The Rock Rats gt-11

by Ben Bova

  Cardenas nodded grimly. “One more piece of the puzzle.” She reached into her desk drawer.

  Fuchs saw her pull out a thin strip of tape, not even ten centimeters long.

  “This was stuck on Ripley’s right glove when he was found,” Cardenas said, handing the tape to Fuchs.

  He stared at it. Hand-lettered on the tape in indelible ink was BUCHANAN.

  Coldly, mercilessly, Cardenas said, “Buchanan is a mechanic for Humphries Space Systems. He has access to tools such as hand lasers.”

  “A hand laser?” Fuchs asked. “You think a hand laser killed Ripley?”

  Cardenas said, “I got one from the HSS warehouse and tried it on my soysteak dinner. One picosecond blast ruptures the cells pretty much the way Ripley’s brain cells were destroyed.”

  “Do you mean that this man Buchanan deliberately murdered Ripley?” Amanda asked, her voice faint with shock.

  “That’s exactly what I mean,” said Cardenas, as hard and implacable as death itself.

  CHAPTER 14

  By the time he and Amanda got back to their own quarters, Fuchs was blazing with rage. He went straight to the closet by the minikitchen and started rummaging furiously through it.

  “Lars, what are you going to do?”

  “Murderers!” Fuchs snarled, pawing through the tools and gadgets stored on the closet shelves. “That’s what he’s brought here. Hired killers!”

  “But what are you going to do?”

  He pulled out a cordless screwdriver, hefted it in one hand. “It’s not much, but it will have to do. It’s heavy enough to make a reasonable club.”

  Amanda reached for him, but he brushed her away. “Where are you going?” she asked, breathless with fear. “To find this man Buchanan.”

  “Alone? By yourself?”

  “Who else is there? How much time do we have before this Buchanan takes off in one of Humphries’s ships and leaves Ceres altogether?”

  “You can’t go after him!” Amanda pleaded. “Let the law handle this!”

  Storming to the door, he roared, “The law? What law? We don’t even have a village council. There is no law here!”

  “Lars, if he’s really a hired killer, he’ll kill you!” He stopped at the door, tucked the screwdriver into the waistband of his slacks. “I’m not a complete fool, Amanda. I won’t let him kill me, or anyone else.”

  “But how can you…”

  He grabbed the door, slid it open, and marched out into the tunnel, leaving her standing there. Billows of dust followed his footsteps.

  The Pub was crowded when Fuchs got there. He had to push his way to the bar.

  The barkeep recognized him, but barely smiled. “Hello, Lars. Gonna call another town meeting?”

  “Do you know a man named Buchanan?” Fuchs asked, without preamble.

  The barkeep nodded warily.

  “Do you know where I can find him?”

  The man’s eyes shifted slightly, then came back to lock onto Fuchs’s. “What do you want him for?”

  “I need to talk to him,” said Fuchs, struggling to keep his voice even, calm.

  “He’s a badass, Lars.”

  “I’m not here to start a fight,” Fuchs said. He even felt it was true.

  “Well, that’s Buchanan right down there at the end of the bar.”

  “Thank you.”

  Fuchs accepted a frosted aluminum goblet of beer, then wormed his way through the crowd until he was next to Buchanan. The man was with two friends, talking to a trio of miniskirted young women, their drinks on the bar in front of them. Buchanan was tall, with wide sloping shoulders, and young enough to have a flat midsection. His blond hair was cut short, except for a tiny imitation matador’s twist at the back of his head. His face was lean, unlined, relaxed.

  “You are Mr. Buchanan?” Fuchs asked, putting his aluminum goblet on the bar.

  Buchanan turned to him, looked Fuchs over and saw a stocky older rock rat in a shapeless gray velour pullover and wrinkled slacks with the build of a weasel and a sour expression on his broad, heavy-featured face. The guy had a tool of some sort tucked in his waistband.

  “I’m Buchanan,” he said. “Who the fuck are you?”

  Fuchs replied, “I am a friend of the late Niles Ripley.”

  He said it quietly, flatly, but it was as if he had shouted the words through a power megaphone. Everything in the Pub stopped. Conversation, laughter, even motion seemed to freeze in place.

