Dark as Day (33 page)

Amazingly, the corridor as far as she could see was filled with noisy people. They were cheering and waving, celebrating a Jupiter closest approach which had not yet happened. A man and a woman, half-undressed, leaned against each other. They were laughing. As Jan pushed past them, the woman said in a tipsy voice, “That’s right, sweetie, go get him. Lots of good mileage left in him, I could see that.”

Paul, five meters ahead, had swung open another door and thrown himself through. Jan, following more slowly, entered the chamber at the exact moment when a second set of bells rang out. These sounded a different note and were less strident than the ones that had interrupted them in the observation chamber.
This
was the moment of Jupiter closest approach—and the feeling in the pit of Jan’s stomach was a universe away from orgasm.

The room she entered contained one of the
Achilles’
exit points. The inner airlock already stood open. Paul was grappling with a heavily-built dark figure floating by the outer one. Two safety catches on the lock had already been thrown. If the last one were freed, air from inside the ship would rush out, low-pressure hydrogen from Jupiter’s upper atmosphere would replace it, and she, Paul, and the other man would all die.

Jan kicked off hard from the wall and sped headfirst across the chamber. Paul had the man around the neck and was trying to pull him backwards, but he had no way to exert leverage. The man ignored Paul completely and went on fiddling obsessively with the third catch on the lock.

Jan didn’t know how to fight, especially in micro-gravity. As she came close she grabbed the man’s right forearm, pulled herself toward it, and sank her teeth into the fleshy part of his thumb.

He gave a loud “Ow!” and released his hold on the catch. The struggling trio spiraled away in mid-air, Paul still trying to throttle the bulky stranger. Jan lost her bite, but still held the arm. Three other people, two of them crew, burst into the chamber. As they wrestled the man to the floor, she saw his face.

It was Sebastian.

* * *

“I feel that I, not Sebastian Birch, must bear full responsibility for all that happened.”

Dr. Valnia Bloom sat in the small medical center of the OSL
Achilles
. Her red hair was drawn back and hidden by a tight white skull-cap. With her thin lips, chalk-pale countenance, and haunted eyes, she resembled a living skeleton.

“It was at my suggestion,” she went on, “that Sebastian agreed to have a series of treatments using selected psychotropic drugs. In our work together over the past weeks, I became convinced that his obsession with planetary atmospheres and their cloud patterns derives from some deep-seated compulsion, either natural or one implanted at an early age. We had been moving backward in time, seeking the site of his earliest memories. This afternoon we came to the time when his memory had been modified by the team that discovered him roaming and helpless in Earth’s northern hemisphere. In an effort to reverse or bypass that block, I administered a second dose. Sebastian had been tolerating the treatment well, with no apparent side effects or post-session abnormalities of behavior. At dinner this evening he seemed his usual self, though perhaps more restrained than the others at our table. That was not difficult, since everyone else was euphoric, and I regarded Sebastian’s poise as the sign of an increasing maturity that matched his actual age. I must admit that I too was in an elevated mood, and when Sebastian disappeared shortly after dinner I thought nothing of it. I assumed that he had gone to join a party somewhere else on the ship. Whereas …”

She gestured to the unconscious body on the bed next to her. Sebastian lay in a deep sleep.

Captain Kondo, standing at the end of the bed, looked to Jan and Paul Marr—both now dressed in conventional if somewhat rumpled clothing.

“Did you or anyone else knock him out, either with a blow or with the use of a sedative?”

Paul and Jan shook their heads.

“And you were with him continuously,” Captain Kondo went on. He was both unrumpled and unruffled. “You were with him from the time that you overpowered him by the Number Three Hatch until he was brought here?”

Paul coughed and said, “Ah—not quite all the time. Two other crew members watched him for a few minutes. But they assured me that they did not touch him in any way while I was gone. He simply became unconscious, and they were afraid to do anything that might affect his condition.” Paul did not add that in those few minutes he and Jan had hurried to the forward observation chamber, where they had dressed as quickly as possible without worrying about the fine details of their appearance.

