The Venus Belt (25 page)

Lucy made the call and was again attempting to restore some order to the mess we’d found downstairs. I hollered at her not to tidy up the ev
i
dence too much and did an Errol Flynn over the rail to give her a hand. Four hours later I concluded sadly that if there were any clues to be disco
v
ered in this place, they’d been repossessed by the finance company. Our i
n
truder hadn’t smoked while he was here—a novelty in a culture unafraid of cancer—or drunk, or even, as far as my modest abilities were able to di
s
cern, used the bathroom. Maybe he was royalty. Or a movie star. Or S
u
perman. Or a ghost.

Or the ghost of Superman.

Another thing struck me: much as I hate to think about it, I’ve seen about a hundred instances where some little old lady’s been toes-up for days without the neighbors noticing, and, given forty-eight hours or so without his Alpo, little Spot or Rover winds up munching on his erstwhile mistress. I wasn’t sure about cats, but Lucy’s hadn’t touched a morsel. Maybe it was the smartsuit. Or maybe felines think they’re citizens, and eschew canniba
l
ism. It was probably that automated food supply in the kitchen.

I draped myself on a chair in a corner to mull things over. Speak of the devil, it wasn’t too much later that old Lysander, Lucy’s venerable roo
m
mate, hopped delicately into my lap.

I rubbed the thinly carpeted spaces in front of his ears as he squinged his eyes and hummed the lyrics. “Well, old-timer, if only you could talk. You watched the whole damn thing, I saw you on the Telecom. What’s the ma
t
ter,
human
got your tongue?” He gave me a disapproving look and procee
d
ed to launder his toes. I could remember when he’d had a pref
e
rence for perching on my head and was glad he’d finally given it up—freefall had been entirely too good for him, he massed twenty pounds if he massed an ounce.

“Cmon, Lysander, who wasted our gallant Ranger?” Lysander switched to his other paw, offsetting a tendency to drift by digging his hind claws into my leg. Another reason to be grateful for smartsuits. “Hey, Lucy?”

That worthy was across the room shoving plastic hardcopies into some kind of machine. “Just a minute, Winnie. You ‘bout ready fer somethin’ t’eat?”

Above my head somewhere, Ranger Trayle’s body was still cooling off. “Uh, not right away.” I excused myself to the cat, lifted him gently and set him in my place in the chair. He went on washing his paws as if I’d never existed in the first place. “I was going to ask you, out of morbid curiosity, about Lysander’s sanitary arrangements, here in, oh, call it ‘s
e
mifall.’ Must be pretty messy.”

She stopped feeding flimsies for a moment. “Go on back in th’ utility room an’ see fer yourself—-my own ingenious invention, if I do say so, as shouldn’t—but gimme a hand with this donkey-work first, will you, son?” So I wound up stuck there for another hour and a half, handing printed plastic sheets to Lucy: correspondence, bills, all kinds of other stuff. She i
n
serted them one at a time into the machine to be digitalized, filed, and cross-indexed, and at the other end—my favorite part—shredded and co
n
veyed to the plantrooms for mulch.
Sic semper
paperwork. This would be a popular export, once we started trading openly with the U.S.A.

“Been meanin’ t’get at this fer months. Here’s one of Eddie’s workups on th’ disappearances.” She slapped it into the machine.

“Hey wait! I wanted to see that!”

“Sorry. Call it back again on one of th’ ‘com pads over there.” She gave me the reference coordinates; I disturbed Lysander once again and sat down. Naturally, he wanted to park himself in the middle of the pad, so I picked him up and hung him in midair where, if I was patient enough, I could watch him fall and even hit the floor—in a half-hour or so. He curled up comfortably on nothing and shut his eyes, well content to sleep through the excitement.

What Lucy had shredded was several sheets of handwritten notes on unexplained disappearances among the asteroids over the last year or so. Even sorting out the normal background occurrences, the list was impre
s
sive—and I’d never quite gotten used to seeing someone else’s doodlings in
my
handwriting. “You know, I think we’ve been wasting time scouting around for
positive
clues. Whoever dug up your petrol trees was looking for som
e
thing. Have you found anything missing around here?”

She swiveled, fixing me with invisible optics. “Now how could it be missing if I’d found it?”

“All right, wise-ass, you know what I mean. Anything at all?”

She paused. “Haven’t really thought about it Could be a thousand things in all this mess. Anything useful in them notes of Eddie’s?”

“Yeah! For example, why did he order several hundred ounces worth of Broach-detecting gizmology? Did he ever get it?”

“Couldn’t rightly say. Remember, I was gone at the time. Oughta be an invoice or somethin’, less’n it’s scattered out with all these other p
a
pers. One thing I hate, it’s messy burglars.”

“
Murderers,
Lucy. Burglars have a little more class.” I climbed back up a level, past the remains of Ranger Trayle—when were those blasted “author
i
ties” going to get here?—and found my way to Ed’s desk, a heavy piece of metal furniture with a built-in swing-out stool and Telecom p
e
ripherals. The main drawer had been nixoned open, crushed down with some kind of power lever that tore it out of its tracks. Amidst the sca
t
tered paper clips and erasers, I found a yellow plastic invoice, just as Lucy had predicted, a
c
knowledging shipment from one of Mars’s industrial centers in the big, co
n
tinent-long canyon where they say the air is actua
l
ly getting thick enough to breathe.

If you’re a virus or a cockroach. Progress marches on.

“Lucy, can you spare a minute? I want to find out if the stuff actually arrived here.”

