The Venus Belt (30 page)

“How time flies when you’re having fun. All right, just the one car. Our friend, a Dr. Scott from Ceres, is hiding out there somewhere, wo
n
dering about us by now. We’re the ‘asteroid’ that tumbled by—whenever it was. Check with your skywatch.”

“I’ll do that.” He signaled to the towel-flapping flunky. “And have them man the lasers again.” To me: “Your doctor, if he exists, is going to
need
a doctor.”

Well, at least they’d waste a little of their time and manpower. A small victory, but a meaningless one. “Now how about telling me what
you’re
up to?”

Malaise tried getting up and pacing, but it doesn’t work too well in nea
r
ly zero gee. He returned to the desk, squirted himself a drink, even squirted another for me. I discovered a split lip I hadn’t noticed before.

“It was the War, of course, Antarctica, Hawaii, watching thousands die on both sides every day. Realizing how deeply, fundamentally, inh
e
rently
evil
human nature truly is. And stupid, criminally, wastefully st
u
pid: you know, the Confederacy could have turned its victory into a world-wide h
e
gemony, imposed a rational, orderly rule, But would they do that?
No!
They’d rather go back to their Telecoms and liquor, their suburban split-levels and hove
r
buggies, instead of finishing the job they’d started.”

“Before my time—in the Confederacy, I mean. But it seems to me, the Czar’s the one who started it—he had ideas about a world-wide h
e
gemony, too.”

“He
lost,
which proves he wasn’t qualified to rule. I moved out here in 211 A.L., just after the United States were discovered. Things were ge
t
ting tough for Hamiltonians about then, and I required a little more freedom to act. And
allies—
are you following this?” He glanced at his watch.

“Sure. I even have some of it figured out. After you got set up in Ceres, you came out here and built yourself a Broach, determined somehow to contact various unsavory characters in my world.”

His eyebrows shot straight upward. “You really are a halfway decent d
e
tective, you know that? We carried the machinery aboard that network newsbus, and yes, I piloted back to Earth—your Earth—myself. Let me tell you, dodging all those radar defenses was quite a trick. But I settled neatly into the middle of enough primitive orbital trash to hide myself, and grad
u
ally got in touch with your Federal Security Police.”

“SecPol—and they’re not mine, friend. Why didn’t you just use an I
n
terworld Terminal? Wait—let me guess. You didn’t want anybody seeing the famous Voltaire Malaise trafficking with—”

“Correct, but there was an even better reason: your planet-bound go
v
ernments took my message
from orbit
very seriously, particularly when it was translated into one of their own childish codes. My onboard computer cracked it in a day and a half.”

“Very clever. So for once you really
were
the Voice from the Stars.”

“A man who appreciates a joke. In any case, it appears that times are getting difficult for duly constituted authority in your world as well. I rea
l
ized, as soon as open trade was initiated, your people would choose the sel
f
ish, undisciplined, hedonistic path the Confederacy has, so I offered your government—and others—a deal.”

“Which was?” I laid the whiskey bag against my forehead. I don’t know how he got the ice cubes into it, but they felt good.

“The obvious: Confederate technology and wealth for their personnel and power. They graciously lowered their radar curtain, and I brought back the first load of SecPol and KGB agents that very trip. Later, we acquired a small fleet of heavy-duty vehicles and began transferring people by the thousands. Can you guess the purpose?”

I mulled that one, but came up temporarily empty. To keep from loo
k
ing stupid, I said, “I’m going to get out a cigar and light it—if your thugs didn’t break them again.” The smoke stung, rising past the abr
a
sions on my face. “Tell me how the brain-bores and the missing women fit. Surely you’re not...Oh, no—it’s just too silly!”

He looked genuinely pained. “
What’s
too silly?”

“Building yourself a hidden Hamiltonian colony out here. Good God, man, the frontier is expanding so quickly, your secret wouldn’t last a year! Especially using
kidnapped
women—for what, breeding stock? Pre
t
ty cold-blooded.” Which is what I was trying to be, keeping my mind off Clarissa.

“Bear, you’re amazing—and so
close!
But still you’re
parsecs
away. We’re building
starships!
Genuine starships! Two hundred thirty of them, on
your
side of the Broach, where
neither
culture can detect them, using asteroid m
a
terials easily located from the correlating strikes made over here. You’re right about the women, though,
nearly a quarter of a million of them
, a hu
n
dred for every man. We’re going to
grow
out there, Bear, find hospitable planets, built up as quickly as we can, and then, in a hu
n
dred years, sweep back in our billions to bring both Systems under proper leadership! Imagine: an i
n
terdimensional, interstellar Empire!”

I had to hand it to the guy, not the faintest glimmer of fanaticism in e
i
ther eye. “Neat. Although not very gentlemanly. Did you know, M
a
laise, that the women you’ve had brain-bored are
aware
of ft, hating you every tortured second they live?”

“Irrelevant. They’ll serve their purpose, and their children—girl chil
d
ren exclusively, at least for the first several generations—won’t hate us. We’ll be their
gods!
”

“I get it: short life spans for them, immortality for you.” I had one last, wild idea: “I don’t suppose you’d be accepting any new recruits this late, would you?” Maybe I could live long enough to—

“Hmm.” He frowned. “No, I doubt that would be wise. Another nice try, Bear. You certainly don’t give up.”

“That’s my
next
move. When are you and your merry little band of sex fiends taking off—and why can’t you let Lucy and me live through it?” If I’d had more guts, I would have mentioned Clarissa.

