"Whatever you say, Mister Gregg," Lightbody replied; the other two sailors nodded agreement. The men treated Gregg with respect due to affection, but they were also quite clearly afraid of him.
As the airlock's outer door closed behind us, Gregg looked over the head of the slumping Macquerie and said, "You say you want to come with us, Moore. I'd rather pay you. I've got more money than I know what to do with, now."
The inner door undogged and began to open even as the outer panel latched. The atmosphere of the personnel bridge struck me like the heart of a furnace.
The bridge was a 3-meter tube of flexible material, stiffened by a helix of glass fiber which also acted as a light guide. The reinforcement was a green spiral spinning dizzily outward until the arc of the sagging bridge began to rise again. A meter-wide floor provided a flat walkway.
I sneezed violently. My nose began to run. I rubbed it angrily with the back of my hand.
"I'll come, thank you," I said. My voice was already hoarse from the harshness of the air. "I'll find my own wealth in the Reaches, where you found yours."
"Oh, you're a smart one, aren't you?" Gregg said harshly. "You think you know where we're really going. . and perhaps you do, Mister Moore, perhaps you do. But you don't know what it is that the Reaches cost. Take the money. I'll give you three hundred Mapleleaf dollars for this night's work."
The big man paced himself to walk along the bridge beside me. The walkway was barely wide enough for two, but Gregg held Macquerie out to the side where the tube's bulge provided room.
"I'm not afraid," I said. I was terribly afraid. The personnel bridge quivered sickeningly underfoot, and the air that filled it was a foretaste of Hell. "I'm a gentleman of Venus. I'll willing to take risks to liberate the outworlds from President Pleyal's tyranny!"
The effect of my words was like triggering a detonator. Stephen Gregg turned fast and gripped me by the throat with his free left hand. He lifted me and slammed me against the side of the bridge.
"I wasn't much for social graces even before I shipped out to the Reaches for the first time," Gregg said softly. "And I never liked worms taking me for a fool."
The wall of the bridge seared my back through the clothing. The spiral of reinforcing fiber felt like a white slash against the general scarlet pain.
Macquerie, somnolent from the drugged liquor, dangled limply from Gregg's right arm. "Now," Gregg said in the same quiet, terrible voice. "This expedition is important to my friend Piet, do you understand? Perhaps to Venus, perhaps to mankind, perhaps to God-but certainly to my friend."
I nodded. I wasn't sure I could speak. Gregg wasn't deliberately choking me, but the grip required to keep my feet above the walkway also cut off most of my air.
"I don't especially want to kill you right now," Gregg continued. "But I certainly feel no need to let you live. Why do you insist on coming with us, Mister Moore?"
"You can let me down now," I croaked.
The words were an inaudible rasp. Gregg either read my lips or took the meaning from my expression. He lowered me to the walkway and released me.
I shrugged my shoulders. I didn't reach up to rub my throat. I am a gentleman!
"I-" I said. I paused, not because I was afraid to go on, but because I'd never articulated the reason driving me. Not even to myself, in the dead of night.
"I have a talent for electronics," I continued. I fought the need to blink, lest Gregg think I was afraid to meet his gaze. "I couldn't work at that, of course. Only artisans work with their hands. And there was no money; the Moores have never really had money."
"Go on," Gregg said. He wiped the palm of his left hand on the breast of his tunic.
"So I've had to find ways to live," I continued, "and I've done so. Mostly women. And the problem with that is that when I found a woman I really cared about-there was no place the relationship could go except the way they've all gone, to bed and then nowhere. Because there's no me! Doesn't that make you want to laugh, Mister Gregg?"
"I'm not judging you, Moore," Gregg said. He shifted Macquerie, not for his own comfort but for that of the snoring captain. Gregg's effortless strength would have been the most striking thing about him, were it not for his eyes.
"I'm twenty-seven," I said. My bitterness surprised me. "I want to put myself in a place where I have to play the man. I pretended it was the money that was pulling me, but that was a lie. A lie for myself."
"Let's walk on," Gregg said, suiting his action to his words. "The air in this tube isn't the worst I've breathed, but that's not a reason to hang around out here either."
I managed a half smile as I fell into step beside the bigger man. Now I massaged the bruises on my throat.
"You don't have to play the man when you're out beyond Pluto, Moore," Gregg said reflectively. "You can become a beast-or die. Plenty do. But if you're determined to come, I won't stop you."
He looked over his shoulder at me. His expression could be called a smile. "Besides, you might be useful."
The Porcelain's airlock was directly ahead of us. I dropped back a step to let Gregg open the hatch.
I thought about the cold emptiness of Stephen Gregg's eyes. I had an idea now what Gregg meant when he spoke of what the Reaches cost.
VENUS ORBIT
Day 1
I'd never been weightless before. My stomach was already queasy from the shaking the Porcelain took from the 500 kph winds of the upper Venerian atmosphere. I hadn't eaten since early the night before, but I wasn't sure that would keep me from spewing yellow bile across the men working nonchalantly around me.
I clung to the tubular railing around the attitude-control console. The starship's three navigational consoles were in the extreme bow; the heavy plasma cannon was shipped in traveling position between the consoles and the attitude controls.
Guillermo was at the right-hand console. Ricimer, Hawtry, and the vessel's navigator, Salomon, stood behind the Molt, discussing the course.
"We need to blood the force, blood it," Hawtry said. He was the only member of the group speaking loudly enough for me to hear.
Hawtry wore a rubidium-plated revolver and the silver brassard which identified him as an officer in the Governor's Squadron. He had at least enough naval experience to keep his place without clutching desperately at a support the way I did.
A sailor carrying a tool kit slid along the axis of the ship, dabbing effortlessly at stanchions for control. "Careful, sir!" he warned in a bored voice before he batted my legs-which had drifted upward-out of his way.
Because the sailor balanced his motion by swinging the heavy tools, his course didn't change. My feet hit the shell locker and rebounded in a wild arc.
Stephen Gregg stood in the center of the three-faced attitude-control console. He reached out a long arm over Lightbody, reading placidly in one of the bays, caught my ankle, and tugged. I released my own grip and thumped to the deck beside Gregg.
Gregg's right boot was thrust under one of three 20-cm staples in the deck. I hooked my toes through both of the others. My hands hurt from the force with which I'd been holding on since liftoff.
"Want to go home now, Moore?" Gregg asked dryly.
"Would it matter if I did?" I said. The spacer who'd pushed past me was working on the Long Tom's traversing mechanism. A hydraulic fitting spit tiny iridescent drops which would shortly settle and spread over the Porcelain's inner bulkheads.
"Not in the least," said Gregg. His voice was calm, but his head turned as he spoke and his gaze rippled across everything, everything in his field of view.
"Then I'm happy where I am," I said. I glanced, then stared, at the controls around me. "These are fully automated units," I said in surprise. "Is that normal?"