collar traits. She and I pooled our coins for a five-minute salt, thirty-second fresh, with soap. I found that I was scrubbing my right hand over and over again. I found that when the cold water hit the left side of my face the pain was dizzying. After the shower I wedged myself into the shuttle and spent two hours zigzagging under the city. My last stop was Times Square, in the heart of the market district. It was mostly a freight station. While cursing consumers hurled crates of protein ticketed for various parts of town onto the belts I tried to phone Kathy again. Again there was nobody home. I got Hester at the Schocken Tower. I told her: “I want you to raise every cent you can, borrow, clean our your savings, buy a Starrzelius apparel outfit for me, and meet me with it soonest at the place where your mother broke her leg two years ago. The exact place, remember?” “Mitch,” she said. “Yes, I remember. But my contract-” “Don’t make me beg you, Hester,” I pleaded. “Trust me. I’ll see you through. For God’s sake, hurry. And-if you get here and I’m in the hands of the guards, don’t recognize me. Now, into action.” I hung up and slumped in the phone booth until the next party hammered indignantly on the door. I walked slowly around the station, had Coffiest and a cheese sandwich, and rented a morning paper at the newsstand. The story about me was a bored little item on page three out of a possible four: SOUGHT FOR CB & FEMICIDE. It said George Groby had failed to return from a pass to his job with Chlorella and had used his free time to burglarize executives’ country in the Taunton Building. He had killed a secretary who stumbled on him and made his escape. Hester met me half an hour later by the loading chute from which a crate had once whizzed to break her mother’s leg. She looked frantically worried; technically she was as guilty of contract breach as “George Groby.” I took the garment box from her and asked: “Do you have fifteen hundred dollars left?” “Just about. My mother was frantic-” “Get us reservations on the next Moon ship; today if possible. Meet me back here; I’ll be wearing the new clothes.” “Us? The Moon?” she squeaked. “Yes; us. I’ve got to get off the Earth before I’m killed. And this time it’ll be for keeps.”
twelve My little Hester squared her shoulders and proceeded to work miracles. In ten hours we were grunting side by side under the take-off acceleration of the Moon ship David Ricardo. She had coldbloodedly passed herself off as a Schocken employee on special detail to the Moon and me as Groby, a sales analyst 6. Naturally the dragnet for Groby, expediter 9, had not included the Astoria spaceport. Sewage workers on the lam from CB and femicide wouldn’t have the money to hop a rocket, of course. We rated a compartment and the max ration. The David Ricardo was so constructed that most passengers rated compartments and max rations. It wasn’t a trip for the idly curious or the submerged fifteen sixteenths of the population. The Moon was strictly business -mining business-and some sight-seeing. Our fellow-passengers, what we saw of them at the ramp, were preoccupied engineers, a few laborers in the minute steerage, and silly-rich men and women who wanted to say they’d been there. After take-off, Hester was hysterically gay for a while, and then snapped. She sobbed on my shoulder, frightened at the enormity of what she’d done. She’d been brought up in a deeply moral, sales-fearing home, and you couldn’t expect her to commit the high commercial crime of breaking a labor contract without there being a terrific emotional lashback. She wailed: “Mr. Courtenay-Mitch-if only I could be sure it was all right! I know you’ve always been good to me and I know you wouldn’t do anything wrong, but I’m so scared and miserable!” I dried her eyes and made a decision.
“I’ll tell you what it’s all about, Hester,” I said. “You be the judge. Taunton has discovered something very terrible. He’s found out that there are people who are not deterred by the threat of cerebrin as the punishment for an unprovoked commercial murder. He thinks Mr. Schocken grabbed the Venus project from him unethically, and he’ll stop at nothing to get it back. He’s tried twice at least to kill me. I thought Mr. Runstead was one of his agents, assigned to bitch up Schocken’s handling of the Venus account. Now, I don’t know. Mr. Runstead clubbed me when I went after him at the South Pole, spirited me away to a labor freighter under a faked identity, and left a substitute body for mine. And,” I said cautiously, “there are Consies in it.” She uttered a small shriek. “I don’t know how they dovetail,” I said. “But I was in a Consie cell-” “Mis-ter Courtenay!” “Strictly as a blind,” I hastily explained. “I was stuck in Chlorella Costa Rica and the only way north seemed to be through the Consie network. They had a cell in the factory, I joined up, turned on the talent, and got transferred to New York. The rest you know.” She paused for a long time and asked: “Are you sure it’s all right?” Wishing desperately that it were, I firmly said: “Of course, Hester.” She gave me a game smile. “I’ll get our rations,” she said, un-snapping herself. “You’d better stay here.” Forty hours out I said to Hester: “The blasted blackmarketing steward is going too far! Look at this!” I held up my bulb of water and my ration box. The seal had clearly been tampered with on both containers, and visibly there was water missing. “Max rations,” I went on oratorically, “are supposed to be tamper-proof, but this is plain burglary. How do yours look?” “Same thing,” she said listlessly. “You can’t do anything about it. Let’s not eat just yet, Mr. Courtenay.” She made a marked effort to be vivacious. “Tennis, anyone?” “All right,” I grumbled, and set up the field, borrowed from the ship recreation closet. She was better at tennis than I, but I took her in straight sets. Her co-ordination was ‘way off. She’d stab for a right forecourt deep cross-court return and like as not miss the button