Look Out For Space (Seven For Space) (5 page)

I left the dead spider wrestler behind me in the unit — let the Antarite cops deal with him! — and took a dropslide to the street.

The contact had been warned about me coming and had skipped, leaving Sonny behind to make sure I didn't follow. The big question of the moment was; Follow
where
?

I vidphoned Iberia. I still trusted him. He'd never have the gutnerve to hire a professional monkey to put out my lights.

Reaching him was tricky. The roboconnector wanted my name.

"Teddy Roosevelt," I said.

Iberia got right on the line.

"That's not funny, Mr. Space."

"Sorry. I thought it was."

"What do you want with me?" On the vidphone panel he scowled. "I
gave
you what you asked for."

"You gave me a name and an address," I said. "But your contact pulled a skip on me. I need an alternate address."

Iberia hesitated. "Impossible," he said. " I don't have one."

"Yes, you do," I told him. "If you didn't, you wouldn't have hesitated before saying 'impossible'." Now, give!"

More scowling from the fat Mr. I. "All right, I
do
have an alternate address — but you'd be taking a strong personal risk in going there."

I snorted. "I almost got myself fogged checking out the first joint. I'll worry about the risks, Iberia. You just supply the info."

"Very well. At least my conscience is clear." He consulted a file by the vidphone. "I happen to know that my contact often visits a private asteroid in the Lowenkopf sector. I was warned not to go there. It's not a functional point of contact."

"Just give me the directional coordinates."

"You must promise not to …"" … reveal my source of information," I finished for him. "Relax. I don't finger stoolies."

He gave me the data and I rang off.

Ole Sam was back in business.

"Joe Hopper?"

"Right."

"You for hire?"

"Depends."

"On what?"

"On how far I have to haul."

"How far is far?"

"You tell me where you want to go. Then I tell you if I
go
that far."

So I told him.

"Yeah, I know the Luani system. It's within my jump range."

"What's your price?"

He named one.

I named another.

We hassled, adjusted, hassled more, agreed. There's a special technique in hiring a space cabbie. You never pay the first price a cabbie names. Only suckers do that. Cabbies love to bargain; it's a natural part of their lives. I know, because I was one myself, and when I told Joe Hopper this he beamed. Joe was a homeplanet boy from Earth.

"So you're an ex-cabbie, eh?"

"Right."

"Where'd you run?"

"Venus mostly," I said. "Drove swamp cans. Local stuff. I never hacked outside the System."

"How long ago was that?"

"Six, nearly seven Earthyears."

Joe scratched his chin. He was big and square and needed a shave."They used the ole Z-grav junkies then, didn't they?"

I said they did.

"Drove me a Z once, on a Moonrun." He shook his head. "Too slow to suit me. How'd you make out as a cabbie?"

"Lousy," I told him. "But I was on the booze in those days and you can't booze and hack. A losing combo. When I bent up one of the company swampers, they dropped the ax on me."

"Tough," he said. "Lost your permit, I guess."

I nodded, shrugging.

"And you never went back?"

"Nope. Took me a while to get off the booze. By then I was into other things."

We walked over to Hopper's spacecab. Long, low, sleek — one the new thrustfin Twin-X jobs. He saw the shine in my eyes as we climbed through the lock.

"Like her?"

"Sure beats the old Z," I said, checking the ship's neatly arranged control grid. "How fast is she?"

"Zero to sixteen thousand in six," Joe said in a flat tone, masking his pride. "She'll out-drag anything in her power-weight class." He coughed, scrubbed at one side of his stubbled jaw. "Course I've done a little tinkering with her, you understand."

"Sure beats the old Z," I repeated.

"I've almost got her paid for," Hopper said. "Two more cred periods and she's all mine."

We webbed up and Joe thumbed the flashpin. The twin-thrust unit cut in and the pocked planet surface whipped away beneath us as we flamed skyward.

Topside, we exchanged grins. I liked Joe Hopper and I liked his ship.

I'd made a good choice for my run.

"Are you
sure
this is the right asteroid?"

"This is it," I said.

