Murder in Orbit

  I said so.

  “Too late, Rusty,” said Dr. Puckett. “You’re already in this up to your eyebrows. Besides, if you do something stupid, you’ll at least have the brains to let me try to fix it—a situation that does not, I assure you, apply when we are dealing with the bureaucracy of this place.”

  Helen Chang’s dark eyes were flashing. “If what you just said has any validity, I may see it after I finish sorting through all the nonsense you wrapped it in, Elmo. But that’s going to take a long time. So unless you need me for anything else right now, I’ve got some work of my own to finish.”

  Dr. Puckett nodded, like a statue of the Buddha coming momentarily to life, and Helen left the room. He rolled his eyes as she went, then twitched his head toward Cassie. Without a word, she moved to follow Helen.

  “She’ll calm down in a little while,” he said when we were alone. “This sometimes happens when I overestimate her tolerance for my ego. None of which changes the reality of the problems I just enumerated.”

  “So what do we do now?”

  “Two things. First we file a report on the scooter incident. Then I’m going to show you something that should give you a clue about what’s going on over there.”

  “You mean you know?” I asked in surprise.

  “I don’t know exactly who did what to whom. But I have a pretty good idea of what’s underneath it all.” He sighed. “I suppose Helen will be angry with me over that, too. You see, I was being a little overdramatic when I made my big speech just now. Not that the danger isn’t real, mind you. It is. But I do doubt that anyone has actually been killed yet.”

  He paused, then looked me in the eye. “The trick is going to be to see if we can keep it that way.”

  Chapter 15

  Bootleg Research

  “You’re going to like this,” said Dr. Puckett, pushing a button and settling back into a chair.

  It was the first time I had actually seen him sit in a chair. But then, it was the first time I had ever seen an easy chair inside an elevator—if, indeed, that’s what the thing we were in actually was. It had the general feel of an elevator. But it was far more luxurious than any elevator I had ever seen—or imagined.

  The door closed and we started to move. At least I had been right about that much. It was an elevator.

  We had reached the elevator by way of Dr. Puckett’s luxurious living quarters, which were by far the largest I had seen in the colony.

  The elevator stopped. The door slid open, and we stepped into a small room. The place had gravity, but it was very low, maybe a tenth of normal. Since that left his functional weight at only 15 kilograms or so, Dr. Puckett was able to bound across the floor like a ballet dancer. When he reached the other side of the room, he pushed a button, then watched, smiling, while part of one wall peeled away to provide a clear view of the stars beyond.

  It was breathtaking.

  Unfortunately, it was a little too reminiscent of my recent adventure for me to appreciate it properly.

  “What is this place?” I asked, fighting down a bubble of panic.

  “One of my hobbies,” said Dr. Puckett jovially. “A private observation port I worked into the plans when the colony was still in the dreaming stages.”

  I looked at him. “How do you get away with things like that?”

  He chuckled. “Power generally comes from a combination of sources, Rusty. To begin with, I have a great deal of money. However, contrary to popular opinion, money is often not enough. Fortunately for me, I also control the patents on several technologies without which these colonies can’t be built. That gives me quite a bit of clout when I want to negotiate for something special. But what really puts me over the edge when I want something like this is the fact that, when I choose to be, I am a genuinely likable person.” He smiled. “You may find that hard to believe. But it’s true. I’m not talking about being a bootlicker; everyone despises that kind of person, no matter how much they might enjoy the flattery. It’s just that underneath all the prickles, I’m a nice guy.”

  I thought about it for a moment. If someone had asked me to describe Dr. Puckett, I would have started out by saying he was the crankiest, most obnoxious human being I had ever met.

  Yet why was I here now? Because my grandfather had asked Dr. Puckett to help me. At first I had thought Gramps was calling in a favor. But that wasn’t the case. In fact, the reverse was true. My grandfather knew Dr. Puckett because the scientist had helped him out with some stories. And now the man was helping me, too. Not because he owed Gramps a favor. Simply because he felt like it.

  I realized something else about him. Because he had chosen to be larger than life himself, Elmo Puckett made life exciting for others. Being with him gave even the most routine moments a feeling that you were hovering at the edge of something special. I had met Elmo only two days earlier. But I knew already that if I survived this investigation, I would very much want to remain part of his inner circle. In fact, I would probably do just about anything he asked of me.

  It was then that I began to understand how Elmo Puckett got away with so much.

  It wasn’t his scorn people feared.

  It was the possibility of losing his presence in your life.

  Dr. Puckett took his place at a console filled with dials, switches, and a variety of video monitors that stretched across one side of the room.

  “Sit here,” he said, motioning beside him.

  I sat.

  “This is what I really wanted to show you,” he said. The excitement in his voice was contagious. “Take a look out there.”

  He pointed toward the lower right corner of the window. I stared, wondering what I was supposed to be looking for.

  “See that bright spot—about half a meter up and maybe ten centimeters in?”

  I nodded.

  “Okay, watch the monitor in front of you. I’ll give you a close-up view.”

