The Ganymede Club (16 page)

"You might have found a better way to put it." She turned to Bat. "I want to apologize. I had just finished an intense drug-augmented session with a patient. I am a haldane."

"So Ghost Boy informed me. However, that does not call for an apology."

Lola decided that Bat might or might not be a genius, but he was without doubt an irritating smartass. "I'm not apologizing for that. I'm
proud
to be a haldane, but it takes time for the sensitizing drugs to lose their effect. I was at a low point when you arrived, that's why I was rude."

"You came here in the middle of the night just to say you're sorry?" Spook whistled. "Well, that's a first."

Spook, genius or not, was no less a smartass. Were they deliberately trying to annoy her?

"I came here to tell you that I have changed my mind. If Bat is interested in helping, I'll let you review the full files on—my patient." Still she found it hard to say his name. "On Bryce Sonnenberg. I'll tell you what he told me, but I'm wondering if his recollections are reliable. You know your way around the data banks. How would you like to make an independent check on Sonnenberg's history, right from the day that he was born?"

She thought there might be hesitation—it sounded to her like a grind—but Spook answered at once, "Great! Can we bring in other members of the Puzzle Network?"

"Definitely
not.
You two, and only you two. You work in strict confidence, and the unedited files never leave my office. All right? And I want to know about anything you find, just as soon as you find it."

Spook was looking at Bat. The fat cheeks puffed out for a moment in thought; then the cannonball head nodded. "Acceptable. We will of course need appropriate access."

"I'll provide that to you." Lola saw they were staring at her expectantly. "You don't mean
now,
do you?"

"As good a time as any." Spook waved her toward the terminal in the corner. "Do it, Lola. Some of us don't like to sleep our lives away."

* * *

Fifteen minutes later Lola was back in her bed, wondering if she had made the right decision. Spook and his new friend had waited until she provided the file access codes, and then they had pointedly ignored her. They didn't come right out and say that her presence was superfluous, but they went off into a strange form of communication, all terse and incomprehensible references to databank pointers and legal index modifiers that excluded her totally.

She settled down to sleep, telling herself thatthat was the whole point of asking Spook and Bat to help. If she could do what they were doing, then she would not need them. And while she slept, they would be working on the problem.

Probably working all night long. Lola had the impression that Bat regarded sleep as an option, something you might choose to do but could manage very well without.

Not her, though. If she didn't get seven or eight hours, she was good for nothing the following day.

A day which would soon be here. She realized that she would have to get up in four hours. And still she felt wide awake.

Now it was not Bryce Sonnenberg and his problems that filled her mind, but the newcomer who had dropped into her office when Spook and Bat were there. Conner Preston had come by to ask one simple question, and stayed on after they left to ask another.

"It's an imposition, I know." The confused, little-boy-lost look was out of place on a strongly built man in his middle thirties, but it was charming. "You see, I only just got here today."

"What do you need?" Lola remembered her own total confusion when she had first arrived on Ganymede. "Don't apologize. When you're a newcomer this place seems like a labyrinth."

"It does. Actually, I've been here before, but not to this part." He moved forward as though intending to occupy the seat opposite her, glanced at the busy desk, and straightened self-consciously. "I'm sorry, I'm interrupting your work."

"I think I've enjoyed as much work as I can stand. I'm wiped out. An interruption would be nice." Lola waved to him to sit down. "You said you have a question?"

"Well, only a pretty basic one. My food unit isn't working yet because the power was off, and I've had nothing to eat since this morning. I was wondering if you could tell me how to get to a public restaurant."

"You're in a bad place for it. This is all industrial and residential. You have to go four levels away. I can give you directions, but it's quite a distance."

"That's all right. I've got plenty of time. Just tell me where to go. Unless . . ." He hesitated, and would not look at her.

Lola smiled inside. You didn't think of becoming a haldane unless you already possessed a talent for reading people, and Conner Preston's body language was unmistakable. But she was not going to help him out. (Only the brave deserve the fair.)

