The Ganymede Club (11 page)

"Fine. We'll use that one."

Lola reached out to the computer console by her left hand. She started the search sequence, lay back, and replaced the sensors on her own eyes. "Don't be disappointed if we don't get much," she added as the grey flicker of images began again. "False memories are tricky things, and this is our first session. We've done well to get this far."

She was speaking as much to herself as to Bryce. An opening session often did not go much beyond calibration, but in this case she was going on because she was fascinated. Sonnenberg did not fit any textbook pattern of mental illness. In fact, the more that she saw of him; the less ill he seemed.

Was that his sickness, that he
imagined
himself to have a problem where there was none? That was the least satisfying answer. Far more interesting was the possibility of some new form of mental illness, one not recorded in the long history of psychotherapy. That was unlikely, but could it be the case?

She was asking herself that question as the computer again achieved synthesis.

Free fall.

Not in an orbiting ship, or floating outside it in a space-suit.

Free
fall,
real fall, toward a planetary surface. As the world spun around her, Lola caught a glimpse of a panorama of buildings. She was dropping toward them, gaining speed, falling vertically past the dark bulk of a great tower on her left-hand side.

She was not wearing a suit. And she was not on Earth. This was hard vacuum. The fog of ice crystals in front of her face was her own breath and blood, spouting out of agonized lungs.

Her motion steadied, so that she was dropping feetfirst. Now she could see where her trajectory would take her—to the roof of a lower level of the building on her left. The impact would kill her, no doubt about it, but incredibly some part of her brain was able to remain aloof. As oxygen starvation made the world before her dim and blur, she was calculating: three more seconds to impact; velocity, forty-nine meters a second.

Two seconds, fifty-two meters a second. One second. Terminal velocity, sixty meters a second. No chance of survival.

She looked down. The black flatness of the roof rushed up to meet her . . .

. . . and the computer disconnect took place.

Lola was left gasping, gulping in air to the depths of her lungs. Unbelievably, she was
alive.
The panorama of brightly lit buildings was disintegrating into streaks of flickering grey. She was in her own office.

And not before time. She sat up, shaking all over, and ripped the telemetry contacts from her temples, the sensor cups away from her eyes. It hadn't been a dream sequence; it had been gritty, hard-edged reality. She forced herself to her feet, convinced that Bryce Sonnenberg would need her help.

He was sitting sideways on the patient's chair, one sensor cup in each hand. Lola stared at him, unable to speak. He was the one who nodded, walked over to her side, and said, "You got it, didn't you? I can tell you did. It's not so bad for me, you see, I've been through it before. But you should have seen me the first time."

"Where is it? Where were you?"

He helped Lola to stand up. "I told you, I don't know. That's one of the scary parts. It seems like somewhere absolutely real and familiar, but wherever it is, I know I've never been there."

"Have you ever been to Earth? Or Mars?"

"Never." He released her hands. "You may not believe this, but I feel better now. You actually
felt
it, didn't you, even though you say you can't read minds? You know what it's like."

"I know what it's like." Lola struggled for control and managed a thin smile. "I'm not going to thank you for that."

"There are other places, too. Not as bad as that. Some of them I kind of like, the ones where I'm the boss and doing something clever. Out in the Belt, some of them. We hit the worst one first. Want to see the others?"

"I will, in due course." Lola sat down again. "But not today. We're done. I'm done."

"What's next?"

"I review your data, see if I missed anything. Then we have another session. Can you come back in three days? Midday, local time."

"Sure." Bryce Sonnenberg moved toward the door of the office. At the threshold he paused. "I know it's too early to ask, but do you really think you'll be able to help me?"

He was right—in principle, it was too early to say. But Lola was getting the clearest images she had ever seen. Bizarre information was difficult to interpret, but it was a lot better than no information at all.

"I'm sure I can help. Just don't expect instant miracles. It's a slow process." She waved good-bye, but she took little notice of his departure because she suddenly had been struck by two oddities at once.

