The Ganymede Club (19 page)

It was time to try something different. Bat turned to consideration of the Hidalgo data base, together with the Sonnenberg "memory" that he and Spook had reviewed earlier. It suggested a new train of thought. Bat adjusted the cowled hood on his shaved head and pulled his robe tighter. He closed his eyes and became totally immobile.

A stranger entering the Bat Cave would have judged him asleep. A physician, examining the pattern of his brain waves, would have disagreed but been unable to describe accurately the mental state. Bat had entered the dreamlike trance where thinking blended the workings of conscious and unconscious mind.

Suppose that both the census files and Lola Belman's records were partially correct. Suppose that Bryce Sonnenberg had been born twenty-four years ago on Hidalgo, just as he had told Lola, but he had come to Callisto only five years ago. Suppose that until then, he had remained on Hidalgo, or on another of the Belt worlds. He had managed to escape during the war, but in the prewar period he had been doing—what?

Bat was sure that he was a genius, smarter than anyone he knew, but he still admitted to a teenager's ghoulish fascination with some things—like the Belt's prewar activities. The subterranean levels of the information highways rang with talk of strange experiments performed on human subjects, horrors far beyond the mild perversities of the Purcell invertor or the Tolkov stimulator.

There was the gene splicing of human and great ape, rumored to be the basis for the organic smart warheads of the Belt's Seeker missiles. No ship had ever escaped from a Seeker, once it had recognized its target. No captured Seeker complete with its brain had ever been released for inspection.

The Seeker neural network could be grown using elementary techniques that were well within the grasp of anyone who chose to perform such work. Far more difficult and outre were the blends of vertebrate and invertebrate DNA performed on Geneva. Reputedly, that work had produced spiderman warriors, amazingly strong and resilient but uncontrollable even by their makers. The Belt's own fusion weapons had been turned on Geneva, vaporizing the inhabited layers of that little world.

Bat's own personal nightmare was the brain corer. This was more than rumor—it had been reported by cleanup squads, cautiously exploring the battered Belt worlds. What they found had been placed in data files that would remain locked for a century. Sometimes Bat wished that he had not taken those ciphers as a personal challenge. He had cracked the codes and been rewarded with dreadful images, of men and women without heads, lumbering like sightless automata along the hidden corridors of the Belt worlds. An augmented spinal cord was enough to offer control of basic body functions. The cored brains, complete with optic nerves, floated naked and alive within transparent jars of nutrient solutions. The attached eyeballs at the ends of their stalks of nerve tissue gazed at the inaccessible world beyond the vats. Delicate traceries of conducting fiber entered the vats and tapped the silent thoughts.

That was the worst part of all. The brains, awake twenty-four hours a day, knew what had happened to them. They begged constantly for release.

It did not help to know that although the work had been done in the Belt, financial support had come from somewhere in the inner system. The cleanup squads had wept, cursed God and man, and provided the mercy stroke before anyone could send orders to do otherwise. The naked brains blessed their killers as they died.

Bat shuddered and returned to normal consciousness. Was that the milieu from which Bryce Sonnenberg had derived—not before the war, but at the end of it? Suppose his "memories" were a cover for a more sinister past.

Bat dropped the idea almost immediately. He had allowed the recollection of Belt atrocities to derange him temporarily. If Sonnenberg were an escaped war criminal in hiding, the last thing he would do was allow a haldane to probe his mind.

There was a more rational alternative. Suppose that Sonnenberg had been not a perpetrator of Belt war crimes, but a
victim.
The technology that developed the Purcell inverter was certainly capable of filling a mind with wild memories, or of inserting a false past. Perhaps it was Bryce Sonnenberg's true past, welling up now from the depths of his mind in random and uncontrolled flashes. Lola Belman's work might be hastening the recollection process.

Except that could not be true, either. Sonnenberg seemed to have memories from multiple individuals, including memories of someone's certain death.

