He stared down into his soup bowl for several moments, then looked back up at her. “Does this mean I can’t publish my work?”
“Publish?”
“In The Journal of Nanotechnology. It’s published in Selene and I thought I’d meet the editors while I’m there.”
Pancho thought it over for all of a half-second. A scientific journal. Maybe a hundred people in the whole solar system read it. But one of them will bring the news to Humphries, she was sure. Hell, she said to herself, the Hump prob’ly knows about it already. Not much goes on anywhere that he doesn’t know about.
“Sure you can publish it,” she said easily. “No problem.” Levinson broke into a boyish smile. “Oh, that’s okay then. As long as I can publish and get credit for my work, I don’t care what the stupid rock rats do.”
Pancho stared at him, struggling to hide her feelings. Like so many scientists, this kid’s an elitist. She felt enormously relieved.
Dorik Harbin knew all about addiction. He’d started taking narcotics when he was a teenager, still in his native Balkan village. The elders fed a rough form of hashish to the kids when they sent the youths out on missions of ethnic cleansing. As he progressed up the ladder of organized murder and rape, his need for drugs became deeper, more demanding. As a mercenary in the employ of Humphries Space Systems he had been detoxed several times, only to fall back into his habit time and again. Ironically, HSS medics supplied the medications as part of the corporation’s “incentive program.”
Their meds were much better, too: designer drugs, tailored for specific needs. Drugs to help you stay awake and alert through long days and weeks of cruising alone through the Belt, seeking ships to destroy. Drugs to enhance your battle prowess, to make you fiercer, angrier, bloodier than any normal human being could be. Most of all, Harbin needed drugs to help him forget, to blot out the images of helpless men and women screaming for mercy as they floated into space from their broken spacecraft to drift in their survival pods or even alone in their spacesuits, drift like flailing, begging, terrified dust motes until at last death quieted their beseeching voices and they wafted through space in eternal silence.
A lesser man would have been driven to madness by the hopelessness of it all. Humphries’s medical specialists took pains to detoxify Harbin’s body, to purge his blood stream of the lingering molecules of narcotics. Then other Humphries specialists fed him new medications, to help him do the killings that the corporation paid him to do. Harbin smiled grimly at the irony and remembered Kayyam’s words:
And much as Wine has play’d the Infidel,
And robb’d me of my Robe of Honor—well,
I often wonder what the Vintners buy
One half so precious as the Goods they sell.
No matter which of the laboratory-designed drugs he took, though, nor how much, they could not erase his dreams, could never blot out the memories that made his sleep an endless torture of punishment. He saw their faces, the faces of all those he had killed over the years, distorted with pain and terror and the sudden realization that their lives were finished, without mercy, without hope of rescue or reprieve or even delay. He heard their screams, every time he slept.
The revenge of the weak against the strong, he told himself. But he dreaded sleep, dreaded the begging, pleading chorus of men and women and babies.
Yes, Harbin knew about addiction. He had allowed himself to become addicted to a woman once, and she had betrayed him. So he had to kill her. He had trusted her, let his guard down and allowed her to reach his innermost soul. He had even dared to dream of a different life, an existence of peace and gentleness, of loving and being loved. And she had betrayed him. When he ripped the lying tongue out of her mouth, she was carrying another man’s baby.
He swore never to repeat that mistake. Never to allow a woman to get that close to him. Never. Women were for pleasure, just as some drugs were. Nothing more.