The Ganymede Club (18 page)

The ground beneath him suddenly twisted and heaved, throwing him off balance so that he banged painfully against the tunnel wall and collapsed to his knees. From that position he stared at the way ahead. It seemed lit by random flashes of light. He knew that they were reflections, that the light actually came from behind him. And they were closer every moment, each lightning flash accompanied by a hot breath on his back. He had to keep running.

He rose, the knots of muscles in his calves and thighs bunching and flexing to bring him to a standing position. Instead of standing, he found that he was propelled high into the air. When at last he came down again, he stood for a moment, swaying. He felt terribly weak, as though he had eaten nothing for days. Run. And then eat.

No. Run, and drink, and then eat. Thirst and smoke had desiccated his throat so much that he could not swallow, could barely breathe. Could do nothing more than yearn to fall to the floor and rest.

He paused, ready to give way to the temptation. As he did so, he saw a dark object close to the wall of the tunnel. It was another human. A woman, lying face down and not moving. Someone had taken the option of surrendering to fatigue and bad air—and death.

He started forward again, along the curving tunnel that never ended. Hope and escape, if they lay anywhere, were in that direction, up toward the surface.

He had been wrong. It could not be run, and drink, and eat.

It must be run, and run, and run. That was the rule, for the whole of the world, forever and ever . . .

* * *

It ended without warning. In a millisecond, Spook was hurled out of derived reality. He found that he was gasping, weeping, gulping in air to the utmost depths of his lungs. The tunnel had vanished. Another world was appearing in a kaleidoscope of bright colors. The computer had broken the link.

And not before time. Spook sat up, ripped the telemetry contacts from his temples and neck, and looked around. He was in Lola's clinic. Bat, sitting six feet away in a chair three sizes too small for him, was watching calmly.

"The sequence is finished?" he asked. "Excellent. Now we can compare notes. What did you make of it?"

Spook fought back the butterflies in his stomach. He and Bat had been jousting like this for two days, each unwilling to admit to any weakness. He was not going to give in now. He allowed himself one more deep breath before he tried to speak.

"I can't tell you what it is. But I can tell you what it
isn't.
That's not Earth—the gravity field is all wrong. And I don't believe that it's Mars, either."

"Agreed. Not Earth, or Mars, or Ganymede. There was insufficient gravitational field in that sequence for any of them."

"Callisto?"

"No again. The Callistan field is only about half of what we experience here on Ganymede, but that is still far too much."

"Where then?"

They sat staring at each other. Bat's great moon face had the calm rapture of the Puzzle Master facing a new challenge.

"I will state an opinion," he said at last. "Although I admit at the outset that it introduces more questions than it answers. I believe that the low gravity indicates a sequence occurring somewhere in the Belt. In view of the well-developed tunnel structure, it was clearly one of the colonized worlds. Beyond that we cannot go. We have no direct indications of body size or mass, other than that it is smaller than any of the inhabited planets or major satellites."

"That's great." Spook had been thinking the same thing, but was not keen to propose it. "You realize what that implies? We've already had Bryce Sonnenberg in sequences on Earth and Mars, two places where he says he's never been. Now we want him remembering the Belt, too—which he insists he left twenty-one years ago, when he was three years old. He sure wasn't three years old in this sequence."

"That is not perhaps the worst problem. Let us adopt, as a working hypothesis, that the
place
is in fact somewhere in the Belt. Then we must consider the
time.
"

"That's easy." Spook had his own unpleasant memories to help him. "If it's the Belt, then that sequence happened just five years ago. That's when Earth and Mars were doing their best to smash the Belt worlds to pieces."

"And conversely. Regrettably, both were succeeding. I agree, this sequence could only have taken place during the war."

"No matter when it happened, it's the same problem all over again. First, Sonnenberg had a sequence on prewar Mars that he could not possibly have survived. Then he had an
earlier
sequence on Earth, but he was
older
than he was on Mars. Now he dies in the Belt during the war, but according to Sonnenberg, in this memory he was
younger
than he was on either Earth or Mars. It's screwy."

"We are not sure that he died in the Belt experience." Bat, who had been sitting totally immobile, lifted a judicial finger. "Permit me to point out the logical difference. In the case of Mars, death seemed both imminent and inescapable. By contrast, in this case Sonnenberg was in a difficult situation but he was actively seeking to escape from it. Perhaps he did escape."

"What do you mean,
perhaps?
" Spook waved his hand toward the other office. "He must have escaped. He was in there this morning, having another haldane session."

"If you could somehow persuade your sister to let us talk to him directly about what we are doing—"

"Forget it, Bat. She'll get up on her high horse again and talk about her sacred duty as a haldane. I've been through it a hundred times and got nowhere. Anyway, she says it wouldn't do any good if we did talk to Sonnenberg. He has these blackouts and weird memories, but he has no more idea what's happening to him than we do."

"He has less. He does not have Puzzle Network experience, which hones the talent for assembling a whole from a miscellany of small fragments. You and I both possess such invaluable experience. Let us accept that Sonnenberg—for the time being—is inaccessible to us. That leaves only one alternative."

"What's that?"

"We must get down to real work." Bat sighed—a sigh of satisfaction more than frustration—and stood up. "We must attack the data banks."

* * *

A name, Bryce Sonnenberg, and a family history. Bat had often started in the Puzzle Network with a lot less.

He had returned as soon as possible to the Bat Cave, where conditions were more favorable for sustained thought. To say that he disliked Spook, once he had taken the big step and reluctantly agreed to meet him, would be quite untrue. He enjoyed the intellectual interaction, and they shared many interests.

