Maelstrom (23 page)

“Go on,” Sparta said.

 

“Because somebody planted it on him.”

 

“And if you had to guess?”

 

Brick shrugged. “Lots of possibilities. I’ll leave it to you.”

 

“I’ll talk to him now. Alone would be best.”

 

“Wait here a minute, I’ll send him in.”

 

“And Brick–the embargo is still on. Except for those of us who are already in on it, I don’t want anyone anywhere to know what you found on Leyland.”

 

When Leyland appeared he was dressed in borrowed coveralls a size too big for him. His expression was grim.

 

“You’re from the Board of Space Control?”

 

“Yes, Mr. Leyland. I’m Inspector Troy.”

 

“You’re an inspector?” Cliff glared at her. “I’d have taken you for a clerk.”

 

“I don’t blame you for being unhappy, Mr. Leyland. I got here as fast as possible and I won’t keep you any longer than absolutely necessary.”

 

“A day in the tug, a day in this smelly tin can. Perhaps I’d rather be orbiting the moon.”

Sparta studied him intently, in ways he could not have suspected. Her macrozoom eye inspected the irises of his brown eyes, the pores of his pale exposed skin. His chemical signature was borne to her through the air; she stored it for further reference. His odor, like his voice, carried overtones of exasperation but not of fear or deceit.

She handed him one the duffels. “They gave me these before I left. Said they were your size.”

 

He took the bundled clothes she held out to him. “Well–that was thoughtful of somebody.” “Do you want time to put them on?”

 

“No, let’s get this over with. I must say, I can’t understand why this couldn’t have waited until I got to Earth.”

Because if you give me the wrong answers you’re not going to Earth, Sparta wanted to scream at him. She rubbed her neck with one hand and said, quietly, “There are good reasons, Mr. Leyland. Drugs in your pocket, for one.”

“As I’ve repeatedly explained, anyone could have put that in my suit. It was in an outside pocket! If I were a smuggler, I certainly wouldn’t have carried it where it would be spotted straight-away when I stepped into L1, now would I?”

“But of course you would have had two days to make other arrangements. Your journey was interrupted. In the excitement you could have forgotten what you were carrying.”

 

“Am I under arrest, then?” he said defiantly.

 

“There’s no need for that, unless you insist. But there are other reasons for keeping you here, which I think will be clear to you shortly.”

 

“Please do carry on, then,” he said, trying his best to be sarcastic.

 

“First tell me exactly what happened. I need to hear it . . .”

 

“I’ve been over that repeatedly with . . .” “. . . from you. In person. Starting with the moment you began packing for the trip.”

 

“Oh all right, then.” Cliff sighed. Sullenly he began to retell the tale. The farther he got, the more he became involved in reliving his own experience.

Motionless in the tiny office, Sparta listened to him, rapt with concentration, although every detail of the events he recited was already familiar to her–every detail except the timbre of his own voice, revealing his emotions at each stage of his terrifying descent and his eventual deliverance from gravity’s maelstrom.

She was quiet a moment when he finished. Then she said, “How many people might want to kill you, Mr. Leyland?”

 

“
Kill
me?” Cliff was shocked. “You mean . . . ?”

 

“Murder you. Because of something you did. Or didn’t do. Or might still do. Or as an example to others.”

Cliff looked at her with wounded innocence. She almost laughed at him, then; had she grown so cynical in so short a time?
“My background is with the customs and immigration branch, Mr. Leyland. The first thing that occurred to me when I reviewed your records was that your shuttling back and forth between L-5 and Farside carrying agricultural samples would make you a perfect mule.”

“A what?”

“A mule is a smuggler’s courier. In your agricultural specimen cases you could have secreted any number of small objects. Forged I.D. slivers. Nanochips. Micromachine cultures. Secrets. Jewels. Drugs being the most obvious and most likely. Clearly this also occurred to someone at Farside.”

Leyland flushed.

 

“Drugs it was,” she said, reading his expression. “Were you a mule, Mr. Leyland? Or did you turn them down?”

 

“I refused,” he whispered. “I thought I had made it clear to them. Even after they beat me.” His voice was rich with self-pity.

 

“Well, that’s a start, isn’t it?” she said, trying to encourage him. “Give me the names and circumstances, please.”

