The Ganymede Club (24 page)

As Alicia Rios terminated the call, Jinx Barker sat for a few seconds longer in the darkness. He was tingling all over, more alive than he had felt for weeks. The very thought was enough to start the adrenaline flowing. Making love to Lola Belman certainly gave pleasure, but it could not compete with the preferred and ultimate form of personal interaction.

He went swiftly and silently back to her apartment, unlocked the door, and moved to cancel the message that he had left on her console. As he removed his shirt and pants, he stared down at her. She had turned over in her sleep, after he left, so that now she lay on her right side with her head thrown back. He studied the slim neck and the graceful line, of her jaw. The pulse in her throat was visible, just above her larynx.

He reached down and touched her skin with his index finger, exactly on that tiny regular spasm of pumped blood.

The other option.
He believed that he knew what his instructions would be. But until he heard for certain, patience was needed.

Jinx lay down again by Lola's side. Pleasure deferred could be thought of as pleasure enhanced. And pleasure should not be mixed with business. This was still business.

His own pulse steadied and slowed. Within five minutes he had sunk into a dreamless and contented sleep.

* * *

Lola needed less rest than most people, and she always slept lightly. As soon as Conner left her side, she had sensed the loss of his warm presence, and when her outer door clicked shut, she had come fully awake.

She read his message on her console. It made little sense. Not even a media reporter got up and went to work in the middle of the night, unless he received a wake-up call to say that something new and urgent had come up. She had heard no call.

So why had Conner gone wandering off?

Lola lay thoughtful in the dim-lit room. One of the gifts—or curses—of being a haldane was that you could never turn off your antenna. You were sensitive, even when you sometimes wished that you weren't. It was quite obvious that Conner was not what he had said he was. She had known that for more than a week, and had ignored the fact because she wanted to. However, during the hours when she was awake and he was sleeping, she had already planted her deep verbal hooks. But would it be right to exercise them?

She was sure she could find some way to justify whatever she did. Most of the conscious mind's efforts went into an attempt to provide logical explanations and justifications, after the fact, for the perverse and nonlogical ninety-five percent of human actions dictated by the unconscious mind. Not even a haldane was exempt from that.

The idea of quizzing Conner without his knowing it had originally been justified as a game by her conscious mind. Now she suspected that it was no such thing. It was a dark suspicion derived from the underside of her brain. The haldane's basic training texts offered explicit advice:
Do not be afraid to act on your gut instincts. Psychometric tools are of great value, but they are most useful when they confirm and reinforce what you suspect to be true.

She was awake when Conner returned, but she pretended to be still asleep. She watched through slitted eyes as he removed his clothes. The moment when he stooped to place his stiffened finger on her naked throat produced the first touch of fear. His face had changed. His movements were somehow different, too, the unpredictable actions of a stranger.

When he lay down again at her side and quickly fell asleep, she told herself that she was suffering from an attack of excess imagination. He had gone away for a few minutes to respond to a work emergency, found that he was not needed, and at once come back to her.

But why had he leaned over her with his hand at her throat, and what was that alien half-smile on his face?

Lola knew that she had to do it, or remain sleepless for the rest of the night. She did not move, but she spoke the first of the sequence of planted keys:
"Black Arrow."

He did not respond. Apparently did not hear her; but she knew that the hook was set. Ten seconds later she had confirmation. His eyes flickered open, stared at nothing, and then closed. Lola felt her own shiver of awe. It was here, and not in the much publicized mind-reading abilities, that the haldane magic lay. Even the best theories were inadequate to explain how this worked, or why sometimes it failed.

She waited thirty seconds, then intoned softly,
"Treasure Island."

The spoken key produced no visible reaction at all. Lola expected none. She waited another full minute, and finally said,
"Kidnapped."

His eyes opened, and this time they stayed open.

It was time to begin. "Conner?" That produced no reaction; so she added, "Conner Preston: Are you awake?"

His lips moved, but no sound came out.

