The Pleasure Tube Page 7

  I feel my palms becoming clammy and the atmosphere acquiring the weight of Guam between Taylor and myself. Taylor here; yet this is just like Guam, him standing up as he sits me down, the mechanics of his practiced insecurity. I sit, shifting my feet apart on the rug. I know where my center is, anyhow; I lean back in the chair.

  "It'd be a chase only if I were running," I suggest. "I had the right to leave time under military procedure and I exercised it."

  "That's under review," replies Taylor, packing his pipe with a blunt finger. "For the moment, you're coming back with me to Pacific SciCom. The sooner we start back the better. Where are your things? Your ticket will say. Show it to Mancek, he'll get them for you." Taylor looks at me as he relights his pipe, his gold lighter tight in his hand, hissing.

  "I'm not going anywhere with you," I say evenly, "unless you have a criminal arrest warrant and he's got status to serve it. In that case, I want to see a local attorney."

  "No, now, I..." Taylor murmurs, the faint smile that had shaped his thick lips fading.

  "Then show me the orders you have. I'd like to see the authority flow on this one."

  "I make the orders," Taylor says, setting his lighter down, his face reddening.

  "Not for me you don't," I say evenly. "I have military status and I'm exercising my leave time."

  "That's a technicality, Voorst."

  "I'm staying here," I say.

  "For the life of me," Taylor sighs, "I can't find out why the military office let you go. I'll concede the technical grounds of your presence here, but we've lost a week already. Let's get on with it." Taylor's bushy eyebrows come together, he punches something through a table console and calls Mancek over. "SectorGold. Casa del... Christ, Voorst, what are you doing with a local residence in SectorGold? I'm in Green, what are you doing in SectorGold?"

  It is a nice moment. Taylor sucks on his pipe, glaring at the screen.

  "I was with a woman," I say. "She was taken away from me. What do you know about that?'

  "... well, I'm in Green," Taylor says, expelling a breath. "Christ, Voorst." He looks at me and his expression twists another way. "That black girl, West Indian? She was working for us."

  "She was?" I ask, my heart sinking. "She was working for you?"

  "I'm not saying," Taylor tells me, beginning to drum his fingers on the table, "that she was doing a very good job. Look, Voorst, SciCom takes precedence over military, let's not press it. They obviously resent that fact, they're always splitting hairs over authority flows. We don't like to abuse our prerogative."

  "Well, you have been," I say, thinking, She lied— straight-faced lied.

  "I'm going to insist on your cooperation. This is an important enough project, a project everyone, even the military, eventually benefits from...."

  "Would you say Cooper benefited?' I ask, my anger rising. "I'm fed up. You ask questions you have no right to ask; my personal belongings have been searched. Maybe you benefit from that, but I don't see what you've done for anyone's welfare. Cooper was a little odd, but he was no suicidal psychotic."

  "We had no control over that. He did it himself, Voorst."

  "Whose care was he under, Taylor? I've felt different since I left Guam, you know that? I'm not so tired any more. Cooper's whole boring report identified the cause of the accident as an impact event, unknown interstellar material. Why do you need another report? We had that from the beginning. You can find it in every tape from the mission. I've told you time and time again that squares with my recollection, and Werhner's, and Tamashiro's, and Levsky's. And Cooper's, right? But Cooper's not alive to defend his report."

  "You jump to conclusions, Voorst. Your conclusions color everything you say. You're a walking example of Heisenberg's Effect, I've observed that, though for your sake I haven't put it on record. Let me remind you that we draw the conclusions. Of course there was an impact event. What I'm concerned about is why there was impact."

  Then Werhner's right, I think, it's SciCom itself, not the dome crew, that should be investigated. Which Taylor must know as well as I do. "It's my conclusions about what you're doing that bother you," I say, "not my conclusions about what happened. Look, have you ever actually finished a debriefing? Or does the crew finally die of old age?"

  Taylor tells Mancek to get my things from the local residence, to which they've been transferred. I think how I might have been going there with Collette; sigh.

  "Don't touch my bag," I say to them both, "or you're going to deal with military police. It may be only a technicality, but I'm staying here."

  "Voorst, you don't want to do that," Taylor says angrily, his forehead tightening. My bluff hand—and thinking of it that way, I raise the stakes.

