Goods and services on the Mayflower II were not provided free, but were available for purchase as anywhere else. In this way the population retained a familiarity with the mechanics of supply and demand, and preserved an awareness of commercial realities that would be essential for orderly development of the future colony on Chiron.
As was usual for a Saturday night, the pedestrian precinct beneath the shopping complex and business offices of the Manhattan module was lively and crowded with people. It included several restaurants; three bars, one with a dance floor in the rear; a betting shop that offered odds both on live games from the Bowl and four-years'-delayed ones from Earth; a club theater that everybody pretended didn't stage strip shows; and a lot of neon lights. The Bowery bar, a popular haunt of off-duty regular troops, was squeezed into one corner of the precinct next to a coffee shop, behind a studded door of imitation oak and a high window of small, tinted glass panes that turned the inside lights red.
The scene inside the Bowery was busy and smoky, with a lot of uniforms and women visible among the crowd lining the long bar on the left side of the large room inside the door, and a four-piece combo playing around the corner in the smaller room at the back. Colman and some of D Company were sitting at one of the tables standing in a double row along the wall opposite the bar. Sirocco had joined them despite the regulation against officers' fraternizing with enlisted men, and Corporal Swyley was up and about again after the dietitian at the Brigade sick bay had enforced a standing order to put Swyley on spinach and fish whenever he was admitted. Bret Hanlon, the sergeant in charge of Second Platoon and a long-standing buddy of Colman, was sitting on the other side of Sirocco with Stanislau, Third Platoon's laser gunner, and a couple of civilian girls; a signals specialist called Anita, attached to Brigade H.Q. was snuggling close to Colman with her arm draped loosely through his.
Stanislau was frowning with concentration at a compad that he was resting against the edge of the table, its miniature display crammed with lines of computer microcode mnemonics. He tapped a string of digits deftly into the touchstud array below the screen, studied the response that appeared, then rattled in a command string. A number appeared low down in a corner. Stanislau looked up triumphantly at Sirocco. "3.141592653," he announced. "It's pi to ten places." Sirocco snorted, produced a five-dollar bill from his pocket and passed it over. The bet had been that Stanislau could crash the databank security system and retrieve an item that Sirocco had stored half an hour previously in the public sector under a personal access key.
"How about that?" Hanlon shouted delightedly. "The guy did it!"
"Don't forget—a round of beers too," Colman reminded Sirocco. The girls whooped their approval.
"Where did you learn that, Stan?" Paula, one of the civilian girls, asked. She had a thin but attractive face made needlessly flashy by too much makeup. Her clothes were tight and provocative.
Stanislau slipped the compad into his pocket. "You don't wanna know about that," he said. "It's not very respectable."
"Come on, Stan. Give," Terry, Paula's companion, insisted. Colman gave Stanislau a challenging look that left him no way out.
Stanislau took a long draught from his glass and made a what-the-hell? gesture. "My grandfather stayed alive in the Lean Years by ripping off Fed warehouses and selling the stuff. He could bomb any security routine ever dreamed up. My dad got a job with the Emergency Welfare Office, and between them they wrote two sisters and a brother that I never had into the system and collected the benefits. So life wasn't too bad." He shrugged, almost apologetically. "I guess it got to be kind of a tradition . . . sort of handed down in the family."
"A real pro burglar!" Terry exclaimed.
"You son-of-a-gun." Hanlon said admiringly.
"Son-of-a-something, anyway," Anita added. They all laughed.
Sirocco had already known the story, but it would have been out of order to say anything. Stanislau's transfer to D Company had followed an investigation of the mysterious disappearance from Brigade stores of tools and electrical spares that had subsequently appeared on sale in the Home Entertainment department of one of the shopping marts.
Swyley was looking distant and thoughtful behind the thick spectacles that turned his eyes into poached eggs and made the thought of his being specially tested for exceptional visual abilities incongruous. He was wondering how useful Stanislau's nefarious skills might be for inserting a few plus-points into his own record in the Military's administrative computer, but couldn't really say anything about the idea in Sirocco's presence. There was such a thing as being too presumptuous. He would talk to Stanislau privately, he decided.
"Where's Tony Driscoll tonight?" Paula asked, straightening up in her chair to scan the bar. "I don't see him around anywhere."
"Don't bother looking," Colman said. "He's got the late duty."
"Don't you ever give these guys a break?" Terry asked Sirocco.
