Gateway To Xanadu (8 page)

“Blew what?” Ringer asked, and then he turned his head to see Val’s expression. “Is something bothering you, Valdon?”

“You might say so,” Val answered with a slow nod, turning those eyes on Ringer instead of me for a change. “Just what exactly did you mean about not leaving too many marks on her’? What do you think I am, that I would do something like that to a woman?”

“I thought you were somebody who had gotten to know her,” Ringer came back with a calculating look in his eyes. “As big as you are you might have an. even chance against her, but not unless you’re willing to use everything you’ve got. You don’t seem to understand that it’s a Special Agent we’re discussing, not a woman; getting her to change her ways will take more than waving a finger in her face and lecturing her. Believe me, it’s been tried before, and by experts.” ”

“And what sort of marks did they leave on her?” Val asked in a too-soft voice, still looking at Ringer.

“Ones they were careful not to let show?”

“They didn’t get a chance to leave any marks on her,” Ringer answered with the same unconcern he’d been showing all along, somehow missing the way Val was looking at him. “She was the one who left the marks on them, visible or otherwise. And I think I understand now; you thought I was throwing her to the wolves.”

“Weren’t you?” Val said without hesitation, unimpressed by Ringer’s calm. “You’ve never seen me before, know nothing about what I’m like, and yet the first thing you do is give me a free hand with her, on the provision I don’t leave any marks that can be seen. What would you call it?”

“I expected to call it sharing an inside joke,” Ringer said with a sigh, on the verge of shaking his head.

“Right now I think the joke’s on me. Apparently you don’t understand how much I do know about you.”

Val opened his mouth to demand an explanation of that statement, but that wasn’t the place to have a private conversation. There were no more than about a hundred people trying unsuccessfully to fill the immense docking area, but some of them had started drifting closer, attracted by the apparent argument between the two men. Waiting for a liner shuttle is boring business; a good fight livens it up any day. In view of this, I interrupted before Val could get the first word out.

“How about we find ourselves a quiet corner somewhere?” I suggested, looking first at Ringer and then at Val. “You two are starting to draw a crowd of admirers.”

“She’s right,” Ringer agreed without looking around, smiling faintly at the sudden awareness in Val’s eyes that nevertheless wasn’t enough to cause him to glance around in the guilt reflex. He turned to our right and began leading the way out of the docking area, and Val and I ambled along behind him.

Faraway Orbital Station had been in service for almost ten years, but it still looked as though it had only just been unwrapped and put into service. We passed beyond the docking area into the main body of the Station, ignoring the room reservation alcoves, enjoying the appearance of new-seeming carpeting under our feet, bright drapes covering the metal of the walls, soft music playing. The saying that goes, “If you’ve seen one Station you’ve seen them all” is perfectly true, except that on Faraway you sometimes get to see an almost empty Station. Right then the volume of traffic going through was minimal.

We ignored the almost empty dining rooms for the even emptier bar, found our own fairly well lit corner, and claimed a table. Just as we were settling ourselves; a tall, thin, long-faced specimen materialized out of nowhere.

“The robot’s out for servicin’,” he announced in a slow drawl, his long face making the simple statement of fact a tragedy of the ages. “Ah’ll have to fetch whatever it is yore drinkin’.”

“I think we can survive that,” Ringer answered with a glance for me, undoubtedly as amused as I was.

“Make it Selesian brandy all around.”

“Why, shore,” the man agreed with an amiable nod, then sort of floated on his way again. It looked like it would be awhile before our drinks came, but Val didn’t seem overly concerned.

“All right,” he said in a soft voice, to keep from carrying his eyes on Ringer again. “You claim you know more about me than I realize; what do you think you know, and how did you gather all of this intricate knowledge?”

“You’d better watch yourself, Valdon,” Ringer growled with faint but very real amusement. “Diana’s sarcasm is beginning to nab off on you. What I think I know about you is pure deduction, but that deduction is based on what I know for certain about Diana. Do you believe I know Diana?”

“Considering the way she greeted you, I think that’s a safe assumption,” Val answered dryly with an odd glance for me. “Does she make that offer to all her old friends?”

