Reality Matrix Effect (9781310151330) (25 page)

They looked at each other in tense
silence.

“So what do we do now?” Rayna
asked.

“I’m not sure.  Contact the
Merchant Fleet?”

“And say what?  Vince can always
deny saying anything about the Nitinol diversions that night. Or he
can claim we misunderstood him. It’s just our word against his.
Ours and Aurora’s, that is. Besides....”

“Yes, Ray?”

“Well, we really don’t have anything
more than a possible slip of the tongue to go on, do we?  But
if Barnard and that Fleet lieutenant are involved, how can we be
sure others in the Fleet aren’t part of this, too?”

Keith shook his head in
silence.

“How about the U.N.’s Interplanetary
Trade Commission?” Rayna asked. “You worked with the commission for
a while, didn’t you?  Maybe they could
investigate?”

“No,” Keith said, “I’m afraid not. The
commission has no independent investigatory arm. Investigations are
handled by the Merchant Fleet’s intelligence unit.”

“So we’re back where we started,”
Rayna said, her mind working desperately to find another avenue for
action. “There has to be something we can do!”

Keith tilted his head, and his face
twisted into an expression of thoughtful concentration.

“We could try to get some more
information,” he suggested. “Maybe I can talk to Barnard
again—tactfully, of course. As you said, all we have right now are
some suspicions. If I talk to him, though, I might be able to get a
clearer picture of what this is all about.”

“Could you do that without letting on
that we know something?” Rayna asked, concerned. “After all, if
Vince is involved in something big enough to affect the whole
world’s Nitinol supplies, this could get kind of
dangerous.”

“Ah, my dear, you underestimate
me!  We lawyers, after all, have a way of getting people to
say things they don’t intend to say. For one thing, I might be able
to find out whether high-level Fleet officials are involved. Then
we’d know whether it’s safe to report this. Would Aurora know
how to contact him?”

“She might. I can ask her.”

“Good,”  Keith said. “Do
that.”  Suddenly, his eyes began to twinkle mischievously.
“You know, this might even start me off on another
profession.”

Rayna eyed him suspiciously. “What are
you talking about?”

Grasping the arms of the easy chair,
he leaned over her, smiling broadly.

“There’s another side to this
mild-mannered lawyer you’ve been hanging around with,” he
said.

“And what would that be?” Rayna asked,
amused, as she draped her arms around Keith’s neck.

He bent to kiss her, then straightened
up and assumed a conspiratorial look.

“Secretly, I’ve always wanted to be a
spy!”

It was
just past 7 p.m. when Keith walked into the Milk of Human Kindness
bar. He moved confidently, a friendly expression on his face, a
relaxed rhythm to his walk. The pose—for it
was
a pose—was
crucial. No matter what he felt inside, this had to look like a
casual visit. His presence here had to appear entirely
natural.

The place was just beginning to fill
with customers. If Aurora Sanger was right, it was nearly time for
Vince Barnard to show up. Barnard wasn’t drinking much alcohol
these days, she’d said, but he liked to meet his buddies here
anyway.

Aurora herself had never been to the
Milk of Human Kindness. Her information was based on Barnard’s
rambling effort to cajole her into meeting him here the night after
their dinner at Eduardo’s. It seemed obvious that Aurora should
not
see Barnard again unless absolutely necessary, however.
The mere mention of his name set her mouth to twitching. Besides,
in view of all her previous refusals, a sudden acceptance might
arouse suspicion—if not in Barnard, then perhaps in his
Fleet-lieutenant friend.

The tavern was small, simple and
unassuming. As he entered, Keith took note of the polished ebony
bar on his left, where a half-dozen customers sat on stools, some
drinking and others engaged in friendly discourse with each other
or with the bartender. Booths lined the more dimly lit right side
of the room, two of them occupied. A few small, round tables of
plastic-laminated oak rested in the space between the bar and the
booths. All the tables were vacant.