"Somebody has to run the Army. It's just his turn. He's as qualified to do it as anyone else."
"Well what do you know—I'm on the loose tonight," Paula said, giving Hanlon a cozy look.
Bret Hanlon held up a hand protectively. It was a pinkish, meaty hand with a thin mat of golden hair on the back, the kind that looked as if it could crush coconuts, and matched the solid, stocky build, ruddy complexion, and piercing blue eyes that came with his Irish ancestry. "Don't look at me," he said. "I'm contracted now, all nice and respectable. That's the fella you should be making eyes at." He nodded toward Colman and grinned mischievously.
"Do him good too," Sirocco declared. "Then they might make him an engineer. But you'll have a hard time. He's holding out till he's found out what the talent's like on Chiron."
"I didn't know you had a thing about little girls, Steve," Anita teased. "You don't look the type." Hanlon roared and slapped his thigh.
"I've got two sisters you can't get in trouble with," Stanislau offered.
"You got it wrong,"' Colman told them. "It's not the little ones at all." He widened his eyes in a parody of lewd anticipation and grinned. "Think of all those grandmothers." Terry and Paula laughed.
Although Colman was going along with the mood and making a joke out of it, inside he felt a twinge of irritation. He wasn't sure why. Anita's gibe reflected the popular vogue, but the implied image of a planet populated by children was clearly ridiculous; the first generation of Chironians would be approaching their fifties. He didn't like foolish words going into people's heads and coming out again without any thought about their meaning having transpired in between. Anita was an attractive girl, and not stupid. She didn't have to do things like that. Then it occurred to him that perhaps he was being too solemn. Hadn't he just done the same thing?
"Some grandmothers!" Terry exclaimed. "Did anybody see the news today? Some scientist or other thinks the Chironians could be building bombs. There was an interview with Kalens too. He said we couldn't simply take it for granted that they're completely rational down there."
"You're not suggesting there'll be a fight, are you?" Paula said.
"I didn't say that. But they're funny people . . . cagey. They're not exactly giving straight answers about everything."
"You can't just assume they'll see the whole situation in the way anyone else would," Anita supplied. "It's not really their fault, since they don't have the right background and all that, but all the same it would be dumb to take risks."
"It makes sense, I guess," Paula agreed absently.
"Do you figure they might start trouble, chief?" Stanislau asked, turning his head toward Sirocco.
Sirocco shrugged noncommittally. "Can't say. I wouldn't worry too much about it. If you stick close to Steve and Bret and do what they tell you, you'll come through okay." Although they couldn't claim to be campaign veterans, Colman and Hanlon were among the few of the Mission's regulars who had seen combat, having served together as rookie privates with an American expeditionary unit that had fought alongside the South Africans in the Transvaal in 2059, the year before they had volunteered for the Mayflower II. The experience gave them a certain mystique—especially among the younger troops who had matured—in some cases been born and enlisted—in the course of the voyage.
"I think it will be all right if Kalens gets elected," Terry told them. "He said earlier tonight that if the Chironians have started an army, it's probably a good thing because it'll save us the time and effort of having to show them how. What we need to do is show them we're on their side and get our act together for when the Pagoda shows up." The EAF starship was designed differently from the Mayflower II. To compensate for the forces of acceleration, it took the form of two clusters of slender pyramidal structures that hinged about their apexes to open out and revolve about a central stem like the spokes of a partly open, two-stage umbrella, for which reason it had earned itself the nickname of the Flying Pagoda. Terry sipped her drink and looked around the table. "The guy's got it figured realistically. You see, there's no need for a fight. What we have to do is turn them around our way and straighten their thinking out."
"But that doesn't mean we have to take chances," Anita pointed out.
"Oh, sure . . . I'm just saying there doesn't have to be anything to get scared about."
Colman was becoming irritated again. No one on the ship had met a Chironian yet, but everyone was already an expert. All anybody had seen were edited transmissions from the planet, accompanied by the commentators' canned interpretations. Why couldn't people realize when they were being told what to think? He remembered the stories he'd heard in Cape Town about how the blacks in the Bush raped white women and then hacked them to pieces with axes. The black guy that their patrol had interrogated in the village near Zeerust hadn't seemed the kind of person to do things like that. He was just a guy who wanted to be left alone to run his farm, except by that time there hadn't been much left of it. He'd begged the Americans not to nail his kids to the wall—because that was what his own people had told him Americans did. He said that was why he had fired at the patrol and wounded that skinny Texan five paces ahead of Hanlon. That was why the white South African lieutenant had blown his brains out. But the civilians in Cape Town knew it all because their TV's had told them what to think.
