The Ganymede Club (36 page)

Spook followed him toward the Bat Cave exit. "You mean leave right now? This minute? Do we really have to be in so much of a hurry?"

Bryce shook his head. "I don't know. I wish I did. It's one of those bets you hate to make: If you're right, you still usually lose."

23

With Spook, Lola, and Bryce Sonnenberg on the way to Lysithea, the Bat Cave was almost back to normal. Bat was tempted to make it completely so by having a leisurely tour of his war treasures and a home-cooked meal. That he did not do so implied no concern on his part for the travelers on their way to Lysithea. He considered them moderately bright; they knew how to take care of themselves, and he suspected that Bryce was overreacting. It was only Bat's own curiosity that overruled his desire for solitary relaxation.

Seated in his favorite chair, he prepared the appropriate programs. They would dive into the data banks and seek answers to his question: Who were the heirs of the first Saturn exploration team, from the time of the original expedition forty years ago down to the present day? Almost as an afterthought, Bat added a subsidiary question: What were the dates of each succession?

With the
Mellifera
probes scurrying, as needed, all over the system, feedback could be expected in bits and pieces. Bat, reluctant to leave his post by the displays, nibbled cold snacks and pondered. If Joss Cayuga was going to help Lola Belman on Lysithea, why was access to her ship cut off by the communications center? What purpose did it serve that Lola was unable to send or receive messages? More questions, with no answers.

The first response to his data search came in after only ten minutes. That meant the necessary data were stored locally in the Ganymede banks.
Simone Munzer
—she had served as anomalist for the original Saturn expedition. Born on Earth but dying in the Belt in 2050; the records indicated that her heir was her first cousin, Estelle Munzer Magritte. Estelle Magritte in turn had died in 2067, during the first weeks of the war, leaving all her possessions to her sister, Shawna Munzer Magritte. Shawna was alive today and a resident of Ganymede.

After that no reports came in for almost an hour. The delay implied that the search was running farther afield. Confirmation of that came with the next history.
Hamilton Polk
—he had been chief engineer for the first Saturn expedition. Like all the rest, he had been born on Earth, but after the first expedition he had disappeared for a few years from the data banks. He popped up again in the Earth records in 2038, lived there until 2053, then headed again for Saturn. He had been killed in 2053, while exploring the Saturn moon Iapetus. Everything that he owned had been left to a second cousin, Hayden Polk. Hayden Polk was alive and living on Ganymede.

Bat, like any high-level Puzzle Network player, marked one obvious but minor oddity about the information that he had received so far. He waited patiently for his program probes to deliver the next result.

This one, when it came, he knew a little about already.
Athene Rios
—she had been one of the junior members of the
Marklake
when that vessel left Earth orbit for Saturn-system exploration. After the expedition was over, she had returned not to Earth but to Mars. Upon her death, during the fourth Saturn expedition in 2054, everything that she owned had been handed down to her half sister, Alicia Rios.

Alicia was reported by the data banks as being alive on Ganymede. Bat had been told otherwise. What were the chances that Bryce Sonnenberg had been misled by what he had seen in Alicia's apartment? Suppose that she
were
actually alive. Bat could not dismiss that possibility, despite Bryce's confidence as to what he had found.

Data were flowing in faster now. Bat organized everything into a single table. After the eighth person he knew what to expect. The final data set confirmed it:
Jason Cayuga
—he, like Athene Rios, had been a junior crew member on the original flight to explore Saturn and its moons. He had returned to Earth with the expedition, but immediately afterward he had moved his home to the Jovian system. He had died on the fourth Saturn expedition in 2054, soon after creating the deep habitat and the communications and transportation systems for Lysithea. Jeffrey Cayuga, his heir, had relocated from Earth to continue the work. Now he, too, was dead. His heir, Joss Cayuga, in turn had given up his home in the Belt in favor of Lysithea.

The original oddity that Bat had noted was sustained all through the data: The inheritors, in every case, had the same initials as the people who had died. The one exception, Estelle Magritte, was easily explained, once you noted that a familiar and shorter form of Estelle was Stella. Did it make sense that your estate should be handed down only to individuals who shared your initials? Not in Bat's opinion. He put the fact to one side and examined the data for something more significant.

