Mining the Oort (42 page)

Dekker scowled at the display; it was going too slowly. He set up another course correction with a longer burn. The computer confirmed it, and he reached out a gauntleted finger to activate—

And paused, frowning.

He had felt another shudder in the structure of the station. A small one and brief, yes. But definitely something had happened, something that had made a thud somewhere in the station far away.

He stabbed the activation switch. It didn't matter. Someone had managed to open an airtight door perhaps, and the gas had slammed out. But no one was going to be able to move through the corridors of the station without a spacesuit.

It occurred to him that although the chances were very small that any of the plotters happened to have a suit available, they were not quite zero. He turned to the door.

Annetta was gone.

He frowned again, thoughtfully. That was not important either, though. There was no place for her to go, and, besides, he thought he knew what that unexpected thud had been.

He closed the door, and locked it with his emergency-override key, and returned to the board.

The long burn was still in progress. The comet's probability cone was now well clear of Earth, and inching farther away every second.

It was a terrible waste of a good comet, he thought. Mars needed those frozen gases.

Still, he thought, it would certainly make a remarkable spectacle from the surface of the Earth it was not, after all, going to strike. And it was almost time to begin the slow job of restoring pressure to the station from the reserve tanks.

44

Dekker was exhausted by the time he found Annetta Bancroft. He was not surprised to find her by the commroom because he had been pretty sure where she had gone. The surprise was that she was alive, waiting despondently to be discovered, with the bodies of the conspirators floating all about her.

"I was afraid—" he began, and didn't finish the thought.

She finished it for him. "You were afraid I'd kill myself, I guess. I thought of it, all right. Maybe I should have, but when I saw they were all dead, there just didn't seem any point to it."

"I'm glad you didn't," he said. "There are enough dead already." And there were. More than enough. Ven Kupferfeld's body was drifting no more than arm's-length away. Her hair was floating in all directions, her eyes were unseeingly open, and there was a froth of blood on her lips. He shook his head. He had been right about that little thudding sound that had shaken the station—when the conspirators had seen that they had failed they had opened the door of the commroom and let themselves die.

Inside the room the vanguard of the people he had released from the flare shelter were pushing past the bodies, making contact with all the alarmed incoming calls. Dekker shivered, cold for the first time in many weeks. The replaced air was chilly from its expansion from the reserve tanks.

"They weren't all Earthies," he said, mourning.

Annetta stared at him and he shook himself. He didn't want to explain his thought, but it stayed with him: Martians, not Earthies alone, had been part of this sad, terrible plan. The others were looking at her, silent and hostile, and he remembered that he needed sleep. He took Annetta's arm. "Come away," he said.

She didn't resist, but looked up at him inquiringly. "Are you arresting me?"

"Me? Of course not," Dekker said, astonished at the idea. "I'm not a Peacekeeper, though maybe when the ships get here—" Out of politeness he didn't finish the thought.

He didn't have to; Annetta knew very well what would happen when the ships began to arrive. She said morosely, "I'll be in Rehabilitation a long time, I suppose. But I'm not the only one. You people are still in trouble, too, Dekker. Do you think they're going to forget about the new terms for the Bonds?"

He shrugged, since he had been wondering about the same question.

"Well," she conceded, "maybe they will, at that. This time. With all the excitement and all. But what's going to happen a year or two from now, when everybody forgets what a wonderful person you were? Don't you see that nothing's really solved?" she demanded fiercely.

He looked down at her in surprise. "Nothing ever gets 'solved,' Annetta," he told her. "You just keep trying to make things a little better—for everybody, you see, and not just for yourself." He thought for a moment, and then added, "You do that if you can, I mean. And if you can't make them any better, then you just try to keep them from getting worse."

"That's all there is to look forward to?" she asked.

"What else could there be? But it's enough," he said. "You do what you can today, and then tomorrow, if you're lucky, maybe you can do a little more. We don't learn fast," he finished ruefully, "but maybe we will learn, sooner or later. At least we can hope, and what else do we need?"