Maelstrom (28 page)

Van Kessel grumbled, “You figured all this out. . . .”

 

“I hypothesized it before I came to the Moon. I had most of the facts I needed.”

 

Van Kessel took a deep breath. “I suppose I should congratulate you.”

 

“Don’t. I was dead wrong,” Sparta said. “Penney had nothing to do with Leyland’s launch failure.”

 

“He
didn’t
?” Van Kessel was more confused than ever.

“Penney’s a killer, all right–I don’t think it will be hard to establish that Istrati went crazy and committed suicide because Penney deliberately dosed him with hypersteroids, just before he reported for this shift. He knew I was closing in on him. But he was not responsible for the launch failure.”

“Then who was?” Van Kessel demanded.

 

“Piet Gress.”

 

“Gress!”
Van Kessel barked. “He’s in the . . . !”

Sparta nodded. “The man in the capsule right now. He’s an analyst from the antenna facility. Their job is to search for extraterrestrial intelligence, but it’s apparent that Piet Gress is willing to give his life to make sure they never find it.”

“You mean he was trying to destroy the antennas?” Blake asked. “Who are you?” Van Kessel said, glaring at Blake as if noticing him for the first time.

“This is Blake Redfield, my associate,” Sparta said, not bothering to complete the introduction. “Because they were about to begin looking in Crux,” she said to Blake. “Where, according to you, they may find the home star of the ‘gods’–of Culture X.”

“Culture X? Culture X. What in hell does a bunch of scribbling on old plates have to do with this?” Van Kessel demanded, but no one paid him any attention.

 

“But then he’s already tried once and failed,” Blake protested to Sparta. “You told me Leyland’s capsule hit the mountains. The antennas are protected by the ringwall.”

 

“Not any more.”

 

Blake saw it then.

 

So, even though he was at a loss for the meaning of it all, did Van Kessel.

 

“Crater Leyland,” Van Kessel moaned.

 

Gress had somehow used Leyland’s capsule to blast a hole in the ring of mountains that protected the Farside Base antennas. A second capsule on the same trajectory would fly through the gap–and make a direct hit.

 

“What’s the orbit on Gress’s capsule?” Sparta asked Van Kessel.

 

“Too early to be precise. Failure occurred in exactly the same section of launch track as Leyland’s. First approximation is that Gress is following the same trajectory.”

 

“Have you contacted him?”

 

“He doesn’t respond. His radio must be dead.”

 

“Let me try.”

She sat at the launch director’s console and keyed the commlink. “Piet Gress, this is Ellen Troy of the Board of Space Control. You think you are about to die. I know why. But you won’t die and you won’t accomplish your mission.”

The speakers gave back nothing but the hiss of the aether.

“Dr. Gress, you think your orbit is the same as Leyland’s was, or close enough. But your capsule will not pass through the gap in the ringwall. You cannot make course corrections without our cooperation. You will not hit the antennas. You can save yourself, or you can die for nothing.”
For several seconds the speakers were silent except for the sound of the cosmos. Then a sad, dry voice issued from them: “You’re bluffing.”

Sparta caught Van Kessel’s eye. His face sagged. “Mr. Van Kessel,” she said quietly, “just so you’ll know what we’re up against: according to my colleague, Mr. Redfield, Piet Gress is a representative of a fanatic sect that believes our solar system has been invaded by aliens in the distant past and is about to be invaded again. The wrinkle is, Gress and his friends are actually looking forward to the invasion. But they’re eager to keep this all a deep, dark secret from the rest of the inhabited worlds. They are so eager, in fact, that some of them like Gress are willing to kill themselves and a lot of other people, just to keep us unwashed masses in the dark.”

Van Kessel’s eyes were bulging in his florid face. “That’s the craziest thing I’ve ever heard.”

 

“I couldn’t agree more,” Sparta said fervently. “But it’s not the first time a gang of maniacs has sacrificed themselves and any number of innocent bystanders to their beliefs, and I doubt it will be the last.”

