Murder in Orbit

by Bruce Coville

  But what actually saved my life in the long run was interchangeable parts. That, and a little idea that was so clever it still makes me smug when I remember it.

  I might not have gotten the idea if it hadn’t been for the next disaster, which occurred when my propulsion belt ran out of power. It wasn’t really a surprise. After all, the thing was designed only to move people around in a small laboratory, not to send them rocketing across the void.

  Why this should have bothered me, when I had already decided things were hopeless, I don’t know. But suddenly a blind rage swept over me. I ripped off the belt and was on the verge of throwing it away out of pure disgust when the germ of an idea stopped me.

  “How do these things recharge?” I wondered.

  I turned the belt over and found the valve where the air source plugged in. My heart leaped at the sight of the familiar configuration. Uncertain, hardly daring to hope, I took a deep breath—and disconnected the hose from the canisters strapped to my back.

  They were a perfect match—which meant that I could attach the air tanks to the belt and get the kind of power I had been missing before. The only problem, of course, was that whatever air I blew through the belt I couldn’t breathe.

  In other words, the faster I headed for home, the less time I would have to make it before I died of asphyxiation.

  I barely hesitated. Shrugging myself out of the straps that held the air pack, I maneuvered the canisters around in front of me. They weighed nothing, of course. Even so, the whole process was pretty awkward.

  When I finally got the air hose connected to the belt I pressed the button that would start the air flowing.

  For a second, I was afraid it was going to be too much for the belt. The helmet on my space suit had a feeder mechanism to diffuse the compressed oxygen and let it in slowly. The belt, less sophisticated, just let the gas through in a rush. Would I blow the connector?

  It held.

  I shot forward, and with the acceleration came a surge of hope that I might make it home after all.

  Unfortunately, I soon also felt a strong urge to breathe again. Disconnecting the hose from the belt, I plugged it back into my helmet and took a few breaths. Then I filled my lungs as full as I could and reconnected the hose and the belt.

  Since there was no friction and no gravity, none of the momentum I gained the first time was lost. I could keep building speed this way as long as my air held out.

  This breathe and accelerate pattern kept me busy for the next hour. Between switching the hose back and forth from the helmet to the belt and trying to keep myself on course, I barely had time to worry about how much trouble I was in.

  At least, until the second air tank ran out.

  I switched to the third tank and tried to figure the odds. I was still a long way from home, but by now I was traveling considerably faster than I had been before. I began to think there was a slim chance I might actually make it back alive. I longed for a calculator. How far did I have to go? How much air was left? Was it better to breathe it, or use it as fuel?

  It was the deadliest math problem I had ever faced.

  Of course once I got to the colony I would be faced with two more problems: one, I would have to slow myself down again; two, I would have to figure out some way to actually get back inside. (After all, I couldn’t just float up to the air lock and ring the doorbell.)

  I was still trying to figure out how to handle those things when I ran out of oxygen altogether.

  It took a few minutes for me to be sure it wasn’t a temporary glitch. It wasn’t like holding my breath, since there was still gas in the suit to breathe. But with every breath I took, there was less oxygen, more carbon dioxide. My thoughts grew blurry. I was terrified, but too weak to struggle.

  I fixed my eyes on the colony, as if by sheer willpower I could pull myself toward it.

  I was still staring at it when I blacked out.

  Chapter 13

  Elmo Explains

  The first thing I saw when I opened my eyes was Cassie. She was looking down at me with what seemed like real concern.

  I thought maybe I had died and gone to heaven. I muttered something about angels and wings, asked for my harp, then closed my eyes again.

  “Rusty!” said a sharp voice. “Wake up!”

  It was Dr. Chang.

  I opened my eyes again. I was still feeling pretty groggy, but this time I managed to get a look around me.

  I was in a medium-sized space vehicle, one of the ones usually used to carry materials back and forth between the colony and some of the manufacturing modules. Cassie and Dr. Chang were kneeling beside me, Dr. Chang holding my wrist between her slim fingers. Both of them looked relieved to see me open my eyes again.

