J. F. Bone, page 9
We passed through a perfunctory decontamination and emerged into a closed area with a pair of big metal doors at the far end. We got out of the cab and walked over to a glassed-in cubbyhole near the doors. Riker checked his manifest with the man behind the glass and received a signed receipt which he folded and put away in his jacket.
He sighed, shrugged his shoulders as though he had just unloaded a heavy weight, and turned away. A couple of hard-faced men entered the wagon and drove it through the rear door which swung wide as the vehicle approached.
The interior of the Roost lived up to the outside appearance; battered, tough, dirty and primitive. The walks didn’t roll so we had to push our way through a jostling crowd of pedestrians. Fortunately, there was no vehicular traffic except handcarts, but our progress was constantly impeded by Outlanders, boisterous men who shook Joe’s hand, pounded his back, and questioned me silently with their eyes. Before we had gotten a quarter of a kilometer, I guessed that about half the population of the Roost knew that there was a doctor in town and had a general description of me to boot.
My impressions were confused. I had a kaleidoscopic picture of noise, color, an occasional scream, drunken laughter, and the sharp whiplike crack of a gunshot. The Roost put Dunkelburg’s Rim to shame, and made the company town look like a staid tea at a ladies’ aid meeting. Apparently there were no police here, or if there were, they were safely out of sight.
Everyone in the dome lived on the Rim because the Hub was nothing but a solid mass of windowless warehouses into which the two radius roads from the gates passed. It was the Rim and the outer rings of buildings that provided the life. And they did a good job if clamor, color, and confusion were any criteria. We made our way through the crowd until we came to the dark entrance of an office building backed against the warehouse area. The entrance was flanked by two guardposts and a robot doorkeeper. Riker stopped and looked at it for a moment.
“The Boss?” I asked.
Riker nodded, fumbled in an inside pocket of his jumper and produced a square of plastic which he passed into the nearest guardpost. The shining one-way glass gleamed featurelessly as we waited. Finally a mechanical voice came from the annunciator.
“You’re okay, Joe, but who’s the man with you?”
“Doc Williams,” Riker said proudly. “A real, honest-to-Shambra M.D.”
There was a clinking noise behind the glass and two squares of plastic came back through the slot. “Here’s your ID, Joe, and one for the medic. You’re cleared to enter. Take your friend with you. The Boss wants to see him.”
Inside, the small lobby was empty except for a guard post at the stairs and the elevator shaft. The place stunk of cheap perfume like a second rate call house. The smell made my eyes water as we crossed the lobby and entered the up shaft. We jumped and rose smoothly upward out of the stink. I counted the floor levels as we slipped by. At the sixth level Riker nodded to me, grabbed the exit rod and swung himself through the door. I was a little slow and dropped nearly a foot as ray heels hit the hall floor. I felt embarrassed at my clumsiness, but I had little recent familiarity with antigrav shafts, and leaving them is a trick that has to be practiced. Riker turned down the hall past another guardpost. This one stood beside an ordinary-looking door. Riker and I held our ID’s to the scanner plate and the door swung open.
There was no gradual transition of reception room. We entered a modern office filled with ‘breed girls busily working under the cold blue eye of a blond Lyranian. He looked at us, pursed his flexible lips at Riker in a gesture the humanoids use instead of a smile. Despite the fact he looked like he wanted to kiss Joe, it meant nothing of the sort.
Riker shrugged and pushed open a door at the far end of the office. “Hang onto your helmet,” he said as he entered. “We’re now coming into the fountainhead of authority.”
I blinked at him, wondering at the florid language, but in a moment I understood exactly what he meant. We walked straight into a set from the Videos. It looked like pre-atomic Arabian with modern conveniences, except that the decor was Arthean rather than Earthian. In the middle of this gorgeous collection of carved Calpawood, screens, divans, drapes and pottery, sat one of the fattest women I have ever seen.
