2
Mars: 2063 A.D.
A sales pitch was always the same; it hadn't changed in five thousand years. First the salesman—though this one happened to be a saleswoman—told you all the advantages: the spectacular view—from eighty kilometers up you could see the whole lower city and, beyond it, the broad curve of the planet; the amazingly generous amount of floor space, enough for a dozen people to live in comfort; the unique privacy, with no one but you living on the whole floor section; and the astonishingly low cost.
And finally, the inevitable kicker: ". . . last one left, going fast, showing to three other people later today."
Julius Szabo listened, nodded, and evaluated her performance: not bad for a beginner. But he had been in the game back when she was kicking her shapely little legs in the air and crying for a change of diaper—and he had played on a field a hell of a lot tougher than real estate.
"I just don't know, Ms. Diver." He rubbed at his nose, put on his bewildered, worried look, and cut in when she was well into her windup and just five seconds before she was ready to state an inflated price. "It's very nice, but I can already tell that this place is way too rich for my blood. I'm retired, you know. I'm looking for something in the three-eighty range, and I can't possibly go more than four-twenty. Four-thirty, maybe, absolute tops."
Gracie Diver stared at him with her mouth open and her luscious pink tongue showing. She was a lovely piece of work. Twenty years ago—make that ten—hell, if he were just back on Earth.
Down, boy. Remember your official age: He had made his own instinctive assessment, inverting every one of the variables. Eighty kilometers up, you were well outside the thin wisps of Martian atmosphere. Damn it, you were in space—hard vacuum right outside the windows. The spectacular view (a 740-kilometer outlook in every direction over the arid Martian surface) was enough to terrify anyone with even a trace of acrophobia. Privacy was guaranteed by the fact that the lift tubes took forever to get you up so high. And the generous floor space and low price were sure signs that they could hardly give the place away.
But for Julius, each of those drawbacks happened to be a virtue. He had done his analysis and had quoted Gracie Diver a figure he estimated at just two percent higher than the minimum she was allowed to accept on the rental. He had cut it close not because of the price—he could afford a hundred times as much and never notice—but from sheer ingrained habit. He told himself he would have to watch out for that. He had altered his appearance, aging himself enough to fool anyone, and he was already thinking of himself as Julius; but personal foibles and vanities were hard to recognize in yourself, let alone change. And that could be fatal.
"Four hundred and thirty?" She hid her disappointment well, and she didn't even deign to mention his lower figures. Maybe young Gracie had a bright future, after all. "I'll have to check with the office, of course, because that's far less than I'm allowed to—"
"Would you do that?" The knife could cut both ways, and he had been wielding it long before she was born. "You see, if I don't take this place, I'm supposed to see another property later today, and I'll be pushed to make the appointment schedule, what with all the time we took to get up here." Julius turned toward the window. "While you call your boss, why don't I wander around and take a look at the view? I've never lived anywhere so high up, I'm not sure what it feels like. And what with today's news, all those tough words from the Belt, I'm not sure Mars is the best place at all. Sometimes I think we'd be a lot safer out in the Jupiter system, on Ganymede or Callisto."
"I'll tell you what." At once she was right in front of him, smiling guilelessly up into his eyes and holding her remote-entry unit out toward him. "Why don't we fill out your application and transfer it in, right now? My office can evaluate it as it arrives, and we'll have a go/no-go decision in just a few minutes. Then we can both go on to our next appointments."
Good girl, he thought. Don't waste time thinking of profits you might have made. Take what you can get, tie it down, and go on to the next one.
Julius reached out and patted Gracie on her bare upper arm. It was a friendly touch; even—steady, man; act your age—a paternal touch. He felt a real affection for her. If she ever wanted to move into a different line of business . . .
He cut that thought off early. "Let's do just what you suggest. You know, you're a good saleswoman, Gracie. And in a couple more years you're going to be a lot better."
Seeing the blush of pleasure on fair young cheeks was worth the extra one percent he was sure he could have squeezed out of her on the rental price.
* * *
Julius Szabo, who used to be Danny Clay, had pondered the problem for twenty years. You could run Earth's highest-stakes gambling operation. You could have a genius for rapid calculation and a memory for numbers and statistics that guaranteed your own success. You could accumulate more wealth than your modest tastes would let you spend in a hundred lifetimes.
