The Ganymede Club

by Charles Sheffield

  What he found at first seemed like simple bad luck. The original explorers had all been remarkably short-lived. The oldest of them had died at age fifty-eight. Was that a byproduct of a hazardous explorer's life, exposure to accidents, excessive radiation, or chemical toxins? There was no way to test that hypothesis. Instead, Bat wondered about the heirs. How long had they lived. If they were still alive, how old were they?

  It meant another trip to the data banks, and another long wait. Bat blamed himself for that. He ought to have had the foresight to ask for more information on the first search. Fortunately his patience was well developed. He had once spent four full days and nights at his data station, cracking a Claudius puzzle. That problem had required that he pull information from the data banks of every colonized body in the solar system—including Venus and Luna, depopulated by the war, and twelve asteroids sterilized by wartime attacks. Two days had been eaten up learning how to communicate with the abandoned but still active computers and communications systems of the vanished colonies. By Puzzle Network standards, four days were a small price to pay for ascent up one rung of the Masters' ladder.

  This time Bat asked for full biographical details on the heirs. When the information came streaming back in, it merely added to the mystery. The heirs were as ill-starred as the people from whom they had inherited. Everyone, living and dead, was less than fifty-eight years old.

  Bat frowned at the display. They couldn't all be weakened by radiation or poisons—unless every one had grown up in the same killer environment.

  Was that the case?

  This time Bat had the information right at hand. He pulled up the records. As he went through them, one by one, a clear, cold suspicion began to bristle the stubbly hair on the back of his shaven neck. At some level, he already knew where the data would lead.

  He laid out the facts as they were confirmed by the data banks:

  ■ No member of the crew of the original Saturn expedition is alive today.

  ■ No member of the original crew had any direct descendant.

  ■ No one who inherited from a member of the original Saturn crew had any direct descendant.

  ■ No one, original crew member or descendant, had ever lived to be more than fifty-eight years old.

  ■ Each member of the original crew had died between 2050 and 2054—that is, sometime between eighteen and twenty-two years after the first expedition.

  ■ Anyone who had inherited from the original crew in 2050 had died in 2067 or 2068, seventeen or eighteen years later.

  ■ Everyone, original crew member or inheritor, had made at least one expedition to the Saturn system.

  ■ Jeffrey Cayuga, who had inherited in 2054 from first expedition member Jason Cayuga, had died this year—just eighteen years later.

  ■ Alicia Rios had inherited from original crew member Athene Rios in 2054. According to Bryce Sonnenberg, she was now dead.

  ■ There was no record of an autopsy's having been performed on any expedition member or heir.

  ■ There was no indication as to where any of the bodies had been interred. According to Bryce Sonnenberg, the body of Alicia Rios had been deliberately destroyed by extreme heat.

  ■ There was little background history for any inheritor. They had come from the Belt, from postwar Earth, or from other regions where records were spotty or nonexistent.

  And now, the implications: If you were on the original Saturn expedition, you died sometime between seventeen and twenty-two years later. If you were an heir of someone on the original Saturn expedition, you also died between seventeen and twenty-two years later. How long you lived depended on how long your testator had lived, after he or she returned from the first Saturn expedition. The death of Alicia Rios was anomalous, but it had been by violence, rather than natural causes. Otherwise, she would have been "scheduled" to die by 2076 at the latest, four years from now.

  With those implications, Bat's original wild surmise grew to certainty. He did not wait for confirmation, and his fingers flew over the communications-center keyboard. It took less than ten seconds to set up a coded link with the Kobold, the ship that was carrying Spook and Bryce toward Lysithea.

  "Mr. Sonnenberg, I owe you an apology." Bat started to speak even before the visual circuit was in operation. "When you left the Bat Cave, I was skeptical."

  Spook's startled face appeared in the display region. "Bat? Hang on a minute, Bryce is messing around in the drive area. I'll go get him."

