Buying Time

  The nasty little man later explained, holding up a note before my frozen face for a couple of weeks, that it was zombi, a harmless drug. Harmless! I wish we could have traded places and he had to look at me for twenty years. I would do all sorts of things that are not in my nature. It would be fun to hold him down and urinate on him. For about a week.

  No. He might enjoy it.

  He sailed slowly into the room, putting the dart gun into the waistband of his trousers. He made a gargoyle face and covered his mouth with both hands, and for a few hours succeeded in not vomiting.

  I knew that it was some sort of drug, but wondered whether it could be lethal. Was I dying with infinite slowness? Fourteen weeks of medical torture for five days with Dallas; only two when I was well enough for love. Then this.

  So the nightmare had materialized, though it wasn’t my insides everywhere. Had they killed Dallas in the kitchen? They probably gave him the same thing I had. Maybe we both were dead. I couldn’t remember whether that million-pound reward was “dead or alive.” With slow panic I realized there were a lot of things I couldn’t remember. I didn’t know how old I was and couldn’t figure it out. I couldn’t remember the name Dallas was using. I knew it was a politician in Julius Caesar’s court, a character in a Shakespeare play, but I couldn’t remember the name.

  The ugly man slowly pulled the dart out of my breast and rubbed the spot with his thumb. I couldn’t feel it; that’s when I realized I couldn’t feel anything. My body was slack and paralyzed.

  He peeled the blood-soaked sheet off my lower half and spent a long time staring at my nakedness. Dallas had loved this new body with abandon, several times a day. His body was still new, too. That was helping me accept it as mine, this hypersensitive overgrown babyish figure.

  He put his filthy hand under my leg and the other arm behind my shoulders and picked me up. We took a long voyage upstairs. On the way we passed Dallas, facedown but relatively unmarked. He was spattered with blood, but no more so than the walls and ceiling. Oh God, God. I wish You were still there, somewhere, and would send help. Though we weren’t supposed to ask for this kind of help; Thy will be done.

  One sharp memory: being a girl in the convent lying bleeding praying, ecstatic in the certainty of God’s grace. I tried to hold on to the feeling and it drained away, like trying to hold on to a handful of dry sand.

  There was a man in a space suit waiting outside the air lock, carrying a bundle. The ugly little man pushed the cycle button and let go of me. Falling three feet on Ceres is like falling an inch on Earth. But a lot slower, even in real time.

  The other came in. They talked to each other, but the words were pitched too low for me to understand.

  He unzipped the space suit and stepped out naked. He was sleek and handsome. The ugly one also took his clothes off; I memorized every square centimeter of both of them. If I ever got to the police I would be able to draw exact pictures of them. Then the police would hand me over to the Stileman Foundation.

  They shook out the bundle: street clothes, two space suits, and a plastic thing I didn’t recognize. The handsome one put on the street clothes, the ugly one put on one of the space suits, and together they stuffed me into the plastic thing, growling at each other, probably about this body.

  I could tell that I normally knew what the plastic thing was, but I couldn’t associate a name with it. It was to go into space with, if there was an accident. My skin stuck to it here and there. It was probably very cold. Oxygen hissed into it, and it inflated, I suppose to a perfect sphere. Most of it was silver, but there was a transparent window close to my face.

  We passed through the air lock, the man pushing me along and carrying the extra space suit, waiting hours for each twenty-second cycle. I hadn’t used the air lock but remembered Peter Quinn saying that’s what it was, twenty seconds, and it seemed like two or three hours. How long did this drug last?

  I wondered whether Quinn had betrayed us. How could those people have gotten in, otherwise?

  We were a long time outside, and the window rolled away from me. I slept for some time. When I woke up I could see peripherally out of the window, but had a hard time figuring out what I was looking at. Finally I realized it was the hull of a small spaceship, but it was so shiny that the hull was a curved mirror. The little man looked tall and lean in the reflection. We went through another tedious air lock.