Corporal Swyley wasn't saying anything, which was significant because Swyley was usually a pretty good judge of what was what. His silence meant that he didn't agree with what was being said. When Swyley agreed with something, he said he didn't agree. When he really didn't agree, he said nothing. He never said he agreed with anything. When he had decided that he felt fine after the dietitian discovered the standing order for spinach and fish, the Medical Officer hadn't been able to accuse him of faking anything because Swyley had never agreed with anybody that he was sick; all he'd said was that he had stomach cramps. The M.O. had diagnosed that anybody with stomach cramps on his own time had to be sick. Swyley hadn't. In fact, Swyley had disagreed, which should have been obvious because he hadn't said anything.
"Well, I think there's something to be scared about," Paula said. "Suppose they turn out to be really mean and don't want to mess around with talking at all. Suppose they send a missile up at us without any warning or anything . . . I mean, we'd be stuck out in space like a sitting duck, wouldn't we. Then where would we be?"
Sirocco gave a short laugh. "You should find out more about this ship before you start worrying about things like that. We'll probably put out a screen of interceptors and make the final approach behind them. They'll stop anything before it gets within ten thousand miles. You have to give the company some credit."
Hanlon made a throwing-away motion in the air. "Ah, this is all getting to be too serious for a Saturday night. Why are we talking like this at all? Are we letting silly rumors get to us?" He looked at Sirocco. "Our glasses are nearly empty, Your Honor. A round was part of the bet."
Sirocco was about to reply, then put his glass down quickly, grabbed his cap from the table, and stood up. "Time I wasn't here," he muttered. "I'll be up in Rockefeller's if anyone wants to join me there." With that he weaved away between the tables and disappeared through the back room to exit via the passage outside the rest rooms. "What in hell's come over him?" Hanlon asked, nonplussed. "Aren't they paying captains well these days?"
"SD's," Swyley murmured, without moving his mouth. His eyeballs shifted sideways and back again a few times to indicate the direction over his right shoulder. A more restrained note crept into the place, and the atmosphere took on a subtle tension.
Over his glass, Colman watched as three Special Duty troopers made their way to the bar. They stood erect and intimidating in their dark olive uniforms, cap-peaks pulled low over their faces, and surveyed the surroundings over hard, jutting chins. Nobody met their stares for long before looking away. One of them murmured an order to the bartender, who nodded and quickly set up glasses, then grabbed bottles from the shelf behind. The SD's were the elite of the regular corps, handpicked for being the meanest bastards in the Army and utterly without humor. They reminded Colman of the commando units he had seen in the Transvaal. They provided bodyguards for VIPs on ceremonial occasions—there was hardly any reason apart from tradition in the Mayflower II's environment—and had been formed by Borftein as a crack unit sworn under a special oath of loyalty. Their commanding officer was a general named Stormbel. B Company made jokes about their clockwork precision on parades and the invisible strings that Stormbel used to jerk them around, but not while any of them were within earshot. They called the SD's the Stromboli Division.
"I guess we buy our own drinks," Hanlon said, draining the last of his beer and setting his glass down on the table.
"Looks like it," Stanislau agreed.
"I got the last one," Colman reminded them. Somehow the enthusiasm had gone out of the party.
"Ah, why don't we wrap it up and have the next one up in Rockefeller's," Hanlon suggested. "That was where Sirocco said he was going."
"Great idea," Colman said and stood up. Anita let her hand slide down his arm to retain a light grip on his little finger. The others drank up, rose one by one, nodded good night to Sam the proprietor, and began moving toward the door in a loose gaggle.
Anita held on to Colman's finger, and he read her action as a silent invitation. He had slept with her a few times, many months ago now, and enjoyed it. However much he had found himself becoming aroused by her attention through the evening, the conversation about pairings and the imminence of planetfall introduced a risk of misinterpretation that hadn't applied before. Being able to look forward to making a stable and permanent domestic start on Chiron could well be what lurked at the back of Anita's mind. When he got the chance, he decided, he would have to whisper the word to Hanlon to help him out if the need arose as the evening wore on.