She was enormous! She literally overflowed the divan on which she sat. She was smoking a fat Earth cigar and eating something small, round and juicy. The smell of food and good tobacco was pain in my perfume-clogged nostrils. Two cold gray eyes looked at me from their hiding places in the full moon of her face. Her body might be fat, but there was nothing fat about those eyes. They were cold, polished, gray ice. Once I looked into them I was acutely aware that this woman was perfectly capable of holding her own against any competition.
She gave no indication that she liked or disliked what she saw. She speared one of the brown balls with a fork and held it poised for a moment before she popped it into her mouth. She chewed, swallowed and wiped her lips with a napkin while I waited. I hoped that I seemed equally at ease, but I was at a disadvantage since I was standing and had nothing to occupy my mouth except silence.
Riker broke the ice. “Kate,” he said, “this is Doc Williams, the fellow I was telling you about in Dunkelburg. Doc, this is Kate. She owns the Roost. She’s Boss here.”
“Glad to meet you,” I said.
Kate took and ground her cigar into shreds in an ashtray beside the divan. “Are you?” she asked curiously in an utterly incongruous mellow contralto.
I made a quick evaluation and decided on the hard line. “Do you want truth or flattery?” I asked coldly. I did my best to get the idea across that I didn’t care much for her attitude, and I wasn’t about to let her get away with it.
Kate blinked. “Joe,” she said, ignoring me, “I thought you were going to bring us a doctor, not a rayburned space bum. He’ll scare patients to death instead of curing them. I don’t like your taste.”
Riker’s face whitened, and I felt a familiar flash of anger. She had unerringly found my tender spot. But I didn’t say anything. I just smiled. I let her have the grin with teeth in it. It must have been worse than usual because she shut up as though someone had slapped her across the face with a wet towel. Her eyes widened and a tiny flicker glinted momentarily in their depths. I guess it took plenty to shut Kate up once she got started, because Riker looked at me with open-mouthed surprise.
Kate did a complete turnabout. “You know,” she said smoothly, “on second thought, maybe you’re just the sort of man we need. Perhaps I should apologize.”
“That would be nice,” I murmured.
So help me, that mountain of blubber sitting in front of me started giggling and her eyes echoed the laughter of her mouth. The rolling billows of her fat shook and I couldn’t stay mad. Her laughter was contagious. I chuckled along with her, even though I was certain that her mind, like mine, was only superficially amused.
“Shambra!” she finally gasped. “You scared ten pounds off me! You looked like a devil straight from hell! But I guess I had it coming. Sorry if I hurt your feelings.”
“Don’t kid me,” I said. “You don’t scare that easily. I’ll bet you just tried to see how far I’d push.”
“Possibly,” she admitted. “‘After all, a lily-liver has about as much chance in the Roost as a snowball would have in the middle of hell. If you don’t have guts I like to know it right off.” She chuckled easily, deep within her fat. “Well, let’s let it go at that. You’ll do. No hard feelings?”
“No hard feelings,” I agreed. “And now that we’ve settled the problem of guts, I have a problem of my own.”
“So?”
“Money,” I said. I spelled out the proposal Riker had offered and then I said, “I’d like it in advance.”
“Why? Don’t you trust me?”
“It’s not that. It’s just that there’s too much uncertainty in this world. You have too many guards to be a good financial risk. Whoever’s trying to get you might succeed before I got my dough, and then I’d be out a fee that I could use.”
“And how do you know that this won’t happen to you?”
“That’s the chance you have to take. And besides, I figure if you have a good investment in me, you’ll take pains to protect it.”
“No dice,” Kate said. She stopped talking and thought for a moment. “Tell you what,” she said, “I’ll work it this way. I’ll put the money to your credit at the bank in Dunkelburg. Then if you do all right, you can get it when you get home, but if some accident happens and you don’t return, neither of us will be out anything.”
“That’s fair enough,” I said, “providing that I die of natural causes. Gunshot, poison, or any other violence make the dough mine.”
“And just what good will that do you if you’re dead?”
“Two goods,” I said. “In the first place you won’t be able to recover it by killing me, which is insurance for my staying alive. Secondly, it will help keep my clinic in Dunkelburg going in case I don’t survive.” I looked at Kate and decided to lay as much on the line as she should know.
