"And all the others? The ones Rosa McCune washed out of my class?"
She shrugged. "They had to make room so Jay-John and Ven and I could get here—there are only eleven of us. We had to do a lot of things just so we could get it set up in time, don't you see? This was our best chance. How often would we get just this right alignment of the planets, so the incomings for Mars would come so close to Earth?" She looked pensive. "It's too bad about their careers, but when the story comes out I'm sure they'll all be reinstated."
"Some of them won't be. They'll be dead, Annetta. One of the dead ones will probably be my mother."
She said furiously, "I told you, nobody's going to be dead." She slammed the hatch shut, and Dekker went somberly back to his rubbing.
He had just returned to the food box, his hands still tied tightly and beginning to hurt, when he heard the hatch opening again. Annetta was looking in on him.
"Just checking," she said. "Sorry you're having so much trouble."
He finished chewing the crumb of roll he had managed to bite off—the rest of it was floating somewhere in the room behind him—and said, "Are you willing to listen to me now?"
"No! I mean," she corrected herself, "I checked the board and there's nothing to do for a bit. I'm willing to talk to you for a minute. Not so you can convince me we're going anything wrong, because we aren't. Just so you'll understand we're doing the right thing."
He said conversationally, "Murdering a lot of people can't be the right thing."
She looked at him with mixed anger and pity. "Damn you, Dekker! You keep saying that and we told you nobody's going to get killed."
"Except Shiaopin Ye, you mean. And maybe Tanabe."
"Belster says he'll be all right!"
He shook his head, and pointed out another fact: "You've still got that gun, too. What would you do with it if I jumped you?"
She pushed herself back a few centimeters. "You can't get out of there. Anyway, I wouldn't shoot to kill, just to stop you. I told you—"
He interrupted. "You told me the Japs would give in and promise to give up their habitats. Maybe they would; they'd probably promise anything right then. But what about after you've diverted the comet? How long do you think they'd keep that promise?"
She said with contempt, "Do you think we didn't plan for that? That's all taken care of, Dekker. There are contracts right there on Earth, ready to be signed. As soon as they see we mean business our negotiators are going to head for Tokyo and get them signed. They'll have penalty clauses and—what?"
He was trying to interrupt her. "You say they're going to head for Tokyo? You mean they aren't there already? Why aren't they?"
She looked at him for a moment. "That's the way we set it up, is all."
"No, Annetta, that isn't all. Think about it a little bit. The reason they aren't in Tokyo is that that's where the comet's going to fall. Right on Japan."
She shook her head. "Oh, no," she said positively. "You don't know what you're saying, Dekker. That's impossible."
He frowned at her. Was there something he had left out? "Why impossible? Do you think Co-Mars One might take over and divert it?"
"Of course not—not 67-JY. Rima and Berl Korman worked that one, out in the Oort, and they planted a command in it. The first thing we did was trigger it, and now it won't respond to any control but our own."
"Ah," said Dekker, the pieces falling into place. "That's why they picked a little one; it'll just destroy the place it lands on. And the place it's going to land on is Japan." He saw the expression on her face cloud over, and then he struck home. "Do you know why I'm so sure of that? Figure it out for yourself. How many Japanese are there on the station?"
"Why—?" She thought for a minute. "I think most of them got sent down," she admitted.
"Most of them?"
"All right, maybe all of them! How would I know? I don't keep the records!"
"I haven't seen any here, anyway. Except Tanabe, and he was the last Japanese in the class, and he damn near quit at the last minute. Why do you suppose that is?"
"You're sick." Annetta said furiously, "and I'm tired of listening to all this crap. Let me tell you what you ought to do. As soon as this is over you ought to go home, DeWoe. Plant some crops; take your mind off these crazy fantasies; marry some Martian woman and have a lot of children—and, most of all, don't bother me anymore!"
And she slammed the hatch again.
The fact was, Dekker acknowledged to himself as he went on rubbing against his bonds, Annetta was at least partly right. He was sick, all right. He was sick in ways he had never experienced before, because his whole concept of morality and social order was on the verge of collapse.
How could even Earthies do such a thing? Much less Martians?
Was it possible he could be wrong?
Dekker considered that possibility carefully, sawing away. It was true that he was under stress. He had never been confined against his will before.
It occurred to him that there was another side to the coin. He wasn't the only one whose judgment could have been clouded. Others had been subject to traumatic experiences, too. Dekker tried to imagine what it was like to be a rich Earthie who had lost all her wealth. A big shock? No doubt of that, he thought, remembering the spoiled young Annetta Cauchy of Sunpoint City, white dress, gold-spangled hair, unquestioned heiress to everything in sight. But was it a big enough shock? Could losing all that produce so lasting a hurt that it might only be healed by this?
Dekker couldn't answer that question. He didn't doubt that the acquisition of money was vitally important to Earthies; the evidence to prove that had been all about him for a long time. All the same, was it possible that they could have been so inflamed by their insensate passion for wealth as to commit this sort of bloody violence?
He had no answer for that, either . . . and then his train of thought was derailed as something in the vicinity of his aching wrists suddenly gave way.
