Lost Child

Copyright 1986 David E. Cortesi

I was one of the patrons. I hired her whenever her talents could aid one of the discreet investigations I make for clients who need their private affairs kept that way, not indexed across the databases of a dozen bureacrats. Well, maybe a few clients come only for the thrill of doing business with a legless beggar in the noise and swirl of the main concourse of MidAmerica Transfer -- but a voyeur's money goes as far as anyone's toward feeding my ragged troop of subcontractors.

Not that I ever hired the Greasy Kid out of mere charity. While she hadn't the patience for a long stake-out, she was a splendid courier. She had come to know the world-spanning pneumatic railway system, in whose depths she and I both lived, better than anyone else I've known. She once made a delivery for me, MidAmerica to New Delhi and return, in twelve hours and nine minutes. The Railway's own booking brain swears it takes at least 14:50. It's not wrong; its mistake is in allowing time to change trains. The Kid knew the back stairs and maintenance shafts in every North American station and some European ones, and she used them to get between levels in impossible times and so make connections that can't be made.

After I'd employed her a few times and had begun to appreciate the wit and energy with which she brimmed, I was flattered when she chose to confide in me. She told me her name, but made me promise to die before I revealed it.

She also told me the street dweller's most precious secret, where she slept. That, once I knew it, accounted for the daubs on her clothes from which she got her nickname. She had a place in the trash at the bottom of a certain elevator shaft. Coming and going, she picked up black lube from the rails and pulleys.

She told me once, "I lie there and listen, y'know? How the wind, right, it like moans, kind of whines up in the shaft? An' this is dumb, but --" Here she bounced a little on her hams as she squatted beside me on the marble, and laid her left forefinger on my wrist, "-- but when the car's way up I pretend like it's tree noises; like I'm in this forest of really tall trees, y'know? With the wind blowing?"

"Sure, I know," I said, though I had had no more personal experience of trees than she did. There were no trees over head height, nor mournful winds either, in Galveston L5. At least, not up to the time when they hurled me down from it, though there may be now.

The Railways, the network of evacuated trackways that wind through the Earth like worms through an apple, were the last great public work. The text in my tenth-grade Economics course dwelt on them as an example of the inefficiencies of building on a planet, fighting gravity and inert soil. And it must have been right, because even as the Railway net was being finished, a lot of the technocrats and managers, much of the capital, and most of the Earth's industry went away to space. Everybody ordinary, of course, was left behind to get along in the ordinary way, just a bit less well managed. And poorer.

The Econ text said that was the natural order of things, and how could I have known different? But High Society was formed from the best and brightest, and it still assumes that people who live in orbit are better and brighter than people who don't. High Flyers detest imperfection; it challenges them. When what was called an accident marked me with the imperfection of leglessness, they kicked me out and down.

Down and dirty, as far from orbit as I could be, I learned to think differently about people. When you live as an amoeba in the bowel of civilization, you haven't much else to worry about. So when The Greasy Kid met Stringless Guitar, and love bloomed in the halls of MidAmerica Transfer, I was in practice for worrying.

I used The Kid on the drops we did for the Angels. The commission for the first of these came over the phone.

"Lady wants to talk to you," Mr. Teeth leaned over me to say. Mr. Teeth is my receptionist; he lounges in the phone booth at the end of the row near my spot, the phone that Illinois Bell's computer has forgotten all about.

"So take a message. Thank you, squire!" The last to a passer-by who'd tossed a dollar coin in my hat.

"She says, Mr. Wallace personal, or nobody."

"Well, I won't put on my legs in the middle of the day just to take one call."

"I could boost you up to the seat."

"I can get up to the seat just goddamned fine, thank you." I'll admit it; I'm vain. I can make calls without the legs, but I have to swivel the lens down. When I stand, I can swing the lens up to my face, so the other party registers me as tall. "Tell this person she can give you a message, or else come see me. Or leave a number and I'll call her back if I ever feel like it."

Mr. Teeth went dolefully away and came dolefully back. "Says, call back in ten minutes or forget it. Here's the number." He held out his hand.

"Forget it, then." I suddenly registered the number Mr. Teeth had written on his palm. It began with 1-200, the prefix for off-Earth. "Wait. Don't wash. I'll be right back."

