Read Online Into the Slave Nebula by John Brunner - Free Book Online Page A

him.
    “But—” Horn felt briefly giddy. “But you
know
where, don’t you? You know what Lars Talibrand’s work was! Why won’t you tell me?”
    “Because you don’t have to walk out of that door, sir. The moment you do, you’ll be in it up to your neck, and from then on it will be up to you whether you come out with your life. Goodbye, Mr. Horn.”
    The heli Berl had borrowed was indeed a long way from the passenger models to which Horn was accustomed. Potbellied, immensely powerful, it lumberedthrough the sky at a slow hundred and fifty with its unretracted legs spread wide on either side of its folded grappling equipment. He sat in acute discomfort on a plain metal bench which doubled as a toolchest—the tools rattled like the chains of a banshee every time the engine hit a particular frequency—beside what struck him as an appallingly flimsy door fitted with a catch Berl sternly warned him not to touch or even brush against while they were moving, for fear it might spring open.
    The square edge of his seat cut off the circulation in his legs, sending his calves to prickling sleep no matter how often he tried to shift his weight from one side to the other. There was a stink of lubricant from the bearings of the rotor overhead.
    “It’s not designed for this sort of trip,” Berl vouchsafed after they had been in flight nealy an hour. He seemed to be half amused and half sympathetic towards Horn’s vain attempts to make himself comfortable. But it was the first thing he had said without prompting since they set out; to Horn’s halting remarks about the advantages and drawbacks of carnival, uttered earlier, he had returned only grunts and nods.
    It was cold up here; Horn leaned back to make the most of what warmth seeped through from the engine astern of their cockpit.
    “Ah—what exactly is this machine designed for, then?” he ventured. “Didn’t you say something about borrowing it from the wreck-salvage section?”
    “That’s right,” Berl nodded. There was no light except from the stars and the dim glow of the instrument panel; the blueness of his skin was turned to a grey as neutral as was Horn’s own complexion. “All I could get was this heavy lifting job, y’see. Rest of the helis are due for major overhauls. Take days, maybe all of what’s leftbefore carnival is through. But this type doesn’t see too much service during an average year, doesn’t get worn out so quick. It’s the kind you send out when a couple of groundcars get so tangled up in an important intersection you can’t risk waiting till you’ve cut ’em into sections the small helis can handle. Ever seen one of them at work?”
    “No, I don’t believe I ever have,” Horn said. “I’ve been by at a spot where accidents like that had recently happened, I think, but it was always cleaned up before I arrived. I guess—” He hesitated, couldn’t decide why, and finished what he had been about to say. “I guess you boys do a pretty fast job!”
    “We try to. Right now, of course, we can take things easy—you can’t do much harm if you break a bubbletaxi, and all it needs is to send out a mechanic in a floater. The rest of the year, though, you keep us pretty busy.”
    He didn’t sound in the least resentful—rather, his tone was one of satisfaction, as though he was glad of the demands his job made on him. Nonetheless he fell silent again, and there was an interval during which the only sound was the drone of the rotors. Horn, peering overside, spotted the lights of a city to the east, which he could not identify: a patch of misty brilliance like an extra-galactic nebula viewed through a giant telescope, dotted with occasional brighter points like novae. He commented on the resemblance to Berl, not wanting to let the conversation die, but the android only shrugged.
    “Wouldn’t know about that. My job’s wreck-salvage.”
    Am I crazy?
Horn asked himself.
To think of leaving Earth on some wild chase among the