The precinct outside was full of people wasting the evening while trying to figure out what to do with it, when Colman and Anita emerged from the Bowery and turned to follow the others, who were already some distance ahead. Anita stopped to fish for something in her pocketbook, and Colman slowed to a halt to wait. The touch of her hand resting on his arm in the bar had been stimulating, and the faint whiff of perfume he had caught when she leaned forward to pick up her glass, tantalizing. What the hell? he thought. She's not a kid. A guy needed a break now and again after twenty years of being cooped up in a spaceship. He turned back to find her holding a phial of capsules. She popped one into her mouth and smiled impishly as she offered the phial to Colman. "It's Saturday, why not live it up a little?" He scowled and shook his head. Anita pouted. "They're good. Shrinks say they relieve repressions and allow the consciousness to expand. We should get to know ourselves."
"I've talked to shrinks. They're all crazy. How do they know whether I know me or not? Do you know how your head works inside?" Anita shook it in a way that said she didn't care all that much either. Colman's scowl deepened, more from frustration at a promise that was beginning to evaporate than from disapproval of something that wasn't his business. "Then how do you expect a pill to figure it out?"
"You should try to find yourself, Steve. It's healthy."
"I never lost myself."
"Zangreni needs stimulants to catalyze her psychic currents. That's how she make predictions."
"For Christ's sake, that's TV fiction. She doesn't exist. It's not real life. There isn't anything like that in real life."
"Who cares? It's more fun. Why be a drag?" Colman looked away in exasperation. She could have been a unique, thinking person. Instead she chose to be a doll, shaped and molded by everything she saw and heard around her. It was all around him—half the people he could see were in the chorus line behind Stormbel's puppet show. They could be told what to think because they didn't want to think. Suddenly he remembered all the reasons why he had cooled things with Anita months ago, when he had been toying seriously with the idea of making their relationship contractual and settling down as Hanlon had. He had tried to tune into her wavelength and found nothing but static. But what had infuriated him more was that her attitude had been unnecessary—she had a head but wouldn't use it.
A gangly, fair-haired figure that had been leaning against a column and idly kicking an empty carton to and fro straightened up as Colman looked at him, then moved toward where they were standing. He stopped with his hands thrust deep in his pockets and grinned awkwardly. Colman stared at the boy in surprise. It was Jay Fallows. "What the hell are you doing here?"
"Oh, I figured you'd be around here somewhere."
"Is this the guy who makes trains?" Anita asked.
"Yeah. This is Jay. He's okay . . . and smart."
"Smart . . . brains." A faraway look was coming into Anita's eyes. "Brains and trains. I like it. It's lyrical. Don't you think it's lyrical?" She smiled at Jay and winked saucily. "Hi, Jay." The pill was mixing with the drinks and getting to her already. Jay grinned but looked uncomfortable.
"Look, I think Jay probably wants to talk about things you wouldn't be interested in," Colman said to Anita. "Why don't you go on after the others. I'll catch up later."
"You don't want me around?"
Colman sighed. "It's not anything like that. It's just—"
Anita waved a hand in front of her face. "It's okay. You don't want me around . . . you don't want me around. It's okay." Her voice was starting to rise and fall singsong fashion. "Who says I need anybody to have a good time, anyhow? I'm fine, see. It's okay. . . . You and Jay can go talk about brains and trains." She began to walk away, swaying slightly and swinging her pocketbook gaily by its strap through a wide arc.
"Look, I-I didn't mean to bust into anything," Jay stammered. "I mean, if you and her are . . ."
Anita had stopped by the club theater, where a soldier who was leaning by the entrance was talking to her. She slipped an arm through his and laughed something in reply. "About as much as that." Colman said, nodding his head. "Forget it. Maybe you did me a favor." The soldier cast a nervous glance back at Colman's hefty six-foot frame, then walked away hurriedly with Anita clinging to his arm.
Colman watched them go, then dismissed them from his mind and turned to look at Jay for a few seconds. "Can't figure life out, huh?" he said gruffly. It saved a lot of pointless questions.
Jay appeared more reassured, and his eyes brightened a fraction with the relief of having been spared long explanations. "It's all screwed up," he replied simply.
"Would you feel better if I said I haven't figured it out yet either?"
Jay shook his head. "It'd just mean we've got the same problem. It wouldn't solve anything."
