The Venus Belt Page 3

  “Win, get out here pronto! He may already be d-dead by now!”

  3: Gorilla My Dreams

  Wednesday, February 24, 223 A.L.

  “I am not!” Clarissa stamped a foot she hadn’t seen in weeks. In the thick carpeting of our gymnasium-size living room, the effect was lost.

  “You are too!” I sat, chomping on my cigar, and glowered at her.

  “I am not!”

  “You are too!”

  Clickety-click-click. “Can I be excused from this colloquium?” My chief assistant and apprentice gumshoe, Koko Featherstone-Haugh, leaned back on a sofa, knitting a sweater for the baby. Koko’s a youngish female gorilla, favorite niece of the President of the North American Confederacy.

  And they pronounce it “Fanshaw.”

  “Sure,” I growled back, “go on out in the kitchen and peel yourself a plantain. You’re on her side, anyway.”

  Koko hitched her holster into a more comfortable position and took a sip of King Kong Kola, a brand suddenly popular since the recent importation of a certain movie. Click-click-clickety. “I am not.”

  “You are too! Say, this sounds familiar. Did I not hear you, with my very own ears, state that ‘mere pregnancy’ is no reason Clarissa shouldn’t go to the asteroids with me?” I looked closer at her knitting, wondering if I should mention that the arms were getting a bit long.

  Click-clickety-click. “Is that a question from my employer, or merely the husband of my dearest friend?” Clickety-click-click.

  “Waffling already! Look, even without Hamiltonians mixed up in this, space travel’s no kind of risk for—”

  Clarissa sat down beside me. “Win, I’m a Healer. I’m also a fully grown sapient being...”

  I’d seen this independent mood before. Unfortunately it was a major reason I loved the woman. “Yes?”

  “I know what I’m doing! Maybe they fly around on giant firecrackers where you come from—”

  “Unfair! Just because my country’s economically depressed—”

  “And technologically backward.” Click-click-clickety.

  “Butt out, banana-breath! And technologically backward, that’s no reason to...Listen: how many gees you figure to pull, just getting up to the liner?”

  “Hmm. Well, the liner itself starts out at one gee, gradually dropping to a tenth of that by the time it reaches Ceres. That can’t be too bad, can it?”

  “You can it. Answer my question: how many gees aboard the shuttle?”

  “Uh, six—but there are ways, Win, heart patients do it all the—”

  “Swell. You’ll qualify sometime the middle of the twenty-fifth century. I’m leaving at the end of the week. You think I like going off a hundred million miles, maybe missing the baby—certainly missing you?” I leaned over to kiss her and hesitated. “Hey, Miss Simian Collegiate, I thought you wanted to be excused.”

  “Don’t mind me, this’ll be terrific for the anthro paper I’m doing: ‘Love among the Humans—Ennui or Boredom?’” Click-click-clickety-clack! “Dirty bad —I’ve dropped another...I wonder who that can be?”

  I got up and crossed to the windows. It was difficult to see in the evening twilight; Confederate tastes run to generous acreage, lots of trees, hedges, miscellaneous bushery. The folks at Cheyenne Ridge had grudgingly let a little white stuff through, not enough to dampen the electrically warmed streets, but plenty for postcard scenery, maybe a snowman or two in the morning. I gave the window knob a twirl, doubling the amplification. Sure enough, through the gate and up the gracefully curving rubber-surfaced drive, a hovercraft skated to a landing and two familiar furry shapes climbed out.

  I turned to my companions. “How about something in the fireplace? And kill the fatted whiskey bottle. It’s Captain Forsyth—and the monkey’s uncle.”

  ***

  Olongo Featherstone-Haugh, a mountain among gorillas, handed me forty yards of dampened overcloak, unwinding a mile or two of muffler from around his massive neck. “Can’t be too careful, old boy”—he wiped an errant snowdrop from his pistol grip—”awfully prone to respiratory complications, don’t you know.”

  True enough. Even given current medical technology, no gorilla took unnecessary chances that way. I added Forsyth’s ancient yellow slicker to a heap of steaming garments on the stair rail. Upstairs, Koko had a roaring fire started. Clarissa handed the President about a gallon and a half of Scotch.

