“Grab that seat.” Hood saw his opportunity and was into the stool next to Matt before the occupant was fully out of it. “I’ve been playing nursemaid to mining worms. And you?”
Hood’s smile suddenly died. “Er—you don’t still hold that scar against me, do you?”
“No!” Matt said with explosive sincerity. “That whole thing was my fault. Anyway it was a long time ago.”
It was. Matt had been in the eighth grade that fall day when Hood came into Matt’s classroom to borrow the pencil sharpener. It was the first time he’d ever seen Hood: a boy about Matt’s size, though obviously a year older, an undersized, very nervous upperclassman. Unfortunately the teacher was out of the room. Hood had marched the full length of the room, not looking at anyone, sharpened his pencil, and turned to find his escape blocked by a mob of yelling, bounding eighth graders. To Hood, a new arrival at the school, they must have looked like a horde of cannibals. And in the forefront was Matt, using a chair in the style of an animal trainer.
Exit Hood, running, wild with terror. He had left the sharpened point of his pencil in Matt’s chest.
It was one of the few times Matt had acted the bully. To him, the scar was a badge of shame.
“Good,” said Hood, his relief showing. “So you’re a miner now?”
“Right, and regretting it every waking hour. I rue the day Earth sent us those little snakes.”
“It must be better than digging the holes yourself.”
“Think so? Are you ready for a lecture?”
“Just a second.” Hood drained his glass in a heroic gesture. “Ready.”
“A mining worm is five inches long and a quarter inch in diameter, mutated from an earthworm. Its grinding orifice is rimmed with little diamond teeth. It ingests metal ores for pleasure, but for food it has to be supplied with blocks of synthetic stuff which is different for each breed of worm—and there’s a breed for every metal. This makes things complicated. We’ve got six breeds out at the mine site, and I’ve got to see that each breed always has a food block within reach.”
“It doesn’t sound too complicated. Can’t they find their own food?”
“In theory, sure. In practice, not always. But that’s not all. What breaks down the ores is a bacterium in the worm’s stomach. Then the worm drops metal gains around its food block, and we sweep them up. Now, that bacterium dies very easily. If the bacterium dies, so does the worm, because there’s metal ore blocking his intestines. Then the other worms eat his body to recover the ore. Only, five times out of sit it’s the wrong ore.”
“The worms can’t tell each other apart?”
“Flaming right they can’t. They eat the wrong metals, they eat the wrong worms, they eat the wrong food blocks; and when they do everything right, they still die in ten days. They were built that way because their teeth wear out so fast. They’re supposed to breed like mad to compensate, but the plain truth is they don’t have time when they’re on the job. We have to keep going back to the crew for more.”
“So they’ve got you by the gonads.”
“Sure. They charge what they like.”
“Could they be putting the wrong chemical cues in some of the food blocks?”
Matt looked up, startled. “I’ll bet that’s just what they’re doing. Or too little of the right cues; that’d save them money at the same time. They won’t let us grow our own, of course. The—” Matt swallowed the word. After all, he hadn’t seen Hood in years. The crew didn’t like being called names.
“Time for dinner,” said Hood.
They finished the beer and went to the town’s one restaurant. Hood wanted to know what had happened to his old school friends, or schoolmates; Hood had not made friends easily. Matt, who knew in many cases, obliged. They talked shop, both professions. Hood was teaching school on Delta. To Matt’s surprise, the introverted boy had become an entertaining storyteller. He had kept his dry, precise tone, and it only made his jokes funnier. They were both fairly good at their jobs, and both making enough money to live on. There was no real poverty anywhere on the Plateau. It was not the colonists’ money the crew wanted, as Hood pointed out over the meat course.
“I know where there’s a party,” Hood said over coffee.
“Are we invited?”
“Yes.”
Matt had nothing planned for the night, but be wanted reassurance. “Party crashers welcome?”
“In your case, party crashers solicited. You’ll like Harry Kane. He’s the host.”
“I’m sold.”
