The Venus Belt (26 page)

“Already used up m’quota of
them
. That thing just ain’t gettin’ through. Twist it all th’ way.”

I fumbled compliantly; Lucy shuddered a little. “Well, my visualizin’s ‘bout half occluded with snow, like fringey Telecom reception. Feel a bit contrary in th’ joints, too. Step a coupa feet closer, will ya?”

I didn’t like that slur in her speech, but shrugged and sticky-footed over as far as the ground cable permitted. “Feel anything now?”

Silence.

“Lucy,
say
something!”

“
Some. Thing
.”
Otherwise, she didn’t move.

“Uh, raise your right, er, arm, please.” How was I going to live with m
y
self if she was permanently injured by this thing? Her right manipulator cranked slowly ceilingward. I twisted the rim back to its original pos
i
tion and placed it on the floor like some kind of poisonous snake. “Lucy, are you all right?”

“
Bet yer lice-infested crotch
I am
!
” She snatched the cage and all but tore it apart getting at the coin. Turning modestly, she opened her built-in gu
n
port and tucked the medallion into a recess beside the artillery. “Nobody
else
gonna start pullin’ m’strings while I got somethin’ t’say about it!”

I tried to repress a shiver. “What was it like?”

“You asked me t’say somethin’ an’ plague if I didn’t come back involu
n
tarily with a bad joke. Then y’asked me t’raise m’arm, wasn’t nothin’ I could do but...
obey
, Winnie,
me
!
That thing’s
dangerous
.
Give th’ bureaucrats a ca
r
tonload, they’d have us all marchin’ around like little tin so
l
diers inside a week.”

“Looks like Ed was on to something really nasty. What did it
feel
like, Lucy, I mean while the thing was operating?”

“
Terrible!
I was madder’n a nesta riled-up yellerjackets, Winnie, coulda kilt you cheerfully. A body under th’ influence
knows
it, hates it, an’ can’t do a flea-bitten thing about it. Second most horrible thing I ever went through!”

Now I knew she was all right—and I wasn’t about to hand her a straight line for free. I pulled a cigar out, lit it casually and enjoyed a puff or two. But she outlasted me, after all: “Okay, what
was
the first, da
m
mit?”

“The first what? Oh, that. You don’t wanna know. I’ll just say th’ next bastard nominates me fer th’ Presidency better be faster on th’ draw than I am. Was a pretty near thing—’None of the Above’ beat me only by a single vote:
mine
!”

“I’ll decide later whether to believe that. Any idea why this medallion gets only to you, and not to me or the cat?” Lysander had taken off like a scorched tachyon when Lucy started acting funny—funnier than usual, that is.

“Winnie, you disappoint me. Anybody with th’ brains of a finely diced planarian could—”

“
Thanks,
Lucy.”

“Y’see, what’s keepin’ me alive is basically th’ same technology as that brain-bore thingummy. Shucks, ain’t even a choice of co
n
trol-frequencies—that’s all determined by th’ neurophysics of th’ situ
a
tion. Anybody wired up right’s a sucker, plain an’ simple, get it?”

I got it, but didn’t have to like it. At least there were some limits to this; we weren’t all going to wind up zombies day after tomorrow. I gave some thought to sleeping in a football helmet for the next few years. At that m
o
ment the doorbell started squawking—well, a little adrenaline’s good for you—announcing the impending arrival of what passed for the authorities. They were asking for permission to come aboard.

In twelve years, I
still
hadn’t gotten used to polite cops.

Lucy went to answer. I finally found Lysander anchored to the ceiling by his toenails, batting at a small shiny object he’d discovered. I kicked m
y
self into orbit, admiring my new-found dexterity at such things, to see what had taken his fancy. Three midcourse corrections and a pair of barked shins later, I had it, an empty, pinky-size, semirimmed, nickel-plated brass ca
r
tridge case inscribed: CDM .38 AUTO. Interes
t
ing. Confederate cases are all mild-steel or titanium.

***

We found Ed’s Broach-detecting equipment spread out in the wor
k
shop where he’d set it up during Lucy’s prolonged professional absence. Once the local Civil Liberties custodians had appropriated the Ranger’s body and ta
k
en depositions from the both of us, we hurried down and Lucy started twis
t
ing knobs and throwing switches. Neither of us was surprised when the di
n
gus on the bench reported noises where there shouldn’t have been any. “Where is it coming from, Lucy?”

“Gimme a second...sure as corruption’s comin’ in strong. Yep, that’s what I thought: somewheres in th’ Nomad group—parta th’ Sargasso Clu
s
ter. Buncha nonconformist rocks sorta wander in an’ outa the ecliptic steada stayin’ neatly put.”

“Sounds like an ideal place for anarchists. Anybody out there?”

“Must be
somebody
,
with a signal like that. Coupla minin’ outfits, a few dozen homesteaders. Mighty lonely stretch of sky, till Aphrodite started buyin’ in. Sure is a humdandy of a signal—mebbe Tormount’s fixin’ t’Broachify th’ Rock of Gibraltar in or somethin’.”

On one of my infrequently productive hunches, I extorted Ed’s notes from a nearby Telecom pad. “How many of these Sargasso disappea
r
ances would you say are in that Nomad clump?”

She took the pad, punched in some instructions, and waited for the r
e
sults. “Two thirds, could be three quarters. Hard tellin’—folks ain’t too co
n
sistent or original namin’ their rocks sometimes.”

“Lucy, my semimechanical
compadre
, I think we’ve finally got a solid lead. Maybe it’s time we hit the road.”

“Gimme a chance t’rinse out a few unmentionables an’ wind th’ cat. Mind you visit th’ little boys’ room— I don’t wanna hafta stop an’ let you out by th’ roadside.”

