The Pleasure Tube (24 page)

It is Eva Steiner who steps from the vane consoles. Taylor clears his throat, sets down an amber envelope with my name on it, and takes off his glasses, begins wiping one lens. "You once were anxious to meet my commanding officer," Taylor says flatly, nodding to Eva Steiner. "Well..."

The cutting edge of my feelings turns against myself. The sight of Eva Steiner, the dawning realization that she is Taylor's superior, slice through me like a knife. I had never thought this through—feel myself flush, feel the anger I had earlier today bleed through and to the sight of her, standing with a tight, thin smile before me in a shiny black flight suit, the crop she held in Las Venus at her side, the amber double loops of SciCom insignia on her shoulder, faint on the handle of her crop.

"I'm glad you are surprised," she says, her thin eyebrows raised, her nostrils wide. "So not even Massimo Giroti knew. Well, very good. I don't go on vacations, Captain. Not even on this ship."

"I don't know if surprise is the right word," I say, thinking, So that's how she knew of my orders, that's why Collette was transferred to her after the first leg. It stuns my imagination. My God, I think, the ship so familiar around me, thinking of the Daedalus crew, what did we do to unleash this?

"You look surprised," Taylor says, his full eyebrows furrowing. "You're right," he says to Eva Steiner. "It was worth it to see his expression."

I reach past him for the amber envelope he's set on the navigator's table. He draws away from my approach, as if my move were to grab him. A small wave of satisfaction' runs through me, at least he knows my mind.

"We're a little embarrassed at the way things have turned out," Eva Steiner says in an oily voice as I break open the envelope's seal. "I can't tell you how much trouble this whole affair has caused between us and military."

I pull out and unfold the stiff sheet within. Formal orders: through Washington via military cable, copies to SciCom. Clean leave orders; military's worked again.

"So I'm authorized to tell you you're officially on leave," Taylor says as if he's doing me a favor.

"I've been on leave since my appeal was approved," I tell him, folding my orders, pulling on the fold, slipping the sheet into my breast pocket. "Neither of you seems to understand that. You're going to hear from Flight, I can guarantee that."

"Oh, Rawley," Eva Steiner says, purring. "We've already heard from Flight."

I look past her pale, lined face and down the row of vane consoles, light green instruments, winking lights at rest. Microweather systems look the same, the principle of propulsion and control identical. To work again, I think, to get away—I've had to put flying out of my mind, but in this instant I find myself wanting to work a ship again, to feel the bump and roll of light-speed flight, I've been away from it long enough. Yet how little difference there's been, I think with a shock of recognition. On board the Daedalus, ship SciCom kept up a running battle with dome crew, bogged us down with Committee Pilot, multiple logs, redundant information, five-copy corrections. In the end it's the same, I think, it's an attitude. But at least we weren't spied on then, not manipulated. Or were we? I wonder now, wonder about Cooper's strangeness to all of us.

"So we're through," Taylor says. "I'm supposed to thank you for your cooperation. I don't think I will."

"Not through, exactly," I tell him.

"I don't think so, either, Voorst," Taylor says, becoming engaged. "I'm not satisfied. There are just too many..."

"You're finished here, Colonel," Steiner says.

"We're through on Guam," Taylor says, slightly surly. "I don't see what difference—"

"I want to know exactly what happened to Cooper," I say firmly. "And I'm going to find out."

Taylor takes a deep breath, exchanges hardening looks with Eva Steiner, then tells me he doesn't doubt that I will. As for himself, he's got nothing more to say. I bite my upper lip, my heart thumping. I stare blankly at the pastel charts laid out on the navigator's table: tomorrow's launch orbit and the sunloop are plotted, overlaid with interstellar courses. What's going on? I look into Taylor's eyes, they swim behind the thickness of his glasses as if underwater. I have the feeling I've been here before, looked into that face with the same exasperation, I have been here forever.

And then Taylor's gone.

