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CHAPTER 20

It was Greyesar who determined the ship's course. The day before they set out, he left an itinerary on Huey's pillow. At breakfast Huey said, appropos of nothing, "Beta system first, Grey. The route is vastly more scenic--not so many mudflies, hm? Will the exigencies of commerce permit?"

Greyesar did not answer to the name Grey, but a revised memo appeared, stuck to Huey's mirror. Clark found the Outlander in the control room laying out the course according to it when he went there to compose a reply to the note the counter had slipped him at the Uchides'.

The captain's screen was crowded with symbols that grew, shrank and disappeared altogether as he plotted ways around the obstacles and risk foci they represented. Little signs decorated the course line with advice like, "Call me at this juncture," that Huey wrote in for his first mate. These signs had realside analogues in bits of paper stuck to the sundry dials, meters and eyes with such comments as, "This will beep if it wants you," or "Leads switched--port side reading here." Greyesar adorned the hold in similar wise, with reminders like, "Keep tempor pressure constant, check for browning," over the storage chambers. Each of the two comrades had taken the work to which he was least suited. It was a scheme that must drive them together and make each always aware of his dependence on the other, yet they could barely speak without arguing, so that Greyesar fled the control room when Huey came and was himself banished from the hold. Clark wondered as he surveyed the control room what Paula would have thought of the communiques. He laughed. She would have pointed out that the only one who read them was Clark.

Pondering several alternative ways to write, "I was called away," Clark fretted over human nature. He doubted that Marlow Maxwell would endanger his relationship with the Uchide by double-crossing them on the matter of the transit pass. As soon as they guessed he knew Paula was dead, Maxwell would become useless or worse to the Viyato, so he had every reason to wish Clark success. Or so it seemed to Clark's understanding. Depending on what else they had on each other, Maxwell and the Viyato could still be working in concert. Almost the moment Clark left his office, Maxwell had reported the whole interaction to Malenyk Uchide, but he might have done the same for Nicolas Viyato. For that matter, if the Viyato had their windows open they might have overheard the call.

Most likely it didn't matter. Maxwell himself probably didn't know which side he was on and wouldn't until the winner had been declared. Clark bounced to the counter's access address on Reshecomp and found a standing message. It was a clip from a news tape, saying he had been injured in an auto accident. Police were investigating. The counter, smiling in his hospital bed, said he held no one to blame. Could have been anyone, anything, Clark thought, but he felt sure that he had lured the man into some misstep among the violent rush of schemes that surrounded him. Perhaps Clark should intercede with someone...could have been anyone, anything. He left a greeting and went below.

Down in the hold, he arranged and re-arranged his equipment, rigging his landing suit with enough dead-man explosives to level a house if his heart stopped for more than a minute. When the soft fabric was stiff with paraphernalia he put it on and wore it, though he stopped short of activating the explosives because gettin out of the suit when it was fully boobytrapped would require a day's work with a simucardiophone and dousers. The suit was hot, and so heavy that he could barely walk. After a few hours he took it off again, and when the critical time came it was lying in a box in the control room.

Sometimes he practiced fighting with Greyesar, though the Eyimalian was a poor teacher. "Duck, not roll, you idiot!" he would shout, or else it would be, "Roll, you bonehead, don't just duck!" and then a punch. He lost his temper and swung blind until Clark ran away, then he would cool off and sulk.

"I don't know what to do with you," he told Clark once while they peeled off their sweaty clothes and sprayed themselves with cleansing solutions. "You don't have speed, strength, or control. You're small but clumsy. If you are challenged, I recommend that you run. Can you aim in a mirror?"

Clark redeemed himself by learning to shoot with a mirror and a backlighted Puro at targets behind, beside and above without turning. When the ship's way was clear, Greyesar exercised in front of him while he did this.

"Why does Huey leave so many notes?" Clark asked him once. He saw his poker face in the mirror. Greyesar was lying on the floor with his legs raised.

"To reassure himself."

"Why doesn't he run the ship, instead of you?"

"He doesn't want to go where we're going."

"Then--"

"Of course his wishes have no meaning. But he prefers my being in control."

"Why--"

"Hugh has decided that the drug market does not suit his tastes. Therefore, I have taken command," Greyesar said. He exhaled slowly, letting one leg descend. "When we leave the pathway at Paffir Haretz, however, I will need his assistance."

"Assistance?" Huey repeated when Clark asked him about it. "That idiot couldn't make a bird fly. As long as the course is locked in, the ship pilots itself."

Huey was re-wrapping a load of green powder. He stopped occasionally to wipe his hands on his pants.

"Do you want get out of the drug market?" Clark asked.

"I want to die usefully."

"Then it doesn't matter what business you're in."

"I used to think so--in, in, in we go," Hugh muttered to his work. "No one tells you how to be useful, alas. If you need to be told, you could be anybody, as Paula would say."

"You are useful," Clark objected. "The money you raise--"

Huey sneezed. Green dust puffed up around them, obscuring their faces like mist. "I don't think the industry is optimal for our purposes. It does drag one down. Cause or no, I lack enthusiasm for giving righteous ardor to kids."

"But you don't."

"Mother Lightning, wrapped in shiny ribbons. I sell it to parents. If you do nothing else, you can give your little one a day in mortal paradise. Birthday presents, for the most part." He sat down on a vacuum pump. "When I first came into this business I worried unceasingly, but distractions have interfered of late. Perhaps I shall leave it to take up my worrying in a more solitary spot."

The best are taken and the worst are taken, Clark thought. If Huey were ever caught and tried, the question of which he was might occupy learned conventions for years and years. He said, "You know, Isadora Maxwell came in to Marlow's office and tried to shoot him while I was there."

Huey beamed. "A friend revealed! What happened?"

"She missed. I didn't know what to do."

"Steady her hand, by all means. Although you needed the fellow, didn't you?"

"I took the Puro away from her."

Huey laughed. "You're an order-loving soul."

"She knocked me down, just like that. I guess I wasn't watching. As soon as Marlow touched her, she fell apart." He brushed the green powder from his knees. "First she tried to kill him, then she knocked me over, then she sat down and cried."

"An eccentric couple," Huey said.

"Well, they were like Paula. Their life together must have been-- unrelieved."

"The two of them?"

"The three of them. No distraction."

Huey laughed again, choked on the dust and had to lean against the bales while he caught his breath. "A house of perpetual immiseration. If Paula Maxwell were my daughter, I would have been a father at an indecently tender age, I suppose."

Huey wandered off to the nether parts of the hold. Clark went back to the control room to pore over the files taken from Maxwell's office. He found some clues, probably outdated, to Sevit's location.

Paffir Haretz boasted two landing fields registered with the Interplanetary Travel Office, a planet-to-planet one on the smaller continent where Clark and the rest had not been, and one for ground-to-ground craft near the Lir. The interplanetary field handled Love's Arrow traffic, it appeared. Recently an Outlander family who worked there tried to cut in between the Ketry and Var by hiring a ship ofther own to carry their private crop to market, and the Viyato had called on Maxwell for help. Interplanetary Security promptly arrested the maverick ship, for which the Viyato thanked Maxwell, but then Security hovered around the planet for weeks while the family's most lucrative business withered.

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CONTINUE.....................

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