The sun dipped below the edge of Gamma Plateau as they rode up. They left their bicycles in back of the house. As they walked around to the front, the sun showed again, a glowing red half-disk above the eternal sea of cloud beyond the void edge. Harry Kane’s house was just forty yards from the edge. They stopped a moment to watch the sunset fade, then turned toward the house.
It was a great sprawling bungalow, laid out in a rough cross, with the bulging walls typical of architectural coral. No attempt had been made to disguise its origin. Matt had never before seen a house which was not painted, but he had to admire the effect. The remnants of the shaping balloon, which gave all architectural coral buildings their telltale bulge, had been carefully scraped away. The exposed walls had been polished to a shining pink sheen. Even after sunset the house glowed softly.
As if it were proud of its thoroughly colonist origin.
Architectural coral was another gift of the ramrobots. A genetic manipulation of ordinary sea coral, it was the cheapest building material known. The only real cost was in the plastic balloon that guided the growth of the coral and enclosed the coral’s special airborne food. All colonists lived in buildings of coral. Not many would have built in stone or wood or brick even were it allowed. But most attempted to make their dwellings look somewhat like those on Alpha plateau. With paint, with wood and metal and false stone-sidings, with powered sandpaper disks to flatten the inevitable bulges, they tried to imitate the crew.
In daylight or darkness Harry Kane’s house was flagrantly atypical.
The noise hit them as they opened the door. Matt stood still while his ears adjusted to the noise level—a survival trait his ancestors had developed when Earth’s population numbered nineteen billion, even as it did that night, eleven point nine light-years away. During the last four centuries a man of Earth might as well have been stone deaf if he could not carry on a conversation with a thousand drunks bellowing in his ears. Matt’s people had kept some of their habits too. The great living room was jammed, and the few chairs were largely being ignored.
The room was big, and the bar across from the entrance was enormous. Matt shouted, “Harry Kane must do a lot of entertaining.”
“He does! Come with me; we’ll meet him!”
Matt caught snatches of conversation as they pushed their way across the room. The party hadn’t been going long, he gathered, and several people knew practically nobody; but they all had drinks. They were of all ages, all professions. Hood had spoken true. If a party crasher wasn’t welcome, he’d never know it, because no one would recognize him as one.
The walls were like the outside, a glowing coral-pink. The floor, covered with a hairy-looking wall-to-wall rug of mutated grass, was flat except at the walls; no doubt it had been sanded flat after the house was finished and the forming balloon removed. But Matt knew that beneath the rug was not tile or hardwood, but the ever-present pink coral.
They reached the bar, no more jostled than-need be. Hood leaned across the bar as far as he could, which because of his height was not far, and called, “Harry! Two vodka sodas, and I’d like you to meet—Dammit, Keller, what’s your first name?”
“Matt.”
“Matt Keller. We’ve known each other since grade school.”
“Pleasure, Matt,” said Harry Kane, and reached over to shake hands. “Glad to see you here, Jay.” Harry was almost Matt’s height, and considerably broader, and his wide face was dominated by a shapeles
s nose and an even wider grin. He looked exactly like a bartender. He poured the vodka sodas into glasses in which water had been prefrozen. He handed them across. “Enjoy yourselves,” he said, and moved down the bar to serve two newcomers.
Hood said, “Harry believes the best way to meet everyone right away is to play bartender for the first couple of hours. Afterward he turns the job over to a volunteer.”
“Good thinking,” said Matt. “Is your name Jay?”
“Short for Jayhawk. Jayhawk Hood. One of my ancestors was from Kansas. The jayhawk was a symbolic Kansas bird.”
“Crazy, isn’t it, that we needed eight years to learn each other’s first names?”
At that moment a fragment of the crowd noticed Hood and swept down upon them. Hood barely had time to grin in answer before they were in the midst of introductions. Matt was relieved. He was sure he had seen Harry Kane pass something to Jay Hood along with his drink, Manners kept him from asking questions, but it stuck in his curiosity, and he wanted to forget it.
The newcomers were four men and a woman. As an individual, Matt remembered only the woman.