  "Don't tell me what I want. Release my program or you're going to have to restrain me from using that alarm console outside. I'm serious, Taylor, I mean what I say. It's already serious enough for me."

  There is another long moment of silence. Taylor glares at me but then leans back. "You really want to stay here," he sighs. "I can countermand your status, Voorst, I can have that done." Forward again over the console, Taylor looks at his wristwatch, punches through a program, scowls. "Well, it's going to take three more days. So Monday. In three days' time I can wallpaper you with authorizations."

  Taylor looks at me blackly. He has said it himself; three days' time. I look him straight in the eye; we both know I am not going with him until Monday.

  "And I'll file an appeal to sustain leave," I say.

  "Good luck," Taylor says flatly, whacking his cold pipe against the ceramic ashtray. "You're too arrogant, Voorst. You have no respect for us."

  "Maybe because Daedalus SciCom doesn't know its ass from a wall screen," I say as I rise to leave.

  In the pastel room, Taylor is telling me that he is going to see to it that I won't fly again, not even out of the service, until he and I are through, not if it takes until the end of his career. Blood rushes to my neck—no bureaucrat can cashier flight crew, what an ugly thing to say—my anger is palpable to me, a thickening of my blood. I slam the door behind me with both hands, as if I want to throw it in his face.

  At one time—it was when Maxine was sleeping in my cabin on the Daedalus, and I realized she was seeing Cooper all along—I told myself I wouldn't let a woman make me feel this way again. Now the woman is Collette, and I am again depressed by the sticky gloom, the heart-thumping mud of betrayal. Seeing Maxine with Cooper—well, they say the first cut is the deepest. I'm not sure. There might be another explanation for the way Collette's behaved toward me, but I shouldn't delude myself. I'm certain now that she lied to me about where she was the night she was gone, lied through her soft lips. I know she was in touch with SciCom at least from the third night.

  Erica meets me at a D-bar in the trans-port and I am finally able to leave the terminal. It is already midafternoon. On our way to the local residence LasVenus sprawls before us from the elevated freeway, bright in the three o'clock sun. The city, Erica tells me, is a layover for sections of theTube and a separate resort complex, the largest of its kind. I am almost too low to appreciate the spectacle. Glittering casinos, a floating Hong Kong nightclub on an artificial lake, three domed stadiums, emerge miragelike in the distance, along with sports and racing circuits, in a high-rise clutter whose buildings shine like mica sheets under the bright haze of the sun. The centerpiece of LasVenus is a massive new club with a forty-acre garden on its roof, complete with artificial weather—occasional summer storms with lightning streak across its sky, thunder rolls in as if from a distance, rain pours into its ponds. From our distance driving in I can only see the Tower as a beige, transparent high-rise. The shimmering movement of its sides, Erica explains, comes from its elevators; the first twenty floors, which shimmer more than the rest, house an administrative core. In the other direction must lie the ongoing city of permanent residents—rows of drab, blocklike buildings stretch into the desert.

  How can I sort out my feelings? It seems usel
ess to try. I miss Collette even as I think, The bitch, the manipulating bitch. Massimo is probably right about these women. And yet...

  We take the exit, offramp through a greenbelt separating sectors, cross over a wide, banked track for land-vehicle racing. From the overpass I glimpse two Formula E's, flywheel-propulsion racing machines I've only seen on the videon. Toadlike, awkward in shape, their power is tremendous. I remember hearing they don't handle well as I watch the lead car lumber into a curve. The oddest thing is the high whistle of their passing.

  Our taxi swoops beneath pedestrian level for a kilometer, then ascends for a slow drive down a boulevard lined with shiny, artificial trees and pastel buildings which flash above like gems set in gems. Erica is telling me about shows she wants to see as we drive on. It is the overall effect that I am still trying to absorb. The size still impresses me, not only the size of this district, but of the other LasVenus, I cannot have seen the end of the residence blocks stretching into the desert.

  "We'll have to play it by ear. I'm sorry," Erica says. "You're entirely desynched from the program. We could stop somewhere if you like."

  "Why not," I say.

