“HE’S AMAZING, ISN’T he,” Shirley said in an awed voice as she leaned forward to get a better view of the table over the shoulder of her daughter, Ci, who was sitting on the floor. “It must be a genetic mutation that makes sticky fingers or something.”
“Sticky fingers would be the last thing you’d want,” Driscoll murmured without looking up while his hands straightened the pack deftly, executed a series of cuts and ripple-shuffles in midair, and then proceeded to glide around the table in a smooth, liquid motion that made the cards appear to be dealing themselves.
“Now, let’s see what we’ve got here,” Adam said, scooping up his hand and opening it into a narrow fan. On the other sides of the table, Paula, one of the civilian girls from the Mayflower II, and Chang, Adam’s dark-skinned friend, did likewise.
“There’s no need to look,” Driscoll told him nonchalantly. “You’ve got a pair of kings.” Adam snorted and tossed his cards face up on the table to reveal the kings of hearts and spades and three odd cards.
“What about me?” Ci asked, hooking at Driscoll. She leaned to one side to let her mother see the hand she was holding.
Driscoll stared at her. “Three queens, and I could beat it,” he said. Ci and Shirley exchanged baffled looks.
Paula was looking at him impishly. “Do you think you could beat mine?” she asked in a curious voice.
“Sure,” Driscoll told her. His eyes twinkled just for an instant. “If you want to know how, I’d beat you with aces.”
“Are you sure, Tony? Paula asked. “You wouldn’t want to bet on that, now, would you?” Paula turned her head to smile slyly at her friend, Terry, also from the Mayflower II, who was watching from behind.
Driscoll met her eyes calmly. “I’d risk it,” he said. “Sure, if this was for real, I’d put money on it.”
“How much?” Paula asked.
Driscoll shrugged. “What would you stake?”
“Twenty?”
“Sure, I’d cover that.”
“Fifty?”
“I’m still with you.”
“A hundred?”
“A hundred.”
Paula slapped down four aces gleefully. “You lose! Hey, how about that? I just cleaned him out. See, I knew he had to be bluffing.”
“Bluffing, hell.” Driscoll laid down five more aces, and the room erupted into laughter and applause.
“Hey, you haven’t asked me,” Chang said. “I beat that.”
“You do?” Driscoll looked surprised.
Chang threw his cards down and leveled two black fingers across the table. “A Smith and Wesson beats five aces.” He grinned and stood up. “Everybody set for another drink?” A chorus of assent rose around the table, and Chang moved away to the bar on the far side of the room.
Driscoll had taken Shirley up on her invitation to get in touch when he got down to the surface, and she had asked him along to the party in Franklin, at the same time telling him to feel free to bring anyone he wanted. So Driscoll had invited Colman, Swyley, Maddock, and Stanislau, who among them had persuaded Sirocco to come too, and Sirocco had suggested bringing some of the girls from the Mayflower II. Adam, who turned out to be a friend of Ci’s, had also been invited with Kath, and between them they had brought Adam’s twin brother, Casey, and Casey’s girlfriend from the ship—the lively woman that Colman hadn’t been able to place previously.
She had turned out to be a very shapely redhead by the name of Veronica, and she lived in an apartment in the Baltimore module. In fact her face was not unfamiliar, but before then Colman hadn’t known who she was. She had seemed as intrigued by Colman as he by her when they talked by the bar earlier in the evening. “Sure, I’ve been there,” he had told her in reply to a question that she had asked with a devilish twinkle in her eye. “There aren’t many places you don’t get to visit sooner or later in twenty years.”
“Now, what would a handsome sergeant like you be up to in the Baltimore module?”
“Why would anybody be interested?”
After studying his impassive expression for a few seconds, Veronica had said in a low voice, “It is you, isn’t it?”
“Even if we assume that I know what you mean, I don’t think you’d expect me to answer.” So now they both knew, and knew that the other knew. Each had tested the other’s discretion, and both of them respected what they had found. Nothing more needed to be said.