“You see,” I continued, “I left Dunkelburg for this job because it is temporary, and because it involves enough munits to help me travel in the direction I wish to go.”
“And where’s that?” she asked.
“I want some first class instrumentation,” I said, “a cardiac bypass, a kidney shunt, a tissue transplanter and a leurocytograph.”
“Aren’t those things in the dome hospital?”
“They are,” I admitted, “but most of my patients either can’t afford them or are too stiff-necked to use company facilities. I’ve lost a few whom I could have saved with proper equipment.”
Kate snorted. “The trouble with you,” she said, “is that you’re an idealist. Get practical. Learn the purpose of money. The stuff is no good at all if you use it to relieve distress. There are always distressed people, and if you give them aid they ultimately forget it’s a favor and think it’s a right, and that you’re expected to provide for them forever. And if you do provide, you’re hated because you don’t provide more.” Kate shook her huge head. “Doc—you’re running down the wrong road. Money can be properly used in only one way, and that way is to gain power. To gain power over people, over production, over politics. Money and power—the two go hand in hand.” Her gray eyes took on a feral glitter. “I’m a fat old bag,” she continued, “but I have money and I have power. Some day my money is going to make me the biggest person on Arthe.” She paused and closed her mouth tightly, the compressed lips looked oddly tiny in the vastness of her face.
I couldn’t help the ribald thought that she was already the biggest person on Arthe. But in a way I pitied her. There was a cold amorality about Kate that was fascinating. It reminded me of the reptile house in a zoo, with its sluggish saurians that could be so dangerous when roused. I had the feeling of balancing on the razor edge of disaster as I talked with her. It was pure excitement! Outwardly at east, we were quite friendly when we parted, and whatever she wanted to see Riker about was forgotten. Joe and I walked out of the building and into the clean odors of oil and ozone. I drew a deep breath of relief. That atmosphere was almost unbearable.
“Thanks, Doc, you saved my neck again,” Riker said. “She would have been down my throat if you hadn’t been here. I think I’ve got it pegged. She’s sore over a lousy hundred munits I stuck her for on the expense account last month. She’s a tender woman with a munit—loves them like babies.”
I murmured something in reply and looked at the card Kate had given me. It had an address written on it in Kate’s fat handwriting. I showed it to Joe and he nodded, “Yeah. I know where it is,” he said. It was halfway around the Rim from Kate’s. The bottom part was one of the biggest bars in town, and the three stories above it were a whorehouse. It could have been worse. Some attempt had already been made to clean the second floor and turn it into a clinic. Furniture had been added to replace what had been moved out. The beds remained, but their purpose would be different. A couple of hard-eyed women were sitting in what might be the reception room. They looked tired. Probably they’d worked at cleaning the place. One of them—her name was Mana—even had a smattering of medical knowledge. Where she had picked it up I’ll never know. At any rate these two were probably no worse than the rest so I made them an offer to work with me. They went for it like a drunkard for a bottle, and the four of us pitched in and began to arrange the place properly. I sent Riker after my gear and dragooned the manager of the bar downstairs into lending me some of his people and some mops and brooms.
Riker brought back my supplies and helped for a couple of hours before going downstairs for his long delayed drink. It was slow work, and I could see that we’d never get done and open for business inside of a week unless I really got some help so I went downstairs, found Joe and explained the situation. He said he’d see what he could do and went out. In about half an hour, people began to arrive, halfbreeds looking hopefully for jobs, traders looking for excitement, and men and women who just wanted to help. I hired some and accepted the services of others, and when we knocked off late that night, we were ready for business the next morning.
I opened the place hopefully, expecting a few patients. I was disappointed. Instead of a few, it seemed that half the Roost was outside. They went clear down the stairs into the bar below. I thought that I’d worked in Dunkelburg and in the Service, but I never knew what the word meant until I opened this place. Treatment of wounds, lacerations and contusions was from the start a major part of my practice, a part that grew larger as new arrivals kept coming into the Roost from the Outside. For the first few weeks I was worked to death before I got my staff trained well enough to handle the minor emergencies. We ran the place strictly on an outpatient basis except for emergencies. There was too much to handle any other way. Fortunately the traders were a tough lot, and our recovery rate was good.
