“Okay, I get it. Don’t worry—the secret is safe. You can count on me. You know,
I always wanted to be an espionage agent with the CIA or something. I figure I’d
be good at it. Do you, er . . . do you have people like that working for you?”
Clarissa looked at Thoring hopefully.
“Uh? Oh no, I’m afraid not.”
“Too bad. Oh well, maybe if you want a secret message taken to the
Communications Director, or something like that, you could let me know.”
“What? Oh yes, sure. If anything like that comes up, I’ll give you a call.”
“Okay, well, I guess I’d better let you get on.” Clarissa got up and crept
furtively over to the door. She opened it a fraction, peered out, and then
looked back over her shoulder at Thoring. “I’m sorry I bothered you over
something so trivial.”
“Oh, think nothing of it. We get it all the time … but we have to keep up our
cover, you understand.”
“That’s what I thought.” Clarissa nodded a final, solemn reassurance, made an O
in the air with her thumb and forefinger, and disappeared. Thoring stared
disbelievingly at the door for a long time after she had gone. Then he blinked
himself back to reality, shook his head, and returned his attention to the
papers on his desk.
“The figures for on-board fuel-pellet manufacturing capacity, emergency reserves
of chemical propellants, and the range corrections factored into the radar
calibration procedures all point to a distance much greater than that of Mars,”
Theuna said to the rest of the team, who were holding a cramped afterdinner
conference in the cabin that Zam-bendorf shared with Abaquaan, West, and
Fellburg. She gestured at the photo prints lying among other papers on the bunk
beside her. “And the flight-profile from Campbell’s duty roster gives a voyage
of something nearer three months than fifty days.”
“I still think the Asteroids is a possibility,” Drew West said, lounging on one
of the upper bunks. “There’s been a lot of talk in recent years about our
vulnerability in strategic minerals—in fact, right back to the last century.
There’s no end of just about everything out there.”
Silence reigned for a few seconds. Joe Fellburg made a face. “Too many things
don’t fit,” he said. “Why all the secrecy? Why the military?”
“Protecting our eternal interests,” Abaquaan answered, sitting on the floor with
his back to the door.
“Who from?”
“Well, it could only be the Soviets,” West said.
“Out at the Asteroids?” Clarissa looked inquiringly at Theuna and Fellburg. “Do
they have anything that could match the Orion at that range?”
Fellburg shook his head. “Not yet. They’ve been concentrating on near-Earth
applications. The Japanese are more interested in Venus and Mercury.”
“The Soviets did develop a series of fusion drives as part of their Mars-base
program,” Theuna said. “But if they’d gone a long way in scaling them up to
anything like the Orion, we’d know about it.”
Clarissa nodded as if that confirmed what she already thought. “And besides,
Leaherney and Giraud don’t fit into that either,” she said. Leaherney used to be
chairman of the House Committee on Foreign Economic Affairs and is a onetime
U.S. ambassador in Brussels; Giraud was a member of the French cabinet. You
wouldn’t pick guys like that to head up a prospecting expedition.”
The cabin fell quiet again for a while. Everybody looked at everybody else.
There were no new suggestions. At last Zambendorf stood up, stepped over
Abaquaan’s legs to get to the coffee pot by the washbasin, and poured himself a
fresh cup. He stirred in a spoon of sugar and turned to face the others again.
“Then it has to be as I’ve been saying,” he told them. “No other hypothesis
explains all of the facts nearly as well. A low-gravity, low-temperature, icy
environment … It has to be a moon of the outer planets.”
“With not only an atmosphere, but a high-pressure one at that,” Thelma agreed,
nodding.
Fellburg rubbed his nose between thumb and forefinger for a few seconds, and at
last nodded slowly. “I can’t fault it … And you know something?—the European
probe that arrived there two years ago and sent down those surface landers that