The Diamond Moon (28 page)

“A drink?” Marianne’s outrage carried almost palpable force. She pointed at the time display on the console behind Forster. “Have you gone crazy? Randolph must have fallen halfway to Jupiter!”

 

Professor Forster regarded her disapprovingly. “Lack of patience is a common failing in the young,” he said, which sounded odd coming from his youthful-appearing self. “I see no cause at all for hasty action.”

 

Marianne flushed red but as quickly became pale again; real fear had temporarily pushed aside her anger. “You promised,” she whispered.

 

In Bill Hawkins’s expression, menace was replacing anx-iousness. “Professor, you told me . . . well, I don’t see there’s any point in prolonging this.”

Seeing their emotion, Forster realized he might have gone a tad too far; he’d had his little joke, after all. “I can tell you at once, Ms. Mitchell—Bill knows this already, which is why he is justly angry with me— that Randolph Mays is in no more danger than we are. We can go and collect him whenever we like.”

“Then you
did
lie to me,” she said instantly. “No, I certainly did not.
Mays
has lied to you repeatedly, but what I told you was the truth. Granted, you jumped to the wrong conclusions. So did Bill here, until I explained it to him—his outrage on your behalf, and on Mays’s, was quite genuine, and I doubt we could have restrained him had we not convinced him that we were telling the truth.”

“Which is?” she demanded—and added with a hiss, “If you’re ready to cut the self-serving bull.”

Despite himself, Forster flinched. “Yes, well . . . when I said that a body would take ninety-five minutes to fall from here to Jupiter, I omitted—not accidentally, I confess—a rather important phrase. I should have added, ‘a body at rest with respect to Jupiter.’ But we are not at rest with respect to Jupiter. Sir Randolph shares our orbital speed, which is about, mm, twenty-seven kilometers per second.”

She was quick even when the ideas were strange, so the moral force of her anger was slightly sapped by a suspicion of what Forster would say next; the best she could do was display her contempt for his selfsatisfaction. “To hell with your numbers. Will you for God’s sake get to the point?”

“Mm, yes, as you say.” Remarkably he was looking al-most sheepish by now. “We did throw him completely away from Amalthea, toward Jupiter. But the extra velocity we gave him was trivial; he’s still moving in practically the same orbit as before. The most he can do, computer says, is drift about a hundred kilometers inward. In one revolution, twelve hours or so, he’ll come right back where he started. Without us having to do anything at all.”

Marianne locked eyes with the professor. To the other two watchers on the flight deck, Walsh and Hawkins, there was no doubting the meaning of the exchange: Forster was ashamed of himself, but defiant, for he believed that what he had done needed doing; Marianne was relieved, but frus-trated and annoyed at having been duped.

“Which is why you wouldn’t let me talk to him,” she said. “Randolph’s smart enough to realize that he’s in no danger. He would have told me that.”

“That’s why I wouldn’t let you talk to him, yes,” Forster admitted. “As for his sophistication with orbital mechanics, I warned you of that myself. Indeed, Sir Randolph was so confident of his ability in that regard that he risked your life without compunction.”

She turned to Hawkins. “You knew.”

Hawkins steadily returned her accusing gaze. “What the professor hasn’t told you, Marianne, is that Mays tried to murder us all. And made you his accomplice. You two didn’t knock us out for just a few minutes; you gassed us good. Then he set the ship to drift into the radiation belt.”

The blood drained from her face, but she said, “So what? Radiation effects are curable.” It came out with more defi-ance than she felt. “I have firsthand knowledge of that fact, too.”

“So long as someone’s awake to administer the cure. You two dosed us to keep us unconscious for a long time, too long to save ourselves after we woke up. He kept you alive to support his story—but he made sure you wouldn’t really witness a thing.”

Marianne stared at Hawkins, her face slowly creasing with the horror of what he was saying. She shifted her wa-vering gaze to the professor. “Then . . . why would he bother hiding the statue?”

“He didn’t bother, of course,” said Forster. “I gave your map to Blake to put under seal with the rest of the evidence against him. Mays told you an involved tale so that
you
would send him back here to the
Ventris
. It was all your idea, Marianne.
You
are the guilty party; the innocent Sir Randolph Mays would never have done it on his own. Or so he would have told the Space Board.”