  “What are a couple of nice girls like you doing in a place like this?” I asked. It was a feeble joke, but feeble is a good description of how I was feeling about then.

  “We were out looking for space litter,” said Cassie, “and we found you.” Though her words were barbed, her voice was soft, and I could tell she was worried about me. For a minute I considered fainting again, just to see how much I could milk the situation.

  Helen nipped that idea in the bud by chiming in with the real explanation of what had happened. Or at least part of it. “Elmo sent us. I’d tell you all about it, but he prefers to explain how brilliant he is in person.”

  I nodded and closed my eyes. Cassie put her hand on my forehead. “He must be exhausted,” she said. “I would be, if I’d been through something like this.”

  I bit down on the smile nibbling at the corners of my mouth and kept my eyes closed. Cassie left her hand on my forehead.

  Dr. Puckett floated behind his desk, vast as an empire, smug as a cat who’s caught the canary.

  “Okay,” I said. “The suspense is killing me. Tell me how you found me.”

  The big man smiled contentedly. “I keep a close watch on the colony’s monitoring systems. Partly because I don’t trust the jamokes who run the place, mostly because I just like keeping an eye on my baby. Anyway, to help me keep in touch, I’ve programmed my computer to alert me when the scanners pick up anything unusual heading in our direction. You, my free-floating young friend, fell into that category. You’re lucky you did, since without your scooter you were too small for the traffic-control guys to pay any attention to you. And since you weren’t on a path that would bring you into a direct collision with us, you didn’t kick off the alarms in the monitoring station, either. So of course those morons just ignored you.

  “Fortunately, my own system considered you an interesting anomaly. Once I was alerted, it didn’t take long for me to realize that this mystery object was accelerating in a very unusual fashion.

  “Naturally, that made me curious. No natural object of which I am aware could have such an erratic pattern of movement. Yet this thing was too small for any kind of spacecraft we use. A tantalizing mystery indeed.

  “I decided that since you have access to a scooter, I would ask you to zip out and take a look at this odd object—not yet realizing that it and you were one and the same! But when I couldn’t locate you, I started to put two and two together. It seemed to me that if you really are on the trail of a criminal act, it was not too far-fetched to imagine that someone might like to send you on a one-way trip to nowhere. It was only a brilliant guess, of course, but if it was accurate, it was urgent. I rushed the girls out to do a check on my mysterious object and sure enough—there you were!”

  “I guess I owe you my life.”

  “You most certainly do. But don’t worry. I’ll find some way for you to pay me back.”

  Helen snorted. “If you want, I can take you back out and dump you in space, Rusty. It might be easier.”

  Dr. Puckett lifted an eyebrow at her, then turned back to me and said, “Now that you know how you got out of that mess, why don’t you tell me how you got into it?”

  Since I was dying to talk about what had happened to me, I didn’t need
any more encouragement. I launched into my story and was gratified when it was greeted with expressions of horror in all the appropriate places—as well as some smiles and nods of approval at how I had used the propulsion belt.

  When I was finished, Dr. Puckett did something I’ll never forget.

  He came out from behind his desk and gave me a hug.

  “You,” he said, “are one terrific kid. Your grandfather should be very proud.”

  I have a hard time handling compliments. In fact, sometimes I think it would be easier to get yelled at than to have someone say something nice to me. So while I was deeply touched by Dr. Puckett’s action, I didn’t have any idea how to respond.

  Before the silence could get too uncomfortable, Helen said, “I might as well go ahead and die right now, because I don’t think there’s anything left that can surprise me.”

  “Give me five minutes,” said Dr. Puckett, returning to his desk. “I’ll think of something that’ll knock your socks off.”

  “I’ll take a rain check,” said Helen. “Now, if you can stop being cute for a while, maybe we can decide what to do about the new information Rusty has turned up.”

  “Let’s start with something simple,” said Dr. Puckett. “Like a computer check on Mr. Henry Smollin.”

