time and radio the home company about your position on the matter.” His smile was sunlight on the cold edge of his voice. “They may give me a little more flexibility in making an offer.…” He bowed.
Chaim stood up, goaded by an indefinable unease: he sat down again abruptly.
Siamang glanced back, pulling on his suit. “You stay here, Red. Finish your interview. You'd just slow me up. I don't intend to spend any more time out in that open air than I have to.” He bowed again courteously to Sekka- Olefin, and left the room.
Dartagnan listened to the odd shuffling of unaccustomed footsteps recede, and swore under his breath, with pain and frustration. He lifted the camera again, compulsively, protective coloration. Through the lens he saw Olefin shake his head, hand up, and reach to pour himself another drink. Chaim let the camera drop, irritated, but relieved to see that the prospector wasn't drinking this one down like the others. There was plenty of time for an interview: with the communications time-lag, Siamang wouldn't be back for at least three kiloseconds.
Olefin grinned. “A little loosens tongues, and makes life easier; a lot loosens brains, and makes it hell. I try to draw the line.… Fall was worse than you care to admit, wasn't it? Where does it hurt? … maybe I ought to have a look at that ankle.” He stood up.
Dartagnan leaned back against the cold wall, laughed once. “Ask me where it doesn't hurt! Black and blue and green all over.… Thanks, but you'd have to cut off my boot, by now, and it's the only one I've got. Doesn't matter, we'll be back in normal gee soon and it won't give me any trouble. I just have to get the job done now—” He winced as Olefin's fingers probed along his ankle.
“Job comes before everything, even you, huh? So you're a corporate flak.…” Olefin's fist rapped the sole of his boot, “Siamang's man?”
“I'm—hoping to be!” Dartagnan muttered, through clenched teeth. “So when he tells me to jump, I don't ask why, or how … I just ask, ‘Is this high enough?’”
“You won't be doing much jumping for a while, for anybody. Got a sprain, maybe a fracture.” The green- brown eyes studied him, amused; he wondered exactly what was funny. Olefin went back to pick his drink off a dusty shelf. “Don't think I could stand to work for anybody else. Comes from being raised among the idle rich, I suppose.…”
“You don't have to be rich, believe me.” Dartagnan settled on an elbow, and the cot creaked.
Olefin looked at him, the rough brows rose.
He smiled automatically. “My father was a prospector. Rock poor, to the day he died … just when he'd finally found something big, or so he claimed.” Establish a rapport with the subject, get a better interview.…
“That right? What was his name?” An encouraging interest showed on Olefin's face.
“Dartagnan—Gamal Dartagnan.”
“Yeah, I knew him—” Olefin nodded at his drink. “Didn't know he had a son. Only talked to him four or five times.”
“You and me both. He took me out with him, though. Just before the last trip he made.”
“That's right … heard about his accident. Very sorry to hear it.”
Chaim shifted his weight. “They called it an accident.”
Olefin sat down, said carefully, “Are you saying you don't think it was?”
He shrugged. “My father'd been prospecting for a long time. He knew enough not to make a mistake that big. And it seemed a little coincidental to me that a corporation just happened to be right there to pick up his find.”
“Somebody had to get there first—” Sekka-Olefin shook his head. “I suppose in your line of work you don't see the best side of corporation policy. But not many stoop to that kind of thing; that would be suicide, if it ever got out. Maybe his instruments went out; accidents happen, people make mistakes … space doesn't give you a second chance.”
Dartagnan nodded, looking down. “Maybe so. Maybe that is what happened. I suppose you'd know the truth if anybody would—you play both sides of the game.… He held that damned junkheap together with frozen spit —”
Olefin sipped his drink, expressionless. “What made you decide to quit prospecting to become a mediaman?”
Dartagnan wondered suddenly who was interviewing whom. “Prospecting. Maybe I didn't know when I was well off.”
“But now it's too late.”
He wasn't sure whether it was a question or a moral judgment. “Not if I make good in this job.…”
Olefin nodded, at something. “How'd you like another long-term job instead?”
Chaim sat up, not hiding his eagerness. “Doing what—prospecting?”
“Conducting a media campaign.”
Dartagnan slumped forward, oddly disappointed. “That's—a hell of a compliment, from a total stranger. Are you sure you mean it? And what kind of a campaign—what are you planning to sell?”
“Planet Two.”
Dartagnan sat up straight again. “What?”
“The colonizing of Planet Two from the Demarchy.”
“Let's forget about that thing for a while—” Olefin shook his head. “I'll talk to it all you want, if you accept the job. But hear me out, before you type me as a crank.”
Chaim grinned sheepishly. “Whatever you say.” He toyed with the lens, aiming it where it lay; he jammed the trigger ON. A sound pierced his left eardrum, barely audible even to him, at the extreme upper end of the register. He gambled that Olefin's hearing wasn't good enough to pick it up.
Olefin laughed, sobered. “How many megaseconds would you estimate Heaven Belt has left?”
Dartagnan looked at him blankly. “Before what?”
“Before civilization collapses entirely; before we all join the hundred million people who died right after the Civil War.”
Dartagnan remembered Mecca City, a manmade geode in the heart of the rock, towers like crystal growths in every imaginable shading of jewel color. He tried to imagine it as a place of death, and failed. “I don't know about the scavengers back in the Main Belt, but I don't see any reason why the Demarchy can't go on forever, just like it always has.”
“Don't you? … No. I suppose you don't. Nobody does. I suppose they don't want to face the inevitability of death. And who am I to blame them?”
“We all have to die someday.”
“But who really believes that? Maybe the fact that Esso was wiped out by the war, the fact that I was squandering literally the last of the family fortune, made me see it so clearly: that humanity's existence here has a finite end; and that end's in sight. Speaking of making mistakes, we made a hell of a big one—the Civil War—and one mistake in Heaven and you're damned forever. Damned dead.…
“Existing in an asteroid belt depends entirely on an artificial ecosystem. Everything that's vital for life, we have to process or make ourselves—air, water, food; everything. But like any other ecosystem—more than most— you destroy enough of it, and nothing that's left can survive for long. It has to retreat, or die. Back in the Solar Belt they had Earth to retreat to, if they needed it, where everything necessary for life happened naturally. But at the time Heaven was colonized, this hadn't happened to them, so they didn't foresee the need. When the old Belters colonized this system, they figured that the raw elements—the ores and the minerals, the frozen gases around Discus—were all they had to have. Never occurred to anyone that sometime they wouldn't be able to process them.
“But that's what happened. Most of the capital industry in Heaven was destroyed during the war. What we've got left is barely adequate, and there's no way we can expand or even replace it. Hell, the Ringers are hardly surviving now, and if they go under I don't know how our own distilleries are going to make it.… How good are you at holding your breath?”
Dartagnan laughed uneasily. “But—” He groped for a rebuttal, found his mind empty, like his sudden vision of
