Cold as Ice (14 page)

"Better than good." He glanced at her warily. "All right, Nell. What's the pitch?"

"How would you like to send your highest-rating star reporter on another assignment?"

"News value?"

"I'd bet on it. But don't ask me what it is, because I don't know yet. I'd have to be away for a while, and it would cost."

"Numbers, dearie. I'm not Croesus. I need numbers. How long, and why would it cost?"

"Weeks at least, probably more. I'd be going all the way out to the Jovian system. To Ganymede and Europa, maybe other places." She held up her hand. "I know. But don't cancel the play before you see the script. Let me talk for a minute."

She talked for much longer than that, while Glyn Sefaris maintained a surprising silence. When she finished, he held that silence for another thirty seconds, pursing his lips and drumming his fingers on the table.

"Jon Perry again," he said at last. "Let's get one detail out of the way. Are you screwing him?"

"No."

"Not yet, you mean. Better not wait too long—others are standing in line."

"I have no intention of seducing Jon Perry, or of being seduced by him." (Below table level, Nell crossed her fingers.)

"But you're certainly
interested
in him."

"Glyn, you don't understand. Perry is a man whom things happen to, and he comes through them without blinking. Back in PacAnt, he's called the Ice Man. I didn't understand why until we hit the seaquake. Then he wasn't scared—he
enjoyed
it. And look at what happened in the Arenas festival. He saw what was happening to that float when no one else did, saved it, and walked away as calm as you please. You admit that he looks good, and I think he has news value. Can't you see this making an exciting show, wandering the wilds of the Jupiter system?"

"Don't press too hard, darling. It puts horrid frown lines on that lovely face."

"But what do you say?"

"I say you're a first-rate reporter. You're pushy when you're after a story, but not so pushy that you turn people off. And you have one great gift that can't be taught and that you did nothing to earn—you have a nose for
action.
You're a person that things 'happen to,' just like Perry."

"So you agree I should—"

"
But
"—he held up his hand to cut her off in mid-sentence—"you have one weakness. You like to tuck poor helpless males under your mother wing and protect them."

"Jon Perry is as far from being a poor helpless male as you can get."

"That's what you say. Every time. Remember Roballo?"

"The only thing I did with Pablo Roballo—"

"The only thing you
didn't
do with him—but let's not get into sordid detail. Just don't fall like that again. It's not good for you. If you go with Perry, watch those wild, runaway hormones. When will you leave?"

Nell, her mouth already open to continue the argument, changed direction. "You mean you
approve
?"

"When could I ever deny you anything? I said, when will you leave?"

"In three days."

"Then I'd better start the paperwork now." He stood up, glancing around the dining room. The place was empty except for a few other couples, deep in their own business discussions.

"By the way." Sefaris turned back to Nell. "One other thing. Remember when you came here after you covered the Inner Circle's dinner for Cyrus Mobarak, and you asked me to put somebody onto finding out about a big new project that he'd mentioned? Well, it took a little while, but I got feedback this afternoon. It's real, and it might have big story potential. It's for huge fusion installations—no surprise there. But if he gets approval, they won't be for use on Earth. They'll be placed out on Europa. How about that?"

Glyn Sefaris savored the look on Nell's face for a second before he left the dining room. It wasn't easy to surprise her. He knew she wanted to ask him questions, but he had just told her all he knew about the new Mobarak project. If she wanted more, she would have to dig it out for herself.

There was just one thing he had not told Nell, and he was not sure that he was going to, at least not until she was well on the way to the Jovian system. Earlier in the day he had read an incoming news clip from Arenas. The travel recorder from the runaway carousel float at the Midsummer Festival had been examined by security police, and its accuracy was now being questioned.

The recorder showed that the vehicle had reached a speed of more than fifty miles an hour during its wild downhill rush.

Faster than a world-class sprinter. Far faster, according to Glyn Sefaris's research service, than any human could ever run, under any conditions.