Her name was Laney Mattson. She was around twenty-six years old, five years older than Matt. In bare feet he would have topped her by a scant half-inch. But she was wearing double-spikes, and her piled confection of auburn hair made her even taller. Not merely tall, she was big, with wide pronounced hips and deep breasts behind an “M” neckline. She looked prettier than she was, Matt thought; she used cosmetics well. And there was a booming exuberance in her every act, an enjoyment as big as herself.
The men were her age and over, in their late twenties. Any of the four would have looked normal dancing with Laney. They were huge. Matt retained of them only a composite impression of a resonant voice and an enveloping handclasp and a great handsome face smiling down from the pink ceiling. Yet he liked them all. He just couldn’t tell them apart.
Hood surprised him again. Talking along in his dry voice, keeping it raised to an audible bellow, not straining his neck to look anyone in the face, Hood somehow kept control of the conversation. It was he who guided the talk to school days. One of the tall men was moved to speak of a simple trick he’d used to rewire his school’s teaching teedee, so that for one day he and his classmates, had watched their lessons both upside down and inside out. Matt found himself telling of the specimen bottle of apple juice he’d sneaked into the Gamma medcheck station, and what he did with it. Someone who’d been listening politely from the edge of the circle mentioned that once he’d stolen a car from a picnicking crew family on Beta Plateau. He’d set the autopilot to circle a constant thousand feet beyond the void edge. It had stayed up for five days before dropping into the mist, with scores of Implementation police watching.
Matt watched Jay Hood and Laney as they talked. Laney had a long arm draped over Hood’s shoulders, and the top of his head reached just to her chin. They were both talking at once, trampling the tail ends of each other’s sentences, racing pell-mell through memories and anecdotes and jokes they’d been saving, sharing them with the group but talking for each other.
It wasn’t love, Matt decided, though it was like love. It was an immense satisfaction Hood and Laney felt at knowing each other. Satisfaction and pride. It made Matt feel lonely.
Gradually Matt became aware that Laney was wearing a hearing aid. It was so small and so cunningly colored as to be nearly invisible within her ear. Truthfully, Matt couldn’t swear that it was there.
If Laney needed a hearing aid, it was too bad she couldn’t hide it better. For centuries more civilized peoples had been wearing specks of laminated plastic buried in the skin above the mastoid bone. Such things did not exist on Mount Lookitthat. A crew, now, would have had his ears replaced from the organ banks…
Glasses went empty, and one of Laney’s big escorts came back with replacements. The little group grew and shrank and split into other groups with the eternal capriciousness of the cocktail party. For a moment Matt and Jay Hood were left standing alone in a forest of backs and elbows. Hood said, “Want to meet a beautiful girl?”
“Always.”
Hood turned to lead the way, and Matt caught a flash of the same odd coloring in his ear that he had noticed in Laney’s. Since when had Hood become hard of hearing? It might have been imagination, aided by vodka sodas. For one thing, the tiny instruments seemed too deeply embedded to be removed.
But an item that size could have been just what Harry Kane passed to Jay Hood along with his drink.
“It’s the easiest way to conduct a raid, sir.” Jesus Pietro sat deferentially forward in his chair, hands folded on his desk, the very image of the highly intelligent man dedicated solely to his work. “We know that members always leave the Kane house by twos and fours. We’ll pick them up outside the house. If they stop coming out, we’ll know they’ve caught on. Then we’ll go into the house itself.”
Behind his mask of deference, Jesus Pietro was annoyed. For the first time in four years he had planned a major raid on the Sons of Earth, and Millard Parlette had picked that night to visit the Hospital. Why tonight? He came only once in two months, thank the Mist Demons. A visit from a crew always upset Jesus Pietro’s men.
At least Parlette had come to him. Once Parlette had summoned him to his own house, and that had been bad. Here, Jesus Pietro was in his element. His office was practically an extension of his personality. The desk had the shape of a boomerang, enclosing him in an obtuse angle for more available working space. He had three guests’ chairs of varying degrees of comfort, for crew and Hospital personnel and colonist. The office was big and square, but there was a slight curve to the back wall. Where the other walls were cream colored, easy on the eye, the back wall was smoothly polished dark metal.
