Buying Time

  “Well … no. This is the only one I have where the client neglected to stipulate rental terms. She wanted to save money and not use a lawyer.” He shrugged elaborately. “So I ask you. Whose fault is it if I make a few rubles? Who’s hurt? She still doesn’t have to pay the lawyer’s fees.”

  “How much do you want?” Dallas asked.

  “Big deposit, low rent. Rent gets lower, the longer you have it.” He leaned back, which made his knees float up and bump the underside of the desk. “If you only have it for a short time, it’s a thousand rubles a week. After four, it’s two thousand a month. After two months, fifteen hundred. That’s cheap for Ceres.”

  Dallas nodded. “And the deposit?”

  “A hundred thousand.”

  “We’re not gonna set fire to the place.”

  “Look at it from my perspective. It’s a long way down. You know how much it would cost me to replace a simple two-ruble glass? I would have to replace it. She can’t know the place was rented.”

  “I wonder,” Maria said. “Suppose she found out. What would she do?”

  “This is Ceres. She could go down to the landing dock and pick up some lowlife and pay him fifty rubles to give me a vacuum lesson. As in breathing vacuum? At my age, I don’t think I could learn.”

  “She wouldn’t do that,” Dallas said. “She’d squeeze you for the money.”

  “Ceres. You get your random arbitrageurs. They decide you don’t get your money. Then what do you do?”

  “Not murder.”

  He shrugged. “She’s an interesting woman. Sort of a cross between Cleopatra and Attila the Hun. I do need a deposit.”

  Dallas reached in the bag and brought out the diamond in its velvet box. He opened it like an egg, a hand span above the desk, giving the diamond a little spin. It glittered hypnotically as it slowly fell, spraying color.

  “I don’t know much about jewelry,” Quinn said.

  “Ten carats, standard brilliant, first water. It was appraised at eighty thousand dollars twenty years ago. Worth a lot more than a hundred thousand rubles now.”

  “I’d have to have somebody look at it.”

  “That’s okay. We’d have to look at the apartment, too. Why don’t we do both at the same time.”

  He pursed his lips and nodded. “Let me have your thumbs.” He took their thumbprints on a Xerocard and phoned them to the apartment, so it would let them in. “I can have an appraiser come in at lunchtime, if not sooner. We could close the deal this afternoon, if the terms are agreeable.”

  “After we see the place,” Dallas said. “Then we can talk about terms.”

  The apartment was luxurious, unusually so for being well away from Tsiolkovski. The address was 220 Thirty-fourth, and all the rest of East Thirty-fourth Corridor was taken up by hydroponics and a chicken farm. So it was as close to living “out in the country” as you could get in Ceres.

  The floor upstairs was Persian-carpeted, which was ostentatious both in terms of money and as a statement that the owner was an Old Hand. It was hard for a tyro to move around a room without Stiktite on the floor. You tended to fetch up against the picture windows.

  It even had an air lock, which Quinn said was “almost unique.” There were only about a dozen private air locks on the whole asteroid, since they had to have elaborate failsafes. It wouldn’t do for someone to go out and forget to close the door.

  Downstairs was more comfortable, more utilitarian. One luxury was a water bed, which tied up a few hundred rubles’ worth of water. Dallas suggested they try it out, but Maria was too tired, still feeling weak from the frostbite.

  On their way back to Quinn’s they stopped at a pseudo-Mexican restaurant that featured cabrito, roast goat. Dallas and Maria opted for the vegetarian plates instead, which cost two orders of magnitude less, and perused the local classified ads to get a sense of what people were paying for rent. Quinn’s terms didn’t seem unreasonable by comparison.

  Waiting for their meal, Dallas had the reader in his lap and was scrolling, reading out the classified ads to Maria. He suddenly stopped and stared.

  “I’ll be damned. Look at this.” He passed the reader to Maria:

  To the nice couple we met on adastra: A little bird tells us you’re in trouble and might be someplace in Novy. If you need a couple of friends, give us a buzz at (Ceres) 34-833.—Bill and Doris

  “It is tempting, isn’t it?” She handed the reader back. “But we don’t want to drag them into this mess.”