What you could not do was get away. You were bound to the system by a thousand shackles, and you knew too much about too many people ever to be allowed to leave. In fact, a quarter century of observation suggested only one way out. Some young upstart would covet the top spot, as you had coveted it yourself. You would guard against that as best you could, and your own long experience would help. You watched for "accidents"—aircar or lift-tube failures, a Hecate spider in a flower bouquet, shower faucets that turned instantly from warm water to superheated steam, idiopathic diseases uniquely tailored to your own body chemistry, even things as simple as stray bullets and natural food poisons. Those had all been used on others, and they could just as well be tried against you. You'd be on the lookout—of course you would—but there was a basic rule of life: The one that got you would be a surprise, the one you had not thought of.
Your talents allowed you to calculate the chances of your own death from natural causes. They were depressingly low, odds unacceptable to any self-respecting professional gambler. Throw in what Danny saw as the high probability that before the decade was out, there would be a no-holds-barred war with the Belt, and your survival chances dropped so close to zero you couldn't calculate them.
So, you had to find another approach. And the only one that he could think of called for lots of planning and a long lead time.
When Danny Clay died early in his fifty-second year, in a vacation boating accident on Lake Baikal, Julius Szabo had already been officially "alive" for six years on Mars. He was a sprightly eighty-three-year-old bachelor with no surviving siblings. His bank credit, as a successful retired actuary and statistician, was substantial. It was less than a fiftieth of what Danny left behind in his estate, but so what? You can't take it with you. Danny/Julius was smart enough not to try. Given the infighting, legal and illegal, that would be going on for his territory and possessions in Mexico City, no one would be able to estimate his wealth at the time of his death to within even ten percent of the total. A two percent skim would be perfectly safe.
He would be safe, too, provided that he made the separation complete. It had to be mental as well as physical. Julius told himself—morning and midday and evening— that he was not that other man, whatever his name was. He did not even know such a person. Danny Clay—who was that? If the mental block was to be effective, it had to be total. But it wasn't easy.
He moved into his new home on the eightieth-kilometer level in the Space Fountain pyramid, a huge ziggurat that stretched for another eight kilometers above him. He furnished the open vastness of the apartment in a spare, drab style that would have disgusted Danny Clay, who had had decadent casino/bordello tastes for plush red velvet and gold-framed mirrors. He provided a change-of-address notice to the Mars Society of Actuarial Consultants; placed a discreet sign, "Dr. Julius Szabo, MMSAC (Ret.)," in the building directory; and settled in to watch sunrise and sunset through-the planet's thin apology for an atmosphere. He was prepared for several happy decades of a new and more relaxed life.
Danny had been thorough. Julius was fully certified and a genuine actuary, totally at home with and fascinated by the probabilities that governed human life expectancy. It was actually not far from the gambling life, except that vagaries of human heredity and environment took the place of a hand of cards or the spin of a roulette wheel.
However, despite his genuine interest in statistics, Julius Szabo had, according to his own society statement of actuarial capability, long ago retired. He did not advertise his services. He did not seek clients. So it was astonishing and disturbing to receive a call when he had been established in his new home for one and a half Martian years.
"Dr. Szabo?" The woman peering at him from the screen had bright violet-blue eyes embedded—that was the impression, jewels in jet—in a shiny black face surrounded by a halo of frizzy black hair.
"Indeed, yes." Those dazzling eyes carried Julius back a full twenty years. He resisted the temptation to add, "my dear." The biggest danger in becoming a courtly, white-bearded gentleman was in overdoing it to the point of caricature. "I am Julius Szabo."
"And I'm Neely Rinker. I need the services of an actuary. Can I come and see you? Today?"
She didn't look or sound like anyone from the Organization. Of course, if she were any good she wouldn't. And if she were their agent, he would learn nothing by refusing to see her, while such a refusal could turn any vague suspicions to certainty. If he did see her, of course, there was a danger that she might try to dispose of him on the spot; but if he were lucky and skillful, he might learn something to protect himself. At the very least, he might gain some time. If everything went wrong, he had one other escape hole, but it was a dubious and frightening long shot, relying upon an emerging (and illegal) Belt technology that most people did not know existed. If he made it through the day, he would check that he was fully paid up for the service.
Odds, odds, everything in the world was odds. You could calculate and calculate, but after all was said and done, you still had to throw the dice. Julius nodded. "If you wish to see me, then of course I will be happy to meet with you."
