Asimov's Future History Volume 5

by Isaac Asimov

  “Dr. Galen said my bill would be charged against a station account.”

  “I’m afraid Dr. Galen made an error,” Jacobson said. “That would be the case if you were indigent and unable to pay, or if the costs of your care exceeded the guarantee made by your homeworld on behalf of its citizens.”

  “But my case is different —”

  “Indeed. Your citizenship is unknown. Your financial assets are unknown. Indeed, there is even some question about your majority under Spacer law,” said Jacobson.

  “I’m old enough.”

  “We have decided to presume so,” he said. “But in any case, since you have not been able to supply us with identification, we have no choice but to seize your tangible personal assets in payment of your account.”

  “My tangible assets —”

  “Your ship and its contents have been appraised generously, I assure you,” Jacobson said, glancing back at his computer. “Even so, I’m afraid there’s not much left after subtracting the salvage fee and the expenses of the rescue operation. Still, there’s more than enough to cover passage to Nexon on the next shuttle and keep you fed in the meantime.”

  Derec gaped disbelievingly. “You can’t do that. You can’t just take everything a man owns.”

  “It’s the judgment of the minister of finance that anyone who has assets enough to own such a ship in the first place can quite afford to pay his bills,” Jacobson said, sitting back in his chair. “If we were to let you get away with this, I’d be overwhelmed by freeloaders, all claiming to have forgotten where their funds are held.”

  “Are you accusing me of making this up? Ask Dr. Galen —”

  “Dr. Galen does not set policy for the station. I do.”

  “At least you finally admit that this is your doing,” Derec retorted. “I can’t believe you have the nerve to charge me for rescuing me. You’d have gone out to intercept that ship whether we’d been on it or not.”

  “From our point of view, that ship wouldn’t have been there endangering our facility unless you were in it,” Jacobson said lightly.

  “Just a moment,” Katherine said. “That ship is half mine. Maybe you can grab his half for payment, but you can’t touch mine. You know who I am. I authorized a draft on my account at the Auroran Exchange.”

  “So you did,” Jacobson said. “Tell me, what sort of account was it?”

  “A Living Share — a family trust —” Katherine’s face was beginning to go gray.

  “Which is a revocable trust, is it not?”

  “I — I guess.”

  “I regret to inform you that on May 26, your account was closed and all funds withdrawn. Have you other assets of which we may not be aware?”

  “No,” Katherine said, her expression acutely pained. “That was my Living Share. How could they take it back? How could they do such a thing?”

  “I cannot say. The fact remains, they did. You are legally an adult and responsible for your own debts. Therefore we have been obliged to exercise our rights to your portion of the property as well.”

  “You won’t get away with this,” Derec threatened feebly.

  “It is not a question of ‘getting away with’ anything,” Jacobson replied. “We are well within our rights. You should be grateful that you’re alive, instead of fussing over a ship which I understand is not in flyable condition in any case. Since you couldn’t have paid for its repair, you would have had to try to sell it anyway, and I doubt very much you could have gotten anything near the price you were paid by us.”

  “You —” Derec sputtered.

  “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have other business to attend to.”

  The link dissolved before Derec could reply. “Do you believe that performance?” he exclaimed, turning to Katherine. He was shocked to see how empty of spirit her eyes were.

  “Performance?” she asked mechanically.

  “This isn’t what it looks like. This is just a way of separating us from the ship. To pay us for it they’d have to have proof that we own it — more than our word and the fact that they found us in it. Do you know why they’re not asking us for that proof? They don’t want to know. Just like they don’t want to know whether I’m too young to be responsible for my own debts.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” she said. “None of it matters.”

  Derec stared at her. “What’s bothering you?”

  “My money. My family took my money —”

  “Is that any great surprise? The Patrol probably reported you missing when they went out and picked over what was left of the Golden Eagle.”

  “They didn’t even give me a chance to explain —” she said despairingly.

  “Explain to who?” he asked gently.

  But his question seemed to awaken her to her loss of control. The line of her jaw stiffened and her eyes hardened. “Frost them. Frost them all,” she said tersely. “It’s ancient history. What do we do now?”

  “What are you game for?”

  “I’ll tell you what I’m not going to do. I’m not going to wait around quietly until the next freighter comes and then meekly traipse off to Nexon,” she declared. “And I’m not about to let a bunch of robots keep me away from my property, even if they are following the orders of that milkface.”

  “Sounds like I’m going to need to start calling you Kate.”

  Surprised, she smiled. “Maybe you’d better.”

  “Good. Because I think we’re going to need her,” Derec said. “This isn’t going to be easy.”

  “I know. But there’s a limit to how many places you can hide a ship of that size, even in a station this large. If it’s still here, we’ll find it.”

  “Probably so,” Derec agreed. “Chances are they moved it from the active dock to one of the deactivated ones — in the military wing, would be my guess. Even if the station directory won’t tell us where the other dock facilities are, we can figure it out. But that won’t help us much.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because the key is what matters, not the ship. Jacobson is right. We don’t have any use for the ship.”

