The Centauri Device Read Free Page A

of the time, and no chairs. He didn't care if he never saw her again.
    All the dispossessed and wayward have a fear of frontages. He discussed going back to The Spacer's Rave there and then, but he knew it was probably too late for that: gravitational tides had thrown him up here and, for the moment, he was marooned. He leered at a receptionist (who sat behind the keyboard of her input terminal as long-legged and unapproachable — by losers — as any ice-princess). She smiled back politely, because that year it was polite to be polite to the underprivileged. He scratched his head.
    Far away, somebody shouted, 'Don't come to me! I told you I couldn't answer for the cluster sampling!' A door opened and shut. Clearly: ' Run off and lick her boots then.'
    'You may go in now, Captain Truck,' said the receptionist.
    So far, nobody had offered any options. Suddenly remembering Angina Seng's big Chambers gun, he wondered just how much of her gravitational attraction it represented.
    What was really keeping him here?
    'I can see you're wearing a girdle,' he said. 'As a matter of interest, where am I?'
    Her smile curdled: it was polite that year for the underprivileged to be polite back. 'The Israeli Consulate,' she said, 'and I don't think you ought to go round saying things like that to people.'
    But he was already on his way through the unmarked door, shouting 'You can just entirely forget about it, Miss Seng!' She wasn't there, of course. 'Oh hell!' He went to leave, but some nosy treacherous element of his make-up had already slammed the door behind him and faced him up to the room's other occupant.
    General Alice Gaw, postmenopausal but hardly decayed at all: onetime vacuum-commando, late of the Fleet Police, now prime executive of IWG's military arm, with a roving commission and carte blanche in any matter of hemiglobal security. Decorated and fêted, she had been one of the six enigmatic 'wardens' of the discontinued Environmental Prison experiment — that nodal myth of the hinterlands, its seeping ducts peopled with ghouls, its vaults packed with lost souls in Gothic decaying orbits about the solar enormity of their own innocence, administered by Fungus Men with cattle prods for arms and ECT machines for heads; and closed-down eventually, so rumor had it, by the revulsion of the very elements of IWG politics that had demanded its institution. Rumor had it also that Alice Gaw was the only one of the Six ever to regret the move.
    She was short and heavily built. She wore the sleeves of her Women's Army uniform perpetually rolled up to display chapped muscular forearms, and affected the coarse jocularity of a male psychiatric nurse. Truck knew her by repute: her eyepatch was a Galactic curiosity, her hands were thick and square. She radiated a fiercely ambiguous sexual energy which was more disturbing for her consciousness of it than for its actual effect.
    Lineal descendant of that characteristic blossom of the twentieth century, the 'National Security Manager,' with a grasp of the art of ad hoc politics almost as breath-taking as the speed of her rise in the IWG hierarchy, she fixed Truck with an eye the color of concrete and said:
    'I want to talk to you, boyo, and I can't do that until you pack it in and sit down.'
    She grinned at him and flopped herself ungracefully into the nearest chair as if inviting him by example — throwing one leg over the other, quite aware of the great expanses of powerful thigh thus exposed. She had varicose veins.
    'Whatever it is,' said Truck, 'no. I had enough of this in the Fleet. I've got my discharge papers here — ' Then, recklessly, because he was fighting down an emotion rather like panic:
    'You don't look like a member of the Chosen Race to me, General.'
    This, he managed to deliver with an insinuating snigger. The General, though, merely adjusted her eyepatch and sighed. Her bleached-out hair was chopped off all the way round her head at ear level; her nose had been broken during a