“Well, if I were you, mon capitain,” I said, “I’d start getting my people under shelter. My spacecraft is accompanied by about a hundred or so rocks that’re going to hit Europa like a meteor shower.”
That was the remains of my heat shield, of course. Most of the rocks had ablated down to pebble size, but at the velocity we were traveling they could still do some damage. Europa’s icy surface was going to get peppered and there wasn’t anything I could do about it except warn them to get under shelter.
Well, to make a long story short (the judges all sighed at that) I landed on Europa nice and smooth, a real gentle touchdown. With Clementine still dragging along beside me, of course. The meteor shower I promised Captain Majerkurth didn’t harm anything, near as I can telclass="underline" just a few hundred new little craterlets in Europa’s surface of ice.
So I’ve got Clementine chewing up ice and storing it in her holds. Bypassed her dumbass mass spectrometer, otherwise her computer would’ve stopped everything because it couldn’t figure out what elements were going into which bins. Didn’t matter. It was all ice, which added up to hydrogen for Jokers fusion torch and oxygen for the Twins.
I expected Majerkurth to show up, and sure enough, I hadn’t been sitting on Europa for more than an hour before this flimsy little hopper pops up over my horizon, heading my way on a ballistic trajectory. For half a second I thought the hardass had fired a missile at me, but my computer analyzed the radar data in picoseconds and announced that it was a personnel hopper, not a missile, and it was gonna land beside Joker.
I buttoned up Joker good and tight. I had no intention of letting Majerkurth come aboard. But the space-suited figure that climbed down from the hopper wasn’t the security captain.
“Mr. Gunn, this is Anitra O’Toole. Permission to come aboard?”
I stared at the image in my display screen. You can’t tell much about a person when she’s zipped into a space suit, but Anitra O’Toole looked small—maybe my own height or even a little less—and her voice was kind of… well, she sounded almost scared.
“Are you one of Majerkurth’s security people?” I asked.
“Security? Goodness no! If Captain Majerkurth knew I was here he’d…” She hesitated, then pleaded, “Please let me come aboard, Mr. Gunn. Please!”
What could I do? I could never refuse a woman asking for help, and she seemed to need my help pretty desperately. It was like the time I—
(“Please stick to the facts of this case!” the chief judge demanded.)
Yeah, okay. So I let her in. Anitra O’Toole turned out to be young, kinda pretty in a cheerleader way, and very worried. Oh, and she was one of the three biologists among the DULL team on Europa.
And she was scared, too. She wouldn’t say why, at first, or why she wanted to come aboard Joker. She just fidgeted and blathered about her husband waiting for her back on Earth and how she was afraid that her marriage was coming apart because they’d been separated so long and her career might be going down the tubes as well.
I only had a few hours to be on Europa, but while my brain-dead Clementine was ingesting ice I tried to be as hospitable as possible. I sat Anitra down in my quarters, just off the bridge, and programmed the galley to produce a gourmet dinner of roast squab, sweet potatoes, string beans—
(“Mr. Gunn!” growled the Toad.)
All right, all right. I popped a bottle of champagne for her. Joker has the best wine cellar in space, bar none.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I don’t try to seduce married women, even when they tell me their marriage is in trouble. Especially then, as a matter of fact. Too complicated; too many chances for lawsuits or grievous bodily harm.
I was more interested in her saying that her career might be going down the tubes. One of three biologists on Europa, working on a newly discovered form of extraterrestrial life, and her career was in trouble?
“Why?” I asked her.
Anitra had these big violet eyes and the kind of golden blonde hair that most women get out of a bottle. Sitting there beside me in a one-piece zipsuit, she looked young and unhappy and vulnerable, like a runaway waif. I stayed an arm’s length away; it wasn’t easy, but I kept thinking about the Twins as much as I could.
“The adaptation isn’t working,” Anitra said, miserable. “All this planning and genetic engineering and they still won’t reproduce.”
“What won’t reproduce?” I asked.
She sipped at the champagne. I refilled her glass.
“Could you take me back to Earth?” she blurted.
I started to say no, which was the truth. But long, long ago I had learned that the truth doesn’t always get the job done.
“I’m heading back to the belt. My company headquarters is in Ceres,” I said. “I could arrange transportation from there.”
She clutched at my wrist, nearly spilling my champagne. “Would you?”
“Why do you want to leave Europa so badly?”
Those violet eyes looked away from me. “My husband,” she said vaguely.
“Won’t DULL set you up with transportation? They have regular resupply flights, don’t they? You could hook a ride back Earthside with them.”
“No,” she said, barely a whisper. “I’ve got to go now, while I’ve got.the chance. And the nerve.”
“But your work here on the lichenoids …”
“That’s the whole point!” she burst. “It isn’t working and everybody’s going to find out and I’m going to be ruined professionally and nobody will want me, not even Brandon.”
I figured Brandon was her husband.
(“Is there a point to all this?” asked the chief judge, frowning.)
The point is this. Anitra O’Toole told me that the lichenoids DULL was studying are not native to Europa. They were engineered in a biology lab in Zurich and planted on Europa by the DULL team.
The courtroom erupted. As if a bomb had gone off. Half the spectators jumped to their feet, shouting. The Beryllium Blonde and her four cohorts were screaming objections. The chief judge was banging the stump of her gavel on the banc, demanding order.
But what caught my eye was the look on the splotchy face of the Toad.
Weatherwax was staring at Sam as if he would have gladly strangled him if he’d had the chance.
It took a while and a lot of whacking of the stump of her gavel, but once order was restored to the courtroom, the chief judge fixed Sam with a beady eye and asked, “Are you maintaining, Mr. Gunn, that there never were indigenous life-forms on Europa?”
Sitting in the witness chair with his hands folded childlike on his lap, Sam replied courteously, “Yes, ma’am, that’s exactly what I’m saying. The whole story was a subterfuge, engineered by the people who run DULL”
“This is outrageous!” Weatherwax roared. Everyone in the courtroom realized that he was the man who ran DULL.
The chief judge was a little more professional. She turned to the prosecution’s lawyers, who were still standing and fuming.
“Cross-examination?”
The Beryllium Blonde stalked out from behind the table like a battle cruiser maneuvering into range for a lethal broadside.
She stood before Sam for a long, silent moment while the entire court held its breath. He stared up at her; maybe he was trying to look defiant. To me, he looked like a kid facing the school principal.
“Mr. Gunn,” she started, utterly serious, no smile, her eyes cold and calculating, “the allegation you have just made is extremely serious. What evidence do you have to support it?”
“The testimony of Dr. Anitra O’Toole, of Johns Hopkins University’s biology department.”