by Paul Preuss
A few other items in Hold A were insured for relatively large amounts of money per unit of mass: two crates of cigars consigned to none other than Kara Antreen, valued at a thousand pounds each—Sparta smiled at the thought of the stiff Space Board captain savoring her stogies—and four crates of wine, one of which McNeil had already confessed to looting, worth a total of fifteen thousand American dollars and consigned to the same Vincent Darlington who was the new owner of the very famous book.
But there were also items that had cost more to ship than they were worth to insure: the newest BBC epic on videochip, “While Rome Burns,” massing less than a kilo (and almost all of that was protective plastic packaging), wholly uninsured. Although the original had cost millions to produce, the chips were much cheaper to reproduce than an old-fashioned celluloid-based movie or a tape cassette, and indeed (admittedly with some loss of fidelity) the whole show could have been beamed to Venus for the cost of transmission time. Plus an item that had earlier struck Sparta as worthy of close attention: a case of “miscellaneous books, 25 kilos, no intrinsic value” consigned to Sondra Sylvester.
The contents of Holds B, C, and D, which had remained in vacuum throughout the flight, were of much less interest—tools, machinery, inert matter (a tonne of carbon in the form of graphite bricks, for example, marginally cheaper to ship from Earth than to extract from the atmospheric carbon dioxide of Venus)—except for the “6 Rolls-Royce HDVM,” Heavy Duty Venus Miners, “at 5.5 tonnes each, total mass 33.5 tonnes gross including separate fuel assemblies,” etc., consigned to the Ishtar Mining Corporation. Sparta satisfied herself that the onboard manifest was identical with the one that had been published. And she and Proboda had already confirmed its accuracy.
Sparta turned quickly to the mission recorder, which contained the entire public record of the voyage. Bringing the full record to consciousness, with the time-slip that involved, would be a lengthy process. For the time being she contented herself with a rapid internal scan, searching for anomalies.
One anomaly stood out, in data space, in smell space, in harmony space—an explosion, secondary explosions, alarms, calls for help … human voices, shocked, coping, accusing—the black-box mission recorder contained the entire sequence of events attendant upon the meteoroid strike.
Sparta heard it through at lightning speed and played it back to herself mentally. It confirmed in fine detail what she had learned in her firsthand look at the site of the accident.
One other anomaly stood out in the mission recorder’s datastream, a conversation, taking place immediately before Grant’s fateful radio message had been beamed to Earth and Venus. “This is Star Queen, Commander Peter Grant speaking. Engineering Officer McNeil and I have jointly concluded that there is sufficient oxygen remaining for one man…”
But in the moments preceding the announcement, Grant and McNeil had not been on the flight deck… The two men’s voices were muffled by the intervening bulkhead. One voice was momentarily raised to the threshold of audibility—McNeil’s—and his words were stern: “You’re in no position to accuse me of anything…”
Accuse him…?
The whole conversation might be recovered, but Sparta would have to put herself into light trance to do it. And there were other chunks of data that might yield to analysis, but she must set aside the time to deal with them. It was too soon to sacrifice alertness again. For now she had to move quickly…
The fast liner Helios, driven by a powerful gaseous-core atomic reactor, had been a week out of Earth, a week and a day from Port Hesperus, when that somber message had been received throughout the solar system: “This is Star Queen, Commander Peter Grant speaking…”
Within minutes—even before Peter Grant had left the Star Queen’s airlock for the last time—the skipper of Helios had received orders from the Board of Space Control, acting under interplanetary law, to notify his passengers and crew that all transmissions from Helios were being recorded and that any pertinent information thus obtained would be used in subsequent administrative and legal proceedings, including criminal proceedings, if any, bearing on the Star Queen incident.
In other words, everyone aboard Helios was a suspect in the investigation of some as yet unspecified misdeed on Star Queen.
Not without reason. Helios had left Earth on a hyperbolic orbit for Venus two days after the meteoroid struck Star Queen. The departure date for the fast liner had been on the boards for months, but at the last minute, after the meteoroid strike, Helios acquired several new passengers. Among them was Nikos Pavlakis, representing the owners of the stricken freighter. Another was a man named Percy Farnsworth, representing the Lloyd’s group who had insured the ship, its cargo, and the lives of its crew.
