“In the immortal words of Carlin Himself,” intoned Scotty, “‘Spare air is fair’.”
“That’s ‘Spare hair‘,” Mikey corrected him. “I’ve got my end and am heading back to Albuquerque Gal. Once we’ve started decelerating, I’m for a long shower—suits make me itch—and about twelve hours’ sleep.”
“Sounds like a plan, to me,” Marko observed. “I’m the highest in the alphabet. I guess I’ll take the first watch. Mikey, you’ll be next.”
“Now isn’t that sweet?” said a fifth voice that Wilson didn’t recognize at first. “And here we all are, just in time to tuck you in!”
It appeared they’d been caught flat-footed, outside of their respective ships, and utterly helpless. There was no way to see what direction the voice was coming from, but they found out soon enough when a bright yellow laser beam lashed past them to impact on the surface of the asteroid. The huge puff of smoke it made quickly dissipated.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX: STAND AND DELIVER
It’s important to remember, when you’re trying to figure out who to trust to protect you from things like piracy and terrorism, that despite the culprits’ protestations to the contrary, the vast majority of such crimes—perhaps 999,999 incidents out of a million—are committed by governments themselves.
Between sovereign nation-states and planets, for example, it’s called “customs”.
Moreover, what precious few resolutions that do not bring about the utter destruction of the very people, places, and things they’re intended to protect, are invariably achieved by private hands. —The Diaries of Rosalie Frazier Ngu
Just like every other passenger ship in the solar system—with the single, notable exception of Fritz Marshall Spaceways’ Beautiful Dreamer—East American Spacelines’ City of Newark had no swimming pool.
What it did have, if not accurately describable as even better, or even just as good, was nevertheless different and enjoyable and soon came to be a favorite place for almost anyone of any age to rest and relax.
Its official title was the “Solarium Deck”. Its windows ran around the hull, just below the passenger decks, for its entire circumference and broke the liner’s neatly tubular silhouette by thrusting outward, their down-slanting top halves meeting their up-slating bottom halves at least a dozen feet outboard, beyond the principle outline of the hull. They could be retracted if need be—for example if the ship’s radar detected a swarm of meteors ahead—and covered with armored shutters.
Part of the Solarium Deck had been partitioned off—mostly with glass—and were occupied by numerous exercise machines and weight racks, half a dozen showers, and a good sauna. The inevitable ship’s centrifuge was smaller than that of Beautiful Dreamer, and located immediately beneath the Solarium Deck, accessible from the service core.
The walls and floor were beautifully tiled and decorated in bright colors and various plantings. The temperature was maintained at a steady ninety degrees Fahrenheit, the humidity at around eighty-five. Ambient sunlight was supplemented with an impressive optical fiber array and plenty of artificial light. There were deck chairs and recliners to be found everywhere, full of people sunbathing. Everybody seemed to wear sunglasses, and the air would have been heavy with the odor of various tanning preparations, had it not been for the excellent air exchange facilities demanded by the first class passengers.
But the most attractive feature of the Solarium Deck was its “stream”, a depression five feet wide down the center of the whole deck, through which perhaps eighteen inches of clean, warm water coursed energetically. Passengers couldn’t swim in it, but they could lie or sit in it, or along its tiled edges. Children could play in it and splash each other. A three-foot “waterfall” marked the place where water was taken out of the stream, purified, and put back into the circuit.
The man who thought of himself as the Fastest Gun in the Moon relaxed in a recliner under a potted palm tree, pretending to read a bestseller. Over the bathing trunks he’d just purchased—which made him self-conscious; he hadn’t gone out in public this way, almost naked, for decades—he wore a towel from his room in which he’d concealed a plastic and glass fiber knife he’d smuggled aboard the City of Newark on his back, under a carefully contrived medical back brace.
He’d waited until the last minute, when the crowd of boarders was thickest and the security drones would be exhausted and reluctant to risk a lawsuit by harassing someone who was obviously seriously handicapped.
