get messed up because somebody didn't spend enough of the right kind of time with him. But that's what this is all about, isn't it?'
They nodded.
'All right,' he said. 'Good job, you two. Go get hold of your parents, get things sorted out. Have them call me if there are any questions. I'll be right here… I have about twenty things to organize and we can't move until they're all in place. So your recommendations are accepted in full… God help us. Now get going!'
They went.
Schiphol Airport outside Amsterdam had once been a relatively small place, built after the war, reclaimed from the sea like so much other polder, and named for the medieval and Viking ships that they had found there, on the old sea bed, when they walled in the area and pumped it dry. Now a replica of at least one of those ships stood in the middle of the new Arrivals Hall built ten years ago-lean, mean and rakish, sail down but her oars all out, and the dragon prow very pointedly facing the 'wrong' way, toward the sea and the outside world. But there was some appropriateness in that, since the Duty-Free area, now more than half the size of the whole airport area, had been relieving foreigners of their money as assiduously as the Vikings ever had, for many years-and with this difference, that mostly the foreigners turned their money over, not just willingly, but gladly.
Burt wandered through the Duty Free area with his eyes wide. It was acres and acres of polished white marble and granite flooring, a space that made you swear you could see the curvature of the Earth, and the whole thing dotted and scattered with shops selling everything you could think of. That was what Schiphol's main Duty Free Sales area was about. Once it had been a little thing, barely a twinkle in the airport designers' eyes. But over the last half a century it had grown like a very lucrative fungus, spreading itself over many hectares of airport, so that the actual ticketing concourses and arrival and landing gates were now like mere tendrils and fringes around the body of a large beached beast swollen with much cash.
Burt had at first thought that it was a pretty raw deal to have to do what his instructions entailed-which was to go to Amsterdam, get off the plane, stay for a night in the airport hotel without leaving the area, and then the next morning, having made his drop and a reciprocal pickup, get right on the plane and go straight home again. My first time out, he'd thought, and what do I get to see? Nothing! Not a damn thing. This realization, as he looked sleepily out the window that morning-gazing for the first time the end of hours of ocean against a strange new coastline-had so soured Burt's mood that the approach to Dutch passport and control and customs, which would normally have made him appropriately first-time nervous, now merely made him want to snarl. In that he was exactly like about nine-tenths of the other passengers getting off the KLM red-eye flight out of Reagan International, and possibly for that reason Customs paid Burt almost no attention at all, past waving him through the 'blue channel' with barely a glance or two.
Burt had gone gladly enough to the hotel and had had a hot shower, and then had fallen gratefully into bed, getting the sleep which he had not been able to get on the plane due to a mixture of excitement, nervousness, and a seemingly never-ending background of crying-baby sound effects. When he woke up, and realized that it was about five in the afternoon Dutch time, and he couldn't leave the hotel, then he really began to be annoyed. There was, however, nothing he could do about it. He wouldn't be paid for this work until he got home; he only had enough credit on the debit card they had given him to pay for meals and some drinks and his hotel room. He didn't even have enough credit to pay for a Net call home… not at the rates they charged here. The rates posted on the very basic little Net cubicle across from the shower room had made him blanch, even after he did the Euro-to-dollar conversion. Burt had been entertaining the idea of how much fun it would be to call Wilma from a public booth, from Amsterdam, both to let her know he was okay, and to completely astonish her. They had used to talk together about how much fun it would be to go overseas. Neither of them had ever envisaged being able to do it any time soon. But here I ami Burt thought.
For all the good it does me. I can't go see anything worth seeing. This is a waste of time…
Still.. there was the money to think of. He thought about it, and watched the local TV news in the cubicle, becoming increasingly fascinated by how strangely like English Dutch sounded sometimes. He looked at various other entertainment channels available, including one pay- per-view channel which caused him to turn so red with astonishment and embarrassment that he actually bolted the Net cubicle. Apparently the Dutch were amazingly liberal about some intrapersonal relationships… And finally, after going down to the hotel's twenty-four hour cafe and having a big plate of a smoky sausage called 'rookworst' and a Coke, he had given up and gone back upstairs to sleep again. His plane back to Reagan was at lunchtime the next day. He would go to the airport early, he decided. It had to be more interesting than the hotel.
