The Merchant's War by Frederik Pohl Read Free Book Online

just led Mitzi out the door and down the stairs, and forgot the whole incident—for a while.
    Hand in hand we strolled to the nearest platform where a tram was waiting. I had thought I had seen people boarding it, but as we were about to get on a Veenie guard hurried up. “Sorry, folks,” he panted, out of breath, “but this one’s out of service. It’s got, uh, a mechanical defect. The next one out—” he pointed—“will be right over there on Platform Three.”
    There was no tram at Platform Three, but I could see that there was one at the junction point, its nose just poking out from the tunnel, waiting for the signal lights to clear so it could enter the platform.
    For some reason I was feeling a little dizzy and generally vague. The wine, I assumed. It kept me from wanting to argue. We turned to start back down the platform but the guard waved us across the tracks. “Save time if you just cut through here,” he said helpfully.
    Mitzi seemed a little blurry, too, but she asked, “Isn’t that dangerous?” And the guard gave us an indulgent let’s-not-hit-the-booze-so-hard-next-time chuckle and guided us to the track. No, he didn’t guide us. He shoved us … just as there was a clatter from the end of the platform.
    Out of the corner of one eye I saw the tram galumphing down on us. We were right bull’s-eye in its path.
    “Jump!” I yelled, and, “Jump, Tenny!” yelled Mitzi at the same moment, and jump we both did. I grabbed for Mitzi, and she grabbed for me, and it would have worked out really well if we had jumped in the same direction. But we didn’t. We bumped each other. If Mitzi had been smaller, instead of taller, than me, I might have tossed her or tugged her clear; as it was she went one way and I went another, but not quite in time. The tram slammed me out onto the platform, with yells and cursing and screeching of brakes. Flames of pain ran up my legs as I slid across rough concrete on my knees. Somewhere along the line I hit my head a good one—or the tram did.
    The next thing I knew my knee and my head were competing to see which one could hurt me the most, and I was hearing yelling voices—
    “—couple of hucks tried to cross the track—”
    “—one dead and one pretty bad—”
    “Get that medic in here!”
    And somebody out of the tram was leaning over me, ruddy whiskered face pop-eyed with surprise, and to my astonishment it was Marty MacLeod, the Deputy Station Chief.
    I don’t remember much of the next little while. There are only flashes: Marty demanding I be taken at once to the Embassy, the medic obstinate that ambulance patients went to the hospital and nowhere else, someone peering over Marty’s shoulder and blurting, “Jeez! It’s the male huck, and he’s alive!” The someone was the traffic-light Veenie.
    Then I remember the cement-mixer bumps and jolts of the ambulance chopper as it leaped the hills around the park, and I went quietly to sleep. Thinking about Mitzi. Thinking about how I felt. Thinking that it wouldn’t be right to say that I loved her, exactly, and certainly nothing she ever said to me, in bed or out, sounded like she felt anything like that … but thinking mostly that it was really sad that she was dead.
    But she wasn’t.
    They kept me an hour in the emergency room—a couple of Band-Aids and an X-ray series—and when they released me into Marty’s custody they told me Mitzi had nine fractures counted and at least six internal ruptures that showed on the tomography. She was in intensive care, and they’d keep us posted.
    Good news! But it didn’t make my heart sing. Because by then I was getting my head straight, and the straighter it got the more certain it became in my mind that the accident had been no accident.
    I will say for Marty that when we got inside the bug-proof Embassy compound she listened seriously while I told her what I thought. “We’ll check,” she promised grimly. “Can’t do anything till we see what Mitzi has