Curtis stepped back, hurt and out of breath, but he was ready when Kane came at him again. He reached overhead for the long metal bar of the suit rack, levered himself into the air and drove both legs at Kane’s injured chest, spilling a dozen suits off their hangers.
Kane saw it coming and tried to cover up, succeeded only in getting his own fists and elbows driven into his face and stomach. Curtis stepped away long enough to slam the inner door of the airlock and to make sure the light above it clicked to red.Then he finished Kane with a wide, looping punch that caught him just inside the cheekbone and stretched him across the floor.
Molly had no way of knowing how much more damage had been done to Kane’s ribs. He was alive, and lucky for that much; what had he thought he was going to prove?
“You did kill her, didn’t you?” Molly said to Curtis.“She must have been the leak you were talking about. She told Morgan about the new physics, and so you killed her.”
“Don’t start, Molly.”
“Start? Me, start? Dian was my friend. She was part of the project, she was integral, you asshole.You kill her and then you tell me not to start?”
“This is more trouble than you can handle, Molly. I sincerely advise you to butt out of this.”
“Are you threatening me? Are you threatening me, you son of a bitch? Are you going to kill me next?”
The airlock light flashed green in her peripheral vision and the rest of Curtis’s people came through. One of them went to Kane’s body and dumped him out of the lower half of his suit, leaving him lying on the rough concrete in his black drawstring trousers.A second moved next to Curtis, and a third stayed by the door.
Like little robots, Molly thought. Her hands shook with rage and frustration. It’s out of control, she thought.There’s not a thing I can do to stop it.
“What about this one?” asked the woman standing over Kane.
“Put him in Little Juarez,” Curtis said.“Lock him in and dope him to the gills, I don’t care with what. Something to keep him out of the way until I make up my mind about him.”
Little Juarez, Molly thought. So that’s what he calls it, his little pleasure cabin. How demeaning. Did he tell all his conquests about the nickname? Had he told Lena, that morning?
He crossed the room to stand in front of her, massaging his right hand with his left.
“Don’t touch me,” she said quietly.
“I’m not going to,” Curtis said.“I’m just going to ask you to do what I tell you, just for now.At least until we find out what the Russian position is. Okay? Can you handle that? Because everything is falling apart right now and my hands are full.”
“You know what they want.They want the fucking project, same as Morgan does.”
“And I’m not going to give it to them. Okay? That’s what we both want, it’s what we both know is right. So all you have to do is walk in and sit down at the table with me and listen to what the Russians have to say. Okay?”
“Okay,” Molly said, looking away from the pained sincerity on his face.“Okay.”
He’d been through it all those last nights in Houston. For nine months he’d locked himself away from the rest of the crew and stared at the possibilities, testing himself against them, the way a suicide would test the bite of the razor on his hands.
But now, now that he had committed himself, Reese was afraid.
Verb had left with the diskette. It had taken her only a few seconds with her eyes closed to tell him that Barnard’s Star would be in optimum position for the run at nine that night. Her freakish abilities had begun to frighten him more than they impressed him, provoking some kind of instinctive xenophobia.
“Be there by eight-thirty or so,” she told him, and gave him directions to the cave. Had she sensed his distaste? Did it matter? His sudden desire to hug her was as selfish and guilt-ridden as it was artificial. He suppressed it and nodded instead.
“Thank you,” he said.
“Sure.”
Molly would want him to report back to sickbay; Curtis would be even less happy about his wandering around without a watchdog.And then, like the bolt of a rifle sliding home, came the thought: this is it. These are the last hours I’m going to have with other human beings, maybe the last, period.
I ought to get laid, he thought, anyway. But he recognized the impulse as no more than a galvanic response, the frog’s leg of his sexuality twitching under the applied current of some leftover, obsolete sensibilities.
His second thought was that he needed a drink.
He started back toward the Center, depressed by the uniformity and orderliness of the houses around him. In the first season under the dome, nicknames and hand-painted signs had proliferated:“Tharsis Hilton” for the Center,“South Hell” for the unheated garages,“the Blister” for the dome itself. Now, in spite of the red-and-blue neon “Frontera Bar and Grille” sign outside the north entrance to the Center, Reese sensed that things had changed. Curtis’s regime reflected the man’s personal sterility and lack of humor. Reese had seen the cameras that tracked him as he walked, the sort of obsessive power icons that became venerated when true power was slipping away.
He went in under the glowing sign and turned left into the wardroom. In the tradition of American bars, the lighting was minimal, despite the fact that it was barely after noon. He’d brought his Mars Identification and Credit Authority with him from Earth on a sentimental impulse; the mica card fit into a slot on the far wall and allowed Reese to select a gimlet from the menu.A sentimental drink, he thought, appropriate to the occasion.
As his eyes adjusted he noticed someone else in the room.“Hello?” he said.
“You’re Reese, aren’t you?” The voice belonged to a young woman, Asian, slim, attractive.
“That’s right.”
“Hanai. Do you want to sit down?” She was clearly upset about something; she was on her third drink, and she still had to steady the glass with both hands.
He took his drink and card and sat down at her table.The room was antiseptic as a hospital automat. He could remember when the walls had been covered with handwritten messages: want ads, poems, kids’ art work. Now, from what he’d seen, people did their drinking at home, sometimes even in the fields outside, pulling their masks just far enough from their faces to accommodate the neck of a bottle or the end of a straw.
“Shouldn’t you be with somebody?” Hanai asked.
For an instant Reese thought she was propositioning him, then understood she was talking about security.“Not me,” he said.“I used to live here.” He wished for a second that she had been coming on to him. Her lips were shallow but exquisitely formed, and he watched with longing as they moved softly against the edge of her glass.
Stop it, he told himself.You’re just trying to bail out, to load yourself down with some low-grade sexual karma so you won’t go through the gate.
“Something’s wrong,” he said to her.“Do you want to talk about it?”
She shook her head.Then, as if changing the subject, she said,“The Russian ship is landing. Did you know?”
“Russian ship?”
“The one from Earth. It’s probably already here. I’ll be on duty again tonight because of it, I shouldn’t be drinking.” She made no move to put the glass down.
Already here, Reese thought. Of course.That was why Morgan had left him so little time. It was no vague threat but an actual mission, one that Morgan had known about even then.
“Do you know what they want?” he asked Hanai,
She shook her head.“It’s funny.We went so long, thinking we would never see anybody from Earth again. Now all of a sudden you’re all over the place, and we realize we really didn’t miss you at all.You know? Only now it’s too late.”
Reese downed the gimlet, the sour lime juice burning more than the gin.“Are they taking them to sickbay?” he asked, standing up.