Fortunately, it didn’t last long, and soon the car resumed its journey. After many turns and much high-speed coupling and uncoupling, the car slowed and stopped again. Something grabbed it in a solid grip, and the hatch clamps rang like hammers. As Meewee was unbuckling his harness, there was a burst of electronic static, and an unfamiliar female voice said, “Please state your name and what business you have here.” It struck Meewee as an amazing utterance, because it was an ID challenge that meant exactly the same thing in both English and Starkese. Until that moment he hadn’t been aware that such phrases existed.
Meewee thought it prudent to reply in Starkese
Recruitment Day
Others might have seen it as a demotion to a station in life that, incredibly, was lower than regular john duty. And that was how Fred first saw it when Ajax, the John Union mentar, informed him of his transfer to the night shift. He didn’t complain. He went along with it in part to spite Mary through self-debasement. Or at least, that was what he accused himself of doing. You bet I’m a new person, he’d tell her. I’m a graveyard-shift john!
And so, Fred left the morgue crew. He reported to his first 1:00 A.M. shift and was assigned to Node B5 at the Chicago Inter-Tube Port. It didn’t take long for him to realize that he had arrived at an unexpected oasis. First, the hangarlike node was an exclusion zone, which meant that all the hungry media bees hounding him were left at the door.
Second, Fred was the only human at the node. He swiped in as the swing-shift john swiped out, and the sixty-acre site was his alone to manage till 10:00 A.M. He didn’t have to deal with people at all. His job was to oversee midem-controlled Node B5 machines. Machines that didn’t actually need any such human oversight. Fred mostly stayed out of their way as they intercepted up to fifteen hundred van freighters per hour for gamma-ray inspection.
The machines were so clever that they rarely malfed, and when they did, they hardly needed a john to tell them how to self-repair. The CITP node operated twenty-five scanner tunnels that towed freighters through in both directions while inventorying and analyzing everything inside them. Whenever the midems found something of interest, which was rare, they alerted the hommers themselves. Fred’s whole responsibility, it seemed, was to be there — just in case. The machines were so quiet that even when working at full speed of one freighter per tunnel/minute, the large bustling space was hushed. And Fred’s endless, pointless, rambling rounds were downright meditative. After only a few shifts, he was actually looking forward to coming to work.
Fred’s demotion to Graveyard Johnny threw Fred’s and Mary’s schedules completely out of sync, and they saw little of each other over the next few weeks. But even this seemed to be a blessing in disguise.
AT 3:07 A.M., during a moderately busy shift, the Node B5 tranquility was shattered by a throat-ripping, nerve-scraping screech of metal. Fred stopped short and turned toward the sound. Lane 6 was shutting down, and its traffic was shunted to 7 and 8. A major transport plate had cracked its frictionless coating and tore up itself and a dozen more plates before grinding to a halt.
As the rest of the facility hummed along as usual, Fred went to check out the damage. His visor cap painted the interior of the hub with field and radiation overlays, and he threaded his way along the bluest shadows along his route.
The special repair ’beitors were hefty brutes in their own right. Two of them straddled Lane 6. One was lifting a section of scanner tunnel while the second replaced slide plates beneath it. The intact sections of tunnel were locked down; their radiation count was cool blue. Fred stepped inside one of these for a better view of the repair work. It was the most excitement he’d seen all week.
After a half hour of machine Zen, Fred noticed a buzzing underneath his feet. The radiation count was no longer blue; it had crept up the scale to turquoise, which meant the node midem was spinning up the gamma-ray scanner for the section he was still inside.
“Hey, B5, a warning would be nice,” he said and didn’t wait for a reply — the interior of the tunnel had risen to lime yellow, on its way to orange, and orange meant hard rads — but when he stepped onto the catwalk to exit, he was startled to find someone blocking his way. A man, apparently, short and broad, in a hazmat suit. Through the facemask the man had the flattened-nose-in-panty-hose look of a tugger, but he was only about half a TUG in size. He pointed a standstill wand at Fred, and when Fred recovered from his surprise, he turned to glance at the other end of the catwalk. There was a second mini-tugger stationed there as well.
“Uh, B5, this is an emergency,” he said, but his radio received only digital dropout in reply. By then the tunnel interior was solid orange. This time, Fred did have a pocket billy on him, not the best defense against a standstill wand, but better than a spot welder. He fetched it from his pocket, but before he could flip it open, another squat figure in hazmat gear entered the tunnel.
“Stand down, Commander,” she said.
“Veronica TUG?” Fred was mystified. He was unable to match the familiar voice to her diminished figure.
“Veronica, yes, but no longer TUG.”
“I see, and as you can see, I’m no longer a commander.” He pinched the material of his johnboy jumpsuit. “And this suit isn’t rated for sunbathing. So, step aside.” He made an attempt to go around her, but her man waved the wand in front of his face.
“Listen, Londenstane,” Veronica said reasonably, “the sooner I say my piece, the sooner we can all leave. The little bit of burn you suffer as a result you can soak away in a tank. Your visorcap is protecting your brain, so can we please move on? We have a lot of ground to cover and not much time.”
But Fred flipped his pocket billy open. “That’s easy for you to say, protected in those hazmat suits.”
“We’re not wearing these for radiation, though I admit that’s a side benefit. These are so we can meet with the most heavily surveilled person on the planet without anyone putting us closer to him than a hundred kilometers. We suited up inside a null room far from here, after a thorough purge, which means that as long as we’re inside these suits, we’re outside the nitwork. Meanwhile, your own spybots are frying, so we can speak with complete security. It’s time for you to pay down your debt to us, and I’m here to tell you how.”
It all made perfect sense in a paranoid sort of way. Meanwhile, the tunnel was turning orange-red, on its way to doing serious damage. Fred pocketed his billy. “So, get on with it already.”
“That’s the spirit.”
“But first tell me why I should even listen to you. My debt is to the TUGs, and you say you’re no longer a TUG.”
“Don’t misinterpret my change of uniform. What we discuss here has everything to do with your debt to us. I’m sure I can convince you of that if you’d like.”
Fred shook his head.
“Good. We need your help up at Trailing Earth where the Oships are being provisioned.”
“What kind of help?”
“We want you to take charge of one of the transshipment docks.”
“What for? Smuggling contraband?”
“You have a problem with that?”
Fred grinned. “As a john, no. In case you haven’t been paying attention, Applied People doesn’t hire me for russ duty anymore.”
“They’ll hire you for this, Commander. With all the labor turmoil going on up there, russies are transferring off the station in droves. Nicholas can’t replace them fast enough. Your type seems to have met its match, the dreaded Capias World donalds, and the situation is jamming up our operation. We feel confident that Applied People will not only hire you to go, but they’ll probably give you a signing bonus. Plus, they’ll be thrilled to keep you out of media reach for a while.”
“The media would just follow me up there.”
“Not likely. There are no free media at Trailing Earth. It’s a corporate station, so there’s limited access and