"You know something about Cooper," I say, alone with Eva Steiner in the fading light, a mauve tropical sky huge through the dome above us, the consoles in deepening shadow.

Eva Steiner turns a little pale. "There are problems," she says. "When Cooper came down, he was experiencing a gross psychotic episode. We held him on Guam for observation, then we had to ship him to Houston. He overdosed while he was there by ingesting a full gram of pure hallucinogens. We brought part of him back, part of him. And what there is of him is ours. He didn't come back quite human. The man is not a human being."

"He's
alive
?”

"After a fashion."

"What do you mean, after a fashion? What are you talking about? Cooper's alive?"

"I can show you something," she says with a thin smile. "Draw your own conclusions." Steiner punches up a security code, then a video link, on the navigator's rack of monitors. The small screen flips, then steadies in an eerie blue light to show what appears to be a cell, there's a white-haired man sitting in a cell, broad shoulders, full bushy beard—the man is Cooper. His hair is white and he is slumped over on a stained cot, behind bars. The picture is fuzzy, its resolution poor, but there appear to be a series of dark patches on his exposed forearm, an ashtray overflowing with cigarettes on the floor beside the cot. He is slumped over, propped against a metal wall, his feet on a metal floor. No, Cooper never smoked, I am thinking as I watch him raise his face—he's drooling, looks twenty years older, his eyes dark, blank sockets, horrifying.

"My God," I say. "Where is he? Is this a tape?"

Steiner is looking at the monitor intently, small beads of perspiration show on her upper lip, her eyes are wide, filled with the eerie light. "Live," she says.

"Live
? Where
is
he?"

She switches the monitor off, leaves me looking at my reflection in the glass; before I turn away I see in my own face the horror I am trying to contain. Dear God, I think, the sight of him—think it could have been me as well, could have been Werhner. "Belowdecks," I hear Eva Steiner say; can't quite believe what I hear.

"I brought him along to question him myself, but it's been... useless."

"You've got him
here?
You've got him here in a damned cage?" I say. "You've got that man in a cage?"

"He's in a security cell in detention," she says flatly. "It's for his own safety."

"Taylor knew?"

"Colonel Taylor has been working since the beginning on the sensible theory that what's been missing in the analysis of the blow has been double-blind evidence. And since he was coming here, I let him know Cooper would be... available."

"You don't have any right to hold him," I say. "The crew's on leave. As of today, the whole crew is on leave." "If you can say that was a man whom you saw," Eva Steiner says. "We brought him back. What's left is ours. Look, Rawley, I know there was no love lost between you. He took your woman for a time, I know that."

"You were the nurse," I say, the pattern dawning on me. "You were the nurse who interviewed him on Guam. And Christ, that's why his name never appeared on a death list. How in God's name can you—"

"Yes, there are problems, I know there are problems," Steiner says quickly. "Military's inquired because of a tracer from someone on your ship—Schole, you know him, he's a friend of yours. There are problems, but we can solve them."

I can see a strange, smoldering look in Eva Steiner's gray eyes. "Let's say this," she goes on. "He came in on a death list, he was already dead when you splashed down, a corpse in reentry. That would clear up the tracer."

"What are you getting at?"

"Military is going to find him in a few days. But if we can show that he came in on a death list, say we simply forgot to post the data, if just one other crew member, like the pilot, will corroborate that he came in on a death list... Perhaps if you talked with him, you'd see. I'm making you a proposition. Name your next assignment, your own ship, if you want. Or this ship, you see what's here. And there are more interesting places, special places."

"Did he tell you something?" I ask, my heart thumping. "Did he tell you something different from what's in the report?"

She says he told her nothing, says so flatly, begins saying that she wants to keep him, he belongs to her.

"I've heard enough," I say.

"No, don't go. Talk to me! Talk to me!"

