Departures (44 page)

Rannveig handled the sign-off. “We’ll be returning you to your regular programming now,” she said. “Stay tuned to this station for developments as they break. When and if competition resumes, of course, you’ll see all of it here.” The monitor cut to a commercial.

Glancing at it, Bennett said, “Meanwhile, our advertisers are out slitting throats because they just lost five hours of guaranteed high ratings.”

“I wish Katayama had said more,” Rannveig said, adding with a curl of her lip, “He was so busy pointing out how none of this was his fault that I think he hardly cares whether he ever catches up with the killer.”

“If his precious satellite didn’t show him anything, he’s got damn-all to go on,” Bennett said. “No wonder he’s asked for copies of our tapes.” He paused. “I wonder … think back to Shepilov. Didn’t it seem to you that he’d spotted something in that split second before the laser got him?”

“What if he did? Our job is to report, not to investigate.”

“There’s still a bit of a different tradition left in the United States. I’ve never had much of a chance to go ferreting things out, but I think it would be interesting to try.”

She shrugged. “If your idea of fun is trying to do the same thing the professionals are doing, don’t let me stop you. But I expect I’ll have a better time with Jozef than you will staring at tapes.”

“You’re probably right,” Bennett admitted. Rannveig’s expression said she was sure she was right. She detached her seat belt and bounded out of the studio. Faintly envious of her carefree attitude, Bennett made a copy of yesterday’s event and fed it into a stereovision set.

In a way, watching death for the second, third, or twentieth
time was harder than seeing it when it actually happened. There was always the dreadful, futile impulse to cry “Look out!”

Bennett sped through the murder of al-Kuwatly at fast forward; the athlete from the Arab World had never known he was in danger. Shepilov, though … Bennett got up, holding tight to the arm of his chair to keep from drifting to the ceiling. He studied the hologram from several angles, and became more convinced than ever that the Muscovite’s arm motion had been deliberate.

And if it was—Bennett interfaced the stereovision set with the big IBC computer. It took several false starts before he got the machine to do what he wanted: to give him a printout showing what section of Mimas’ surface Shepilov had been trying to point at.

The circle that came out shaded in the printout was north of the jumpers’ flight path, much closer to the landing area than to the runway. Depressingly, it was also about two kilometers across. But Bennett did not stay depressed for long. Major Katayama had been grousing about trying to cover 3,800 square kilometers; Bennett only planned to examine a bit more than three.

He checked his spacesuit’s systems with the caution of a neophyte, then cycled through an air lock and bounded down onto the surface of the moon. Looking about, he could almost have thought himself on Luna. Dirty ice looked very much like rock, and one set of jumbled craters much like another.

Yet there were differences, after all. Aside from the very low gravity, the sun, while still too bright to look at, was hardly more than an incandescent point in the sky. And one could never see several moons at once from Luna—not natural ones. Enceladus, Dione, Rhea, and orange Titan all showed visible disks, though none could compete with even the attenuated sun as a light source.

Remembering Angus Cavendish’s comments on the jumpers’ form on the runway, Bennett tried to stay as low to the ground as he could while he loped along. Even so, his motion was swift and almost dreamlike. He began to understand, however dimly, the feeling the athletes had as they soared into space.

The reporter steered by the inertial compass in his helmet. To his surprise, he saw people with lights moving about in the area he had decided to search. One of them saw him, too, and came bounding his way. A challenge rang in his earphones:
“Who the devil are you, and what are you doing snooping around here?”

“Bill Bennett, IBC,” he replied, and added pointedly, “I might ask you the same question.” But the words were hardly spoken when he saw that all the people he was approaching wore the robin’s-egg blue spacesuits of Security.

“Bennett, eh?” The guard was close enough to peer through his faceplate. “So you are,” she admitted, lowering her side arm. “I think you’d better come talk to Major Katayama.”

The security chief greeted Bennett with a smile as chilly as Mimas’ ice. “How did you find out where we were searching?” he demanded. “If one of my people has been blabbing, I’ll send him out here without a suit.”

Bennett explained his method. He saw Katayama relax slightly. The broadcaster tried to retake the offensive: “Suppose you tell me why you decided to look here.”

