attention to her. “Sril, they’ll throw us all in jail.”
“We can fight anybody,” Ketac said. “Anybody.”
Sril straightened up. “Yes, but we shouldn’t make trouble for her. Come on. Bakan—”
Beneath the thunder of the music there was a pounding on the door. “Open up in there! This is Security!”
Paula looked around for some place to hide them. Ketac started to his feet and sat down hard. Sril bent to help him.
“Open this door!”
“In here.” She pointed to the bedroom door.
Bakan and Sril lifted Ketac up by the arms and hauled him away. She went around the couch to turn off the videone. The bedroom door shut, and the front door crashed open. The Martian hotelman and three policemen in gray bugle-boy uniforms charged in a wedge into the room. Paula went between them and the bedroom. Three bell-shaped pistols veered toward her.
“Where are they?”
She looked up at him. “Who?”
The red furred face of the hotelman puffed up fat with rage. “You have twelve hours to get yourself and those animals—those—” He was shouting in her face. She blinked.
“Mr. Lanahan, this is opium!”
The Martian’s windy voice rose to a shriek. “You’ll get thirty years in prison for this, if it takes me that long to put you there.”
“What is this?” The Akellar came in the broken door behind them.
Lanahan swung around. The Styth walked into their midst. The three guns swiveled from Paula to the bigger target. He ignored them. To Lanahan he said, “You’re bothering her. Leave her alone.”
The Martian said, stiff, “I don’t exactly think you—”
“Put your hands up!” a policeman cried.
The Akellar got Lanahan by the wrist and swung him around between him and the gunman, one hand on his collar and one on his arm. Paula stood where she was. She glanced at the bedroom door. The police backed up, their guns pointed at their chief’s belly.
“Mr. Lanahan—”
“Do as he says—” Lanahan stood up on his toes, his arm twisted up behind him.
“Out,” the Akellar said.
The police backed out the door. The Styth lifted Lanahan in big steps toward the threshold. He said, “Don’t talk back, nigger, it’s painful, see? See?” Lanahan screeched. The Akellar thrust him out the door. Paula went up beside the Styth to look out to the corridor. Lanahan sagged down on his knees, cradling his hand to his chest. He sobbed, his face gray with pain. The policemen stood around him. The Akellar lifted the door back onto its tracks and slammed it shut.
Sril came up to them. “I’m glad you’re here. Ketac has fallen out in her bed.” Bakan stood in the bedroom doorway.
“Go back to the trap. We’d better leave. I was getting a little tired of this Planet anyway.”
Paula went into her bedroom. Ketac lay sprawled on his face on her bed. The Akellar came after her.
“You can’t free slaves, you see? They just forget who they are and make trouble.” He sat on the edge of the bed and shook his son. “Wake up, crumb.”
“They aren’t slaves. We don’t keep slaves.”
Ketac was limp as rope. If he was awake, he gave no evidence. The Akellar said, “They talk like slaves. They work like slaves. The difference is when they get old and sick you don’t take care of them.” He heaved his son up across his shoulders.
She followed him out to the front room. Ketac’s head and arms hung down his father’s back. She gathered up the opium heater and the straw and piled them into the crook of the big man’s arm. “You have a diplomatic license and I don’t.”
“Will you be safe here?”
“Yes.”
“I won’t leave you here if you’re going to have trouble.”
She raised her head, smarting. “How did I ever get along without you?”
He started to say something. Instead he left, angling his child’s long legs through the door.
The cruise ship’s corridor was just wide enough for one person. Paula held her suitcase awkwardly before her, reading the numbers on the brown sliding doors on either side. At 113, she knocked.
“Who is it?” Bunker called, inside, and she pushed the door back and went in.
Two stacks of beds filled the little stateroom. Bunker sat on the end of the near lower shelf, his shirt off. A medic in a white coat was pasting sensors to his chest. Paula threw her bags on the upper bed. The phony gravity held her feet down to the floor as if she had glue on her shoes. She looked curiously at Bunker.
“How was it?”
The medic said, “Breathe in, Browne.”
Bunker inhaled. She wondered if he ever told his real name to strangers. “Interesting. I’ve never been in a deep-space ship before.” The medic made notes in a notepad.
“Are you Paula Mendoza?”
“Yes.”
“I’m supposed to give you a physical.”
Paula sat down on the lower bed opposite Bunker. She took off her jacket, unsnapped the pocket, and pulled out a piece of paper, which she gave to Bunker. She said, “You look pale.”
“He’s anemic,” the medic said. “Free fall and rich atmosphere.”
“You were in free fall on Ybix? What was it like?”
Bunker was reading the rough draft of the agreement. “This is solid check. Mendoza, I don’t know how you did it.” He folded up the paper and gave it back to her.
“He’s getting what he wants.”
“He’s getting what he thinks he wants. We get what we need.”
Paula looked around the room. There were no ports. The walls were covered in textured beige plastic. It was smaller than the bath at the Nineveh. The medic put his computer on the bed and gave Bunker a towel to wash the sensor paste off his chest. Paula pulled her shirt off over her head. She turned her back to the medic.
“Did you get to know any of the crew?”
“All the ones inboard.” Bunker put on his shirt. He stood and pulled a ring in the beige wall, and a panel opened out. The medic held something cold against her back. Bunker said, “Some of them are real compulsives.”
“Is he honest?” She glanced over her shoulder at the medic.
“Yes. Breathe in.”
She breathed deep. Bunker took a small film can from the shelf in the wall. Paula reached for it. The medic thumped her back. The end of a strip of film stuck out of the can. She pulled out half a roll of pictures. The first several frames were exteriors of a kite-shaped spaceship. On its metal back was painted a black three-pointed star.
The door rattled under a rapid knock. “Who is it?” Bunker said, and Jefferson came in, squeezing sideways through the door.
“Well, Richard, you look fit.”
Paula held up photographs of a spherical room. “What’s this?”
“The bridge.”
“They let you go all over the ship? Hello, Jefferson.”
Jefferson slid between the medic and Bunker and sat down on the bed beside Paula. The medic’s fingers pressed gently under Paula’s jaw. He felt along her shoulder.
“You’re tense, relax.”
Jefferson unbuttoned the front of her suit. The frilly blouse underneath made her breast look a yard wide.
