Mike's respect for her acting ability increased. From now on, it would be unwise to assume that any of Kristen Waldemar's responses were spontaneous. And yet he was still convinced that the change in her general attitude toward him was genuine.
Wishful thinking?
He let his thoughts run free and concentrated on enjoying the best meal he'd eaten in years. There was a generous array of drink and drugs set out at the end of the table, everything a human might want to snort, smoke, pop, or mainline. Mike ignored them all. So did Kristen. If there were anything added to the food, they were both ingesting it; but as an added precaution he quietly downed a detox pill between courses.
It was Kristen who broke the spell of genteel dining pleasure. After a dish of candied kelp she sat up a little straighter in her chair and glared at him. "Mikal Asparian, how old are you?"
Mike cleared his throat—twice. "I'm twenty-three," he said at last.
"You could pass for less. And how many Trader missions have you been on?"
"This is my—er, my fourth. Or maybe my fifth. It depends how you count."
"Sweet Scott. What are your people doing? First, they send a man. You know, don't you, that we had specifically requested a female negotiator?"
"I didn't know that." Daddy-O, what are you doing to me? I'm supposed to be briefed when I come here.
"Plus, we asked for a very experienced Trader. You're ten years too young, and you have hardly any experience. When I took my first look at you I was ready to tell you to climb back on that plane and go back home. You're right about me leaving you out in the snow. I was so mad, I wanted to give you a real scare."
"I can see why you'd want to. So why are you being nice to me now?"
"You didn't scare. You were in no danger, I wasn't lying about that. As soon as I got in here I had you under radar observation all the time, so there was no way you could get lost or get hurt. But you didn't know any of that. And you surprised me. You did everything right, as well as any native could have done. And that's when I thought, damn it, he's a man, and he's wet behind the ears, but there's good stuff in him. Maybe I'd better give him a chance." She smiled. "You know, I expect to be negotiating deals here for another thirty years. You'll be around longer than that. If there's a chance we'll be working together for that long, we'd better be nice to each other."
"Thank you."
"But don't get the wrong idea. I'm not going to kid-glove you when we get to the deals. You pay for your own mistakes there. Are you willing to have a first session tonight, or are you too tired?"
Mike pulled out the contract he had prepared from Max Dalzell's rough draft and put it on the table. The Chill serving robots came scuttling out of the table hatches and cleared off all the dishes.
"That's a first cut?" Kristen asked. "Well, at least you've done some homework. Let's take a look, and we'll see how far apart we are."
She took the five sheets and spread them out in front of her. There was a ten-minute silence, while she frowned and Mike fidgeted. He couldn't read a thing from her expression, and when she finally looked up and shook her head he felt highly uneasy.
"This is amazing," she said. "Where did you learn to spell out negotiable options?"
Mike shrugged. There was one honest answer—all the terms and alternatives had come straight from Max Dalzell—but he didn't want to mention that.
"I thought this would take us four days, minimum," she went on. "But with this as a starring point, we'll be through in an hour or two." She shook her head again. "You know, I could sign this damned thing now, and everybody here would be happy. Are you sure that these terms will be acceptable to the Unified Empire?"
"I know they will."
"Then they . . ." Staring through him, she sat like a statue for a couple of minutes. Finally she squared off the sheets he had given her into a neat pile and leaned back in her seat. "I think we've done enough on this for tonight. But we have to talk some more."
"Carry on."
"Not here." She stood up. "Come on."
They retraced their path all the way to the entrance chamber, put chillsuits back on, and returned to the blue door. Mike wondered what he was getting into. Nothing in Daddy-O's warnings and advice had covered this situation.
They went out again, back onto the frozen surface. Three paces beyond the exit he stopped, entranced.
The snowstorm was over. The southern sky had turned to flame. Yellow-green stripes trailed streamers of red and salmon-pink across the starlit heavens.
Aurora australis—the southern lights.