"Right away?"
"If you so desire. However, to avoid any possible misunderstanding at the outset, I want to be sure that you realize that I am retired, and have been for some years."
"But you still have a mortality computer, don't you?"
"I do. And of course I am still a member in good standing of the MSAC."
"I'll be right up. I'm in the building, but I'm down at ground level."
"My fees—"
"Will not be an issue. I have plenty of money."
She vanished, leaving Julius to his own thoughts. First, in the world of his own past, only a fool ever claimed to have lots of money. Second, Neely Rinker sounded oddly tense, while a professional from that same past world would never reveal tension. Third, if she thought she would "be right up," she was an optimist. The fastest lift tube needed half an hour to ascend eighty kilometers. Julius had ample time for preparations.
He made sure that his weapons were unobtrusive and ready. With one movement of finger against thumb, he could apply force to stun or even kill anyone, anywhere in the apartment, from half a dozen different directions. When he had finished that review he called his special service and confirmed that they were on-line for a possible emergency. Finally, he forced himself to sit down in an easy chair in his study. Thus far, Neely Rinker had the feel of a genuine client. It would be curious if she were. Julius smiled. It was the rueful smile of a man who, for the first time in his whole life, was perhaps about to make money by legal means.
Half an hour was an absolute minimum to get up from the ground level. He told himself that and tried to relax, as forty minutes passed and no one arrived. The final ring of the bell was both a release of tension and a new heightening of it. He pressed the door control before he could have second thoughts.
She entered quickly, in a swirl of violet-blue cape that matched her bright eyes. She glanced around nervously as she entered. In person she was more striking than he had realized. The screen could not begin to capture the glow of total health, nor the beauty of perfect dark skin. Julius told himself, not for the first time, that total solitude wasn't working. He might pretend to eighty-three, but his hormones said otherwise.
One thing at a time. He led her along the broad corridor that ran from the lift tubes to his usual living quarters, walking carefully behind her and studying her tall, slim figure. No sign of concealed weapons—but then, if they were visible they would not be concealed. He ushered her into his study and indicated a seat across from his. So long as she was sitting there, he could destroy her instantly in a dozen different ways.
He sat down by the computer console and smiled at her. "Now, before you tell me just why you are here, satisfy my curiosity. How did you come to choose me, of all the actuaries in Oberth City? I feel sure that we have never met, for I would surely not have forgotten so beautiful a young woman."
"No. We've never met. I just consulted the directory."
"And picked my name? But how, Ms. Rinker? It could not have been alphabetical."
"No. It wasn't. I used a different criterion." Neely Rinker cast another swift glance around the room. She licked her lips and leaned forward. "I consulted the directory, as I said, for actuaries. And I picked the one with a current active license who has done the least work as a consultant for the past five Mars years. That is you."
After all his efforts to blend perfectly into the background, he had made himself conspicuous after all. Julius marveled at the irony of it, at the same time as he resolved to do something as soon as Neely Rinker was gone. He would change his society status from active member to associate member, on the grounds of increasing age.
But she was continuing, with an earnest and pained intensity: "I didn't want someone with a busy practice, people wandering in and out of the office all the time. And I told you that money was not an issue. It is not. I will pay you well, and more than well. But I ask something in return. I need your promise that you will never talk about this meeting."
"That will be no problem, Ms. Rinker." Except, why did she want such a promise? "Although actuaries are seldom the recipients of the system's most exciting secrets, it is our general practice to respect client confidentiality."
"Good. I want you to tell me my life expectancy. Actually, I want to know two life expectancies. I assume you can calculate that."
"Indeed, I can." Julius reached over to the computer and pulled the entry unit onto his knee. Neely Rinker's request suddenly made a lot more sense. She was planning some kind of long-term relationship, and she wanted to know if she was likely to outlive her partner.
"A life expectancy," he went on, "is exactly what a mortality computer is designed to provide. However, I assume that you realize that what you will get is no more than a probability? It answers the question, given a very large number of individuals just like you: What is the average life of all those people? It promises nothing about you in particular, or indeed any specific person."
"I understand that."
"Very well. And a life expectancy depends on many more things than the age of a person." He rubbed at his nose—an old habit, damn it, that he somehow had to break—and went on, "So, Ms. Rinker, if you do not mind giving me the answers to a rather large number of questions—some of which, I'm afraid, must be quite personal . . ."
