“Ah,” said Leo. Damn. Clearly, he should have taken Minchenko aside before he’d muddied the waters with Van Atta, Too late now. It wasn’t just the exercise that was making Van Atta red in the face. Leo wondered what all Minchenko had really said—doubtless pretty choice, it would have been a pleasure to hear. Too expensive a pleasure for the quaddies, though. Leo schooled his features to what he hoped would be read through his puffing and blowing as sympathy for Van Atta.
“How’s the salvage planning going?” asked Van Atta after a while.
“Almost complete.”
“Oh, really?” Van Atta brightened. “Well, that’s something, at least.”
“You’ll be amazed at how totally the Habitat can be recycled,” Leo promised with perfect truth. “So will the company brass.”
“And fast?”
“Just as soon as we get the go-ahead. I’ve got it laid out like a war game.” He closed his teeth on further double entendres. “You still planning the Grand Announcement to the rest of the staff at 1300 tomorrow?” Leo inquired casually. “In the main lecture module? I really want to be in on that, I have a few visual aids to present when you’re done.”
“Naw,” said Van Atta.
“What?” Leo gulped. He missed a step, and the springs slammed him painfully down on one knee on the treadmill, padded against just such clumsiness. He struggled back to his feet.
“Did you hurt yourself?” said Van Atta. “You look funny.…”
“I’ll be all right in a minute,” He stood, leg muscles straining against the elastic pull, regaining his breath and equilibrium in the face of pain and panic. “I thought—that was how you were going to drop the shoe. Get everybody together, just go over the facts once.”
“After Minchenko, I’m tired of arguing about it,” said Van Atta. “I’ve told Yei to do it. She can call them into her office in small groups, and hand out the individual and department evacuation schedules at the same time. Much more efficient.”
And so Leo and Silver’s beautiful scheme for peacefully detaching the downsiders, hammered out through four secret planning sessions, was blown away on a breath. Wasted was the flattery, the oblique suggestion, that had gone into convincing Van Atta that it was his idea to gather, unusually, the entire Habitat downsider staff at once and make his announcement in a speech persuading them all they were being commended, not condemned…
The shaped charges to cut the lecture module away from the Habitat at the touch of a button were all in place. The emergency breath masks to supply the nearly three hundred bodies with oxygen for the few hours necessary to push the module around the planet to the Transfer Station were carefully hidden within. The two pusher crews were drilled, their pushers fueled and ready.
Fool he had been, to lay plans that depended on Van Atta following through on anything… Leo felt suddenly sick.
It was going to have to be the second-choice plan, then, the emergency one they’d discussed and discarded as too risky, too potentially uncontrolled in its results. Numbly, he detached his springs and harness and hooked them back in their slots on the treadmill frame.
“That wasn’t an hour,” said Van Atta.
“I think I did something to my knee,” lied Leo.
“I’m not surprised. Think I didn’t know you’ve been skipping exercise sessions? Just don’t try to sue GalacTech, ‘cause we can prove personal neglect.” Van Atta grinned and marched on virtuously.
Leo paused. “By the way, did you know that Rodeo Warehousing just misshipped the Habitat a hundred tons of gasoline? And they’re charging it to us.”
“What?”
As Leo turned away he had the small vindictive satisfaction of hearing Van Atta’s treadmill stop and the snap of a too-hastily-detached harness rebounding to slap its wearer. “Ow!” Van Atta cried.
Leo did not look back.
Dr. Curry met Claire as she arrived for her appointment at the infirmary. “Oh, good, you’re just on time.”
Claire glanced up and down the corridor, and her eyes searched the treatment room into which Dr. Curry shoo’d her. “Where’s Dr. Minchenko? I thought he’d be here.”
Dr. Curry flushed faintly. “Dr. Minchenko is in his quarters. He won’t be coming on duty.”
“But I wanted to talk to him.…”
Dr. Curry cleared his throat. “Did they tell you what your appointment was for?”
“No… I supposed it was for more medication for my breasts.”
“Ah, I see.”
Claire waited a moment, but he did not expand further. He busied himself, laying out a tray of instruments by their velcro collars and placing them in the sterilizer, not meeting Claire’s eyes. “Well, it’s quite painless.”
Once, she might have asked no questions, docilely submitting—she had undergone thousands of obscure medical tests starting even before she had been freed as an infant from the uterine replicator, the artificial womb that had gestated her in a now-closed section of this very infirmary. Once, she had been another person, before the downside disaster with Tony. For a little time thereafter she had hovered close to being no one at all. Now she felt strangely thrilled, as if she trembled on the edge of a new birth. Her first had been mechanical and painless, perhaps that was why it had failed to take root…
“What—” she began to squeak. Too tiny a voice. She raised it, loud in her own ears. “What is this appointment for?”
“Just a small local abdominal procedure,” said Dr. Curry airily. “It won’t take long. You don’t even have to get undressed, just roll up your shirt and push down your shorts a bit. I’ll prep you. You have to be immobilized under the sterile-air-flow shield, in case a drop or two of blood gets on the loose.”
You’re not immobilizing me… “What is the procedure?”
“It won’t hurt, and will do you no harm at all. Come on over, now.” He smiled, and tapped the shield unit, which folded out from the wall.
“What?” repeated Claire, not moving.
“I can’t discuss it. It’s—classified. Sorry. You’ll have to ask—Mr. Van Atta, or Dr. Yei, or somebody. Tell you what, I’ll send you over to Dr. Yei right after, and you can talk to her, all right?” He licked his lips; his smile grew steadily more nervous.
“I wouldn’t ask…” Claire groped after a phrase she had heard a downsider use once, “I wouldn’t ask Bruce Van Atta for the time of day.”
Dr. Curry looked quite startled. “Oh.” And muttered, not quite under his breath, “I wondered why you were second on the list.”
“Who was first on the list?” asked Claire.
“Silver, but that engineering instructor has her on some kind of assignment. Friend of yours, right? You’ll be able to tell her it doesn’t hurt.”
“I don’t care—I don’t give a damn if it hurts, I want to know what it is.” Her eyes narrowed, as the connections clicked at last, then widened in outrage. “The sterilizations,” she breathed. “You’re starting the sterilizations!”
“How did you—you weren’t supposed—I mean, whatever makes you think that?” gulped Curry.
She dodged for the doorway. He was closer and quicker, and sealed it in front of her nose. She caromed off the closing panel.
“Now, Claire, calm down!” panted Curry, zigzagging after her. “You’ll only hurt yourself, totally unnecessarily. I can put you under a general anesthetic, but it’s better for you to use a local, and just lie still. You do have to lie still. I have to do this, one way or another—”
“Why do you have to do this?” cried Claire. “Did Dr. Minchenko have to do this—or is that why he isn’t here? Who’s making you, and how, that you have to?”
“If Minchenko was here, I wouldn’t have to,” snapped Curry, infuriated. “He ducked out, and left me holding the bag. Now come over here and position yourself under the steri-shield, and let me set up the scanners, or I’ll have to get—get quite firm with you.” He inhaled deeply, psyching himself up.