The Venus Belt Read Online Free Page A

hardly tell them apart. He dropped the empty mag a zine, rammed home a spare, and zipped through another quick six. Score: sixty, of course. Time: four and a tiny fraction seconds.
    Arthritis be damned, remind me never to get the Captain really riled.
    Beep! Only the old chimp failed to go for his gun: I reholstered mine and watched my blushing bride do likewise, sticking out her tongue at me as I reached into a belt pouch for my pocket-pager, the only one in L a porte, possibly unique in all the Confederacy.
    “And that’s another thing,” she told him. “How any civilized being to l erates a nosy, interrupting nuisance like that. . .”
    “Then don’t interrupt so often, dear.” I wasn’t quite adroit enough to spare my shin a wifely kick. Forsyth simply shrugged his furry shoulders. He knew me, almost as well as Clarissa pretends not to sometimes, and unde r stands how an old cop’s habits die hard. I limped dramatically to the Tel e com and undedicated it. There, relayed from our machine at home, was a n other pretty face. Just my lucky day, I guess.
    “Winnie? Clarissa, girl? This here’s Lucy!” Only this face hadn’t been so pretty when I’d first seen it, splotched and withered, wrinkled with old age and radiation sickness, topped with a mop of snow-white hair and an outr a geous paisley sunbonnet.
    Lucille Gallegos Kropotkin had lived next door to the house Clarissa and I now occupied, neighbor and friend to a good friend of mine, E d ward William Bear—my own counterpart in this world. Lucy had gotten well, r e gained her youth, hitched up with Ed, and moved out to the ast e roids. I looked closely now at her warm dark eyes, olive skin, and glossy black hair. Pretty sexy for 148.
    “Listen, you two,” she advised, “this here’s a recordin’—can’t wait around fer signals t’get there an’ back. I was gonna call anyway, see how th’ baby’s comin’ along an’ all, but...well, it ain’t gonna be as pleasant as all that, now.”
    She glanced down at some object in her hand and shook her head.
    “I got trouble. Somethin’ fishy goin’ on out here, an’ Ed—th’ du m my—started pokin’ round, rusty at detectivin’ as he was...”
    She stopped, squinted hard against a flow of tears that was visibly only seconds away. “Anyhow, he—Win, I hate like th’ dickens t’put you out, a daughter on th’ way, an all, but—Ed’s been missin’ fer days, an’ I found this in his desk an hour ago. You’ll know what it means.”
    She held a medallion to the pickup, round, about an inch and a half in diameter, bronze. I didn’t have to inspect it to know there was a date on one side, 1789. On the reverse loomed the eerie trademark of the System’s foremost enemies of liberty: the Hamiltonian Eye-in-the-Pyramid.
    “Win, get out here pronto! He may already be d-dead by now!”
3: Gorilla My Dreams
    Wednesday, February 24, 223 A.L.
    “I am not!” Clarissa stamped a foot she hadn’t seen in weeks. In the thick carpeting of our gymnasium-size living room, the effect was lost.
    “You are too!” I sat, chomping on my cigar, and glowered at her.
    “ I am not! ”
    “You are too! ”
    Clickety-click-click. “Can I be excused from this colloquium?” My chief assistant and apprentice gumshoe, Koko Featherstone-Haugh, leaned back on a sofa, knitting a sweater for the baby. Koko’s a youngish female gorilla, favorite niece of the President of the North American Confederacy.
    And they pronounce it “Fanshaw.”
    “Sure,” I growled back, “go on out in the kitchen and peel yourself a plantain. You’re on her side, anyway.”
    Koko hitched her holster into a more comfortable position and took a sip of King Kong Kola, a brand suddenly popular since the recent import a tion of a certain movie. Click-click-clickety. “I am not.”
    “You are too! Say, this sounds familiar. Did I not hear you, with my very own ears, state that ‘mere pregnancy’ is no reason Clarissa shouldn’t go to