Buying Time

  I could smell the metal of the bulkhead. A whiff of sweat and urine. I could feel where my bones were. Throbbing pain in my bumped nose and fire in all the muscles and joints—much faster than last time, every few seconds a new person, new and slightly less comfortable than the last one.

  There is a God, it came to me in a rush, and he is reviving me so that I can feel pain before I die. As soon as I’m able to move, the fusion torch will light and I’ll be slammed back against the aft bulkhead. To consider for a few agonizing seconds the eternal consequences of my newly embraced atheism.

  I closed my eyes and waited obediently to die, but instead I kept surviving and the roll call of pain got longer and longer. Sinus headache, diaper rash, stubbed toe, infected sore where the dart had gone in, stomach cramps, kidneys, and bladder. If I didn’t die soon I would have to go to the toilet.

  My calves flexed without my thinking about it, and I floated aft, toward the head. It was a wonderful experience, again, to relieve myself, variously, but overall not really worth the wait. I wadded up the clothes I had been wearing for the past twenty years and unfolded a fresh paper tunic from the cabinet. “Might as well die looking fresh,” I said out loud, and my reverberating voice was weird in my ears.

  I kicked up toward the acceleration couches. The clock on the control console said + 09:43:23 CORRECTION URGENTLY REQUIRED. I touched the couch, and the console spoke:

  “Acceleration cannot proceed until one or both passengers are properly secured. Please strap yourselves in and press any key to resume guidance sequence.”

  I pushed aft and port and retrieved the little man, whose frozen face was still contorted in a rictus of horror. Sweet dreams, I hoped. I took the dart pistol from him and started to maneuver him into the couch; then remembered it saying “one or both.” That would be a lovely irony, if the torch lit while I was in the process of saving his worthless skin.

  I suppose it could hear me. “Will you wait to accelerate until after both of us are strapped in?”

  “Yes. Guidance revision sequence will not be initiated spontaneously. The pilot must press a key.”

  Before strapping him in, I took off his shirt and tried to rip off the sleeves, to tie his arms down, but didn’t have the strength. Then I saw I could use the sleeves as bonds without separating them from the shirt. Inelegant but adequate.

  I contemplated further immobilizing him by pulling his pants down around his ankles, giving him a few years of embarrassment, but didn’t do it, on the off chance that he would enjoy exposing himself or, rather, having somebody else expose him.

  I strapped myself in and touched a key. The console counted down from five, we made two pairs of swings and dips in pitch and yaw, and then deceleration slammed in. I watched the accelerometer climb to minus six gees, and then my lids closed.

  What was it like in the old days, with airplanes? Hearing the engines scream, the wind whip by. All I heard was little creaks and pops as the ship debated with itself whether or not to break up under the strain. Then a pair of crashes from the pantry: something not properly secured.

  It was very hard to breathe. It went on for a long time. I tasted blood and realized I had caught the side of my tongue between my teeth, how stupid, and extricated it with difficulty.

  Then it was over. The clock showed we’d been blasting for thirty-one minutes. I felt as if somebody had been massaging me with a cricket bat for that long. My tongue was raw and swollen; all the blood I’d swallowed wanted to come up. Some cool water helped, and I found an antacid that at least covered up the heavy taste of blood. The little man seemed about the same. Too much to ask, to have him bite his tongue.

  I studied the control console. There was not much to it; a fairly standard American idiotproof layout. I never could understand people who would trust AI circuits so completely that they didn’t even install readouts and controls for the thousands of things that would have to be done if you were actually put in charge of the ship. Every year several people disappear into space. Most of them probably spend their last days shouting at an unresponsive screen.

  “Show me where we are,” I asked the machine.

  The screen split into two pictures, one a diagram of Earth with a circular orbit around it, the other an image of the actual planet. “We are currently in geosynchronous orbit over longitude thirty-nine degrees east, which is Kenya. My basic algorithm precludes coming closer to Earth while stealth mechanisms are in effect.”

  That explained the mirror finish outside. “Suppose I ask you to change that part of your algorithm?”

