“Well,” Rhodes said. “The prodigal returns. Where the hell are you calling from, man?”
“Right over here next door to you in San Francisco. How are you, Nick? Splicing a lot of interesting genes these days?”
Rhodes stared. “San Francisco? You’re in town? Why? What for? Why didn’t you give me a little notice that you were coming in?”
“I didn’t think I needed to. I’ll be here for a few weeks, and then the Company’s shipping me out to the fucking South Pacific. Skipper of an iceberg trawler, I am. Call me Ahab. Do you think you could manage lunch with an old friend sometime next week?”
“Next week?” Rhodes said. “What about today?”
Carpenter looked surprised. “Can you do it on such short notice? Important man like you?”
“I’d love to. A chance to get out of this goddamned bughouse for a couple of hours.”
“I could catch a pod across the bay and be over there in thirty minutes. Go straight up to your lab, get the grand tour before we eat—how’s that?”
“Not good,” Rhodes said. “All the interesting work areas are under security seal and the rest is just offices. Anyway, there’s someone here I’m trying to duck this morning and I don’t dare come out into view before lunchtime.” He looked at his watch. “Meet me at noon at a place called Antonio’s, along the Berkeley waterfront, right on the seawall. Any cabbie will know where that is. Jesus, it’ll be good to see you, Paul! Jesus! What a goddamned surprise!”
5
farkas said, “I think we’ve located our merchandise.”
He was in his hotel room, alone, talking by scrambled telephone to Colonel Emilio Olmo, the number-three man in Valparaiso Nuevo’s Guardia Civil. Colonel Olmo was very high up in the confidence of Don Eduardo Callaghan, the Generalissimo, El Supremo, the Valparaiso Nuevo habitat’s Defender and Maximum Leader. More significantly for Farkas’s purposes, though, Olmo was Kyocera-Merck’s chief point man on Valparaiso Nuevo. It was Kyocera-Merck’s long-range plan, so Farkas understood, to bring Olmo forward as the successor to El Supremo whenever it seemed appropriate for Don Eduardo’s long reign to come to an end. Drawing pay from both sides, Olmo was in a nice position and it might be considered unwise to trust him in any major way, but his long-term interests plainly lay with K-M and therefore Farkas deemed it safe to deal with him.
“Who’s your courier?” Olmo asked.
“Juanito Holt.”
“Nasty little spic. I know him. Very clever kid, I have to say. How’d you find him?”
“He found me, actually. Five minutes off the shuttle, and there he was. He’s very quick.”
“Very. Too quick, sometimes. Father was mixed up in the Central American Empire thing—you remember it? The three-cornered revolution?—working both sides against the middle. Very tricky hombre. He was either a socialist or a fascist, nobody could ever be quite sure, and in the end when things fell apart he skipped out and continued his plotting from up here. He made himself troublesome and after a time the right and the left found it best to team up and send a delegation here to get rid of him. The kid is tricky too. Watch him, Victor.”
“I watch everything,” Farkas said. “You know that.”
“Yes. Yes, you certainly do watch.”
Farkas was watching the telephone visor, now. It was mounted flush against the wall, and to Farkas it looked like an iridescent yellow isosceles triangle whose long, tapering upper point bent backward into the wall as though it were trying to glide into some adjacent dimension. Olmo’s head-and-shoulders image, centered near the base of the triangle, impinged on Farkas’s sensorium in the form of a pair of beveled cubes in cobalt blue, linked by a casual zigzag of diamond-bright white light.
The air in the room was unnervingly cool and sweet. Breathing it was like breathing perfume. It was just as artificial as the air you breathed indoors anywhere on Earth, in fact even more so: but somehow it was artificial in a different way. The difference, Farkas suspected, was that on Earth they had to filter all sorts of gunk out of the air before they could let it come into a building, the methane, the extra CO2, all the rest of the greenhouse stuff, so that it always had a sterile, empty quality about it once they were done filtering. You knew it was air that had needed to be fixed so you could breathe it, and you mistrusted it. You wondered what they had taken out of it besides the gunk. Whereas on an L-5 satellite they manufactured the atmosphere from scratch, putting together a fine holy mix of oxygen and nitrogen and carbon dioxide and such in the proportions God had originally intended, in fact better than God had designed things, since there was less of the relatively useless nitrogen in the air than there was on Earth and a greater proportion of oxygen; and there was no need to filter anything out of it, since it contained nothing in the first place that wasn’t supposed to be there.
So the completely synthetic air of the habitats was richer and fuller in flavor than the denatured real air of Earth’s sealed buildings. Headier. Too heady for him. Farkas knew that it was better air than the indoor air on Earth, but he had never been able quite to get used to it. He expected air to taste dead, except when you were outdoors without a mask, filling your lungs with all those lovely hydrocarbons. This bouncy, springy stuff was holier than he needed his air to be.
But give me a little more time, Farkas thought. I’ll get to like it.
He said to Olmo, “The merchandise is said to be stored in a place called El Mirador. My courier will be taking me there later in the day to inspect the warehouse.”
“Bueno. And you are confident you will find everything in order?”
“Very.”
“Do you have any reason to think so?” Olmo asked.
“Just intuition,” said Farkas. “But it feels right.”
“I understand. You have senses that are different from our senses. You are a very unusual man, Victor.”
Farkas made no reply.
Olmo said, “If the merchandise is to your satisfaction, when will you want to make shipment?”
“Very soon, I think.”
“To the home office?”
“No,” said Farkas. “That plan has been changed. The home office has requested that the merchandise be sent directly to the factory.”
“Ah. I see.”
“If you would make certain that the cargo manifests are in proper order,” Farkas said, “I’ll let you know as soon as we’re ready to transfer the goods.”
“And the customs fees—”
“Will be taken care of in the usual manner. I don’t think Don Eduardo will have reason to complain.”
“It would be very embarrassing if he did.”
“There won’t be any problem.”
“Bueno,” Olmo said. “Don Eduardo is always unhappy when valuable merchandise is removed from Valparaiso Nuevo. His unhappiness must always be taken into account.”
“I said there’d be compensation, didn’t I?”
There was sudden new force in Farkas’s tone, and Olmo’s image responded by changing color ever so slightly, deepening from cobalt blue almost to black, as though he wanted Farkas to understand that the possibility that the necessary bribes might somehow fall through was disturbing to him and that the eyeless man’s implied rebuke was offensive. But Farkas saw Olmo’s color return to its normal shade after a moment, and realized that the little crisis had passed.