The Venus Belt (5 page)

The President leaned forward slightly. “Might I offer a suggestion? Al
t
hough I must confess to certain reservations...”

“Fire away, old primate, I need all the help I can get.”

“Very well, to paraphrase one of your greatest statesmen—or was he a religious leader?—take my niece,
please
.”
His ponderous stomach jiggled in imitation of human laughter.

Koko dropped her knitting and bounded to her feet, resembling a cross between Orson Welles and shag carpet rampant. “Honest? You’re not just—”

“No, my dear, I’m not just. But I’m logical: you visited Ceres with me not so many years ago. If you strive to overcome that youthful impetuos
i
ty of yours...Come see me in the morning, I’ll make all the arrang
e
ments.”

“Oh, boy! The
asteroids!
”

I shook my head. “Don’t get too excited. I want to think about this.”

“
Think?
What’s to
think
about? Oh, boy! The asteroids!”

“
Quiet!
Unless you’d rather spend the voyage in a cargo hold...”

“Then I
can
go! Gee thanks, Boss! Oh, boy! The— ”

“Don’t thank me. It’s your uncle’s idea, and I understand his reserv
a
tions. On the other hand,
two
investigators might...Say, should we be inte
r
rupting your education for a field trip? Olongo?”

“Win, my friend, time is passing this planet by, along with everything it has to teach us. Were it my decision—and it’s not, it’s Koko’s—I’d say go!
And never come back!
”
He looked around the room. I knew what he was se
e
ing, I was seeing it, too: furniture, fixtures, nanoelectronic a
p
pliances—if not actually manufactured in the asteroids, then made from asteroid raw materials.

“It isn’t only consumer goods,” Olongo said, “it’s the
future
.
And, I might add, a considerable portion of the present. Thank Lysander we were able to talk your Propertarians out of their demand for a strict gold stan
d
ard.”

“I wasn’t aware that you had! Gold’s as important to them as...” I tric
k
led to a stop, unable to think of anything
that
important.

“Win, my boy, in this one minuscule respect, the Keynesians approach the truth: gold has no particularly magical properties that make it the only kind of money possible. A stable economy relies upon a myriad of co
m
modities; you can draw a check as easily from a petroleum account, or on h
e
lium, or wheat.”

“Yes, yes, but why this sudden allergy to gold?” What little econo
m
ics I knew were being ripped out from underneath me.

“Hardly sudden. Confederate metals have been declining—relative to nonmetallic standards—for a considerable time. The asteroids, you unde
r
stand.”

I understood. When something gets more abundant, it gets chea
p
er—Marginal Utility, they call it. The Belt was cranking heavy metals out like popcorn—one advantage to working the debris of a planet that never quite got its shit (or anything else) together. You don’t have to dig very deep. No matter, something scarcer would turn up to base our currencies on.

But Olongo was still pontificating: “—down to Earth on a nice, easy ballistic spiral. Your United State will benefit as well, eventually. But the Invisible Hand is going to have to manage some readjustments along the way.”

“Great. So sometime next year I can get a black mask and start o
r
dering my bullets cast out of solid silver. People will want to thank me. I—”

“Say, Win, speaking of bullets...” Captain Forsyth stood and stretched a little, wincing at the arthritic pain in his shoulder. He slapped the weapon at his hip. “Were you planning to take that old Smith & Wesson with you?”

Terrific. Time for another ribbing. “Sure. Why not?”

The chimpanzee shrugged—and winced again. “Well, for starters, think what the cold will do to its mainspring: first time you pull the trigger,
crunch
!— powdered steel.”

“For that matter,” added Olongo, “the entire weapon’s steel. Drop it to a few degrees above Absolute, then suddenly subject it to—forty tho
u
sand psi? I shudder at the thought!”

“Now hold on a minute, I can have the springs replaced. And it isn’t any forty thousand pounds. The custom loads I use—”

“That reminds me,” interrupted Captain Forsyth, “those lead-alloy bu
l
lets of yours, they’re lubricated, right? Little grooves around each slug, filled with some kind of grease?”

“Right, beeswax and—”

“Volatiles evaporate in hard vacuum. Same goes for that antiquated n
i
tro powder, not to mention primers.”

“Okay, wise-ass, let’s look over the inventory and see what
you
su
g
gest.” I rose reluctantly and went to the gun case, Forsyth and Olongo right b
e
hind me. The lock yields for only two thumbprints in the world, mine and Clarissa’s—three, if you count Ed Bear, who uses the same fingerprints I do. I opened the double doors.

“Well, I suppose this lets out most of my collection.” There was the handmade .41 hideout derringer I’d brought with me to this world with the Smith, and almost a dozen other souvenirs of various misadventures since. “Hold on, what about this?”

I reached up and took down a Walther-Zeiss hand-laser. “No ammo to evaporate, no steel. This was made in your world, gentlemen. Think it might do?”

Forsyth took the pistol and turned it over in his hands. “It’s proofed for space, anyway.” He showed me a tiny stylized spaceship stamped into the base of the trigger guard. “But this overgrown flashlight has some dra
w
backs, wouldn’t you say, Mr. President?”

“Rawther. In the first place, smartsuits are designed to absorb all the energy they can, and reflect any—”

“Smart
suits
?”