I scooted through the crowds to the closet that I rent from a Railway janitorial supervisor. I walked out of it on my Public Health legs and two canes, the motors in knees and ankles whining.

The number answered on the first ring. The woman in the screen had the smooth skin and that fullness around the cheeks and eyes that comes with a long spell at low gravity. I recognized her uniform, too. My neck once came out of a collar like that. "Good morning, Senior Guardian. How's the weather up there?"

"You are Wallace?"

"Ah, the diplomatic ways of space dwellers. Would it hurt you to be pleasant to an Earthworm?"

She wasn't amused. "If you are Wallace," and she recited my citizen registry number, or one of them, "then you are said to be a capable and discreet operative."

"I'm touched to find we have mutual friends."

"My name is Leverett. We want a letter picked up and brought to us, unexamined and in private. Can you do that?"

"Sure. So can a hundred express companies. Why me?"

"Normal courier services file a computer record for every pickup and delivery. Neither the sender nor we want any record whatever to be made of this transaction."

Uh-huh! What a curious kind of a correspondence for the Guardians, the official security force of the orbital cities, to be engaged in. What could they be up to?

"I can do it," I said. "It breaks a number of pro-forma rules, of course."

"Five thousand dollars."

It was so much more than I'd planned to ask that I didn't even dicker. I've wondered since how high she'd have gone, and wanted to kick myself for not finding out.

"Once more."

"Wallace, I got it already."

"By Railway to SeaTac ..."

She sighed. "Check, SeaTac; 62 bus; 14 bus; pink elephant sign; Hemisphere Today box --"

"Not before 3 p.m. Pacific time."

"-- not before 3, right, buy paper --"

"You have a coin."

"-- fucking coin, check; Wallace, I wanta go."

"What's the rush, you've got hours."

"Nah." Stares at toes. "Stuff to do."

"This is an important run. Your share of the fee would rent a room for a month."

"A body box, big deal. I got more room under my elevator."

"No, one you can stand up in, with a bathroom."

"Oh, yeah? All right! Hey, can I have a friend in?"

"It'd be your room, who'd care? What friend?"

"Oh --" Bounces up; squeezes my shoulder; leans on the wall; slumps to the floor. Sighs. "-- somebody."

Jesus. Growing up. "Yeah." I clear my throat. "Whatever. What do you find in the paper box?"

"Crumpled envelope, empty."

"Where do you take it?"

"Houston, Johnson Museum, coffee shop, 9 pm Central time, lady in uniform says Wallace sent her. Can I go now?"

"I guess you have to. Vaya con dios, Kid."

She skittered away, leaning between the noontime travellers as if they were flags in her private slalom course. But she'd hugged me, a quick brush of her arms around my shoulders.

"Mr. Teeth?"

"Yeah?"

"Who is The Kid spending time with?"

"I'll ask around."

It turned out to be Stringless Guitar.

Like most people who panhandle the crowds in the rotunda, Stringless appeared from nowhere. He wore a flapping Pendleton shirt, torn jeans, and a scratched Fender Bassman that lacked strings and one of its four tuning heads. The guitar was as constant a part of his attire as the rest; only it and his height made him stand out from the ordinary run of the homeless. He was pale and skeletal and all his vitality seemed to have gone into his hair and the pupils of his eyes.

When I found out The Kid was hanging out with him, I rolled out one evening to see his act. It was a good one. He worked in front of a battery boombox with the audio switched off, since the Railway cops are death on noisy panhandlers. Music was only the root of his performance, however.

Stringless handled his scratched guitar with an athletic verve that would have done credit to any performer in show biz. It didn't matter that his axe had no strings: he didn't know how to play. What he did know was the moves. He leapt and slunk and duck-walked and kicked. He matched and improved on every move of the guitarists that danced, finger-tall, on the screen of the cassette player behind him. An earpiece brought the thunder into his head. All you could hear over the pervasive rumble in the rotunda was the slap and shuffle of his bare feet.

I knew that, like Railway panhandlers around the world, Stringless would have expenses. The one- and two-dollar coins that went into his hat (which was now often guarded and thrust at passers-by, by The Kid) were only his gross. The top third of it would go, in his case, to Nathan Rooly, the self-appointed licensing agent for panhandlers on the concourse level of MidAmerica. A third of the remainder would go to the Railway Security guard on duty, who in return, would only make Stringless move along a couple of times in his shift, and then only between numbers.