The knife, an outsized copy of the old mid-twentieth century Buck “Kalinga”, had a curved, nine-inch blade much like a Middle Eastern sash-dagger, with a wickedly sharp point and—an innovation—a serrated edge. It had been produced in its original form for tasks like skinning elephants. He thought of it as his “Brown Recluse” because it was cast in that color, and treated with selenium salts to delay healing of the wounds it produced. He’d cut his thumb with it six weeks ago, and it still hadn’t healed.
At last, through a pneumatic door from the ladies’ locker room there emerged the reason he was here today, exposing his fishbelly white flesh to an unwitting public. (He’d always felt his feet looked funny, too.) Llyra Ngu and Jasmeen Khalidov looked around, commented to each other on the brightness, heat, and humidity just as everybody did, and picked out a couple of fragile chairs to drape their towels over. He might have regarded them both as outrageously beautiful, if he hadn’t been thinking of them as his “daughters” for the past two years.
The two girls went to the “stream”, sat on its edge, and let their feet down into the swift-moving water, until Llyra finally stood up in it, lowered herself to her belly and her elbows, and let her feet and legs float behind her. The fast-moving water formed a wave around her chest and chin, and she appeared to be supremely comfortable and at ease.
The Fastest Gun in the Moon looked around carefully, as he had when he’d first arrived. None of Krystal Sweet’s henchpersons were here, of that he was reasonably certain. Within sight, he counted fourteen women, most of them middle-aged and very fat. (If the fascist East American government ever wanted to do something legislatively about overweight women in bathing suits, he might just forget to protest.)
There were also two dozen children of various ages, sexes, odors, and decibel ratings, and half a dozen men, mostly older than he was, mostly paler, hairier, balder, and spindlier than he was. He was at least a head and a half taller, on the other hand, than any of them.
Which was why he was slouching beneath this sad, captive desert cycad. His extreme height was definitely a handicap in his chosen profession.
He didn’t notice anybody watching the girls, so he returned to his bestselling novel from the gift shop. It concerned a valiant federal bureaucrat who had been taken—and was being brainwashed—by vile Pallatian anarchists. The writing was poor and the story ridiculous, but it bore a seal of approval on its cover from the United States’ Department of Literature. The East American PTA probably liked it, too, except for the naughty bits.
As he pretended to read, he adjusted a device that looked like an advanced hearing aid, but was designed so that he could eavesdrop on girl talk.
“Didn’t you think he was dreamy in his white jacket?” Llyra asked Jasmeen.
The coach adopted a sour look and shook her head. “Dreamy? I do not get silly over East American pretty boy assistant purser. Besides, was obviously not Pallatian. Was a head and a half shorter than you, my little.”
Although she faced directly away from him, he could almost hear Llyra bat her eyelashes. “Not a head and a half shorter than you, my even littler.”
“Blech!” Jasmeen shook her head again. “When I get silly over male of species—if ever happens, which is extremely not probable—will be over full-grown man, not mere boy. Man who already knows way through life. If capable of septuple Axel and hitting playing card at one hundred yards with pistol, so much the better.”
“So speaks Martian Woman, ever practical, ever sensible, never romantic. You’
d probably like him to have broad, child-bearing hips, too.”
Jasmeen almost laughed, but caught herself and retained her grim demeanor. “Women—females—must be practical, sensible. Life on Mars, even now, is too harsh for anything less. Women are conservators of gene pool in which too many dirty feet and ingrown toenails are dangling.”
The Fastest Gun in the Moon had trouble not laughing out loud.
Llyra shot her a raspberry and splashed her in the face with water. “Well, who do you like, Miss practical sensible gene pool conservator?”
“I like Captain West,” she replied solemnly. “Too bad he is already married.”
***
The spacecraft out on the open crater floor was being fueled just for him. Enough magnesium iron silicate dust to take him a hundred million miles.