“I don’t have to tell you a damn thing,” Katayama said. Bennett was aware of how true that was; it had been a good many years since what had once been called freedom of the press got more than lip service from officials. Public relations, though, still mattered. Katayama relented.

“Basically, we used a more sophisticated version of what you did,” he said. “Once we had autopsy data, we could plot the trajectories of the beams that killed the three jumpers. This is where the lines came together. All the same, we still have a couple of square kilometers to go over.”

Bennett hid his smile. The security chief’s technique hadn’t narrowed the area down much better than had his own. “Any luck so far?”

“We’re still busy.”

No
, Bennett translated. “Do you mind if I join you?” he asked.

After a brief hesitation, the Security chief shook his head. “Suit yourself. You might be lucky; who knows?”

Katayama’s people were working in pairs. One would leap twenty or thirty meters off the surface, shining a spotlight down onto the ice to light a large area for the other team member to examine. The spots were brighter than the feeble sun, and illuminated inky shadows that might otherwise have made perfect hiding places. The security personnel also carried metal detectors.

Without any such special gear, Bennett had to do the best he could using his helmet lamp and his eyes. He quickly learned
not to look straight down; being mostly ice, Mimas reflected seventy percent of the light that struck it, more than enough to dazzle.

There were enough minerals in the ice to give the terrain some color beyond pure, cold blue-white. Some chunks—was that the word, Bennett wondered, or would “rocks” be better?—were grayish, others brown. The broadcaster nearly shouted for Katayama when he saw a rusty streak. But it had nothing to do with blood. It was only a tiny inclusion of iron ore, trapped for ages in the surrounding ice.

Bennett squatted to peer into a cave. He spied the edge of something green, hidden almost out of sight. He did not let excitement run away with him. Green beryllium compounds-emeralds, if you like—were a fairly common part of the stew of light elements from which Mimas had been made.

But if it was a crystal, it was very large and regular. Excitement shot through Bennett as he looked more closely—no crystal ever had writing on it!

He scrambled into the cave and reached down for it. The cold bit at his gauntlets, which were not as well insulated as his boots. He did not mind, though, not when he was holding an expended heavy-duty charge cube in his hands.

Then he keyed his suit radio, and Security personnel converged as if drawn by a magnet. They scoured the cave from one end to the other, and discovered two more of the plastic cubes, both better concealed than the one Bennett had found.

Katayama held out his hand for that one. Reluctantly, Bennett surrendered it. “It’s one of the standard sizes,” he said, “but not a type I know.” He was looking at what were presumably instructions on the side of the cube. They were written in the Roman alphabet, but in no tongue he recognized. Whatever the language was, it went in for wild combinations of consonants.

“Made in Praha,” the security chief said. He seemed more willing to be informative now that Bennett had done something useful for him. Seeing that the name meant nothing to the broadcaster, he actually unbent far enough to explain: “Prague, you would call it, I think.”

“An Eastern European brand, then.”

“Yes.” Katayama fairly purred. “We have some interesting new questions to ask, wouldn’t you say?”

“You certainly do. Shepilov must have seen the light leakage here when the killer fired at al-Kuwatly. Pity the cave roof kept the observation satellite from picking it up.”

“Yes. Still, we make progress.” Katayama put his people back on the search to see if there was anything else to be found. Bennett helped for a while, but lightning did not strike twice. He headed back toward the Olympic complex.

One disadvantage of spacesuits was the difficulty of getting out of earshot. Katayama’s voice rang in his helmet as if the security chief were still standing beside him: “Don’t use this until you get clearance from me. Do you understand?” When Bennett tried to ignore the order, Katayama snapped, “Acknowledge!”

“Acknowledged,” the broadcaster said sulkily, but most of his pique had evaporated by the time he returned to the Olympic village. Katayama had not said anything about poking around on his own.

When he got back to the studio, he checked a list he already knew pretty well. It confirmed what his memory told him. Most of the Eastern European jumpers had had their turns toward the middle or end of the first day’s run. They would not have had a lot of time to make any murderous preparations, and there would have been enough people about so that they could hardly have counted on not being noticed when they went to use an air lock.

