The Diamond Moon (24 page)

“What
is
Troy doing? You said you’d explain.”

 

“She’s not
doing
anything, sir. Things are happening. Her place is down here. Ours is up there.”

The dome of the south polar lock was not as big as the equatorial dome to which the school of squid-like animals had originally led Sparta and the professor, but it was still big enough to admit a terrestrial aircraft carrier. As its mo-lecular layers peeled off, or retracted, or at any rate became magically transparent—in that process which the human ex-plorers had not begun to understand, but which they had rapidly come to depend upon—Blake and Forster saw through to the seething sea outside, filled with the ruddy opalescence of Jupiter-light which shone through the fast-subliming ice.

“They’re coming inside!” Forster exclaimed. Against his fatigue, he could still respond to new wonders.

The Manta was swimming upward against an inflowing tide of luminous sea creatures, luminous squid and shrimp and jellyfish and plankton by the millions, pouring into the core ship in orderly formations that streamed in the water like columns of smoke in the wind.

“They certainly act as if they know what they’re doing, don’t they?” Blake remarked.

 

The professor said, “It’s as if the ship were drawing them in . . . into its protection.”

 

“Or into the stock pens,” Blake said dryly. “Hm.” Forster found that notion distasteful.

 

“Clearly they are responding to some programmed sig-nal.”

 

“Could simply be equilibrium conditions. Inside and outside pressure and temperature are just about in equilibrium at the core surface.”

 

“Very rational,” said the professor. “And still a miracle.”

Blake smiled privately. Professor J. Q. R. Forster was not given to speaking of miracles. But then, any sufficiently advanced technology . . . Blake suspected that they were on the verge of encountering one or two more miracles.

The sleek black Manta was outside the lock now and beating its wings in a swift climb toward the surface. The lock remained open below them as the sea creatures swam swiftly down into the huge ship; above them, the last hard layer of Amalthea’s ice rind was fracturing into ever smaller plates.

Blake still could rouse no one on the
Ventris
. He found the hole in the ice without trouble; the passage through the shaft was fraught with risk, but the sub flew cleanly through it and shot through the boiling interface between water and vacuum.

The
Ventris
stood off half a kilometer from the seething surface of the moon. Flying as a spacecraft now, the Manta sought the hold of the freighter with quick bursts of its rockets.

 

“It’s beginning to look like a Halloween party down there,” said Blake.

 

“A what?”

 

“Like a fake witch’s cauldron—a tub of water and dry ice.”

Beneath the flying sub, lanes of black water were open-ing in the cracks in the ice, and from under the jostling ice floes great round bubbles full of milky vapor rose up and burst into puffs of mist. Ahead of the Manta the equipment bay of the
Ventris
stood wide open, its metal interior bright against the stars— open, bright, and empty.

“The Moon Cruiser’s gone,” said Blake. “Communications are out, radiolink too.”

 

“What’s happening?” Forster demanded.

“Better put your helmet back on, Professor. We may have trouble ahead.” Without help from the commlinks, Blake eased the Manta cautiously into the open equipment bay, managing to dock the sub without trouble. His remote controls still functioned—the great clamshell doors closed quietly over the sub. As soon as they were sealed, air rushed into the bay. A few moments later, the hatch to the
Ventris
’s central corridor opened, audibly clanging against its stops.

Blake tried the commlinks again. “Jo? Angus? Anybody hear us? What’s the situation here?” He peered around through the bubble, but could see nothing amiss. That no one had appeared in the hatch was perhaps a bit odd, al-though not in itself unusual.

The sub’s gauges told him that the air outside was almost at normal pressure. “Okay, Professor, I’m going to open up. We’re pretty wet in here, so this thing is probably going to fog up good. Let me go first.”

“Why should you go first?”

 

“I can move faster. I’m not wearing a spacesuit.”

 

“Do you believe something is seriously wrong?”

 

“I don’t know what to think. It just smells funny.”