When she nodded, he began. The first few variables were so standardized that he expected no problems: name, personal ID number— "No."
Julius looked up. "I beg your pardon? All I need—"
"No. I can't tell you my personal ID number."
"But really, my dear Ms. Rinker, this is just to save you time and money. I need your ID number to pull from the data files the most general information about you. Nothing personal. Just things like your place of birth, age, height, weight—"
"I will give all of those to you directly. Please go on."
Julius shook his head in pretended bewilderment. Actually, he ought to be the last person to complain if Neely Rinker—surely an assumed name—chose to hide her true identity. That made two of them. But what was she hiding? He might find out in due course. He already had one piece of information that she had probably never intended to give him: that she was not from Mars. If she were, she would have said she picked the actuary who had done "the least work as a consultant for the past five years," rather than "for the past five Mars years."
He went on. Age (thirty-one), height (one-point-eight meters), weight (sixty kilos), education, profession, health profile from infancy, personality profile, children (none), long-term liaisons (none), parents' and grandparents' health history, health profile of siblings, food preferences, use of stimulants, sleep needs, sexual preferences and habits.
Julius paused. This was the place where people often became coy.
Neely Rinker described the strength of her sexual needs and the frequency of their fulfillment, including her tastes for and extensive experience with vaginal, oral, and anal sex. She spoke calmly, fully, and clearly, without batting an eye. Julius felt that the answer was affecting him a lot more than her.
But the very next question was: "Current residence?"
And she was hesitating, biting her full purple-black lower lip. "You really need to know that?"
"Certainly, or I would not be asking. Low-gravity environments induce calcium loss. High-gravity environments impose excessive cardiovascular load. Nonstandard atmospheres change blood ionic balance. Deep habitats often introduce a high level of ambient radioactivity. Need I continue?"
"I guess not." Neely Rinker drew in a long breath. "All right, I'll tell you. I live on Ganymede. In Moira Cavern, forty kilometers below the Hebe access point."
Julius nodded and entered the data into the computer. His deduction had been confirmed. After all the secrecy, it was nothing even to raise an eyebrow. Ganymede was by far the most populous of the Jovian satellites, even though the hot prospects for development today were on Callisto and, as soon as the Von Neumanns got through with their work, on Titan. Ganymede was a safe, settled, and well-regulated environment. If the Earth-Belt situation deteriorated further, he might even head for Ganymede himself.
He went on, working his way through the second-order variables: hobbies and recreations, religious beliefs, phobias, dream patterns, ambitions. When he had everything, he paused.
"That's it. Unless there is something else that you think may be significant, and want to tell me about? Remember, a mortality computer can't do better than the data fed into it."
She stared back, the beautiful dark face as expressionless as an obsidian mask. "Nothing else, Dr. Szabo."
"Very well." Julius performed the run. The results came back without even a request for backup data. "According to what you have given me, your future life expectancy is one hundred and nineteen years. I assume that you would like a printed and signed statement confirming the input and output?"
"That is not necessary. A hundred and nineteen? All right, now I want to do the second case."
Julius nodded. "I might add that one hundred and nineteen is rather good. The average life expectancy for all females of your age is ninety-two years. But now, I wonder if we will in fact be able to run the other case that you need. Unless you can provide equally complete input data for your proposed partner—or for whoever that other person might be—"
"That won't be a problem." But suddenly she was restless, unwilling to proceed, standing up from her chair and walking across to the window. She showed none of the fear of open spaces that a Ganymede cavern dweller typically showed, but leaned against the thick transparent plastic to watch the setting sun strike the silvered sides of buildings, thirty or forty kilometers away. The ziggurat's next level was a full half-kilometer down, and beyond Oberth City the naked red plain stretched far and wide.
"How old are you?" she asked suddenly. "How old are you really?" She spat out the question without warning, as she turned back to face Julius.
The temptation was to destroy her instantly, annihilate her where she stood. She knew—she must know, to ask such a thing. But if she knew, why did she ask?
He forced himself to smile and to ask in reply: "Now why do you want such an uninteresting piece of information? However, it is no secret. I am eighty-three years old. May I inquire as to the reason for your question? And what do you mean, how old am I really?"
"Because you look old, but you don't seem it." She came close to him, her jeweled amethyst eyes staring into his. Strong young hands gripped his thin arms, specially treated to reduce their natural muscle fiber. "There's something about you, the way you look, the way you look at me. You don't act like an old man."
