The shuttle came sighing up just as the man looked to have worked up the nerve to speak to her. With a feeling of relief, she fed Marie Roux's credit card into the slot by the door; she wanted nothing to do with him. Her leeriness only increased when she heard the fare apparatus suck up a bill?he had paid his way aboard with cash. People who used untraceable money generally had a reason for it, and rarely a good one.
From habit, Magda sat near the front of the shuttle. She was soon kicking herself for it. Once, when she yawned and stretched, she caught the stranger staring at her from behind, though again he quickly looked away when he saw she had noticed him. After that she did not look back, but she imagined she felt his gaze on the back of her neck. It made for an unpleasant ride; she was glad to get off.
That did not last long. The stranger scrambled down as the shuttle was on the point of pulling away; its doors, which had started to close, hissed open for him. He had been holding his backpack in his lap and paused to resling it before leaving.
A trifle faster than she might have otherwise, Magda walked toward the Survey Service office, fortunately no more than a block and a half from the shuttle stop. She scowled?the stranger was still following her. If he tries anything cute, she told herself, I'll make him regret it. Like anyone who did Survey Service fieldwork, she had been well trained in unarmed combat.
All of which, she thought, would do her no good at all if he had a projectile weapon. But if he planned on shooting her, he'd already had plenty of chances.
That reasoning was reassuring, but only until he came into the office after her. Then he made her feel like an idiot, because he headed straight for the director's room in the back. She supposed that having two people come from the same shuttle stop to the Survey Service office wasn't twisting coincidence's arm outrageously.
Pandit spotted her and saved whatever document he was working on. "My screen is clear," he declared. "We are ready for another try?a successful one this time, I hope."
"So do I," Magda said, taking the data card from her hold-all, "but I'm not going to hold my breath. Central doesn't seem to want to know about Bilbeis IV."
She had forgotten the fellow who had been on the shuttle with her. He stopped in his tracks, turned, and walked back toward her. "You really are Magda Kodaly, aren't you?" he said.
"What if I am?" she said, her suspicion of him flaring again.
"I thought you were, but I didn't dare believe it. I thought you were dead."
"You aren't the only one," she muttered. He stared at her, not understanding. "Never mind. What do you want?"
"That's the report on Bilbeis IV you have there, the one from the J?ng Ho?"
"Yes. Who are you, anyway? How do you know about it? I've been trying for weeks to get it into Survey Service Central files, and I haven't had any luck yet. This is my fourth try."
Pandit had loaded the data card into his terminal and was about to hit the transmit button. "Don't send it!" the stranger exclaimed, so urgently that the clerk jerked his finger away in alarm. "Whatever you do, don't send it," the fellow repeated. He bent down, pushing Pandit aside, and took the card from the computer.
"Give me that back," Pandit said indignantly.
"No." The stranger stepped away from the terminal. He still had a tight grip on the data card. Magda tensed herself to grab it away from him. He noticed and handed it to her. "Here?it's yours. All I ask is that you don't transmit it until you've heard me out. You're in danger if it goes to Central?you may be in danger anyhow."
"Do you know," Magda said to nobody in particular, "I've had more melodrama in my life in the little while since we came back from Bilbeis IV than in all the time before that, and I don't like it one bit."
"I believe you," the stranger said with perfect seriousness. "So have I."
Magda studied him. He neither looked nor sounded like a madman… and things had been strange lately. "All right, talk," she said. "This had better be good."
"None of it is good," he said; again he seemed very tired. "I don't want to talk here, in front of Survey Service people." Pandit let out an indignant sniff. The fellow said, "Nothing personal. Believe me, you're better off not knowing any of this."
"All right, we'll find a public terminal and see what you're so excited about," Magda decided. She pointed warningly at Pandit. "Don't go away. I may be back very soon." Then she turned back to the stranger. "Who are you, anyway?"
He waited until they were back on the sidewalk outside before he answered. "My name is Stavros Monemvasios. I am?I was?a grad student in anthropology at the University of Hyperion. My seminar group got assigned to summarize some newly arrived Survey Service reports."
Magda nodded; she'd had similar assignments herself before she escaped to fieldwork. She and Monemvasios walked into a bank. The terminals were next to the pay phones. "You haven't really told me anything yet, you know," Magda said as she stepped into a booth. It was on the crowded side for two.
"Yes, I do know. I want to show you instead." Stavros looked the terminal over and laughed ruefully. "You'll have to pay for it, though. This thing doesn't have a cash slot, and I cashed out my credit card to get off Hyperion without making myself conspicuous."
"Hmm." Magda gave him another hard look. Now he was practically admitting he'd done something shady on Hyperion. But she'd come this far… Clicking her tongue in exasperation, she shoved Marie Roux's credit card into the opening by the keyboard. The screen came on.
Stavros had been rummaging in his backpack. He pulled out a data card, fed it into the machine, and hit recall. The abstract of a document appeared.
"Where did you get that?" Magda was proud of herself. Instead of screaming the question, she let it out in a whispered hiss, but it was no less urgent for that.
"The report on Bilbeis IV, you mean? My prof gave it to me. I told you, it was my assignment. Go through it?make sure it's the same document the J?ng Ho submitted to Central."
Magda scrolled rapidly through the report, checking a page here, a page there. She was soon satisfied. "It's the same document." She was about to burst with questions and felt like reaching over to shake the answers out of Monemvasios. "How did your prof get it? And why isn't he screaming his head off about it?"
"He got it because Survey Service records are?or are supposed to be?public documents. And he isn't screaming about it because he's dead." The flat statement brought Magda up short. Stavros also paused before he went on and seemed to have to bring out his words by main force. "So is a woman who was in my class?she and I were trying to make people notice what this report means. We were also falling in love with each other, but that's another story. And so is everybody who was on the Clark County. That includes the whole crew of the J?ng Ho, or I thought it did until I met you. Do I need to draw any more pictures for you?"
"You're saying the crash wasn't an accident." Magda's voice sounded far away in her own ears.
"If it was, it was a mighty convenient accident for the Survey Service. Not even the Assembly can subpoena dead people or ask them awkward questions about a report the Service calls a fraud from top to bottom."
"A what?" Magda clenched her fists until her nails bit into her palms. "The hell it is! We worked our tails off on that thing."