“Well, first of all, because I don’t like you. You’ve cost me personnel and wasted a great deal of my valuable time. Most of all, because I don’t want either Earth expecting us a century from now. I’ll tell you what, though: if you can survive until we leave, and providing someone rescues you, it’s up to you.”

“That
is
sporting, Voltaire. What’re you going to do, bury me up to my head and let the ants eat me? Not too many ants out here, I’d guess.”

“You’ll see, Mr. Bear. Our interview is at an end. Take him down and dispose of him in the usual way. I won’t be seeing you again.”

“
That’s the way it
looks,
Malaise!
“ I snarled but I had to admire their technique. They left my legs fastened together (I must have weighed all of a pound and a half on this rock), tied my hands, and carried me dow
n
stairs like a victim of safaricide. My Webley was long gone, of course, as was my Rezin—not that they’d have done me much good. Maybe I was imagining it, but the corners of my little .25 seemed to be gouging my sternum inside the front of my suit. Either they were careless, or what they were about to do was pretty final. With nothing much to lose, I squirmed and fought the best way I could. Even connected once—fatally, I hoped—with my heels, right to the jaw of the sap-wielder trying to carry my feet. He floated away, a ba
s
ketball-size blood gobbet oozing from his mouth and ear.

That’s when I found out what I had to lose.

My consciousness.

I came to, lying on the floor in a room even more bleak and depressing than before, a bare metal cube maybe twelve feet on a side. There was me, the walls, floor, and ceiling, a slowly-dripping utility sink.

And a door.

Carefully being welded shut from the outside.

T
uesday, March 23, 223 A.L.

In the movies, the hero would’ve jumped right up, rushed over to the door, and pounded it indignantly, shouting at the villains, maybe burning his hands a little on the steel where they were welding it.

Movie heroes don’t get sapped down twice in one day, not for real, and not as inexpertly as I’d been. What I did was lie there on the floor, sort of fading in and out of reality for what my suit said later was a day and a night. At some point I must have zipped up my hood on the theory it might help hold my broken head together. Sometimes, when I was more or less co
n
scious, I’d count the rivets in the ceiling, wondering when I was going to die.

Soon, I hoped.

The suit must have done its job, though, because to my annoyance I eventually found myself wondering about a couple of other things. Like where the light was coming from, and ditto for my next meal.

I sat up sort of gradually and checked the clock display in a lower co
r
ner of my vision field, just as if I planned on going somewhere. The light seemed to be oozing from the thickly laid-on paint covering the steel walls, floor, and ceiling. Dark, irregular patches all around the door showed where the welding had scorched it. And “oozing” was just the word—a sickly shade of glow-in-the-dark toy-plastic blue. It might have been better to do my dying in the dark. My stomach growled. I growled right back. Another thing about movie heroes: first thing they want when they come out of a bad guy-induced coma is a drink, whiskey for PG through X, water for the Disneys. I watched the faucet in the galvanized corner sink, drops hanging from it big as golfballs, falling like feathers in a broad, funnel-shaped drain. Hungry as I was, the thought of drinking
anything
from that basin turned my stomach.

Which growled again like a qualifying-lap at Indy. After maybe an hour and a half of this, I cranked myself to my feet, excruciatingly parti
c
ular not to lose adhesion with the floor. I needed another bump on my head like—well, like I needed another bump on my head. I didn’t quite have the guts to touch it, not wanting to find out what
brains
feel like.

This room was originally intended as an outsize janitorium of some kind, about the height of two tall men in every direction, stark, fluore
s
cent-coated metal, utterly featureless save for the sink and four thousand seven hundred and sixty-two rivets. Don’t bother checking; I
know
.

Every running inch of the imitation submarine-type door frame had been carefully beaded shut, a job old Karyl Hetzer would’ve been proud to call his own. It was a mystery how I’d survived this long without suffoca
t
ing. Maybe air was coming up the sink trap. There certainly wasn’t any su
r
plus of it; every few hours, especially if I was fairly active, I had to zip my hood again and let the suit do my breathing. After some indeterminate while, the telltales on my arm would go green again and I could take my hat off. It was a break in the routine. Like a good Boy Scout, one of the first things I did was inventory my meager possessions. My captors hadn’t been very thorough, but then again, they didn’t really need to be. There was the suit, of course, with its considerable talents, and, sure enough, tucked down inside my
uncolletage
,
the little stainless steel Bauer, capable of hurling a ma
s
sive fifty-grain slug at 810 feet per second, generating a full 73 foot/pounds at the muzzle. Just about enough to chip the paint off the walls, perhaps a little too lively for playing handball.

Besides the artillery, I had four cigars, each and every one of them u
n
broken, thanks to Murphy’s Law (I’d save them until I didn’t
care
how much oxygen I had left), a pocketful of smallish gold and silver pieces, the keys to my luggage, which was undoubtedly vaporized by now on its return trip through the meteor defenses, and a Bic lighter.

Finally, in my right thigh-pocket, I encountered a minor miracle and knew at least I wouldn’t pass from this vale of tears
unentertained
: Clari
s
sa’s thoughtful present, my goddamn noisy wonderful Gigacom. I once heard a Denver disc jockey maintain that the world would be measurably improved if all clock radios played jugband music. Hard staying depressed to Kweskin’s “Sadie Green, the Vamp of New Orleans,” which opus I put on and immediately felt better, possibly even ready for that drink.