The Ganymede Club (12 page)

"Forget it. I'm not
that
busy, and I never will be."

"But I have more spare time than you do. One other person, then? Just one. That's all I would really need to work with me."

Spook crossed his fingers again—but, this time, out of sight—while Lola hesitated.

"Who is this other person?" she said at last. Lola didn't want Spook to know it, but she was feeling a terrible need to show that she cared about him, that she trusted him.

"He's one of the top Puzzle Network people." What else did Spook know? He had some idea how the other's mind worked on problems, but that was not going to impress Lola. "He calls himself
Megachirops.
"

"That's his real name?"

"No. Hardly anybody on the Puzzle Network uses his or her own name. I certainly don't.
Megachirops
is taken from
Megachiroptera.
That's the name of the Order of Great Bats."

"I hope that tells you more than it tells me. What's his real name?"

A good question. "I'm not sure he'd want me to tell you that."

"Well,
he'd
better be prepared to tell me that.
In person.
I'm willing to make a heavily edited version of the record for the two of you to work with, but I want to meet him. Soon. You arrange for us all to have dinner. All right?"

"No problem."

Spook stared at the ceiling, where the war display had continued and Earth's Northern Hemisphere was dying under a silent rain of radioactive dust. Now all he had to do was persuade the reclusive Megachirops—who had so far shown no interest in meeting anyone, not even a soul mate from the Puzzle Network—that he would enjoy nothing better than a cozy dinner with Lola and Spook Belman. "No problem" was right. No problem for Lola.

8

Five years after the end of the war, traffic within the solar system was at last creeping back to planned schedules. With regular traffic came systemwide traffic monitoring, but there was one major difference: Before the war, the transportation nerve center had been on Earth; now and for the foreseeable future, it was on Ganymede. The populated Southern Hemisphere of Earth was too busy struggling for its own survival to control or direct anything anywhere.

The deep space radars of Ganymede and Callisto had readily picked up the silvery exploration vessel when it appeared on their perimeter. Its trajectory suggested an origin farther out, almost certainly in the Saturn system, but the computers were not sure.

Transport computer talked to ship's computer, and made the confirmation. This was the explorer ship
Weland
, returning with the Seventh Saturn Expedition to its home base on Lysithea after two months away.

At that point the Ganymede dispatch computer lost interest. Lysithea was far from Jupiter's main moons and off the beaten track for all major transport routes. The probability of conflict with other trajectories or competition for docking resources was zero. The
Weland
was turned loose, free to determine its own rendezvous. It moved on toward Lysithea under minimal power, the Diabelli Omnivores barely sustaining their fusion reactions.

The ship would not dock on the outer surface of the planetoid. No human facilities were there, or ever likely to be. The surface communications and control stations were staffed entirely by machines, designed to operate with an ambient temperature that never went higher than seventy-five degrees above absolute zero.

These machines did not merely tolerate the cold. They depended on it. Their components would fail if the temperature ever rose as high as the boiling point of nitrogen, a "hot" seventy-seven Kelvin. In the event of a supersized solar flare or other anomalous heat, the machines would estivate, tunneling down through the volatiles of Lysithea's surface like crabs into sand, until they reached a colder level a few tens of meters beneath.

Lysithea was all right for machines, but what about humans? Three hundred years earlier, people would have argued that any form of life was unthinkable on anything as cold and small as Lysithea. A hundred years ago, "unthinkable" might have changed to "undesirable." Today, a machine could tolerate—even be programmed to relish—surface conditions on Lysithea. A human could survive on the surface with special equipment. But why would one choose to, when the interior was cool, quiet, and safe?

The
Weland
eased up to the landing circle on the icy shield of Lysithea's surface and entered a broad entry shaft that slanted steeply down through rock mixed with a slush of nitrogen and methane. The ship descended nine kilometers vertically, until it finally docked on the three-hundred-meter metal globe of the central habitat.