  Buchanan leaned his right elbow on the bar as he faced Fuchs. “Ripley won’t be blowing his horn around these parts anymore,” he said, grinning. One of the men behind him snickered nervously.

  Fuchs said, “Your name tag was found in his dead hand.”

  “Oh, so that’s where it got to. I was wondering where I’d lost it.”

  “You killed him.”

  Buchanan reached slowly behind him and pulled a hand laser from the pouch strapped to his waist. He laid it down carefully on the bar, next to his drink. Its power cord trailed back to his belt; its business end pointed at Fuchs.

  “If I did kill him, what’re you going to do about it?”

  Fuchs took a breath. The lava-hot rage he had felt only a few minutes earlier had turned to ice now. He felt cold, glacially calm, but not one nanobit less enraged than he had been before.

  He replied softly, “I thought you and I could go back to Selene and let the authorities there investigate the murder.”

  Buchanan’s jaw dropped open. He gawked at Fuchs, standing like a stubborn little bull in front of him. Then he lifted his head and brayed with laughter. His two friends laughed, also.

  No one else did.

  Fuchs slapped Buchanan’s laughing face, hard. Shocked, Buchanan touched his bleeding lip, then reached for the laser on the bar. Fuchs was prepared for that. He clamped Buchanan’s hand to the bar with a viselike grip and pulled the screwdriver from his waistband with his right hand.

  The laser cracked once. Fuchs’s aluminum goblet went spinning, leaking beer through a tiny hole, while Fuchs thumbed the screwdriver on and jammed it into Buchanan’s chest. Blood geysered and Buchanan looked terribly surprised, then slumped to the floor, gurgling briefly before he went silent forever.

  Splashed with Buchanan’s blood, still holding the buzzing screwdriver in his right hand, Fuchs picked up the hand laser. Buchanan’s fall had wrenched the power cord out of the base of its grip.

  He glanced down at the dead body, then looked at Buchanan’s two friends. Their eyes were wide, their mouths agape. Unconsciously, they both backed away from Fuchs.

  Without another word, Fuchs turned around and strode out of the silent Pub.

  CHAPTER 15

  THREE WEEKS LATER

  They held a trial of sorts. Under Fuchs’s own prodding, the people of Ceres picked a judge by sorting through the computerized personnel files and coming up with a woman who worked for Humphries Space Systems as a contracts lawyer. A jury was selected by lot; no one picked was allowed to refuse the duty. For the defense, Fuchs represented himself. No less than the owner and barkeep of the Pub volunteered to prosecute the case.

  The trial, held in the Pub itself, took all of forty-five minutes. Practically everyone in Ceres jammed into the rock-walled chamber. Chairs and two tables had been moved up to the bar to accommodate the accused and the counselors. The judge sat on a high laboratory stool behind the bar. Everyone else stood.

  Six different witnesses told substantially the same story: Fuchs had asked Buchanan to go to Selene with him for a formal investigation of Ripley’s murder. Buchanan reached for the laser. Fuchs stabbed him with the power tool. Even Buchanan’s two companions admitted that that was the way it had happened.

  Fuchs’s punctured beer goblet was presented as evidence that Buchanan had indeed fired his laser with intent to kill.

  The only question arose when the prosecutor asked Fuchs why he had come into the Pub armed with the tool that eventually killed Buchanan.

  Fuchs adm
itted openly, “I knew that he was a dangerous man. I knew that he had murdered Niles Ripley—”

  The judge, sitting on a high stool behind the bar, snapped, “That’s inadmissible. This trial is about you, Mr. Fuchs, not about Ripley’s death.”

  With only the slightest of frowns, Fuchs said, “I was afraid he would be dangerous. I had been told that he had come to the Pub before and started a fight. And that he had several friends with him.”

  “So you armed yourself with a lethal weapon?” asked the prosecutor.

  “I thought it might be useful as a club, if it came to a fight. I had no intention of using it to stab him.”

  “Yet that’s exactly what you did.”

  “Yes. When he tried to shoot me I suppose I reacted without thinking of the consequences. I defended myself.”

