“No.”
“There used to be commercial sailing ships — sailing on the ocean, by wind power. Vandervecken was trying to round the Cape of Good Hope during a heavy storm. He swore a blasphemous oath that he would round the Cape if he had to beat against the wind until the last day. In stormy weather passing ships can still see him, still trying to round the Cape. Sometimes he stops ships and asks them to take letters to home.”
Her laugh was shaky. “Letters to who?”
“The Wandering Jew, maybe. There are variations. One says Vandervecken murdered his wife and sailed away from the police. One says there was a murder on board. Writers seem to like this legend. It turns up in novels, and there was an old flat movie, and an even older opera, and — have you heard that old song the backpackers sing around the campfires? I’m the only tar that e’er jumped ship from Vandervecken’s crew…”
“The Bragging Song.”
“All the legends have that one thing in common: an immortal man sailing under a curse, forever.”
Alice Jordan’s eyes went big and round.
“What is it?” he asked.
“Jack Brennan.”
“Brennan. I remember. The man who ate the roots aboard the Pak ship. Jack Brennan. He’s supposed to be dead.”
“Supposed to be.” She was looking down at her desk. Gradually her eyes focused on coils of printout. “Roy, I’ve got to get some work done. Where are you staying, the Palace?”
“Sure, it’s the only hotel in Waring City.”
“I’ll pick you up there, eighteen hundred. You’ll need a guide to the restaurants anyway.”
For a monopoly, the Palace was an excellent hotel. Human service was spotty, but the machinery — bathroom facilities, cleaning widgetry, waiters — all ran to perfection. Belters seemed to treat their machines as if their lives depended on them.
The east wall was three meters from the dome itself, and featured picture windows guarded by big rectangular screens that swung automatically to shut out raw sunlight. The screens were open now. Truesdale looked out through a wall of glass, over the shallow bulge of the Anderson City dome, past a horizon so jagged and close that he felt he was on a mountain peak. But the stars were not this vivid from any mountain on Earth. He saw the universe, close enough to touch.
And the room was costing him plenty. He was going to have to learn to spend money again without wincing.
He took a shower. It was fun. The shower delivered great slow volumes of hot water that tended to stay on his body as if jellied. There were side jets, and a needle spray. A far cry from the old days, he supposed, when the deep cavity that now housed Anderson City had been carved by the extensive, expensive mining of hydratebearing rock. But fusion was cheap, and water once made could be distilled over and over, indefinitely.
When he left the shower he found that there had been a delivery. The information terminal beside his desk had delivered several books’ worth of information, printing it into a book the size of the San Diego telephone book, with pages that could be wiped after the departure of a guest. Alice Jordan must have sent this. He leafed through it until he found Nicholas Sohl’s memoirs, and started there. The section on the Pak ship was near the end.
There was a chill on him when he finished. Nicholas Sohl, once First Speaker for the Belt… not a fool. The thing to remember, Sohl had written, is that he’s brighter than we are. Maybe he’s thought of something I haven’t.
But how bright would a man have to be to make up for the lack of a foodsource?
He read on…
Alice Jordan arrived ten minutes early. At the door she glanced past him at the, information terminal. “You got it. Good. How far did you get?”
“Nick Sohl’s memoirs. A textbook on the physiology of the Pak. I skimmed Graves’s book on evolution. He claims a dozen plants that could have been imported from the Pak world.”
“You’re a flatlander. What do you think?”
“I’m not a biologist. And I skipped the proceedings of Olympus Base. I don’t really care why a gravity polarizer doesn’t work yet.”
She sat down on the edge of the bed. She was wearing loose slacks and a blouse: not dressed for dinner, in Truesdale’s view. But he hadn’t expected skirts in Vesta’s gravity.
She said, “I think it’s Brennan.”
“So do I.”
“But he’s got to be dead. He didn’t have a food source.”
“He had his own singleship on a tow line. Even two hundred years ago, a singleship kitchen would feed him for a long time, wouldn’t it? It was the roots he was missing. Maybe he had a few he took from the cargo pod, and there were more aboard the Pak ship. But when he ate those he’d be finished.”
“But you still think he’s alive. So do I. Let’s hear your reasons.”
Truesdale took a minute to get his thoughts organized. “The Flying Dutchman. Vandervecken. A man immortalized by a curse. It fits too well.”
She nodded. “What else?”
“Oh, the kidnappings… and the fact that he puts us back. Even with the chance that he’ll get caught, he puts us back. He’s too considerate for an alien and he’s too powerful for a human. What’s left?”
“Brennan.”
“Then there’s the duplicate Stonehenge.” He had to tell her about that. “I’ve been thinking about it ever since you mentioned Brennan. You know what it sounds like to me? Brennan had plenty of time with the gravity polarizer in the Pak cargo pod. He must have solved the principle, and improved it into a gravity generator. Then he had to play games with it.”
“Games. Right again. This superintelligence must have been like a new toy to him.”
“He may have pulled some other practical jokes.”
“Yes,” she said with too much emphasis.
“What? Another practical joke?”
Alice laughed. “Ever hear of the Mahmed Asteroid? It was in those excerpts I sent you.”
“I guess I didn’t get to it.”
“An asteroid a couple of miles in diameter, mainly ice. The Belt telescopes spotted it fairly early, in… 2183, I think. It was still outside Jupiter’s orbit. Mahmed was the first man to land on it. He was also the man who plotted its orbit and found out that it was going to hit Mars.”
“Did it?”
“Yah. It probably could have been stopped, even with the technology of the day, but I suppose nobody was really interested. It was going to hit well away from Olympus Base. They did carve off a hefty chunk of ice and move it into a new orbit. Nearly pure water, valuable stuff.”
“I don’t see what this has to do with—”
“It killed the martians. Every martian on the planet, as far as we can tell. The water vapor content of the atmosphere went way up.”
“Oh,” said Truesdale. “Genocide. Some practical joke.”
“I told you, Vandervecken may be too big for us.”
“Yah.” From a recorded voice on a self-destructing spool Vandervecken had grown in all dimensions. Now he was two hundred and twenty years long, and the realm of his activities blanketed the solar system. In physical strength he had grown too. The Brennan-monster could have slung an unconscious Elroy Truesdale over his shoulder and carried him down off the Pinnacles. “He’s big, all right. And we’re the only ones who know it. What do we do now?”
“Let’s get dinner,” she said.
“You know what I mean.”
“I know what you mean,” Alice said gently. “But let’s get dinner.” markup_rbmk-3~1.html — n56
The top of the Palace Hotel was a four-sided dome that showed two views of reality. For the east and West quadrants looked out on Vesta, but the north and south quadrants were holograph projections of some mountainous part of Earth. “It’s a looped tape, several days long,” Alice told him. “Taken from a car cruising at ground level. This looks like morning in Switzerland.”