"This one will get a reaction," Magda said.
The clerk's look said that Magda thought her little concerns were a lot more important in the grand scheme of things than they really were. She glared at him. Then the screen on his terminal lit. His brown face went smug as he glanced over to it?here he was, handing down the word from on high, Magda thought scornfully. His smugness abruptly shattered. "What the?" he said, startled into a purely human reaction.
Magda walked around to see the screen for herself. He didn't scowl at her the way he had before when she took such liberties. report from survey service ship j?ng ho: not in files, she read.
"That's crazy," she muttered. She turned on the clerk. "You must have screwed up the transmission again, uh, Pandit." She had to read his name backward through the clear plastic plate on his desk; she'd never bothered noticing what it was before.
"I did not," he said angrily. "What are you doing, saying things like that? You hovered over me like some miserable vulture, and you didn't complain then."
"So I didn't," she admitted, taken aback by his hot response. "Well, what has gone wrong, then?"
"How should I know? Whatever it is, as far as Survey Service Central can tell, you and your whole crew are still in space. You'll have to retransmit one more time."
"Wonderful. The whole damn crew is in space, except for me. Captain Brusilov will nail my hide to the wall when he gets back, too. He'll have as much trouble believing back-to-back computer failures as I do."
"What else could it be?" said the clerk?Pandit, Magda reminded herself. She could not stay irritated at him; he sounded as puzzled as she was.
She said, "For all I know, the people at Central are scrubbing the damn thing on purpose every time it comes in." Pandit's expression said what he thought of that. Magda didn't believe it either. A little paranoia was all well and good, but letting it run wild was something else again. She sighed. "I suppose I'll have to bring it in again, won't I?"
"Unless you'd sooner save yourself the trip and just send me a copy through your computer."
"Not after all the trouble we've gone through already. I want to watch you again while you make the transmission to Survey Service Central."
"Whatever you say." It wasn't Pandit's problem.
"I'll see you tomorrow."
Magda went back to the apartment and made another halfhearted lunge at her monograph. Before long, she was looking for an excuse to quit. She turned on the news. She did not watch often; most of the time on Topanga it was comfortable chatter and not much else. Not this afternoon. A rubble-strewn crater filled the screen; disaster crews struggled frantically amid the debris.
The newswoman was saying, "?almost certainly dead, of course, are the 317 passengers of the ill-fated starship. The toll is expected to rise far higher as the ruins of the crowded terminal building yield their grim secrets. Here is a list of deaths confirmed by credit card recovery?"
"Vultures," Magda muttered. She reached out to switch off the screen.
"?in the crash of the Clark County," the newswoman finished.
Magda's hand froze in the air. The rest of her also felt as if it had turned to ice.
Credit cards were nearly indestructible; men and women, sadly, not. Every so often, another name Magda knew would come up, setting her crying again. Irfan Kawar… Norma Anderssen… Captain Brusilov would never nail Magda's hide to the wall now. She even had tears for Atanasio Pedroza.
Then she saw her own name.
VI
Stavros opened the door and stepped back in surprise. "Hello! Come in."
"Thank you." Van Shui Pong had not phoned ahead. For that matter, he had not been back to the dormitory since the day he had first introduced himself. He nodded to Andrea, who was eating a candied orange. "Perhaps you and Stavros would like to go for a walk with me. The campus is a pleasant place; I don't get here often enough."
"A walk?" Stavros echoed foolishly. "It's close to midnight."
Van only waited. Andrea stood up and threw on her cloak. Muttering, Stavros got his cap and mantle out of the closet and closed the neck clasp. He and Andrea followed Van to the elevator.
The night was just this side of chilly. The air had a cool green smell, different from the way it smelled during the day. A few lights glowed in distant labs and offices. Still, the path the three walked was to the eye merely a pale snake coiling across dark lawns.
After a while, Van stopped. Stavros could hear the silence between the trills of Terran insects and Hyperion's own small night creatures. Van said, "I've finally managed to track down the crew of the J?ng Ho."
"Have you? That's wonderful!" Stavros exclaimed. "Will they back their report?"
Andrea, though, found another question. "Why did you bring us out here to tell us that?" Even before Van answered, that dampened Stavros's first rush of excitement.
The reporter nodded somberly. "You begin to understand. Here I can hope, at least, that we are not overheard. I don't dare be so optimistic about your rooms anymore, Stavros."
The grad student took a moment to find a name for what he heard in Van's voice. "You're afraid."
"Yes, I am. You see, the J?ng Ho's crew was aboard the Clark County." When neither Stavros nor Andrea reacted, the newsman snorted in irritation. "Why do we go to so much trouble getting out the news when no one pays any attention to us? The Clark County is the ship that crashed on Carson Planet not so long ago. Something over three hundred people died, including all of the crewmembers of the J?ng Ho."
"That proves the Survey Service is lying in its teeth," Stavros burst out. "If the J?ng Ho didn't get back till the day Paulina Koch claimed, how could the crew have gone on their junket and had that accident?"
"If it was an accident," Andrea said slowly.
Stavros felt the air rush out of him as if he had been kicked in the belly. "That makes too much sense for me to like," he said at last.
"And for me, too," Van said. "I was going to point it out to you people if you didn't come up with it for yourselves. Too many coincidences add up to scaring me a lot?if we keep pushing at this thing, I have a bad feeling we'll end up the same way your Professor Fogelman and twenty Survey Service crewfolk ended up. I'm sorry, but I've had enough. I wish you well if you want to go on, but you'll have to do it without me. My phone won't accept your calls any more; if I hadn't been afraid it was tapped, I'd have called you to tell you this. As is, we have a decent chance of talking in private here. Now I've talked, and now I'm going to leave."
"But, but?" Stavros sputtered to a halt and tried again. "But now we can prove the Service really is trying to suppress the report on Bilbeis IV. They lied about when the J?ng Ho came back, which meant the report I have is genuine. It can't mean anything else."
"No, it means one thing more, Stavros. It means the Service isn't just trying to suppress that report?they're doing it. Ask Fogelman, ask the J?ng Ho's crew, ask three hundred other people on the Clark County if you doubt me… and if you can. I don't need to ask them: I get the message loud and clear."
Andrea said, "How can you back away from this, knowing what you know?" She did not sound angry; if she had, Van would never have answered her. She only sounded bewildered.