The Year’s Best Military SF & Space Opera (9 page)

The Superior Silk Corporation of Venus sprawled across a half-square-mile plot not far from the port—which wasn’t surprising, given that almost all of their product was exported to Mars and Earth for use in airship balloons. Seven vast hangars, each one an arched wooden structure as long as a football field and over a hundred feet tall, stood in an arc around the manufacturing plant, a blocky collection of greenbrick buildings topped by dozens of smokestacks. Only about a quarter of those stacks were sending their black fumes up to join the gray and muddy sky. But the cabbie drove his mount toward a building that stood out from that great industrial agglomeration like a Chrysler hood ornament on a woodpile.

Superior Silk’s office block held itself aloof from the ugly, utilitarian buildings where the actual work was done. It was built to impress, three stories of streamlined aluminum and glass, all Art Deco curves and parallel lines. A large neon sign, reading only SUPERIOR, cast its harsh blue-white light over the buildings, streets, and swamps nearby.

A huge, stylized aluminum sculpture of a Venusian silkworm loomed over the main entrance. As I passed beneath it, I couldn’t help but notice that the electric light that illuminated its left eye was burned out.

After I presented my card to the receptionist—MIKE DRAYTON, PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR, it read, with the old address crossed out and the new one written beneath in pen—she used the intercom to call the executive offices.

A minute later, the chairman’s secretary appeared to take my hat and suitcase and lead me up to his office. I was not at all surprised that she was honey-blonde, zaftig, and very pleasing to my eye; Grossman’s tastes had always matched my own.

“Mr. Grossman is expecting you,” she said as she gestured me through the double doors.

Grossman’s office was even more deluxe than the exterior of the building, the aluminum and steel joined by marswood and oak trim that would never have withstood Cooksport’s spring rains. An electric fan whirred silently overhead.

“Welcome to Venus, Mr. Drayton,” said the great man, extending a hand with something that could have been mistaken for sincerity. “I trust you had a pleasant trip?”

“I lost a hundred bucks on zero-gravity billiards,” I replied, taking the hand with something that could have been mistaken for respect.

Victor Grossman was still tall, lean, and impeccably dressed—white silk from collar to spats, of course, with the shine and luster of the
really
expensive stuff. But in the twenty years since I’d last seen him he’d lost the last of his hair, picked up some wrinkles, and added dark bags under his eyes. Bags crafted of the finest Venusian silk, I was sure.

“You’re probably wondering why I’ve asked you to come all this way,” he said, seating himself behind his broad, immaculate desk and gesturing me to the supplicant’s chair.

“The thought had crossed my mind. Especially considering the first-class airline ticket. For which thanks, by the way.”

“I have an immediate requirement for a man to perform a . . . confidential task,” he said, steepling his fingers. “A man of great personal integrity. A man with bravery, wit, and keen investigative skills. In short, a man with your unique qualities.”

“I’m flattered. Also surprised.”

He waved a hand dismissively. “I know we have not always seen eye to eye on every issue, Mr. Drayton, but I am not a man to carry a grudge.”

That, I knew, was a bald-pated lie, but the weight of Grossman’s retainer in my bank account held my mouth shut. “So why’d you send all the way to L.A. for this paragon of virtue?”

“Because there is no one on Venus I can trust.”

That made two of us. The corrupt swamp of Venusian politics and jurisprudence made the Wugunta Bog look like a rose garden, which was one of the things that had driven me off of the planet in the first place. Grossman, of course, had been another. “All right, I’m here. What’s the gig?”

He unlocked a desk drawer and extracted a file folder. The first thing I found in it was a photograph of a fat froggie with a scarred snout. “That,” said Grossman, as though indicating a slug that had crawled onto his rosebush, “is Uluugan Ugulma, a prominent local fungus dealer. His very successful legitimate business in construction fungi is a front for an even more successful
ulka
ring.”