"Unless—" His eyes, brown and beseeching, turned to hers. "Unless I could talk you into joining me; then you could show me instead of telling. Of course, if you have already had your evening meal . . ."

"I haven't. And I am hungry." She stood up. "Come on. I know a great place, and on the way you'll see a bit more of the inside of Ganymede. If it's been a while since you were here, you may not even recognize the place. It changes fast."

Strolling along corridors and standing on slideways, she learned more about Conner Preston. He was a senior news reporter, posted to Ganymede for a special one-year assignment. He had last been here six years earlier, one year before the war, when he was still a junior reporter.

Then came the first surprise: He was not from Earth or Mars, as she had assumed. He worked for United Broadcasting, and he had come from the Belt.

"I didn't know United Broadcasting even
existed
any more," Lola said. "I mean, I thought that the whole of Ceres and Pallas and Vesta—" She paused. She might be on the brink of a big social gaffe.

"Don't exist, either?" Conner Preston, uneasy in personal relationships, took that in his stride. "You won't offend me if you say it, because it came close to being true. People think Earth suffered most in the war, and so they did in terms of sheer numbers. Nine billion dead, that's a horrifying total. But if you think percentages, the Belt got hammered worst. When the war began we had thirty populated asteroids and a self-sufficient economy. We led the system in some areas of technology. By the time that we surrendered, all we had were colonies on Ceres, Pallas, and Juno. We were down to nine million people, from a hundred and seven million—less than ten percent survival. I'm the only survivor of my whole family. And afterwards we lost another million and a half to starvation and cold, because we weren't self-sufficient any more. We barely are today. We have to import food, and our data banks are still total chaos."

Lola resisted the temptation to ask, "And what did
you
do during the war?" Had he been involved in the attack on Earth? Polite Ganymede dwellers, themselves remote from all the conflict, did not ask such personal questions of the combatants of either side. But Lola could not help thinking it. Strip away Conner Preston's casual manner, and beneath it she sensed a man who was always alert for trouble. They had reached the restaurant and were settling in at their table, and Lola noticed how carefully he inspected everything around him—the room, the automatic servers, and the place settings—and how precisely he placed his own eating utensils. That was another contrast to his casual clothing and easygoing manner. It might be the result of wartime experience, but possibly it was a simple byproduct of a Belt upbringing and restricted living quarters. The Belt was often thought of as wide-open space, with many millions of kilometers between the major planetoids, but the habitats on most of them were cramped. The Von Neumanns had not touched the smaller worlds before the war began. Now it was anyone's guess as to how long it would be until they could start work in the Belt again.

"I'm sorry, Lola." Conner Preston had noticed her silence. "I've been talking too much about myself. That's boring."

"You didn't bore me at all. You just got me thinking about the war. I lost my whole family, too."

"I'm really sorry to hear that. So you are alone here."

"Yes. Except of course for Spook. You met him today."

"The thin one. He's your brother? I mean, he couldn't possibly be your son."

"He could—just. He's fifteen, and I'm twenty-seven. We were the lucky ones; we made it away from Earth just in time. The Armageddon Defense Line was on fire as we rose to orbit."

"Really? I've only heard third-hand reports before. You probably don't want to talk about that, but I'd really like to hear what happened."

"I don't mind."

Conner Preston was astonishingly easy to talk to. Once Lola had started, she found it hard to stop. Under casual prompting from him, she found thoughts and feelings coming to the surface that she had hidden away for years. He was a first-rate listener, perhaps as a result of his work in the media. She normally despised media people—all show and no substance—but it wasn't the time to say so. And maybe there were exceptions. She talked on and on, moving forward and backward in time, from leaving Earth as a would-be haldane, then to her training, and back again to the first bewildering months on Ganymede, and at last to her final graduation and current practice.

