The Venus Belt (31 page)

This I obtained fastidiously through a pseudocellophane cigar peeling held against one of the outsize drops collecting on the tap. Flat and m
e
tallic-tasting, but it shut my stomach up for a while. Kweskin’s final k
a
zoo chorus came crashing to a halt, I punched up a rare Mike Morrison flick where there aren’t any horses (didn’t want to be reminded of food just now), the detective thriller,
O’R
.

Now what the hell would Mike do in a pickle like this? Bash through the walls with his bare fists? Try finding out how bad he was hurt so he could stoically ignore it? Well now, if this suit could broadcast my image to another suit’s receptors, why couldn’t I kid it into transmitting
me
to
myself
?
It took half an hour, and I missed the usual Morrison-movie ba
r
fight, but I finally turned the inside of my hood into a nanoelectronic mirror.

And promptly turned it off.

Funny, I hadn’t
recalled
being thrown down seventeen miles of industr
i
al-grade staircase at three or four gees, nor even realized my left eye was swollen shut.

And I was really going to miss those three teeth. Shit, nearly sixty years so far, I’d avoided needing dentures. For that matter, I was probably
still
going to avoid them.

I slept as much as I could, then found my smartsuit’s medical ove
r
rides and helped myself to sleep some more. It filled the time, as did experime
n
tally determining that I could burn precisely three-eighths of an inch of c
i
gar before I had to put it out, more from pollution than anoxia (although there was that, too). I also found that even smartsuit waste-containers have to be emptied after a while, and felt grateful for the sink drain—and the water to wash up afterward.

Another interesting discovery was that the waistline of my suit contrac
t
ed all by itself, about a quarter of an inch per day slower than I did. Some technology—couldn’t even tighten my
belt
by myself.

On the third day it occurred dimly that perhaps I wasn’t alone in this predicament; I felt stupid for not thinking of it sooner. Maybe it was all the sapping. Or maybe it was just the sap, himself. There’d been a lot of missing persons recently; though I couldn’t figure out why Malaise was preserving my remains for posterity this way, maybe there were others in the same condition.

And of course, Lucy. One of these cubicles would effectively protect her against even the most persuasive control impulses. Hell, she’d prob
a
bly been herself again longer than me. I resisted the urge to rephrase that and conce
n
trated my minimal intelligence on the problem at hand: this wasn’t any Chateau D’if, I’d never fingernail myself into the next cell, but maybe I could generate some companionship one steel wall removed. I shut off the Gigacom and shuffled over to a wall, my .25 in hand.

Better unload it first—could be a slug in the guts was exactly what I needed most right now, but I’ve always been a sissy where gratuitous pain’s concerned, and it wouldn’t do my posthumous rep any good to be disco
v
ered accidentally finished off by my own pocket popgun. Like L
u
cy’d said: humiliatin’.

On the other hand, maybe I never
would
be found. Then it wouldn’t matter. I realized this thought had cheered me, glanced at my oxygen war
n
ing lights, and sealed up again. I thumbed back the magazine r
e
lease, pulled out the little clip, slid the safety off and jacked the cha
m
ber-round into my hand. Then I turned up my audioreceptors as loud as they’d go, draped m
y
self artistically along the baseboard, and rapped the pistol sharply against the wall.

My ears stopped ringing an hour and a half later.

This time, I kept the sound off while I did the tapping,
then
boosted it. Nothing. I tried again, with the same results. Next, the opposite wall, with similar reward. Either I was here alone, or the walls were awfully thick. Or they’d kidnapped a bunch of deaf people. This left a third wall which I tried, and the one with the door, which seemed silly—ought to be a corridor out there—but I gave it a shot anyway. Also the floor at several locations: one thing I had plenty of was time.

Finally, stretching my intestines to the limit of their fortitude, I stickied every suit-surface capable of it, reoriented what was left of my thinking, and crawled up the wall to the ceiling. It would have been a great way to e
s
cape—wait until the jailer brought my dinner and spring down on his back like the Scarlet Pumpernickel. Only my hosts weren’t cooperating in the cuisine department; just as likely they’d forgotten by now that I existed at all. And anyway, the upstairs neighbors weren’t at home, either.

All this exercise must’ve gone to my head; in the odd moment now and then, I found myself imitating a detective again out of sheer perverse habit. I don’t know why Malaise had lied to me. Pure meanness, maybe. But a lot of what he’d told me—and a few items he’d left out—didn’t add up.

Take that bit about the Broach, for instance, the one installed in his network trolleycar? If he’d had
that
at his disposal, then why the conspic
u
ously monumental architecture mounted on the outside of this rock? Sure, he had a fleet now, but there was enough capacity here to transfer every ship that ever sailed any sea, and you could throw in a hundred years’ pr
o
duction from Detroit for good measure. Seemed uncharacteristically wast
e
ful.

And another thing: aside from the impostor who’d greased Ranger Trayle, there’d been exactly zero (count ‘em) other male—well, field-workers executing Voltaire’s dirty work. And, more significantly, an equal number of simians and cetaceans. This was entirely consistent; Hamilton
i
ans have little use for our hairier or soggier citizens—they feel they’re b
e
ing generous acknowledging the existence of folks with low albedos and fo
r
eign accents.

But this left me with a couple of problems: just who the hell broke into my stateroom? There were friends of mine apparently involved somehow with Aphrodite, Ltd. No matter how I stretched things, I just couldn’t see Ooloorie or Deejay, or even Freeman Bertram cooperating with the Fede
r
alists.

