“First trip and last trip,” Suds grumbled.
“And who has complained about the price? No one so far excepting M’sieur. Look at it thus; it is an investment.” She slid one of the forms across the table. “Please to read it, M’sieur.”
Suds studied the paper for a moment and began to frown. “Les Folies Lunaires, Incorporated… a North African corporation… in consideration of the sum of one hundred dollars in hand paid by—who?—Howard Beasley!—aforesaid corporation sells and grants to Howard Beasley… one share of common stock!”
“M’sieur! Compose yourself! It is no fraud. Everybody gets a share of stock. It comes out of the twelve hundred. Who knows? Perhaps after a few trips, there will even be dividends. M’sieur? But you look positively ill! Henri, bring brandy for the gentleman.”
“So!” he grated. “That’s the way it goes, is it? Implicate everybody—nobody squawks.”
“But certainly. It is for our own protection, to be sure, but it is really stock.”
“Blackmail.”
“But no, M’sieur. All is legal.”
Henri brought a plastic cup and handed it to him; Suds shook his head.
“Take it. M’sieur. It is real brandy. We could bring only a few bottles, but there is sufficient pure alcohol for the mixing of cocktails.”
The small compartment was filled with the delicate perfume of the liquor; Brodanovitch glanced longingly at the plastic cup.
“It is seventy-year-old Courvoisier, M’sieur. Very pleasant.”
Suds took it reluctantly, dipped it toward Mme. d’Annecy in self-conscious toast, and drained it. He acquired a startled expression; he clucked his tongue experimentally and breathed slowly through his nose.
“Good Lord!” he murmured absently.
Mme. d’Annecy chuckled. “M’sieur has forgotten the little pleasures. It was a shame to gulp it so. Encore, Henri. And one for myself, I think. Take time to enjoy this one, M’sieur.” She studied him for a time while Henri was absent. She shook her head and began putting the forms away, leaving out the sight draft and stock agreement which she pushed toward him, raising one inquisitive brow. He gazed expressionlessly at them. Henri returned with the brandy; Madame questioned him in French. He seemed insistently negative for a time, but then seemed to give grudging assent. “Bien!” she said, and turned to Brodanovitch: “M’sieur, it will be necessary only for you to purchase the share of stock. Forget the fee.”
“What?” Suds blinked in confusion.
“I said—” The opening of the hatch interrupted her thought. A dazzling brunette in a filmy yellow dress bounced into the compartment, bringing with her a breath of perfume. Suds looked at her and emitted a loud guttural cluck. A kind of glazed incredulity kneaded his face into a mask of shocked granite wearing a supercilious moustache. The girl ignored his presence and bent over the table to chat excitedly in French with Mme. d’Annecy. Suds’s eyes seemed to find a mind and will of their own; involuntarily they contemplated the details of her architecture, and found manifest fascination in the way she relieved an itch at the back of one trim calf by rubbing it vigorously with the instep of her other foot while she leaned over the desk and bounced lightly on tiptoe as she spoke.
“M’sieur Brodanovitch, the young lady wishes to know—M’sieur Brodanovitch?—M’sieur!”
“What—? Oh!” Suds straightened and rubbed his eyes. “Yes?”
“One of your young men has asked Giselle out for a walk. We have pressure suits, of course. But is it safe to promenade about this area?” She paused. “M’sieur, please!”
“What?” Suds shook his head. He tore his eyes away from the yellow dress and glanced at a head suddenly thrust in through the hatch. The head belonged to Relke. It saw Brodanovitch and withdrew in haste, but Suds made no sign of recognition. He blinked at Madame again.
“M’sieur, is it safe?”
“What? Oh! I suppose it is.” He gulped his brandy and poured another.
Mme. d’Annecy spoke briefly to the girl, who, after a hasty merci and a nod at Suds went off to join Relke outside. When they were gone, Madame smilingly offered her pen to the engineer. Suds stared at it briefly, shook his head, and helped himself to another brandy. He gulped it and reached for his helmet. Mme. d’Annecy snapped her fingers suddenly and went to a locker near the bulkhead. She came back with a quart bottle.
