The Ganymede Club (5 page)

She didn't snort, she didn't scowl, she didn't laugh at him with mocking disbelief. She stared at the starscape beyond the window, and he could not even guess what she saw there.

"Thank you, Dr. Szabo." She reached into the pocket of her pantsuit, pulled out a fistful of money, and handed it to him without looking. "You have been very helpful. Now, I have to be going."

She was heading out of the study, striding down the long corridor. Julius hurried along behind. "I don't think I should be taking your money." He tried to keep up, but she was moving far too fast for his artificially aged legs. "I shouldn't be paid for what I did with that calculation," he called out, as the entrance to one of the lift tubes opened and she stepped toward it. "It was just a meaningless exercise."

"Thanks again, Dr. Szabo." She turned, waved, and dropped out of sight. The lift-tube entrance closed.

Julius was left with his mouth open. The only residual traces of Neely Rinker were a hint of her light and pleasant perfume and the wad of money in his left hand. He stared at it.

Cash—
no one
paid in cash, unless they were engaged in gambling, blackmail, or a political payoff. Cash was easy to make, and as a result it was easy to counterfeit. He had been handling fake money, good and bad copies, for thirty years. The bills in his hand were garishly colored, of improbably high denominations, and bore, across the top, the words
Ganymede Interior Trading Company.

Neely Rinker had come, Neely Rinker had gone. She was surely not from the Organization. But from the look of it she might have stiffed Julius Szabo.

He could employ a lift-tube container to deposit the notes in his account, and learn in a day or so whether they were a legitimate form of Outer System currency. If they were not, their deposit was likely to arouse a good deal of unwelcome attention. Or he could make a descent to a bank level himself, and have an answer within the next hour.

It would be impossible to think of anything else for a while. He might as well admit that, and waste a little more of an already wasted day.

Julius opened his mortality computer and hid all but two of the bills within its largely empty interior. He returned to the lift tubes and rode one down, not to the nearest bank at the seventy-kilometer mark, but all the way down, until he was below ground level. And when he got there he headed not for the financial section, but over to the sprawling open kilometer of a multilevel shopping mall.

The food stores offered selections from everywhere in the system. He chose a vending machine on a lower level and inserted one of his two notes. The machine was smart enough to make change or detect a counterfeit, but not to question why a customer would pay with a note big enough to purchase a thousand items.

The machine swallowed the note and hummed softly to itself for a few seconds. The money apparently passed its rigorous inspection, because a bottle came sliding down along the rack to where Julius could reach it, along with a stack of change. He took the bottle and placed it, unopened, in a disposal bin. The money he stuffed into his pocket; then he started back toward the bank of lift tubes.

He was halfway there when he became aware of a cluster of a dozen people in the broad mallway on his left, with many more converging to swell their number.

None of his business. Safety lay in avoiding all forms of anomaly. But on the ground there, that flash of color within the cluster . . . He somehow found himself walking with the rest, standing at the edge of the crowd.

"From there." Heads around Julius were craning up, following the arm of the woman speaker in front of them. Far above and right overhead, a stone balustrade reached out in a long rising arc to connect two of the mall's upper levels. "That's where it must have come from. A loose piece. I wouldn't like to be the one in charge of maintenance."

Instinctively, the people around Julius backed up a few steps, afraid that something else might fall at any second. He moved in the other direction, closer to the huddled shape on the ground. It lay sprawled with one arm reaching out in front, as though pointing accusingly at the rounded, red-stained stone on the ground ahead. The cape of violet-blue covered her like a shroud. It was not enough to hide the deformed and crushed skull, or the mat of bloodied hair.

Julius backed away. In his old life he had seen violent death so often that it did not sicken him in the way that it might affect most others. What he felt was more of a sense of hysterical improbability.

Less than an hour ago, he and Neely Rinker had been talking of lives that might extend for almost three thousand years. But death cared nothing for probabilities. Death had arrived in the tiniest fraction of the time calculated as the life expectancy (one hour, or one twenty-six millionth of that time, said his mental calculator). In the real world, statistics made statements about
averages
and were useless in predicting individual events.

