the fax of Sub's briefing report on them to see if it might explain to me why Cochenour had lost interest so fast.
The report couldn't answer that question. It did tell me a lot, though. The woman with Cochenour was named Dorotha Keefer. She had been traveling with him for a couple of years now, according to their passports, though this was their first time off Earth. There was no indication of a marriage between them-or of any intention of it, at least on Cochenour's part. Keefer was in her early twenties-real age, not simulated by drugs and transplants. While Cochenour himself was well over ninety.
He did not, of course, look anywhere near that. I'd watched him walk over to their table, and he moved lightly and easily, for a big man. His money came from land and petro-foods. According to the synoptic on him, he had been one of the first oil millionaires to switch over from selling oil as fuel for cars to oil as a raw material for food production, growing algae in the crude oil that came out of his well and selling the algae, in processed form, for human consumption. So then he had stopped being a mere millionaire and turned into something much bigger.
That accounted for the way he looked. He had been living on Full Medical, with extras. The report said that his heart was titanium and plastic. His lungs had been transplanted from a twentyyear-old killed in a copter crash. His skin, muscles, and fats-not to mention his various glandular systems-were sustained by hormones
and cell-builders at what had to be a cost of several thousand dollars a day.
To judge by the way he stroked the thigh of the girl next to him, he was getting his money's worth. He looked and acted no more than forty, at most-except perhaps for the look of his pale-blue, diamond-bright, weary, and disillusioned eyes.
He was, in short, a lovely mark.
I couldn't afford to let him get away. I swallowed the rest of the drink and nodded to the Third of Vastra for another. There had to be some way, somehow, to land him for a charter of my airbody.
All I had to do was find it.
Of course, on the other side of the little railing that set Vastra's cafй off from the rest of the Spindle, half the tunnel-rats on Venus were thinking the same thoughts. This was the worst of the low season. The Hohmann crowd was still three months in the future, and all of us were beginning to run low on money. My need for a liver transplant was just a little extra incentive; of the hundred maze-runners I could see out of the corner of my eye, ninety-nine needed to cut a helping out of this tourist's bankroll as much as I did, just for the sake of staying alive.
We couldn't all do it. He looked pretty fat, but nobody could have been fat enough to feed us all. Two of us, maybe three, maybe even half a dozen might score enough to make a real difference. No more than that.
I had to be one of those few.
I took a deep swallow of my second drink, tipped the Third of Vastra's House lavishly-and conspicuously-and turned idly around until I was facing the Terries.
The girl was bargaining with the knot of souvenir vendors leaning over the rail. 'Boyce?' she called over her shoulder. 'What's this thing for?'
He bent over the rail and peered. 'Looks like a fan,' he told her.
'Heechee prayer fan, right!' the dealer cried. I knew him,
Booker Allemang, an old-timer in the Spindle. 'Found it myself, miss! It'll grant your every wish, letters every day from people reporting miraculous results-'
'It's sucker bait,' Cochenour grumbled. 'Buy it if you want to.'
'But what does it do?' she asked.
Cochenour had an unpleasant laugh; he demonstrated it. 'It does what any fan does. It cools you down. Not that you need that,' he added meanly, and looked over to me with a grin.
My cue.
I finished my drink, nodded to him, stood up, and walked over to their table. 'Welcome to Venus,' I said. 'May I help you?'
The girl looked at Cochenour for permission before she said, 'I thought this fan thing was pretty.'
