The Iron Maiden (23 page)

The railroad station was in the basement of Ybor, below the residential section, where gee was slightly high. It seemed cavernous, because it was mostly empty and poorly lighted. Gee and illumination combined to provide an illusion of great depth at the outer rim of the bubble. The cars stood beside the long loading platform, the tops of their wheels barely visible in the crevice at its edge. The glassy windows reflected the things of the station, making the whole scene seem stranger yet.

“Ooo, I like it!” Hopie exclaimed, clinging tightly to Hope's hand. She was now almost as tall as Spirit herself, and had young breasts and dawning appeal of feature, but she wavered back and forth between child and adolescent. “A real old choo-choo train!”

Hope let the girls board first, with Hopie and Ebony helping Shelia get her wheels across the gap between platform and train floor. He turned at the entrance platform, before the lock closed, and smiled and waved to the crowd, and they cheered. Then he and Spirit entered the coach.

It was like an elegant dayroom, with swiveling couch-chairs and ornate pseudowood tables and fluffy curtains on the windows. Light descended from hanging chandeliers. The floor was lushly carpeted, with protective plastic over the spots where wear was likely to be greatest.

“Please take your seat, sir,” the porter said. “If you dim the lights you can see out the windows better.”

Hopie plumped into a seat next to Hope and clasped her hands. “I want to see us pull out!”

There was a jolt; then they began to move, ever so slowly, seeing the platform with its burden of people pass behind. Gradually they accelerated, so that the platform moved back at a walking, then at a running, pace. The vertical support pillars started to blur. Their weight increased because they were moving in the direction of the bubble's rotation, adding to the effective centrifugal force.

“I like this part,” Hopie said, her hands holding tight to the arms of her couch-chair.

There was a warning whistle, a double note. Then the coach flung out of the station, going into free-fall.

In a moment they were out of Ybor's gravity shield. Now they felt Jupiter's real gravity, diffused more than halfway by the train's own gee-shield, to reduce it to Earth-normal.

They got up and toured the train. The dining car was domed, with a restaurant that seated as many as eighteen people; they could peer out to either side and above, seeing the sights while they ate. There was also the sleeping car, with neat cubicles containing wall-to-wall beds; Hopie could hardly wait for evening to come so she could try it out. There was a conference car, with an office-like section and equipment; Shelia's files were already ensconced. There was a playroom car, set up for games and entertainments ranging from pool to commercial holovision; Hopie's mouth fairly watered at that. There was a baggage car, used also for supplies. And there was the caboose. This was where the train's own staff resided; they ate and slept there when not on duty, staying out of the way of the paying clientele. Naturally Hopie found it the most fascinating one of all, perhaps because it was tacitly forbidden; they were not supposed to intrude on the crew's privacy.

The seeming wheels of the train opened out into propellers that drove it forward through the atmosphere.

They could also see the railroad tracks ahead. These were actually two beams of light, used to guide the train on its course; as long as the engineer kept it between those tracks, all was well.

Satisfied with the tour, they returned to the dining car, where the cook was serving lunch. For this first meal aboard the train, all eight of them gathered in the dome restaurant where they could further admire the distant smoke through the curving ceiling. Theoretically Hope was the leader and Megan his consort, while Ebony, Shelia, Coral, and Mrs. Burton were mere employees, but they had long since abandoned pretense in private; they were more like a family. Hopie excitedly told the others about the wonders of the engine, and they listened with suitable expressions of interest. At first the cook and waitress (in other cars she became the maid) evinced muted disapproval of this un-hierarchical camaraderie, but slowly they relaxed, perceiving that it was genuine. A long train journey, like a space voyage, was a great leveler; social pretensions faded.

But the joyride rapidly became something else. Hope returned from the male restroom with Casey, the engineer. They had narrowly missed being electrocuted by a wired urinal. The train was booby-trapped, and that was unlikely to be the only one.

Mrs. Burton dismantled the urinal trap and discussed its details with Coral. They would have to check the entire train before any of the party could relax. “Meanwhile,” Coral told Hope firmly, “you stay with me, close, Governor. I will taste your food first; I will use your facilities.”

“But the sanitary--”

“You want privacy at risk of life?”

