Foundation (34 page)
Trumaine made a meaningful pause.
“
Do you wear one, too? A more sophisticated model, maybe, one you can keep in your pocket?”
Benedict didn’t say anything, but it made no difference—Trumaine knew he did.
He showed Benedict the silvery ticket for Pegasi II.
“
And what about this? Gromer was this close from leaving from the feed, wasn’t he? A few minutes more, and he would be gone forever; nobody would have ever known about his existence.”
Benedict exhaled in a long and tired sigh.
“
It’s an ingenuous story you have come up with, Detective.” He turned his head and glanced down at Gromer’s squashed body. “What do you say, Troy? Is our detective right?” Again, he looked up, at Trumaine. “Pity,” he said in a querulous, mocking voice. “He doesn’t look like he can say much now ...”
Trumaine set his jaw, angrily; he looked like he was going to punch Benedict in the nose any moment now, but all he did was curse him under his breath.
Benedict grinned nastily, reveling in victory—because he had won ...
Then something weird happened, and the grin on Benedict’s face was replaced with amazement:
A vibration was suddenly shaking Benedict’s hands, as if they weren’t real, but seen in some broadcast with a problematic reception—they fizzled and crackled as he lifted them in front of his disbelieving eyes ...
Benedict’s marvel reached a new peak when he realized that the vibration was crawling up his forearms and down, toward his belly; in moments, it extended to his shoulders and his waist and, soon, it would swallow his head, too.
“
No!” was Benedict’s horrified comment.
Then, as if he had just remembered that Trumaine was still in front of him, he glanced at him ...
The same thing was happening to the detective—he had also begun to flicker and to fade.
“
What the hell is this—”
Before Trumaine could finish his question, he and Benedict disappeared from the bottom of the believers’ chamber.
Benedict and Trumaine stood in the same positions they occupied in the bottom of the chamber, only they now wore golden spacesuits.
A naked, scorching sun bore low on the horizon, sweeping a barren landscape engulfed in red rocks and dust. The oceans and the rivers that had once flowed here had long since evaporated; not even the intricate, immense arabesque of their dried-out beds had remained—it had been wiped away by the thousand craters impacting rocks had chipped into the surface for a billion years.
Nothing lived here. The extreme conditions of the planet were too much for anything to grow except, maybe, for some forgotten bacteria which lay frozen under the shelter and the relative cool that could be found at the poles.
Here and there, only the trained eye would tell the rocks from the rusted-out shells of the machines that mankind had sent from Earth in the one failed attempt at mining the planet, more than fifty years before.
A surface rife with
Helium-3
and the huge ores of iron and magnesium that lay underneath it, waiting to be exploited, were prospect of gain big enough for the corporations to finance the whole program: the first who had set foot on the planet would have dictated the market price for the mined gas and metals and the rest of the world would have just paid it. All in all, a very promising investment.
Automatic drills had been designed, built and launched into the poles of the planet in the long night that shrouded it.
The drills were supposed to harvest in the relative cool of the shadow, then send back the processed minerals through space. For a while, all went according to plan, until an electromagnetic storm of epic proportions had cut off all communications, abandoning the drills in the forgotten plains where they had been sent mining. When, a couple of months later, the scorching sun had risen, everything had turned into a crucible—drills included. While the steel the drills were made of was engineered to endure extreme heat, the circuits it contained were not—they had melted and fried in moments. As time went by, the machines had rusted out and thick layers of dust had covered them—now they looked exactly like the rocks that surrounded them.
That was it for the machine, but what about man?
There was no way a man could survive the extreme heat of the day or the freezing cold of the night. Even special thermally-insulated suits would offer very little protection. Being alive after twenty minutes’ exposure to direct sunlight at noon was without a doubt a generous concession.
The sun cast its unbearable beam of heat at the shielded helmet visors that both Benedict and Trumaine wore.
Neither had moved; they were still beside themselves with surprise, too much awed and horrified to react or say anything.
Only after a while, they came to.
“
It can’t be ...” said Benedict.
Trumaine heard the voice inside his helmet—he tapped it with the bulky glove that wrapped his hand, realizing that the suits were radio connected.
“
What is this?” asked Trumaine.
Benedict didn’t say anything, he just broke into a creepy, sonorous laughter. He went on for a while.
“
Stop it!”
Benedict didn’t seem to hear Trumaine, or he wasn’t listening; he just kept laughing his head off.
The minutes crawled by and the heat rose steadily inside their suits. That brought Benedict back to reason—and to the inevitable conclusion that they were going to die very soon.
He turned to Trumaine with a sneer.
“
Don’t you recognize it?” asked Benedict, motioning for all that lay around him. “Haven’t they shown you the pictures, back at school? Too bad in all these years nobody has colonized it for us. Welcome to Mercury, Detective! The sun is still low, but it will rise—too soon, I’m afraid. I’m no mercurial expert, but I’d say we have still ten minutes before it kills us ...”