It took a moment for Dekker to realize what it was. His persistent rubbing had begun to pay off. One strand of the sticktight had finally worn through. It didn't mean he was free. There wasn't much sensation in his hands now, except for pain, but when he tested his bonds, the remaining strands still held them fast.
They were, however, a little looser than they had been before, and that opened a new possibility, which Dekker began to explore. If he could just get his hands in front of him—
It meant twisting his spine in ways he had never tried before, and he knew they would all hurt. Painfully he arched his back, trying to slide his wrists down over his hips. It was not impossible anymore, he found. It was merely very painful, but he had the advantage of his lean anatomy; a slim Martian body could bend a good deal more pliability than a stocky Earthie's. Even so, after he got his wrists down past his hams there was still the problem of getting past his long Martian legs.
That was harder. It took a long time, and a good deal of pain, for Dekker to forcibly twist one ankle enough to work the bound hands over one foot, then another.
But then his hands were in front of him.
The rest was only a matter of finding loose ends of the sticktight and tugging at them with his teeth until his hands were free. He flexed his fingers experimentally. Circulation was poor. The hands tingled painfully and did not move well, but he managed to push one hand into the pocket of the coverall and close the fingers on what they found.
The emergency override key was still in his pocket. It meant that he was no longer a prisoner.
He held the key in his teeth while he rubbed his wrists to restore circulation. Then he did what he had not done for a while and pushed himself over to where Toro Tanabe lay motionless and lashed to the wall. Dekker bent over him to see how Tanabe was doing.
Tanabe was no longer breathing.
When Dekker straightened up his face was drawn. He hung there in the air, by his dead friend, still absently rubbing his hands together. He wasn't mourning the death of Tanabe. There was n
o point in that; instead, Dekker was thinking through what he had to do. It would not be easy. There was a good chance that in the process he could get himself killed as well. But what choice did he have?
When Dekker appeared at the door of the workstation, tugging a spacesuit behind him, Annetta gasped and grabbed for the gun. She waved it toward him. "Get back in there! How did you get out, anyway?"
He didn't answer; his priorities went to more urgent questions. He pushed the suit in at her. "Put this on," he ordered.
She stopped the floating suit with one hand, blinking at him. "The hell I will! Look, Dekker, if you think I'm afraid to shoot you—"
He shook his head at her. "Tanabe's dead," he told her.
Her face fell. "Oh, Dekker!" she whispered, stricken. "Belster promised he'd get a doctor for him before it was too late."
"Belster lied," Dekker said, surprised he should have to say it. "He lied about everything; I thought you knew that by now. The question now is how many more people do you want to see die, Annetta? Me, for instance?"
"I never wanted to kill anybody!"
"Then," he said sensibly, "we need to get that comet out of the way before it hits Earth, don't we? There's still time for a few big burns to slide it away—"
"No!"
"Yes," he corrected her. "You don't have much of a choice, Annetta, because the only way you can keep me from doing that is by shooting me. Are you going to do that?" It was not a trivial question in his mind, but he was almost amused at the expression on her face. He added, "That comet isn't going to miss the Earth, you know. Not unless we make it miss."
"What's the use of talking about it?" she said wretchedly. "Even if you're right, it wouldn't work anyway. We can't do it. As soon as we started the course-correction burns they'd know in the comm room, and they'd be charging right up here to make us stop."
Dekker tried to be kind because she had said "we." "No, they won't be able to do that, Annetta. They won't be going anywhere; I'm going to make sure of that. But I don't have any more time to argue. So here it is: you can do one of two things. You can go ahead and shoot me if that's what you want. Or else you can just put that stupid gun down and start getting into this suit."
Whether Annetta was doing as she was told or not Dekker did not know. He turned away without waiting for her response. He felt a crawling sensation between his shoulderblades as he returned to the lock, but he did not look around when he began the process of climbing into his own spacesuit. He estimated that the actual likelihood that she would shoot him was low, but the decision was not his to make.
By the time the helmet seals were tight, the shot had not come, and a muffled clatter from the next compartment suggested that Annetta was in fact doing something with her own suit. So far, so good, he congratulated himself; now it was time to get to work.
He caught at the override key where he had left it floating in the air and pushed himself over to the lock controls. He didn't look at Tanabe's body. There was no point; Tanabe was past all help, but the Earth was not. It was an awkward job, fitting it into its slot with his still pained and now gauntleted hands, but the procedure was just the familiar fire-emergency blowout drill he had practiced so many times on the hill, after all.
Just as in drill, as soon as he activated the locks for full air blow, the take-shelter klaxons blared deafeningly from all over the station.
The warning period they allowed was only ten seconds. He hoped Annetta would have finished sealing her suit. He did not want to take a life—even hers, though she had been part of this deadly plan. Especially hers, he corrected himself, and wondered why.
Then the ten seconds were over.