 

“I don’t know the names, not certainly. One of them I could recognize, but he’s of no importance. . . .”

 

“I’ll judge that,” Sparta said.

 

Leyland hesitated. “Just a moment. The voice . . .”

 

“What is it, Leyland?”

 

“The launch attendant–the one who strapped me in just before the capsule went into the launcher. I’m sure it was the same voice. One of the men who beat me up.”

 

“Do you think he could have planted the acid on you?”

 

“He could have done–while he was checking the seat straps. I didn’t notice anything.”

 

“Okay, he’ll be easy enough to identify.”

 

“The man who planted the drugs on me certainly didn’t try to kill me. What good would it have done him?”

“Quite right. Who else? Who could conceivably have had a motive for revenge?” Floating weightless, she leaned forward to press the question. “Anything, Mr. Leyland. No matter how trivial.” He said nothing, merely shrugged, and she knew he was hiding something. “You’re an attractive man, Mr. Leyland,” (some people might think so), “didn’t any of the women at the base tell you that?”

“There was a woman,” he whispered. “I don’t know how . . .”

 

“Her name?”

 

“Katrina Balakian. An astronomer at the telescope facility.”

 

“So she was attracted to you. She made it obvious.”

 

He nodded. Sparta was amused to see Leyland’s reaction to what he evidently took to be her intuition.

 

“And you spurned Ms. Balakian,” she said. “Or maybe you didn’t. But at any rate, you were going home to your wife and children.”

 

“I saw her only one more time. Do I . . . ?”

 

“I have no intention of embarrassing you or violating your confidence, Mr. Leyland. But I have to have all the facts.”

Reluctantly Cliff told his story. When he was done, Sparta said, “It will be a fairly simple matter to find out whether Balakian had the means and opportunity to sabotage the launcher. It won’t be necessary to drag you into it.”

“Why do you insist it was sabotaged, Inspector?” he protested. “Why not an accident? These things have failed before, haven’t they?”

“Occasionally.” It was an understatement. Sparta knew that the electromagnetic launcher at Cayley had suffered glitches aplenty in the early days. Firing five ten-kilogram blocks of sintered moon rock every second for days at a time, the stress on the Cayley launcher was great enough to cause numerous powercontrol failures. While the area downrange was somewhat safer than a shooting gallery, a thin swath of the moon to the east of Cayley was peppered with meter-wide craters, punched by blocks that fell short.

The engineers who built the big launcher at Farside had benefited from Cayley’s experience. Cliff Leyland’s accident was the first time Farside’s launcher had ever failed during a launch.

“I can’t prove it was deliberate or that you were singled out,” she said, and smiled. “In fact, I admit it doesn’t seem likely, unless this woman you tangled with is the archetype of a vengeful harpy–but I’m simple-minded. I have to start the investigation somewhere.”

Leyland, almost against his wishes, smiled with her. “Well–if someone
is
trying to kill me–perhaps I should actually thank you for keeping me here.”

 

“I hoped you’d understand. Just a few more questions, Mr. Leyland. . . .”

An hour later she was falling toward Farside, a passive rider in a capsule like the one that Clifford Leyland had abandoned in mid-flight; rather than ride a Space Board cutter to the surface, she wanted to sample as much of Leyland’s experience as possible.

She’d cleared him to continue his interrupted journey to Earth. The poor man’s long-awaited homecoming was about to be spoiled by howling newshounds, one reason the Space Board had kept him at L-1–not to protect him from murderers but from the media.

For her, it would be a sleepy ride, and then she would set foot on the busy moon for the first time. . . .
PART FIVE
AT THE CROSSROADS
XIV

They sent a moon buggy to fetch her from the landing field. She spent half-an-hour in the tiny office of Farside Security, querying the computer files, before she phoned Van Kessel at launch control. “Inspector Troy, Board of Space Control. Let’s see if we can find out what’s bugging your system, Mr. Van Kessel.”

“I’ll be there to pick you up in twenty minutes,” Van Kessel replied.

“This is where we control the whole operation,” Van Kessel said importantly, as men and women squeezed past him to take their places at their consoles or to get out the door to the trolley stop; Van Kessel and Sparta had arrived in the narrow-tiered control room just as the shift was changing. “Most systems are fully automated,” he said, “but we humans like to keep an eye on what our robot friends are doing.”