With all public bars having been put off-limits to the Mayflower II’s soldiers after the shooting, the party couldn’t have come at a better time, Colman reflected as he leaned against the bar and nursed his glass while gazing around the room. Swyley and Stanislau were behind him in a corner with a mixed group of Chironians and seemed interested in the planet’s travel facilities; Sirocco was with another group in the center of the room discussing the war news with another group, and Maddock, looking slightly disheveled, was sprawled along a couch in an alcove on the far side with his arm draped around Wendy, another girl from the Mayflower II, who seemed to be asleep. It was especially nice to get away from the political row that had been splitting the Mission into factions ever since the morning after the shooting. Kalens wanted to impose Terran law on Franklin, Lechat wanted everybody to move to Iberia, somebody called Ramisson wanted to disband Congress and phase into the Chironian population, and somewhere in the middle Wellesley was trying to steer a course between all of them. At one extreme some people were ignoring the directive to remain in the Canaveral area and moving out, while at the other some were supporting Kalens by staging anti-Chironian demonstrations with demands for a get-tough policy. Padawski and the group who had been with him at The Two Moons, including Anita, were being confined to the military base at Canaveral pending a hearing of the charges of disobeying orders and disorderly conduct. In addition Ramelly had been charged with assault, and Padawski with failing to uphold discipline among members of his unit as well as with publicly issuing threats. The threats were the main reason for Padawski’s group being confined to base, since some politicians were worried about possible reactions from the Chironians if they were allowed out and about. Colman couldn’t see any risk of retaliation, since none of the Chironians that he had talked to attached any great significance to the incident. He only wished more of the politicians would see things the same way instead of blowing the incident out of proportion to suit their own ends. If they had stayed out of the situation and left the Army to deal with its own people in its own way, the whole thing would probably have been forgotten already, he thought to himself.
Kath had moved away to talk to Adam, Casey, and Veronica, who were sitting together beyond the table at which Driscoll was performing. Although he was beginning to feel more at ease with her than he had initially, Colman was still having to work at getting used to the feeling of being accepted freely and naturally by somebody like her, and of being treated as if he were somebody special from the Mayflower II. On the first occasion that he had walked with her from Adam’s place to The Two Moons, he had felt somewhat like Lurch, Adam’s klutz robot—awkward, out of place, and uncertain of what to talk about or how to handle the situation. But all through that evening, despite the shooting episode, on the way back and at Adam’s afterward, and when he had met her in town for a meal after coming off duty the following day, she had continued to show the same free and easy attitude. Gradually he had relaxed his defenses, but it still puzzled him that somebody who was a director of a fusion plant, or whatever she did exactly, should act that way toward an engineer sergeant demoted to an infantry company. Why would she do something like that? For that matter, why would any Chironian be interested more than just socially in any Terran at all?
“Because she’s seducing you,” a voice murmured from behind him.
Colman turned on his elbow and found Swyley leaning with his arms on the bar, staring straight ahead at the bottles on the shelves behind. Colman raised his eyebrows. Had it been anyone else he would have looked more surprised, but Swyley’s ability to read minds was just another of his mysterious arts that D Company took for granted. After a few seconds Swyley went on, “They’re seducing all of us. That’s how they’re fighting the war.”
Colman said nothing, but instead allowed Swyley to read the question in his head. Sure enough, Swyley explained, “They don’t make bombs or organize armies. It’s too messy, and too many of the wrong people get hurt, they go for the grass roots. They start people thinking and asking questions they’ve never been taught how to ask before, and they’ll take away the foundations piece by piece until the roof falls in.” He paused and continued staring at the wall. “You’re an engineer, and she runs part of a fusion complex. If you want out, you’ve got a place to go. That’s what she’s telling you.”
Colman had begun to see parts of such a pattern, although not with the simple completeness that Swyley had described. What Swyley was saying might be true as far as it went, but Colman was certain that in Kath’s case Swyley had, for once, missed something, something more personal than just political motivation,
A hand descended on his arm and slid upward to tease the back of his neck. He turned round to find that Kath had come back. “You’re starting a bachelors’ party here,” she said. “I have to break that up before the idea catches on.”
