Crashlander

By then it was too late to bite my tongue, though I didn't know it yet. «Not much to tell. Elephant's a friend of mine, a flatlander. He's got friends all over known space. I walked in at lush hour one afternoon, and Bellamy was there, with a woman named … here she is, Tanya Wilson. She's in the same hunting party. She's Bellamy's age.»

«What's Bellamy like?»

«He's three hundred years old, no kidding. He was wearing a checkerboard skin-dye job and a shocking-pink Belter crest. He talked well. Old jokes, but he told them well, and he had some new ones, too.»

«Would he kidnap a Kdatlyno?»

I had to think about that. «He might. He's no xenophobe; aliens don't make him nervous, but he doesn't like them. I remember him telling us that we ought to wipe out the kzinti for good and all. He doesn't need money, though.»

«Would he do it for kicks?»

Bellamy. Pink bushy eyebrows over deep eyes. A mimic's voice, a deadpan way of telling a story, deadpan delivery of a punch line. I'd wondered at the time if that was a put-on. In three hundred years you hear the same joke so many times, tell the same story so many ways, change your politics again and again to match a changing universe … Was he deadpan because he didn't care anymore? How much boredom can you meet in three hundred years?

How many times can you change your morals without losing them all? Bellamy was born before a certain Jinxian biological laboratory produced boosterspice. He reached maturity when the organ banks were the only key to long life, when a criminal's life wasn't worth a paper star. He was at draft age when the kzinti were the only known extrasolar civilization and a fearful alien threat. Now civilization included human and nine known alien life-forms, and criminal rehabilitation accounted for half of all published work in biochemistry and psychotherapy.

What would Bellamy's morals say about Lloobee? If he wouldn't kidnap a Kdatlyno, would he «steal» one?

«You make your own guess there. I don't know Bellamy that well.»

«Well, it's worth checking.» Jilson bent over the timetables. «Mist Demons, he landed a third of the way around the planet! Oh, well. Let's go rent a car.»

«Huh?»

«We'll need a car.» He saw he'd left me behind. «To get to their camp. To find out if they rescued Lloobee. You know, the Kdadyno touch sculptor who —»

«I get the picture. Good-bye and good luck. If they ask who sent you, for Finagle's sake don't mention me.»

«That won't work,» Emil said firmly. «Bellamy won't talk to me. He doesn't know me.»

«Apparently I didn't make it clear. I'll try again. If we knew who the kidnappers were, which we don't, we still couldn't charge in with lasers blazing.»

But he was shaking his head, left, right, left, right. «It's different now. These men have reputations to protect, don't they? What would happen to those reputations if all human space knew they'd kidnapped a Kdadyno?»

«You're not thinking. Even if everyone on Gummidgy knew the truth, the pirates would simply change the contract. A secrecy clause enforced by monetary penalty.»

Emil slapped the table, and the walls echoed. «Are we just going to sit here while they rob us? You're a hell of a man to wear a hero's name!»

«Look, you're taking this too personally — huh?»

«A hero's name! Beowulf! He must be turning over in his barrow about now.»

«Who's Beowulf?»

Emil stood up, putting us eye to eye, so that I could see his utter disgust. «Beowulf was the first epic hero in English literature. He killed monsters bare-handed, and he did it to help people who didn't even belong to his own country. And you — «He turned away. «I'm going after Bellamy.»

I sat there for what seemed a long time. Any time seems long, when you need to make a decision but can't. It probably wasn't more than a minute.

But Emil wasn't in sight when I ran outside.

I shouted at the man who'd loaned us the timetables. «Hey! Where do you go to rent a car?»

«Public rentals. Dial fourteen in the transfer booth, then walk a block east.»

So the base did have transfer booths. I found one, paid my coin, and dialed.

Getting to public rentals gave me my first chance to look at the base. There wasn't much to see. Buildings, half of them semi-permanent; the base was only four years old. Apartment buildings, laboratories, a nursery school. Overhead, the actinic pinpoint of CY Aquarii hit the weather dome and was diffused into a wide, soft white glow. There were few people about, and all of them were same shade of black for protection against the savage, invisible ultraviolet outside. Most of them had goggles hung around their necks.

That much I saw while running a block at top speed.

He was getting into a car when I came panting up. He said, «Change your mind?»

«No, but … hoo! … you're going to change yours. Whew! The mood you're in, you'll fly straight into … Bellamy's camp and … tell him he's a lousy pirate. Hyooph! Then if you're wrong, he'll … punch you in the nose … and if you're right, he'll either … laugh at you or have you … killed.»