Outland (10 page)

Montone hesitated, looked to his right. There were four small hinges set against the inner wall of the crawlway. According to the maintenance engineer they held the panel which opened into the sealed compartment.

Holding the small flashlight in his mouth, he started feeling for the hinges. Gingerly, he tugged one inward—it slid open silently and efficiently. There was no warning snap. Quickly he started working on the second hinge. He could hear Sagan raving on the other side of the wall.

O'Niel spoke while checking his chronometer. He couldn't wait for Montone much longer, not judging from the sound of the crane operator's voice.

"I'm not going to argue with you, Sagan, and I'm not going to try and trick you. I am going to count down from ten to one. At one, the door will open slowly. I will not rush in. I'm not going to do anything that will alarm you, and I'm not going to shoot you.

"I don't want anybody hurt, including you. It's my job to see that people
don't
get hurt, not the other way 'round. I don't think you really want to hurt anybody either, Sagan. Not really." He watched the seconds tick away on the chronometer.

"Please trust me. Whatever the problem is, whatever's making you do this, we can work it out without anyone having to get hurt. I promise. It'll be better that way, both for you and for me."

Montone felt the last hinge give way, leaving the panel balanced loosely in its slot. It was hard not to fight for air in that cramped passageway but he forced himself to breathe in slow, open-mouthed gasps. He was ready. A check showed the same was true of the two men who'd accompanied him. They were waiting for a cue from O'Niel.

Sagan had finally stopped stumbling about the room. The knife dangled from his limp right hand and the wild fire in his eyes had turned to a faintly glazed look. O'Niel's calming words were beginning to have an effect

"You're . . . you're going to kill me," Sagan murmured uncertainly toward the door. For the first time, he sounded confused instead of fanatically confident.

"I'm not," O'Niel rushed to assure him. He allowed himself to feel some hope. "You have my word. You also have my word that if you kill the girl, I
will
kill you." He turned, lifted his hand as a signal to the maintenance engineer, then spoke once more into the pickup.

"Now listen carefully, Sagan. I'm going to do what I told you a moment ago. I'm going to count slowly from ten to one. Just do as I say and everything will work out all right. Ten, nine . . ."

Sagan stood swaying in the compartment, fighting to reason his way through the ugly nimbus of hate which had taken control of his thoughts. His expression had turned blank, his brain overloaded by too much contradictory information. Only moments earlier everything had seemed so straightforward, so simple. Now . . .

O'Niel's voice reached him from somewhere far away. "Eight, seven . . ."

In the crawlway Montone's right hand tightened on the hatch, preparatory to flinging it aside. He could hear O'Niel's voice from the speaker inside the compartment.

"Six . . . five . . . four . . ." The maintenance engineer's finger caressed the cutoff switch.

". . . three . . . two . . ."

Sagan turned a slow half circle, stood gazing dumbly at the doorway. There was a soft clang from behind him as the panel covering the flow duct access sprang in and upward on springs to slap against the wall. Montone dropped into the room as Sagan whirled to see what had caused the noise. O'Niel's voice still echoed in his ears.

". . . one . . ."

Montone fired. The explosion of the riot gun was stunning in the small compartment. The girl came fully out of her self-enforced paralysis with a scream that rose above the roar of the gun.

At the same time the engineer thumbed the switch. There was a quick, almost inaudible rushing sound from inside the door as it slid inward.

O'Niel stood there, staring through the open doorway, his own gun held loosely in both hands: he'd heard the explosion. Quickly he scanned the interior of the compartment, taking stock, summing up.

The girl was okay. She lay on the bed, crying softly to herself and holding her arms tightly across her chest. He noted the blood dri bling down her neck onto her chest, and hoped that the wound wasn't serious.

His attention shifted leftward to where Sagan lay on the floor, arms and legs spraddled and his head cocked at an angle much too acute. There was a gaping, smoking hole where his chest should have been. His eyes were locked open, staring vacantly toward the ceiling.

Montone looked at the Marshal, his mouth working weakly. "He turned on me. I . . . I saw the knife . . ."

