Pavlakis bobbed his big head and said, “Good day, Inspector.”
Sparta did not acknowledge him until she had finished reading something from her filescreen. Meanwhile he tugged nervously at the cuffs of his tight jacket.
“I see this is your first visit to Venus, Mr. Pavlakis,”
she said, looking up. “Regrettable circumstances.”
“How is Mr. McNeil, Inspector?” Pavlakis asked. “Is he well? May I talk to him?”
“The clinic has already released him. You’ll be able to talk to him soon.” His concern struck her as sincere, but it did not deflect her from her line. “Mr. Pavlakis, I note that Star Queen is a new registry, yet the ship is actually thirty years old. What was her former registry?”
The heavyset man flinched. “She has been completely refurbished, Inspector. Everything but the basic frame is new, or reconditioned, with a few minor . . .”
Viktor Proboda cut into Pavlakis’s nervous improvisation.
“She asked for the former registry.”
“I . . . I believe the registry was NSS 69376, Inspector.”
“Kronos,” Sparta said. The word was an accusation.
“Ceres in ’67, two members of the crew dead, a third woman injured, all cargo lost. Mars Station ’73, docking collision killed four workers on the station, cargo in one hold destroyed. Numerous accidents since involving loss of cargo. Several people have been injured and at least one other death has been attributed to below-standard maintenance. You had good reason to rechristen the ship, Mr. Pavlakis.”
“Kronos was not a good name for a spaceship,” Pavlakis said.
She nodded solemnly. “A titan who ate his own children.
It must have been difficult to line up qualified crews.”
Pavlakis’s amber beads were working their way over and through his strong fingers. “When will I be allowed to examine my ship and its cargo, Inspector?”
“I’ll answer your questions as best I can, Mr. Pavlakis.
As soon as I finish this procedure. Please wait for me— through that door to your left.”
Again the invisible door yawned unexpectedly on the cold steel tube. Grimly, staring down over his mustache, Pavlakis moved through it without another word.
When the door closed Proboda admitted the next passenger from the disembarkation tube. “Ms. Nancybeth Mokoroa, Port Hesperus, unemployed.” She came in mad, glared at Proboda wordlessly, sneered at the videoplate.
As the corridor door closed, sealing her inside, Proboda said, “This is Inspector Troy.”
“Ms. Mokoroa, a year ago you sued to break a threeyear companionship contract with Mr. Vincent Darlington, shortly after you both had arrived here. The grounds were sexual incompatibility. Was Mr. Darlington aware at the time that you had already become the de facto companion of Mrs. Sondra Sylvester?”
Nancybeth stared silently at the image on the videoplate, her face set in a mask of contempt that was the product of long practice— —and which Sparta easily recognized as cover for her desperate confusion. Sparta waited.
“We’re friends,” Nancybeth said huskily.
Sparta said, “That’s nice. Was Mr. Darlington aware at the time that you were also lovers?”
“Just friends, that’s all!” The young woman stared wildly around at the claustrophobic carpeted room, at the hulking policeman beside her. “What the hell do you think you’re trying to prove? What is this . . . ?”
“All right, we’ll drop the subject. Now if you would . . .”
“I want a lawyer,” Nancybeth shrieked, deciding that offense was better than defense. “In here, right now. I know my rights.”
“. . . answer just one more question,” Sparta finished quietly.
“Not another damned word! Not one more word, bluesuit.
This is unlawful detainment. Unreasonable search. . . .”
Sparta and Proboda traded glances. Search?
“Impugnment of dignity,” Nancybeth continued.
“Slanderous implication. Malicious aforethought . . .”
Sparta almost grinned. “Don’t sue us until you hear the question, okay?”
“So we don’t have to arrest you first,” Proboda added.
Nancybeth choked on her anger, realizing she’d jumped the gun. They hadn’t arrested her yet. Possibly they wouldn’t. “What d’you wanna know?” She sounded suddenly exhausted.
“Nancybeth, do you think either of them—Sylvester or Darlington—would be capable of committing murder . . .
for your sake?”
Nancybeth was startled into laughter. “The way they talk about each other? They both would.”
Proboda leaned toward her. “The Inspector didn’t ask you what they . . .”
But Sparta silenced him with a glance from the videoplate.
“Okay, thanks, you can go. Through that door to your right.”
