The Ophiuchi Hotline

"I've seen what she can do. I also think I know some of her weaknesses. She's very confused right now. Tweed should never have sent her on this trip alone."

"He didn't," Cathay said. "He sent you, too."

"What do you mean by that? You think I'm a Free Earther?"

"No. But he sent you. He would have a reason."

She lifted her head to look at him. "My being here seems to be an accident. We were on the way to Titan when he got word of this message you sent—"

"No. It wasn't that way at all. I sent him that message three months ago. I don't care where he told you and Vaffa you were going; your destination was right here. Probably the pilot didn't even know it. The message would have gotten to you just in time to divert to Mars."

"It was a pretty close thing," she conceded.

"Not at all. That means he wanted you out here. He wanted Vaffa as his only loyal agent among us. If he thought Vaffa couldn't handle you, be sure he would have sent someone else to trail you from the spaceport."

"I don't get it. It sounds like a game. Does he want us to do anything for him out here, or just to tear each other apart?"

"It's never simple," Cathay sighed. He took her arm and gently coaxed her up alongside him. She pressed close to his side, enfolded in his arm. "I've dealt with him for fifteen years. Five more... well, he promised me a new identity. I've begun to doubt it, but you have to have something to live for."

Now he no longer wanted to talk about it. He hugged her closer, then moved down and began kissing her breasts. But now it was Lilo's turn to push him away and raise her head to study him.

"I still don't understand what you're saying."

"All right. Vaffa's a great soldier, but a lousy general. She has no initiative. That's what you're here for; to make the hard decisions that might come up, things that can't wait a day to be resolved by the Boss. Not the life-or-death ones, nor the ethical ones—Free Earther ethics. He can trust Vaffa to be right on those. He has you judged very well. I know something of what you've been through, and how well he does know you. You won't gang up on Vaffa. That's out of the question."

"How can you say that?" she demanded. She felt her cheeks heating up; it was part anger, part shame. She had just about decided that resistance at this point would be futile, that her best chance would be to wait until they returned to Pluto and she knew more about her opponent.

"For one reason, because your best chances of escape will be later. You can see that. Your cage is insubstantial. You won't learn the limits of it by rattling bars. You will win your freedom piece by piece, by slowly finding out what you can get away with and putting it together into a successful escape. If that's possible, which has not yet been proved, so far as I know. At this point, there's a very good chance that Vaffa is not alone. Tweed would not have to tell her that he has someone else watching you. He thinks you'll realize this, and not try to get away."

It did look like the sort of tantalizing chance her first clone, Lilo 2, must have taken, Lilo realized. She remembered her resolve to suspect the easy escape, to look for the unlikely one. But she was still angry.

"What if I say the hell with common sense? Damn him, anyway. Go for broke, throw in with you, and we knock her off. How can he tell that I won't make an irrational decision? Unless this is just another test and there's really no message from the Hotline."

"There is, but I'm glad you saw that possibility. You've trusted me entirely too quickly for your own good, you know." His tongue was at her nipples again, and this time she didn't protest. She stroked his back and let her eyes close slowly. The last of the muscle kinks from the high-gee trip were fading beneath an enveloping warmth, a tingling that went from her hot earlobes to her toes. But she opened her eyes again and looked down at him.

"You didn't answer my question."

"He doesn't know. Your best chance might actually be to make a try right now. He has no real defense against your doing something totally illogical. He can't predict that."

"Then how can he chance it?"

Cathay sighed. "Because he knows me pretty well, too. You can't join me if I'm not willing. And I'm not. I'm going. I'm choosing to live. I will abandon my students, abandon my self-respect, or what's left of it, one more time. Now that I've revealed that, bared my shame to you, will you please shut up and open your legs?"

He said it with lightness in his voice and a half-smile, but when he entered her he was fierce, determined to lose himself in an excess of passion. Lilo surrendered and let him set the tempo, at least for the first time. To her surprise, she was responding well. Part of that was her physical need; it had been a long time. Another part was feeling sorry for him. It was not pleasant to admit what one is willing to do to go on living. But part of it was something else again, maybe the begi

15

Career Counseling, a reader-response eventbook, Programmed by the E-Z Educational Peripherals Company.

READER: I can't read.

CAREER COUNSELOR: That's okay with me. I'll respond orally from now on. You just ignore those words on the screen, all right?

R: Uh, okay. How can I, I mean, what do I have to do to be a holehunter?

CC: A holehunter! That's one of the more popular career ambitions we encounter. It sure sounds romantic, doesn't it? You're your own boss, you have this ship all to yourself, and you can get rich. Is that what attracted you to holehunting?

R: Yeah. I guess so.

cc: We try to steer young people away from holehunting as a career. There's a lot of problems. For instance, what do you think one of those ships costs?

R: A lot, I guess.

cc: Whew! You said it! You've got to get money together for the initial investment in your ship. Outfitting it for a trip costs a lot more. And it's dangerous. What you do, in case you don't know much about it, is just go flat out in your ship for as long as your engines are good for. Then you sit back and watch the mass detector. You may have to wait fifteen years, and you may never see anything. So you stop dead, and you start back the way you came. Three trips out of four you won't find a hole, so you'll be broke when you get back. Your first trip will be your last. If you survive it.

R: What do you mean?

cc: It's dangerous! If you find one, you've got to slow down long enough to figure out just where it is, and where it's going. Sometimes, you'll plow right into it! But if you do all that right, you've got to come back to get it with an electromagnetic tug. There are folks who sit around Pluto and watch for that. They'll follow you back. You might be half a light-year from the sun. You go

R: Well, I can fight, good as anyone. What I wa

cc: I don't see why. What's your computer for, anyway?

The verdict on Cathay was blunt and to the point. Vaffa showed it to me after she'd decoded it. Trying to vindicate herself in my eyes? I hoped so; if she cared that much about my opinion, whether she was aware of it or not, it strengthened my position. The Boss did not need Cathay, not if allowing him to live meant leaving him on Pluto, knowing what he knew.

I think Vaffa made her plans in the first minute after reading the message. Her mind was that linear. She had to shift gears painfully when I told her Cathay was going with us.