Protector

“Somewhat. How are you making out?” Truesdale took a seat. The office was small but comfortable, with tea and coffee spigots set in the desk.

Robinson leaned back from the desk as if glad of the interruption. “Mostly negatives. We still don’t know who kidnapped you. We couldn’t trace the money anywhere, but we’re sure it didn’t come from you.” He looked up. “You don’t seem surprised.”

“I was sure you’d check on me.”

“Right. Assume for the moment that someone we’ll call Vandervecken has a specific amnesia treatment. He might go around selling it to people who want to commit crimes. Like murdering a relative for her inheritance.”

“I wouldn’t do that to Greatly ’Stelle.”

“Regardless, you didn’t. Vandervecken would have had to pay you, and a hefty sum, too. The idea’s ridiculous. Other than that, we found two other cases of your type of selective amnesia.” There was a computer terminal in the desk. The ARM used it. “First one was a Mary Boethals, who disappeared for four months in 2220. She didn’t report it. The ARMs got interested in her because she’d stopped getting treatments for a kidney ailment. It seemed likely shed got a transplant from an organlegger. But she told a different story, very much like yours, including the a

“Then there was a Charles Mow, disappeared in 2241, came back four months later. He had an a

“And my a

“Tough. Now, in those two previous cases the money was to go to prosthetics research. There wasn’t any criminal rehabilitation a hundred years ago. They all went into the organ banks.”

“Yah.”

“Otherwise the cases were all quite similar. So it looks like were looking for a struldbrug. The time fits: the earliest case was a hundred and twenty years ago. The name Vandervecken fits. The interest in prosthetics fits.”

Truesdale thought about it. There were not that many struldbrugs around. Minimum age for admission to that most exclusive of clubs had been frozen at one hundred and eighty-one. “Any specific suspects?”

“If there were, I couldn’t tell you. But, no. Mrs. Randall definitely died of natural causes, and she definitely wasn’t Vandervecken. If she had some co

“Have you checked with the Belt?”

Robinson looked at him narrowly. “No. Why?”

“Just a thought.” Distance in time equals distance in space?

“Well, we can ask. They might have had similar cases. Personally, I don’t know where to go from here. We don’t know why it was done, and we don’t know how.”

There wasn’t room in all of Earth’s national and international parks for the potential backpackers alive in the year 2341. The waiting list for the Amazon jungle was two years long. Other parks had similar lists.

Elroy Truesdale carried a backpack through London, Paris, Rome, Madrid, Morocco, Cairo. He rode supersonic trains between the cities. He ate in restaurants, carrying credit cards rather than dehydrated foods. This was something he had pla

He saw the pyramids, the Eiffel Tower, and Tower of London, the Leaning Tower — which had been propped up. He saw the Valley of the Fallen. He walked Roman roads in a dozen nations.

Everywhere there were other backpackers. At night they camped in places set aside for them by the individual cities, usually old parking garages or abandoned freeways. They would pool their lightweight stoves to form a campfire and sit around it teaching each other songs. When he tired of them Truesdale would stay at a hotel.

He wore out disposable hiking socks at a furious rate, and bought new ones from dispensers in the campspots. His legs became hard as wood.

A month of this, and he was not finished. Something was driving him to see all of Earth. A cancellation got him into the Australian outback, probably the least popular of the national parks. He spent a week there. He needed the silence and the room.

Then on to Sydney, and a girl with a Belter haircut.

Her back was to him. He saw a pony’s tail of bobbing hair, black and wavy and almost long enough to reach her waist. Most of her scalp was bare and as darkly ta

Twenty years ago it wouldn’t have jarred. There had been a fad for the Belter crest. But it had passed, and now she was like an echo from long ago… or far away? She was tall as a Belter, but with musculature far better developed. She was alone; she had not joined the campfire congregation at the other end of this, the eighth floor of a ten-story parking garage.

Inexpert singing echoed between the concrete roof and floor. I was born about ten thousand years from now. When we land upon the Moon I’ll show them how…

A real Belter? Backpacking?

Truesdale picked his way to her through a maze of mummy bags. He said, “Excuse me. Are you a Belter?”

She turned. “Yes. What of it?”

Her eyes were brown. Her face was lovely in a fashion that was all planes and angles, and it held no welcome. She would react badly to a pass. Maybe she didn’t like flatlanders; certainly she was too tired for games.

Truesdale said, “I want to tell a story to a Belter.”

She shrugged her eyebrows: an irritated gesture. “Why not go to the Belt?”

“I’d never get there tonight,” he said reasonably.

“All right, go ahead.”

Truesdale told her of the kidnapping on the Pi

She listened with uneasy patience, then said, “Why tell me?”

“Well, there were two other cases of this kind of kidnapping, both a long time ago. I wondered if anything like it has happened in the Belt.”

“I don’t know. There may be records in the goldskin files.”

“Thanks,” said Truesdale, and went away.

He lay in his sleeping bag, eyes closed, arms crossed on his breast. Tomorrow… Brasilia? They were still singing:

“Why, I once signed on with Amra, and I damn near lost my skin,

For the blood it flowed like water when the fighting did begin.

I’m the only tar who’s e’er jumped ship from Vandervecken’s crew—”

Truesdale’s eyes snapped open.

“And that’s about the strangest thing a man will ever do.”

He’d been looking in the wrong place.

Backpackers tended to wake with the dawn. Some preferred to find an all-night restaurant for breakfast; others made their own. Truesdale was cooking freeze-dried eggs when the girl walked up.

“Remember me? My name’s Alice Jordan.”

“Roy Truesdale. Have some eggs.”

“Thanks.” She passed him a packet, which he mixed with water and poured in with the rest. She was different this morning: rested, younger-looking, less formidable.

“I started remembering things last night. Cases like yours. They really do exist. I’m a goldskin myself, and I heard about them, but I never bothered to look up details.”

“You’re a goldskin?” A cop? Come to that, she was his size; she’d have the muscle to handle any Belter.

“I’ve also been a smuggler,” she said a bit defensively. “One day I decided the Belt needed the income more than the smugglers.”

“Maybe I’ll have to go to the Belt after all,” he said lightly. Thinking: Or talk Robinson into sending for the files. The eggs were ready. He served them into the cups all backpackers carried at their belts.