Between the Stars (9 page)

Carstairs chuckled. "Tell him, Linde."

"Esteemed junior cousin," she said as formally and a good deal more pointedly, "there is one other person in the building in Greenwich, England, where Anthony's office now resides. This is a clerk-type person, male, approximately thirty-four years of age, one hundred seventy-two pounds weight. From his heartbeat I know that he's not eavesdropping."

"His
heartbeat
?!" Ulric's voice became a near-squeak.

"Exactly," she confirmed. "I can monitor a great deal of what he's doing, how he's feeling. I can't really tell you what he's thinking, but I can get a good lead on what his intentions are. Believe me, he's now involved in drudgery."

"It's quite true," said Chih' Chin Fu. "With modern techniques of electronic surveillance, brought to their highest pitch by this lady and my humble self, it is quite possible to make such statements."

François turned on her. "You can do this and you don't make it available to us? Do you realize how valuable this thing is to our security?"

She glared back at him with eyes far colder. "I know exactly how valuable these techniques are to any who want to monitor other peoples' thinking. That's why I'll never turn them over to you or anybody else—family, government or other!"

"Hear, hear!" Derek said.

"Got the family sorted out, love?" Carstairs asked. "Must be a problem, all this blood relation stuff. Don't know what I'd do if I had to let all my cousins and such into my confidence."

Sieglinde sat back and sipped her amber drink. "You'll never understand, will you, Tony? We disagree on almost everything, but I'll trust my life to Ulric. I have in the past. Same with François or Derek. We're all family. They're bound to support and help me, and I'll do the same for them. It doesn't matter if we hate each others guts. We'll give each other the support we need."

Derek looked at Ulric. He couldn't believe it. The man was blushing. This subject actually embarrassed the fearsome Ulric Kuroda!

"That's correct," Ulric said.

Carstairs smiled ruefully. "Then you've retained something the rest of us've lost. No matter. Let's get down to business. The subject under discussion is Mehmet Shevket. Do we all agree that this bugger's a prime pain in the arse?"

"Agreed," chorused Sieglinde, Fu, Ulric, François, Derek and Valentina.

"Then let's come up with some decent tactics to deal with him. First of all. Valentina?"

"Yes?" she said.

"From now on, you're to cooperate with this lady. We are now establishing a coordinated intelligence operation. Linde's going to be occupied with her green egg for quite some time to come, I presume, so will you be directing operations at that end, Mr. Ulric?"

"That's correct," he said, eyeing Valentina dubiously.

"Splendid. Through Linde's magical bug-proof communications I'll keep you abreast of my dealings with General Shevket. There is, of course, the likelihood that I'll be assassinated. In that case, you're on your own, because I don't know anybody down here you could trust."

"You seem to take the prospect of assassination calmly," Sieglinde said.

His face twisted and he refilled his glass. "Live like I have the past half-century and it becomes a bloody welcome alternative to watching this planet stumble from one catastrophe to the next. War, the ecology, the population—I've fought 'em all. But the world won't survive Dictator Shevket."

"Why not just kill him?" Derek suggested.

Carstairs emitted a barking laugh. "You think it hasn't been tried? Not by me, mind you, but there've been plenty of attempts. He got to his present eminence by treading over a lot of corpses. Fanatics from resistance movements, hired guns, jealous rivals, they've all had their innings. He's yet to be nicked. I'll keep alert for an opportunity, but don't count on any results."

"Ordinarily," Sieglinde said, "I don't approve of assassination, but this man sounds like a good candidate for it."

"He's a bloody butcher," Carstairs affirmed, "and about fifteen different kinds of pervert. Not that that's so uncommon, it's just that he has the sort of charisma that gets a lot of people enthusiastic about him. Man on horseback, you know? Think he's going to be their savior, God knows why."

"What's his interest in the Rhea Object?" Derek asked.

"Same as everybody's," Carstairs said. "He figures it for a weapon or a power source, and in any case, he doesn't want you to have it. Speaking of the thing, what've you learned so far, Linde?"

"Enough to treat it with respect. Have you been keeping up with the reports from Aeaea?"