  “Ahh! A wintry evening among friends. Thanks indeed, dear lady.”

  “Catch your prowler yet?” I asked. Some fool had broken into his office last weekend. Putting in some overtime, Olongo had come back from the john and interrupted them in mid-burgle.

  He settled in my biggest chair, arms stretched comfortably across his ample frontage, firelight flickering in his eyes. “Afraid not, old man. Stupid sod that I am, I left my life-preserver in the office when I stepped out. Spot of luck they didn’t shoot me with it—had it halfway out of the holster when I threw that wastebasket. Next time I’ll be ready for them. Now tell me about this emergency of Lucy’s before I perish from curiosity.”

  “Not much to tell.” I pushed my somewhat less-magnificent facade aside to reach into my sporran for a Bic—another popular import—rekindling my cigar. Clarissa wrinkled her nose and punched the ventilation up on the Telecom pad lying in her lap. I passed a tiny datachip across to Olongo. “Been trying all day to get more than this from her, but—”

  “I understand.” The gorilla nodded. “Something about solar interference.”

  “Mighty odd solar interference,” Forsyth muttered as he took another swallow of Kola—he preferred soft drinks, too, a legacy of many years’ abstinence on duty. “Wrong time of year, wrong part of the solar cycle. Lucy’s right—something funny going on.”

  “My dear Captain, these things happen.” The President lifted a weighty paw and set it down again. There was a distinctly reddish quality to his pelt; I never had the nerve to ask about orangutans in the woodpile. “The cycle’s only an approximation, after all.” He handed back the chip. “Why not observe for ourselves what Lucy had to say?”

  I slid the chip into another ‘com pad—we keep several around—the fireplace winked out of existence, and the wall lit up with Lucy’s face.

  “Winnie! Clarissa, girl! This here’s Lucy! ...”

  This time I ignored her words, concentrating on the surroundings. A commercial booth. Not her homestead, then, on—what was it?—Bulfinch 4137, a tiny planetoid she and Ed owned outright. Behind her people bustled through a crowded corridor. Ceres, I guessed, first stop on my spaceliner’s itinerary. But why Ceres and not her home?

  The message ended. I turned the fireplace display back on, felt its radiation warm my face again and shimmer softly on the polished wood and metal of the weapons in the case across the room.

  “Intriguing,” Olongo mused, “if not very informative. Notice how she kept looking back over her shoulder? What do you plan doing about it, Win?”

  I watched the fireplace a moment. “Well, I’m booked aboard the Indomitable Spirit, leaving day after tomorrow. When you guys showed up, we’d finally decided that Clarissa wasn’t—”

  “Just a minute, Win Bear!” She looked up from the ‘com pad where she’d been telemetering her critical patients off and on all evening. “We never decided any such—”

  “Clarissa”—I took her hand and patted it gently—“if it were just the baby, I might not...I mean, I love our daughter as if she were already born, but you can always make another kid.”

  “That’s easy for you to say!” This from my shaggy apprentice, sprawled across the floor beside the fire. She ran a pickup down each nearly finished sweater arm, stared at the slip of paper in her hand and at the conflicting data on the tiny screen, a look of simian puzzlement on her face.

  “Shut up, Koko.”

  “Can he talk to me that way, Uncle President?”

  “Not when I’m around—to do it for him. Shut up, dear, there’s a good ape.”

&
nbsp; Clarissa squeezed my hand. “I know what you’re trying to say, Win, but—”

  “No buts! I can’t get another Clarissa, in this universe or any other. I didn’t mean to make this a public debate, but what would you be saying if it were me who was pregnant?”

  She opened her mouth, glanced down at my generously developed middle, and giggled. Maybe a dissertation on married telepathy might do Koko’s anthropology grades some good, but hell, let her find out for herself.

  “I hate it when you’re right,” Clarissa sighed. “To tell the truth, I was wondering how I’d stand up to six gees. So what are we going to do?” There was that sad look on her face. Any more of this, I’d probably let her come along.

  “Be miserable for a while.” In all our married years, we’d spent maybe five, six nights apart. “I’ll try making it as short a while as possible. Wish I could get hold of Lucy—thought we’d killed off all those Hamiltonian bastards years ago.”