What he found at first seemed like simple bad luck. The original explorers had all been remarkably short-lived. The oldest of them had died at age fifty-eight. Was that a byproduct of a hazardous explorer's life, exposure to accidents, excessive radiation, or chemical toxins? There was no way to test that hypothesis. Instead, Bat wondered about the heirs. How long had
they
lived. If they were still alive, how old were they?

It meant another trip to the data banks, and another long wait. Bat blamed himself for that. He ought to have had the foresight to ask for more information on the first search. Fortunately his patience was well developed. He had once spent four full days and nights at his data station, cracking a Claudius puzzle. That problem had required that he pull information from the data banks of every colonized body in the solar system—including Venus and Luna, depopulated by the war, and twelve asteroids sterilized by wartime attacks. Two days had been eaten up learning how to communicate with the abandoned but still active computers and communications systems of the vanished colonies. By Puzzle Network standards, four days were a small price to pay for ascent up one rung of the Masters' ladder.

This time Bat asked for full biographical details on the heirs. When the information came streaming back in, it merely added to the mystery. The heirs were as ill-starred as the people from whom they had inherited. Everyone, living and dead, was less than fifty-eight years old.

Bat frowned at the display. They couldn't
all
be weakened by radiation or poisons—unless every one had grown up in the same killer environment.

Was that the case?

This time Bat had the information right at hand. He pulled up the records. As he went through them, one by one, a clear, cold suspicion began to bristle the stubbly hair on the back of his shaven neck. At some level, he already knew where the data would lead.

He laid out the facts as they were confirmed by the data banks:

■ No member of the crew of the original Saturn expedition is alive today.

■ No member of the original crew had any direct descendant.

■ No one who
inherited
from a member of the original Saturn crew had any direct descendant.

■ No one, original crew member or descendant, had ever lived to be more than fifty-eight years old.

■ Each member of the original crew had died between 2050 and 2054—that is, sometime between eighteen and twenty-two years after the first expedition.

■ Anyone who had inherited from the original crew in 2050 had died in 2067 or 2068, seventeen or eighteen years later.

■ Everyone, original crew member or inheritor, had made at least one expedition to the Saturn system.

■ Jeffrey Cayuga, who had inherited in 2054 from first expedition member Jason Cayuga, had died this year—just eighteen years later.

■ Alicia Rios had inherited from original crew member Athene Rios in 2054. According to Bryce Sonnenberg, she was now dead.

■ There was no record of an autopsy's having been performed on any expedition member or heir.

■ There was no indication as to where any of the bodies had been interred. According to Bryce Sonnenberg, the body of Alicia Rios had been deliberately destroyed by extreme heat.

■ There was little background history for any inheritor. They had come from the Belt, from postwar Earth, or from other regions where records were spotty or nonexistent.

And now, the implications: If you were on the original Saturn expedition, you died sometime between seventeen and twenty-two years later. If you were an
heir
of someone on the original Saturn expedition, you also died between seventeen and twenty-two years later. How long you lived depended on how long your testator had lived, after he or she returned from the first Saturn expedition. The death of Alicia Rios was anomalous, but it had been by violence, rather than natural causes. Otherwise, she would have been "scheduled" to die by 2076 at the latest, four years from now.

With those implications, Bat's original wild surmise grew to certainty. He did not wait for confirmation, and his fingers flew over the communications-center keyboard. It took less than ten seconds to set up a coded link with the
Kobold
, the ship that was carrying Spook and Bryce toward Lysithea.

"Mr. Sonnenberg, I owe you an apology." Bat started to speak even before the visual circuit was in operation. "When you left the Bat Cave, I was skeptical."

Spook's startled face appeared in the display region. "Bat? Hang on a minute, Bryce is messing around in the drive area. I'll go get him."