“Only to a certain select few,” Ringer said with even more amusement, glancing at me. “It brought back a lot of old memories, and let me be as sure as possible that this little girl I’m looking at is the woman I’m used to working with. Until then, I wasn’t sure at all.”

“That’s ‘young woman,’ not ‘little girl,’ ” I corrected Ringer, bringing his eyes to me. “‘Young woman’ I can live with without any hassle; ‘little girl’ is positively out.”

“Little girl,” Ringer repeated very firmly, grinning widely, then turned his attention back to Val. “You just finished a two-month trip with this harmless-looking little girl, and the first thing you did after leaving the ship was complain about how she treated you. Look at her and tell me what you see.”

Val blinked and looked at me, but not understanding what Ringer was talking about made it a waste of time.

“I don’t see anything,” Val said after that very brief hesitation, his black eyes puzzled. “What is it I’m supposed to see?”

“Just what you did see,” Ringer answered, settling back comfortably in his armchair. “Nothing. Which is just what I saw, and on both of you. If Diana ever makes a mistake in character judgment and ends up alone on a long trip with someone who turns out to be the sort no gal would bring home to meet her mother, you can be damned well sure she’d do more than let herself be stretched out to dry. I remember one crumb who tried to use her to prove what a big man he was; she put him face first into a brick wall.

But there was also one who got the drop on her, and I remember what she looked like afterward. She isn’t bright when it comes to cooperating with something like that when she isn’t on assignment. ”

“And since there wasn’t a mark on either one of us, she had no trouble with me on the trip,” Val summed up, understanding finally breaking through the confusion. “But what if I had-gotten the drop on her, and simply hadn’t beaten up on her? How would you have been able to tell?”

“I was trying to explain how well I understood the trouble you had with her,” Ringer answered, with a sigh of patience, pausing to sip at his brandy. Brandy sits best on top of an exquisitely cooked, many-coursed meal, but Ringer had ordered it as a special welcome-home for me. Selesian brandy is very expensive, well worth every credit, and my personal favorite among potables. The only other time he’d ever bought it for me was the day I finally made it out of Blue Skies, a Federation hospital, after a particularly un”easy” assignment. When I’d first been brought in there, they hadn’t thought I would live.

“. . . are any number of people in this Federation who have had personal experience with Diana’s sense of humor, and would love to explain. their view of the experience to her in detail,” Ringer was continuing to Val. “Unfortunately for them, none of them can fight as well as she can, or if they can, they can’t afford to have her on the sick list when there’s urgent work to be done. The common daydream is to someday get even with her, even if it means leaving a mark or two. It won’t ever happen, of course, but there’s still the dream; I was just offering you a chance to share it. ”

“Why won’t it ever happen?” Val asked, and I could feel his eyes on me even though most of my thoughts and attention had drifted elsewhere.

“Because most of those people believe they owe her even more than she owes them,” Ringer answered lightly. “She has a habit of exercising her sense of humor any time there’s a danger of the gratitude or sentimentality rising too high, and it does make a damned good distraction. She’s never learned how to take a thank-you gracefully.”

I made a rude noise. “At the salary I get, thank-you’s become superfluous,” I told them both, not liking the bright interest I saw in Val’s eyes. “And my bank is fresh out of deposit forms for maudlin sentimentality. How about changing the subject to something more interesting, like where Radman might be right now?”

I hoped I’d diverted them from silliness to business, but no such luck. Instead of taking the hint, they just laughed.

“You’re right, of course,” Val said to Ringer, and the closeness was there again. “Most of the things she does have reasons behind them, but even if the reasons are good ones, her efforts tend to be on the excessive side. There has to be a way of breaking her of the habit.”

“I told you,” ‘Ringer growled, making a face. “It’s been tried more than once, and by people who were downright eager to get somewhere. Even I gave it a shot once, for all the good it did. The only thing it taught her was to keep her distance when she played games, and to stay out of my reach while I still had the urge to strangle. A few members of the Council would give me a medal if I killed her, but most of them would be annoyed. They don’t like seeing agents of her caliber wasted.”

“And speaking of agents of a particular caliber,” Ringer went on to Val, “I understand you have a certain talent of your own. If I’m not misinterpreting what Diana told me, you ought to find it a handy thing to have during the next year.”