  “It violates international law to operate a stealthed vehicle any closer to Earth.”

  “I didn’t ask you about the law. Will you take me to Earth?”

  “It violates international law to operate a stealthed vehicle inside geosynchronous orbit.”

  “I understand that. Will you break the law for me?”

  “I cannot.”

  Not surprising. “All right. Turn off the stealth and take us to Maui.”

  “I cannot deactivate stealth measures without proper authorization.” That gave me a cold ripple; we could go around that track until we ran out of air.

  I unhooked the microphone and thumbed it. “Mayday. Mayday.” I doubted that Briskin was sitting somewhere over Kenya, waiting for us. “I’m in a stealthed ship, name unknown, in geosynchronous orbit above thirty-nine degrees east. Please answer.”

  The console answered. “No communications are allowed while stealth conditions are in operation. I cannot deactivate stealth measures without proper authorization.”

  “What is proper authorization?”

  “Place thumb in identification square.”

  Of course. “Just a moment.” I untied the man and pulled him over. Pressed his thumb to the square. A small STEALTH OFF message blinked on and disappeared.

  I tied him back up and strapped him in. Strapping myself in, I paused to think. Maybe I had better not go straight to Maui. Maybe I’d better not stay here, either. You had to assume that when a spaceship suddenly appeared out of nowhere, various authorities would notice.

  How much power did Briskin actually have? Did everyone in authority accept his version of what had gone on in Yugoslavia? Dallas and I had chewed on those questions a few times, and I’d had forty more years to think them over. With no new data, unfortunately, other than the fact of my kidnapping, although that was not insignificant.

  Wait. “Where were you programmed to land?”

  “I was not programmed to land. I was only asked to wait in a parking orbit above thirty-nine degrees east.”

  “Are there any other spaceships in the vicinity?”

  “Yes. A stretch Mercedes is closing on us at thirteen hundred meters per second. Range four hundred eighty kilometers.”

  “Take us to Maui. As fast as possible.”

  “Very well. Sixty-second countdown—”

  “Take us now!” I had been leaning forward into my straps with the tension. The sudden acceleration was like a huge soft animal rolling over on me. I did manage not to bite my tongue again.

  They would be waiting for me. What was I going to do?

  Dallas

  The ship refused to come closer to Earth than geosynch, stealthed. I hadn’t asked the Barons about that, but it was no problem. I just plugged Eric in as an override system; he was able to use the ship’s knowledge but ignore inconvenient legalities.

  Assuming that the kidnapper—if there was only one—had come to Earth as fast as Baird’s ship would allow, then they had arrived three days ahead of us. If there were two kidnappers, they’d be slowed by the extra life-support mass, and we’d arrive about the same time.

  Where would they come in? Probably Maui or the Seychelles, if they wanted to unload an unconscious passenger in secret and spirit her away. The hangars are underground. White Sands, the Cape, Zaire, and Baikonur are too well monitored. Or they might have used Anchorage themselves, though their landing and unloading could be watched
from orbit.

  I don’t like landings. Floating around in space is okay—or it used to be, before I had a porthole pop out—but takeoffs and landings scare the shit out of me. I didn’t like them in airplanes, even before my DC-3 crash, and I don’t like them in spaceships. So I took a tranquilizer, which may have been a mistake. Or it may have saved my life, by slowing my reflexes.

  On Eric’s advice we did a “Frisbee” deorbiting maneuver, skimming along the top of the lower atmosphere like a flat stone bouncing over the surface of a lake. It took us an extra orbit, but kept us from having too bright an infrared signature as we came over Pacifica, which would have been the case with a normal braking orbit. But it’s not a maneuver you would recommend for the space-shy, since it does entail a lot of bumping and shuddering. I took a second tranquilizer and was able to observe the process with the detachment of a hitchhiking tick securely fastened to a galloping horse. Interesting, how it flings you around.

  The instant we crossed into Alaska airspace, we simultaneously flipped, destealthed, and blasted. We decelerated hard and Eric surrendered control to the North Anchorage Spaceport.