Carstairs shrugged. "Not my field. And I hope you'll understand if I don't have perfect confidence that they're telling us everything."

"You have my assurance that what they've released so far is reliable. They first put it through an angular momentum test and determined that all the mass is concentrated in that opaque area at the center. The mass in that opacity is a ton per cubic centimeter, which makes it about fifty thousand times as dense as gold. The mass of the translucent envelope is negligible."

"I think I follow you so far," Carstairs said. "But what's keeping that much compressed mass confined?"

"That's what we're all trying to find out. There's no external electric or magnetic field emanating from it, and it seems to have no definable temperature of its own. The Aeaeans dipped it in molten lead, and the surface temperature seemed to reach equilibrium with its environment instantaneously. They switched it to liquid helium and it reached extreme low temperature just as quickly.

"The central part is opaque to all electromagnetic radiations, from gamma-ray to radio. Lately, they've been getting desperate. They tried to get through the envelope with chemical agents, extreme heat, extraordinary pressure, high electric voltage, even laser beam. So far, it's been unproductive."

"Damn!" Carstairs said. "Being a bit rough on the thing, aren't they?"

"I agree. In fact, I consider some of their more extreme measures to be foolhardy. We're dealing here with matter under inconceivable compression. If that pressure is released in any manner except the intended way . . ."

"Blooey," Carstairs finished for her. "What are the chances they'll blow up Aeaea?"

"Very slight. They're being amazingly unimaginative, even for that bunch. At this rate they won't accomplish anything no matter what they try."

"Are you doing any better?" he asked her.

"Somewhat. It's too soon to say for certain, but I have an experiment in progress that may tell us just what it is and how it works."

"I know you don't like to make any pronouncements until you have all the evidence," Carstairs said, "but do you have any hunches or educated guesses about what the bloody things are?"

She looked at the others in the room, then back to Carstairs. "I'm fairly certain that it's some sort of fuel pack for an interstellar vessel. And I think it's depleted. Dense as the matter in it is, I think there was originally far more of it. If certain conjectures are correct, it might have been over a billion tons per cubic centimeter."

For several hours after the conference with Carstairs, Sieglinde brought the others up to date on her work, explaining some of the more abstruse details of her exotic new technology. "New to us" she hastened to add. " Somebody else had it, maybe a long time ago."

Something kept nagging at the back of Derek's mind. He hadn't specialized in physics in college, but anyone whose life depended on spacecraft had to know something about the subject. He worked up his courage and hit her with a question.

"Hey, Aunt Linde, I'd have thought that a superluminal conversation would play merry hell with the principle of cause and effect in physics. How's it work?"

Her look was pitying. "Derek, when you went to school, were they still teaching that garbage?"

"I'm afraid," Ulric said, "that quite a few physicists still hold with that view. I was wondering the same thing, in fact."

She sighed. "It's one of those problems science is riddled with. Somebody makes a mistake that looks plausible. Years later it still has currency because it's an old mistake. Somehow, the musty smell of age adds credence. All right, let's tackle it. Back in the twentieth century, a physicist came up with the concept of tachyons. You remember what tachyons were supposed to be?" The rest all shook their heads solemnly.

"Okay, a tachyon was a mythical superluminal particle. Get that—not energy, but a particle. It was a sort of vehicle for energy, if you can imagine that. Anyway, the way they were visualized was completely incorrect. Can you imagine information traveling faster than instantaneously?" They all shook their heads dutifully.

"Right. So, the fastest a tachyon can travel from point A to point B, separated, say, by one light-year, is instantaneous. An event occurring at point A, let's say it's the primary star exploding as a supernova, could be transmitted to point B instantaneously through indeterminate n-dimensional space, or by tachyon, if you prefer the mythical superluminal particle." She mused for a moment. "As a scientific blunder that sounded awfully reasonable at the time, I suppose aether or phlogiston were roughly equivalent in earlier times."

"Aether?" Derek said.

"Phlogiston?" said François.

