Free The Pleasure Tube by Robert Onopa Page A

Even with my sign key, every query I make comes to the same thing, the computer's wink for computation and the identical display I have been sitting with for more than two hours. The pale green figures pain my eyes. I can't shake a strange feeling that I've sat here before, waiting, just this way, waiting.
     
    LasVenus DataBase Information Service/7
    Current DataBase Information//
     
    Voorst, Rawley//
     

     
    your local residence is ------------
    SectorGold Casa del Sol 202//Suite 3
    your local program instructs you to -------
    YOU ARE RESTRICTED
    PLEASE REMAIN WHERE YOU ARE
    PLEASE REMAIN WHERE YOU ARE
    PLEASE REMAIN WHERE YOU ARE
     
    Program LasVenus DataBase//"We serve your need to know"// thePleasureTube corp.
     
    And so I sit staring in the other direction, wondering what part of my headache I owe to this morning, what part to last night, watching one ship in particular, which could only be our ship. Massive, dull silver, wings barely wings in retraction, its fuselage apart in sections now, sections from which units protrude for service, the area a forest of cranes and hydraulics. How similar and much simpler by comparison the Daedalus was—an even larger ship, but one whose mass was formed by the circular clarity of a single propulsion system, one hull to these three, each dome a dragonfly's eye—and how much simpler it was to fly straight out.
    Something nibbles at the edge of my mind, that sense of having been here before. I want to get in touch with Werhner, I know that is my right.
     
    The shock of seeing Taylor clears my head. In the past week I've been surprised more than once, but I had not prepared myself to see him here, his bushy eyebrows rising as I enter this cold conference room, the air sweet with the odor of his pipe tobacco. My chemistry had been shifting back to Guam, and this settles it. Sitting at the far edge of the long, transparent table, his elbows on its surface, his hands resting on amber SciCom files, Taylor nods, smiles at another man I only now notice standing by the other door. He is someone I have never seen, a brown-haired man with a farmer's build. Taylor rises from his chair and points the stem of his pipe at a seat midway down the table, says to me, "That's quite a chase you led us on."
    I feel my palms becoming clammy and the atmosphere acquiring the weight of Guam between Taylor and myself. Taylor
here;
yet this is just like Guam, him standing up as he sits me down, the mechanics of his practiced insecurity. I sit, shifting my feet apart on the rug. I know where my center is, anyhow; I lean back in the chair.
    "It'd be a chase only if I were running," I suggest. "I had the right to leave time under military procedure and I exercised it."
    "That's under review," replies Taylor, packing his pipe with a blunt finger. "For the moment, you're coming back with me to Pacific SciCom. The sooner we start back the better. Where are your things? Your ticket will say. Show it to Mancek, he'll get them for you." Taylor looks at me as he relights his pipe, his gold lighter tight in his hand, hissing.
    "I'm not going anywhere with you," I say evenly, "unless you have a criminal arrest warrant and he's got status to serve it. In that case, I want to see a local attorney."
    "No, now, I..." Taylor murmurs, the faint smile that had shaped his thick lips fading.
    "Then show me the orders you have. I'd like to see the authority flow on this one."
    "I
make
the orders," Taylor says, setting his lighter down, his face reddening.
    "Not for me you don't," I say evenly. "I have military status and I'm exercising my leave time."
    "That's a technicality, Voorst."
    "I'm staying here," I say.
    "For the life of me," Taylor sighs, "I can't find out why the military office let you go. I'll concede the technical grounds of your presence here, but we've lost a week already. Let's get on with it." Taylor's bushy eyebrows come together, he punches something through a table console and calls Mancek over.