John Varley - Steel Beach

"-to play the black ten on the red Jack," I finished for her.

"You heard it. Well, at least it'll give you something to do." She left, casting a worried eye over her pet, who didn't seem at all disturbed to see her go, and with a final admonition that Winston got his walkies three times a day or he was apt to get mean enough to make a train take a dirt road.

I'd already brought a deck of cards. I usually have one with me, as manipulating them is something to do with my hands at idle moments, better than needlepoint and potentially much more profitable. If you don't practice the moves you find your hands freeze up on you at a critical moment.

But I never play solitaire, and the reason is a little embarrassing. I cheat. Which is all very well for blackjack or five-card stud, but what's the point in solitaire?

Point or not, I eventually found myself laying out a hand.

Pretty soon I got into it. Not the game itself, than which there are few purer wasters of time, but the cards. You have to be able to visualize the order, make them your friends so they'll tell you things. Do it long enough and you'll always know what the next card will be, and you'll know what the cards are that you can't see, as sure as if they were marked on the back.

I did it for a long time, until Winston got up and began to scratch at the wall of the tent. Better get him into his suit before he got frantic, I thought, and looked up into the face of the girl. She was standing there, outside the tent, grinning down at Winston, and she had a telescope tucked under her arm. She looked at me and shook a finger: naughty , naughty .

"Wait!" I shouted. "I want to talk to you."

She smiled again, shrugged her shoulders, and became a perfect mirror. All I could see of her was the distorted reflection of the tent and the ground she stood on. The distortions twisted and flowed and began to dwindle. Pressing my face against the tent wall I could follow her progress for a little while since she was the only moving object out there. She wasn't in any hurry and I thought she looked back over her shoulder, but there was no way to be sure.

I got into my suit quickly, thought it over, and suited Winston, too. I let him out, knowing his ears and sense of smell were totally useless out here but hoping some other doggy sense would give me a lead. He shuffled off, trying to press his nose to the ground as he usually did, succeeding only in getting moondust on the bottom of his helmet. I followed him with my flashlight.

Soon he stopped and tried to press his face to the surface with more than his usual doggedness. I knelt and looked at what he was trying to pick up. It was a bit of spongy material that crumbled in my glove when I lifted it. I laughed aloud; Winston looked up, and I patted the top of his helmet.

"I might have know you wouldn't miss food, even if you can't smell it," I told him. And we set off together, following the trail of breadcrumbs.

Feeling not unlike the hood ornament on a luxury rover-and showing a lot more chrome-plated belly than either Mr. Rolls or Mr. Royce would have approved of-I stepped boldly forth into the sunlight, almost as naked as the day I was born. Boldly, if you don't dwell on the thirty minutes I spent getting up my nerve to do it in the first place. Naked, if you don't count the mysterious force field that kept me wrapped in a warming blanket of air at least five millimeters thick.

Even the warming part was illusory. It certainly felt as if the air was keeping me warm, and without that psychological reassurance I doubt if I'd have made it. Actually, the air was cooling me, which is always the problem in a space suit, whether bought off the shelf at Hamilton's or hocus-pocused into existence by the Genius of the Robert A. Heinlein . See, the human body generates heat, and a spacesuit has to be a good insulator, that's its main purpose; the heat will build up and choke you without an outlet. See?

Oh, brother. If you had a chuckle at my explanations of nanoengineering and cybernetics, wait till you hear Hildy's Field Suits Made Simple .

"You're doing fine, Hildy," Gretel (not her real name) coaxed. "I know it takes some getting used to."

"How would you know that?" I countered. "You grew up in a field suit."

"Yeah, but I've taken tenderfeet out before."

Tenderfeet, indeed. I bent over to see those pedal extremities, thinking I'd have to get re-acquainted with them post-partum. I wiggled my toes and light wiggled off the reflections. Like wearing thick mylar socks, only all I could feel was what appeared to be the rough surface of Luna. There was some feedback principle at work there, I'd been told; the field kept me floating five millimeters high no matter how hard I pressed down. And a good thing, too. Those rock were hot .

"How's the breathing?" Gretel asked, in a funny voice I'd get used to eventually. Part of the field suit package was a modification of my implanted telephone so that sub-vocalization could be heard over the channel the Heinleiners used suit-to-suit.

"I still want to gasp," I said.

"Say again?"

I repeated it, saying each word carefully.

"That's just psychotic."

I think she meant psychosomatic, or maybe psychological. Or possibly psychotic was the perfect word. How would you describe someone who trusted her delicate hide to a spatial effect that, as near as I could understand it, had no existence in the real world?

The desire to breathe was real enough, even though a suppressor of some kind was at work in my brain cutting off that part of the autonomic nervous system. My body was getting all the oxygen it needed, but when your lungs have been inhaling and exhaling for over a hundred years, some part of you gets a little alarmed when asked to shut it off for an hour or so. I'd been holding my breath for almost ten minutes so far. I felt about ready to go back inside and gulp .

"You want to go back inside?"

I wondered if I'd been muttering to myself. Gotta watch that. I shook my head, remembered how hard that was to see, and mouthed "No."

"Then take my hand," she said. I did, and our two suit fields melted together and I felt her bare hand in mine. I could see that, if these things ever got on the market, there was going to be a big fad in lovemaking under the stars.

Don't go shopping for a field suit just yet, though.

They'll surely be available in a few years, what with current conditions. A lot of people are angry at the Heinleiners for not just bestowing the patents gratis to the general public. I've heard mutterings. A lot of good it will do the mutterers; they simply don't understand Heinleiners. There goddam sure ain't no such thing as a free lunch, and they're out to prove it.

As I write this, the Heinleiners are still pretty pissed off, and who could blame them? All charges have naturally been dropped, the statutes of limitations have expired, as it were. Nobody's out hunting them. Yet I swore a solemn oath not to reveal the names of any of them until given permission, and that permission has not been granted, and who's to say they're wrong? Say what you will about me as a reporter, but I never revealed a source, and I never will. Hence, the girl I will call "Gretel." Hence all the aliases I will bestow on the people I met after I followed Gretel's trail into the perfect mirror.

And I promised not to lie to you, but from here on in I will not always tell you the whole truth. Events have of necessity been edited, to protect people with no reason to trust authority but who trusted me and then found… but I'm getting ahead of myself.

The trail of breadcrumbs led into the rubble that washed at the base of the Heinlein . At first it seemed as if they vanished into a blank wall, but I found that if I ducked a little there was a way through.