The Ganymede Club (33 page)

He could do all that, probably without much difficulty, and maybe the answer would allow Lola Belman to pick out the right name when she awoke. But Bat had worked the Puzzle Network too long to ignore minor anomalies. One of them was staring him in the face.

He returned to the information gathered by Mellifera. The probes insisted that no member of the original expedition had a living descendant. That was certainly possible, and a computer would have had no problem with it. But a human is a strange amalgam of logic and illogic, where hunches from the subconscious guide and warn conscious thought processes. Bat knew the answer he had received was possible; but it seemed somehow implausible.

He again summoned Mellifera. This time the probes went into the Ganymede data banks with a different mission: to report any known liaisons of the first expedition members, and any descendants—living or dead.

The answer, when it came, was worse than the last one. According to the data banks, no member of the first expedition had ever engaged in a long-term liaison. None had ever been the mother or the father of a child.

Implausibility was approaching impossibility. Lola Belman had seen a man "related to a member of the first expedition." Related
how?

Bat moved away from the communications center and sought the darkest corner of the Bat Cave. He was disappointed—with himself. It was obvious that he had been delivered a fact profoundly relevant to the deaths of Jinx Barker and Alicia Rios and to the lives of Lola Belman and Bryce Sonnenberg. It was equally obvious that Bat did not understand what he had been told. The reason for his databank search was not really a quest for
facts;
it was for
insight.
And that insight was sadly lacking.

Bat sat alone and sleepless, through the small hours of the night, waiting for the still, small voice of enlightenment to whisper in his ear.

21

Lola woke up groggy and uneasy. It took her a few seconds to realize where she was, and to decide that she had every right to feel worried. Even the depths of the Bat Cave provided uncertain security.

She was still where she had fallen asleep, but someone had come along and thrown a thick blanket over her body and her feet, which hung over the edge of the chair. She didn't remember kicking off her shoes, but she was now barefoot.

She pushed back the cover and leaned over to scrabble on the floor, working by touch more than by sight. Once she had her shoes on, she couldn't justify lying down again. She rubbed her eyes, looked around, and saw no signs of anyone.

And no wonder. She glanced at the clock on the long kitchen range and saw that she had snored away the whole night and half the morning. Over by the communications center the display was frozen and a red attention light was blinking. She went across to it. The message said:

To Lola Belman: Spook and Bryce Sonnenberg both rose earlier than I, and they have gone off somewhere together. I, too, have occasion to be absent. I offer my apologies for providing nothing more than the food-service machine can offer. On another matter, would you kindly peruse the list that follows, and determine if any of the names listed therein correspond to persons reported by Jinx Barker as having been present at the First Family party that you attended. Signed: Rustum Battachariya (landlord).

The last word wasn't much of a joke, but Lola was surprised to see it there at all. She, more than anyone else, recognized Bat's desire—better call it a compulsion—for privacy. Count it as one more reason why she had to find out who was pursuing her and liberate them all from the Bat Cave.

The list of names, then—as soon as two more urgent items had been taken care of. Lola used the bathroom and found it amazingly neat and clean, considering Bat's slovenly dress and apparent lack of interest in bathing. She would have to have a word with Spook. Let him loose in there for half an hour, and Bat would throw them out and damn the consequences.

She went back to the kitchen and studied the autochef. It was a top-of-the-line model, new to her and able to produce food that was not merely adequate but better than what most human cooks could manage. Apparently Bat was a real gourmet. On the other hand, you didn't get that fat without being a pig as well. Lola itched to lure him into the haldane's chair, then scolded herself. It was her job to treat people whose problems were making them or others unhappy. There was no sign that Bat was guilty of either sin.

In other circumstances she would have had fun testing the limits of the autochef, but today had higher priorities. She filled a bowl with sliced fruit, smothered it with cream and honey, and did what she had told Spook never to do again: She set it down on the communications-center console and started to spoon sticky food into her mouth as she examined the list that Bat had left her. The astonishing thing was that nervousness and stress and fear of deadly attack didn't destroy the desire to eat. It seemed, in her case at least, to increase it.