"Bright tonight," Kristen said in a matter-of-fact tone. "Must be one hell of a solar flare. Pity the poor Chipponese, up there on a night like this, eh? But it's good for us—we won't need lights."
"It's gorgeous."
"Ah. First time for you, is it? Don't worry, you'll soon get used to it."
Mike slowly turned all around for his first real exposure to the terrain of the Cap. There was nothing; nothing living, nothing familiar. They were standing in a flat area of undisturbed snow maybe half a mile across. Beyond it lay a landscape crumpled and shattered into spiky ice hills. Sharp ridges and spires glowed pink and ghostly blue under the flickering sky.
He felt as cold as the outside air and as broken as the ice-hill surface. The scenery was beautiful, but everything else was going wrong. The negotiation for the robots had turned into a farce, over before it began. Max Dalzell had done the ground work so well that there was nothing left to do. Mike was no more than a messenger boy on the prime mission. And now that he was here, he could see why Daddy-O had set the odds so high against the other mission. Mundsen Labs and Seth Paramine were only forty miles to the south—but that might as well be four thousand. Perhaps a Chill could find a way across that frozen chaos. For Mike it would be impossible.
"Walk," Kristen said. "Follow me."
She set off south at a steady pace. This time she was not trying to lose him. He followed her footsteps through the snow.
Where the smooth surface gave way to crevasses and ridges she halted. Then she was off again, winding her way easily into the ruined wilderness. In the shadow of an overhanging ice cliff she halted and turned again to face Mike. The green eye discs glowed.
"This is the real homeland. What do you think of it?"
"It's like the frozen circle of Hell. 'Great God, this is an awful place.' "
She laughed in delight. "Marvelous. I guess you did get some briefing before you came here—I was beginning to wonder. But a real native would want to be at the Pole before he'd quote Scott, and we're still four hundred and fifty miles north of it. Stand still, and keep quiet."
She raised one arm to the throat of Mike's suit and pressed hard. The world went dark and silent.
The cheerful tone of her last remark saved him from panic. But he was on the way to it when he felt another pressure against the side of his head. "Right," Kristen's voice said. "I've turned off both our suits. We're head to head and nobody can overhear us. We can't stay like this for very long—no heat control. We'd broil or freeze. But we're safe for half an hour. You all right?"
"I've just learned a good way to kill somebody," Mike said. "Take them out into the ice cap. Destroy the chillsuit control—and leave them. If they pull off the suit they freeze. If they don't, they're blind and deaf and never find their way back."
"It's been done. But it's easier to knock you on the head and stick you down a crevasse. Anyway, more people come onto the Cap for sex than death—chillsuits have adaptabilities most outsiders don't dream of. But we're not here for games. I want privacy. We couldn't get that inside. Trader Oath?"
Mike was on the spot. If he accepted information under Trader Oath, it could not be told. Not to anyone, not even to another trader. Daddy-O would lock it away in the data files, but no human would ever know it.
He began to sweat inside the chillsuit. What the devil could Kristen want to tell him that would need Trader Oath? But if he refused, he might be passing u
p something big.
Mike used up three precious minutes while he thought it over. Would the situation become even more out of control? Could it? He wished Jack Lester were hooked in on a Mentor link, whispering preposterous advice into his ear. Was the fingertip recorder catching all the audio through the suit's air layer?
"I accept," he said at last. "Anything you tell me here will be under Trader Oath." He would worry about the recorder when he got back.
"Good. Let me update you on recent Federation politics. We have a big hassle starting between two groups. The Purists want us to keep to ourselves, with a bigger Cap defense system. They want no dealings with Traders or the other regions. They're a minority. The Rimmers—I'm one of them, and so are all our negotiators—want more trade and cooperation. We believe bigger weapons are a futile effort."
"You're wasting Trader Oath time. Everything you've told me is common Trader knowledge."