  Inside, he unzipped the balloon and carried me to an acceleration couch. There were four of them. The ship was a fairly new standard-model Rocketdyne, apparently ordinary except for the mirror finish outside. It was a little faster than Fireball, but if we were headed for Earth, it would still take more than a month. What would that be if this zombi drug didn’t wear off? A hundred years? Two hundred?

  At least I could sleep. After he’d spent about an hour strapping me in, my eyes slowly closed.

  Waking up was interesting. Mind fast and body slow: I was wide awake but my eyes were just slits, a tiny bit more information coming in every few minutes. I seemed clean; he had wiped the dried blood off my upper body. I could see him off to one side, blurred, ambiguous. With sudden indignation I realized he was stimulating himself sexually, rubbing up and down, staring at me. Each cycle of his hand took about ten minutes. The whole process could take days! Would I be the first woman in history to be bored senseless while being sexually abused?

  Maybe, in a way, I wasn’t being actually abused, since he didn’t know I could see him. He could just as easily be raping me, I realized, and about thirty seconds later had an odd ghost of a feeling around the lower chest, loins, scalp, extremities: adrenaline. I tried to will my eyes to shut. If he knew I could see him he might indeed rape me; men can be funny about being observed. Women are funny about it, too. Dallas and I had talked about voyeurism; Italian attitudes are different from American, but I said there was a commonality. The ultimate violation of privacy. He said that, nevertheless, it was the only crime in the world that didn’t exist until it was discovered; if the woman didn’t know she was being looked at, the crime had no effect on her. I told him he was a pagan and didn’t understand sin. It wasn’t necessary for the victim to know, for the sin to exist. He tried to wax anthropological on the subject, more than half kidding, and I pretended to get angry and moralistic, also kidding, since fornication, rather more serious than peeping, was one sin I had to confess to regularly. We did a lot of that kind of game-playing, silly attitudinizing, and I missed that frivolous side of him with a terrible sudden ache. I laughed more with him, and harder, than I ever had with a man. With two of the sisters at the convent, Dominica and Laraine, before we were old enough for ginnasio, when we went to the orchards outside of the walls, we would talk about things in the world, about men, especially about the gardener and the driver, and sometimes we would laugh so hard, that terrible guilty laughing, that we would cry and our cheeks would hurt from the stretching, and we would be hoarse when we got back, and once the Mother Superior asked us about it and we started laughing again, inside the walls! That was so wicked we laughed until we peed ourselves.

  Oh well. The one thing you can never find again, after you lose it, is innocence. I did manage to force my eyes completely shut. Spare the man the knowledge that his trivial sin had been observed, and therefore existed.

  Dallas

  I handed back the draft of Big Dick’s Vigilante Committee report. “Fast work. You really think it could be a floater, though?”

  “Aw hell. That was before I knew about Doc’s ship gettin’ stolen. That’s gotta be it.”

  “So she could be anywhere in the Belt,” Baird said, “if they are indeed the ones who stole the Rocketdyne. Or headed for Earth, most likely.”

  “Gives us a window,” Big Dick said. “Hell, more than a window. They an’t gonna be wastin’ any time; we got the Rocketdyne’s params—push ’em through the machine an’ you prolly get ETA accurate within an hour or so. Day, for sure.”

  One of the cleanup crew came up from downstai
rs, hauling along the largest piece. It had an arm and a leg and a head, horribly caved in. It was flayed from the chest down and scooped out inside. It looked like something you might see hanging in a butcher shop, except for the face. “You guys know who this is?”

  “Huh-uh,” Dick said, “and I never forget a rib cage.”

  “I gave him his immunosuppressant series last week, him and his two buddies. A little guy and a big weight lifter type. They’d just come from Earth, took jobs up at SORF.”

  “Just mechanics, or what?”

  “I dunno. Went up, gave ’em the pops, came back. Didn’t seem like no Stephen Hawking.”

  “Do me a favor,” Baird said. “Find out what names they were going under, what day they came in.”

  “That’s easy enough. I got ’em right off the pickle boat.” He carried the half-corpse back down.

  “Pretty sight. What does it take to make you doctor guys wanna puke?” Dick asked Baird.

