Stavros opened the door and stepped back in surprise. "Hello! Come in."
"Thank you." Van Shui Pong had not phoned ahead. For that matter, he had not been back to the dormitory since the day he had first introduced himself. He nodded to Andrea, who was eating a candied orange. "Perhaps you and Stavros would like to go for a walk with me. The campus is a pleasant place; I don't get here often enough."
"A walk?" Stavros echoed foolishly. "It's close to midnight."
Van only waited. Andrea stood up and threw on her cloak. Muttering, Stavros got his cap and mantle out of the closet and closed the neck clasp. He and Andrea followed Van to the elevator.
The night was just this side of chilly. The air had a cool green smell, different from the way it smelled during the day. A few lights glowed in distant labs and offices. Still, the path the three walked was to the eye merely a pale snake coiling across dark lawns.
After a while, Van stopped. Stavros could hear the silence between the trills of Terran insects and Hyperion's own small night creatures. Van said, "I've finally managed to track down the crew of the Jêng Ho."
"Have you? That's wonderful!" Stavros exclaimed. "Will they back their report?"
Andrea, though, found another question. "Why did you bring us out here to tell us that?" Even before Van answered, that dampened Stavros's first rush of excitement.
The reporter nodded somberly. "You begin to understand. Here I can hope, at least, that we are not overheard. I don't dare be so optimistic about your rooms anymore, Stavros."
The grad student took a moment to find a name for what he heard in Van's voice. "You're afraid."
"Yes, I am. You see, the Jêng Ho's crew was aboard the Clark County." When neither Stavros nor Andrea reacted, the newsman snorted in irritation. "Why do we go to so much trouble getting out the news when no one pays any attention to us? The Clark County is the ship that crashed on Carson Planet not so long ago. Something over three hundred people died, including all of the crewmembers of the Jêng Ho."
"That proves the Survey Service is lying in its teeth," Stavros burst out. "If the Jêng Ho didn't get back till the day Paulina Koch claimed, how could the crew have gone on their junket and had that accident?"
"If it was an accident," Andrea said slowly.
Stavros felt the air rush out of him as if he had been kicked in the belly. "That makes too much sense for me to like," he said at last.
"And for me, too," Van said. "I was going to point it out to you people if you didn't come up with it for yourselves. Too many coincidences add up to scaring me a lot—if we keep pushing at this thing, I have a bad feeling we'll end up the same way your Professor Fogelman and twenty Survey Service crewfolk ended up. I'm sorry, but I've had enough. I wish you well if you want to go on, but you'll have to do it without me. My phone won't accept your calls any more; if I hadn't been afraid it was tapped, I'd have called you to tell you this. As is, we have a decent chance of talking in private here. Now I've talked, and now I'm going to leave."
"But, but—" Stavros sputtered to a halt and tried again. "But now we can prove the Service really is trying to suppress the report on Bilbeis IV. They lied about when the Jêng Ho came back, which meant the report I have is genuine. It can't mean anything else."
"No, it means one thing more, Stavros. It means the Service isn't just trying to suppress that report—they're doing it. Ask Fogelman, ask the Jêng Ho's crew, ask three hundred other people on the Clark County if you doubt me . . . and if you can. I don't need to ask them: I get the message loud and clear."
Andrea said, "How can you back away from this, knowing what you know?" She did not sound angry; if she had, Van would never have answered her. She only sounded bewildered.
The newsman's reply came slowly and grudgingly. "I thought about all this. I've done nothing but think about it the last couple of days. I've lived with my ideals a good many years now. I've always believed in them, but I've found that if I have to choose between keeping my ideals and keeping alive, I'd sooner live. If I go on, I don't think I will, and if you go on, I don't think you will either."
"But—" Stavros had been saying that ever since they got out into the quiet dark. He felt stupid, but nothing better came to mind.
"No more buts." Van thumped him on the shoulder, reached to take Andrea's hand, but dropped his own when she drew back from him. He grimaced. "Good-bye, then." He strode quickly away.
Stavros stared after him, still trying hard not to believe any of what he'd heard. It sank in despite his best efforts. Van's fear was too real to ignore. So was the Clark County. "Three hundred some odd people dead," Stavros whispered. "They are playing for keeps."
"Three hundred some odd innocent people dead, on top of Bilbeis IV itself," Andrea said. "Can we let the Survey Service come away untouched after that?"
