The Ganymede Club (32 page)

"He's not like Jinx Barker or the Rios woman," Spook continued, "because he died weeks ago—that's why the death's already reported in the bank. See what it says."

He called for a stored file, and the brief announcement rolled into the display:
The death was reported today of Jeffrey Cayuga, leader of the fifth, sixth, and seventh Saturn expeditions . . .

Bryce pointed to the end of the message. "What about the nephew they mention, Joss Cayuga?"

"Most unpromising," said Bat. "For one thing, he is much younger than all the other individuals we have so far encountered in this matter. For another, he is apparently a recent arrival in the Jovian system. According to the record, he was born in the Belt, was fortunate enough to survive the war, and shipped out to join the most recent Saturn expedition less than two months ago."

"So that's it. The story's over, except for one thing." Bryce pointed to Lola, completely asleep now in the chair next to him. "Someone is still out to get her and to get me. We don't know who, and we have no idea how to stop them. And I don't see why
that's
anything to look pleased about."

"My apologies." Bat did his best to appear contrite. "I am not at all unsympathetic to your plight, even if I appear to be. However, you must understand that this has all the ingredients of a complex and fascinating puzzle. One that can surely be solved, given a little more information. And might I suggest that some of that information is contained
there?
" He pointed a pudgy finger. "Right there, with an individual named Bryce Sonnenberg, who may originally have been completely honest with Lola Belman, and even with himself, but who has recently, I am now convinced, become rather less so."

* * *

"It was never good odds, you see," Bryce said, "but it was a whole lot better than no odds at all." He, Bat, and Spook had moved to a dark corner of the Bat Cave, leaving Lola to sleep where she sat. Bryce was leaning over a battered piece of metal, which had originally formed a broad, flat hoop with hundreds of tiny filaments on its top edge. "Yeah, you're quite right. This is part of one, same thing as I had."

"A brain-coring experiment?" Bat sank for a moment into his own personal war nightmare, of lumbering, sightless men and women and isolated, cored brains.

"Not like you're thinking." Bryce was rubbing his fingers thoughtfully over the tangle of thin neural filaments. "You've probably heard stories from the war-tribunal hearings, and that sort of thing did go on in some of the Belt labs. Pretty gruesome. But there was another side of it, straight commercial. If you had money—and I had plenty—you could take out a sort of life insurance. If you died with your brain intact and well preserved, it would be hustled into ultra-cold storage, and assuming they had a donor available in the Belt, you'd wake up—if you were lucky—in a new body."

"Bryce Sonnenberg," said Spook. "Died on Hidalgo of a brain hemorrhage. Natural causes, seven years ago."

"Which is a relief to me." Bryce put his hand up to his head. "I never asked, but I did sometimes wonder when I first woke up if he had been, how shall I put it, 'helped along' on the way to becoming my body-transplant donor. I'd made my plans soon after I escaped from Earth to Mars, but of course I never had any idea when I might require the service. So there was no way to make sure a donor would be available if I needed one."

"The memories that the haldane treatment tapped." Bat pointed in the direction of the sleeping Lola. "The casino, and the submersible, and the dark-haired young woman— they were of your life on Earth?"

"Those ones were. That was Danny Clay's life—my life. Being starved and beat up as a young kid is Danny, too. Dying on Mars, though—that was Julius Szabo." Bryce shook his head in a puzzled way. "Something else about Julius, before the fall. But I can't quite get to it. It's strange, bits and pieces of memory drift back in and I have no control of when or what. I guess Danny's me, and Julius is me, and I'm me, but I feel like we're still sorting out the territory. I don't know who I am any more. It didn't mention anything like this when I bought the policy."

"I am not surprised," Bat said. "It seldom does. I suspect, however, that there was a statute of limitations. You are unlikely to be eligible for a refund."

