by A. C. Ellis
But today the fiction could not hold her attention. There was simply too much on her mind. Within a few seconds her concentration slipped, and the images, sensory impressions, and emotions ceased.
She removed the chip from her LIN/C and put it back in its case. After slipping the card back into its pouch, she returned the case to the desk drawer, then stood and stepped to the phone’s lens cluster. She began pacing nervously, just beyond the activating field.
Again she toyed with the thought of calling Base Security, and again decided against it. It was ridiculous. Evans would call as soon as he had something, just as he had promised.
Who was she trying to kid? Evans would never call. He didn’t consider her story worth investigating.
This waiting was getting to her. There was so much nervous energy bottled up inside her it felt as if at any moment she would explode. She had to be doing something—anything.
She shuffled to the door. It irised open and she stepped through.
Besides, she thought as she started down the corridor, they—whoever they were—might try again. They had already shown they could enter her rooms at will. If she stayed in her quarters, she would only make it easier for them. At least in a crowd she would stand a chance.
Chapter Four
Unlike Luna City, Fleet Base possessed little in the way of organized entertainment, and the exchange stores provided one of the community’s few social outlets. The stores were always open, and because there was neither day nor night and work continued in shifts around the clock, they were always well patronized. There were, however, three peak periods within each twenty-four hours when the crowd was nearly intolerable.
Susan arrived almost an hour before one of those peak periods. It wasn’t quite eleven hundred hours, yet the crowd was larger than she had anticipated, making browsing in the stores anything but enjoyable. And, although fighting the crowd was preferable to sitting alone in her rooms, waiting for a call she was certain would never come, after being jostled in several of the more popular shops—not really seeing the merchandise, but merely struggling through—then gulping down a hurried lunch at a stand-up deli while watching the crowd swell, she was more than ready to return to her quarters.
On her way back through the crowded exchange area, a sign above a door off the main corridor caught her attention. It was the only old-style, painted sign in sight; all others were holographic, flashing their messages in garishly colored three-dimensional block letters. This sign was two dimensional, yet physically present, peeling and faded with age. In nearly unreadable red script it proclaimed: EDDIE’S OUT-SYSTEM CURIOS.
Susan didn’t remember the shop being there on any of her previous visits to Luna. Somehow, although she had been on Fleet Base as recently as three years ago, she had always missed it. Yet from its antiquated appearance, it had obviously been there for quite some time.
Much to her surprise, the door beneath the sign irised open as she approached. On impulse, she stepped through.
Inside, the light was considerably dimmer than it had been in the corridor, and there was a damp, musty odor in the air, as though a water pipe had burst long ago and had never been discovered. It was silent, almost eerily so; the hectic crowd noises from the corridor had been silenced when the door irised shut behind her.
Three rows of large, metal, five-tiered storage shelves stretched back to the shop’s rear, nearly disappearing in the gloom. They stood close together, leaving little room to navigate the aisles between. A clutter of objects of all sizes and shapes filled the shelves nearly to overflowing, and she noted with irritation that none of those objects was identified. There seemed to be absolutely no system to their storage. Something neat and orderly within her cried out against the cluttered confusion.
“Can I help you?” came a voice from behind, soft and papery thin.
Susan jumped, startled. She had heard no approaching foot steps.
Turning, she faced a small man with a fluffy white halo of hair ringing his otherwise bald head. His jumpsuit may have been clean and white at one time, but it was now a dirty gray color, with darker patches of grime at elbows and knees. He was one of those men whose age it is entirely impossible to guess, but he was old—there was an aura of antiquity about him that did not in any way depend on appearance.
“Did I frighten you, my dear?” he asked, and Susan found his voice’s softness extremely pleasant, like the touch of velvet on her cheek.
“Yes,” she answered, “a little.”
“I am sorry. I didn’t mean to, you know. It’s just that I don’t get many customers in here any more.”
“Why is that?”
“Perhaps people no longer find the strange interesting—and I do have a shop filled with the strange collected from across the inhabited galaxy.” He gestured toward the cluttered shelves with a sweep of his hand. “Perhaps man has lost his sense of wonder.” He smiled sadly.
“Yes, perhaps some have.”
“Perhaps all have, some.”
Susan nodded, noting the distinction.
“But I’m boring you. No, I can tell, I am. Are you looking for something special?”
“Just browsing. I probably won’t buy anything.”
“That’s fine.” He smiled again. “If you find you need help, please call.”
“I’ll do that.” Susan returned the old man’s smile, and he shuffled off down the aisle, a shuffle of age rather than that of an unseasoned lunar visitor. He turned right in the gloom at the back of the shop and disappeared from view.
Turning her attention to the contents of the shelf before her, just below eye level, Susan identified a few of the objects in the chaotic heap: a small crystal bottle containing a pale green liquid she recognized as wine from the Rigel colony; a blood-stone necklace from Phobos colony; a three-piece Gordian knot puzzle from Beta colony in Sirius system, employing a ninety degree twist into hyperspace. But she had never before seen, nor did she know the function of the great majority of the objects.
