"I do, don't I? But I want to suggest another answer. You are what in another age would have been termed a 'lightning calculator,' a person with the ability to perform feats of memory and rapid mental calculation that most people would consider impossible."
At last, he saw a reaction. Her blue eyes were frightened, and her lower lip was quivering. "You can't prove any of that."
He reached out and patted her hand. "My dear Ms. Iver—may I call you Dulcie?—you do not understand. I am not seeking proof. I did not bring you here to accuse or punish you. I wanted to congratulate you and to admire your talent. And to offer a proposition."
"Ah." Her expression became contemptuous. "I've been getting those since I was fourteen."
"Not that sort of proposition, Dulcie. " (Not yet, at any rate.) "I mean a business proposition. Come and work here, with me."
"You mean as an employee, in this place? Why should I? I can make more money playing Delphi."
"You can. Unless—or rather, until—you are blackballed here and in the other gaming rooms. But I don't think you are telling me the truth. Your gains have not been large. Also, I watched you. You don't play for money. You play for the thrill, the excitement of beating the system. I know that thrill, all too well."
"How can you? You sit on the house side, you make the system. There's no way you can lose."
"Do you think I always sat up here, in this room, rather than down at the tables? How do you think I was able to recognize third-level play so quickly? If you want proof, come back with me to the gaming floor, and let me convince you that at least one other person in the world is capable of third-level Delphi play."
"You are—"
"Of course I am. It takes one to know one. " He reached out his hand. This time she grasped it in both of hers, and smiled at him in a way that sent tingles up his back.
"I never met another. I never thought I would." She laughed like a child. "We should compare what we can do."
"You show me yours and I'll show you mine?" He thought it might be too soon to say that, but all it did was make her smile more broadly. "And there is something that is even more fun than playing the games. I'm referring to designing them, creating something that offers scope for all skills from blind betting to your own level of play. Are you interested in working with me on that? I can make you an attractive offer. And I can assure you, there is no one else with talents remotely like yours in this establishment."
"I am interested. Very interested." The excitement on her face brought back memories of his own younger days. "But you have to tell me more about everything, and everybody here. I don't even know your name. Who are you?"
"My name?" He paused. Why was there a reluctance to tell her? "My name is—"
Don't say it, don't say it. That was the past. You are not that man any more.
The deep mental block came into play, shattering reality. He was falling again, falling as he had fallen many times, falling on a dark airless world—lungs gasping out a final bloodied froth of breath—falling until the solid roof below rushed up to put an end to everything. . .
And Lola, breaking out of the haldane synthesis with a second shock that rivaled the first one in its sickening intensity, knew that with Bryce Sonnenberg she was out of her depth. Memories of Mars, and now memories of Earth, when according to his own statements and all his records, he had never been to either planet. If those were false memories, how many more of the things that he had told her might be untrue?
She had to learn more about his past if she were to help him, and she could not rely on him to provide that information. To make progress, she herself must have independent help.
* * *
Lola tossed and turned in her bed. She had known that she needed assistance even before the most recent session with Sonnenberg; today had merely provided a confirmation. But when possible help had come along, she had rejected it, and for all the wrong reasons.
She remembered, ruefully, what she had told Spook a hundred times: Don't judge people by appearances. That was exactly what she herself had done when Bat had lumbered onto the scene. Thinking back, she felt sure that he had formed no better impression of her than she had of him. He had not spoken one word from the time Spook dragged him in to the time he dragged him out again. And he had scowled at her throughout the brief meeting.
But Spook insisted that Bat was a genius, someone who as Megachirops operated at the highest Masters' level on the Puzzle Network. He had shown her some of Bat's problems and solutions, and Lola acknowledged that the mind that came up with those possessed a subtlety and a deviousness far beyond what she would ever be able to achieve, plus an uncanny skill at handling large data bases.
Unfortunately those were skills that she had rejected, out of hand, because of a fat body and a few food stains.
She turned over in bed and looked at the clock. It was the middle of Ganymede's sleep period, a time when everyone sensible was asleep. But if she didn't do something, she was not likely to join that group.
Lola rose, pulled on a grey, one-piece suit, and walked along the dim-lit hall that led to Spook's rooms. He had chosen a separate part of the living quarters, as far away as he could get from where Lola lived. There was a message in that choice: Spook liked privacy. But in this case she didn't intend to do more than leave him a note on the door of his bedroom.
She opened the outer door quietly and slipped inside. She had expected all to be dark, but as her eyes adjusted to the gloom, she could see a faint light showing under the closed study door. Lola shook her head. Everyone sensible was asleep at this hour. She ought to have known that category would not include Spook.
She tapped gently, waited a second, and went in. Spook was there, peering into the display volume at a bloated cylinder with six convoluted and reentrant legs that sprouted from and reattached to its body. At Spook's side, arms folded like a judgmental Buddha, stood Rustum Battachariya.
Lola hadn't expected Bat still to be here, but actually it might make her job simpler. Before she could get to that, though, she had to fulfill her duty as a responsible surrogate parent.