  “We find the ship, we find the key.”

  Derec shook his head unhappily. “The key won’t be there. The robots have it.”

  “Jacobson didn’t say anything about it.”

  “Why should he take the chance of being the first to call our attention to it?” Derec asked rhetorically. “I just know that the whole time we talked to him, he was sitting there waiting for us to ask about our personal effects or give some sign we know about the key — waiting to pounce if we did. It was a test. We passed, so they’re going to let us go. If we hadn’t —”

  “Why should they take any special notice of the key? It doesn’t look like anything special. They don’t know what Aranimas went through to get it. I do, and I still don’t’ know why it’s so important.”

  “So you say.”

  “Do you think I’m lying?”

  Yes, he thought. Or at least not telling the whole truth. I’m starting to believe that everybody knows what this thing is but me — that you’re pretending that you’re just as ignorant as I am, while all the time you know exactly what it is and why it’s important.

  But he said none of that. “I don’t know what to think,” Derec said, frustration thick in his voice.

  “I think the key’s still hidden wherever Aranimas kept it. Jacobson didn’t mention the key because he doesn’t know anything about it. He’s just worried about the ship in general.”

  “He knows. I’m sure of it,” Derec said stubbornly.

  “Look, if Jacobson knows about the key and the robots found it, then it went out on Fariis. Which means he has it by now. End of story.”

  “Not necessarily,” Derec said, shaking his head. “The packets are contract haulers, not Nexonian nationals. Do you think he’d trust them with something that’s probably ten times more valuable than their whole fleet contract? For that matter, do you think he’d put it on an unarmed
vessel with the raiders still sitting out there somewhere trying to figure out how to get it back?”

  “What, then?”

  “Put yourself in their shoes. First you protect your find from being disturbed, and then you get together a team to go retrieve and investigate it. As long as you’ve done the first one right, you can take your time doing the second. They’ll be here when they’ve assembled the people and the hardware they need. At the very least they’ll need to scare up a bulk freighter to carry the spacecraft back and a warship to give the raiders second thoughts.”

  Katherine sighed. “What a mess. Maybe we ought to just let them have it.”

  “The hell with that,” Derec spat. “As long as Aranimas doesn’t have the key, and the raiders don’t attack, and Jacobson is still on Nexon — we’ve got a chance.”

  “But it’s a race.”

  “Yes. It’s a race. And we can’t wait around for you to get a clean bill of health from Dr. Galen before we start,” Derec said pointedly, bracing for an argument.

  The argument never came. “You’re right,” she said simply, swinging her legs over the side of the bed and feeling for the floor. “Where to?”

  Before that question could be considered, there was Dr. Galen to deal with. The robot came bursting into the room before Katherine’s bare feet even had a chance to pick up a chill from the floor.

  “Please return to the bed, patient Katherine,” Dr. Galen requested. “Florence can see to whatever needs you might have.”

  Derec was girding himself for another protracted argument, but Katherine surprised him. “I’ll go where I want when I want,” she snapped. “And if you start trying to act like a warden instead of a doctor I’ll have your brain reprogrammed for basket-weaving.”

  “I must protest strongly —”

  “Am I in danger of dying?”

  “No, patient Katherine. But your recovery —”

  “Then save your protest for your medical log: ‘Patient Katherine Burgess disregarded recommended rehabilitation program.’ Isn’t that the phraseology? Derec and I are going for a walk. If you don’t want me catching pneumonia you’d better get me some normal clothes. And something for my feet.”

  Any human addressed in that tone would have been clenching his fists and strongly considering using them. But Dr. Galen only nodded slightly. “I will have clothing brought.”

  “If it’s not here in five minutes I’m going out like this,” she warned him. “And don’t get any ideas about following us around. If I have any problems, Derec will be there to bring me back.”

  When the robot left, Derec stared at Katherine in amazement. “How’d you learn how to do that?”

  She shrugged. “Medical robots are as bossy as they come, but they can’t make it stick unless you’re really in some danger. I’m not.”

  “All the same, it would have taken me twenty minutes to get to the same point, if I’d ever gotten there at all.”

  “That’s because you always let yourself get suckered into arguing with the robots. I just give them orders. Much more efficient.”

  “I guess it is, sometimes,” Derec said. “But you ought to know, in about four hours your dermal analgesic is going to wear off and your skin is going to start feeling like someone’s scraping it off with a spatula.”

  As Derec spoke, Florence entered, wordlessly laid a sleeveless jump suit and a pair of foot pillows on the end of the bed, and then left.

  “Thanks for the warning. Let’s make a point of being back in three and a half,” Katherine said. “Now get out of here while I change.”

  By the time Katherine emerged from the ward, Derec had decided to go along with her proposal that they look for Aranimas’s ship first. He had several reasons for surrendering that the ship was the last known location of the key, that even if the key had been found and removed it might logically be kept nearby. But the most important reason was that if he didn’t show her early that she was wrong, she’d soon be trying to order him around as she did the robots.

