“Right,” Carpenter said.
There was no way of refusing. The sudden alteration of the program was strange, yes. If Farkas wanted him along with him for his chat with Olmo, he should have told him that last night. But they were a team; this morning was the critical time; aside from Jolanda’s uneasiness, Carpenter had no reason to believe that the man who had recruited him for this enterprise was summoning him now to some sort of betrayal. Farkas said he was needed; Carpenter had no option but to go.
Still—even so—
Carpenter showered and dressed quickly. He felt alert and keyed up, now, but before he left the room he swallowed one of Jolanda’s hyperdexes. The stimulant would make him that much sharper: give him a little extra edge, if anything unusual began to happen. Carpenter tucked the other two pills into his shirt pocket. He had brought a light sleeveless woolen vest along on the trip, because he had heard that the air on a space habitat was kept at a temperature cooler than he was accustomed to; he pulled the vest on now, not so much because he was chilly as to keep the pills from falling out of his pocket if he leaned forward.
The only way he knew of getting to Spoke D was to go down to the hub, change spokes, and ride the elevator back up. It seemed to him that there were connectors in midspoke, but no one had told him anything about how to use them.
At this hour the Valparaiso Nuevo day was already in full swing. People were bustling around everywhere. The place was like a gigantic airline terminal, Carpenter thought, that knew neither day nor night, and functioned under artificial illumination twenty-four hours a day. Except the main source of illumination here wasn’t artificial. It was supplied by the adjacent solar body, which also functioned twenty-four hours a day, hanging right up there in the sky available for use at all times.
The up-spoke elevator was marked with exits. When the one labeled EL MIRADOR came up, Carpenter stepped off and looked around for the central plaza. Signs directed him. He came in a few minutes to a curiously quaint cobblestoned expanse, with open-air cafes lining its border. It was all like fairyland, this place, an unreal world. But of course it
Carpenter caught sight of Farkas at once, across the way, standing out from the others in the plaza like an elephant in a herd of sheep. He went to him.
Farkas was alone.
“Olmo not here yet?” Carpenter asked.
“We are having our discussion with him in the outer shell of the satellite,” said Farkas. “It is the only safe place to talk of such things: entirely outside the pickups of the Generalissimo’s sonic detection system.”
That sounded very odd to Carpenter, a conference in the outer shell. He began to worry again. Perhaps an even finer edge would be a good idea. As Farkas led him toward a doorway in the wall behind the cafe, Carpenter reached under his sweater, pulled out another of the hyperdex pills, and popped it into his mouth.
He crunched it between his teeth and forced himself to swallow it. Carpenter had never taken a hyperdex that way before, straight, no water: the taste was amazingly bitter. He had never taken one hyperdex right on top of another before, either, and he felt himself lighting up almost immediately, entering into an almost manic mode. He wanted to run, to leap, to swing from treetops. That was a little frightening, that sense of becoming unhinged; but he felt, along with it, a potent sensation of heightened awareness, of quickened reflex, such as was completely new to him. Whatever surprises Farkas might be planning for him in the space satellite’s outer shell, Carpenter was confident he would be ready to deal with them.
“In here,” Farkas said.
He opened the door in the wall, and beckoned Carpenter to go ahead of him.
Carpenter peered through the door into a realm of darkness.
“I won’t know what I’m bumping into in there,” he said. “You’re the one with the trick vision, Farkas. You go first.”
“As you wish. Follow me, then.”
They entered the shell. The bright and cheery plaza of El Mirador vanished behind them. They were in the dreary behind-the-scenes carapace of Valparaiso Nuevo now, the dark, secret skin of the satellite.
Once inside, Carpenter realized that the place wasn’t entirely dark: there was a narrow catwalk just to his left, illuminated in a sparse way by a row of antique-looking incandescent bulbs set into the low ceiling, giving the merest possible glimmer of yellow light. As his hyperdex-augmented vision adjusted to the dimness, Carpenter saw piles of black slag, ballast of some sort for the satellite, he supposed, heaped here and there, and what looked like golf carts, probably for the use of maintenance people. Beyond was a zone of complete blackness, dark as space itself.
There was barely room for Carpenter to stand upright. Farkas appeared to be maintaining a half-crouching posture. Deeper in, the ceiling seemed even lower.
He and Farkas were all alone in here.
“Where’s your friend Olmo?” Carpenter asked. “Late for our little appointment?”
“He is just ahead,” said Farkas. “You don’t see him? No. But with my trick vision, as you put it, I have no difficulty making him out, standing right over there.”
There was no one in here but the two of them. Carpenter was totally certain of that.
So there was going to be trouble. He took the third hyperdex from his shirt pocket, conveyed it to his mouth, chewed it and swallowed it.
It was like a bomb going off in his head.
Farkas said, “What are you doing?”
“I don’t see Olmo,” said Carpenter. “Or anybody else.” His words came out slurred. His voice sounded to him as though he were speaking in an echo chamber.
“No. In fact Olmo isn’t here.”
“I didn’t think so.”
“Indeed,” Farkas said. “It is just you and me, here. Tell me something, now. You are still in the pay of Samurai Industries, are you not, Carpenter?”
“Are you crazy?”
“Answer me. You are spying on us for Samurai, yes or no.”
“No. What kind of bullshit is this?”
“I think you are lying,” Farkas said.
“If I were still working for Samurai,” said Carpenter, speaking terribly slowly, sounding as slow as a robot whose charge was running down, making an effort to keep his voice intelligible as the third hyperdex unloaded its full impact on his nervous system, “would I be mixed up in a wild scheme like this one?”
Instead of replying, Farkas pivoted, knelt, came up with something from the ground in his hand—a jagged lump of slag, maybe?—and swung it in a level arc toward Carpenter’s head. But the hyperdex was doing its work. Carpenter was prepared for some sort of attack; and, the moment it came, he moved back and to one side, easily outpacing Farkas’s movements, so that Farkas’s arm moved futilely through empty air. Carpenter heard the bigger man’s grunt of surprise and displeasure.
He jumped forward, trying to get around Farkas and return to the daylight of El Mirador. But Farkas blocked the door; and when Carpenter attempted to feint past him, Farkas simply spread his enormous arms and waited for Carpenter to run into them. Carpenter backed off. He glanced quickly over his shoulder, saw nothing but stygian gloom behind him, and backpedaled into it even though he had no idea of where he was going.
Farkas came after him.
“Keep heading that way,” Farkas said. “You’ll fall off the edge. There’s a shelf there, just before the layer of protective tailings, and then there’s a drop, and you’ll go right into the gravity well. It’s a long floating fall, but by the time you hit bottom at the rim, it’ll be Earth-one gravitation. Very messy for you.”
Was he bluffing? Carpenter had no clear idea of the geography in here. He hesitated just a moment, and Farkas lunged. The man was quick, and he was huge; but once again the triple hyperdex dose made the difference. To Carpenter, Farkas’s movements seemed ponderous, almost glacial. It was easy to avoid them. Carpenter stepped aside, catching no more than a glancing blow on his left shoulder. He heard Farkas, puzzled and angry, muttering to himself.