  He tapped a few commands into the keyboard at his desk.

  “Here he is,” he said. He tapped a few more keys, and the wall behind him displayed a three-foot-high photograph.

  “My God,” I whispered. “That’s him—the guy I saw in the waste tank!”

  “Interesting,” said Dr. Puckett. “The computer has him listed as alive and well.” He punched a few more numbers into his console.

  “What are you doing now?” asked Cassie.

  “Calling Mr. Smollin.”

  He propped up the phone screen on his desk, adjusting the angle so Helen, Cassie, and I could see it without being seen ourselves.

  I started to say something, but the vid-phone was already ringing. I still might have tried to cut it off, just so I could have a minute to think about this before I had to deal with it, but the screen on Dr. Puckett’s desk lit up after the second ring.

  “Can I help you?” asked a deep, friendly-sounding voice.

  “It’s him,” I whispered. “The guy I saw in the waste tank!”

  I stared at the screen with my mouth open, trying to decide whether or not I had finally and completely lost my mind.

  Chapter 14

  Conference

  “The living shall die, the dead shall live, and music will untune the skies,” said Dr. Puckett.

  “Care to run that by us again?” said Helen. “I think I had a potato in my ear.”

  “I was just quoting an old poem,” said Dr. Puckett. “It seemed appropriate.”

  The four of us were floating in a ring around Dr. Puckett’s desk, trying to make some kind of sense out of what had just happened.

  The vid-phone was off. After he heard me tell Cassie that Smollin was indeed my “dead” man, Dr. Puckett had severed the connection with a hasty, “Sorry, wrong number.”

  As he explained it later, while he was not exactly at a loss for words (I doubt that will ever happen), he didn’t think it would be a good idea to ask Smollin if he was indeed the man who had been spotted swimming in the waste recycling tank two days ago.

  “He might have found the question offensive,” said Dr. Puckett primly.

  Helen pointed out that, to her knowledge, this was the first time the possibility of offending someone had ever stopped Dr. Puckett from saying anything that floated into his mind.

  Dr. Puckett chose to ignore the comment.

  “So what do we do now?” asked Cassie.

  “Organize our thoughts a bit,” said Dr. Puckett, punching a few buttons on his desk. Once again the wall behind him went dark. His fingers flew over the keys. Suddenly a vertical line divided the wall from ceiling to floor. Amber letters about a foot and a half high centered themselves over each column. WHAT WE KNOW, said the left side of the wall. WHAT WE DON’T KNOW, said the right.

  “Your input is invited,” said Dr. Puckett.

  I kept quiet for the time being, since about the only thing I could say I knew with any certainty at the moment was “I’m confused!” and I didn’t think that was what Dr. Puckett was looking for.

  “The ‘Don’t Know’ side is a lot easier,” said Helen. “We don’t know who—or what—Rusty really saw in the waste tank. We don’t know who put it there. We don’t know why they put it there. And we don’t know who tried to kill Rusty a few hours ago.”

  “Not bad for starters,” said Dr. Puckett, tapping away at the keys on his desktop. “But as we can see, some of that leads us to things we do know, or at least can be pretty sure of. For example, only a day ago the opening question on the left side would have been ‘Is there really anything strange going on in ICE-3?’—or, more rudely phrased, ‘Is Rusty losing his marbles?’ But with the attempt on Rusty’s life, it seems safe to assume that there is indeed some funny business going on.”

  “And it must be centered in the BS Factory,” I said, breaking my vow of silence in a record forty-five seconds.

  “Agreed,” said Dr. Puckett, adding that to his list. “Which is why we have to do some additional investigation of the place. You, of course, are the most logical candidate for that mission.”

  “But someone over there is trying to kill me!” I yelped.

  “I thought you might mention that,” said Dr. Puckett calmly. “The thing you have to remember is that whoever is involved in this doesn’t just want to hide what they’re doing, they want to hide the fact that there’s anything going on at all. So they’re not going to do something like blow your brains out in the hallway. That would bring them unnecessary attention. However, I would suggest that you don’t eat or drink anything while you’re over there. And we’d better get a report filed on that scooter as soon as possible.”

