Floating Worlds (50 page)

“Maybe.” Hanse was coming toward them, his face oiled with sweat. Clearly he had lost his argument with Cam. Paula moved away.

“Are you getting along all right?” Hanse said. His little eyes gleamed. “Rodgers is treating you well?”

“Very well,” she said. “A perfect gentleman, Captain Rodgers. The flower of Martian manhood.”

“I’m going to Luna for a few days. We’ve had a tempting offer from some friends of yours.” He was watching her intently, unblinking. The creases of his face were marked in talcum powder. “The Styths have two flag officers of mine they’re willing to exchange for you.”

“You’re going to do it?”

“I need those officers. You’re outstaying your usefulness. As much as I enjoy our conversations.”

She turned her face away from him. That was what the medal had meant. Her hand rested on the desk and she beat her fingers on it. She would go back to Styth with nothing, at their mercy, like a slave. Sold like a slave. Hanse stood, his uniform jacket bulging over the pad of his stomach.

“If everything on Luna goes as I expect it will, I won’t be seeing you again—we’ll exchange off Ceres in an Earthish month. I’d like to feel we parted friends.” He put his hand out to her.

Paula bounded out of her chair. She felt too large for her body, a scream coming up from the gut, a bursting rage. “Get out.” She looked around for something to throw. Hanse, scrambling, was already at the door, calling for Rodgers. She threw the ashtray at him. He went out fast and the door slammed.

She was not ready for Rodgers; she barricaded her door with the desk. They spent two hours taking the door off the hinges. She went three or four times around the room, which she knew now inch by inch. When Rodgers came in she was sitting on the bed, resigned. He hauled her down to the little room and tied her up to the wall so she could neither sit nor stand straight and left her. The worst was waiting for him to come back.

Slumped against the wall on her throbbing legs, she thought with alarm of the exchange Hanse was planning. The Styths wanted her back because of what she knew about the Middle Planets. Hanse certainly realized that. He would never send her to them in any condition to serve them. Her half-bent knees gave way and she fell, hit the rope that fastened her arms to the wall, and jerked them almost out of her shoulders. Grimly she pushed herself back up to a crouch. This was all Hanse’s idea, so she would complain and he could rescue her from Rodgers and make her trust him. She closed her eyes.

The first thing she saw in Cam’s office was the large painting by Jacques-Louis David of Marat, dead in his bath. The oil hung directly over Cam’s desk. Paula stopped near a chair to the side of the room, looking around, while other people filed into the room. On the paneled wall beside her a dragon-robe was spread out like a pair of scarlet wings, feathered in gold thread. The room was cluttered. Pictures hung thick as scale from the walls. Here and there among the living people statues stood. Paula sat down in the chair behind her. Surrounded by soldiers, she rubbed her fingers nervously together, her eyes on the painting of the dead revolutionary above the desk.

The wall below it split open. Cam came out of her private lift. Two trim young men followed her. The soldiers in the room straightened rigidly to attention. Cam was neat as a mannequin. Her hair gleamed. An aide held her chair for her. She spoke to him, sitting down, and he laughed at what she said.

“At ease, gentlemen.”

In unison they relaxed. Paula looked curiously around at their scrubbed, shaven faces. In their midst Bunker stood with his jacket unbuttoned, his cheek blurred with beard. Cam folded her hands together.

“He defiled the uniform, putting you into it.”

Behind Paula, Rodgers muttered, “In she goes.”

“Are you drunk?” Cam said to Bunker.

He shuffled his feet. “Slightly.” He glanced up at the clay-colored corpse on the wall above her. “Not enough.”

“You’re a disgusting little man.”

“Thank you. I was hoping you’d appreciate my modest efforts.”

“Cut his balls off,” Paula said. “Make him walk the plank.”

Cam swung back and forth in her chair. “It makes me sick to see him in a Martian uniform.”

“Shall I take it off?” He pulled one arm out of the sleeve.

“You’re out of uniform,” Cam said, “for which you’ll spend the next five days in solitary.”

Paula cheered. She clapped her hands together three or four times, the only sound in the crowded room. Cam threw her a hard look. “Do you want to join him?”

“Then we wouldn’t be in solitary,” Bunker said. He shrugged into his jacket.

