‘You can’t. You’re wearing the brassard.’
‘Maybe.’
‘There’s no risk involved! Remember? We Venusians can’t use violence. That’s the first thing we do, before we take off the brassard. We get conditioned against it. And you’re immune to anything else. That’s what the brassard’s for.’
‘Well. You didn’t tell me what you want.’
‘I want you to come see how the other half lives. The Terra Club.’
‘What’s at the Terra Club?’
‘Albert Quayle,’ I said.
Vince hit us up for a ride back to town - in Dunlap’s car, of course. I let him, provided he sat in the back seat.
He grinned at me wryly.
But I couldn’t apologize, because the fission-blasts were going off again and the noise drowned everything out for a moment.
Dunlap demanded aggressively: ‘What is all that?’
‘That’s the reason, Dunlap.’
‘Blasting? The reason for what?’
‘The reason for the conditioning. Every man a Titan. This is Venus. You’ve heard of the saposaurs?’
‘Saposaurs?’ He nodded. ‘Sort of intelligent lizards, eh? But they don’t like people. They stay in the back lands.’
‘Most of the time. Not always. Look.’ I pointed to the built-in machine-guns on the car. ‘They’re needed, Dunlap. It isn’t safe to travel on Venus without plenty of weapons. And the tools! Plutonium built the Wallow. All of Venus was marsh. Most of it still is. Without the atomic explosives to drain it off, we’d be living in jellied mud.’
He said hoarsely: ‘There isn’t any danger from the saposaurs in the car, is there?’
‘Not unless one shows up.’
He said, ‘Oh.’
Vince Borton volunteered eagerly from the back seat - it must have been a joy for him to talk again - ‘There are plenty of them out in the fields. Not so much at night. They come in the daylight months, when there’s plenty of fog.’
‘Why?’
‘They like knives,’ Borton told him. ‘They’re not really smart - sort of like gorillas plus twenty-five per cent. But they’re smart enough to know that steel will outlast their teeth and claws. They never had fire and don’t much want it. Steel is something else. They’ll break up a car if they can just to take the jagged pieces of metal for weapons.’
Dunlap said slowly: ‘But - all right, granted you have to have strong safeguards against violence with all that plutonium around, and guns for protection against the saposaurs. What about this business of ignoring people to death?’
‘Shunning them,’ I corrected him. ‘Cutting them dead. There has to be some way, Dunlap. The community can’t tolerate anti-social behaviour! Why, if somebody insults my wife, I can’t hit him - I don’t know how. The community has to have protection against - against -’
‘Against you and me, Oliver,’ said Vince mournfully from the back seat.
We dropped Vince at the edge of the city and followed the tapewalks to the Terra Club.
Dunlap complained: ‘It’s hot. I don’t like it so hot.’
‘You came here all by yourself.’
‘But I can’t stand this heat!’ He was fretful and irritable because he didn’t like what he was getting into, I was sure.
‘Watch the tape,’ I ordered. Lights were ahead, bobbing like pastel ghosts in the fog. A man loomed up. He glanced at me, then through me and he nodded to Dunlap.
‘Already,’ I said.
‘What?’
‘Forget it.’ But it was a blow. The police weren’t like the locals of the unions: they didn’t content themselves with filing a protest and letting it get around to their own members. Now I was shunned by everyone; everyone in Grendoon would have seen my picture on the tri-V. ‘Turn in here, Dunlap,’ I told him, with my heart a solid load inside me.
The sign hanging from the tape wheeped faintly as we came close and its scanners picked us up, then blazed with the orange letters:
Terra Club
We went in the door.
The maitre-de greeted us affably - glad-to-see-you-tonight and all that. I moved into the light where he could get a better look at me and I was a ghost. He couldn’t see me at all.
I skinned off my thermosuit, and Dunlap out of his. The check girl took his, but there was nothing to do with mine but sling it over my shoulder. ‘Ask for a table for two, Dunlap,’ I said tightly.
‘I’d like a table…For two.’
‘The gentleman is expecting someone,’ the maitre-de inquired politely.
‘Say yes, Dunlap.’
‘Yes.’
‘Very well, sir.’ The maitre-de led Dunlap down to a table right at the side of the dance floor. It was for me, that table, not for Dunlap, but Dunlap didn’t know that. The maitre-de wanted it that way. He wanted me to be seen. I mean not seen, but not-seen by everybody. So that everybody who was not-seeing me could get a good look. Good enough so that they would know enough never to see me again.
The table was for two, all right, but it was only one chair that the maitre-de pulled out. I had to pull out my own. And when the waiter came, he only turned one glass right-side up, spread one napkin and offered one menu.
I said: ‘Thank God for your brassard. Order me some Scotch, Dunlap. And a sandwich.’
‘Two Scotches and a sandwich,’ Dunlap looked at me. ‘Ham?’
‘Anything.’
‘Ham, or whatever you’ve got.’
The waiter looked at him, then shrugged.
He brought the two Scotches, and lined them both up in front of Dunlap.
I didn’t mind leaning across the table to get mine. I wolfed the sandwich; already I was hungry. Later it would be worse, but I wasn’t looking that far ahead. I lifted my glass.
‘Confusion to our enemies.’
Dunlap was acting more and more nervous. He said sullenly: ‘But I don’t know. I mean, it’s more your enemy, isn’t it? I wonder if I really should get involved in what is, essentially, a private disagreement.’
‘A private murder.’
‘All right, damn it! But this isn’t much fun, Oliver. And it’s costing me money.’
‘Money?’ I reached in my pocket and dumped my wallet in front of him. He stared at me. ‘Keep it. It’s no good to me. Literally. There isn’t a man in Grendoon with something to sell who’ll take money from me.’
He looked thoughtful. He opened the wallet and whistled.
‘There’s a lot of dough here, Oliver.’
‘What? Well, why not.’ I swallowed the drink. ‘I worked for Quayle nearly six months. Out in the boon-docks. Hard work, fighting off saposaurs, handling the plutonium. Ask Vince Borton, he was there with me. Then -’
‘What then?’
‘I got to talking to Quayle’s wife. You saw her.... Down at the Wallow.’
Dunlap looked at me with a certain expression on his face.
‘All right,’ I said. ‘She was his wife. But you don’t know him, Dunlap! A rat. Made life hell for her. Rough to work for - you wouldn’t think he was conditioned, the language he used. In town, he’d be shunned himself, but out on the fields customs are a little different about giving offence. Especially when the man giving offence is the boss.’
He grumbled nervously. ‘But I don’t even know this Quayle!’
‘Now you do,’ I told him, and pointed. ‘He’s just coming in.’
Quayle was a toad, with a toad’s face and features.
Three men were with him - overseers from the farms, big men, rough and mean men, the kind that seemed to seek him out. And there was a woman, a woman in a scarlet dress.
That would be Diane’s successor. Trust Quayle! He wouldn’t go long without a woman, and always a beauty. Diane had been far from the first - he’d been married to only three of them. She was one; the other two had died out on the boondocks. Not in-quotation-marks ‘died’; one got in the way of a saposaur and one disappeared in the swamps. That was how Quayle had got where he was, in fact - they had been rich, and he inherited from both.