“If you knew, why did you go through with all of this?” Marianne asked. Forster said quietly, “So that you would know too.”
XXV
“We’ve got you, Sir Randolph. You’ll have been listening in, I suppose.”

 

“Yes.”

McNeil and Groves closed on Mays an hour after Forster told them to retrieve him; he was only twenty kilometers up, and they located him without too much trouble by tracking the radio beacon on his suit, which they’d left intact when they disabled his suit-comm. His radiation ex-posure would be no worse than that of his rescuers.

“No need to make the long round trip after all. Ms. Mitchell valued your life too much,” said Groves.

 

“Yes, well . . . good-hearted person. Quick study. Have to give her that.”

 

“I’m afraid you’ve rather shaken her faith in you.”

 

Mays made no reply.

Of the two crewmen, quick little Tony Groves was more inclined to play Mercurius, the psychologist; it seemed to him that something had gone out of Sir Randolph Mays, some dark force of resistance, for he came down with them very listlessly out of the bronze-colored, Jupiter-dominated sky.

It occurred to the navigator to suggest to Professor For-ster, that famous rationalist, that now would be a good time to question Mays more closely. Perhaps the historian-journalist was willing to admit, if not defeat, something closer to the unvarnished truth about himself.

First they had to get back to the
Michael Ventris
, a barely visible speck of light alongside the glowing fluff-ball of Amalthea, which was virtually plummeting through the night, visibly shifting against the background of fixed stars.

Even as they watched, diving full speed toward the sat-ellite on their suit maneuvering systems, Amalthea’s aspect changed. The last of the icy husk melted into hot water, and the last of the hot water boiled away in a flash. A rapidly dissipating whiff of vapor slid away, ever so slowly, like the silk scarf of a magician lifting in interminable slow motion and with exquisite grace, to reveal—

—what they had known was there but could not have seen with their own eyes before now, the mirrorfinished spacecraft, the world that was a spaceship. The diamond moon.

 

Just then, Jo Walsh’s voice broke in on their suit-comms: “Angus, Tony, get back here as fast as you can. We’ve got an emergency on our hands.”

 

“What’s up, Jo?”

 

“Give it all you’ve got, guys. Bleed Mr. Mays’s maneu-vering gas if you must. Looks like the neighborhood is about to go critical, if our informants know what the hell they’re talking about.”

 

* * *

 

And on the flight deck of the
Ventris:

 

“. . . bring the
Ventris
into the one-eighty equatorial hold. I can’t be sure, but I think you’ve got only about twenty minutes to accomplish this,” Sparta’s quiet voice was saying over the speakers.

“Twenty minutes,” Marianne exclaimed softly. She looked about as if someone could save the situation. But Forster and the captain were staring at the blank videoplate as if by force of concentration they could see Sparta on it. Hawkins was chewing his lip, looking at Marianne help-lessly. Even Blake, whose normal impulse in emergencies was to go out and blow something up, stood glumly by, inactive.

Forster said, “We’re still missing McNeil and Groves, In-spector Troy.”

 

“Mays?” came Sparta’s voice on the link.

 

“Yes, he’s with them.”

 

“Are you in contact?”

 

“Captain Walsh has just now instructed them to make all possible speed, but we estimate that they are perhaps fifteen minutes away from our current position.”

 

On the bridge of the
Ventris
all was silent for a moment, until Sparta’s voice spoke again from the radiolink. “You will have to enter the hold now. They’ll have to come in when they arrive.”

 

“Their
maneuvering
fuel . . .” Marianne began.

 

Sparta’s voice continued. “There seems to be no leeway here—it’s my sense of the situation that the . . . the world-ship is in an automated countdown. And that we’ve already gone past the point of no return.”

 

“But Inspector Troy . . .”

“Sorry, sir, give me a moment”—Walsh interrupted For-ster’s reply with a hired captain’s diplomatic firmness, which under her politeness brooked no contradiction—“I’ll be get-ting the ship underway, alerting the men. You and Inspector Troy can carry on your debate again shortly.” Walsh busily communed with the computer of the
Ventris
—it was a bit more work than usual to get the ship started without the help of her engineer—and programmed it to head for the equator of the diamond moon. “Better strap in, sir. Blake, please take the engineer’s couch. Ms. Mitchell, Mr. Hawkins, down below, please. Secure for course adjust-ment.”