He looked helplessly at Megan, but she merely nodded agreement. “Coral is only doing her job,” she said. She was pale, not from the notion of another woman staying so close to her husband, but because of the immediate threat of death.

“Good luck using the urinal,” he murmured to Coral. Hopie tittered, but she too was shaken.

It went well beyond that. When they were ready to sleep, Coral took Hope's whole bed apart, remade it, then stripped and climbed in herself. “Now, wait--” he protested.

Coral smiled. “No seduction, sir,” she reassured him. “Maybe chemical on sheets, or radiation; I know if I feel.”

She climbed out and stood for a moment, nude, considering. She was well formed; her Saturnine skin was silken, her torso slender and extremely well toned, her breasts not large but perfectly shaped, her waist so small that her hips and posterior became pronounced. Coral was every bit as pretty in her fashion as her reptilian namesake, and as lithe, and her face was of matching quality. She certainly had not had to go into this sort of work; any man of any planet would have been glad to marry and support her. But she was her own woman, and matchless at her profession.

Hopie had of course seen the inspection; Hopie saw everything. “I wish I had a figure like yours,” she said wistfully.

Coral laughed. “Yours will be more like Spirit's.”

Hopie considered that, and smiled. “That's good enough.” Spirit felt foolishly flattered.

Next day the quest for traps resumed. Coral stayed so close to Hope that she often touched him, suspicious of everything. But it was not only that. “I am jealous of Megan,” she confided when he looked askance.

Spirit nodded to herself. The woman had no animosity to Megan, nor would she ever betray Megan's interests. She was merely in love with Hope, as all his women were. As Spirit herself was, in her twisted way.

Still no traps turned up, and that was bad because they were sure they existed. All of them felt the tension, especially Hopie. “I don't want anything to happen to you, Daddy!” she cried, hugging him tightly.

“Or to you,” he said, kissing her on the forehead. Indeed.

“Her, too,” Coral muttered. That was a corollary aspect: If Megan had his love as wife, Hopie had it as daughter, and the others were excluded. They suffered an amicable jealousy of any such attachment.

Hope went to the men's room to wash his hands, and Coral went with him. He picked up a bar of soap and began to unwrap it.

“Me first,” Coral said, taking it from his hand.

“Harpy,” he muttered. She ignored him, wetting her hands and squeezing the bar through them, pausing to smell it.

“No poison,” she concluded, satisfied.

“Unless it's just male poison,” Hopie put in, laughing. She had followed them in; there was no longer any such thing as privacy for Hope.

It was a joke, but Coral stiffened. “Sex-differentiated enzymes--it just could be!” She took the bar and hurried away. Soon she was back with grim news. “It was, sir. I ran it through my chem-kit. Affects only Y chromosome, so no effect on female. But you--if not death in hours, brain damage in days.”

Hopie seemed about to faint. Spirit put her arms about the girl, comforting her, though Spirit was privately appalled by the narrowness of the escape. “I thought it was humor,” Hopie whispered.

“That enemy not laughing,” Coral said grimly.

The train approached the site of the first campaign speech. As they passed through the maneuvers for entry to the station, Hopie was at Hope's elbow, trying to tell him something. He was distracted and not paying attention; this really was not the occasion for the indulgence of childish prattle. “You'll have to let me go now, honey,” he told her gently. “I have a campaign address to give.”

“Daddy, you aren't listening!” she exclaimed, and it became apparent that she was crying.

“I'm sorry,” he said sincerely. “I'm listening now.”

“Daddy, I had a dream, sort of,” she said, her tears abating. Sunshine followed rain very quickly, with teenagers.

“A dream,” he agreed.

“Sort of. I don't think I was exactly asleep, so--”

“A vision,” he said. “I have them sometimes. Maybe it runs in the family.”

She smiled gratefully. “Maybe.” It was a running joke: How could an adoptive child inherit a genetic trait?

But behind it was reality: as Spirit knew so well, Hopie was blood kin, and might indeed share traits. “But this was a bad one.”

“Sometimes they are. But often there is truth in them.”

“Daddy, I saw you start to talk to the crowd, and then--then it all blew up. Daddy, I'm terrified!”