7
Let's Make a World

It was the saddest job imaginable, like abandoning your half-grown children. Camille sat alone at the terminal in a trance state, closing files, shutting down experiments, putting programs in mothballs. In another hour she would be finished; nothing at DOS Center would remain of her and her work.

So good-bye, NGC 3344. Her spectroscopic probing of low cross-section helium fusion at the center of that perfect spiral galaxy had to end. Good-bye, SGC 11324. She would have no more observations of that dark mystery three billion light-years from Sol.

And good-bye now to her special babies: galaxies so far away that even DOS could not resolve their centers to individual stars.

Camille erased the program sequences for four of them. At the fifth, she paused. The observational program for this experiment in the far infrared had only just begun. She was using multimillimeter wavelengths to study fusion processes of the heavier elements as they built their way from carbon to iron. The early results from this galaxy, seven billion light-years out, were already showing intriguing anomalies. She had a thin scatter of data points far from what theory predicted.

Did she
have
to erase this experiment? In principle, she did. Those were her instructions. But suppose she just dropped it into background mode on the DOS sequencing algorithm? Then her observations would be made only in dead time, when no other observer was asking for use of the telescope array. No one would miss it, or probably even notice.

It was a dreadful way to perform an experiment, with no guarantee that results would ever be obtained. But it was the way that she and David had been forced to operate during the whole period while DOS was being checked out. She had learned how to deal with data gaps and incomplete recording sequences.

And suppose that someone found out what she had done? Well, she would be banned from future use of DOS—and no worse off than she was now.

Camille placed her experiment at the bottom of the DOS priority list and gave it an innocuous name, one that a casual reader would assume was part of the telescope array's own diagnostic routines. She set up an off-site tap with her own ID so that she could query the relevant DOS data bank remotely. Then she signed off the system, feeling like a criminal.

But an
unrepentant
one.

She left the DOS control chamber and headed back to the living quarters. David had to be told what she had done, and he should have a chance to do the same thing for one of his own pets. The canceling of the DOS deep probes had produced at least one beneficial side effect; she and David had nothing left to fight over. They were being extra-nice to each other. Camille had, with enormous self-control, managed to avoid further prying into his trip to Earth.

"Want to know what a hardened criminal looks like?" she started to say to his broad back as she floated into the chamber.

She cut herself off just before she reached the incriminating word. David Lammerman was not alone. She could see a pair of feet sticking out from beyond the little table.

The newcomer's face had been shielded from view by the bank of supply cupboards. As she moved past David, Camille saw a jutting nose, prominent brow ridges, and a thick shock of grey hair. She recognized that strong profile at once. Anyone who worked in fusion, even if it was in abstract science rather than commerce, knew him from a hundred cartoons.

She stared at Cyrus Mobarak too hard to be polite, while he casually turned and smiled. The pale, vacant eyes warmed and lit his whole face. He held out a manicured hand.

"Dr. Camille Hamilton. It is a pleasure to meet you. I know your work, of course."

Which was a mystery as big as the Sun King's presence at DOS Center. Camille had no false modesty about her own worth and competence. At what she did, she was the best. But
what
she did was abstruse and little-known theory, far from the sort of thing that Cyrus Mobarak cared about; none of her own delusions of grandeur could convince her that, like him, she was a household name around the system.

She turned to David and saw on his face the same awkward expression that it had worn when he had been summoned for the meeting on Earth. He was twisting his thick fingers around each other. His shoulders were stiff, his lips were tight, and he showed no sign of wanting to introduce the Sun King to her.

Camille grasped Mobarak's outstretched hand instinctively and received a businesslike handshake in return. His hand was small, dry, and unusually warm. Or was her own unnaturally cold after that long session of sitting at the DOS computer?

"What in the world are you doing on DOS Center?"

It was hardly a diplomatic greeting, but Mobarak took it in stride.

"I am on my way from Earth to the Jupiter system. I very much want to talk to you, Dr. Hamilton, but would you excuse me for just a couple of minutes first? I need to send a message over the communications net."