"Can we stop them?" Stavros did not feel anything like a hero. The longer he stood outside in the blackness, the better he understood Van Shui Pong.
"We have to," Andrea said indignantly.
"Yes, I suppose we do." Giving up would mean not calling the Survey Service to account for what it did on a good many thousand pre-Federacy worlds, to say nothing of leaving Paulina Koch in charge of that immense and powerful bureaucracy. But Stavros remembered Andrea's warning after she first saw the report on Bilbeis IV. Then he'd had to hesitate before he even took her seriously. Now she was proving only too good a prophet.
His shiver had nothing to do with the chill of the night.
"The problem appears to be contained within manageable limits," Paulina Koch remarked.
"Yes," Hovannis said. "The loss of the Clark County was a great tragedy."
"So it was." The Chairman did not ask her External Affairs Director any questions about that. Whatever he knew, he knew. She hoped it was nothing, but she did not want to find out.
Certainly, the Assembly probe had crashed with the Clark County. No one was in a position to contradict Survey Service testimony after that. A few people, Paulina Koch's informants said, made snide comments about the crash's convenience. No one made them to her face or on the record.
"Is there anything more?" she asked Hovannis.
"Nothing to speak of, PK. Hyperion Newsnet is finally calming down, as you may have noticed. I understand some small fuss or other is still going on there, but I expect that will fade out, too."
"All right." Paulina Koch dismissed Hovannis. She wondered how long she would be able to dismiss him and be sure he would obey. He knew too much, had done too much to help her cement her own position. One day, she thought, she might have to make certain he would stay silent. That carried its own risks. Roupen Hovannis was no one's innocent. Data could point an accusing finger even after a man was gone.
The Chairman's lips creased in a bitter smile. If she had not known of the power dead men carried, Bilbeis IV would have taught her all about it. That damned anthropologist had been dead more than fourteen hundred years, but the trouble his meddling had caused looked to be as immortal as the queen whose cancer he'd cured.
The smile disappeared. Paulina Koch drilled herself never to reveal too much. Behind the impassive mask she cultivated, though, her mind was still racing. More and more she thought she should have let the report on Bilbeis IV go public and simply taken whatever heat descended on her and on the Service because of it.
Too late for that. If it had not been too late from the moment the report vanished from the Service file, it had become so with the death of—what was his name?—Fogelman. She had managed to make herself believe that was necessary to protect the Survey Service for which she had worked so long and hard.
About the Clark County she did not want to think at all. Most of the people aboard the Clark County had never heard of Bilbeis IV. Well, they never would now, that was certain. And now she was not just protecting the Service but herself as well. Rehabilitation—she shuddered at a euphemism grimmer than any in the Survey Service lexicon—would be the least she could hope for if the truth came. No way but forward, then.
"But that's insane!" Magda yelled. She was tired of having people turn around to stare at her and even more tired of being in positions where she made them turn around to stare. More quietly, she went on, "Here I am in front of you, Mr. Peters."
"Yes, Ms., umm—" The credit manager's voice trailed away. He'd done that before, as if he wouldn't have to admit Magda was alive if he didn't speak her name. Peters reminded her of Paulina Koch, though he and the Survey Service Chairman looked nothing alike. Both of them had the same air of being not quite human, only projections of the organizations they represented.
"Mr. Peters, do I look dead?" she demanded.
"No," he admitted, not sounding pleased about it.
"Then why can't I make this stinking piece of plastic work? The red light goes on every time I try to use it. I've explained about how Marie was carrying my card when she went aboard the Clark County."
"So you have. Unfortunately, you have not explained why no card authorized to Marie Roux has been unearthed on Carson Planet. If that card appears, it will facilitate the substantiation of your account and the restoration of your credit. Until then, I lack the authority to make that restoration, as the cancellation of your account was not originally implemented here. All I can do is pass on the discrepancy notice to our headquarters and allow them to make the determination."
"Where are your headquarters?" Magda asked dangerously.
"Why, on the capital world, of course."
"You officious idiot!" Magda shouted. Everyone in the office who hadn't been looking at her before was now. She was past caring. "Here I am, and you can't even tell I'm not dead? Make any check you want on me, for heaven's sake. If the ID doesn't match what's on my card, put me away and throw out the stinking key."
"I was going to suggest that in any case. It will bolster your account in the report I submit."
