Starliner(24)

The autobar chirped in irritation. "I'm sorry, sir," said the machine in an apologetic male voice," I believe there's a problem with this chip. If you'd try another one, please?"

Wade withdrew the chip with a look of amazement and outrage on his aristocratic features. "Oh, good lord," he said. "I haven't recharged this from my Terran account! Look, fellows, I'll just pop down, to the Purser's Office—"

"Pretty busy just now, don't you think, Dickie?" Belgeddes warned with a lifted eyebrow.

"Never mind," said Dewhurst. "I'll pay for the round."

"Much obliged, old fellow," Wade muttered. "Very embarrassing."

"Dickie's always doing that sort of thing," Belgeddes said indulgently.

"I dare say," agreed Dewhurst as he summoned a whiskey and water. The autobar chuckled happily over Dewhurst's credit chip.

Da Silva looked up into the auroral sky. "The first time I traveled," he said, "I thought that—"he gestured toward the whispering light with a rum drink "—was what the stars would look like when we were . . ."

He paused and cleared his throat. "In sponge space, you know. But it was nothing like that."

"Even though the bulkhead shows exactly what an optically clear panel would show," Wade said, "in here we're still completely cut off from the insertion bubble. If you've only seen sponge space from the insulated interior of a vessel, you haven't a hint of what it's like to be out in the cold, twisted radiance with nothing but a suit to protect you."

Dewhurst snorted. "I suppose you've been a Cold Crewman, then, Wade?" he said.

"Oh, good lord no!" Wade chuckled. "But back long before you were born, I volunteered when Carlsbad decided to raise a sponge space commando during their unpleasantness with Jaffa Hill. Wasn't my quarrel in the least, but I thought it might be interesting."

He shook his head and looked deep into his drink. "It was that, all right," he said. "Bloody interesting."

"Dickie was the only member of the unit to survive," Belgeddes explained to the others. "They found that practice isn't the same as the real thing."

"Practice was bad enough, though," Wade murmured.

Reed stared at the crystalline mural over the autobar. The Empress of Earth's ports of call were sculpted as icons. They ranged from Earth—bands of rose quartz and topaz to suggest the aurora borealis—to three onion-domed towers representing Tblisi. The bead of red light now on Earth would follow the Empress's progress across the arc, while the blue indicator for the Brasil moved in the opposite direction until they merged briefly on the oil derricks of Hobilo.

"I don't like this talk about wars," Reed said morosely. "It's going to cause trouble, I feel it. I just hope that we make Ain al-Mahdi. After that, well, I wish all you other fellows the best, but it's not my problem once I've gotten where I'm going."

"We won't land on Nevasa or Grantholm if the war breaks out," Dewhurst said. "They'll pick nearby neutrals and offload passengers there."

He sounded calm enough, but what started as a sip drained most of the whiskey from his glass. "Anyway," he added forcefully, "I think it's all overblown. They'll back off, you'll see. Both sides."

"I said," Reed snapped, "that I didn't want to talk about it!"

"I wonder," Wade said, "if you gentlemen are familiar with the beach walkers of Ain al-Mahdi?"

The others looked at him. "The legend, you mean?" said Da Silva. "Beautiful women who, shall we say, make friends with men at night on the beach, but they drink them down to a hollow skin?"

"Ah, well," Wade said. "I thought it was a legend too. Still, it's a big universe, isn't it? We shouldn't be surprised when we learn that it's a little stranger than we'd expected."

"On Ain al-Mahdi?" Reed said. "Look, buddy, my company's based me on Ain going on fifteen years now. Beach walkers and flats, they're the sort of thing you hear about in sailors' bars—period."

"I should have thought that was where you'd expect to hear about them," Belgeddes commented. "From transients. If there were such a thing as a beach walker, it wouldn't prey on locals, surely?"

Wade pursed his lips in consideration. "Flats," he said. "They look like a pool of shadow, but when you step on them—"

He brought his hands together with a clop of sound.

"—like that?"

"That's the story, all right," Reed said over his gin. "But it's always the friend of a friend of a sailor who's seen it, not anybody you meet."