chest. He wore his black hair in ringlets, tied back from a plump face glistening with sweat in the heat of the Indian sun.
“Bennett, isn’t it? Welcome to India. Please excuse the haste of my team—pressure of work, as I’m sure you’ll understand. I’m the chief of security here at the port. If you could spare ten minutes of your time, I’d like to ask a few routine questions. This is purely a formality I go through with all unscheduled landings. If you’d care to come this way.”
Touching the warm oval of the receiver in the pocket of his flight-suit, Bennett followed the perspiring security chief across the tarmac to the control tower. A ten-minute formality he hoped was all it would be; he was more than a little impatient to begin his search.
They entered a small room looking out over the port, furnished with comfortable sofas and chairs. The security chief gestured Bennett to sit, and he sank back into a ridiculously padded sofa. The officer himself elected to perch on the arm of a nearby chair, establishing a positional superiority. He glanced down at the com-board in his right hand. With his free hand he mopped his face with a red bandanna.
“You’ve come a long way, Mr Bennett.” He indicated his screen. “All the way from the Rim. Do you mind describing the nature of your flight?”
Bennett wanted nothing more than to get away from here. He would answer the questions quickly—and lie, of course.
“Exploration,” he said. “I work for the Mackendrick Foundation and I was prospecting a number of outlying systems for the usual mineral deposits.”
“Alone? Without even a co-pilot?”
“The Cobra’s a good ship,” Bennett said, and added, “and I’m a good pilot. I didn’t need a co-pilot.”
“No doubt. But you would agree with me, wouldn’t you, that solo flights so far out are a little unusual?”
Bennett shook his head. There was something about the chief of security that he didn’t like, a presumed familiarity beyond the call of duty. “I see nothing unusual in it at all. Many ships these days are flown solo.”
“Then perhaps I’m behind the times. Tell me, which systems were you prospecting on the Rim?”
“I looked at three systems in the G5 sector.”
“And you found?”
Bennett returned his stare, considering his reply. “That information is confidential and between myself and my employers.”
“Of course.” The officer waved a feigned apology. “You discovered no habitable planets?” His smile showed that the question was intended as his little joke.
Bennett played along. “Unfortunately not.”
“And you have returned to Earth for what reasons?”
“To report to my employers with my findings.”
The officer nodded, stood and moved to a com-screen on a desk in the corner of the room. He considered the screen for a minute, lips pursed.
He looked up. “My team informs me that the Cobra is programmed for a return flight to the G5 sector.”
Bennett tried not to let his surprise show. He wondered since when protocol allowed port workers, even those in security, to access the flight systems of privately owned starships.
“Well, Mr Bennett?”
“I wasn’t aware that you’d asked a question.”
A look of impatience flashed across the security chief’s face. He mopped his brow. Bennett noticed that his hand was shaking.
“Why return, Mr Bennett, if you have already prospected that system?”
“I don’t see what that information has to do with the security of Calcutta spaceport,” Bennett replied. “But for your information there are more planets in the systems to be explored.”
The officer waved a hand, it must be an interesting life, prospecting the stars.”
“It pays a wage. If that is all, I have a lot to do.”
“Why, of course, Mr Bennett. I do hope I haven’t been intrusive, but one must be vigilant. India has many enemies and one can never be too careful.” He reached into the desk and produced a small polycarbon card. “This allows you entry into India for a stay of up to three months. It is official authorisation of admittance, so please keep it about your person at all times.”
Bennett took the card and slipped it into the breast pocket of his flight-suit.
The officer held out a hand. “My apologies if I have kept you, Mr Bennett. Enjoy your stay in India. If you will make your way round the tower to the terminal building, immigration will process your card.”
Bennett shook the proffered hand, found it warm and sweat-soaked. He was aware of the man’s eyes on his back as he left the room.
He crossed the tarmac and entered the terminal building, and five minutes later he was through the checks. He crossed the foyer, bustling with the newly arrived and those come to greet them, and stepped through the sliding glass doors into the harsh sunlight of the subcontinent.
He took a taxi and they crawled down streets crowded with pedestrians, stall-holders and beggars not averse to thrusting their hands into the open window of the moving car. He closed his eyes, at least visually editing the strangeness of the country from his consciousness. The noise of the place, however, was not so easily ignored. The blare of horns set his nerves on edge, along with the cries of vendors and the occasional stentorian boom of a passing ad-screen.
He booked into a hotel close to the spaceport, drank a beer from the cooler in the room, then sat on the bed and pulled the receiver from his pocket. He stared at it for a long time, before touching the panel Hupcka had told him would activate the small screen set into the silver face of the device.
Only when the screen flashed on did Bennett realise that he’d been holding his breath. The screen was working, but there was no flashing arrow or numerical measurements to indicate the direction and distance of the softscreen. It was, he supposed, highly unlikely that he would have struck gold at first try. The screen had a range of ten kilometres. After a meal he would take a taxi and cross and re-cross the sprawling city.
If that failed, then he would reassess the situation.
He dined in the hotel restaurant—the first real meal he had eaten in weeks—then withdrew local currency on his credit card from the hotel bank. He left the building, ignored the press of beggars encamped on the steps, and boarded a taxi. He instructed the driver to take him to the city centre. There he would buy a map of Calcutta and block off the sections of the city as he searched.
He tried not to dwell on the awful possibility that the receiver might be defective.
As the taxi carried him from the hotel drive and gained speed along a busy main road, Bennett considered the events that had conspired to bring him back to Earth. The incidents on Penumbra, from the landing to his capture and subsequent escape, and his time with the rebels to the flight in the Cobra, had about them the quality of a dream. After the unspoilt vastness of Penumbra, the noisy, overcrowded streets of Calcutta seemed imminent and ultra-real. He found it hard to credit that on a distant world Mack, Ten and the rebels would be impatiently awaiting his successful return.
He pulled the receiver from his pocket, touched the control and stared at the screen. It was still blank. He watched it, expecting the arrow and numerals to appear at any second. When they did not, he took to looking away for long seconds at a time, staring through the window at the passing city, and then glancing almost surreptitiously at the screen, hoping each time to see the arrow.
The taxi was passing down narrow streets flanked by long, low lines of concrete shops, each unit open like a garage and stacked with goods: fruit and vegetables, bolts of cloth, household goods. Before most shops were beds without mattresses, dining chairs on which men sat in circles and smoked. Above each shop was a sign in Hindi, with the occasional English word appearing more alien for being misspelled. Ahead, Bennett made out the rearing polycarbon skyscrapers of central Calcutta, shimmering in the midday sun.
He was considering the daunting possibility of having to search the whole of India for the softscreen when he glanced down at the receiver and, to his disbelief, saw a flashing arrow, and beneath it the distance in jade green: 9 kilometres, 500 metres, and counting down.
The arrow was pointing in the direction of the city centre. He experienced a surge of relief, followed by a warning to himself that it couldn’t be so easy. He had still to locate the screen. If it were in the possession of someone unwilling to part with it, for any amount of money, what then? Or what if it were part of an antique