Sparta listened without comment as he explained at length the functions of each console station, even though most were self-evident at a glance. This was the first stop on what already promised to be a long tour of the electromagnetic launcher; her head was throbbing again. She focused her attention on the big videoplate screens on the forward wall. They showed that, except for the inactive launcher itself, Farside Base had returned to normal activities.
The only things visibly out of the ordinary were the occasional coruscations of light that played over the concave shadows of the distant radiotelescope antennas. The monitoring camera that viewed the eastern portion of the landscape was mounted halfway down the launcher track; the track stretched away for twenty kilometers toward the sun, and the antennas to one side of it were barely visible in the picture, a wide, flat row of rim-lit circles, like a raft of soap bubbles viewed edge on. The big screen had plenty of resolution, and Sparta’s right eye zoomed in on the sector, enlarging the image of the telescopes. They were racked low, pointing to the southern sky, with their line of aim presently crossing the launch track. The sparks were from electric welders; spacesuited humans and bare metal servos were crawling over the faces of some dishes, patching the damage caused by the debris from “Crater Leyland.”

“Frank, I want you to meet Inspector Troy,” Van Kessel said.

 

Sparta turned her attention back to the control room. A sandy-haired man in his mid-thirties was smiling at her out of a handsome, artificially tanned face.

 

“This is Frank Penney, Inspector,” Van Kessel said. “He’s in charge this shift. Frank was the launch director on duty when we encountered our little glitch.”

 

“You rescued those guys on Venus, didn’t you?” he said with boyish enthusiasm as he reached for her hand. “That was really something.”

“Mr. Penney.” When she shook his hand his grin got wider, showing lots of perfect white teeth. Frank Penney on parade. She couldn’t help but notice his deep chest rippling under his thin short-sleeved shirt, his muscular forearms, the firmness of his grip.

“Hey, it’s really an honor.” His eye held hers. He was pouring on the charm–out of habit.

Sparta tugged her hand free. Her interest in him was not what he hoped. As she watched him she inhaled his faint odor. Under the aftershave perfume and ordinary human sweat there was an odd aroma; its formula popped into her mind unbidden, a complex steroid with unusual side chains. Was Penney hyped on adrenalin? Nothing about him suggested fear or excitement; in fact he seemed quite a cool character.

Van Kessel said, “We’re going to look over the site, Frank, how’d you like to come with us?”

 

“Great, if you don’t mind.”

 

“Don’t be silly,” said Van Kessel, playing the gracious boss to Penney’s favored employee. “Let’s get suits on and get out there.”

 

“That’s the end of the rough acceleration track–twenty-seven kilometers of it–and now we’re coming into the three-kilometer stretch of track for fine-tuned acceleration.”

Van Kessel filled the driver’s seat of the moon buggy to overflowing, with Sparta and Penney squeezed in behind. They were bounding along beside the massive structure of the launcher track, which seemed to stretch endlessly across the level floor of the Mare Moscoviense, and every time Van Kessel raised a gloved hand to gesticulate, the buggy swung dangerously toward the track supports. He was not a good driver. Sparta itched to grab the moon buggy’s controls.

“How rough is rough?” she asked, hoarsely.

“The whole track is built from independently-powered sections, each ten meters long,” he shouted over his shoulders. “Over the whole length of the rough acceleration track we can let them get out of line by up to four or five millimeters. More than that and you get oscillations in the capsule that would shake the teeth out of your head. Also we’re less concerned with the precise acceleration rate here–we let it vary up to a centimeter per second-squared. In the fine-tuned section we tolerate no more than a millimeter variation from a perfectly straight line and no more than a millimeter per second-squared off the ideal acceleration.”

“How do you keep three kilometers of track straight to within one millimeter?” She addressed the question to Penney. Her headache had subsided and she was managing to sound more persuasively interested now, but in fact she had memorized the plans and technical specifications of the Farside launcher before leaving Earth and could call them to consciousness instantly. It was not the sort of knowledge she wanted anyone to know she had.

“The variations aren’t too bad to begin with,” Penney explained. “Mostly expansion and contraction with lunar night and day. And we get a bit of sag between the track supports. The active-alignment technology itself is practically ancient, developed last century for particle accelerators, compound optical telescopes, that stuff.”