The Venus Belt (24 page)

It was hard to say for sure, but for some reason Malaise seemed a touch paler. “You
know
I don’t report on crap like that. It’s stale inform
a
tion, and won’t be relevant again until the signals are translated—if there’s anything to translate there. They haven’t been, have they, Roger?”

Now I saw why Benton looked unhappy all the time. He stared down at his feet and sighed. “No sir, this is just a new—”

“Then take that thing away and don’t bring it back until somebody can tell me what it
means!
” He turned toward me as Benton slunk away. “
Am
a
teurs!
Sometimes I think that kid’d be better off hustling used fliv
v
ers.”

I eventually got through to the end of my story, more or less in s
e
quence. I finished up with Koko’s—well, defection you might call it.

“Featherstone-Haugh, you say?” He seemed genuinely startled. “First the President of the Confederacy—we should have known about that—and then his...?”

“Niece. I don’t know what the hell is going on, but— Listen, those space signals really give me the willies, too, I—”

“Bear, I misjudged you. You have a professional’s eye for detail, and you’re not too bloody bad at doping out the angles. But we’re going to have to cut this short.” He readjusted the straps of his special chair, the same one he’d used for the beamcast. “My back is killing me, and I’d be
t
ter try to get a little sleep. You and Mrs. Kropotkin, here, help yourself to the bar. I’m going aft.”

And that, as they say, was that.

***

Wednesday, March 17, 223 A.L.

Next day, Lucy and I were outbound again from Port Piazzi in a bo
r
rowed Tucker Thracian, heading for Bulfinch 4137. It was going to be a longish trip, and I’d been watching movies on my Gigacom for about three hours when I noticed it was newstime. I tuned the flivver’s Telecom, wo
n
dering if Voltaire would mention anything I’d told him yesterday. The pi
c
ture blossomed into life and there was the
wrong
familiar face:

“—Roger Benton, substituting for Voltaire Malaise. At the top of the news, Voltaire Malaise, 83, veteran fifty-year journalist and Managing Ed
i
tor of the Ceres Central Evening News,
has vanished without a trace
.
Network s
e
curity police report signs of a violent struggle in the missing bea
m
caster’s apartment.”

And speaking of violent struggles, that’s exactly what Benton was going through now, trying to suppress his sheer, undiluted glee.

Bulfinch 4137 was a chunk of carbonaceous chondrite whose main e
x
cuse for existence seemed to be holding about a billion assorted craters t
o
gether. Call it an incompetently squashed-out hamburger patty two miles across, maybe half that thickness; eight thousand acres that Lucy and Ed (when he was in) called Home Sweet Homestead.

One face was splashed by an enormous impact crater, fully half the a
s
teroid’s diameter, around which rambled their makeshift-looking house, a miniature landing port, and the Mine All Mine, surrounded by nondescript heavy machinery. The obverse of the little world, sporting four gigantic si
l
very water storage tanks, was carpeted in nitrogen-fixing corn and wheat, hemp, and Lucy’s cash crop, opium poppies.

She nosed the rented Tucker toward the plastic atmospheric envelope, aiming for a big red-decaled bull’s-eye: “Won’t be a minute now, Winnie. Watch out th’ window.”

There wasn’t much to see until we made gentle contact. Then, the ta
r
get-marked portion of the envelope became a bulging funnel under our e
n
gine’s steady pressure, sweeping backward from the hood ornament to swa
l
low us up until we were hanging only a few hundred feet above the rocky surface. Behind us, the plastic funnel was closing in, the bull’s-eye shrinking to a dot. Suddenly, the material beneath us ruptured, admitting our little spaceship without losing a single cubic foot of precious atmo
s
pheric gas.

And now I knew what an amoeba’s dinner feels like.

Lucy hovered a while to let me watch the plastic stalactite shrink sk
y
ward like silly putty in reverse.

Then she put the nose up and set us neatly in a landing area gouged out beside the big crater.

“Now listen, boy, don’t let the pretty scenery deceive ya—ain’t ‘nough gravity out there t’anchor down a postage stamp. Step out too smartly, you’ll wind up bumpin’ yer head on th’ sky. An’ it’ll snap y’back hard enough t’break yer whatsit. Use yer sticky feet, an’ have a care.”

I nodded absently. Through some optical chicanery, the sky was a bea
u
tiful rich blue. The asteroid’s unimproved surface was a dirty grayish-brown, but in scattered crater bottoms, bushes, grass, and at least a hundred spi
n
dly, ridiculously skinny trees relieved the eye. We slipped out of the flivver and began picking our way toward the house, which was bigger than I’d thought, at least a hundred feet on a side, and even then, dwarfed by a pearly dome that stood behind it.

Lucy went walking on her hands, along a chiseled stairlike trail to a broad landing. There an odd three-legged contraption rested, a Tho
r
neycroft utility Rockhopper, according to the nameplate, painted, to suit mine hostess’s lack of taste, a garish yellow paisley. It was parked before a cluster of rugged concrete structures and a more finished-looking transl
u
cent h
e
misphere, which together made up the ranchhouse.

“Started out with that there pour-fab,” Lucy said, pointing toward one of the massive cement cubes. “Hadda cast it centrifugally in freefall an’ set it down real gentle-like. Lived there fer three solid years. It’s a barn now—an’ there’s m’Stairway to th’ Stars!” An impressive metal tower on the barren crater’s central peak seemed to reach up even through the atmospheric e
n
velope. “Usta mount th’ shackles fer th’ Drexler lightsail that drug this rock into our orbit—”

“
Your
orbit?”