There were scores of names on the list. Unfortunately there was a high degree of similarity among many of them. She counted twenty-one Dahlquists, twenty Cayugas, eighteen Jing-lis, fourteen Rioses, eleven Munzers, eight Costases, and six Polks. After a long time, enough for her to empty the bowl and go back for another helping, she tagged two of the names: Lenny Costas and Ignatz Dahlquist. She added a note:
I'm not absolutely sure, but these two seem right. Can you obtain a physical description of them? I remember what they looked like.

At that point she seemed to be at a loose end. For all her sense of urgency she had no idea of what to do next. She studied Bat's communications center for a few minutes, marveling at its complexity. He seemed to have a computer contact point in every transportation center and every ship throughout the whole Jovian system. He might never travel himself and might shudder at the thought, but he had his inorganic eyes, ears, and hands everywhere. There was no sign saying, "This is an illegal operation," but Lola was sure that Bat paid little attention to anyone's right to privacy, except his own. If he wanted to, he could have tapped her patient-data files. Maybe he had. More likely, the tampering that she had detected there had been part of Jinx Barker's efforts.

Jinx Barker. Lola sighed and did what she had not been able to face doing the previous day. She chose a message mode that could not be traced back to its origin and sent a terse note to Ganymede Security. The body of a man, Jinx Barker, would be found in the office of the haldane, Lola Belman. She provided location coordinates.

Her action made Lola's own position worse. She knew Security would go to her office at once, with a full investigating team of humans and machines. The presence of haldane drugs in Barker's body would be determined within minutes, together with the cause of death. Her own absence would suggest her guilt to them. Then the mystery employer of Jinx Barker would not be the only one interested in finding Lola. She would become a fugitive from the Ganymede government, wanted at the very least for questioning. Security had some very fancy tracking methods. There was no reason why they would keep this location a secret if they found it, so her presence in the Bat Cave endangered all the others.

She was keenly aware of her own feelings of guilt toward the other three in the Bat Cave. Jinx Barker and his employers had really been after
her
, with anyone else regarded as secondary. More than ever, she had to find out who wanted her dead, and why. And she had to get away from the Bat Cave.

She saw on one of the communication center's other units, over to her left, a fixed display. It was something she remembered vaguely that Bat had been talking about last night when she was right at the point of passing out:
The death was reported today ofJeffrey Cayuga, leader of the fifth, sixth, and seventh Saturn expeditions . . .

That's right. Jeffrey Cayuga was dead, too, and with him went their last real lead. Lola stared hard at the final sentence of the display:
His heir is his nephew, Joss Cayuga, who is one of the few survivors of the Ceres final battle and recently arrived in the Jovian system from his home in the Belt.

Since Joss Cayuga had inherited his uncle's estate, he also presumably had all Jeffrey Cayuga's records. Alicia Rios's files had been destroyed, but if Cayuga's were intact, they might hold the key to everything that had been going on.

Joss Cayuga had made his home in the Belt, but that was before his uncle's death. Where had Jeffrey Cayuga lived? As a leader of Saturn expeditions, there was a good chance that he had chosen the Jovian system, perhaps even Ganymede.

Lola consulted the general data banks, not knowing she was covering ground that Bat had explored less than twelve hours ago. She had an answer inside two minutes. Jeffrey Cayuga was there all right, and was correctly identified as the late Saturn explorer. He had lived, as she hoped, in the Jovian system—but he had lived on
Lysithea.

Lola sagged in disappointment. Lysithea was certainly in the Jovian system,
technically.
In practice, no one paid much attention to anything but the four biggest moons. Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto had been known and named since the original discovery of the telescope. She had seen them herself with Spook's little refractor, back when the two of them still lived on Earth. The dozen small fragments of rock and ice that orbited closer than Io or beyond Callisto were another matter. They had been discovered and catalogued in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but no one had taken much notice of them, then or since. Lysithea was one of those insignificant mini-worlds, along with Elara and Himalia and Pasiphae and Sinope. Lola didn't know how big Lysithea was, or how far out, except that it was a long way from Ganymede. It was news to her that anyone made a home there.

