The invention of the home video player a century ago had brought erotic films into the living room, but that was a mild innovation compared to what followed when the invention of the cheap supercomputer-on-a-chip brought new meaning to the phrase “interactive fantasy.” McNeil’s id was much on display in these private files, which Sparta closed hastily; despite her opinion of herself as sophisticated beyond her years, her face had turned bright pink.
She made her way into the corridor that passed through the center of the life support deck. Just on the other side of these close, curving, featureless steel walls the fatal explosion had occurred; at the same moment the access panels had been automatically dogged shut to prevent decompression of the crew module.
She went through the lock into the hold access then, to the three locks that warned VACUUM and the one that sternly wagged its bright yellow finger: “Unauthorized entry strictly forbidden.”
McNeil had told the truth. The traces of his and many other hands resided on the keypad, but the most recent trace was Peter Grant’s—his touch on six of the keys overlaid all others. Sparta could not recover the order of touch—six keys gave rise to six-factorial possible combinations—but if she’d wanted to play a game with herself she probably could have deduced the likelier possibilities within a few seconds, from her knowledge of probabilities and, mostly, from what she’d learned of the man himself.
There was no point in taking the time. She’d already uncovered the combination where Grant had noted it in his personal computer files.
She tapped the keys. The indicator diode beside the lock blinked from red to green. She turned the wheel and tugged on the hatch. Inside the airlock the indicators con- firmed that the interior pressures of the hold were equal to those outside the lock. She turned the wheel on the inner hatch and a moment later floated into the hold.
It was a cramped circular space, hardly big enough to stand erect in, ringed by steel racks filled with metal and plastic bags and cases. The roof of the compartment was the reinforced cap of the hold itself; the floor was a removable steel partition, sealed to the walls. The wooden ships that once plied Earth’s oceans commonly carried sand and rocks for ballast when travelling without a paying cargo, but ballast was worse than useless in space. Aft of the few stacked shelves ringing the pressurized top of the hold, the vessel was just a big bottle of vacuum.
The pallets near the airlock were strapped down securely, carrying sacks of wild rice, asparagus tips in gel, cases of live game birds frozen in suspended animation— delicacies that, having made the trip from Earth, were worth far more than their weight in gold.
And of course that miscellany which had snagged Sparta’s attention in the manifest. Kara Antreen’s Cuban cigars. Sondra Sylvester’s “books of no intrinsic value.”
Sylvester’s books were in a gray Styrene case which showed little sign of handling—Sparta noted Sylvester’s own traces, McNeil’s, Grant’s, others unknown, but none recent. Sparta quickly deduced the simple combination.
Inside she found a number of plastic-wrapped paper and plastic books, some bound in cloth or leather, others with quaint and lurid illustrated covers, but nothing she did not expect to find. She resealed the case.
She moved next to Darlington’s consignment, a similar but not identical gray Styrene case equipped with an elaborate magnetic lock, something even more complex than the numeric pad on the airlock. The case showed no signs of tampering. Oddly, it showed no signs of having been handled at all. The only chemical signals on the entire case were the strong contending odors of detergent, methyl alcohol, acetone, and carbon tetrachloride. It seemed to have been throughly scrubbed.
A defensive measure, that, like the human hair laid across the crack in the closet door, intended to divulge any attempts at searching or tampering? Well, there had been no tampering.
Sparta proceeded to tamper with it. The lock’s code was based on a short stack of rather small primes. No one without Sparta’s sensitivities could have cracked the combination in less than a few days, without the aid of a sizable computer—it would take that long just to run through half the possible combinations. But Sparta eliminated possibilities by the millions and billions, instantly, simply by reading electronic pathways deep in the lock’s circuitry and discarding those that were dormant.
She was in trance while she did it. Five minutes later she had the lock open. Inside the case was the book.
The man who had had this book made for himself had reveled in fine things. He had valued the presentation of his hard-wrought words so much that he would not let those he hoped to impress with it, or even his friends, see anything but the best. The Seven Pillars of Wisdom had not only been given the trappings of a marbled slipcase, leather binding, and beautiful endpapers, it had been printed like the King James Bible itself, on Bible paper, set in double columns of linotype.
Sparta had heard about metal type, although she had never actually seen the effect of it. She slid the book from its case, let it gently push itself open. Sure enough, each single letter and character was pressed onto the paper, not simply appearing there as a filmy overlay but as a precise quantity of ink pushed crisply into the pulp. That sort of craftsmanship in an object of “mass production” was beyond Sparta’s experience. The paper itself was thin and supple, not like the crumbling discolored sheets she had seen in the New York library, displayed as relics of the past. . . .
The richness and glory of the book in her hand was hypnotic, calling her to handle its pages. For the moment she forgot investigation. She only wanted to experience the thing. She studied the page to which it had spontaneously opened.
“An accident was meaner than deliberate fault,” the author had written. “If I did not hesitate to risk my life, why fuss to dirty it? Yet life and honour seemed in different categories.
. . . or was honour like the Sybil’s leaves, the more that was lost the more precious the little left . . . ?”
An odd thought. “Honour” considered as a commodity, the more that was lost the more precious what was left.
Sparta closed the fabulous book and slid it back into its slipcase, then settled the whole thick package into its padded case. She had seen what she needed to of Star Queen.
XVI
“Ladies and gentlemen, I regret to announce that there will be a delay in the disembarkation process. A representative from Port Hesperus will be joining us shortly to explain.
To facilitate matters, all passengers should report to the lounge as soon as possible. Stewards will assist you.”
Unlike Star Queen, Helios had arrived at Port Hesperus in the normal way, grappled into parking orbit by shortrange tugs. Plainly visible through the windows of the ship’s lounge, the space station hung in the sky a kilometer away, its wheels revolving grandly against the bright crescent of Venus, the green of its famous gardens glinting through the banded skylights of its central sphere. Murmuring resentment, the passengers gathered in the lounge; the most reluctant found themselves “helped” by stewards who seemed to have forgotten deference. All aboard the ship, passengers and crew, were frustrated to have travelled millions of kilometers across a trackless sea and at the last moment to be prevented from setting foot on the shore.
A bright spark moved against the insect cloud of other spacecraft drifting about the station, and soon resolved itself into a tiny white launch bearing the familiar blue band and gold star insignia. The launch docked at the main airlock and a few minutes later a tall, square-jawed blond man pulled himself briskly into the lounge.
“I’m Inspector Viktor Proboda, Port Hesperus office of the Board of Space Control,” he said to the assembled passengers, most of whom were unhappily glowering. “You will be detained here temporarily while we continue our investigation into the recent events aboard Star Queen; we sincerely regret any inconvenience this may cause. First I’ll need to establish that your registration slivers are in order. Then I will soon be approaching some of you individually and asking you to assist us in our inquiries. . . .”
Ten minutes after she left Star Queen, Sparta knocked on the door of Angus McNeil’s private ward. “Ellen Troy, Mr. McNeil.”
“C’m in,” he said cheerily, and when she opened the door he was standing there smiling at her from his freshly shaved face, wearing a freshly pressed, luxurious cotton shirt with its sleeves folded above the elbows and crisp plastic trousers, and puffing lightly on a cigarette he had evidently lit only moments before.
“I’m sorry to interrupt you,” she said, seeing the open kit on the bed. He had been packing bathroom articles; she noted that they seem to have been issued from the same government stores as her own hastily acquired toothbrush.