"Never mind. Anyway, the person receiving the message will learn immediately about the supernova occurring at point A instead of waiting a year, staring at the sky. That doesn't mean that the receiver heard from the future. It doesn't mean that the sender communicated with the past. No, there was no violation of the law of causality when I spoke with Carstairs. There will be none in the future through use of my superluminal transmitter."

"Damn!" François said. "If we put this thing to use in the stock market, it'll be like we have a telegraph and everybody else has runners!"

"That's about what I'd expect from you," Derek said disdainfully. "But, if we could use this on the horse races and ball games down on Earth, the bookmaking advantages—"

EIGHT

Vladyka had spotted the woman on his third off-shift. He had finished tidying Vecchio's lab and had gone to Concourse B. Since his arrival, he had spent his off-shift hours in the entertainment facilities, striking up conversations with as wide an acquaintanceship as possible. It was seldom difficult. After an initial reserve at his obvious Earth origins, the Island Worlders almost invariably relaxed and grew congenial. Vladyka had an ingratiating manner, and most of the Belt inhabitants were easygoing and gregarious. Although they differed widely in lifestyle, they had little suspicion of strangers. To Vladyka, they seemed almost childishly trusting. He came from a land where the denizens of the next valley were usually enemies, and had risen in rank through a system in which treachery and murder were the surest means of advancement.

The first establishment he selected for the evening was called Bar #3. He had learned that the tediously predictable names were the result of their former use as numbered laboratories. When they had been rezoned for commercial use, some niggling regulation had required that they keep their former designation. It was no wonder, Vladyka thought, that the other, more free-wheeling Island Worlders thought the Aeaeans were so strange.

As usual, he picked a table with a good view of the bar, the entrance and some of the concourse outside. Within minutes, he acquired several drinking companions. Two of them he already knew; the others he made fast friends by buying a round of drinks. As usual, the conversation was dominated by the Rhea Object.

"You put in your bet yet?" asked a ship captain. He nodded to the back of the room, where a holograph of the Object surmounted a display dominated by large red letters spelling, "What Is It?" Below were listed a multitude of possibilities and the day's odds. Gamblers could place bets on any of them, or introduce a new possibility with a minimum bet. Total sums bet already were in the hundreds of millions. Speculations varied widely. Some thought it was not an artifact at all, but a natural phenomenon. A few suspected a hoax. One had bet that it really was a paperweight. The odds-on favorite, though, was that it was some form of power source. The captain was arguing just that point.

"Stands to reason," he said. "Why the hell else would you cram that much mass into that small a space unless you planned to release it in a controlled manner for propulsion?"

"It's a tempting thought," said a chemist's assistant, "but how do you get it out of there without destroying the envelope? And how would you keep it under control? I think it's something left over from a collapsar. We've always wondered where the matter went when it got so supercompressed. I think it just squeezes down," he made a squeezing gesture with both hands to demonstrate, "and when it won't squeeze any more, it pops out in some other part of the universe, maybe in some other form. I think that's what the green egg is." He spoke with the conviction of one who was neither physicist, mathematician nor astronomer.

"All neatly packaged in a nearly massless envelope?" said a woman who wore the charcoal-gray uniform of the astronomical section.

"We know we're dealing with something totally new," the chemist's assistant said. "We have no idea what goes on in the heart of a collapsar. Hell, how do we know it doesn't wrap its remains neatly before ejecting them through hyperspace or wherever?"

Vladyka had no interest whatever in the fundamental nature of the egg, so he refrained from all such speculations and arguments. He was about to steer the conversation in some other direction when he saw the woman walk into the bar. Something clicked in his perception. She seemed fortyish, reasonably pretty, and had dark-brown hair. All that could be the result of surgery, of course, but other things were more revealing. She moved like one who had spent many years in space, but she retained the indefinable awkwardness of one who had not been born there. The Kornfeld woman had been born on Mars and had spent at least her first sixteen years there. There was something in the woman's attitude as well. She wore the uniform of a low-ranking scientist, but her bearing was that of a highly assured savant. Most of all, he trusted his instinct. He knew his instinct was infallible and his instinct said that this was Sieglinde Kornfeld. She was looking for a table space in the crowded bar.