After buying the latest discs to keep abreast of his art, and batteries for the player, Stringless would be able to spend the rest of his take on recreational drugs. Or, probably as an afterthought, food.

I don't know where he slept before The Kid took him in. But take him in she did, into the Sani Roomette she rented off a stop on the Evanston surface line, and then spent most of her spare time with him, either there or on the marble. I hardly saw her except when she came by for assignments. I missed my bright little protege, and I hated it that she would hang out with a homeless panhandler. But she must be her own person, I told myself, and this may be the first freely-given affection of her life. I thought about it as little as possible.

Supporting a room and a roommate made a quantum jump in the cost of The Kid's living, but she had the money to support it. The Spacers kept ordering courier runs and I gave them all to her, keeping back only an agent's commission.

Not long after the first run, she carried an ice-cream bar wrapper from Houston to San Diego and stuffed it back of a drinking fountain at the entrance to the Zoo Dome.

Two days later it was another crumpled envelope to Houston from a men's room in the New Mexico State Office Building in Albuquerque. I told The Kid I could try to get the plan changed so she wouldn't have to enter a men's room. "Nah, that's ok," she said. "I like men's rooms better, anyway. In the women's somebody's always trying to pick me up. Well, yeah, in the men's too, but there when I say I'm a girl, they lose interest."

Then Houston wanted a Mars bar to be stepped on next to a certain dumpster by the Zep terminal in Eugene. By now I was eaten up with curiosity. I decided to satisfy it by putting in an observer team to cover the drop.

"But I never been to Eugene," Penelope complained.

"It's a state capital, you'll like it."

"Is it like Albany? They rousted me in Albany."

"Much nicer than Albany." (I had no idea.) "Just roll out there and sit in the sun." (Was it warm in Eugene?) "Like I said, you'll see a kid come and stomp a candy bar into the ground. A while later somebody will come and get it. You finger that person for Mr. Teeth, then come on home."

Penelope hugged her worn shopping bag. "I don't like the surface anymore. Why can't Teeth do it alone?"

"Because The Kid might recognize him even when his teeth are out and he's doing his disgusting-drunk act. You, she hasn't met."

"Cross, cross, double cross" she mourned as she waggled a finger under my nose. "You can't trust nobody no more." But she went.

"For a start, he's a lousy operator," said Mr. Teeth. "And he sure as shit don't live on the street, which he was trying to dress like."

"I believe you, but how do you know?"

"Big thing was, he didn't check the dumpster. You don't pick up no stepped-on candy unless you are hungry. But if you're hungry and you walk past a dumpster, you check inside it. So he wasn't hungry. Plus he didn't eat the candy, which I would of, if I was making that pickup."

"Well, you're an artist."

"You fuckin' know it."

"Don't forget who trained you. How was he dressed?"

"Old military fatigues, like you can get anywhere. Sneakers. No coat or nothin', which I would sure want in that Eugene burg, it was chilly. Penelope says she caught pneumonia. No bags or pack or nothin', just Joe Condo out for a little slummin'."

"Where did he go after the pickup?"

"Around in circles for about ten minutes, he was easy to follow. Then back into the Zep port. By the time I got cleaned up and my teeth on so they'd let me in, he was gone. There was only one Zep through in that time, north to Portland."

"From where he could take the Railway anywhere. Too bad. Description?"

"Kind of oriental, bulky, round-faced like they are sometimes. There was something funny about the hair. It was cut funny in back."

Oh? "Tell me how, funny?"

He frowned, trying to remember. "Well, it must have been growing out, so there was like plush above his collar, but you could see where, one time, it was cut straight across in back, high up."

"As if you drew a line from ear to ear around the back of his head, and cut the hair square along it?"

"Yeah, that's it. You seen that?"

I've worn it, but didn't say so. "How long was the plush part, where it was growing out."

"Oh ... so." He held thumb and forefinger a centimeter apart.

"A month's growth, give or take, and he still had a plump face. Buddy, less than a month ago, your man was working the High Iron."

"A spacer?"

"That's how you cut your hair when you spend twelve hours a day, six days a week in a p-suit."

But why was he down here, and why was he playing peek-a-boo with the Guardians?

