"Yes?" Susan prompted.
"He wore a Base Security uniform."
Again Base Security! "Are you sure?"
The old man nodded. "And he was tall-at least as tall as you."
That was a surprise. "You're sure about that, too?"
"As sure as I can be after all this time."
"Anything else? Anything at all?"
"No, nothing."
"If you do remember anything more, please get in touch with me. I'm Susan Tanner. I can be reached through Admiral James Renford, here on Fleet Base."
"I understand," the old man said, still smiling.
"Thanks for your help." Susan turned back to the door. It irised open, and she stepped through, out into the side corridor.
Tall, she thought as she shuffled toward the junction with the main corridor. That was interesting. She had been expecting him to say that the other man had been short. She had half expected him to describe the belter who had attacked her in her quarters. But that wouldn't have made sense. That belter couldn't have been much older than thirty. He probably hadn't even been born when the old man bought the pendant.
As she stepped out into the main corridor, she was instantly struck by a blast of hot, stifling air and the heavy stench of body odor. There were many more people in the corridor now than there had been when she had entered the shop, and the ventilation system simply could not cope.
In spite of the crowd, or perhaps because of it, Susan no longer wanted to return to her quarters. She wanted to be out among people-doing, seeing, experiencing. Alone in her rooms, she would only brood about everything that had happened since this morning. And she was not yet ready for that.
She remembered a nice little cafe from her last visit to Fleet Base. It was only a short walk up the main corridor, and it served the best espresso available on Luna.
But this time of day the place would be packed. Was that espresso really worth fighting the crowd for?
Yes! she decided, and she could almost smell its aroma and taste its dark richness on her tongue as she made that decision.
Light glinted on polished metal, flashing through a break in the crowd to her left. She turned to stare into the shadows between shops.
Thirty feet away, a tall man in Security black stood with his feet planted slightly apart. The shadows hid his face, but a patch of light fell on the pendant hanging around his neck-a pendant identical to the one Susan had just bought.
The light fell as well on his right hand, a hand wrapped in dirty cloth. In that hand he held a weapon-a weapon pointed directly at Susan.
Chapter Five
It took her an instant to realize that the weapon was not a stun pistol, but a blaster. It would not merely knock her out; it would burn flesh and char bone. It could kill.
She scanned the corridor, looking for somewhere to hide. The nearest shop entrance was several yards away. The other could get off two, perhaps three shots before she reached it.
Then her ears popped, as if there was a sudden change in the corridor's air pressure, and the man standing in the shadows holding a blaster on her disappeared. One instant he was there, the next he was not.
Could she have looked away for an instant without realizing it, she wondered, giving him a chance to become lost in the crowd?
No, that made no sense at all. He'd had her-he wouldn't just melt into the crowd without first taking a shot. And even if he had taken it, and missed, the blaster charge would have hit something or someone. There would have been destruction, or at least panic in the crowd around her.
But there was nothing. The crowd remained calm and unaffected, their movements not at all out of the ordinary. Yet it was a much thinner crowd than it had been only an instant before, as if two out of every three people had simply vanished.
And now Susan noticed the air in the corridor was cooler, the odor of many tightly packed bodies considerably diminished from what it had been only an instant before. The ventilation system, unable to cope prior to her attacker's disappearance, was suddenly doing a quite adequate job.
It couldn't have reacted that quickly, she thought. Even if the crowd had miraculously thinned, the ventilation system would have taken at least an hour to cool the air and scrub it of the stench of so many bodies. Yet in the blink of an eye it had accomplished exactly that.
Her mind felt suddenly numbed by the experience, her thought processes momentarily paralyzed as they came up hard against the inexplicable. The dizziness she had experienced earlier in her quarters returned, and again the pain began to build behind her eyes.
Instantly the snowflake pattern blossomed in her thoughts, and within seconds she was mouthing the mantra's guttural monosyllables. The headache and dizziness subsided as quickly as they had come.
She became aware of a burning sensation between her breasts, beneath her jumpsuit. Fumbling for the chain hanging around her neck, she pulled the pendant out. It felt hot in her prosthetic fingers. She unfastened her jumpsuit several inches down the front and checked her skin. There was a definite reddening where the gray metal had rested between her breasts.
Why was the pendant now hot, she wondered as she re-fastened her jumpsuit, when only a few seconds before it had felt cool against her skin? Why and how had her assailant, as well as a good portion of the crowd, suddenly vanished?
It all seemed so familiar, smacking of that earlier incident when the dark man had attacked her in her quarters, then disappeared. He, too, had been wearing a pendant.
Lifting the chain over her head, she dropped the pendant into one of the pouches at her waist. She would not wear it again, she decided, until she knew more about it.
She started down the curiously depopulated corridor toward her quarters, glancing at the chronometer on the back of her left wrist. It read 0911-slightly more than three hours earlier than it should have registered. She tapped the crystal with her fingernail and waited for the last digit to change. It was working, but she would have to get it looked at.
Pushing that thought from her mind, she again concentrated on more urgent matters. One thing was certain: There was no longer any doubt that the first attempt on her life had been meant for her. Evans's inference that it might have been a case of mistaken identity no longer held up. They, whoever they were, had now tried twice.
But Evans would have just as much trouble believing an account of this attack as he had that first one. There was simply too much that could not be explained: The way the attacker had failed to take his shot. The way the crowd had thinned and the pendant had become hot. But most of all, the way the attacker had vanished.
She would report the incident to Evans, she decided, but she didn't expect him to believe her. She was having trouble believing it herself.
Suddenly, it struck her-she had not known of this attack before it happened; she had not been forewarned. Each time she had been in danger since Aldebaran, she had been given the slightest hint of a warning just before it happened. But not this time.
Of course, she could not tell Evans about that.
The date-time display read 0927 as she again stood before the holo-phone lens cluster in her quarters. She glanced at her wrist chronometer. It indicated the same time. Apparently, there was nothing wrong with it.
But that couldn't be. It couldn't have displayed the correct time back in the corridor, outside that strange little shop. It had said 0911 then, but at 0911 she had been in Admiral Renford's office.