Bad news. So much for safety and security. Julius felt his smile freeze on his face. "But I am old, my dear," he said gently. "Maybe it is you. Maybe there is something about you that makes me wish that I were not old, that I could be young again."
If she treated it as a geriatric come-on and grabbed him, he would do his bit or die trying. Close-up, she smelled delicious. Mostly, though, he was just trying for a change of subject.
He got one.
"That's a very charming compliment." And then, before he could speak, she asked, "Have you lived on Mars your whole life?" Her question again unsettled him before he could gain his mental balance. He had just enough self-possession to make the quick calculation.
"Hardly. Ms. Rinker, the first Mars colony was not established until forty-three years ago."
She was staring at him with what seemed to be genuine astonishment. Didn't young people know any history any more?
"At the time," he went on, "I was already forty years old. Like everyone else in the solar system, I was living on Earth. I came to Mars at the age of fifty-two."
This last statement was, as it happened, absolutely true. But one more wild question and he would lose control.
And here it came.
"What does it feel like, being old?" Neely Rinker was standing closer, gazing into his eyes. "I can read about aging, and I can think about it, but I can't feel it."
"Age is—shall we say?—not an unmixed blessing." Julius caught his breath and tried to smile again. "Your bones ache, your senses dim, you sleep fitfully, your desires exceed your energies. Everyone wants to live a long time. But no one would choose to be old."
"That's what I needed to hear." Again, there came the tangential change of subject. She released her grasp on his arms and headed back to her chair. "Thank you, Dr. Szabo. What you just said is exactly what I had to know. I'm sorry, I've been wasting your time. When you are ready, I want to do the second calculation."
"But the profile—are you sure that you can provide me with all the inputs?"
"I already did. They are the same as before."
"Your own parameters?" Julius was calm again, back with something he knew how to handle. "My dear, although the mortality computer works to provide us with probabilities, there is no indeterminacy or random element in its calculations. With the same profile, you will obtain exactly the same answer as before."
"I understand that. I want to change just one of the assumptions. Suppose that everything about me is the same, except that I won't die of disease, or of general degeneration due to old age. Suppose that the only way I can die is from some kind of accident. What would my life expectancy be then?"
"There is no way that the mortality computer can answer such a question. It does not contain suitable tables, or appropriate computational procedures." But even as Julius Szabo spoke, Danny Clay came chiming in. It wasn't a question for an actuary, but it was a natural for someone who could handle probability calculations in his sleep.
Assume that the only way to die was from an accident. Suppose that the chance of avoiding such a fatal accident was a constant, P, the same every year. Start with a large population—say, a million people. Then the number living at the end of the first year would be a million times P. During the second year, of those remaining, a fraction of P would avoid dying by accident, so at the end of the second year, a million times P2 would be left. Keep going: in the third year, a million times P3; in the fourth . . .
"Dr. Szabo?"
"I'm sorry, Ms. Rinker." Julius came back down. He wondered, for the thousandth time, what the young Danny Clay might have become if he had not been forced to claw his way to adulthood in a city desensitized and brutalized by its ruling gangs. Then he denied, for the thousandth time, that he had ever in his life known a person called Danny Clay. "I was saying, the mortality computer cannot provide an answer. It is not designed to do so. But I can do it. I can easily work it out for you from first principles, from the known risks that you will die of different forms of accidents. However, it may take me a minute or two."
"I can wait."
Even if Neely Rinker had said she was leaving at once and had no further interest in the answer, Julius would not have been able to resist doing the calculation. The only hard step was to determine her risk of accidental death. He had to retrieve part of the mortality computer's data, and allow for all possible accidental causes. He found that there was one chance in 2,935 that Neely Rinker—assuming she had not lied about her habitat and lifestyle— would die from an accident in the next year.
Then it was easy. Take the individual terms of the P series, weight them by the year number, and calculate the sum of the whole series to infinity. The answer was surprisingly simple. Her life expectancy was just the reciprocal of the chance that she would die during one year. In other words, a disease-free and aging-free Neely Rinker would live, on average, for 2,935 years.
Julius stared at his answer with a mixture of pleasure and annoyance. Pleasure, that the answer had come so quickly and cleanly. Annoyance, because the result had no meaning in the real world. The oldest validated age in the solar system was one hundred and fifty-seven Earth years.
