He was putting his shirt on. His head emerged through the neck, and he stood up and tugged the shirt down over his body. He sat back down on the couch. She turned her gaze away from him, back to the red stream of fish in the wall.
“How are you going to do that?” he said.
“There’s no trade now between the Middle Planets and your city, is there?”
“No. You have nothing I want.”
“But there is a lot of smuggling.”
“Not much.”
“Whatever you say.” She watched the fish reverse direction, perfectly aligned. “I could get you a report on it. We estimate about forty to fifty thousand dollars’ worth of goods come and go between Matuko and the Earth every Earthish month.”
“That’s exaggerated.”
“Suppose you brought the smuggling inside the law and controlled it yourself, you’d make that money, instead of the smugglers getting it all.”
He said nothing. She turned around to face him. He had his belt in his hands; after a moment he seemed to remember it was there and rose and slung it around his waist.
“You’re brave,” he said, “offering me a bribe.”
“That’s your word.”
“Why would I sell my people for a couple of thousand nigger dollars?”
She leaned on the couch. “We can negotiate you a contract that would guarantee you one million dollars the first year, a caesium year, climbing to ten million a year by the fifth year.”
There was a long silence. She drew with her fingernail in the yellow plush of the couch. He sat down again to put on his boots.
“It’s still a bribe.”
“Whatever you want to call it. Why don’t you go think about it?”
“I don’t have to think about it,” he said, and walked out. In his wake the door slammed shut, rebounded, and bounced off its track. She tried to shut it but it was stuck halfway open. She took a shower, wrapped herself up in her robe, and went out to the front room again. Jefferson had worked him out, sight unseen: his key was money. She turned out the lights, barricaded the bedroom door with chairs, and went to sleep.
Tanuojin’s bassoon voice said, “You mean she seduced you?”
“I wouldn’t have thought of it myself, looking at her—she’s nothing to look at, is she? What do you think they’re trying to do?”
“They’re trying to buy you.”
Paula was washing her hair in the bathroom sink. The soap smelled of egg. The Akellar’s voice came up from the recorder on the floor by her feet. “How long is a caesium year?”
“It’s a lie. She’s lying. Why do you go soft-headed over any woman who sleeps with you?”
“Ah, shut up.”
“Can you keep her out of her room long enough for me to search it?”
Paula rinsed her hair and turned on the dryer in the ceiling. The Akellar said, “I can think of something to do with her. And she doesn’t cost me fifty dollars an hour, either.”
A strange voice said, “Jesus, it’s hot.” “Jesus” was their favorite expletive. They pronounced the J like a hard g.
“You think it’s hot in here, stud, stand out there in the radiation.” That was Sril, the small one with the wire in his nose. His voice grew louder. “Akellar, I see you get along better with that Earthish woman now.” Several men laughed.
“No,” the Akellar said. “She gets along better with me.”
She took the recorder into the sitting room and listened to it while she collected everything she did not want Tanuojin to find: the wires from the recorder, the devices Savenia had left. The men talked about their ship and the Martian food, which they loved.
“How long is a caesium year?”
“Saba, don’t listen to her!”
“I asked you a question.”
Sulky: “Around twelve hundred watches.”
The Akellar and Tanuojin puzzled her. They talked like equals, intimately, not the way the Akellar talked to the other men, but now and then he leaned over Tanuojin, and Tanuojin always yielded. Now the deep, surging voice said, “I called the ship, while you were down there letting that woman make use of you.”
“Ah?”
“Kobboz says they—”
The wire ran out. She loaded the recorder again, packed everything she was removing from the suite into her satchel, and took it down to the lobby.
“My door is broken,” she said to the clerk.
He was bent over the desk doing the anagram in the ten o’clock hourly. He did not look up. “Did it involve a Styth?”
“Unh—”
“We’ll have to move you to another room.” He circled an answer in red ink. “We’re leaving all that damage for the underwriters’ inspector.”
“Never mind.” She put the satchel on the desk. “I want this kept in the vault.”
He took it away. She went into the restaurant to eat her lunch. While she was sitting at a table near the windows eating a minji and drinking coffee, Lilly M’ka came up and took the chair opposite her.
“The one with the yellow eyes is back.”
“I know that,” Paula said.
“Yes, I guess you have your own ways of finding things out.” The whore straightened the ruffles on her halter top. Paula envied her tiny waist. “I hope you don’t plan on taking any more of my clients.”
“Do you have any more like that?” Paula bit into the minji.
“He’s good, isn’t he?”
Paula swallowed a mouthful of bread and sausage and hot sauce. “He has a beautiful body.”
“He’s a very handsome man. Or haven’t you looked that far?”
Over the girl’s shoulder, at the far end of the room, Paula saw the Akellar coming in the door. “You sound as if you’re in love with him.”
“I have a thing for men who pay cash.”
He had seen them; he was coming toward them. Lilly said, “Besides, he—” and Paula jabbed her chin at him, and the whore turned and saw him. She sat back. The Styth stood beside the table, between them, looking from one to the other.
“Hello, Saba,” Lilly said. She got up, taking her shoulderbag off the back of her chair.
“Hello, Lilly.”
“See what I mean?” Lilly said to Paula, and went off across the bar to the door. The Akellar sat down in her place.
“Comparing things?”
Paula drank her milk. “What do we have in common? I thought you were giving up on me.” She pushed her plate out of the way. Lilly was wrong: his features were too coarse to be handsome.
“I may give you another chance,” he said. “After all, you’re just a woman.”
“You broke my door.”
“One of my crew will fix it. Come outside with me. It’s like a hot-box in here.”
She went with him out to the park. She had gotten up well after noon, and the sun was falling toward the horizon, the domelight was coming on. He stayed in the cool and shade of the great deodar trees that lined the golf course. The ground was deep in spongy grass, even where the trees’ cloaking branches kept the light out all day long. Paula lagged behind him. On the far side of the path he stopped to let her catch up. Two Martians in knee- length pants, a man and a woman, were coming toward her. Another man in the hotel’s livery pulled a cart full of
