The Venus Belt (16 page)

The clerk punched up the relevant data. “That’s right,” she answered. “Your room is on the third floor, number 313. I also see you have a me
s
sage, and—hmm, that’s odd—the manager wants to see you when it’s co
n
venient.” She checked the time on the suitscreen hanging down in front of her like a big rubber pocket watch. “He’s going to lunch in fi
f
teen minutes —be back an hour after that.”

“Let’s make it now and get it over with.” I let the little chimp lead me back through a hallway, open the office door, and let me in.

Some State-side feminist once cracked that a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle. This wasn’t exactly a bicycle, and a porpoise isn’t exac
t
ly a fish, but she’d better apply for a new metaphor—or is it s
i
mile?—anyway: the hotel boss, decked out from snout to tailfins in rubber unde
r
wear, was resting in a lightweight wheeled metal frame. “Mr. Bear, I pr
e
sume. I’m Criickleer Ackackack Sweenie. Please come in and take a seat.” His quadricycle rolled forward smoothly, a manipulator similar to Lucy’s extended from the frame to shake my hand, then pulled a chair for me around to face the desk.

I sat.

“Sorry to bother you, Mr. Bear, but something odd has happened I think you should know about.”

“Plenty
of odd things seem to be happening to me lately. What is it now?”

The slightest whisper of mechanics, and his arm extended once again, offering a box of cigarettes. I took one, wondering how all this shiny gad
g
etry was operated. His claw-tip snapped into flame just like Lucy’s had an hour ago. He lit one for himself and stuck it in his blo
w
hole.

“Well, I try to run a good house here. So it pains me to admit it, but someone tried to steal your luggage—simply walked by and took it off the rack in the lobby. Our security circuitry noticed, of course, and we reco
v
ered it undamaged.”

My personal effects, it seemed, were getting more and more in d
e
mand every day. First the intruder aboard the
Bonaventura
and now this. Just call me the Man with the Million-Dollar Underwear. “How about the thief?”

“Quite the oddest thing of all. She collapsed spontaneously as soon as we apprehended her. She’s in Nivenville Emergency right now, and the Healer there gives her very little hope.”

I thought this over. “Did they mention anything about a ‘brain-bore’?”

“Let me think—a little circuit box, no larger than a herring?”

I nodded. So did he, in a fishy sort of way.

“Well, they say it’ll be some time before...Will you be available for the inquest?” He blew a thin stream of smoke from the back of his head. I hope they won’t be quite so anxious to get me buried when the time comes.

“Depends. If the
Bonaventura
’s
still at Gunter’s Landing, I suggest your local sawbones contact a gorilla name of Francis Pololo. His test
i
mony’ll be a lot more valuable than mine. He knows something about brain-bores—enough to hate them thoroughly. As for me, I hate to be u
n
cooperative, but there’s an emergency back home, and whoever wants me to stick around here better be faster on the draw than I am. I’d go over to the clinic now, but I’m way behind on sack time, and I gather it’ll wait.”

“Possibly forever, Mr. Bear, possibly forever.”

I let myself out of the office and went upstairs. Maybe I was simply su
f
fering fatigue of the surprise-muscles: suburban ski-lifts; wheeled porpoises; talking garbage cans (as long as Lucy wasn’t around to hear it). The room seemed a nice, quiet oasis of familiarity until I realized that this, in itself, was another surprise.

Furniture, for example: given one-tenth gee, the rugscaping ought to be futuristic, spindly. That’s the way they show it on the Telecom. But furn
i
ture anywhere is built more to withstand bodily wrecking power than grav
i
ty. Plunk yourself into a chair, it’s still gotta take your full mome
n
tum—and it’s far easier to high-velocity plunk at lower gees. If an
y
thing, I noticed the furniture gets heavier—scoots around a little less that way, I guess.

I inventoried the contents of my nearly purloined overnight bag and briefcase: nothing missing as far as I could tell; peeled off my smartsuit and slid between the magnetically anchored sheets. Then I remembered with a groan that there was still some message waiting for me at the desk.

“That’s right,” said the Telecom, “you’re Mr. Bear in 313.” Ever n
o
tice how hotel clerks seem anxious to assure you of your own identity? “One minute...here it is. You’re scheduled for a stasis-berth aboard the
Lord Ka
l
van
late tomorrow night? Well, I’m sorry, Mr. Bear,
Lord Ka
l
van
’s departure has been postponed, indefinitely.”

“
What?
” This was getting ridiculous. “How come? Can’t you get me a
n
other ship? It’s an emergency.”

“I’m very sorry, but this seems to be an emergency, too, a general war
n
ing out for all interplanetary travel: unseasonally energetic solar flares, it says here. No passages accepted until further notice.”

I thought about Deejay and Ooloorie. Were they safe, way down there by the fire? Or were they simply little wisps, blowing in the photon wind by now? Wait a minute, could their tinkering have
caused
this disa
s
ter? That was a hell of a thought!

And so was this one: Clarissa needed me, and I was
marooned
.

T
he first year we were together, I often wondered whether Clarissa didn’t feel she’d married down. Her being a high-powered surgeon and me a two-bit shamus, I mean. I shouldn’t have worried: detectives are disgustin
g
ly respectable and middle-class in the Confederacy.
Everybody’s
middle-class in the Confederacy.

Healers lack the bulge that U.S. doctors throw around: there’s a hell of a lot more of them; they have to get out and hustle, make house calls. So things even out.