He frowned. The conspicuous exception was Jozef Jablonski. Rannveig was not going to like hearing that. Unfortunately, she was probably going to, if not from Bennett, then from Katayama. If the broadcaster could follow his nose this far, so could the security chief.

As it happened, he got a chance to broach the subject when Rannveig came over to share a table with him at dinner. She bristied, just as he had known she would. He spread his hands placatingly. “I’m not telling you what I think, only what I found,” he said, and wondered whether he was lying. “But we can both guess what Major Katayama will make of it. In his shoes, I’d do the same. Who else would use an obscure brand of charge cubes made in Prague but an Eastern European?”

“Someone trying to put the blame on one.” Bennett made shushing motions; she had spoken so loudly that heads had turned.

He said, “Security men won’t look at it like that; they shave with Occam’s razor. Do you know what your, ah, friend did after he jumped? Does it leave him in the clear?”

“No,” she said, her voice low now, and troubled. “He told me he went back to his room and fell asleep. He was laughing at me; he said I’d kept him awake too long the night before.”

“Not good.”

“No,” Rannveig said again. Bennett could see her wondering. She had, after all, met Jablonski only the other day. But then she shook her head, as if coming to a decision. “I can’t believe it. He’s just too—open—to kill from ambush. And what about the tape from the Second Irgun?”

“They denied it,” he reminded her. “That’s not like them; usually they’re only too happy to take credit for their outrages.”

“But why would Jozef want to kill any of the men who were shot?” she demanded. “What’s the point? What would it gain him?”

“What would it gain anyone?” he asked. Neither of them could find a answer.

Bennett did not tell anyone but Rannveig about the find north of the jumpers’ flight path, and he had no reason to think she had noised it about. Nevertheless, rumors of all sorts raced through the Olympic village overnight. At breakfast Bennett heard claims that three different people had been arrested; one of them was drinking a bulb of coffee not three meters from him at the time.

He also heard that Jozef Jablonski was a secret Jew, which probably would have infuriated the skier from Gdynia; that the assassin was a renegade
ronin
from Japan (now there was a delightful prospect, he thought); that Moscow was about to declare war on Siberia or the Arab World or Eastern Europe or the Chinese Empire—which it did not border. But then, Moscow was always about to declare war on someone.

Brachiating back to the studio, Bennett almost ran into Itzhak Zalman. As they both slowed to avoid the collision, the jumper winked and said, “So tell me, have I been elected Pope in there yet?”

“Twice,” Bennett said solemnly. As the athlete burst out laughing, he added, “Some of them also have you as a member of the Second Irgun, with Menachem’s threat part of your masquerade.” He thought he saw Zalman’s amusement slip for a moment, then told himself he was letting his suspicions run away with him. Pretty soon he wouldn’t be able to look in a mirror and trust the face he saw.

How much the rumors about arrests were worth was proved when the second round of jumping was canceled again. The program that went back to Earth was correspondingly short. Because Bennett had been muzzled, there was next to nothing
to say beyond repeating as many variants on “The investigation continues” as a skilled team of scriptwriters could concoct.

“Well, there’s the easiest day of work I’ve had in a while,” Angus Cavendish said when the shortened broadcast was over. “I think I’ll check out a suit and do a bit of walking about. I haven’t had the chance to play sleuth like you, Bill.”

“Where did you hear about that?”

The Scotsman laid a finger by the side of his nose. “A wee birdie told me.”

“A birdie in a Security suit?” That was Rannveig.

“However you please.” Cavendish grinned. “Come with me, if you care to, and share the glory when we find the kern to blame for all this.”

“Thank you, but no. Whatever Bill may fancy himself as, I’m no detective.”

Cavendish turned to Bennett. “Are you game, Sherlock?”

“Why not? I’m at loose ends.”

“Good. Nothing like a few brisk laps around the village to get the blood going.”

Bennett tried to swallow a groan. That meant Angus was going to run the legs off him. The Scotsman was older, but he was also in better shape, more used to spacesuits, and had his bronze medal to prove himself a master at effective motion on Mimas. Rannveig, curse her, was giggling as she left the studio. The only exercise she was likely to get was more fun than anything you could do in a suit.