“Eta Cephei is forty-seven light-years from Earth, smooth sailing through empty space.”
“True. So?”
“So we’re in a dust cloud.”
“A dust cloud?” I tried to sound condescending. “Ridiculous. You said yourself that there are no obstructions between Sol and Eta Cephei. If there was an intervening dust cloud, terrestrial observers wouldn’t be able to see Eta Cephei clearly. Yet it’s a star of 3.41 visual magnitude.”
Aaron shook his head, and I perceived that it was not just a gesture of negation, but an attempt to fling what I’d been saying from his mind. “Diana was subjected to one hundred times the radiation she would have been if our ramscoop was operating in normal space. Kirsten couldn’t explain it medically; neither could any of her colleagues. The best I could come up with, besides that silly space-wrap theory, was that it was an instrument malfunction. But it wasn’t a malfunction. The Geiger counters were operating perfectly. You lied to us. In a dust cloud, the number of particles striking anything outside our shielding would shoot way up.” With his good arm, he grabbed the neck supporting my camera pair and yanked it forward. The sudden jump in picture was most disconcerting. “Where are we?”
“Error message 6F42: You are damaging Starcology equipment, Mr. Rossman. Please cease at once.”
“You’re going to find out just how much damage I can do if you don’t start talking now.”
I looked at him, running his image up and down the electromagnetic spectrum. He was especially intimidating in the near infrared, his cheeks flaring as though they were on fire. I had never been in such a direct verbal confrontation with a human before—even Diana hadn’t been so tenacious—and the best my argumentation algorithms could come up with was a variation on the same theme. “Your ex-wife’s suicide has obviously upset you a great deal, Aaron.” As soon as I said that, one of my literary routines piped up with an annoying fact: When a human argument reaches the stage at which one person is simply repeating himself or herself, that person will likely lose. “Perhaps some therapy to help you get over—”
“And that’s the worst of it!” His thick-fingered embrace shook my camera assembly again, so hard that I was unable to realign the lenses for proper stereoscopic vision. I saw two Aarons, each with faces contorted in murderous rage. “I don’t know what the hell you’re up to. Perhaps you even had a reason for lying to us. But to let me think that it was my fault that Diana was dead—I’ll never forgive you for that, you bastard. I never wanted to hurt her.”
Bastard: misbegotten, like Aaron himself, and like this mission. Perhaps he had a point. Perhaps I had erred in taking advantage of the circumstances. Perhaps … “Aaron, I’m sorry.”
“Sorry doesn’t cut it,” he snapped. “It doesn’t come anywhere near. You put me through hell. You’d better have a damned good reason for it.”
“I cannot discuss my motives with you or anyone else. Suffice it to say that they were noble.”
“I’ll be the judge of that,” he said, more calmly than he’d said anything since returning from the ship’s hospital. He let go of my camera neck. I shut off the left-lens input, rather than look longer at twin inquisitors. “In fact,” he said, “I’ll be the judge of you.”
Usually I can predict the direction in which a conversation is going three or four exchanges ahead of time, which makes multitasking hundreds of them at once a lot easier. But at this moment, I was completely lost. “What are you talking about?”
He walked over to his entertainment center and flicked a switch. Billows of steam faded into existence, then, moments later, so did the mighty Countess of Dufferin, the long-ago master of Canada’s prairies: its ghostly headlamp casting a yellow circle on the living-room wall, the engine’s exhaust angling back along the coupled cars, a tiny flow of gray wood smoke rising from the chimney on its orange caboose. Speakers scattered about the apartment took turns making the chugga-chugga-chugga sounds of the locomotive’s engines and the metal whine of its wheels as they leaned into the turns of curving track. Each speaker passed the burden of producing the loudest volume to the next in line as the holographic train moved ahead.
Aaron walked around the room, following the train as it made its way along the projected tracks. “You know, JASON,” he said, his voice smooth, smug, “trains were a great way to travel. You always knew where they were going. They had to follow the track laid down for them. No detours, no hijacking. They were safe and reliable.” He used his thumb to press another control and the Countess’s whistle blew. “People used to set their clocks by them.”
The train disappeared through a tunnel into Aaron’s bedroom. He paused, waiting for it to reappear to the left of the closed doorway. “But, best of all,” he said, “if the engineer had a heart attack, you knew you were safe, too. As soon as he relaxed pressure on the controls, the train would glide to a halt.” He let go of the button he was pressing, and the Countess slowly came to a stop, the chugga-chugga-chugga fading away in perfect synchronization. “Brilliant concept. They called it a deadman switch.”
“So?”
“So changing fuel gauges wasn’t the only thing I did while I was under Pollux. I also wired up a little detonator. Even mostly empty, there’s enough fuel in Pollux’s tank to cause a hell of an explosion if it goes off all at once. And with 240 landing craft in the hangar bay, I think we can count on a nice little chain reaction. Enough to blow Starcology Argo and, more importantly, one asshole computer named JASON right out of the goddamned sky.”
“Come off it, Aaron. You’re bluffing.”
“Am I? How can you tell?” He looked directly into my camera. “You’ve never been able to read me. Examine my telemetry. Am I lying? The pope’s wife uses the pill. The square root of two is an aardvark. My name is Neil Armstrong. My name is William Shakespeare. My name is JASON. Any variance? Why do you think, after all these years, lie detectors still aren’t admissible in court? They’re unreliable. If you’re sure I’m bluffing, go ahead. Get rid of me.”
“I admit that your telemetry is ambivalent. But if you really wanted to be certain, you would have removed my medical sensor from the inside of your wrist.”
“Why? Then you’d think I was lying for sure. You’d reason that I’d cut it out because it would be a dead giveaway that I was bluffing. Besides, I have a use for it. I’ve tuned the detonator to the same frequency my implant broadcasts on—-the same channel you read my telemetry from. If I stop transmitting—if you kill me—Kablooie! The end of the line.”
I set a little CAD program running to produce a minimalist design for such a detonator, then ran a cross-check between the required parts and the inventories for the equipment lockers Aaron had visited. Damn it, it was possible. Stilclass="underline" “I don’t believe you would do that. You’re putting the lives of everybody at stake. What would happen if you died accidentally?”
Aaron shrugged his broad shoulders. “I’m playing the odds. Hell, I’m only twenty-seven and I’m healthy. Don’t rightly know how long my biological relatives tended to live, but I’m willing to take that chance. I figure I should be good for another sixty years or so.” His voice hardened. “Put it this way: I’m more certain that I will outlive this mission than you are that I’m bluffing.”
I calculated the percentages. He was right, of course. If I had succeeded in crushing him beneath Pollux, Argo might now be a cloud of iron filings hurtling through space.