  It was twilight, a few minutes after sunset, and to our right the dazzling lights of Anchorage proper were in garish competition with the majestic mountain range that half ringed the city, craggy snow tops glowing peach-pale in the last rays of the sun. The city itself had a powdering of snow, surprising for this late in the year; maybe a tourist gimmick. Most of the acre-wide coruscating signboards for the casinos and whorehouses were in Japanese, with tiny footnote names in English.

  The airport in central Anchorage was an ultramodern, daring extravagance of offworld materials, a graceful fairyland. The spaceport, ironically, was a huge crumbling ferromac parking lot that wasn’t even kept free of snow. We sat down tailfirst at the end of a row of seven smaller ships, with a crawler already headed for us. God forbid that I should jump the four or five meters to the ground and run away without paying the landing tax. Run across the cherry-red glowing ferromac onto the glare ice where our backsplash had temporarily melted the drifts.

  I bled in air and swung down to the air lock platform to wait for the crawler. Gravity wasn’t too bad; felt kind of good, actually, since I’d been keeping in shape. Eric shouted at me and I sheepishly crawled back up to unplug him from the controls and take him along.

  “So what’s the first thing you’re going to do?” Eric said.

  Part of me conjured up a vision of a thick rare steak and a bottle of rare wine in a place not far from here, where you are served by lovely women who wear nothing but a nametag and a smile. “Find a room with a safe phone and call Kamachi, try to line up some quick and dirty financing. Then maybe a bath.” It had been six months since I’d been on a planet with spare water.

  I remembered that last bath, though, a bloodbath, and touched the crowdpleaser on my belt. I wondered whether it was legal to carry it through the spaceport. Seemed to me that Alaska was as gun-happy as the rest of the western United States, though I remembered you couldn’t go armed into a casino. The person or machine running the crawler would tell me whether to pack it away.

  The mating part of it, the little accordion room, bumped outside and—a little dull with two tranquilizers—I opened both doors. Waiting on the other side of the air lock were four men in blue thermal uniforms with guns drawn.

  “Don’t do it!” one said, as I raised my hands.

  “Easy,” I said. “What, I broke some law?”

  “That you did, partner.” The oldest-looking one holstered his pistol and stepped forward to handcuff me, arms behind my back. “Oldest law there is: ‘Don’ git the wrong people pissed off.’”

  Two of the other three grinned. “You aren’t police.”

  “W-e-ell now, that depends on how you look at it.” He took the crowdpleaser and gave me a gentle shove through the door. “The people inside think we’re police.”

  “We got police uniforms and a police floater,” another said.

  “Can it,” a black man said with authority. “Let’s just deliver him and get home.”

  “Been a long two days,” the older one said. “Too fuckin’ cold in this—”

  “I said can it.” He shook his head. “Jesus.” That was the last any of them said for the next ten minutes. They took the crawler back to the spaceport but didn’t unload us; we just waited while the older one went inside with a stack of papers and came back with a receipt. Then we crawled to a far corner of the ferromac, and they unloaded Eric and me and my suitcase over two sudden meters of sub-zero cold and blowing snow in the back of a police van, along with the black man and the older one, silently staring.

  It was about zero in the van, but there was a thin draft of hot air. My teeth chattered. “Don’t suppose you have an extra jacket.”

  “No,” the black man said, but threw me a thin blanket. I wrapped myself up Indian style.

  “I can triple what you’re being paid,” I said.

  “No, you can’t,” the black man said.

  “Do you know who I am?”

  “Know what you’ve done.”

  “So what have I supposedly done?” He shook his head and turned to look out the window.

  We went east from the spaceport, away from Anchorage proper, floating toward the mountains. We climbed just high enough to miss the stands of stately fir—this wilderness so carefully maintained for a complex variety of economic, political, and emotional reasons—and sped off at about three hundred kilometers per hour.

