Between the Strokes of Night

“And some of the people, too,” said Hans Gibbs as they rode the moving cable in toward the hub of Spindletop. “Once they become used to zero gee, it’s a devil of a job to get them up here again. There’s a compulsory exercise program, but you wouldn’t believe the ways they find to get around it. We have engineers here who couldn’t go back down to Earth without a year’s conditioning — they spend all their time loafing around Workwheel. They even take their meals down there.” He pointed along a metal corridor, twenty meters across, that went away at right angles from their inward passage. “That’s the main route between Workwheel and Spindletop. See, we’re at the hub now. If we wanted to we could just hang here and drift.”

They paused for a few seconds so that Judith could take a good look around her. The central section was a labyrinth of cables, passages, and airlocks. “It’s all pressurized,” he said in answer to her question about the need for interior airlocks. “But different sections have different pressure levels. And of course the locks are there for safety, too. We’ve never had a blow-out or a bad air loss but it could happen anytime — we can’t track all the meteors.” He took her arm as they caught the cable out along another radial passageway of Spindletop. Her muscles tensed slightly beneath his fingers, but she made no comment.

“Have you spent much time in freefall?” he said after a few moments. He turned so that they were facing each other, dropping outward steadily down the spiralling circular tunnel that led to the edge of Spindletop.

She shook her head. “Enough so that it doesn’t trouble me in the stomach any more, but that’s about all. I’ve sometimes thought it might be nice to take a vacation up on Waterway and see how freefall swimming is done; but I’m told it’s expensive and I’ve always been too busy.”

“If you come up here to work, you can do it free. The big fish tanks down on Workwheel are open to swimmers all the time.”

He turned his face so that he was no longer looking directly at her before he spoke again. His voice was completely neutral. “There are some other experiences in freefall that you ought to try — really interesting ones. Maybe you can sample them before you go back down to the Institute and tell the others what it’s like here.”

He felt her arm muscles tighten again in his grasp. “Let’s see what happens first with Salter Wherry, shall we?” she said. Her voice was noncommittal, but she sounded slightly amused. “Maybe I’ll have to tell them it didn’t work out. Or maybe we’ll have something to celebrate.”

The area they were entering looked substantially different from the parts of Salter Station that Judith had already seen. Instead of metal walls and bulkheads they now passed over soft carpeted floors flanked by elaborate murals. At the door of an antechamber they were met by a young man dressed in a skintight electric-blue uniform. To Judith he looked like a pretty child, no more than thirteen years old. His complexion was soft, without a sign of facial hair.

“He has decided that he will see her alone,” he said, in a voice that was not yet fully broken.

Hans Gibbs shrugged, looked at the youth, then at Judith. “I’ll wait for you right here. Good luck — and remember, you’re holding a card that he wants very badly.”

Judith managed a wry smile. “And what he wants, he gets, right? Thanks anyway, and I’ll see you later.”

She followed the young boy in through the curtained entrance. In the reduced gravity his walk lent an elegant, undulating sway to his hips.

Was he accentuating it intentionally? Jan de Vries was probably right about Salter Wherry’s personal tastes — it was the sort of detail that he would know. Judith tried to make her own movements as economical and functional as possible as she followed her guide around the curved floor of the chamber and on to another large room, this one with no viewports. The boy in front of her halted. Apparently they had arrived. Judith looked around her in surprise. Opulence would have been understandable. These were the private living quarters of a man whose fortune exceeded that of most Earth nations — perhaps all. But this?

The room they had entered was bare and ugly. Instead of the drapes and murals of the outer chamber, she was looking at dark walls and simple, plastic-coated floor and ceiling. The furniture was hard upright chairs, a single narrow couch, and an old wooden desk. And there was something else, stranger yet… Judith had to think for a few seconds before she could pin it down. Something was missing. The room lacked any signs of data terminals or display screens; she could not even see a telephone or television outlet.

But Salter Wherry had System-wide influence and interests. One word from him could bankrupt whole States. He must find the most modern and elaborate communications equipment absolutely essential.…