Now-standing in the midst of that vast, polished, glittering space that was the main 'sales hall' in Schiphol Duty Free-Burt realized that he had been understating the case somewhat. There was more stuff here to buy than he had ever seen in one place in his life. Jewelry, clothes, liquor, watches, cameras, vidders, tricams, sound systems, porcelain, crystal, gold by the gram, ounce or kilo, diamonds by the carat or gram-He had stopped to stare in front of a little open-countered stall where a handsome young woman in a trim Schiphol staff uniform was weighing an emerald-cut diamond the size of Burt's thumbnail for a young man, while his girlfriend pored over another part of the case where still bigger ones lay under the security-wired glass, each in its little box, each labeled for size and brilliance. Burt had lingered there for a while, wishing he could bring something of the sort home for Wilma. But he didn't even have to look at these to know that their prices would turn him a whole lot paler than the ones on the Net cubicle back in the hotel.
He turned away regretfully, checked his watch. The pickup's ten minutes away. Better go put myself where I'm supposed to be.. He started walking the eighth of a mile or so to the place where he had been told to wait, looking as he went at the stall next to the diamond place. There was a large rectangular hole in. the floor, there, and Burt stopped to look at it curiously as a discreetly hooting klaxon began to sound. At the desk in front of the hole in the floor, a man in a dead black sliktite was bent over some paperwork, signing it, as the glittering new car he had just bought ascended from out of the depths to be examined before it was crated up and put on the man's flight out.
I want this, Burt thought. I want to live like this. I like this kind of life! Not that he had had much of it himself, so far. But he had seen other people living it now… and that was enough for him. He would do as much of this work as he had to to keep on living this way. No life Burt had ever thought possible for him at home had had this kind of wonder about it. It was uncomfortable, too, but it was worth it.
Burt made his way to the spot where he had been told to make his pickup-a fast-food shop owned by a famous chain. Burt hated their hamburgers, but he had been told to buy one, and which table to sit at to eat it, with his carry-on bag on the seat beside him. Then he was to go to the newsstand five stores down from the hamburger joint and buy a copy of a magazine called Paris-Match.
He did all these things, though he had never cared for hamburgers, finding them too greasy. Afterward, the rack carrying Paris-Match was well toward the back of the newsstand, and Burt had to go digging on the shelf for it, as someone had piled copies of some noisy yellow tabloid called Blick in front of it. He had put his bag down by his left foot, and was watching it out of the corner of his eye, so that when another bag that looked just like it appeared there, having been placed there by the owner of a very shapely pair of legs in blackline stockings, Burt was not surprised. After a little while the stockings moved away, their owner having picked up Burt's bag in exchange for her own, and vanished.
Shortly thereafter Burt squeezed his way back out to the front of the newsstand, between a number of other people who had appeared there, paid for the magazine with his debit card, and went on out into the concourse to see if his flight had been called. He knew from what he had been told that he should have had little time to do anything but go straight to his gate after making the pickup. But the big holographic display hanging in the middle of the sales hall, and automatically 'repeated' in smaller versions down the length of the hall, said 'delayed' in several languages. Burt sighed and went to the men's room.
Inside the stall, he sat down and stared at the bag. He had been told not to look… but he couldn't help it. What was the point of doing this kind of thing if you didn't have a hint of what was going on?
Very quietly Burt zipped open the bag. There was another jiffy bag in it, identical to the last one, but he had felt the difference in the weight of the bag the moment he picked it up. Burt peered into the bag, then took some toilet paper and used it to protect his hands as he pulled the jiffy bag out of the overnighter.
The jiffy bag wasn't closed. Burt peered into it. Inside was something which appeared to have been vacuum- sealed in heavy clear plastic. It was a brown substance. He couldn't smell anything, but Burt could see a faintly fibrous structure…
