It was almost an hour and four Buskers’s later before Sheila Haskel came in. She stopped and shook off her umbrella outside, then leaned it next to the door. She spoke to the bartender for a minute and came to the booth.
“Hey, Reg, how are you? Seems like you and I’ve missed each other the last week or two. You were here when I wasn’t, and vice versa.”
He looked blearily at her. “I’m going up to Luna,” he said without preamble.
She glanced at Reg’s nearly empty mug, then over at the bartender, who gave her a carefully expressionless look in response. “Um, Reg, are you sure you know what you’re doing?”
“You mean, have I thought it over and all that?”
She nodded.
He tipped his mug up on one side and swiveled it back and forth. “Yeah.”
“When did you decide this?”
“Today. This morning.”
“But why? I thought you hated Luna.”
“It’s…” He shook his head. “I don’t want to talk about it, OK? It just looks like the only thing left for me to do.”
“When are you going? Have you decided yet?”
“I’m going to apply tomorrow. Supposedly, they’re able to reply pretty quickly. I just came in tonight to say good-bye to all you guys. I think you’re all assholes and idiots, but I’m going to miss you. Funny, the way you get hooked on people, isn’t it?”
Touched by his bumbling, crude attempt to show his feelings, she reached out and covered his hand with hers. “It’s OK, I know what you’re saying.”
He looked at her, then his eyes fell to where her hand rested on his. “You wouldn’t want to… uh…” He gave up. “Never mind.”
She waited until his eyes came back up. She smiled slightly and shrugged. “Just might. You never know. Besides, someone’s going to have to drive you home. You’re obviously in no condition to do so yourself.”
Reg took a deep breath, slid to the end of the booth, then pivoted and sat heavily on her side. “Sheila, did you know that you’re an angel?”
An elaborate graphics terminal sat unused while Roberta Lith sketched by hand an intricate web of lines on a pad of paper next to her elbow. Small blocks, neatly labeled with part numbers, reached out geometric tendrils towards other blocks. Occasional clusters of discrete UV optical transistors appeared when no commercially available integrated circuits would do.
“Roberta?” came the voice from behind her.
“Hmmm?” She continued to trace in parts of the circuit.
Jennifer Holmes, inventor of the Holmes Door, bent to look over Roberta’s shoulder at the schematic. “I’ve never been able to decide whether you use a pad and pencil because you’re from Earth or because you have this innate need to be an anachronism.”
Roberta laughed. “Neither. I get a better intuitive feel for the circuit when I do it by hand. That thing,” she gestured at the terminal, “has no soul.”
“Is that the feedback loop for the secondary sampler?”
“I finished that hours ago.” She made a long reach and grasped the corner of a piece of paper, which she turned and handed to Jenny. “I changed my mind at the last minute. You know how we had talked about running the time base up another couple of meg? I thought of another way to do it. If you look over towards the clock for the logic circuits, you’ll see that I’ve pulled the pulse from there, instead. That way we can dispense with the phase check, they’ll already be in sync.”
Jenny studied the schematic for a moment. “Cute. Kills two birds with one stone.”
Roberta shrugged. “If it doesn’t work, we can always go back to doing it the way we discussed, but this looked like a more elegant solution.”
“I’m not sure it matters how we get the job done, just as long as we get there. Alan asked me again the other day about the Mars Door.”
“He really wants to go, doesn’t he?” Roberta asked.
Jenny nodded. “He first asked me about this the night of the vote for independence. I don’t think a week has passed since then that he hasn’t checked in, just to see how things are getting along. Mark my words—we’re going to Mars.”
“But… I mean, we work for Lunar Magnetics. How did he get them to spring for the project?”
Jenny laughed. “I’ve known Alan for years, and I’ve never known him to ask for anything. Not like that, anyway. He just starts talking about it as though it were an accomplished fact, and somehow things fall out the way he wants them to. Sometimes I think he’s got some kind of mysterious mind power that makes others go along with him. God knows he’s gotten me to do enough things that I didn’t want to do.”
Roberta frowned. “That doesn’t sound like the Alan I know. He’d never force anyone to do anything.”
“Oh, don’t get me wrong—just between you and me, I’ve carried a bit of a crush on the man ever since I first met him, but I’ve seen him be tough as steel when the mood strikes him.” A distant look came into her eyes. “Sometimes he scares me.”
“Alan, scary? Oh, come on, now! He’s just a teddy bear.”
Jenny smiled, still distant. “Never forget, Roberta. Even cuddly bears have teeth and claws…”
Edgar Rice was beginning to take an interest in the graffiti that was popping up in random corridors around town. Part of it was the story value—after all, he was a newsman at heart, and The Crisium Observer was always hungry for a good story. But somehow, that wasn’t the whole of it. The artist had struck a chord. The paintings were not just the random vulgarities and simple-minded doodles that one would see on Earth. They were thoughtful, well done. They cut across the social spectrum, managing to appeal to everyone. Like a well done political cartoon, they managed to combine elemental truths with a poignant irony, almost self-deprecating.
The latest one showed an asteroid. The pockmarks and scars of millennia in space had been cleverly combined to make a recognizable face. Trevor York. Somehow, the artist had contrived the impersonal stone surface of the asteroid into something ugly and frightening, a clever mockery of Trevor York’s well known fascination with his own looks.
Just to see what reaction it would provoke, Rice had made certain that a reproduction of the painting had made it onto the first screen of the Observer. Somewhere where it was certain to come to York’s attention.
So far, York had made no public response. Rice, however, was sure that it was going to have a place in whatever show York was concocting about Crisium.
There was one other thing about the picture in the corridor. The asteroid was clearly on a collision course with a much larger body in the background: Luna.
Anne Lister sat behind the expansive semicircular desk she used in her secretarial duties for her husband. It was, in feet, considerably larger than her husband’s desk, something that had been fodder for much joking back when she had set up her office in their home. Now, it was simply accepted as a fact of life that she needed multiple terminals to keep her finger on the pulse of the city.
Right now, she was reading through something that the city computer had kicked up to her for resolution. Brows furrowed, she pondered it, then, since it would involve setting a precedent, decided to present the situation to Alan.
She had the computer inquire as to whether he was busy at the moment. He wasn’t. “Alan,” she began, as her image materialized in his office, “I’ve got a problem.”
“What is it, babe?”
“We’ve got a guy who has immigrated from Earth. He applied—well, wrote a letter, since we don’t have a form for it—asking for unemployment compensation.”