Jeffrey Cayuga and Alicia Rios, suitless, emerged into an icy vacuum and moved to the entrance of the air-filled and heated interior. A monitor confirmed their identities by half a dozen tests before it permitted them to enter.

Lenny Costas was waiting for them within. A stranger would have remarked on the musty and unpleasant odor that permeated the habitation bubble. Neither Costas nor the newcomers seemed to notice it.

"I arrived here two days ago." Costas spoke in his usual dry monotone. "There have been no significant problems during your absence. I will bring one small oddity to your attention in due course. I assume that the trip went according to plan?"

"Construction continues on schedule. Three more months, and it will be complete." Cayuga moved on past Costas, drifting through the habitat toward the main lounge and message center. He offered no form of ritual greeting, any more than the other had said a word of welcome. "There was one small complication, which is why we arrive one day later than our original return date. We saw evidence that a smart probe recently performed a Helene flyby. However, when we investigated further we decided that it was not necessary to send a message here."

Costas froze. "A probe. That is surprising and disturbing."

"It is not as bad as it sounds." Cayuga was at the computer console. "We determined that there have been no recent lease-monitoring probes sent to the Saturn system. The trajectory of this one indicates that it was launched decades ago, before the First Expedition. My guess is that there was some flaw in its navigation program. It traveled way out, beyond the Kuiper Belt, and finally swung back toward Sol. Helene was no more than a target of opportunity for its return journey. We confirmed that the probe did not penetrate or explore the Helene interior. I doubt if any analysis facilities on Earth or Mars are in a position to accept its findings, whatever they may be. However, this proves that our decision to make Helene modifications as inconspicuous as possible was a wise one. We also need to make sure that no anomalies have been reported locally."

"I feel sure that they have not. I talked to Polk and Dahlquist yesterday, and everything is perfectly normal on Ganymede." But Costas offered no objection when Alicia Rios joined Cayuga, and they shunted a large fraction of Lysithea's computing facilities to augment the standard search routines.

Within a few seconds the first results were appearing. They did not constitute a real-time message analysis, since although the communications net of the Jovian system was under scrutiny—constant and automated—by the Lysithean monitors, its message load was too vast and variable to permit instant analysis. However, within twenty-four hours any chosen subject could be queried.

In this case there was no need to wait.
Helene
, the tiny moon of Saturn in its libration point orbit with Dione, was a permanent key word for query in the Lysithean computers. Any mention, for any reason, would have been flagged.

The three watched impassively as a scant handful of references were played out.

"Good enough," said Cayuga at last. "Reports and standard catalogs for natural bodies within the solar system. No mention of a probe flying close to Helene. You said that you had an anomaly of your own to report?"

" 'Anomaly' may be too strong a word." Costas took over the panel. "Polk came across this four days ago. It was generated by the search routine that we have been using for singular events related to life and death. This record was part of a data transfer taking place on Ganymede."

"Open line?"

"No. It was on one of the closed pathways that we have been able to tap. One of the oddities is that the transfer destination wiped itself automatically from the records. Someone has gone to great trouble to make sure that no one can track them to their physical location. That's another reason why Polk believes this may be significant. I am skeptical. In view of your impending return I decided to wait before taking action. Get ready. Any second now you will enter derived reality."

The warning was necessary. The sequence began at once, as a disconcerting fall through space. Cayuga and Rios found themselves accelerating toward a dark surface. A ghostly clock, overlaid on the scene but not part of it, was ticking away the seconds. Lights, steady but dim, shone far off toward a distant horizon. The drop continued for hundreds of meters, until the surface beneath resolved to the flat roof of a building, marked by skylights and antennas. Their body position had steadied so that they fell feetfirst. They could see where the landing would occur, on a dark flat area of smooth metal. Down, down, down, faster and faster, moments from final impact.

And then, without warning, the sequence ended.

"I don't see why this was worth noting." Cayuga remained impassive. "Where is the rest of it?"

"You've experienced the whole thing. For some unknown reason, that file has been cropped. It lacks subject identifiers. That's why I think it is no more than a clever simulation."