“M’sieur’ will surely accept a small token?” She offered the bottle for his inspection. “It is Mumms 2064, a fine year. Take it, M’sieur. Or do you not care for champagne? It is our only bottle, and what is one bottle of wine for such a crowd? Take it—or would you prefer the brandy?”
Suds blinked at the gift while he fastened his helmet and clamped it. He seemed dazed. She held the bottle out to him and smiled hopefully. Suds accepted it absent-mindedly, nodded at her, and stepped into the airlock. The hatch slid closed.
Mme. d’Annecy started back toward her counting table. The alarm bell burst into a sudden brazen clamor. She looked back. A red warning signal flashed balefully. Henriburst in from the corridor, eyed the bell and the light, then charged toward the airlock. The gauge by the hatch showed zero pressure. He pressed a starter button, and a meter hummed to life. The pressure needle crept upward. The bell and the light continued a frenetic complaint. The motor stopped. Henri glanced at the gauge, then swung open the hatch. “Allons! Ma foi, quelle merde!”
Mme. d’Annecy came to peer around him into the small cubicle. Her subsequent shriek penetrated to the farthest corridors. Suds Brodanovitch had missed his last chance to become a stockholder.
“It wasn’t yo’ fault, Ma’am,” said Lije Henderson a few minutes later as they half-led, half-carried her to her compartment. “He know bettuh than to step outside with that bottle of booze. You didn’t know. You couldn’ be ’spected to know. But he been heah long enough to know—a man make one mistake, thass all. BLOOIE.”
Blooie was too graphic to suit Madame; she sagged and began retching.
“C’mon, Ma’am, less get you in yo hammock.” They carried her into her quarters, eased her into bed, and stepped back out on the catwalk.
Lije mopped his face, leaned against a tension member, and glanced at Joe. “Now how come you s’pose he had that bottle of fizzling giggle water up close to his helmet that way, Joe?”
“I don’t know. Reading the label, maybe.”
“He sho’ muss have had something on his mine.”
“Well, it’s gone now.”
“Yeah. BLOOIE. Man!”
Relke had led the girl out through the lock in the reactor nacelle in order to evade Brodanovitch and a possible command to return to camp. They sat in Novotny’s runabout and giggled cozily together at the fuzzy map of Earth that floated in the darkness above them. On the ship’s fuselage, the warning light over the airlock hatch began winking, indicating that the lock was in use. The girl noticed it and nudged him. She pointed at the light.
“Somebody coming out,” Relke muttered. “Maybe Suds. We’d better get out of here.”
He flipped the main switch and started the motor. He was backing onto the road when Giselle caught his arm.
“Beel! Look at the light!”
He glanced around. It was flashing red.
“Malfunction signal. Compressor trouble, probably. It’s nothing. Let’s take a ride. Joe won’t care.” He started backing again.
“Poof!” she said suddenly.
“What?”
“Poof. It opened, and poof—” She puckered her lips and blew a little puff of steam in the cold air to show him. “So. Like smoke.”
He turned the car around in the road and looked back again. The hatch had closed. There was no one on the ladder. “Nobody came out.”
“Non. Just poof.”
He edged the car against the trolley rails, switched to autosteering, and let it gather speed.
“Beel?”
“Yeah, kid?”
“Where you taking me?”
He caught th
e note of alarm in her voice and slowed down again. She had come on a dare after several drinks, and the drinks were wearing off. The landscape was frighteningly alien, and the sense of falling into bottomlessness was ever-present.
“You want to go back?” he asked gloomily.
“I don’t know. I don’t like it out here.”
“You said you wanted some ground under your feet.”
“But it doesn’t feel like ground when you walk on it.”
“Rather be inside a building?”
She nodded eagerly.
“That’s where we’re going.”
“To your camp?”
“God, no! I’m planning to keep you to myself.”
She laughed and snuggled closer to him. “You can’t. Madame d’Annecy will not permit—”
“Let’s talk about something else,” he grunted quickly. “OK. Let’s talk about Monday.”
“Which Monday?”
