Cold as Ice

by Charles Sheffield

  "Jon." She jabbed at the screen with her finger. "What is that?"

  "Huh?" Jon was expecting to see nothing, and his attention had been on the pressure gauges.

  "There, on the seafloor. There. Can't you see them?"

  The Europan ocean bed, a kilometer below, appeared close enough to touch under the imaging system's high magnification. Its former bland plain had turned into a pattern of lines, as evenly spaced as a plowed field. The space between furrows was only a few tens of meters, but as the Danae came closer, each one was seen to stretch like a ruled grid from horizon to seabed horizon. The water above the furrows was slightly blurred and clouded as if by small-scale turbulence.

  Wilsa, who regarded Jon as the ultimate expert on everything to do with oceans and submersibles, expected a casual answer. It was disturbing to turn and find him gaping at the screen with an expression that reflected her own confusion.

  "I don't know what it is." He was already cautiously guiding the ship lower, meter by careful meter. "Don't even know what it could be. But I know that we have to find out. Hold tight. I'm taking us all the way down."

  22

  The Bat Takes Flight

  Bat's special chair, planted in the middle of Bat Cave, was his most treasured possession. He had owned it for nearly twenty years. Well-padded and covered with the softest of velvet, custom-shaped to accommodate the great balloons of his buttocks, it permitted him to sit in motionless comfort for days at a time. When he was drifting and dreaming, or deep into a tough problem, he did just that: sat. He would move for food intake or elimination, and that was all; certainly he would not stir, as Magrit Knudsen had long ago learned, for something as irrelevant as personal hygiene.

  But now, for the first time, Bat's comfort seat had failed him. He had tried to relax into it and had found that he could not sit still. Soon he was standing up to prowl the cave from one end to the other, monitoring his message center, eyeing the displays or glancing hopefully at the door, while he examined treasured and delicate war relics, or fingered fragile, yellowed documents that should never have been touched by human hands.

  He thought he was busy, but he was merely waiting.

  Waiting for the improbable event: for a visit from a man who, if he came to Bat Cave at this time, would be arriving in response to Bat's own request—an abrupt request, an unprecedented request, a quite unreasonable request made with no shred of explanation.

  The door announced in its soft voice that someone stood outside. Bat started and dropped what he was holding: a Hidalgan Olfact, an inorganic device surpassing all living forms in sensitivity to odors. It had been developed in the later days of the Great War and improved continuously until its makers and its production factory were annihilated in an unrelated reprisal raid. All work records had been lost. Twenty years of intense postwar effort had gone into studying the Olfact, and finally to making a new device that could match its performance.

  But the object that Bat had dropped was the original prototype. It was priceless.

  Bat regained his self-control, caught the spidery Olfact in its slow fall under Ganymedean gravity, and placed it carefully back in position before turning to the opening door. He breathed a sigh of self-condemnation. If it had broken . . .

  "I want you to know what it took me to get here." Cyrus Mobarak came bustling in, showing rare signs of impatience. "This is the second time in two weeks that I've left a meeting with my top backers. One more walkout and I'll have a Jovian reputation that I'll never live down."

  "I am honored that you took my request for a meeting so seriously." Mobarak might be upset, but now Bat could relax a little. He had estimated seventy-thirty odds that Mobarak would not respond to his message.

  "Only because your reputation says that you never ask for a meeting with anyone." Mobarak sat down uninvited, his grey mop of hair falling over his eyes. "This had better be damned good."

  "I fear that it may be damned bad." Bat settled into his chair. Still, he was not sitting easy. A personal visit—even one from Gobel, bearing lobsters—remained a personal visit, with the unsettling presence of a second individual in Bat's private living quarters. "The fact that I asked you to come here shows that I have a need, and I suspect that my need may be urgent."

  "Equipment?"