  “Patients who don’t pay. We get to them sooner or later, though, and the feeling passes.” He turned to me. “You’ll want to head for Earth as soon as possible. But don’t do it. Not until you can find another stealthed vessel.”

  I heard the words but couldn’t put them together. Like Dick, I don’t see that many scooped-out corpses. “I’m sorry. What was that?”

  He repeated it, slowly: don’t go tearing out after them. “You might as well wave a flag at the foundation. They’ll be keeping an eye on anyone who leaves from the Belt over the next few days. So hold it. Wait until we can find a stealthed spaceship.”

  “Right.” I crossed the room in one slow step, picked up Eric’s reader, and turned him on.

  “Long time no see,” he said. “What’s new?”

  “Plenty; no time now. Try to get me Bill Baron.”

  “Okay.” The phone screen lit up with a ringing pattern, and Bill appeared.

  “Bill. It’s Dallas.”

  He inclined his head. “Looks more like Fernando Lamas. You remember him?”

  “No, look, I got my face laundered. Let’s see …” Try to think. “First night we had dinner together on adastra, you had the pheasant. It tasted like greasy chicken.”

  He laughed. “Okay, you’re you. What’s happening with all this murder business? A new hobby?”

  “Yeah, sure.” I hesitated. “Don’t want to talk over the phone. Can you come over to my place?”

  “Okay.” I gave him the address. “Jesus—did you just have another murder over there?”

  “Practice makes perfect,” Dick said sotto voce.

  “Afraid so. I think the place is safe for the time being, though.”

  “Is Maria all right?”

  “That’s part of the problem.”

  He reached for the screen. “We’ll be right over.”

  “What was that all about?” Baird asked.

  “Friend of mine. He has a stealthed Sasaki.”

  Dick whistled. “That’s a real truck. He’s into big-league smuggling, eh?”

  “What do you mean, smuggling? How can you have smuggling here if there aren’t any laws about it?” I hoped I hadn’t compromised the Barons. I could have called later.

  “The term’s not accurate,” Baird said. “What we mean by ‘smuggling’ is secretly tapping an income source, usually a precious-metal or rare-earth variegate—they’re criminally easy to mine; you just place a few textbook charges, stake out a Kevlar tarp, blow a hole, scoop up the gravel, take it back to Earth and sit back and count your money.”

  “But if everybody knew where it was,” Dick said, “the market price of the stuff would nosedive. One small variegate of gold would have more gold than Fort Knox. So that’s why they use stealthed vessels.” He shrugged. “It an’t anything people disapprove of. I’ve spent months at a time lookin’ for a variegate I could retire off of.”

  “That’s where the Rocketdyne came from,” Baird said. “Guy who loaned it to me comes up here about two months a decade. Makes his pile and goes back to Earth in a regular ship, rented. Nothing secret about it, though I don’t suppose he tells the foundation where his money comes from.”

  “Gonna be hell to pay when he finds out it’s stolen,” Dick said.

  “We’ve got eight years before he comes back,” Baird said. “A lot can happen.”

  I went down to meet Bill and Doris so as to prepare them for the blood-spattered hallway before they came inside. The big pieces had been photographed, bagged, and hauled off to the dump, and a cleanup crew was working on the walls, but it still looked like a set left over from a grisly horror movie. Dick and Baird went on to work, saying they’d check back in the evening.

  Bill and Doris were glad to be rushed upstairs. I started fixing coffee.

  “I’m going to need a big favor. But I can’t tell you everything about why I need it.”

  “Maybe we don’t want to know that much about it,” Doris said, “if it involves this double murder.”

  “Single murder. At first they thought I was dead too, but it was just a drug.”

  “We at least ought to know why the Stileman Foundation’s after you,” Bill said. “What did you do to deserve such a big price on your head?”

  “Not what I did. What I know.” I served the coffee and sat down with them, paused, and took a deep breath. “This is hard to believe. But I can prove that the foundation’s been taken over by a secret inner circle that will do anything—murder, kidnapping, blackmail—in pursuit of its goal. Which is world domination.”