There was little here to distinguish
the Milk of Human Kindness as a 21st-century establishment rather
than one of the middle-to-late 20th century. At first, Keith
thought the ambiance might be the result of a conscious desire for
nostalgia, but then he noticed a stout, middle-aged man depositing
a coin into a modern syntho-player at the rear of the place.
Seconds later, the gentle strains of
Earthshine
, a popular
love tune, filled the room, the sound seeming to emanate from all
four walls.

The man had chosen a conventional
arrangement featuring mellow strings and rich horns and a moving
piano solo. Keith usually preferred the more imaginative
approach:  Linked as it was to the Consolidated Data Network,
a syntho-player’s programming permitted you to come up with your
own versions of virtually any musical composition. Keith liked to
invent his own “instruments,” building unique sounds from aural
information stored in the CDN’s data banks.

The music helped soothe Keith’s
nerves, which, despite his carefully honed appearance, were taut
with anticipation. He was grateful that the selection wasn’t one of
those
avant-garde
electronic pieces that grated like
fingernails on an old-fashioned blackboard, or some boisterous
number designed to challenge your ears’ capacity to absorb
decibels. He wandered toward the bar, humming softly to himself and
wondering how he was going to approach Barnard if, indeed, the big
merchanter came into the Milk of Human Kindness tonight. He was
just hoisting himself up on a bar stool when he felt a large hand
grasp his shoulder.

“Well, hey there, pal!  You
remember me, don’t ya?”

It was Vince Barnard—all 6 feet 5
inches of him—grinning boyishly.

“C’mon over ta our booth,
uh…uh...?”

“Daniels. Keith Daniels.”

“Right. Daniels. Aurora’s friend’s
friend. Right?”  Barnard winked and began pulling Keith toward
one of the occupied booths.

“Right over here, Daniels,” Barnard
said genially, ignoring the lock of coarse, dark hair that had
fallen across his forehead. “This here’s Charlie Wraggon, and the
Irishman over there is Casey Flynn.”

Barnard slid his large form into the
booth with surprising grace and patted the rust-colored upholstery
in a bid for Keith to join him.

Keith marveled at his good fortune.
Barnard had found him!  It couldn’t have begun better, he
thought.
They can’t very well suspect me of anything if Barnard
approached me first.

He introduced himself, shaking hands
with Wraggon and Flynn, and then settled into the booth next to
Barnard.

“How about a drink?” the big
merchanter asked. This prompted a sour look and some grumbling from
Wraggon. “Don’t worry, Charlie,” Barnard said quickly, “I’m
not  ordering any hard stuff. But that don’t mean Daniels
can’t have some good hooch!”

Keith looked inquiringly at
Wraggon.

“Vince has a little problem with
liquor sometimes,” Wraggon explained. “We’re trying to help him
stay clean.”

“Yeah,” said the man Barnard had
introduced as Casey Flynn, “but, like Vince says, that don’t mean
you can’t have a whiskey if you want.”  As if to emphasize his
point, Flynn tossed back a glass of dark amber liquid and signaled
to the waitress, who acknowledged the gesture but continued talking
with a patron at the bar. Wraggon looked hard in Flynn’s direction
but said nothing.

“It’s all right,” Keith told them.
“I’ll just have a ginger ale.”

“Hey, sweetheart!” Barnard called out
to the waitress in a booming voice. “Over here!”

The waitress wore one of those painted
smiles affected by people whose professions require them to be
friendly at all times.

“A ginger ale for my new friend,
here,” said Barnard. “How ’bout you, Casey?  You gonna have
another one?”

Flynn clawed at his russet-colored
beard in thought, then replied, “Naw. I guess that’ll be it for
now.”  He reached out and patted the waitress on the behind.
“I got me some plans for later tonight, and we wouldn’t want the
juice ta get in my way. Would we, now, baby?”

“I don’t know about
your
plans,
Casey Flynn,” she said, “but
I
plan to go home and wash my
hair!”

Barnard guffawed and slapped the
table. “Guess she told you, Casey!”

Flynn grinned and shrugged. “Oh, well.
It was worth a try. Anyway, Tauber don’t like us to have too much
liquor
or
too much pussy.”