Other passengers had booked the flight long in advance. There was an emeritus professor of archaeology from Osaka, three Dutch teenage girls setting forth on a grand planetary tour, and half a dozen Arabian mining technicians accompanied by their veiled wives and rebellious children. The Dutch girls rather relished the notion of being suspected of interplanetary crime, while Sondra Sylvester, another passenger who had booked in advance, did not. Sylvester’s young travelling companion, Nancybeth Mokoroa, was simply bored rigid by the whole affair.
These were not the sort of passengers who mixed easily: the Japanese professor smiled and kept to himself, the Arabs kept to themselves without bothering to smile. The teenagers staggered about in their high-heeled shoes during periods of constant acceleration and twitched uncomfortably in their unaccustomed tight dresses, whether under acceleration or not, and at all times made a point of ogling the one unaccompanied male passenger over fifteen and under thirty. He did not return their compliment. He was Blake Redfield, a last minute addition to the manifest who kept very much to himself throughout the voyage.
Such social encounters as did occur took place in the ship’s lounge. There Nikos Pavlakis did his nervous best to be gracious to his client Sondra Sylvester whenever their paths crossed. That wasn’t often, as she generally avoided him. The poor man was distracted with worry anyway; he spent most of his time nursing a solitary ouzo and a plastic bag of Kalamata olives. Farnsworth, the insurance man, was often to be found lurking in the nearby shadows, sipping on a bulb of straight gin and ostentatiously glowering at Pavlakis. Pavlakis and Sylvester both made it a point to avoid Farnsworth altogether.
But it was in the lounge, not long after Grant’s public sacrifice, that Sylvester found Farnsworth plying Nancybeth with a warm bulb of Calvados. The middle-aged man and the twenty-year-old woman were floating, weightless and slightly giddy, before a spectacular backdrop of real stars, and the sight infuriated Sylvester—as Nancybeth had no doubt intended. Before approaching them Sylvester thought about the situation—what, after all, should she care? The girl was possessed of heart-stopping beauty, but she had the loyalty of a mink. Nevertheless, Sylvester felt she could not afford to ignore the sly Farnsworth any longer.
Nancybeth watched Sylvester’s approach, her malice diffused only slightly by weightlessness and alcohol. “ ’Lo, Sondra. Meet m’ friend Prissy Barnsworth.”
“Percy Farnsworth, Mrs. Sylvester.” One did not get to one’s feet in microgravity, but Farnsworth straightened admirably nonetheless, and tucked his chin in a credible bow.
Sylvester looked him over with distaste: although he was approaching fifty, Farnsworth affected the look of a young army officer, off duty for the weekend to do a bit of pheasant slaughtering, say—Sylvester’s recent acquaintance at the Salisbury proving grounds, Lieutenant Colonel Witherspoon, was a model of the type. Farnsworth had the mustache and the elbow-patched shooting jacket and the rigid set of the neck right down. The public school accent and the clipped Desert Rat diction were strictly secondhand, however.
Sylvester looked past his outstretched hand. “You’ll want to be careful, Nancybeth. A brandy hangover’s not pleasant.”
“Dear mother Sylvester,” she simpered. “What’d I tell you, Farny? Expert on everthn�
�. I never heard of this stuff ’fore she innerduced me.” Nancybeth batted her bulb of apple brandy from hand to hand. On the third toss she missed, and Farnsworth snatched it out of the air for her, returning it without comment.
“Understand you had a very pleasant visit to the south of France, Mrs. Sylvester,” Farnsworth said, braving her determined unpleasantries.
Sylvester gave him a look intended to silence him, but Nancybeth piped up brightly. “She had verry pleasan’ two days. Three days? I had verr’ boring three weeks.”
“Mr. Farnsworth,” Sylvester hastily interrupted, “your attempt to pump my companion for information that you imagine may somehow be of use to you is … is transparent.”
Nancybeth’s eyes widened—“Pump me? Why, Mister Farmerworthy”—and she snatched dramatically at the billowing skirt of her flowery print dress.