  He fiddled with the console a bit. Suddenly a familiar-looking object appeared on the screen. It was one of the colony’s radio telescopes, a complicated construction of tubes and flat surfaces larger than the colony itself. There were a dozen of these telescopes in all, stationed in an enormous ring around the colony.

  “Let’s see what it’s focused on,” said Dr. Puckett. He tapped away at the console. The wall slid back into place. I heard a clicking noise, and then a picture of a reddish disk appeared on the blank surface.

  “Mars,” said Dr. Puckett. “Dr. Yolen is monitoring the weather conditions for the Morigi/Russell exploration party.”

  I stared at the wall in fascination. Good pictures of Mars aren’t that unusual, of course. But it was something else to see the planet as it was at that very moment. I heard the keys clicking; the picture zoomed in to show more details—first a red desert scattered with enormous boulders, then Olympus Mons, the famous giant volcano that stands more than two and a half times as tall as Mount Everest.

  Before I had begun to have nearly enough of looking at the ancient planet, Dr. Puckett changed the picture again.

  “Io,” he said, as a slightly egg-shaped object appeared on the wall. The Jovian moon was mottled with shades of yellow, orange, red, and brown. As Dr. Puckett continued to enlarge the image, I saw a huge gaseous plume billowing up from the surface. One of the volatile satellite’s volcanoes was in full eruption.

  More clicking keys, and the picture changed yet again. This time the screen showed a luminous globe floating in a sea of darkness, its surface a shifting mixture of blues and whites.

  “Home,” said Dr. Puckett. The tone in his voice was unmistakably, if somewhat surprisingly, wistful. Not that it wasn’t easy to be wistful for a place that, from this viewpoint at least, was really remarkably beautiful.

  All this impressed me. But I couldn’t figure out what it had to do with whatever was going on at the BS Factory.

  “It’s very pretty,” I said cautiously.

  “Pretty?” cried Dr. Puckett. “Calling that ‘pretty’ is
like saying the universe is ‘big.’ You ain’t lying, but you certainly ain’t doing it justice.” He snorted, though whether it was directed at me, or at himself for being caught in a moment of sentiment, I wasn’t sure. “Anyway, I have something else I want to show you.”

  He tapped a few more keys. A chart appeared on the screen in front of me. As near as I could make out, it was a list of the twelve radio telescopes, along with information on what they were currently monitoring, who was using them, and what priority level was given to both the user and the project.

  “We’ll use number nine,” said Dr. Puckett. “Farns-worth isn’t doing anything important with it right now, and that’s where I have the biggest block of data built up.”

  “What are you doing?” I asked at last.

  “Painting a picture of the universe.”

  “Well,” I said somewhat sharply, “that explains everything.”

  Dr. Puckett laughed. “Hoisted on my own petard! You’d better watch out, Rusty. I may be catching. Spend too much time around me and you, too, may develop a reputation for cranky superciliousness.”

  “Whatever that means,” I said.

  “Look it up,” replied Dr. Puckett. (I did; it’s a twenty-dollar way of saying “snotty.”)

  “Can we get back to the universe?” I asked, trying to take the conversation someplace that would do me some good.

  “Certainly,” said Dr. Puckett jovially. “For the last year I’ve been using this radio telescope to examine the ultraviolet radiation from a sector of space twenty billion light-years away from here. Think about that for a minute, Rusty. The light I’m looking at is twenty billion years old. When I examine it—for example, when I analyze a quasar in that area—I’m not seeing what that quasar looks like today. I don’t have the slightest idea what it looks like today. For all I know it may not even exist anymore. What I’m seeing is what it looked like twenty billion years ago. It’s almost like having a time machine; I’m looking right into the past—in this case back to the time when we think the universe was created.”

  He leaned back in his chair and stretched. “It’s deliciously frustrating. Every time we think we’ve made it back to the beginning, we find another layer to peel away. The well of the past is very deep indeed.”

  I still wasn’t sure what this had to do with the BS Factory. But I was beginning to understand that when Dr. Puckett wanted to tell you something, he did it on his own schedule.

  “That little project is pretty much smiled upon,” he said, sitting up to the keyboard again. “I feed the data to a couple of scientists who are officially working on the topic, and nobody much minds.

  “But I’ve got another little thing going here that really isn’t approved.” He wiggled his eyebrows and flashed me a wicked grin. “I’m searching for extraterrestrial intelligence.”

  That caught me by surprise. Because it was of such interest to my grandfather, I had been following the political conflict over that kind of research for the last couple of years. As far as I knew, it had been squashed on the grounds that it was a real money waster. That was a pretty good joke, considering the way the government was throwing money around on other things. My grandfather’s opinion was that the underlying motive was fear of success; there was a powerful political-religious coalition that really didn’t want to find anyone else out there—and certainly didn’t want to do anything that would attract their attention if they were there.

  “How are you getting away with that?” I asked.

  Dr. Puckett put a finger beside his nose and gave me a conspiratorial wink. “I keep my mouth shut. At least, most of the time. There are people who know what I’m up to, of course. You can’t keep a project this big, involving this much equipment, totally secret. But it’s nothing unusual. There are a lot of scientists in ICE-3 working on projects that aren’t officially approved. It’s called bootleg research, and if you want my opinion, it’s the most exciting stuff going on out here.”

