Murder in Orbit (3 page)

I really don't want to describe what happened next. Let's just say they both yelled at me. Then they started yelling at each other. Then they took turns yelling at me
and
each other. After a while someone finally got the bright idea of looking in the tank to see what I was talking about.

It was too late, of course. By then, the body was gone—completely dissolved. They decided to drain the tank. It didn't do any good; there wasn't anything left of that guy that you couldn't have bought at your local chemical supply store.

“Okay, lad, I think you'd better come with me,” said the man from Dispute Management. His name was Dyvach Jones, and we weren't getting along in person any better than we had over the phone.

“What for?”

“A lot of things. I'll want a statement from you. We'll need a formal description of this ‘body' you thought you saw. And I want to run a few blood tests on you.”

I knew what he was getting at, and I didn't like it. “I'm not on anything,” I said tersely.

“I'll vouch for that, Jones,” said Dr. Hadley. “Rusty's not that kind of kid.”

“They never are,” Jones said gruffly. “But I happen to believe in Occam's razor. And the idea that this kid has been sniffing, snorting, or popping something one of his friends cooked up with their home chemistry set is a lot easier for me to swallow than that someone in ICE-3 is a murderer.”

Dr. Hadley shrugged. “Have it your way. I'm sure you won't find anything.” He looked at me, and I could see the question in his eyes:
You're not going to make a fool of me on this, are you
?

I looked straight back at him and shook my head just a fraction of an inch.

He smiled. “You better just do what he says, Rusty. It'll be easier that way.”

I shrugged and headed out the door after Jones.

I figured at least this way I wouldn't have to clean up the mess.

Just shows you how wrong a guy can be. There's more than one kind of mess and more than one kind of cleaning up. I spent the next hour and a half trying to keep from losing my temper while Jones worked me over from six different angles.

I really don't think he ever believed my story. Even the fact that his tests didn't show a trace of anything in my veins but my own blood didn't slow him down. All it did was change his theory. He decided if I wasn't on drugs, I must be pulling some kind of prank.

The last straw came when the computer check he had ordered on the current status of the colony came back saying, “All persons present and accounted for.”

“What do you have to say to this?” snarled Jones, waving it under my nose.

I didn't say anything. What
could
I say? As far as I was concerned, the report meant one of three things:

1. The computer was wrong.

2. There was someone up here we didn't know about.

3. I was losing my mind.

All things considered, the third possibility was probably the least frightening. After all, we depend pretty heavily on the computer. We have a lot of backup systems, of course. Even so, it's a major part of our lives.

If the computer really
had
made an error, I could see three possible reasons:

1. There was something wrong with it.

2. Someone was tampering with it.

3. It was being fed faulty data.

Again, considering the degree to which the colony relies on the computer system, I didn't find any of those ideas particularly appealing.

What about the idea that there was someone up here we didn't know about? If there was, it had to be one of two people: the killer or the victim. Or maybe both. In any event, I didn't find the idea of someone sneaking into a closed colony 240,000 kilometers from the nearest planet all that reassuring. I began fantasizing that we had been invaded by some strange space creatures.

The brief daydream seemed to give a lot of strength to my third theory: I was losing my mind.

“Well,” repeated Jones. “What do you have to say for yourself?”

Look, by now you've made it through three chapters of this thing. So I hope you've decided that I'm not totally stupid. (Though I suppose you may change your mind when you read about some of the mistakes I made in the next few days.) Anyway, I was never one to get a lot of pleasure out of banging my head against a brick wall. Deciding I had had enough self-torture for the day, I dropped my head and whispered, “I'm sorry.”

Please note—I didn't say what I was sorry about, which was mostly that Jones was too stupid to see I was telling the truth. At that point I just wanted to get out of there. I had wasted enough energy on Mr. Dyvach Jones.

It was time to take things into my own hands.

Chapter 4

The Colony

It's about two kilometers from the Office of Dispute Management to our apartment. I skipped the rolling sidewalks and went on foot. I figured the exercise might help me let off steam.

And boy, did I need to let off steam. I was still boiling from the lecture Jones had given me
after
I apologized—a ten-minute tirade on foolish pranks and wasting other people's time. (I know it lasted ten minutes, because I timed it. If I was just going on the basis of how long it
felt
, I probably would have said three hours. Or longer. It seemed as endless as those tasteful Iranian miniseries my parents are always watching on our wall screen.)

Even worse than Jones's lecture were the threats he made when he was done. All kinds of things about what would happen if I ever dared, blah, blah, blah, etc., etc., etc.… I'll tell you, it was a good thing I'd already thrown up once that day. Otherwise his desk would have been in real danger of getting a puke bath.

After I had meandered past a few of my favorite shops, my stomach began to remind me that it was extremely empty.

I stepped into a fast-food joint.

Since we don't have enough room to raise grazing animals, our primary meat source out here is the cuddly but rapidly reproducing rabbit—which means our fast-food shops tend to specialize in things like the Double McBunny Burger.

I had two.

If you've never tasted one, stop laughing and wait until you've tried it.

Then you can laugh.

Actually, I kind of like the things. I'm certainly glad I'm not like my father, who's been known to get so desperate for a piece of red meat he'd consider swapping his mother for a slab of prime rib. He's not alone. One of ICE-3's biggest political controversies is over whether we should use some of our precious land area to raise cattle.

Believe it or not, people have enormous fights about this.

Personally, I think it's an awful lot of fuss over whether or not someone gets to chew a piece of dead cow every once in a while. I'd just as soon stick to rabbit.

Once I had finished my bit o' bunny, I wandered out of the shopping area and through the Altair Park orchard, which took me to the base of our apartment complex. I stopped to sit on my favorite rock and enjoy the view.