  “We might have to.” Dallas pushed the REMEMBER button and said “Barons” to the machine.

  Their meals came, couscous with a variety of steamed vegetables. Dallas tore into his like the starving creature that he was, but Maria ate hesitantly and excused herself after a couple of minutes.

  She came back from the toilet pale and trembling. “Still not completely recovered,” she said. “You go ahead and finish mine.”

  “Should we find a doctor?”

  “No. They said I’d be weak for a while.”

  “You might have picked something up at the aid station.”

  “Picked up?” She looked at him quizzically. “Oh, you mean a virus or something.”

  “There were lots of sick people there. Oddly enough.”

  “If it gets worse, all right.” She picked up the wineglass and took a careful sip, but then put it down a little too fast. The wine lagged behind the container; she retrieved most of it.

  “Do you get the feeling that you’re stuck in a slow-motion movie?”

  She gave him a weary smile. “Often.”

  Dallas

  When we got back to Peter Quinn’s office, he was at his desk, ready and waiting. “Nice place, eh?”

  “It will do. You have the diamond appraised?”

  He took the velvet box out of a vest pocket and opened it, admiring the stone. “This is a remarkable piece, evidently. I mean, beautiful, that I can tell myself. But my friend says remarkable. If you got it for eighty thousand, you got a real bargain.”

  I shrugged. I’d paid almost three times that much, illegal cash. “That’s what it was appraised at, ’way back when. You know Earth. Of course, I paid more, in order to hang on to it through the Stileman shakedown.”

  “‘Away back when,’ yes; twenty years.” He set the diamond exactly halfway between us. “I sent a holo to the International Diamond Registry in Antwerp. The last owner of record was a Stileman, Russell Coville. He happens to be in Novy, out at 127 Johanna. I wouldn’t live there on a bet. It goes around once each forty minutes, your own shadow makes you dizzy.”

  “You talked to him?” Good old Russell.

  “He says he sold it to Dallas Barr.”

  Quickly: “That’s who I bought it from. You can understand why I don’t want to sell it on Earth.”

  “Oh yes.” He leaned back. “I took the liberty of assuming that was the case, and that’s what I told Mr. Coville.” I nodded, not trusting myself to say anything. “If you were Dallas Barr, it wouldn’t do me that much good. The million pounds, the Stileman Treatment. I’ve been off Earth for too long, haven’t kept up with my exercise. Couldn’t handle gravity. My heart would stop before the shuttle did.

  “I stay here, I’ve got twenty years, thirty, maybe more. Maybe a lot more. You hear things; things are happening.”

  “That’s good.”

  “You’ve got several alternatives. Antwerp says on Earth you might get $175,000 for this. That’s 160,000 rubles minus some change. If you were to offer it for, say, one-forty, you’d have a dozen people lining up. You’d probably get the one-sixty if you held out.”

  “That’s good to know.”

  “But you’d probably be kidnapped or dead the next day. The connection with Dallas Barr would not stay secret, and there are some desperate people here, predators.”

  “The other alternatives?”

  “You could have the stone broken up. My friend could have it done confidentially; this is not something outside his experienc
e. You would have four largish stones and some gravel, assuming no accidents: aggregate value perhaps 60,000 rubles.”

  “That might be best.”

  “Or—or you could just leave it with me. In lieu of a damage deposit. If everything blows over, you get the diamond back, you haven’t lost a kopek. If someone mistakenly kills you, thinking you are Dallas Barr, or kidnaps you … the stone wouldn’t be worth anything to you anyhow. Would it?”

  “Aren’t you taking an awful chance? What if I were Dallas Barr? Sitting across from you with a crowdpleaser on my belt. A dangerous psychotic murderer.”

  He didn’t say anything for a moment, and when he spoke, there was a quaver of tension in his voice. “So all of life is a gamble. You would live longer if you hid under the bed and never came out. But I’ve never hidden … and I don’t believe everything I read in the papers.” He sat forward. “What I believe is the things I read between the lines. Who owns this paper? Who wants you to think what?”