"I didn't think it would, so I won't say it."
"So does that mean you've got it figured?" Jay asked.
"Would it make any difference to your problem if I had?"
"No. It'd be your solution, not mine."
"Then that's the answer."
Jay nodded, straightened his arms into his pockets with his shoulders bunched high near his ears, held the posture for a few seconds, and then relaxed abruptly with a sigh. "Can I ask you something?" he said, looking up.
"Do I have to answer it?"
"Not if you don't want to, I guess."
"Go ahead."
"Why is it the way it is? How does what you and I do in Jersey have anything to do with my dad's job? It doesn't make any sense."
"Did you ask him about it?"
"Uh-huh."
"And?"
Jay squinted into the distance and scratched his head. "Pretty much what I expected. Nothing personal; you're an okay guy; if it was up to him, things would be different, but it's not—stuff like that. But he was only saying that so as not to sound mean—I could tell. It goes deeper than that. It's not a case of it being up to him or not. He really believes in it. How do people get like that?"
Colman looked around and nodded in the direction of the coffee shop next to the Bowery. "Let's not stand around here all night," he said. "Come on inside. Could you use a coffee?"
"Sure . . . thanks." They began walking toward the door. "And thanks for the valves," Jay said. "They fit perfectly."
"How's it coming along?"
"Pretty good. The axle assembly's finished. You'll have to come and take a look."
"I sure will."
Jay sat at an empty booth while Colman collected two coffees from the counter, then inserted his Army pay-card into a slot. In a lot of ways Jay reminded Colman of himself when he was a lot younger. Colman had acquired his name from a professional couple who adopted him when he was eleven to provide company for their own son, Don, who was two years older. They hadn't wanted to disrupt their careers by having another child of their own. Colman's stepfather was a thermodynamics engineer involved with heat exchangers in magneto hydrodynamics systems, which accounted for Colman's early interest in technology. Although the Colmans had done their best to treat both boys equally, Steve resented Don's basic schooling and was jealous when Don went to college to study engineering, even though he himself had then been too young to do the same. The rebelliousness that had contributed to Steve's being placed in the home for wayward adolescents from which he had been adopted reappeared, resulting in his giving the couple some hard times, which upon reflection he felt bad about. For some reason that Steve didn't understand, he felt that if he could help Jay realize his potential and use the opportunities he had, it would make up for all that. Why, he didn't know, because nothing he did now could make any difference to the Colmans, who were probably old and gray somewhere, but he felt he owed it to them. People's minds worked like that. Minds could be very strange.
He set the coffees down and slid into the seat opposite Jay. "Ever been thirsty?" he asked as he stirred sugar into his cup.
Jay looked surprised. "Why . . . sure. I guess so. Hasn't everybody?"
"Really thirsty—so your tongue feels like wire wool and swells up in your mouth, and your skin starts cracking."
"Well. . . no. Why?"
"I have. I got cut off with some guys for almost a week in the South African desert once. All you think about is water. You can't describe the craving. You'd cut off your arm for a cup." He paused, and Jay waited with a puzzled expression on his face. "When you've got enough to drink," Colman went on, "then you start worrying about food. That takes longer to build up, but it gets as bad. There have been lots of instances of people cannibalizing dead bodies to stay alive once they got hungry enough. They've killed each other over potato peels."
"So-o-o-o?"
"When you've got enough to eat and drink, then you worry about keeping warm. And when you're warm enough, you start thinking about staying safe." Colman opened his hands briefly. "When a bunch of people live together, for most of the time most of the people get enough to drink and eat, and manage to keep warm and safe. What do you think they start worrying about then?"
Jay frowned and looked mildly uncomfortable. "Sex?" he hazarded.
Colman grinned. "You're right, but you're supposed to pretend you don't know about that. I was thinking of something else—recognition. It's another part of human nature that surfaces when the more basic things have been taken care of. And when it does, it gets to be just as powerful as the rest. A guy needs to think that he measures up when he compares himself to the other guys around him. He needs to be recognized for what's good about him and to stand out. Like you said, it's probably sex, because he thinks the girls are taking notice, but whatever the reason, it's real."
Jay was beginning to see the connection. "Measures up with respect to what?" he asked. "What's the standard?"
