"Identify yourself," he said. "You have fifteen seconds before I fry you with high voltage."
Muffled through the helmet, the nervous reply came: "Miss Nevada Brown, colony ship Expo 99. Please don't—fry me!"
A woman!
Nonplussed, he drew his hand back from the incinerator control. He had not been bluffing. Whatever language the visitor spoke, human or alien, the meaning of his challenge would have been clear. No person got into space without becoming aware of the hairtrigger reflexes of station operatives.
Those reflexes were sadly disordered now! A man he could have dealt with. A woman—how could he kill her? Even if she were a Dep—and this was distinctly possible—it was hardly in him to—to do what was necessary. Spaceships he could blast; women, no. His conditioning was not that good.
"Take off your suit and deposit any weapons on the shelf," he said, trying to restore gruffness to his voice. Weapons? The weapons a woman wore were part of her body. "I'm watching you." And he remembered belatedly to turn on the screen. He really was shaken.
Obligingly she stripped the bulky segments away. The process took some time, since a UN suit was intended to be safe, not convenient. He noted with guilty disappointment that she was adequately covered underneath. Some people wore their suits nude, to facilitate circulation of air and heat.
A woman! Human or Dep? On the verdict hung months of delight or torment worse than either loneliness or guilt. If she were really from a colony ship—
Hands quivering, he punched for information from the register.
Expo 99: WORLD'S FAIR, LOCATION MADAGASCAR, 1999. ATTENDANCE, CUMULATIVE, 42,000,000 PAID. POINTS OF SIGNIFICANCE—
He cut it off and punched a correction. It was the Ship he wanted.
In the interval the girl had emerged from her suit. She was a young brunette, slender rather than voluptuous, and not shown to best advantage by the rumpled coverall she wore. Her hair was quite short, in the fashion of most women who went to space—apart from so-called entertainers—and her ears stuck out a bit. Not the kind he would have looked at even once, back on Earth with his million-dollar retirement fund.
But this was not yet Earth. This was isolation for another thirteen and a half months, while his station orbited its numbered sun and at length returned to a favorable orientation for rendezvous. For that lean period, any woman would be lovely, particularly a young one.
Any human woman.
He looked at the register's message: DATA INSUFFICIENT.
Leo punched a clarification, but he already knew what it meant. There was no such ship. The girl was a phony.
Incinerate her?
She was pathetically fragile in her tousled state, and breathing rapidly from nervous energy. She was well aware of her danger.
It flashed through his mind: even a Dep female would be company.
He released the inner lock and admitted her to the station.
He met her in the comfortable day room. She was still unsteady in the gravity field, after her time in a free-fall. Her shoulders and breasts sagged slightly, as though they had lost their tonus in space. She had tried to straighten her outfit, to make herself presentable; but a moment of primping could hardly undo days of suit-confinement. Particularly when the natural attributes were modest. As a pinup she was not that good.
"Sit down," he said curtly, refusing to address her by name.
"Thank you." Grateful but not graceful, she took one of the overstuffed chairs. The station was small, but the day room was intended to be as homey as "feasible," to mitigate the starkness of the duty.
"I believe you are an agent of an alien power," he said. "Specifically, you are a Dep spy."
Her mouth opened. She wore no lipstick or other makeup, such things not conducive to survival in space. Her eyes were shadowed by fatigue, not artifice. Her teeth were subtly uneven. He knew her for an alien creature, yet every detail was painfully human.
"Hold your comment," he said, preventing her from speaking. He knew he had to do this rapidly or his nerve would break. He was not a military man, though for this single tour he was subject to military regulations. Discipline in the soldier-sense was more a sometime concept than gut-reality to him. "My name is Leo MacHenry and I have no Scottish or Irish blood that I know of. I am a civilian mercenary on duty for fourteen months, most of which lie before me. I am being well paid for this service because personality tests indicate that I am more likely to survive with my wits intact than a conventional soldier would be. I mean to complete my tour honorably and retire to rich living and overindulgent amours for the ensuing fifty years.
"I am keyed in to this station in such a way that I cannot leave it even to walk the surface of the planetoid without destroying it and myself. Only the relief ship has the equipment to re-key for the next observer. My brain waves are continually monitored by the main computer. If they stop—that is, if I should die or suffer some drastic mental change, such as entering a drugged state—the computer will detonate this station immediately. The radius of total destruct is well beyond the distance any person could travel in a space suit, because of needle shrapnel and lethal radiation. There are other safeguards of more devious but effective nature. My point is that I am to all intents and purposes invulnerable here. I made you leave your weapons"—she had had a heatbeamer and a knife, both standard for a UN suit—"only to prevent you from attempting anything foolish before I had a chance to talk to you. I may look ordinary, but any serious attack on me will bring your demise or our mutual destruction. This in turn will summon a competent Earth-fleet ready and eager for trouble.
"I run this station. No other person can do so much as open a door except at my direction, because of the electronic and neural keying. You cannot leave, you cannot obtain food, you cannot even use the sanitary facilities without my cooperation. I intend either to execute you or to hold you here until the relief ship arrives, at which point I will turn you over to the appropriate authorities for interrogation and probable liquidation.
"I will, however, give you one chance for freedom, since your presence here will be a severe blot on my record. If you wish to leave right now you may do so; I will let you take off in your suit and return to your compatriots with the news that my station is in business for the duration. I suggest that you accept it; it is an easy way out for both of us."
He turned his back on her to hide his own nervousness. He had done it. He had made his speech, and it was all true, except that his discipline was not that good. Not that good at all. He could let her go, but if she decided to stay he—even if she were a Dep spy—
He was lonely and, suddenly, woman-hungry. He would try to keep her prisoner, but inevitably come in time to treat her less as a suspect and more as—as what she seemed. Already he was sorely tempted. Perhaps that was what the Dep command had counted on. That he would penetrate the ruse but submit to a gradual, emotional subversion. A year was plenty of time to do the job. A year of propinquity, and he would no longer care. He would have a new loyalty. After that—
She looked up at him. "I—I don't know what to say, Mr. MacHenry. Except that I'm not—what you said. I don't know why you don't believe me. But I can't go. My ship isn't there any more. I—I didn't want to say this because I'll get in trouble, but I—jumped ship, and it went on without me. I knew I was breaking the law, but it was my only chance. To get back to Earth. So I guess you'll have to lock me up, if that's what you want."
She was going to play it out, and she was letter-perfect! He felt, oddly, relieved. Her departure would have been a confession of guilt, and he would have had to shoot down the alien ship the moment he spotted its location. This way there was at least a chance she was real. A chance he knew he was foolish to hope for. The subversion was proceeding too rapidly, but he was helpless to inhibit it because his will to do so was uncertain.