“That sounds right. He may have been growing tree-of-life root… He might not still be there.”
“He’d have left traces. Were talking about a moon now. There’d be a scar where he landed a fusion drive, and big gaping scars where he dug his mines, and buildiiigs he’d have to abandon, and heat. He could cover up some of the damage, but not the heat, not on some little moon way the hell beyond Pluto. It would have gone into the environment, and fouled up superfluid effects, and vaporized some of the ices.”
“We’d have proof,” said Truesdale. “Holograph pictures. At worst we’d have holos of the scars he left on Persephones moon. Not just a half-cocked theory.”
“And at best?” She grinned. “We’d meet the Brennan-monster face to face.”
“Have at him!”
“Right on.” Alice raised her brandy. They clinked the blown glass snifters carefully, and drank.
The fear of falling brought him half awake, and the familiar sensations of a hangover did the rest. He sat up on a bed like a pink cloud: Alice’s bed. They’d come here last night, perhaps to celebrate or to seal a bargain, perhaps just because they liked each other.
No headache. Good brandy leaves a hangover, but not a headache.
It had been one of the better nights.
Alice wasn’t there. Gone to work? No, he could hear her in the kitchen. He padded into the kitchen on bare feet. She was frying pancakes in the nude.
He asked, “Did we really mean it?”
“Now you get to taste Belter cooking,” she said. She handed him a plate with a stack of pancakes, and when he grabbed it wrong they bounced and floated, just like in the advertisements. He managed to catch them, but the stack came down skewed.
They tasted like pancakes: good pancakes, but pancakes. Maybe you had to include the nudity of the cook to make it Belter cooking. He poured imitation maple syrup, and made a mental note: send Alice some bottles of Vermont maple syrup, if she stayed in the Belt, if he ever reached Earth alive.
He asked again. “Did we really mean it?”
She gave him a cup and a jar of freeze-dried coffee with an Earth brand. “Let’s find out about Persephone first. Then we can decide.”
“I can do that myself, at the hotel. Route you the information the way you sent it to me yesterday. Save you some work.”
“Good idea. Then I can brace Vinnie.”
“I’m wondering if a goldskin fleet would let me come along.”
She sat in his lap — feather-lightly, but a lot of girl, as much girl as a man could need. She looked him in the eyes. “Which way are you hoping?”
He thought about it. “I’ll come if your superiors let me. But I’ll put it to you straight: if I can set the goldskins on Vandervecken’s tail, I’ve proved that he can’t manipulate me. As long as Vandervecken knows it, that’s all I care about.”
“I… suppose that’s fair enough.”
They left the apartment together. Alice’s apartment was part of what seemed a cliff dwelling, apartments carved into a wall of the deep hydrate-mining scar that was Alderson City. They took a tube train back to Waring, and parted there.
PERSEPHONE: First discovered by mathematical analysis of perturbations in the orbits of certain known comets, 1972. First sighted 1984. Persephone is retrograde, in an orbit tilted sixty-one degrees to the ecliptic. Mass is somewhat less than Saturn.
Possible first exploratory visit to Persephone was by Alan Jacob Mion, in 2094. Mion’s claim has been cast into doubt by the lack of photographic evidence (his films were damaged by radiation, as was Mion himself; he had stripped shielding from his ship to save fuel) and by Mion’s claim that Persephone has a moon.
A more formal exploratory expedition was launched in 2170. Persephone was reported to have no moons and an atmosphere typical of gas giant worlds, rich in hydrogen compounds. The planet’s atmosphere would be worth scoop-mining if the planet itself were as available as Jupiter. There have been no further expeditions.
Damn, thought Truesdale. No moons.
He wondered if Brennan could have scoop-mined Persephone’s cold chemical gasses. With what, his cupped hands? And for what? He couldn’t have found metals that way… and it didn’t matter; he’d have left no scars in the clouds.
He located the report of the 2170 expedition and read it. With a little more trouble he found a condensed interview between Alan Jacob Mion and a reporter for Spectrum News. He was a boastful, flamboyant type, the kind of man who would take a year off to orbit a tenth planet, just to say he was the first. Not a careful observer. Perhaps his “moon” had been a comet head cruising past Persephone on a slow parabola.
He used his information terminal to send the material off to Police Headquarters.
Alice came back about 1800. “Vinnie didn’t buy it,” she said wearily.
“I don’t blame her. No moons. All our beautiful logic, and no mucking moon.” He had spent the day trying to play tourist in a city that wasn’t designed for tourists. Waring was a working city.
“She wouldn’t have gone for it even if there’d been a moon. She said… well, I’m not sure she wasn’t right.” Alice’s weariness was not a thing of gravity. She did not drop sagging onto the bed. Her posture was straight, her head high. But in her eyes and her voice… “In the first place, this is all hypothetical, she said. Which is true. In the second place, if it were true, what would we be sending a poor, helpless goldskin fleet into? In the third place, this Snatcher business has been adequately explained as cases of the Far Look.”
“I didn’t get that.”
“The Far Look. Self-hypnosis. A Belter spends too long staring into infinity. Sometimes he wakes up in orbit around his destination without remembering anything after his takeoff. In fact, Vinnie showed me the report on Norma Stier. Remember her? Disappeared 2230—”
“Right.”
“She was on course during that four months she was supposed to be missing. The films in her ship prove it.”
“But the bribes. The Snatcher bribes the people he kidnaps.”
“We’ve got evidence of a couple of bribes. But they could be explained away. People using the Snatcher story to hide profits from a smuggling run — or something dirtier.” She smiled. “Or Vandervecken doctored the films on Norma Stier’s ship. I believe in the Snatcher, myself.”
“Hell, yes!”
“But Vinnie makes a telling point. What are we going up against with a miserable Belt police fleet? Brennan had to get his metal from somewhere. If he mined Persephone’s moon, he must have moved it afterward!”
“That didn’t occur to you?”
“No.”
“It’s not that startling. What are we talking about, a mass the size of Ganymede, or a little ball of rock like Vesta? Asteroids have been moved before.”
“Right… and he had unlimited hydrogen fuel, and he already had his gravity generator, and we’re already assuming he moved the Mahmed Asteroid. But he couldn’t have moved it far. Any metallic chunk we find out there is going to be Persephone’s moon, right? And he wouldn’t have moved it unless it was pretty telling evidence against him.”
“You’re still going up against him?”
Truesdale took a deep breath. “Yah. I’ll need your help to pick my equipment.”
“I’m coming with you.”
“Good.”
“I was afraid I’d have to drop it,” she said. “I don’t have the money to finance anything like this, and you didn’t seem… eager enough, and Vinnie just about convinced me it’s a wild goose chase anyway. Roy, suppose it is?”