Steel Beach (60 page)

So it was good that I had finally made contact, of a sort. At least, I
hoped
it was she who had left the horse, butterfly, and painting. It was still possible another sort of prankster entirely was at work here, but I didn’t think so. Each gift told me something, though it was hard to know just how much to read into each one.

The horselet was illegal, so she was telling me she didn’t give a damn about the law. The painting, when I examined the photo I took of it, proved to be of a Lipan Apache brave, not just a generic “Indian.” That meant to me that she knew the gift came from Texas…  and that I lived there? Might she come to me? You’re getting too far-fetched, Hildy.

The butterfly was the most interesting of all, and that was why I had not erected the tent but was on my way to Liz’s apartment in King City. Of the people I knew, she’d be the most likely to be able to give me the help I needed with no questions asked.

Before I got there I stopped and bought another computer. I used this one to doctor the images from my recorder, completely wiping out the background from those crucial seconds until I had nothing but the nude figure of a girl running against a black background. The impulse to protect the story is a deep one; I had no reason to mistrust Liz, but no reason why she should know everything I knew, either.

I showed her the film and explained what I wanted from her, managing to befuddle her considerably, but when she understood I was answering no questions she said sure, it would be no problem, then stood watching me.

“Now, Liz,” I said.

“Sure,” she said, and did a double-take. “Oh, you mean
right
now.”

So she called a friend at one of the studios who said, sure, he could do it, no problem, and was about to wire the pictures to him when I said I’d prefer to use the mail. Looking at me curiously, Liz addressed the tape and popped it into the chute, then waited for my next trick.

“What the hell,” I said, and got out the butterfly. We both looked at it with the naked eye, handling it carefully, and she wanted to let her computer have a go at it, but I said no, and instead ordered an ordinary magnifying glass, which arrived in ten minutes. We both examined it and found I had been right about the propulsion system. There were hair-fine tubes under the wings, which were somehow attached to the insect’s musculature in such a way that flexing the wing caused air to squirt out.

“Looks kind of squirrely to me,” Liz pronounced. “I think it’d just fall down and lie there.”

“I saw it fly,” I said.

“If that’ll fly, I’ll kiss your ass and give you an hour to draw a crowd.” She waited expectantly for my response, but I didn’t give her one. It was obvious she was being eaten with curiosity. She tried wheedling a little, then gave it up and turned to the horse. “I might be willing to take this off your hands,” she said. “I know somebody who wants one.” She tickled it under the chin, and it trotted to the edge of the table where I’d released it, then jumped down. A scale model horse in one-sixth gee is quite spry.

Liz named a price, and I said she was taking bread from the mouths of my children and named another, and she said I must think she just fell off the turnip wagon, and eventually we settled on a price that seemed to please her. I didn’t tell her that if she’d asked, I’d have given it to her.

The pictures arrived. I looked at them and told her they’d do nicely, and thanked her for her time and trouble. I left her still trying to find out more about the butterfly.

What I’d obtained from her was a strip of images suitable for installing inside a zoetrope. If you don’t know what that is, it’s a little like a phenakistoscope, but fancier, though not quite so nice as a praxinoscope. Still at sea? Picture a small drum, open at the top, with slits around the sides. You put the drum on top of a spindle, paste pictures inside it, rotate it, and look through the slits as they move past you. If you’ve chosen the right pictures, they will appear to move. It’s an early version of the motion picture.

I put the strip inside the zoetrope I’d bought at the Whiz-Bang toy store, twirled it, and saw the girl running jerkily. And I’d done it all without the aid of the Lunar computer net known as the CC. With any luck, these images still existed only in my recorder.

I went right back out to Delambre and put the zoetrope in a location where it couldn’t be missed. I set up the tent, fixed and ate a light supper, and fell asleep.

I checked it several times during the weekend and always found it still where I’d left it. Sunday night—still daylight in Delambre—I packed the rover and decided to look once more before leaving. I was feeling discouraged.