  Bat waited impatiently, checking departure times from Ganymede and the travel schedules of the ships. Even at top speed the Kobold would reach Lysithea after Lola and the Dimbula. He suspected that was what Bryce was doing—fiddling around in the drive area, hoping he could find a way to crowd out a little more acceleration. It wasn't going to work. Bat knew what the Miranda-class ships could and couldn't do.

  Bat noticed that the Kobold and the Dimbula were not the only ships to have left Ganymede in the past few hours. The Weland, official ship of the Saturn exploration parties, had lifted within minutes of Dimbula. The register showed the owner as Jeffrey Cayuga—which meant that the owner was now Joss Cayuga. Had Joss Cayuga been here, on Ganymede, all this time, while Lola believed he was on Lysithea?

  He put the question to one side as Bryce Sonnenberg appeared in the display.

  "I owe you an apology," Bat repeated. "Although you said that there might be real danger to Lola Belman, I did not believe you. I believe you now."

  "Why?" Bryce was no longer the man that Bat had met in Lola Belman's office. He looked weary and wary, his eyes blinking rapidly as though the lights in the ship were too bright. "Are you all right, Bat? What's happening back there?"

  "I am perfectly all right. I think that may not be true for Lola Belman."

  "I've had that worry for quite a while. I thought you didn't. What changed your mind?"

  Bat took a deep breath. He thought he was right—felt sure he was right. But no matter how he phrased it, this would sound strange.

  He plunged right in. "Joss Cayuga is the same person as Jeffrey Cayuga. If Jeffrey Cayuga had a reason to kill you and Lola, Joss Cayuga still has that reason."

  They didn't laugh. It would have been better in some ways if they had. Spook went bug-eyed, and Bryce made an odd hissing noise. "You can prove that?" he said.

  "Only by circumstantial evidence."

  "Jeffrey Cayuga was forty-two years old when he died. I can't believe he could pass himself off as nineteen-year-old Joss Cayuga."

  "You will like what I have to say next even less. Jeffrey Cayuga is also the same person as Jason Cayuga, who was a crew member of the original Saturn expedition in 2032."

  "That was forty years ago. He would have to be over sixty years old—and look nineteen!"

  "Right." Bat ground on. No turning back now. "Also, Alicia Rios is the same person as Athene Rios, of the original Saturn expedition. Hayden Polk is the same as Hamilton Polk. Lenny Costas is the same as first-expedition member Luke Costas. Simone Munzer, the first team's anomalist, is now Estelle Munzer Magritte, living on Ganymede. The only one of the original group who died is the captain, Betty Jing-li, and apparently she never made it back from the first trip out."

  There were other implications to what Bat was saying, possibilities that he was still reluctant to say out loud. Maybe one of the others would propose his idea and convince him that his brain was not spiraling out into total wildness. It was not encouraging when Spook twisted up his face and said, "You know, Bat, that's totally screwy!"

  "I'll send you the data. You can go over it for yourself, convince yourself. But that's not why I called."

  Bryce shook his head. "We can't go any faster. I've been checking the drive. We're already flat out on acceleration."

  "Agreed. According to my schedule, there is no way that you can reach Lysithea within fifteen minutes of the Dimbula."

  "And Lola doesn't respond to messages from us. We've tried."

  "I am not surprised. Like our
earlier message, they are being blocked in the Lysithean relay point."

  "So we can't catch up with her and we can't talk to her. Why did you call us?"

  Bat puffed out his cheeks in frustration. Bryce Sonnenberg's question had the simplicity of genius. Why had he called? Surely not because he doubted the validity of his own deductions.

  But Bryce was continuing, without waiting for Bat's answer. "Once we're at Lysithea, we can be useful. Until we get there, there's not a thing that Spook and I can do. It's up to you, Bat. Either you discover a way to get a message through to Lola and warn her. Or you suggest a way that we can speed up this ship. Or you dream up something completely new, something that none of us has managed to think of."

  And at last Bat knew why he had called. It was to be told what he already knew—that nothing could be done unless he, the Great Bat, conjured up a way to do it. He had to accomplish the impossible. Once that burden was placed on his shoulders, every uncertainty went away. He could concentrate on finding an answer.

  Of course, there might be no solution. Puzzle Network problems always seemed impossible when you first looked at them, but they were designed to have answers. This time the problem might actually be insoluble. And in any case, he had only—Bat glanced across at the display of ship schedules—seventeen hours and fifteen minutes. If he did not come up with something in that time, Lola and the Dimbula would be at Lysithea.

  Bat sighed, feeling a tremor of excitement and challenge through the whole of his ample frame. It was going to be a long seventeen-and-a-quarter hours. Maybe it would also be too short.

  24

  Before the Weland was an hour out from Ganymede, Cayuga had decided on the best way to do it.

  Lola Belman's death within the Lysithean habitat was something to avoid. It would invite prying visitors, wanting to know how and why she had died. Far better was a death before she ever reached the little moon, or at the moment of her arrival. The Dimbula was an old vessel. It was quite expendable. An equipment failure at a crucial moment—what could be more natural?

  He had left Ganymede within an hour of Lola's departure, and in a faster ship. The Weland had been closing steadily on the Dimbula, until the older vessel was within the range of his forward scope. From ten minutes after liftoff the trajectory of the Dimbula had been under the control of the tracking station on Lysithea. That station, in turn, could be operated from the control center of the Weland. Cayuga confirmed his authority with a command for a brief burst from the drive of the Dimbula. After twenty seconds he saw the flare at the rear of the other ship. Lola Belman, if she noticed the boost at all, would take it for a routine midcourse correction.

  So far, so good. The next step would be more difficult because there were built-in safeguards to prevent it. He wanted the forward drive to cut out and the rear drive to go on—hard—during the crucial seconds when the Dimbula was on its final approach to a Lysithean docking. Say, one gee of acceleration for the final kilometer. That would do nicely. Instead of the ship slowing for a soft touchdown, it would speed up, hitting the frozen Lysithean surface at one hundred and forty meters a second. That would be more than enough to pulp any living thing inside the ship. Even if Lola Belman realized what was wrong, she would have no time to do anything. The total period from onset of thrust to final impact would be less than fifteen seconds. He, arriving later—regrettably, too late to be of assistance; lots of crocodile tears—would visit the wreck and make sure that the ship's flight recorder showed a drive-controller malfunction during the accident.

  He settled in to override the safety locks, comfortable in the knowledge that he had plenty of time. Within three hours it was done. He had coded an extra firing sequence into the Lysithean master computer's approach control. When the Dimbula was one kilometer from final docking, the rogue boost command would be given. The ship would rush forward, missing the landing circle and smashing into the surface. Cayuga would watch it happen, because by that time the Weland would be no more than a couple of kilometers away from its own docking. After his own arrival he would delete the extra computer command from the system.

  He took another look at the ship ahead. He was still closing slowly on the Dimbula. He resisted the urge to call Lola Belman and talk to her directly. Only fools ran unnecessary risks. There was always a danger that he might say something that hinted at what would happen when they reached Lysithea.

  Instead, he monitored the message file. There had been four attempts to communicate with the Dimbula. Each had been halted, according to his instructions, by the computer at the Lysithean control center. He created a special message for Lola in case she called from the Dimbula, and before loading it into the Lysithean system he went over it carefully to make sure that it said nothing revealing.

  He turned to the general broadcast channel from Ganymede. It was no great surprise to learn that Lola Belman was wanted for questioning in connection with a body discovered in her offices. The broadcast named Jinx Barker, but it did not go so far as to say that Lola was suspected of his murder. Cayuga had brought her away from Ganymede just in time. A few more hours, and Security would have had her where he could not reach her.

  He did not need to call back to Ganymede and tell Lenny Costas and the others to lie low. The news broadcast about Jinx's death would do that for him.

  He was a cautious man. It was against his nature to celebrate prematurely. However, it was difficult to resist the feeling that everything was going about as well as it could go. The Ganymede Club was once again secure.

  * * *

  Lola did not like going to space. It was not fear so much as memories. Every liftoff made her think of that chaotic final day, when Earth shuddered and the Moon caught fire. That had been five years ago, but still she tensed at the moment of ascent.

  During the first few seconds she had stared at her own white-knuckled hand on the seat's armrest. Thank goodness there was no one to see her. A trained haldane ought to have better control. Physician, heal thyself. Easier said than done. She was physically and emotionally exhausted, tired to the bone by the strain of the past few days.

  The flight was fully controlled by the ship's control center, leaving Lola free to look around. The Sun was a little disk of fierce white fire on her right. It was hard to believe that such a tiny ball could provide warmth and gravitational control for the whole system. Ganymede, visible on the rear screen, was already shrinking to a frosty half sphere. Its craters, plains, and mountains did not look much different from Earth's Moon as it had been before the war. Lola glanced at the Dimbula's planned trajectory, presented for her benefit in one of the display volumes. Callisto was sweeping around from the other side of Jupiter. It would pass within a quarter of a million kilometers, and she would have a good view of its ancient, battered surface. After that there would be little to see. The outer Jovian moons, from Leda to Sinope, were all smaller than a decent-sized Belt asteroid. She might catch a glimpse of the biggest one, Himalia, but more likely there would be nothing but stars to look at until her final approach to the Lysithean docking facility.

  After a while staring through the port and at the external display screens, she turned her attention to the interior of the Dimbula. Originally planned as an exploration vessel in the days when drives were less efficient and travel times were longer, its design was different from that of today's passenger ships. The total living space was tiny, but it was intended to provide as much privacy as possible. Soundproof partitions could be slotted into a dozen different positions, offering individual cramped cubicles in which a person could sit, work, and perhaps imagine that she was alone. The fittings were of dark metal and weathered plastic, worn and somehow weary looking. The food-production facilities were primitive and the selections limited.

  Well, Joss Cayuga hadn't promised the royal yacht. And it wasn't as though she were going to be living here for the next few months. Everything seemed to be in good working order. The Dimbula's certificate confirmed that the ship was spaceworthy, a
nd that was all that mattered.

  A musical chime sounded through the whole ship, and lights flickered briefly for attention. "WE ARE AT THE CONTROL TRANSFER POINT," said a soft female voice. "YOUR ASCENT WITHIN THE GANYMEDE SPHERE OF CONTROL IS COMPLETE, AND THE NEXT PHASE OF YOUR TRAJECTORY WILL BE MANAGED BY THIS SHIP'S COMPUTER. THAT WILL CONTINUE FOR NEARLY SIXTEEN HOURS, UNTIL YOUR FINAL APPROACH IS TRANSFERRED TO THE TRANSPORTATION-CONTROL SYSTEM ON"—there was a fraction of a second's pause—"LYSITHEA."

  In other words, Lola would have nothing to do for almost a whole day. She had brought nothing to occupy her time. On the mad run from the Bat Cave to the surface of Ganymede and the safety of space, boredom had seemed the least of her worries.

  She moved over to the ship's communications center and studied the controls. The unit was small, cramped, and primitive. There were output speakers and microphones for voice reception and transmission, but she could see no option for vocal input to control the computer. Some points on the old-fashioned tactile keyboard were so worn by other fingers that the letters and numbers on their surface could no longer be seen. Even so, the layout was familiar. Lola should be able to use it without difficulty.

  She sat down on the uncomfortable, spindly chair, and sat with her fingers poised above the entry unit. What she most wanted to do was to call the Bat Cave, to make sure that Spook and the others were all right. She dared not do it. She would assume that by this time her own flight from Ganymede had been discovered, by Security and her would-be assassins. If that were the case, they might know that she was on board the Dimbula. All messages from the ship to Ganymede would be monitored. A call to the Bat Cave was a good way to direct others to the very place she did not want them going.

  Instead of initiating an outgoing message, she asked to receive the general Ganymede news channels. They were broadcast through the whole Jovian system, and she could pick them up without revealing anything of her own identity or position.

  What came in confirmed her fears.