The long exchange of pussy-foot messages suggested a negotiation over a ransom. Why else would all parties be so concerned about secrecy? Someone had something (or somebody?) of value. They were negotiating a price for returning it to the High Flyers that owned it. The remaining questions were only, Who?

And, What?

And, Can I get a piece of the action?

I was still wondering when Senior Guardian Leverett invited me to join the game.

"You may have been curious about these message drops," she said.

"I wondered how much they were asking," I ventured.

She stared at me for seconds. "You are bluffing. But all right, who is asking, and for what?"

"Don't you know, either?"

"We'll save time, Mr. Wallace, if you stop clowning. A person has been kidnapped, apparently only for ransom. We Guardians are acting for the person's family."

She collected her thoughts, clearly meaning to share as little as possible with me.

"We have insisted on proof that the person is safe. The other party refuses to set up a phone call, claiming that we could trace it."

"They're right, aren't they?" I put in.

"The North American police could, but we don't intend to involve them. We have been directed to act quietly, accede to reasonable demands, and get the person back, no more than that."

"Very civilized. But your good intentions don't matter, do they? The only thing the other party can consider is what you are capable of."

"Correct. They seem very nervous. They have offered still pictures which we rejected as too easy to fake. They have not offered a video, which we take as ominous.

"Then, we proposed a physical visit by a third party, namely you, and to my surprise they accepted."

"I'm flattered everyone trusts me."

"They trust you because you are said to hate High Flyers. We trust you because you don't know enough to be an embarrassment."

Ah, the diplomatic touch of the truly arrogant. It immediately became my fondest hope to become an embarrassment to Senior Guardian Leverett. "Thanks for clarifying that," I said. "Where am I supposed to go?"

"The first stop is Dallas-Fort Worth freight port, but it's my impression there will be several more."

There surely were. I was beginning to recognize the style of these conspirators. At D-FW surface port, where the big Zeps school like mackerel and rockets rise through them like sharks, I waited by a pay phone, outdoors in a dusty wind. When it rang, there was no sound, but a hand-drawn card showed on the screen. It said only "Under the counter." I felt among the bumps of hardened gum and found a candy wrapper on which instructions for the next leg were written in marker.

The planners of this treasure hunt were doing their best with a hard problem. Eventually they would have to tell me where they were, but they wanted to do that in such a way that no third party could find out in time to crash the meeting or follow them away from it. There's no sure solution, but they made a determined effort.

Which is to say that they put me through a long, weary day of travel. I took trains, busses, cabs. I waited twice more by pay phones for silent calls that may have been placed from adjacent booths, for all I knew.

Their cleverest move was to have me board a passenger Zep and then call in an emergency page for me after the gangplank was up. If I'd had a tail, it would have had to stay aboard or reveal itself. The problem was that they'd reserved me a seat at the back, and I had to stump and lurch and whine my way the length of the cabin under the eyes of all the people being delayed by my exit. I lost any sympathy for the kidnappers during that walk.

At sunset of a long day, I got off a bus at Dealy Plaza in downtown Dallas. My hands had lost feeling from leaning on the canes and my wrists burned from the straps that held the canes to them. My stumps were on fire. The vendors in the plaza were closing up and wouldn't sell me a drink. I stood by the curb and thought about how I'd travelled all day to go less than a 100 kilometers.

"Get in, crip," said a voice at my right, and I lashed my right cane in a flat circle as hard as I could. It was a beefy, part-oriental man on a pedicab. His haircut still showed the p-suit neckline. His reflexes were good, too; I could tell because he'd taken the cane across the palms of both hands, not on the bridge of his nose. If it stung he didn't show it. He held it, and applied just enough leverage to show he could jerk me around if he wanted to. "Get in if you're gonna," he said, and I did.

"I need them to walk."

"I don't care, they could be anything." The skinny woman, who was trying to convert her p-suit haircut into a page-boy without much success, waved a security wand around my legs. It squealed about all the metal it found on me. "You're just loaded." She was manic; she couldn't keep her feet or hands still and she couldn't stop talking. "You're just loaded. Just listen. You could have a bomb, anything. What do we do? You're just--"

"All right, shut up." I sat down on the arm of an upholstered chair, a Goodwill reject that added tone to a very cheap hotel room, and stripped the canes from my wrists. "Here. Set them over there where I can't reach them. Now I can't walk, so we'll convene the meeting right here."

