He found an empty space farther down the table and sat down. The vision of a lavish dinner evaporated from his mind; whatever food the people from the training center had ordered, its remnants were sparse and unattractive. Still, it was possible to drink, at least. Dekker located a glass that seemed to be clean, and poured himself beer from a pitcher in the middle of the table. He sipped it, looking with distaste at the remains of one of the things they called "pizza" on the table, cold and gluey.
"Are you hungry?" a woman's voice asked him.
He turned to see Ven Kupferfeld looking down at him.
"Yes," he said simply.
"You looked that way. There's a free lunch over there—" she waved to the end of the room, almost obscured in smoke and fug. "You're cold, too, aren't you?" He nodded, discovering it was true.
"Well, you'd better borrow my sweater," she told him, untying the sleeves she had wrapped around her waist. She herself couldn't have felt cold at all, Dekker thought. She certainly wasn't dressed for warmth, because all she was wearing was a skimpy halter top and a skirt that scarcely covered her hips. "You people get sick pretty easily, you know," she went on.
"We people don't," he corrected her, "if we've had all our immunizations, and I have." Still, the baggy sweater felt agreeably warm on his chilled body—it must have been immense on her—not to mention that as he pulled it over his head he caught a charming, compelling scent of Ven Kupferfeld.
Unfortunately, that train of thought led nowhere. As soon as her errand of mercy was done she had left him to resume an intense, low-voiced discussion with some male student Dekker didn't know. Dekker regarded the table without pleasure. It smelled of spilled beer and tobacco smoke, which made him feel queasy without diminishing his hunger. He got up and walked over to explore the "free lunch." It turned out to be little more attractive than the revolting cold pizza; there was nothing on the counter but sandwich materials and strange-looking killed-animal pastes spread on crackers. Dekker studied it dispiritedly, mourning for the lavish displays at the brunch; this was no substitute.
It occurred to him to wonder what he was doing in this place. Tanabe showed no interest in him. It appeared that the only reason for being there was to get drunk, and Dekker had good family reasons for not wanting to do that. It would have been more interesting if he had had Ven Kupferfeld to talk to, but she hadn't been encouraging. Most of the people in the bar were unfamiliar, or busy talking to somebody else. He saw Jay-John Belster at the bar, talking to another Martian. Then Dekker looked again to make sure, for, surprisingly, the other man wasn't a trainee. It was unmistakably Dekker's former tutor, Marcus Hagland. Belster looked his way, but Dekker turned away.
As Dekker was making a sandwich out of fatty slices of killed-animal and soggy bread Belster came over. "Hi," he said, picking up a piece of the stuff, folding it and jamming it into his mouth.
"Hi," Dekker said in return. "I didn't know you knew Marcus Hagland."
"Marcus? That his name? I don't really know him; he just hangs around here. I think he used to be a trainee, but they say the corporation threw him out for cheating." He munched thoughtfully, then added, "Your buddy Tanabe's getting really sloshed."
"It's his business," Dekker said shortly, though what Belster said was true enough. The Japanese was flushed and sweating, and Dekker observed that he had switched from beer to Scotch.
Belster chewed and swallowed. "Doesn't that make it yours? I thought you were going to be his nursemaid, getting him back to base?"
Dekker didn't answer. Belster was a great disappointment to him—considering how few fellow Martians there were in the training group, they should have been friends. But the man couldn't help being offensive, it seemed. "Is there anything to drink here but alcohol?" he demanded.
"Soft drinks, probably," Belster said, "but you'll have to pay for them. Listen. I hear your mother's a big shot back home."
"She's a representative to the Commons, if that's what you mean."
Belster gave a short, sharp laugh. "Fucking Commons. They've really screwed things up, trying to save a few cues to please the Earthies."
"My mother works real hard for Mars," Dekker said stiffly.
"Oh, sure she does. Only she's on the Bonds commission, isn't she? And they're the ones who got me fired, you know."