He popped the Manta’s lock and winced as his eardrums were hit by the pressure difference. The inside of the Manta instantly filled with fog, which misted the surface of the polyglas sphere. They were blind inside. The fog dissipated quickly, but the condensation on the sphere remained. Blake squeakily wiped at the curved polyglas, clearing a space to peer through. He saw nothing.

He wiggled himself around so that he could go head first through the hatch in the rear of the sub. He got his head and shoulders into the cold, dry air of the equipment bay—

 

—when something brushed the exposed skin of his neck. He flipped himself over to see Randolph Mays crouching weightless on the back of the Manta. In his right hand Mays held a pistol-shaped drug injector.

Mays’s enormous mouth curved in an obscene grin. “Bad
call
, I believe you say in North American football. Unfor-tunate
tactical
error. You should have sent the professor out first—my little mixture of chemicals would have been quite
useless
against a man in a spacesuit. . . .”

But Blake didn’t hear the rest. He was already asleep.

 

Inside the Manta, Forster struggled to reverse his ori-entation in the cramped cabin.

Mays’s voice came to him through the open hatch. “You next, Inspector Troy. Or should I call you Linda? Have I given you time enough to put your helmet back on? Need a few more seconds? How about you, Professor? I must say your body is a
marvel
, sir. Outwardly the very
picture
of youth. When not swathed in a spacesuit, of course. Just think, in the wake of that very nearly successful attempt to firebomb you on Venus”—Mays’s tone sounded oddly re-gretful—“well, your
surgeons
are certainly to be congratu-lated. But your poor old bones! Your muscles
and
organs! Unhappily they must have suffered the wear and tear
ap-propriate
to your, what, six-plus
actual
decades? And with what cost to your resilience? To your
endurance
?”

Forster had now thoroughly got himself stuck in the nar-row passage, curled up as if halfway through a somersault.

“You can come on out whenever you think you’re ready, Inspector Troy; you’ll find
me
quite ready for
you
,” Mays said cheerfully, “and as for you, Professor, please, just rest a
moment
while I explain the situation. Like our friend Blake here, all your crew are taking little
naps
—but unless I have a reason to keep them asleep, their drowsiness will wear off in another hour or two. And I’ve put your
external
communications hook-up out of commission. Quite thoroughly, I’m afraid. And you
have
been keeping us incommunicado for reasons of your own, eh? Having to do with me? How did you plan to
explain
that?”

Forster had himself turned around now, and could see out the open hatch to the bare metal walls of the equipment bay. But Mays was keeping out of sight.

“So I’ve given you the perfect
excuse
to cover for your own transgressions, d’you see?” Mays paused, as if something had been left out of his script. “You
are
with us, Troy? You must be. You know it all, don’t you?
All
of it.” Another pause, but despite his apparent hopes to the contrary, Mays was not interrupted. “As for you, Professor, after all, anten-nas are always getting themselves sheared off, what a pity! Don’t bother to
thank
me. I’ll tell you how to make it up to me.”

Forster reached for his helmet, and found it jammed against the passage wall below his knees. He would have to back up into the sphere to get enough room to bring it up over his head. He was beginning to breath loudly now, so loudly that he had difficulty hearing Mays.

“All I want, you see, is what you illegally tried to deny me. I want to broadcast to the
inhabited
worlds the nature of our—yes, our—finds here at Amalthea. And especially I want to tell them about the Ambassador. That
magnificent
statue.”

As if repelled by Mays’s insistence, Forster had got himself back up into the front of the Manta, into the polyglas sphere . . . and at last his helmet was free. He rolled it over in his gloved and trembling hands, trying to find the bottom of it, aiming to pull it onto his head—

“But to
do
that,” Mays was saying, “you have to lend me this nice
submarine
. For just the briefest moment. There are certain angles and points of view—certain effects of lighting, you understand—that are useless for your business, that of the archaeological
scholar
, but quite essential to mine. . . .” At last Forster had his helmet properly aligned. “No, Mays. Never,” he said defiantly, surprised at the hoarseness of his own voice. He pulled the helmet toward him. Once it was on his head, Mays’s drugs could not harm him.

