Kill Station by Diane Duane & Peter Morwood Read Free Book Online Page A

quoted the station's housing law to him, chapter and verse. He did this before he had brushed his teeth, which was simple enough, because the 'fresher had broken down between the haircut and the shave. The man had winced
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    and gone scowling off into his own quarters, muttering about changes in the law and calling the station. He hadn't come back.
    Evan was satisfied. So was Joss, who had left Evan to deal with the guy at the desk and had gone about the morning's first errand: that postponed discussion with the people in the approach control. "Maybe the guy heard about last night," Joss said to Evan as they headed out together for the station police office.
    Evan laughed. "I doubt there's anyone within a light-hour's circumference who hasn't heard," he said. "There's nothing to do out here but work and gossip. And which would you rather do?''
    Joss grunted.
    "And how was your interview with the radar techs?"
    Joss rolled his eyes. "Pretty pitiful. None of them had anyone's demise in mind, I'm sure of that much. It looks like they're understaffed, and they're working with the kind of equipment I haven't seen since my high school science fair. I yelled at them some, but my heart wasn't in it. They'll be more careful, maybe, but how much good is it likely to do when you're working with machines that have vacuum tubes in them?" He grimaced.
    The look was unusually pained. "Your head bothering you?" Evan said.
    "No, I'm fine. It just seems—" Joss shrugged. "Maybe it's just me, but everything looks dirtier this morning."
    "Oddly enough, I know what you mean," Evan said, and there was truth to that, as he thought back to what he had found in the 'fresher head, and how long it had taken him to remove it before anything would flow freely again. "You were right. People do seem awfully preoccupied here, at first glance, much more so than normal. Even the bare minimum of cleaning doesn't seem to be done."
    "Or other things," Joss said. "I had a closer look at the rock this morning."
    "Trust you to do that," Evan said, only partly bantering. Among various other hobbies, Joss was an amateur 38 SPACE COPS
    geologist and spelunker, when he could find a cave worth crawling into. "What did you do, pull up the flooring?"
    "Not much to pull up. We're on raw rock here, cut flat. The dome seals are direct, just aged silicon clathrates."
    "Diw," Evan said softly. 'How cheap can you get?" Such seals were little better than sticking a dome to the rock of the asteroid with rubber cement.
    "That cheap, at least. Evan, the rock's not as bad as the reports made it out to be. It's straight conglomerate with iron and iron oxides. Even without my kit, I make it out at about one percent iron. It's hardly high-grade ore for these parts, though, and even if they had slagged the asteroid out when they first came here, I'm not sure they could have made their settlement expenses back. It's too bad."
    Evan shook his head. It all fit together in a veritable panorama of tackiness. The patched domes, the dirt, the shoddy surroundings, the shoddy people—for all the people they had seen in the bar last night had that same aura of worn-down goods. There seemed to be no one there really successful and showing it, not even one flash of cash from a miner in from a good strike. There hadn't even been the grumbling hospitality of someone in from a run that had been a break-even business, simply okay. People had sat nursing their drinks like precious things, and had fought not out of anger, but boredom. It was distressing.
    In some ways it reminded Evan of pictures of Wales as it had been in the bad old days between the great coal-mining period and the inrush of high technology, when half the country was on the dole. People hadn't cared about work, or anything else, their spirit almost broken by years of never having enough.
    The comparison troubled him a great deal. "You told me," he said, "that this area was doing all right hi terms of mining.