First, he had said that some of his false memories were "out in the Belt." How could he know what the Belt was like, if he had left it for Callisto at the age of three?

Second—and more directly disturbing to Lola—she had been all set to transfer Sonnenberg's records to her general case files when she noticed the access record. It indicated that an access had been made on the previous day, when she had certainly not been using the system. The implication was as clear as if it had been written as a message on the screen: Someone else had been snooping around in her haldane file of stored experiences.

Someone.
Lola swore to herself. She didn't have to go far to know who that someone was, someone who seemed unable to stay out of anything, even Lola's private case records.

When she got her hands on Spook she was going to wring his scrawny neck.

7

"Look after Spook. Don't let him get into trouble."

Lola had never forgotten her mother's plea. She had done her best to honor it, to look after him, to make sure he was well cared for. And she had done well.

In fact, in the eyes of at least one person she had done far too well.

Spook was fifteen years old, certainly not a kid any more. Surely he was entitled to a bit of breathing space. On the other hand . . .

He looked at Lola, standing at the entrance to his private domain, and knew he was in deep trouble. She wouldn't normally charge into his den without giving at least a few minutes' warning.

"All right." Lola ignored the new setting, Spook's careful reconstruction of the sky as seen by a high-gee probe in one of the local comet clusters of the Kuiper Belt. "You've really done it this time. Those are absolutely private files you've dabbled in. Haldane files.
Patient
files. Do you realize what would happen if a patient learned that someone who wasn't a haldane had been poking around in them?"

"I've not been poking around." There was a time to tell the truth, but this wasn't it. "I just copied one small file."

"Copying one is as bad as if you copied all of them. Unless a patient gives permission,
nobody
except a haldane is supposed to see anything."

"Suppose it wasn't a patient's file?"

That stopped her, as it was designed to do. She glared at him. "The only things in that directory—"

"Not true. I didn't touch a patient's file. And I wasn't trying to peek, not really. I summoned your directory by accident—I'm a Belman, too, you know, and you didn't protect properly with a unique ID. Once I had it I couldn't help noticing a file in there. It was called 'Wartime Memories.' And your name was on it."

"You rotten little geek." Lola flopped down into a seat opposite Spook. "That's
personal
material, from a session that another haldane ran on me as part of my final training. Those are
my
war memories!"

"I know." Spook managed to think tricky and look apologetic. "But I wasn't after anything creepy and personal—you know I'm not interested in that sort of stuff, 'specially in you. What I hoped to get—what I got—was
this
."

His fingers stabbed the console on the arm of his chair. The den environment changed. The comet cluster disappeared, and in its place was Earth's Moon. Wan and glaring with pale-blue light, it hovered over them. The Armageddon Defense Line formed a livid scar across its face.

"I saw that," he went on. "And I had to have it. See, I
remember
it, but the whole time when we were leaving Earth is like a muddle in my head. Your file was like being there
in person
, all over again. I wish you'd probe me, the way you were probed."

"Never!" Lola told herself that her violent reaction was appropriate: No one fifteen years old should be exposed to haldane sessions except in a medical emergency.

Another part of her mind told her what an awful hypocrite she was. She had been itching to sit Spook down in that special chair since the day she finished formal training. Thanks to the haldane sessions, she had some idea what the loss of Earth, friends, and parents had done to her, at age twenty-two. What must it have done to poor Spook, at ten years old? What was it doing to him
now
, at fifteen?

She remembered her own adolescence, filled with fears and wants and nameless worries over the nature of sanity, especially her own (according to haldane training, no one became a haldane completely by choice). Spook didn't admit to any worries at all—least of all, to Lola—but surely he had some. And he had no mother or father, infinitely understanding, to discuss things with. He had only a sister preoccupied with her own problems . . .

