"Close," he said. "Too damn close. You almost killed all of us, coming when you did."
"Alice. . ."
"She's gone. Come on. We have to collect her body."
He jetted off toward a stiff-limbed suit that turned in the Sun's harsh light. Its red beacon light was still forlornly blinking. Rick trailed after him.
"What do we do now?" he said, as they reached Alice.
"Now?" Jigger gathered the body in his arms, staring down into the silent but agonized rictus of death by sudden vacuum. "That's one hell of a question. Now, I guess that you and I go and ruin a party before it's had a chance to get started."
The apprentices were chatting to each other as they wandered through the inside of the smelter, examining and admiring all the new fixtures. The noise level had been growing steadily.
Then Jigger appeared from the inner airlock. Alice's dead body, still in its suit, was cradled to his chest. Many people had been looking the other way, but somehow the whole giant enclosure at once became uncannily silent.
"Alice?" said an uncertain voice. It was Vido Valdez, standing like a statue near the lock. "Is that Alice?"
"Not really." Jigger, with Rick right behind him, moved to the area equipped for serving food and laid the body gently onto one of the tables.
"But it is," said Rick, wondering if Jigger had lost his mind. It was understandable if he had. Rick himself did not feel like a human being, he was numb and dead inside. "It's Alice—Alice Klein."
"No. You thought she was Alice Klein, but this woman is Moira Lindstrom." Jigger lifted his head and stared around at the closing circle of apprentices. He inhaled and exhaled deeply, like a man who has been holding his breath for a long time. "I received a confirming call less than an hour ago from headquarters. She is twenty-six years old. And she works—worked—for Avant Mining, not Vanguard Mining."
Gina Styan and Barney French stepped forward to stand by Alice's body.
"She's the one?" said Gina.
"No doubt about it. We caught her in the act. She had overridden the safety and she was all set to open the smelter. If Luban and I hadn't come along when we did, she'd have killed the lot of you. The whole group of apprentices, plus Gina and Barney."
The expression on Jigger's face ordered Rick, about to blurt out that he had been no help, to keep quiet.
Gina was nodding slowly. "So that was it. I wondered." She turned to face the shocked group. "It's time to explain a few things that we couldn't tell you about before. For over a year we've known of efforts to ruin Vanguard Mining operations. We were pretty sure that it was Avant Mining's work, but we had no proof. The 'accident' that you saw on CM-31 was a good example. It was deliberate sabotage, a planted explosive on the outer surface of the smelting cylinder. Jigger and I suspected as much when Morse Watanabe and the Avant Mining ship, the Scarab, just 'happened' to come along at precisely the right time to claim a derelict. He had no way of knowing that two survivors had avoided the blow-up by being outside the habitat, or that we would arrive on the scene so quickly.
"We had suspicions, but that was all. And we had no proof that a saboteur had been planted in the latest group of trainees. So far as we were concerned, every one of you was suspect. But we were able to narrow it down, bit by bit. When Alice Klein told Barney that she didn't feel well, earlier today, we didn't like the sound of that. It meant that she, and she alone, might not be here at the smelter tonight. Jigger agreed to hang behind and keep an eye on her."
"I nearly failed." Jigger again stared straight at Rick. "She was a smart operator, smart enough to fool any of us most of the time. She sneaked out of a cargo lock instead of the usual exit, and she was on the way here before I knew it. Good thing I was already in my suit, just in case. But you're all lucky to be alive."
"We are alive. That's what matters." Barney French had been watching the apprentices closely, monitoring their expressions. "Look, it's quite obvious that this is no time for any sort of party. We are going back to the main station. On the way you can think about this whole thing, and when we get there we'll meet in the main hall. If you have questions, I'll try to answer them."
"But what—" Chick Teazle started.
"I said there, not here." Barney clapped her hands. "Come on, do it." She turned to Rick and added in a lower voice. "You join us later if you want to. For the moment, you go with Jigger. No questions—just go."
No questions.
Rick drearily followed Jigger Tait, away from the smelter and into Jigger's private room in the main body of CM-26.
No questions—when he had a thousand, starting to percolate up from the depths of his numbed brain. But more disturbing than any question was a growing conviction. If Alice were a saboteur, planted in the group way back at the time of the first tests on Earth, then her whole relationship with Rick had been a lie.
"I'm afraid you're right." Jigger Tait agreed when Rick suggested it. He sat draped over a chair, his forearms along its back and his chin on his fists. "She picked you out, but I doubt that she had any special fondness for you. She was working on Vido Valdez, too, just in case."
"She thought I was an idiot," Rick said bitterly.
"Not an idiot, or you would have been no use to her. She probably thought you were bright. But intelligence and experience of the world are two different things." When Rick grunted at his own stupidity, Jigger went on, "Don't feel too bad about that. Men and women have manipulated each other right through history, everyone from emperors to peasants."
"What did she have in store for me?"