My impulse descending in the hum of the dome lift is to leave the ship as quickly as possible, yet once in the secondary lift I punch the lower working lobby, leave the elevator there. There is only a skeleton crew for the layover; across the carpeted floor two service personnel are lazily chatting at the counter. If the ship is set up as I imagine, then the detention area is only one level up from here. I am almost right—up one level, but over in third-class hull, a man with small eyes tells me. With a coolness I did not think I still had, I turn him back to his word game with a casual wave of my hand and pass through the hatchway otherwise in his view, my mind racing as my legs carry me on what I hope looks like a visit to a drunken friend.

On the metal grating in the dim, low-ceilinged passageway between hulls, I am gripped for an instant by the sense that I am doing something foolish, that once I am in detention, the hatch lock could close with a firm click behind me and give Eva Steiner two of us to play with instead of one.

"Cooper!"

There he is, slumped against the metal wall in a poorly lit cell, his hair white, his broad face blotchy and drawn, his eyes glazed over, unfocused.

"Cooper!"

He looks up slowly, looks at me without comprehension, his mouth slowly coming open with drool in the corners, gravity in folds on his face as if he has aged terribly or has been beaten up, worked over, the look of a man lost from the world, lost beyond his ability to remember. Then, making me out, his eyes widen and he begins to grin—a terrible grin, his upper lip drawn back, stretched back. No, not a tape; I shudder, thinking, How long can he have been here?

"Do you recognize me? It's Voorst, Rawley Voorst." Now I see stains on his flight suit, the overflowing ashtray on the floor, crumpled papers—and there is an odor, an odor like ozone.

Cooper's eyes are shining. "Voorst..." he says, his voice hollow, eerie, still grinning. "... you, too... dead."

"Listen to me, Cooper. I'm as alive as I'm standing here," I say tightly, gripping the cold steel bars, shaking them. "And so are you. I'll try to get you out of here, get you to a hospital. Can you understand me?"

Cooper only looks at me, his eyes narrowing, wiping his hand across his mouth.

"Do you remember what happened on Guam? You talked with a woman. What happened then? Did you tell that woman something?"

Cooper smiles crookedly, raises his hand from his face to turn a forearm to me blotched with scars. A cackle runs through his voice. "I'm a corpse, Voorst. She burns me and... I can't... feel it."

I bang the steel bar with my fist; there is a low thud.
"Cooper.
Werhner Schole is here, too. We all came back. You're as alive as I am, Cooper, there's a world outside. Listen to me. Tell me what they've done to you."

Cooper turns his haggard face away, he is chewing his lower lip, spittle at the corner of his mouth. He looks back at me; I hear him say: "Do you see things, Voorst?"

The hair rises on the back of my neck. Behind me there is a sound, quick footsteps padding on metal, nearing. Around the corner through the hatchway comes the small-eyed security man, rushing down the passageway, paling. "Hey, no visitors. I got a call down, no visitors. Get out, you gotta get out," he says, shooing me with his hands.

It is as if there is something crawling on me, on my skin, crawling.

I take one last look at Cooper, his mouth awry with contempt, his eyes, dark with hate, directed at me or the warden, I cannot tell; I see the burns again on his forearm as Cooper raises his hands to his eyes and turns to the wall, the security man is pushing at me now.

The moon is spectral, huge. Werhner and I sit in the wicker chairs at the cabana, spooked into drinking rum, watching the almost full moon rising over the ocean. It has taken me a long time to tell the story, a long time to unwind. "It never did feel straight," I tell Werhner finally. "And seeing him... My God, man, it was like seeing a ghost."

"What did Cooper mean?" Werhner wonders aloud, wonders again. "How can he think he's a corpse? What did they do, exactly? Well, not so much difference now. But if Eva Steiner hadn't wound up needling you, if it wasn't for that, who'd know about Cooper? Who'd know?"

"Your tracers," I remind him. "She did say it seemed like a matter of days. But what might happen in the meantime?" I sigh. "Christ, am I glad we get our orders through military. Imagine what it would be like if SciCom was hooked into that."