  We wind up at a place in the Tower Complex called the Club Erotica, a big, shimmering bar of several levels, with men and women suspended on small stages, outrageously dressed, some completely naked, some in intimate heterosexual and homosexual pairs. Erica and I sit at a long walnut bar, talk for a while. I feel preoccupied. I am looking for someone in the mirrors, I realize, looking among the scattered blacks. I am embarrassed, angry, and humiliated at the same time.

  The suite is laid out like the cabin unit on theTube, a couch/recliner, a window/wall, a kitchen/bar. But here space is tripled and the furniture is larger: a huge, tiered sofa; a white, circular dining table. In place of a shower, there is a lavish bath with a sunken marble tub, the bath illuminated by thin mauve neon tubes which skirt the mirrored walls. From a balcony beyond the sliding window/wall I can see the whole of SectorGold and beyond its freeway border the vast rows of drab, identical residence blocks of the other city. Even from this elevation they fade into the brownish haze of late afternoon without visible end.

  When I key into the computer, a message jumps up right into video, a short tape loop waiting for me from Massimo Giroti. He asks me to meet him tomorrow, about noon, at an address which reads like a warehouse number. He doesn't say why, fades out with a grin. Working for a while at the small console which lifts from a coffee table, I discover that outside communication is not well developed here, and when I look through my bag for the routing book I decided to take along, I have the feeling someone's been through my things again. Why, I wonder, is the LasVenus page smudged? Even with the routings and the traffic channel I secured just before we landed, I cannot raise Werhner on a live line—one routing I try lists Werhner as off station, the other as on station but unavailable for outside calls. I think they both amount to the same thing. A little later, I decide, I will compose a message, key in, and route it as a teletype, not to Guam's SciCom base at Agana, but rather to the maintenance station at Utama Bay, where Werhner dives. A debugging rider will make it disappear if someone listens in.

  I doze on the couch, and when I fall hard asleep something wakes me—as if the darkness of sleep carried with it something monstrous, something unformed, a nightmare. I recall the darkness, but I don't remember a single detail of whatever it was that woke me until I am seeing it all—Cooper's tight lips, his narrowed eyes as he tells me, Let her go, and Maxine's flushed face, her vacant, embarrassed smile, her watery eyes. Erica is in the bath. Now I am angry, I want to throw that door at Taylor. The thought of Collette makes me sigh audibly.

  channel 393/7

  sign key 0202/Voorst//

  telex medium//

  route: SoCal Center

  Honolulu

  Midway

  Guam Utama Sta, (des.)

  debugging rider: erase if intercept

  ATTN: WERHNER SCHOLE

  QUERY: DO YOU KNOW ANY INFORMATION ANOMALIES OUR DAEDALUS MISSION? EXCEPT FOR THE MISSING, AM NOT AWARE OF ONE IN COOPER'S REPORT. BUT SEE WHAT YOU CAN FIND: CHECK WHAT SCICOM IS HOLDING IN ITS BANKS, COMPARE WITH C'S REPORT, WOULD YOU? THE CIRCUS HAS COME TO TOWN, HAD A TALK WITH TAYLOR, REPEAT, TAYLOR HERE. SEE WHAT YOU CAN FiND.

  RAWLEY

  Once I punch that through I begin getting nervous, my palms sweating—I am always nervous when I compose one of these:

  channel 393// 0202/

  sign key Voorst//

  telex medium//

  route: local

  local

  Military Flight HQ

  ATTN: MILITARY CMDR, FLIGHT

  APPEAL SCICOM ORIG. RECLASSIFICATION TO GUAM SCICOM, EFFECTIVE 10-24.

  APPEAL BASIS: ACCUMULATED LEAVE TIME.

  S/Voorst, Rawley//Flt Vane Eng. Class 2//codex 292//sign key 0202//

  "Too many drugs," Erica is saying from the kitchen/bar; she is taking one capsule as we settle in before dinner. She is telling me about an older woman she saw while waiting for me. The woman staggered out of a D-bar down the way and fell at the cement curbing of a ramp, fracturing her skull.

  "And in a SectorGold street," she goes on. "I say that's not her fault, she should have been better taken care of. The thing is not to take so many. I happen to be a moderate person. I mean, I don't believe in the drugs themselves, just what they open up inside you, it has to be there already. Do you know what I mean? God, she wouldn't have known if somebody was doing her from the way she was walking. I saw it a block away."

