After all these years, Fuchs thought, staring through the train window, and still they live like animals.
Then he caught his first glimpse of the Alps. Bare rock, stark and barren as the Moon. Where’s the snow? he asked himself, knowing that it was gone, perhaps for centuries, perhaps forever.
His world, the world he had known, was gone also. He didn’t realize how much he had loved it, how much he missed it, until he realized that he would never see it again.
As the train plunged into the tunnel at the Brenner Pass, Fuchs stared at his own grim reflection in the window. He looked away, squeezed his eyes shut, and determined to stop thinking about the past. Only the future. Think only of the day when you kill Martin Humphries.
To do that he had to return to Selene, and to accomplish that he had to change his identity. Pancho thought she was saving Fuchs’s life, protecting the man she had known since he’d first left Earth as an eager graduate student more than a decade earlier. She had provided Fuchs with a new identity and enough money to live comfortably for a few years. At his insistence, she had also done as much for the nine men and women of his crew. Nautilus was parked in a Sun-circling orbit deep in the Belt, still disguised to resemble a smallish asteroid. It will be waiting for me when I finish my business with Humphries, Fuchs thought.
He knew what that business was, what it had to be. Pancho hasn’t brought me to Earth merely out of friendship. She wants me to get back to Selene. She can’t trust any communications link to say it in so many words, but her intention is clear. She wants me to kill Humphries. She knows that’s what I want to do, and she’s willing to help me do it. It will be a great help to her, of course. But it will be a joy to me. Even if it costs my own life, I will snuff out Humphries.
His thirst for vengeance kindled him for the remainder of his train ride to Bern.
But once in his native Bern he became sad and dispirited, depressed at how the old city had become so shabby, so filled with aimless, homeless men and women, even children, wandering the streets, begging for handouts when the police weren’t looking. Fuchs was shocked that the streets were littered with trash; the city that had once sparkled was now grimy, obviously decaying. And at night the streets could even be dangerous, he was warned by the weary-eyed concierge at his hotel.
A week was more than enough for him. Fuchs used the identity Pancho had provided for him to book passage back to Selene. He rented a modest suite for himself at the Hotel Luna, with an expense account to be paid by Astro Corporation. Closer to Humphries, he told himself. Within arm’s reach, almost. Close enough to kill. But you must be patient, he thought. You must be careful. Humphries is surrounded by guards and other employees. Pancho can’t openly help me to reach him; she can’t allow herself to be seen as aiding an assassin. I’ll have to act alone. I’ll have to get through to Humphries on my own. I don’t know how, not yet, but I will do it. Or die in the trying.
He had to disguise his appearance, of course. Lifts in his shoes made him slightly taller. Rigid, spartan dieting had slimmed him somewhat, but no fasting could reduce his barrel chest or thickly muscled limbs. He had grown a thick black beard and wore molecule-thin contact lenses that Astro’s people had clandestinely sent him; they altered his retinal pattern enough to fool a computer’s simple comparison programming.
Still, Fuchs could not help sweating nervously as he shuffled through the line leading to the customs inspection booth at Selene’s Armstrong Spaceport. He had taken a mild tranquillizer but it didn’t seem to be helping to calm his growing apprehension.
When he came to the inspection station the computer’s synthesized German sounded slightly strange to him, until he realized the machine was not programmed to speak in his own Swiss dialect. He answered its questions as briefly as he could, knowing that the system did not have the voice print of Lars Fuchs in its memory, yet still worried that somehow it might. It didn’t. He followed instructions and looked into the retinal scanner for the required five seconds, slowly counting them off in silence.