“And despicable,” Sylvester added.
But Farnsworth pretended to take no notice. “No offense meant, Mrs. Sylvester. Light chat, that’s all. Comes to business, much prefer to talk to you straight from the shoulder. Eh?”
Nancybeth growled, “Man to man, so to speak,” then pretended to flinch when Sylvester glared at her. Evidently she was farther into her cups than Sylvester had feared.
“Got me wrong, Mrs. Sylvester,” Farnsworth said smoothly. “Represent your interests too, y’know. In a sense.”
“In the sense that you’ll be forced to pay your clients whatever sum you can’t weasel out of?”
He drew himself up a bit. “You’ve nothing to fear, Mrs. Sylvester. Star Queen would dock safely with your cargo even if she were a ghost ship. Take more than a measly meteoroid to do in a Rolls-Royce robot, what?”
Throughout their exchange Nancybeth was contorting her face into a series of exaggerated masks, miming first Sylvester’s aloof contempt, then Farnsworth’s wounded innocence. It was the sort of childish display that under some circumstances lent her a gamin attractiveness. At the moment she was about as attractive as a two-year-old on a tantrum.
“Thanks for your interest, Mr. Farnsworth,” Sylvester said coldly. “And perhaps you would leave us alone now.”
“Let me be blunt, Mrs. Sylvester, begging your pardon—”
“No, why don’t you be pointed?” Nancybeth suggested brightly.
Farnsworth pushed on. “After all, we’re both aware of the difficulties of the Pavlakis Lines. Eh?”
“I’m aware of no such thing.”
“Doesn’t take much imagination to see what Pavlakis had to gain by doing in his own ship. Eh?”
“Nancybeth, I’d like you to leave with me, this moment,” Sylvester said, turning away.
“But he did it rather badly, didn’t he?” Farnsworth said, floating closer to Sylvester, his voice deeper and harsher. “No significant damage to the ship, no damage whatever to the cargo? Not even that famous book you were so interested in?”
“Don’ forget crew,” cried Nancybeth, still the giddy imp. “Tried to kill ’em all!”
“Good God, Nancybeth…” Sylvester glanced across the lounge to where Nikos Pavlakis hovered over his ouzo. “How can you say such a thing? About a man you’ve never met?”
“Only got half of ’em, though,” the girl finished. “Good ol’ Angus won through.”
“That’s a shrewd guess, Mrs. Sylvester, and I’d lay odds she’s right.” Farnsworth’s insinuating gaze narrowed melodramatically. “Pavlakis Lines holds rather large accidental-death policies on its crewmembers—did you know that?”
Her eyes fastened on his, almost against her will. “No, Mr. Farnsworth, actually I didn’t.”
“But suicide, though. Now there’s another matter…”
Sylvester jerked her gaze away from him. Something about his teeth, his gingery hair, set her stomach to seething. She glared at Nancybeth, who peered back in fuddled and exaggerated innocence. Taking hold of a nearby convenience rail, Sylvester turned her back on both of them and launched herself hastily outward, into the gloom.
“Bye-bye, Sondra … sooorry we made you mad,” Nancybeth crooned as Sylvester disappeared through the nearest doorway. She squinted at Farnsworth. “Suicide? ‘Sat mean you don’ have to pay Grant? I mean, for Grant? ’Cause he killed himself?”
“Might mean.” Farnsworth peered back owlishly. “Unless he didn’t, of course.”
“Didn’t? Oh, yeah … an’ if he was murdered?”
“Ah, murder. Gray area, that.” Farnsworth tugged at the knot of his blood-colored polymer tie. “I say, been awfully good. But ’fraid I must run.”
“Yes, Wusspercy,” cooed the abandoned Nancybeth. So that’s what he’d wanted from her, nothing more than a conversation with Syl. “Run along, why don’t you? And while you’re at it, take a hint from Commander Grant…? Lose your body too.”
