The fearful are often holders of the most dangerous power. They become demoniac when they see the workings of all the life around them. Seeing the strengths as well as the weaknesses, they fasten only on the weaknesses.
- Shipquotes
WINSLOW FERRY sat in his dimly lighted office unaware of the random chaos around him - the piles of tapes and software, the dirty clothes, the empty bottles and boxes, the papers with scribbled notes to himself. It had been a long, tense dayside for him, and the place smelled of stale, spilled wine and old perspiration. His entire attention focused on the sensor screen at the corner of his comdesk. He bent his sweaty face close to the screen which showed Panille walking down a passageway with that lithe and succulent med-tech, Hali Ekel.
A wisp of gray hair fell over his right eye and he brushed it aside with a deeply veined hand. His pale eyes glittered in the com light.
He watched Hali on the holo, watched the smoothness of her young body glide from passageway to hatch to passageway. But the musk that surrounded him there in his office was Rachel. At times Rachel Demarest seemed all bone and elbow to him, a hard woman hardly used. He developed an amused distance from her whine. She had dreams that included him because she wanted him, even if he was a sack of graying wrinkles and sour breath. She wanted power and Ferry liked to snuggle up to power. They were good for each other and they tricked themselves into a personal distance by trading information for liquor, wine for position or a warm night together. This game of barter between them walled off the kind of hurt they'd both been dealt at the hands of whimsical lovers.
Rachel was asleep now in his cubby, dreaming herself Senior Chair of a new Council that would wrest power from Oakes, make the Colony self-sufficient and self-governing.
Ferry sat at his console, slightly drunk, dreaming of Hali Ekel.
He waited to shift to the next spy sensor until he could no longer make out the details of Hali's small, firm hips tight against her jumpsuit. What luscious hips! As he switched sensors to the one ahead of them, he forgot to change focus. The two were a blur as they approached the sensor's forward field limit. Ferry fumbled with the controls and lost them.
"Damn!" he whispered, and his old surgeon's hands were shaking like a wihi in a flare.
He touched the screen to steady himself, touched Hali's image blurring past the sensor and into a treedome.
"Enjoy, enjoy, my dears." He spoke aloud, his words absorbed by the piled confusion around him. Everyone knew why young couples went into the treedome. He checked to see that the holo was on record and that sound levels were satisfactory. Lewis and Oakes would want to see this, and Ferry anticipated making a special copy for himself.
"Give it to her, young fellow! Give it to her!"
He felt a pleasant swelling at his crotch and wondered if he could get away to visit Rachel Demarest.
"Get something on that poet," Lewis had ordered, and he'd had five liters of the new Pandoran wine delivered to Ferry's office from groundside by Rache...double gift. One of the empties lay across his mazed hookup to the Biocomputer. Another empty was still on the deck of the cubby temporarily occupied by Rachel. She was a clone (one of the better ones) and wine was the treasure to her that Ferry was not. Rachel was the treasure to him that Ekel was not.
Ferry watched the small touches between Panille and Ekel, imagining every one of them to be his own.
Perhaps with a little wine...he thought, and he leered at the faint, half-imagined nipples pressing her suit, shouting him out of her conversation with Panille.
Are they going to couple?
He was beginning to doubt it. Panille was not reacting correctly. I should've told them about Panille's groundside orders sooner. That was always a good lever for sex. "I'm going groundside soon, dear one. You know what the dangers are down there?"
"Go ahead, do it, fellow!"
Ferry wanted to watch Hali slip out of her singlesuit, wanted her to desire a horny old surgeon with that desire she had in her eyes for Panille.
"So you want to know about the kelp," Ferry slurred to Panille's reclining image in the viewscreen. "Well, you'll know it all soon enough, fellow. And Hal...." His clammy fingers caressed the screen. "...perhaps Lewis can see to it that you are assigned to us here at Classification and Processing. Yesss." And the yes was a feverish hiss through his yellow teeth.
Suddenly, the conversation on the screen jarred him out of his daydream. He was sure he had heard correctly. Panille had told Hali Ekel that the kelp was sentient.
"Damn you!" Ferry screamed at the viewer, and this became his low-voiced chant as the eavesdropping continued.
Yes, Panille was telling her everything. He was spoiling everything!
Panille was going groundside, was going to be out of the way. And all because of the kelp! Ferry was sure of it. The groundside orders must have been cut by Lewis or Oakes. That had to be because they were cut as soon as that mass of study-circuits on the kelp started showing up on Panille's program orders. Panille was onto something, but could be stopped. He was quiet, and could be removed quietly. The only logical reason for the delay in sending the fellow groundside had to be that order from Lewis: "Get something on 'im."
Wel.... orders said the delay ended if Panille started talking too much.
"But damn him, he told her!"
Ferry caught his breath and tried to calm himself. He opened his last bottle of wine, the fantasy bottle that he would have offered to Ekel, if only in his dreams. He had neither the key, the code, nor the technical expertise to alter the holorecording, to erase all evidence that Ekel, too, knew about the kelp.
He took a long swallow of the wine and slammed the call key coded to her.
"Hal...." He threw the bottle across his office in rage, then lost his balance and fell against the console, breaking the call-connection. He pushed himself back, calmed his voice and once more opened the channel.
"Sorry I dropped you. This is Winslow Ferry. Is that Kerro Panille with you, Hali?" How he loved the sound of her name on his tongue, the touch of her even in word.
She laughed at him!
Ferry had no recollection of ending the call, ordering Panille to his office, but he knew he had done it.
She laughed at hi.... and she knew about the kelp. When Lewis reviewed this holorecord (and he would certainly do that), then Lewis would know she had laughed at him and Lewis would laugh because he often laughed at Ferry.
But it's always old Winslow who gets him what he needs!
Ye... always. When no one else could manage it, Winslow knew someone who knew someone who knew something and had a price. Lewis would not care deeply that she laughed at old Winslow. Momentary amusement, that was all. But Lewis would care about the kelp. New orders would be cut for Ekel. Ferry knew that for certain. And wherever Ekel was assigned, it would not be to Classification and Processing.