"So far. But this isn't: the Purists have just been taken over by a group of extremists. They've started a program to guarantee isolation. And last week they took the first extreme step. They organized a smash to the Great Republic and captured a group of Yankee scientists. They took them to a research facility that they control completely."
Mike could feel an icicle crawling up his spine, and it wasn't chillsuit failure. He was being drawn into something outside the mission parameters. "Seth Paramine," he said.
"What?"
"Nothing. You're sure it was a group of Yankee scientists? Keep going."
Kristen gripped his shoulder. "The Purists deny everything—naturally. The information we have, and there's not much of it, came from stringing together bits and pieces of data. But do you see our position? We can't stand up and tell the rest of the world what the Purists have done, because it would look bad for all the Cap Federation. We have to stop the Purists, and we have to get the word out to the Yankees that this was an isolated incident that didn't involve most of us."
"I can see that. But I don't know what it has to do with me or the Traders—unless you want me to act as your go-between with the Yankees."
"We do, but that's the easy part. We want you to work on our behalf with the Purist leaders, to see if you can work out a way to free the Yankees. Unofficial negotiation. Officially you'll still be on Trader business."
"But why don't you do that? You're a negotiator, and you've far more experience than I have."
"I'm a known Rimmer. I don't think they'd let me near the Mundsen Labs. But you, you're a Trader, and a good one, they'll let you in."
Rule 44: Give praise; it's free. It was interesting to see Trader techniques from the other side.
Mike sighed. "Maybe I'll do it. Tell me what terms you're prepared to offer, then let's get back below before we both freeze."
* * *
The flight to Mundsen Labs was made in a skimmer, a wide-bodied craft that traveled just a few feet above the jagged surface. It was under automatic flight control, and after a few dizzying seconds with the ground blurring away underneath him Mike turned from the window.
He had plenty to think about.
He was heading for the Chills' main research center, the stronghold of the Purist faction. The Chill scientists there were specialists in miniaturization. Would his fingertip recorder pass their surveillance?
Worse than that, the two agendas for the mission were becoming hopelessly confused. So far as the Unified Empire and the Chill government were concerned, he was here to negotiate for gaming robots. From the point of view of the Yankees, he was trying to obtain definite evidence of Paramine's presence at Mundsen Labs.
But Kristen Waldemar and the Chill Rimmer faction also wanted him to pretend to be working for the Yankees, while he tried to negotiate secretly for the return of the "kidnapped scientists"—who was just Seth Paramine, though Kristen didn't know it. And finally there were the Purists. They thought Mike was coming to Mundsen Labs to look at the latest ag-robot circuitry as part of a possible separate deal with the Yankees—a deal their isolationist leaders would never agree to make!
Mike sat with that mess of conflicting objectives buzzing around in the back of his head and studied the skimmer's control panel. If he had to leave Mundsen Labs in a hurry it would be nice to know how. The skimmer had a free-flight mode with extensible lifting surfaces. He saw that the airspeed indicator went to Mach Three, and the altimeter to fifty thousand feet. Not bad—if he could make it back to the skimmer and get it off the ground.
The plane was slowing to a hover. Kristen had planned the arrival time carefully. At this latitude and season, daylight lasted only a couple of hours. The skimmer touched down on the Mundsen airstrip just before local noon; a wintry sun peered over the horizon. Mike found himself in a shallow depression well shielded from southern winds and located to catch every ray of light. On a fine summer day, the noon temperature here might actually rise above freezing point. The icy surface was polished smooth and glowed a beautiful phospor-green in the oblique sunlight.
The human side of the scenery was unfortunately a lot less attractive. Even before Mike could close his suit and step onto the powdery ice, two chill suited figures had appeared from nowhere and were standing outside the skimmer door. They were armed strangely, with ancient-looking projectile weapons.
Act confident. "Hello." Mike spoke as soon as he stepped outside. "I'm a Trader, here to negotiate on behalf of the Yankees for new ag-robot equipment. I'm—"
"Mikal Asparian." One of the figures shook his head. "You're a Trader, true enough. But you're not here for any ag-robot equipment." From the sound of his voice Mike was sure he had a nasty smile on his face. "You're working for the Rimmers. Want to deny it?"
Mike certainly did, but he doubted if it would be much use. He cursed the security leaks at Cap City. If they already knew this, what else did they know? He said nothing.
They led him past a complex of four metal huts, ancient and scarred. From their exteriors, the buildings dated to the earliest days of Antarctic research. They were uninhabited. Memorials, maybe, to the early scientists who had worked on the ice cap? That was just the sort of thing that would appeal to the Purists.
They walked on in silence for almost half a mile, to another smooth depression in the ice. This one was circled by a substantial chain fence. There was one break in the barricade, a wide opening spanned only by a thin pipe at ground level. They stepped across it and walked to a cylindrical structure projecting from the ice. It was the top of an elevator shaft.
With one guard on each side of Mike they stepped in and descended for thirty seconds, the only sound a faint whine of machinery from the side of the shaft. Before they reached the bottom the man on the right removed his chillsuit. He gestured to Mike to do the same.
"One degree a foot temperature gradient," he said. "You may find you're too hot." He was a sallow-skinned man with a lumpy bald head and a thin mouth. He looked pleased with himself, but not unfriendly. "You'll be staying here until tomorrow morning," he went on. "This place was designed as a research lab, not a prison, so you can't complain if you have to share our only secure accommodation. Go on, out you get."
He motioned with his gun as the elevator doors opened. Beyond them lay a long, low-ceilinged corridor with the same reflecting walls of chillsuit material. Mike was led to a closed door and made to face the other way while his hairless companion operated a cipher lock.
"In you go," he said. "Hope you enjoy the company. It's not our fault if you don't."
The other man, still wearing his chillsuit, gave a high-pitched laugh and prodded gently with his gun. Mike walked inside and looked around as the door slammed solidly to behind him.
Success—but it didn't feel like it. He was standing no more than twenty feet from Seth Paramine.
The missing genius was hunkered down on the floor of the room, in the same posture shown in the videos. This time he was frowning and muttering over a sort of interlocking spiral structure made from many pieces of thin metal and plastic
balls.
As the door closed he looked up and stared at Mike with his lower Up pushed out. "Where's my dinner?" he said.
Mike went to sit next to him. The room had a soft floor, but no chairs. "It's too early. It won't be dinnertime for another three hours."
That earned a frown and a shake of the heavy head. "I want dinner now." Then he ignored Mike to concentrate on his metal spirals.
Mike's thoughts ran wild. He was face-to-face with Seth Paramine. Paramine was a genius. Mike would explain the whole thing to him, Paramine would think of a way to get both of them out of there, they would fly away in the skimmer, back to Trader headquarters . . .
Improbable, but he had to try. Mike gave it his best shot. He sat beside Seth Paramine and explained the whole thing, slowly and in detail: how Seth had been kidnapped, how his friends and family back in the Great Republic were worried about him, how the brain probes that had been used on him here could do harm, how Mike had been sent to find him, how with his help they could both escape and go back home . . .
Nothing was left out. At the end of it Paramine looked at Mike thoughtfully with those dull, slaty eyes. "You talk too much, and you have funny ears," he said. And then he delivered the irrefutable counter-argument to all Mike's eloquence. "I get two kinds of pie with dinner here."
For the next three hours he sat playing, while Mike prowled the big room and fantasized about overpowering the man or woman who brought in dinner.
He should have known better. This was Chill territory—the land of the people who had invented table-service robots. The whole food-supply system, kitchen included, was automated. Promptly at five o'clock a wall panel turned, becoming a table complete with serving hatch. Plates of hot food slid out onto the flat surface. No knives or forks were provided, but that didn't worry Seth Paramine—he didn't seem to expect them. He picked up his spoon, bent his head low to the plate, and gobbled all his share. Then he sat impatient for dessert.
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