The Seiners he was interested in hooking were probably female.
BenRabi could not fathom Mouse. Mouse seemed happy most of the time. That was disconcerting. The man carried a load of obsessions heavier than his own. And somebody whose profession was hatchet work should, in benRabi's preconceptions, have had a happiness quotient approaching zero.
BenRabi never had been able to understand people. Everybody else seemed to live by a different set of rules.
Mouse shrugged. "Fingers crossed? Hope Beckhart will pull it off? Wouldn't bet against him."
BenRabi never knew where he stood in the Admiral's grand, tortuous schemes.
"Hey, I've been here long enough," Mouse said. "No point attracting attention straight off. I saw you get pills from that girl. What was wrong? Head?"
"Yeah. Might even be my migraine. My head feels like somebody's been using it for a soccer ball."
Mouse went to the door. "A game tonight, then?"
"Sure, as long as you don't mind playing an amateur." BenRabi saw him off, feeling foolish. There had been no one around to hear his parting speech.
The public address system announced dinner for passengers. Mouse turned back. "Feel up to it?"
BenRabi nodded. Though it had ached miserably seconds ago, the tracer was not bothering him at all now.
Somebody was trying to impress them. The meal was superb. It was the kind Navy put on when important civilians came aboard. Everything was hydroponics and recycle, yet supremely palatable. Each mouthful reminded benRabi of the horrors of a Navy mess six months out, after the fresh and frozen stores were gone. From some angles the mission had begun to show promise.
He looked for the Seiner girl, Amy, but did not see her.
Lazy days followed. There was little to do in transit. He stayed in his cabin most of the time, loafing, toying with Jerusalem, and trying not to remember too much. Mouse, and a few others he had met, occasionally came to visit, play chess, or just bullshit about common interests.
The landsmen began to settle in, to get acquainted. The unattached singles started pairing off. Mouse, never inclined to celibacy, found himself a girl the second day. Already she wanted to move in with him.
Individual quarters had been assigned everyone but the married couples. There was room. The ship had been prepared to haul a thousand people.
Mouse immediately established himself as a character and leader among the landsmen. His notion of a chess club, while no fad, caught on.
One of the joiners was the Seiner who had striven to rattle them at Blake City.
His name was Jarl Kindervoort. He did not hide the fact that he ranked high in Danion's police department.
BenRabi marveled again at the size of the harvestship. A vessel so huge that it had a regular police agency, complete with detectives and plainclothes operatives... Just incredible.
They called themselves Internal Security. BenRabi saw nothing in what he learned of their structure to remind him of a security unit in the intelligence sense. The function was doubtless there, cobbled on in response to the arrival of outsiders, but the agency look was that of a metropolitan police force.
Mouse's club inspired a general movement. Half a dozen others coalesced. Each was Archaicist-oriented.
In an age when nothing seemed as permanent as the morning dew, people who needed permanence had to turn to the past.
BenRabi looked on the whole Archaicist movement with studied contempt. He saw it as the refuge of the weak, of moral cowards unwilling to face the Now without the strategic hamlets of yesterday to run to when the pressure heightened.
Archaicism could be damned funny. BenRabi remembered a holocast of pot-bellied old men stamping through modern New York outfitted as Assyrian soldiery off for a sham battle with the legions of the Pharaoh of New Jersey.
Or it could be grim. Sometimes they started believing... He still shuddered whenever he recalled the raid on the temple of the Aztec Revivalists in Mexico City.
One morning he asked Mouse to read the working draft of his story. He had managed to push it all the way to an unsatisfactory ending.
Mouse frowned a lot. He finally said, "I guess it's all right. I don't know anything about non-objective art."
"I guess that means it isn't working. I'd better get on it and do it right. Even if you can't figure out what the hell it's about, it should affect you."
"Oh, it does, Moyshe."
His tone conveyed more message than did his words. It said that he thought benRabi was wasting his time.
Moyshe wanted to cry. The story meant so damned much to him.
Six: 3047 AD
The Olden Days, Luna Command
He waited patiently in the line outside Decontamination. When his turn came he went to Cubicle R. No one else had done so. A sign saying OUT OF SERVICE clung to the door beneath the R.
That sign had been there more than twenty years. It was old and dirty and lopsided. Everyone in Luna Command knew that door R did not open on a standard decon chamber.
The men and women, and occasional non-humans, who ignored the sign were agents returning from the field.
He closed the door and placed his things on a counter surface, then removed his clothing. Nude, he stepped through the next door inward.
Energy from the scanner in the door frame made his skin tingle and his body hair stand out. He held his breath, closed his eyes.
Needles of liquid hit him, stung him, killing bacteria and rinsing grime away. Sonics cracked the long molecular helixes of viruses.
A mist replaced the spray. He breathed deeply.
Something clicked. He stepped through the next door.
He entered a room identical to the first. Its only furniture was a counter surface. On that counter lay neatly folded clothing and a careful array of personal effects. He dressed, filled his pockets, chuckling. He had been demoted. His chevrons proclaimed him a Second Class Missileman. His ship's patch said he was off the battle cruiser Ashurbanipal.
He had never heard of the vessel.
He pulled the blank ID card from the wallet he had been given, placed his right thumb over the portrait square. Ten seconds later his photograph and identification statistics began to appear.
"Cornelius Wadlow Perchevski?" he muttered in disbelief. "It gets worse and worse." He scanned the dates and numbers, memorizing, then attached the card to his chest. He donned the Donald Duck cap spacers wore groundside, said, "Cornelius Perchevski to see the King."
The floor sank beneath him.
As he descended he heard the showers go on in the decon chamber.
A minute later he stepped from a stall in a public restroom several levels lower. He entered a main traffic tunnel and walked to a bus stop.
Six hours later he told a plain woman behind a plain desk behind a plain room, behind a plain door, "Cornelius W. Perchevski, Missileman Two. I'm supposed to see the doctor."
She checked an appointment log. "You're fifteen minutes late, Perchevski. But go ahead. Through the white door."
He passed through wondering if the woman knew she was fronting. Probably not. The security games got heaviest where they seemed least functional.
The doctor's office made him feel like Alice, diving down a rabbit hole into another world.
It's just as crazy as Wonderland, he thought. Black is white here. Up is down. In is out. Huck is Jim, and never the Twain shall meet... He chuckled.
"Mr. Perchevski."
He sobered. "Sir?"
"I believe you came in for debriefing."
"Yes, sir. Where do you want me to start, sir?"
"The oral form. Then you'll rest. Tomorrow well do the written. I'll schedule the cross-comparative for later in the week. We're still trying to get the bugs out of a new cross-examination program."