The Venus Belt (29 page)

“Sure. How come?”

“I’m gonna git us pointed right, then turn everything off, includin’ life-support. We’ll take a slow roll that’ll make us look like a natural hunka rock, an—”

“Yeah? And what happens when whoever’s out there gives us a blast of his meteor-defense lasers?”

“We’re gonna pass close, but clearly a miss. Be more trouble’n we’re worth t’pulverize us. I’m plannin’ t’walk th’ rest of th’ way—an’ lookie here: while you were snoozin’, I was knittin’.” She held up a clothlike copper wire mesh, with long dangling fringes.

“Swell. Get yourself some steel wool and knit me a gun. What the hell is it?”

“Sort of a Franklin cage. Ill drape this over me an’ let it trail to th’ ground. Oughta perteck me against them medallions.”

“And make you one hell of a radar target. I’m zipping up, now; you can roll the windows down.” With the lights out and control panels dead, I b
e
gan to get an entirely different view of space travel, not at all the empty black loneliness I’d expected. The sky was awash with color, enough damn starlight to read by—although Lucy wouldn’t let me use the Gigacom—and the erratic wobble she encouraged in the car only served to make it a 360-degree panorama.

Problems and all, I discovered I was
liking
it out here, and even if ever
y
thing (by some miracle) came out all right, Laporte and the Conf
e
deracy—hell, even
Earth
—were going to seem mighty small from now on. Maybe if Clarissa was all right...

“Okay now, Winnie, git ready t’jump! Don’t worry which direction, I’ll jet around and get us headed straight. I got th’ plumbin’ fer it, an’ you don’t—good thing we ain’t got power doors on this crate.”

At her signal, I knelt on the upholstered seat and
pushed
myself through the open door into the starry void. We’d picked a spot a few moments after passing near the asteroid when the meteor watch (if any) would be letting out their breath in relief and going back to their ches
s
boards and foldouts-of-the-month.

I tumbled stupidly, hoping Lucy hadn’t lost control of herself again or something, then felt a firm manipulator on the rubbery nape of my neck. The universe swam around upright and I was looking down on the rugged darkened surface of an undeveloped asteroid.

Except for the titanic machinery, labeled
APHRODITE, LTD.

Scattered over the surface were structures that made the Great Wall of China look like kindergarten blocks. If there was any order or purpose to the assemblage of enormous beams and girders, frameworks and m
e
tallic grids and coils, it defied me. For a moment I seriously wondered whether we were being invaded by extrasolar aliens after all, and this was their idea of House Beautiful.

Then, as we drifted closer and I got the scale and angles straightened out, a pattern began to emerge, a familiarity my mind had rejected at first because it seemed so ridiculous.

I’d once held a laboratory model of this thing in my hands.

Suppose, for example, that you’d stumbled across an ordinary light bulb, made of ordinary glass with a little stem inside supporting a hair-fine tungsten filament and a pood old familiar brass screwbase at the bottom with the usual little button of solder on the end. Would you re
c
ognize it right away? Sure you would.

Unless it was five miles in diameter
...

The last time I’d seen machinery like this, it had been at the cosmic ot
h
er-end of a closet on the corner of Colfax and York. A Broach. A perfec
t
ly ordinary Broach, big enough to pour both sections of Niagara Falls through, with room to spare for the Amazon River, piranhas, crocodiles, headhunters, and all.

We drifted closer, each wrapped up in stunned amazement. No
wonder
this thing was making noises detectable half a System away! And there, a tiny, insignificant speck resting on the rock beside some sort of dwelling complex, was a sight I found even more astounding, somehow. A flivver.

Well, more of a spacegoing bus, really. Lots of room inside for plenty of passengers. And Telecom equipment.

Even room for the Voice of the Stars himself, Voltaire Malaise.

At least that’s the way it looked.

Saturday, March 20, 223 A.L.

Malaise’s network velocipede was locked up tighter than a virgin’s pa
n
tyhose. I hung there from its door-handles while Lucy sniffed around for signs of electronic activity on the asteroid. The noises we’d been homing on had gotten intermittent during the last leg of the journey. Now the titanic machinery lay silent and deserted. And so was the conventional ether. I didn’t like that, it implied we were
expected
. But then I wasn’t liking much of anything these days.

Unlimbering the Webley, I stickied up my feet and practiced looking like a crater or something equally unobtrusive. The surface dwellings had the hasty appearance of quonset huts, and there weren’t any windows—a minor break, anyway. Overhead, the Broach construction reached up like a cast-iron highway overpass, and underneath it, my imagination pop
u
lated every shadow with boogie men. Hamiltonian boogie men.

I signaled Lucy and sticky-footed over to the entrance, wondering how silently it could be cycled. Most of them make noises like a garbage truck in labor, but this, thank Vaselina, goddess of doing things the easy way, was a lot simpler, a single, relatively uncomplicated but well-sealed door, u
n
locked—for travelers needing emergency shelter—like they used to do in Alaska before the Teamsters and the Feds improved the crime rate. Not an airlock at all, which meant hard-vacuum inside, and that struck me as pas
s
ing peculiar.

Inside the corrugated hemicylinder, an eerie bluish twilight lay upon long rows of steel benches and hermetic lockers. Plenty of standing room, and at the other end, another door. The whole damned
building
was an ai
r
lock, capable of handling a construction gang in one big hu
n
dred-person gulp.

