—maybe even
killing
people . . . ”

Russ’s gut contracted.

Well. There it was. A woman, a pregnant woman, soon to be a mother. Warning her husband about the storm troopers.

And he, Russell Parker, was one of the men she was talking about.

He’d taken an interest in Kitty Torrence. Maybe because when he’d questioned her, she made him think of his wife, who’d died eight years back. A plain woman, like Kitty Torrence, but as sweet and pure as mountain snowmelt.

Russ had intervened. He’d checked up on her, found they were going to send the Parenthood Monitoring officers around to bring her in for a mandatory abortion. He’d scotched that and managed to slip it past Praeger. For now. The baby wasn’t really safe till it was born . . . 

Was it safe even then? Her Lester was a troublemaker, all right. Smart, leadership qualities, and a radical. Bad combination.

But if he could help Lester and Kitty, he would.

And Lester was scheduled to go out on RM17.

Thinking about RM17 made him shift uneasily in his seat. RM17 had been chewing at the back of his mind for almost an hour now.

He stabbed a finger at General Communications and this time got through.

“Bucher here,” said the face on the screen. “Rear Launch Deck. Can I help?”

“This is Russ Parker, Security. I want you to hold that RM17 launch for . . . ten minutes.”

“You got it, Chief.”

Russ changed frequencies and punched for Praeger’s office.

Praeger’s image, scowling, appeared on the screen. “Yes?”

“Hey, how yuh doin’ there . . . ”

“Cut the corn pone and get on with it, Russ. I’m in conference.”

Russ cleared his throat.
Keep your cool.
“I’ve been checking the passenger list for RM17. Must be some kind of mistake—you check this list personally?”

“Yes, what of it?”

“It’s almost all Suspects and High Risks. Blacks, radics, you name it. I thought you wanted . . . ”

“You wanted me to give them more work, did you not? ‘Defuse their anger,’ I think you said. Well, I’ve done it.”

But Russ didn’t buy it. There was something more. Even in the two-dimensionality of the videoscreen he could see it in Praeger’s face. “Just exactly why . . . ”

He broke off, cursing as the screen fuzzed over with snow.

And then, gaping, he stared at another face forming in the visual white noise . . . a face forming out of the boiling field of white flecks.
Rimpler.
Old man Rimpler.

Russ had the uncanny feeling Rimpler was looking out at him. At him, personally. Was seeing him, was that instant staring back . . . 

“Russ . . . ” A small, raspy voice from the speaker.

Startled, Russ leapt back, overturning his chair. He fell on his ass.

The screen laughed. “Russ!”

Russ got to his feet. “What the hell!”

“
Russ!”
It was Rimpler’s voice—but Rimpler was dead.

Russ hit the reset button on the console. The screen flickered. The snow returned. So did the face, a face of white-on-white, with empty eyes.

Russ went to the door, thinking,
Get help.
Part of him wondering,
Help against what? What are you scared of? A glitch on a monitor?

But he slapped the open panel on the door. It didn’t open.

He swore and pulled open the access box in the wall to one side of the door, reached in, threw the emergency open switch. The door slid aside.

He started to step through—

The door slammed shut on him, pinning his chest, wedging him in, crushing. A vertical bar of hot pain in his chest. He yelled and tried to push the door back. The door’s mechanism whined.

One of the guards came into the hall outside his office, stared for a second, then ran up to help him. Together they pressed the door open. Suddenly it switched off. It was as if it had stopped trying. It slid meekly into the wall.

“What happened, sir?”

“I don’t know. My whole damn office went haywire. Get tech security up here.”

“Yes, sir.” The guard loped away.

Russ turned to look back into his office. He saw that one of his wall cameras had moved. It was a camera used by his comm system to pick up his image for transmission—and it had shifted toward the door. The camera moved only when it was electronically commanded to. He had given it no such command. So why had it moved?

To follow him, when he’d gotten up to go through the door . . . 

To follow him so that someone—whoever it was—would know when to slam the door on him.

He rubbed his chest. It was bruised. It stung. Was the attack a practical joke? Or had someone really tried to kill him?

On the Colony’s rear launch level, A-Deck, the deck foreman looked at his watch. Russ had said ten minutes. It was now fifteen.

His screen pulsed, and Praeger’s image appeared there.

“Bucher!”

“Yes, sir?”

“What’s the delay?”

“Chief Parker said . . . ”

“He’s out of line. Launch it now!”

“Yes, sir.”

Bucher turned and looked out the foot-thick tinted glass window into the Launch Deck area. The seventy-foot graymetal bulk of Repair Module 17, roughly beetle-shaped, was sitting in its deck collars, its pilot windows lit up, its launch lights glowing red.

Bucher hit a button, and the launch lights went green. He hit another button and spoke into a mike extending from the wall. “Clearance, 17.”

“Copy,” crackled from the speaker.

The enormous air-lock doors slid aside. There was no whoosh of air: the launch area was already pumped airless. The collars unlatched from the beetle’s legs, and it drifted up. Small jets on its aft sent it sliding neatly into space.

It became a black insect-shape snipped out of the field of stars, and then slipped like a shadow to Bucher’s left, out of sight, as it followed the curve of the hull back to where the temporarily sealed punctures were.

As the doors were closing behind it, Bucher saw something odd.