  After a few minutes we climbed over some low hills and up to a plateau, and there in the middle of the snowdrifts, inside a perfect circle of snow-free tundra, was an incongruous Georgian manor house, stately but comical in the dying light. It was surrounded by a high wall with servomech laser weapons that tracked us as we approached and settled to the ground in front of a gate. The driver mumbled into a microphone, the gate opened, and we floated through.

  At least Maria would be here. Maybe together we could … no. Probably not.

  “You’re an immortal, aren’t you?” I said to the black man. He had the look; the others didn’t. He stared impassively. “What are these, rent-a-cops? Briskin’s private army?”

  “Sir Charles does not need an army,” he said quietly. “The force of ideas is enough.”

  “You’re on the goddamned Steering Committee.”

  “Be quiet,” he said. The older man tried to look as if he weren’t listening.

  “Probably as crazy as he is.”

  “One more word,” he was almost whispering, “and I’ll have this man hit you over the head with his blackjack.” The older man looked straight at Dallas and unsnapped the blackjack from his belt. “You know,” the black man continued, “it’s a delicate operation, trying to knock a man out with a club and yet not do permanent damage or kill him. It’s not like in the movies.”

  I knew he was right—in fact, had given Maria a lecture about it once, after we watched an old movie aboard Fireball—and wondered what difference the Kevlar over-skull would make. Prevent a fracture, but of course the scalp would bleed normally. I could feign unconsciousness.

  I took the chance. “You wouldn’t dare.” The older man stood and raised the blackjack; I tensed to lunge at him low, leading with my shoulder.

  “Hold it,” the black man said. “Sir Charles probably wants him unharmed.” He looked at me and smiled. “Maybe you’ll be allowed to practice on him later. It does take a lot of practice.”

  The floater settled down onto the gravel drive with a solid crunch. Two men in British servants’ livery opened the rear doors. “Sir Charles is waiting for you in the study.”

  It was warm, which explained the snowless circle. Pressor field.

  The black man helped me out the double doors. “Put Mr. Barr’s things in the garage.” He pointed at the other guard. “Including the pistol.” He picked up the reader.

  It was still on. Eric was taking in everything, though you couldn’t tell. He?
??d had the sense to turn off his screen image and the ready light. “I may need that for data, if I’m going to talk to Sir Charles.”

  “Well …” He took the reader up to the front of the floater and handed it through the passenger-side window. “Scan this.” After a moment a man passed it back and said it was clean.

  I hoped it hadn’t been a positron scan. That would be the end of Eric.

  The black man stuck the reader under my arm and unlocked the handcuffs. “Don’t do anything stupid. You’re surrounded by armed men, inside a fortress.”

  “Thank you.” I wondered to what extent that was true. Why would Briskin actually need armed men everywhere? Grizzly bears? Inside?

  We walked through a large entrance hall, expensively draped and carpeted and chandelier-ed, and on into a library. Briskin was standing at the far end, posing, contemplating a Mondrian construction.

  “Dallas Barr,” he said and turned. “I won’t say it’s good to see you.”

  I didn’t give him the satisfaction of a reply; just studied him. He didn’t look crazy.

  “Leave us alone.”

  “Sir … he’s very dangerous, an athlete.”

  “He’s been in space for six months; I’m surprised he can walk.” He displayed a small pocket laser. “Besides, he has to be slower than this. Three hundred million meters per second.”

  “Yes, sir.” The man went out and I collapsed into an easy chair. By all means, let Briskin think I was weak.

  He dropped the laser into his pocket—it was an old-fashioned silk smoking jacket, somewhat extreme, shiny maroon with dragons embroidered in gold—and sat down behind a desk a safe distance away.

  “So you came charging in to save your lover. How marvelous that you chose North Anchorage. But I would have had you no matter where you came in.”

  “Sure. Baikonur.”

  “You should have tried it.” He waved a cigarette alight. “Actually, we suspected you would come here, for the rest of whatever lunatic plan you had. Either here or the Conch Republic, and you couldn’t land a spaceship there. You couldn’t go anyplace where there was law.”