She fretted and babbled, and made me pull down my pants and show her the seamless plastic of the prostheses. She checked me out with half a dozen tools from the vast canvas shoulder bag in which she continually rummaged, and finally agreed I wouldn't have to strip down to stumps.

She banged on a connecting door. Beefy came through it pushing a slight, brown man by the elbows the way you'd steer a shopping cart. The small man sparkled: his shirt and pants were white, his teeth gleamed and so did the whites of eyes and the highlights in his blue-black moustache. He looked like the type to wear jewelry. In fact he had done so; I could see pale bands on two, no, three fingers and -- shame on you, Beefy -- a scabby wound in one earlobe where an earring had been forcibly stripped. "Sir, you--" he started, but Beefy shook him and growled.

Twitchy had rummaged up a camera from her bag. The little guy was pushed up beside me. Beefy held his elbows back so hard his shoulders were up to his ears, and his eyes swung frantically back and forth. Twitchy took a snapshot and, as soon as the flash went, Beefy pulled the man away toward the door.

"Wait a minute," I lied, "I'm supposed to talk to him."

"Yes, yes, we must murfle," the little man said as Beefy wrapped a hand over his face.

"No way, that wasn't the deal," yapped Twitchy. She danced between us and waved the snap. "This is all you need."

I stood up and held to the chair-back for balance. Beefy was almost out of the room, leaning backward with the little guy over his hip. I took a step to follow, Twitchy pushed at me, and I pitched forward into her arms. She dodged back and let me fall full length on the floor beside her canvas carryall. "The photo's on the floor there," she said as she picked up my canes and tossed them to the farthest corner. "It's all you need, take it with you." She whisked up her bag from the floor by my hand and trotted out.

Air was contaminating the DFW-to-St. Louis tunnel. I had to detour through New Orleans and Cincinnati and it was two in the morning when I stepped off at MidAmerica. There was only a sprinkle of travellers on the concourse, scattered like grains of sand across a platter.

The Greasy Kid caught up with me at my closet. She squatted down and talked at me all the time I was removing my legs, cleaning their cups, changing their batteries.

"Hey, step outside for a minute, will you?"

"Oh... sure, why?"

"'Cause I want to change my underwear, all right?"

"What? Oh, Wallace, that's silly. Oh, all right," she leaned her back on the door jamb, "Go ahead, I won't look."

But the cotton stockings stuck to the stumps. I must have made a sound.

"Oh, Wallace, you're raw! Ooh, God, don't touch it, Jeez, that's, here, let me. No, wait, don't pull on it, we'll soak it off." And she wet a clean sock in warm water in the utility sink and sponged the cloth free of the dried blood and disinfected me and dried me. She started to talcum me but, without the distraction of the stinging pain, my middle stump began to react to her cool hands and the sight of her bent, intent head, and I snapped and growled until she let me dress myself.

"Anyway," she said as she walked and I scooted across the concourse, "I told ol' Rooly that you didn't mind if we switched, but you say if you care and he'll understand, I'm sure he will."

I finally tuned in on her monologue and absorbed what she had been telling me: that Stringless Guitar had set up next to my spot, the patch of marble that is my place of business. I was not pleased at the idea, but for her sake I put off saying so.

In a very few minutes I was ready to say it. Stringless was on, and the ends of his wilder sorties were already impinging on the space where I laid my inverted cap seeded with small change.

"I could stomp his boom box," Mr. Teeth offered privately.

I had to call Leverett and report, but first... "I'll take care of it myself," I said.

Oh, yes, I took care of it just fine. The Kid was crouched beside his hat and he had gotten well into his performance when a dramatic knee-slide brought him skidding at me with the head of the guitar stuck out like the bowsprit of a ship. It would have stopped inches from my nose, but I reached and closed my left hand around it and swept it past my left shoulder. I brought my right arm around Stringless's shoulders and swung up into his lap, my sore stumps on his thighs, my eyes level with his dilated pupils. I held the guitar head out so far the strap cut into his neck. I could hear the insect whine of the music in his earpiece.

"Don't. Do. That." I applied pressure to my one-armed hug. He felt bony, birdlike, fragile. "Stay. Off. My. Turf. Hear me?" He nodded. His teeth, I noticed in passing, were surprisingly clean. "Good. Remember it." I hopped off his lap, meaning to palm-walk back to my cart.