“Absolutely
de rigueur,
old boy. A solid-state invention in the form of a tough, lightweight rubbery garment. A bit like ocean divers wear, though infinitely more sophisticated. You didn’t imagine we’d still be using that clumsy armor your astronauts—”

“Olongo, we’ve already had our critique of NASA for the evening. B
e
sides, I’ve seen these smartsuits on TV—pardon, the Telecom—now that I think of it. Can’t get anything these days but goddamned space opera. An
y
way, lasers, I take it, are out?”

The Captain rubbed his chin in contemplation. “Well, this toy
might
overload a smartsuit, but you’d really have to bear down—no pun i
n
tended, Win. Be like hunting elk with that Browning 9 mm hanging there—theoretically possible, but chancy.”

I thought about the years I’d worn a puny .38 as a cop, never very ha
p
py in a cruel world filled with .45s and magnums of assorted lethality. “Don’t say another word. I get your drift.” I stretched and placed the Wa
l
ther back on its hooks. “So what do you advise—time’s getting short?”

Olongo glanced briefly at Forsyth. The Captain nodded confirmation and the President drew his pistol. “I’d be honored if you’d consider taking this.”

Across the room, Clarissa peeked up from her Telecom, smiled, and went back to work. She missed my look of helpless exasperation.

It wasn’t
quite
the ugliest thing I’d ever seen: a Webley & Scott, big brother to the little electric quick-shooter my wife favored. It was .17 cal
i
ber—about the size of pellet guns back home—but I knew it threw its little steel darts at eleven or twelve thousand feet per second—call it Mach 10—enough to mess up anybody’s outlook. The magazine was good for a hu
n
dred rounds. The handle, shaped to suit a gorilla’s fingers, was awkward in my own.

“Let’s find the original stocks,” Olongo suggested. “I’ve got them in the car someplace. I also brought some special projectiles you might want to try.”

Forsyth grinned. “If you’ve got any
big
enemies.”

“The good Captain refers, in his elliptical manner, to Owen tubes—a hollow contrivance which slips
over
the front end. You see, the drive cu
r
rents also flow along the outside of the—”

“My God!” I interrupted, looking at the hefty barrel coils. “What would the diameter amount to?”

“A little under two inches,” the Captain replied evenly, “just right for putting an ape-size dent in a personal flivver. That’s what they use for ho
v
ercraft out there, little tiny spaceships that—”

“I
said
I watch the Telecom. Sounds like I oughta invest in some of these Owen goodies. You’re sure I’ll need a nasty thing like that out there?”

“Oh, it’s quite up to you, dear boy. However, with Hamiltonian Fede
r
alists involved, I assume you want to be adequately defended.”

“I just don’t care to think about it so soon after dinner.” I started to shut the gun case.

“One more thing, Win.” Forsyth reached past me. “You won’t want to leave this toadsticker behind. It’s a spaceman’s knife, or I never saw one b
e
fore.”

“You mean that old Bowie—
Rezin,
rather?” Named after the fellow who invented them in both worlds, Jim’s little brother, the specimen in question was another
“trophy”; I hadn’t more than looked at it in years. Eighteen inches from pommel to point, it had a foot-long blade two and a half inches wide and a quarter thick, razor sharp halfway along the back edge, as well. The alloy was something called Stellite, and the grip aft of the heavy brass guards was long enough for a hand and a half—somebody like Olongo e
x
cepted. The damn thing weighed better than two pounds, and gave me the papercut shudders just thinking about it.

“Swords, already. Don’t you clowns realize it’s almost the twenty-first century?”

“Not by
my
calendar.” Forsyth took the knife, ran his thumb along the edge with a casual swipe that made me cringe, and handed it back. “You wanted to know about smartsuits? Well, they
heal up
, better and faster than ordinary window glass. You can’t always count on a gun to do the job. Knives make bigger, messier holes.”

“And,” Olongo offered, “asteroiders have a highly sensible custom r
e
garding personal weapons: pistols, for the most part, are for outdoors; blades are for indoors. Reasonable, when you live in a pressurized enviro
n
ment, wouldn’t you say?”

***

Friday, February 26, 223 A.L.

You’d think of all the places they’d control the climate, it’d be the ai
r
port. For some reason, Confederates don’t see it that way. The Lilie
n
thal Aeronautics Building, planted smack in the middle of town, pokes up a couple hundred stories, right into the real weather. We were at the very top, waiting for the shuttle to depart.

I stood shivering with my cloak wrapped around me as many times as it would go, wondering if Clarissa was really dressed warmly enough. Through blowing snow I could see my assistant huddling against her u
n
cle, who had come to see us off. Despite a four-hour briefing the day b
e
fore, he was still piling on last-minute advice. She looked up at me in silent appeal, then went resignedly back to having her furry little ear bent.

I felt sorry for the old gorilla, too. He’d caught his burglar last night: an attractive young American woman who’d apparently expected the ape to be unarmed again. He hadn’t been—his spare persuader’s a .375 Nauvoo Browning; she was DOA before she hit the floor, a sawed-off .22 Colt Woodman clenched in her rapidly cooling fingers. Some people take a while understanding why we have so little crime here.

Others never get the chance.

Now Koko and I were off on some mysterious adventure, while the President had nothing to return to but the same old grind, the continuing subversion of my homeworld. Olongo was personally involved, and for a good reason: his species is damned near extinct back there, getting e
x
tincter all the time. In order to survive, they had to be educated to the culture their more fortunate Confederate fellows had adopted. Just considering the h
u
man politics in that neighborhood, it was going to be a long, dangerous job. The Voice of the Stars, good old Voltaire, had me
n
tioned it last evening, in a slightly different context: