"Is anything wrong?" Stavros asked, softly this time.
"Well—" The clerk looked again at the all-clear light on the sniffer. "I suppose not." She punched keys with unnecessary violence and handed Stavros his ticket. But she could not resist a parting shot: "I do suggest, sir, that you obtain a more easily verifiable means of identifying yourself."
"I'll see to it," said Stavros, who had several, none of them, though, as valuable to him at this moment as that little incomprehensible piece of plastic.
The spaceport was studded with clocks, both FSY and local time. Twenty-nine hours to go, Stavros saw. He was not out of the woods yet. His main concern was staying inconspicuous; in a crowded spaceport, that shouldn't be too hard. All he needed to do was stake out a seat and look bored.
* * *
The discreet individual was wondering if he'd outsmarted himself. He had hooks into the spaceport information system, of course, but that was like saying he had a knitting needle lodged in a whale's fluke—he could not cope with the avalanche of data.
Restricting the incoming feed to travelers who paid cash helped some, but not enough. Too blasted many people came through the spaceport. Only a few of them, though, planned routes that would take them to New Thessaly or even the general direction of the planet. The discreet individual had his computer analyze the routing forms of cash customers going that way.
The conclusion became inescapable after awhile: none of those people was Stavros Monemvasios. Some were too old, others too female, and still others had papers an amateur could not fake on the spur of the moment.
All of which meant the discreet individual had miscalculated somewhere. He was still certain Monemvasios meant to get off Hyperion—what point to cashing out and then waiting around to be caught? And Monemvasios's home planet seemed the most logical place for him to go.
But logic and truth had at best a nodding acquaintance. The discreet individual always bore that in mind. He also had other things to do than worry about a student on the run. He decided to do some of them and come back to Monemvasios if inspiration struck.
As with peripheral vision, the mind is often sharper if it looks to one side of a problem. That evening, the discreet individual suddenly sat bolt upright. In guessing Monemvasios would head for New Thessaly, the discreet individual tacitly assumed his quarry would be trying to get away, nothing more.
What if that was wrong? What if Monemvasios was still in the mood to create problems? The discreet individual found that unlikely but believed in covering his bets. If it was so, where would Monemvasios go?
The discreet individual put the question another way—where offplanet could Monemvasios get backing for his claims? Not from the central bureaucracy of the Survey Service, that was for sure! Where had that miserable report come from? After a few minutes of searching through his files, he had the answer.
Then he had to reprogram his computer to examine cash customers en route to Topanga, or rather to Enkidu. When he found a certain S. Mesropinian, he smiled and picked up that attaché case. It was time to go back to the spaceport.
The preliminary screening gadgets at the terminal entrance never hiccuped as he walked through. The more sophisticated contraband sniffers that dealt with passengers' luggage would also have given his case a clean bill of health. Programmers, he thought smugly, did not know everything there was to know.
He queued up to use an information screen. The Arminius, the ship outbound for Enkidu, would be departing from sub-terminal seven—naturally, the one farthest from where he sat. He sighed and climbed onto the slidewalk that would take him there. All he'd need to do then would be to spot Monemvasios-Mesropinian and bump him a little. He'd have enough time for a getaway, but in a few minutes it would all be over.
Someone bumped him a little. "Beg your pardon," said a slim woman in business attire. She pushed past the discreet individual, adding her own walking speed to the steady roll of the slidewalk. He watched appreciatively; she had a nice backside.
Because she was so brisk, she soon put several people between herself and the discreet individual. Out of sight, out of mind, he thought as she disappeared. He went back to planning the credit-transfer scheme he could finally give full time to once Monemvasios was disposed of.
* * *
Waiting kept Stavros on edge. He migrated back and forth between the outgoing passengers' lounge and the cafeteria next to it. He was full to bursting by then, but each trip gave him an excuse for getting up and stretching his legs. That was easier than just sitting in one spot, headphones drowning out the world.
Or it would have been, except that every fifty-meter hike took him past the spaceport security guards. They ignored him, but each time he showed himself to them, he twisted with fear they wouldn't.
He was also, he noted ruefully, using the jakes a good deal.
* * *
The discreet individual glanced around the lounge. He saw no one who looked even a little like Monemvasios. Shrugging, he sat down to wait. The man he hunted could not be far away. He shivered. The air-conditioning was very high.
He stiffened. Was that skinny fellow walking out of the head the one? No, too short; no matter how desperate a man was, he could not shed ten centimeters.
There was Monemvasios, coming from the lunchroom! All he'd done was shave, but the discreet individual's first glance had slid right past him. Sometimes the least disguise was best.
The discreet individual got up, or started to. For some reason his legs did not want to work. He put his hands on the arms of his chair and pushed himself upright.
He shivered again. It's awfully cold in here, he thought. He took a step toward Monemvasios, staggered, caught himself. He took another step. This time he could not keep himself from sliding bonelessly to the floor.
His last conscious thought was that the woman who'd poisoned him really did have a fine behind. He never felt his head hit the ground.
