The Diamond Moon (25 page)

 

“You did precisely the right thing,” he said. “You trusted me and
waited
.”

 

She hesitated. “They’re safe? They’re awake now?”

“Yes, all lively and
quite
talkative. As I assured you, it was a harmless hypnotic, only briefly effective— just long enough for you and me to get this, our little home, away from them. They don’t even show signs of hangovers.”
“They agreed, then.”

He lowered his sad eyes and concentrated on taking off his gloves. “Well, I suppose the short reply is . . .” He glanced up at her mischievously. “
Yes
! After much rather heated discussion, during which I assured Forster that you and I would
testify
that he had held us incommunicado against our wills, Forster gave me the submarine.”

She seemed more relieved than excited. “Good. Let’s use it right now. Let’s make the transmission. Once that’s done we can go back.”

“I
do
wish it were that easy. They agreed to let me make my own photograms of the Ambassador. Here are the chips”—he fished them from his inner shirt pocket and handed them to her. “They agreed to let us tightbeam the images. But just
minutes
ago, when I spoke to the ship and sought to establish communication, they
claimed
that their long-range radiolinks were still out of service.”

She moaned, low in her throat. “They wouldn’t let you send the damn . . . the pictures?”

 

“No, darling. But I have some
experience
of the ways of men and women, and I was prepared for their
bluff
.”

 

“O God, Randolph, O God O God . . . what have you done now?”

 

He regarded her, judiciously concerned. “Please don’t upset yourself, my dear. All I did was move the statue.”

 

“What?
What!
You
moved
it?”

 

“I had to do just that
little
thing, don’t you see? I hid it to assure that after our account is published
no
one can contradict us. For only
we
will be able to produce the thing itself!”

 

“Where did you hide it?”

 

“Since it is inside a very big spaceship, it would be rather difficult for me to expl . . .”

“Never mind.” Marianne stared sullenly at the flatscreen, now blank, that had so recently been the source of profound deception. She wiped at her eyes, as if angry to discover tears there. “I’m really not sure what to think about all this.”

“What do you mean?” “You say one thing. They say the opp . . .”—she cleared an obstruction in her throat—“something different.”

“By
‘they’
you mean young Hawkins, I suppose.”

 

She shrugged, avoiding his prying gaze.

 

“I
won’t
stoop to demean him,” Mays said righteously. “I believe that he is an honest young man, although a thor-oughly deluded one.”

 

Marianne turned her dark-eyed gaze upon him. “You meant to come here all along.”

 

“Your meaning is unclear, Mari . . .”

 

“Bill says that you must have monkeyed with the computer, the maneuvering system, of this capsule. And ruined the communications gear so we couldn’t call for help.”

 

“Does he say all that? Is he a navigator? A physicist? A specialist in electronics?”

 

“He heard it from Groves and the others. After they in-spected it.”

 

“Forster and his people will say anything to keep the truth from getting out. I’m convinced they are
all
members of the evil sect.”

 

Marianne pulled her seat harness tightly about her, as if in memory of what had been wiped from her conscious mind, the horrible moments of the crash into the ice.

 

“Marianne . . .”

 

“Be quiet, Randolph, I’m trying to think.” She stared at the blank screen, and he nervously complied with her de-mand. After a moment she asked, “Did you tell them you had hidden the statue?”

 

“Yes, of course.”

 

“What did they say to that?”

 

“What
could
they say? They simply cut me off.”

 

“Randolph, you told me—and I quote—‘the eyes of the solar system are fixed upon us. Even now a Space Board rescue cutter is standing by, prepared to come to the assis-tance of the
Ventris
.’ ” “Yes.”

“Well, I’m telling you I’m not going to sit out here in this stinking tin can and wait for rescue. If you’re holding so many cards, I want you to start playing them. I want you to get out in that submarine and get on the horn with For-ster—or even go back to the
Ventris
if you have to—and get down to serious bargaining. And I don’t want you back in here until you’ve made a deal.”

“What if I
were
to confront him personally?” Mays asked with unaccustomed timidity. “What’s to keep him from lock-ing me up? Or even
torturing
me in some . . . subtle fashion?”

