Voyage From Yesteryear

“Have you made your mind up about Sterm?” Cells asked.

Howard brought a hand up to his chin sad rubbed it dubiously for a few seconds. “Mmm . . . Sterm. I can~ make him out. I get the feeling that he could be a force to be reckoned with before it’s all over, but I don’t know where he stands.” He thought for a moment longer and at last shook his head. “There are some confidential matters that I’ll want to bring up. Sterm could turn out to be an adversary. It wouldn’t be wise to show too much of our hand this early on. You’d better leave him out of it. Later on it might change… but let’s keep him at a distance for the time being.”

CHAPTER SEVEN

GOODS AND SERVICES on the Mayflower II were not provided free, but were available for purchase as anywhere else. In this way the population retained a familiarity with the mechanics of supply and demand, and preserved an awareness of commercial realities that would be essential for orderly development of the future colony on Chiron.

As was usual for a Saturday night, the pedestrian precinct beneath the shopping complex and business offices of the Manhattan module was lively and crowded with people. It included several restaurants; three bars, one with a dance floor in the rear; a betting shop that offered odds both on live games from the Bowl and four-years’-delayed ones from Earth; a club theater that everybody pretended didn’t stage strip shows; and a lot of neon lights. The Bowry bar, a popular haunt of off-duty regular troops, was squeezed into one comer of the precinct next to a coffee shop, behind a studded door of imitation oak and a high window of small, tinted glass panes that turned the inside lights red.

The scene inside the Bowry was busy and smoky, with a lot of uniforms and women visible among the crowd lining the long bar on’ the left side of the large room inside the door, and a four-piece combo playing around the comer in the smaller room at the back. Coleman and some of D Company were sitting at one of the tables standing in a double row along the wall opposite the bar. Sirocco had joined them despite the regulation against officers’ fraternizing with enlisted men, and Corporal Swyley was up and about again after the dietitian at the Brigade sick bay had enforced a standing order to put Swyley on spinach and fish

whenever he was admitted. Bret Hanion, the sergeant in charge of Second Platoon and a long-standing buddy of Colman, was sitting on the other side of Sirocco with Stanislau, Third Platoon’s laser gunner, and a couple of civilian girls; a signals specialist called Anita, attached to Brigade H.Q. was snuggling close to Colman ~with her arm draped loosely through his.

Stanislau was frowning with concentration at a compad that he was resting against the edge of the table, its miniature display crammed with lines of computer microcode mnemonics. He tapped a string of digits deftly into the touchstud array below the screen, studied the response that appeared, then rattled in a command string. A number appeared low down in a comer. Stanislau looked up triumphantly at Sirocco. “3.141592653,’ he announced. “It’s pi to ten places.” Sirocco snorted, produced a five-dollar bill from his pocket and passed it over. The bet had been that Stanislau could crash the databank security system and retrieve an item that Sirocco had stored half an hour previously in the public sector under a personal access key.

“How about that?” Hanlon shouted delightedly. “The guy did it!”

“Don’t forget–a round of beers too,” Colman reminded Sirocco. The girls whooped their approval.

“Where did you learn that, Stan?” Paula, one of the civilian girls, asked. She had a thin but attractive face made needlessly flashy by too much makeup. Her clothes were tight and provocative.

Stanislau slipped the compad into his pocket. “You don’t wanna know about that,” he said. “It’s not very respectable.”

“Come on, Stan. Give,” Terry, Paula’s companion, insisted. Colman gave Stanislau ‘a challenging look that left him no way out.

Stanislau took a long draught from his glass and made a what-the-hell? gesture. “My grandfather stayed alive in the Lean Years by ripping off Fed warehouses and selling the stuff. He could bomb any security routine ever dreamed up. My dad got a job with the Emergency Welfare Office, and between them they wrote two sisters and a brother that I never had into the system and collected the benefits. So life wasn’t too bad.” He shrugged, almost apologetically. “I guess it got to be kind of a tradition… sort of handed down in the family.”

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