  I wondered briefly if Dr. Puckett was conducting his search for alien intelligence because it interested him, or simply because he wasn’t supposed to. I decided that wasn’t fair. For all his outrageous behavior, he was a scientist right to the core. He couldn’t be bothered with something that didn’t interest him.

  But I still wondered what he was trying to tell me. Surely not that the trouble in the BS Factory had something to do with aliens?

  “So, what’s the clue?” I asked as we were leaving the room a few minutes later.

  Dr. Puckett rapped me on the head with his knuckles. “Good God, boy!” he cried. “When are you going to learn to think?”

  And that was all the answer I could get out of him.

  Chapter 16

  More Problems

  My father is a physicist. My mother specializes in fusion techniques. We give new meaning to the phrase “nuclear family.”

  This fact seems to carry over into our family arguments. Generally speaking, the best way to measure them is in megatons.

  I mention that now because we had a several megaton blowout that evening. It started because my father had found out about the incident with the scooter, and he was angry.

  Very angry.

  “Why didn’t you call one of us?” he shouted (over and over again). “One of us should have been notified!”

  “But I was all right,” I kept saying. “Nothing really happened.”

  “Nothing happened?” cried my mother. “You were trapped in a scooter that’s currently making a oneway trip out of the solar system. Then you were stranded, alone, in space for three hours. You ran out of air. You almost died. And you say ‘nothing happened’?”

  “I meant I was fine when it was all over. If there had been anything wrong with me, of course I would have gotten ahold of you. I just didn’t want to bother you.”

  That was true. But it wasn’t the whole story. The thing was, I had been so busy from the time I woke up in the rocket with Helen and Cassie to the time I left Dr. Puckett’s observatory that contacting my parents had never crossed my mind. Even so, I still couldn’t see what the fuss was all about. It’s not like anything terrible had actually happened. Just almost.

  I think the real problem was the way my father heard about the incident. He has a friend in Traffic Control, and after Dr. Puckett and I reported the mishap with the scooter, this guy decided to call Dad and fill him in on the details. Hearing the story from someone else, instead of me, was what really had him riled up. At least, that was my opinion.

  I said so.

  That didn’t improve matters any, and we spent some more time yelling at each other. I guess I probably said some things I shouldn’t have. I know they said some things they shouldn’t have.

  It got worse and worse, until finally I decided I had had enough of the whole stupid argument and went storming into my bedroom. I slammed the door (which is a relatively stupid thing to do, since it only makes other people madder) and sat down to call my grandfather.

  That was when the really terrible thing happened.

  I waited for my grandfather to appear. What I got on the screen instead was my father’s face, which was still dark with anger. “Forget it, Rusty,” he growled. “I’m not going to have you running to your grandfather for sympathy every time you think you’re being mistreated. I’ve locked your line. You’ll just have to do something else instead. Given your last set of grades, you might consider studying, for a starter.”

  He clicked off. I was left staring at a blank screen and thinking things about my father that it is, believe me, better not to think.

  The worst thing was, I hadn’t been calling Gramps just to complain about my parents, though I probably would have started out with that. I was calling because I needed his help to sort out the things that had happened to me that day—including that strange scene where Dr. Puckett had given me a “clue” to what he thought was going on in the BS Factory.

  In the end, I spent the evening at my computer, making notes on everything t
hat had happened. I typed out a list of all the events and the times that they had occurred. Then I went over and over it, looking for connections, trying to make some kind of sense out of it all. I even ran a couple of pattern-seeking programs.

  No luck.

  By the time I finally fell asleep, I was as mystified as ever.

  The next morning we met in Dr. Puckett’s office for a brief strategy session.

  On the wall behind his desk he had created a list of the total staff of the BS Factory, from the seven senior scientists down through the custodial workers.

  There were thirty-four names in all, including mine.

  “We are about to make an assumption,” said Dr. Puckett. “The reasoning for it goes like this—”

  He put his huge hands in front of him and began ticking off points on his tobacco-stained fingers.

  “One: Yesterday, someone at the BS Factory tried to kill Rusty.

  “Two: The only reason we know of for someone to want to kill this fine young man is that he spent the day asking questions someone didn’t want answered—questions about the body in the waste tank.

  “Three: While it is not a dead certainty, it seems reasonable to assume that the two incidents are connected—which means it is likely that the body did indeed come from the BS Factory.

  “Four: That means we can set aside the rest of our suspects for now and concentrate our efforts in this one place. Which is why Rusty and Cassie are going to spend the day poking around over there.”

  He smiled wickedly. “But before you go, I want you to look through these dossiers.”

  He slid several folders across his desk. I took them and whistled in astonishment. There were seven in all—a complete “Eyes Only” file on each of the Mad Scientists.

  “I pulled them out of the main computer last night,” said Dr. Puckett. He turned to Dr. Chang. “Helen, I want you to initiate a visit with Hank Smollin. See what you can find out from him.”