  Maria cleared her throat. “I think we have to trust him.”

  He nodded to her and looked back at me. “I told you I’m in this business fifty years, real estate. Before that, would you believe it? I was a social worker. New York, what was left of it.”

  “Bad times, fifty years ago.”

  “Good times for a boy who wants to change the world. A lot of the world needed changing.”

  “Still does.”

  “More worlds now. Ten years I beat my head against the wall. Against the system. I was an old man at thirty.” He smiled. “And a young man at sixty, when I sold everything and came out here. But by then I’d learned: nobody changes the system. Not unless you’re a Hitler or a Khomeini. And even then, the system eats you. You change it, but you don’t change it into what you wanted.” He looked at Maria again, intently. “I’m not old compared to you two. But it is trust, gospoda; that’s the one thing I learned in eighty years. The system does whatever history makes it do, and the same kind of dreary criminals take charge, generation after generation. But we can be better than that, one at a time, two at a time; family, friends, business associates. We can beat the system bit by bit, in our own little spheres, being human with each other. And learning to know the predators when we see them, of course, the ones you can’t be human with, and handling them.”

  Maybe he was a kindly old man and maybe he was a cynical hypocrite trying to lull us into vulnerability. In either case, we had only two reasonable courses of action: go along with him or get rid of him.

  If he were going to betray us, he would have done it already. So maybe when we got back to the apartment, the “villa,” there would be an assassin waiting, or some foundation goon. I did doubt it; he seemed to be a straight character.

  Besides, I’d done enough killing for one lifetime. “Okay. You have a piece of paper for us to look at?”

  “Here. Save paper.” He turned on the holo apparatus and a standard rental agreement appeared on the wall, with the numbers he’d mentioned.

  “Tell you what. Let’s not haggle.” I took out the bottle of Glenmorangie and set it on his desk. “Twenty percent off, all the way down the line.”

  He considered that. “I’m not a Scotch drinker. But let’s not haggle. Ten percent.”

  “Fifteen,” I said, and reached for the bottle.

  He grabbed it. “Fifteen and the Scotch.” He smiled. “Never too old to learn a new vice.”

  “Deal.” The old bastard knew it was worth two hundred rubles. If we stayed less than a month, that would more than make up the difference. “If we’re screwing each other, I guess this is the foreplay?”

  Our large bags were being held at the shuttle depot; I called from Quinn’s office, and they arrived only a couple of minutes after we got to the villa.

  Maria wanted to lie down, but first I made her memorize the various places I stashed the shatterguns: one per room, easily accessible but out of sight. I decided not to try anything fancy in the way of booby traps. Just have a weapon fairly close to hand wherever you were. That had saved my life in the Conch Republic, where, it was becoming apparent, we had been in less danger of discovery. Old Quinn knew who I was, and so did Blinky, and the appraiser most likely had figured out we were here, even if Quinn hadn’t revealed anything. Not forgetting Russell Coville, who could put two and two together and also would sell his own mother into white slavery. Bill and Doris Baron suspected we were here—was that just from the foundation ad, or did they know something a thousand other people did? Best to assume the worst.

  While she slept, I turned on Eric and filled him in about what had happened since we came down from synchronous orbit. We agreed that the safest thing to do would be to move to a smaller asteroid as soon as Fireball was ready, and not tell anyone that we’d gone or where we were going.

  Then I went down to the water bed, where Maria was sprawled naked, gently snoring. She was still beautiful, though the frostbite had given her skin an odd color and texture. I undressed and slipped in next to her.

  When I touched her she went into convulsions; her body started bucking in and out of a crouched fetal position, floating in midair after having risen with the first twitch.

  I wrapped her in a blanket and held her, and the convulsions quieted down and stopped. But she wouldn’t wake up enough to respond to any questions. Her eyes wouldn’t focus; her breath was sour and hot.

  I pulled on my clothes and checked the map card. There was a clinic at Twentieth and Tsiolkovski. Quicker to carry her there than wait for whatever Ceres used for ambulances, so I wrapped the blanket tight and ran her outside.