Captain Kondo slowly nodded. “There will of course be a full investigation of this incident when we reach Ganymede. For the moment, I wish you to say nothing to any of the passengers. I will ask the same of the others who were present in the Number Three Hatch.” He hesitated. “I was about to add that I would make a general statement, reassuring all passengers that the
Achilles
remains in a safe and spaceworthy condition. However, it is my sense that such an action on my part is quite unnecessary. The vast majority of the passengers are under the misapprehension that alarm bells, naked passengers and crew in a high state of physical arousal”—his eyes flicked from Jan to Paul. He knew!—“unarmed physical combat, and the towing of an unconscious person along a corridor to the ship’s medical center, constitute nothing more than a normal and reasonable element of a Jupiter swingby ceremony. I believe it best if they remain with that impression. Mr. Birch will of course be held under continuous close observation, for which I will now make arrangements.”

He turned, apparently about to leave. Jan blurted out, “But what will this mean? Will Sebastian and I be allowed to continue on to Saturn? Do we—will we—I mean, is there a chance that we will be sent back—back to Earth?

“You need have no fear on that score. You have been accepted into the service in the Outer System, and such acceptance cannot be revoked. You will not be returned to Earth. However, I am less sure that you will be permitted to proceed to Saturn.” Captain Kondo raised an eyebrow toward Valnia Bloom. “I also think it likely that Dr. Bloom will choose to go with you wherever you are, at least for some initial period of time.”

Valnia Bloom came to life. Her skeleton head nodded vigorously. “Of course. I caused this to happen. It is my responsibility to remain with Sebastian until I learn exactly what I did to him.”

“That seems reasonable and appropriate. Let me add, we will dock on Ganymede in approximately six hours. I hope that you will find some agreeable diversion—or, at the very least, a respite from your immediate worries and concerns—during the remainder of what has been by far the most unusual Jupiter swingby of my career.”

Captain Kondo nodded formally to the little group. “And now, I bid you a very good night.”

22

In the early days of the Ligon corporate empire, the tradition was well-known if unspoken. The smartest of each generation ran the family business. The worthy but uninspired went into the church or military service, while the idiots with Cousin Hector’s combination of stupidity and furious energy would be tucked away on a remote part of the broad baronial estates where he could do little damage.

Alex stared out of the port and decided that the Ligon family had now adopted a new principle. Today, the fool of the family was sent off on a fruitless mission to a distant part of the solar system. There he was supposed to meet with a man who preferred to avoid everyone, and persuade him in a manner unspecified to share his lease on Pandora with the Ligon corporate interests.

Based on what he had seen so far, Alex found it hard to believe that a rational human would want any part of the Saturnian system. The sun was a feeble and shrunken disk of light, nothing like the radiant orb visible from Ganymede. As for the planet itself, guarded by its great ring system, Saturn gave an impression of cold, aloof mystery. When Great-aunt Cora had described Alex’s trip to Saturn as being to “the outback of the solar system,” Uncle Karolus had laughed and said, “More like the outhouse.” As for Alex’s final destination, which he was fast approaching, that was nothing at all—an insignificant mote of a world, forever unable to support an atmosphere, a gravity field, or a civilization.

The only moon of Saturn that any Ligon family member took seriously was Titan, today clouded by dense hydrocarbon fogs, but with long-term potential, according to the professional world-builders, that matched Ganymede and Callisto.

So what
did
Pandora, only minutes away, have to offer? Nothing but the old rule of real estate: location, location, location. It was well situated to operate as the nerve center for the swarming Von Neumanns who would mine the Saturnian atmosphere. More important yet, it commanded the access rights for that mining.

Which just made things tough for the present occupant, because in Alex’s experience, what Ligon wanted Ligon got. For instance, they wanted him here, and here he was. Kate had been confident that the work he was doing on the predictive model would persuade their superiors that he should remain on Ganymede. Her message of recommendation to that effect had gone all the way up to Magrit Knudsen—and bounced back down with a totally contrary command. Alex would not only go to Pandora and communicate with its mysterious occupant, he would explain his work on predictive models and the problems that they were encountering.