Colman grinned. “Good thinking. We were starting to talk shop.” Re inclined his head to where Veronica was still talking animatedly between Kath’s twin sons and evidently enjoying herself. “Somebody seems to be quite a hit over there.”
“Isn’t she a lot of fun,” Kath agreed. “She’s talking Casey into teaching her to be an architect. She could do it too. She’s an intelligent woman. Have you known her long?”
Colman smiled to himself. “I’ve only seen her around.
This may sound crazy, but I never really met her before tonight.”
“After twenty years on the same ship? That’s not possible, surely.”
Colman shrugged. “Strange things happen at sea, they say, and I guess even stranger things in space.”
“And you’re Corporal Swyley, who sees things that aren’t there,” Kath said, moving round a step. “Your Captain Sirocco told me about your ability. I like him. He told me about the way you ruined the exercise up on the ship too. I thought it was wonderful.”
“If you’re going to lose anyway, you might as well win,” Swyley replied. “If you win the wrong way, you lose, and if you lose either way, you lose. So why not enjoy it?”
“What happens if you win the right way?” Kath asked him.
“Then you lose out to the system. It’s like playing against Driscoll—the system makes it’s own aces.”
At that moment one of the Chironian girls from the group in the corner took Swyley lightly by the arm. “I thought you were getting some more drinks,” she said. “We’re all drying up over there. I’ll give you a hand. Then you can come back and tell us more about the Mafia. The conversation was just getting interesting.”
Colman’s eyes widened in surprise. “Him? What in hell does he know about the Mafia?”
The girl gave Colman a funny look. “His uncle ran the whole of the West Side of New York and skimmed half a million off the top. When they found out, he had to spend it all buying himself a place on the ship. You didn’t know?”
For a second Colman could only gape at her, He’d known that Swyley had been brought on to the Mayflower
11 as a kid by an uncle who had died fifteen years into the voyage from a heart condition, but that was about all.
“Hey, how come you never told us about that part?” he asked as the girl led Swyley away.
“You never asked me,” Swyley answered over his shoulder.
Re turned back, shaking his head despairingly, and looked at Kath again. Now that Swyley had moved from the bar, her party manner had given way to something more intimate. Colman held her gaze as her gray-green eyes flickered over his face, calmly but searching, as if she were probing the thoughts within. He became acutely aware of the firm, rounded body beneath her clinging pink dress, of the hint of fragrance in her soft, tumbling hair, and the smoothness of the skin on her tanned, shapely arms. Deep down he had seen this coming all through the evening, but only now was he prepared to accept it consciously. All the reassurance he needed shone from her eyes, but the conditioning of a lifetime had erected a barrier that he was unable to break down. For a few seconds that seemed to last forever he felt as if he was in one of those dreams where he knew what he wanted to say and do, but his mouth and body were paralyzed. He knew it was a reflex triggered by ingrained habits of thought, but at the same time he was powerless to overcome it,
And then he realized that Kath was smiling in a way that said there was no need to explain or rationalize anything. Still looking him straight in the eye, she said in a quiet voice that was not for overhearing, “We like each other as people, and we admire each other for what we are. There isn’t anything to feel hung up about on Chiron. People who feel like that usually make love, if that’s what they want to do.” She paused for a second. “Isn’t that what you’d like to do?”
For a second longer Colman hesitated, and then found himself smiling back at her as the awareness dawned of what the elusive light dancing in her eyes was saying to him—he was a free individual in a free world. And suddenly the barrier crumbled away.
“Yes, it is,” he replied. There was nothing more to say.
“I only live at Port Norday during the week,” Kath said. “I’ve got a place in Franklin as well. It’s not far from here at all.”
“And I am on early duty tomorrow,” Colman said. He grinned again, and she smiled back impishly, “So why are we still here?” they asked together.