Выбрать главу

“What about the day she died? Can you remember the date?”

“I can get it from my diary.” It was the day after we’d seen Chloe.

“The city might have done an autopsy. There will be a death certificate in any case, which could be useful. Is there anything else that might help identify one of them?”

I told him about James’s bugeye prosthesis, and the address of the place we usually met. He made some notes while I tried to remember everything I could. It felt good to tell him. Benny had relieved me of a large burden. Maybe I would get into trouble with the FBI. I doubted that they would hold me down and poison me.

When I’d. finished, he zipped the notebook shut and didn’t say anything.

“You think I’ve been foolish.”

“Not really. Naive, yes… you and Benny, too. What this sounds like is a handful of penny-ante thugs, fanatics with, as you say, delusions of grandeur. That doesn’t make them less dangerous than a large organization, not to you and Benny. It makes them more dangerous. They don’t have to answer to anybody.”

He took a sip of wine and continued, quietly. “That Benny found the bug in his room is interesting. It could be that they were simply amateurish and low on resources. But you can get an invisible bug for less than a thousand bucks. It could be that they wanted him to find it.”

“To test him?”

“That’s right. And he did exactly the wrong thing, tip-toeing around it. He should have confronted James with it—been outraged. Instead, he gave them every reason to believe that he’s spying on them.”

“Well, he should be safe now, I hope.”

“You say he was going to Vegas for a dryclean, and then on to someplace secret. He probably will shake them that way, but it’s not perfect. My agency could find him, for instance, and they may want to.”

“How could the FBI work in Nevada?”

“We don’t, officially. But it’s an open secret that we have thousands of people there on retainer, so to speak. Some of them are in the laundry business. Benny doesn’t know enough about the underworld to avoid them. I’d give you odds there’s a file on him in Washington now, if there wasn’t one before.”

I had a sudden intuition that James and his gang might be just the opposite of what they claimed; might be a clandestine arm of the government set up to monitor and control dissidents. I didn’t mention that to Jeff.

He put the notebook back in his purse. “Feel like walking?”

“Let’s go down to the beach. I’m a little light-headed.”

The streets were gaily lit and full of wanderers. But within a block of the beach, all the streetlights were out of commission; the beach itself was dark as the inside of a closet. And full of people.

We made love standing up under the sign SE DETIENEN PERSONAS DESNUDAS. To stay within the law we left most of our clothes on.

I like the clinging-vine position, but it’s easier in low gravity. Afterwards, Jeff sat with Ids back against the sign and I lay down with my head on his lap. We panted to each other for a while.

“This gravity,” I said. “It makes me feel like an old woman.”

He stroked my damp hair. After a minute he said, “How old are you, Marianne?”

“Twenty-two.” I’d guess Jeff to be ten years older.

“Must be the youngest post-doctoral candidate at the university.”

“I’m only post-doc for their own paperwork. Hard to translate New New’s certification ”

He ran his large hand gently over my face, tracing its shape as a blind man would. had a… disturbing experience when I was your age. Nine years ago. I was starting my last quarter of undergraduate work, and found out I had missed one physical education credit Signed up for a quarter of wrestling.

“It was frustrating. I was as strong as any man in my weight class, but I couldn’t win a angle match. Points, I’d get early points, but they’d always outlast me.

“I went to the infirmary, finally, and they said I was in excellent shape. Then I asked the wrestling instructor about it and he sat me down and told me the obvious: everyone in the class was a few years younger than me. Up until your middle or late ‘teens, you’re still a growing organism.

Then there’s a few years of stasis.” He paused. “In your early twenties, you start to die.”

“Hey, thanks. I needed cheering up.”

He traced his finger around my breast. “The funny thing is, in my case he was exactly wrong. Exactly.”

“How so?”

“Well, I kept getting weaker. Finally they sent me to a glandular specialist—the big clue was that my shoes were getting tight; my shirts seemed all to be shrinking around the shoulders.”

“You were growing?”

“That’s right I had a rare form of acromegaly. Pituitary gland thought I was a kid again. That’s why I’m so big. I actually grew eleven centimeters before medication stopped it.”

I stroked him. “It must have been pretty short before that.”

He laughed and returned the gesture. After a while he said: “Shall we do it like everybody else, lying down?”

“Me on top, though.” I’d heard stories about the sand.

The next morning I tried to call New New through the New York operator. I got a printed message advising me that all communications would be passed through a delay circuit and would be subject to censorship. Then a hard-looking male operator came on the cube.

“Name and Social Security number,” he said.

“Sorry. Wrong number.” I pushed off and looked up the number of the Cape shuttle office; punched it.

A tired man stared at me. “Before you say anything,” he said, “be advised that this call is being recorded and traced.”

“That’s all right. I just want some information.”

“Plenty of that.”

“I’m a Worlds citizen touring Europe. I tried to call New New just now, from Spain, and got some blather about censorship. What’s going on?”

“Harassment As far as we can tell, that’s all it is. You can sometimes get around the delay circuit thing by calling Tokyo. They can patch you into New New via Uchūden, if you get good operators; if the phase angle works out. I can compute optimum times for you, if you wish.”

“No, it was just a social call. Say, if I were a U.S. citizen, they couldn’t censor me, could they?”

“Not if you could prove you were calling another U.S. citizen. There can’t be a dozen left in the Worlds, though.”

“A dozen! What about tourists?”

He laughed bleakly. “Don’t get much news in Spain, do you? The last tourist came back two weeks ago. We can’t afford to send them anymore. It’s another piece of harassment, but a more serious one. You know we have to buy our fuel now, since we can’t trade with U.S. Steel.”

“I know.”

“Well, on December thirty-first, the government pulled the price controls off deuterium. Supposedly… actually, there was a long list of applications for which the controls still apply. Virtually everything but space flight. We have to pay ten times the fixed rate—but the amount we can charge for a ticket is still fixed by law! We’d lose a fortune on each flight if we shuttled tourists.

“We have enough fuel stockpiled to get every Worlds citizen home, with a comfortable margin. But it has to be orchestrated—do you have a reservation?”

“No, I don’t. It’s that critical?”

He nodded. “It’s not just the shuttle. The tug that takes you through the Van Allen belts also runs on deuterium; it has to run with a full load of passengers. So we orbit five shuttle loads each Monday.” He studied a sheet of paper. “The earliest I can schedule you is May fourteenth.”

“I’ll still be in school.”

He shrugged. “If I were you, I’d take the earliest date possible. You can always cancel and reschedule—but if the situation doesn’t improve, there won’t be any more shuttles after mid-July.”