"Well, all right." Spook had seen the change in Lola's mood, from anger to something else. He didn't know what she was thinking now, but he wanted her to go on with it. He had done one other thing with part of the "Wartime Memories" record, something he didn't want his sister to discover before he was good and ready to tell her. "I know you won't let me be probed. But I don't see any harm if I see something through you that I already saw for myself, in person."

"Maybe." Lola sighed. Her anger had gone, replaced by the usual dull worry. Was she doing what her mother had asked? Was she doing enough? She could not ignore Spook's obsession with the war, but was that abnormal when the destruction of the Inner System was probably the main interest of every teenage boy who lived in or on the Jupiter moons? "Promise me you won't dig any more into my directory, without asking me first. And promise me that you'll
never
try to get into the locked patient files."

"I promise." It was an easy commitment to offer. Spook had taken a quick peek at some of the haldane stuff, out of sheer curiosity—the keys were easy to crack, for any Puzzle Network devotee. But he was quite willing never to look again. Someday, Lola would learn just how little interest he had in soggy emotional experiences. He held up crossed fingers. "Honest. Fingers cross my heart."

"And don't go into
my
files, either."

"I won't." That should have satisfied her, but still she was sitting there frowning. And not at him, but at nothing. "I mean it, sis. Don't you believe me?"

"I want to ask your opinion on something. Your sort of thing." She had gone off at right angles, in another direction completely.

Which was fine with Spook. "Ask away."

"I want to see if you come up with the same conclusion as I did. Think of it as one of your puzzles. You have an object, and it's free-falling under gravity. It's going to hit some hard surface. Three seconds before impact, it's traveling at forty-nine meters a second. Two seconds before impact, at fifty-two meters a second. And when it hits, it will be traveling at sixty meters a second. All right?"

"Go on."

"Right. Where in the solar system is this happening?"

Spook looked at her in disgust. For someone who now operated at the Masters' level in the Puzzle Network, the question was like an insult. "Is it important? And there's no tricks?"

"It might be really important. And no tricks, it's a straight question."

"Then it's Mars or Mercury, close to the surface." His shrug showed his disdain for the simplicity of the question. "I mean, from what you said, the object is accelerating at about eleven meters in three seconds. That's three and two-thirds meters per second per second. The only two bodies in the solar system with anything like that value for surface gravity are Mars and Mercury. Neither one has enough atmosphere to change the answer, either."

"I decided the same thing. But which is it, Mars or Mercury?"

"Not enough information to distinguish between them. I assume that your numbers have been rounded off. Mercury's surface gravity is 3.57 meters per second squared, Mars's ranges from 3.56 at the equator to 3.76 at the poles. It could be either one. Does it matter which?"

"It might. I don't see how it could, though. He's never been to either one."

"He? Hey, I thought we were discussing a falling
object.
"

"I can't tell you any more."

"But you know more."

"Why do you think that?"

"Sis, don't play dumb with me. You said, 'It's going to hit some
hard surface.
' How do you know that? And then you say, '
He's
never been to either one.' You have things you're not telling me."

"Things I can't tell you."

"You can't tell me anything personal, if it's from one of your patients." Spook was seeing a glimmer of hope, a possible way to extricate himself from his own rash act with Lola's file. "But couldn't you sanitize it, and then show me? I mean, take away anything that would let me know who the person is, but let me see the record for myself. Maybe I could figure out where the person is, and what's going on."

"How?"

"I can't tell you that, can I, if I don't see it for myself? There might be all sorts of subtle clues in a visual record." Now was the time to make the stretch. "In fact, even if I couldn't give you a precise location, I bet that someone else could, someone who's been around the system more. This would be just the sort of thing to throw at the Puzzle Network."

Not a smart move. He had gone too far, and the steam was coming out of Lola's ears. Spook backed off fast.

"Not the
whole
Puzzle Network, of course, I didn't mean that. But I'd like to help, and it would really make things easier if I had somebody else to bounce ideas off of. And you're busy, you don't have time to spend on this."