It was part of the outer hull of the Planck. Jesus Pietro’s office was right up against the source of half the spiritual strength of Mount Lookitthat, and half the electrical power too: the ship that had brought men to this world. Sitting at his desk, Jesus Pietro felt the power at his back.
“Our only problem,” he continued smoothly, “is that not all of Kane’s guests are involved in the conspiracy. At least half will be deadheads invited for camouflage. Telling them apart will take time.”
“I see that,” said the old man. His voice squeaked. He wore the tall, skeletal look of a Don Quixote, but his eyes held no madness. They were sane and alert. For nearly two hundred years the Hospital had kept his body, brain, and mind functioning. Probably even he did not know how much of him had been borrowed from colonists convicted of major crimes. “Why tonight?” he asked.
“Why not, sir?” Jesus Pietro saw what he was driving at, and his mind raced. Millard Parlette was nobody’s fool. The ancient was one of the few crew willing to accept any kind of responsibility. Most of the thirty thousand crew on Mount Lookitthat preferred to devise ever more complex forms of playing: sports; styles of dress that changed according to half-a-dozen complex, fluctuating sets of rules; rigid and ridiculous social forms. Parlette preferred to work—sometimes. He had chosen to rule the Hospital. He was competent and quick; though he appeared rarely, be always seemed to know what was happening; and he was difficult to lie to.
Now he said, “Yesterday the ramrobot capsule. Last night your men were scouring the area for spies. Tonight you plan a major raid for the first time in four years. Do you think someone slipped through your fingers?”
“No, sir!” But that would not satisfy Parlette. “But in this instance I can afford to cover my bet even when it’s a sure thing. If a colonist had news of the ramrobot package, he’d be at Kane’s place tonight though demons bar the way.”
“I don’t approve of gambling,” said Parlette. Jesus Pietro uneasily searched his mind for a suitable answer. “And you have chosen not to gamble. Very good, Castro. Now. What has been done with the ramrobot capsule?”
“I think the organ-bank people have it unpacked, sir. And the…contents stored. Would you like to see?”
/> “Yes.”
Jesus Pietro Castro, Head of implementation, the only armed authority on in entire world, rose hastily to his feet to act as guide. If they hurried, he might get away in time to supervise the raid. But there was no polite way to make a crew hurry.
Hood had spoken true. Polly Tournquist was beautiful. She was also small and dark and quiet, and Matt definitely wanted to know her better. Polly had long, soft hair the color of a starless night, direct brown eyes, and a smile that came through even when she was trying to look serious. She looked like someone with a secret, Matt thought. She didn’t talk; she listened.
“Parapsychological abilities are not a myth,” Hood was insisting. “When the Planck left Earth, there were all kinds of psionics devices for amplifying them. Telepathy had gotten almost dependable. They—”
“What’s ‘almost dependable’?”
“Dependable enough so there were specially trained people to read dolphin minds. Enough so telepaths were called as expert witnesses in murder trials. Enough—”
“All right, all right,” said Matt. It was the first time tonight that he had seen Hood worked up. Matt gathered from the attitudes of the others that Hood rode this hobbyhorse often. He asked, “Where are they now, these witches of yours?”
“They aren’t witches! Look, Kell—Look, Matt. Every one of those psi powers was tied up a little bit with telepathy. They proved that. Now, do you know how they tested our ancestors before they sent them into space for a thirty-year one-way trip?”
Someone played straight man. “They had to orbit Earth for a while.”
“Yes. Four candidates in a ferryboat, orbiting for one month. No telepath could take that.”
Polly Tournquist was following the debate like a spectator at a tennis match, swinging her shoulders to face whoever was speaking. Her grin widened; her hair swung gently, hypnotically; she was altogether a pleasure to watch. She knew Matt was watching. Occasionally her eyes would flick toward him as if inviting him to share the joke.
“Why not, if he’s got company?”