"It doesn't matter," Colman told him. "It's different in different places. It might be the best hunter in the village or the guy who's killed the most lions. It might be the way you paint your face. Through most of history it's been money. What you buy with it isn't important. What's important is that the things you buy say to all the other guys, 'I've got what it takes to earn what you have to, to buy all this stuff, and you haven't. Therefore I'm better than you.' That's what it's all about."
"Why's it so important to be better than somebody?"
"I told you, it's an instinct. You can't fight it. It's like being thirsty."
"Am I supposed to feel that way?"
"You do. Don't you like it when your team wins in the Bowl? Why do you work hard at school? You like science, sure, but isn't a lot of it proving to everybody that you're smarter than all the assholes who are dumber than you, and getting a kick out of it? Be honest. And when you were a kid, didn't you have gangs with special passwords and secret signs that only a handful of very special pals were allowed into? I bet you did."
Jay nodded and smiled. "You're right. We did."
"We all did. And it doesn't change when you get older. It gets worse. Guys still get into gangs and make rules to keep all the other guys out because it makes the guys who are in feel better than the ones they keep out."
"But the rules are so dumb," Jay protested. "They don't make sense. Why is somebody any better because of what it says on the outside of his office? It's what he does inside that matters."
"They don't have to make sense. All they have to do is say you're different. Now do you get it? Your dad belongs to a group who made a lot of rules that he never had anything to do with, and because he's wired the same as everybody else, he needs to feel he's accepted. To be accepted, he has to be seen to go by the rules. If he didn't he'd become a threat to the group, and they'd reject him. And nobody can take that. Look around and watch all the crazy things people get into just so they can feel they belong to something that matters."
"Even you?"
"Sure. What could be crazier than the Army?"
"You're not crazy," Jay said. "So what made you join?'
"It was a group, just like I've been saying—something to belong to. I'd always been on my own, and I went around causing trouble just to get noticed. People are like that. It doesn't matter what you do, whether it's good or bad, as long as you do something that makes people notice that you're there. Nothing's worse than not making any difference to anything." Colman shrugged. "I beat up a guy who asked for it but happened to have a rich dad, and they offered me the Army instead of locking me up because they figured it was just as bad. I jumped at it."
Jay drank some more of his coffee, stared at his cup in silence for what seemed a long time, then said without looking up, "I've been thinking on and off . . . you know, I think I'd like to get into the Army. What would be the best way of going about it?"
Colman stared hard at him for a few seconds. "What do you think you'd get out of it?" he asked.
"Oh, I dunno—some of the things you said, maybe."
"Get away from being caged in at home, be your real self, break out of the straitjacket, and all the rest, huh?"
"Maybe."
Colman nodded to himself and wiped his mouth with a napkin from the dispenser on the table while he tried to form the right answer. He was stuck in the Army but wanted to become a professional engineer; Jay could walk into being an engineer but thought he wanted to be in the Army. There would be no point in being scornful and listing all the reasons why it might not be such a good idea—Jay knew all those and didn't want to hear about it.
Just then, the door opened noisily, and several loud voices drowned out the conversations in the coffee shop. Colman recognized three faces from B Company, Padawski—a tall, wiry sergeant with harsh, thin lips and hard, black eyes set in a long, swarthy face—and two corporals whose names didn't come immediately to mind. They had been drinking, and Padawski could be mean at the best of times. Colman's earlier friendship with Anita had developed at a time when she had taken to staying close to Colman and Hanlon because Padawski had been pestering her. Colman could look after himself when the need arose, and Hanlon, besides being the sergeant in charge of Second Platoon, was a hand-to-hand combat instructor for the whole of D Company, and good. The combination had proved an effective deterrent, and Padawski had nursed a personal grudge ever since.
"Who are they?" Jay asked as he sensed Colman's tensing up.
"Bad news," Colman hissed through his teeth. "Just keep talking. Don't look round."
"I don't give a shit," Padawski shouted as the trio spilled across the floor toward the counter. "I don't give a goddamn shit, I tell ya. If that asshole wants to—" His voice broke off suddenly. "Say, who've we got over here? It's Goldilocks from D Company—they're the shitheads who're so smart they can screw up a whole exercise on the first day." Colman felt the floor vibrate as heavy footfalls approached the booth. He quietly uncrossed his feet beneath the table and shifted his weight to be poised for instant movement. His fingers curled more snugly around the half-full cup of hot coffee. He looked up to find Padawski leering down from about three feet away.
"This is private," he murmured in a voice that was low but menacing. "Beat it."
"Hey, guys, Goldilocks has got a new girlfriend! Take a look. Is there something you wanna tell us, Colman? I've always had my doubts about you." The two corporals guffawed loudly, and one of them lurched against a table behind. The man sitting at it excused himself and left hurriedly. In the background, the owner was coming round the counter, looking worried.
Jay had turned pale and was sitting motionless. Colman's eyes blazed up at Padawski. Padawski's leer broadened. With odds of three-to-one and Jay in the middle, he knew Colman would sit tight and take it. Padawski peered more closely at Jay and blew a stream of beery breath across the table.
"Hey, kid, how do you like—"
"Cut it," Colman grated. "You leave him out of it. If it's me you want, I'll take the three of you, but some other place. He's got nothing to do with this."
The owner bustled forward, twisting a cloth nervously in his hands. "Look, I don't want any trouble. I just wanna sell food to the people, okay? They don't want no trouble either. Now why don't—"
"Oh, so it's trouble them fellas is looking for, is it?" a voice with just a hint of an Irish brogue asked softly from the doorway. Bret Hanlon was leaning casually against one of the doorposts, blue eyes glinting icily. His huge shoulders seeming almost to reach the other side of the door. He looked completely relaxed and at ease, but Colman registered his weight carried well forward on the balls of his feet and his fingers flexing inconspicuously down by his hip. The two corporals glanced at each other apprehensively. Hanlon's appearance altered the odds a bit. Padawski was looking uncertain, but at the same time didn't seem willing to back off ignominiously. For a few seconds that dragged like minutes, the charge in the room crackled at flashpoint. Nobody moved.
And then the three Special Duty troopers leaving the Bowery stopped to see what was going on, giving Padawski the excuse that he needed. "Let's get out of here," he said. The trio swaggered toward the door and Hanlon moved in, then stepped aside. Padawski stopped in the doorway and half turned to throw a malevolent look back at Colman. "Some other time. Next time you won't be so lucky." They left. Outside, the three SD troopers turned away and moved slowly off.
Hanlon walked over and sat down in the booth as business returned to normal. "They knew you were here, Steve. I heard them talking in the back of Rockefeller's. So I thought I'd come back down and hang around."
"I've always said you've got a good sense of timing, Bret."
"So, is this fine young fella the Jay you were telling me about?" Hanlon asked.
"That's Jay. Jay, this is Bret—Bret Hanlon. He runs one of the other platoons and teaches unarmed combat. Don't mess with him."
"Was that why those guys took off?" Jay asked, by now having regained most of his color.
"It probably had something to do with it," Colman said, grinning. "That's the kind of trash you have to deal with. Still interested?"
"I guess I'll have to think about it," Jay conceded.
Hanlon ordered three hamburger dinners, and the two sergeants spent a half hour talking with Jay about Army life, football, and how Stanislau could crash the protected sector of the public databank. Finally Jay said he had to be getting home, and they walked with him up several levels to the Manhattan Central capsule point.
"Shall we be getting back to the party then?" Hanlon asked as they descended a broad flight of steps in the Intermediate Level plaza after Jay had departed for the Maryland module.
Colman slowed and rubbed his chin. He wasn't in the mood. "You go on, Bret," he said. "I think I'm just gonna wander around. I guess I'd rather be on my own for a while."
Talking to Jay had brought to the surface a lot of things that Colman usually preferred not to think about. Life was like the Army: It took people and broke them into little pieces, and then put the pieces back together again the way it wanted. Except it did it with their minds. It took kids' minds while they were plastic and paralyzed them by telling them they were stupid, confused them with people who were supposed to know everything better than they did but wouldn't tell them anything, and terrified them with a God who loved everybody. Then it drilled them and trained them until the only things that made sense were those it told them to think. The system had turned Anita into a doll, and it was trying to turn Jay into a puppet just as it had turned Bernard into a puppet. It turned people into recording machines that words went into and came out of again and made them think they knew everything about a planetful of people they'd never seen, just as it blew black guys' brains out because they wanted to run their farms and didn't want their kids nailed to walls, and then told the civilians in Cape Town it was okay. And what had it done to Colman? He didn't know because he didn't know how else it might have been.
"Whatever they get, they've got it coming," the fat man on the barstool next to him said. "Kids running around wild, breeding like rabbits—It's disgusting. And making bombs! Savages is what they are—no better than the Chinese. Kalens has got the right idea. He'll teach 'em some decency and respect." Colman drank up and left.
