fit my spare frame just a little better. The suit had been a gift from a friend whose husband was much more portly, and there's a limit to what alterations can accomplish.
'I believe it's the duty of every man on Venus,' I said loudly, 'to expand our planet's trade beyond the orbit of Pluto. We owe this to Venus and to God. The duty is particularly upon those like the three of us who are members of factorial families.'
I struck the defiant pose of a man ashamed of the strength of his principles. I'd polished the expression over years of explaining-to women-why honor forbade me to accept money from my father, the factor. In truth, the little factory of Rhadicund in Beta Regio had been abandoned three generations before, and the family certainly hadn't prospered in the governor's court the way my grandfather had hoped.
Piet Ricimer's face stilled. It took me a moment to realize how serious a mistake I'd made in falsely claiming an opinion which Ricimer felt as strongly as he hoped for salvation.
Stephen Gregg stretched his arm out on the table before Ricimer, interposing himself between his friend and a problem that the friend needn't deal with. Gregg wasn't angry. Perhaps Gregg no longer had the capacity for anger or any other human emotion.
'About the manner of your leaving Councilor Duneen's service, Moore,' Gregg said. He spoke quietly, his voice cat-playful. 'A problem with the accounts, was there?'
I met the bigger man's eyes. What I saw there shocked me out of all my poses, my calculations. 'My worst enemies have never denied that their purse would be safe in my keeping,' I said flatly. 'There was a misunderstanding about a woman of the household. As a gentleman-'
My normal attitudes were reasserting themselves. I couldn't help it.
'— I can say no more.'
The Molt's three-fingered hand tapped on the door. 'Captain Macquerie has arrived, sir.'
'You have no business here, Mister Jeremy Moore,' Gregg said. He rose to his feet. Gregg moved with a slight stiffness which suggested that more than his soul had been scarred beyond Pluto; but surely his soul as well. 'There'll be no women where we're going. While there may be opportunities for wealth, it won't be what one would call easy money.'
'Good luck in your further occupations, Mister Moore,' Ricimer said. 'Guillermo, please show in Captain Macquerie.'
Ricimer and his aide were no more than my own age, 27 Earth years. In this moment they seemed to be from a different generation.
'Good day, gentlemen,' I said. I bowed and stepped quickly from the room as a squat fellow wearing coveralls and a striped neckerchief entered. Macquerie moved with the gimballed grace of a spacer who expects the deck to shift beneath him at any moment.
I knew that arguing with Ricimer and Gregg wouldn't have gained me anything. I knew also that Mister Stephen Gregg would
There were more than thirty men in the tavern's public room-and one woman, a spacer's wife engaged in a low-voiced but obviously acrimonious attempt to drag her husband away. The noise of the crowd blurred whenever the outer door opened onto Dock Street and its heavy traffic.
I pushed my way to one corner of the bar, my progress aided somewhat by the fact I was a gentleman-but only somewhat. Betaport was more egalitarian than Ishtar City, the capital; and spacers are a rough lot anywhere.
The tapster drew beer and took payment with an efficiency that seemed more fluid than mechanical. His eyes were sleepy, but the fashion in which he chalked a tab or held out his free hand in a silent demand for scrip before he offered the glass showed he was fully aware of his surroundings.
I opened my purse and took out the 10-Mapleleaf coin. That left me only twenty Venerian consols to live on for the next week, but I'd find a way. Eloise, I supposed. I hadn't planned to see her again after the problem with her maid, but she'd come around.
'Barman,' I said crisply. 'I want the unrestricted use of your phone, immediately and for the whole of the afternoon.'
I rang the coin on the rippling blue translucence of the bar's ceramic surface.
The barman's expression sharpened into focus. He took the edges of the coin between the thumb and index fingers of his right hand, turning it to view both sides. 'Where'd
'Gambling with an in-system trader on the New Troy run,' I said truthfully. 'Now, if you don't want the coin. .'
That was a bluff-I needed this particular phone for what I intended to do.
The tapster shrugged. He had neither cause nor intention to refuse, merely a general distaste for strangers; and perhaps for gentlemen as well. He nipped up the gate in the bar so that I could slip through to the one-piece phone against the wall.
'It's local net only,' the tapster warned. 'I'm not connected to the planetary grid.'
'Local's what I want,' I said.
Very local indeed. The tool kit on my belt looked like a merchant's papersafe. I took from it a device of my own design and construction.
The poker game three weeks before had been with a merchant/captain and three of his officers, in a sailors' tavern in Ishtar City. The four spacers were using a marked deck. If I'd complained or even tried to leave the game, they would have beaten me within an inch of my life.
The would-be sharpers had thought I was wealthy and a fool; and were wrong on both counts. They let me win for the first two hours. The money I'd lived on since the game came from that pump priming. Much of it was in Federation coin.
The captain and his henchmen ran the betting up and cold-decked me, their pigeon. I weepingly threw down a huge roll of Venerian scrip and staggered out of the tavern. I'd left Ishtar City for Betaport before the spacers realized that I'd paid them in counterfeit-and except for the top bill, very poor counterfeit.
I attached to the phone module's speaker a contact transducer which fed a separate keypad and an earpiece. The tapster looked at me and said, 'Hey! What d'ye think you're doing?'
'What I paid you for the right to do,' I said. I pivoted deliberately so that my body blocked the tapster's view of what I was typing on the keypad-not that it would have meant anything to the fellow.
On my third attempt at the combination, the plug in my ear said in Piet Ricimer's voice, '. . not just as a Venerian patriot, Captain Macquerie. All
The communications console in the private room was patched into the tavern's existing phone line. The commands I sent through the line converted Ricimer's own electronics into a listening device. I could have accessed the console from anywhere in Betaport, but not as quickly as I needed to hear the interview with Macquerie.
'Look, Captain Ricimer,' said an unfamiliar voice that must by elimination be Macquerie, 'I'm flattered that you'd call for me the way you have, but I gave up voyaging to the Reaches when I married the daughter of my supplier on Os Sertoes. Long runs are no life for a married man. From here on out, I'm shuttling my
'We mean no harm to the Southern Cross,' said Stephen Gregg. 'Your wife's family won't be affected.'
With Macquerie, there was obviously no pretense that the expedition had anything to do with asteroids. Os Sertoes was little more than a name to me. I vaguely thought that it was one of the most distant Southern colonies, uninteresting and without exports of any particular value.
'Look,' said Macquerie, 'you gentlemen've been to the Reaches yourself. You don't need me to pilot you- except to Os Sertoes, and who'd want to go there? It's stuffed right in the neck of the Breach, so the transit gradients won't let you go anywhere but back.'
'Captain,' said Ricimer, 'I wouldn't ask you if I didn't believe I needed you. Venus
A chair scraped. 'I'm sorry, gentlemen,' Macquerie said. His voice was subdued, but firm. Ricimer's