That was when everything happened at once. Dekker heard the grating, rumbling, crashing sound of every door on the station simultaneously slamming shut. A moment later the whole station shook as every outside lock flung itself open to let the station's air pour out into the vacuum of space. There was a harsh, hurricane scream of escaping air, but that noise dwindled fast. In a moment there was no longer enough air within the open spaces of the station to carry sound, and Co-Mars Station Two lay airless and still around him.
Anyone outside a closed compartment was now dead, he thought, hoping no one had been so stupid. And everyone within one would now stay there until he chose to fill the corridors once more with air.
When Dekker let himself back into the control station its internal air puffed out in a sudden blast. It almost blew him away from the door, but he caught at a holdfast until it was gone.
Annetta was waiting there inside. She was suited up, staring white-faced at him through the visor. He made a meaningless gesture of reassurance in her direction but did not touch his helmet to hers to speak. There was nothing to say and a lot to do.
Dekker placed himself before the board, rehearsed for a moment what he had planned, and then summoned up the orbital elements of the comet on his screen.
When he keyed in the display of the comet's probability cone, nothing had changed. The thickest part of the cone of golden light was still centered precisely around the whole planet of Earth.
That was what he had to alter. It was difficult to work the controls with the gauntlets on, but he managed to set up the integrals for a course correction and place his commands. As soon as he had checked the computer's solution and found it satisfactory he sent the command for the first long burn. It was certainly going to be close, he thought.
Then he remembered to look around at Annetta. She was watching him silently from beside the open door, and he could see through her faceplate that she was weeping.
That didn't surprise him. It was a good time for weeping; there was plenty of cause to go around. He wondered what would happen to Annetta Bancroft. Something, he was sure of that; vindictive Earthies would not let her go unpunished for her part in the action. But nothing compared to what would have happened to a good many million human beings if the comet had been allowed to strike.
He turned back to the important job. The golden probability cone had begun slowly to slide across the screen as the simulation reflected the effects of the ongoing burn. Dekker studied the display carefully. The dot that was Earth still lay within the comet trajectory's probable error, but it was no longer directly in the center.
Dekker scowled at the display; it was going too slowly. He set up another course correction with a longer burn. The computer confirmed it, and he reached out a gauntleted finger to activate—
And paused, frowning.
He had felt another shudder in the structure of the station. A small one and brief, yes. But definitely something had happened, something that had made a thud somewhere in the station far away.
He stabbed the activation switch. It didn't matter. Someone had managed to open an airtight door perhaps, and the gas had slammed out. But no one was going to be able to move through the corridors of the station without a spacesuit.
It occurred to him that although the chances were very small that any of the plotters happened to have a suit available, they were not quite zero. He turned to the door.
Annetta was gone.
He frowned again, thoughtfully. That was not important either, though. There was no place for her to go, and, besides, he thought he knew what that unexpected thud had been.
He closed the door, and locked it with his emergency-override key, and returned to the board.
The long burn was still in progress. The comet's probability cone was now well clear of Earth, and inching farther away every second.
It was a terrible waste of a good comet, he thought. Mars needed those frozen gases.
Still, he thought, it would certainly make a remarkable spectacle from the surface of the Earth it was not, after all, going to strike. And it was almost time to begin the slow job of restoring pressure to the station from the reserve tanks.
44
Dekker was exhausted by the time he found Annetta Bancroft. He was not surprised to find her by the commroom because he had been prett
y sure where she had gone. The surprise was that she was alive, waiting despondently to be discovered, with the bodies of the conspirators floating all about her.
"I was afraid—" he began, and didn't finish the thought.
She finished it for him. "You were afraid I'd kill myself, I guess. I thought of it, all right. Maybe I should have, but when I saw they were all dead, there just didn't seem any point to it."
"I'm glad you didn't," he said. "There are enough dead already." And there were. More than enough. Ven Kupferfeld's body was drifting no more than arm's-length away. Her hair was floating in all directions, her eyes were unseeingly open, and there was a froth of blood on her lips. He shook his head. He had been right about that little thudding sound that had shaken the station—when the conspirators had seen that they had failed they had opened the door of the commroom and let themselves die.
Inside the room the vanguard of the people he had released from the flare shelter were pushing past the bodies, making contact with all the alarmed incoming calls. Dekker shivered, cold for the first time in many weeks. The replaced air was chilly from its expansion from the reserve tanks.
"They weren't all Earthies," he said, mourning.
Annetta stared at him and he shook himself. He didn't want to explain his thought, but it stayed with him: Martians, not Earthies alone, had been part of this sad, terrible plan. The others were looking at her, silent and hostile, and he remembered that he needed sleep. He took Annetta's arm. "Come away," he said.
She didn't resist, but looked up at him inquiringly. "Are you arresting me?"
"Me? Of course not," Dekker said, astonished at the idea. "I'm not a Peacekeeper, though maybe when the ships get here—" Out of politeness he didn't finish the thought.
He didn't have to; Annetta knew very well what would happen when the ships began to arrive. She said morosely, "I'll be in Rehabilitation a long time, I suppose. But I'm not the only one. You people are still in trouble, too, Dekker. Do you think they're going to forget about the new terms for the Bonds?"