A sudden glint of reflected light caught her attention and she reached out, picking up a fine silver chain with a small lump of pitted, dull-gray metal dangling from it. The pendant looked exactly like the one she had seen earlier that morning, the one worn by the dark man who had attacked her in her quarters.
She glanced down the aisle the way the old man had departed, about to call him, but she did not know his name. Then she realized that, in fact, she did know it; it had been painted on the sign outside the shop.
“Eddie,” she called softly, expecting to have to call again, louder.
“Yes, ma’am,” came an immediate response from behind. Again she jumped at the voice so near, then turned to face him. “Ah,” he said, “you have found something.”
Susan held the pendent up by its chain between them. “What can you tell me about this?” she asked.
“Very little, I’m afraid.” The old man scratched the white stubble on his chin and thought for a few seconds. “Now, let me see,” he said, “I bought that so long ago. Thirty-five, or was it forty years back?”
“Anything you might recall.”
He reached out, taking the pendant in his long, thin fingers, and Susan involuntarily gripped the chain tighter. Somehow, she could not let him have the pendant for even an instant.
He shook his head. “Like I said, it has been here for quite some time. You wish to buy it?”
“Yes.”
“Then it is three—no, four credits.”
“So cheap!” She lifted the pendant from the old man’s fingers, then slipped her LIN/C from its pouch and handed it to him.
“I’m afraid it’s not much of a necklace,” he said, taking the card. “Besides, the set is broken.”
“A set?”
He nodded. “The fellow who sold it to me had two, identical.”
“He kept one?”
“That’s right. I tried to talk him out of it—told him I could give him a better price for the set—but he insisted h
e had to keep one.”
“Can you describe him?”
The old man did not speak for a long moment. Finally, he said, “No, I’m afraid I can’t remember.”
Susan nodded. Perhaps she was expecting too much. After all, for something that had happened so long ago, he had done remarkably well.
He turned, and Susan followed him down the aisle to the back of the shop. There, atop an ancient wooden desk, sat a credit terminal, a green painted metal box about a foot on the side. The old man sat wearily in a chair behind the desk. Without a word, he placed Susan’s LIN/C into the slot in the side of the box, then typed slowly on a keyboard built into the desk top, hunting for each symbol as if unaccustomed to using the device. When he had finally finished, a red light blinked on top of the terminal, indicating an electronic transfer of credit from Susan’s account to his own.
“There you are,” he said, smiling as he removed the card from the machine and handed it back to her. “I hope you will enjoy your purchase.”
Again Susan returned his smile. “Thank you for your time and trouble,” she said as she placed her LIN/C back in its pouch. She slipped the chain over her head and tucked the pendant into her jumpsuit, out of sight between her breasts. The metal felt cool against her skin.
Turning, she walked back up the aisle, toward the shop’s exit. Within a few feet of the door she again heard the old man’s soft voice behind her.
“Young lady.” Susan turned and gazed down at him. “I just remembered something about that pendant. The man who sold it to me said he found it on a burned-out cinder of a planet circling a star at the very heart of the Crab Nebula. And he…” Eddie paused.
“Yes?” Susan prompted.
“He wore a Base Security uniform.”
Again Base Security! “Are you sure?”
The old man nodded. “And he was tall—at least as tall as you.”
That was a surprise. “You’re sure about that, too?”
“As sure as I can be after all this time.”
“Anything else? Anything at all?”
“No, nothing.”
“If you do remember anything more, please get in touch with me. I’m Susan Tanner. I can be reached through Admiral James Renford, here on Fleet Base.”
“I understand,” the old man said, still smiling.
“Thanks for your help.” Susan turned back to the door. It irised open, and she stepped through, out into the side corridor.
Tall, she thought as she shuffled toward the junction with the main corridor. That was interesting. She had been expecting him to say that the other man had been short. She had half expected him to describe the belter who had attacked her in her quarters. But that wouldn’t have made sense. That belter couldn’t have been much older than thirty. He probably hadn’t even been born when the old man bought the pendant.
As she stepped out into the main corridor, she was instantly struck by a blast of hot, stifling air and the heavy stench of body odor. There were many more people in the corridor now than there had been when she had entered the shop, and the ventilation system simply could not cope.
In spite of the crowd, or perhaps because of it, Susan no longer wanted to return to her quarters. She wanted to be out among people—doing, seeing, experiencing. Alone in her rooms, she would only brood about everything that had happened since this morning. And she was not yet ready for that.
She remembered a nice little cafe from her last visit to Fleet Base. It was only a short walk up the main corridor, and it served the best espresso available on Luna.
But this time of day the place would be packed. Was that espresso really worth fighting the crowd for?
Yes! she decided, and she could almost smell its aroma and taste its dark richness on her tongue as she made that decision.