Bryce stared at Bat, not quite sure that he was joking. "That's one way to put it. But I can't blame the group that did the transplant, unless you can also prove they started the whole damn war. They told me the ground rules up front. If I got zapped on Mars but my brain came through in one piece, I'd be popped into a donor. But that would be just the beginning. No point in sitting inside a body you can't control, and nerve tissue is tricky stuff. It can be re-grown with the right hormones, but it's a slow job and a delicate one. I was warned, there would be a five-year period of treatment and convalescence before I was back to normal, even if things went exactly right."

"And long before that, the war began between the Belt and the Inner System."

"Right. I'd been there only a couple of years. So I was screwed. Or I was superlucky, depending on how you look at it. Most of the other people in the transplant center with me had been there just a few months. Their brains and bodies had hardly made contact. Me, I guess I managed to get to the surface and onto one of the escape ships when Hidalgo was hit, but when I was done my lungs were ruined and my brain wasn't fit to make cabbage soup. I was sent to a place on Callisto."

"The Isobel Busby Sanctuary for War Victims," said Spook. "I went there, but they wouldn't let me in."

"That right?" Bryce stared at him in surprise. "Well, you did better than I did. They wouldn't let me
out.
And the whole place was packed with madmen. I know, because I was one of them. The staff did their best, but of course they had no idea what had happened to me—nor did I. They re-grew my lungs, and they regrew my hair and toes, and they treated me for 'war psychosis,' whatever that is. But they didn't have the neural feedback equipment I needed, so for the first couple of years I got worse and worse. I only began to get better when they gave up on the treatment and left me alone. After I could walk and talk and stopped wetting my pants, they wired me up and gave me the best set of planted memories that they could conjure up from my records. Three years of that, and I knew who I was again. Of course, most of my memories were bogus, but that didn't matter as long as there was no competition inside my head. I was released, thought I knew who I was, started to live my life—and then things really went to hell. I began to get
real
memories. That's when I came to Lola and she started picking my brain apart." He stared thoughtfully back toward the partition. "She's a sexy young woman, you know. No wonder Jinx Barker liked his assignment." He saw Spook's expression, and added hastily, "The first part of it, I mean."

"She's older than you are!"

"Depends how you count. Older than Bryce Sonnenberg, a quarter of a century younger than Danny Clay. Over half a century younger than Julius Szabo's official age. But I don't see what age has to do with anything."

"She's my sister!"

"Most women are somebody's sister. All right, all right." Bryce held up his hands. "Don't get excited. I've got no designs on Lola. She and I have other more urgent things to worry about—like staying alive."

Bat had been listening to these exchanges with disgust. From his expression, it seemed that people who thought like the new Bryce Sonnenberg were hardly worth keeping alive. "In order to remain among the living," he said, "it is necessary that you learn exactly who is seeking to kill you, and why."

"Right. And we just agreed that we came to a dead end there. We have zero clues."

"Not at all. We have numerous clues. It is only a matter of pursuing them, and constructing a rational whole from what we learn." Bat sighed. Something else was becoming apparent to him. As long as the lives of Lola Belman and Bryce Sonnenberg were threatened, he could hardly expel his uninvited guests from the sanctuary of the Bat Cave—much as he might wish to do so.

"Rest, if you wish," he said. "For my part, I propose to initiate my investigations at once."

There was no point in mentioning that his own desire for a swift resolution exceeded anything that Lola or Bryce could possibly be feeling.

* * *

Five hours later the Bat Cave was still and silent. Its solid outer door was secured, its security system active. There was no safer place on Ganymede.

Lola lay curled up in the same chair, dead to the world. Bryce Sonnenberg had watched Spook and Bat for a quarter of an hour, then shook his head and stretched out on the kitchen floor. He fell asleep in a couple of minutes. For someone who had seen violent death twice in the past twenty-four hours, and who was threatened with it himself, he seemed remarkably relaxed.

Spook had worked at Bat's side for the first four hours, until he at last yawned, said, "Wake me when it's my shift," and wandered off along the darkened Bat Cave to seek a soft place to sleep.