  “Very thoroughly,” the judge grumbled.

  The verdict was never in doubt. Fuchs was acquitted, the killing called justifiable self-defense. Then the prosecutor displaced the judge behind the bar and proclaimed that there would be a round of drinks on the house for everybody.

  Amanda was delighted with the outcome, but Fuchs was morose for the next several days.

  “This isn’t the end of it,” he told her one night as they lay in bed together.

  “Lars darling,” said Amanda, “you mustn’t let this get you down so. You acted in self-defense.”

  “I really would have gone with him to Selene,” Fuchs said. “But I knew he would never do that. Never.”

  “It’s not your fault that you had to kill him. It was self-defense. Everyone knows that. You mustn’t feel bad about it.”

  “But I don’t!” He turned to face her. In the darkened room, lit only by the glow of the digital clock numerals in one corner of the wallscreen, he could barely make out the puzzled expression on her lovely face.

  “I don’t feel bad about killing that vermin,” Fuchs said, in a low, firm voice. “I knew I would have to. I knew he would never listen to reason.”

  Amanda looked surprised, almost fearful. “But Lars—”

  “No one would do a thing about it. I knew I was the only one who would bring him to justice.”

  “You knew? All along you knew?”

  “I wanted to kill him,” Fuchs said, his voice almost trembling with fervor. “He deserved to die. I wanted to kill the arrogant fool.”

  “Lars… I’ve never seen you this way.”

  “What’s worrying me,” he said, “is Humphries’s reaction to all this. The negotiations for buying out Helvetia are obviously finished. Buchanan was part of his attempt to force us out of the Belt. What is he going to try next?”

  Amanda was silent for a long while. Fuchs watched her adorable face, so troubled, so filled with care for him. He almost smiled. The face that launched a thousand spaceships, he thought. Well, at least several hundred.

  Yet she was thinking that her husband had turned into an avenging fury. Perhaps only for an hour or so, but Lars had gone out to the Pub deliberately to kill a man. And it didn’t worry him, didn’t frighten him at all.

  It terrified her.

  What can I do? Amanda asked herself. How can I stop him from becoming a brute? He doesn’t deserve this; it isn’t fair to force him to become a monster. She racked her brain, but she could see only one way back to sanity.

  At last she said, “Lars, why don’t you speak directly to Martin?”

  He grunted with surprise. “Directly? To him?”

  “Face-to-face.”

  “Over this distance that’s not possible, really.”

  “Then we’ll go to Selene.”

  His expression hardened. “I don’t want you that near to him.”

  “Martin won’t hurt me,” she said. Tracing a hand across his broad chest, she went on, “And you’re the man I love. You have nothing to fear from Martin or any other man in the universe, on that score.”

  “I don’t want you at Selene,” he whispered firmly.

  “We can’t go to Earth unless we go through weeks and weeks of reconditioning.”

  “The centrifuge,” he muttered.

  Amanda said, “I’ll stay here, Lars, if that’s what you want. You go to Selene and talk this out with Martin.”

  “No,” he said immediately. “I won’t leave you here.”

  “But…?”

  “You come to Selene with me. I’ll talk to Humphries, assuming he’ll agree to talk to me.”

  Amanda smiled and kissed his cheek. “We can put an end to this before it becomes an out-and-out war.”

  Pulling her to him, Fuchs said gently, “I hope so. I truly hope so.”

  She sighed. That’s more like it, she thought. That’s more like the man I love.

  But he was thinking, It’s Amanda that Humphries wants, nothing less. And the only way he’ll get Amanda is over my dead body.

  “She’s coming here?” Martin Humphries asked, hardly daring to believe what his aide had just told him. “Here, to Selene?”

  Diane Verwoerd allowed a tiny frown of displeasure to crease her forehead. “With her husband,” she said.

  Humphries got up from his high-backed chair and practically pranced around his desk. Despite his aide’s sour look he felt like a little kid anticipating Christmas.

  “But she’s coming to Selene,” he insisted. “Amanda is coming to Selene.”

  “Fuchs wants to talk to you face-to-face,” Verwoerd said, folding her arms across her chest. “I doubt that he’ll let his wife get within a kilometer of you.”