The false-past idea was untenable. And yet . . .

The workings of the subconscious were, by definition, inaccessible to the usual thought processes. Bat hated that. At the same time, he had learned never to ignore his own irrational hunches. They often turned out to be right—and intelligible after the fact in logical terms.

He felt that he was close to the truth but was unable to see it. He tried his usual trick. He put the problem to the back of his mind, and turned to another subject. A search for Sonnenberg's mother would certainly prove productive one way or another. If she were alive and working on Oberon, it should be trivial to find her, regardless of the name she was using. Oberon was one of the "big two" moons of Uranus, but it was still a shrimp by Jupiter system standards, only a fortieth the volume of Ganymede. The number of Von Neumann designers there could hardly run to double figures. If she were not on Oberon, it would be one more reason to question Bryce Sonnenberg's reliability.

Bat was constructing the query when an attention light flashed on his console. A Mellifera probe had returned, and it was indicating success. The first one back usually found the shortest path to the data destination, but Bat made himself wait in delicious anticipation for another five minutes, until four more were in the hive.

Access to the Hidalgo data base could be found— where?

Bat examined the node sequences determined by the Mellifera modules, at first with delight and then with dismay. All five questing programs agreed that a copy of the Hidalgo data files was kept on Callisto. But incredibly, the files were not on-line. In order to examine them, it would be necessary to go to Callisto in person.

That confirmed Bat's worst suspicions of Callisto, a hick world with a total IQ less than Bat's own. What sort of morons kept data bases without access?

He felt his frustration grow. Callisto was where Sonnenberg had supposedly made his home after he left Hidalgo. All investigation paths seemed to lead there. In solar system terms Callisto was almost in Bat's own backyard—just the next moon out from Ganymede. As far as he was concerned, it might as well have been in a different galaxy. He never ventured as far as the surface of Ganymede, and the prospect of going beyond it appalled him.

His irritation lasted for only a second or two. Another Puzzle Network dictum:
Every well-posed problem has a solution.
In this case Bat realized that the solution was obvious: Spook Belman.

Spook loved the idea of charging off all over Ganymede, grubbing into old files and examining tattered war relics. He had more energy than sense. Surely he would view the prospect of a trip to Callisto with great enthusiasm.

Bat reached for the phone. It was the middle of the Ganymede night—but what better time to be sure that Spook was home, alone, and available to talk?

13

The cartographers of the solar system had pegged Helene as a dead, quiet rock fragment of little interest to anyone. Probably it had once been a comet, swinging in close to the Sun and then far out again, until on one approach it had come too close to Saturn and been captured by the planet's gravitational field. That had happened millions of years ago, long enough for Helene to find its way to L-4, a low point in the Saturn/Dione gravity-potential well. It remained there still, in stable orbit. The little world's low density was consistent with a captured comet, most of whose volatiles had survived the approaches to the Sun and were still trapped inside it.

That capture by Saturn was the end point of Helene's history. The worldlet was known to be quiet, dead, and dull. The Ganymede Club, the group of apparent eccentrics who had taken a lease on Helene in the 2040s, had done nothing in thirty years to change its external appearance or reported status. But the cartographers would have received a big surprise if they had been able to pay a visit to the interior.

A dozen concealed shafts had been sunk into one side of the little moon. Below the surface plates that concealed them, a group of special-purpose Von Neumanns was constantly at work. They were installing drive units whose dilute exhausts were designed to be indistinguishable in composition from the solar wind. Around the drive shafts, but well separated from them, stood the original Helene tunnels. Numerous and interconnected, they produced a deep interior riddled with holes, like a great chunk of termite-infested wood. At the surface those tunnels were dark and frozen, but spreading across their mouths, a few hundred meters down, were thin membranes of a white rubbery material. It remained tough and flexible, although the local temperature was hundreds of degrees below freezing.

Jeffrey Cayuga had parked the
Weland
in contact with the surface of Helene. It was held there by superconducting magnets. Only a huge force would wrench it free.

