The Centauri Device by M. John Harrison Read Free Book Online Page B

Authority) police with a long, jowled face and a rumpled uniform. They sat down on the other side of the table, not looking at Truck. The agent gave his file to Truck's guard. 'Take that to Whillans for me, will you.'
    'Whillans is sick,' the guard told him, 'sir.'
    'Well, give it to Jansen, then.' He examined Truck's papers. He seemed interested in the log book from My Ella Speed . He was young-looking and tanned, but partly bald, and there were deep lines running down from his nose to the corners of his mouth.
    'We know he was on Morpheus, whatever the BCA have to say,' he said to the sergeant.
    Suddenly, he turned to Truck and asked, 'Who are you selling to these days?'
    'I'm not selling,' said Truck. He had to give them something, so he went on, 'I admit I was at Veronica's place, but I was only consuming.' He'd had precious little time to do any of that.
    'I'm not selling anything — '
    The sergeant got up noisily and pointed his finger at Truck. He was slack in the belly and shoulders, which is where West Central weighs heaviest on its executives. He shook his finger accusingly.
    'You'd better straighten yourself up. You're up to your ears in Earth heroin and morphine.
    We could break your leg and no one would care. In here we could break your leg.'
    Truck had always avoided the opium derivatives. Nobody wanted colonial heroin because papaver somniforum lacked 'bite' when grown away from Earth, and its alkaloids were always either weak or peculiar. Rigid control of growing by both IWG and UASR had shut down the black market — there was simply raw material to be had; so the only trade in the genuine article was gray, a thin trickle of refined and packaged material stolen mainly from military medical supplies, traveling a precarious conveyer belt to the cutting factories of the giant H and M monopolies of Earth.
    It was scarce, it was expensive, and it was profitable enough for the monopolies to protect their connections jealously. Truck had never wanted his head blown off.

    (There was a second reason, one that seemed odd even to Truck. He called it squeamishness because he didn't think he had any right to a moral stance. In that, he was probably correct. But underneath his leather hat and funny clothes lived a puritan. He wouldn't sell anything he didn't believe in taking himself. He never ceased wondering about it He thought of it as a fatal flaw in his character.)
    'Earth heroin can get you killed,' he said. 'You know that as well as I do.'
    The IWG man rapped the table. 'He's not playing fair with us, sergeant,' he said distantly.
    The sergeant sat down. 'Why don't we make it harder for him?' he complained, looking at his blunt, hairy hands as if he loathed them. The IWG man was staring vaguely up at the ceiling.
    'There's an easy way and a hard way of getting things straight,' he agreed. He opened the log book again, flicked its pages over. He began to poke Truck's belongings about.
    'You're not co-operating John,' he said. 'Look, this, could have been harder for you personally; we've shown you a lot of consideration.' His eyes were blue and watery, aimless; he gave his full attention to anything they happened to focus on, like an old animal. He blinked, and everything had equal weight for him. 'We know you were on Morpheus, not too many years back, dealing in amphetamines. Your operation made a significant contribution to the Butter Putsch, so we can assume you have a political involvement. Now you turn up in a raid on Veronica's. Why shouldn't you have a heroin connection as well?
    'You're in a bit of a mess, John.'
    In those callow days, drifting among the dark machine-tool factories and vast rolling mills, concerned only with making enough money to buy back his indentures and get off the planet, Truck hadn't been able to tell a political involvement from a vomiting fit. He was still having trouble.
    'I don't know what you're talking about,' he confessed. 'I don't see what H has to do with politics. I've never