A moment later the maneuvering rockets went off like howitzers, hard enough and loud enough to give them all headaches. The
Ventris
curved smartly inward, toward the black hole that was even then spiraling open in the side of the glistening worldship.

McNeil looked at Groves. They’d just been briefed by Walsh over their suitlinks. “Any help, Mr. Navigator?”

“Well, Mr. Engineer, I’ve just run a rather preliminary estimate on my sleeve”—he tapped the computer locator pad on his suit’s forearm—“and it puts us in a bit of a bind. To make the vector change, we’ve got to save what fuel we’ve got. But if we save what we’ve got, we arrive, oh, a tad late.”

“We haven’t got the delta-vees, then?”

 

“That’s putting it succinctly.”

 

“Any recommendations?”

 

Inside his suit, Groves visibly shrugged. “I say, let’s go like bats out of hell and hope somebody thinks of something before we run out of gas.”

 

McNeil looked sideways at their captive. “S’pose you should have a vote, Mays. Not that we have to count it.”

 

Mays said, “No matter. I’ve nothing to add.”

 

They hit their suit thrusters then, and dived toward the diamond moon.

The
Ventris
entered the huge dome originally explored by Forster and Troy in the Manta submarine. Its cathedral-like space was a filigree of ink and silver, drawn with a fine steel needlepoint—for it was full of vacuum now, not water, and its intricate architecture was severely illuminated by in pouring Jupiter light.

From the floor a bundle of gleaming mechanisms, flex-ible and alive as tentacles, sprang up to grasp the
Ventris
and draw it inward. They turned it as they carried it, so that finally it lay on its side, firmly entangled in a nest of suck-ing tendrils like a fish that had blundered into the grip of an anemone.

The
Ventris
was aligned so that it was parallel to the axis of the world-ship, pointed in the direction of what they had called the south pole. On the flight deck, what feeble gravity there was tended to draw people to one wall instead of the floor, but the force was so slight that the sensation was not so much like falling as drifting sideways in a slow current.

“The Manta’s got fuel,” Blake said to Walsh. “I can ride it out toward them and abandon it, use my suit gas to help them come in.”

 

“Sorry, Blake,” she said shortly. “You’d use up your suit gas and more, just matching their trajectory.”

 

“I insist upon making the attempt,” Blake said, with all the angry dignity he could muster.

 

“I refuse to have four casualties instead of three.”

 

“Captain . . .”

“If there were the slightest chance”—Walsh was rigid; two of her long-time companions, her oldest friends, were among the men she proposed to abandon—“but there is not. Run the numbers, if you like. Please prove me wrong.”

Forster—strapped into his couch and brooding, his face in his hands—had stayed out of the dispute. Now he lifted his sad gaze to Blake. “Do as the captain suggests, Blake. Run the numbers.”

 

“Sir, computer is using its own fuel estimates. I suggest . . . I’m saying they’re low.”

 

“Or high,” Walsh shot back at him.

 

“Run the numbers, Blake,” Forster said. “Leave Mays’s mass out of the calculation.”

 

Walsh looked at Blake without saying anything. She was asking him to take the burden.

 

“Sorry, Jo. Professor,” Blake whispered. “I won’t say I’d be sorry to see them make that choice for themselves. But . . .”

Walsh turned to the console and tapped numbers into the computer manually; it was not the sort of thing you told the machine to do in voice mode. The numbers came back, and the potential trajectories were graphically displayed.

Walsh and the rest of them stared at the plate. “Well,” she said, “let’s hope that when the idea occurs to them, they’re less squeamish than . . . than I am.”

“What are you talking about?” Marianne demanded. She and Bill Hawkins had at that moment arrived on the flight deck.

 

Forster didn’t look at her, but he spoke loudly and flatly, “With Mays’s fuel—but without his mass— McNeil and Groves have a chance to make it back here before Inspector Troy’s deadline.”

 

“A rapidly diminishing chance,” growled Walsh.

 

Marianne sifted that. “You want them to abandon Ran-dolph?” she said.

 

“I wish they would.” Forster looked her in the eye. “But I doubt that they will.”

 

Marianne could have expressed outrage or horror. But she didn’t.

 

Inward toward Jupiter, Tony Groves said, “We just passed it, mate. Point of no return.”