Kieran stared distantly over the remains of the evening meal, while June attended to dishes in the kitchen area. There was no word in the English language that rhymed with "orange," she had claimed. A few feet away, Teddy hunched on one of the breakfast-bar stools, eying Guinness as he lay sprawled on the edge of the living area, chin resting on paws.
"An Irishman green,
Can take the potheen,
But an Irishman orange,
Just falls to the flooranj-,
Ust doesn't seem able,
To stay at the table."
He looked triumphantly across. "Were we playing for forfeits?"
June shook her head despairingly. "Kieran, you're impossible."
"But surely it can't come as a surprise. You know that my creative genius knows no bounds. In fact, I'm considering a project to popularize Shakespeare in the American South by translating it into redneck. I thought the first sample might be As Y'All Like It. What do you think?"
"I refuse to think anything. I'm putting it down to nonadaptation to the gravity and the air mixture here. It can affect some people strangely, you know . . ." she looked at him hesitantly, "except that for you, I suppose, it isn't that strange."
"Scoff if you will. You'll regret it one day, when women are flocking around in a feeding frenzy after they put up a statue to me in Atlanta. Or maybe they'll give my name to an expressway across Alabama and the Carolinas. Won't you feel proud to have known me, then?"
"Are you sure you wouldn't rather an airport?"
Kieran considered the suggestion gravely. "Well, okay . . . but I wouldn't settle for less than international."
Before June could reply, the room's sound system chimed for an incoming call. She took it on the comset that she had placed nearby, listened for a few seconds, and then switched the call to the mural screen in the living area for Kieran to join in too. "It's Leo and Elaine, from Phobos," she informed him. "Donna got them places on a Triplanetary lifting out tonight. They're just about to board."
"Splendid!" Kieran got up and moved to the couch to be in the wall unit's viewing angle. June joined him a moment later. The screen showed Sarda, minus mustache and with his hair trimmed and darkened, pointing a comset while he stood with Elaine, both wearing sunglasses-like imaging spectacles, reflected in one of the mirror panels provided in public places to afford two-way visual connection for handheld devices. Their old feelings had come back in a flood within hours of pulling off the stunt the day before. Kieran had urged them to get away from Lowell that same night, before any repercussions had a chance to catch up with them. They had been sitting out the day at the transfer terminal on Phobos while one of Kieran's ubiquitous "friends in the business" juggled with reservations and pulled wires.
"Hey, Kieran, so we're on our way," Sarda greeted. "TP Sirius clipper, lifting out at three-ten local standard for the Ceres sector. After then . . ." he shrugged, grinned, and gripped Elaine's hand, "who knows?"
"Well, I've no doubt that you'll both end up doing something interesting," Kieran said. "There's enough in the kitty to keep you comfortable for a while, anyhow. Just watch the deals out there. If it sounds too good to be true, then it probably is."
"I don't know how to thank you enough for what you did," Elaine said. "June, I'm so glad that you picked a man who's curious about everything."
"It can have its moments," June answered dryly.
"Our commission more than covered the costs," Kieran said. "So, you see, I'm just as brazen and commercial as the rest, really."
Sarda shook his head. "No, not like the rest. Never. You're something else . . . `Knight.' "
"And how's Guinness?" Elaine asked.
"Fed, content, and at peace with the limited part of the world that interests him."
"We were thinking you should have called him Sirius," Elaine said. "The Dog Star. Get it? He is one."
Kieran smiled. "That's good. I wish I'd thought of it."
Sarda moved the spectacles a fraction to look around. "Well, it looks as if we're going to have to be moving. It's all been a rush here at the last minute, but I'm glad we had a moment to call. Thanks again from me too. It goes without saying that if there's ever anything we can do . . ."
"I'll want to know what you get into next," Kieran said. "So you'd better stay in touch from time to time. You've always got the number on the card."
"You can count on it," Sarda promised. "So . . . take care for now."
The two figures on the screen waved; then Sarda pressed a button on the unit he was holding, and the image vanished.
"And a happy-looking couple they make, doubtless destined to live so forever after, wherever they end up," Kieran pronounced. "A pity that people will still have to be shut up inside tin cans for weeks or more to get to places, thoughfor a while yet, anyhow. With Sarda-the-First walking around not knowing what day it is, the word's probably going around the business already that the process is fatally flawed somewhere. No one's going to be interested in touching it now. There simply isn't a marketable technology anymore."