He descended the closest tunnel, dropping steadily until he came to the membrane. It was not necessary to slice through it. A tug detached part of the tunnel wall and made a slit wide enough for him to slide past. He was still wearing his suit. Once on the other side of the membrane, he unlocked the seals and lifted his helmet.

The head that emerged was hairless, with sagging cheeks cratered and fissured by deep lines in pockmarked and withered skin. As the helmet came off in a puff of freezing air, Cayuga gasped and shivered. His body drifted slowly forward and down.

The interior below the membrane was forty degrees warmer than above, but its cold, hard vacuum would kill an unprotected human within a couple of minutes.

Cayuga indeed seemed to be dying. His eyes were wide open and his rigid body went floating helplessly toward the tunnel wall. That wall was no longer a featureless crust of rock. It was pleated and striated, and within the numerous cracks and pouches lurked a pale blue phosphorescence. As soon as Cayuga's body touched the wall, glowing strands of blue reached out from the crannies to envelop him.

Then there was no movement for four days, until at last a cloud of blue-white vapor puffed without warning from the corpse's open mouth. Staring eyes blinked, slowly and then faster. The broad chest shivered. A few seconds later Cayuga's hands began to twitch and clench and moved up to place his helmet back into position. There was a clicking of seals. The suit began to fill with air.

Cayuga sneezed, once and then twice more. There was another long pause, until his suited figure began to move upward. Out again on the frozen surface of Helene, he began his inspection. He visited each of the drive installations, determining how close they were to completion. Another two days passed before he was ready to return to the waiting ship.

An hour later, the
Weland
left. Helene became once more the silent and unpopulated world known to the solar system's official cartographers.

* * *

Lola was at an all-time, rock-bottom low.

The day had started with the sort of patient that she wanted to kick around the office. It was a man, twenty years older than she, who said he needed a haldane's help because his life was "unfulfilled" and his talents were not appreciated. Before the end of the first session, Lola, without the aid of any psychotropic drugs, knew exactly what he was: he was a lazy, incompetent, greedy whiner who all his life had taken from anyone who would give—family, lovers, government, and former friends. Now he was expecting to take her time and was clearly not proposing to pay for it.

When she suggested, after listening to his maundering complaints for most of the morning, that she couldn't do a damn thing for him because he was the cause of his own problems, he became furious. She hadn't heard the last of this, he said, as he stormed out. Bitch—he was going to report her. She would lose her haldane license.

That was the beginning. Then came news that the next patient would not be arriving for his second session, because he had committed suicide. The person who called Lola clearly blamed her for that. He asked her, bitingly, if she had billed the dead man for "previous services."

She had, she replied, and she had not been paid a cent. It was pretty clear that she would not be.

The whole experience did not make a person ecstatic to be a haldane. You might perform miracles occasionally, but people expected them of haldanes all the time.

Which brought her to Bryce Sonnenberg and her third appointment of the day. They previously had been through a long, intense session that had left both of them exhausted and soaked in sweat. The difference was that after it, Bryce could go away and recuperate, while Lola must sit in her office and live through the whole thing a second time, and then maybe a third time, to see if she had missed anything.

She was already feeling tired, but she called up the background files for Bryce's sessions in case she needed them during the review. That led to another irritation. She had set up file protection so that no data could be changed, and so that if anyone else asked for one of those files, she would know about it. Someone had. The flags showed that someone had been in the system since her previous session, four days ago.

Spook. It had to be. She always locked her office doors, inner and outer, but he could get in from their connecting apartment. He had been told the ground rules under which he and Bat must operate, and he was ignoring them.

She tried to call him, tried everywhere he was likely to be, to tell him in person what she thought of him. No good. He had vanished without a trace. He must have known that she would come after him and he had gone on a walkabout, rambling the byways of Ganymede, where he knew that Lola would never be able to follow.