“Hunh.”
Ulka
was one of the nastier products of the fecund Venusian biosystem, a drug with a powerful kick and even more powerfully addictive. “So what’s it to you?”

“My brother George is an
ulka
addict. He has gone into substantial debt to Mr. Ugulma’s syndicate.”

“Sorry to hear that.”

“He is a weak man, Mr. Drayton, but he is my brother. I need you to investigate and document Mr. Ugulma’s little side business so thoroughly that even the Cooksport police can’t overlook it.”

“That’s a tall order, Mr. Grossman. They can be extremely myopic.”

“I’m confident in your abilities, Mr. Drayton. Once I have your documentation in hand, I can offer it to Mr. Ugulma in exchange for forgiveness of my brother’s debt.”

Drugs, blackmail, and a focus on the money over his own brother’s welfare . . . that was Grossman to a T. “That won’t keep your brother from going right back into hock.”

“Leave that part to me, Mr. Drayton. It’s Ugulma I want.”

I flipped through the file folder. It had names, addresses, schedules, a few more photographs. “I can work with this. I get fifty a day, plus expenses.”

“Agreed. And there’s a five-hundred-dollar bonus for you at the end of the job.”

I raised one eyebrow at that. “I assume this is on the down-low?”

“Extremely confidential, yes. All payments henceforth will be in cash.”

“My favorite flavor.”

I closed the folder and tapped it on the desktop to settle the papers I’d disturbed. The job smelled fishy—I’d expected nothing better from the moment I received Grossman’s radiogram—but his story was self-centered, underhanded, and nasty enough that I almost believed it.

I could spend the retainer on a week of high living at the Lugwunta Bay casinos, tell him I’d found nothing, and use the return ticket to fly back to sunny L.A.

Or I could do the job, milk him for all I could get, and maybe catch a glimpse of Maria.

I extended my hand, this time with a measure of genuine warmth. “All right, Mr. Grossman, you’ve got yourself a P.I.” We shook on the deal.

I resisted the impulse to count my fingers afterward.

After the conclusion of our deal, Grossman’s secretary—her name was Lillie—gave me the nickel tour of the plant. We started at Hangar One, where millions of Venusian silkworms dropped a hundred feet from the ceiling, dangling on their shining threads. The smell was as appalling as I remembered.

“Hell of a life,” I said. “Start at the top, work your way to the bottom on a string you pull from your butt, then when you get where you’re going they take away everything you’ve accomplished and make you start all over again.”

“At least they’re well fed.” She tilted her honey-blonde head. “You know a lot about silkworms for a detective, Mr. Drayton.”

“My dad was a silk salesman. He dragged us to Venus when I was twelve, and I worked in the hangars for a while before I became a cop.” A business that stank even worse than silkworms, as I’d learned. “Then I joined the Marines.”

“Is that where you got the broken nose?”

I looked down in embarrassment. “That was in a bar fight, actually.”

“It gives you character.” Her smile was heartbreaking. “You must have some fascinating stories. Would you care to join me for dinner?”

If only I were twenty years younger
, I thought. “Sorry, miss, I’ve had a long day. In fact, I think I’d better cut this tour short and find my hotel. Get a fresh start tomorrow.”

“Some other time, perhaps?”

I should have told her to back off but I didn’t want to bruise her little heart unnecessarily. She looked like such a sweet, innocent kid. “Perhaps,” I said.

Leaving the plant, I found myself in the middle of the departing shift-change crowd, humans and froggies chatting amiably together as they made their way home by bus, boat, foot, or flipper. I listened in as I walked.

Beneath the casual talk of weather, kids, and squabbleball there was an undercurrent of concern. Everyone knew that with the rise of airliners—metal-bodied internal-combustion contraptions using wings instead of balloons to reach the interplanetary atmosphere—the silk trade was changing. Fat military contracts were going the way of the sandsnake and fashion wasn’t picking up the slack. But Superior appeared to be doing better than its competitors, at least.