But were statistics the issue here? Julius had a sudden sense of his own vulnerability. Neely Rinker had refused to tell him her personal ID number. She had sworn him to secrecy, without giving him any idea why. She had traveled all the way from Ganymede, where mortality computers were as available as they were on Mars. Had someone else followed close behind her? Someone to whom Neely's secret was even more important?

Julius headed straight for home. He waited until a lift tube with no other passengers was available. He was nervous through every second of the ascent, waiting for an unprecedented power failure that would drop him to his death. He did not begin to relax until he was once more safely in his apartment with all his defenses primed.

Even then, he found it impossible to eat. He made himself a strong drink, went to sit by the window, and mocked his own weakness. Almost certainly, Neely Rinker's death had been a stupid accident; but even if it were not, they had been after
her
, not Julius Szabo or Danny Clay. She had picked his name almost at random from the directory. Probably no one else knew she had visited him. He could even argue that from his point of view, her death was a benefit. All knowledge of the visit had been destroyed at the moment when Neely Rinker's skull was flattened.

He felt an urge to call his special service, but for what? He had nothing to tell them.

It was long past sunset, far past the hour when he usually went to bed. Julius felt no desire for sleep. He made himself another drink, stronger than the first, and returned to sit by the long window.

The stars were as bright as always, undimmed at this altitude by even a trace of atmosphere. Phobos was visible as a fast-moving silvery point, sweeping from west to east across the Martian sky. He stared at it. Trouble, if it came, would derive from his own past, not from Neely Rinker's. He was just as safe now—or as unsafe—as he had been at this hour yesterday. The odds had not changed. The only thing different was his own mental attitude.

He frowned out at the night, pulled abruptly from his reverie. Something had happened. What?

It took a few moments to see it, to realize that what he had noticed was an
absence
of something. Phobos was no longer visible. But it could not have disappeared so quickly beyond the horizon.

As he watched, it winked back into view. Something had briefly occulted the little moon, some object between him and Phobos. There was no natural body that could have come between them, so it must have been an aircraft. But that implied a craft of such immense size that it could shield Phobos for at least five full seconds. No aircraft was that big—Phobos vanished again, then, just as quickly, reappeared—or that mobile.

Unless—

Julius leaned forward. Unless it was
close.
And under active control.

In the final half-second he saw it: a flattened and spinning, star-occulting shape that hung briefly to adjust its position, then rushed toward the window. He had no time to move. He saw the impact of the remotely piloted vehicle, and watched inch-thick, shatterproof plastic stretch and bow inward.

The wall was tough, designed to withstand heat, cold, and air pressure, but not a scything force of many tons per square centimeter. The spinning blade cut through the window and exploded as it did so. A five-meter section of plastic vanished.

Julius was not hurt by the explosion, but the outward burst of air took him with it. He was suddenly in a hard vacuum, falling, falling, falling. The air was bursting out of his lungs as he struggled to orient himself. He saw, far off, the lights of distant buildings.

No fear of hitting them. He was dropping vertically, a full half kilometer to the flat roof of the next building level. The impact would certainly kill him, unless he died first of lack of oxygen.

How long? His flair for calculation, functioning even now, fed him the answer. Half a kilometer drop in Mars gravity with no air resistance—he would hit after falling for sixteen and three-quarter seconds. He would still be alive and conscious at the moment of impact. He must do everything that he could to land feetfirst and try to save his skull with its metal protective mesh. That would not, however, save the rest of his body. He would hit at sixty meters a second, fast enough to smash every bone.

As air and blood frothed into ice spray from his ruptured lungs, Julius managed to reach his belt and key in the signal to Special Services. For what it was worth, they guaranteed their arrival within fifteen minutes anywhere on Mars.

