Free Starfire by Charles Sheffield Page B

yourself."
    I had to concentrate hard to keep my self-control. My mind had filled with an image of the body of Julia Vansittart. It floated in the great void, lost in a cavernous emptiness without end.
    You'll get a much better idea when you see everythin' for yourself.
    Those words raised the level of my discomfort to the point where my record of the next five minutes is based on despised conjecture, rather than the hard evidence of accurate recall.
    "What do you mean, see for myself?" I croaked, terrified by the implications of his statement.
    "Up on Sky City." Seth stared at me. "We gotta go there. Even the best reconstructions are nothin' like the real thing. I was thinkin', you get your head around the facts, then in a day or two the pair of us make a little trip."
    "No! Absolutely not." The room was spinning around me. "A visit on my part to Sky City is totally impossible."
    "It is? Look, if you're worried about gettin' caught, you don't have to. I got the system greased. I can make sure that nobody even suspects—"
    "Did you not hear me?" I cried. "I cannot go to Sky City—or anywhere else in space." And, when he stared at me, "Did you not check my background before you came here? Since childhood I have suffered from extreme forms of acrophobia and agoraphobia. I cannot, to save my life, tolerate heights or open spaces." I pointed toward the invisible cliffs, half a mile to our west. "I can go no closer to the sea than we are now. As for outer space"—the very words caught in my throat—"in that intolerable environment I would be unable to think, to work, even to breathe."
    He did not, to his credit, argue or rage or deny the reality of the problem. Instead he stood up and went to stare into the dying fire. "I didn't know that," he said at last. "I should have. There's nothin' you can do about it? I mean, like with drugs and fizzes?"
    "Nothing. I have tried. Anything that damps my reaction sufficiently to tolerate an open environment leaves me unable to think."
    "Which ain't too good, since your brain is what I need an' it's no use when it's mush." Seth turned to me, and to my astonishment he had a little smile on his face. "Dumb of me not to check everythin', wasn't it? But I guess I was in too much of a hurry to get here."
    He went to sit once more by the fireside. "Well, now we got us a problem. You can't go to Sky City, an' Sky City sure as hell can't come to you. But it's real important for me to catch our murderer, an' I still think you're my best bet for that. So let's you an' me sit down, talk slow and easy, an' see what we come up with as a solution."
    The man, mirabile dictu, was humoring me. For possibly the first time in my life I did not object.

6
    Celine was used to kisses. She had spent her teenage years in the Philippines and traveled widely in Europe and the Middle East. In many nations of the world she knew that an embrace or a kiss on the cheek was as natural as a handshake.
    Less common—unique, in fact, in Celine's experience—was the visitor who strode across the Oval Office, grabbed you in a bear hug, and gave you a great smacking kiss on the lips.
    But that was Wilmer. He had acknowledged few of the rules of polite society when he and Celine were partners on the Mars expedition, and in the twenty-seven years since, he had apparently changed not at all.
    Celine kissed him back, just as heartily. Lovers, even long-ago and faraway lovers, possess privileges denied to others. After a couple of seconds she pushed him away and held him at arm's length. "Wilmer Oldfield, you're as handsome and debonair as ever." His head, close to bald, wore its remaining hair close-cropped, and his idea of suitable White House dress was a faded brown shirt and pants short enough to show two inches of white socks.
    "Now you must introduce me," Celine went on.
    She had glimpsed the woman walking in behind Wilmer in the moment before she was grabbed and hugged. She made a more detailed survey now. The other visitor