  The President leaned forward slightly. “Might I offer a suggestion? Although I must confess to certain reservations...”

  “Fire away, old primate, I need all the help I can get.”

  “Very well, to paraphrase one of your greatest statesmen—or was he a religious leader?—take my niece, please.” His ponderous stomach jiggled in imitation of human laughter.

  Koko dropped her knitting and bounded to her feet, resembling a cross between Orson Welles and shag carpet rampant. “Honest? You’re not just—”

  “No, my dear, I’m not just. But I’m logical: you visited Ceres with me not so many years ago. If you strive to overcome that youthful impetuosity of yours...Come see me in the morning, I’ll make all the arrangements.”

  “Oh, boy! The asteroids!”

  I shook my head. “Don’t get too excited. I want to think about this.”

  “Think? What’s to think about? Oh, boy! The asteroids!”

  “Quiet! Unless you’d rather spend the voyage in a cargo hold...”

  “Then I can go! Gee thanks, Boss! Oh, boy! The— ”

  “Don’t thank me. It’s your uncle’s idea, and I understand his reservations. On the other hand, two investigators might...Say, should we be interrupting your education for a field trip? Olongo?”

  “Win, my friend, time is passing this planet by, along with everything it has to teach us. Were it my decision—and it’s not, it’s Koko’s—I’d say go! And never come back!” He looked around the room. I knew what he was seeing, I was seeing it, too: furniture, fixtures, nanoelectronic appliances—if not actually manufactured in the asteroids, then made from asteroid raw materials.

  “It isn’t only consumer goods,” Olongo said, “it’s the future. And, I might add, a considerable portion of the present. Thank Lysander we were able to talk your Propertarians out of their demand for a strict gold standard.”

  “I wasn’t aware that you had! Gold’s as important to them as...” I trickled to a stop, unable to think of anything that important.

  “Win, my boy, in this one minuscule respect, the Keynesians approach the truth: gold has no particularly magical properties that make it the only kind of money possible. A stable economy relies upon a myriad of commodities; you can draw a check as easily from a petroleum account, or on helium, or wheat.”

  “Yes, yes, but why this sudden allergy to gold?” What little economics I knew were being ripped out from underneath me.

  “Hardly sudden. Confederate metals have been declining—relative to nonmetallic standards—for a considerable time. The asteroids, you understand.”

  I understood. When something gets more abundant, it gets cheaper—Marginal Utility, they call it. The Belt was cranking heavy metals out like popcorn—one advantage to working the debris of a planet that never quite got its shit (or anything else) together. You don’t have to dig very deep. No matter, something scarcer would turn up to base our currencies on.

  But Olongo was still pontificating: “—down to Earth on a nice, easy ballistic spiral. Your United State will benefit as well, eventually. But the Invisible Hand is going to have to manage some readjustments along the way.”

  “Great. So sometime next year I can get a black mask and start ordering my bullets cast out of solid silver. People will want to thank me. I—”

  “Say, Win, speaking of bullets...” Captain Forsyth stood and stretched a little, wincing at the arthritic pain in his shoulder. He slapped the weapon at his hip. “Were you planning to take that old Smith & Wesson with you?”

  Terrific. Time for another ribbing. “Sure. Why not?”

  The chimpanzee shrugged—and winced again. “Well, for starters, think what the cold will do to its mainspring: first time you pull the trigger, crunch!— powdered steel.”

  “For that matter,” added Olongo, “the entire weapon’s steel. Drop it to a few degrees above Absolute, then suddenly subject it to—forty thousand psi? I shudder at the thought!”

  “Now hold on a minute, I can have the springs replaced. And it isn’t any forty thousand pounds. The custom loads I use—”

  “That reminds me,” interrupted Captain Forsyth, “those lead-alloy bullets of yours, they’re lubricated, right? Little grooves around each slug, filled with some kind of grease?”

  “Right, beeswax and—”

  “Volatiles evaporate in hard vacuum. Same goes for that antiquated nitro powder, not to mention primers.”

  “Okay, wise-ass, let’s look over the inventory and see what you suggest.” I rose reluctantly and went to the gun case, Forsyth and Olongo right behind me. The lock yields for only two thumbprints in the world, mine and Clarissa’s—three, if you count Ed Bear, who uses the same fingerprints I do. I opened the double doors.