"Can you hear me?"

"I can hear you."

"So why didn't you answer me?"

"Because I am not Conner Preston."

Lola did not know what she had been expecting. It was not this. "Then who are you?"

There were a few moments of what seemed to be an internal struggle, until at last he muttered, "I am Jinx Barker."

A strange reply, far off from anything that Lola might have predicted. "So who is Conner Preston?"

"He was a media reporter for Ceres Broadcasting."

"Is that the same as United Broadcasting?"

Another pause. "Ceres Broadcasting became part of United Broadcasting, after the war."

"And do you work for United Broadcasting?"

"No."

"So who do you work for?" After a long unyielding silence, Lola added, "Who do you work for, Jinx Barker, and what do you do?"

His silence continued. At last it became apparent that he was not going to answer.

What was she supposed to do now? Lola rose from the bed and began to pace the room. She was naked, but she didn't even notice. Deep hooks and keys were a standard part of haldane technique. She had run through a dozen sessions with them during her own training, as both a subject and as a haldane questioner. She had read transcripts of scores more. Sometimes a subject would freeze, as Conner (or Jinx) had frozen, but it was always when the questions touched on some deeply personal or long-hidden topic. It was unheard of for a subject to tense up when asked something as simple as who he worked for, and what he did.

The worst thing that she could do now would be to act rashly. She needed time to ponder what had happened and perhaps consult references or another haldane.

And in the meantime, she needed to protect herself. It was probably quite unnecessary—but she felt again the finger on her neck, and saw the strange, almost exalted, expression on his face. She crouched naked by his side, and prepared to implant the series of haldane protection keys.

Would they work? She had never tried them before, never knew anyone who had. Conner seemed a gentle, loving man, but patients who turned violent were not uncommon. She had to prepare for the worst.

It took almost an hour—installing the verbal cues and then checking his physical responses over and over until she was satisfied. At last she gave the command that released the original triple hooks:
"Kidnapped. Treasure Island. Black Arrow."

It was like cutting an internal string. His eyes closed and his taut body relaxed. If he had ever been awake, rather than in some induced state between sleep and waking, that had now been replaced by a deep natural slumber.

Lola lay down beside him—beside her lover, Conner Preston, who was also a stranger, Jinx Barker. She felt watchful and wary. Twenty minutes earlier she had been worried about the possibility of lying awake all night; now she was afraid that she might go to sleep.

It never occurred to her to leave. Above everything else, she was still a haldane. At her side lay a man with a deep, deep problem.

* * *

Even when she was distracted by worry and lack of sleep, work had to go on. Lola blinked at Bryce Sonnenberg, sitting in the chair opposite, and wished that she could borrow some of his bright-eyed energy. She had remained awake until Conner Preston left, early in the morning, and by that time it was too late to think of sleep.

She started slowly and easily, more for her sake than for his. "I'd like to talk to you about your mathematical work. When did you first become interested in number theory, and how old were you when you got into it?"

It was a minor trap, since it offered Bryce an easy chance to talk about parental influence. But he answered without hesitation. "I can't really answer that question. I know that I could do sums before I could read or write, almost before I could speak. When I was a child, my idea of a good time was a long, complicated calculation."

"Did anyone ask you to do calculations?"

"Why, yes." His brow wrinkled. "When I was very young, it was my father. He encouraged me, gave me harder and harder problems."

According to every instrument, and backed by Lola's own experience, he was not lying.

"During our first session," Lola said gently, "you told me that you never knew your father."

"That's true." The instruments confirmed his confusion—and still insisted that he was telling the truth. "I didn't know him," he went on. "But this is weird. If I close my eyes, I can
see
him. He's bending down and asking me something. And I know he died, when I was still very little."

"Let's take a look. Concentrate on him. Listen to him."