“Next Monday. It’s my birthday. When is it going to be Monday, Bill?”
“You said Bill.”
“Beel? That’s your name, isn’t eet? Weeliam Q. Relke, who weel not tell me what ees the Q?”
“But you said Bill.”
She was silent for a moment. “OK, I’m a phony,” she muttered. “Does the inquisition start now?”
He could feel her tighten up, and he said nothing. She waited stiffly for a time. Gradually she relaxed against him again. “When’s it going to be Monday?” she murmured.
“When’s it going to be Monday where?”
“Here, anywhere, silly!”
He laughed. “When will it be Monday all over the universe?”
She thought for a moment. “Oh. Like time zones. OK, when will it be Monday here?”
“It won’t. We just have periods, hitches, and shifts. Fifty shifts make a hitch, two hitches make a period. A period’s from sunrise to sunrise. Twenty-nine and a half days. But we don’t count days. So I don’t know when it’ll be Monday.”
It seemed to alarm her. She sat up. “Don’t you even have hours?” She looked at her watch and jiggled it, listened to it.
“Sure. Seven hours in a shift. We call them hours, anyhow. Forty-five seconds longer than an Earth hour.”
She looked up through the canopy at the orb of Earth. “When it’s Monday on Earth, it’ll be Monday here too,” she announced flatly.
Relke laughed. “OK, we’ll call it that.”
“So when will it start being Monday on Earth?”
“Well, it’ll start at twenty-four different times, depending on where you are. Maybe more than twenty-four. It’s August. Some places, they set the clocks ahead an hour in Summer.”
She looked really worried.
“You take birthdays pretty seriously?” he asked.
“Only this one. I’ll be—” She broke off and closed her mouth.
“Pick a time zone,” Relke offered, “and I’ll try to figure out how long until Monday starts. Which zone? Where you’d be now, maybe?”
She shook her head.
“Where you were born?”
“That would be—” She stopped again. “Never mind. Forget it.” She sat brooding and watching the moonscape.
Relke turned off the road at the transformer station. He pulled up beside a flat-roofed cubicle the size of a sentrybox. Giselle looked at it in astonishment.
“That’s a building?” she asked.
“That’s an entrance. The ‘building’s’ underground. Come on, let’s seal up.”
“What’s down there?”
“Just a transformer vault and living quarters for a substation man.”
“Somebody lives down there?”
“Not yet. The line’s still being built. They’ll move somebody in when the trolley traffic starts moving.”
“What do we want to go down there for?”
He looked at her forlornly. “You’d rather go back to the ship?”
She seemed to pull herself together professionally. She laughed and put her arms around him and whispered something in French against his ear. She kissed him hard, pressed her forehead against his, and grinned. “C’mon, babee! Let’s go downstairs.”
Relke felt suddenly cold inside. He had wanted to see what it felt like to be alone with a woman again in a quiet place, away from the shouting, howling revelry that had been going on aboard the ship. Now he knew what it was going to feel like. It was going to feel counterfeit. “Christ!” he grunted angrily. “Let’s go back!” He reached roughly around her and cut on the switch again. She recoiled suddenly and gaped at him as he started the motor and turned the bug around.
“Hey!” She was staring at him oddly, as if seeing him for ‘the first time.
Relke kept his face averted and his knuckles were white on the steering bar. She got up on her knees on the seat and put her hands on his shoulders. “Bill. Good Lord, you’re crying!”
He choked out a curse as the bug hit the side of the cut and careened around on the approach to the road. He lost control, and the runabout went off the approach and slid slowly sideways down a gentle slope of crushed-lava fill. A sharp clanking sound came from the floor plates.
“Get your suit sealed!” he yelled. “Get it sealed!”
The runabout lurched to a sudden stop. The cabin pressure stayed up. He sat panting for a moment, then started the motor. He let it inch ahead and tugged at the steering bar. It was locked. The bug crept in an arc, and the clanking resumed. He cut off the motor and sat cursing softly.
“What’s wrong?”
“Broke a link and the tread’s fouled. We’ll have to get out.”