He looked up, to find Neely Rinker displaying her own mixture of emotions, a combination of worry and anticipation.
"Well." She moved to look over his shoulder at what he had written. Since it consisted of one number and three formulas, he doubted that it could provide her with much satisfaction.
"I have the answer to the question that you asked," he said. "But it is not a useful one."
"What does it show?"
"If you did not die of disease, or aging, but only from an accident—that means 'accident' in the general sense, including murder and suicide—then you could expect to live for almost three thousand years. To be specific, you could expect to live for another two thousand nine hundred and thirty-five years."
She didn't snort, she didn't scowl, she didn't laugh at him with mocking disbelief. She stared at the starscape beyond the window, and he could not even guess what she saw there.
"Thank you, Dr. Szabo." She reached into the pocket of her pantsuit, pulled out a fistful of money, and handed it to him without looking. "You have been very helpful. Now, I have to be going."
She was heading out of the study, striding down the long corridor. Julius hurried along behind. "I don't think I should be taking your money." He tried to keep up, but she was moving far too fast for his artificially aged legs. "I shouldn't be paid for what I did with that calculation," he called out, as the entrance to one of the lift tubes opened and she stepped toward it. "It was just a meaningless exercise."
"Thanks again, Dr. Szabo." She turned, waved, and dropped out of sight. The lift-tube entrance closed.
Julius was left with his mouth open. The only residual traces of Neely Rinker were a hint of her light and pleasant perfume and the wad of money in his left hand. He stared at it.
Cash—no one paid in cash, unless they were engaged in gambling, blackmail, or a political payoff. Cash was easy to make, and as a result it was easy to counterfeit. He had been handling fake money, good and bad copies, for thirty years. The bills in his hand were garishly colored, of improbably high denominations, and bore, across the top, the words Ganymede Interior Trading Company.
Neely Rinker had come, Neely Rinker had gone. She was surely not from the Organization. But from the look of it she might have stiffed Julius Szabo.
He could employ a lift-tube container to deposit the notes in his account, and learn in a day or so whether they were a legitimate form of Outer System currency. If they were not, their deposit was likely to arouse a good deal of unwelcome attention. Or he could make a descent to a bank level himself, and have an answer within the next hour.
It would be impossible to think of anything else for a while. He might as well admit that, and waste a little more of an already wasted day.
Julius opened his mortality computer and hid all but two of the bills within its largely empty interior. He returned to the lift tubes and rode one down, not to the nearest bank at the seventy-kilometer mark, but all the way down, until he was below ground level. And when he got there he headed not for the financial section, but over to the sprawling open kilometer of a multilevel shopping mall.
The food stores offered selections from everywhere in the system. He chose a vending machine on a lower level and inserted one of his two notes. The machine was smart enough to make change or detect a counterfeit, but not to question why a customer would pay with a note big enough to purchase a thousand items.
The machine swallowed the note and hummed softly to itself for a few seconds. The money apparently passed its rigorous inspection, because a bottle came sliding down along the rack to where Julius could reach it, along with a stack of change. He took the bottle and placed it, unopened, in a disposal bin. The money he stuffed into his pocket; then he started back toward the bank of lift tubes.
He was halfway there when he became aware of a cluster of a dozen people in the broad mallway on his left, with many more converging to swell their number.
None of his business. Safety lay in avoiding all forms of anomaly. But on the ground there, that flash of color within the cluster . . . He somehow found himself walking with the rest, standing at the edge of the crowd.
"From there." Heads around Julius were craning up, following the arm of the woman speaker in front of them. Far above and right overhead, a stone balustrade reached out in a long rising arc to connect two of the mall's upper levels. "That's where it must have come from. A loose piece. I wouldn't like to be the one in charge of maintenance."
Instinctively, the people around Julius backed up a few steps, afraid that something else might fall at any second. He moved in the other direction, closer to the huddled shape on the ground. It lay sprawled with one arm reaching out in front, as though pointing accusingly at the rounded, red-stained stone on the ground ahead. The cape of violet-blue covered her like a shroud. It was not enough to hide the deformed and crushed skull, or the mat of bloodied hair.
Julius backed away. In his old life he had seen violent death so often that it did not sicken him in the way that it might affect most others. What he felt was more of a sense of hysterical improbability.
