The Venus Belt (6 page)

“The simian population of the other Earth is doomed without our help, but this is little justification for tampering with human affairs in that conti
n
uum. Yes, let us lead chimpanzees and gorillas to a better world, but let the established civilizations go their own way. We have better things to do. At least that’s the way it looks, Thursday, February 25, 223 A.L. This is Vo
l
taire Malaise, Ceres Central, good night.”

Trouble is, nobody could possibly round up all the wild simians. Vo
l
taire hadn’t bothered mentioning porpoises and killer whales—the cetaceans of both worlds, civilized for millennia, had gotten things straightened out right away. Likewise, teach a few apes to speak, and in a few years they’d be rounding
themselves
up, and not just to escape.

After all, it’s their planet, too.

Koko pried herself away and disappeared into the saucer-shaped shu
t
tle. I turned to Clarissa, who looked pretty, pink, and pregnant, the kind of woman no sane man would be leaving. “Well, I—”

“Oh, Win, promise me you’ll—”

“Honey, I’ll eat
all
my galoshes and wear my spinach every day.”

“Idiot! Take care of yourself!” She threw her arms around me, hot tears trickling into my tunic collar. “I want you back, and so, no doubt, will your daughter...
I love you so!
”

I grinned, nuzzling her hair. “Yeah, and I’ve been trying to figure out why for years. I was a worn-out, half-senile old—”

“Oh shut up! Three reasons, silly—no, not
those,
well, yes, those, too, but—because you make me think, and because you make me laugh—”

“That was simple. All I had to do was show you my—”

“And because you make me horny! You’d better be back soon, or I swear I’ll come looking for you!”

“Clarissa, I thought we had that settled.”

“Well, you know what I mean.” She bit her lower lip to keep it from trembling. That, and her little red nose, suddenly made her so appealing I almost started crying myself.

“I hope so. And I love you, too—don’t ask
me
why, or I’ll never get on that shuttle. Now don’t stay to wave good-bye, I hate that. And it’s cold out here! Take care of our little girl; I’ll try to get back here before she does, okay?”

She nodded, wiping her eyes. “Oh! I almost forgot...” She handed me a gift-wrapped package the size and shape of a paperback book. “And the Captain sent you this.” Another small parcel, heavier, tied up in plain brown plastic. “I wouldn’t let him bring it himself, the cold’s bad for his—”

“And it’s bad for
yours,
too. Get downstairs where it’s warm!” I kissed her hard and turned, not daring to look back. Even in the dead of Rocky Mountain winter, the shuttle’s gaily-painted hull shone cheery red and white:
LAKER SPACEWAYS ELECTROJET
.

Good thing I brought my own lunch. I crossed the catwalk protecting the impeller grid, climbed the three-step boarding ladder, handed Olongo’s Webley to the stewardess, who racked it with a hundred other assorted pieces of artillery, and clumped around the aisle to find a seat beside my assi
s
tant. She’d brought a brown-bag lunch herself.

“Hey, Boss, want a banana? Frozen clean through, I’m afraid, but I brought an extra one for you!”

The shuttle began to vibrate, lifting slowly. Clarissa stood outside in the cold, obedient as ever, tearfully waving me good-bye.

Six gees ain’t so bad, I can take ‘em standing on my head.

Which is more or less the way it felt.

Laporte vanished below us in the clouds as the electrojet was driven skyward by an outboard ring of high-voltage impellers, basically similar to those in my Neova, but powered by a ground-based microwave array. I
n
side, seats were arranged in concentric circles beneath a transparent dome. In the center, a pylon stretched through the roof: elevator or stairs to the control module; on Laker Spaceways, probably the ladder.

Fifteen minutes later, we’d gained a hundred fifty-odd thousand feet, where even anaerobic bacteria have trouble catching their breath, and where the impellers ended their usefulness. The major drag on a bullet, I’m told, isn’t so much gravity as air. Presumably the same holds true for spaceships, which is why it pays to use a ground-powered boost before torching off the main machinery.

Spaceships?
I was on a spaceship!
Beside me, Koko munched away, hu
m
ming dementedly to herself as she gazed in rapture through the cei
l
ing. A stewardess came by to fold our seats back like psychiatrists’ couches, tuc
k
ing us in for a stomach-thrilling moment of freefall as the impellers folded like a cheap flashbulb reflector. Wind whistled past the plummeting hull, then...

Whaaammm!
I suddenly weighed more than Nero Wolfe ever dreamed of, my breathing a matter of conscious exercise. Three minutes’ acceler
a
tion—my features melting toward my ears like Silly Putty—didn’t seem much longer than an hour. How time flies when you’re having fun. Abrup
t
ly, the fusion drives seemed to cut, my seat straightened up, I could breathe again.

Zero gee?
This
I’d been looking forward to: I groped past the saf
e
ty-webbing, extracted my favorite felt-tip pen,
LAPORTE PARATRONICS, LTD
. stenciled along its barrel, and held it a foot or so in front of my face. I let go.

It fell in my lap and rolled off onto the cabin floor.

“Gravity and government stop here!”
A central panel displayed the dar
e
devil visage of a chimpanzee in a space-black tunic. I folded myself painfully in half, head between my knees, and groped beneath the seat in front of me for my pen, only to discover I was
wedged
in that position. “Welcome aboard Laker’s Electrojet service to synchronous rendezvous. Sorry about that lift-off, folks, heh, heh. We’ll be pushing along now at a comfortable and co
n
venient one gee for approximately twenty-eight more minutes. Thanks for flying Laker, and good morning.”

One gee?
Now
he tells me! “
Koko!
“ I whispered in embarrassment.