Now Clarissa could be that
special
kind of physician, even in Laporte, the kind with rich hypochondriacal customers and a solid-platinum steth
o
scope. She’s good enough, got that kind of touch. I believe she could snap the mummy of Ramses II out of his slump, have him up and dan
c
ing the mazurka in a week. Three days if he watched his diet.

But what I remember is a hundred gut-bending nights like the one I spent handing her silverware, trying not to look down while she stitched together what was left of a six-year-old neighbor kid who got precocious with a can of pistol powder. Eight full hours, and when that was done and I thought I could crawl away somewhere and throw up quietly, she pulled the well-singed ruins of an alley cat—a ragged little scrap of blo
o
dy fur—out of stasis where she’d placed it and repeated the whole pe
r
formance so the little guy could wake up in the morning with his kitten buzzing on his chest.

Like I said, she’s got that kind of touch.

***

I didn’t take that room clerk’s word, but ‘commed H T & H myself. A
l
so Pan-Confederate, TransSystem—if there’d been an interplanetary Avis, I’d have tried them, too. Each and every one was sitting tight, ho
p
ing the fireworks would sputter down. Outward traffic was still lifting: engine shields in the south end of a northbound hull are good for solar radi
a
tion—until turnover—and there wasn’t any shortage of cus-tomers or crew willing to bet old Sol’d get over his hiccups in a day or three. But Sunward was a differently complected critter: nary a spacehand in the Belt who’d gamble salary and bonuses against winding up barbecued.

By this time, I was wide awake again. I chipped a note for Koko, learned by trying to reach Forsyth that the ‘coms were down for the dur
a
tion, then decided to see for myself what passes for medical care in the a
s
teroids.

Confederates regard hospitalization as a shameful relic of the past—like whipping the insane or invoking Sovereign Immunity—the worst punis
h
ment you can inflict on a sick person. Consider all the inte
r
esting diseases gathered there in one location, the inevitable bureaucrat
i
cally rotten food, continuous disturbances just outside your door, the way they wake you up for sleeping pills.

My one stateside experience as a surgeree—perforated in the wallet muscles by a .22 slug—had been all of that: tottering along the slickly waxed linoleum like Methuselah on his nine-hundred-first, leaning weakly on a treacherously unsteerable IV hanger; the midnight PA ope
r
ator hollering “
ICU, ICU, respiratory arrest!
”, then a few minutes later, “
Nice try, ICU
”; e
l
derly neighbors coughing, snorting, wheezing, moaning in the certain knowledge that, if this wasn’t the visit that’d finish ‘em off, the next one would for sure; the middle-aged contractor I roomed with, inexorably gro
w
ing hooked on soap operas; the lilting murmur of Extreme Unction som
e
where down the hall.

These are a few of my favorite things.

My first medical adventure in the Confederacy had been different. After Clarissa had stapled me back together, I’d recovered in bed, at home. Pro
b
ably cut my healing time in half.

Now, I headed for the shower, not especially looking forward to the task. A mere tenth of a gee makes personal hygiene a messy, claustr
o
phobic ordeal. Along the way to the bathroom, it gradually dawned on me that I didn’t really need a wash that badly. Strange, when I’d been cooped up in a rubber coverall since morning. Sure enough, on consultation with the ow
n
er’s program in my suit, I discovered that, in the ast
e
roids, shower stalls will soon be relegated to museums.

Except in hotels for flatlanders.

Guess I wasn’t much more scandalized than those first Elizabethans when their vergin’ Queen installed a bathtub and started using it regula
r
ly, twice a year, whether she needed it or not. This smartsuit business would sure save time; maybe I could teach it shaving too. I wondered whether I could start a fashion trend back home, all by myself.

There’s a lot to be admired about small-town convenience and honest courtesy. Suited up again, I stepped out in the sunshine to familiar grass-upholstered streets. A hovercabbie saved me half a tenth-bit by volu
n
teering that Nivenville Emergency was within a minute’s walking di
s
tance, the small foamed-metal building right between the General Store and ba
r
bershop.

Asteroiders must be a healthy crowd; the paramedic behind the counter was asleep. I cleared my throat. He jumped, reflexively extending a hand to keep his brains off the ceiling. “Well, well!
Two
customers t
o
day. Don’t look sick t’me, Mac. What can I do y’for?” He retrieved a ‘com pad from the floor where it had fallen, a crossword puzzle showing on the screen.

“I’m here about your other customer, the one who collapsed in the h
o
tel?” I glanced around at what looked more like a rustic veterinarian’s office: a couple of examination cubicles, a surgery, maybe three or four other rooms. The shingle on the door had read “G.A. Scott, H.D.”

The paramedic’s smartsuit was rigged out in a traveling salesman’s horse-blanket plaid. He hooked a casual thumb over his shoulder. “Second cubby on the right,” and sat again, pulling a light-stylus from his pocket to resume Man’s ageless struggle against 37 down.

Second on the right was an office. His suit display an unadorned surg
i
cal green, a Confederate medical circled cross on his shoulder, the Healer hunched over his desk, three different ‘com pads displaying tex
t
book data.

“Excuse me, I’m Win Bear.”

“Doesn’t sound like too serious an offense. You’re here about the brain-bore case.” Scott, a big, tough-mannered, grizzle-bearded man, his forearms almost blackened by the sun, might have seemed more at home running a jackhammer on a demolition gang—or possibly on horseback, punching giant arctic hares. “Just checking with my reference books. Bet you didn’t know we do this before looking at a patient—sort of like chea
t
ing on an exam.”