He eased past her and left the room before she could respond. She turned to David feeling something between confusion and accusation.

"That's ridiculous. DOS Center isn't on a reasonable flight path from Earth to the Jovian system, not for another six months. How do you know Mobarak, and why did you bring him here? And why did he walk out the moment he met me?" Questions spilled out of Camille before David could even try to answer. "He's the one who made you go to Earth, isn't he, the one who told you we were going to be dumped out of the DOS program? Why did he do that . . . and what have you been telling him about me?"

With Mobarak out of the room, the tense, constipated expression on David's face eased a little.

"Nothing he couldn't have told me. He seemed to know all about Camille Hamilton before I ever arrived on Earth."

"How?"

"Don't know. Maybe . . . maybe from that man who was here before me." David didn't want to mention the name, had never mentioned the name. "Didn't he go to work on Earth?"

"My God. Tim Kaiser. He did. He went to Earth to work on fusion projects." Camille had a new worry. If Mobarak's ideas about her had come from poor lovelorn and jealous Tim, convinced of Camille's casual carnality . . .

"But how do
you
know Mobarak? You never met Tim Kaiser."

"True." David didn't just look uncomfortable now, he looked
ill
—and he was as physically tough as Camille. She had never seen him sick for a moment.

"I don't know Tim Kaiser." The words were being pulled out of him. "I don't want to. You understand that. But I do know Cyrus Mobarak." The twisted smile was out of place on his plump, good-natured face. "You might say that I have always known Cyrus Mobarak. Or maybe you'd say that I've never known him."

The stiffness left David's shoulders, and he seemed to shrink into his seat with a great exploding sigh of escaping breath. "He's my
father
, Camille. My real, biological, goddamned father."

She stared at him in disbelief. She realized that other people had known relatives, even if she didn't. But
Mobarak
as David's father . . .

"You never told me that."

"Of course I didn't. I didn't want you to know . . . didn't want anyone to know."

"But David
Lammerman
. . ."

"Lammerman was my mother's name. She and Mobarak lived together—for just six months, after the war—when he first arrived on Earth from the Belt."

"And he
disowned
you?"

"No. She disowned
him.
She didn't want me to mention his name. Ever. I didn't. But she mentioned it often enough. She told me that he was a horrible man, nothing like the pleasant person that he pretended to be. I believed her—I was only a kid. I can see now how irrational and bitter she was, but I didn't know it
then.

"She died when I was seventeen, and she left me broke. But I wouldn't ask
him
for anything, not to save my life. He came to see me a month after she died. He was too much for me to handle. You know, I couldn't even get up the nerve to ask him to
leave
, and I really wanted to. He told me that there was a bank account to pay for my education, whether I liked it or not. He would not try to force other money onto me or interfere with my life in any way, and he kept his word until last month, when he called out of the blue and asked me to come to Earth. He paid for my trip, and he told me the news, that our work on DOS was going to be canceled, that we'd have to get out of here."

David's burst of words ended. Camille nodded. It made sense, in an oddly distorted way. The rejected—or rejecting—son, in the presence of the larger-than-life father. Cyrus Mobarak was still too much for David to handle.

And yet it made no sense at all. What else had David kept from her?

"David, I don't understand. Why would Cyrus Mobarak summon you all the way to Earth just to tell you what we would hear anyway in a few weeks? There's
no way
they could keep the cancellation of the DOS deep-probe program a secret. A hundred other experimenters are affected as well as ourselves. The whole DOS scientist community was buzzing with the news less than a week after you got back here."

He shrugged but said nothing. Recounting his relationship to Cyrus Mobarak had apparently drained him. Camille did not push further. Instead, she returned to her worries about Cyrus Mobarak's reason for being here, and David's miserable condition. If Mobarak were going to try to push David around, he'd have to take Camille Hamilton on first. And she was getting madder and madder. The pair of them sat for five minutes in uncomfortable silence until Mobarak returned.