Lola felt disappointment as the computer feed came in. This derived-reality scene lacked the sharpness of previous sequences. The visual information was minimal, and a gruff but soft voice was saying, "All right, here's another one. What's twelve thousand and sixteen times thirty-seven?" The human shape that came with the voice was blurred in outline, its features indistinct. Only the numbers seemed real, springing into existence before her, then rapidly reshaping themselves into a new form. She rattled off the result like a machine: "four hundred and forty-four thousand, five hundred and ninety-two."

"Right!"

After that word of praise came a sudden discontinuity. She felt overwhelming fear and sadness. Another form hovered over her, and a harsher voice was in her ears: "Forget that stuff, and forget them. They're both dead and they're not coming back. You do what I say now. Understand? Exactly what I say and when I say—or you'll pay."

The image faded. Lola waited, but nothing else happened.

Memory, or imagination?

"Bryce. I'm going to ask you questions. I want you to reply as quickly as you can, or tell me if you can't answer."

"Very well." There was no alarm or tension in him. He seemed almost bored.

"What is three hundred and sixty-four times nine hundred and seventy-six?" Lola had his interior body scans, as well as the evidence of the telemetry. He had no form of augmenting implant. His reply came almost before she had finished speaking: "Three hundred and fifty-five thousand, two hundred and sixty-four."

"What is the cube root of nineteen?" Lola did not bother to check his first answer. There would be time for that after the session.

"Two-point-six-six-eight-four-zero. How many more places do you want?"

"That will be enough." She would check that answer, too, but she had little doubt as to what she would find. No one would spit out answers with such confidence and precision unless they were correct. Bryce Sonnenberg was a born calculator. His "memory" of his father asking him questions was unreliable, since his own subconscious might be feeding him those answers.

However, there was a huge difference between arithmetic and mathematics. History was full of
idiots savants
, able to do prodigious feats of mental calculation while having no idea of the nature of mathematical proof. Was he truly a mathematician, as he had claimed?

"You specialize in number
theory
," she said. "Would you agree that theory is a long way from simple numbers and calculations?"

She expected agreement, but instead his whole face brightened and he laughed aloud. "Are you kidding? There couldn't be a closer connection. In classical number theory, everything starts and ends with the numbers." His words came bubbling out twice as fast as usual. He was more animated than he had ever been before. "You see, it's not like physics or biology, where you might do an experiment and then spend years trying to come up with a theory, or develop a theory and not be able to find a practical way to test it. All the great number theorists in history, Fermat and Euler and Gauss and Ramanujan and Deslisle, all the way back to Euclid—they found their theorems by playing with the numbers themselves. They still had to
prove
a result after they discovered it, and that can get fiendishly hard—like the Goldbach conjecture, or the infinite number of prime pairs, or the last Fermat theorem—but it helps a lot, when you're trying for a proof, if you are already convinced that the result is true. Quadratic reciprocity, the little Fermat theorem, the prime-number theorem—they all started from numerical examples. Of course, sometimes even the greatest theorists were
wrong.
Even Fermat was wrong about a particular sequence of numbers being primes. But then the numbers proved that, too. One ugly counterexample; it's enough to dispose of a beautiful conjecture. Did you ever hear of de Pulignac?"

Lola was surprised to find that he knew she was still there. "I don't think so. It's not a name that springs to mind."

"It ought to be." He grinned at her. "Poor old de Pulignac—he is an awful warning to number theorists. In 1848, he stated that every odd number can be written as a sum of a power of two and a prime number. For example, thirty-seven is thirty-two plus five, and eighty-seven is sixty-four plus twenty-three. De Pulignac said he had confirmed his theorem for every number up to three million."

"And?"

"Well, he was wrong. And in a very embarrassing way. His theorem doesn't work for one hundred and twenty-seven, and that's not what you'd call a big number. Try it for yourself and you'll see."

"I'll take your word for it." But she didn't need to. Anyone could improvise a lie. What a person could not do was display expert knowledge in a particular field where it was easy to expose a factual falsehood. "Have you ever had other memories in which you were doing mathematical calculations?"