"You shouldn't be up at this hour." She glared at both of them, the scrawny Spook and the Great Bat, and realized for the first time how young Bat was. Certainly no more than sixteen or seventeen. His huge size made you think he must be old, but his face had the innocent, unlined, and peaceful countenance of a baby. "Both of you should be asleep in bed."
"The late hour, I am afraid, is my fault." Bat spoke to her for the first time. "I pleaded with Ghost Boy—Spook—for instruction as to a certain geometrical construction technique."
"No, it's not your fault. You don't know the house rules." She pointed her forefinger at Spook. "He certainly does. What are you doing up so late?"
"Hey, it's no big deal." Spook was more annoyed than defensive. "I'm up as late as this nearly every night. The only reason you don't know it is you're always in bed, snoring your head off. A better question is, what are you doing up so late?"
"I couldn't sleep." Lola sat down on the one free chair in the cluttered workroom and told herself that she was making the right decision, improbable as it seemed. "I threw the two of you out earlier today, and I shouldn't have."
Spook shrugged. "That's all right. We could have done nothing if we'd stayed. I explained to Bat that you were stoned out of your skull."
"You might have found a better way to put it." She turned to Bat. "I want to apologize. I had just finished an intense drug-augmented session with a patient. I am a haldane."
"So Ghost Boy informed me. However, that does not call for an apology."
Lola decided that Bat might or might not be a genius, but he was without doubt an irritating smartass. "I'm not apologizing for that. I'm proud to be a haldane, but it takes time for the sensitizing drugs to lose their effect. I was at a low point when you arrived, that's why I was rude."
"You came here in the middle of the night just to say you're sorry?" Spook whistled. "Well, that'
s a first."
Spook, genius or not, was no less a smartass. Were they deliberately trying to annoy her?
"I came here to tell you that I have changed my mind. If Bat is interested in helping, I'll let you review the full files on—my patient." Still she found it hard to say his name. "On Bryce Sonnenberg. I'll tell you what he told me, but I'm wondering if his recollections are reliable. You know your way around the data banks. How would you like to make an independent check on Sonnenberg's history, right from the day that he was born?"
She thought there might be hesitation—it sounded to her like a grind—but Spook answered at once, "Great! Can we bring in other members of the Puzzle Network?"
"Definitely not. You two, and only you two. You work in strict confidence, and the unedited files never leave my office. All right? And I want to know about anything you find, just as soon as you find it."
Spook was looking at Bat. The fat cheeks puffed out for a moment in thought; then the cannonball head nodded. "Acceptable. We will of course need appropriate access."
"I'll provide that to you." Lola saw they were staring at her expectantly. "You don't mean now, do you?"
"As good a time as any." Spook waved her toward the terminal in the corner. "Do it, Lola. Some of us don't like to sleep our lives away."
* * *
Fifteen minutes later Lola was back in her bed, wondering if she had made the right decision. Spook and his new friend had waited until she provided the file access codes, and then they had pointedly ignored her. They didn't come right out and say that her presence was superfluous, but they went off into a strange form of communication, all terse and incomprehensible references to databank pointers and legal index modifiers that excluded her totally.
She settled down to sleep, telling herself thatthat was the whole point of asking Spook and Bat to help. If she could do what they were doing, then she would not need them. And while she slept, they would be working on the problem.
Probably working all night long. Lola had the impression that Bat regarded sleep as an option, something you might choose to do but could manage very well without.
Not her, though. If she didn't get seven or eight hours, she was good for nothing the following day.
A day which would soon be here. She realized that she would have to get up in four hours. And still she felt wide awake.
Now it was not Bryce Sonnenberg and his problems that filled her mind, but the newcomer who had dropped into her office when Spook and Bat were there. Conner Preston had come by to ask one simple question, and stayed on after they left to ask another.
"It's an imposition, I know." The confused, little-boy-lost look was out of place on a strongly built man in his middle thirties, but it was charming. "You see, I only just got here today."
"What do you need?" Lola remembered her own total confusion when she had first arrived on Ganymede. "Don't apologize. When you're a newcomer this place seems like a labyrinth."
"It does. Actually, I've been here before, but not to this part." He moved forward as though intending to occupy the seat opposite her, glanced at the busy desk, and straightened self-consciously. "I'm sorry, I'm interrupting your work."
"I think I've enjoyed as much work as I can stand. I'm wiped out. An interruption would be nice." Lola waved to him to sit down. "You said you have a question?"
"Well, only a pretty basic one. My food unit isn't working yet because the power was off, and I've had nothing to eat since this morning. I was wondering if you could tell me how to get to a public restaurant."
"You're in a bad place for it. This is all industrial and residential. You have to go four levels away. I can give you directions, but it's quite a distance."
"That's all right. I've got plenty of time. Just tell me where to go. Unless . . ." He hesitated, and would not look at her.
Lola smiled inside. You didn't think of becoming a haldane unless you already possessed a talent for reading people, and Conner Preston's body language was unmistakable. But she was not going to help him out. (Only the brave deserve the fair.)
"Unless—" His eyes, brown and beseeching, turned to hers. "Unless I could talk you into joining me; then you could show me instead of telling. Of course, if you have already had your evening meal . . ."
