Medusa: A Tiger by the Tail

He looked them over, smiled, then handed them back.

“Well, it’s easy to see why. They departed on the eighteenth—that was yesterday.”

I was thunderstruck, and for a moment my self-control failed. I hadn’t slept a few hours, I’d slept almost a day and a half on that city roof!

I must have looked really crushed—as I was—because the government man said, “You’re going to have some problems, huh?”

I nodded, thinking as fast as I could. “Yes, sir. I’m pretty new here, and while I just was told by my boss to get these things down here, when I come back with them and they see the wrong date it won’t be my sergeant who gets the blame. Discipline’s pretty rough up here, too.”

He seemed genuinely touched. “Give me your card.”

“Sir?”

“I said, give me your card. Let me see what I can do.”

I was afraid he was going to call me in and try and square a nonexistent mission with an unknown superior, but I had no choice. I did, however, eye the exit. I was outside the city here, and all I really needed was some running room. Unfortunately, I was also in the most heavily monitored type of buildings on Medusa—since it was exposed to the outside—and one connected to live evaluators with automatic rifles all over the place. If I made a run for the door now they’d hit the alarm; if I stood here, I was prcbably trapped. The only thing I could think of was to let this scene run its course and take a last-gasp chance at a panic escape when the right time came.

The man was back from a small office in a couple of minutes and he was smiling as he handed back my card. “I think we can arrange for you to complete your mission, Monitor. I’ll square things with your superior, since you’re not due back on duty until 0800 tomorrow anyway.” He winked. “Nobody will ever know, huh?”

I was thunderstruck. “Then you’ll take the papers with you to Centrum and see that they’re delivered?”

“Oh, my, no. I’m not going to Centrum, unfortunately. But there’s plenty of room on the shuttle, and I’ve logged you as my guest as far as Centrum, with a return on the morning flight. The trip is still going to cost you some money you probably don’t” have—Centrum’s not cheap—but you’ll get there and back and be able to deposit your papers with no one the wiser at your end, since I’ve cleared it on my personal assurance.”

I could hardly believe this. “You mean you want me to come with you?”

He nodded. “And better hurry. We’re about to board. Well? How about it?”

I considered his offer. Out there was freedom. The shuttle meant new dangers, and I was probably too late to do much anyway, even if I could find them. Still, I’d come this far, and this seemed the only sensible thing to do under the circumstances, so I nodded. “All right, sir—and thanks.”

Of course, the question I had weighed was not that hard to answer. Nobody, and I mean nobody, has this kind of luck. When too many things keep going right, you just have to know you’re being had. I don’t know whose bodies they’d found, or where my slip had come, but somebody had gotten a lot of laughs at seeing me do my routine, knowing all the while that I was a day late and didn’t realize it.

Obviously escape was out. They’d never let me make the door, and it would be a very uncomfortable ride. It seemed to me that going along with things would at least bring me close to Ching and Hono, even if very dangerously, and I was still, not without resources.

The shuttle was the same comfortable craft I remembered, only now there were only the two government bureaucats and myself aboard. The takeoff was smooth and effortless, although not without the press of many gravities into the soft foam seats and the unsettling but thrilling feeling when the boost was cut off.

“Dunecal, next stop, five minutes,” the speaker said crisply. “Remain in your seats and strapped in at all times.” That surprised me, since I’d assumed we were going directly to Centrum, where my welcoming committee would be waiting. But, sure enough, we descended smoothly and were soon in Dunecal, mam city of the central continent, and my benefactor’s destination. He wished me well, and departed, acting for all the world as if he had no idea who or what I really was—and he may not have known, I reflected.

“Loading passengers now,” the speaker announced. “Centrum next stop.”

I thought about jumping ship at this point, but there seemed no purpose to it. I was hooked and was being reeled in slowly for the amusement of whatever sportsman was on the other end.

Three passengers boarded at Dunecal, a man and woman in government black and another young woman whose looks were so startlingly different I almost had to stare.

Women on Medusa were no beauties. Oh, once you got used to them they were fine, but all were chunky, and had a masculine muscularity about them. There was, after all, a chance that anybody could flip from one sex to the other and so the average person was a bit of both, really. I had frankly almost forgotten the difference between normal human and Medusan females until this young woman came on.

She was certainly Medusan—her casual clothes would not have been sufficient protection for anybody else— but, then again, she wasn’t. Her olive skin looked far softer than the tough hide we all took for granted. She was built as few women I’d met were built and had mastered all the right sexy moves. She also had a sweet, sexy smile on her very pretty face and her hair was longer than normal and light brown—the first of such a color I’d ever seen on Medusa, and one I’d rarely seen anywhere else, for that matter.

“Take that seat and strap in, Tix,” the man instructed.

She smiled. “Oh, yes, my lord,” she said in a childish-sounding yet sexy voice, and did as instructed. I noticed she never stopped smiling and just about never took her eyes off him. The other two strapped themselves in and the man noticed me staring at the young woman.

“Never seen a Goodtime Girl before, huh?” he called out conversationally.

I shook my head. “No, sir. I’m from Gray Basin, and we don’t see any there.”

“I daresay,” he answered with pride. “You just arrest ’em and send ’em to us and we make ’em.” He chuckled at that.

I responded with a smile I didn’t feel. There was something creepy about Tix, something unnatural.

I’d heard mentions of Goodtime Girls, of course. Everybody had. Entertainers, consorts, concubines, and a little of everything else, it was said—mostly for the entertainment and gratification of the bigwigs. But nobody I had ever talked to had actually seen one, or really knew anything about them except that theirs was a different kind of job. I always wondered why, on a planet ninety-percent female, there weren’t Goodtime Boys.

The man proved chatty. Either he, too, was ignorant of who I was or he was putting on a mighty fine act. I gave him my cover story, with the truth when explaining what I was. doing on the shuttle. He seemed to accept it.

Goodtime Girls, it seemed, weren’t employees, they were slaves. Oh, he didn’t call Tix that, but it was clear that all the euphemisms were stand-ins for the word “slave.” They had been convicted of crimes against the state and sentenced to Ultimate Demotion. Most UDs, as he called them, were sent off to the mines of Momrath’s moons, but a few were selected and turned into Goodtime Girls by expert psychs in the government’s Criminal Division. “Some of ’em are real artists,” he told me proudly. “You wouldn’t believe what Tix looked like before they worked on her.”

“There are no Goodtime Boys?” I couldn’t resist asking.

He shook his head from side to side. “Nope. Something in the process having to do with our little buggers the Wardens. When they remove the psyche or whatever it is they take out, the subject’s invariably locked in as female.” He gave a leer in Tix’s direction, and she nearly shivered with delight. “Not that I mind that a bit.”

I had to repress the urge to shiver. In all the barbaric acts of mankind, the worst was certainly abject slavery, and probably the worst of the worst was to create willing, natural slaves with a psych guide and a pysch machine. The system seemed terribly perverted, somehow, as well as downright crazy. Why have slaves on a world where robots were happily employed? The only possible answer was instant ego-gratification for the kind of mentality that worshiped only power. This guy had been “given” Tix by the government for doing such wonderful work and reaching a government grade level that warranted a Goodtime Girl. He took her with him as a highly visible status symbol, and because he got his jollies having a personal slave to order about. It was the ultimate reflection of the sickness of this society, I thought sadly. What kind of a place was it that was run by people who had psych-created fawning slaves the way influential people in other societies owned great gems or great works of art?

I repressed a sudden urge to kill the fellow and his companion right then and there, and maybe the Goodtime