Fool's Run (v1.1) Read Free Page A

morning. I know you don’t like to be bothered with Rehab matters, but you told me yesterday to schedule this call. It’s on the roster for ten hundred hours—”
    “What call?”
    “I told you—”
    “No, you didn’t.” He held his hand underwater, ran it over his face. For no reason at all the face of a girl he had known twenty-five years before crossed his mind. He smelled the soap and sunlight in her hair, and found himself smiling. “Oh. Yes, I do.” All those protein-head scientists are wrong, he thought. Time isn’t a circle or a straight line. It’s a smell bottle. You catch a whiff here, a whiff there… “Yes,” he said, interrupting Jeri. “Yes, yes, yes. I’ll authorize the call. Who is it I’m supposed to talk to? Oh, never mind, tell me later. I’m in the bathroom.”
    He cut off Jeri’s flurry of protests and immediately the com sounded again. “Hell’s bells,” he fumed. “Can’t you wait until I reach the office?”
    “Sir—”
    The door alarm buzzed, then lit, going through its triple ID scan.
    “Voice ID 246-859-7. Johnson, Samuel Nyler. Status—”
    “Sir, it’s your coffee!”
    “Come in!” Jase bellowed, and the locks snapped back at the sound of his voice. He took a deep breath, smelling Time again: wind, and a house with a door that didn’t talk back.
    Johnson, Samuel Nyler, bleary-eyed and immaculate, set the coffee tray on the table. Fresh coffee. Not black plastic dispensed from a vein in the wall. That’s all it amounts to, he thought.
    That and the privilege of introducing myself to artistic geniuses. Of the two niggardly rewards he much preferred the coffee.
    “Sir,” the com on the table said. It was his Deputy Chief, Nils Nilson. He was just going off duty; his voice sounded tired. Jase liked him, so he toned his own voice down a few decibels.
    Nils’ great dream in life was Jase’s job; Jase’s dream was to give it to him. But the wheels on Earth that turned over spacers’ fortunes were oiled by the endless perversity of the FWG bureaucracy. Because Jase wanted Earth, they’d keep him in space forever.
    Because Nilson would do an excellent job of running the Underworld, they’d find someone who couldn’t, to replace the mummified Jase.
    “What is it, Nils?”
    “I’m sorry, sir. There’s a Dr. A. Fiori calling from New Horizon. He won’t talk to anyone but you.”
    “Oh, for—what does he—tell him to go to hell.” He gulped coffee. The com chuckled. “All right. Tell him I’ll talk to him. When I’ve reached the office. Not before. Who is he anyway?”
    “Equipment salesman, I think.”
    “What does he want?”
    “A lifer.”
    “Tell him to stand on his head.”
    “I’ll tell him,” Nils said, yawning.
    The room was silent. Jase drank his coffee warily. He daydreamed a moment. Bacon and hot biscuits. Lose thirty pounds when I get back to Earth. If. Maybe even a face-job. Nose not so bad. Change eyes brn to grn . Hair. Fifty-six, Chief of the Underworld. Lots of credit, nowhere to spend it up here. Request Sundown Sector. Beaches. Sun. Or Archipelago Sector.
    Warm blue water. Maybe I’ll just resign… But he knew he never would, just as he knew the Underworld would never release him. Perversity.
    In the office half an hour later, he read the shift reports on his console screen, while Nils, at his own desk, completed the night log. Their office was in the Hub of the Underworld, the circular fortress at the center of the rings, connected to them by two spokes: one for transport; the other holding water lines, generators, the main greenhouse. The Hub spun to its own gravitational needs. It housed the vast central computer, communications, a small armory, the chief officers’ quarters, its own kitchens, greenhouse and generator. It even contained a tiny dock, with one smallcraft always in readiness. In fifty years, the smallcraft had been replaced twelve times but never used.
    The office, for a few moments, was soundless. The grey