“It wasn’t exactly a waste during the past three years, either,” Val answered with a small laugh of amusement, probably because of Ringer’s expression. The man I worked for was trying very hard not to look like a hick from the sticks on his first visit to the big town, awed by all those gosh-dam tall buildings. Ringer wanted to know more about Val’s changing talent, but obviously felt that asking straight out for a demonstration would be boorish. I could have let him continue stumbling along on his own, but soft-heartedness is a major failing of mine.

“I think he’d get a kick out of seeing that drink server again,” I told Val in the trade language used at Dameron’s base, then made an annoyed sound for Ringer’s benefit. “Damn it, if I don’t pay attention to what I’m saying, I slide right out of Federation Basic,” I said to Ringer’s frown in what I knew he’d take as an explanation. “What I was trying to say was, can you reach my bag? I have something I want to show you, but somehow it ended up closer to you than to me. ”

Ringer grunted in what he thought was understanding and leaned over to look under the table, missing Val’s grin and the way my new partner slid out of his chair. I’d pushed my monolon bag as far away as I could with my foot, mostly to give Val the time he needed, but Val didn’t need much in the way of time.

Even as he stood, his features were already blurring and his body was slimming; when Ringer straightened up no more than a moment later, Val even had the proper slouch.

“How ‘bout a nuther round?” the waiter’s voice asked a Ringer who was paying almost no attention to him after noticing that my new partner seemed to have disappeared. “Ah don’ mind fetchin’ it.”

“Not right now, thanks,” Ringer answered absently while looking around at as much of the bar as he could see. “Diana, where did Valdon go? And why didn’t you go with him? He hasn’t been here long enough to wander around on his own. ”

“For some reason, people get huffy when I tag along with those using men’s rooms,” I told Ringer with a faint grin, but I wasn’t grinning at what he thought I was. “If you think he’ll need the help I’ll ignore the huffiness, but I think he can handle it on his own.”

Ringer opened his mouth to growl an answer to my wisecracking, but the “drink server” he’d already dismissed in his mind beat him to it.

“Say now, looky here,” Val drawled, sitting down in his chair again and picking up his only partly tasted brandy. “This here feller din’t finish his first. Guess Ah oughta do it fer ‘im.”

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Ringer demanded, finally turning to watch as Val-cum-the long and lanky waiter reached the glass to his lips and took an appreciative swallow. “Get your butt out of that chair and back to where it belongs, and while you’re at it you can replace that drink you just tasted-on the house. My friend isn’t into sharing. ”

“Oh, come on, Ringer, don’t be so stuffy,” I put in as he continued to glare at an innocently sipping Val.

“Let the guy stay and have a drink with us. Val won’t mind.”

“He surely looked like a right decent feller t’ me,” Val agreed in the same drawl, leaning back in his armchair. “Ah don’ think he’d mind neither.”

Ringer opened his mouth a second time to put his annoyance into words, but this time he stopped himself. His eyes had gone from the waiter’s face to the familiar blue base uniform that didn’t quite go with the face, a uniform he hadn’t taken the time to notice earlier, and suddenly everything clicked into place. He stared at the waiter’s face again with disbelief, then shook his head.

“I’ll be damned,” he said very softly, taking it a lot better than I had, his stare still unmoving from Val’s face. “If you’d had the time to change clothes, there’s no way I would have known. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like it.”

“I would have had him do you, but people tend to have trouble recognizing themselves,” I told Ringer. I was still being ignored because Val was blurring back to himself and filling out again, and nothing short of armed attack would have been able to draw Ringer’s attention away. “If he ever manages to do reversals, we’ll never need a mirror again.”

“I’m sorry to spoil your good time, but I’m not a toy,” Val said to me. “I came here to work, not to take the place of your vanity table.”

“Well, we all have to do what we do best,” I retorted. “Personally, I think you’d look cute as a vanity table.”

“Personally, I have the feeling I shouldn’t have had this brandy without eating first,” Ringer cut in after lowering the glass he’d abruptly emptied. “I’ve never worried about that before, but this seems to be a day for firsts. Anybody else interested in a sobering influence?”