We ghosted through as silently as possible—floors and walls conduct sound, too—until Lucy caught her antielectronic frock on a tool rack. Her muffled curses crackled through my suit receiver, but she managed to get disentangled without too much noise, leaving the snarled copper mess b
e
hind her. About that time, I tripped over someone’s abandoned lu
n
chbox, and wound up bumping my head on the ceiling. It’s damned hard to tippy-toe around and keep your feet firmly glued to the ground. In a hundredth-gee, anyway.

The inner door turned out to be a double one, I supposed for times when groups in less than platoon strength wanted to come in and visit the plumbing. Experiencing a few moments of worried claustrophobia, we soon found ourselves in an air- and light-filled corridor. The whole place had the unmistakably portable, temporary aspect of a pipeline co
n
struction camp.

But where the hell were the constructors?

I unzipped my face and followed my gun, Lucy treading on my heels. Why this joint should be so deserted—

“
Urrk!
” I spun around, half-afraid I knew what was bothering Lucy. She was whirling in place like a top, while I cast wildly about for som
e
thing or somebody to shoot—somebody with a bronze medallion.

Crunch!
For the first time in my detectiveship, I’d gotten blackjacked from behind. Dumb thing to think of.
Crunch!
It hurt. I turned groggily, waving my gun, and
crunch!
I took it on the forehead just above the eye, and
crunch!
I didn’t know where that one landed, but I seemed to be a lot shor
t
er all of a sudden, realized I was on my knees, and
crunch!
I found myself wis
h
ing dimly that they’d do a more professional job, and
crunch!
I vaguely r
e
member three or four hundred more like that, then throwing up.

And endless blackness.

***

They were making me watch TV, the bastards
. This act with seals, and it must have been 3D like the Telecom, only a whole lot better; the seals kept sla
p
ping me in the face with their cold, wet flippers. Or maybe a dead fish.

Or was I?

The channel changed, I was watching the news. Pretty boring, except they seemed to be mentioning my name: “
Bear,
can you hear me now?
You idiots, how many times did you hit him?
Bear, pay attention! We’ve got the old lady, Bear. Who else did you bring with you? Where’s your ship?”

So many questions at once.

I blinked up through the blood dripping down my face. What, oh, what had I ever done to get Voltaire Malaise so angry? Wasn’t I rescuing him? Wasn’t I making nice, interesting news? Wasn’t that the smell of vomit ri
s
ing from the seat they’d strapped me to?

Well, they
were
making me watch TV, after all—probably Lawrence Welk.

“For Alex’ sake, pour another bag of water over him. And watch it this time—this is a new sweater! Bear! Who
else
did you bring with you?”

“George Strong-arm Custer,” I mumbled, marveling how it all seemed to make sense, “and the U.S. Seventh Cavalry, out there hiding in a crater. They’ll be here any minute, just in the nick of time—no, that was at the bugranch. Anyway, you’d better let me and Voltaire go. Give yourself up.”

This rhetorical extravaganza generated little violet-colored sparks before my eyes, so I decided to relax and enjoy the shower I seemed to be taking. Abruptly things swam into focus and I was looking up at good old Voltaire again. Only he didn’t seem to be in quite as much trouble as I was.

“Bear, I’m running out of patience with you. I want some answers and I want them now!”

I spat out what I hoped wasn’t a tooth and waited until I could think a little more clearly. At some far corner of’my vision, I could sense a se
e
dy-looking type leaning on a big gray filing cabinet, swinging something small and black and heavy by a thong around one finger. It’d be a little leather bag, I knew, filled with several ounces of lead shot, its contours matching the dents in my personality. I was going to groan, but I was tuckered out from calling General Custer.

Malaise broadcast another exasperated expression and addressed the sap-swinger. “Look at the blood on this carpet! Blasted
amateurs!
”

I remembered not to shake my head; it wouldn’t do any good, and it would hurt a lot. A second guy, the one who’d been slapping me with a wet towel, stammered back at his boss, but I put a hand up as far as the straps would let me. “ ‘Sokay—it’s my blood, I’ll pay for the drycleaning. Can I have a drink?” I peered at the System’s premier newscaster. “So you’re the one behind all this. No wonder you could never find J.V. Tormount! Mind telling me what ‘all this’ amounts to? You interrupted me in mid-detect.”

“Get him a drink, Harry. I hate to revert to clichés, Bear, but
I’m
the one asking questions now. Tell me where your ship is, how you got down here, and how many others there are.”

I took a deep breath. Somebody’d kicked me in the ribs when I was down, the rat; I couldn’t have fallen
that
hard in this gravity. I don’t know who loosened the straps, but I took a squeeze of something that warmed nicely, and looked around. An office, stark enough, but not as sparsely fu
r
nished as the rest of the place. Judging from the plastiboard boxes scattered here and there, Malaise was either moving in or moving out. I took another sip, not really caring which.

“Malaise, you’re gonna kill me, anyway. Do a tired old cop a favor and tie up some loose ends.”

He plastered a concerned look on his face. “I assure you, I don’t i
n
tend to have you killed, not at all.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“We’re simply going to let you die a clean, natural-appearing death.”

“Oh. Yeah.”

He sat back behind his desk and steepled his fingers. “Still, I don’t su
p
pose it’ll hurt to tell you just a bit. Mind you, don’t breathe a word of it, now. But first, who came with you besides the crippled old woman?”

“What crippled old— Oh, you mean Lucy. Two flivvers,” I impr
o
vised, “our Stanley and a Tucker. If I’m not out of here in two hours, they’re co
m
ing in—and calling the Rangers.”

He shook his head. “Try again—you expect the truth from me, don’t you? Anyway, you’ve been here far longer than two hours already.”