  When Erica comes to the couch, she is stirring Viennese coffee with cinnamon sticks, still talking. She is wearing the tight silver halter she wore when I first saw her in the L.A. trans-port, still slightly flushed from the bath, sweet-smelling.

  As she settles next to me I point out that she took a handful of pills this morning—a handful. At the console I have begun retrieving some of the coded information I've assembled on Eva Steiner, beginning with a map array from Las Venus DataBase. We both watch it click into place on the smoky bronze window/wall:

  "But that's when I'm flying," Erica says. "I only do that many when I'm terrified. Taking off. Landing. Cruising. My stomach goes up to here," she says, pointing to the level of her breasts. "My nipples go crazy. I think it's all in my mind. I mean, I have to concentrate on getting the ship up, keeping it up. Which suits me for another kind of work, I guess," she giggles. "But otherwise, I'm very careful. I'm like a monk about what I put in my mouth." She giggles again. "Though we could try a little D-Pharmacon for kicks tonight." She focuses on the map, then asks what I'm looking at.

  "A local residence," I say. Then, using Werhner's trick, I retrieve the personnel file I saw but didn't closely study before—the listing on Eva Steiner. The data on the screen describes a busy executive, but something is confusing. I can't determine whether she is an executive in security for EnergyWest, or whether she is given special security facilities for her EnergyWest work. The second, I think— or are they both blinds, covers for something else? She had originally been trained as a nuclear engineer, and seems to fly regularly on the ship.

  "My God," Erica says when she realizes what she is seeing. "What are you doing reading that, how did you retrieve that? Eva Steiner—she's a Director, look, I told you about her. Oh, Rawley, lover, you ought to just forget it, you're going to get into trouble. What are you going to do?"

  "I'm not sure," I say, switching off and letting the window/wall clear to show the city beyond. "Don't you have a report to make?"

  Erica raises her hands. "Not me," she says, then sighs. "All right, look, I told you about her. I'll tell you everything else I know. This hairy man with glasses talked to me..."

  "Taylor."

  "That's his name. But all he said was to keep you in sight and in good health. Lover, I'm on your side. I told him that's exactly what I'd do, that's what I'm supposed to do. That's all. I think they treated Collette pretty rottenly, I told him that, too. I saw
the way they took her. I don't know what this is all about, except that with people like Eva Steiner, you might get into trouble, so between you and me... I've been in trouble myself. It's not worth it."

  I ask Erica what kind of trouble she's been in,

  "They caught me getting off in L.A. six months ago with a suitcase full of brandy and ampules," she says, flushing with embarrassment. "I'm still on probation."

  I punch up Erica's file, run through the security sheet; what she says is true. Courvoisier, Five Star, twenty-four bottles. I could use some right now. "You know," I say, half to myself, settling back on the sofa, "all I wanted to do when I came here was to get away."

  "Honestly, I didn't know you were being screened till this morning," Erica says quietly. "I can't tell you what Collette's up to, but I know what I am. I mean, why am I here with you? That's what I told that man. This is thePleasureTube, I have a job to do, and look, I should be taking better care of you."

  I look into Erica's slightly glazed blue eyes and laugh.

  She laughs, too, pushes back her blonde hair, and sidles near me on the couch. "Well, actually, it doesn't seem much like work today," she says, putting her hands around my neck, then trailing one hand across my shoulder. "You have a nice body." She grins, moving her hips so that her skirt rides up her thighs, still moving her hips. Her other hand has slid down my spine and I can feel my back loosen up. "It's whatever you want, you know. Don't forget that. You're your own worst enemy if you forget that. Anything. Anything you want."

  Her breast cupped in my hand, a nipple in relief on the lame halter, I feel a kind of sad detachment even as my sexuality responds to the touch and the soft weight of her. I ask myself what I have to regret—and as if in answer, Erica's head falls back, her eyes open wide and their pupils roll back as her mouth hangs open in heavy, self-absorbed breathing. Her legs come up across my lap and she opens her thighs. How overripe, how voluptuous, how enormously sexy she is, I think. And how enormously empty and alone I feel at this moment.