Jesus, he thought, he was sick of the system. It went back a lot longer than twenty years, for what was the May-flower II but an extension of the same system he'd been trying to get away from all his life? Jay was beginning to feel the trap closing around him already. And none of it was going to change—ever. Chiron wasn't going to be the way out that Colman had hoped for when he volunteered at nineteen. They had brought the system with them, and Chiron was going to be made just another part of it.
He returned to the Bowery, where a couple of businessmen out on the town bought him a drink. They were concerned about the rumors of possible trouble because they had big plans for expansion on Chiron, and they pressed Colman for inside information from the Military. Colman said he didn't have any. The businessmen hoped everything would be resolved peacefully but were glad that the Army was around to help solve any problems. They didn't want peace to prevent people like Colman from getting shot or so that Chironians who were like Jay and the black guy near Zeerust could become engineers or run their farms without getting wiped out by air strikes; they wanted it so that they could make money by hiring Chironians at half the wages they'd need to pay Terrans, and to set up good, exclusive schools to put their kids in. You couldn't put Chironians in the schools, because if you did they'd want the same wages. And in any case they'd never be able to afford it. The Chironians weren't really people, after all.
"What does a Chironian computer print when you attempt illegal access?" one of them asked Colman when they had got into their joke repertoires.
"What?"
"help! rape! Ha-ha, hah-hah!"
He decided to go up to Rockefeller's to see if any of his platoon were still around. On the way his pace slowed abruptly. Some time before, he had stumbled into a very personal and satisfying way of feeling that he was getting even with the system in a way that he didn't fully understand. Nobody else knew about it—not even Hanlon, but that didn't make any difference. He hadn't seen her for a while now, and he was in just the right mood.
To avoid using a compad in not-too-private surroundings, he went to a public booth in the lobby at Rockefeller's to call the number programmed to accept calls only if she was alone. While Colman waited for a response, his mind flashed back six months. He had been standing stiffly at attention in dress uniform alongside a display of a remote-fire artillery control post that was part of the Army's contribution to the Fourth of July celebrations, when she wandered away from a group of VIPs sipping cocktails and stood beside him to gaze admiringly at the screens carrying simulated battlefield displays. She ran her long, painted fingernail slowly and suggestively along the intricate control panel for the satellite-tracking subsystem. "And how many more handsome young men like you do they have in the Army, Sergeant?" she murmured at the displays before her.
"Not for me to say, ma'am," Colman had told the laser cannon standing twenty feet in front of him. "I'm not an expert on handsome men."
"An expert on ladies in need of stimulating entertainment, perhaps?"
"That depends, ma'am. They can lead to a heap of trouble."
"Very wise, Sergeant. But then, some of them can be very discreet. Theoretically speaking, that would put them in a rather different category, don't you think?"
"Theoretically, I guess, yes, it would," Colman had agreed.
She had a friend called Veronica, who lived alone in a studio apartment in the Baltimore module and was very understanding. Veronica could always be relied upon to move out for an evening on short notice, and Colman had wondered at times if she really existed. Acquiring exclusive access to a studio wouldn't have been all that difficult for a VIP's wife, even with the accommodation limitations of the Mayflower II. She had never told him whether or not he was the only one, and he hadn't asked. It was that kind of a relationship.
The screen before him suddenly came to life to show her face. A flicker of surprise danced in her eyes for the merest fraction of a second, and then gave way to a smoldering twinkle of anticipation mixed with a dash of amusement, "Well, hello, Sergeant," she said huskily. "I was beginning to wonder if I had a deserter. Now, I wonder what could be on your mind at this time of night."
"It depends. What's the situation, company-wise?"
"Oh, very boring for a Saturday night."
"He's not—"
"Wining, dining, and conspiring—no doubt until the early hours."
Colman hesitated for a split second to let the question ask itself. "So . . . ?"
"Well now, I'm sure Veronica could be persuaded if I were to call her and talk to her nicely."
"Say, half an hour?"
"Half an hour." She smiled a promise and winked. Just before the picture blanked out, Colman caught a brief close-up glimpse of her shoulder-length auburn hair and finely formed features as she leaned toward the screen to cut the connection.
Colman's top-echelon, part-time mistress was Celia Kalens.