Gina Styan and Barney French stepped forward to stand by Alice’s body.
“She’s the one?” said Gina.
“No doubt about it. We caught her in the act. She had overridden the safety and she was all set to open the smelter. If Luban and I hadn’t come along when we did, she’d have killed the lot of you. The whole group of apprentices, plus Gina and Barney.”
The expression on Jigger’s face ordered Rick, about to blurt out that he had been no help, to keep quiet.
Gina was nodding slowly. “So that was it. I wondered.” She turned to face the shocked group. “It’s time to explain a few things that we couldn’t tell you about before. For over a year we’ve known of efforts to ruin Vanguard Mining operations. We were pretty sure that it was Avant Mining’s work, but we had no proof. The ‘accident’ that you saw on CM-31 was a good example. It was deliberate sabotage, a planted explosive on the outer surface of the smelting cylinder. Jigger and I suspected as much when Morse Watanabe and the Avant Mining ship, the Scarab, just ‘happened’ to come along at precisely the right time to claim a derelict. He had no way of knowing that two survivors had avoided the blow-up by being outside the habitat, or that we would arrive on the scene so quickly.
“We had suspicions, but that was all. And we had no proof that a saboteur had been planted in the latest group of trainees. So far as we were concerned, every one of you was suspect. But we were able to narrow it down, bit by bit. When Alice Klein told Barney that she didn’t feel well, earlier today, we didn’t like the sound of that. It meant that she, and she alone, might not be here at the smelter tonight. Jigger agreed to hang behind and keep an eye on her.”
“I nearly failed.” Jigger again stared straight at Rick. “She was a smart operator, smart enough to fool any of us most of the time. She sneaked out of a cargo lock instead of the usual exit, and she was on the way here before I knew it. Good thing I was already in my suit, just in case. But you’re all lucky to be alive.”
“We are alive. That’s what matters.” Barney French had been watching the apprentices closely, monitoring their expressions. “Look, it’s quite obvious that this is no time for any sort of party. We are going back to the main station. On the way you can think about this whole thing, and when we get there we’ll meet in the main hall. If you have questions, I’ll try to answer them.”
“But what—” Chick Teazle started.
“I said there, not here.” Barney clapped her hands. “Come on, do it.” She turned to Rick and added in a lower voice. “You join us later if you want to. For the moment, you go with Jigger. No questions—just go.”
No questions.
Rick drearily followed Jigger Tait, away from the smelter and into Jigger’s private room in the main body of CM-26.
No questions—when he had a thousand, starting to percolate up from the depths of his numbed brain. But more disturbing than any question was a growing conviction. If Alice were a saboteur, planted in the group way back at the time of the first tests on Earth, then her whole relationship with Rick had been a lie.
“I’m afraid you’re right.” Jigger Tait agreed when Rick suggested it. He sat draped over a chair, his forearms along its back and his chin on his fists. “She picked you out, but I doubt that she had any special fondness for you. She was working on Vido Valdez, too, just in case.”
“She thought I was an idiot,” Rick said bitterly.
“Not an idiot, or you would have been no use to her. She probably thought you were bright. But intelligence and experience of the world are two different things.” When Rick grunted at his own stupidity, Jigger went on, “Don’t feel too bad about that. Men and women have manipulated each other right through history, everyone from emperors to peasants.”
“What did she have in store for me?”
“I don’t know. My bet is that it would have been something deadly to you. You’re very lucky to be alive. She saw an opportunity tonight to wipe out the entire group of apprentices in one go, so she grabbed the chance without calling on you. If she had succeeded, I think she’d have tried to make the whole thing look like an accident, the way that the destruction of CM-31 was supposed to be an accident. If the Scarab had arrived before us you can bet that all evidence of sabotage would have disappeared before anyone else could see it.”
Rick recalled Jigger’s face, glaring at the vanishing plume of the Scarab’s exhaust. “You knew all that, didn’t you, when the Scarab first appeared? That’s why you were so angry and rude. But how did you know? I mean, what made you suspicious when the rest of us didn’t have a clue?”
“I was afraid you’d ask me that.” Jigger’s big moon face was gloomy, and he shook his head. “I could make up a story, but one of you would see through it. Didn’t it strike you as strange that Gina and I have been with you all the time, right from your flight from Earth up to CM-2?”
“I never thought it was anything out of the ordinary. Deedee did, though. She said you’d been snooping. She pointed it out to me, and said we ought to keep an eye on you.”
“Deedee is one with-it girl. But I guess it’s time to tell the truth. Gina and I work for Vanguard Mining, just as we said. We don’t work for Operations, though. We work in Security. We were assigned to tag along with your group because there was word of a possible saboteur. The problem was, we had no idea who it might be—you, or Deedee, or Alice, or Vido, it could have been anyone. Actually, our first clue that it might be Alice came from Turkey Gossage.”
“Did he see her doing something?” Rick was beginning to suspect that he was the only blind person in the solar system.
“Not in the usual sense. He had been reviewing her test results, and he noticed that she always scraped through with a score just a few points above the pass mark. That can happen a few times by accident. But if it happens consistently, that’s unnatural. It suggests that the person taking the test really knows the right answers, and is deliberately giving enough wrong ones to keep her down in the pack. Scraping through was intended to make Moira Lindstrom inconspicuous. Thanks to Turkey’s experience and shrewdness, it had the opposite effect.
“That gave a starting point. But of course it wasn’t anything like proof. It could have been just a statistical fluke.”
Jigger had been studying Rick as they talked. He had noticed the yawns and the drooping eyelids.
“Rick Luban!” And, when Rick jerked to attention, “You don’t realize it, but you’ve had more shocks than a person can stand in one day. Stress exhausts more than anything. We still have a lot to talk about, but we won’t do it tonight.”
“The other group, with Barney . . .”
“Will still be there in the morning.”
“I can’t possibly go to sleep. Everything inside my head is a big jumbled-up mess.”
“I’m sure it is. But you need rest.” Jigger pointed across to his own bunk. “I’ll tell you what. Stretch out on that for a little while. If you’re still awake in ten minutes, you can get up again and we’ll talk some more. But it’s my bet that you’ll fall asleep.”
“I bet I don’t. I can’t possibly sleep.” Rick went over to the bunk, lay down on it, and reluctantly closed his eyes.
He lost his bet with Jigger by eight and a half minutes.
Chapter Nineteen
Rick emerged from a vivid nightmare, a chaos of screams and freefall darkness and bursting bodies. He came suddenly awake, opened his eyes, and sat up.