Triton (Trouble on Triton) Read Free

for his chest was an attempt at something original enough to preserve dignity, but not too far from this year’s. He was putting his card back into his purse when something clinked: his two-franq token had fallen into the return cup, reiterating what the booth itself had been placed there to proclaim: The government cared.
    He forefingered up the token (with the machine broken, he would not know if the two franqs had or had not been charged against his labor credit till he got to his co-op computer) and fisted aside the curtain. He thought:
    I haven’t really looked at my final person. I—
    The Plaza of Light was, of course, now almost deserted. Only a dozen people, over the concourse, wandered toward this or that side street. Really, there was just no crowd to pick a final person from. Bron Helstrom frowned somewhere behind his face. Unhappily, he walked to the corner, trying to repicture the colored dots fading into his syrup-edged reflection.
    The sensory shield (“It merely shields us from the reality of night;” again, Lawrence) flowed overhead, translating into visible light the radio-sky behind it.
    Neptune (as was explained on various tourist posters frequently and, infrequently, in various flimsies and fiche-journals) would not be that intense a turquoise, even on the translation scale; but it was a nice color to have so much of up there.
    Night?
    Neriad? From Triton, the other moon of Neptune never looked larger than a star. Once he’d read, in a book with old, bright pictures, “... Neriad has a practically sausage-shaped orbit ...” He knew the small moon’s hugely oblate circuit, but had frequently wondered just what a sausage was. He smiled at the pink pavement. (The frown still hung inside, worrying at muscles which had already set their expression for the crowd; there was no crowd ...) At the corner, he turned toward the unlicensed sector.
    It was not the direct way home; but, from time to time, since it was another thing his sort didn’t do, he would wander a few blocks out of his way to amble home through the u-1.
    ^ At founding, each Outer Satellite city had set aside a city sector where no law officially held—since, as the Mars sociologist who first advocated it had pointed out, most cities develop, of necessity, such a neighborhood anyway. These sectors fulfilled a complex range of functions in the cities’
    psychological, political, and economic ecology. Problems a few conservative, Earth-bound thinkers feared must come, didn’t: the interface between official law and official lawlessness produced some remarkably stable unofficial laws throughout the no-law sector. Minor criminals were not likely to retreat there: enforcement agents could enter the u-1 sector as could anyone else; and in the u-1 there were no legal curbs on apprehension methods, use of weapons, or technological battery. Those major criminals whose crimes—through the contractual freedom of the place—existed mainly on paper found it convenient, while there, to keep life on the streets fairly safe and minor crimes at a minimum. Today it was something of a truism: “Most places in the unlicensed sector are statistically safer than the rest of the city.” To which the truistic response was: “But not all.’9
    Still, there was a definite and different feel to the u-1 streets. Those who chose to live there—and many did—did so because, presumably, they liked that feel.
    And those who chose only to walk? (Bron saw the arched underpass in the gray wall across the alley’s end.)—those who chose to walk there only occasionally, when they felt their identity threatened by the redundant formality of the orderly, licensed world ... ? Lawrence was probably right: They were a type too.
    The wall right of the arch was blank and high. In their frame, green numbers and letters for the alley’s coordinates glowed. Forty or fifty stories up, windows scattered irregularly. Level with him, someone had painted a slogan; someone else