"And it's probably just as welluntil somebody comes up with a way of doing it right," June said. "They thought they could pull a fast one, and it backfired. Let's face it, Kieran, the world and beyond isn't ready for something like TX yet, and probably won't be for . . . I don't know, maybe a century. Look at the mess it got into with just one, carefully designed experiment. Even the guy who practically invented it ended up not being convinced. Look what it did to him." She shook her head. "You couldn't turn something like that loose on the public. Can you imagine it going on everywhere at the rate of millions a day? The whole Solar System would be turned into an insane asylum within a week."
"And that's not even part of it," Kieran said.
"What do you mean?" June asked.
"Something I've been thinking about on and off ever since Elaine and I talked about it in the park. We don't know that the deal Balmer was setting up was with another of the trans-system carriers at all. It could have been with interests having totally different aims."
"Other than a light-speed teleporter?"
"Exactly."
"Such as what?"
"How about what you told me it was in the first place?" Kieran suggested. "A people-duplicator. Think of all the things you could do with that. Your life insurance company keeps the record on file. If anything happens to the original, they can provide a replacement. Or if the talents of rare genius are priceless, then why not enrich the condition of the human race thousandsfolds by mass-producing them? Come to that, why expend effort selecting and training lots of near-good experts like sports stars, élite military, and so on, when you can concentrate on getting just a few right and then copy them? What kind of crazy social dynamics might result from people making two of themselves to share the loador three, or four. . . . Seethere's no end to it. That would make what you're talking about seem as sober as a convention of judges."
June frowned at him in the reflexive way that said there ought to be something wrong with it, but then seemed at a loss to pinpoint what. Her expression changed to one of perplexity. "Why does it always take someone else to point out the obvious?" she asked.
"Because it's always the last thing you think of," Kieran replied. "For the same reason that you always find things in the last place you look: Who's going to carry on looking for something after they've found it?" His voice took on a more ominous note. "But there's another side to it too. What if the wrong people got their hands on something like that? How about that bunch who wiped out the people on the Far Ranger and tried taking over Urbek, for instance? Knight's Pest Control Inc. might have taken care of them this time, but what if there were dozens of the leaders loose to start up all over again? See my point?"
"You're thinking that Balmer might have been selling to people like that somewhere?"
"It makes you wonder, doesn't it?"
"Then I'm even more sure that it's better with things the way they are for a long time yet." June leaned back along the couch with a faraway look on her face, stretching out a hand automatically as Teddy jumped up, wanting attention. "You know, the only thing I feel bad about is Herbert and Max. They put everything they had into it; worked as hard on their end of the operation as Leo did; compensated him for the risk he was taking. . . . It doesn't seem right that he and Elaine should fly away to start anew, while they're left to count the losses. It's just feels, somehow . . ." She caught the look on Kieran's face. "What's so funny? I don't happen to think they deserved it. They got it right, for heaven's sake, Kieran! Their project worked! Only now, they'll probably never even know."
"Well, there is one more little detail I didn't want to go into until I was sure the money transfers had gone through," Kieran said. "A quarter of a billion would be a bit much for Leo to handle. Sums like that do strange things to people, and always to the detriment of their personality. Take Brother Henry, for example . . . Oh, don't get me wrong. Leo and Elaine will have more than enough to keep the autochef stocked and start up their own operationand if my instinct is anything to go by, it won't be long before Leo's into something far-out again. And naturally the KT retirement fund has benefitted not inconsiderably. . . . But on top of that, some time this afternoon, Herbert and Max should have found a substantial credit paid into Quantonix's account from an anonymous source that will be impossible to connect with anything that happened yesterday. It should be ample to get them going again. I just hope they pick something a bit less zany, and think it all the way through next time."
June threw her head back with a laugh of delight, then leaned forward to fling her arms around Kieran. "I should have known! It's just like those guys you played cards with at the terminal, coming in. You're just too soft to leave it any other way. Please don't ever stop being soft."
"Well, I guess it means I'll never end up running something like Three Cs," Kieran commented. "But I think I prefer life better this way, nonetheless." He eyed June circumspectly. "Would you be interested in a ten-million-a-year Three Cs CEO?"
She shook her head. "Too self-important and serious. It would probably mean hearing about nothing but money all the time. And besides, who'd think up the silly rhymes?"
Kieran leaned back and clasped his hands behind his head. "Fine. I've been here five days, and look what you've got me into already. So now what are we going to do about this vacation I was supposed to be coming here to have, where absolutely nothing untoward or out of the ordinary was going to happen?"