"She's older than you are!"
"Depends how you count. Older than Bryce Sonnenberg, a quarter of a century younger than Danny Clay. Over half a century younger than Julius Szabo's official age. But I don't see what age has to do with anything."
"She's my sister!"
"Most women are somebody's sister. All right, all right." Bryce held up his hands. "Don't get excited. I've got no designs on Lola. She and I have other more urgent things to worry about—like staying alive."
Bat had been listening to these exchanges with disgust. From his expression, it seemed that people who thought like the new Bryce Sonnenberg were hardly worth keeping alive. "In order to remain among the living," he said, "it is necessary that you learn exactly who is seeking to kill you, and why."
"Right. And we just agreed that we came to a dead end there. We have zero clues."
"Not at all. We have numerous clues. It is only a matter of pursuing them, and constructing a rational whole from what we learn." Bat sighed. Something else was becoming apparent to him. As long as the lives of Lola Belman and Bryce Sonnenberg were threatened, he could hardly expel his uninvited guests from the sanctuary of the Bat Cave—much as he might wish to do so.
"Rest, if you wish," he said. "For my part, I propose to initiate my investigations at once."
There was no point in mentioning that his own desire for a swift resolution exceeded anything that Lola or Bryce could possibly be feeling.
* * *
Five hours later the Bat Cave was still and silent. Its solid outer door was secured, its security system active. There was no safer place on Ganymede.
Lola lay curled up in the same chair, dead to the world. Bryce Sonnenberg had watched Spook and Bat for a quarter of an hour, then shook his head and stretched out on the kitchen floor. He fell asleep in a couple of minutes. For someone who had seen violent death twice in the past twenty-four hours, and who was threatened with it himself, he seemed remarkably relaxed.
Spook had worked at Bat's side for the first four hours, until he at last yawned, said, "Wake me when it's my shift," and wandered off along the darkened Bat Cave to seek a soft place to sleep.
Bat struggled on alone, with grim concentration. All very well for Spook to snore away the rest of the night—it wasn't his home that had been invaded.
Progress was slow. Bat told himself that the puzzle he faced could not be nearly as complicated as some of the transportation problems that he had solved, involving, as they did, interlocked ship schedules, moving destinations, time constraints, and even the reprograming of pilotless cargo vessels that had been designed to resist all outside interference by cargo hijackers. The difference was that in this case his objective was harder to define. The obvious goal—save the people with him in the Bat Cave—felt like an incidental to the real problem.
He had been sorting questions and answers mentally, but now he felt that he needed to see them sitting in front of him. He made a list.
Who wants Bryce Sonnenberg and Lola Belman out of the way? Answer: some group or individual who believes that the two know something dangerous or damaging. It was irrelevant whether or not they did know such a thing. However, it did point out the ruthless nature of the people that Bat had to find. They were quite willing to kill on the basis of suspicion.
Why had Jinx Barker and Alicia Rios been killed? This time the answer was easy. Bat agreed with Bryce Sonnenberg: Barker and Rios had been killed to close off a trail that might lead to someone else. That suggested that whoever hired Barker and Rios did not have total trust in them. Also, that the secret being protected was so important that many lives would be sacrificed to keep it.
Did the death of Jeffrey Cayuga have anything to do with the present mystery? Bat had no answer. He collected everything that he could find about Jeffrey Cayuga from the general data banks and merged them into a file of their own.
Who else might have been involved? The only information available to Bat was a vague statement made by Lola Belman that the other man who had talked to Alicia Rios at the First Family party "was related to someone on the first Saturn expedition." Maybe she would remember his name, maybe she would not. But there was one sure way to jog her memory: Bat could present her with a list to choose from. Obtaining that list might prove tedious, but he was used to tasks that called for infinite patience. And in this case he had his special helpers.
Bat summoned Mellifera once more from his private directory. This time the instructions provided for the program area had to be more complex. He was not interested in the route to a particular destination, as he had been with the Hidalgo data base. Instead, he wanted to know the complete list of descendants of each member of the original Saturn expedition. He also needed to know whether each of them was now living or dead. Bat decided that this time five hundred copies of the completed version of Mellifera should be more than sufficient. He provided a different entry point for each one into the general Ganymede data banks and released them all into the network.
He expected a long delay before he had feedback. The original expedition had started from Earth, over forty years ago. In that time the descendants of the crew members were likely to have scattered all over the system. If they had stayed on Earth, or moved to the Belt, their fates might be unknown. He had to face the possibility of making another exploration of incomplete or inaccessible data bases.
He was rising from his chair—his mouth filled with naturally salted pistachios from the halophytic-plant farm two levels down from the Bat Cave—when the attention light flashed on his console. He sat down again, anticipating trouble. When a Mellifera probe returned so quickly, it was usually the sign that it had encountered an immediate dead end to the search.