They discussed it, and Hope agreed to be alert for anything explosive. But there was nothing. He took the mike, to address the small crowd--then backed off, signaling Mrs. Burton to turn off the mike.

Coral started forward, concerned. “Sir, is something--”

Mrs. Burton switched off the mike. “What's on your mind, Governor? Surely not stage fright!”

“Let's try a test record,” he whispered. “One with my voice.”

“Sure.” They had made several recordings of single-issue spot discussions for backup use in case his voice got strained; that was another standard precaution. She put one on and turned on the mike, while the crowd outside looked on curiously. They retreated to another chamber.

“Hello, friends,” his voice said on the loudspeaker. “My name is--”

The mike console exploded. Metal shrapnel blasted into the wall and cracked the shatterproof pseudoglass window. Hopie screamed.

In a moment there was silence. The broadcast chamber was a shambles; anybody in it would have been damaged beyond repair.

Coral nodded ruefully. “Voice-activated bomb, coded to your voice only,” she said. “Sir, I failed you. I did not anticipate that.”

“Fortunately Hopie did,” he said, putting his arm around her heaving shoulders. “I think you saved my life, cutesy.”

“Oh, Daddy,” she said, sobbing into his shoulder.

In due course Mrs. Burton rigged another mike, one not booby-trapped, and he gave his address from the shambled chamber. He kept Hopie with him, holding her left hand with his right. “Someone tried to assassinate me,” he told his audience firmly. “Don't worry; it wasn't anyone from here. My daughter anticipated it and saved my life; but for her I would have had trouble addressing you now. I think she deserves to participate.” And he lifted her hand in a kind of victory gesture.

The crowd cheered so hard that the train vibrated, and Hopie blushed. No one had ever cheered her before. But Spirit was concerned. The girl's vision had saved Hope; was it sheer chance, or did she have some power of vision? Was it a real ability, or an early signal of the kind of internal delusion Hope was capable of?

Hope's first presidential campaign address was a great success. But all of them were sobered: a deadly anonymous enemy was out to kill the candidate, and only a girl's nervous anticipation had prevented it.

This time.

During the long hours of intercity travel they had to have a distraction, as much for Megan's and Hopie's benefit as Hope's, so they played cards. There were all manner of computerized games available, of course, but none of them had any present taste for these. They had been checked safe, but it was too easy to imagine a unit blowing up when a certain configuration was achieved, such as the code word Hubris. And, despite all the advances in game-craft, the old-fashioned physical cards still represented an excellent all-around repertoire of diversion. They taught Hopie how to play partnership canasta, and she and Hope tromped Megan and Spirit. Then Hope and Hopie played two-person games, like Old Maid, War, and Concentration, but even these palled in time, perhaps because Hopie, with the wit and luck of the young, kept winning. In the afternoon they were at the point of staring out into the Jupiter atmosphere, watching the cloud formations just above the train, as they were augmented by the drifting column of train smoke. They fancied they saw shapes and pictures there--goblin heads, potatoes, dragons' tails, and such. Imagination was wonderful stuff, and Hopie's was akin to Hope's.

Then Casey passed by, and they roped him into a game of imaginary sightseeing. He turned out to be good at the game. “You can still see the old molybdenum mine, there by the cattle herd; it's reclaimed land now, converted to pasture.”

“Brown cows,” Hopie said. “With white faces.”

“You got it,” Casey agreed.

Spirit nudged Megan. The three spectators were evidently starting to see those sights. That was the sort of thing Hope could do, in the lighter stages of his madness. Did Hopie share the ability?

“Oh, see the flowers!” Hopie exclaimed. “Pretty yellow ones!”

“Yeah, they got golden pea here, Indian paintbrush--wild flowers galore, in summer. We'll be passing nigh Enver real soon; see, we're crossing the South Platte River; got to follow the river channels to find the best passes.”

Hopie peered ahead. “Those mountains look awful tall,” she said. “Can we really get over them?”

“Don't have to,” Casey said grandly. “Got us a bridge--and a tunnel.”

“A bridge and tunnel?” she asked, awed.

“There's a chasm just before the face of the last peak,” he explained. “Train has to go level, or at least stay within a three percent grade. Can't yo-yo up and down the jagged edges. So the track bridges across the valley and bores right through the peak. You'll see.”