  "Nothing so simple. Something much more precious. Information." Bat had played through this meeting a dozen times while waiting for Mobarak's arrival. He had not liked most of the outcomes. The other man enjoyed intellectual subtleties as much as Bat did, but there was no time now for those multilayered and pleasurable complexities of subterfuge and evasion. The best approach was probably crudity: shock tactics, hitting Mobarak with something so out of the usual that both men would be forced to operate at a new level of directness. Today it must be Rustum Battachariya confronting Cyrus Mobarak, not the complex maneuvering of Megachirops versus Torquemada.

  "I want to tell you things that I am not supposed to know." Bat broke his own rules of politeness and offered nothing for refreshment before beginning the conversation. "I tell you these things not as the basis of a proposed quid pro quo for information that you may provide, but rather to prove the serious level of my worries. And I assure you at the outset that I am rarely a dispenser of information. If you give me what I need today, it will go no further without your permission."

  "Fine." Cyrus Mobarak looked interested but wary. "Surprise me. If you can."

  "I will try. Let me begin with small things. Long before you arrived on Ganymede, Cyrus Mobarak had a reputation as someone of great power and influence, both on Earth and through the whole Inner System. The Mobarak fusion units had made you a very rich man, but Mobies were only a small part of the story. And simple wealth was never your goal. You used wealth, to buy influence and to steer events."

  "Just like every other man or woman who ever had money. If you don't use it, why bother to acquire it?" Mobarak shrugged. "No secrets so far. I'm listening, but I've heard nothing either to surprise or inform me."

  "I have scarcely begun. Wealth can start many things. It can also, just as often, be used to stop them. For example, a moderate amount of money by your standards—great wealth to most people—has been used to publicize and promote the cause of Outward Bound. Part of that effort, quite naturally, is the search for habitable planets around other stars. Now, to most people it would seem equally reasonable that the Distributed Observation System, with its unrivaled power to probe beyond the solar system, should be diverted to aid in the search.

  "But you and I know better, do we not? We know that DOS is ill-suited to survey the heavens only a few tens of lightyears away, rather than the millions or billions for which it was designed. And we know that the change in emphasis of DOS activities, with its associated curtailment of deep-space experiments, was made for a quite different reason. Specifically, it was done so that David Lammerman and Camille Hamilton would lose their research positions at DOS Center, and could thus be persuaded to come to the Jovian system and work for Cyrus Mobarak."

  "An amazing suggestion." Mobarak, now that he had settled in, was quite relaxed. One bushy eyebrow had gone up, and there was a crooked smile on his face. "I'm surprised that you would even consider something so preposterous, still less suggest it to me."

  "When you have been forced to accept the improbable, as I have been, it is one short step to the preposterous. I notice that you have not denied it."

  "Did you bring me here just so you could listen to denials?"

  "No. I cite the case of David Lammerman and Camille Hamilton only to point out to you that I have unusual sources of information—"

  "I never doubted it. I originally came to you for assistance for that very reason."

  "We will return to that subject later. Before then, I want to prove to you that I am, for the first time, willing to reveal to another living being many of my sources, and also many of my conclusions. Your diversion of the use of DOS to serve your own purposes was my initial, and quite unimportant,
example. Let me offer another, closer to my real concern. I know the name of your adversary in the Jovian system."

  Both eyebrows raised this time. Mobarak sat bolt upright. "What?"

  "Thank you. You have told me all that I needed to know. You are surprised, genuinely surprised."

  "I am." Mobarak leaned back. "I never expected you to find out so quickly."

  "No, that will not do." Bat pushed the black hood away from his head, to reveal his close-cropped scalp and dark, thoughtful eyes. "You were surprised, and now you are shrewd enough to admit it at once. But you were surprised for a different reason. Because there is, you see, no adversary. You invented that person.

  "When you first came to see me, I took your request at face value. Who in the Jovian system might seek to harm you, you asked, or to sabotage the cause of the Europan fusion project?

  "I looked. And I found no one. Less than no one. Your efforts in the Jovian system were going remarkably well. Surely you must have known that, too. Then why ask me for help? And so I was led at last to another thought. Who had made this odd request of me? Not some innocent to intrigue, but Torquemada, scourge of the unwary problem-solver, bane of the incompetent puzzler, my old and infinitely devious rival. Wasn't it likely that he would test me, as he had always tested me? And that if he did, surely he would also practice misdirection, as he and I had always practiced it.

  "So then I had to ask a different question: Why would you come here and task me with a pointless inquiry? For simple intellectual sport? Most unlikely. You could obtain that over the Puzzle Network. You would come, I decided, only to further some agenda of your own.

  "What agenda? And now I had to invert the problem, as Torquemada himself loves to invert. Thus: Suppose that you had no hidden enemy in the Jovian system, but, rather, a secret ally. If you would like that relationship to remain hidden, you would also worry that it might be revealed. You were confident of your discretion, but what of the other party? Suppose that person was a weak link, or that the connection was not sufficiently hidden?

  "So now comes the first twist of Torquemada. You approach your old rival in the Puzzle Network, and you invite Megachirops to discover the existence of a linkage between your affairs and those of some other person in the Jovian system. If I fail, that is the best possible answer for you. Because where I fail—I will not pretend to false modesty—no one else will succeed.

  "Ah, but suppose that I succeed? This is the nicest point, the second twist of Torquemada. For you had told me to find an adversary. Yet since there was none, I could at most find a relationship. And if I discovered that, you would then say, 'Aha, there's my enemy, that's all I needed to know. Thank you. I can handle the problem from this point.' The only way that I could truly surprise you was to claim that I had discovered the identity of your adversary. Because there is, of course, no such person."

  Bat, monitoring his own performance, was dissatisfied with it. It was too cerebral, too much like an interaction on the Puzzle Network. He had wanted to be brutal and direct, pushing the Sun King off his legendary balance. It was cause for amazement and relief when Mobarak brushed the hair out of his eyes, leaned forward, and said casually, "All right, I'll call you. Who is this hidden ally?"

  Bat released a long, sighing breath. "It is the director of Europan science activities: Dr. Hilda Brandt."

  The little nod of the other man's head should have filled Bat with delight. His long shot, built up from meager scraps of information and a lot of guesswork, had paid off. But in that very moment of success, the worries that had led him to make his call to Cyrus Mobarak came back. Bat found himself rushing on, breaking in his urgency every rule of gaming.

  "She has been your insider with Outward Bound—although you knew her long before that organization became important to you. I suspect that you understand her better than any of the rest of us in the Jovian system. I hope you do, for now I must ask two life-and-death questions. You said in our last meeting that evidence would soon appear showing that the Europan native life forms are not genuine. I must know, will that denial of native life be provided by Dr. Jon Perry, who has been exploring the Europan ocean for the very purpose of confirming the existence of such life? And second, will those negative conclusions be provided by Jon Perry directly to Hilda Brandt?"

  Mobarak was staring at him, finally perhaps off balance—but not as far off balance as Bat, who could feel himself quivering. He was ashamed of his emotion and loss of objectivity.

  "Suppose the answers to both your questions are yes. So what?"

  "So—this." Bat pulled out from his robe the list of calls that he had made over the past day. "To confirm some of my thoughts and suspicions, I have tried again and again to reach Jon Perry. And I have failed, a dozen times. Observe these replies: Ararat Base admits that Jon Perry and Wilsa Sheer are on Europa, but they insist that they are 'unavailable.' Europa itself is in isolation mode. Mount Ararat will not permit me to communicate with Perry and Sheer in any way."

  "What about it? They're probably in the submersible again, wandering around."

  "Then why am I not offered that information? But regardless of where they are, I believe that they may be in terrible personal danger."

  "I don't see why. They've been there before. They're both experienced."

  "The danger does not come from the planet. It comes from Hilda Brandt."

  "Nonsense. I know Hilda . . . and you're the one who insists that I know her better than anyone else in this system."

  "That is true. Yet I think that perhaps you do not know her at all. She is a complex personality."

  "So is anyone worth knowing."

  "I mean unusually complex. More so than you . . . or me. And far more dangerous. I wish I could find a way to prove to you how dangerous."

  "Oh, rubbish." Mobarak rose from his seat and went striding away toward Bat Cave's communications center. "Give me a fast line, and I'll settle this in a minute. Camille Hamilton is still at Ararat Base, too, and David has an open connection to her. I'll find out exactly where Jon Perry and Wilsa Sheer are, and what's been happening on Europa."

  "You are proposing to call David Lammerman?" Bat rose from his seat also, and padded across to stand at Mobarak's side.

  "Right now."

  "You seek his assistance?"

  "I sure do." Mobarak was keying in access codes. "I'll tell him to sort this out. If necessary, I'll tell him to head right over to Europa and to call us from there."

  "Then permit me to intrude where I have no right to." Bat placed his hand next to Mobarak's on the console, preventing the completion of the call sequence. It was the closest that Bat had come to physical contact with anyone in years, and far beyond his comfort level. He forced himself to keep his hand there, and went on: "You asked me to discover your enemy in the Jovian system. In exploring that question, I naturally considered many people, and reviewed many private files. Including David Lammerman's."

  Mobarak pulled his hand away from the console as though it had stung him. "You investigated David? You thought that David—"

  "I looked at everyone. And I learned much of personal relationships that did not concern me. But they should concern you."

  "Are you telling me that David—I can't believe it." Cyrus Mobarak looked sick, and his face aged fifteen years. "I can't believe . . ."

  "That he is your enemy, and would betray you?" Bat was filled with conflicting emotions. He was confronting naked misery, just the sort of situation that he had designed his whole life to avoid. He should retreat, and remain aloof. Or at the very least, he should use Mobarak's misunderstanding to further his own purposes. Emotion was a weakness that should be exploited.

  Except that the man bent-headed in front of him was, in a curious but real sense, Bat's best friend—an alien thought! They had jousted over the Puzzle Network since Bat's youth: Torquemada and Megachirops, Megachirops versus Torquemada, aware of each other always, head and shoulders above the rest, knowing that they were each other's only
real competition. They had spent twenty years in teasing and challenging, devising special problems intended for one other remote and invisible person. Bat's most diabolical brain teasers had been constructed with Torquemada alone in mind.

  Friendship? Did not such intellectual contact mean more than the carnal contacts, mindless camaraderie, or inebriated revelry that most of humanity was forced to describe as friendship? And did not the higher form of friendship impose its own duties and constraints?

  Bat sighed again, this time for opportunity foregone. "I am sorry. You mistake my meaning. David Lammerman is no enemy of yours, although many would say that he has ample reason to be. Tell me, are you"—Bat had to force the alien word out—"fond of your son?"

  "Am I fond—" Mobarak cleared his throat. "My God. David is my only child. We've seen too little of each other over the years, but not because I wanted it that way. Of course I'm fond of him. I would give him anything. But he avoids me."

  "He does." Bat was committed now, to discussion of the kind he most hated. There was no way out of it, even though he wriggled in horror at the waves of raw emotion filling the air around him. "And I know why he avoids you. I have seen tapes made when he was talking to you, or preparing to do so. He thinks that his father is the greatest man in history, but he is terrified of him. He becomes tongue-tied in your presence. You crush him with your personality."

  "I don't mean to. He's the apple of my eye."

  "You do it without thinking. Cyrus Mobarak overwhelms David Lammerman. If you want to be close to him, you must let him breathe."

  "How? I'm just being myself with him."

  "Then you must be someone different, someone more like the Cyrus Mobarak who meets with me. I have seen you on tape also, many times. Do you think I am unaware that with me your personality has been damped down, for my benefit?" Bat lifted his hand at last from the control console. "Call David now, if you wish. But ask him for what you need. Do not tell him. Say that you would like his assistance, that there is a special task that you dare not entrust to anyone else in the system. Can you do that?"