She turned back to the microphone. “No, Gress, I’m not bluffing,” she said to the invisible inhabitant of the capsule. “I knew about your plans before you were launched”–
about two minutes before you were launched, thanks to Blake
–“and steps were taken to alter your trajectory”–
steps, leaps, desperate measures: I jumped from a speeding moon buggy and I read the acceleration of your capsule and read the phase reversal and my belly burned and I gushed a burst of telemetry at the trackside power-control receiver in the code I’d memorized and I did my best to override the signals your capsule was sending too, all before I hit ground again, and I pray that I succeeded but who knows
?–“and you will not hit Farside Base. You may hit the moon, but not where you want. You may sail on into space forever. But you will not destroy the antennas. Save yourself, Gress. Use your maneuvering rockets.”

Gress’s voice scratched from the speakers. “I say you are bluffing.”

 

Blake leaned close to her and touched the filament mike. He raised his eyebrows: let me talk?

 

She nodded.

 

Blake said, “Piet, this is Guy. I bring you a message from the sanctuary of the Initiates.” He paused. “All will be well.”

 

“Who are you?” Gress’s angry demand came instantly.

Blake said, “One of us. A friend of Katrina’s. Of Catherine’s”–he glanced at Sparta:
forgive me, but how wrong can I be
?–“but it’s too late. They interfered with the launch. Whatever happens to you, you’re not going to hit the antennas. And Gress, they know where to look now. They could find the home star with one thirty-meter dish on Earth.” Blake let that sink in. On the speakers there was nothing but the hiss of empty space.
Gress’s voice, suddenly louder, filled the room. “You are an impostor, a traitor.” He could have been on the edge of tears.

Blake said, “Save yourself!”

 

There was no sound from the speakers, no image on the flatscreens, which sparkled only with noise.

 

Blake stood away from the mike. “Sorry. Guess he wants to die.”

 

The watch went on. Piet Gress’s capsule, like Leyland’s, rose and at last began to fall slowly back toward Farside.

In the control room the shift changed, but Sparta and Blake and Van Kessel stayed. They sipped bitter coffee and talked in desultory tones about Istrati and Penney and Leyland and Gress and Balakian. Penney was in custody, exercising his right to keep quiet, and Istrati was in cold storage, but base security reported that other members of the smuggling ring they’d picked up on suspicion had begun talking freely.

Katrina had been taken into protective custody. Nobody had read her her rights. Nobody had explained anything to her.

Exactly what Gress–with Balakian’s help?–had done to cause Leyland’s near-death was a still-unsolved puzzle. Sparta ordered base security to reconstruct the movements of the two during the twenty-four hours before Leyland’s capsule was launched. The security people reported back almost too quickly: it seemed that neither of them had ever left the radiotelescope operations area.

“If they didn’t have access to the capsule, how could they have interfered with the launch?” Van Kessel asked.

 

Sparta was silent, lost in thought. Dark circles had formed under her staring eyes. She was hunched over, clutching her belly.

“Maybe I can answer that,” Blake said to Van Kessel. “Gress is a signal analyst; it was probably easy for him to decode your power control signals. All he needed was a transmitter loaded with a preset code, set to go off when Leyland’s capsule reached the right point in its launch–a signal strong enough to override the capsule’s onboard transmitter. He could just as easily have put the capsule’s computers out of whack with a remote command, as soon as it left the track.”

“A remote transmitter . . . ?” Van Kessel was skeptical.

“There’s one aimed at the track right now,” Sparta whispered. “The radiotelescopes. Every receiver can be used as a transmitter. Every transmitter can be a receiver.” She knew now, although she said nothing about it, that the source of the disorienting, queasy sensation she felt when she stood on the launcher track was a burst of test telemetry from the antennas, still under repair.
“Once Security gets around to it,” Blake said, “I’ll bet they’ll find Gress was feeding in a little extra programming. And that Katrina had a hand in the fine alignment of the telescopes. She had something to say about the target list, after all.”

Van Kessel shrugged. “We’ll see.” He looked at Sparta. “Do you think she deliberately picked Leyland after all?”

 

“That was as much her bad luck as it was his,” she said.

 

“He just happened to be the next load down the track. He was in the right place at the wrong time.”

 

Time crept by. As Doppler readings from radar stations around the moon poured into the control room, the estimates of Gress’s trajectory became ever more refined.

 

Van Kessel was the first to put it in words. “Gress is not going to hit the moon.”

