Planetary Agent X by Mack Reynolds (best fiction books of all time .TXT) 📗

life. Chance for everybody getta head. Not like stinkin’ Earth—everybody down on you, less you benta lots school an’ all.”

The man was drooling drunk, Billy realized. Drunk beyond the point of memory tomorrow. He said, urging in his voice. “So you don’t know anybody else among the colonists, ay? When do you check in with them?”

Barry eyed him owlishly, and for a moment Billy Antrim was afraid the other was going to fall forward, passed out. But with a dull shake of the head, he evidently regained enough clarity to get out, “Big party tonight. Spend all last Earth credits. Tomorrow, ev’thing set. Take shuttle rocket, local spaceport, shuttle out New Albuquerque. Got alla tickets. Get aboard S/S Ley. An’ we burn off for New Arizona. Burn off. Thas space talk for…”

A voice from behind him said, “Friend, your buddy here seems to have had enough. In fact, I should’ve noticed him earlier. How about getting him on home?”

Billy, keeping his face averted, said, “Yeah. Suppose you’re right, Mac.”

The usher said, “Here, I’ll help you with him. Cheese, he’s really got a load on.”

“Hey,” Barry protested feebly. “I ain’t drunk. I been drunker’n this. Big blowout. Gotta celebrate.”

“Sure, sure,” Billy soothed him. “Come on, let’s get on home.”

“Hey, wait up just a minute, friend. Somebody trot out his credit card. You got a man-sized bill here.”

Billy moistened his lips. “The drinks were on him.”

“Yeah. Well, by the looks of your pal, he’s passed out. How about that? Hey, haven’t I seen you someplace before?”

Billy said quickly, “I’ll take care of it.” He fished his purloined credit card from his wallet and pressed it against the payment screen. “Come on, help me to a cab with him. I wouldn’t want him to puke all over your floor.”

“Cheese,” the other said. “Let’s get going.”

XXII

Ronny Bronston took the message in the police floater in which he was prowling the Norfolk waterfront entertainment area.

Credit Card 78Y-7634-L991-Division GW has been utilized to pay a nightclub bill at the Pleasure Palace…

Ronny snapped to his driver, “You know where the Pleasure Palace is?”

“We passed it not five minutes ago. There on…”

“Get there! Fast!”

While the floater spun, ignoring traffic, narrowly averting disaster three times in thirty seconds, Ronny grabbed the hand mike.

“He’s on the run! Pleasure Palace nightclub, Norfolk Waterfront. All floaters zero in! Something important happened. He’s had to use the credit card. Zero in!”

Billy Antrim was as near to being in a funk as Billy Antrim ever allowed himself to get. He could hear the whining of the sirens from afar, a multitude of sirens. It brought to mind a faintest memory of youth when he had still been with his mother and their way of life had involved planet jumping with the troupe with which she had performed. It had been a planet in the Aldeberan group, he couldn’t remember exactly which one. He’d been too young, but the planetwide holiday had been celebrated in a fantastic blowing of whistles and sirens. Thousands and thousands of sirens. On business buildings, on official cars, on factories, on ships, seemingly everywhere. It had been ear piercing, nerve racking…

He tore his mind from such nonessentials. He was in the clutch now. It was no time to be thinking of Ruth Antrim, and childhood. He had to get out of here, but fast!

He had dialed the cab more or less at random. He hadn’t the vaguest idea where this Horace Barrymore might be staying. Some hotel, undoubtedly, but which was a mystery.

A floater was screaming down the street at them. Billy dropped to the cab’s floor, leaving his semi-conscious companion propped against the glass of the door, eyes bleary but open. A light flashed, lingered a moment on the other’s face, then the police vehicle was past.

Billy Antrim muttered, “One chance in a million,” and regained his seat.

Even as they sped, he went through the other’s things. Ticket on the rocket shuttle to New Alburquerque. A small sheaf of papers identifying Horace Barrymore as a member of the New Arizona Company. A spaceport pass, signed by an official of the company and the first officer of the Spaceship Ley. And the credit card which would halve made so much difference, had Billy been able to utilize it earlier to pay the bar bill at the Pleasure Palace.

But things were still looking up better than they had ever since the debacle that had taken place on the shooting of Giorgio Schiavoni. If he could only get out of this immediate tight spot.

Another floater was screaming up the sub-freeway toward them, its lights blazing. Billy ducked to the floor again. It was past.

His lips, white, thinned back over his prominent teeth in his wolf grin. As long as the fuzz-yokes were heading in the direction of the Pleasure Palace, he was comparatively safe. But as soon as the usher there revealed that Billy had left in a cab with a companion who was dead drunk, then the fat would be in the fire. They’d know what they were looking for.

Suddenly inspiration came. He grabbed up a directory, thumbed through it. Then quickly redialed the cab.

The auto-motel was only a few hundred yards away. The cab pulled up. As usual, there was but one clerk.

Billy got out and said, “Ay Mac, my buddy here took on too big a load. Gotta room?”

The clerk had seen drunks before. In his time he had seen literally thousands of drunks. Drunks no longer interested him in the slightest. “He got a credit card to register with?”

“Sure, here it is.”

“You registering too?”

“Naw, just my buddy. Wait’ll I dismiss this here cab.” Billy manhandled Barry from the floater-cab, turned him over to the clerk to balance waveringly for the moment necessary to press the Horace Barrymore credit card to the payment screen, then turned back.

Between them, they managed to usher, push, half carry the flopping drunk to a room. Billy let him drop to a bed. He grinned at the clerk.

“I’ll see he