"Fired from what?" Dekker asked in surprise.
"I was working for the trade delegation here—not a bad job, you know? Then they started that damn parliamentary commission, and they started firing people left and right—cutting expenses."
"But they had to cut back! The debt was simply getting out of hand—"
"I know all about the damn debt," Belster growled. "All I'm saying is, I'd still be working in San Francisco right now if your mother's commission hadn't come along." He looked sulkily at Dekker, then conceded, "Not your fault, I guess." He jerked a thumb at Tanabe. "He's the bad guy here, not you or me. His father's got big money in the farm habitats. Why do you hang around with him?"
"I didn't pick him. They gave him to me for a roommate," Dekker said, then added more honestly, "Anyway, today he invited me to come down to Denver with him. I couldn't afford it on my own."
"Sure he invited you," the Martian agreed. "Why wouldn't he? The Japs've got all the money, them and the Russians and all. And it doesn't look to me as though he's being really generous with his invitation." He glared at Tanabe with undisguised loathing. Without taking his eyes off the Japanese he said to Dekker, "Wouldn't you like to take it all away from them?"
"I suppose so, I guess," Dekker said, not understanding, but also not—quite—willing to break off the conversation with this unpleasant person who seemed at least to be trying to be less so. "But that's just what we're going to do anyway, Belster, isn't it? When the project begins to show results, and Mars has its own atmosphere and we can start developing the planet—"
"I don't mean fifty years from now, for God's sake. I mean now."
Dekker shrugged. It seemed as though Belster was trying to get at something, but Dekker could not see the point. "Supposing you're right, how would we go about doing that?"
Belster blinked at him with a curious expression. "Maybe there's ways," he said. "See you later." And he left Dekker alone again.
The trouble with being a guest was that you couldn't leave until your host wanted to go. Dekker was not enjoying himself. Everyone else at the table seemed to be settled there for life, wrangling and arguing in ways that struck him as perilously close to outright affront. It didn't surprise Dekker that the voices were getting more quarrelsome. There had been a lot of alcohol already, and more coming all the time. Although Dekker had figured out that drunkenness was the tolerated Earthie escape from the imposed regime of at least keeping your hostilities to yourself, if you couldn't avoid feeling them, he wondered how much farther some of these people could go before the Peacekeepers came in.
Now that he had dried off, the place was unpleasantly warm, too. He pulled the sweater off and tied it around his waist, looking around the room. It was more crowded then ever, though he could not see Marcus Hagland anywhere. That was just as well, he thought, and thought resentfully again that there was no good reason for him to be here. There was no one he particularly wanted to talk to in the room but, maybe, Ven Kupferfeld, and she was busily head to head with another man again.
Maybe, Dekker thought, there wasn't any good reason for him to be on Earth at all. To help his planet, sure. But if the whole Oort project was as shaky as everybody seemed to think, then it might easily happen that he'd get through the course just in time to find that there were no jobs. Then what about his career?
Then, for that matter, what about Mars?
He didn't like that thought. Lacking anything better to do, he headed for the free lunch again.
There wasn't much left of it. As he was trying to pick out enough scraps to make another sandwich, someone bumped into him.
"Sorry," she said, and as he turned he saw it was the female i
nstructor he had seen talking with Liselotte Durch.
"That's all right," he said, and began to turn back to his sandwich when she put out her hand to touch his arm.
"Wait a minute," she said. "I know you."
"You've probably seen me around. I'm a trainee. My name's Dekker DeWoe."
"I know you're a trainee," she said impatiently. "I don't mean that. I mean you look a little bit like—oh, my God," she said, "you're the Martian kid, aren't you?"
He stared at her, then memory flooded back. "From Sunpoint City, yes," he said. "And you're—you're the one who had the party, just before the first impact," he said to the grown-up Annetta Cauchy.