"So you decided that you wanted to be a haldane long before you left Earth," he said, when the serving machine had forced a break in the conversation by clearing the table. "I never met a haldane before. We don't have them, you know, in the Belt. You're supposed to be intimidating. Haldanes know everything, even what a person is thinking. But you don't feel threatening. I'd love to hear more about being a haldane, and a lot more about you. Not tonight, though. I have to travel up to the top level and check that the rest of my luggage has arrived. I hope the power is on by now in my office."

"Spook would have been to see us if he'd had problems."

"So I owe the whole Belman family."

"No, Conner. I owe you." Lola rose from the table. She had just realized how much she had said to him, and how much she had enjoyed doing it. "You let me babble on at you for hours. That was nice of you."

"That's what I'm here for."

"No. That's what
I'm
supposed to be here for. Nothing of what I've said has any interest to a news reporter."

"It does to this reporter. But don't misunderstand me, I wouldn't dream of using anything that you say to me." They were leaving the restaurant, and at the exit he took her hands in his. "You have no idea what a good time this has been. It's the most pleasant evening I've had since I don't know when. Goodnight, Lola."

He smiled, turned, and headed quickly for the elevators that would take him to the upper levels. Lola, watching him go, felt some of the easy, warm feeling inside her fading away.

It was a perfectly reasonable way for the evening to end, but it wasn't what she wanted. He had implied that he would like to know her better; then he had failed to follow up on it. When he left he had said not one word about the possibility of their meeting again.

Why did that annoy her so? You didn't have to be a haldane to make a good guess.

She started for home, knowing that Conner Preston was going to be on her mind for the rest of the evening. As she walked, vague other thoughts roamed the margins of her consciousness. She had been through two haldane sessions within twenty-four hours, and traces of the drugs were still active in her system. But even without drugs, a trained haldane possessed a sensitivity to nuances of personality that no one else would ever read.

Conner Preston was bright, easygoing, and charming. He was also intriguing and personally interesting to Lola, in a way that few men had ever been. He seemed equally interested in her. But with all that . . .

Some deep-rooted analytical faculty was at work inside her head. She sensed anomalies in Conner Preston. She itched to interact with him when psychotropic drugs were active in both of them, when she as a haldane could explore his inner workings. At the very least she would like to hear him under hypnosis.

She had no possible way to fulfill these urges. By all objective standards Conner was healthy, happy, and not remotely in need of a haldane's service. But the idea kept nagging at her. She had already sensed, although it was not yet late in the evening, that an uneasy and thought-filled night might lie ahead.

11

The General Assembly had set the ground rules in the 2040s, when the Organization of Outer Planets that the assembly represented was little more than a fledgling body:
No individual, or group of individuals, may own real estate assets lying permanently within the domain of the Organization of Outer Planets.

No matter that "permanently" was a poorly defined term, in a solar system whose long-term chaotic nature had been recognized by everyone but the legislators. If and when there was a change in the planetary configuration from Jupiter to Persephone, the law would change with it. Meanwhile, no one but the government of the outer planets could own any part of the surface or the interior of a planet, a ring structure, or a major or minor moon.

Comets, passing through the outer-planet region, were up for grabs. You were free to mine one for volatiles—if you could snag it.

And, of course, you could
lease
property.

The negotiators for the General Assembly drove a hard bargain. Even in the 2040s, when the Von Neumanns had been at work on Ganymede and Callisto for only a decade, and the human inhabitants were no more than a handful of supervisors, the future potential of these worlds was recognized. You could not get a cheap lease, and you could not get a long lease. On Europa, the protected waterworld of the Jovian system, you could not get a lease at all. The only permits available were for research work.

What about sulfur-spitting Io; or little Amalthea, buffeted by Jupiter's intense radiation storms; or the small and barren outer satellites? Those were another matter. No one had ever applied for a development permit on Io, where even the hardiest Von Neumanns had so far proved unable to replicate and could barely even survive. But should you happen to want a lease there, or on Leda, Himalia, Elara, or Ananke, or on one of the other frozen chips of rock in orbit many millions of kilometers from the mother planet—well, in that case have we got a deal for you.