Keith took mental note of the new
name—and of the way Wraggon seemed to stiffen at the mention of
it.

“So, Barnard,” Keith said after a long
silence, “when are you going back out with the Fleet?”

“Oh,” Barnard responded, “you mean you
ain’t heard?  They called off all Merchant Fleet runs till
they get things straightened out with the colonies over this
Nitinol stuff.”

“Yeah,” said Flynn, his green eyes
twinkling, “if the rock farmers won’t give us our Nitinol, we’ll
just starve ’em out by not delivering their supplies!”  Then
he laughed, pounding the table as if he were privy to some secret
joke.

Barnard, too, was smiling, and Wraggon
waged a losing battle to suppress a smirk.

They’re all in on it, Keith thought.
Whatever
it
is.

“Are you a merchanter, too, Flynn?”
Keith asked.

 
Flynn was a ruddy-faced man with
a bent nose and a small mouth that peeped like a frightened rabbit
from the thicket of his ill-kempt beard. Suddenly, the gleam left
his eyes, and his face grew even more florid.

“Wrong question, pal,” Wraggon
commented. “Casey washed out of the Merchant Fleet Academy.” 
Wraggon seemed to enjoy seeing the Irishman squirm as Flynn tried
to keep  his temper under control. Clearly, Wraggon and Flynn
were not the best of friends.

“It’s okay, Casey,” Barnard chipped
in. “We all know you got a raw deal. Hell, they almost bumped me,
too!  Made me lose 20 pounds before they’d even let me take
the training as a Grade One merchanter. Said I was just too big.
Aurora’s the one finally talked ’em into giving me a crack at it if
I dumped the pounds. Don’t know how she did it, but they agreed. I
have to weigh in again after every shore leave, though, and if I
weigh too much, they won’t let me ship out.”

“You get bonus pay if you ship out to
the Asteroid Belt,” Flynn explained, “so if they don’t let Vince
ship out, it costs him bucks.”

“Yeah,” Barnard added, “it ain’t fair,
neither. Hell, I’m six-foot-five. Whadda they expect?  They
want me to weigh what Casey or Charlie weigh?  I mean, they’re
little guys. Not even six foot. No offense, fellas,” he said,
turning to the others. “Shit, I only weighed 250 to begin with, and
all of that was muscle!”  He flexed his biceps to emphasize
the point. “Besides, I’m the best tender they got!”

“Tender?”

“I keep forgetting you’re such an
Earth-baby, Daniels,” Barnard said with a laugh. “A tender kind of
herds the robbies in and out of the ship to unload supplies and
load up finished goods. Sounds easy, but it can be pretty tricky.
Those robbies are really dumb. Like, you tell ’em to unload the H2O
supplies and bring ’em into the domes, and they’ll just keep right
on unloading till you tell ’em to stop, even if it’s the
ship
’
s
supplies they’re
taking. And if you’re not careful, they’ll pile all the H2O
containers together without checking stress readings. That happened
to another tender I know once. The containers broke open, and water
was everywhere except where it was supposed to be.”

“I thought directions like that were
taken care of in the robots’ programming,” said Keith.

“Some of it’s in the programming all
right, but lots of times the rock farmers’ll want things changed
around at the last minute. The robbies up there are mostly
single-purpose types or tech-programmables. After all, they still
ain’t invented the robbie yet that can think like a
man!”

“A-men!” Wraggon intoned.

“They finally figured out it works
better to program robbies so’s they can be directed by
specialists—” Barnard smiled, squared his shoulders and proudly
tapped his massive chest “—specialists like me—than it is to
rewrite whole programs every time the bowl squatters want to change
some little thing or another. The rock farmers have a few tenders
of their own, of course, but they don’t mess their hands with
loading and unloading operations. That’s the Fleet’s
job.”

Keith struck a sympathetic pose,
inclining his head at Barnard’s sarcasm.

“Yeah,” Flynn added, “the rock farmers
don’t respect merchanters, and the Merchant Fleet don’t know how to
recognize good men. That’s why the Fleet’s lost so many
guys.”