That was as far as he would go. Gradually Magda realized that he was not out to give her a hard time but that he would not stick his neck out one millimeter for her either. "How long will your miserable report take to go through?"
"I can't be sure. A couple of weeks perhaps, if the medical data are as you say. I'll hold off filing till I have them from you."
"A couple of weeks?" Magda echoed in dismay. "What am I supposed to do in the meantime, starve?"
She had meant it as a rhetorical question, but Peters took it literally. "If I might make a recommendation—"
"Please." By then Magda was ready to listen, seeing no way anything Peters said could make things worse.
"Well, then, I would suggest you use this Marie Roux's card, which is active, as your own while your credit identity is being reconfirmed. When that happens, or when her own death is established as fact, charges accrued can be transferred back to your account."
Magda knew he was trying to be helpful. She even knew he was giving her good advice. That didn't make it any easier to take. She had practically frog-marched Marie onto the Clark County in her place; if anyone but Pedroza had told her about the trip, she knew, she would have gone, and gone eagerly. But she hadn't, and Marie was dead instead of her. The thought of using her friend's card made her feel even worse than she did already—she hadn't felt like a ghoul before. And worse still, she knew she would do it. She left the credit office in a hurry.
The doctor who ran the medical checks on her that afternoon gave her a quizzical look. "You're paying me with this credit card so I can confirm you're the rightful user of that one?"
"Believe me," she told him, "it doesn't make any more sense to me than it does to you. Just rush those results over to Credit Superintendent Peters." She gave him the access code.
She went back to her apartment and for the most part stayed there. She lived as frugally as she could, not wanting to use any more of Marie's credit than necessary. She watched the screen more in ten days than she had in years—and discovered why she hadn't bothered. She did not watch the news.
Every morning she tried her own credit card. Every morning the system rejected it. She used the thesaurus program on her computer to generate page-long curses to call down on Peters's head.
The monograph got short shrift; Magda lacked the heart to work on it. She also kept delaying taking the report on Bilbeis IV back to the field office. Finally she made herself do it. She had no better monument to offer the crew of the Jêng Ho.
Riding the shuttle felt strange—she had grown too used to being cooped up. Pandit the clerk raised an eyebrow when she walked into the office. "You were so intent on transmitting this, and then you never came back. May I ask what happened?"
"I died," she said. "Ask your computer if you don't believe me."
His eyes widened as he made the connection. "The Clark County—"
"Exactly. I was supposed to be on it." Briefly, not naming names, she explained how she had stayed behind, and finished, "So if I had been on that ship, odds are this would have stayed shelved for good. Make sure Central gets it this time, will you, Pandit?"
"I don't know what went wrong the first two times." He sounded genuinely aggrieved; like Peters, he did not care for anything that upset his routine. Unlike the case of the credit representative, though, getting that routine back implied helping Magda, not frustrating her. He loaded the data card into his terminal and squirted its information across the light-years.
"Come in, Roupen. Do please sit down." Paulina Koch flicked an imaginary speck of lint from her gray blouse. Her slacks were a darker shade of gray, almost charcoal; that was as much extravagance as she allowed herself as far as clothes went. Anyone who thought of the Survey Service Chairman in a negligee—in itself an unlikely notion—would have imagined her in a gray one.
"What's up, PK?" Hovannis rumbled. Paulina Koch handed him a printout. His always dour features grew harsher still as he scanned it. "We've already scrubbed this twice," he observed. "If we do it again, whoever keeps filing the damned thing will really start wondering what's going on."
"It's already gone," the Chairman said, "though I leave to you the details of making the erasure invisible. We've involved ourselves too deeply in denying the authenticity of the report to have it linger in public files even for a moment."
"That's true," Hovannis agreed. They both knew what an understatement it was.
Paulina Koch hesitated before going on, as if searching for words. At last she said, "After the tragic loss of the Clark County, I had not expected to see this document surface again."
"Neither had I," Hovannis answered. They said no more than that; the subject was much too touchy to go into deeply.
"We have to be more thorough," the Chairman said.
"I'll look into it," Hovannis said.
Paulina Koch was checking another printout. She nodded to herself. "As I thought: the entire complement of the Jêng Ho is listed as having been aboard the Clark County."
"I'll look into it," Hovannis repeated.
"Very well. Thank you for coming up." The Chairman's eyes had returned to her screen before Hovannis was out of her office.