Gress could not know that, of course, since he apparently refused to believe what they told him and had stopped responding on the link. Sparta watched the bright lines on the graphic screens, the lines that diagrammed Gress’s rush toward the moon, and she tried to imagine what he must be thinking, what he must be feeling, as the bright backlit mountains of Farside rushed toward him. The man wanted to die, wanted the face of the moon to rush up and crush him . . .

Van Kessel was watching Sparta. She had shown no surprise, no emotion at all, at the news that Gress would miss the moon.

 

“You
were
bluffing–weren’t you?” Van Kessel asked.

 

“We must have been lucky,” she whispered.

 

“But if Gress could program Leyland’s capsule so precisely with a remote transmission,” Van Kessel demanded, “why couldn’t he program his own? He’s
riding
in the thing!”

Sparta looked at Blake’s round, handsome face and saw that eyebrow lift again. Why, indeed? Blake was wondering–and what exactly had Sparta been up to when she’d jumped out of the speeding moon buggy? It was not the sort of question Blake would ask her in public.

Coolly Sparta addressed Van Kessel. “Maybe with Leyland he had . . . beginner’s luck.”

 

Van Kessel grunted. “Are you saying there’s something about this that the Space Board doesn’t want known?”

“That’s an excellent way of putting it, Mr. Van Kessel,” she said. “You should have said so in the first place,” he grumbled. He kept his questions to himself after that. Whatever it was the Space Board wasn’t telling him, he doubted he’d ever find out.

Once more the alarm went out to the base. This time the measure was strictly precautionary. A few people strolled to the deep shelters, but the bolder workers went out on the surface to watch as Gress’s capsule soared over the crest of the Mare Moscoviense rimwall.

When the capsule streaked soundlessly overhead, brilliantly floodlit by the sun that was still low in the east, it had a kilometer of altitude to spare.

 

Seconds later Gress was arcing back into space.

 

Sparta, at the edge of exhaustion, called him again.

 

“We’ve calculated your orbit with a little better precision, Dr. Gress. You’ll go wider on each swing. Eventually you’ll end up in the spider web at L-1. Your rations probably won’t last that long.”

There was nothing but the vacant hiss of the aether. It went on so long that everyone but Sparta and Blake had given up, when lights flickered on the consoles, and the weary controllers stirred. Flatscreens unscrambled. Shortly Gress’s haggard voice came over the radiolink. “You have control of this capsule now,” he said. “Do what you want.”

“He’s taken the capsule’s maneuvering systems out of manual,” said Van Kessel.

Before anyone else in the room could respond, Sparta had tapped coordinates into the launch director’s console. “In a few seconds you will experience some acceleration, Dr. Gress. Please be sure you are secured.” She had rewritten the capsule’s program and locked it off before Van Kessel could confirm her calculations.

“We could have done that,” Van Kessel grumbled.

 

“I didn’t want to give him time to change his mind.”

 

The consoles indicated that somewhere above the moon the engines of Gress’s capsule spurted flame–

 

–and aimed him toward an early recovery at L-1.

 

Sparta was bruised with fatigue.

 

“Do you need to be here any longer?” Blake asked.

“No, Blake. I need to be with you.” There was one more stop to make before the long day was over. Katrina Balakian was being held in the tiny detention facility at Base Security under the maintenance dome. Sparta and Blake looked at Katrina’s image on the guard’s flatscreen. The astronomer sat quietly in an armchair in the locked room, staring down at her clenched hands.

“Catherine?” Sparta asked Blake.

 

He nodded.

 

“We’ll go in now,” Sparta said to the guard.

The guard keyed the combination into the pad on the wall, and the door swung open. Katrina did not move or look at them. The smell that wafted out of the room was oddly traditional, instantly recognizable. It was the smell of bitter almonds.

Seconds later Sparta had confirmed that Katrina Balakian had died of cyanide poisoning, self-administered from that most ancient of cloak-and-dagger devices, a hollow plastic tooth. Her features were frozen with the wide-eyed blue shock of one whose breath has suddenly, irrevocably been cut off.

“She smiled at Gress the last time she saw him,” Sparta said to Blake. “I thought it was because she loved him. Maybe she did, but she also knew he was marching out to die for the cause.”

 

“She was braver than he was, then, in the end,” Blake said.

 

Sparta shook her head. “I don’t think so. I think when they open that capsule at L-1, they’ll find a dead man in it.”