Nor the one who hurt the most, Koko Featherstone-Turncoat.

Here I’d
had
the goddamned cliché interview with the villain-in-chief a
l
ready, and I was
still
a long way from unraveling the truth.

And I was likely to
die
in that condition.

***

Saturday, March 27, 223 A.L.

“
Listen t’me, kid, n’listen good. Ya won’t do yerself no good goin’ ta pieces every time y’fill some train robber fulla.
..
holes. Ya didn’t decide he was gonna be no train ro
b
ber. Y’didn’t make ‘im try fer this payroll. He decided all that fer hisself. Ya mighta shot ‘im, sure. But th’ way I lookit it, it was his finger on th’ trigger, all along. Look, kid, we’re th’ best guns Wells-Mulligan’s got—-anybody’d break inta
our
boxcar’s just plain committin’.
..
suicide. An’ ever
y
body’s got th’ right to commit suicide, ain’t they...kid
?”

Four days and twenty-seven Lone Star Republic Pictures later (I’d been doing as much sleeping as I could), I woke up barely able to move and guessed I’d finally reached the end of the trail. Hell, I’d thought you could go longer than a week without eating, provided you had air and plenty of water. So I lay there feeling sorry for myself. It didn’t seem fair: I’d been looking forward to those three or four extra centuries Confed
e
rate medicine kept promising me.

Contrariwise, if my Clarissa was one of Malaise’s brain-bored breeding slaves by now, an extra three or four
minutes
would be too much bu
r
den for a single lifetime to bear. Odd, how someone else becomes your soul. Mu
s
tering every molecule of willpower, I keyed the Gigacom. If I was going to cash in, I’d do it with her image in my eyes—God, if I’d only thought to record her Telecom calls aboard the—

“
Have a good trip, darling, and hurry home.
”
There she was in that go
r
geous outfit, lying sexily across our bed. ‘’
While you’re gone, I hope this gadget keeps you entertained almost as well as I could
!”
I played it over and over tr
y
ing not to cry, wondering why I bothered trying. The inside of my hood was plenty damp anyway, and I couldn’t even open up to wipe it out. Not enough air. In fact there hadn’t been enough for quite a while, and now I thought of it, wasn’t it rather hot? Look at the way the water drops were boiling on the tap.

Boiling?

Without my suit I’d probably be
poached
by now! Lying on my back, I placed a suited hand against the door—and jerked it back again! Why, after all this time, were they torturing me this way? Couldn’t they just let me die in peace? Or were they leaving in their starships, their interstellar exhaust consuming both the outpost and the prisoners they’d left behind?

A sudden, reflex motion had launched me on a gentle, low-gravity tr
a
jectory across the floor. I didn’t have the gumption to fend off the i
m
pact with the opposite wall, but simply lay there confused, awaiting death.

Karumph
!
The door exploded inward in a cascade of brilliant sparks and molten metal droplets, swirling me upward through the room like a leaf, my telltales flashing green again, a sudden flood of energy rushing through me like a can of Popeye’s spinach. I whipped out a hand and glued myself to the ceiling. In the shattered, twisted doorway below swayed a blocky figure, some kind of lethal burner hissing in his upthrust hand.

I breached my smartsuit long enough to snag the « little .25. Let them do what they want, I was going to take a few of the bastards with me, star
t
ing with this one. He staggered in reaction to the implosion, shook his hooded head and passed with hesitation into the room. I flipped the tiny safety down and lined up the sights, rudimentary bumps of metal on the upper surface of the slide, slowly increasing pressure on the trigger.

Abruptly, another scarlet-suited figure followed, weapon at the ready, and reached up to unzip her hood.

“
Clarissa!
”

“P

ut away that toy, son—gonna poke somebody’s eye out!” Lucy tru
n
dled in behind Clarissa, looking like she’d gone fifteen rounds with a jackhammer.

And lost.

I fastened my eyes on my wife and let go of the ceiling, remembering in midair to scoot the tiny pistol’s safety lever up into its notch under the slide. I lighted fairly gracefully (okay, call it a seven-point landing), and wrapped myself around Clarissa while she was doing the same to me. A
f
ter a while we Kleenexed each other’s eyes and I turned to the guy with the torch, Ka
r
yl Hetzer.

“One hell of a firestick you’ve got there! You should’ve seen the blast from
this
side!” I described the door exploding into the room. Now it hung from its frame like the lid on a half-opened can of sardines. “If that thing’d come loose, it would’ve cut me right in half! Not that I’m co
m
plaining—it would have been preferable to—”

“Win
Bear
!”
Clarissa interrupted, “how could you say such a thing?”

“Very easily, sweetheart, I’ll
tell
you about it sometime.” I sat on the floor, hoping dizzily that someone had brought me a roll of Life Sa
v
ers—or a couple of mastodons.

Karyl scratched his beard where a puzzled expression lay buried som
e
where. “Kind of hard to figure. Anything explosive in this place?”

“Hafta be out in th’ hall,” Lucy answered, saving me the trouble. “Lookit th’ way th’ door’s bent inward.” She rolled her bedraggled way back to the entrance, peering closer. I didn’t really give a damn; I held Clarissa, a
d
miring her smile, and wondering, just a little, what seemed different about her. Maybe it was the dashing scarlet smartsuit she was wearing, or—

“Hey!” Lucy and I shouted simultaneously.