“Sure. Shucks, Winnie, so many planetoids out here, they’re practically free fer th’ takin’. It’s the good
locations
cost money. I was gonna use that tower fer an elevator an’ dockin’ platform, but they went an’ invented d
i
latin’ plastics.” She chuckled. “Been thinkin’ of upholsterin’ the crater in ti
n
foil—gimme th’ biggest sun-powered barbecue in th’ System.”

“So that’s why you haven’t done any landscaping out there. Looks like the backside of the Moon.” Lunatic image of our satellite mooning the rest of the System—maybe I just needed more sleep.

“Well, it wouldn’t do t’make
everything
look like Earth, would it, Wi
n
nie? All th’ same, someday they’re gonna figger out how t’localize gravity, an’ when they do, that crater’s gonna be m’
lake.
Be real pretty, don’tcha think?”

More visions, this time of trout bumping their heads on the sky, but I kept them to myself.

We entered the house through an ordinary door, but there was ga
s
keting around its edges and an emergency canister of oxygen hanging on the wall beside a fire extinguisher. This room, one of the concrete blockhouses, had a transparent ceiling and seemed to be a greenhouse or conservatory. Lucy stopped suddenly. I avoided bumping into her, but wound up flailing around in the air until she fished me down.

“What’s the matter, Lucy?” I shook my head, trying to reorient m
y
self.

“Shh!” She glided forward cautiously, drawing her .50 caliber pistol. I slid my Webley out of its holster and followed her example, creeping softly. There was something wrong, all right: half the plants, petr
o
leum-bearing cousins of the latex tree, were uprooted from their beds and plastered in a dried-out tangle against the ventilation grillework. Even where the giant “seedlings” were still in place, the soil and its retainer-netting had been gouged out brutally.

“Some uninvited worm-turd’s been diggin’ fer treasure!” Lucy p
a
trolled the aisles, grumbling angrily to herself as she pushed the freefa
l
ling greenery aside. At the end of fifteen minutes, she hadn’t found an
y
thing to shoot at, so we repeated the performance two short flights of stairs higher, weapons at the ready.

Here, in the dome, the clutter and destruction were only a little less o
r
ganic in character. Furniture, bric-a-brac, plastic documents floated ever
y
where in the negligible gravity, stirred up by our passage. A skeletal steel framework divided the plentiful space into several lofts and levels, the bo
t
tom being the living room where we had entered. Immediately above our heads were the library computer and Lucy and Ed’s office areas.

Which is where I found the body.

Now I’ve been finding bodies all my life—or looking at them after ot
h
er people found them. That’s what a homicide cop gets paid for. That, and finding out who done it. I’ve seen them in every state of post-demise, from warm and pink to green and gooey; every single one of them made me want to throw up.

I often got my wish.

In that respect, this customer wasn’t any different; the only thing kee
p
ing me out of a state of reverse-peristalsis was thinking about the mess it’d make in a thousandth or a millionth of a gee or whatever this was. The guy was hanging, face to the outer wall, by a nail or screw where his open smar
t
suit hood had caught as he’d gone sailing by it. No blood, but his cr
a
nium was sort of squishy, the result of violent contact with an anvil or some re
a
sonable facsimile. What made him unique was that he was a
cop
,
or as close as asteroidal anarchism comes to it: I recognized the tannish program Ran
g
er Trayle’s suit had worn. The patch above his breast pocket said “Rot
h
bard’s Security Patrol.”

“Lucy? Put that sofa down somewhere and get up here.”

“Sure thing, Winnie.” She didn’t bother with the spiral ladder. As she passed my level in a snowstorm of magazines and sheet-plastic, she shot an arm out and grabbed the railing. “Whatcha got now, Winnie—Oh, my lights and liver!”

“It’s more a matter of
who
, Lucy. Recognize this guy?”

She dragged herself inboard and took a closer look. “Why, that’s Ranger Trayle, Win. Somebody’s stove his head in—with a real stove, looks like. An’ he was such a nice young feller.”

“I’ll take your word for it. This isn’t the Ranger Trayle I talked to. If the body weren’t so fresh, I’d guess he died just a little before my convers
a
tion—with an impostor—well over a week ago.”

“No takers. Yer fergittin’ his smartsuit, Inspector—though a good pathologist could still...Oh, well, guess I better call th’ Patrol. Reckon they been wonderin’ about him.” She slid toward the edge of the balcony.

“Reckon. And take a lesson learned the hard way—make sure you r
e
ally know who you’re talking to. Rothbard’s a plump, curly-headed little guy with—”

“With a chuckle like a horny-toad in heat. Gotcha.”

Call me sentimental, the main thing on my mind was what a space-going ambulance would look like. Make that a hearse: this former person was way beyond the talents even of Confederate medicine, and only his smartsuit was keeping him from making an olfactory spectacle of hi
m
self.

Ain’t science wonderful.

Customs being what they are, I had no legal obligation to leave things as I’d found them. Besides, I was as good at this sort of thing as any Confe
d
erate pseudocop, and considerably more experienced, given the comparative crime rates of the U.S. and the N.A.C. I gave the d
e
ceased a once-over. In the pockets of his suit (which garment, eerily enough, had begun fading back to neutral silver-gray), I found his patrol ID, a little hard money (the richest kind), and various personal effects uninteresting to anyone but his next of kin. The weapon on his hip, in my opinion, marked him for som
e
thing of a tenderfoot—which made some sense of his present lamented condition: a plasma gun, the very
la
t
est
thing, and by all accounts not entirely accurate or reliable. No matter, he’d never even had the chance to take it from the holster.