“I don’t have the time.”
He pushed her away. “Go.”
Her door was open. Heavy synthetic music blared through into the hall. She stopped in the doorway. Sril was cross-legged on the floor, inhaling smoke through a tube from a small bowl on the floor in front of him. Ketac sat on the couch. The air was sweet with opium. Ketac looked asleep; his cheeks fluttered. She took her clothes off in the bathroom and went into the shower.
The Styths’ taste in music was distinct and narrow. When the synthesizer gave way to something more complex, they hunted through the radio and found some hard rock. The music reached her clearly even in the washroom. While she was drying off, the music stopped and a shocked Martian voice said, “What’s going on in here?”
Pulling on her robe, she went to the threshold of the front room. The music blasted on again. The big scarred man was standing in front of the videone, protecting it from the Nineveh’s manager. The Martian’s face was furred with a night’s beard. He looked about him, aghast. Paula wrapped her belt around her waist and tied it. The booming music hurt her ears. Sril and Ketac stooped over the opium heater. The Martian wheeled on Paula.
“I’m holding you responsible for this.” He shook his finger in her face. “You brought them here—”
The scarred man said, in Styth, “Don’t let him turn the music off.”
The manager strode out the door. Paula looked after him down the corridor, worried. Narcotics were illegal on Mars. Sril raised his head. He was hunched over the opium bowl; he held the long tube in his fingers like a paintbrush. “Ketac,” he said, in his own language, “find out what that was all about.”
Ketac was slumped on the floor, his forehead resting on one raised knee. He made no response. Paula knelt beside Sril. The music was so loud she had to shout.
“Sril. You have to get out of here. He’s gone for help.”
Sril laughed. The whites of his eyes were stained with red. “He needs help.”
“You don’t know them. He’ll bring a security team—”
Ketac lifted his head. His eyes were only half-open. His mouth hung slack. “You think we can’t take their whole army—”
She shook her head. “I can’t understand Styth in this racket.”
Sril said, “We fight two Martians each. Guns too.” He held up two fingers. “Maybe three.” With effort he added another finger.
“I’m sure you can. That only makes it worse, don’t you see?” She took his hands, trying to make him pay attention to her. “Sril, they’ll throw us all in jail.”
“We can fight anybody,” Ketac said. “Anybody.”
Sril straightened up. “Yes, but we shouldn’t make trouble for her. Come on. Bakan—”
Beneath the thunder of the music there was a pounding on the door. “Open up in there! This is Security!”
Paula looked around for some place to hide them. Ketac started to his feet and sat down hard. Sril bent to help him.
“Open this door!”
“In here.” She pointed to the bedroom door.
Bakan and Sril lifted Ketac up by the arms and hauled him away. She went around the couch to turn off the videone. The bedroom door shut, and the front door crashed open. The Martian hotelman and three policemen in gray bugle-boy uniforms charged in a wedge into the room. Paula went between them and the bedroom. Three bell-shaped pistols veered toward her.
“Where are they?”
She looked up at him. “Who?”
The red furred face of the hotelman puffed up fat with rage. “You have twelve hours to get yourself and those animals—those—” He was shouting in her face. She blinked.
“Mr. Lanahan, this is opium!”
The Martian’s windy voice rose to a shriek. “You’ll get thirty years in prison for this, if it takes me that long to put you there.”
“What is this?” The Akellar came in the broken door behind them.
Lanahan swung around. The Styth walked into their midst. The three guns swiveled from Paula to the bigger target. He ignored them. To Lanahan he said, “You’re bothering her. Leave her alone.”
The Martian said, stiff, “I don’t exactly think you—”
“Put your hands up!” a policeman cried.
The Akellar got Lanahan by the wrist and swung him around between him and the gunman, one hand on his collar and one on his arm. Paula stood where she was. She glanced at the bedroom door. The police backed up, their guns pointed at their chief’s belly.
“Mr. Lanahan—”
“Do as he says—” Lanahan stood up on his toes, his arm twisted up behind him.
“Out,” the Akellar said.
The police backed out the door. The Styth lifted Lanahan in big steps toward the threshold. He said, “Don’t talk back, nigger, it’s painful, see? See?” Lanahan screeched. The Akellar thrust him out the door. Paula went up beside the Styth to look out to the corridor. Lanahan sagged down on his knees, cradling his hand to his chest. He sobbed, his face gray with pain. The policemen stood around him. The Akellar lifted the door back onto its tracks and slammed it shut.
Sril came up to them. “I’m glad you’re here. Ketac has fallen out in her bed.” Bakan stood in the bedroom doorway.
“Go back to the trap. We’d better leave. I was getting a little tired of this Planet anyway.”
Paula went into her bedroom. Ketac lay sprawled on his face on her bed. The Akellar came after her.
“You can’t free slaves, you see? They just forget who they are and make trouble.” He sat on the edge of the bed and shook his son. “Wake up, crumb.”
“They aren’t slaves. We don’t keep slaves.”
Ketac was limp as rope. If he was awake, he gave no evidence. The Akellar said, “They talk like slaves. They work like slaves. The difference is when they get old and sick you don’t take care of them.” He heaved his son up across his shoulders.
She followed him out to the front room. Ketac’s head and arms hung down his father’s back. She gathered up the opium heater and the straw and piled them into the crook of the big man’s arm. “You have a diplomatic license and I don’t.”
“Will you be safe here?”
“Yes.”
“I won’t leave you here if you’re going to have trouble.”
She raised her head, smarting. “How did I ever get along without you?”
He started to say something. Instead he left, angling his child’s long legs through the door.
The cruise ship’s corridor was just wide enough for one person. Paula held her suitcase awkwardly before her, reading the numbers on the brown sliding doors on either side. At 113, she knocked.
“Who is it?” Bunker called, inside, and she pushed the door back and went in.
Two stacks of beds filled the little stateroom. Bunker sat on the end of the near lower shelf, his shirt off. A medic in a white coat was pasting sensors to his chest. Paula threw her bags on the upper bed. The phony gravity held her feet down to the floor as if she had glue on her shoes. She looked curiously at Bunker.
“How was it?”
The medic said, “Breathe in, Browne.”
Bunker inhaled. She wondered if he ever told his real name to strangers. “Interesting. I’ve never been in a deep-space ship before.” The medic made notes in a notepad.
“Are you Paula Mendoza?”
“Yes.”
“I’m supposed to give you a physical.”
Paula sat down on the lower bed opposite Bunker. She took off her jacket, unsnapped the pocket, and pulled out a piece of paper, which she gave to Bunker. She said, “You look pale.”
“He’s anemic,” the medic said. “Free fall and rich atmosphere.”
“You were in free fall on Ybix? What was it like?”
Bunker was reading the rough draft of the agreement. “This is solid check. Mendoza, I don’t know how you did it.” He folded up the paper and gave it back to her.