He was falling, faster and faster. The roof was no more than fifty meters away. He had time for one final moment of revelation. He had still been right in one way. The odds of his old game had not changed. But the arrival of Neely Rinker had thrust him into a totally different game—one which Julius Szabo, who had once been Danny Clay, had never learned.

And he would never be able to answer Neely's question:
What does it feel like, being old?

3

Ganymede: 2066 A.D.

There's no place like Ganymede. It has volatiles in abundance, ammonia and methane and water. In fact, fully half of Ganymede is water or water-ice—pure and potable—more than anywhere else in the solar system. Its surface gravity is just right, a pleasant and healthful one-seventh of Earth's field. Put all these things together, and they make Ganymede the perfect world, a paradise, the jewel of the Jovian system.

There's no place like Ganymede.
All the Ganymede publicity and press releases tell you so.

Conner Preston looked around him and was unpersuaded.

He was far from his home on Ceres, shipped out for a one-year assignment that his boss had described as "broadening." Conner thought of it another way: A year in the Jovian system was one more bridge to be crossed on the way to the top of Ceres Broadcasting, the system's top news agency.

But it wasn't going to be an easy year. He was standing on the highest interior level, just a hundred meters below Ganymede's surface, and even here the noise was loud enough to rattle your teeth. He wondered what the Von Neumanns could possibly be doing so close to open space. The damned things had been at it on Ganymede for almost forty years. It made sense that they might still be active deep in the interior, because Ganymede was
big
, the biggest moon in the solar system, larger than the planet Mercury. It represented a huge amount of real estate that had to be shaped and developed. But surely work on the outer layers should have been finished years ago.

Maybe it would have made more sense to leave the Moon uninhabited until the Von Neumanns were all done, instead of people rushing in to colonize at the earliest possible moment. Humans had needs: air, warmth, water, food. The Von Neumanns required none of these. So far as they were concerned, humans were nothing but a nuisance.

One of the bigger Von Neumanns, the size of a small dog, came trundling by Conner while that thought was still in his head. It was holding a vibratory borer, whose subsonics and ultrasonics would powder the hardest rock. If it chose to turn that damned thing on, anywhere within thirty meters . . .

He was tempted to ask what it thought it was doing, up here so far from interior construction, but he knew that would be a waste of time. The self-replicating machines were dim. They were just smart enough to do their jobs, respect the presence of humans, and reproduce themselves from local materials; and not one bit smarter. Humans had learned, the hard way, Fishel's Law and Epitaph:
Smart is dumb. It is unwise to build too much intelligence into a self-replicating machine.
That applied as much on Ganymede as it did in the Belt or anywhere else.

Conner sighed. He could escape from the noise if he were willing to take the next step, and head out onto the actual surface. He had been putting that off.

It wasn't that he disliked suits. He had worn them for jaunts around the Belt since he was three years old. But Ceres and Pallas and Vesta didn't have Jupiter looming over them, a mere million kilometers away and apparently ready to drop onto your head.

It couldn't, of course. Ganymede's orbit was totally stable. But Jupiter could do something almost as bad. It could bombard you with an endless sleet of high-energy protons, gathered from the solar wind, accelerated by Jupiter's magnetic field, and delivered as a murderous hail onto Ganymede's frozen surface.

The Ganymede suits with their woven-in threads of high-temperature superconductors took care of that. The charged particles followed the magnetic-field lines, harmlessly around and past the suit's surface. Conner, inside, would be safe and snug.

But how could he be sure? How would he know that the suit hadn't quietly failed, leaving him to cook where he stood?

He wouldn't know—better admit it. Conner glanced at his watch. It was time to go. Death before dishonor. Except that Ceres Broadcasting seemed to provide assignments where there was a good chance of both. He checked his suit again and walked across to the elevator that would give him the hundred-meter boost to the surface.

The shuttle craft was waiting for him when he got there. Within five minutes he was lifting off and heading toward the ship of the Sixth Saturn Exploration Team, nine hundred kilometers above him in its orbit around Ganymede.