  A selfish thought that couldn’t be avoided: this was fine timing. The last thing we needed—I needed—was to be tied down by a serious illness.

  I should have guessed how serious it was.

  Novysibirsk Medical Services Ceres Center

  DATE: 10 yanvár 81

  CLIENT’S NAME: Selena Vaughn

  SPONSOR (if other than self): Cassius Donato

  REASON FOR ADMISSION: Frostbite complications, general debility

  Disposition/Prognosis

  Suit malfunction caused reversible frostbite. Patient recovering well from this. Continue pain medication as needed.

  Patient is a Stileman rejuvenee whose current period of rejuvenation has almost expired. Early stages of deterioration evident in skin and muscle tone, considerably accelerated by the trauma of frostbite. In three to four weeks her condition will begin to deteriorate rapidly.

  Recommendation/Rx

  80 ea. 6 mg. Neophet; 30 ea. sandman gen.

  Euthanasia per patient’s desires, no later than 10 févral.

  CHARGE: R50.00 / $US 54.87 currency

  PHYSICIAN/PARAMEDIC:

  Maria

  They thought I was asleep, and whispered. I had my back to them but could see Dallas in the examining room mirror. He looked at the bill, turned pale, leaned slowly against the wall.

  “This can’t be right.”

  “Today’s exchange rate.” The doctor was an attractive woman with long flowing white hair, who looked under thirty, except for the eyes, penetrating and sad and old.

  “I mean …”

  “Oh, I know what you mean. My specialty is Stileman physiology. There’s no mistake. She didn’t tell you she was getting close to her time?”

  “She said two or three years … I wouldn’t have brought her if I … she can’t get back to Earth.”

  “She knew how much time she had when she left. You start to feel it the last few months.”

  He shook his head. “I know. Went down to the wire last time.”

  “She out of money?”

  “No. She just …” He shrugged.

  I turned around, slowly. Hot skin hurt under the scratchy hospital robe. “We have to talk … Cash.” Almost said his real name.

  “Be down the hall,” the doctor said, and left. Dallas was at my side in one drifting step, half the room long.

  “Dallas,” I whispered, “Dallas.
” Trying to slow down my spinning mind, focus on the speech I’d been rehearsing for weeks. “I don’t know how to ask you this.”

  “Anything,” he said gently.

  “I have to get back,” I said. “Somewhere between Earth and here I … stopped wanting to die. I want to live with you, go on living.…”

  He was crying. He jerked his head sharply, and the tears spun away from his face, tiny crystal spheres.

  I touched his face. “It’s a terrible gamble. But we don’t know for sure that they’re after me. You could stay here; I can run the Fireball alone.”

  He was shaking his head, not looking at me. “I’m sorry I lied. I was just protecting you.”

  “You … you can’t do it.”

  “Of course I can. I’ve done it alone before.”

  His teeth were clenched, voice hoarse: “Don’t have time!”

  “Yes, I do. Five to seven months. Even saving fuel, I can get there in—” He thrust the hospital printout at me.

  It took a few moments to register. That was me they were talking about.

  Euthanasia in four weeks.

  “This is wrong. This has to be wrong.” But my body told me otherwise.

  Dallas and I walked back to the villa together in almost total silence. What could we say? When we got there I wanted to hold him, and talk, and cry, but that had to be later, after I had a chance to be by myself for an hour or two, and reason things out. He understood. Aloneness is one thing we all understand better than normal people. I went to the downstairs bathroom and turned out the light.

  The drugs had me buzzing and glowing. They gave me a four-week supply of Neophets to keep me charged up, as well as sandman for sleep. They wouldn’t do that on Earth. They should. A terminal Stileman tends to surrender psychologically, spiritually, to the diffuse malaise that grows on you as all the body’s systems realize that time is running out. And then one system after another collapses. They can hook you up to an artificial heart and lung, and bypass your kidneys and liver with machines, but that’s unnecessary cruelty. Eventually the catalog of maladies includes cancer, and within a day, within hours, it’s corroding you everywhere. Or your brain blows a fuse, if you’re lucky. They don’t yet know how to do a brain bypass, unless you count things like Eric.