***

It wasn’t quite that simple. For one thing, there were half a dozen very carefully worded Telecom calls to make, nailing down certain ind
i
viduals I wanted to interview. The object would be to follow Ed’s inve
s
tigations as far as we could without ending up among the missing ou
r
selves. According to Ed’s records, a neighbor, discovering my friend’s Earthside background, had pressed him to look for a pair of daughters who’d left home to stake a claim among the Nomads. When word began to circulate, other folks with absent friends and family had added to the pot. Ed found himself tempted by more valuta than he and Lucy could have scratched out in years of ord
i
nary pi
o
neering.

What made it complicated was that Belters turn up missing all the time: there are something like two billion of them scattered through the System, and anybody foolish enough to try taking census or demand identification numbers is a likely candidate for early retirement—and burial.

Everyone’s a refugee from something. Take that neighbor’s daughters, out to make an independent place for themselves. Thousands of former Czarists, Hamiltonians, cryptoauthoritarians of a hundred diffe
r
ent stripes were welcome out here as long as they minded their manners, although they were well advised to change their names. Similarly those who fled from ty
r
anny in
my
world were flocking to the asteroids, often winding up cheek-by-claimstake with the very characters they’d fled from, driven out by Prope
r
tarian progress. Add millions of American embezzlers, alim
o
ny-duckers, income-tax evaders,
Confederate
criminals fleeing restitution obligations: a mighty difficult population to analyze and reduce to statistics. People were getting a new chance out here—sometimes two or three new chances—and often failed to leave a forwarding address.

Still, Ed’s computations indicated a rash of vanishings unexplainable by such cynical and mundane considerations. Something big and sinister seemed to be going on, centered, at least statistically, on the wandering clump of minerals known as the Nomad Cluster. If there was a difference between my cosmic twin and me, it was that he’s more methodical—at least on paper. I keep my investigation schedule in my head. The last time he’d logged in with the computers here on Bulfinch, he’d decided to take off for the Nomads post-cliché.

And then he’d disappeared.

Our
first stop would be that original trouble-making neighbor, a ranc
h
er of some description named Schroeder. Proximity in the asteroids is a figur
a
tive sort of thing; Lucy told me the trip “next door” would take six hours at a standard tenth-gee. Accordingly, I gave my Webley mag
a
zines a thorough charging and checked to see there was an expl
o
sive-tipped round in the tiny chamber of my confiscated Bauer. Then I hardcopied Ed’s notes and we actually did take care of the cat and go to the bathroom (at least I did—I don’t even want to
know
what Lucy had to face in that department), then bade farewell to the old homestead. L
y
sander wanted to come along, so I found myself squeezing ridiculously past him through the front door and shutting it quickly behind me—I think I bent a couple of his whiskers.

Strapping myself into the seat of Lucy’s flivver (we’d sent the Tucker home on autopilot), a Stanley Flitemaster painted her usual vomitous shades, I watched her laying out the course. “Hey, isn’t that a little out of the way? If you plotted it across this empty-looking stretch, we’d save at least—”

“Don’t tell grandma how t’suck eggs—a revoltin’ turn of phrase if I e
v
er heard one! Winnie, that’s straight through Charlie’s Cloud; we’d get holed, fer sure. You
like
breathin’ vacuum?”

“Charlie’s Cloud?”

“Named—posthumously, acourse—fer one Charles Cato Montgo
m
ery, its late lambasted former owner.”

“Somehow I sense another shaggy story in the wind.”

“It’s them egg-salad sandwiches y’had fer lunch, boy. Seems as how, when we first started enterprisin’ this section of th’ Belt, a buncha San Fra
n
cisco greenies—some say exiled Hamiltonians, mebbe old Nort
o
nians, I dunno—declared themselves th’ Guardians of th’ Asteroids. Swamped about a thousand frequencies announcin’ they were gonna git things all neatened up an’
organized
out here. Told us t’git ready t’receive Cato’s Edict Number One.”

“And what, pray tell, was that?”

“Never rightly found out. That rock ol’ Charlie’d settled on just sorta blew up one night, spontaneous-like. Right before his big broadcast. Bullets, lasers, rockets, every kinda deestructive whatnot zeroed in from so many directions at once, we never did figger out who th’ culprits was. All that’s left of Charlie an’ his gang’s a great big swarm of little bitty pebbles. We gotta do some maneuverin’ t’avoid ‘em.”

“Sounds like plain old-fashioned murder to me. How many of those ‘destructive whatnots’ were
yours
,
Lucy?”

“Further deponent blabbeth not.
Did
run plumb outa ammonium n
i
trate that season. Near cost me th’ whole poppy field. It was a fair ba
r
gain: government’s a vice best left—if anywhere at all—back where it started, on Earth.”

“I see, and if this volunteer government had been accepted by a major
i
ty of asteroid-dwellers, what would you have done then?”

“Found some
more
ammonium nitrate.
Nobody’s
got a right t’start a go
v
ernment, Winnie. We left that—
and
typhoid
and
cholera—back on Earth when we came out here. An’ everybody’s got a right t’stamp it out. Simple self-defense.”

***

Thursday, March 18, 223 A.L.

Six hours, two Gigacom movies, and a pong tournament later (I think Lucy beat me nine out of eight), our instruments reported contact with a target still too far away to be directly visible. Of course, decelera
t
ing as we were, we’d have had to use rearview mirrors, anyway. By the time we’d matched velocities, it was big enough to take me by surprise, an enormous, swollen, rotten-looking apricot of a world whose bilious col
o
ration made even Lucy’s yellow paisley look downright tasteful.