O'Niel continued to stare silently, unable to believe the scene in the room. He shook his head and gazed in disbelief at Montone.

The two deputies who'd accompanied the sergeant had dropped into the compartment and were busy administering first aid to the girl, while others clustered behind O'Niel, straining for a look inward. They gaped at the remains of the crane operator, at the girl, at Montone, and muttered to themselves.

You don't move slowly on a place like lo and save others. The two paramedics fairly burst through the emergency entrance of the hospital, convoying the gurney between them. On it lay the unconscious, shocked body of the unlucky young prostitute. A tube ran from a bottle held by one of the paramedics into her arm. Deputies led the way with O'Niel two steps behind.

Dr. Lazarus was waiting for them at the emergency entrance and was examining the girl, taking readings and making measurements, as they rushed her to intensive care.

There was commotion without confusion. Everyone knew his job. They were spurred to still faster action by Lazarus' stream of orders. The duty nurse was trying to organize everything and not succeeding as well as she would have liked.

Inside the emergency area Lazarus and the paramedics stripped the protective sterilizing sheet from the girl's body, then slid her, gurney and all, into a long, glassine tube. Lazarus moved to the computer console built into the side of the tube and began punching out directions.

A low hum rose from somewhere beneath the cylinder that started to rotate. Instantly three nearby video screens came awake with a plethora of information. Two displayed diagrammatics of the girl's body, giving reports on everything from skeletal stability to circulatory flow. The third screen was awash with numbers and words delineating blood pressure, temperature, white cell count, and so on.

O'Niel waited nearby, studying the girl, watching the information change on the monitors, and wished he knew more than minimal medicine. Devoid of its usual coolness, her bruised face looked almost innocent.

It was worse than he'd guessed at first

"Jaw looks broken," Lazarus was mumbling. "At least in one place, maybe more. Possibly the nose as well. Contusions all over the body and face. Neck wound is superficial, thank God." She spared time to throw O'Niel a disbelieving glance.

"Jesus Christ, who did this to her?"

"A worker." His attention was still on the girl. "Crane operator, supposedly stable as they come. He went nuts. It happens here . . . remember?"

She gave him a look but spared the sarcasm that instinctively welled up in her. Maybe she deserved the dig. She'd been something less than cordial to O'Niel during their first meeting.

In any case, this wasn't the time and place for verbal sparring.

"No skull fractures," she announced, carefully examining the blowup of one diagram. "By the way, I got that list you wanted. She's bleeding internally downstairs. Damn the man, whoever he is and whatever was wrong with him. I'd like to get him in here."

"You won't. He's dead."

Lazarus' quick reaction was understandable, if unhippocratic. "Good."

"Why didn't you bring it to my office?" O'Niel asked her.

"The list?" She adjusted a control. Inside the cylinder a small nozzle pressed against the girl's bruised belly, then withdrew. It didn't appear to have done anything, but numbers changed rapidly on the third monitor and the girl shifted slightly. "I don't make house calls."

"You do now." He looked a last time at the girl. "She going to be all right?"

"Maybe . . . if you let me do my job."

O'Niel smiled, nodded briefly and moved away.

Off to the right was a section of white wall lined with large drawers resembling a hive. It served as the mine's morgue. The transparent faces of each drawer were fogged with cold. Lazarus continued working behind him, her sole attention on the girl in the cylinder.

O'Niel studied the drawers. The fog didn't completely obliterate the interiors and bodies would be visible within. After several minutes of careful inspection a frown broke out on his face. The two examining tables arranged in front of the drawers were unoccupied. A closer look gave no sign that they'd been in recent use.

A voice sounded from immediately behind him. "Twenty-eight, in six months."

He turned, saw Lazarus standing nearby. She looked worn, but then she always looked worn.

"I wonder how many in the six months before that?" he murmured interestedly.

"Twenty-four. I've got initiative."

"Good for you."

He turned back to the wall and began pulling out the body They were clean, antisepticized, and empty.