We drifted at quarter-power over the twisted ruins of an empty city. There was no sign of moving life below us. The area seemed totally devastated.

"The coordinates check out," I said. "This is the one, Joe. Take me down."

"Down to what?"

"To whatever's there. Can't be sure yet."

Hopper looked skeptical. "That's a dead rock, Sam," he said flatly. "Whoever you're lookin' for sure ain't down there."

"Maybe. Maybe not. But I want to poke around."

Joe gave up his argument and began easing the Twin-X down to the surface. When we'd unwebbed and the jets were quiet I said, "Wait here for me. I'll need you again."

"I'll keep the meter running," he said.

We had landed just beyond the ruins of the city. I stretched, taking in a deep breath. No facemask needed. The air was okay, with the oxygen level on the thin side. But then I didn't plan on doing any running.

I figured the best place to begin looking for my contact was in the middle of the city. Once there, I'd do some plain old fashioned yelling. In the dead silence of the ruins my voice would carry for a hell of a distance.

The twisted ped belts were inoperative, so I had a bit of walking to do in order to reach the city's heart. Most of the buildings I passed were tumbled in on themselves like so many card houses. I had to avoid shards of glassite and sharp edged chunks of plastorock on the ruptured street surface.

The needle shape of the Twin-X dwindled behind me. Joe counted me nuts to be doing what I was doing, but he just didn't understand the detective business. Things often prove to be quite different than what they seem and a smart op can't take anything at face value. Sure, this
looked
like a shattered, totally abandoned asteroid, but I'd been fooled plenty of times before. Better to keep an open mind. And, of course, a ready gun.

The ruins gave way to a wide city square. Broken statues. A giant fountain, split open. Dead-limbed nearoak trees.

I stepped into the middle of the square and stopped. No sounds. No movement. "Hey, anybody
home
?" I yelled. And waited. No response.

I tried again. More yelling. And waiting. And yelling.

I was beginning to feel like a prize chump. Maybe Joe was right. Maybe I was nuts, yelling my head off to nobody in the middle of a dead city.

Then someone touched my shoulder. I spun around like a startled mooncat, snapping out my .38 as I turned.

"Hello, Mr. Space," said a sad-eyed, solemn-faced humanoid standing in front of me. He was middle-aged. Basic earth-type body construction. Wearing dirt-streaked, ragged clothing. Frayed sandals. Scabs on his knees.

"Who the hell are you?" I asked him.

"The one you came to see," he told me in a soft voice. "I'm McKabe."

Which stoned me. "You mean —
you're
Iberia's gray market contact?"

"Yes. I do business with him, among many others."

I gave him a slow lookover. But I understood that you were
loaded
. That you'd built your own pleasure world out here in the Lowenkopf sector."

"All perfectly true," he nodded. "Furnishing this asteroid cost me several million credits."

"I don't get you, McKabe."

The sad-eyed humanoid walked over to a fallen, headless statue. He tapped the statue's chipped torso. "I
paid
to have all this done," he said. "Paid to have this whole city built here, and then paid to have it destroyed." He looked down at himself. "Even my clothing is custom destroyed. Good ragged, dirt streaked clothes don't come cheap. And where do you find the right size in frayed sandals these days?"

"But why build a city and then have it destroyed?"

"Sit down on this chipped torso and listen to a sad story," he said. I sat down, stowing my .38 in its holster.

"I'm married. I love my wife and she loves me. But, like many marriages, ours had gone stale. Sex had become boring. Predictable. So I got the idea for this place. I considered it an inspiration."

I still didn't follow him, and said so.

"My wife and I had often speculated on what it would be like to be the last male and the last female in the world. The idea excited us. Two passionate, love-starved creatures grappling and grunting out their sexual release amid chipped torsos and tumbled buildings."

"Love among the ruins, eh?"

"Quite so," he nodded. "I got my world and paid to have it ruined. Everything seemed perfect. Here was I, the last male, stumbling aimlessly and numbly through the broken, empty streets. And there
she
was, the last surviving female."

"Did you grapple and grunt out your release?"