“Complete solitary,” Cam said. “In the closet. No food, no water, no lights. No liquor.” She sat back, smiling. Bunker said nothing. Alert, Paula settled deep into her chair, watching him, thinking about what he had just done. Cam’s gaze swung toward her. “Why aren’t you cheering, baby?”

“I hope you got me down here for some purpose,” Paula said. “Other than making an ass of yourself, which is less entertaining than it used to be.”

“Rodgers, the same for her. Five days.”

Rodgers was standing behind Paula. He said sharply, “Doctor, you’re going to put them together?”

“That’s what I said. Put them both in the closet. Maybe they’ll tear each other to pieces.”

“That’s immoral. General Hanse—”

“Joe isn’t here,” Cam said. She took a sheet of clear paper from her desk and held it out to one of her aides, who brought it up the room to Paula. Cam was lighting a cigarette. She said, “Read that, Paula.”

“You’re crazy,” Paula said.

Cam smiled at her. Her lip-paint was the color of venous blood. “Six days in the closet.” The aide was holding the paper out to Paula, who ignored it. Bunker was paying no attention to any of this.

“Seven days,” Cam said.

Rodgers said, “You can’t put them in together, for Christ’s sake, it’s immoral.”

Cam gave him an instant’s angry look. She stared at Paula. “Eight days.”

Paula took the page. Around the room, the men stirred, commenting to each other, impressed by Cam’s techniques. Paula turned the plastic around. The message was in Styth. When she read it, her heart quickened.

“It’s a declaration of war,” she said. “How formal.”

“Read it,” Cam said.

“To Mars, by the rAkellaron. We have warned you in many ways to submit to us before justice brought you into its course. Now you have violated the Earth, our mother, and wakened her children dead even in dreams. If you resist us, we cannot say how you will suffer, only that you will suffer.” She handed the page to a soldier, who took it to Bunker.

“What tripe,” Cam said.

Bunker was reading through the paper. “I don’t follow this
dead even in dreams
.”

Paula was chewing the skin around her thumbnail. “The old heroes. You know they’re all descended from heroes.” Krita was ringing his bell again. It was a stronger declaration than she had expected: very strong.

“It sounds as if they’re committing the whole Empire.”

“Yes.”

“They double-crossed you,” Cam said to her. She tapped a cigarette on the desk, her holder in the other hand. “They’re using you as an excuse. I told you that bastard would do this. Why the hell didn’t you listen to me?”

Paula got up. “Come on, Rodgers. The dark is more edifying.” She started toward the door.

“Paula! Get back here until I dismiss you.” Cam bounced up onto her feet, poised behind her desk. At the door, Paula wheeled.

“I dismiss you.” She snapped her fingers at Cam and went out the door. Someone caught her by the arm: a soldier.

“Let her go,” Rodgers said. He pushed her on across the hall.

“Dr. Savenia—”

“Dr. Savenia is a civilian.” Rodgers hurried her into the vertical.

They went up three flights in silence. Beside her Rodgers stood with his hands clasped behind him, his feet exactly eighteen inches apart. He took her down the hall to the little room.

“I’ll call General Hanse,” he said. He shut the door on her. The lock turned over.

She had never been here before without being tied up. There was little to explore. Three strides across by four strides down. The room was without windows. While she was walking around it, the door opened and Bunker was put in with her. The door shut and the light in the ceiling went out.

“Is this place wired?” she said, in the dark. She sat down with her back to the wall.

“I don’t think so.” His voice passed her, going down the room. “Why couldn’t you keep out of this?” He sat down against the opposite wall.

“You gave me to Hanse, you can help me get away.”

“It won’t be easy. Probably impossible, in fact. You’d be better off staying here.”

“Have they been working you over?” she asked.

He made an indefinite sound. For a long while they sat in the dark without saying anything. Finally, he said, “I would love to pay them back. More than anything. I’d pass up getting away to pay them back.”

“I’d sooner get away.”

Another silence fell. She got up and walked up and down the room, trailing her fingers over the wall. The seamless plastic felt cold to the touch. There was no way out but the door. Maybe she had misjudged his intentions. Maybe he had no way to escape. She sat down but in a few moments she started to pace around the room again.

“Don’t step on me,” Bunker said.

