He grinned, easing the impression of hard command. “I promise you, it won’t be a waste of your time. We have the mining project to the point where I want to talk to you about it, and maybe show you a few things. I guarantee that they’ll interest you. There’ll be plenty of time when we are finished here for you to get back to L-4 and work on the fly-in and tether. You know that I wouldn’t do anything to jeopardize that. But I want to get some other business out of the way before we move Atlantis out to the Belt.”
Regulo paused for a few seconds as though looking and listening to something just off-screen. He nodded and reached forward to press two keys on the desk control panel. “Don’t bother to call and try to discuss this,” he said, returning his attention to the screen. “Just let me know when you’ll be here, and tell me if you have any problem making it soon. I have our fastest ship on stand-by near L-4. Bring Cornelia with you if she wants to come.” He grinned. “Will you take a bet with me that she’s not sitting there right now, listening? See you soon.”
The screen went blank. Rob looked at Corrie and shrugged. “That’s Regulo. Short and sweet. He’s in a hurry, as usual. I think he suspects he’ll get me there a lot quicker if he arouses my curiosity and won’t tell me what he has in his back pocket. I want to send him a message anyhow. Would you tell him that I’ll be on my way in six hours? There are a few things to take care of here, and I have to talk to the tether crew back on Earth.”
“We’ll be on our way in six hours,” she corrected him. “You heard Regulo. He’s expecting both of us, and don’t think you can leave me here after hearing him dangle a bait like that. I’ll send your message, but I’ll have to move fast, too. I’ve been trying to clear another of Regulo’s permits through the Earth system. I’m feeling the same way about the Earth government and the United Space Federation as Regulo does — sick to death of them. He always says that ninety-nine percent of the people on Earth aren’t worth keeping alive, but evolution will take care of that. I finally think I know how it will go. Earth won’t choke on pollution, or starve for lack of resources. It will drown in its own bureaucracy.”
She left quickly, while Rob was still smiling at her brisk evaluation. Corrie wasn’t a woman with much time for incompetence, in organizations or in individuals. Rob had seen enough red tape in his construction projects to know how irritating the bureaucrats could be to anybody whose focus was on results rather than procedures. Corrie was even less tolerant. Sometimes he had the feeling that she regarded him as just another of the assets of Regulo Enterprises, to be managed as efficiently as possible. That could mean charming, or cajoling, or persuading through logic. Corrie had all the tools in her locker, and it seemed to be partly hereditary. Rob had seen Senta working the same combination on Howard Anson.
That last thought produced a twinge of conscience. A call from Rob to Anson was badly overdue. When the beanstalk demanded it, everything else in Rob’s life was pushed into the background. And the problems had been coming thick and fast in the past few weeks. But Rob had better make the call from here, rather than waiting until they were out on Atlantis. With Regulo and Joseph Morel in a position to tap all incoming and outgoing calls there, privacy of conversation couldn’t be guaranteed.
Pushing fatigue to the back of his mind, Rob reached again for the communicator.
CHAPTER 11: “What seest thou else, in the dark backward and abysm of time?”
“What have you been doing to yourself?” Howard Anson peered anxiously into the holoscreen, where Rob’s weary face was displayed. “You look terrible.”
“Thank you. I’ve been working, and worrying. Too much of both.” Rob took in the details of Anson’s strange costume, and his face relaxed into a tired smile.
Anson nodded. “That’s better. Now you’re more like the man I met at Way Down. You don’t need me to tell you this, but you don’t look good. I think you’d better find some way to take a rest for a while. You’ve added ten years since we first met.”
“I feel all of them.” Rob wriggled his shoulders, trying to get the tension out of them. “More than ten years, inside. I can’t get my mind off the beanstalk, and if ever I do I’m back to worrying about my parents. A year ago, I felt like an engineer. Now, I feel like a mess.” He stared again at Anson’s outfit. “Less of one than you look, though.”
Howard Anson glanced down at himself with undisguised irritation. “It’s not my idea, you know. A couple of my big clients are doing this as the latest madness. If I want to stay close to my customer base, I have to go along with it.”
He picked at the lapel of his flowered dressing-gown with disgust. “You know what this is, don’t you? We’re all supposed to dress as `gay young things’ from a hundred and forty years ago.”
He picked up a small black cylinder from the table in front of him and regarded it gloomily. “I think I know what’s been happening to you, though I doubt it does much to help. Until a year ago, you were a real orphan. You probably never thought of that as an advantage, but there’s a positive side to a lack of ties. You don’t have anything to live up to when you start out in life with no family. Now, you’ve started to think of your parents as real people — not just abstract nouns, but individuals with lives and deaths. That’s what is getting to you, Rob. I take a lot of the responsibility for that, and I’m sorry.”
He sniffed at the cylinder he was holding, while Rob watched him curiously.
“You may be right, Howard. Something started me off, and now I can’t stop. What is that thing?”
“This?” Anson held up the cylinder. “It’s a cigarette holder. Something else that was de rigeur for a man-about-town around 1925. A fire on one end and a fool on the other. It was Senta’s idea. We’re supposed to go to a Dawn-of-Man party in these clothes later today. Now I’m not sure we’ll make it. Maybe that’s a good thing.” He put down the holder. “Let’s get down to serious stuff. How’s the ’stalk coming along?”
“We’re well past seventy thousand kilometers of cable. Four more months and we’ll be flying it in for landing. How would you like to come over to the Control Center and see it happen?”
“Out in space?”
“No.” Rob smiled at the mixture of disdain and trepidation on Anson’s face. “The Control Center will be down on Earth, near Santiago. But it would do you good to get out into space. You’re a creeping Earth-worm, you know. `What can men know of Terra, who only Terra know?’ “
“Indeed.” Anson raised his eyebrows. “Half a year ago you felt the same about space as I do. And you’d certainly never have said that, misquotation and all, when we first met. Somebody’s been educating you. Keep it up, maybe you’ll become human after all. I’ll stick with my own views of space travel. Anybody who wants to sit on a heap of explosives and have it lit underneath him can have my share of space. I’ll stay on terra firma — and the more firmer, the less terror. I’ll take you up on your other offer, though, and come to Control Center. You’ll be able to get Senta in, too?”
“Sure. Where is she now?”
“Gone to talk to the Perions, if you remember them. They were with us when we first met you. They were one of the couples who had a narrow escape, and Senta thought they might need to talk it out with somebody.”