The Ganymede Club

by Charles Sheffield

  No busybody human or machine stopped him to ask what he was doing or where he was going. Anyone he spoke to took his presence for granted. Best of all, no one seemed to care how old he was. Apparently a Callistan at fifteen was regarded as an adult and given full freedom and responsibilities.

  Spook had decided to tackle the Hidalgan data base before he worried about checking on Bryce Sonnenberg's presence on Callisto. It sounded like the more interesting job, and one better suited to his computer talents. Unfortunately the data facility, when he at last reached it, looked like the central trash heap of the universe. It seemed that Callistans did not place information storage and retrieval high on their list of priorities. Spook had expected problems because he would have to learn a different access technology. He found a more serious problem: For the records that he was seeking, there was no access technology at all.

  He knew now why the Hidalgo data base was not available on-line. It was supposedly somewhere in a monstrous chamber, whose door read: "Miscellaneous files and records." Everything was kept in individual boxes and cartons and cabinets, covered with dust, and with only the most rudimentary descriptions on their outsides—handwritten descriptions, in many cases, without any computer-readable codes anywhere in sight.

  There was no other person in the room and no computer assistance. Without a choice, Spook began what looked like a hopeless job. He had to find the data file that he wanted, in a disorganized mass of a million other files. Only after the first hour did he realize that there was in fact an organizing principle, even if by his standards it was a crazy one: The files were stored in the order in which they had been received, rather than the order in which they had originally been created. Putting it another way, they had been hauled in and dumped. What was already there was just shunted a little farther down the room.

  It was not much, but it was something that he could work with. Hidalgo had not been settled until 2051. Since the planetoid had been totally wiped out in the war, the transfer of records to Callisto must have taken place no later than 2067. He needed to work only within that sixteen-year window.

  Spook marked out the temporal boundaries in terms of floor space. He estimated that his search was now reduced to five thousand possible storage containers. In Bat's words, trivially easy and not worthy of the name "problem." Unless you had to do it yourself.

  Five hours later, covered with dust and with a tongue that felt like a piece of dry sandpaper, Spook held in his hands a brown container about the size of a shoebox. Within it, if the scrawl on one end could be believed, lay the long-sought Hidalgo data base. He blew off the dust, sneezed, and lifted the lid. He found himself staring at a blue cylinder the size of his forefinger. Not much to look at, but enough storage in principle for billions of data records.

  It might be what he wanted—if only he could find a piece of clunky old equipment able to read it. Spook had never seen that kind of storage device before, and he doubted that it was because it was too modern.

  He slipped the blue cylinder into his pocket and headed for the exit. There was no security. He could have walked out with anything he liked—a good measure of the value that the Callistans placed on any of the data in the chamber.

  Why didn't they junk the whole mess? He could think of only one reason: They were being paid by Ganymede to store it, where space was cheaper—but not paid enough, apparently, to make them maintain it properly.

  Wandering around looking for signs of life, Spook had one other thought. Given the degree of informality that seemed to be typical of Callisto, Bryce Sonnenberg could have arrived here any time at all, and nobody would have noticed.

  The first man he came to, a bearded worker in a dirty blue overall, stared at the cylinder when Spook produced it. The man said, "Somewhere around here, or nowhere. This is where all the oddball reading machines are kept. Did you try the lunatic asylum?"

  Not a promising suggestion. Spook learned after another couple of questions that "lunatic asylum" had to be interpreted literally. It was the place where all lunar records and equipment were held in protective safe keeping, until such time as Earth's moon was again populated by humans. The equipment, naturally, was all prewar technology.

  He found his way there after only one false start. A thousand data-input devices lined the walls of the room that he finally came to, but most of them could be ruled out after a brief inspection. The little blue cylinder had a series of narrow flanges and grooves along its side, and it required a precise mate.

  Spook's main worry was in finding the right hardware. Once he had that he had absolute confidence, as a Master of the Puzzle Network, in his ability to mesh with any software system in existence. Two hours of rummaging located the equipment he needed. It was a battered metal canister that looked as though it had barely survived the lunar wartime attacks, but it worked. The software interface was a lot trickier than he had anticipated. Another hour of work was needed before the data cylinder finally yielded and came on line. Spook began to transfer its contents to more accessible high-speed storage. Five more minutes, and he was reading through a list of index files.

  That was when he decided that it was time to gloat. Although the little cylinder contained ninety-three billion records, some farsighted Hidalgan information specialist had provided a front-end query program. Spook could ask keyword questions, and the program would then do all the work.

  Bryce Sonnenberg. It was the obvious first query. And here came data. Bryce Sonnenberg, resident of Hidalgo. All right!

  And yet not all right. Spook frowned at the display. According to this, Bryce Sonnenberg had been born on Earth in 2043, and had arrived on Hidalgo only in 2063. That would make him twenty-nine years old today—five years older than he said he was, but not impossible.