"I don't know. My bet is that it would have been something deadly to you. You're very lucky to be alive. She saw an opportunity tonight to wipe out the entire group of apprentices in one go, so she grabbed the chance without calling on you. If she had succeeded, I think she'd have tried to make the whole thing look like an accident, the way that the destruction of CM-31 was supposed to be an accident. If the Scarab had arrived before us you can bet that all evidence of sabotage would have disappeared before anyone else could see it."
Rick recalled Jigger's face, glaring at the vanishing plume of the Scarab's exhaust. "You knew all that, didn't you, when the Scarab first appeared? That's why you were so angry and rude. But how did you know? I mean, what made you suspicious when the rest of us didn't have a clue?"
"I was afraid you'd ask me that." Jigger's big moon face was gloomy, and he shook his head. "I could make up a story, but one of you would see through it. Didn't it strike you as strange that Gina and I have been with you all the time, right from your flight from Earth up to CM-2?"
"I never thought it was anything out of the ordinary. Deedee did, though. She said you'd been snooping. She pointed it out to me, and said we ought to keep an eye on you."
"Deedee is one with-it girl. But I guess it's time to tell the truth. Gina and I work for Vanguard Mining, just as we said. We don't work for Operations, though. We work in Security. We were assigned to tag along with your group because there was word of a possible saboteur. The problem was, we had no idea who it might be—you, or Deedee, or Alice, or Vido, it could have been anyone. Actually, our first clue that it might be Alice came from Turkey Gossage."
"Did he see her doing something?" Rick was beginning to suspect that he was the only blind person in the solar system.
"Not in the usual sense. He had been reviewing her test results, and he noticed that she always scraped through with a score just a few points above the pass mark. That can happen a few times by accident. But if it happens consistently, that's unnatural. It suggests that the person taking the test really knows the right answers, and is deliberately giving enough wrong ones to keep her down in the pack. Scraping through was intended to make Moira Lindstrom inconspicuous. Thanks to Turkey's experience and shrewdness, it had the opposite effect.
"That gave a starting point. But of course it wasn't anything like proof. It could have been just a statistical fluke."
Jigger had been studying Rick as they talked. He
had noticed the yawns and the drooping eyelids.
"Rick Luban!" And, when Rick jerked to attention, "You don't realize it, but you've had more shocks than a person can stand in one day. Stress exhausts more than anything. We still have a lot to talk about, but we won't do it tonight."
"The other group, with Barney . . ."
"Will still be there in the morning."
"I can't possibly go to sleep. Everything inside my head is a big jumbled-up mess."
"I'm sure it is. But you need rest." Jigger pointed across to his own bunk. "I'll tell you what. Stretch out on that for a little while. If you're still awake in ten minutes, you can get up again and we'll talk some more. But it's my bet that you'll fall asleep."
"I bet I don't. I can't possibly sleep." Rick went over to the bunk, lay down on it, and reluctantly closed his eyes.
He lost his bet with Jigger by eight and a half minutes.
Chapter Nineteen
RICK emerged from a vivid nightmare, a chaos of screams and freefall darkness and bursting bodies. He came suddenly awake, opened his eyes, and sat up.
He stared around him. He was not in his own familiar cabin. When he realized where he was, he knew that part of the nightmare was no dream. Alice had died, in an agony of ruptured lungs and exploding air that turned to a fog of ice crystals. Every other apprentice had come within seconds of that same fate.
He rolled off the bunk and lurched to his feet. His stomach hurt, and he felt drunk or drugged. How long had he been asleep? Where was everyone else?
There was no sign of Jigger Tait, although it was his room. Rick went outside and staggered along the darkened corridor to the dining area. Everywhere seemed oddly quiet, with the hushed silence of a hospital or a church. All Rick could think of was a drink. His throat was parched and his tongue felt like a withered lump of flesh in his mouth.
He walked into the bright room, squinting his eyes against the sudden light. Only after he had bent over the spigot and allowed cold water to run into his mouth and over his whole face did he take any notice of the people at the tables.
There were three of them. Deedee Mao, Vido Valdez, and Polly Quint were sitting with drinks in front of them, but they were not talking to each other. All of their faces had a pale, waxen look.
Rick moved unsteadily over to them and slumped onto a hard chair. "What time is it? I mean, is it night or morning?"
"Half and half," said Polly. "It's the middle of the night. We've tried but we haven't been able to sleep. Even after Barney's explanation, we can't decide what really happened."
"I wasn't there with Barney." Rick paused. Was he ready to talk about this? "But I was there when Alice died."
"Moira," said Deedee. "That's what Jigger Tait called her. But I'm like you, I can't think of her any other way than Alice."
"And twenty-six years old." Vido shook his head. "First time I saw her, I guessed she was thirteen. She could have passed for it, easy."
"How did she die?" Polly asked. "Barney didn't actually say."