  “I think I missed a step there,” said Cassie. “What does filing a report on the scooter, which we should have done by now anyway, have to do with their fear of unnecessary attention?”

  “It will help protect the two of you,” said Dr. Puckett.

  “The two of us?” asked Cassie, in a strangled voice.

  Dr. Puckett nodded. “You’re going to the BS Factory with Rusty tomorrow. He’ll tell them—oh, I don’t know. Tell them she’s your girlfriend, Rusty, and that you brought her over to show her around.”

  Cassie started to protest. “His girlfriend! Now look, Elmo—”

  Dr. Puckett waggled a finger at her. “It’s not going to hurt your reputation, my dear. The lad is not entirely ugly, you know. And showing off for his ‘girlfriend’ gives Rusty a reason that is understandable, if not valid, for poking around where he doesn’t belong. Besides, I have several other purposes that will be filled by sending you over together. For one thing, except in the case of someone as astute as myself, two pairs of eyes are always better than one. Furthermore, one of you can stand guard while the other digs around in places where he or she doesn’t belong. But your most important job will be to act as a kind of insurance policy for Rusty.”

  Cassie looked puzzled. So did I, for that matter.

  “Well, it should be obvious,” said Dr. Puckett, rolling his eyes. “Even if the thought of killing off an innocent bystander doesn’t slow our villain down, the thought of the attention that two deaths would bring to the BS Factory surely will. Which, to go back to your original question, is why we not only have to report the scooter incident, but to report it in the right way.”

  “I’ve got it,” I said. “Once we’ve reported it, whoever rigged the thing won’t dare try it again. One failure like that could be an accident. If it happens twice, everyone will know something is going on.”

  Dr. Puckett nodded serenely. “We might make a thinker out of you yet. What you didn’t mention is that we have to make the report read as though we think it was an accident. That will both keep t
he officials out of this and simultaneously confuse our opponents a little, which is generally a useful tactic.”

  “I don’t like it, Elmo,” said Helen. “You’re asking the kids to take too many risks. We should just turn this thing over to the authorities.”

  Dr. Puckett actually managed to look stern. “What authorities? The colonial management? This job calls for intellect, Helen. Intellect, logic, and deductive reasoning. Even two out of three wouldn’t be bad on most days. But you know as well as I do that if you combine the best three bureaucrats in this place you’ll be lucky to end up with more than one and a half of those traits.”

  I glanced at Cassie to see how she was taking this attack on her father’s profession. Not well. Her eyes were smoldering, and I had a feeling she was about to launch some angry response.

  Dr. Chang beat her to the punch. “Elmo, I can put up with your oversize ego when it’s only feelings that are getting hurt. But this time you’re playing with people’s lives.”

  “Not me,” said Dr. Puckett. “But someone is. And that’s exactly why we’re keeping this to ourselves. We don’t know what kind of person we’re dealing with yet. About all we do know is that this person has a very small regard for human life. How small? That’s the question, Helen. How small? One person, we don’t even know who, is dead already. But for a combination of luck and intellect, Rusty would be in the same deplorable condition. Where does a person who would commit two murders stop? How desperate is he? Desperate enough to kill again? To kill a dozen people? To kill a hundred? This colony is very well designed. But it is not sabotage proof. And it certainly isn’t maniac proof. Until I know what we’re dealing with, I’m not going to pass the situation on to some fuzzy-brained, fumble-fingered administrative assistant who might just push our mysterious friend into doing something we’ll all regret, should we live long enough to see it.”

  Well, as you know, I already took this thing pretty seriously. But by the time Dr. Puckett finished that little speech, I was wondering if maybe I should just bow out. I get pretty fuzzy-brained and fumble-fingered myself sometimes. I didn’t want to be the one to make a mistake that would push our murderer over the deep end.