"Rios?" Cayuga turned to her. "You are the specialist."

"It is not a simulation." Alicia Rios shook her dark head and gave the instruction to repeat the last few seconds of the record.

"Definitely not," she went on, as the sequence again ran its course to the final dizzying moment of the fall. "Too much detail for a straight simulation. That's the real thing. Some person experienced that fall—and it didn't kill them. It should have. I am not sure that any one of us would survive it. And someone else was able to tap the person's memory record. This is a haldane product, it has to be."

Cayuga nodded. "I'm beginning to see what Polk is making a fuss about. A haldane product would explain the use of the closed pathway, but it doesn't account for the big problem: survival."

"I agree. Any normal human who experienced that fall must have died on impact." Alicia Rios turned to Lenny Costas. "What do you say to that?"

"It may not be a real-time sequence. Maybe it was a fall in a low-gee environment, speeded up."

"Not unless the clock overlay was false. Time was passing at a standard rate."

"Even if we can produce an explanation for everything, I still agree with Polk." Cayuga requested the header-record descriptors. "It is something to be taken seriously. We must have answers to some basic questions. Who is this? Where did it happen? When did it happen?"

"Polk says he can answer one of those," said Lenny Costas. "If that is a real-time sequence, and if the clock is right, then the motion indicates a fall on either Mars or Mercury. And there are no large buildings on Mercury. So it is Mars."

"Mars again." Cayuga was scrolling through the header record, frame by frame. "I thought we were finished with Mars when we disposed of Neely, and then for sure when Barker got rid of that reporter. But perhaps not. Maybe someone else managed to become a Club member, and we don't even know about it." He paused, freezing the frame display. "Look at this. We may not have a subject identifier, but at least we know who initiated the transfer. Here is the name. Spook Belman. Rios, would you—"

"I know." Alicia was already making a query of the general data files. "He's here, in the open census file. Spook Belman, of Ganymede. But he's just a child. He's only fifteen years old. He is in the custody of . . . ah!"

"Of who?"

"Of a woman identified as his sister, Lola Belman." Alicia paused. "She is in the file, too. And Lola Belman is shown as a licensed haldane."

Members of the Ganymede Club did not "argue" with each other, according to the usual meaning of that word. They held discussions, they examined problems, and they considered alternatives. In this case, it seemed to Lenny Costas that there was little to decide.

"It is simple," he said. He had queried the census bank for more information on Lola and Spook Belman, and had been studying the return. "Their mother and father died on Earth in the first Belt attack. All their other near relatives died in the war. No one in the Jovian system is close to them. If we take care of them, nice and quietly, that will be that. And since they are already on Ganymede, it makes matters easier. Another little job for Jinx Barker?"

Alicia Rios and Jeffrey Cayuga exchanged glances. During their two-month journey to the Saturn system and back, Lenny Costas had been the subject of discussion many times. He would carry out instructions to the letter, and no one was more zealous in safeguarding the interests of the Club. But there was a point at which single-mindedness and lack of imagination became dangerous. And he seemed, to both of them, to be getting worse. Alicia often compared Costas with Jinx Barker, to the former's disadvantage.

"We could ask Barker to serve as you suggest," Cayuga said quietly. "But it doesn't address the real problem. Whoever had the fall on Mars, we know it wasn't Lola or Spook Belman. Their records show that neither of them has ever been there. Disposing of them won't tell us who it was."

"It's worse than that," Rios added. "Without the Belmans, we have nothing. They are our only lead to what we really want."

"So what do we do?" Costas frowned in perplexity.

"Someone has to meet with Lola and Spook Belman and get to know them personally," replied Cayuga. "Find out what they know, learn how they know it."

"Me?"
Costas said the word reluctantly.

"Not you. Definitely not you. I don't want a Club member exposed to a haldane, under any circumstances. We have too much to lose. I think your first suggestion was better, but with a variation." Cayuga turned to Alicia Rios. "You have assured me that Jinx Barker has superior talents as a male companion."