She glanced at him out of the corner of her eye. He was glowering. She looked back toward the sentrybox entrance to the substation and smiled thoughtfully.
It was chilly in the vault, and the only light came from the indicator lamps on the control board. The pressure gauge inside the airlock indicated only eight pounds of air. The construction crew had pumped it up to keep some convection currents going around the big transformers, but they hadn’t planned on anyone breathing it soon. He changed the mixture controls, turned the barostat up to twelve pounds, and listened to the compressors start up. When he turned around, Giselle was taking off her suit and beginning to pant.
“Hey, stay in that thing!” he shouted.
His helmet muffled his voice, and she looked at him blankly. “What?” she called. She was gasping and looking around in alarm.
Relke sprinted a few steps to the emergency rack and grabbed a low pressure walk-around bottle. When he got back, she was getting blue and shaking her head drunkenly. He cracked the valve on the bottle and got the hose connection against her mouth. She nodded quickly and sucked on it. He went back to watch the gauges. He found the overhead lighting controls and turned them on. Giselle held her nose and anxiously sipped air from the bottle. He nodded reassuringly at her. The construction crews had left the substation filled with nitrogen-helium mixture, seeing no reason to add rust-producing moisture and oxygen until someone moved into the place; she had been breathing inert gases, nothing more.
When the partial oxygen pressure was up to normal, he left the control panel and went to look for the communicator. He found the equipment, but it was not yet tied into the line. He went back to tell the girl. Still sipping at the bottle, she watched him with attentive brown eyes. It was the gaze of a child, and he wondered about her age. Aboard ship, she and the others had seemed impersonal automata of Eros; painted ornaments and sleekly functional decoys designed to perform stereotyped rituals of enticement and excarnation of desire, swiftly, lest a customer be kept waiting. But here in stronger light, against a neutral background, he noticed suddenly that she was a distinct individual. Her lipstick had smeared. Her dark hair kept spilling out in tangled wisps from beneath a leather cap with fleece ear flaps. She wore a pair of coveralls, several sizes too large and rolled up about the ankles. With too much rouge on her solemnly mischievous face, she looked ready for a role in a girls�
�� school version of Chanticler.
“You can stop breathing out of the can,” he told her. “The oxygen pressure’s okay now.”
She took the hose from her mouth and sniffed warily. “What was the matter? I was seeing spots.”
“It’s all right now.”
“It’s cold in this place. Are we stuck here?”
“I tried to call Joe, but the set’s not hooked up. He’ll come looking for us.”
“Isn’t there any heat in here? Can’t you start a fire?”
He glanced down at the big 5,000 kva transformers in the pit beyond the safety rail. The noise of corona discharge was very faint, and the purr of thirty-two cycle hum was scarcely audible. With no trucks drawing, power from the trolley, the big pots were cold. Normally, eddy current and hysteresis losses in the transformers would keep the station toast-warm. He glanced at a thermometer. It read slightly under freezing: the ambient temperature of the subsurface rock in that region.
“Let’s try the stationman’s living quarters,” he grunted. “They usually furnish them fancy, as bunk tanks go. Man has to stay by himself out here, they want to keep him sane.”
A door marked PRIVATE flipped open as they approached it. A cheery voice called out: “Hi, Bo. Rugged deal, ain’t it?”
Giselle started back in alarm. “Who’s there?”
Relke chuckled. “Just a recorded voice. Back up, I’ll show you.”
They moved a few paces away. The door fell closed. They approached it again. This time a raucous female squawked at them: “Whaddaya mean coming home at this hour? Lemme smell your breath.”
Giselle caught on and grinned. “So he won’t get lonesome?”
“Partly, and partly to keep him a little sore. The stationmen hate it, but that’s part of the idea. It gives them something to talk back to and throw things at.”
They entered the apartment. The door closed itself, the lights went on. Someone belched, then announced: “I get just as sick of looking at you as you do looking at me, button head. Go take a bath.”
Relke flushed. “It can get pretty rough sometimes. The tapes weren’t edited for mixed company. Better plug your ears if you go in the bathroom.”
Dark Benediction Page 48
