The Venus Belt Read online

  “Hi, me!” She was still wearing that hormone-inspiring outfit. “Gee, I’m glad to see you. The house feels lonely already. Like my present?”

  “Give a listen to the background—’Midnight at the Oasis.’ Where’d you dig up all the American flicks?”

  “Jenny Noble, bless her, those Propertarians have quite a library. How was the shuttle ride?”

  “Koko enjoyed it. You wouldn’t have, and neither would our prospective offspring. Olongo get back to his office all right?”

  “I guess so, he took off in some kind of big hurry. Listen, do you think our budget could stand it if you called me every day? Why I ever let you talk me out of—”

  “Baby, it was awful getting up here. You should see my lunch.”

  “Oh dear, you didn’t—”

  “I never had the chance. You take care of yourself, now.”

  “I promise. See you tomorrow, then?”

  “You got it, kiddo, every day until the lightlag gets impossible.”

  Her image disappeared, leaving behind that slightly better/slightly worse feeling you get from such conversations. I holstered my Tom Swift Electric Popgun and went out to find a drink.

  ***

  Saturday, February 27, 223 A.L.

  It took an amazing amount of shiptime to get the hang of the Bonaventura. The layout was simple in conception, all but impossible in practice: take four old-fashioned U.S. pennies—the copper kind, I mean—and arrange them in a square, edges touching a quarter in the center. That’s a cross-section of the ship. Now place all five coins on a pack of cigarettes, and convert them into stacks, say fifty quarters and forty pennies high: five enormous towers planted kitty-corner on a blocky rectangular base. The outer cylinders are mostly staterooms, arranged in wedges, so that everybody gets a chance at tossing his acrophobic cookies. The center tower, all seven hundred and ninety-two stories, is services, shops, restaurants, recreational facilities, with a slowly revolving saloon at the top, just beneath Captain Spoonbill’s domain, the bridge.

  Three elevators ran up and down in tracks along each connective structure between cylinders, a dozen captive miniature rocket ships in all. I didn’t discover until the final day of the cruise that there’s an internal transport system for us craven yellowbellies. Each residential tower is coded inside, mine gold, the others blue, green, and orange. The center column’s white—another thing I didn’t notice until a few days out; kept turning the wrong way from the elevators and winding up lost.

  One such occasion proved intriguing. Koko was at a beauty shop, getting covered with plastic curlers from sagittal crest to prehensile toes. Killing time before lunch, I misnavigated into the bar on the 790th floor, and when it rotated around sufficiently, I could see Earth dwindling steadily through the glass, and a bright yellow splinter surging gamely toward the Bonaventura at what must have been eight or nine gees. Somebody was determined not to miss the boat. I finished my Coke and hurried to an elevator like a Rocky Mountain yokel heading downtown to watch the traffic lights change.

  From a porthole above the hangar deck, I watched the speedy vessel come alongside, too big for the liner to take aboard, very long and slender, her reentry-blackened nosecone and glowing pink stern drives contrasting brightly with her yellow-painted hull. Along her fuselage, in striking metallic green, the lettering stood out clearly:

  TICONDEROGA

  JERSEY CITY, N.A.C.

  She locked fast to the outside of the giant ship.

  They brought her passenger aboard through the extended accordion tube. Whoever it was—an auburn-coated elderly gorilla, it appeared—he looked the way I’d felt the morning they relieved me of my appendix, lying on a gurney, swathed in pale-green drapery that matched my complexion. His limbs were festooned with plastic tubing and telemetry, an oxygen tent obscured his features further. Going to the asteroids for his health? Maybe the high-acceleration rocket ride had proven more than he’d bargained for. At least it’d be something interesting to tell Koko about over lunch.

  I met her, as agreed, at a little hamburger joint two or three overhangs above the lobby floor, where we could watch the finny folk cavorting below. The proprietor leaned casually on the counter, joshing with the customers.

  “—so I finally gave up trying to make money,” he was telling Koko. “It wasn’t worth anything once I got it, and the IRS took it anyway, everything, including the royalties on my books. Learned welding and bartered my services for what I needed.” The husky bearded hash-slinger was apparently a fellow refugee. Somehow, he looked familiar.