"I haven't. And I am hungry." She stood up. "Come on. I know a great place, and on the way you'll see a bit more of the inside of Ganymede. If it's been a while since you were here, you may not even recognize the place. It changes fast."
Strolling along corridors and standing on slideways, she learned more about Conner Preston. He was a senior news reporter, posted to Ganymede for a special one-year assignment. He had last been here six years earlier, one year before the war, when he was still a junior reporter.
Then came the first surprise: He was not from Earth or Mars, as she had assumed. He worked for United Broadcasting, and he had come from the Belt.
"I didn't know United Broadcasting even existed any more," Lola said. "I mean, I thought that the whole of Ceres and Pallas and Vesta—" She paused. She might be on the brink of a big social gaffe.
"Don't exist, either?" Conner Preston, uneasy in personal relationships, took that in his stride. "You won't offend me if you say it, because it came close to being true. People think Earth suffered most in the war, and so they did in terms of sheer numbers. Nine billion dead, that's a horrifying total. But if you think percentages, the Belt got hammered worst. When the war began we had thirty populated asteroids and a self-sufficient economy. We led the system in some areas of technology. By the time that we surrendered, all we had were colonies on Ceres, Pallas, and Juno. We were down to nine million people, from a hundred and seven million—less than ten percent survival. I'm the only survivor of my whole family. And afterwards we lost another million and a half to starvation and cold, because we weren't self-sufficient any more. We barely are today. We have to import food, and our data banks are still total chaos."
Lola resisted the temptation to ask, "And what did you do during the war?" Had he been involved in the attack on Earth? Polite Ganymede dwellers, themselves remote from all the conflict, did not ask such personal questions of the combatants of either side. But Lola could not help thinking it. Strip away Conner Preston's casual manner, and beneath it she sensed a man who was always alert for trouble. They had reached the restaurant and were settling in at their table, and Lola noticed how carefully he inspected everything around him—the room, the automatic servers, and the place settings—and how precisely he placed his own eating utensils. That was another contrast to his casual clothing and easygoing manner. It might be the result of wartime experience, but possibly it was a simple byproduct of a Belt upbringing and restricted living quarters. The Belt was often thought of as wide-open space, with many millions of kilometers between the major planetoids, but the habitats on most of them were cramped. The Von Neumanns had not touched the smaller worlds before the war began. Now it was anyone's guess as to how long it would be until they could start work in the Belt again.
"I'm sorry, Lola." Conner Preston had noticed her silence. "I've been talking too much about myself. That's boring."
"You didn't bore me at all. You just got me thinking about the war. I lost my whole family, too."
"I'm really sorry to hear that. So you are alone here."
"Yes. Except of course for Spook. You met him today."
"The thin one. He's your brother? I mean, he couldn't possibly be your son."
"He could—just. He's fifteen, and I'm twenty-seven. We were the lucky ones; we made it away from Earth just in time. The Armageddon Defense Line was on fire as we rose to orbit."
"Really? I've only heard third-hand reports before. You probably don't want to talk about that, but I'd really like to hear what happened."
"I don't mind."
Conner Preston was astonishingly easy to talk to. Once Lola had started, she found it hard to stop. Under casual prompting from him, she found thoughts and feelings coming to the surface
that she had hidden away for years. He was a first-rate listener, perhaps as a result of his work in the media. She normally despised media people—all show and no substance—but it wasn't the time to say so. And maybe there were exceptions. She talked on and on, moving forward and backward in time, from leaving Earth as a would-be haldane, then to her training, and back again to the first bewildering months on Ganymede, and at last to her final graduation and current practice.
"So you decided that you wanted to be a haldane long before you left Earth," he said, when the serving machine had forced a break in the conversation by clearing the table. "I never met a haldane before. We don't have them, you know, in the Belt. You're supposed to be intimidating. Haldanes know everything, even what a person is thinking. But you don't feel threatening. I'd love to hear more about being a haldane, and a lot more about you. Not tonight, though. I have to travel up to the top level and check that the rest of my luggage has arrived. I hope the power is on by now in my office."
"Spook would have been to see us if he'd had problems."
"So I owe the whole Belman family."
"No, Conner. I owe you." Lola rose from the table. She had just realized how much she had said to him, and how much she had enjoyed doing it. "You let me babble on at you for hours. That was nice of you."
"That's what I'm here for."
"No. That's what I'm supposed to be here for. Nothing of what I've said has any interest to a news reporter."
"It does to this reporter. But don't misunderstand me, I wouldn't dream of using anything that you say to me." They were leaving the restaurant, and at the exit he took her hands in his. "You have no idea what a good time this has been. It's the most pleasant evening I've had since I don't know when. Goodnight, Lola."
He smiled, turned, and headed quickly for the elevators that would take him to the upper levels. Lola, watching him go, felt some of the easy, warm feeling inside her fading away.
It was a perfectly reasonable way for the evening to end, but it wasn't what she wanted. He had implied that he would like to know her better; then he had failed to follow up on it. When he left he had said not one word about the possibility of their meeting again.
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