He was overwhelmed by the tragic hilarity of it all; again, the laughter rose from inside him—this time, it turned to a convulsed cough.
“
What have you done!?” asked Trumaine.
Benedict made one step, then another, approaching Trumaine. He gave him a consolatory pat on his back.
“
I’m afraid I haven’t done anything—your friend has done it all ...”
“
My friend? Who are you talking about?”
“
Don’t you realize, you idiot?” growled Benedict.
“
That little bitch has sent us up here! To die! We’re done for!”
For the third time, laughter flooded in Benedict’s throat; when he spoke again, his voice was a raspy wheeze.
“
God only knows I tried to stop her! I tried hard! But she won!”
Benedict looked at the scorching sun, as if he was lost in thought, then he turned to Trumaine.
“
With your help! Couldn’t you just take your fucking Aquarian citizenship and leave the planet for good? You couldn’t! Couldn’t you just be used and disappear once and for all? You couldn’t! You wanted to carry out a fair investigation!”
Benedict sneered. Then, with a bitter note, “Your ardor has killed us both ...”
Trumaine wondered if Benedict was right. Could it be that poor, innocent Faith, kind and friendly Faith, the same Faith who was so eager to help Jarva in the noble intent of bringing Raili back to life, had planned their premature demise? Had she really been conspiring against them all the time? Did she use the unlimited powers of the unaware believers to send them on a forgotten planet to die, getting rid of two major obstacles in her way?
Trumaine couldn’t believe that. What was going on, then?
“
You and your accomplice killed Jarva.” he said. “Jarva had a crawler, but you had your own, it was Gromer. It’s he who interfered with the Main Belief, and it’s he who sent the Hibiscus astray, isn’t it?”
Benedict, still sore about Faith, didn’t say anything.
“
But Gromer wasn’t acting of his own mind. He was just obeying ... your ... orders ...”
Trumaine’s last words had come out with a considerable effort. It took just a moment for him to realize that something wasn’t quite right with his breathing.
“
I can’t ... breathe ...”
Benedict shook his dizzy head and slumped onto a rock—he too was lacking air.
“
I told you ... We’re gonna die ... up here ...”
Trumaine wobbled to another boulder and dropped on it; they stood there for a while, looking at each other, getting their breath back.
“
It was Gromer who caused the ripple that sent the Hibiscus off course ... Isn’t that so? You could have killed them all, Benedict—Men ... women ... babies ...”
To Trumaine’s surprise, a tiniest sigh came from Benedict’s suit. Was it regret? Trumaine wasn’t sure, but he pressed on.
“
You, the one person responsible for their lives, the man the
TSA
and the Federal Authority entrusted all those lives with ... The very man who should have watched over their journey, making it as safe as it was possible, you almost killed them ... You failed your purpose, Benedict ...”
To Trumaine’s dismay, the minutes crawled by in absolute silence. After all, Benedict wouldn’t admit a darned thing—that was it. He had shot his last bolt and he had missed—nothing would ever scratch Benedict’s monolithic, impervious personality. He shook his head in defeat and glanced over at the quickly rising sun.
It was a long, maddening wait—a wait for death ...
Then, unexpectedly, a voice broke the silence: it was a voice full of regret, of bitterness and, possibly, of shame—It was Benedict’s voice.
“
Gromer wasn’t properly trained for the job. He was clumsy, yes. He caused the ripple. When I first heard that the Hibiscus was lost, I was horrified. I was overwhelmed, I didn’t know what to do. I thought that, maybe, I should tell Federal Authority what had just happened, because it wasn’t really Gromer’s fault—as you said, it was mine. But I did it for a good reason—I did it to save Credence ...”
Trumaine couldn’t believe his ears, Benedict had yielded at last. He turned slowly, knowing he had just found Benedict’s weak spot: it was the same thing that made him so strong—responsibility.
Responsibility would make him stand out proudly, giving him the strength to fight relentlessly for his beliefs—the rule of the Federal Authority. At the same time, the weight of the responsibility for the million souls that Credence flushed everyday all over the universe, had become unbearable.
It was the responsibility for the loss of the Hibiscus which, in those three days, had been gnawing away at Benedict’s cockiness and self-assuredness, so hard and so deep he had snapped at last.
“
Why did you kill Jimmy Boyd?” asked Trumaine.
Benedict sighed. “He overheard us ... Gromer and me. Gromer thought it was better if there weren’t any witnesses; he entered Boyd’s mind and forced him to hang himself ...”
“
What about the wiring on Gromer’s body? It was a shield. Do you wear one too?”
Trumaine scowled at Benedict’s nod. More questions whirled in the detective’s head, waiting for an answer but, this time, he didn’t need to ask them—Benedict was like a broken dam.
“
He deliberately showed her to me. He invited me to his bunker and showed Raili to me. He had succeeded in his plan—she was alive. We both knew that in the time it took me to report him, he would have hidden her again. He was defying the law of the Federal Authority—he was defying ... me.”