* * *
Someone screamed. Security guards rushed into the lounge. Stavros almost jumped out of his skin. His body took two involuntary half-running steps before he realized he was not the target of the guards' attention.
They gathered instead around a man who had crumpled on the thin carpeting. All Stavros could see of him was his shoes, for the guards screened his upper body from view. One guard was frantically massaging his chest, while another stooped to give mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.
The spaceport doctor came running in a couple of minutes later. She immediately pushed one of the security guards out of the way and got to work. Soon she rose again, her mouth twisted in a grimace of frustration.
Stavros reflexively crossed himself. At the doctor's direction, a couple of guards lifted the dead man and carried him away. The usual babble of the lounge was stilled. Background music, ignored a moment before, seemed loud and intrusive. Shivering as if he had taken a sudden chill, Stavros found a seat and waited for the Arminius to arrive.
* * *
The report was oblique, talking about a personnel transfer being satisfactorily expedited. Anyone who saw it on Paulina Koch's screen might have wondered why the Chairman had to deal with it herself but would have forgotten about it before he was out of her office.
The Chairman cleared the screen. Another loose end taken care of, and this time before any trouble resulted. Hovannis's discreet individual would never be anything but circumspect now. Better still, she had used her own contacts to arrange that, not going through the External Affairs Director. One day she might find it useful to have independent resources in that area.
She frowned, but only briefly. Bureaucratic language and patterns of thought made it easy for her to take an impersonal view of the operations she ordered carried out. She had trouble imagining people dead but could clearly see how her position and her agency had been protected by what she'd done.
And they had been protected. The appropriation was safe, the Purists discredited or ashamed of their own policies. The latest polls showed publ
ic approval of the Survey Service near an all-time high.
Now it was payback time. With her new power, she could make life very uncomfortable for the gadflies who'd been buzzing around the Service for years. Lately they'd thought they were vultures, come to pick her bones. It was time to remind them they were still small enough to swat.
What a delightful prospect, she thought.
* * *
Stavros had a bad moment boarding the Arminius. The steward who fed his ticket into the ship's computer nodded to him and said, "Glad to be aboard?"
"You'd better believe it!" he said fervently.
"Thought as much. You look like you're about three steps ahead of the executioner." The steward laughed at his own joke. Stavros managed a strained chuckle. The steward stepped aside and waved him into the ship.
Even after he was in his cabin, he did not feel altogether safe. The Hyperion police could still take him off the ship. If they came after him now, in fact, he could not even run. His stomach churned. He lay on the bunk and tried to relax. He couldn't. Pacing up and down in the narrow space between the bunk and the bulkhead helped more.
Because he was pacing, he never felt the Arminius lift off. He had to check his watch to realize he was in space. He had been running on nerves too long. As soon as he understood he was safe, at least for a while, he flopped to the bunk like a marionette whose puppeteer has dropped the strings.
"A chance," he said out loud. "A chance." Somewhere on Topanga, someone might have heard of the report on Bilbeis IV. And if someone had, he might yet call the Survey Service to account for Andrea—action had made him bottle up that hurt, but it came flooding back now full force—for Professor Fogelman, for the crew of the Jêng Ho, and for all the poor people who just happened to board the wrong starship at the wrong time.
The Service was huge and powerful, but it was not, must not be, beyond the reach of law. The Chairman had to be shown she and hers were not too big to swat.
What a delightful prospect, Stavros thought.
VIII
"Hello, Pandit," Magda said. "Let me guess—you've checked, and as far as Survey Service Central knows, you never sent in that report."
In the phone screen, the clerk's brown face grew even more troubled than it had been. "I am afraid that is correct. I tell you frankly, I have never seen another case like this. I don't know what to make of it. All the other documents I've processed have gone through flawlessly."
"It figures. Things have been going that way lately. As far as the credit system knows, I'm still dead, too. Something is screwed up in those computers, what's-his-name—Peters—says."
"I am sorry for your difficulties." Pandit actually sounded as though he meant it. Maybe he does, Magda thought; his orderly soul had to cringe for the chaos that had attached itself to her. He went on. "I suppose I can expect to see you again soon with our vanishing document?"
"No." Magda had decided to spread a little chaos herself. "I'm sick of this nonsense. I think I'm going to take the whole thing to the Noninterference Foundation and see what they make of it."
"You can't do that!" Pandit exclaimed in horror. Magda knew how he felt; giving information to the Noninterference Foundation was like going over to the enemy. The Foundation kept an eye on the way the Survey Service interacted with natives of pretechnological worlds. That would have been bad enough, but the private watchdog group got most of its support from the Purists, the people who thought the Service ought to keep off those worlds altogether.
Magda had about as much use for Purists as she did for cockroaches: to her they were two examples of pests the Federacy had never been able to eradicate. But that did not mean she thought the Survey Service ought to get away free when it made a mistake. Service personnel had interfered on Bilbeis IV, even if with the best of intentions, and the courses of billions of lives there had been changed as a result.
"Going through channels hasn't done me any good," she said. "I've told you before, Pandit—this report is important. One way or another, it has to get out."