That seemed like an insult to both Kate and Alex. Kate had done some checking through her own network, and learned that the hermit who lived on Pandora had a reputation for gluttony and arrogance in roughly equal parts. The only reason for asking him anything was that he had once worked for Magrit Knudsen and apparently owed her some allegiance. Also, a few years ago he had sorted out—more by luck than anything else, according to his fellow-workers at the time—a major mystery on Europa.

Alex had been told to expect no greeting at Pandora’s single dock. He was to make his way from the surface, through multiple air-locks, and down a long elevator shaft. That was as far as the instructions took him. From that point he would be on his own.

Docking in the negligible gravity of Pandora took only a few minutes. Alex, about to leave his single-person ship, hesitated. On the journey from Ganymede he had spent his waking hours playing with the predictive model, making a variety of assumptions, plugging them in as exogenous variables, and studying the output. The ship’s computer had a Seine link, but one permitting only an infuriatingly low transfer data rate. Alex’s results had been more puzzling than persuasive.

However, he would not leave them behind. He dismounted the data cube that contained both his program and his most recent results, and tucked them away in a side pocket of his travel bag. If Rustum Battachariya was, as Magrit Knudsen insisted, a computer specialist with considerable intellectual resources of his own, perhaps Alex might find a way to repeat his recent runs in a more forgiving computer setting.

The descent into Pandora’s gloomy interior did not affect Alex as it would have, say, Kate or his mother. He was not interested in the physical appearance of his surroundings—“blind as a worm,” according to Kate, when it came to niceties of furnishings. Had he been taking notice, he would have discovered one point at least on which he and the lone inhabitant of Pandora agreed: simplicity. The walls were bleak rock or dull plastic. Alex passed through the last of three massive sets of air-locks, removed his suit, and kept going.

At the end of the elevator shaft he had no options as to what to do next. A single corridor, forty meters long, ended in a steel door. The door was closed, but a red button stood in the center with a sign above it: AFTER THE BUTTON IS PRESSED, YOU WILL HAVE SEVEN SECONDS IN WHICH TO ENTER.

Alex pressed, drifted on through as the door opened, and wondered about the need for such security. So far as he could see there was nothing on or in Pandora that anyone in his right mind would think worth stealing. What it suggested was extreme paranoia on the part of the man he was about to meet.

Beyond the door Alex found himself at the side wall of a chamber that stretched far off to left and right. If the corridors and elevators he had seen so far were unusually empty, this room made up for them. It was packed—not with furniture, but with
machines
, all dust-free, gleaming, and placed relative to each other with great care. The only object out of place, in both its nature and its condition, stood about eight meters away on Alex’s left.

It was—Alex had to take a second look to make sure—a person; a man of colossal size, dressed in rumpled and tight-fitting black clothes, and with a black cowled hood that partly concealed his face.

The man nodded to Alex. He said, in a rumbling but precise voice, “I have observed your progress since the arrival of your ship at the surface. I must say that you arrive at a peculiarly inconvenient time.”

“For both of us,” Alex said.

He was ignored as the other went on, “I will not say welcome to Pandora, since that would be gross insincerity on my part. I will, however, ask if you have dined.”

Alex hadn’t eaten, nor did he particularly want to; but since this seemed like an unexpected attempt at politeness, he shook his head and said, “I didn’t eat.”

“Nor did I.” The other man threw back the cowl, to reveal a round shaven head. “I am, of course, Rustum Battachariya, and you of course are Alex Ligon. You may find it easier to call me Bat, though this should not be presumed to indicate any desire for a closeness of relationship between us. And when I invite you to share my afternoon repast, it is only because a failure to do so would display a churlish lack of civility and hospitality on my part.”

He led the way toward the far end of the room. Alex, who wondered if he had understood what the other was saying—it sounded, improbably, like he was inviting Alex to eat lunch—followed close behind. He could not help glancing from side to side as they went. The artifacts lining the walls or standing mounted on the floor formed a bizarre collection. None was new, many seemed from a much earlier generation of technology. Some bore the marks of fire, great force, or heavy impact.