The Ganymede Club (40 page)

"All the expedition members departed Earth soon after the expedition's return and made their homes elsewhere. By the time that fifteen years had passed, every survivor was living in the Jovian system—all but one of them here on Ganymede. That was curious, but understandable in a group whose illness had set them apart from most of humanity, and whose interests had always been in the outer solar system.

"But then the data-bank records began to appear stranger yet. The people who inherited from the original expedition members also died between eighteen and twenty-two years later. And so did
their
inheritors. It seemed as though any heir of the original expedition was doomed to die after forty and before sixty, and be succeeded by someone between twenty and thirty.

"Was it some sort of family taint, a hereditary curse that came down generation after generation? Hard to believe, since many different families were involved. However, I examined the backgrounds of the people who had inherited, and I found something else that defied explanation: Not one of them possessed a complete and verifiable background. They had lived on Earth, or Mars, or in the Belt; but when I looked for their original records, they were not to be found. The heirs appeared to have sprung up from nowhere.

"A fine puzzle indeed, but one that still seemed incompletely specified. I added in one other fact: Every individual in this whole affair died in circumstances leaving no body available for autopsy. Note that this includes the only case of which we have direct knowledge. Whoever killed Alicia Rios went to great pains to ensure that there would
not
be a body available for autopsy.

"Now I had the basis for a strange conjecture. The original Saturn expedition had indeed suffered an encounter with an alien entity, which we may, if we wish, still call an infection. However, it cannot fairly be called an infectious
disease
, since the affected hosts did not sicken and die. Quite the opposite. They were protected from all the usual forms of infectious disease, including the aging process. Anyone 'infected' could still die by accident or violence, but otherwise they might look forward to a very long life span. I do not know how long."

"I do." Bryce had been sitting with his hands over his eyes. Now he moved them to cup his chin. "I know."

"You mean you
believe
all this stuff?" Lola was staring at Bat and Bryce with equal skepticism.

Bryce ignored her. "What was her name, now? Lord, it feels like it's been a hundred years. Nelly? No, Neely. Neely Rinker. She came to see me seven years ago when I was Julius Szabo and living on Mars. She wanted to know how long she would live if she was immune to infectious diseases and she did not age. I told her: almost three thousand years. She died that same day." He sighed. "And so did I, dropping to my death through the thin air of Mars. So much for statistics."

"But I've never heard of anyone called Rinker," Spook protested. "That's not one of the First Family names."

"No. I don't believe her real name was Rinker. And she was scared."

"With reason." Bat was frowning, absorbing a new variable into his thought pattern. "We have seen that the group we are dealing with is totally ruthless in protecting its secret—whether dealing with an outsider or one of their own. Jinx Barker was expendable, and he was not a member of the Club; but so too was Alicia Rios, when she became unreliable. It is bizarre. You, Bryce, have apparently encountered the group not once, but twice. Each time they have sought to kill you, and each time they have failed. What are the odds of that happening?"

"The odds are certainty—because it
did
happen." Bryce straightened up in his seat and was suddenly a different person. Lola, watching the shift, wondered how long it would be before Bryce recovered his memory completely and became an integrated personality. That was her department, but she was not at all sure she was up to the challenge.

"And it's not surprising if you understand anything about probabilities," Bryce went on. "You know, when I—Danny Clay back then—ran the Indian Joe casino, we made a killing out of the gambler's belief in 'special luck.' With fair tables and no cheating, there's no such thing as a run guaranteed to last beyond the hand you just played. Of course, if there's one chance in five that you win each time, there's a one-in-twenty-five chance that you'll hit lucky two in a row, and a one-in-ten-million chance that
somebody
will win ten times in a row. It happens, it's bound to happen, the laws of chance guarantee it. But when somebody wins ten in a row, that's when they start to think they're so hot they can't lose. That's when they—and their friends—start to lay really big stakes on the
next
hand. And that's when the house cleans up."

