Lucifer's Hammer - Larry Niven [13]
Past the sisterhood place was a plate-glass window. Letters in Gothic script said SECURITY FIRST FEDERAL BAR. Inside were stools, three small tables, four booths, a pinball machine and a jukebox. The walls were decorated with whatever the customers preferred, a supply of marking pens lay on the bar, and the walls were whitewashed at intervals. Paint peeled away in places to reveal comments made years before, a kind of pop-culture archeology.
Harvey moved into the dimness like a tired old man. As his eyes adjusted he spotted Mark Czescu on a stool. He pulled himself up next to Czescu and propped elbows on bar.
Czescu was thirty-odd, almost ageless, a perpetual young man about to launch himself on his career. Harvey knew Mark had been in the Navy for four years, and had tried several colleges, starting at UCLA and working down through community junior colleges. He sometimes called himself a student even yet, but no one believed he'd ever finish. He wore biker's boots, old jeans, a T-shirt and a crumpled Aussie digger hat. He wore his black hair long and his black beard full. There was ground-in dirt under his nails and fresh streaks of grease on the jeans, but his hands and clothes had been freshly washed for all of that; he just didn't have any pathological need to be scrubbed pink.
When Mark wasn't smiling he had a dangerous look, despite the respectable beer belly. He smiled at lot; but he could take some things very seriously, and he sometimes moved with a tough crowd. They were part of his image: Mark Czescu could run with the real bikers if he wanted to, but he didn't want to. Just now he looked concerned. "You don't look good," he said.
"I feel like killing somebody," said Harvey.
"You feel that way, I could maybe find somebody," Mark said. He let it trail off.
"No. They're my bosses. They're all of them my bosses, damn their innumerable souls." Harvey ordered a pitcher and two glasses, and ignored Mark's suggestion. He knew Mark couldn't arrange a real murder. It was part of the Czescu image, to know more than you did about whatever subject came up. It usually amused Harvey, but just now he wasn't in the mood for games.
"I want something from them," Harvey said. "And they know they're going to give it to me. How the hell can they not know? I've even got the sponsor wired! But the sons of bitches have to play games. If one of them fell off a balcony tomorrow, I'd be in for an extra month breaking in a new one, and I can't afford the time." It didn't hurt to humor Czescu; the guy could be useful, and a lot of fun—and maybe he could arrange a murder. You never really knew.
"So what are they going to give you?" Mark asked.
"A comet. I'm going to make a whole series of documentaries about a new comet. The guy who discovered it chances to own seventy percent of the company that will sponsor the documentaries."
Czescu chortled. Harvey nodded agreement. "It's a beautiful setup. Chance to make the kind of films I really want to do. And to learn a lot. Not like that last shit, interviewing doomsters, everybody with his own private vision of the end of the world. I wanted to cut my throat and get it over with before that one was finished."
"So what's wrong?"
Harvey sighed, and drank more beer, and said, "Look. There are about four guys who could really tell me to go take a flying frig and make it stick. But that'd be a mistake, right? The New York people won't put up with blowing a sponsored series. They're going to buy the show. But how will anyone know they've