Across the room, not far away, Nikos Pavlakis floated near the bar with his bulb of ouzo and his bag of olives. He was well aware that they had been talking about him. His temper urged him to confront Farnsworth, to call him to immediate account, but his business sense urged him to stay calm at all costs. He was frantic over the condition of his beautiful new ship. He was almost equally sorrowful for the man Grant, who had been a dependable employee of his and his father’s for many years, and for Grant’s widow and children. He was even more apprehensive about the prospects of McNeil, another good man…
Pavlakis thought he knew what had happened to Star Queen. To him it was retrospectively obvious, transparently so—but not, he hoped, to anyone else. Nor could he afford to breathe a word of his suspicions to anyone. Farnsworth least of all.
As Helios slid into its parking orbit near Port Hesperus, Sparta was poking about in Angus McNeil’s private cabin on Star Queen.
She’d quickly looked through the galley, the personal hygiene facility, the common areas. She’d found nothing inconsistent with McNeil’s account. A slot in the medicine chest which would have held a tiny vial of tasteless, odorless poison was vacant. There were two packs of playing cards in the drawer of the table in the common room, one of which had never been opened, one of which had been handled by both McNeil and Grant—McNeil’s traces were strongest, although Grant had gripped one card tightly. She noted its face.
After the common areas Sparta had visited the pilot’s cabin next. It had not been entered since Wycherly was last on the ship, before it left Falaron Shipyard.
Grant’s cabin, then—notable mostly for what it failed to reveal. His bed was still made, the corners squared off and the blanket so tight one could have bounced a nickel off it at one gee. His clothes were neatly folded in the restraining hampers. His bookshelf and personal-computer files were mostly electronics manuals and self-improvement books; there were no signs that Grant did any reading for pleasure or had any hobbies except fiddling with microelectronics. The promised letters to his wife and children were clipped to the little fold-down writing desk, and Sparta left them there after ascertaining that no one except Grant had touched them. McNeil, if he’d been curious about their contents—as well he might have been—had had the integrity to leave them strictly alone. In fact there was no trace of McNeil’s presence anywhere in the room.
There was another letter, addressed to McNeil himself, in Grant’s desk drawer. But as McNeil had not searched the drawer, presumably he did not know of its existence.
McNeil’s cabin painted a portrait of quite a different man. His bed had not been made for days, perhaps weeks—Sparta noted purplish splotches of spilled wine on the sheets that, if he’d been telling the truth about not getting into Hold A after Grant changed the combination, had been there since four days after the explosion. His clothes were in a jumble, jammed into the hampers of his locker. His chip library was a fascinating mix of titles. There were works of mysticism: the Tao Te Ching of Lao Tsu, a treatise on alchemy, another on the Cabala. And of philosophy: Kant’s Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysic, Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy.
Some of McNeil’s books were real, photogra
mmed onto plastic sheets that imitated the paper of a hundred years ago. Games: a slim little book on parlor magic, another on chess, another on go. Novels: Cabell’s odd Jurgen, a recent work of the Martian futurists, Dionysus Redivivus.
McNeil’s personal computer files revealed a different but similarly wide range of interests—it took Sparta only moments to discover that he had been playing master level chess with his machine, that he had carefully followed the London, New York, Tokyo, and Hong Kong stock exchanges, that he subscribed to a variety of clubs, from rose-of-the-month to wine-of-the-month. Wine and roses—he must collect several months’ worth of each, between trips.
There were other files on the computer, protected by passwords that would have stopped a casual browser but which were so trivial Sparta barely noted them—files that made full use of the machine’s high-resolution graphics. The invention of the home video player a century ago had brought erotic films into the living room, but that was a mild innovation compared to what followed when the invention of the cheap supercomputer-on-a-chip brought new meaning to the phrase “interactive fantasy.” McNeil’s id was much on display in these private files, which Sparta closed hastily; despite her opinion of herself as sophisticated beyond her years, her face had turned bright pink.
She made her way into the corridor that passed through the center of the life support deck. Just on the other side of these close, curving, featureless steel walls the fatal explosion had occurred; at the same moment the access panels had been automatically dogged shut to prevent decompression of the crew module.
She went through the lock into the hold access then, to the three locks that warned VACUUM and the one that sternly wagged its bright yellow finger: “Unauthorized entry strictly forbidden.”