Then, as I reached the street and raised a hand to hail a cab, I heard a voice that stopped me in my tracks.

“Darling!” she called from the rear window of a black eight-cylinder Duesenberg that had just purred up to the curb. Importing it from Earth must have cost ten times my annual income for the shipping alone, but hearing that voice and seeing that face again were worth far more to me than the car.

Maria Grossman, née Keene, still had the bluest eyes, the sweetest smile, and the silkiest honey-blonde hair of any girl on Venus. Maybe that’s just infatuation talking, but I don’t think so. The years might have made her a little plumper, a little paler, and a little sadder around the eyes, but from where I stood she still looked just as good as she had when I’d left Venus twenty years ago.

But before I could return her endearment and run to her arms, I heard another voice, almost as familiar but not nearly so pleasant, from behind me.

“Sweetie!” It was Grossman, of course, striding from Superior’s offices with the brisk, confident step of a rich man whose beautiful and much younger wife had just called him “darling.” She swung open the door as he reached the car, they kissed, and he climbed in.

She hadn’t seen me at all.

I stood at the curb like a statue of
The Sucker
while the car purred away to their luxurious home in Bentwood or Wunguunna or some other neighborhood with servants and swimming pools and real Earth trees.

Right then I was wishing real hard I was still a drinking man.

I spent most of the evening sitting in the hotel bar anyway, pounding down glass after glass of soda water as though I had something to prove. Which I did. If I could sit within arm’s reach of a whole bar full of alcohol and not touch a drop, I’d prove that I was still my own man, not a slave to the bottle.

Of course, at the moment I was Grossman’s man. But the principle was still sound.

“She was the one who left me,” I told the bartender, who listened as attentively as you might expect for a barman whose only customer was paying a dollar thirty-five a glass for soda water and tipping heavily. I’d say he was all ears, but froggies don’t have external ears. “I wish to hell I knew what I could have done to keep her.”

“Kugna,” he gurgled.

“What?”

“Kugna. It’s a kind of fish. A courting gift. Dames love a guy who brings them lots of fish.”

I sipped my soda and listened to the sweat trickling down my back. The barman had something there. Even though Grossman was fifteen years older than me and not particularly handsome, with the fat military contracts he’d landed in the early days of the war he could offer Maria a hell of a lot more fish than I could.

But there had been something between us—something real, something bigger and better than money. And she’d proved it that night in Lugwunta Bay, eighteen months after the wedding, when we’d met by chance at the casino. We wound up in bed together less than half an hour later.

When I woke up and saw her beautiful, sleeping face in the wormlight that oozed through the hotel window, I knew if I stayed on Venus we’d both regret it sooner or later. I didn’t wake her up to say goodbye.

I’d run off to the Marines that very morning. And after beating the Krauts at Ceres and Io, and losing a lot of good friends while suffering nothing worse than a broken nose myself, I’d crawled into the bottle. When I managed to drag myself out again I found myself back in California, where I’d been born and raised, and that’s where I’d stayed. Because I knew if I ever went back to Venus I’d regret it sooner or later.

Well, now it was later.

I’d come back.

And I regretted it.

I stared at the ceiling fan all night, thinking and sweltering instead of sleeping, but by the time Venus’s lame excuse for dawn rolled around, at least I’d made up my mind. I’d come here to do a job . . . I would do the job, take as much of Grossman’s money as I could, and get out.

After breakfast, I hailed a cab and gave the cabbie Mr. Ugulma’s business address. I always like to verify any information my clients provide, especially when the client is someone as trustworthy as Grossman.

Ugulma’s shop was on the swampier side of town, a typical Venusian structure that looked like a banyan tree topped with a slice of peat bog. The sign out front read UGULMA FUNGI in English with two lines of Venusian squiggles below it, presumably the same thing in the two major local languages. I had the cabbie drive past and drop me a few streets beyond it, then walked around to the back to scope out the place for myself.