  “Unbelievable.” Koko shook her head. “Good thing for you the Propertarians— Win! Karyl Hetzer, this is Win Bear, a United Statesian from Saint Charles Town. Win, Karyl.”

  “That’s Denver, my dear Whatsit. Hey, guess what I just saw arriving!”

  “Er, Karyl’s got a son who lives in Denver, don’t you, Karyl?”

  “No, Koko, Laporte—the little Laporte, just outside Fort Collins. You know the place, Mr. Bear?”

  “That’s Win. Yes, I know it—know about you, too: Government, The Mindless Maw, by Karyl Hetzer. I thought you looked familiar; Jenny Noble gave me a copy. How’d you wind up taking short orders aboard the Enterprise, here?”

  “Welding. I helped build her, had a little money to invest—for once—and decided to stay on. What’ll it be, Win?”

  I looked the menu over as it flickered on the countertop. Either of the Jennies would’ve loved this place. “Think I’ll try a Spoonerburger, and pour me out a shot of Scotch and a glass of milk.”

  “It’s your stomach,” Karyl observed, punching in the order.

  “And a Free System. What have you been up to, faithful simian companion?”

  “Uh, not much, kemo sabe—getting beautifuller, didn’t you notice?” She spun around on her stool, showing off her freshly curled pelt. “Never know aboard these cruises, I might run into a handsome young ape who’s a captain of industry or something. Say, did you know there are seven hundred and ninety—”

  “I read the brochure, too. Here’s our food, let’s eat.”

  Monday, March 1, 223 A.L.

  A couple of days later, I finally found the gunsmith. He was listed under Ranges, shooting. There were also Ranges, cattle and sheep (breeding stock for the colonies), and Ranges, golf—the kind where you use a little white ball. Never touch the stuff, myself.

  The sign taped to his window said:

  THERE’S ONLY 24 HOURS IN A DAY

  THERE’S ONLY 1 OF ME

  YOU CAN HAVE A FAST JOB OR A GOOD JOB

  YOUR CHOICE

  The overweight unsanitary-looking character behind the counter folded his muscular arms, cultivating the sour-looking expression creased permanently into his face. “You wanna ruin a fine piece of ordnance, dontcha?”

  I’ve never run across one of these characters who wasn’t like this. I think they take classes in it at trade school: Cranky 201, hr. arr. “Look, the customer is always right—”

  “Except sometimes.” Two inches of ash fell from the butt screwed into the corner of his mouth and rolled down his greasy shop apron. “Friend, you’ve gotta perfectly good coaxial sighting-laser built into that piece. Just haul up on the trigger slack, and the needles’ll land wherever the little red dot is pointing. Iron sights? Downright medieval!”

  Koko looked up from a coffee-stained display case where she’d been drooling over some new engine of destruction. “Medieval is right, firmly rooted in the bedrock of—”

  “Koko, when I need your help, I’ll send up a semaphore—maybe even a whole phore.” I glowered right back at the ‘smith. “Can you put the sights on, or can’t you?”

  He rubbed a grimy thumb over his unshaven chin. “Well, it means unshipping the front coil, and I gotta find someplace t’mount the rear sight. Take me at least a week. Wanna loaner?”

  “Make it twenty-four hours. And what have you got?”

  “Well, how about a nice .14 Edison—one in the back room I
got stuck with on a bad debt—you bein’ an electric man?”

  “I’m a Smith & Wesson man. Tell me, what have you got that’s very small?”

  “Small?” He rummaged around in the fascinating debris under the counter. “Nothin’ that’d interest you. What’s a Smith & Wrestling, some kinda European number? Got a couple of kids’ guns here.” He handed me a tiny weapon, no bigger than a matchbook, marked Kolibri. “Electric .09—probably got a barrel liner around here’ll beef it up to .17, so you can use your own ammo. Single-shot, though. What you want with a dinky little—”

  “Ever hear of a holdout gun?” He hadn’t. In this whole enormous trigger-happy civilization, concealed backup guns were a novelty. I decided to skip it—I could get along for a day or two unarmed. I persuaded him to complete the alterations in two days, but I wanted to get some practice with the Webley first.

  “Hold on, what’s this?” The gunsmith had the rotor housing off already, peering down the barrel from the muzzle end. He fumbled absently on the bench behind him for a brass cleaning rod.