I have to keep reminding myself of what my grandfather said—I mean about not assuming you know what this is like. The view from my rock is so natural to me it seems silly to describe it. But maybe you've never seen a picture of the inside of an ICE wheel.

If you haven't, hang on to your hat. This gets a little complicated.

The first thing you have to remember is that since we're too small to have much real gravity, we use centrifugal force to make a kind of fake gravity. An ICE wheel spins on its axis once every sixty seconds or so, depending on its size. That “throws” everything outward (swing a yo-yo around your head and you'll have the basic idea). In a way, it's almost the opposite of gravity. Instead of being sucked in, we're being thrown out. But the end result is the same: a sensation of weight.

What does that have to do with the view from my rock? Well, to begin with, it means once you're inside the colony, “down” is in the direction of the outside edge.

I know, from watching newcomers, that it's hard to get this straight. When you look at the wheel from the outside, with the mirror on one side and the spindle on the other giving you a sense of “up and down,” it's hard to realize that people inside the wheel aren't walking on the “bottom,” but on the sides.

Think of one of those exercise wheels people have for hamsters and mice. Now imagine laying that wheel on its side. And imagine that instead of the wheel turning, the hamster can run all the way around it. That's the way it is here. We can walk all the way around the edge of our wheel. And when I sit on my rock, I know there are people on the other side of the wheel, over three kilometers away,
with their heads pointing at me
. But they're not upside down, any more than I am.

You have to remember that while planet dwellers live on the outside of their world, we colonists live
inside
ours. Here the horizon curves up. When I sit on my rock I can see about 200 meters in either direction; then the view disappears upward, around the bend. If I start walking, I'll walk uphill all the way, no matter what direction I go. (That sounds pretty strenuous, but in reality the slope is so gentle you hardly notice it.) And if I walk about seven kilometers, I'll end up back where I started.

(Some people have a hard time with that. It drives them space-wack to be able to walk around the world in just over an hour.)

Anyway, from my rock I could see a broad band of land, about 200 meters across. To my right was a large, parklike area filled with fruit trees. (It's important to have parks—but they have to pay their way.) The colony's air circulation system carried the sweet fragrance of the trees to where I sat.

Beyond the park was an area filled with small shops and restaurants, and beyond that was a science and research area, where I could see one of the six spokes. A silvery tube some twenty-five meters wide, it rose straight through the colony, drawing my eye upward, toward our “sky,” where the light bounces in from the big mirror. A little past that, the horizon curved up and out of sight.

I thought it looked pretty neat.

But of course it wasn't the view that was on my mind.

It was the body in Tank One. Apologizing to Dyvach Jones hadn't changed the fact that I
had
seen it there. Something was terribly wrong in ICE-3. And since it didn't look like anyone was going to believe me, I was going to have to handle this on my own.

Well, not quite on my own.

I got up off my rock and went to make that phone call.

I fiddled with a dial on my desk. When the focus on my wall screen improved, I punched a long series of numbers into my terminal.

The
WAIT
message flashed on the screen. I settled in to do just that while the computer processed my call.

I felt better now that I was here in my own room, surrounded by my own things. I suppose that just goes to show that no matter how far we stretch out into space, we're still basically territorial creatures. I sure know that I am, anyway.

A bell sounded, and my grandfather's lean face appeared on the wall. His hair, which had once been as red as mine, was shot through with gray and white. His green eyes creased at the corners as he smiled a welcome. It was good to see him, and I appreciated again the inexpensive colony-to-Earth communication system the ICE Corporation provides for us. It's just good business, of course—one of those little things they figure will keep us from going space-wack. Even so, I get a kick out of being able to call a quarter of a million klicks for less than it costs most people on Earth to call across town.

“Rusty!” said Grampa happily. “I didn't expect to hear from you at this time of day.”

Usually I called Gramps later in the evening; his evening. Our days and nights are totally artificial. Fortunately for Gramps and me, ICE-3's time system is only a few hours different from his.

“I've got a problem,” I said.

One of the things I appreciate about my grandfather is that he takes me seriously. “I'm all ears,” he replied.

After I told him what had happened, he rubbed his hands together gleefully. “That's the most fascinating thing I've heard in ages!”

“It may be fascinating,” I said. “But it's got me plenty worried!”

The grin he had been trying to control faded from his face. “Sorry, Rusty. You know how I love a good mystery.”

“I love them, too—when
you
write them. But I wanna tell you, it's a lot more fun reading about some poor guy finding a body than it is to actually find one yourself.”

“I see what you mean. And you can't get anyone up there to take you seriously? Have you talked to your parents about it?”

I didn't have to say a thing. I just looked at him.

“I see what you mean. Well, I guess you'd better go see Dr. Puckett.”

My jaw dropped. I looked at him in astonishment. “
The
Dr. Puckett?”

“Of course. He's an old friend.”

Chapter 5

Dr. Puckett

My grandfather called back during dinner to tell me that Dr. Puckett had agreed to see me.

Since rumor had it that the man chewed up research assistants for breakfast, the idea made me so nervous I could hardly settle down all evening.

I wandered around my bedroom, looking for something to distract me. I tried watching the news from Earth, but it was the same old stuff: food riots in England, another notch up on the worldwide pollution index, and more whining from an increasingly powerful bloc of South American countries that had declined to participate in the original ICE pact and was angry now because the colonies were becoming successful and it didn't have any of the action.

I switched off the screen and took out one of my grandfather's books, the first in his famous “Macdonald of Terra” series. But even the swashbuckling space adventures of Lieutenant James D. Macdonald (“And don't capitalize the
d
in Macdonald, buddy!”) couldn't keep my mind off what I was going to have to face in the morning.