Cinnabar:
Turquoise:
Tiger’s Eye:
Hector Calhoun Eisenhower finally buckled down and spent these three months learning how to be a respectable member of the upper middle class underworld. That is a long novel in itself. High finance; corporate law; how to hire help: Whew! But the complexities of life have always intrigued me. I got through it. The basic rule is still the same: observe carefully, imitate effectively.
Garnet:
Topaz (I whispered that word on the roof of the Trans-Satellite Power Station, and caused my hirelings to commit two murders. And you know? I didn’t feel a thing):
Taafite:
We were nearing the end of Taafite. I’d come back to Triton on strictly Glacial business. A bright pleasant morning it was: the business went fine. I decided to take off the afternoon and go sight-seeing in the Torrents.
“… two hundred and thirty yards high,” the guide announced and everyone around me leaned on the rail and gazed up through the plastic corridor at the cliffs of frozen methane that soared through Neptune’s cold green glare.
“Just a few yards down the catwalk, ladies and gentlemen, you can catch your first glimpse of the Well of This World, where, over a million years ago, a mysterious force science still cannot explain caused twenty-five square miles of frozen methane to liquify for no more than a few hours during which time a whirlpool twice the depth of Earth’s Grand Canyon was caught for the ages when the temperature dropped once more to…”
People were moving down the corridor when I saw her smiling. My hair was black and nappy and my skin was chestnut dark today.
I was just feeling overconfident, I guess, so I kept standing around next to her. I even contemplated coming on. Then she broke the whole thing up by suddenly turning to me and saying, perfectly deadpan: “Why, if it isn’t Hamlet Caliban Enobarbus!”
Old reflexes realigned my features to couple the frown of confusion with the smile of indulgence. Pardon me, but 1 think you must have mistaken… No, I didn’t say it. “Maud,” I said, “have you come here to tell me that my time has come?”
She wore several shades of blue, with a large blue brooch at her shoulder, obviously glass. Still, I realized as I looked about the other tourists, she was more inconspicuous amidst their finery than I was. “No,” she said. “Actually I’m on vacation. Just like you.”
“No kidding?” We had dropped behind the crowd. “You are kidding.”
“Special Services of Earth, while we cooperate with Special Services on other worlds, has no official jurisdiction on Triton. And since you came here with money, and most of your recorded gain in income has been through The Glacier, while Regular Services on Triton might be glad to get you, Special Services is not after you as yet.” She smiled. “I haven’t been to The Glacier. It would really be nice to say I’d been taken there by one of the owners. Could we go for a soda, do you think?”
The swirled sides of the Well of This World dropped away in opalescent grandeur. Tourists gazed and the guide went on about indices of refraction, angles of incline.
“I don’t think you trust me,” Maud said.
My look said she was right.
“Have you ever been involved with narcotics?” she asked suddenly.
I frowned.
“No, I’m serious. I want to try and explain something… a point of information that may make both our lives easier.”
“Peripherally,” I said. “I’m sure you’ve got down all the information in your dossiers.”
“I was involved with them a good deal more than peripherally for several years,” Maud said. “Before I got into Special Services, I was in the Narcotics Division of the regular force. And the people we dealt with twenty-four hours a day were drug users, drug pushers. To catch the big ones we had to make friends with the little ones. To catch the bigger ones, we had to make friends with the big. We had to keep the same hours they kept, talk the same language, for months at a time live on the same streets, in the same building.” She stepped back from the rail to let a youngster ahead. “I had to be sent away to take the morphadine detoxification cure twice while I was on the narco squad. And I had a better record than most.”
“What’s your point?”
“Just this. You and I are traveling in the same circles now, if only because of our respective chosen professions. You’d be surprised how many people we already know in common. Don’t be shocked when we run into each other crossing Sovereign Plaza in Bellona one day, then two weeks later wind up at the same restaurant for lunch at Lux on Iapetus. Though the circles we move in cover worlds, they are the same, and not that big.”
“Come on.” I don’t think I sounded happy. “Let me treat you to that ice cream.” We started back down the walkway.
“You know,” Maud said, “if you do stay out of Special Services’ hands here and on Earth long enough, eventually you’ll be up there with a huge income growing on a steady slope. It might be a few years, but it’s possible. There’s no reason now for us to be personal enemies. You just may, someday, reach that point where Special Services loses interest in you as quarry. Oh, we’d still see each other, run into each other. We get a great deal of our information from people up there. We’re in a position to help you too, you see.”
“You’ve been casting holograms again.”
She shrugged. Her face looked positively ghostly under the pale planet. She said, when we reached the artificial lights of the city, “I did meet two friends of yours recently, Lewis and Ann.”
“The Singers?”
She nodded.
“Oh, I don’t really know them well.”
“They seem to know a lot about you. Perhaps through that other Singer, Hawk.”
“Oh,” I said again. “Did they say how he was?”
“I read that he was recovering about two months back. But nothing since then.”
“That’s about all I know too,” I said.
“The only time I’ve ever seen him,” Maud said, “was right after I pulled him out.”
Arty and I had gotten out of the lobby before Hawk actually finished. The next day on the news-tapes I learned that when his Song was over, he shrugged out of his jacket, dropped his pants, and walked back into the pool.
The fire-fighter crew suddenly woke up; people began running around and screaming: he’d been rescued, seventy percent of his body covered with second and third degree burns. I’d been industriously not thinking about it.
“You pulled him out?”
“Yes. I was in the helicopter that landed on the roof,” Maud said. “I thought you’d be impressed to see me.”
“Oh,” I said. “How did you get to pull him out?”
“Once you got going, Arty’s security managed to jam the elevator service above the seventy-first floor, so we didn’t get to the lobby till after you were out of the building. That’s when Hawk tried to—”
“But it was you actually saved him, though?”
“The firemen in that neighborhood hadn’t had a fire in twelve years! I don’t think they even knew how to operate the equipment. I had my boys foam the pool, then I waded in and dragged him—”
“Oh,” I said again. I had been trying hard, almost succeeding, these eleven months. I wasn’t there when it happened. It wasn’t my affair. Maud was saying:
“We thought we might have gotten a lead on you from him. But when I got him to the shore, he was completely out, just a mass of open, running—”