  “Something wrong?” Odd, I’d figured Glongo for a fellow who’d keep his hardware spotless, inside and out.

  “Dunno. Let’s—” The rod went halfway down the barrel. And stopped.

  I took the weapon and sighted down the smooth, shiny bore. Not much to get dirty in there. The .17 caliber needles, magnetically suspended in flight, never contacted the inside walls. A bias in the windings put spin on the projectiles. “Looks okay to me. I can see daylight just fine.”

  “Yeah, and you’ll see stars, too, right before the end. There’s something—” He put some pressure on the rod. It bent a little, then slid stubbornly until an object popped out on the counter and rolled to the floor. He squatted with a grunt and picked it up.

  “Here’s your ‘daylight,’ mister.” It was a tiny, bore-size cylinder of incredibly transparent plastic, about a quarter of an inch long. “Fella, you pull the trigger on that thing—at eleven thousand foot-seconds—it woulda blown you clean away. Couldn’ta got in there by accident. Somebody don’t like you.”

  ***

  “El Presidente,” I told the terminal, turning my back. “Boop!” the machine answered. I wheeled, taking up a little on the trigger. A brilliant spot of crimson splashed the target center, followed by a pair of steel needles as I pulled the trigger through. I shifted to the next silhouette, and on to the third. A fast reload, and once over lightly. Score: 42. Time: 9.67.

  This was going to take some practice.

  I examined the Webley: ambidextrous controls—something U.S. manufacturers had never gotten around to, as if a seventh of their clientele weren’t southpaws—the safety fit nicely under my thumb, and, further forward, a lever, marked with three positions. The first was SAFE, the second had delivered one shot at a time, each time I pulled the trigger. Now I slid the lever to the middle BURST position and called for a target.

  D-d-dit! Three ragged holes in the plastic. Experimenting with a knob at the back of the rotor housing allowed me to adjust the burst-length anywhere from two shots to a dozen. I set it on five and left it there.

  Next lever-position was full automatic: an empty magazine (about four seconds) later, and the plastic target looked like a sheet of badly woven lace. I switched back to BURST and called for a solid target, something approximating the fluid characteristics of living tissue.

  D-d-d-d-dit! When the ventilators finished pulling steam out of the room, I took a good look at the pseudocarcass downrange, and set the BURST control back to three. No use getting penalized for unnecessary roughness.

  I left the Webley with the ‘smith, reminding myself to double whatever his bill came to—small payment to the guy who saves your life. Question: was it my life the sabotage had been aimed at terminating, or Olongo’s?

  Koko complained so loudly about my “social nakedness” that I gave in and went up to my cabin for the Rezin. The Telecom was blinking on and off in red—probably my apprentice downstairs hollering at me to get a move on. Strapping the unwieldy knife to my hip, I hurried back down to see the sights.

  ***

  One whole tower, the blue, of course, was for porpoises and killer whales. I resisted Koko’s urgings that we rent some scuba gear, following the air-filled parallel corridors, instead. We stared at the marine critters on the other side of the glass; they stared right back at us. In a sort of aquatorium, they were holding a class in the use of smartsuits.

  Funny, I hadn’t thought of smartsuits for the water-walkers. The instructor was a chimp, the same guy I’d signed us up with for later in the week. Floating in the middle of the theater, he was demonstrating the advantages of rubber spacewear, pointing out to the cetaceans that, in zero gee, they could maneuver in a waterless environment just as well as any anthropoid. I was tempted to have the engineer stop the train so I could see that, but I couldn’t find the emergency cord.

  Without much effort, we soon found ourselves turned around and completely lost in a cargo area deep within the Bonaventura’s rectangular stern, something like a huge apartment building parking garage, filled from wall to wall with the slumbering shapes of a thousand inert hovercraft, gleaming in the subterranean twilight.

  I always thought it was nifty how Apollo took an aluminum Lizzie to the Moon. Confederates, too, adore any contraption that’ll move under its own impetus, and they’ve harnessed every conceivable form (and not a few inconceivable forms) of energy to operate them: steam, internal combustion, electricity, flywheels; there’ve been attempts to run hoverbuggies on enormous rubber bands, spring clockworks, charges of dynamite, now even thermonuclear fusion.