  Bill gave me a look. “Do you feel all right?”

  “Why would anybody want to rule the world? They’d have to run it.”

  “I know. And in fact, they don’t put it that baldly; they just think the ’phems are doing a bad job and ‘we’ ought to step in and clean things up. The ‘we’ is a group of about a hundred handpicked immortals.

  “They wanted me, I supposed for my visibility, and when I refused they tried to kill me. That failed, so they set me up as a murderer. Maria and I fled out to here, and they sent a couple of thugs after us. They knocked me out and either kidnapped Maria or killed her.” I gestured downstairs. “She killed one of them with a shattergun.”

  “But if they were after you,” Doris said, “why didn’t they kidnap you while they had the chance?”

  “I don’t know. It doesn’t make sense. Maybe the survivor panicked after Maria killed his partner—it is a pretty brutal sight after all. Maybe he just grabbed her and ran.”

  “Wouldn’t he look pretty obvious?” Bill said. “Running down Tsiolkovski with a protesting woman in tow?”

  “Yeah, naked and bloody, too.” I pointed toward the air lock. “He took her outside.” Dick’s Vigilante Committee report was over on the couch. I sailed over, picked it up, tripped, caromed off the window, and came back, slowly tumbling head over heels.

  “Can you teach me how to do that?” Bill said.

  I handed them the report. “There was another guy involved. They evidently stole a stealthed Rocketdyne, put her aboard, and used this rise in the ground to sneak away unnoticed. Probably headed back to Earth.”

  He studied both of the pages, nodding. “Look, Dallas. Anybody overhearing this would say you were crazy. Dangerously crazy, considering the string of bodies that leads to here.”

  “That’s something they’re counting on.” I told them about the letter we’d sent to all the board members. “Have you been following the news?”

  They both shook their heads. “Never,” Doris said. “They change the names but the stories stay the same.”

  “They even published the letter as proof of my insanity.”

  “I did see that, actually,” Bill said. “I mentioned to a friend that I’d met you in adastra—don’t see that many celebrities—and he told me about the accusations. I looked it up and decided it couldn’t be true. I flatter myself that I can read people pretty well. At least I ought to be able to tell a screwloose murderer after having a few meals with him. That’s wh
y we put an ad on the board. Did you see it?”

  “Yes. But we didn’t want to get you involved. Now I’m afraid I have to.”

  “What do you need?”

  “A stealthed ship.”

  They looked at each other. “It’s full of silver,” Bill said. “I mean full. We were just about to head back to Earth.”

  “I don’t see how we could handle a passenger,” Doris said. “There are only two acceleration couches, and the life-support system couldn’t handle three people, not back to Earth.”

  “Besides, we’re taking three months. You’ll want to go back as fast as possible.”

  “You’re right,” I said. “We calculated no more than five weeks for them.”

  “But you do need stealth,” Doris said, “if you’re even halfway right about the foundation. They’ll have a welcoming committee waiting on Earth for anyone who leaves the Belt in the next few days.” She bit her lip, concentrating. “But that’s worth thinking about, too. They’ll expect you to be hot on their trail, right? What if you did take three months? They wouldn’t be as ready for you. Might even assume you weren’t coming.”

  “That’s right,” Bill said. “We could split up; Doris could take a commercial flight home while you and I crawled back to Earth.”

  “Or vice versa,” Doris said. “You might find it easier to get along with me than him, cooped up.”

  “You’re both too generous. But I don’t think I could do it. After three months I would be crazy. What if I was a week late? What if they decided I wasn’t coming and … disposed of her?”

  Bill sipped his coffee reflectively. “That’s playing into their hands, though, thinking like that. They want you to come charging in. You ought to put them off-balance.”

  “They’ve got me off-balance. How would you feel if somebody snatched Doris?” He gave me a patient look. “Sorry. I know a couple of months doesn’t compare to seventy years.”

  There was an awkward silence. “Men,” Doris said. “A gallon of honey is no sweeter than a thimbleful.”

  “We could offload,” Bill said slowly. “Without the silver, the ship would be light and fast.”