Gateway To Xanadu by Sharon Green Page B

blinking bays out of eighteen, four private ship slips filled out of fourteen, and less than two hundred people in an area designed to hold the traffic from maximum filled shuttle and slip space. It looked like Faraway was destined to continue as a ghost station until that sector of space filled up a good deal more and the frontier moved out past it.
    I continued my amble into the docking area and down the center, idly glancing at the rows of empty waiting-seats, uninterested in them despite the added weight of books in my monolon bag. I had almost reached the spot when footsteps sounded behind me, and I turned to see Val and Ringer coming up.
    Ringer looked just as he had a little while earlier, but Val was no longer wearing his cobalt-blue base uniform. He’d traded it for a pair of dark slacks, a blue-green wide-sleeved shirt, dark loafer-like shoes, and an expensive-looking ,woven-metal neck chain of gleaming, silvery stellenium. He looked a hell of a lot better than an absolute stranger had any right to look, but I made sure not to let the opinion show on my face.
    “Looks like we both decided to get here a little early,” I said to Ringer. “Too bad the shuttle won’t do the same.”
    “Just be glad you timed it so well,” Ringer answered, glancing around at the twenty-five or thirty people sitting in waiting-seats not too far away from us. “If you’d come in too late for this liner, you would have had to wait more than a month for the next, or you would have had to take that ship in closer to Xanadu than was smart. It wasn’t hard getting the Station officials here to neglect checking the registry on your transportation, but almost anywhere else the request would have had to be through channels more public than we would have liked. We need as much quiet on this as we can manage, for as long as possible.”
    “Until we spot the busy little eyes and ears at work,” I nodded, glancing around the way Ringer was doing, automatically checking that no one had too much interest in our conversation. “But if we were really up against it, we could always take your ship. A month off wouldn’t disagree with you, would it, Ringer?”
    “On Faraway Station?” he asked with a growl of ridicule. “If I have to be stranded somewhere, it isn’t going to be a place like Faraway O.S. I left that behind me a long time ago. Let’s sit down for a while, or it will feel like that shuttle is never coming. ”
    Ringer started for an empty section of seats in his usual way, without checking to see if anyone was following, but this time I didn’t get the immediate choice of joining him. A big hand took my arm before I could turn, nearly crushing my sleeve despite the lack of deliberate muscle in the grip, and I looked up to see Val’s calm appraisal.
    “You haven’t said anything about how dowdy I look,” he observed with a hint of amusement. “I’m sure it’s as bad as you expected it to be, if not a good deal worse.”
    “It was clear he knew he didn’t look dowdy at all, and it was also clear he expected me to do anything but admit it.
    “Why, not at all, Val,” I protested in very sincere tones, a friendly little smile backing the words. “You look just fine, you really do, and Ringer must have been very pleased with the amount of money you saved the department. Keep it up, and you and he will get along just fine.”
    “So you’ve decided to keep on being mad at me,” he said, a compromise between doubt and annoyance.
    “How long do you intend keeping it up?”
    “Oh, I never get mad at the men I partner with,” I assured him. “We’ll do just fine working together-but I hope some of those clothes you got are warmly lined. If you don’t manage to score elsewhere during your off-hours, you’ll need them. ”
    “If being an irresponsible brat is one of your criteria for being an agent, I won’t be qualifying,” Val said with a look of scorn. “If she considers you off-limits and leaves you out of it