It occurred to Lola, listening in disbelief, that males truly were an alien species. While she was struggling with the idea of a subgroup of humanity that was blessed or cursed with the gift of extreme longevity, the other three had wandered off quite happily to a completely different subject. They were mad, every one of them.

"Three thousand years!" she exploded. "Nobody lives three thousand years. It's preposterous."

Bat turned to her calmly. "It is admittedly implausible. But when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable—"

"There has to be a better explanation."

"Perhaps. I invite you to provide one. And in your cerebrations, consider these additional facts. First, from certain hints provided by Security officials, I deduce that
all
living heirs of the original Saturn expedition have now suddenly vanished. Their escape routes must have long been planned, and it would not be surprising if they remain out of sight for what is—by our ephemeral standards—a very long time. Years or even decades may mean little to them."

"If they hide away, how will we find them?" asked Spook.

"We won't," said Bryce. "It's Security's job now. They have ten thousand times our resources."

"Second," Bat went on, as though no one else had spoken, "although no part of the body of Joss Cayuga remained intact after the
Weland
's impact with the surfa'ce of Lysithea, the investigating team from Security discovered certain organic crystals in the debris. Anomalous, and not susceptible of exact reconstruction. The secret of the symbiote, if we can call it that, vanished with Joss Cayuga."

"Three thousand years." Bryce spoke in thoughtful tones. "Waiting for all of us, perhaps, somewhere near Saturn."

"That is the problem.
Somewhere.
" Bat stared up at the ceiling as though he could see through it. "The Saturn system—rings and moons and planet itself—is enormous. We have little idea where the expedition went, since I feel sure that any records we do possess have been falsified. Might I suggest, to anyone eavesdropping at this moment, that here we have a problem well suited to the members of the Puzzle Network."

"And a toughie," added Spook. "Since we don't have a place to start. Not even a toehold."

Lola sighed. Maybe they were going to get to more important matters—in their own good time. But there was nothing to stop her from trying to move them along. "I can suggest a toehold. It may not appeal to you three, because it's not so much logical as psychological."

"The battles within the Puzzle Network are mainly psychological," Bat said. "How can you make me head off along the wrong line of logic? How can I simulate your thought processes? Solution often begins with the recognition of misdirection."

"Then consider this. Your secret club, if it exists, doesn't just
want
to remain secret. It is
obsessed
with remaining secret. Do you realize that if they hadn't been fixated on death and mortality, they would be quite safe today, and Alicia Rios and Joss Cayuga would still be alive? So would Jinx Barker. No one
needed
to investigate Bryce's survival from what seemed like certain death on Mars. No one
needed
to try to kill him, or me. The Club's weak spot is its own obsessive fear of discovery."

Bat and Spook looked at each other. "Could be," said Spook at last. "Hey, Lola, what's happening to you? You're starting to have actual ideas."

"It's like a gambler," Bryce added. "An obsessive gambler is sure to lose, for one simple reason: He doesn't fold even when he knows he ought to. He keeps going when the odds are against him. He can't help himself."

Lola saw her opportunity. "But from what you said, sometimes he
does
win—that's what chance is all about. Cayuga could have won. Jinx Barker didn't kill me, but he came awfully close. Cayuga missed me by just a few hours in my office. And I still don't understand why he didn't get me on the way to Lysithea. Why am I alive, and he's dead? What happened during that final approach?"

"You still don't know?" Bryce waved his hand toward Bat. "Take a bow, maestro. You deserve it. And you, Lola, you should thank him."

"Fine. Thanks a lot, Bat. But thanks for
what?
I don't know what you did."

"From most points of view, very little." Bat ruefully rubbed the stubble on the back of his shaven head. "My opportunities to influence events were highly limited. But I can certainly offer you my logic. Consider the situation. I was convinced that Joss Cayuga planned to kill you. I could not get a message through to warn you of that danger, since any attempt was blocked by the Lysithean communications computer, presumably under orders from Cayuga. Spook and Bryce could not catch up with you. Despite our best efforts they would arrive too late. Your ship, like Joss Cayuga's ship, was directed on its approach by a Lysithean control computer. I proved, by repeated trials, that I could not gain command of that computer—given a month or two, perhaps I might do it, but I had only hours. The computers of which I have the most knowledge and to which I have best access are naturally the ones closest to me, here on Ganymede.

