A Reasonable World

30

In one way it was crazy, but on the other hand it would be crazier not to spend the money and get something for it, after spending so much for nothing. What if he got sick, though? He didn’t think he would. He bought a pill from a dispenser in the lobby, and hoped for the best.

No one was around the elevator. He got in by himself, changed his shoes. The shoes stuck to the velcro floor, but he folded the carpet flaps over them the way the attendants had done, just to make sure.

The street shoes in his pockets made him feel funny, like a kid up to something. He realized that he was having a daydream about running into a cop named Martinez that he hadn’t seen in thirty years, probably dead now. “Up,” he said, and the door closed.

His weight dropped off to nothing at the midpoint; again the car seemed to roll over, and then his weight came back. After another minute the door sighed open. The velcro ramp he had come in on was gone, and now he could see just how big the chamber really was. He weighed maybe a pound or two here; his face was already feeling puffy. There she was, upside down, haloed by lights from somewhere. Beside her, a thick white rope hung from a ring on the floor. She gave him her hand to help him turn himself around and get his feet under him.

Now they were both right side up, and the big empty space was over their heads where it belonged. With part of his brain, Harry was trying to figure out why they hadn’t had to do this upside-down thing when they first came in. The ramp, he. realized—they must have been walking on the underside of the ramp when they came out of the shuttle, so then they were upside down to begin with, only they didn’t know it. That was pretty cute.

She took the envelope he handed her, examined the bills and put them in her purse, then turned and knuckled him lightly up and down the ribs. “Here’s how it works,” she said. “Clothes off here, except for shoes— you’ll need them later. We put our clothes in these bags.”

She undressed quickly. Her breasts were small and high; when she moved, they went every which way. Harry had a painful erection. Ignoring it, she said, “Now grab the rope and just lift one foot off the floor, then the other. That’s it. Now we pull ourselves up to the middle.”

Harry felt himself growing lighter as they ascended. Now they were both floating, head to head, holding on to the rope. At the middle two thin cords with velcro patches at the ends were waving like snakes. Caroline caught one and fastened the velcro around her crossed ankles. “Put the other one on around your waist.” Harry did it, still holding onto the rope, but he could feel himself whirling around, and he was afraid for a minute he was going to be sick.

“Let go,” she said. As they floated away, she pushed herself down along his body, then swung her legs up to encircle him. She pulled herself up again, clasped him with legs and arms, and looked him in the eyes. “Now, lover,” she said.

It was easier to ignore the lack of an up or down than he had expected, because the lights on both of them kept him from seeing the distant walls, but the sex itself was hard to get the hang of. It seemed like her body didn’t weigh anything, because there she was floating in the air, and yet when he moved against her there was a feeling of resistance; then she would start moving away, and when he pulled her back with his hands there was a resistance again. Her boobs and her hair went this way and that way.

After a minute or two he got the rhythm better. She smiled sleepily and let go of him with her arms, laying out in the air in front of him with her hands behind her head. When he came, she drew herself close again and held him.

“Hey,” he said.

“Good boy.” She pulled herself in to the rope by the cord. Harry followed her, and they went hand over hand down to the bottom of the chamber.

“That was something,” he said.

“Sure it was. Get your clothes on fast, or they’ll hit you for another half-hour.”

In the elevator, he said, “You want to have a drink?”

She shrugged. “Sure.”

As they were crossing the park, they passed a young man in a silver jacket, and she made some kind of signal to him.

“Friend of yours?”

“Kind of.”

They sat at a table in a dim cocktail lounge. “Listen, I want to ask you something,” Harry said. “That was the only thing I done here that made any sense to me, and no hard feelings, but I wouldn’t of come all this way for that. What the hell is the point?”

“Of Star Towers? The idea was to make a space colony, where people could live just the way they do on Earth, only better. You know, no pollution, no overcrowding, no bureaucrats. But that was a joke. Seven hundred people built this place, and it cost two trillion dollars. Figure out how much apiece we’d have to pay if we wanted to own it.”

“Two billion nine,” Harry said.

“Right. The project was supposed to be paid for by building solar power satellites, but that never worked, and anyhow they’ve got better power sources now and they don’t need solar. Okay, the only other thing is a tourist trap. People come here because they can afford it and other people can’t. Maybe that isn’t a great reason, but that’s the way it is. Sound familiar?”

“Yeah.” Harry hung his head. “This trip might be the dumbest thing I’ve done since ought five.”

“Don’t feel bad. You’ll get respect for it, just like the pilgrims do when they go to Mecca. I don’t know what your business is, but I’ll bet it will pay off.”

“Yeah. You might be right. Well, thanks for everything.”

“No problem.” She rose. “So long, lover.”

In the hotel elevator, a young man in a silver jacket got on with him. “Hi,” he said pleasantly.

“You staying here too?”

“Seems that way.” As the doors opened and Harry started to leave, the young man stuck out his hand. “Here’s something you forgot.” Harry accepted it automatically; it was a little crystic cube with an image on one side. He took one look, then barged back through the closing doors. He grabbed the young man by the shirt. “Did you cube that?” He turned the cube over in his fingers: one of the two linked figures had his face. The young man, looking startled and afraid, pulled away and swung at him. Harry took a tighter grip, hit the guy square in the nose and felt it crunch, but then the young man pulled something out of his pocket that gave him a pain in his chest greater than he had ever known. Fortunately, it didn’t last long.

By the time the general manager heard about the killing, it was too late to do anything different. Bobby Dalziel had hidden the body in a closet while he called Caroline. Together they had smuggled it into the docking elevator, put it in a sallyport and blown it out into space.

At this point, they had at least had the sense to confide in the sexual services manager. She had bucked the problem up to the GM, Edward Goodhew, who met with his executive committee in extraordinary session at about three-thirty in the morning. The committee, which had had one or two problems of this kind in the past, authorized a substantial bribe to the purser of a departing spacecraft to accept a seventy-three-kilo consignment without putting it on the manifest, and to add Harry’s name to the passenger list. The consignment was waste water in sealed carboys, just enough to compensate for Harry’s missing mass. An agent in Houston would dump the carboys, and that would be that. The records would show that Harry had disappeared after he got to Houston; with luck, he would never be seen again, and his widow would never find out what happened.

The bribe came out of the contingency fund, to be replaced from the earnings of the two employees. A smaller amount was budgeted to contrive the purser’s accidental death later on.

Bobby had acted hastily, and both he and Caroline would have to be disciplined, of course; but there had been no scandal, nothing to hurt the image of Star Towers. That was the important thing, after all. The committee members yawned and went back to their beds. Heigh-ho. Another day on the high frontier, another fifty million dollars.