What he found hard to take was the jittering, the furious nervous energy and the hyperactive disposition. Spook was only a few centimeters shorter than Bat and could match him course for course at the dinner table, but he massed only one-fourth as much. He was as thin as a stick, with biceps no bigger than his Adam's apple. After spending the day together, Bat understood why. Spook burned off all his calores, buzzing around the room and never sitting still.

Whereas Bat, like any rational person, preferred to do what he was planning to do now: Sit, sift, compare, and think.

He made sure that ample snacks were available, put on his favorite cowled robe, seated himself at the terminal, and went visiting. First stop: the general census files.

One of the basic rules of the Puzzle. Network was also the simplest:
Nothing is what it seems.
And as a corollary of that:
Don't believe anything that you are told, check it for yourself.

Bat made the most basic check of all. Was there such a person as Bryce Sonnenberg?

There was. According to the census file, he was twenty-four years old. He lived on Callisto. His occupation showed as mathematician, specializing in nonpolynomial algorithms. His hobby was low-gee space-scooter competition.

At that point, any resemblance between the census files and the history that Sonnenberg had given to Lola Belman ended.

After an initial moment of disbelief—could this be another Bryce Sonnenberg?—Bat set out to chart the differences.

Which data set to believe? The census file, or what Lola Belman had been told by Bryce Sonnenberg? Mother worked on Ceres, or Callisto—or neither?

The census data and Lola Belman's records were alike in this: They depended totally on what was told to them. Bat didn't have that limitation.
Don't believe anything you are told.

He moved up a level in the data base and inquired as to the sources of the census entries. As he had feared, he met the Wall:
Requested data unavailable.

The distributed-information network for the solar system had been designed in the 2020s. The Unity was a wonderful and logical construct, one of humanity's shining and most perfect creations. Within the Unity every data bank was smoothly interlocked. A query might bounce from Ganymede to Earth to Mars to Pallas, but the user would neither know nor care. The answer would come eventually, if it were stored anywhere, because every data element was accessible from anywhere. Each bank could service or call for data from any other, efficiently, economically, and logically.

There was one default assumption: The human race was presumed to be equally logical. Unfortunately, the Great War was not the act of a logical species.

The Wall had been thrown up hastily after the war, when it became obvious that the Unity had collapsed to a wilderness of isolated data sources, informational ganglia without a central nervous system. A user, wandering the system, would be turned back by the Wall whenever a destination data bank no longer existed.

The Wall was intended to save time and effort. Why encourage a user to search for something, when no one knew where it might be or if it still existed? On Earth, Mars, Moon, or in the Belt, a trillion facts had dissolved to a swirl of random electrons. The Wall was telling Bat and a billion other users to forget it—their search would be a waste of time. It was protecting them all from an uncharted Sargasso Sea of lost and derelict data sets.

But Bat had been here before. He had built up, within his head, his own map of that sea. The Luna data base had gone completely and forever. It was a waste of time even looking there. Earth had a reduced service capacity, but the basic data were there—if you could find them. Mars was a mess, but a team was working on it and little by little it was coming back on-line.

All the leading Belt colonies had been hit hard in the war. The Ceres data bank was gone, except for a few skimpy index files stored in backup form on Ganymede—index files that pointed, like ghostly fingers, to phantom data no longer existing on Ceres. The situation for Vesta was even worse. There were no files, pristine or backup, of any kind. Data banks on Pallas had been purged by the warlords of the Belt, just before they killed themselves rather than surrender to Earth. The record of bloody deeds that those banks had contained could only be conjectured.

Hidalgo, the planetoid that Bat was interested in, was one of the lesser Belt worlds. Its defenses had proved totally inadequate and its human population had been annihilated in a single raid. The basic computer system apparently still existed together with its census files, but it was in isolation. The Wall insisted that the data were not linked to any access node that Bat could reach. Also, Hidalgo itself was still under military embargo. Some highly unpleasant experiments had been conducted there before or during the war, and the surviving results could not be allowed to escape.

At that point, anyone but a masochist would have given up. Bat did not think of it. He had tools in his bag of tricks that no one else even suspected. A ten-minute pause for refueling: cheese, dried fruit, and walnuts, all grown or synthesized by the service machines on the agricultural level, within walking distance of the Bat Cave; and then Bat took the next step.

From his program directory he summoned one of his own routines,
Mellifera.
Its program data area had been left empty. He prepared the instructions to fill that void with great care. It would be galling to fail because of some minor coding error, although in human terms the basic message was simple:
Seek access to the Hidalgo data base.
Bat made ten thousand copies of the completed version of Mellifera, provided a different system entry point for each one, and released them into the Ganymede network.

Mellifera was not very smart, no more intelligent than the honeybee after which it had been named. Like the individual bees of a hive, each module would quest far and wide through the interconnected data banks of the solar system. If one of them found what it was looking for, it would return at once to the "hive" of Bat's computer, bearing with it the sequence of steps that it had taken on the way.

Once he saw that sequence, Bat would decide what to do next. What he could not specify in advance was how long the search should take. Movement within the Ganymede data banks would be very fast, but he felt sure that his answer did not lie there. The myriad copies of Mellifera would need to leap out into space as tight bundles of digital signals, beamed to every node in the solar system. That would be done at light-speed, but at the present time Earth was—how far away? Bat leaned back and thought for a moment; the orbital ephemerides of the planets and major moons were something that he kept in his head, since they were basic to efficient solar system transportation. Earth was 828 million kilometers away from Ganymede. Round-trip travel time would be a little more than an hour and a half. Assume that there would be a need to bounce around quite a bit, to the Belt and inner planets and back, and the Mellifera units would not be returning for quite a while.