She looked at him, for the first time in their brief rela-tionship, with a suggestion of contempt. “Well, I’ll tell you, Randolph, it’s because it won’t do them any good. You’ve given me the chips, and now you’re going to draw me a map of exactly where the statue is. So they’ll have to kill both of us,
partner
. . . isn’t that the way they put it in the old viddies?”

For a man of his experience, Randolph Mays found it hard to keep from laughing out loud at this moment. Mar-ianne had asked him to do exactly as he had hoped she would. If he had written her script himself, she could not have said it better. For a long moment he mulled her sug-gestion before he said, soberly, “They
would
have rather a difficult time explaining that to the Space Board, wouldn’t they?”

But it was
her
idea, and that was how she would remem-ber it—when they faced the inquiry together, the sole sur-vivors of J. Q. R. Forster’s expedition to Amalthea.
XXIII
Sparta rose naked out of the foam, higher through the milky mist into hard vacuum, her skin reflecting the diffuse and coppery Jupiter-light.

 

Something odd about the
Ventris
, not quite where she’d left it, and apparently deserted, all its lights blazing, lit up like high noon. . . .

That something was wrong was no surprise. She’d smelled the return of the Manta in the waters of the core and had gone to investigate. In the deserted corridor she’d found her empty spacesuit, broken and gashed, the last bub-bles of its depleted oxygen stores oozing from a gaping tear. Someone, imagining that she was inside the suit—a very reasonable assumption—had tried to kill her.

Who else had that someone tried to kill?

Sparta reached the
Ventris
’s equipment bay airlock and went inside. She had steered herself by hanging on to her spacesuit’s borrowed maneuvering unit; she left that beside the hatch but did not bother to shed the bubble suit of silvery mucous that clung close to her skin. Shining like a chrysallis, she would have seemed hardly human to any ca-sual observer as she made her way through empty bays and corridors, felt her way through the ship—until she came to the crew module.

There she came upon an eerie scene. Josepha Walsh was limp in her acceleration couch on the flight deck, with An-gus McNeil hanging half out of his own couch on the other side of the deck. Tony Groves was in the sleeping compart-ment he’d been forced to share with Randolph Mays, neatly bundled into his sleep restraint. In the compartment across from him, Hawkins was similarly enmeshed. Blake and Pro-fessor Forster were resting lightly on the floor of the wardroom; it appeared that they’d been having a friendly game of chess. Sparta had never seen Forster playing chess.

Mays and Marianne Mitchell were gone, along with the Moon Cruiser capsule in which they had arrived so precip-itously.

The unconscious people still in the
Ventris
were alive, their vital signs robust—steady respiration, strong heartbeat and the rest—but they had been massively dosed with anesthetic. Sparta bent to absorb samples of their breath through the thin membrane that isolated her from the outer world. She allowed a telltale whiff of the drug to diffuse through the protective mucous; its chemical formula un-folded itself on the inner screen of her mind. It was a benign narcotic of the sort that would soon vanish, leaving hardly a trace. They would all wake up eventually, having slept soundly for perhaps three or four orbits of Jupiter, without even hangovers to show for it.

She took a few moments to check the status of the ship. The first anomaly was obvious: the radiation shield was down again, after Walsh and McNeil had sworn they’d fixed it for good. But to the casual eye nothing else was amiss.
PIN spines slid from beneath her fingernails, puncturing the shining film that coated her; she inserted the spines into the ports on the main computer and let tingling data flow straight to her brain. Nothing to be seen or heard here out of the ordinary, but amidst the tangy data an odd aroma—something off, something metallic, coppery-sour like suck-ing a penny, or an acrid whiff of potassium—under the baked-bread smells of normalcy.

Ah, there, there in the maneuvering control system . . . Everything just as normal as could be, and only this slightest hint of a leak in a valve . . . a trickle of fuel, venting under pressure through—remarkably bad luck!—a trio of ex-ternal nozzles, so positioned on the hull that the
Ventris
was being pushed ever so slowly into the full force of the radiation slipstream that blew past Amalthea.