At first I thought it hadn’t been touched, then I realized the pictures had been changed. I knelt and spun the drum, and through the slits I saw the flickering image of myself in my pressure suit, with Winston in his, capering around my legs.

I had a week to think it over. Was she saying she wanted to see the dog? Any dog, or just Winston? Or was she saying anything at all except
I see you
?

What I had to remember was there was no real hurry to this project, my feelings of impatience notwithstanding. If Winston had to be involved, it would require bringing Liz deeper into my confidence, something I was reluctant to do. So the next weekend I went out armed with four dogs, one from each of the cultures in Texas. There was a brightly painted Mexican one, carved from wood, another simpler wooden pioneer dog, a Comanche camp scene, with dogs, painted on rawhide—the best I could do—and my prize, a brass automaton of a dog that would shuffle up to a fire hydrant and lift its leg.

I set them out on my next visit. As I was crawling into the tent afterwards my phone rang.

“Hello? I said, suspiciously.

“I still say it can’t fly.”

“Liz? How’d you get this number?”

“You ask
me
that? Don’t start me lying this early in the morning. I got my methods.”

I thought about telling her what the CC thought of her methods, and I thought about chewing her out for invading my privacy—since my retirement I’d restricted my telephone to incoming calls from a
very
short list—but thinking about those things was as far as I got, because as I was talking I’d stood up and turned around, and all four of my new gifts were lined up just outside the tent, looking in at me. I turned quickly, scanning the landscape in every direction, but it was useless. In that mirror skin of hers she might be lying flat no more than thirty meters away and I wouldn’t have a prayer.

So what I said was “Never mind that, I was just thinking of you, and that lovely dog of yours.”

“Then this is your lucky day. I’m calling from the car, and I’m no more than twenty minutes from Delambre, and Winston is having a wet dream that may concern your left leg, so throw some of that chili on the stove.”

“I think you gained two kay since last week,” she said when she came into the tent. “When it comes time to whelp that thing, you’re gonna have to do it in shifts.” I appreciated those remarks so much that I added three peppers to her bowl and miked it
hard
. Pregnancy is maybe the most mixed blessing I’d ever experienced. On the one hand, there’s a feeling I couldn’t begin to describe, something that must approach holiness. There’s a life growing in your body. When all is said and done, reproducing the species is the only demonstrable reason for existence. Doing so satisfies a lot of the brain’s most primitive wiring. On the other hand, you feel like such a
sow
.

I told her as little as I could get away with, mostly that I’d seen someone out here and that I wanted to get in contact with her. She saw my box of toys: the zoetrope, and the dogs.

“If it’s that girl you had the pictures of, and you saw her out here, I’d like to meet her, too.”

I had to admit it was. How else was I going to convince her to leave Winston in my care for the rest of the weekend?

We tossed around a few ideas, none of them very good. As she was getting ready to leave she thought of something, pulled a deck of cards from her pocket, and handed them to me.

“I brought these along when I found out where you’d been coming all these weekends.” She’d previously told me the story of her detective work, nosing around Texas, finding out from Huck that I always left Friday evening when the paper went to bed—lately even earlier. Rover rental records available to the public, or to people who knew how to get into them, told her where I’d been renting. A bribe to the right mechanic got her access to the odometer of my vehicle, and simple division told her how long a trip I’d been taking each time, but by then she’d been pretty sure it was to Delambre.

“I knew you’d seen something out here during the Bicentennial,” she went on. “I didn’t know what, but you came back from that last walk looking wilder than an acre of snakes, and you wouldn’t tell anybody what it was. Then you show up at my place with those pictures of a girl running through nothing and you won’t let me wire ’em or digitize ’em. I expect you got secrets to keep, but I could figure out you were looking for somebody. So if you want to find somebody, what you do is you start playing solitaire, and pretty soon they’ll come up and tell you—”

“—to play the black ten on the red jack,” I finished for her.

“You heard it. Well, at least it’ll give you something to do.” She left, casting a worried eye over her pet, who didn’t seem at all disturbed to see her go, and with a final admonition that Winston got his walkies three times a day or he was apt to get mean enough to make a train take a dirt road.