“What’s up, Boss?” She bent and stared down at the veins bulging in my forehead. “View’s better through the windows, y’know.”

“Get me out of here! Mother didn’t raise me to do slapstick!”

“Okay, okay! Move your shoulders a little to the right...that’s it. Now, lift your leg and...want me to call the stewardess?”

“For godsake,
no
!” Something went
scrunch!
in the back of my neck, and I was free. The passenger ahead craned around and glared. I grinned shee
p
ishly and tried to straighten a tie I wasn’t wearing. Comfortable and conve
n
ient? Have to check
that
out with my chiropractor.

***

The void around the liner glittered with a thousand fireflies; shuttles like ours, vehicles from Luna, the Lagrange stations, synchronous and near-Earth satellites. But as we swam nearer with little puffs and bumps of course-correction and the giant ship gradually acquired recognizable shape, I knew it wasn’t the vessel I had tickets for. According to the tourist br
o
chure,
Indomitable Spirit
was a big round ball, half a mile across, propulsion a
s
semblies sticking out behind like the stem of a pumpkin. The apparition ahead of us was at least four times that size, a collection of giant silvery mailing-tubes glued to a cigar box. As we swept by her colossal drivers, it was spelled out for us in hundred-foot letters:

BONAVENTURA

LOS ANGELES, N.A.C.

A nominal registry, to say the least. This thing would never make it to the surface whole. But what had happened to
Indomitable Spirit
? Were we all being shanghaied or something? There followed a funny elevatory queas
i
ness: zero gee at last—though I wasn’t going to risk my souvenir pen (or my dignity) twice in one day. The shuttle aimed for the liner’s rectilinear stern, slid into an enormous hangar on one edge, where it clanged gently to a stop. Weight returned; the seatbelt light went out.

Koko favored me with an uninformative shrug.

At the lock, the stewardess was passing out briefcases, umbrellas, and guns. “
Indomitable Spirit
has been chartered for scientific purposes. This is
Bonaventura
.
All reservations will be honored.
Indomitable Spirit
has been charted for...”

For scientific purposes? A whole spaceliner? Glad
I
didn’t have to pay for it! I followed Koko’s waddling bulk into an accordion-pleated tunnel stretching from the shuttle to an inner wall of the hangar. We filed through a submarine-type door that shut behind us with a hiss. Wonde
r
ing where all this free gravity was coming from, I nudged my assistant and turned back to a window: the passenger tunnel had retracted, the shuttle was buttoning up. Mist filled the hangar, and the electrojet slid outward across the threshold, dropping instantly from view. Now I u
n
derstood: we were underway!

***

The ticket they swapped me said Stateroom 12-22. Koko’s, some seve
n
ty-seven levels forward, was 89-141. I don’t usually cotton to cute little three-foot robots, but this one had wheels and brought back memories of a time and place where Good Humor men were pedal-powered. B
e
sides, it volunteered to carry my luggage. I bade adieu to my apprentice and let the machine show me through the confusing lobby several decks above the hangar, a maze of pathways and irregularly shaped pools where dolphins squeaked and paddled, conversing with humans and simians seated at the water’s edge in little oval cocktail bays. Laced about with curving stairs and escalators, a dozen lapping, overhanging mezzanine levels created a bewi
l
dering perspective overhead. The suitcase-critter led me to an impressive ochre-hued column, one of many varicolored cylinders that appeared to be holding up the lobby roof. A pair of doors slid open, admitted us, and closed.

“
Ohmygodwhatthefuckisthis!”
The elevator shot past mezzanines and stai
r
ways, through the very ceiling, and suddenly the little glassy cage was
outside
the ship, skimming along its leviathan hull. I huddled numbly by the doors, peeking between my fingers with a sort of suicidal fascination. The little robot emitted a disgusted snigger. I glared at it: “R2, Brutus?’’ It sw
i
veled its head, staring pointedly the other way.

It was almost a religious experience for me when the elevator surged to a halt and its blessed portals slid aside. I was
indoors
again, being dazedly d
i
rected leftward around a corridor to my room. There, another spell of vert
i
go awaited: one entire wall was transparent from ceiling to floor, riveting my paralyzed attention like a cobra hypnotizing dinner. The bellbot pol
a
rized the glass a trifle and waited, humming softly.

With sweating hands I fumbled for a coin—anything round and shiny—and dropped it in the little machine’s receptacle. It departed, vibra
t
ing a cheerful octave and a quarter higher. I counted my change—I’d given it half an ounce of gold! The architect who built this mind-bending Disne
y
land for claustrophobes must have been taking payola from the Business M
a
chines’ Union!

Polarization or not, there was still quite a fireworks display visible through the wall-sized window. The elevators, four of them from my va
n
tage point—one pair reflected by another silvery tower across the way—were capped with little haloes of blue flame. The damned things had their own rocket motors! Intermittent brilliant flashes sparkled in the greater di
s
tance, I knew not why. And, despite acceleration, we were still admitting last-minute shuttles. I watched one from AntarcticAir slide into the ha
n
gar-deck below.

Out of the corner of an eye I caught a frigidly official-looking face sta
r
ing from the ‘com screen on the right-hand wall. I turned up the sound: “. . . your Captain, Edwin H. Spoonbill III. Those bursts of color you see to starboard are tests of our debris-defenses. Nothing to worry about, the fl
y
ing’s so clean here that our gunnery computer’s had to throw chaff out to practice on. ETA for Ceres: three hundred forty hours—about two weeks—so just relax and enjoy the ride. If you have any questions, our I
n
formation Section can—”