Bat struggled on alone, with grim concentration. All very well for Spook to snore away the rest of the night—it wasn't
his
home that had been invaded.

Progress was slow. Bat told himself that the puzzle he faced could not be nearly as complicated as some of the transportation problems that he had solved, involving, as they did, interlocked ship schedules, moving destinations, time constraints, and even the reprograming of pilotless cargo vessels that had been designed to resist all outside interference by cargo hijackers. The difference was that in this case his objective was harder to define. The obvious goal—save the people with him in the Bat Cave—felt like an incidental to the real problem.

He had been sorting questions and answers mentally, but now he felt that he needed to see them sitting in front of him. He made a list.

Who wants Bryce Sonnenberg and Lola Belman out of the way?
Answer: some group or individual who believes that the two know something dangerous or damaging. It was irrelevant whether or not they did know such a thing. However, it did point out the ruthless nature of the people that Bat had to find. They were quite willing to kill on the basis of suspicion.

Why had Jinx Barker and Alicia Rios been killed?
This time the answer was easy. Bat agreed with Bryce Sonnenberg: Barker and Rios had been killed to close off a trail that might lead to someone else. That suggested that whoever hired Barker and Rios did not have total trust in them. Also, that the secret being protected was so important that many lives would be sacrificed to keep it.

Did the death of Jeffrey Cayuga have anything to do with the present mystery?
Bat had no answer. He collected everything that he could find about Jeffrey Cayuga from the general data banks and merged them into a file of their own.

Who else might have been involved?
The only information available to Bat was a vague statement made by Lola Belman that the other man who had talked to Alicia Rios at the First Family party "was related to someone on the first Saturn expedition." Maybe she would remember his name, maybe she would not. But there was one sure way to jog her memory: Bat could present her with a list to choose from. Obtaining that list might prove tedious, but he was used to tasks that called for infinite patience. And in this case he had his special helpers.

Bat summoned
Mellifera
once more from his private directory. This time the instructions provided for the program area had to be more complex. He was not interested in the route to a particular destination, as he had been with the Hidalgo data base. Instead, he wanted to know the complete list of descendants of each member of the original Saturn expedition. He also needed to know whether each of them was now living or dead. Bat decided that this time five hundred copies of the completed version of Mellifera should be more than sufficient. He provided a different entry point for each one into the general Ganymede data banks and released them all into the network.

He expected a long delay before he had feedback. The original expedition had started from Earth, over forty years ago. In that time the descendants of the crew members were likely to have scattered all over the system. If they had stayed on Earth, or moved to the Belt, their fates might be unknown. He had to face the possibility of making another exploration of incomplete or inaccessible data bases.

He was rising from his chair—his mouth filled with naturally salted pistachios from the halophytic-plant farm two levels down from the Bat Cave—when the attention light flashed on his console. He sat down again, anticipating trouble. When a Mellifera probe returned so quickly, it was usually the sign that it had encountered an immediate dead end to the search.

It was even worse than he had feared.
All
the probes had returned, and all reported the same information. The data banks indicated that there were no living direct descendants of
any
of the original Saturn expedition members.

Bat realized that he had made an assumption, and apparently an invalid one. Lola Belman had said she saw a man "related to" someone on the first Saturn expedition. Bat had wrongly interpreted that to mean "descended from."

It would be easy, though tedious, to cast his net wider. Bat could first invert the direction of the search, ascending the family trees to seek out the parents, grandparents, and even great-grandparents of the members of the first expedition. Then he could reverse the process, descending the family trees and asking for all living descendants of each ancestor. There were two problems with that. How far back would he need to go? And how many people were likely to be on the final list?

He could calculate a plausible answer to the second question if he made a couple of assumptions. First, assume that it would be enough to go back as far as grandparents. There had been ten people on the first expedition, which would mean that there were twenty pairs of grandparents. Now, assume two children per generation, and four generations to bring you to the present day. If all those fourth-generation children were still alive, Bat could expect to see a hundred and sixty names of people who were related to the original expedition members, but not descended from them.