Bester swiveled on his heel and walked briskly down the corridor.
“Some shortcut,” sneered Ivanova. “All one-way.”
Gray whirled around and stared at her. He was clearly shaken, but he managed to say, “You were quite magnificent.”
Ivanova was too drained to take in any more. “I’m sorry, Mr. Gray, but I’ve got to get some sleep. And I think the three minutes I promised you are up.”
“Please,” he begged, “a large favor. Would you call me Harriman and let me call you Susan?”
She stared at him with amazement, then softened and nodded. “All right, but only when we’re alone. Around other people, let’s be formal.”
Gray beamed with pleasure. “Does that mean we’re friends?”
“Don’t count your luck,” she said. Ivanova turned to go, but she halted after one step. “I’m glad to hear you won’t be that schmuck’s assistant. Good night.”
“Good night, Susan,” he said softly.
“For humans,” said Garibaldi, handing out the breathing masks, “the Alien Sector is always something of a disappointment. You can’t see a damn thing, and if you could see, you wouldn’t want to. We keep trying to improve it, and the one thing we want to avoid is making it look like a zoo. So, if a bunch of closed doors in murky, unbreathable air is your idea of a good time, let’s go.”
“Surely, it’s got to be more interesting than that,” said the tall one, Mr. Malten.
Garibaldi shook his head. “Not really. Most of the folks down here have special food, drink, and atmosphere requirements, so they don’t go out much. Ms. Winters can tell you. She’s got a regular client in here.”
“Yes,” said Talia rather proudly. “Ambassador Kosh of the Vorlons. We invited him to the reception tomorrow night, and I hope he’ll attend.”
Garibaldi added, “But all we ever see of him is his encounter suit. It’s up to you if you want to stroll through the sector, but you won’t see anything unless we bang on people’s doors.”
“I hadn’t thought of that,” said Talia. “I only come down here when I have an appointment.”
The small telepath, Emily Crane, looked up at the storklike Mr. Malten. “I don’t want to d-disturb the residents.”
“Neither do I,” answered Malten, placing the breathing mask back on the shelf. “But I don’t expect to be shortchanged out of our tour of Down Below.”
“Of course not,” said Garibaldi. “What do you want to see? There’s smuggling, stolen gear getting stripped down, a bunch of derelicts nodding out. You name it, we’ve got it.”
“All of it.” Arthur Malten smiled.
Talia winced and Emily screwed her eyes shut as a hairless behemoth belted some scaled creature and sent him flying over shipping crates and crashing into broken shelves, long since looted. As the grubby crowd of derelicts screamed their approval, the hairless thing went slobbering after its prey and commenced the beating anew. The babble of the bettors was insane, sounding like quadraphonic bedlam inside Talia’s mind, and she would have left if the men hadn’t been enjoying it so much.
“What do they bet?” asked Malten.
“Just about anything,” shouted Garibaldi over the din, “credits, goats, dust, passage out of here! Passage out of here will settle almost any debt.”
“I c-can’t stand this,” muttered Emily into Talia’s shoulder. “It’s barbaric.”
“I agree!” Talia replied. “We must leave this terrible place at once.”
Suddenly, there was a disgusting cracking sound, followed by howls of rage and joy, in equal measures. Talia averted her eyes from the sights on the other side of the room and found herself looking at Garibaldi. Even he was preferable. To her, Garibaldi looked more like a criminal than most of the criminals—crude, shifty, wolfish, a man who prowled instead of walked. On occasion he said something funny, but those occasions were not as numerous as he believed. She would have to be out of her mind to get too friendly with him, yet he obviously liked her. It was hard to hate a guy who drooled whenever he saw you.
The bedlam had died down to a roar, and she was able to hear him say, “This is not a terrible place for Down Below. This is a nice place. You see a fight, and they serve you some flavored antifreeze and take your money. What more do you want?”
Then he smiled and rubbed his chin. “Oh, I forgot, you folks can’t gamble.”
“Isn’t that a silly regulation?” asked Malten. “I don’t see any way we could determine the outcome of this primitive sport, so what would be the harm in betting on it?”
“It would be wrong,” said Emily simply.
Malten smiled. “Yes, I suppose so. But we don’t know anything about some of these species, do we? They could be far more telepathic than us, yet no one tells them they can’t gamble. I think it’s a ridiculous rule. Everybody knows who we are, and they can let us play at their own risk.”
Garibaldi frowned. “Can’t you be horsewhipped by Mr. Bester for saying stuff like that?”
The private telepath snorted a laugh. “I’ve been saying stuff like that for a long time, only nobody listens. I’ve worked for thirty years to have telepaths accepted as just another professional class, no different than doctors or pilots. Do you think I like to see Bester and his crowd ruining all my work?”
Talia shifted uncomfortably on the crate where she was sitting. She tried to change the subject. “These fistfights—they can’t possibly be legal.”
“No,” admitted Garibaldi. “We could shut this place down, but the fights would just spring up ten minutes later in a manufacturing bay, or a cargo bay. We haven’t got the manpower to patrol all of the station. Down Below was used a lot during the construction of the station. Then funds ran out, and it was left unfinished. People get stranded on B5, or kicked off the crew of their ship, or just dumped here, and there’s nowhere else for them to go.”
He shook his head in amazement. “I don’t understand this place either, but we’ve had social engineers through the station who say that Down Below is normal. If it hadn’t grown organically from poor planning, we would’ve had to invent it. If you have order, they say, you also have to have chaos.”
The chief looked meaningfully at Talia. “Does that make sense to you?”
“I think chaos can be avoided,” she replied.
“It makes sense to me,” said Malten. “I want to see more.”
Garibaldi led them into a grungy corridor and sniffed the air. “If I’m not mistaken, down this way we have people sifting through garbage. I don’t know how they reroute it down here, but they do.”
Emily crinkled her nose. “P-people steal garbage?”
“Yes,” said Garibaldi with a reassuring smile. “But they don’t keep all of it, just the good stuff.”
“I think we can pass on that,” said Mr. Malten. “What’s down this corridor?”
“A shanty camp. Do you want to see it?”
“Yes,” answered Malten forcefully.
Talia hung back, but she couldn’t hang back too far as Garibaldi led them briskly through a scene of both despair and amazement. Aliens of every description—with jutting jaws, fins, segmented limbs, hairy pelts, or compound eyes—commingled with humans. Adults, children, old people, the dying—they all had a haunted look on their faces as they stared at the visitors. The shanties had been cobbled together from old crates, stolen panels, sheet metal, shelves, and whatever else might stand up.
“We give them fresh oxygen,” said Garibaldi. “That’s about all they get from us, although the Minbari run a soup kitchen. We can go there next.”
Talia couldn’t decide which was worse, the sense of despair or the smell of the place. To her surprise, the voices she heard in her head were not demanding, begging, or insistent. Some were resigned and helpless, others were angry at their plight and their well-dressed visitors, and a few were clearly insane. It was a mixture, like any bunch of people, and she knew that some of these unfortunates would scrape their way out of here. Others would sink even deeper until there wasn’t a trace of them left.