She performed a quick check. The population file indicated that Jeffrey Cayuga had been Lysithea's only inhabitant. It must have been a strange life, alone on a world, but there was no accounting for personal tastes. Bat would probably like it just fine. Lysithea's average distance from Ganymede was close to eleven million kilometers—a good day's journey each way in a medium-performance ship. There was no guarantee that if she went there, the late Jeffrey Cayuga's files would tell her anything.

On the other hand, she was learning nothing here, and there was a lot to be said for being far from Ganymede for the next few days. On far-off Lysithea she would be safe from pursuers and would-be government questioners alike.

Lola hesitated for a few seconds before she took the next step. Two questions still had to be answered: Was Joss Cayuga on Lysithea? And if he were, would he allow her to fly out there and review his uncle's records?

She could see no point in waiting. Lola again chose a message mode that would not reveal her location and asked for a connection with Joss Cayuga—wherever he might be.

* * *

Spook and Bryce Sonnenberg had awakened at about the same time, while the other two in the Bat Cave were still asleep. Bat was a great, snoring mound of black sheets on a bed three times normal size, and Lola was curled up in her chair. Spook threw a cover over his sister, then by unspoken consent he and Bryce tiptoed around until the autochef produced their selections.

Bryce picked up a filled mug and a covered dish and raised his eyebrows at Spook. "Outside?" he whispered. "We can talk better there without disturbing them."

Spook nodded. He went out of the Bat Cave with his own loaded tray and led Bryce along the corridor. The nearest place to sit down was on the next level up. The scenery there wasn't the greatest, rows and rows of giant fungi covered with grey warts, but if Bryce didn't mind looking at them, Spook could certainly stand it—so long as he wasn't asked to eat them, or wasn't told that he had been eating them already.

They sat side by side in silence for a few minutes. Spook was desperately keen to talk to Bryce, but he didn't know how to start. A few days ago Spook thought he understood him, one of Lola's patients not all that much older than himself and troubled by horrible nightmares. Now Sonnenberg had become a tough, wary man, who according to his own confusing words was either twenty-five or fifty years older than he looked.

Spook wasn't frightened by that. In some strange way the new Sonnenberg made Spook feel more secure. But casual chatting was not easy.

"You were really there?" he said at last. "You spent all those years on Earth."

"I think I was. Odd as it sounds."

"And you remember it all?"

"Better than what happened afterwards." Bryce grimaced and tapped his forehead. "I'm getting things back, bits and pieces, but there are holes. I'm still fishing hard for a particular one."

"But all those Earth memories, about you being in a gambling place—those are true?"

That produced a glance at Spook and a raised eyebrow. "You are referring to what are supposed to be secret haldane files. You've been into them? Don't bother to answer that, because it doesn't matter. Yes, I was the boss of the biggest casino on the North American continent for more than twenty years."

"It sounds great. Really exciting."

"No. Sometimes scary, more often boring." But Bryce's tone didn't match his words.

"I wish I could go to Earth."

"Nothing to stop you, in a few more years." Bryce didn't mind the way that the conversation was going. He wanted Spook relaxed and rational, and you couldn't be either if you were thinking every minute that someone was coming along to kill you. "You mean go to Earth as a visitor?"

"I want to go back to where we used to live. I want to make sure that my parents are really dead."

"I hope my adopted ones are. I guess yours didn't find neat uses for belts and basements. Were they living in the Northern Hemisphere?"

"Yes."

Sonnenberg shrugged. "Then you know the odds as well as I do. Seven and a half billion people north of the equator before the war; eighteen thousand after it—and all those in deep shelters. I don't think you ought to go to Earth for more than a short visit."