  Secretly playing Prussian War ace in a cloud of impeller dust, reading quietly while their computer-guided vehicles whisk them down the Greenway at five hundred miles per, Confederates don’t really care very much about the power source. In the portable privacy of their road machines, they’ve discovered a far greater fountain of energy, a sort of deep contemplative self-reliance which is the wellspring of all their “lesser” miracles.

  Then I looked closer: these “hovercraft” had no impellers, no skirts, just fusion-powered drivers, perfect little copies of the monumental hellburners pushing Bonaventura along by now at several hundred thousand miles an hour. So these were flivvers, miniature personal spaceships which were the asteroid equivalent of the private automobile. Reminded me of an argument I’d overheard in Denver, something about mass transit.

  “But that’s exactly what we’ve got already!” insisted Jenny (I forget which one). “And it takes you from exactly where you are to precisely where you want to go, whenever you want, in comfort, relative safety, and total privacy—at a hell of a lot less money per passenger mile than any BART or Metro system. Look it up: I’m right.”

  I’d looked it up: she was.

  Your basic asteroid flivver is capable of sustaining standard thrust—one-tenth of a gee—for a couple of days in a row. I was admiring a big candy-striped 223 Truax, when I discovered something even more interesting under a canvas cover on its port fender.

  “What is this heap, Koko, a police cruiser?”

  “A what?” She lumbered nearer and saw what I was talking about. “Oh, that—it’s just a darling gun.”

  “And I think it’s just the cutest thing, myself,” I lisped, peering into a cluster of six wicked-looking muzzles in a foot-long pod. “What the hell is it for?”

  “A hybrid of the Dardick and the Gatling: slugs from triangular plastic cartridges at maybe twenty thousand rounds a minute. Probably going to a prospector who struck it rich—helps discourage piracy and claim-jumping. Or maybe to a Registration Patrol, who knows?”

  I glanced around the hold, suddenly aware that most of these innocent-appearing vehicles were fitted out for Armageddon. “Registration Patrol? That has a decidedly un-Confederate ring to it.”

  “Naww,” she sighted along the weapon, squinting a little. “They’re just insurance companies, sort of. They travel around making su
re their customers’ property doesn’t get involuntarily transferred. Kind of friendly—sometimes a patrol person is all the company a hardrock miner’ll have for months.”

  Like Sergeant Preston and his dog, Tyge. A small reminder I was headed for the frontier. I slipped the protective shroud back over the cannon and continued looking for the egress.

  Instead, I found another storage hold. The light was even dimmer here, blocked off by stacks of crates that threw a million eerie angular shadows. I stopped out of curiosity: three quarters of the loot in this section was invoiced to some character named J. V. Tormount, of Aphrodite, Ltd. The interesting datum was the manufacturer: good old Laporte Paratronics, Ltd., creator of fine Telecommery, electric pencil sharpeners, and refrigerator parts. Also, through the scientific talents of my friends Ooloorie P’wheet and Deejay Thorens, originator of the Probability Broach.

  I wondered what was inside these crates, and who the devil J. V. Tormount was. Halfway through my ruminations, I heard a little scuffling noise behind me. “Koko?”

  Silence. I turned, slowly, extremely conscious I was armed with only a hyperthyroid kitchen knife. I wrapped my hand around the pommel, then felt silly. Probably a spacefaring bilge rat—or some crewman wanting to know what the hell I was up to down here.

  Another skittling noise, this time to my left. I tippy-toed in that direction, wondering what made me do these things. Peering down an aisle between two mountains of containers, I saw a graceful ankle disappear around a corner. Something lay on the floor between me and the fleeing feminine extremity. Four or five cautious steps took me to the object: a length of hefty jewelry chain, attached to a—

  “Boss! Look out!”

  A shadow loomed above me, getting larger, fast. I grabbed the chain and rolled forward as something landed behind me with a crash that shook the deck and hurt my molars clear down to my insteps.

  Koko shoved her way through the shattered remnants of the fallen crate. Interesting: I’d spent enough time in Deejay’s laboratory to recognize loose Broach parts when I see them. “Win! Are you all right?” Her paw was shaking as she touched my bruised shoulder. I patted it.