Jack Chalker - Kaspar's Box

“Oh, nothing like that,” Mary Margaret laughed. “We just did like everybody else. We picked what we wanted, we gave ’em our finger and looked through their eyepiece or whatever it is, and it said we was okay. Worked every place we went.”

He sat back down, a bit dumbfounded. “Heh! Best damn security system for payment and credit I know, and you girls just breeze right past it ’cause the machines all think they know you and want to make you happy! Sweet Jesus! As hard as I had to work to steal things over me many years!”

“We didn’t steal,” Irish O’Brian insisted. “We just did what everybody else did for payment and it was good. So who loses? The shops got paid, right? So if there’s no money there, it’s the government’s own fault for giving it to us!”

“I wanta try on that stuff but I’m beat,” Mary Margaret McBride put in.

“Me, too,” chipped in Brigit Moran.

Irish came over to the old captain and kissed him on the forehead. “So can you be a dear man and put them things someplace here for us? I think it’s bedtime.”

You didn’t argue with these gals, that was clear. He let them go in, get their showers, and stake out their bed places and get settled, then he quietly made certain that the connecting door was completely shut and went back to the comm console.

“Manual mode. Keyboard, please,” he said quietly.

In front of him a holographic keyboard appeared. Few could read and write these days, or needed to do either, but there were times when that was a real advantage for someone who could.

With his index finger he tapped out, “Order of Saint Phineas, Dir.” The same listing came up as before. This time, however, he input, “Call. Low volume.”

A weak electronic signal buzzed on and off several times. Then a woman’s voice answered, “This is the main number of the Order of Saint Phineas. Leave your message and contact information and someone will get back to you.”

He waited for the tone, then said softly, “Captain Patrick Murphy, Hotel Aden, suite five five four. I am in early with cargo for you. Please contact me and arrange delivery or pickup. Message ends.”

He suspected that they already knew he was here, and probably just about all that had happened, via those stones or whatever they were, but it never hurt to go through the motions. Now there was nothing left to do but to wait for contact.

Truth be told, he almost would miss the girls. If he could get them to trust him with that power of theirs, there was no limit to what they could do, and the fantasy of a man his age with three very pretty companions wasn’t at all unpleasant to him. Still, they’d probably get him in more trouble than he’d ever been in in his whole life just by being their own sweet ditzy selves and, besides, it was beginning to look more and more like the very last folk you’d want to cross would be these Phineas people.

Still, all the previous deliveries had been a bit older, a bit smarter, and generally just one or two at a time. He really wondered what the future held for these girls, or if they had one once he delivered them. Clearly it wasn’t the trio that this Order was interested in, it was what they carried in their bellies. This was a huge, mostly wild, and very unpopulated world where folks could disappear forever and never be missed, in spite of all those state-of-the-art police controls. Once relieved of their babies and their fancy gem gadgets, they were just three pretty, helpless, far-too-young girls, fit for cleaning up the place or making bushmen a bit less lonely or, if all else failed, providing a nice dinner for some of them creepy crawly types out in the wild.

He began to feel depressed. Not so much at their fate, but at the very clear evidence that, after all those years and all that shady living, he was somehow developing at least an embryonic conscience.

The communicator rang softly. He jumped, startled at the sound, then said simply, “Murphy.”

“Ten hundred tomorrow morning,” said a woman’s voice, not the same one as in the message. “Tanzania Park. North entrance, then to the Great Apes pavilion. Bring your delivery.”

“How will I know your person?” he asked.

“ They’ll know. And we know you.”

There was no use in going any further; the line was definitely dead. He sighed. Well, it was more cloak-and-dagger on his part than he was used to in these things, but at least it would be over.

He wished he had some way to work out with the girls some kind of signal so that, if they got into trouble or didn’t like where they wound up, they could contact him or someone else for help, but it didn’t seem likely he could do it without also giving the same information to these clients of his. The girls weren’t about to take off those Magi stones, and not being able to read, there just was no other way to get private.

In a way, that made him feel a bit better. If he couldn’t do anything, then he could hardly be guilty of any serious breaches, right? Nobody, not even he, could blame him if it all went wrong for them. Not so long as they had that power and also wanted to go.

He decided to let them be for this last night and go down to the hotel pub and relax with the best it had, at least until he really believed that himself.

Tanzania Park looked and even operated very much like a metropolitan zoo. It charged an admission, had the usual amenities, and allowed people to see ancient animals, mostly Old Earth species, some long extinct from that planet even before the Great Silence, in a kind of natural habitat recreation, but that wasn’t its primary purpose.

Like its aquatic, arctic, and other planetary biome zoos, it was a place where the old species were born and bred until strong enough to be released into the wild, and trained as much as possible to be self-sufficient out there. It was also where injured animals came for treatment, was used for research on animal biology and behavior, and as a transit point for outgoing orders as well.

The three young women loved it.

Murphy had done his best to brief them that this was it, that they’d be meeting the people they were supposed to meet and going away with them from the park, but that seemed to be the farthest thing from their minds this nice morning. The only thing they’d asked, when he told them earlier at the hotel what was going to be going down and where, was how they were going to get the bulk of their brand-new purchases to wherever they were headed next. Murphy assured them that he’d have all that sent over, and that seemed to be the end of that.

The cab didn’t look any different from the others waiting outside the hotel and probably wasn’t; if he was bringing the “merchandise” to them, why bother?

The north entrance was imposing, consisting of giant prefab stonelike columns carved with ancient tribal symbols, colors, and designs that matched the original long-ago land of these creatures. His finger paid their admission, but he had to work hard to keep the trio from immediately heading for the souvenir shop. It was already almost ten, and the map said they had about two kilometers to walk to get to the Great Apes area. Murphy realized that whoever they’d be meeting probably had them in sight the whole way now and he didn’t want to be perceived as deliberately dawdling to miss the appointment.

There weren’t a whole lot of people in the park, or so it seemed, but there were small hordes of children running about here and there, often being chased by nearly exhausted teachers or nannies, and now and again there were groups of twos and threes looking like business people killing time or people there on zoological business. A few families, yes, as well, and the occasional, but rare, individual.