I’d already brought a deck of cards. I usually have one with me, as manipulating them is something to do with my hands at idle moments, better than needlepoint and potentially much more profitable. If you don’t practice the moves you find your hands freeze up on you at a critical moment.

But I never play solitaire, and the reason is a little embarrassing. I cheat. Which is all very well for blackjack or five-card stud, but what’s the point in solitaire?

Point or not, I eventually found myself laying out a hand.

Pretty soon I got into it. Not the game itself, than which there are few purer wasters of time, but the cards. You have to be able to visualize the order, make them your friends so they’ll tell you things. Do it long enough and you’ll always know what the next card will be, and you’ll know what the cards are that you can’t see, as sure as if they were marked on the back.

I did it for a long time, until Winston got up and began to scratch at the wall of the tent. Better get him into his suit before he got frantic, I thought, and looked up into the face of the girl. She was standing there, outside the tent, grinning down at Winston, and she had a telescope tucked under her arm. She looked at me and shook a finger:
naughty, naughty
.

“Wait!” I shouted. “I want to talk to you.”

She smiled again, shrugged her shoulders, and became a perfect mirror. All I could see of her was the distorted reflection of the tent and the ground she stood on. The distortions twisted and flowed and began to dwindle. Pressing my face against the tent wall I could follow her progress for a little while since she was the only moving object out there. She wasn’t in any hurry and I
thought
she looked back over her shoulder, but there was no way to be sure.

I got into my suit quickly, thought it over, and suited Winston, too. I let him out, knowing his ears and sense of smell were totally useless out here but hoping some other doggy sense would give me a lead. He shuffled off, trying to press his nose to the ground as he usually did, succeeding only in getting moondust on the bottom of his helmet. I followed him with my flashlight.

Soon he stopped and tried to press his face to the surface with more than his usual doggedness. I knelt and looked at what he was trying to pick up. It was a bit of spongy material that crumbled in my glove when I lifted it. I laughed aloud; Winston looked up, and I patted the top of his helmet.

“I might have know you wouldn’t miss food, even if you can’t smell it,” I told him. And we set off together, following the trail of breadcrumbs.

Feeling not unlike the hood ornament on a luxury rover—and showing a lot more chrome-plated belly than either Mr. Rolls or Mr. Royce would have approved of—I stepped boldly forth into the sunlight, almost as naked as the day I was born. Boldly, if you don’t dwell on the thirty minutes I spent getting up my nerve to do it in the first place. Naked, if you don’t count the mysterious force field that kept me wrapped in a warming blanket of air at least five millimeters thick.

Even the warming part was illusory. It certainly
felt
as if the air was keeping me warm, and without that psychological reassurance I doubt if I’d have made it. Actually, the air was cooling me, which is always the problem in a space suit, whether bought off the shelf at Hamilton’s or hocus-pocused into existence by the Genius of the
Robert A. Heinlein
. See, the human body generates heat, and a spacesuit has to be a good insulator, that’s its main purpose; the heat will build up and choke you without an outlet. See?

Oh, brother. If you had a chuckle at my explanations of nanoengineering and cybernetics, wait till you hear Hildy’s
Field Suits Made Simple
.

“You’re doing fine, Hildy,” Gretel (not her real name) coaxed. “I know it takes some getting used to.”

“How would you know that?” I countered. “You grew up in a field suit.”

“Yeah, but I’ve taken tenderfeet out before.”

Tenderfeet, indeed. I bent over to see those pedal extremities, thinking I’d have to get reacquainted with them post-partum. I wiggled my toes and light wiggled off the reflections. Like wearing thick mylar socks, only all I could feel was what appeared to be the rough surface of Luna. There was some feedback principle at work there, I’d been told; the field kept me floating five millimeters high no matter how hard I pressed down. And a good thing, too. Those rock were
hot
.

“How’s the breathing?” Gretel asked, in a funny voice I’d get used to eventually. Part of the field suit package was a modification of my implanted telephone so that sub-vocalization could be heard over the channel the Heinleiners used suit-to-suit.