"Yes, so you've said. All the same, do you feel like throwing away your career in a fit of pique over computer problems at Central? Think about the assignments you will draw when people know you collaborate with the Foundation."
Magda winced. What Pandit had suggested was illegal, of course. It was also very likely. For that matter, she wouldn't have wanted to ship with a known informer herself. "I've got good reason to go," she said, but her voice sounded defensive even to her.
"Yes, so you've said," Pandit repeated. "I'm sure you believe it, but remember, it is a step you cannot take back. May I suggest something?"
"Go ahead," Magda said grudgingly.
"Why not try once more to transmit your report through the proper channels? If you fail after four attempts, I do not suppose anyone could blame you for doing something irregular."
"As far as I'm concerned, they couldn't blame me after three." But despite her tough talk, Magda was secretly glad to have a chance to put off the trip to the Foundation. "Oh, all right. I'll see you before long. It had better go through this time, though; that's all I can say."
She broke the connection, picked up the data card, and rode the elevator down to the lobby of the apartment complex. The nearest shuttle stop was only a short walk from the building.
A few minutes later, a slim, swarthy man somewhere close to her own age joined her at the stop. His clothes were on the faded side and he wore a backpack. He looked tired. After a casual glance that told her that much, Magda ignored him, or tried to.
He did not make it easy, though. He kept looking stealthily in her direction and jerking his head away when she caught him at it. They were not the sort of glances a man gives a female stranger he finds attractive; Magda would have thought nothing much of those one way or the other. It was almost, she thought, as if the fellow was wondering whether he knew her. With all the strange goings-on of late, she did not like that, because she was sure she had never set eyes on him before.
The shuttle came sighing up just as the man looked to have worked up the nerve to speak to her. With a feeling of relief, she fed Marie Roux's credit card into the slot by the door; she wanted nothing to do with him. Her leeriness only increased when she heard the fare apparatus suck up a bill—he had paid his way aboard with cash. People who used untraceable money generally had a reason for it, and rarely a good one.
From habit, Magda sat near the front of the shuttle. She was soon kicking herself for it. Once, when she yawned and stretched, she caught the stranger staring at her from behind, though again he quickly looked away when he saw she had noticed him. After that she did not look back, but she imagined she felt his gaze on the back of her neck. It made for an unpleasant ride; she was glad to get off.
That did not last long. The stranger scrambled down as the shuttle was on the point of pulling away; its doors, which had started to close, hissed open for him. He had been holding his backpack in his lap and paused to resling it before leaving.
A trifle faster than she might have otherwise, Magda walked toward the Survey Service office, fortunately no more than a block and a half from the shuttle stop. She scowled—the stranger was still following her. If he tries anything cute, she told herself, I'll make him regret it. Like anyone who did Survey Service fieldwork, she had been well trained in unarmed combat.
All of which, she thought, would do her no good at all if he had a projectile weapon. But if he planned on shooting her, he'd already had plenty of chances.
That reasoning was reassuring, but only until he came into the office after her. Then he made her feel like an idiot, because he headed straight for the director's room in the back. She supposed that having two people come from the same shuttle stop to the Survey Service office wasn't twisting coincidence's arm outrageously.
Pandit spotted her and saved whatever document he was working on. "My screen is clear," he declared. "We are ready for another try—a successful one this time, I hope."
&nb
sp; "So do I," Magda said, taking the data card from her hold-all, "but I'm not going to hold my breath. Central doesn't seem to want to know about Bilbeis IV."
She had forgotten the fellow who had been on the shuttle with her. He stopped in his tracks, turned, and walked back toward her. "You really are Magda Kodaly, aren't you?" he said.
"What if I am?" she said, her suspicion of him flaring again.
"I thought you were, but I didn't dare believe it. I thought you were dead."
"You aren't the only one," she muttered. He stared at her, not understanding. "Never mind. What do you want?"
"That's the report on Bilbeis IV you have there, the one from the Jêng Ho?"
"Yes. Who are you, anyway? How do you know about it? I've been trying for weeks to get it into Survey Service Central files, and I haven't had any luck yet. This is my fourth try."
Pandit had loaded the data card into his terminal and was about to hit the transmit button. "Don't send it!" the stranger exclaimed, so urgently that the clerk jerked his finger away in alarm. "Whatever you do, don't send it," the fellow repeated. He bent down, pushing Pandit aside, and took the card from the computer.
"Give me that back," Pandit said indignantly.
"No." The stranger stepped away from the terminal. He still had a tight grip on the data card. Magda tensed herself to grab it away from him. He noticed and handed it to her. "Here—it's yours. All I ask is that you don't transmit it until you've heard me out. You're in danger if it goes to Central—you may be in danger anyhow."
"Do you know," Magda said to nobody in particular, "I've had more melodrama in my life in the little while since we came back from Bilbeis IV than in all the time before that, and I don't like it one bit."
"I believe you," the stranger said with perfect seriousness. "So have I."
Magda studied him. He neither looked nor sounded like a madman . . . and things had been strange lately. "All right, talk," she said. "This had better be good."
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