"Come join us," Vladyka called. "I think we can wedge in one more." He made a space so that she would be next to him.

She smiled and inclined her head at an oblique angle, the zero-g equivalent of a bow. "Thank you. It's always mobbed of late, with all the new people in on the Rhea Object study."

"Is that what you're on?" Vladyka asked.

"No, I'm from Serendip."

The Montenegran wondered what this could mean. "I thought I knew them all, but I never heard of that one. Let's see, Serendip was the old name for Sri Lanka, wasn't it? Is that your home asteroid?" The custom of naming the asteroid worlds for islands was an old one.

She smiled, displaying a small dimple slightly to the left of the tip of her chin. He was almost certain that the Kornfeld woman had such a dimple. He'd have to check his records. "You must be new around here."

"Just been here a few days." He packed it with all the affability and charm he could muster, which was considerable.

"It's the department where serendipitous ideas are tested for potential—commercial, military, scientific or anything else." She ordered a Martian Chablis and Vladyka insisted on paying.

"These Aeaeans continue to amaze me," he said. "They give bars numbers and stick a name like that on a research department." Actually, the whole thing sounded phony to him. It was probably a blind constructed to hide her real work—studying the Rhea Object in private and hiding her findings from Earth.

"They're weird," she agreed. Her wine materialized and she tested it. It seemed to pass inspection. "Martian wines are much better than the ones they make out here."

"Is that where you're from originally?" he said slyly.

"No, I was born on Phobos Station." He thought the answer came too hastily, as if she had revealed too much. "I'm a third-generation Phobian. My grandparents were among the founders."

"Mars and its satellites were Russian back then," Vladyka said. "Is that where they came from?"

"No, they were French, hired for the Russian project. My name is Giselle Pellier. Does that sound Russian?"

"I'm glad to hear it," Vladyka said, "I'm a Serb, and we don't get along with Russians so well. My name's Josip Mihajlovic. Shorten it to Joe." It did his ego good to know that he could so easily charm a woman of such wide experience whose suspicions were legendary. But then, he reflected with satisfaction, if any man could do it, it would be Daniko Vladyka.

The astronomer turned to Giselle. "How are you betting?"

"Alien weapon. Imagine the explosive power those things must have."

"I've been imagining that all too clearly," said the chemist's assistant. "I don't like the way they're experimenting with that thing right here in Aeaea. Suppose they do succeed in cracking the envelope? Aeaea would just cease to exist."

"Along with any ships parked nearby," said the ship captain, sourly. "I don't know why they don't work on it somewhere else. They could build a lab not far from here and experiment with it to their heart's content and risk only the minimum number of lives."

This hadn't occurred to Vladyka before. What if the damned thing weren't here at all? In Quadrant Three the scientists might be pretending to work on a hunk of glass while the real work went on in a much safer environment. This would take some consideration.

"I'm sure they're taking all necessary precautions," Giselle said. Her accent was just faintly French, as if she had been raised in a household where the language was still used. He always admired good cover work by a fellow pro. And she looked a good many years younger than her true age. Of course, with modern medical science and cosmetic surgery, anyone could look almost any age, at least until they reached their seventies or eighties.

"How can they know what precautions to take?" the chemist's assistant demanded. "This thing is utterly unique."

"It's a bit pointless worrying about it, isn't it?" Vladyka said. "We're here and it's here and if it goes boom, there's not a damned thing any of us can do about it, is there?" Noticing that they looked a little gloomy at this, he decided to lighten the mood. "The tricky question is, if they do blow this place up, there's a major problem."

"What might that be?" Giselle asked.

He pointed to the display at the back of the bar. "Undoubtedly, somebody's bet that that is exactly what's going to happen. If it does, how is he going to collect?" That got a laugh, and he called for another round and paid for it, further increasing his popularity. He played on them expertly, steering conversation away from serious subjects, ingratiating himself with them, especially with Giselle.

