not ready for marriage, Don. I don’t want to hurt you, but you simply aren’t. Look me up, Don, in a few years.”
“Di! Just a couple of hours this afternoon.” He was desperate.
Dian Keramikou looked him full in the face and said, “Colin Casey finally died of his burns and wounds this morning. The President has asked for five minutes of silence at two o’clock. Don, I plan to spend that time here alone in my apartment, possibly crying a few tears for a man who died for me and the rest of the human race under such extreme conditions of gallantry that he was awarded the highest honor of which man has ever conceived. I wouldn’t want to spend that five minutes while on a date with another member of my race’s armed forces who had deserted his post of duty.”
Don Mathers turned, after the screen had gone blank and walked stiffly back to the bar. He got up on the stool again and called flatly to Harry, “Another tequila. A double tequila. And don’t bother with that lime and salt routine.”
II
By evening he was drenched, as the expression went these days. When Harry had closed the Nuevo Mexico at two o’clock, in memory of Colin Casey, Don Mathers had summoned a hovercab and dialed the hi-rise apartment house where he quartered himself in Center City.
He took one of the vacuum elevators up to the 45th floor and staggered to his mini-apartment. A mini- apartment was all he could afford on his sublieutenant’s pay. In fact, he shouldn’t have afforded that. He could have stayed considerably cheaper, living in bachelor’s quarters on the base. But in the last year he had become so fed up with the Space Service that he preferred to stay away from any contact whenever he could. Besides, he’d had high hopes of Dian capitulating to him, with or without marriage, and wanted a place to be able to bring her.
She was a strange one, he had long since decided, when it came to sex matters. So far as he knew, she was a virgin, in an age where it was no longer considered necessary or even very sensible to remain one after your mid- teens; though of recent date there had been somewhat of a swing of the pendulum in that regard, a newly swelling Victorianism, a return to the old virtues. Don Mathers supposed that it was a result of the Kraden threat and the possibility of human annihilation. The Universal Reformed Church was said to be growing in all but a geometric progression.
His identity screen picked him up, upon his approach, and the door automatically opened.
He entered the apartment and looked about distastefully. Wasn’t it bad enough spending weeks at a time in a One Man Scout to have to return to quarters as small as this automated mini-apartment? Functional it might be, attractive it was not. A living room-cum-bedroom-cum study. A so-called kitchenette with small dining alcove; so- called because he never utilized it for more than making coffee. A small bath. Most of the furniture built in, very neatly, very efficiently.
He stripped off his uniform and hung it in the closet and brought forth civilian garb and redressed. The SPs, the Space Police, took a dim view of any spaceman, even an officer pilot, being seen in public intoxicated, and Don Mathers was already drenched and had every intention of getting more so. Everything and its cousin was going wrong. Dian was leaving tomorrow for the ridiculous job on the Jupiter satellite, Callisto. He was on the commodore’s S-list and most likely would be on it in capital letters shortly, because the fact of the matter was he was rapidly getting to the point where he couldn’t bear the space patrols. Sooner or later, Bernklau was going to insist on a psych on him. Then the fat would really be in the fire, because under a psych they broke you down completely, entirely, and when they did that the medicos were going to find out that Don Mathers, for some time, had been planning on desertion.
In actuality, he would have gone over the hill long since had he been able to figure out some method of swinging it. In this day of International, actually Interplanetary, Data Banks, it wasn’t the simplest thing in the world to try and disappear and take up a new identity. With Solar System wide unity, you couldn’t run to some country where they wouldn’t extradite you. And, for another thing, you simply couldn’t survive without a Universal Credit Card. Money, as known in the past, was non-existent. Everything, but everything, was bought with your credit card. When you
And for still another thing, every bit of information about you since your day of birth was in the data banks, on your Dossier Complete. Hell, before your birth. They also had complete rundowns on not only your parents, but— according to your age-usually your grandparents as well.
Of course, theoretically he could take off to some remote spot, and there were few enough left in the world, and live a hermit’s life. He could become a present day Robinson Crusoe. Theoretically. But that life didn’t seem a particularly attractive prospect.
However, he was checking out an alternative. There were some areas, for instance the Amazon basin in what was formerly called Brazil, which were now being developed in an all-out manner. It was said to be chaotic there. Everything fouled up. He was investigating the possibilities of getting down there and assuming a new identity. Possible? Maybe.
But now, immediately, he had three weeks before him to supposedly recuperate from his last patrol, even though he had spent only a fraction of it in space.
He could have done his additional drinking right here in his mini-apartment. His small autobar would have supplied him with all the ersatz guzzle he could dial. But he didn’t want that. He didn’t want to be completely alone after even, only five days of patrol. He wanted people around, even though they didn’t talk to him, associate with him. He just wanted them around. As a matter of fact, he didn’t particularly want companionship, save that of Dian Keramikou. In his present state of mind. He wanted to suffer in silence.
He had lied to Harry Amanroder, in the Nuevo Mexico. He wasn’t particularly short financially. He had put his drinks on the cuff so that he could hold onto enough pseudo-dollar credit to show Dian a really big time. He had planned to take her to the Far-Out Room, located in the biggest hotel in Center City, and blow her to the finest spread possible. No whale steak, no synthetics. The real thing. From hors d’oeuvres to real fruit for dessert.
But now he planned to blow it on more guzzle.
And not in this building, either. There were several dozen bars, nightclubs and restaurants in the high-rise and he had, in his time, been in all of them. But not tonight. Tonight, he wanted to pub crawl, and preferably in the cheapest areas of town. Why, he didn’t know, but he felt like slums, or the nearest thing to them the present world had to offer.
One automated bar faded into another. He seldom had more than one drink in any of them. He would sprawl at an empty table, put his Universal Credit Card in the payment slot and dial a tequila, or whatever. By this time he was mixing his drinks and feeling them to the point where he usually had to close one eye to be able to dial.
It was well into the night when the fog rolled out of his brain and he realized that he was zig-zag-ging down the street without remembering the last bar he had been in. He tried to concentrate. Had it been that one where the garish looking girl, or rather woman, had tried to pick him up? The place with the overly loud, harsh canned music and the overly loud, harsh crowd of drunks? He couldn’t remember. He had blacked out, somewhere along the line. He was going to have to get to a metro station and take the vacuum tube back to his apartment house. If he passed out on the street and was thrown in the drunk Nick, they’d turn him over to the Space Police when they learned his identity and then he
And suddenly he was confronted by three men in the uniforms of Space Platform privates. In the Space Service those who manned the heavily armed Space Platforms which orbited not only Earth but Luna, Mars and the colonized satellites as well, were the low men on the totem pole. Of all the elements in the service, theirs was the least glamorous, the most undesirable. In a way, the platforms were something Like the Foreign Legion forts in the Sahara, a couple of centuries earlier. The space cafard incidence was high, particularly in view of the fact that a tour of duty lasted six months. Six months confined to a Space Platform! Most spacemen shuddered at the idea.
But now, here were three of them. And they stood there, blocking the way of Don Mathers. They averaged about his own build and they, too, were somewhat drenched, though not nearly as far gone as Don.
Two of them carried what appeared to be improvised truncheons, the other, the largest of them, had his fists balled.