Less than an hour ago, he and Neely Rinker had been talking of lives that might extend for almost three thousand years. But death cared nothing for probabilities. Death had arrived in the tiniest fraction of the time calculated as the life expectancy (one hour, or one twenty-six millionth of that time, said his mental calculator). In the real world, statistics made statements about averages and were useless in predicting individual events.
But were statistics the issue here? Julius had a sudden sense of his own vulnerability. Neely Rinker had refused to tell him her personal ID number. She had sworn him to secrecy, without giving him any idea why. She had traveled all the way from Ganymede, where mortality computers were as available as they were on Mars. Had someone else followed close behind her? Someone to whom Neely's secret was even more important?
Julius headed straight for home. He waited until a lift tube with no other passengers was available. He was nervous through every second of the ascent, waiting for an unprecedented power failure that would drop him to his death. He did not begin to relax until he was once more safely in his apartment with all his defenses primed.
Even then, he found it impossible to eat. He made himself a strong drink, went to sit by the window, and mocked his own weakness. Almost certainly, Neely Rinker's death had been a stupid accident; but even if it were not, they had been after her, not Julius Szabo or Danny Clay. She had picked his name almost at random from the directory. Probably no one else knew she had visited him. He could even argue that from his point of view, her death was a benefit. All knowledge of the visit had been destroyed at the moment when Neely Rinker's skull was flattened.
He felt an urge to call his special service, but for what? He had nothing to tell them.
It was long past sunset, far past the hour when he usually went to bed. Julius felt no desire for sleep. He made himself another drink, stronger than the first, and returned to sit by the long window.
The stars were as bright as always, undimmed at this altitude by even a trace of atmosphere. Phobos was visible as a fast-moving silvery point, sweeping from west to east across the Martian sky. He stared at it. Trouble, if it came, would derive from his own past, not from Neely Rinker's. He was just as safe now—or as unsafe—as he had been at this hour yesterday. The odds had not changed. The only thing different was his own mental attitude.
He frowned out at the night, pulled abruptly from his reverie. Something had happened. What?
It took a few moments to see it, to realize that what he had noticed was an absence of something. Phobos was no longer visible. But it could not have disappeared so quickly beyond the horizon.
As he watched, it winked back into view. Something had briefly occulted the little moon, some object between him and Phobos. There was no natural body that could have come between them, so it must have been an aircraft. But that implied a craft of such immense size that it could shield Phobos for at least five full seconds. No aircraft was that big—Phobos vanished again, then, just as quickly, reappeared—or that mobile.
Unless—
Julius leaned forward. Unless it was close. And under active control.
In the final half-second he saw it: a flattened and spinning, star-occulting shape that hung briefly to adjust its position, then rushed toward the window. He had no time to move. He saw the impact of the remotely piloted vehicle, and watched inch-thick, shatterproof plastic stretch and bow inward.
The wall was tough, designed to withstand heat, cold, and air pressure, but not a scything force of many tons per square centimeter. The spinning blade cut through the window and exploded as it did so. A five-meter section of plastic vanished.
Julius was not hurt by the explosion, but the outward burst of air took him with it. He was suddenly in a hard vacuum, falling, falling, falling. The air was bursting out of his lungs as he struggled to orient himself. He saw, far off, the lights of distant buildings.
No fear of hitting them. He was dropping vertically, a full half kilometer to the flat roof of the next building level. The impact would certainly kill him, unless he died first of lack of oxygen.
How long? His flair for calculation, functioning even now, fed him the answer. Half a kilometer drop in Mars gravity with no air resistance—he would hit after falling for sixteen and three-quarter seconds. He would still be alive and conscious at the moment of impact. He must do everything that he could to land feetfirst and try to save his skull with its metal protective mesh. That would not, however, save the rest of his body. He would hit at sixty meters a second, fast enough to smash every bone.
As air and blood frothed into ice spray from his ruptured lungs, Julius managed to reach his belt and key in the signal to Special Services. For what it was worth, they guaranteed their arrival within fifteen minutes anywhere on Mars.
He was falling, faster and faster. The roof was no more than fifty meters away. He had time for one final moment of revelation. He had still been right in one way. The odds of his old game had not changed. But the arrival of Neely Rinker had thrust him into a totally different game—one which Julius Szabo, who had once been Danny Clay, had never learned.
And he would never be able to answer Neely's question: What does it feel like, being old?