"We tried to," he said. "But my wife got sand in her mouth and a small stone lodged itself in her navel as we were rolling about. She found it all quite depressing. Now she's gone. Left me here. When I heard your ship I thought she might be returning for me."

"You mean she left just before I got here?"

"Correct. I suddenly found that I
was
the last male in the world, and it's no damn fun, let me tell you."

"I've got a cab waiting outside town. You can get a ride back home with me."

"That's most kind of you, Mr. Space," he said. "Makes me regret trying to have you killed back on Antar."

"So that was your doing?"

"Afraid so," he admitted. "I work hard. I try to do a good job. Sure, I'm in the gray market game, but you have to work just as hard being crooked as you do being honest. People like you don't understand a thing like that. You come along and want to take my money away from me."

"You're full of beans," I told him. "I don't give a damn what you do with your money."

His eyes widened. "You don't?"

"No, I don't."

"But … aren't you a federation snooper nosing into our gray market activities?"

"Nope."

"But that's why I tried to have you killed in Antar. We gray marketeers always kill federation snoopers. When you left Iberia's and booked passage for Antar we assumed you were a professional investigator."

"I am, but I'm private. I don't work for the federation. Right now I'm on a missing asteroid trace for a client. It seemed to me that you market boys might be able to help me find the asteroid."

McKabe chuckled. "Amazing how we turn simple things into complex ones by assuming that which is not always truly assumable."

"Sorry I had to stiff your hairy friend," I told him.

He shrugged. "Sonny was expendable. Spider wrestlers are fairly easy to come by. And, after all, he
was
working under instructions to break every bone in your body."

"Now that things are clear between us," I said, "will you help me on the trace?"

"Be happy to," he said.

On the way back to Joe's cab I showed him the map the planet preach had given me. No, he didn't have any direct knowledge of this particular asteroid, but he could send me to someone who might be able to finger it for me.

As we flamed away from his ruined world he blinked his sad eyes and sighed. "I'll have it all done over," he said. "Import some thick green custom made wilderness. Robosnakes. Automated rhinos. Plastoelephants. Vines to swing on. I'll even design my own loincloth!"

"What about your wife?" I wanted to know.

"She can be the frustrated ape mother who adopts me," he said. "I just know that playing a gorilla will sexually ignite her."

"Yeah, jungle incest ought to do the trick," I said. McKabe relaxed into his webbing.

"If you want to know the truth," said Joe Hopper, "I'm glad I ain't married."

I'd hit pay dirt with McKabe. Thanks to him, I had a strong lead. In fact, with a pinch of luck, I could break this case early.

He told me that the gray market bought a lot of their bootleg asteroids from a roving gang of young rustlers of mixed body types who ranged through various systems picking up "stray rocks" (as they termed them) which were then herded into areas, or space corrals, well off the beaten paths of the planetary patrol cruisers.

"These babes are always one step ahead of the law," McKabe had told me. "They're sharp and tough and they know their way around the universe. Their leader is the one you want to see. They call him 'Halfcat' — and he's usually on High-L when he can get it. Ten to one he can show you where to find your asteroid. If
he
can't, nobody can."

McKabe had told me how to reach the gang's headquarters on the planet Bailey and what pass-poem to use in order to identify myself as a friend. He also gave me a warning.
"Don't
get Halfcat sore at you. I saw him chew up an Earthcop once and swallow him, bones and all. He can be kind of mean."

I said that I'd try real hard not to get Halfcat sore at me.

* * *

Bailey was on a commercial dropline, so I didn't have any problem in getting there. The planet was one of the larger bodies in the Wilton System, and was extremely rugged and mountainous. A prime source of ionite ore, it was honeycombed with mines. According to McKabe, Halfcat's gang had appropriated one of the small domed mining towns as headquarters. Once they'd killed every miner in the area, no one objected to their being there.

Antigrav transport was impossible over the mountains due to sucking downdrafts, which would crush an aircab like an Earthegg between canyon walls. Which was one of the major reasons the gang had picked this location: a sneak attack was out of the question. You came in by fuggback or you didn't come in at all — and a posted lookout could spot any moving thing within a mile of the town.