Once into that belt, and without any radiation shield whatever, a mere couple of orbits of Jupiter would do the whole crew in. Even with all their antiradiologicals, by the time they woke up they’d be too far gone to save themselves.

Sparta hardly took the time to think about what to do. She corrected the ship’s positional problems first. Then she moved unhurriedly to the clinic and opened its well-equipped pharmaceutical cabinet. She visited the sleeping crew in the order of their need, injecting each with what she had determined was sufficient to bring them safely awake—about one day sooner than the clever saboteur had planned.

Randolph Mays flew the Manta close to the
Ventris
and parked it in vacuum. The
Ventris
seemed not to have moved as much as he would have expected, but such things were almost impossible to judge by eye. Ships and sub and sat-ellites were whirling around Jupiter in ever-adjusting orbits as Amalthea boiled itself into nothing, a few meters below them.

He floated into the equipment bay through its clamshell doors, open to space as he had left them. He parked the Manta and climbed cautiously out of it. He went carefully through the hatches of the internal airlock, sealing it behind him so as not to disturb the condition of things inside, keep-ing his spacesuit sealed.

Not that he feared the crew; they were safely asleep, even unto eternity.

 

He drifted through the ship’s corridor, while inside his helmet his amplified breath sucked and hissed in his ears.

 

He passed the sleeping compartments. Hawkins was un-conscious, wrapped in his sleep restraint; little Tony Groves was still asleep in his, in the compartment he and Mays had shared.

Through the wardroom. Forster and Redfield were there, huddled over the chessboard, having drifted only a few cen-timeters from where he’d left them.
On up to the flight deck—Walsh inert in her couch, McNeil in his. Nothing on the big console different from the way he’d left it.

Above the flight deck there was storage space and tanks of maneuvering-system fuel and an overhead hatch which the expedition rarely used, preferring the more convenient airlock through the equipment bay. Mays was not a careless man; he checked these spaces again. Still no one there.

He moved down through the ship, past the sleeping men. Everything was in place. Mays had sketched out many a mys-tery scenario in his lifetime, but none was more perfect than this. Marianne’s testimony . . . all the physical evidence . . . every last detail would confirm his special version of the truth.

He’d just about made it to the bottom of the corridor when he sensed a presence, a flicker of shadow along the corridor wall. Someone behind him? He wheeled around. . . .

“Why don’t you say a bit more, Sir Randolph?”
Forster was prodding him hard, with a forefinger that felt as thick as a cricket bat. “About why you felt you had to gas us all. About why you felt you had to sabotage the communica-tions systems. About what has become of your . . . of Ms. Mitchell.”

Mays was surrounded—rather closely, given the confines of a working spaceship—by the people he had gassed. All of them. His legalistic arguments were having no effect—

—but it was not his purpose to change any minds, as they all understood. It was his purpose to have his state-ments recorded by the ship’s recorders—now that they were functioning again, evidently—and to stall for time. “
You
sabotaged the communications, Professor,” he said loudly, “not I. Marianne and I took what measures we felt were necessary to
escape
.”

“Escape from what?”

 

“It will take us a little longer than it will take
you
, perhaps, but we can get back to Ganymede without your help. We’ve made contact with the Space Board. They are on their way.”

 

“You’ve radioed them from your capsule?” Bill Hawkins blurted. He’d forgotten, or never learned, that the first rule of negotiation is to show no surprise.

“Yes, by dint of great
effort
I managed to repair the cap-sule’s communications gear,” Mays said with a wide-mouthed, big-toothed grin. “Although I wouldn’t attempt to contact Marianne, if I were you. I’ve instructed her to ignore
anyone’s
voice but my own. Until all of us here have come to terms.”

Hawkins cried out in anguish, “Does anyone here think she’s actually fond of this blackguard?” He pushed his limp blond hair out of his eyes so vigorously that he drifted halfway across the room.

 

“Bill,” Josepha Walsh murmured uncomfortably, “let’s leave that kind of thing for later, what say?”