“Whoever made that slip about Liechtenstein must’ve also been high,” I said.
“Well it wasn’t me.”
“I’m glad to hear it,” I said. But either my expression or my tone told her I didn’t altogether believe her profession of innocence.
Marj patted my cheek with one long, slender-fingered hand. “Sam, dear, there are times when I would gladly kick you in the balls.”
If there’s one thing I hate, it’s condescension. “You’d hurt your delicate little foot, tall lady. I wear a lead jockstrap.”
She laughed out loud. “I’ll bet you do, at that.”
I assured her that I did.
Anyway, that was almost a month ago. Since then nobody’s said or done anything suspicious, and the cruise is going along without a hitch.
Which worries me. Maybe Grace really is the Rockledge agent. Maybe she’s kept lots of secrets, especially about herself. How would I know? Or Marj. Or any one of them.
Jeez, I’m getting paranoid!
Anyway, we pass the point of no return in another six days. The ship is under a constant acceleration from the plasma thrusters. It’s a very low acceleration; in the hub of the ship you still feel like you’re in zero-gee, that’s how low the acceleration is. But although those little thrusters don’t give you much push, they’re very fuel-efficient and can run for years at a time (when they don’t crap out) and keep building up more and more velocity for you.
As an emergency backup, we’re also carrying three pods of chemical rockets with enough delta-v among ’em to change our course, swing past Mars, and head back to the Earth-Moon system. So we can cut this ride short and go back home if there’s any major trouble—up to the point of no return. Then, if we have a problem, no matter what the hell it may be, we’ve still got to coast all the way out to the Asteroid Belt and swing back to Earth on a trajectory that’ll take us at least eleven months.
So, six days from now we become hostages to Newton’s laws of motion and momentum. The point of no return. I hate to admit it, but I’m nervous about it.
Those mother-humping, slime-sucking, illegitimate sons of snakes from Rockledge! Now I know what they’re up to, and why they’ve got an agent on board!
We passed the point of no return two days ago.
Today the main food freezers crapped out. All three of ’em, at the same time. Bang! Gone. Sabotage, pure and simple. Nineteen months more to go, and all our food is thawing out!
I wish I was an Arab, or even a Spaniard. Those people know how to curse!
It makes perfect sense. We die of starvation. That’s all. Those bastards from Rockledge murder us—all except their own agent, who waits until we’re all dead, then sends a distress call back to Earth where Rockledge has a high energy booster all set and ready to zoom out to rescue their man. Or woman.
Or maybe they let the poor sucker die too. Dead spies tell no tales. And you don’t have to pay them.
Oh hell, I know that doesn’t make any sense! I’m starting to babble, I’m so pissed off.
All three food freezers shut down. We don’t know exactly when because there was no indication on the Christmas Tree of the main control console. All the goddamned lights stayed clean green while our food supply started to thaw out.
It was Erik who noticed the problem. Bright-smiling, genial, slowwitted Erik.
I was showing off the command center to Jean Margaux, our high society lady from Boston’s North Shore. (She pronounces it Nawth Showah.) She’s the one who got jealous the first night about my zero-gee antics with Sheena and Marj. What the hell, if I’m naming names I might as well name all of them.
Jean is the tall, stately type. Handsome face; good bones. Really beautiful chestnut-colored hair, and I think it’s her natural shade. Not much bosom, but nice long legs and a cute backside. She likes to wear long slim skirts with slits in them that show off those legs when she moves.
Cool and aloof, looks down her nose at you. It’s not as if she gives the impression that her shit don’t stink; she gives the impression that she doesn’t ever shit. But touch her in the right place and she dissolves like a pat of butter in a rocket exhaust. She turns into a real tigress. All it takes is a touch, so help me—and then afterward she’s the Ice Queen again. Weird.
So I’m showing her the Christmas Tree, with all its red and green lights, only there wasn’t a single red one showing. The ship was humming along in perfect condition, if you could believe the monitor systems. Alonzo Ali was on duty at the command console; Lonz is not only my first mate, he’s a Phi Beta Kappa astronautical engineer and navigator from the International Space University.
So Erik comes into the command center with a puzzled frown on his normally open, wide-eyed face.
“There are no windows,” Jean was saying. Coming from her, it sounded more like a complaint than a comment.
“Nope,” I said. “With the ship swinging through a complete revolution every two minutes, you’d get kind of dizzy looking out a window.”
“But we have windows in the lounge,” she said. “And in our suites.”
“Those are video screens,” I corrected as gently as I could. “They show views from the cameras at the ship’s hub, where they don’t rotate.”
“Oh,” she said, as if I’d stuck a dead skunk in front of her.
Erik was kind of hanging around behind her, in my line of vision, not interrupting but sort of jiggling around nervously, like a kid who has to pee.
“Excuse me,” I said to Jean. Her high-society airs sort of made me act like a butler in a bad video.
I stepped past her to ask Erik, “Is something wrong?”
“I think so,” he said, furrowing his brow even deeper.
“What is it?” I asked softly.
“I’m not really sure,” said Erik.
Jean was watching us intently. I restrained my urge to grab Erik by the throat and pull his tongue out of his head.
“What seems to be the trouble?” I asked, as diffidently as possible. No roughneck, I.
“Funny smell.”
“Ah. A strange odor. And where might this odd scent be coming from?”
“The food freezers.”
All this polite badinage had lulled me into a sense of unreality.
“The food freezers? Plural?”
“Yeah.”
“The food freezers,” I repeated, smiling and turning toward the blue-blooded Ms. Margaux. Then it hit me. “The food freezers!”
I lunged past Erik to the command console. The goddamned Christmas Tree was as green as Clancy’s Bar on St. Patrick’s Day.
“No malfunctions indicated,” Lonz said, in that deep rich basso of his. He’s from Kenya, and any time he gets tired of space he can take up a career in the opera.
My heart rate went back to normal, almost, but I decided to go down to the freezers and check them out anyway. Jean asked if she could accompany me. There was a strange light in her eyes, something that told me she anticipated a lesson in arctic survival.
I nodded and headed for the hatch.
“Isn’t Erik coming, too?” Jean asked.
Oh-ho, I thought. She wants the cram course in arctic survival.
“Yeah, right. Come on Erik. Show me where you smelled this funny odor.”
The logistics section is almost exactly on the opposite side of the wheel from the command center. We could have gone down one of the connecting tubes and through the hub, but I decided with Jean along it’d be better if we just walked around the wheel and stayed at a full one gee.
It’s always a little strange, walking along inside the wheel. Your feet and your inner ear tell you that you’re strutting along on a flat surface, while your eyes see that the floor is curving up in front of you, right out of sight. Anyway, we walked down the central corridor, past the lounge, the galley and dining salon, the passengers’ living quarters, and the gym before we got to the logistics section. The workshops and maintenance facilities are all on the other half of the wheel. Our factory and processing smelter are down near the hub, of course, in microgravity.