The Venus Belt (28 page)

“It was all done with mirrors, Winnie. That suit of hers had an extra layer of shielding. That’s why I said they’re after us, specific-like. Othe
r
wise—”

“Right—why the extra medallion? You win, but let’s at least leave a message for the Patrol.” I slid my arm back into the suit, braced for even greater agony. Surprisingly, the pain completely vanished. I tried the limb out every whichway, and it seemed all right. “You rustic types certainly pi
o
neer in style,” I commented as I poked around the room. “Don’t think they had a piano as big as this one, even aboard the—
Sonofabitch!
”

Lucy turned. “Thought you came out here aboard th’
Bonaventura
.
Whatcha got there, son?”

I turned the holoframe so she could see it. A hand-written inscription floated in the air below the double portrait:
TO DADDY WITH LOVE, HIS GIRLS.

“Ain’t it th’ one on th’ right tried t’steal yer luggage on Ceres?”

“Yeah—now in stasis at Dr. Scott’s.” I consulted Ed’s notes. “Disa
p
peared shortly after staking claim with her sister—guess where. Maybe we should
skip
the rest of the interviews and go directly to the heart of the ma
t
ter.”

“Th’ Cluster?”

“Wherever that Broach-noise was coming from. Ed seemed to think—”

“But not often enough. One thing, though: how’m I gonna keep from gettin’ poleaxed by ever Tom, Dick, an’ Alex got one of them m
e
dallions? It’s getting downright monotonous!”

“I just stomp ‘em, Lucy. You’re the technician.”

***

“Stop foolin’ with that
antique.
Gonna ventilate us both fer sure.” We’d just finished turnover on the first leg of our journey. I was exami
n
ing the weapon she’d taken from the knife-happy hit-lady.

“Lucy, this could be important: Olongo was assaulted with an Ame
r
ican .22; I nearly got shot with an American .25. . .”

“An’ Trayle blown away with an American .38. There’s yer pa
t
tern—it’s them pest-ridden countrymen of yers!”

“Country
women
. That’s what I thought, but, Lucy, CDM is a
Mexican
headstamp—
Cartouchos Deportivos,
or something like that, and the .38 S
u
per Automatic is a hell of a lot more popular there and in Central America than it is Stateside. Now there’s
this—
”

“Another little bitty beanshooter. So what?”

“So it’s a
Russian
beanshooter, to be specific, a 9-millimeter Makarov, and to get one, you have to have the right initials: KGB.
That
’d be a hell of an alliance, my world’s Soviets, and your very own Hamiltonians!”

“
Smile
when y’say that. We fought two wars provin’ it ain’t so. Mebbe it’s just somebody collects little tiny guns. Don’t like t’hurt folks
too
much.” She patted the monstrous Gabbet Fairfax safely reinstalled at her side.

“Be serious! This means there’s a
second
secret channel to my world, somebody who uses brain-bores and makes people disappear. Som
e
body—”

“Stupid enough t’plant a Broach out here where nobody in
your
Sy
s
tem’s
reached
yet. Winnie, yer deducin’ yerself right over th’ brink. Wait’ll we see what’s what ‘fore y’start theorizin.”

“Oh, yeah? Well, tell me, Lucy, what did they get
you
with? What cal
i
ber?”

A long pause. Then: “I been afraid you’d ask that, son, it’s downright humiliatin’: .309 diameter, 71-grain copper jacket. In other words...“

“A .32 ACP—the only machine gun
I
know of that uses it is a Czech
o
slovakian antique, the Model 60 Scorpion. Lucy, I’m going to go right on ‘theorizin’ ‘ all I like. Clarissa’s
missing
, and I keep thinking about her with a brain-bore fastened on her head, being
used
.” Neither of us spoke for a while.

“Winnie, how about findin’ us a movie on that Gigglycom of yours. One of them East Clintwood things y’keep tellin’ me about.”

***

Friday, March 19, 223 A.L.

Twenty hours later, we stopped to take on more reaction mass and life-support supplies at another puffed-up asteroid similar to Navigation Rock. Instead of just one explosion,
thousands
had been set off at the right stage of plasticity, creating a vast, complicated “apartment house” of fo
a
my rock, a myriad of interconnected bubbles.

Inside the planetoid, in addition to fuel-storage and reservoirs for air and water, there were artificial environments as varied as the many Earth provides—plus many more invented simply to please and amaze (and co
l
lect hard money from) the passing traveler. The last couple of thousand miles, the proprietors of this astroknott’s berry-farm had beamed their Tel
e
com brochure our way: forests, jungles, deserts, icecaps, Ma
r
tian rills and crater bottoms, depths and shallows suited to marine voy
a
gers.

Lucy had noodled with the flivver’s transponder on the theory that
we
didn’t
want
to advertise. She paid for our supplies in blessedly an
o
nymous cash. I didn’t hear any complaints from the management. We hadn’t any choice, however, about deflivvering while the cabin was being serviced. We went inside, determined to maintain as low a profile as we could.

Some trick with Lucy dressed up like a big paisley mailbox.

“Somethin’ I been meanin’ t’check on anyway,” she told me. “Wanna see a genuine prehistorical critter ‘fore we take off again?” We floated at the intersection of a dozen tubular tunnels in the rock, each one co
l
or-coded to avoid confusion. Theoretically.

“What are you talking about?” I looked nervously over my shoulder, imagining Hamiltonians, CIA agents, and Communists at every bend in the tunnel. There were a
lot
of bends. This wasn’t any time for sightseeing, though I confess I’d grabbed the opportunity to replenish my
own
life-support: a box of native-grown cigars securely tucked beneath my arm.

