"So I hear. I thought you were in a hurry, but if you're not, you can
just provide me with wine, women, and other necessities until
tomorrow. That's above and beyond my fee, of course, since you're
wasting my time, and I'm evidently not wasting yours."
I couldn't be sure whether the noise he made was a grunt or a muffled
chuckle, and I didn't much care. "Sorry, Oak; I really didn't expect
you so soon, but I do want to ... I want you to get started right
away. Leave your flitterboat where it is; I'll have someone take care
of it. Walk on over to the dome and come on in." And he cut off.
I growled something I was glad he didn't hear and hung up. I wished
that I'd had a vision unit on the phone; I'd like to have seen his
face. Although I knew I might not have learned much more from his
expression than I had from his voice.
* * * * *
I got out of the flitterboat, and walked across the dome, my magnetic
soles making subdued clicking noises inside the suit as they caught
and released the metallic plain beneath me. Beyond the field, I was
surrounded by a lumpy horizon and a black sky full of bright, hard
stars.
The green light was on when I reached the door to the dome, so I
opened it and went on in, closing it behind me. I flipped the toggle
that began flooding the room with air. When it was up to pressure, a
trap-door in the floor of the dome opened and a crew-cut, blond young
man stuck his head up. "Mr. Oak?"
I toyed, for an instant, with the idea of giving him a sarcastic
answer. Who else would it be? How many other visitors were running
around on the surface of Raven's Rest?
Instead, I said: "That's right." My voice must have sounded pretty
muffled to him through my fishbowl.
"Come on down, Mr. Oak. You can shuck your vac suit below."
I thought "below" was a pretty ambiguous term on a low-gee lump like
this, but I followed him down the ladder. The ladder was a necessity
for fast transportation; if I'd just tried to jump down from one floor
to the next, it would've taken me until a month from next St.
Swithin's Day to land.
The door overhead closed, and I could hear the pumps start cycling.
The warning light turned red.
I took off my suit, hung it in a handy locker, showing that all I had
on underneath was my skin-tight "union suit."
"All right if I wear this?" I asked the blond young man, "Or should I
borrow a set of shorts and a jacket?" Most places in the Belt, a union
suit is considered normal dress; a man never knows when he might have
to climb into a vac suit--_fast_. But there are a few of the
hoity-toity places on Eros and Ceres and a few of the other
well-settled places where a man or woman is required to put on shorts
and jacket before entering. And in good old New York City, a man and
woman were locked up for "indecent exposure" a few months ago. The
judge threw the case out of court, but he told them they were lucky
they hadn't been picked up in Boston. It seems that the eye of the
bluenose turns a jaundiced yellow at the sight of a union suit, and he
sees red.
But there were evidently no bluenoses here. "Perfectly all right, Mr.
Oak," the blond young man said affably. Then he coughed politely and
added: "But I'm afraid I'll have to ask you to take off the gun."
I glanced at the holster under my armpit, walked back over to the
locker, opened it, and took out my vac suit.
"Hey!" said the blond young man. "Where are you going?"
"Back to my boat," I said calmly. "I'm getting tired of this runaround
already. I'm a professional man, not a hired flunky. If you'd called a
doctor, you wouldn't tell him to leave his little black bag behind; if
you'd called a lawyer, you wouldn't make him check his brief case. Or,
if you did, he'd tell you to drop dead.
"I was asked to come here as fast as possible, and when I do, I'm told
to wait till tomorrow. Now you want me to check my gun. The hell with
you."
"Merely a safety precaution," said the blond young man worriedly.
"You think I'm going to shoot Ravenhurst, maybe? Don't be an idiot." I
started climbing into my vac suit.
"Just a minute, please, Mr. Oak," said a voice from a hidden speaker.
It was Ravenhurst, and he actually sounded apologetic. "You mustn't
blame Mr. Feller; those are my standing orders, and I failed to tell
Mr. Feller to make an exception in your case. The error was mine."
"I know," I said. "I wasn't blaming Mr. Feller. I wasn't even talking
to him. I was addressing you."
"I believe you. Mr. Feller, our guest has gone to all the trouble of
having a suit made with a space under the arm for that gun; I see no
reason to make him remove it." A pause. "Again, Mr. Oak, I apologize.
I really want you to take this job."