“Penney’s a killer, all right–I don’t think it will be hard to establish that Istrati went crazy and committed suicide because Penney deliberately dosed him with hypersteroids, just before he reported for this shift. He knew I was closing in on him. But he was not responsible for the launch failure.”
Sparta nodded. “The man in the capsule right now. He’s an analyst from the antenna facility. Their job is to search for extraterrestrial intelligence, but it’s apparent that Piet Gress is willing to give his life to make sure they never find it.”
“This is Blake Redfield, my associate,” Sparta said, not bothering to complete the introduction. “Because they were about to begin looking in Crux,” she said to Blake. “Where, according to you, they may find the home star of the ‘gods’–of Culture X.”
She sat at the launch director’s console and keyed the commlink. “Piet Gress, this is Ellen Troy of the Board of Space Control. You think you are about to die. I know why. But you won’t die and you won’t accomplish your mission.”
“Dr. Gress, you think your orbit is the same as Leyland’s was, or close enough. But your capsule will not pass through the gap in the ringwall. You cannot make course corrections without our cooperation. You will not hit the antennas. You can save yourself, or you can die for nothing.”
For several seconds the speakers were silent except for the sound of the cosmos. Then a sad, dry voice issued from them: “You’re bluffing.”
Sparta caught Van Kessel’s eye. His face sagged. “Mr. Van Kessel,” she said quietly, “just so you’ll know what we’re up against: according to my colleague, Mr. Redfield, Piet Gress is a representative of a fanatic sect that believes our solar system has been invaded by aliens in the distant past and is about to be invaded again. The wrinkle is, Gress and his friends are actually looking forward to the invasion. But they’re eager to keep this all a deep, dark secret from the rest of the inhabited worlds. They are so eager, in fact, that some of them like Gress are willing to kill themselves and a lot of other people, just to keep us unwashed masses in the dark.”
She turned back to the microphone. “No, Gress, I’m not bluffing,” she said to the invisible inhabitant of the capsule. “I knew about your plans before you were launched”–
about two minutes before you were launched, thanks to Blake
–“and steps were taken to alter your trajectory”–
steps, leaps, desperate measures: I jumped from a speeding moon buggy and I read the acceleration of your capsule and read the phase reversal and my belly burned and I gushed a burst of telemetry at the trackside power-control receiver in the code I’d memorized and I did my best to override the signals your capsule was sending too, all before I hit ground again, and I pray that I succeeded but who knows
?–“and you will not hit Farside Base. You may hit the moon, but not where you want. You may sail on into space forever. But you will not destroy the antennas. Save yourself, Gress. Use your maneuvering rockets.”
Blake said, “One of us. A friend of Katrina’s. Of Catherine’s”–he glanced at Sparta:
forgive me, but how wrong can I be
?–“but it’s too late. They interfered with the launch. Whatever happens to you, you’re not going to hit the antennas. And Gress, they know where to look now. They could find the home star with one thirty-meter dish on Earth.” Blake let that sink in. On the speakers there was nothing but the hiss of empty space.
Gress’s voice, suddenly louder, filled the room. “You are an impostor, a traitor.” He could have been on the edge of tears.
In the control room the shift changed, but Sparta and Blake and Van Kessel stayed. They sipped bitter coffee and talked in desultory tones about Istrati and Penney and Leyland and Gress and Balakian. Penney was in custody, exercising his right to keep quiet, and Istrati was in cold storage, but base security reported that other members of the smuggling ring they’d picked up on suspicion had begun talking freely.
Exactly what Gress–with Balakian’s help?–had done to cause Leyland’s near-death was a still-unsolved puzzle. Sparta ordered base security to reconstruct the movements of the two during the twenty-four hours before Leyland’s capsule was launched. The security people reported back almost too quickly: it seemed that neither of them had ever left the radiotelescope operations area.
“Maybe I can answer that,” Blake said to Van Kessel. “Gress is a signal analyst; it was probably easy for him to decode your power control signals. All he needed was a transmitter loaded with a preset code, set to go off when Leyland’s capsule reached the right point in its launch–a signal strong enough to override the capsule’s onboard transmitter. He could just as easily have put the capsule’s computers out of whack with a remote command, as soon as it left the track.”
“There’s one aimed at the track right now,” Sparta whispered. “The radiotelescopes. Every receiver can be used as a transmitter. Every transmitter can be a receiver.” She knew now, although she said nothing about it, that the source of the disorienting, queasy sensation she felt when she stood on the launcher track was a burst of test telemetry from the antennas, still under repair.
“Once Security gets around to it,” Blake said, “I’ll bet they’ll find Gress was feeding in a little extra programming. And that Katrina had a hand in the fine alignment of the telescopes. She had something to say about the target list, after all.”
Gress could not know that, of course, since he apparently refused to believe what they told him and had stopped responding on the link. Sparta watched the bright lines on the graphic screens, the lines that diagrammed Gress’s rush toward the moon, and she tried to imagine what he must be thinking, what he must be feeling, as the bright backlit mountains of Farside rushed toward him. The man wanted to die, wanted the face of the moon to rush up and crush him . . .
Sparta looked at Blake’s round, handsome face and saw that eyebrow lift again. Why, indeed? Blake was wondering–and what exactly had Sparta been up to when she’d jumped out of the speeding moon buggy? It was not the sort of question Blake would ask her in public.
“That’s an excellent way of putting it, Mr. Van Kessel,” she said. “You should have said so in the first place,” he grumbled. He kept his questions to himself after that. Whatever it was the Space Board wasn’t telling him, he doubted he’d ever find out.
Once more the alarm went out to the base. This time the measure was strictly precautionary. A few people strolled to the deep shelters, but the bolder workers went out on the surface to watch as Gress’s capsule soared over the crest of the Mare Moscoviense rimwall.
There was nothing but the vacant hiss of the aether. It went on so long that everyone but Sparta and Blake had given up, when lights flickered on the consoles, and the weary controllers stirred. Flatscreens unscrambled. Shortly Gress’s haggard voice came over the radiolink. “You have control of this capsule now,” he said. “Do what you want.”
Before anyone else in the room could respond, Sparta had tapped coordinates into the launch director’s console. “In a few seconds you will experience some acceleration, Dr. Gress. Please be sure you are secured.” She had rewritten the capsule’s program and locked it off before Van Kessel could confirm her calculations.
“No, Blake. I need to be with you.” There was one more stop to make before the long day was over. Katrina Balakian was being held in the tiny detention facility at Base Security under the maintenance dome. Sparta and Blake looked at Katrina’s image on the guard’s flatscreen. The astronomer sat quietly in an armchair in the locked room, staring down at her clenched hands.
The guard keyed the combination into the pad on the wall, and the door swung open. Katrina did not move or look at them. The smell that wafted out of the room was oddly traditional, instantly recognizable. It was the smell of bitter almonds.
Seconds later Sparta had confirmed that Katrina Balakian had died of cyanide poisoning, self-administered from that most ancient of cloak-and-dagger devices, a hollow plastic tooth. Her features were frozen with the wide-eyed blue shock of one whose breath has suddenly, irrevocably been cut off.