Murder in Orbit (18 page)

“Actually, I'd be hard pressed to come up with anything more frightening than the thought of having two of you around,” said Helen.

“Could someone just answer my questions?” pleaded Cassie.

I spoke fast, before Dr. Puckett had a chance to come out with another one-liner. “As far as figuring out it was a clone, the answer was in the hands. Something about them kept bothering me, and when I finally realized what it was, I knew that corpse couldn't be the real thing. Spread out your hands,” I said to Dr. Puckett.

He placed them on the desk in front of him. They were indeed as I remembered them.

“The clone was a genetic duplicate of Elmo,” I said. “But of course, it wouldn't have any of his acquired characteristics. That was one reason Dr. Twining really roughed up the body when he was pretending to treat it for heart attack. He figured the distress of the treatment would distort the features enough to cover any discrepancies we might notice. But he forgot about this.”

I reached out and touched the permanent brown smear that Dr. Puckett's years of nicotine addiction had left between the first and second fingers of the right hand. “The hands of the clone were missing the evidence of your old vice,” I said to him.

“Very clever, Rusty. And a potent demonstration of the usefulness of vices. As to why poor Antoine had cloned me to begin with, the answer is it's because he was a worrywart. He had convinced himself that I was going to have a heart attack before the year was over, and he was hoping that if he could get a viable duplicate of me, he would have a strong new heart to transplant into my body, a perfect match that would stand no chance of rejection. Of course, as my physician, it was easy enough for him to get the raw material for the cloning. All he really needed was the kind of tissue sample you can take any time you do a physical.” A surprisingly wistful smile crossed Dr. Puckett's face. “When you come right down to it, it was pretty thoughtful of Antoine.”

“And it was a natural path for his research,” I pointed out. “Or would have been, if the government hadn't outlawed cloning experiments ten years ago. Growing body parts with clones would be the next best thing to actual tissue regeneration. And if he had been successful in your case, he might have been able to reverse the government's ruling on the matter.”

“Okay,” said Helen. “So Dr. Twining was making clones and Pieter Durkin, rest his soul, was fiddling around with recombinant DNA. But what got this whole thing started was the body that Rusty spotted in the waste-treatment facility. Since there were four more just like it at the BS Factory, I assume it was a clone of Hank Smollin. But why was it in the trash?”

“There you've got me,” I said. “I have no idea.”

“I do,” said Dr. Puckett. “I picked it up from conversations between Antoine and Millie that I overheard while I was locked in that damn treatment table. It seems Antoine had used a tissue sample he took from Smollin to make several experimental clones. He had one of them out in his lab when he got an unexpected visit from one of the colony's political hotshots. If they had caught him working on an essentially dead body, there would have been hell to pay. So he dumped it in his waste system, planning on retrieving it later. But the official overstayed his welcome, and by the time Antoine got back to it, the thing had been collected with the rest of the waste materials. Since it's pretty much a closed system, he figured that would be the end of it.” Dr. Puckett glanced in my direction. “He hadn't counted on your bizarre little habit of poking around in the vats to see what was in them. I imagine when he got word that you had found the body, he just about went out of his skin.”

“A potent demonstration of the usefulness of vices,” I said smugly.

Chapter 27

The Stars

I adjusted the parameters on the radio telescope and leaned back in my seat.

“Very good, Rusty,” said Dr. Puckett. “Give me ten or twelve years, and I'll make a scientist out of you after all.”

I sighed. Having Dr. Puckett as a mentor wasn't going to be easy.

Oh, I would learn a lot.

But I was certainly going to pay a heavy price for it.

“Have you got your speech ready?” he asked.

I nodded.

Memorial services for Dr. Twining and Dr. Durkin were scheduled for that afternoon. As Dr. Twining's former protege, I was expected to speak.

The thought had frightened me at first. I've never liked talking in front of people, though by the time I was done testifying at Millie's trial, I was fairly used to it.

What changed my mind was when I finally figured out I had something I needed to say about Dr. Twining. Not about the man himself. Other people would be doing that. But I wanted to talk a little about his work, which I thought was important, and the fact that he might still be alive if he hadn't been driven into secrecy to pursue the scientific questions that burned inside of him.

Dr. Puckett and my grandfather had both helped me put the speech together. Dr. Puckett was especially excited, because he had slipped in a few particularly outrageous comments and couldn't wait to hear me deliver them.

I cut a couple of them out without telling him—something I would pay for later, though I'm fairly sure he expected me to do exactly that. But a few more were right on target, and I intended to zing them out there. Elmo was convinced they would make the international news.

I stared at the image on the wall screen. It showed a star cluster about 48 trillion miles away.

We would be launching the bodies of Dr. Twining and Dr. Durkin toward it later this afternoon.