Light glinted on polished metal, flashing through a break in the crowd to her left. She turned to stare into the shadows between shops.
Thirty feet away, a tall man in Security black stood with his feet planted slightly apart. The shadows hid his face, but a patch of light fell on the pendant hanging around his neck—a pendant identical to the one Susan had just bought.
The light fell as well on his right hand, a hand wrapped in dirty cloth. In that hand he held a weapon—a weapon pointed directly at Susan.
Chapter Five
It took her an instant to realize that the weapon was not a stun pistol, but a blaster. It would not merely knock her out; it would burn flesh and char bone. It could kill.
She scanned the corridor, looking for somewhere to hide. The nearest shop entrance was several yards away. The other could get off two, perhaps three shots before she reached it.
Then her ears popped, as if there was a sudden change in the corridor’s air pressure, and the man standing in the shadows holding a blaster on her disappeared. One instant he was there, the next he was not.
Could she have looked away for an instant without realizing it, she wondered, giving him a chance to become lost in the crowd?
No, that made no sense at all. He’d had her—he wouldn’t just melt into the crowd without first taking a shot. And even if he had taken it, and missed, the blaster charge would have hit something or someone. There would have been destruction, or at least panic in the crowd around her.
But there was nothing. The crowd remained calm and unaffected, their movements not at all out of the ordinary. Yet it was a much thinner crowd than it had been only an instant before, as if two out of every three people had simply vanished.
And now Susan noticed the air in the corridor was cooler, the odor of many tightly packed bodies considerably diminished from what it had been only an instant before. The ventilation system, unable to cope prior to her attacker’s disappearance, was suddenly doing a quite adequate job.
It couldn’t have reacted that quickly, she thought. Even if the crowd had miraculously thinned, the ventilation system would have taken at least an hour to cool the air and scrub it of the stench of so many bodies. Yet in the blink of an eye it had accomplished exactly that.
Her mind felt suddenly numbed by the experience, her thought processes momentarily paralyzed as they came up hard against the inexplicable. The dizziness she had experienced earlier in her quarters returned, and again the pain began to build behind her eyes.
Instantly the snowflake pattern blossomed in her thoughts, and within seconds she was mouthing the mantra’s guttural monosyllables. The headache and dizziness subsided as quickly as they had come.
She became aware of a burning sensation between her breasts, beneath her jumpsuit. Fumbling for the chain hanging around her neck, she pulled the pendant out. It felt hot in her prosthetic fingers. She unfastened her jumpsuit several inches down the front and checked her skin. There was a definite reddening where the gray metal had rested between her breasts.
Why was the pendant now hot, she wondered as she re-fastened her jumpsuit, when only a few seconds before it had felt cool against her skin? Why and how had her assailant, as well as a good portion of the crowd, suddenly vanished?
It all seemed so familiar, smacking of that earlier incident when the dark man had attacked her in her quarters, then disappeared. He, too, had been wearing a pendant.
Lifting the chain over her head, she dropped the pendant into one of the pouches at her waist. She would not wear it again, she decided, until she knew more about it.
She started down the curiously depopulated corridor toward her quarters, glancing at the chronometer on the back of her left wrist. It read 0911—slightly more than three hours earlier than it should have registered. She tapped the crystal with her fingernail and waited for the last digit to change. It was working, but she would have to get it looked at.
Pushing that thought from her mind, she again concentrated on more urgent matters. One thing was certain: There was no longer any doubt that the first attempt on her life had been meant for her. Evans’s inference that it might have been a case of mistaken identity no longer held up. They, w
hoever they were, had now tried twice.
But Evans would have just as much trouble believing an account of this attack as he had that first one. There was simply too much that could not be explained: The way the attacker had failed to take his shot. The way the crowd had thinned and the pendant had become hot. But most of all, the way the attacker had vanished.
She would report the incident to Evans, she decided, but she didn’t expect him to believe her. She was having trouble believing it herself.
Suddenly, it struck her—she had not known of this attack before it happened; she had not been forewarned. Each time she had been in danger since Aldebaran, she had been given the slightest hint of a warning just before it happened. But not this time.
Of course, she could not tell Evans about that.
The date-time display read 0927 as she again stood before the holo-phone lens cluster in her quarters. She glanced at her wrist chronometer. It indicated the same time. Apparently, there was nothing wrong with it.
But that couldn’t be. It couldn’t have displayed the correct time back in the corridor, outside that strange little shop. It had said 0911 then, but at 0911 she had been in Admiral Renford’s office.
There had to be something wrong with the phone’s time display circuitry as well.
“Base Security,” she said. “Priority emergency follow-up.”
The date-time display vanished, and the image of the young man who earlier had been so unnerved by her nakedness appeared. He looked up from his computer printouts and blushed.
“Can I help you, Captain?” he asked nervously.
“Get me Staff Sergeant Evans,” Susan replied. He reddened further as he reached out and pushed a button on his desk top console, then disappeared.
