Triton

The little man was sitting on his couch, his own drink hanging from his bony fingers.

Bron said: “By the way, whatever happened to that charming oriental woman you were playing vlet with on the trip out?”

The redhead looked up sharply. He frowned. Then his shoulder dropped, and the exhaustion Bron had become used to on the faces around him worked its way back among the features. “I suspect—” The little redhead looked down again, turned his drink—“the chances are overwhelming she’s dead.”

Which made Bron start. (Someone passing glanced at them, then glanced away.) Chills rolled up his back.

The redhead’s eyes raised. “This was a political mission.” His voice was strained and soft. “Many of us were in great danger. All of us were under pressure. And ... well, we are at war.” He took a breath, looked out at the stars, and then went on to talk about something else with entirely information-less anecdotes, a style that Bron had noticed twice before. This time Bron commented on it, a bit a

Sam was explaining to Bron, among half a dozen other, simultaneous conversations, that no, he wouldn’t be returning to the co-op today; he, Linda, and Debby were anxious to get back to the rest of the family in Lux. A voice chirped overhead, in astonishingly low fidelity: “Will Bron Helstrom please go to one of the blue courtesy phones. Will Bron Helstrom please . • J9

Bron excused himself.

“And say hello to the old pirate for me when you get home,” Sam called after him. “Hope you beat the fuzz off his balding pate—”

On the phone (“Yes, what is it?”) they told him there was a letter for him and—Oh, excuse me: apparently it had been already sent on to his co-op. In fact, it had come from Earth with him on the same rocket in which he’d—

“From Earth?”

That’s right, and they were terribly sorry; they were just trying to get it to him quickly, but apparently there’d been some mix-up—

“Well, then why call me all the way to the—?”

Was he on his way home now?

“Yes!”

Well, if it was an emergency and he was passing any postal outlet, if he would just present his identification card, he would be immediately presented with a government facsimile of—

“And what is the government doing with a facsimile of my private mail?” (The mail was a co-operative, not a government, enterprise.)

This is wartime, they explained testily. And besides, he had just returned from a High Surveillance Mission; as he no doubt knew, that surveillance would continue on High for at least seventy-two hours after his return, for his own protection. Now, would he like to take advantage of it and pick up his letter before he got home?

“Yes!” Bron said. “Thank you!” Hanging up, he turned, angrily, from the phone.

The little redhead (who’d made noises about sharing a transport compartment back into Tethys) was the only one waiting.

“Seems I just got a letter from my girlfriend,” Bron explained, realizing as he did so that it might just as easily be (in fact he hoped it was) an official apology from the Earth enforcement-girls (or whatever the hell they called them there) about the way he had been treated. “But they seem to have sent it on ahead by accident.” An apology from the Spike? He smiled. Well, it was to be expected. But really, he didn’t feel she’d done that much to apologize for. “I’ll have to stop off and pick up the letter. I really enjoyed those games. I guess we’ll be ru

“We probably won’t,” the redhead said with a mischievous smile. “I don’t live in Tethys.”

“Oh,” Bron said. “I thought you said you lived in a—oh, you mean your co-op isn’t in the city.”

“That’s right.” And the redhead began to talk animatedly about something else, till they reached the transport. “Oh, and may I ask you a mildly embarrassing favor: Could you pay my fare with one of your to—

kens. It’s only half a franq on your credit; I know it seems silly but—”

“Oh, sure,” Bron said, opening his purse and fingering around for his half-franq token. He pushed the coin-shape into one of the change slots beside the entrance. (There was still some leftover money; but Sam seemed to have forgotten about it.) The green light flashed, and the token rolled out again into Bron’s palm.

“Thank you,” the redhead said, and walked through the gate.

Bron put the token in again; the light flashed again; again the token was returned (and somewhere two fares were billed against his labor credits on some highly surveyed government tape); returning the token to his purse, he followed the redhead onto the transport platform, constructing schemes of paranoid complexity about why the redhead might not want his presence in the city known. After all, basic transportation was a nonrefusable (what the dumb earthies would call “welfare”) credit service.

They rode a while together. Then the redhead said good-bye and got off. (Bron’s fantasies had gone to the other extreme by now: the redhead was probably just a skinflint credit cadger. Ex-Intelligence indeed!) Bron realized as the doors closed that actually he had no idea at all where the man lived (in some other city? on some other moon?); he didn’t even know his name. Had he actually said he was living in the homosexual co-op, or just that someone had been living there? It had all been too artfully ambiguous. Forget it! Bron thought: Oh, forget it; he stood up, while the floor swayed, and went to stand at the doors. If he was going to pick up his letter at a postal outlet, before he got home, he’d better do it here:

The transport pulled into the Plaza of Light Station.

He expected his letter to be flashed in the viewing screen above the card slot (since there was a viewing screen). Instead, a larger slot at knee-level slowly extruded the black and gold edging of a space-mail enve—