It was even worse than he had feared. All the probes had returned, and all reported the same information. The data banks indicated that there were no living direct descendants of any of the original Saturn expedition members.
Bat realized that he had made an assumption, and apparently an invalid one. Lola Belman had said she saw a man "related to" someone on the first Saturn expedition. Bat had wrongly interpreted that to mean "descended from."
It would be easy, though tedious, to cast his net wider. Bat could first invert the direction of the search, ascending the family trees to seek out the parents, grandparents, and even great-grandparents of the members of the first expedition. Then he could reverse the process, descending the family trees and asking for all living descendants of each ancestor. There were two problems with that. How far back would he need to go? And how many people were likely to be on the final list?
He could calculate a plausible answer to the second question if he made a couple of assumptions. First, assume that it would be enough to go back as far as grandparents. There had been ten people on the first expedition, which would mean that there were twenty pairs of grandparents. Now, assume two children per generation, and four generations to bring you to the present day. If all those fourth-generation children were still alive, Bat could expect to see a hundred and sixty names of people who were related to the original expedition members, but not descended from them.
He could do all that, probably without much difficulty, and maybe the answer would allow Lola Belman to pick out the right name when she awoke. But Bat had worked the Puzzle Network too long to ignore minor anomalies. One of them was staring him in the face.
He returned to the information gathered by Mellifera. The probes insisted that no member of the original expedition had a living descendant. That was certainly possible, and a computer would have had no problem with it. But a human is a strange amalgam of logic and illogic, where hunches from the subconscious guide and warn conscious thought processes. Bat knew the answer he had received was possible; but it seemed somehow implausible.
He again summoned Mellifera. This time the probes went into the Ganymede data banks with a different mission: to report any known liaisons of the first expedition members, and any descendants—living or dead.
&n
bsp; The answer, when it came, was worse than the last one. According to the data banks, no member of the first expedition had ever engaged in a long-term liaison. None had ever been the mother or the father of a child.
Implausibility was approaching impossibility. Lola Belman had seen a man "related to a member of the first expedition." Related how?
Bat moved away from the communications center and sought the darkest corner of the Bat Cave. He was disappointed—with himself. It was obvious that he had been delivered a fact profoundly relevant to the deaths of Jinx Barker and Alicia Rios and to the lives of Lola Belman and Bryce Sonnenberg. It was equally obvious that Bat did not understand what he had been told. The reason for his databank search was not really a quest for facts; it was for insight. And that insight was sadly lacking.
Bat sat alone and sleepless, through the small hours of the night, waiting for the still, small voice of enlightenment to whisper in his ear.
21
Lola woke up groggy and uneasy. It took her a few seconds to realize where she was, and to decide that she had every right to feel worried. Even the depths of the Bat Cave provided uncertain security.
She was still where she had fallen asleep, but someone had come along and thrown a thick blanket over her body and her feet, which hung over the edge of the chair. She didn't remember kicking off her shoes, but she was now barefoot.
She pushed back the cover and leaned over to scrabble on the floor, working by touch more than by sight. Once she had her shoes on, she couldn't justify lying down again. She rubbed her eyes, looked around, and saw no signs of anyone.
And no wonder. She glanced at the clock on the long kitchen range and saw that she had snored away the whole night and half the morning. Over by the communications center the display was frozen and a red attention light was blinking. She went across to it. The message said:
To Lola Belman: Spook and Bryce Sonnenberg both rose earlier than I, and they have gone off somewhere together. I, too, have occasion to be absent. I offer my apologies for providing nothing more than the food-service machine can offer. On another matter, would you kindly peruse the list that follows, and determine if any of the names listed therein correspond to persons reported by Jinx Barker as having been present at the First Family party that you attended. Signed: Rustum Battachariya (landlord).
The last word wasn't much of a joke, but Lola was surprised to see it there at all. She, more than anyone else, recognized Bat's desire—better call it a compulsion—for privacy. Count it as one more reason why she had to find out who was pursuing her and liberate them all from the Bat Cave.
The list of names, then—as soon as two more urgent items had been taken care of. Lola used the bathroom and found it amazingly neat and clean, considering Bat's slovenly dress and apparent lack of interest in bathing. She would have to have a word with Spook. Let him loose in there for half an hour, and Bat would throw them out and damn the consequences.
She went back to the kitchen and studied the autochef. It was a top-of-the-line model, new to her and able to produce food that was not merely adequate but better than what most human cooks could manage. Apparently Bat was a real gourmet. On the other hand, you didn't get that fat without being a pig as well. Lola itched to lure him into the haldane's chair, then scolded herself. It was her job to treat people whose problems were making them or others unhappy. There was no sign that Bat was guilty of either sin.