  “That’s what he thinks,” Humphries countered. He turned to the electronic window on the wall behind his desk and tapped at his wristwatch several times. The stereo image on the wide screen flicked through several changes. Humphries stopped it at an Alpine scene of a quaint village with steeply-pitched roofs and a slim church steeple against a background of snow-covered peaks.

  That’s ancient history, Verwoerd thought. There hasn’t been that much snow in the Alps since the great avalanches.

  Turning back to her, Humphries said, “Fuchs is coming here to surrender. He’ll try to wheedle as much of the ten million we offered him as he can get. But he’s bringing Amanda because he knows—maybe in his unconscious mind, maybe not consciously—but he knows that what I really want is Amanda.”

  “I think we should look at this a little more realistically,” Verwoerd said, stepping slowly toward the desk.

  Humphries eyed her for a moment. “You think I’m being unrealistic?”

  “I think that Fuchs is coming here to negotiate your buyout of his company. I very much doubt that his wife will be part of the deal.”

  He laughed. “Maybe you don’t think so. Maybe he doesn’t think so. But I do. That’s what’s important. And I bet that Amanda does, too.”

  Verwoerd had to deliberately keep herself from shaking her head in disagreement. He’s insane about this woman. Absolutely gonzo over her. Then she smiled inwardly. How can I use this? How can I turn his craziness to my advantage?

  DOSSIER: OSCAR JIMINEZ

  When he finished the New Morality high school, at the age of seventeen, Oscar was sent to far-off Bangladesh for his two years of public service. It was compulsory; the New Morality demanded two years of service as partial repayment for the investment they had made in a youth’s education and social reformation. Oscar worked hard in what was left of Bangladesh. The rising sea levels and the terrifying storms that accompanied each summer’s monsoon inundated the low-lying lands. Thousands were swept away in the floods of the Ganges. Oscar saw that many of the poor, miserable wretches actually prayed to the river itself for mercy. In vain. The swollen river drowned the heathens without pity. Oscar realized that just as many of the faithful were drowned, also.

  Luck touched him again, once he finished his two years of public service. The New Morality administrator in Dacca, an American from Kansas, urged Oscar to consider accepting a job in space, far away from Earth.

  Oscar knew better than to argue with au
thority, but he was so surprised at the idea that he blurted, “But I’m not an astronaut.”

  The administrator smiled a kindly smile. “There are all kinds of jobs up there that need to be filled. You are fully qualified for many of them.”

  “I am?” Oscar’s qualifications, as far as he knew, were mainly lifting and toting, handling simple invoices, and following orders. With a nod, the administrator said, “Yes. And, of course, there is God’s work to be done out there among the godless humanists and frontier ruffians.”

  Who could refuse to do God’s work? Thus Oscar Jiminez went to Ceres and was hired by Helvetia, Ltd., to work in their warehouse.

  CHAPTER 16

  Selene’s Hotel Luna had gone through several changes of management since it was originally built by the Yamagata Corporation.

  In those early days, just after the lunar community had won its short, sharp war against the old United Nations and affirmed its independence, tourism looked like a good way to bring money into the newly-proclaimed Selene. Masterson Aerospace’s lunar-built Clipperships were bringing the price of transportation from Earth down to the point where the moderately well-heeled tourist—the type who took “adventure vacations” to Antarctica, the Amazonian rain forest, or other uncomfortable exotic locales—could afford the grandest adventure vacation of them all: a trip to the Moon.

  Sadly, the opening of the hotel coincided almost exactly with the first ominous portents of the greenhouse cliff. After nearly half a century of scientific debate and political wrangling, the accumulated greenhouse gases in Earth’s atmosphere and oceans started an abrupt transition in the global climate. Disastrous floods inundated most coastal cities in swift succession. Earthquakes devastated Japan and the American midwest. Glaciers and ice packs began melting down, raising sea levels worldwide. The delicate web of electrical power transmission grids collapsed over much of the world, throwing hundreds of millions into the cold and darkness of pre-industrial society. More than a billion people lost their homes, their way of living, everything that they had worked for. Hundreds of millions died.