Inside, watching through the glass walls of the south polar office of Fritz Marshall Spaceways, Adam wondered, How in the sacred names of Marx and Lennon did we let this happen again? As he waited, he’d been thumbing through a travel magazine he hadn’t read a single word of so far. His sparse luggage was piled beside him on the chrome and leather sofa. He wasn’t taking much, but then he hadn’t brought much. Despite every expectation to the contrary, he was headed back to Ceres.
Now the maintenance crew was detaching the big plastic hoses out there, and sealing up the fueling ports. Around the rim of the Port Admundsen crater, ten miles wide, he could see at least a dozen similar operations in progress, homesteader families headed back after a few days of shopping and recreation in the “big city”, prospectors ready to go out searching for hidden treasure once again, maybe even a few pirates.
Who could tell?
Maybe even some like him, headed back to wherever they’d come from with a great big black hole in the middle of their existences. He’d tried several times to reconstruct what had happened with Ardith. He’d thought that this time would be different. He always thought that. But as usual, it had taken about three days—three absolutely miraculous days—for her to find an excuse to blow up, screaming and throwing things, her beautiful face reddened, contorted, tears of fury streaming.
Exactly like every single time it looks like maybe we’re finally going to make it, he thought, every single time we start getting closer.
Every.
Single.
Time.
He couldn’t recall the exact sequence of events. He never could, afterward, and he was willing to bet she couldn’t, either. A willfully misinterpreted word or phrase, her hysterically exaggerated reaction, and he was out the door, onto the roof, boarding an ionopter flown by his old friend R.G. Edd, who knew them both well enough to keep his mouth shut. A phone call established that there was nothing headed for Ceres from up north, Port Peary, but that he could charter a jumpbuggy at the south pole and be back on Ceres—back in exile—in a few days.
And so, here he was.
This was, Adam reasoned, probably the last performance of this particular farce. No man had ever loved a woman more than he loved Ardith. Even now, the thought of her, of her scent, of her voice, of her body, of what they’d done over the last couple of days, inflamed him. He loved her as he loved the lovely pair of children she had given him, even the four she had tried to give him. He’d promised himself solemnly, before he’d come back to Pallas this time, that if the same old cycle began to happen again, he’d remember what started it.
No such luck. Once again, his relationship with his wife had exploded in his face at the very moment that everything seemed to be going perfectly, and he had no more idea why this time, than the first time it had happened, a couple of years after Llyra had been born. This time, one moment they’d been laughing, wrestling gently, talking about a honeymoon on Mars and of seeing the daughter they both adored. They had both regretted deeply that their son couldn’t be there, as well.
The very next moment, she was screaming at him, calling him vile names, and accusing him of vile acts, or at least of vile intentions. The name of his goddamned assistant had come up again, despite the fact that he had never looked on her as anything but a girl, like his own daughter or her coach. Finally, Ardith was ordering him out of his father’s—and his grandfather’s—house. Bewildered as usual, he’d left.
Outside, he watched a crew in envirosuits pulling a boarding tube toward the jumpbuggy’s airlock. Aside from the pilot, the copilot, and an attendant they’d insisted on sending with him, only one individual would be using it today. The way his luck was running, the attendant would turn out to be gorgeous and it would somehow get back to his wife. He realized that he should have rented a jumpbuggy and flown it himself.
Somewhere, deep down inside, he knew that whatever had happened, it wasn’t Ardith’s fault. He’d seen her face as it began. She’d seemed absolutely bewildered at what she was doing. She hadn’t wanted to say the things she’d said, any more than he’d wanted her to say them. If he’d been a religious kind of man, he might have guessed that she was possessed.
But at some point, the very best intentions, the most tender and ardent affection, didn’t cut it any more. His home life had been a living hell for twenty years, despite all he’d done to try and push it in some other direction. He couldn’t live this way any more. He was a decent human being, too old for this shit, and he deserved something better.