In other circumstances she would have had fun testing the limits of the autochef, but today had higher priorities. She filled a bowl with sliced fruit, smothered it with cream and honey, and did what she had told Spook never to do again: She set it down on the communications-center console and started to spoon sticky food into her mouth as she examined the list that Bat had left her. The astonishing thing was that nervousness and stress and fear of deadly attack didn't destroy the desire to eat. It seemed, in her case at least, to increase it.
There were scores of names on the list. Unfortunately there was a high degree of similarity among many of them. She counted twenty-one Dahlquists, twenty Cayugas, eighteen Jing-lis, fourteen Rioses, eleven Munzers, eight Costases, and six Polks. After a long time, enough for her to empty the bowl and go back for another helping, she tagged two of the names: Lenny Costas and Ignatz Dahlquist. She added a note: I'm not absolutely sure, but these two seem right. Can you obtain a physical description of them? I remember what they looked like.
At that point she seemed to be at a loose end. For all her sense of urgency she had no idea of what to do next. She studied Bat's communications center for a few minutes, marveling at its complexity. He seemed to have a computer contact point in every transportation center and every ship throughout the whole Jovian system. He might never travel himself and might shudder at the thought, but he had his inorganic eyes, ears, and hands everywhere. There was no sign saying, "This is an illegal operation," but Lola was sure that Bat paid little attention to anyone's right to privacy, except his own. If he wanted to, he could have tapped her patient-data files. Maybe he had. More likely, the tampering that she had detected there had been part of Jinx Barker's efforts.
Jinx Barker. Lola sighed and did what she had not been able to face doing the previous day. She chose a message mode that could not be traced back to its origin and sent a terse note to Ganymede Security. The body of a man, Jinx Barker, would be found in the office of the haldane, Lola Belman. She provided location coordinates.
Her action made Lola's own position worse. She knew Security would go to her office at once, with a full investigating team of humans and machines. The presence of haldane drugs in Barker's body would be determined within minutes, together with the cause of death. Her own absence would suggest her guilt to them. Then the mystery employer of Jinx Barker would not be the only one interested in finding Lola. She would become a fugitive from the Ganymede government, wanted at the very least for questioning. Security had some very fancy tracking methods. There was no reason why they would keep this location a secret if they found it, so her presence in the Bat Cave endangered all the others.
She was keenly aware of her own feelings of guilt toward the other three in the Bat Cave. Jinx Barker and his employers had really been after her, with anyone else regarded as secondary. More than ever, she had to find out who wanted her dead, and why. And she had to get away from the Bat Cave.
She saw on one of the communication center's other units, over to her left, a fixed display. It was something she remembered vaguely that Bat had been talking about last night when she was right at the point of passing out: The death was reported today ofJeffrey Cayuga, leader of the fifth, sixth, and seventh Saturn expeditions . . .
That's right. Jeffrey Cayuga was dead, too, and with him went their last real lead. Lola stared hard at the final sentence of the display: His heir is his nephew, Joss Cayuga, who is one of the few survivors of the Ceres final battle and recently arrived in the Jovian system from his home in the Belt.
Since Joss Cayuga had inherited his uncle's estate, he also presumably had all Jeffrey Cayuga's records. Alicia Rios's files had been destroyed, but if Cayuga's were intact, they might hold the key to everything that had been going on.
Joss Cayuga had made his home in the Belt, but that was before his uncle's death. Where had Jeffrey Cayuga lived? As a leader of Saturn expeditions, there was a good chance that he had chosen the Jovian system, perhaps even Ganymede.
Lola consulted the general data banks, not knowing she was covering ground that Bat had explored less than twelve hours ago. She had an answer inside two minutes. Jeffrey Cayuga was there all right, and was correctly identified as the late Saturn explorer. He had lived, as she hoped, in the Jovian system—but he had lived on Lysithea.
Lola sagged in disappointment. Lysithea was certainly in the Jovian system, technically. In practice, no one paid much attention to anything but the four biggest moons. Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto had been known and named since the original discovery of the telescope. She had seen the
m herself with Spook's little refractor, back when the two of them still lived on Earth. The dozen small fragments of rock and ice that orbited closer than Io or beyond Callisto were another matter. They had been discovered and catalogued in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but no one had taken much notice of them, then or since. Lysithea was one of those insignificant mini-worlds, along with Elara and Himalia and Pasiphae and Sinope. Lola didn't know how big Lysithea was, or how far out, except that it was a long way from Ganymede. It was news to her that anyone made a home there.
She performed a quick check. The population file indicated that Jeffrey Cayuga had been Lysithea's only inhabitant. It must have been a strange life, alone on a world, but there was no accounting for personal tastes. Bat would probably like it just fine. Lysithea's average distance from Ganymede was close to eleven million kilometers—a good day's journey each way in a medium-performance ship. There was no guarantee that if she went there, the late Jeffrey Cayuga's files would tell her anything.
The Ganymede Club Page 25