“Be up in two shakes of a shaman’s rattle.” Ten seconds later she was clucking electronically over the noncomputerized rat’s nest Ed had a
l
lowed to build up. I don’t know what his excuse is. My desk at home looks just the same because I’m always afraid I’ll entrust something i
m
portant to the ‘com and not be able to summon it up again.

“That’s funny.”

“Lucy, very little is
funny
when there’s a stiffening corpse floating six feet from your left shoulder and you’re going over the contents of a burgla
r
ized desk.”

“I ain’t
got
no shoulders right now, an’ I don’t mean funny ha ha. I’ll tell you what’s missing; it’s that Federalist geegaw I showed you on th’ Tel
e
com. I left it where I found it, second drawer down, an’ now it’s v
a
moosed.”

Interesting. That might explain why the bottom drawer had remained undefiled. “You know, an awful lot of mayhem has been ass
o
ciated with these little medals over the years.” I reached down into a pocket and e
x
tracted the medallion from the
Bonaventura.
I still hadn’t decided whether they’d dropped it accidentally or left it as bait. “Damn eye in the pyramid, always gives me the creeps. Say, I never noticed b
e
fore: the knurled rim is actually a separate piece and turns around the rest of the— Lucy?”

“
Urrrk!
Greeshbobble n’frammish glork, Winstead!” With that, she started spinning, whirling dizzily in larger and larger circles. I looked down at the coin and a light suddenly dawned. I gave the rim a quick quarter-turn back to where it had started just as Lucy crashed through the flimsy railing and toppled over the edge.

“
Great thunderin’ balls afire!
”
She blasted her impellers, righted herself, scattering half the papers we’d sorted out below, and, regaining equ
i
librium, thrust out a manipulator. “Gimme that thing afore y’ruin me!”

I reached out gingerly and handed her the medallion, which she clutched defensively to her nonexistent bosom. “What’s going on, Lucy?”

“Nothin’ special—
I
just totally lost control of m’ whole body!
Win, when we were lookin’ at that infernal brain-bore, back on Ceres, we were only seein’
half
of what was goin’ on. This medal here’s th’ other half.
It’s what gives th’ orders!
”

How Lucy ever trained the kitty to a freefall litterbox...It was sort of a half-gee miniature cement-mixer with an open end so Lysander could climb in and out. Every now and again, an automated vacuum cleaner would whisk the contents out through the dome wall into a farm-bound trajectory and replace them with fresh-ground asteroid.

But that wasn’t half as interesting as the hole above it in the par
a
tronic deepfreeze, precisely at heart level and punched cleanly into the enameled metal surface. Inside, the slug had stopped in a plastic carton of quince y
o
gurt: full copper jacket, about 130 grains, .356 in diameter, as American as pizza pie.

There were only three commercial cartridges I knew with a payload like that, one of them nine decades obsolete. The other two were mil
i
tary-issue .38 Special, one an oddball bastard with a cannelure, or crim
p
ing-groove, around the middle of the slug to hold it in the case—and insufficient po
w
der to drive it even halfway through that freezer door, and the other a much more efficient, autoloading item originally designed for Treasury agents who wanted something that’d get into gangsters’ armored limousines. Six grooves, lefthand twist. This penny-colored goodie rolling around in the palm of my hand hadn’t come from any revolver. Unlike the otherworldly weapons I’d encountered so far, it was a profe
s
sional’s choice. Maybe they were calling in their first string.

Which, I reluctantly concluded, made it necessary to re-examine the late Ranger Trayle and reconsider this head-injury business. Lucy watched; the body turned easily in the absence of even
dead
weight, its opened smartsuit exposing, as I’d expected, an ugly purple-puckered hole in the lower right chest. The suit had sealed up and tried to treat it, but the high-velocity pr
o
jectile had virtually exploded the liver—a certain death wound—but none too quick, and very painful. Trayle had been on the run; his massive skull fracture had come in a chance collision with Ed’s desk or something of that sort. Given the circumstances, it was probably a blessing. A little careful snoopery turned up hair and dried blood along the rail of the mezzanine.

My appetites and aptitudes don’t generally include post-mortem a
u
gury, but the size of the wound, smack on the nine-millimeter mark (allo
w
ing for the skin’s elastic properties), was all I needed to see: Confederate weapons either run a lot bigger or a lot smaller (and commensurately faster) or, like lasers or Trayle’s own Flash Gordon blart-and-bonkus blaster, leave even uglier wounds, if such comparisons are possible.

A .38 Super Automatic, then, a Hartford Colt: either a Government model or the short, lightweight Commander—with a Spanish Star or Llama as extremely marginal alternatives—made in U.S.A. The suit had absorbed the blood and other body fluids, trying to save its wearer, but now, in some nanoelectronic sense, was dying, itself.

By the time I’d had enough and decided to leave the rest of the carving to whatever medicos finally arrived, Lucy was ready to conduct another e
x
periment. She’d cobbled up something she called a Franklin cage, grounded it on a balcony rail, and placed the Hamiltonian meda
l
lion inside. “Okay, Winnie, turn th’ plague-blasted thing on—I wanna see if I can take it.” She handed the infernal instrument to me and slid a few feet away.

“Lucy, you’re either going to fry your brains or wind up bashing into something, very possibly me.” I looked at the medallion in its hastily spot-welded container. “Why don’t we send for some proper test equi
p
ment?”

“We got company comin’ any minute now. ‘Sides, I gotta whole wor
k
shop fulla gear downstairs if I thought it’d tell us anything useful. You ready?”

“No. Brace yourself.” I reached between the bars, careful to avoid the neck chain Lucy believed was an antenna, and clumsily turned the edge of the coin.

“Nothing—give ‘er another twist.”

“It’s your funeral.”