“There’s a charge for Rust on invoice 26-953,” Raven said.
Waxman shook his head. “That’s not possible.”
Pointing to the desktop screen, Raven said, “Take a look.”
Waxman hesitated a brief moment, then took a breath and called up the invoice. He scanned every item. “I don’t see any mention of Rust.”
Raven stepped around his desk and stared at the screen.
“I saw the entry,” she insisted.
Leaning back in his desk chair, Waxman said coolly, “It’s not there now.”
“It’s been erased.”
For an eternally long moment Waxman stared into Raven’s eyes. She stared back, unflinching.
At last he said, “It wasn’t supposed to be there. One of the accounting robots made an error.”
“We’re buying narcotics?”
Waxman eased into a sly smile. “No. We’re selling the stuff.”
“Rust?” Raven asked, in a voice half an octave higher than a moment earlier. “We’re selling Rust?”
“To whoever wants to buy it,” said Waxman. “How do you think we keep this habitat running?”
Raven stepped over to one of the chairs in front of Waxman’s desk and sank into it.
“We’re selling narcotics?”
“Down in the Chemlab Building we manufacture the drug called Rust. It’s our major export item.”
“But it’s illegal.”
“Not here. Not aboard Haven. There’s no law against it here.”
“But on Earth… on the other worlds, the Asteroid Belt…”
Waxman tilted his head slightly. “They have their laws, we have ours.”
It took several moments for Raven to process what Waxman was telling her. Then she asked, “What does Reverend Umber have to say about this?”
“Nothing. Not a thing. He closes his eyes and doesn’t get in our way. He acts as if he doesn’t know anything about it.”
“But he does know?”
With a shrug, Waxman replied, “Of course he knows. But I can tell you this: he doesn’t want to know.”
An almost delirious laugh bubbled out of Raven’s throat. “This entire habitat—this haven of refuge—it’s built on money from narcotics.”
Waxman shrugged again. “Politics makes strange bedfellows, Raven.”
“This isn’t politics,” she retorted. “It’s drugs! It ruins people. Kills them!”
“They kill themselves,” Waxman said sternly. “We don’t force anyone to use the stuff. They pay good money for the privilege.”
Nodding toward Waxman’s office door, Raven said, “Like Alicia.”
“Like Alicia,” Waxman agreed. “She’s working hard to get off her habit. She might even be successful, sooner or later.”
“Sooner or later,” Raven echoed.
Waxman leveled a stern gaze at her. “That’s up to her. People bear the responsibility for their actions, you know.”
“I know that narcotics can sizzle your brain, turn you into a zombie, kill you.”
“That’s not our fault. We simply sell the stuff. We don’t force anyone to use it.”
A picture of some of the people she knew in Naples filled Raven’s mind. No, she thought, you don’t force anyone to use the drugs. You just make them available. You just lay them out in front of them, like offering candy to a baby. You pocket their money and leave them to tear themselves apart.
But she said nothing. She knew that Waxman would not tolerate any objections from her, any questions, any doubts.
Instead, she asked, “You pay for this whole habitat with the money you make from Rust?”
With a shake of his head, Waxman smilingly replied, “Oh no, not at all. Most of the habitat’s money comes from good-hearted people who honestly want to help the poor. They donate money and tell themselves they’re doing good.”
“And they stay in their mansions and live their lives and think everything’s okay.”
Waxman sighed. “That’s about the size of it. We help the good, honest, high-minded citizens of the worlds to feel they’re doing the right thing.”
“While you make millions from selling Rust. Or is it billions?”
“Not quite billions,” Waxman answered with a thin smile, “but it’s getting close.”
“I see.”
“Now that you know,” Waxman told her, “naturally I’d like you to keep quiet about it. No sense advertising it all through the habitat. Not that it’s illegal here, remember. It’s perfectly legal.”
But slimy, Raven thought. Dirty. Filthy.
Unaware of what she was thinking, Waxman went on, “We try to keep a low profile here in the habitat. We’ve used Rust to help pacify some of our rowdier residents, of course. There’s always a few who slip through the screening process—as you did.”
Raven saw that he was staring at her, his face set in a mask of authority. Automatically, she made herself smile back at him. “Why Evan, I thought you liked me.”
“I do,” he said, breaking into a sunny smile. “I like you very much, Raven.”
Like you once liked Alicia, she thought.
His expression hardening again, Waxman said, “But I want this Rust business kept as quiet as possible. Loose lips sink ships… and sailors.”
THE PRODIGAL RETURNS
Raven went to the main auditorium to watch the recovery of Gomez’s submarine. Tómas had invited her to his quarters, but she couldn’t make herself accept his invitation. That would be too close, she told herself. It might give him ideas. Better to stay separated.
Waxman had declared an official holiday, so the auditorium was already crowded, and more people were coming in to watch the sub’s return, standing and staring at the big screens that hung on every wall. So far, they showed nothing but Uranus’s blue-gray clouds.
Raven was surprised—almost shocked—when she saw Tómas shouldering his way through the crowd that had gathered in the auditorium. Heading toward her.
“Tómas!” she called to him. “What are you doing here?”
His face looked tense, worried. “Same as you,” he shouted over the hubbub of the crowd. “I’ve come to see if my sub had survived its mission.”
“But not in your quarters?”
“I couldn’t stand being alone,” he said, stepping beside her.
And you wanted to be with me, Raven said to herself. Well, there’s nothing I can do about it. He’s here. She realized that she was glad that Gomez had come to be with her. And that her reaction was anything but wise.
The speakers set into the auditorium’s ceiling announced, “Breakout from the ocean in thirty seconds.”
“If she breaks out,” Gomez muttered. “If she’s intact. If nothing happened to her while she was down on the sea bottom.”
A different voice sang through the speakers, “Breakout attained at oh-nine-seventeen hours GMT.”
The crowd roared out a lusty cheer. Raven threw her arms around Gomez’s neck. “She’s okay! She made it!”
Gomez’s grin could have lit up a major city. They both stared at the wall screens, which still showed nothing but Uranus’s endless expanse of clouds.
“It’ll take almost an hour to climb through the atmosphere and break out of the clouds,” said Gomez tensely.
They waited. Nearly quivering with anxiety as they stood in the middle of the crowd, they stared at the pole-to-pole expanse of blue-gray clouds, together with all the others, half-listening to the scraps of conversation from the people around them.
“…atmospheric turbulence…”
“…wind shear in the clouds…”
Raven was surprised to hear so much talk about the conditions in Uranus’s atmosphere. These people didn’t sound like poor, ignorant dregs of civilization. They had learned something, many of them, since they’d arrived at Haven. She realized that she wasn’t the only one who had been educating herself.