It struck me as funny. If we were as scientific and advanced as we liked to believe, we would just recycle Dr. Twining's body for its chemicals.

But like Dr. Durkin, whose body was contaminated anyway, he was to be buried in space.

I thought about the long journey they were about to begin.

It was the same one I wanted to make someday—though I hoped I would still be alive when I started it.

I had been talking to Cassie. To my surprise, she had the same dream: that someday she would be on the first ship sent to the stars.

She and Helen were going to be at the memorial service that afternoon—to give me “moral support,” as they phrased it.

Afterward, Cassie and I were going out for a bite to eat and a 3-D concert.

All in all, the afternoon looked like it might be fairly interesting.

For that matter, so did the next forty or fifty years.

A Personal History by Bruce Coville

I arrived in the world on May 16, 1950. Though I was born in the city of Syracuse, New York, I grew up as a country boy. This was because my family lived about twenty miles outside the city, and even three miles outside the little village of Phoenix, where I went to school from kindergarten through twelfth grade.

Our house was around the corner from my grandparents' dairy farm, where I spent a great deal of time playing when I was young, then helping with chores when I was older. Yep, I was a tractor-ridin', hay-bale-haulin', garden-weedin' kid.

I was also a reader.

It started with my parents, who read to me (which is the best way to make a reader)—a gift for which I am eternally grateful. In particular it was my father reading me
Tom Swift in the City of Gold
that turned me on to “big” books. I was particularly a fan of the Doctor Dolittle books, and I can remember getting up ahead of everyone else in the family so that I could huddle in a chair and read
The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle
.

I also read lots of things that people consider junk: Nancy Drew, the Hardy Boys, and zillions of comic books. In regard to the comics, I had a great deal going for me. My uncle ran a country store just up the road, and one of the things he sold was coverless comic books. (The covers had been stripped off and sent back to the publishers for credit. After that, the coverless books were sent to little country stores, where they were sold for a nickel apiece.) I was allowed to borrow them in stacks of thirty, read them, buy the ones I wanted to keep, and put the rest back in the bins for someone else to buy. It was heaven for a ten-year-old!

My only real regret from those years is the time I spent watching television, when I could have been reading instead. After all, the mind is a terrible thing to waste!

The first time I can remember thinking that I would like to be a writer came in sixth grade, when our teacher, Mrs. Crandall, gave us an extended period of time to write a long story. I had been doing poorly at writing all year long because we always had to write on a topic Mrs. Crandall chose. But this time, when I was free to write whatever I wanted, I loved doing it.

Of course, you think about doing many different things when you're a kid, but I kept coming back to the thought of being a writer. For a long time my dream job was to write for Marvel Comics.

I began working seriously at writing when I was seventeen and started what became my first novel. It was a terrible book, but I had a good time writing it and learned a great deal in the process.

In 1969, when I was nineteen, I married Katherine Dietz, who lived around the corner from me. Kathy was (and is) a wonderful artist, and we began trying to create books together, me writing and Kathy doing the art.

Like most people, I was not able to start selling my stories right away. So I had many other jobs along the way, including toymaker, gravedigger, cookware salesman, and assembly line worker. Eventually I became an elementary school teacher and worked with second and fourth graders, which I loved.

It was not until 1977 that Kathy and I sold our first work, a picture book called
The Foolish Giant
. We have done many books together since, including
Goblins in the Castle
,
Aliens Ate My Homework
, and
The World's Worst Fairy Godmother
, all novels for which Kathy provided illustrations.

Along the way we also managed to have three children: a son, Orion, born in 1970; a daughter, Cara, born in 1975; and another son, Adam, born in 1981. They are all grown and on their own now, leaving us to share the house with a varying assortment of cats.

A surprising side effect of becoming a successful writer was that I began to be called on to make presentations at schools and conferences. Though I had no intention of becoming a public speaker, I now spend a few months out of every year traveling to make speeches and have presented in almost every state, as well as such far-flung places as Brazil, China, Ethiopia, and Bangladesh.

Having discovered that I love performing and also that I love audiobooks, in 1990 I started my own audiobook company, Full Cast Audio, where we record books using multiple actors (sometimes as many as fifty in one book!) rather than a single voice artist. We have recorded over one hundred books, by such notable authors as Tamora Pierce, Shannon Hale, and James Howe. In addition to being the producer, I often direct and usually perform in the recordings.

So there you go. I consider myself a very lucky person. From the time I was young, I had a dream of becoming a writer. With a lot of hard work, that dream has come true, and I am blessed to be able to make my living doing something that I really love.

Hey, baby! You looking at me? I was born on May 16, 1950, in Syracuse, New York. In this picture I'm one year old.

As a farm boy, I learned to drive a tractor when I was quite young.