The conclusion made him feel sick and empty inside. What was there in the universe that could be better? Even with all of their troubles, for all of his adult life—and a good deal of his youth—Ardith Zacharenko the lovely, exotic, sexy, bright girl who lived next door, the one with the great big dark eyes a man could fall into and drown in, had been the very definition, at least for him, of desirability, of womanhood.
“Excuse me, Dr. Ngu.” The receptionist had come out from behind her counter. A pretty thing, he realized dimly, tall and slender like most Pallatians, she was probably no more than twenty. She was black, with hazel-gray eyes, a turned-up nose and freckles, and a small gap between her upper front teeth he’d always found provocative. She wore her dark, glossy hair in a complex braid curled up on the top of her head.
Adam looked up from the magazine that he hadn’t been reading. “Yes?”
“I just wondered if I could get you something, sir, coffee, tea, a Coke?”
He took a deep breath, suddenly aware that there was a whole world outside of himself, a good world that wasn’t mourning in abysmal despair.
“Um, no thank you,” he told her. “And Miss, I’m not a sir, I’m Adam.”
She smiled. A very pretty thing, he realized. “Well, Adam, if you want anything, please let me know. I shouldn’t tell you this, but the head office at Port Peary said to take the very best care of you we can.”
He nodded. He didn’t realize it, but a large measure of Wilson’s amazing popularity with the ladies had been inherited from his father. “Well, you’re doing just fine, er—” The tag on her blazer said her name was Emily. “You’re doing just fine, Emily, and I thank you very much.”
As the receptionist walked away, Adam suddenly noticed the girl’s miniskirt and her long, shapely legs. I guess I’m not dead yet, he thought. The fact was, he’d never been with another woman sexually, which was looking more and more like not such a good idea, maybe. He wondered (it was too long ago for him to remember) what it would be like to make love to a beautiful female without anticipating—like a male mantis or a male black widow—having your head torn off shortly afterward.
He began to think back over the years he’d been with Ardith. Been with Ardith off and on, that was. Many of those years—at the start—had been everything that any man could wish for. More than that, even. Ardith had loved him as he had not been aware a man could be loved. There was nothing she wouldn’t do to make him happy, even lots of things he hadn’t known he’d wanted. She’d always said she read a lot. As inexperienced as he’d been, back then, he’d known that he was lucky.
But then … when had it started? She’d been almost suicidall
y depressed after the last miscarriage. The fourth miscarriage. Those graves were out behind Ngu House, too. Their children that never were. But they’d had Wilson to keep them going, and eventually Llyra. Not for the first time, he marveled at the courage it had taken for Ardith to become pregnant a second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth time—and to endure nine long months of terror every time.
Each second must have been agony, enough to drive anybody mad.
Adam had thought that Llyra’s arrival—ten fingers, ten toes, every feature in the right place, every organ functioning perfectly—would make everything better. And for a while, it had.
But only for a while.
***
The voice sounded familiar.
“Now,” it said, “if you don’t wanna get yourselves vaporized like bugs in a bug zapper, you’ll do exactly what I tell you, nothin’ more, nothin’ less. You’re gonna slow this rock down, all four of you, just like you meant to, at which point we will kindly take it off your hands.”
Okay, thought Wilson, that probably constituted real piracy. His suit gear was relatively feeble, compared to that of Mighty Mouse’s Girlfriend, but it did show him four small ships in the immediate area. He felt almost helpless hanging on the chainlink screen he’d built.
The voice continued in an insultingly casual drawl. “Now just haul those tow cables you got there to your ships, and bend them around your towing bollards. But don’t go onboard your ships after that, until one of us gets there to make sure that you don’t try nothin’ stupid.”
Almost helpless, Wilson corrected as he pushed two of forty-two small buttons on the left forearm of his envirosuit. He watched his own ship roll over a few degrees, and the plasma gun mount rise and swivel around, at his command, seeking the origin of the radio signal. The weapon’s hot beam thrust outward and lit up a small vessel no more than a mile away, burning a ragged, yard-wide hole through its stern coaming.
“Hey, you sonofabitch, those are my engines you’re shooting—yeek!”