The Venus Belt (2 page)

I shook my head and stepped into the reading-room, looking forward to some quiet. Halfway to the broom closet, I swiveled, surprised by the chattering of a printer even in this sanctuary. At a library table, typing fur
i
ously, sat—another Jenny.

“Last time I heard, you were doing business out on Ceres.” I hefted my snow-soaked topcoat to a more comfortable position over my arm. “Very hush-hush. Got a chip from Lucy and Ed about it. How’ve you been, Prez?”

President of the Confederacy, that is.

“Ex-prez,
por favor
.”
She handed copy to an assistant, who hurried it off to god-knows-where. “I understand Olongo’s thinking about a third term, poor masochistic old ape. Say, what’s all this about his getting held up?”

That had been the day I left; I didn’t know enough about it yet to tell her, but spread the paper out to show its chilling headline. “Crime marches on—everywhere, it seems lately. Why do you suppose they’re only taking women?”

“Probably because they’re
men
.
This makes over a hundred fifty tho
u
sand, doesn’t it?” She shook her head grimly.

“In the Americas and Western Europe, anyway. I haven’t really been keeping score.” I glanced down at another column. “Says here there’s a
n
other dozen IRS men missing, too.”

“Yes, and sales of canvas and quicklime are up in seven western states and rural New Jersey—old joke. But
nobody
supposes that’s got anything to do with the kidnapped woman—it’s just another
healthy
sign.” She patted the protruding handle of a hefty automatic tucked into a holster underneath her jacket. “Anyway, thank goodness it hasn’t spread to the Confeder
a
cy—and while I’m over here, it’s not going to happen to me, either!”

Jenny Smythe is just as decoratively energetic as Jenny Noble, and for an excellent reason; while the latter was being conceived in the United States, her charming “twin” began existence in the Confederacy at pr
e
cisely the same instant. Yet physiologically she’s four years younger, due to some advanced paratronic skulduggery called stasis delay: her mama wanted her, right enough, but not just at the moment, thank you.

Complicated, isn’t it? In the history I grew up with, Alexander Hami
l
ton decreed a tax on whiskey, almost touching off a second revolution. Pres
i
dent Washington mobilized fifteen thousand federal troops to quiet it down, abetted by a professor-type named Albert Gallatin who didn’t want to see his fellow Pennsylvanians slaughtered.

End of Whiskey Rebellion.

In the Confederacy, Gallatin’s counterpart organized the irate booze-farmers, conned the bluecoats into taking his side, and marched on Phil
a
delphia. Old George went to the wall; Hamilton beat it Prussiaward, inaug
u
rating a minor quasi-fascist movement that caused trouble for a couple ce
n
turies afterward.

End of Federal Government, however.

While Jenny Noble’s riding herd over an unruly crowd of anarchists whom Gallatin might’ve kissed on all four cheeks in sheer Discordian d
e
light, Jenny Smythe makes frequent visits stateside to lend a seditious hand. I’m not sure whether all this qualifies as “synchronicity”; it’s just one of a million semi-coincidences that need better explaining, at least to this r
e
treaded old flatfoot.

“Well,” she said finally, “there’s good news, too. Fraser’s begun clic
k
ing with the media, almost a year before the Demagogues and Republ
i
crats even nominate
their
mealy-mouthed barrel scrapings.” She indicated the books lying open on the table, works that Gallatin had never gotten around to writing in this here branch of probability.

“So you figured Fraser might crib a stirring speech or two from
Rule of Reason
or
Principles of Liberty
?”
I sneaked a peek at my watch, an annihil
a
tion-powered goodie from the Confederacy’s fifty-year-old Lunar colonies.

“Hmmph! I’ve been known to give a stirring speech or two, myself.”

“Yeah. The last one
started
this whole expensive, complicated, and probably unethical undertaking. Well, write on, sister! Dinner’s a-cookin’, and probably so’s the little woman by now, late as I am.”

Jenny’s flunky stood waiting impatiently for the next batch of profund
i
ty. She let him fidget. “If Clarissa hears that ‘little woman’ crap, it’ll be
you
doing the cooking, right up to your prominent ears in the soup!”

“No thanks”—I curtsied—”just had some—tomato bisque, I believe. And now, dear former Chief Executive,
au ‘voir
.
My closet awaits wit
h
out.”

“Pass,” Jenny answered, turning down a terrific straight line, “I’ll be back in Laporte by the time your daughter’s due.” She made a show of loo
k
ing me over. “Guess I’m sort of morbidly curious how she’ll turn out.”

I replied with a raspberry cheer, turning again to the closet, the only Propertarian institution that hasn’t changed in twelve years. Originally a tiny, insignificant splinter group valiantly determined to shove America back in the direction Tom Paine had pointed it, the Party had occupied a lonely di
s
infected cubicle here at Colfax and York amidst an otherwise pee-stained conglomeration of leftists, eco-freaks, and latter-day Lu
d
dites. Now Jenny’s yahoos owned the building, printing presses, hundreds of telephones, even a lively public bar downstairs.
And
numerous less well advertised facilities that SecPol—the Federal Security Police—even in its presently chastened cond
i
tion, would doubtless frown upon severely.

One of those was this closet. I forced the creaking door aside and squeezed in. Peace at last. Here were the old familiar dingy sink with a little brown spider homesteading it as always, a couple of rusted buckets, a plastic garbage pail, and a damp, moldering smell that titillated my gag reflex. There was also a dry rotted two-by-four on the wall with nails sticking out from which depended a ratty battery of mops and brooms. Pulling at the frayed cord dangling in my face, I squinted in the fifteen-watt illumination, coun
t
ing nails on the rack, and pushed up
hard
on the third, fifth, third again, and seventh from the left.

