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 Jake McGraw, and friends.
He bent over the keyboard, then straightened up quickly and looked at me.  Did
you say... Jake
McGraw?
 That s right.
 Glad to have you aboard the Laputa, sir.
 Glad to be anywhere right now. Tell me, when do we get where we re going? And
where are we going?
 We should make Seahome by tomorrow afternoon, sir. That s the biggest town
here on Splash.
 Splash? That s what the planet s called?
 Well, it isn t really called anything officially, and every language group
seems to have its own name, but in Intersystem it s called Akwaterra.
 Straightforward enough. I take it there are large land masses then?
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 Big enough, but not continent-size.
Welcome to Splash, but don t go near the water.
The Laputa?
Carrying my bag only (Darla had opted to keep hers), a steward led us to
another elevator. We went up to B Deck, where we followed him through a maze
of corridors. Roland lagged behind, planting more transponders at various
strategic and inconspicuous locations. . Our adjoining staterooms were
lavish, the crappers positively palatial, with sunken tubs made of a
gold-veined stone that looked something like marble. There were few modern
conveniences, but the charm more than made up for the lack. I tried to think
of the last time I d used a bathtub. John knocked on the connecting hatch and
stepped in.  I
haven t seen plumbing like that since I lived in London, he said.
 Really? I said, distracted. I still wasn t sure whether I liked having the
Teelies next door, for their sake more than mine. Time for them to start
disassociating themselves from me. I had wanted at least half a ship between
us, but Roland had insisted on keeping nearby.  Don t want to lose you now,
Jake.
You re our ticket home.  Home? Where s that? He acknowledged the point.  You
have me there. But our people are still important to us. We must get back
somehow.
 Sorry. I understand. Maybe Roland was right. They d be more vulnerable away
from me. Susan walked in, looking depressed. She had her shirt back on and
was wearing her tan bush pants, but she was barefooted, having left her
sandals in the Chevy.  There are shops on board, Susan, I told her.  You
should pick up some footwear. John has money.
 Yes, I will, she answered dully and slumped into a velvet armchair.
John went over to her.  What s wrong, Suzie? he asked, massaging her
shoulders.  Oh, I was just thinking of Sten back there in the hospital. He s
probably worried sick, wondering what happened to us. She looked at me.  We
were on the way to the hospital when you... She lowered her head and began
crying softly.
It made me feel just great. Darla took her by the hand, led her to the other
room, and closed the hatch.
 Does she have these mood swings often? I asked John.  Suzie s emotional and
changeable, it s true. But you must realize, Jake, this whole affair s been a
nasty shock for all of us.  Sorry, sorry.... It struck me that I d been
apologizing a lot lately. I had to reach down deep into my resources to remind
myself that I had done nothing to deserve any of this, nor was any of it my
fault. A sense of guilt for unspecified and probably imaginary offenses is a
load that gets dumped on you early on. Most people spends lifetime looking for
a place to set it down.  John, would you excuse me for a moment? I want to
talk to Sam.
 Of course. He went to the hatch and opened it, turned to say something, but
thought better of it.
 We ll talk later, he said, then went out and closed the hatch. He had his
own guilt to deal with.
Winnie was on the couch, huddled up with her arms wrapped around her knees,
looking at me with wet, questioning eyes. I winked at her, and she gave me a
grimace-grin in return. Funny that she responded to a wink. I couldn t
remember ever seeing her eyelids close except in sleep; she never blinked
them.
 I m copying you fine, Sam said when I keyed him.  How d you do it?  Roland
engineered it, but those button transponders did the trick. We have them
planted all over the ship. What have you got for me?
 Well, when I went down to the basement, I got quite a shock. There s tons of
stuff from years back.
I checked a list-out of that news-recording subroutine. The way it s coded is
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all goofed up. It tells me to erase all the junk I ve kept for the last thirty
days, but allows me to keep what I ve recorded that day, the day I houseclean.
What the subroutine does then is give everything that s left in the workfile a
PROTECT tag. Then, when I erase again, all that stuff gets dumped into the
reference library. As a result, there s all kinds of random crap down there
from years back.
 I ll have to stop buying that cheap off-the-shelf software and do my own
coding for a change.
You find anything interesting?
 Yes, very. Like this item in Pravdu from about three years ago. Sam snorted.
 Never fails to amuse me that they thought the change of one letter makes a
Russian word into an Inter-system one.
 Makes it easier for them. Go ahead.
 Okay. Quote, Tsiolkovskygrad, Einstein, October 10, 2103. The season premiere
of the New
Bolshoi was well-attended this year, as it is every year, but last night
standing-room-only crowds packed the house to see a daringly innovative
staging of, blah blah blah blah, etcetera. Skip six paragraphs.
Among the notables attending were KamradaBig Cheese, Kam-rada Head
Whatshisname, your mother s
Uncle Pasha, and here it is, get this Minister of Intercolonial Affairs Dr.
Van Wyck Vance, daughter
Darla Petrovsky-Vance, and some prominent friends of the Authority, including
labor leader Kam-rada [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]