Not, of course, that he cared about the book, actually, the actual contents of the book, that is to say, the words in the book. War stories, you know. Given that this fellow Lawrence was said to have written rather well, and there were those endorsements, G. B. Shaw, Robert Graves, whoever they were, but they were said to have written well themselves, for the period, that is, anyway someone said so, and really, any reputation that lasts a century has some value, wouldn’t-you-say? But not really what he thought he was getting, in fact—permitting himself to make a small confession to himself—some confusion actually, quite understandable, another chap named Lawrence from the same period, after all it was more than a hundred years ago.
Which was quite beside the point. He’d paid money for this bloody book. There were only five copies in the universe, and three of those were lost, and now there was only the one in the Library of Congress of the United States of America and his—the Hesperian Museum’s, which itself was his. And he’d bought it for one reason, to humiliate that woman, who had humiliated him in the aftermath of her disgraceful public pursuit of his . . . well, that oh-so-special someone. His legal companion, once.
He supposed he should simply say good riddance to the little slut. But he couldn’t. She had her quite remarkable charms, and Darlington was not likely to find her Which set him to brooding, as he did endlessly, over whether he would ever get off Port Hesperus, whether he could ever go home again. He knew, deep down, that he wouldn’t. They’d bury poor Vince Darlington in space, unless by some miracle they buried his sisters first. Not a matter of fighting extradition to Earth, nothing so public, or so legal. No, it was the price the family—the poisonous sisters, actually—had exacted for keeping their persimmonlips puckered tightly—for keeping him out of a Swiss jail, to be precise. Of course it would have had to be their money . . .
This was the retreat he’d made for himself, and here he would stay, in these few small rooms with their velvet walls and this . . . really amazing glass dome (perhaps it really had been built as a church?), surrounded by his dead treasures.
He eyed the shrimps. They weren’t getting any fresher.
He set off on another round of picture straightening.
When would he be allowed to take possession? Perhaps he should cancel now. Captain Antreen had been most unhelpful.
Oh, smiles and all that, said she’d do the best she could, but results? No promises there, darling. It all had a sour taste to it, rather curdling his intended triumph over Sylvester.
Darlington passed nervously into one of the smaller, darker side rooms, He stopped beside a glass case, caught by his reflection in its lid. He patted his thinning black hair and adjusting his old-fashioned horn-rimmed eyeglasses —hadn’t lost his looks quite yet, thank God—twitching his lips in a little moue, then moving on, ignoring the contents of the case.
What Darlington left behind in this small room were his real treasures, although he refused to acknowledge them. Here were those odd scraps of fossil imprints, found on the surface of Venus by robot explorers, which had made the Hesperian Museum a place of intense interest to scientists and scholars, and, after Sato’s gardens, one of the chief tourist attractions of Port Hesperus. But Darlington, absurdly wealthy even on a negotiated allowance, was a collector of second-rate European art of the melodramaand- curlicue periods, and to him rocks and bones belonged in some desert gas station or Olde Curiosity Shoppe on Earth. His Venusian fossils brought him system-wide attention, so he grudgingly allowed them their space.
He continued to pace, staring at his garish paintings and sculptures and expensive bric-a-brac and brooding on what that busybody police person from Earth was up to, poking about on the derelict ship that held his precious book.
Shortly before Helios was due to rendezvous with Port Hesperus and shortly after Sparta had asked him to assure its quarantine while she went off on business of her own, Viktor Proboda presented himself at the Board of Space Control’s local headquarters. Captain Antreen called him into her office; Lieutenant Kitamuki, her aide, was already in the room.
“Your instructions were simple, Viktor.” Antreen’s smiling mask had slipped; she was rigid with anger. “You were not to leave Troy’s side.”
“She trusts me, Captain. She has promised to inform me promptly of everything she finds.”
“And you trust her?” Kitamuki demanded.
“She seems to know what she’s doing, Lieutenant.”
Proboda felt it was getting awfully warm in this office.
“And Central did put her in charge.”
“We requested a replacement. We didn’t ask that the investigation be taken away from us.” Antreen said.
“I didn’t like that any better than you did, Captain,”
Proboda said stoutly. “In fact I took it personally at first, considering you’d already given me the assignment. But after all, most of the principals in the case are Earthbased.
. . .”
“Most of the principals are Euro-Americans,” Kitamuki said. “Does that give you a clue?”
“Sorry,” Proboda said stoutly. He could see the conspiracy theory coming—Kitamuki was big on them—but conspiracy theories were not his thing. He put his faith in simpler motivations, like vengeance, greed, and stupidity.
“I really think you ought to take a look at these lab results.
We did—Troy did, in fact—a very close inspection of the impact site, and what she found . . .”
“Someone back there has passed the word that this department is to be discredited,” Kitamuki interrupted.
“Here on Port Hesperus, Azure Dragon is producing spectacular results, and some among the Euro-Americans, on the station and back on Earth, don’t like it.” She paused to let her dark suspicions sink in.
“We’ve got to watch our step, Viktor,” Antreen said evenly. “To preserve our integrity. Port Hesperus is a model of cooperation, and unfortunately some would like to destroy us.”
Proboda suspected somebody was blowing smoke in his face—he wasn’t sure who. But while Captain Antreen didn’t always choose to make her reasoning clear, she did make her point. “How do you want me to handle it, then?”
“You do as Troy asks you. Just know that we’ll be working with you too, sometimes behind the scenes. Troy is not to be made aware of this. We want the situation resolved, but there’s no need to go beyond the pertinent facts.”
“All right, then,” Proboda concurred. “Shall I see to Helios?”
“You do that,” Lieutenant Kitamuki said. “Leave Troy to us.”
“Now what did you want to tell us about these lab results?” Antreen asked him.
XV
Alone in Star Queen, Sparta started her investigation from the top down.
Immediately below the inner hatch of the main airlock was a claustrophobic space jammed with stores and equipment lockers. Three spacesuits normally hung against the wall in one quadrant of the round deck. One was missing.
Grant’s. Another appeared unused. Wycherly’s, the unfortunate pilot’s. Curious, Sparta checked its oxygen supply and found it partially charged—enough there for half an hour. Had McNeil been saving it, in case things went wrong, and he too decided to lose himself in space? Sparta poked here and there among the supply lockers—tools, batteries, spare lithium hydroxide canisters and such—but she found nothing of significance here. She quickly moved down to the flight deck.
The flight deck was spacious by comparison, taking up a slice through the wide tropics of the crew module’s sphere. The consoles that circled the deck beneath the wide windows were alive with flickering lights, their blue and green and yellow indicator lamps glowing softly on auxiliary power. Facing them were seats for commander, second pilot, and engineer—although Star Queen, like other modern freighters, could be flown by a single crewmember or none, if placed under remote control.
The room was a pragmatic mix of the exotic and the mundane. The computers were state of the art and so were the window shades, although the state of the windowshade art had not changed a whole lot in the past century, and the fire extinguishers were still just red-painted metal bottles, clipped to the bulkheads. There were racks and cabinets of machines, but there was also plenty of good working space and a good view out the surrounding windows; the deck had been designed in the awareness that crews would spend many months of their lives within its confines. Sparta was struck, however, that there were no personalizing touches, no cut-out cartoons or posters or pin-ups, no cute notes. Perhaps neo-commander Peter Grant had not been the sort to tolerate individual litter.
Besides the ship’s working programs, the logs—Grant’s verbal log and the ship’s black-box recorders—were accessed from these consoles. In fact almost all of the codable information about the ship and its cargo, except Grant’s and McNeil’s personal computer files, was accessed from this deck.