Lazarus watched him. "You want to know how many in the six months before that? Hmmm? Go on, ask me how many in the six months before that."

He turned to her, asked the question with his eyes.

"Two," she told him.

"Two." He stared down at her. "You notice anything?"

"I'm unpleasant," she replied, "but I'm not stupid. Of course I notice something. Funny numbers, and they don't come from the gaming machines in the Club."

"What do you think?"

"I don't know what to think." She sounded confused as well as exhausted. "Almost everybody here doesn't have both oars in the water as far as I'm concerned. Why people suddenly start to lose their marbles in greater numbers is not so mystifying to me. I don't know why more of them haven't done it sooner.

O'Niel pulled out the last drawer. It was as vacant as the others, the sheets unstained, the air inside fragrant with ammonia and other disinfectants. He shut the drawer with a vicious push.

The morgue's lack of occupants raised several interesting questions, foremost among them being the fact that Sagan's body wasn't anywhere to be found. He could think of excuses for the other empty drawers, but the crane operator ought to be resting quietly in one of them.

"Where do they send the bodies?"

"They usually put them on the first shuttle out. They wrap them up and jettison the body halfway to the support station. Burial at sea and all that crap." Lazarus was not a closet romantic. To welcomed realists, dealt harshly with displaced dreamers.

"The Company tries to pass it off as glamorous and proper. You know, 'we now commend his body to the vast reaches of the frontier he helped to push back a little farther.' What they're doing is saving freight charges back to Earth, or wherever home was. It's efficient. It sucks, but it's efficient."

Very efficient, O'Niel had to agree.

The freight dock was deserted. It was the largest pressurized structure on Io. When the shuttle docked the cavernous chamber was a sea of activity with men and machines swarming around the shuttle in an attempt to complete their tasks in the shortest possible time. Huge hopper cars were raised and their preprocessed ore dumped into the shuttle's cargo bays. Containers and people flowed out of the bulky vessel.

There no shuttle sealed to the dock now. The next ore load wasn't due from the mine 'til the end of the night shift. Relays snapped and clicked as machinery hummed in man's absence, performing maintenance and checking functions that had once required human supervision.

Everything functioned smoothly. The dock waited in silence for the next scheduled burst of activity.

High-intensity funnel lights hung from long tubes keeping portions of the dock illuminated. At the far end of the chamber was the huge airlock which would open to envelop the arriving shuttle. It was well lit. Much of the rest of the dock and its mountains of containers and ore carriers lay in darkness.

Something flitted from one shadow to the next, dodging cautiously around the bright pools of light that fell from above. It was small compared to the massive ore carriers. There was no one around to notice the movement.

From time to time the figure would pause to check the sealed bills of lading heat-stamped into each outgoing container. The larger ones the figure ignored. It was the non-ore carriers that occupied its interest. Every container had the Con-Amalgamated company logo stamped prominently on sides and top.

O'Niel moved stealthily from one container to the next, always checking to make sure he was alone. He'd worked his way across the length of the dock before he came across two containers near the airlock transship loader which bore stamps of interest.

His gaze traveled over the nearest, noting the bill of lading and list of contents, the word "fragile" stamped below the manifest. After careful perusal of the inventory be moved on to inspect the second container. Instead of fragile it carried the imprinted instructions, "To Be Jettisoned" on one side.

A last cautionary glance revealed nothing moving in the vast docking chamber. O'Niel's breathing seemed unnaturally loud to him as he methodically unsnapped the four latches which sealed the container's north end. Each let free with a booming metallic click as it was released. O'Niel caught his breath at each snap, but no one arrived to investigate.

Using both hands and getting his weight behind the effort he heaved the sliding panel to the right. He snapped on his flashlight and began probing the container's interior.

The beam danced over long stacks of metal boxes, sealed cylinders, plastic cubes, and heat-sealed lumps of garbage: Each bore the ancient triple red triangle that warned of the presence of radioactive waste. The mine and its complex equipment was wholly solar-powered, but many individual sections like the hospital used radioactive components, as did certain pieces of equipment.