"But all your stories have been so positive."
"I'm not the only newscaster. And... the public doesn't always determine it anyway. Right now, they're in favor of Charlie, seventy-thirty. But that's declining, and a lot of that seventy percent is soft, as they say. Not sure. The talk is, the decision makers are going to make it look like an unfortunate accident. Tik-Tok will be a great help there; it'll be easy to provoke an incident that could kill Charlie."
"It's just not right," Bach said, gloomily. Galloway leaned forward and looked at her intently.
"That's what I wanted to know. Are you still on Charlie's side, all the way? And if you are, what are you willing to risk to save her?"
Bach met Galloway's intent stare. Slowly, Galloway smiled again.
"That's what I thought. Here's what I want to do."
Charlie was sitting obediently by the telephone in her room at the appointed time, and it rang just when Megan had said it would. She answered it as she had before.
"Hi there, kid. How's it going?"
"I'm fine. Is Anna there too?"
"She sure is. Want to say hi to her?"
"I wish you'd tell her it was you that told me to—"
"I already did, and she understands. Did you have any trouble?"
Charlie snorted.
"With him? What a doo-doo-head. He'll believe anything I tell him. Are you sure he can't hear us in here?"
"Positive. Nobody can hear us. Did Tik-Tok tell you what all you have to do?"
"I think so. I wrote some of it down."
"We'll go over it again, point by point. We can't have any mistakes."
When they got the final word on the decision, it was only twelve hours to impact. None of them had gotten any sleep since the close approach. It seemed like years ago to Bach.
"The decision is to have an accident," Galloway said, hanging up the phone. She turned to Rossnikova who bent, hollow-eyed, over her array of computer keyboards. "How's it coming with the probe?"
"I'm pretty sure I've got it now," she said, leaning back. "I'll take it through the sequence one more time." She sighed, then looked at both of them. "Every time I try to re-program it, it wants to tell me about this broken rose blossom and the corpse of a puppy and the way the wheel looks with all the lighted windows." She yawned hugely. "Some of it's kind of pretty, actually."
Bach wasn't sure what Rossnikova was talking about, but the important thing was the probe was taken care of. She looked at Galloway.
"My part is all done," Galloway said. "In record time, too."
"I'm not even going to guess what it cost you," Bach said.
"It's only money."
"What about Doctor Blume?"
"He's with us. He wasn't even very expensive. I think he wanted to do it, anyway." She looked from Bach to Rossnikova, and back again. "What do you say? Are we ready to go? Say in one hour?"
Neither of them raised an objection. Silently, they shook each other's hands. They knew it would not go easy with them if they were discovered, but that had already been discussed and accepted and there seemed no point in mentioning it again.
Bach left them in a hurry.
The dogs were more excited than Charlie had ever seen them. They sensed something was about to happen.
"They're probably just picking it up from you," Tik-Tok ventured.
"That could be it," Charlie agreed. They were leaping and running all up and down the corridor. It had been hell getting them all down here, by a route Tik-Tok had selected that would avoid all the operational cameras used by Captain Hoeffer and those other busybodies. But here they finally were, and there was the door to the lifeboat, and suddenly she realized that Tik-Tok could not come along.
"What are you going to do?" she finally asked him.
"That's a silly question, Charlie."
"But you'll die!"
"Not possible. Since I was never alive, I can't die."
"Oh, you're just playing with words." She stopped, and couldn't think of anything good to say. Why didn't they have more words? There ought to be more words, so some of them would be useful for saying goodbye.
"Did you scrubba-scrub?" Tik-Tok asked. "You want to look nice."
Charlie nodded, wiping away a tear. Things were just happening so fast.
"Good. Now you remember to do all the things I taught you to do. It may be a long time before you can be with people again, but I think you will, someday. And in the meantime, Anna-Louise and Megan have promised me that they'll be very strict with little girls who won't pick up their rooms and wash their hair."
"I'll be good," Charlie promised.
"I want you to obey them just like you've obeyed me."
"I will."
"Good. You've been a very good little girl, and I'll expect you to continue to be a good girl. Now get in that lifeboat, and get going."
So she did, along with dozens of barking Shelties.
There was a guard outside the conference room and Bach's badge would not get her past him, so she assumed that was where the crime was being planned.
She would have to be very careful.
She entered the control room. It was understaffed, and no one was at her old chair. A few people noticed her as she sat down, but no one seemed to think anything of it. She settled down, keeping an eye on the clock.
Forty minutes after her arrival, all hell broke loose.
It had been an exciting day for the probe. New instructions had come. Any break in the routine was welcome, but this one was doubly good, because the new programmer wanted to know everything, and the probe finally got a chance to transmit its poetry. It was a hell of a load off one's mind.
When it finally managed to assure the programmer that it understood and would obey, it settled back in a cybernetic equivalent of wild expectation.
The explosion was everything it could have hoped for. The wheel tore itself apart in a ghastly silence and began spreading itself wildly to the blackness. The probe moved in, listening, listening...
And there it was. The soothing song it had been told to listen for, coming from a big oblong hunk of the station that moved faster than the rest of it. The probe moved in close, though it had not been told to. As the oblong flashed by the probe had time to catalog it (LIFEBOAT, type 4A; functioning)
and to get just a peek into one of the portholes.
The face of a dog peered back, ears perked alertly.
The probe filed the image away for later contemplation, and then moved in on the rest of the wreckage, lasers blazing in the darkness.
Bach had a bad moment when she saw the probe move in on the lifeboat, then settled back and tried to make herself inconspicuous as the vehicle bearing Charlie and the dogs accelerated away from the cloud of wreckage.
She had been evicted from her chair, but she had expected that. As people ran around, shouting at each other, she called room 569 at the Kleist, then patched Rossnikova into her tracking computers.
She was sitting at an operator's console in a corner of the room, far from the excitement.
Rossnikova was a genius. The blip vanished from her screen. If everything was going according to plan, no data about the lifeboat was going into the memory of the tracking computer.
It would be like it never existed.
Everything went so smoothly, Bach thought later. You couldn't help taking it as a good omen, even if, like Bach, you weren't superstitious. She knew nothing was going to be easy in the long run, that there were bound to be problems they hadn't thought of...
But all in all, you just had to be optimistic.
The remotely-piloted PTP made rendezvous right on schedule. The transfer of Charlie and the dogs went like clockwork. The empty lifeboat was topped off with fuel and sent on a solar escape orbit, airless and lifeless, its only cargo a barrel of radioactive death that should sterilize it if anything would.
The PTP landed smoothly at the remote habitat Galloway's agents had located and purchased. It had once been a biological research station, so it was physically isolated in every way from lunar society.
Some money changed hands, and all records of the habitat were erased from computer files.