She hadn't changed much. Oh, she had certainly filled out: The budding breasts were now fully adult, and she was wearing more makeup than she had ventured at her parents' party. But not enough, Dekker saw critically, to hide the spiderweb of broken blood vessels around the eyes. Annetta Cauchy had been through an explosive decompression at some time.
There was one significant change: Her name wasn't Cauchy anymore. It had become Bancroft. "That was my ex-husband," she explained. "I dumped him long ago—no, that's not true. He was the one who dumped me, when he found out I wasn't going to inherit a few million cues. I suppose I kept his name to spite him."
He was astonished to find out how short she was, at least twenty centimeters less than himself. When she was standing with Liselotte Durch she had been at instructor height on the teacher's platform, elevated above the students. At close range he could look right down at the top of her head. She wore an oddly placed barrette, high on the left side, pulling her hair forward to fall over her left shoulder. But the barrette had slipped a little, taking some of the hair with it, and under it he caught a glimpse of a ragged white scar, six or seven centimeters long.
She saw what he was looking at and reached up to touch the barrette. "Souvenir of Station Two," she told him.
"Ah," he said, nodding. "One of the co-Mars orbitals. I'm hoping to go out to the Oort itself, actually."
"Sure you are. All you recruits think that's the only place to be, but without the co-Mars controls how would you ever get the comets onto the planet?" She smiled and shook her head. "Anyway, we had a docking problem and my head got in the way, so that's where I got these little mementos. Station Two was okay, though. I was out there for a year, until they sent me back. Not for the accident. Medical problem," she added, though he hadn't asked. "Physical medical, none of that psychological crap."
"I didn't say anything," Dekker said.
"Well," she said, almost apologetically, "I know you didn't, but I get a little sensitive because there's all that talk around about people cracking up in the stations. I wasn't one of them. Anyway, it's nice to see you again. How do you like the Earth?"
"It's fine," he said flatly, poking around the remnants of his sandwich.
She studied him quizzically, but all she did was ask, "What are you eating that crap for? Oh, wait a minute. Are you hungry?"
"Do you think I'd be eating this if I weren't?"
She grinned suddenly. "I could stand something, too. Come on over here; do you like steak?"
He held back. "I can't afford steak," he said.
"Hell, neither can I, but we're not going to pay for it." She tugged him over to the bar. "Two cheese steaks and a couple of bottles of decent beer," she ordered, "and put them on the tab for that guy over there." She was pointing at Tanabe. Then she turned to Dekker. "So you're going to help straighten out your planet?"
He wasn't prepared to joke about it, even for a free meal. He just shrugged. "Oh," she said, "I shouldn't kid you. I know what it means to you."
"And to you?"
"You mean you want to know what I'm doing in the program?" She thought for a moment. "Partly I signed up because the damn Oort thing just about wiped Daddy out when it went sour—he's still holding on to those bonds, but that's just because he can't afford to take the loss if he sells them. Partly because, I guess, I did get affected by your people when I was there as a kid. You Martians are all crazy, sure. Mars isn't worth all this trouble. But I have to admire you, a little." Their orders arrived and she looked at them coldly. "When I think of the way we used to eat then—Oh, well, Dekker, we live and we learn, don't we? Tell me, are you any relation to this Martian senator that's getting in the news all the time?"
He hadn't realized that Gerti DeWoe was getting so famous, but he nodded. "My mother."
She stared at him, then nodded. "Oh, sure. I remember her. She was the one who called my parents after that party and bawled them out for getting her kid drunk. . . . But that was a neat time, Dekker, wasn't it? I mean that whole night, not just the party but the fireworks and all, watching that first comet splash down? I never forgot it. And then what did you do after I came back to Earth?"
"Grew up," he said, smiling. But she wanted to hear details; and so, as a matter of fact, did he.
