On the whole, prices of what few things there were to acquire for personal use remained trifling. A cup of coffdrink, for instance, was two credits, moonglow and sunglow were three. In practice it made the system hardly worth bothering with. So the money element withered away. We found we could get along happily without it.
No one drew wages or paid taxes.
A reckoning will come when – if ever! – the rockets return from Downstairs. But, after all, we own the planet, thanks to the UN constitution, and so can sort the matter out without too much friction.
One evening, Cang Hai was on her way to see a dupe friend of hers living above the We Mend Everything post, in the recesses of the old cadre building. The lane was deserted. Of a sudden, a door ahead of her was flung open and three masked men rushed out. Cang Hai had barely turned to run before they slammed into her, seized her and dragged her into a bare room, a store of some kind.
She heard the door being locked as they tied her to a chair. A bright light was shone into her eyes. She could scarcely make out the outline of her attackers for its dazzle.
She heard their breathing and was afraid.
‘Right, girl, don’t be frightened. We only want to talk to you,’ said a voice that Cang Hai recognised as Feneloni’s. ‘We are not planning to do anything unpleasant, as we could easily do, such as raping you or pulling off that artificial leg of yours.’ Someone behind the light chuckled.
‘The time to talk was during the forum,’ she said, but could hardly bring the words out from her trembling lips.
‘Now then, just you listen to us. We’ve had enough yacking from your lot. You and your pal Jefferies. This shit about the Rivers plan and Utopia has got to stop. It’s nothing but a time-waster. How are you going to improve people – people stuck on Mars? It’s crap! We’re going to die here if we just sit around yakking.’
‘Let me have a go at her. She’s a tasty little dish,’ said one of the hidden men.
‘In a minute,’ said Feneloni. ‘She’s a wimp, doesn’t much like sex. Maybe you could teach her.’ They laughed. She begged them not to touch her. Feneloni replied, ‘Look, we’re trying to scare some sense into you. Get real! Stop all this pissing about. Stop beaming these stupid sessions of yours back to Earth, as if everything here was okay. It’s not okay. My brother’s ship was lost, worse luck, or he’d have done something about us being stuck here.
‘We need to get back to real life. We should be staging scenes of riot, carnage, starvation. We have to force the hand of the UN. Get a ship up here, get us out of this mess. You understand that?’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes, of course. But—’
‘So you go back to Jefferies and tell him to keep his namby-pamby mouth shut from now on, or you’re going to suffer damage, you and your kid. You understand?’
‘Let’s have a little fun with her,’ said one of the men. ‘So she takes us seriously…’
‘Don’t think about it,’ Feneloni ordered.
The door burst open. Two security guards ran in, armed with torches and truncheons. The store had been designed as a dry goods warehouse and was covered by functioning security cameras, a factor Feneloni had disregarded. Directly he saw the men he shouted to the others to follow and rushed the intruders. The guards kicked his legs from under him and pinned him to the floor as he fell. The other two men burst out of the door and ran for it down the passageway.
Once Feneloni was tied up, the security men went over to Cang Hai and released her from the chair. She collapsed with shock. They phoned me. I arrived and helped her back to our quarters. After a shower she fell asleep, to wake in the morning recovered, at least in part.
Now the question arose of what to do with Feneloni. I went to see him. He was being held in his quarters on Tharsis Street, and looked as sullen as one might expect.