“Don’t wanna hurry anybody loadin’ Single-H, Winnie. That stuff’s downright tempermental. You remember how I said I wanted livestock out on Bulfinch? Well, there’s more calories on th’ hoof in this place than you ever saw in yer life! Gonna stand there gawkin’ or come with me?”

I shrugged and seized one of the cables snaking through a convoluted purple tunnel. Due to a modest spin and the varying composition of the asteroid, there were more gravitic anomalies here than on a roller coas
t
er—something like being inside a loop of Salvador Dali’s intestines. At another complex intersection we took a sickeningly greenish fork, which dropped us at the entrance to one of the enormous bubbles that filled most of the vo
l
ume of the asteroid.

“Lucy, I think someone’s following us! Two of them, taking the same branches we did. Somebody in a red smartsuit, and a big, solid-looking guy.”

“Aww, yer just nervous, Winnie. It’s th’ stimulatin’ environment. Now come on, an’ mind where y’step—they got meadow-muffins in here’d swa
l
low up th’
Bonaventura
!”

PLEISTOCENE PLAZA
. At least that’s what the sign said. It was chilly inside, and took a little while for my suit to adjust. An artificial sun was shining brightly, though, and beyond the transparent plastic tunnel we found ourselves in, it looked just like a prairie day in Colorado.

Except for the glaciers.

There they are, Winnie! Gimme ten years, I’ll have a herd of my own!” She pointed out over the rolling plains.

“Elephants? Lucy, you should be ashamed! Who ever heard of eating elephants?”

“What you think that burger was you had for lunch? They give milk, too, gallons an’ gallons of it—though y’have t’use a mighty long-legged stool! Better look again, Winnie, those ain’t elephants at all.”

I held my hood in front of my face and stepped up the magnification. Great curving lengths of ivory, massive, heavy heads and bodies.

Hairy
heads and bodies. “Lucy, those are
mastodons!
Huge, woolly ma
s
todons!” I couldn’t believe it. Had the Confederacy’s time-line diverged b
e
fore I thought it had?
Thousands
of years before I thought it had?

“Them’s mammoths, Winnie. Imperial mammoths, cloned from a little bitty test tube fulla tissue frozen in Siberia. Keepin’ ‘em here t’build up their immunities—there’s a lotta diseases developed on Earth since they went extinct.”

I watched a group of half a dozen animals wandering slowly across the plain. “That’s why the plastic tunnel, then, although I wouldn’t want to be out there with them, under any circum—”

“Wouldn’t be no problem, Winnie. Look close here, by th’ ground. See that plastic mesh about eighteen inches up in th’ tall grass? Plenty of foot-room, but it keeps ‘em from runnin’. Otherwise, they’d be practically flyin’ around in
this
weak a pull.”

“Like Dumbo, huh? Mammoths—that’s really neat.”

“Yeah, an’ let that be a lesson to ya. Here’s a critter th’ world woulda never seen agin, resurrected by the very science your United Statesians think is
sooo
nasty. Same science gonna give me back m’body in another few months.”

“Your body? You mean you don’t have to go on like—”

“Like Dorothy’s Tin Woodman? Not as long as there’s nice thick juicy elephant steaks t’gobble, an’ whiskey t’be drunk.
Never
,
if we can find Eddie in one piece! I’m plannin’ on bein’ a
person
agin, steada comic relief!”

I knew that tone of voice. Someday there’d be tears to go with it again. If only Clarissa—

“
Hey you!
“ Down the tunnel a figure was running toward us, waving a long, deadly looking artifact. He shook it at us, hollering his lungs out. “Stop, I say! Stop!”

“I
told
you we were being followed! See, there’s the other one, right b
e
hind him! I’m getting tired of this!” I went for my gun. Suddenly a metal arm clamped my wrist.

“Not in here, Winnie. If you break th’ glass, it could kill all th’critters!”

I hesitated a moment, then ran the other way, Lucy following. At the end of the plastic tunnel another well-sealed door awaited us. Lucy started pushing buttons while I drew my Rezin, standing guard. The assassins pounded down the tunnel a hundred yards away.

“Got it!” Lucy whisked me through the door and pushed it closed, punching in more numbers. Somewhere a siren started wailing, accomp
a
nied by slamming sounds on the other side of the door. “That’s th’ fire alarm. Tunnel’s sealed. I imagine they’re takin’ quite a bath in there by now. Let’s get back to th’ flivver.”

***

Thus we were off again in a streak of light and a cloud of dust and a hearty “Hiyo, Sowbellies”—silver presently being on the skids, specul
a
tion-wise. Every now and again I gave Ed’s Broach-detector a look, and Lucy adjusted our course minutely to center the disturbance in our nav
i
gation sights.

I took a shower and tried to nap and fixed some sandwiches and watched Lucy watching me eat them. We played tic-tac-toe and nim and Botticelli and watched Mike Morrison and Dirty Harry and Diana Rigg kill all the baddies. I thought about our own baddies and how close they’d come to getting us back at the mastodons, then cleaned my Rezin (the bugranch had dulled its finish noticeably—some bugs!) and played with the Makarov and bit my fingernails and argued with the pilot.

Space travel could stand some improving.

Finally, the Nomad Cluster swelled before our instruments. At an ave
r
age of a thousand miles apart and a mile in diameter, there wasn’t much to eyeball through the windows. Lucy started trying to match one of the rocks with the paratronic screeching of the Broach.

“That’s th’ one, Winnie. Gotta be.” She held up a ‘com pad in my face.

“You mean that little one down in the corner?”

“Naw, that’s just a crumb from that last sandwich of yers. This one here, Bester 9656, accordin’ to th’ registry. Biggest rock in th’ Cluster, if y’call a dozen miles big. I’m gonna do a little sneakin’, now—don’t wanna announce our arrival. Can y’stand buttonin’ up yer suit?”