  The electronic map on the wall of the lobby offered little help, Rockliffe Station was built out of three connected spheres. The central sphere, called C Section, contained some forty levels from top to bottom. Two satellite spheres barely half as large were anchored to it by cylindrical pylons only a few levels in diameter.

  Large areas within the station’s outline were colored black and labeled “Inactive.” No amount of coaxing could persuade the map’s controller to reveal what facilities were in those areas or even show the traffic grid.

  Less than fifteen percent of C Section was drawn in with the pale blue color, labels, and identifying symbols of the active zone. Most of E Section, which contained the known dock facilities, was blue. But W Section, together with its connecting pylon, was completely black.

  “There,” Katherine said, pointing to W Section. “They probably had an east terminal and a west terminal.”

  “Symmetrical design,” Derec agreed. “Makes sense.”

  “It’s a good place to start, anyway.”

  “Let’s hope that those sections are just closed down, not closed off.”

  The hospital was located near the center of C Section, three levels down from the main thoroughfare. Together, Katherine and Derec climbed up to the main level and headed west. There were no physical barriers, though the four-lane express slidewalk was not operating, obliging them to walk.

  But past the boundary of subsection 42, the corridor lights were out and the directional “lightworms” were off. Based on what he had seen during his earlier excursion, Derec had thought that might be the case. He had hoped for either a local control option or a presence sensor, but in vain. With eighteen subsections of blackness ahead of them, they were forced to turn back.

  They recruited the first robot they encountered to show them where hand lanterns were kept, and soon returned to the subsection 42 threshold. The beams of the powerful portable lights stabbed deep into the cavelike corridor and created a cozy island of light around them. But they were very aware of the darkness beyond, the way their footsteps echoed hollowly, the chill of the unused spaces they were entering.

  Ten minutes of walking brought them to the great triple pressure seal doors at the outer boundary of C Section. The doors were resting retracted in their grooves, apparently deactivated. Past the interlock, the throughway narrowed to a single-lane slidewalk in each direction with far fewer jumpoffs and side passages than before.

  Derec expected to find robots guarding the entry to W Section, and told Katherine so. But when they reached the far end of the slidewalk, they were still alone. The west docks were there, just as they had guessed. But the main public entrance to the complex was not even locked.

  “No guards, no locks,” Derec said as they stood on the threshold. “This looks very bad. Maybe they had one of the tugs take the ship and stand off a hundred klicks from the base.”

  “Let’s find out,” Katherine said, starting ahead.

  If the west docks were being held for possible military use as Dr. Galen had implied, it was merely as a line item on some logistics officer’s list of resources. There was no sign that the complex had even been or ever would be anything other than a general purpose cargo and passenger transfer node. All the familiar facilities were there: Import Registry, Customs, the travelers’ Personals.

  Katherine led Derec past the unstaffed security stations and up the loading ramp to the upper concourse. Along the length of the high-ceilinged room were six check-in stations, six glassed-in waiting areas, and six two-story viewports each of which looked out onto an enormous docking slip and space beyond. All six slips were empty and dark. Nothing could be seen through the viewports except a few dim and distant stars.

  “Downstairs?” Derec asked.

  Her lips pressed into a tight line, Katherine answered by leading the way back down the ramp. The lower concourse seemed like a mirror image of the upper. All six bays on the lower concourse were dark — but one was not empty.


  “Bingo,” Derec said, sprinting through the check-in station and up the boarding tunnel.

  “I don’t understand,” she said, dogging his heels. “Where are the guards? There ought to be guards.”

  “Maybe they’re inside,” Derec said, pulling up short. The boarding tunnel was connected to the emergency hatch they had seen being installed, and across the lock-side seam there was a security seal. It was a token seal, however, meant only to give notice that the hatch had been opened. It could not stop them from going aboard.

  Nothing inside had been disturbed, it seemed, since they had been found and removed. For that matter, except for cracks in three of the screens above the great command console, it did not even seem as though there had been an explosion on the main deck. Yet there were a dozen blackened fist-sized pits in the walls and ceiling to mark where the charges had been.

  “You don’t blow up your house because a burglar breaks in,” Katherine observed. “Aranimas’s security would have been tailored to his own species. Whatever you want to call what we tripped —”

  “Radiation bomb, maybe.”

  “— must have been designed to kill or disable an Erani without doing serious damage to the ship.”

  “It did a good enough job on us.”

  Though they could not find Aranimas’s stylus, whatever locked the deck plates in place had apparently been disabled when the ship was powered down. Twenty minutes later, they had torn up the whole floor, but found nothing.

  “Shall we put it back?” Katherine asked, gesturing at the mess they had created.

  “No point. The robots are going to know we were here anyway.”

  “They have the key, don’t they?”

  “Almost certainly. If they don’t, Jacobson does.”

  Katherine sighed. “How are we ever going to find it? The size of this station — even if it were just lying in open view in a corridor somewhere, it’d take us weeks to find it. And you know that they’ve hidden it better than that.”

  “There’s a lot of places they could put it that you can be sure they didn’t,” Derec said, looking around the main cabin one last time. “They won’t leave it unattended, you can count on that. Not like they left this ship.”