A hole in the universe—the P’wheet/Thorens Probability Broach—irised open before me. When the aperture was large enough, I stepped through gingerly, unwilling to test its matter-annihilating pro
p
erties with a coattail or the heel of my shoe. Behind me, the Broach dwindled like the little dot you used to get when you switched off a TV set, then vanished with a
pop!
and a tiny, star-bright flash of blue.

I’d made it safely once again, to the other side of reality.

Eyes watering in the sudden glare of Laporte’s Inter-world Terminal, I stepped through a glassed-in security booth onto the concourse. Comme
r
cial gunmen circulated, alert for the occasional unfriendly immigrant. The Confederacy welcomes strangers, but likes to look them over first. The only import we reject is hostile intentions.

Like many another “breakthrough,” the Probability Broach got i
n
vented by mistake. A dolphin—
Tursiops truncatus
—name of Ooloorie Eckickeck P’wheet had been aiming for the stars. Her human partner, Professor De
e
jay Thorens—who might’ve looked more natural,
without
her labcoat, somewhere among the pages of
Penthouse
—had cobbled the prototype t
o
gether, and I’d been their first unwitting sample, accidentally collected.

Laporte’s a hop, skip, and a universe—call it sixty miles—from De
n
ver. Each has its counterpart in the other’s continuum, the former as a minu
s
cule Fort Collins suburb, the latter as the sleepy village called Saint Charles-Auraria. Each was once a candidate for capital of Colorado, Denver for its railroad. But Confederate
stagecoaches
ran on steam, so Laporte, an Overland Trail depot, became a population center of two million.

Far across the stadium-size terminal, a giant holo applauded
KING
S
LEY’S PENNSYLVANIA WHISKEY—THE DRINK THAT MAKES YOU DRUNK!
Truthful and to the point, especially for brand-new refugees from a hundred Prohibitions. After a couple days in my native land, always more narrow and depressed than I usually remembered, I could use a drink, m
y
self. Even Kingsley’s Pennsylvania Crude.

Along the shining concourse, other agents, spies and smugglers, emerged the same way I’d just done, the familiar flash and
pop!
announ
c
ing them. Even more departed, laden with equipment, trade-goods, bound for a million secluded phone booths, jungle clearings, and “d
e
serted” warehouses. Elsewhere, automated Broaches fed radio signals and printed propaganda which would appear out of nowhere anywhere from Salt Lake City to P
e
king Square. Huge freight machines rumbled in another portion of the Te
r
minal.

I’d had a lot of doubts, initially, about the infiltration of my country, and I’m still wrestling with the moral ones. Hell, no one’s ever
certain
,
but unless all human aspirations are to bog down in a syrupy fog of second guessing, we have to push on. Whatever the consequences may be, the a
l
ternative’s worse. What bothered me originally was logistics: thanks to Ga
l
latin’s successors, the Continental Congress is little more than a ritual, hasn’t convened in over a decade, and likely never will again. No taxes, no regul
a
tion of any kind (all that got settled, with George Washington’s hash, back in 1794), so how do you scrape up enough valuta and person-power to su
b
vert the universe next door?

Well, Kingsley’s Whiskey, for example, could use a few billion new cu
s
tomers—it’s pretty much a one-time purchase—and so could Laporte Par
a
tronics, Securitech, Ltd., Neova Hovercraft. It’s a new twist on the concept of industrial espionage: Confederate entrepreneurhood wants a free market established in America sometime yesterday afternoon if possible. Shucks, this latest caper of mine was for an old respected chain of family porno
g
raphers.

Forget
“redeeming social value,” dirty pictures are
fun.
When I die I want my ashes sprinkled over a nudist camp.

I waved back at a couple of operatives I knew as they vanished into a Broach. Their specialty was stopping counterfeiters—the kind that grind out bushel basketsful on government printing presses. Sure hoped they’d be careful with all those blasting caps.

The less-reasonable satrapies of my homeworld are getting even shorter shrift. I remember reading about World War II, when the Allies dropped millions of crude single-shot “Liberator” .45s to European partisans. Stamped out by General Motors for $1.71 apiece, each pistol came with a bubblegum comic illustrating its operation and purpose: sneak up behind Herr Nazi, blow away his mind, trash the disposable zipgun, and appropr
i
ate the enemy’s Mauser or P38. We’re pursuing identical tactics via Broach, with substantially more sophisticated but equally inexpensive hardware. Next time the Russians “discipline” Czechoslovakia or Afgh
a
nistan, they’re in for a humiliating shock.

So, for that matter, are the Israelis.

I hopped onto a walkway and rode upstairs a couple of levels into a more conventional underground intersection. Colorfully dressed shoppers gawked briefly at my otherworldly shirt and tie, beat-up felt hat, gray tub
u
lar suit, and comfortable brown loafers. (Once a cop, always a cop—had to change before I went out to the club.) Then, perhaps remembering the te
r
minal below, they went about their business, respec
t
ing my fundamental right to unmolested eccentricity.

I found a Telecom and punched our combination. Clarissa’s a blonde, sort of cuddly and golden, with eyes that are difficult to label: green, hazel, something like that; they change. Her features welled up in three dime
n
sions before the flat white screen, but I hardly got a word in—

“This is Clarissa Olson-Bear, or rather a recording of me. I’m not home right now, and Win’s...out of town. Please call our professional numbers for referrals or messages—and if you’re a house burglar, you’ll be interested to hear we’re covered by Griswold’s Security.”