I made it clear from the beginning that my services were available to anyone, and held rigidly to the rule that emergencies came first, and afterwards it was first come, first served. Oddly enough, there wasn’t any trouble about my rulings, but I suppose Outlanders are basically more tolerant than their less rugged cousins in the domes. At any rate, I had an easy time getting the idea of equality of suffering across.
I never made the mistake of thinking that this operation was a free clinic. I knew Kate better than that. She never would have stood for giving something away that had value. So I charged regular fees from the start, and spent the first free hours I had in her office where we argued about costs, equipment and profits.
We hammered out an agreement. My retainer was already deposited in Dunkelburg. I’d charge regular fees and pay the help. Anything left over went to Kate out of which she’d supply necessary drugs, instruments, and equipment. The rest was hers. Kate was unhappy about it, but I flatly refused to consider any substantive modifications; so she made the best of it.
By the end of the week I had the whole second floor. Bill Alwyn, the fellow who leased the bar downstairs, used to call the place my harem on account of the number of girls I had working for me, but he was happy about it. His business was tripled what with nervous patients having a couple of quick ones before braving the doctor in his den. I ran a school at night, teaching my staff fundamentals of medicine and nursing. My little library, a dozen volumes ranging from Muller’s “Human Anatomy” to Maciewicz and Holland’s “Physiological Basis of Medical Practice” got a real working over. In my spare time I’d tape lectures and force feed them over Kate’s neurosynthesizer. They went through a meat grinder course that I’d never have taken, but they liked it and howled for more. As a result I had a useful and disciplined corps of assistants who would have been a credit to any clinic in the Confederation—and it was fast, too, I hadn’t been at them more than a week before they really took hold.
I never saw such desire. They took the routine matters off my hands and left me free to handle the emergencies and to do investigative work. However, the usual troubles were still with me. Since Kate probably had one or two spies among my help, I had to be careful to avoid the appearance of being nosy, and I was generally too busy to learn much at any one time. I marked down some interesting leads for future reference, but I seldom had a chance to follow up unless I could hospitalize the subject. It was considerably more difficult than Dunkelburg because I had no backup and no really trustworthy assistants. But one way and another, I accumulated bits of information. Superficially, they didn’t add up to much except a consensus that Kate was playing some sort of shady game. There were a few interesting sidelights on the trade in weapons that went on with the natives. I was a little surprised that the Traders who should have been smart enough to realize that they couldn’t sell blasters to hostile natives and expect to live to tell about it afterwards still traded Mark IV’s for gorron and ryk hides. Of course the Mark IV isn’t the latest thing but it’s a potent weapon even though its rate of fire is slow. The natives had the hides and the traders needed them to stay in business. The natives wanted blasters and wouldn’t trade for anything else; so the trade went on. About the only thing that would unite a group of Traders against gun running was the knowledge that a modern, high capacity, energy weapon like a Mark VII was in native hands. Under these conditions they declared private war for its recovery and, if the weapon could be traced they promptly executed the one who sold it.
I was hoping for the big break where I could get all the answers at once, but it didn’t look like that was going to happen. Most of my investigative work was negative, just like it had been in Dunkelburg. There were few interesting patients. Through small talk and narcosine, I learned enough that I could have made a comfortable income from blackmail. But I wasn’t interested in that sort of knowledge—what I wanted was tonocaine, and information on that subject was nil.
I couldn’t conceive that this place was as clean as it seemed. I firmly believed that Kate would sell her soul if the price was right and, furthermore, I couldn’t help thinking that she had already done it. I had accumulated no evidence to back my belief, but from what I knew of Kate, she was precisely the type who would go for the accountant’s answer. Where the rewards for winning were greater than the penalties for failure and where the odds in favor of winning were good enough to warrant the risk, there Kate would be found, immersed right up to her second chin.