Something popped.

Even truncated, I weigh over 50 kilos, and what isn't bone, is muscle (especially the head, oh yes). I had bowed my trunk and hopped hard enough to lift me to the floor. How was I to know that Stringless had bones like breadsticks?

With a hoarse, voiceless gasp, he curled up like a bug, sprawled on his side. The guitar clattered across the marble floor where two passers-by danced over it and another kicked it farther.

I looked up from Stringless's gape-mouthed agony to find The Kid's horrified eyes on me. She moved instantly to cradle his head. Mr. Teeth went to the phone. I hovered. When I hovered too close, she glared me back. I leaned in to ask some stupid officious question and she broke off her continuous flow of soothing whispers to say to me, in the coldest, most adult voice I expect ever to hear, "Wallace, that was stupid."

God, yes. Criminal stupidity. Culpable arrogance. Negligent trampling. Guilty, guilty, guilty.

The medical service in MidAmerica Transfer is as good as in any small town. Better; the problems they handle are all acute; the head colds and hernias stay on their trains until they get home. But they deal with transients, so the paramedics work only for cash. They scooted through the crowd in their electrical cart until they came in sight of Stringless. Then the klaxon and the flasher went off and they started a U-turn. They only stopped when Mr. Teeth stood in their path, and they didn't get out of the car until I held up a CitiBank debit card with a value stripe still green.

Once they did get out, they were efficient. Within minutes their portable ultrasound screen showed the break in his thigh, and they had sedated him and put on a temporary splint. But they wouldn't take him to the hospital until I prepaid a day's stay. The Kid went with him on the cart, bent over the stretcher. I went to put my legs back on, then followed.

The doctor on emergency duty was not happy at being stuck with Stringless's case.

"Your friend isn't a registered citizen, is he, Mr. Wallace?"

"I wouldn't expect so. But he isn't my friend; I don't even know his name. Our only connection is that I'm responsible for breaking his leg."

"His femur."

"Whatever. Bones aren't hard to fix, are they?"

"Not usually, not simple fractures. We'd ordinarily mortise in a bridge of artificial bone, assemble with bone glue, and send him home wearing a growth-inducing cuff."

"Why haven't you done that? I showed fiscal responsibility."

"Because of the man's condition, of course. All I can deduce is that he must be seriously, chronically malnourished. He has the bones of a man of 80; no, worse, the bones of a woman of 80, one who never had an osteoporin implant."

"You can't glue and screw, or whatever."

"Mortise and glue, Mr. Wallace. No. The ends of the fractured area would almost certainly crumble. The leg has to be immobilized in a cast while it knits the old-fashioned way."

"Well, all right, have you done that?"

"I have, which ends my responsibility. But do you understand that it isn't going to heal?"

"No, I don't. Why the hell not?"

"The bones of a person in this man's condition don't grow. There will be little suturing if any. Sooner or later he'll jar the cast and the ends will pull apart and he'll be back here."

And all the time, I thought, he can't flail the air with silent guitar solos. I sighed. "What will it take to fix it right?"

"I'd say he needs a stay of at least eight weeks in a convalescent facility. With physical therapy and a decent diet, the growth-inducer would have something to work on." He paused. "He's a streeter, so I don't suppose there's any chance of that happening, is there."

I recalled a private hospital in Basel where I'd been given a week of training on prosthetics. It was expensive as hell. Good! It wouldn't be paid with my money. "Yeah. There is. Will you keep him here through the day? I'll get back to you before rush hour, I promise."

The doctor looked professionally dubious. "I can't hold anyone that doesn't want to stay ..." I started to say "Will you..." and he continued "... and before you ask, no, I won't sedate someone against their will."

"As I was trying to say, will you just tell the young woman that came in with him, that it's important he stay? That's all it will take."

"What's that?" Senior Guardian Leverett squinted and peered into her screen at the snapshot I was holding up. She didn't look happy, maybe because it was dawn in the Central Time Zone.

"What you sent me for. I was shown this man, who seemed to be in the pink of health though I wasn't allowed to talk to him. There he is. Why aren't you pleased?"

She looked as if I'd offered her a cockroach sandwich. "That is not the party we are concerned about."

"Not..."