"That was the framework of
facts
within which I had to operate. To them I was forced to add conjecture: If you could survive long enough for Spook and Bryce to reach you, your chances for survival would then improve considerably. In other words, my primary concern had to be to keep you alive until you had arrived at the docking facility at Lysithea.

"So far, everything is logical and straightforward. The next step was neither. I had to do what every Puzzle Network Master strives to do constantly. I had to simulate within my own mind the mental processes of my adversary. Unless I could
think
as Joss Cayuga thought, I could not hope to defeat him.

"So how would Joss Cayuga, eager to destroy Lola Belman, see the situation? I knew already that he had allowed you to leave Ganymede, without another attempt to kill you.

"Why? The obvious answer was that I, Joss Cayuga, was feeling the heat on Ganymede. Cayuga dared not run the risk of being caught doing new murder, or being associated with old murder. Much better to kill you far away, perhaps on Lysithea, where everything was under tight control. But even here, Cayuga could see a problem. The report of your death on Lysithea would certainly arouse Security interest because Jinx Barker died in your office. They would send representatives and examine the interior of Lysithea in too much detail. From his point of view, there was a far better answer: kill you when you were well away from Ganymede, but before you reached the Lysithea interior. In other words, dispose of you
on the journey.

"And how would I, as Joss Cayuga, go about that?

"This is where I—Rustum Battachariya—had my biggest problem. The journey from Ganymede to Lysithea seemed a time of greatest risk, but I had no information suggesting how Joss Cayuga might choose to kill you. All I could do was rule out certain ways on logical grounds. For example, he might ram your ship with his, but no one in his right mind would do that because it would kill both of you. He could plant a bomb on the
Dimbula
, but it is practically impossible to do so without leaving material evidence. He could order your drive to full acceleration, zooming you off to the far reaches of the solar system. However, if he did so, there was always a chance that Security would be able to track you and even rescue you. He had just one option that seemed to me both simple and foolproof; he could fly your ship on a collision trajectory with Lysithea.

"Given all of this, you can see why I (as Cayuga) had little choice but to do exactly what I did."

Bat paused as though he had now explained everything. Lola knew exactly why he had stopped—to make her
ask
—but she could not help herself: "But what did you
do?
"

"Why, I went to the Ganymede data banks, where all ships' registry and ID information is held. I simply swapped two files, the ship ID codes for the
Dimbula
and the
Weland.
Then I patched in a command that sent the information to the Lysithean computer, together with an urgent request that a file update be made immediately. No computer decision can ever be better than the data provided to it. Once the update was performed, so far as the control computer was concerned, the
Dimbula
would be the
Weland
, and the
Weland
the
Dimbula.
I knew it would cause a few confused seconds when the change was installed, with the computer sending drive commands to redirect each ship to the other's landing site. But that was a small price to pay. The main thing was, if I had everything
wrong
and Joss Cayuga had no deadly notions in his head, nothing bad would happen to anyone. Your ships would simply be redirected to the landing site originally planned for the other. If on the other hand he
did
have murderous intent toward you and your ship, then that intent would instead be visited upon him. As it was. That cloud of hot vapor on the surface of Lysithea was supposed to be composed of Lola Belman."

"Pretty neat, eh?" said Spook, as Lola shuddered.

"Actually, quite masterly," added Bryce. "I finally believe you, Bat—you manipulate the outer-system transportation net better than anyone alive."

"Or dead." Bat was not strong on false modesty. "However, in this case I cannot take much credit. As I say, there was a negligible suite of options. What did I do? Regrettably, I did the only thing that I could think of."