“Right?” Proboda asked, and Sparta nodded sharply.
He opened the doorway.
Nancybeth was suspicious. “Where’s that go?”
“Out,” Proboda said. “Fruits and costumes. You’re free.”
The young woman stared wide-eyed around the room again, her flaring nostrils seeming almost to quiver. Then she darted through the door like a wildcat freed from a trap. Proboda looked at the videoplate, exasperated. “Why not her? It looked to me like she had a lot to hide.”
“What she’s hiding has nothing to do with Star Queen, Viktor. It’s from her own past, I’d guess. Who’s next?”
“Mrs. Sylvester. Look, I have to say I hope you’ll handle this with more tact than . . .”
“Let’s play the game the way we agreed.”
Proboda grunted and opened the door to the tube.
“Mrs. Sondra Sylvester, Port Hesperus, chief executive of the Ishtar Mining Corporation.” His voice was as formal, as heavy with respect as a majordomo’s.
Sondra Sylvester floated smoothly into the small carpeted room, her heavy silks clinging about her. “Viktor?
Must we go through this yet again?”
“Mrs. Sylvester, I’d like to present Inspector Troy,” he “I’m sure you’re eager to get to your office, Mrs. Sylvester,”
Sparta said, “so I’ll be brief.”
“My office can wait,” Sylvester said firmly. “I’d like to unload my robots from that freighter.”
Sparta dipped her gaze to the phony filescreen, then up to Sylvester’s eyes. The women stared at each other through the electronics. “You’ve never dealt with Pavlakis Lines before,” Sparta said, “yet you helped persuade both the Board of Space Control and the ship’s insurers to waive the crew-of-three rule.”
“I believe I’ve just told Inspector Proboda why. I have six mining robots in the cargo, Inspector. I need to put them to work soon.”
“You were very lucky, then.” Sparta’s relaxed voice conceded no sign that she was being pressured. “You could have lost them all.”
“Unlikely. Less likely, even, than that a meteoroid would strike a ship in the first place. Which at any rate has nothing to do with the size of Star Queen’s crew.”
“Then would you have preferred to trust your robots— insured for approximately nine hundred million dollars, I believe—to an unmanned spacecraft?”
Sylvester smiled at that. It was an astute question, with political and economical overtones one hardly expected from a criminal inspector. “There are no unmanned interplanetary freighters, Inspector—thanks to the Space Board, and a long list of other lobbyists, the predictable sort of special interest groups. I don’t waste time on hypothetical questions.”
“Where did you spend the last three weeks of your Earth holidays, Mrs. Sylvester?”
A decidedly non-hypothetical question—and it cost Sylvester effort to cover her surprise. “I was vacationing in the south of France.”
“You rented a villa on the Isle du Levant, in which, except for the first day and last day and two occasions when you visited, Ms. Nancybeth Mokoroa stayed alone.
Where were you the rest of the time?”
Sylvester glanced at Proboda, who avoided her look.
His earlier superficial questioning had not prepared her to face this level of detail. “I was . . . I was on private business.”
“In the United States? In England?”
Sondra Sylvester said nothing. With visible effort she settled her features.
“Thank you, Mrs. Sylvester,” Sparta said coldly.
“Through that door to the left”—and Sparta noted that Proboda took just a little too long opening the hidden door, softening the impact of its surprise. “It will be necessary to detain you a short while longer. Not more than five or six minutes.”
Sylvester kept the mask in place as she went through the door, but she could not disguise her apprehension.
Proboda hurried the next passenger into the room.
“Mr. Blake Redfield. London. Representing Mr. Vincent Darlington of the Hesperian Museum.”
In the instant Proboda was opening the corridor door, Sparta’s fingers flicked out to the monitoring lens, degrading the videoplate image visible to Redfield. He came into the small room, looking alert, relaxed, proper in his expensive English suit, but showing just the edge of a young man’s temptation to strut his stuff in that certain cut of the lapels, that certain length of his shiny auburn “Inspector Troy, Space Board,” Proboda said, nodding at the videoplate, failing to notice the image had lost its crips focus. Blake turned toward the screen with the reserved, expectant half-smile that marks the socially adept.
If he recognized her he did not betray himself, but she knew he was as good at this game as she was. If he had a reason to hide, he could hide better than any of the others.