  What was impossible was the rest of it. According to the records, Bryce Sonnenberg was dead. He had died of a massive brain hemorrhage, just two years after he arrived on Hidalgo. There was no suspicion that it was anything other than natural causes. A postmortem had revealed the congenital malformation of a thin-walled brain artery, one that could have ruptured at any age. He had collapsed and been pronounced dead during routine exercise in one of the Hidalgan sports facilities.

  Spook leaned back and glared at the offending display. He was a rational person, with no time for the logically ridiculous. And Bryce Sonnenberg, as recently as yesterday, had been sitting in a haldane session with Lola.

  Solution: there must be several different Bryce Sonnenbergs. Spook had located the wrong one.

  Fifteen minutes' more work disposed of that idea. The Hidalgan data base held one, and only one, Bryce Sonnenberg. More than that, the physical description given in this file was a look-alike to what was in Lola's record: Height, weight, eye color, hair color, build—they were all the same.

  Time for some serious thought. Spook made a copy of the whole data file onto an output record that he was sure he would be able to read back on Ganymede, pocketed that wafer-thin output card together with the original blue cylinder, and headed again for the Callistan data graveyard. The chance that anyone else would want to look at the Hidalgan records was close to zero, but some things were sacred. You didn't destroy data sources.

  On the way he bounced around other ideas. Bryce Sonnenberg had come to Lola because he was having strange memory problems. Spook had seen the records on some of them and agreed that they were very peculiar. Wasn't it more likely that Bryce hadn't actually died of a brain hemorrhage, but had almost died? Brain injuries were notoriously weird things. After a big one you were quite likely to lose a large fraction of your memories and then find them slowly seeping back.

  Except that these were memories that Bryce Sonnenberg could not possibly have had. Memories of an older man than Bryce was now. And the record, without ambiguity, insisted that he had not just been injured. He had died.

  It was time to call in reinforcements. Half the charm of Puzzle Network problems was that you solved them strictly alone, with no help from an
yone. On the other hand, Spook knew from experience that puzzles were solved an order of magnitude more quickly when two people worked on them together.

  He sent a short message to Bat: Data located but facts present major puzzle.

  If that didn't have Megachirops panting for more, nothing would.

  Well, Bat deserved to suffer. Spook still had the more disagreeable part of his task on Callisto ahead of him. He had to see what he could learn directly about Bryce Sonnenberg.

  * * *

  It was just as well that Spook did not know the results of the latest Sonnenberg session. Lola, hardened to the worst that human nature could produce, was having problems facing it again. But she had to make the review, just in case she had missed something the first time through.

  She summoned up her resolve and commanded the computer to take her once again to derived reality.

  The ceiling above the bed was breaking down, crumbling before his eyes. He knew that he must stay here in this room, that he was not ready. In a few more months he might go outside occasionally, but the full treatment must go on for at least another two years.

  He had been warned of the effects of interrupting the protocol of drugs and indoctrination. But now the floor was breaking, too, revealing nothing beneath him but a long fall into darkness.

  He could not bear the idea of another fall, even in low gravity. He remembered the last one, the long drop through vacuum, with its sudden and violent end, and it terrified him. Anything was better than that.

  He balanced on the narrow support beams of the floor, staggered across them to the door, and pushed it open.

  He emerged into a chamber of horrors. Doors were opening, all along the corridor. From them staggered half a dozen pale figures. The nearest was a woman—or had once been a woman. Her skull bone ended at her eyebrows, revealing the pink and grey of naked brain tissue. A mass of thin, white neural fibers, still attached to a heavy metal circlet around her head, sprouted like sparse and unnatural hair.

  The woman was screaming—in pain or fear, he could not tell which. She was clutching the top of her head, still trying to hold the circlet in position, when she was suddenly thrust out of the way by a running man. She went headfirst into the wall. Blood and brain tissue splashed out around the metal circlet like a gory crown. The woman fell and did not move.

  He crouched against the wall. The others were all running at him, heading away from wreaths of white smoke that spread along the sloping corridor. But "running" was the wrong word. They were hobbling, reeling, staggering, like hopeless zombies. He saw that everyone had something unnatural about the head—shaven skulls, split skulls, deformed skulls, no skulls.

  He straightened as the last of them passed. He might feel bad, but compared with them, he was in perfect health. If they could try to escape, so could he.

  And he realized something that they apparently did not. Escape, if it lay anywhere, did not lie downward. It lay upward, toward and through the clouds of choking smoke.

  The white pall was thicker near the broken ceiling of the corridor. He dropped to his hands and knees and began to crawl in the opposite direction from the zombie crew, heading away from them along the gentle upward gradient. They had been right, though, to be afraid of the smoke. It was poisonous. His lungs began to burn. Much more of this would kill him.

  But so would returning the way that he had come. Some part of his brain, functioning clearly, despite the pain and terror, made its calculations. He kept going. If he died, it would be while crawling forward and upward.

  And maybe he would live. He had cheated death before—why not again?

  You could never beat the odds. That was an unalterable law. But you could always try to place your bet where the odds were most favorable.