  “Well, I suppose this lets out most of my collection.” There was the handmade .41 hideout derringer I’d brought with me to this world with the Smith, and almost a dozen other souvenirs of various misadventures since. “Hold on, what about this?”

  I reached up and took down a Walther-Zeiss hand-laser. “No ammo to evaporate, no steel. This was made in your world, gentlemen. Think it might do?”

  Forsyth took the pistol and turned it over in his hands. “It’s proofed for space, anyway.” He showed me a tiny stylized spaceship stamped into the base of the trigger guard. “But this overgrown flashlight has some drawbacks, wouldn’t you say, Mr. President?”

  “Rawther. In the first place, smartsuits are designed to absorb all the energy they can, and reflect any—”

  “Smart suits?”

  “Absolutely de rigueur, old boy. A solid-state invention in the form of a tough, lightweight rubbery garment. A bit like ocean divers wear, though infinitely more sophisticated. You didn’t imagine we’d still be using that clumsy armor your astronauts—”

  “Olongo, we’ve already had our critique of NASA for the evening. Besides, I’ve seen these smartsuits on TV—pardon, the Telecom—now that I think of it. Can’t get anything these days but goddamned space opera. Anyway, lasers, I take it, are out?”

  The Captain rubbed his chin in contemplation. “Well, this toy might overload a smartsuit, but you’d really have to bear down—no pun intended, Win. Be like hunting elk with that Browning 9 mm hanging there—theoretically possible, but chancy.”

  I thought about the years I’d worn a puny .38 as a cop, never very happy in a cruel world filled with .45s and magnums of assorted lethality. “Don’t say another word. I get your drift.” I stretched and placed the Walther back on its hooks. “So what do you advise—time’s getting short?”

  Olongo glanced briefly at Forsyth. The Captain nodded confirmation and the President drew his pistol. “I’d be honored if you’d consider taking this.”

  Across the room, Clarissa peeked up from her Telecom, smiled, and went back to work. She missed my look of helpless exasperation.

  It wasn’t quite the ugliest thing I’d ever seen: a Webley & Scott, big brother to the little electric quick-shooter my wife favored. It was .17 caliber—about the size of pellet guns bac
k home—but I knew it threw its little steel darts at eleven or twelve thousand feet per second—call it Mach 10—enough to mess up anybody’s outlook. The magazine was good for a hundred rounds. The handle, shaped to suit a gorilla’s fingers, was awkward in my own.

  “Let’s find the original stocks,” Olongo suggested. “I’ve got them in the car someplace. I also brought some special projectiles you might want to try.”

  Forsyth grinned. “If you’ve got any big enemies.”

  “The good Captain refers, in his elliptical manner, to Owen tubes—a hollow contrivance which slips over the front end. You see, the drive currents also flow along the outside of the—”

  “My God!” I interrupted, looking at the hefty barrel coils. “What would the diameter amount to?”

  “A little under two inches,” the Captain replied evenly, “just right for putting an ape-size dent in a personal flivver. That’s what they use for hovercraft out there, little tiny spaceships that—”

  “I said I watch the Telecom. Sounds like I oughta invest in some of these Owen goodies. You’re sure I’ll need a nasty thing like that out there?”

  “Oh, it’s quite up to you, dear boy. However, with Hamiltonian Federalists involved, I assume you want to be adequately defended.”

  “I just don’t care to think about it so soon after dinner.” I started to shut the gun case.

  “One more thing, Win.” Forsyth reached past me. “You won’t want to leave this toadsticker behind. It’s a spaceman’s knife, or I never saw one before.”

  “You mean that old Bowie—Rezin, rather?” Named after the fellow who invented them in both worlds, Jim’s little brother, the specimen in question was another “trophy”; I hadn’t more than looked at it in years. Eighteen inches from pommel to point, it had a foot-long blade two and a half inches wide and a quarter thick, razor sharp halfway along the back edge, as well. The alloy was something called Stellite, and the grip aft of the heavy brass guards was long enough for a hand and a half—somebody like Olongo excepted. The damn thing weighed better than two pounds, and gave me the papercut shudders just thinking about it.