For her part, Giselle was amused by him, but fascinated at the same time. He was good-looking, in a rough sort of way. He had a certain charm, although she thought he might have been more attractive had he spent more of his attention on her, and less on the others at the table. It was painfully apparent to her that his bonhomie was intended to curry favor with his companions. Well, she could understand that. He was a stranger here, and so was she, although she had been working on Aeaea for several years. She knew how lonely a new arrival could be.

She did wonder why he had chosen her as a prospect. She had no illusions about her desirability. Age no longer meant what it used to, and beauty could be bought from a good clinic. She knew she could hold her own, but there was a niggling part of her mind that insisted on saying,
why me?
She was aware that those men who had been attracted to her in the past had been charmed by her conversation, her wit, any number of qualities that served to reinforce her adequate physical charms. She had preferred such men. This Josip looked like the type who would pursue nubile young creatures with ripe bodies and rudimentary minds. There were enough of those about—daughters of the staff people, girls off the innumerable family-ships that handled so much of Island World freighting. Yet he had targeted her. It brought her up short, that she had unconsciously settled on the word "targeted." She began to give him some serious thought.

She was a highly trained metallurgist, but recently her duties had been broadened. A few months before she had been called for an interview by the head of Aeaean security. She had been enlisted as a part-time security agent. The Rhea Object Project had brought droves of non-Aeaeans to the Island World, and the authorities were worried about industrial espionage.

The problem was nothing new, but the influx of outsiders increased the chances of espionage greatly. Giselle was charged with keeping an eye on the non-Aeaeans. It was nothing that might be considered true spying or surveillance, but more a matter of noticing any behavior that seemed to be suspect. Island Worlders had such a detestation of government surveillance that this was as far as the Aeaean security forces were willing to go.

She decided to go along with him, at least to a limited extent. He might be one of the people the security forces were apprehensive about. Of course, it might simply be her body he was interested in. That was not a totally discomforting thought. But she was not utterly unrealistic. He might well be an agent sent to work his way into Aeaean operations. Romancing a staff scientist was not an unreasonable way to go about it. Whatever his motivation might be, it seemed worthwhile to play along.

While the others were deep in a conversation about a major new find of high-grade titanium ore, Vladyka turned to Giselle.

"Not to be pushy or anything, but do you have any plans for dinner? I don't know this place very well yet. Maybe you could show me, for instance, where a good place for dinner might be."

Whatever he had in mind, he wasn't wasting any time at it. She, however, wanted him checked out first. "I'm sorry. I teach a class in about an hour. It meets every third day."

He could tell she wasn't being truthful, which was a good sign. Kornfeld was noted for her caution. "How about tomorrow, then?" He smiled his best smile.

She hesitated a moment. "I believe I'm free for that shift. If you like, we could go to Rubinoffs. It's one of the better places if you like Russian food. Does that conflict with Serbian prejudices?"

"Not at all. I'll even eat Turkish food. All cuisine is innocent until proven guilty. Shall we meet here?"

They made arrangements and she left. The next day she reported to the security office for her weekly briefing. The head of security told the operatives of several spies nabbed in the previous few days. He displayed life-sized holograms of suspected spies they were to be watching for. There were dozens of them, but the security chief, an Avalonian named Genovese, singled out one for special attention.

"This one," he said, "has just been reported as working in the Belt. He is from Montenegro, and his real name is Daniko Vladyka. We're showing him here with and without hair." Giselle felt a tingle of excitement. The hairless version looked somewhat like the man she had met the day before. That meant little, as features could be easily altered, but these holos, taken when the man did not know he was being imaged, expressed something of his personality.

"This is one to be ultra-careful with," Genovese droned on. "He's no mere industrial spy. He has been identified as an Earth agent. Of course, I realize that we are at peace with the Earth authorities," that drew some dry chuckles, "nevertheless, an informant has spilled the information that he has in the past been a successful assassin and torturer. Should he appear here and try to appropriate the Rhea Object, he wouldn't hesitate to kill."

She almost called for his attention, but a self-conscious fear of embarrassment stopped her. It was, after all, just a suspicion. There must be thousands of men similar to this one. Suppose she had him hailed into the security office and questioned, and he proved to be perfectly innocent? She decided to wait until she had better grounds for suspicion.