  * * *

  Lola wondered if there were such a thing as too much empathy. She was feeling the pain, not only of Bryce Sonnenberg but of all the human deformities in the smoke-wreathed corridor.

  She was also beginning to doubt her own abilities to help him. His memories were so wild and so diverse it was hard to believe that they had all actually happened. Yet she had never heard of a case where anyone under the influence of psychotropic drugs could lie to a haldane.

  She was alone in her office, peering at the log of her sessions with Sonnenberg. When the door opened behind her, she did not look up or turn around. She did not need to. Conner Preston had an absolutely uncanny knack of dropping in on her when she was feeling at her most depressed.

  He came up behind her, dropped his hands onto her shoulders, and began to knead the tight muscles at the base of her neck. "Looks like hard work to me. Do you know what you're doing?"

  "Sometimes. Haldanes aren't infallible, you know—not like media people."

  "Same problem child?" He was leaning over her, peering at the records.

  "He's not a child." Normally she would have cleared the display instantly, but with Conner it was different. She knew that he was interested in Bryce Sonnenberg and his records—hardly surprising, since she fretted over the case constantly. Even if she did not talk about it, Conner was smart enough to know what was eating her. She also suspected that Conner knew Bryce's identity perfectly well, though she never mentioned his name.

  "He's far from being a child," she went on. "He's twenty-four years old, and sometimes I feel he's a lot older."

  "Twenty-four, and not a child. And you're twenty-seven. Are you trying to tell me that he's the competition?"

  "You have no competition, and you know it." Lola leaned back and let his strong, probing fingers work away at her tension. "If you want to hear about my real problem child, I'll tell you."

  "Spook? I thought you said you'd heard from him."

  "I did. He's on Callisto. He didn't say what he's doing there, and he didn't say when he's coming back. I'll murder him next time I see him."

  "Don't say that word—you'll make me think you mean it." His hands were still on her neck, but their touch had changed. Conner was making a circle with his hands, all the way around her throat, then running his fingers up to touch the sensitive skin below her ears and play with her earlobes. "It's too late for you to be working, Madam Haldane. Aren't you ready to take a break?"

  "Don't you think of anything else?"

  "I try not to. Sometimes my work gets in the way." He was lifting Lola to her feet and turning her to face him. "Before dinner, or after?"

  "Would you consider both?" She moved willingly against him, reaching around to rub the muscles of his back and rib cage. It made her feel almost guilty, the pleasure that she took in his touch and in touching him. What she was planning to do to him—had already started to do—ought to make her feel much more guilty. It didn't because it was all a game, part of the fun of lovemaking.

  Haldanes aren't infallible, she thought, but we can still do some pretty amazing things that we don't talk about. Without using drugs.

  Hypnotic blocks and spoken keys were the least of them. She could hardly wait to see Conner's face when she discovered what he was up to, and told him all about it.

  * * *

  Computers were easy. People were hard. Spook had thought about his own epitaph and decided how it should read: Here lies Spook Belman. He was interested in ideas, things, and people, in that order.

  But sometimes you had no choice except to deal with people. Here he was, heading for the place on Callisto that, according to Lola's files, Bryce Sonnenberg came from. He had no idea what to do next. The central address system provided an exact location on Callisto, but it didn't say one thing about the nature of the place itself.

  Spook sought inspiration in his surroundings as he was carried the final few hundred meters. This didn't look like the approach to any residential area, even by Callisto's modest standards. The walls on either side were featureless—bare metal and plastic. At the end of the tunnel stood two massive doors, and in front of them was a funny-looking little house. Odder yet, inside that house he could see a guard—not a machine,
but an actual human in a dark-green uniform.

  He wandered along the last fifty meters, staring at the great doors. There were no handles on them and no way to see how they might be opened.

  "What do you want?" The guard was leaning out over a half-door that came only up to his waist.

  "Nothing." Spook studied the man. He was maybe ten years older than Spook, with dark round eyes and a double chin.

  "Go away then."

  Spook nodded, but it seemed to him that anybody who had to stand all day in a guardhouse doing nothing must be out of his mind with boredom. And probably not all that smart. Instead of obeying, Spook pointed at the doors. "What's inside there?"

  "None of your business."

  "It looks like a prison."

  "Well, it isn't." The uniformed guard gave Spook a superior smile. "So now you can go away."

  "I'm not doing any harm." Spook gaped again at the doors. "If it's not a prison in there, what is it then?"

  "None of your business." And then, when Spook still showed no sign of leaving, "Look, what are you doing here?"

  "Nothing." Spook shrugged. "I just came along this way and I wondered—why the big doors?"

  The guard studied Spook's earnest, gawky face and his pipe-stem arms and legs. The temptation was too much. "It's worse than a prison," he said slowly. "Much worse. If you knew what was inside there, your flesh would creep."

  "Dead people?" Spook moved two paces closer.

  "Worse than that." The guard leaned confidentially over the half-door. "You want to know what's in there? Well, I'll tell you. You know about the war?"

  That was like asking Spook if he knew his own name. He controlled himself, and nodded. "Uh-huh."