She went around and around the room in the dark, avoiding him. Her mouth was dry with thirst. For eight days she would get no water. Finally she sat down in a corner. Hours seemed to pass, or maybe just minutes. Bunker got up and went down the room to the door. He returned to his place against the wall opposite her.

She managed to doze. He shook her awake.

“Let’s go. The guard’s left for a few minutes.”

Muzzy with sleep, her heart pounding, she followed him to the door. She could hear a faint metallic click, like a combination lock being dialed, and then the door opened. The bright light hurt her eyes. They went into the long empty corridor.

“Hurry.” He took her arm and pulled her along, and they ran down the corridor, past the vertical and past the door to her room. The guards were all gone. Many of the overhead lights were out. It seemed to be late at night. At the end of the corridor was a door marked EXIT. Bunker led her through it onto a stair landing.

“Sssh.” He put his finger to his lips. The stairwell was painted glossy gray. She looked up overhead, up the stairs, and went to the rail and looked down.

“Which way?”

He started down. She took her shoes off, to keep from making noise, and went after him. The stair treads chilled her bare feet. They passed another door, marked with a big red 5.

Below them, voices sounded. The hollow of the stairwell distorted them so that she could not make out the words. Bunker stopped. She went by him, cautious, down past the door marked 4, and he came after her. On the third-floor landing she put her head out over the railing.

On the next landing down was a table, with three men sitting at it. She held her breath, disappointed.

“Hey, did you hear this one?” said a man on the landing. “How do you tell when an anarchist is lying?”

She raised her head. Bunker was on the steps above her. She shook her head at him.

“You got me,” another Martian voice said, below her.

“His lips are moving.”

There was general laughter. She climbed back away from it, and Bunker turned and preceded her. At the third-floor landing, he pushed the door open onto the corridor where Cam’s office was.

“What—”

He beckoned her after him. The corridor was dark except for a single light over the vertical doors. Her feet sank into the deep carpet and she stopped to put her shoes on. Bunker went ahead of her to Cam’s door, fastened his magnetic key to the lock, and bent to fiddle with it. He had given up on escaping and was going for his revenge.

She went at a trot down the hall to the vertical. There had to be some way out of the building. She could not take the vertical down for fear of meeting someone else, but there was certainly some other way. A chime rang over her head, and she jumped. The vertical arrow flashed. Someone was coming to this floor. She sprinted back down the hall to Bunker, who was just sliding Cam’s door open. They went into the office.

“What are you going to do?” She made sure the door was locked again. The office was dark, but as she spoke Bunker turned on a light midway down the room.

“I didn’t ask you along,” he said. He circled behind Cam’s big desk to the big wheel-file against the wall.

Paula looked up at Marat, hanging on the wall over the door to Cam’s private lift. The wound in his chest was like a mouth, like his slack mouth. Bunker was trying to open the drawers of the file with his key. She sat in Cam’s chair and tried the desk drawers.

They were unlocked. She yanked them out and turned the contents over in a heap on the floor. When she tipped over the deeper drawer on the bottom shelf, a mass of photographs and slides fell out, and a little white egg rolled after. She picked it up.

“Dick.”

He turned, and she held Sybil Jefferson’s eye under his nose. He sucked in his breath. When he put his hand out to take the eye, she closed her fingers over it and put it in her pocket.

Bunker pushed the file box. “I can’t open this. It must be important.” He gave the box a savage kick.

Paula took the cigarette lighter off the desk and knelt by the pile of papers and film on the floor. “They killed her.” She held the flame to the edge of a photograph.

“That’s your diagnosis, is it?” He punched the call button on the vertical several times with his thumb.

“You need a key for that, too.”

The flames caught and ran over the heap of papers. The holographs burned better than anything else, and she took one by the corner and torched the rest. Bunker was pushing and rocking the waist-high round file cabinet.

“I have an idea. Help me.”

She helped him push the box up onto two legs. It fell over onto its side and he caught it before it toppled onto its back.

“Now.”

The door of the vertical slid open easily, exposing the empty shaft. They propped open the door with a chair and pushed and groaned and heaved at the file box until it rolled like a wheel between the wall and the desk toward the vertical. Paula’s fire was beginning to light the carpet. She rushed around ahead of the file, pushed the chair through into the shaft, and held the door open, and Bunker guided the rolling file through the gap. It crashed below. Bunker leaned after it. He braced the door open.