Bat waited impatiently, checking departure times from Ganymede and the travel schedules of the ships. Even at top speed the
Kobold
would reach Lysithea after Lola and the
Dimbula.
He suspected that was what Bryce was doing—fiddling around in the drive area, hoping he could find a way to crowd out a little more acceleration. It wasn't going to work. Bat knew what the Miranda-class ships could and couldn't do.

Bat noticed that the
Kobold
and the
Dimbula
were not the only ships to have left Ganymede in the past few hours. The
Weland
, official ship of the Saturn exploration parties, had lifted within minutes of
Dimbula.
The register showed the owner as Jeffrey Cayuga—which meant that the owner was now Joss Cayuga. Had Joss Cayuga been
here
, on Ganymede, all this time, while Lola believed he was on Lysithea?

He put the question to one side as Bryce Sonnenberg appeared in the display.

"I owe you an apology," Bat repeated. "Although you said that there might be real danger to Lola Belman, I did not believe you. I believe you now."

"Why?" Bryce was no longer the man that Bat had met in Lola Belman's office. He looked weary and wary, his eyes blinking rapidly as though the lights in the ship were too bright. "Are you all right, Bat? What's happening back there?"

"I am perfectly all right. I think that may not be true for Lola Belman."

"I've had that worry for quite a while. I thought you didn't. What changed your mind?"

Bat took a deep breath. He thought he was right—felt sure he was right. But no matter how he phrased it, this would sound strange.

He plunged right in. "Joss Cayuga is the same person as Jeffrey Cayuga. If Jeffrey Cayuga had a reason to kill you and Lola, Joss Cayuga still has that reason."

They didn't laugh. It would have been better in some ways if they had. Spook went bug-eyed, and Bryce made an odd hissing noise. "You can prove that?" he said.

"Only by circumstantial evidence."

"Jeffrey Cayuga was forty-two years old when he died. I can't believe he could pass himself off as nineteen-year-old Joss Cayuga."

"You will like what I have to say next even less. Jeffrey Cayuga is also the same person as
Jason
Cayuga, who was a crew member of the original Saturn expedition in 2032."

"That was forty years ago. He would have to be over sixty years old—and look nineteen!"

"Right." Bat ground on. No turning back now. "Also, Alicia Rios is the same person as Athene Rios, of the original Saturn expedition. Hayden Polk is the same as Hamilton Polk. Lenny Costas is the same as first-expedition member Luke Costas. Simone Munzer, the first team's anomalist, is now Estelle Munzer Magritte, living on Ganymede. The only one of the original group who died is the captain, Betty Jing-li, and apparently she never made it back from the first trip out."

There were other implications to what Bat was saying, possibilities that he was still reluctant to say out loud. Maybe one of the others would propose his idea and convince him that his brain was not spiraling out into total wildness. It was not encouraging when Spook twisted up his face and said, "You know, Bat, that's totally screwy!"

"I'll send you the data. You can go over it for yourself, convince yourself. But that's not why I called."

Bryce shook his head. "We can't go any faster. I've been checking the drive. We're already flat out on acceleration."

"Agreed. According to my schedule, there is no way that you can reach Lysithea within fifteen minutes of the
Dimbula.
"

"And Lola doesn't respond to messages from us. We've tried."

"I am not surprised. Like our earlier message, they are being blocked in the Lysithean relay point."

"So we can't catch up with her and we can't talk to her. Why did you call us?"

Bat puffed out his cheeks in frustration. Bryce Sonnenberg's question had the simplicity of genius. Why
had
he called? Surely not because he doubted the validity of his own deductions.

But Bryce was continuing, without waiting for Bat's answer. "Once we're at Lysithea, we can be useful. Until we get there, there's not a thing that Spook and I can do. It's up to you, Bat. Either you discover a way to get a message through to Lola and warn her. Or you suggest a way that we can speed up this ship. Or you dream up something completely new, something that none of us has managed to think of."

And at last Bat knew why he had called. It was to be told what he already knew—that nothing could be done unless he, the Great Bat, conjured up a way to do it. He had to accomplish the impossible. Once that burden was placed on his shoulders, every uncertainty went away. He could concentrate on finding an answer.