Just then an arm and hand came into view in the small opening of the hatch, holding a pistol.

 

The pistol dispensed an aerosol spray this time, and For-ster had barely a fraction of a second in which to realize his mistake in speaking out. Not long enough to get his helmet sealed.

 

* * *

As he flew the Manta through the fog above the boiling icescape, immersed in the submarine’s incongruous smells of fresh human sweat and billion-year-old salt water, Mays’s mind ignored immediate sensations and ranged ahead across a plane of abstraction, reviewing possibilities. His plan had already gone awry, but he was a brilliant and highly experienced tactician who found something exhila-rating about improvising within the strictures of an unfold-ing and unpredictable reality. He had accomplished most of what he’d set out to do; it was what remained undone that could undo all the rest.

Inspector Ellen Troy was
missing
! She hadn’t been aboard the Manta—nor aboard the
Ventris
earlier, when he’d gassed the others. Surely Redfield and Forster wouldn’t have left her in the water! But just as surely Redfield had intended to park the sub permanently, with
no
intention of making another trip.

Was
she in the water—even inside the alien ship? He had to
know
. He had to
deal
with her.

He plunged the Manta with uncanny skill through a tem-porary opening in the ice, handling the machine as if he’d been trained in its use. He steered it through black water, empty of life, toward the south polar lock of the world-ship. No one could reasonably expect to find a single person within the world-ship’s millions of kilometers of passageways, its hundreds of millions of square kilometers of space and rooms. But Mays was willing to bet that he knew where the woman was.

And if she was not there, what matter? What could she do to him then?

Through the great ship’s mysterious lock, which always seemed to know when entry and exit were wanted . . . through the black and winding corridors . . . through water positively
filled
with squirming creatures, so thick as to make visibility impossibly low . . . nearly to the Temple of Art itself . . .

Mays drove the Manta on beating wings to the heart of the temple, until it could go no further in the narrowing labyrinthine passageways. He was preparing to pull his suit on and go into the water when he thought he saw a flicker of white. . . .

There was a wider passageway, away from the center of the temple, off to one side. He drove the Manta into it at full speed. The rounded embossed walls, weirdly lit in the white beams of the lamps, slid past the sub’s wings with centimeters to spare; still he rushed on. He came around a sharp curve—

—and she was there in front of him, her white suit blooming so brightly in his lights he had to wince. She was wallowing helplessly in the dark waters, trying to swim away from him. He drove into her at full speed; he felt and saw the back-breaking impact of her body against the po-lyglas sphere of the sub’s nose.

He couldn’t turn the Manta around in the narrow cor-ridor, but some meters further along he came to a round hub of passageways and circled the sub. He made his way slowly back down the corridor from which he’d come.

There she was, floating slack in the eddies. Her helmet glass was half opaque, but through it he was sure he saw her upturned eyes. And there was a huge, very visible gash below her heart, cut clean through the canvas and metal of her suit. Tiny air bubbles, silver in the sub’s light, still oozed from the wound.

Mays chuckled to himself as he steered the Manta past the floating body of Inspector Troy. His second task was done. One or two more still to accomplish. . . .

Shrouded in writhing fog only a kilometer away from the
Ventris
, Moon Cruiser Four was safely parked in Amal-thea’s radiation shadow. More than three hours had passed since Mays had left Marianne alone to safeguard it. He ap-proached it with caution.

Transferring from the Manta to the Moon Cruiser in open vacuum was a tedious business, requiring both Marianne and himself to don spacesuits and depressurize the capsule. When at last they were safe inside the dark little cabin, with air pressure enough to get their helmets off their heads, he found her in a bad mood.

“God, Randolph, this is the worst,” said Marianne.

 

“Not quite the
greeting
I’d hoped for, I must confess.”

 

“Oh, I’m glad you’re safe. You know that’s not what I meant. But three
hours
! I didn’t know where you were. Or what was happening. I almost went over there, but . . . I didn’t want to spoil everything.”