And actually, Dekker found as they exchanged life stories, he was beginning to enjoy himself. The food was a help. So was the bottled beer, imported from Japan, he saw, and an order of magnitude better than the slop in the pitchers. When Annetta finished hers she pushed the plate away, drank the last of the beer, and stood up. "I've got to get back to the base. Nice to see you. But remember, when you get into my class I'm still Teach, no familiarity."
"Sure. Thanks for the steak, too."
"I told you, I'm not paying. It goes on your Jap friend's bill."
"Tanabe? But why would he pay for it?"
"Don't worry about it, he owes me." She glanced over at the long table, where voices were rising. "It looks like it's about time to get him back, too, before he gets himself in trouble."
She was right. Dekker sighed and walked over to where Tanabe was sitting with Ven Kupferfeld and several others. He unwrapped the sweater from his waist and handed it back to her. "Thanks," he said. She glanced at him incuriously but accepted it and returned to her discussion. It was a three-way argument now, Ven as deeply engaged as either of the others. "You Western people," Tanabe was telling them, slurring his words, "you're history." He smiled affably at her, but his eyes were narrowed and hot. "You were important for a while, maybe, but never as important as you thought you were."
"Really?" she snapped. "But you Japanese must have thought we were pretty important. Considering how you copied us."
"Oh, my dear Kupferfeld," he giggled, "is that what you think? But you were such devoted missionaries, Kupferfeld. You wanted so much that everybody in the world would learn to be like you in all your little ways—it was only good manners for us to do it." He poured himself another drink. "Especially the Russians. Do you remember how that went? You were so desperate to have the Russians copy you. Yes, and the Chinese, too. You wanted them to adopt American ways—American elections and American churches and American traffic jams and, most of all, American free-enterprise business. Didn't it ever occur to you what was going to happen when the Russians and the Chinese, with all their people and all their resources, began to copy your economy? Why, they almost put Japan out of business, let alone America!"
One of the other trainees said nastily, "We were doing all right until you bastards sneaked out of the Mars deal."
"Sneaked out?" Tanabe giggled. "But we merely changed our investment portfolio a bit. Obviously the habitats were a better prospect."
"You left us holding the bag!" the man brayed.
"What a pity you did not see the situation clearly," Tanabe commiserated.
"Now we're stuck with the goddamn Martians!" the other man cried.
And from behind Dekker, Jay-John Belster rumbled, "Hey, watch what you say about Martians!"
Tanabe glared drunkenly at him. He seemed to try to struggle to his feet—almost, Dekker thought in shock, as though they were going to fight—but then he looked around the table. There weren't any friendly faces. The other trainee was as hostile as Belster, and almost as big.
Tanabe collapsed back in his chair and g
rinned sloppily up at Dekker DeWoe. "I think," he said, hiccuping, "that now is a good time for you to take me home."
And yet, to Dekker's surprise, when they were out in the open Tanabe straightened up. "I dislike these people very much," he muttered, no word slurred. "Here! Taxi!"
And when they were inside he pillowed his head on the corner of the seat and closed his eyes. "Wake me when we get to the base," he ordered, and was at once asleep.
26
Phase Three of the Oort project's training course was what they called "snake-handling." It was an important one, for the most skilled workers on the Oort program weren't the comet controllers or the pilots who went out and found the comets in the first place. The hardest job there belonged to the snake handlers, who were the people faced with the task of tagging and priming a comet for capture.
To capture the desired comet and send it on its way, it first needed to be threaded with a long, loose chain of instruments, Augensteins, and machines. That was not easy. It was like sculpting dust. That's what comets are, dust and snow; the snow is frozen gases and it has no more structural strength than a Popsicle. Driving the chain through it by remote control from thousands or even millions of kilometers away took skill, not to mention the fact that somehow the whole fragile mass of the comet had to be reinforced enough to stand the thrust of an Augenstein drive. The chain of instrumentation was called a snake, and the people who stitch those chains into the comets' crumbly cores were the ones called snake handlers.
The snakes they handled were probably the hardest in the universe to deal with. Handling cobras would have been a good deal less trouble.