The Venus Belt by L. Neil Smith Read Free Book Online

uninformative shrug.
    At the lock, the stewardess was passing out briefcases, umbrellas, and guns. “ Indomitable Spirit has been chartered for scientific purposes. This is Bonaventura . All reservations will be honored. Indomitable Spirit has been charted for...”
    For scientific purposes? A whole spaceliner? Glad I didn’t have to pay for it! I followed Koko’s waddling bulk into an accordion-pleated tunnel stretching from the shuttle to an inner wall of the hangar. We filed through a submarine-type door that shut behind us with a hiss. Wonde r ing where all this free gravity was coming from, I nudged my assistant and turned back to a window: the passenger tunnel had retracted, the shuttle was buttoning up. Mist filled the hangar, and the electrojet slid outward across the threshold, dropping instantly from view. Now I u n derstood: we were underway!
    ***
    The ticket they swapped me said Stateroom 12-22. Koko’s, some seve n ty-seven levels forward, was 89-141. I don’t usually cotton to cute little three-foot robots, but this one had wheels and brought back memories of a time and place where Good Humor men were pedal-powered. B e sides, it volunteered to carry my luggage. I bade adieu to my apprentice and let the machine show me through the confusing lobby several decks above the hangar, a maze of pathways and irregularly shaped pools where dolphins squeaked and paddled, conversing with humans and simians seated at the water’s edge in little oval cocktail bays. Laced about with curving stairs and escalators, a dozen lapping, overhanging mezzanine levels created a bewi l dering perspective overhead. The suitcase-critter led me to an impressive ochre-hued column, one of many varicolored cylinders that appeared to be holding up the lobby roof. A pair of doors slid open, admitted us, and closed.
    “ Ohmygodwhatthefuckisthis!” The elevator shot past mezzanines and stai r ways, through the very ceiling, and suddenly the little glassy cage was outside the ship, skimming along its leviathan hull. I huddled numbly by the doors, peeking between my fingers with a sort of suicidal fascination. The little robot emitted a disgusted snigger. I glared at it: “R2, Brutus?’’ It sw i veled its head, staring pointedly the other way.
    It was almost a religious experience for me when the elevator surged to a halt and its blessed portals slid aside. I was indoors again, being dazedly d i rected leftward around a corridor to my room. There, another spell of vert i go awaited: one entire wall was transparent from ceiling to floor, riveting my paralyzed attention like a cobra hypnotizing dinner. The bellbot pol a rized the glass a trifle and waited, humming softly.
    With sweating hands I fumbled for a coin—anything round and shiny—and dropped it in the little machine’s receptacle. It departed, vibra t ing a cheerful octave and a quarter higher. I counted my change—I’d given it half an ounce of gold! The architect who built this mind-bending Disne y land for claustrophobes must have been taking payola from the Business M a chines’ Union!
    Polarization or not, there was still quite a fireworks display visible through the wall-sized window. The elevators, four of them from my va n tage point—one pair reflected by another silvery tower across the way—were capped with little haloes of blue flame. The damned things had their own rocket motors! Intermittent brilliant flashes sparkled in the greater di s tance, I knew not why. And, despite acceleration, we were still admitting last-minute shuttles. I watched one from AntarcticAir slide into the ha n gar-deck below.
    Out of the corner of an eye I caught a frigidly official-looking face sta r ing from the ‘com screen on the right-hand wall. I turned up the sound: “. . . your Captain, Edwin H. Spoonbill III. Those bursts of color you see to starboard are tests of our debris-defenses. Nothing to worry about, the fl y ing’s so clean here that our gunnery computer’s had to