"That is an unimportant person, a tutor. He was with the person we want, and disappeared at the same time. In fact we thought he might have been an accomplice."

I remembered the dapper little man's torn ear. "No, I'm quite sure he was a captive."

"But this is all you saw? This man?"

"And the two construction workers. Twitchy and Beefy."

"Yes. I believe I can place them already, iron workers that we fired a month ago for concealing a marijuana garden. They must have stumbled onto the boy and his tutor and seized their opportunity. The boy... the subject is likely dead; if they'd had him, they'd have shown him."

"You aren't going to let it go at that, are you?"

"No, of course not." She might have been as weary as I was; she looked it. "We'll carry on trying to retrieve a manager's social-deviant son until there's no hope. Then the kidnappers will run away unpunished."

"You could ask my advice," I suggested brightly.

"Go ahead, then." She rubbed her eyes, looked at her watch.

"You could speed things up by agreeing to all their demands immediately. If they don't have the boy, they might hedge and raise the price; then you'd know."

"Or they might not, but take the money and leave only the tutor. Is that your best suggestion?"

"Nope. Do you recognize this?"

"A small black lump; it could be anything."

"It's a yoohoo. It monitors a certain channel for a certain code. When it hears its name, it burns itself up giving one almighty radio pulse to say yoo-hoo, over hee-ur."

"Stop belaboring the obvious. What of it?"

"I dropped one in Twitchy's haversack. The code will not be cheap, but I'll ask a lot less than their ransom."

She was angry, but I barely noticed. I've been glared at by experts.

The rings had been replaced by cheap bands and a simple gold clasp covered the torn earlobe; nevertheless the little man still sparkled. He dropped easily into a tailor's squat before me; we bowed to each other.

"I am glad to see you at liberty," I said.

"I am glad to be alive to thank you for my liberty," he replied. "I am Ravi Subigupta."

"Wallace." We bowed again. "You are no longer a member of High society?" I asked.

"Alas, no, I am now at liberty in another sense as well. I was a tutor and failed my charge. My pupil ran away and was never found, and I was kidnapped and caused a great deal of expense and trouble to everyone, even, I believe, to yourself."

"All in a day's work." We bowed again. "But I would appreciate it if you would satisfy my curiosity."

"Of course. Ask, and I will answer."

"I think I know what happened, but tell me if I guessed right. You were attempting to distract a difficult pupil with a tour of the romantic earth, yes?" He nodded. "And he eluded you." He closed his eyes in memory of trials past, and nodded again. "I imagine you must have wandered through Dallas-Fort Worth Railway concourse looking for him, until you fell in with those other two?" He stared at his folded hands. "You recognized them as space workers, so you told them your name and asked their help in finding your pupil."

"They were very kind, until they had me alone in a hotel."

"You must have thought your pupil dead, and convinced them as well."

"Of course," he spread his hands dramatically, "He had never been down before. Neither had I. The noise, the dirt, the confusion -- it was overwhelming. I feared for my own survival. Of course, now that I am living in it for a while, indeed in a body box because of my limited means, I am learning its ways. But the poor boy -- how could he have lived?"

"You don't think he might have adapted?"

"He had been a deeply disturbed child, Mr. Wallace. When I knew him he was a very troubled youth. He could not function even in the simplicity of orbital life -- for instance, no one could persuade him to spend sufficient time in the healthy high-g areas."

"I guessed that, too; it explained his bone deficiency."

He blinked, then smiled in embarrassment. "You have the advantage of me, Mr. Wallace. Are you saying you knew my pupil?"

"The Guardian who employed me blabbed enough to key a search of travel records; that gave me his name. But the matter of his bone weakness came up during a personal encounter. Here." I fingered through my clutch and handed him a snapshot of two people, one in a wheelchair, on the shore of a lake.

He looked at the picture, up at me, down again, laughed in relief. "But this is remarkable! He is alive? Smiling, healthy? Does his family know?" I shook my head. "He even has a tan! Where is he?"

"Mr. Subigupta, do you recognize that scenery?"

He looked, looked up blankly. "Mountains, a lake -- no. It might be anywhere."

"Just so." I plucked the picture from his hand. "And it will remain so. But the girl in the picture used to be my best courier. Since she seems to have taken over your old responsibility -- well, tell me, how well have you learned the Railways?"