Keeping him covered, I bent over and picked up the knife. It was a beautiful piece, with a nicely carved wine-colored handle—I’d been admiring one like it a while ago in a shop Diana and I had visited over on Tenth. I retracted the blade and slipped it into my pocket.
“Man, that’s mine,” the punk said.
“Was yours,” I corrected.
“But I need it. I need to get money. I gotta eat.”
“Try your hand at fossil hunting. People get rich every day here.”
“Tried. No luck.”
I could sympathize with that. I reached into my other pocket, found a twenty-solar coin, and flipped it into the air. Anyone who had been on Mars long could have caught it as it fell, but he really was new here: he snatched at air way below the coin.
“Get yourself something to eat,” I said and started walking.
“Hey, man,” he said from behind me. “You’re all right.”
Without turning around, I gave him a hat tip and continued along my way.
* * *
As I’d said, Diana and I weren’t exclusive—and I was detective enough to pick up the signs that she’d been routinely seeing someone else for well over a month now, although I had no idea who. But that was fine.
My encounter with the punk had delayed me a bit, and by the time I got to The Bent Chisel, she’d already put her top on. “Hey,” I said, leaning in to give her a quick kiss.
“Hey, Alex.”
“All set to go?”
“Yup.”
We walked back to her place, which was four blocks away. There was no sign of the kid who’d accosted me, so I didn’t feel any need to mention it, but when we got into Diana’s little apartment—it was even smaller than mine—and I’d pulled her into an embrace, she said, “Is that a gun in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?”
I wondered if she knew she was paraphrasing Mae West. “Actually,” I said, smiling, “it’s a switchblade.” I brought it out and told her the story of how I’d acquired it.
“Wow,” she said. “It’s nice.”
“Yeah. My lucky day, I guess.”
It was her turn to smile. “And now it’s going to be your lucky night.”
We headed into her little bedroom. My earlier encounter with Lacie had been athletic indeed, but Diana and I always had gentle, playful sex. She’d been here on Mars for a dozen years, and that had taken its toll; she had the typically weak musculature of the long-term inhabitants of this world. I couldn’t go back to Earth for legal reasons; Diana was stuck here because she’d never be able to hack a full gee again. But, still, we made do; we always did. And I was happy to see her.
* * *
Turned out there wasn’t any New Klondike Historical Society, but I guess things like that are never created while the history is being made. In the morning I headed over to the shipyard. I started by checking in at the yard office, which was little more than a shack between two dead hulks. The yardmaster was Bertha, a husky old broad with a platinum blonde buzz cut.
“Hey, gorgeous,” I said as I entered the shack. I wondered briefly why whenever you said, “Hey, gorgeous,” people thought you were being serious, but if you said, “Hey, genius,” they thought you were being sarcastic.
“Hi, Alex. What’s up.”
“Just some research.”
“No rough stuff, okay?”
“Why does everyone say that to me?”
“I’ve got two words for you: Skookum and Jim.”
“Okay; true enough. But it’s a different ship I’m interested in this time.”
She gestured at her computer screen. “Which one?”
“Something called the B. Traven.”
“Jesus,” she said.
“What?”
“You don’t know?”
“Know what?”
“The Traven.”
“What about it?”
“It was a death ship.”
I looked at her funny. “What?”
“How’d you get to Mars?”
“Me? Low-end liner. I forget what it was called. Saget, Saginaw—something like that.”
“Sagan?”
“That’s it, yeah.”
“Good ship. Made eight round trips to date.”
“If you say so.”
“And how long was the journey?”
“Christ, I don’t remember.”
“Right. You literally don’t—because the Sagan, like most of the ships that come here, uses hibernation. They freeze you when you leave Earth and thaw you out when you arrive here. That kind of ship employs a Hohmann transfer orbit, which takes very little power but a whole lot of time to get here. Transit time if you leave at the optimum moment is 258 Earth days, but it all passed in a blink of an eye for you. The Traven was supposed to do the same thing—all of the passengers in deep sleep, with just a bowman to