by Paul Preuss
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 opening 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, although 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. Unfortunate 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 orientation 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 regretful—“well, your surgeons are certainly to be congratulated. But your poor old bones! Your muscles and organs! Unhappily they must have suffered the wear and tear appropriate 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 narrow 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, antennas 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 Forster 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 exhilarating about improvising within the strictures of an unfolding 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 temporary 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 mil
lions 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 polyglas sphere of the sub’s nose.
He couldn’t turn the Manta around in the narrow corridor, 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 Amalthea’s radiation shadow. More than three hours had passed since Mays had left Marianne alone to safeguard it. He approached 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.”
“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 thoroughly 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 inspected 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 demand. 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 assistance 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 Forster—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 locking me up? Or even torturing me in some … subtle fashion?”
She looked at him, for the first time in their brief relationship, 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. Marianne had asked him to do exactly as he had hoped she would. I
f he had written her script himself, she could not have said it better. For a long moment he mulled her suggestion 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 remember it—when they faced the inquiry together, the sole survivors of J. Q. R. Forster’s expedition to Amalthea.
23
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 bubbles 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 casual 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 Angus McNeil hanging half out of his own couch on the other side of the deck. Tony Groves was in the sleeping compartment 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 Professor 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.