"Jigger killed her." Rick felt obliged to add, "In self-defense. And I almost screwed that up, and killed all of you."
While the others stared, everything came blurting out. Rick made no attempt to excuse his own naivety and incompetence. The others did not offer a word of criticism, though he knew it was well-deserved. They didn't seem in the least surprised that Rick had been seduced by Alice, and it turned out that Gina Styan had already told them that she and Jigger worked for Vanguard Mining's security office.
The surprise was on Rick's side, when after describing Alice's terrible death he said gloomily, "The rest you know. Jigger didn't come right out and blame me for getting in the way, but I'm sure he thought it. I guess you can cross my name off the short list for exploring the moons of Jupiter."
The other three exchanged looks. "Jigger didn't tell you?" Deedee said.
"Tell me what?"
"That the whole thing was a set-up. Security knew there were information leaks somewhere in Vanguard. The people from Avant Mining had been finding out about valuable asteroid discoveries made by our surveys, and flying out there to stake claims before we did. So Security planted stories, different ones in different places. Then they watched to see what Avant did. And Avant took the bait on this one."
"You mean the Jupiter moon exploration—"
"Isn't real," said Polly. "Not a word. And I had my heart set on it."
"Yeah," Vido snorted. "You and everybody else. Move over, lady."
"Outer System exploration will happen, maybe in another ten years," said Deedee. "It won't be those moons, though. So far as Vanguard's remote surveys can tell, the lesser moons of Jupiter are just big useless lumps of rock. But Gina has been monitoring the shipping records, and a few days ago three of Avant's main prospecting vessels went whomping out through the Belt at maximum acceleration—heading for Jupiter."
"Pulsed fusion, two and a half gees on and off every few seconds," Vido smiled with vicious glee. "Serves the bastards right. Let's hope it takes 'em a long time to get there and longer to come back."
"No Jupiter project." Rick leaned forward and rested his head on the table. "What else have we been lied to about? I've had it. I say screw Avant Mining, and screw Vanguard Mining, and screw everything. We'd be better off in the Pool, back on Earth."
"Amen," said Vido.
The other two seemed to have nothing to add, and after a long pause Vido stood up. "Well," he said, "I've been to bed twice, and I've got up twice because I couldn't sleep. I'm going to take another shot at it. Third time lucky. Good night, all."
"Wait for me." Polly dragged herself to her feet. "Anything you can do, Vido Valdez, I can do better."
Rick and Deedee were left alone at the table. He did not speak or lift his head, and after a while she sighed and stood up. "Maybe they have the right idea. I'm going to give it a try."
She began to leave the table, then reached across and gently ruffled Rick's hair. "You too, hero. That's what Barney and Gina told us you are, even though you don't think so. Jigger says you saved everybody. Better get used to fame."
She was at the door before she turned and spoke again. "One other thing you may have missed. Barney says that a day to get over shock is the maximum allowance when you work for Vanguard. She told us the party is scheduled for tomorrow night, come meteor shower or solar flare. And it's going to take place the same as before, in the smelter. Still want me to give you dance lessons?"
She waited. Rick did not speak or move. Finally Deedee shook her head and said, "Why don't you sleep on it? But do it in your bunk and not here. Even a bonehead deserves a softer pillow than a table."
And she was gone.
Morning was not pleasant. But it was tolerable, as the middle of the night had not been tolerable.
Work helped. For reasons either therapeutic or punitive, Barney French drove the apprentices as never before. She piled on cleaning chores and exercise fatigues and maintenance details with a vicious disregard for human limitations. Rick reeled through the day from one assignment to the next, without time to rest or think or even eat a proper meal, until a general siren sounded. He realized with astonishment that it was the signal to down tools and head for the smelter.
All for a stupid party.
Rick felt that he wanted nothing in the world less—until he reached the racks at the exit port and saw his suit. He stared at it with a distaste that bordered on horror. More than avoiding a party, more than anything, he did not want to put himself inside that suit and drift through open space to the SM. His mind flung at him a vivid image of Alice, face plate smashed, limbs contorted, dying in the airless void.
He was still standing and staring when Jigger Tait and Gina Styan arrived. They did not notice—or chose to ignore—his frozen immobility.
"This is a bit of luck," said Jigger. "I've been wanting a quiet word with you all day, but Barney told me she had you fully scheduled and I was to stay out of your way. Let's take five minutes when
we get over to the smelter, all right?"
It was easier to go along than to admit the truth. Rick found himself climbing lethargically into his suit while he read the sign on the wall.
You may feel SICK, you may feel SAD, you may feel STUPID. . .
He felt all of those, as well as scared. But he followed protocol, and together with Jigger and Gina performed the thirty-six point check of the suits. That ritual somehow helped.
They went into the airlock together, and he floated across to the smelter with one of them like a guard on each side of him. In the pressurized second hatch of the SM's airlock, Jigger halted.
Higher Education Page 23
