“The question was asked.”
“ Did you love him?”
“There was a problem to be solved.”
Grace stared at him. She had met many bruised people in the course of her life; it was a bruising world. But Zane was exceptional. “Do you think any of the others loved him?”
“Matt loved him, I think, Matt Weiss. Matt told me so, once. He was drunk.”
“Did you ask anybody for help? Did you tell anybody what was going on?”
“He asked the father,” he said oddly. Then, a double-take: “I asked my father.”
“And?”
“He said a Candidate for the Ark crew should sort out such issues himself. He said such a victim was dirty and unworthy.”
She pressed him for more details, and he replied in the same abstracted, impersonalized way.
For Zane there had been no sudden fracture of his relationship with Harry, no revealed lies, no blowup, no rejection, as there had been for Venus. Zane had never taken control. The relationship had gone on and on, the sex. Yet there had been an ultimate crisis.
“Harry said he’d protect you. But in the end he failed, didn’t he? You were deselected.”
“There was a psych test. Zane Glemp is technically capable but emotionally unintelligent. That was what the doctors said.”
“So in the end Harry didn’t fulfill the bargain. All that sex, all the creeping around, your father’s anger-the shame you must have felt. Despite all that he didn’t deliver the one thing you wanted, a place on the crew.”
“Perhaps that was never possible. His influence was always more negative than positive, the ability to stop people with a bad report rather than confirm a place.”
“It was all a lie, then. You hated him for it,” she said, pushing. “You hated him for blackmailing you, for not delivering you a place on the Ark. You had means and motive to kill him.”
“There was no hate. There was nothing. Murder was not necessary.” And instinctively she believed him. Zane was a victim, not an perpetrator; he could never have taken control, as Venus had, and as the killer evidently had.
“Then if you didn’t kill him, who? It sounds as if it must have been Matt.”
“I don’t know.”
“But logic suggests-”
“Logic?” For the first time he turned to look at her directly; his eyes were surprisingly soft, full of character. “To see the logic, ask yourself what Matt wanted. And, indeed, what Harry wanted. We’re here. Gunnison.”
The car was slowing. Grace peered out of the windows, curious. The sky had cleared to reveal a deep blue, and the old town was a pretty place of clapboard buildings, surrounded by pine trees and with the Rockies floating on the horizon. But it was overwhelmed by Project Nimrod, crowded with fresh-looking prefabricated buildings and industrial facilities, gantries, rails, pipelines that bridged the road, immense storage tanks that were plastered with frost even in the August heat. She thought she recognized a rocket gantry, slim and upright, with propellant hoses dangling.
The car pulled up at the foot of a massive building, like a factory, a rectangular block maybe thirty meters wide and three times as tall. A tangle of cylindrical tanks and immense coiled springs were contained within a framework of scaffolding.
“So where’s your spacecraft?” She had been expecting something like the moth-shaped space shuttle orbiters in the photos Gary Boyle used to show her.
He smiled and pointed at the large industrial building. “That’s it.”
34
Where Venus Jenning and Zane Glemp had seemed indifferent to Harry Smith’s death, Matt Weiss was heartbroken. Grace spoke to him in a small conference room in the basement of one of the launch-center buildings. It was a bare, bleak room, with unpainted plaster walls and a concrete floor. The room was hot, stuffy, stale, despite the noisy aircon. There was evidently no luxury in any of these new project installations.
Grace gulped more coffee. She had had one hell of a long day. She didn’t even know where she’d be sleeping that night. She tried to focus on the young man in front of her.
Around the same age as the others-Zane was twenty-one, Holle and Venus twenty-two-Matt Weiss was stocky, strong-looking, with a broad face with a wide nose and heavy lips. He wore his hair severely crew cut, military style. He wasn’t in the usual red-and-blue Candidate suit; he had been working on some heavy engineering project and he wore jeans and a vest. His bare arms, heavily muscled, were streaked with oil, though his face and hands were clean, and his boots left dirt marks on the floor. He looked down at his hands, which were folded on his lap. He seemed to be on the brink of crying.
“I knew the sex was wrong, sort of,” he said. “I was never like that. I had girlfriends, before I joined the Academy. I was a cadet with the Denver PD. Once I got in here, when I found out how competitive it was and how easy you could get washed out, I got scared.” He had a broad Texan accent.
“Scared of being sent back.”
He looked up. “I don’t know what you’ve seen. My parents died in a food riot in Dallas when I was a kid. Then with the cops I was on the front line, even as a cadet. There’s never enough cops. I was still just a kid. Once, in Nebraska, these rafters tried to crash the barriers. We had riot shields and we linked arms, and we just shoved our way down that old roadway and threw them back into the water. There were mothers holding their babies up to us. Everybody was screaming.”
“I understand-”
“Every second from age twelve, I was afraid that I’d screw up somehow and end up on the other side. With the eye-dees. I mean, what’s the difference between me and them? We’re all just Americans, just people.”
“And Harry Smith said he’d save you from being sent back.”
The pattern, as it had begun, was familiar to Grace by now. Harry homed in on his students at their most vulnerable, seduced them with promises of loyalty and safety, and then subjected them to the strange choreography of his first nighttime visit. And then, just as before, he told Matt he loved him.
“And I loved him back,” Matt said defiantly now, and he wiped a running nose on the back of one massive hand. “Why shouldn’t I? He was protecting me, like a father, or a brother. You love the people who protect you. That’s what love is. So he made me suck his dick. Probably half the fucking Candidates are sucking dick to stay in the program, who cares?”
He talked a while longer about his relationship with Harry, how it had continued right up until the time he had been killed. And he talked about the accident. He spoke of the technical details of how the test bomb had been tampered with, the additional charge loaded in. After Zane initially discovered the tampering, Matt had helped the forensic team piece together what had happened. Yes, he could have been the one who did it. No, he hadn’t done it. “Ask Zane,” he said coldly. “I loved him, Harry. I really did. Zane didn’t.”
“Setting the charge,” she said. “The bomb that killed Harry. How much planning would it take? I mean, could it be done on impulse, quickly, as soon as you had the idea? Or would it have taken some planning?”
He hesitated. “You could do it fast. If you knew what you were doing, and you were in the right place with the access to the stuff you needed. Wouldn’t take no planning. Ask Zane.”
When she was done, she had Matt escort her out into the open air. Gordo Alonzo had come down from Alma and was waiting for her. He nodded to her, eyes hidden behind huge black sunglasses.
They walked the few hundred meters to the Orion spaceship, in its vast, gleaming, uncompleted frame. The stack was topped by a pyramid shape of black, gleaming tiles. She could hear a hiss coming from deep within the structure, and saw showers of sparks-welding torches, perhaps. It looked so massive it might sink into the Earth, rather than rise up from it. The ship was closely guarded, with armed troopers patroling a wire-fence perimeter, and others walking along gantries in the guts of the thing itself.