Was that why some of the people seemed so unfamiliar?
As they passed through the door into the opulent cabin, with its carpeted levels and reclining chairs, Bron realized that at least three people were, indeed, new.
Sam, looking pretty tired himself but, smiling, had an, arm around plump Debby’s shoulders. Someone handed him a drink, and Bron was left with the disconcerting question—since all the chairs were taken—which three people were missing.
Take-off was very rough. And it was a different cabin—or else the take-off’s screen broken blue lights had been fixed. There was conversation, laughter, gossip, all sounding somewhat strained.
Bron wondered if they all had secrets like his. His stint in the earthies’ cell had returned to him with pressing vividness the moment the doors to the room had rolled to. Ten hours out he found himself doubting if the people he’d spotted as new were new after all. Nobody had made particular reference to them, everyone seemed to know them. But five hours later, after checking down in the free-fall cabin, and then surveying the swimmers in the pool, he had definitely identified one of the missing persons.
After refilling his drink, Bron walked up to the redhead who had been so garrulous before.
The little man was sitting on his couch, his own drink hanging from his bony fingers.
Bron said: “By the way, whatever happened to that charming oriental woman you were playing vlet with on the trip out?”
The redhead looked up sharply. He frowned. Then his shoulder dropped, and the exhaustion Bron had become used to on the faces around him worked its way back among the features. “I suspect—” The little redhead looked down again, turned his drink—“the chances are overwhelming she’s dead.”
Which made Bron start. (Someone passing glanced at them, then glanced away.) Chills rolled up his back.
The redhead’s eyes raised. “This was a political mission.” His voice was strained and soft. “Many of us were in great danger. All of us were under pressure. And ... well, we are at war.” He took a breath, looked out at the stars, and then went on to talk about something else with entirely information-less anecdotes, a style that Bron had noticed twice before. This time Bron commented on it, a bit annoyed. The redhead laughed and explained that he had developed that style of small talk back when he’d been actually working for Intelligence—“That’s where everything you say is used against you.”—and then slaughtered Bron three games running on his small-sized, traveling vlet board; mercifully, no game took more than forty minutes. “But I think,” the redhead explained by way of aooeasement, “the next time you play someone else, you’ll find your own game much improved.” Bron had already recognized the beginning of another of those annoying friendships he was so frequently falling into when he fell into any friendship at all. The pattern was only confirmed when the redhead, in one of his anecdotes, mentioned something peculiar about life in some male homosexual commune that had something peculiar about its particular history. And the redhead, Bron realized, was one of those guys who wouldn’t even proposition you outright and give you the satisfaction of telling him to fuck off. Not that Bron ever said fuck off; he’d just say, as politely as the situation allowed, No. A couple of times, when he was a kid on Mars, someone had taken his politeness as an invitation to get physical, so that Bron once had to elbow someone in the ribs. (The image of the Spike, elbowing him that night, how many nights ago, in the ruins of Earth, came back to make him grin.) But the physical approach—especially if you were over six feet tall—gets rarer as you get older. (And somehow the obsessive feeling about her had begun to slip away ...) All these thoughts, of course, were not consecutive, but spread over the next seventy hours. Around them and in between them, Bron learned, from overhearing several other conversations and hovering about the edges of several more (trying to think of a leading question, terrified of asking a stupid one), that while Sam had been keeping him off out of harm’s way in Mongolia, indescribable atrocities had occurred, unspeakable retaliations had been committed, and that, though no one could really be surprised, the “we” who were at war now was, yes, Triton.
Sam was explaining to Bron, among half a dozen other, simultaneous conversations, that no, he wouldn’t be returning to the co-op today; he, Linda, and Debby were anxious to get back to the rest of the family in Lux. A voice chirped overhead, in astonishingly low fidelity: “Will Bron Helstrom please go to one of the blue courtesy phones. Will Bron Helstrom please . • J9
Bron excused himself.
“And say hello to the old pirate for me when you get home,” Sam called after him. “Hope you beat the fuzz off his balding pate—”
On the phone (“Yes, what is it?”) they told him there was a letter for him and—Oh, excuse me: apparently it had been already sent on to his co-op. In fact, it had come from Earth with him on the same rocket in which he’d—
“From Earth?”
That’s right, and they were terribly sorry; they were just trying to get it to him quickly, but apparently there’d been some mix-up—
“Well, then why call me all the way to the—?”
Was he on his way home now?
“Yes!”
Well, if it was an emergency and he was passing any postal outlet, if he would just present his identification card, he would be immediately presented with a government facsimile of—
“And what is the government doing with a facsimile of my private mail?” (The mail was a co-operative, not a government, enterprise.)
This is wartime, they explained testily. And besides, he had just returned from a High Surveillance Mission; as he no doubt knew, that surveillance would continue on High for at least seventy-two hours after his return, for his own protection. Now, would he like to take advantage of it and pick up his letter before he got home?
“Yes!” Bron said. “Thank you!” Hanging up, he turned, angrily, from the phone.
The little redhead (who’d made noises about sharing a transport compartment back into Tethys) was the only one waiting.
“Seems I just got a letter from my girlfriend,” Bron explained, realizing as he did so that it might just as easily be (in fact he hoped it was) an official apology from the Earth enforcement-girls (or whatever the hell they called them there) about the way he had been treated. “But they seem to have sent it on ahead by accident.” An apology from the Spike? He smiled. Well, it was to be expected. But really, he didn’t feel she’d done that much to apologize for. “I’ll have to stop off and pick up the letter. I really enjoyed those games. I guess we’ll be running into each other again—Tethys isn’t that big a city, and once you meet someone, you practically can’t get away from them.”
“We probably won’t,” the redhead said with a mischievous smile. “I don’t live in Tethys.”
“Oh,” Bron said. “I thought you said you lived in a—oh, you mean your co-op isn’t in the city.”
“That’s right.” And the redhead began to talk animatedly about something else, till they reached the transport. “Oh, and may I ask you a mildly embarrassing favor: Could you pay my fare with one of your to—
kens. It’s only half a franq on your credit; I know it seems silly but—”
“Oh, sure,” Bron said, opening his purse and fingering around for his half-franq token. He pushed the coin-shape into one of the change slots beside the entrance. (There was still some leftover money; but Sam seemed to have forgotten about it.) The green light flashed, and the token rolled out again into Bron’s palm.
“Thank you,” the redhead said, and walked through the gate.
Bron put the token in again; the light flashed again; again the token was returned (and somewhere two fares were billed against his labor credits on some highly surveyed government tape); returning the token to his purse, he followed the redhead onto the transport platform, constructing schemes of paranoid complexity about why the redhead might not want his presence in the city known. After all, basic transportation was a nonrefusable (what the dumb earthies would call “welfare”) credit service.
They rode a while together. Then the redhead said good-bye and got off. (Bron’s fantasies had gone to the other extreme by now: the redhead was probably just a skinflint credit cadger. Ex-Intelligence indeed!) Bron realized as the doors closed that actually he had no idea at all where the man lived (in some other city? on some other moon?); he didn’t even know his name. Had he actually said he was living in the homosexual co-op, or just that someone had been living there? It had all been too artfully ambiguous. Forget it! Bron thought: Oh, forget it; he stood up, while the floor swayed, and went to stand at the doors. If he was going to pick up his letter at a postal outlet, before he got home, he’d better do it here: