“It does,” he agreed. The vodka martini was hitting him hard. He’d skipped lunch, and now his belly was a yawning vacuum. “Tell me about Belter foods.”
“Well, the Palace is mainly french flatlander cooking.”
“I’d like to try Belter cooking. Tomorrow?”
“Honestly, Roy, I got spoiled on Earth. I’ll take you to a Belter place tomorrow, but I don’t think youll find any new taste thrills. Food’s too expensive here to do much experimental cooking.
“Too bad.” He glanced at the menu on a waiter’s chest, and recoiled. “Ye gods. The prices!”
“This is as expensive as it gets. At the other end is dole yeast, which is free—”
“Free?”
“—and barely worth it. If you’re down and out it’ll keep you fed, and it practically grows itself. Normal Belter cooking is almost vegetarian except for chicken and eggs. We grow chickens in most of the larger domes. Beef and pork we have to grow in the bubble-formed worlds, and seafood — well, we have to ship it up. Some comes freeze-dried; that’s cheaper.”
They punched their orders into a waiter’s keyboard. On Earth a restaurant this expensive would at least have featured human waiters… but Roy somehow couldn’t imagine a Belter playing the role of waiter.
The steaks Diane were too small, the vegetables varied and plentiful. Alice tore in with a gusto he admired. “I missed this,” she said. “On Earth I had to take up backpacking to work off all I was eating.”
Roy put his fork down. “I can’t figure out what he ate.”
“Drop it for awhile.”
“All right. Tell me about yourself.”
She told him about a childhood in Confinement asteroid, and the thick basement windows from which she could see the stars: stars that hadn’t meant anything to her until her first trip outside. The years of training in flying spacecraft — not mandatory, but your friends would think you were funny if you dropped out. Her first smuggling run, and the goldskin pilot who hung on her course like a leech, laughing at her out of her com screen. Three years hauling foodstuffs and hydroponics machinery to the Trojans before she’d tried it again, and then it had been the same laughing face, and when she’d bitched about it he’d lectured her on economics all the way to Hector.
They were down to coffee (freeze-dried) and brandy (a Belt product, and excellent). He told her about the cousins and the part-cousins and the generations of uncles and part-uncles and great-uncles and -aunts to match, all spread across the world, so that there were relatives anywhere he chose to go. He told her about Greatly ’Stelle.
She said, “So he was right.”
He knew just what she meant. “I wouldn’t have gone to the law. I couldn’t have turned down the money. Alice, he thinks of the whole human race that way. On wires. And he’s the only one who can see the wires.”
Alice’s face was almost a snarl. “I won’t let a man think of me that way.”
“And he takes samples. To see how we’re doing, where we’re going. I suppose his next step is a selective breeding project.”
“All right, what’s our next move?”
“I don’t know.” He sipped at his brandy. Wonderful stuff; it seemed to turn to vapor in his mouth. The Belt ought to export it. It’d be cheap in fueclass="underline" all downhill.
She said, “We’ve got three choices, I think. First is to tell everything we know, first to Vinnie, then to any newstape producer that’ll listen.”
“Will they listen?”
“Oh—” she waved a negligent band. “They’ll publish, I think. It’s a new slant on things. But we don’t have any proof. We’ve got a theory, and it’s got a gaping hole in it, and that’s all we’ve got.”
“What did he eat?”
“Right.”
“Well, we can try it.”
Alice thumbed a call button. When the waiter slid over in a whisper of air, she punched for two more brandies. She said, “Then what?”
“… Yah.”
“People would listen, and talk it over, and wonder. And nothing would happen. And gradually it would all blow over. Brennan would just wait it out, as long as it takes: a hundred years, a thousand…”
“We’d never know. We’d be yelling into a vacuum.”
“All right. Second choice is for us to drop it now.”
“No.”
“Agreed. Third choice is to go after him. With a Belt police fleet, if they’d back us. Otherwise, alone.”
He thought about it, sipping brandy. “Go where?”
“All right, let’s think about that.” Alice leaned back with her eyes half-closed. “He headed out toward interstellar space. He stopped in the cometary belt, well beyond Pluto’s orbit, for a couple of months — came to a dead stop, which must have cost him plenty in fuel — then went on.”
“His ship went on. If he’s here now, he must have sent the Pak drive section on without him. That leaves him with the Pak control cabin and a Belt singleship.”
“And fuel. All the fuel he wants, from the maneuvering reserve tanks in the drive section. They were filled before he took off.”
“All right. We assume he found a way to grow the roots for food. Maybe he took some seeds from the cargo pod before he left Mars. What does he need now that he doesn’t have?”
“A home. A base. Building materials.”
“Could he have mined the comets for those?”
“Maybe. For gasses and chemicals, anyway.”
“All right. I’ve been thinking about this too,” said Truesdale. “When you speak so glibly of the cometary belt, do you think you’re talking about a ring of rocks like the asteroid belt? The cometary belt is a region of convenience.” He spoke with some care. The brandy was getting to his tongue. If he mangled some complicated word she would only laugh. “It’s where the comets slow up and hover and fall back toward the sun. It’s ten to twenty times the volume of the solar system, and most of the solar system is in a plane anyway. There’s hydrogen in most of the compounds in a comet’s tail, isn’t there? So Brennan’s got no fuel problem. He could be anywhere in that shell by now, and somewhere else tomorrow. Where do we look?”
She watched him narrowly. “You’re giving up?”
“I’m tempted. It’s not that he’s too big for me. He’s too small. His hiding place is too mucking big.”
“There is another possibility,” she said. “Persephone.”
Persephone. And how the hell had he forgotten that there was a tenth planet? Still — “Persephone’s a gas giant, isn’t it?”
“I don’t know for sure, but I suppose so. It was detected by its mass, its influence on the orbits of comets. But the atmosphere could be frozen. He could hover until he’d burned a hole through the frozen layers, then land.” She leaned forward across the table. Her eyes were intense, and deep brown. “Roy, he had to get metals from somewhere. He built some kind of gravity generator, didn’t he? And he must have done some experimenting to get it. Metal. Lots of metal.”
“From a comet head, maybe?”
“I don’t think so.”
Truesdale shook his head. “He couldn’t mine Persephone. A planet that big has to be a gas giant — with a molten core. It’ll heat itself; it’ll have a gaseous atmosphere. He couldn’t land in it. The pressure would be, well, Jovian.”
“A moon, then! Maybe Persephone’s got a moon!”
“… Why the hell not? Why shouldn’t any random gas giant have a dozen moons?”
“He spent two months at rest, making sure he could live out there. He must have located Persephone and studied it with his telescopes. When he was sure it had moons, that was when he cut loose from the Pak drive section. Otherwise he’d have come home and turned himself in.”