Murder in Orbit (14 page)

Frustrated, I turned on the evening broadcasts, which were full of information about Elmo's life and work. They showed (several times) an interview he had granted just a year ago. As usual, he had refused to be photographed. But the clip did include several segments shot over his shoulder, his voice explaining what he was doing as his hands tapped out equations on his trusty computer.

Basically, it was stuff I knew. After all, the man had been a “living legend.” The media had been doing articles and features about him for years. I watched it anyway. If nothing else, I knew Dr. Puckett would enjoy the fuss he had created by passing away.

But something about the interview kept nagging me. Finally I downloaded it, then ran it several times for myself.

His hands. What was it about his hands?

It wasn't until I was trying to go to sleep that everything finally clicked into place.

When it hit me I jumped out of bed so fast that I knocked over my chair. Then I gave myself one of those clichéd slaps on the forehead.

But I figured I deserved a solid whack.

I couldn't believe what a dunce I had been.

Chapter 20

Midnight Excursion

“Cassie? It's Rusty.”

“Rusty! Are you crazy? It's almost eleven o'clock.”

“I know. I'm glad you answered. I was afraid I might get your father.”

She frowned at me. “What do you want?”

I took a deep breath. “Can you get free later tonight, after everyone is asleep? I want to go back to the BS Factory.”

“You
are
crazy.” I could see her reaching forward to snap off the screen.

“Cassie! Wait!”

She hesitated.

“Listen, I don't want to talk about it right now. But we need to do a little more snooping over there, when there's not so many people around. I'm going to go whether you do or not. I just thought you might want to come along.”

“Why don't you ask Helen?”

It was a reasonable question. In fact, I had tried to ask Helen—mostly because I thought she might take me more seriously than I expected Cassie to.

Unfortunately, Helen was in no condition to take anyone seriously, much less go out on a possibly dangerous investigation. Of the three of us, she had been hardest hit by Dr. Puckett's death, and she was still in a state of intense grief. It had taken a long time for her to answer when I called, and when she did come on the line, her eyes were red and puffy from weeping. What bothered me even more was that her voice was slurred and drowsy, and she seemed to have trouble focusing on what I was saying. I was beginning to suspect foul play when she apologized for her condition and explained that her doctor had given her a sedative because of her emotional state. Feeling terrible for having intruded on her private grief, I made up a little story about having called to see how she was doing, then rang off as quickly as possible.

Cassie didn't need to know all that right now. “She's not available,” I said simply.

Cassie sighed. She glanced over her shoulder, then said softly, “All right. What time?”

“Can you meet me at the elevators at two o'clock?”

“Two o'clock? You're out of your mind!”

I didn't feel like arguing. “I know that. Are you in or not?”

She hesitated. “Oh, all right. I'm in. I suppose working with Elmo damaged my brain. I know he'd be disappointed in me if I didn't come.”

Then her eyes started to fill up, and she clicked off.

I lay down on my bed and tried to think.

Cassie was waiting when I got to the elevators. “You're late!” she hissed.

Of course I was late. I'm always late. It's the stupidest thing about me. But I didn't want her to know that.

“I had a hard time getting out of the apartment,” I said softly. Actually, that was true. I had stumbled noisily over a footstool, almost awakened my parents, and give my bum hip a major twist that was still throbbing.

We took the elevator in to the Hub and then another along the Spindle to the area where the scooters were docked. I inserted my ID card into the mechanical guard and punched in my personal code.

The small screen on the front of the guard lit up with the words
PERMISSION DENIED.

Muttering angrily, I punched in a code requesting to know why.

A copy of my personal ID form appeared on the screen. It held a lot more information than I needed to know right then, and certainly more than I cared to have Cassie see, including my height, my weight, and my middle name. (The middle name? All right—it's Cuchulain, a fact which can be blamed entirely on my Irish grandfather, and the one thing for which I have never forgiven him. Are you satisfied now?) Highlighted at the bottom of the grid was the pertinent information: “Level One Access.”

I touched those words, which was a way to request more information. The display disappeared and a new screen came up, explaining exactly what “Level One Access” allowed.

It didn't allow much. And one of the things it didn't allow was signing out a scooter in the middle of what passed for night in ICE-3.

I pushed a button and retrieved my card.

“Let me try,” said Cassie.

She slipped her own card into the machine. A few seconds later we were on our way to a scooter.

“The long arm of Dr. Elmo Puckett,” she said hoarsely as we walked past the electronic sentry. “If you had continued to work with him, you'd have high-level access, too. I was never sure if he got it for me because he believed in being prepared for emergencies, or simply because he knew I wasn't supposed to have it, and it tickled his fancy to provide it. I can't even pilot one of these things. My father didn't want me to learn yet.”

I know it was completely petty of me, but I was glad that at least I would be doing the driving.

I was also glad Cassie didn't take advantage of the situation to make a few remarks about how far I would have gotten if she hadn't come along. Maybe she was starting to mellow a little.

We docked at the BS Factory without incident. To my astonishment, Millicent Carter was on duty.

“Millie!” I said when we climbed out of the scooter. “What are you doing here?”

“I might ask you the same thing,” she said, sounding fairly surprised herself.

Cassie jumped right in. “I asked Rusty to bring me over,” she said, smooth as silk. “I have an important assignment due first thing in the morning and I was up late working on it when I realized I had left some of my most important documents here this afternoon.” She moved her hands in a small gesture of helplessness that was totally unlike her and also totally effective. “All the confusion, you know … Anyway, I
have
to have it first thing in the morning, or I'm in real trouble. But I don't even have a license. So I called Rusty.” She looked at me adoringly. “I think it was awful nice of him to bring me over at this time of the night. He hardly complained at all.”

She was so good I almost believed that line of baloney myself!

Millie seemed satisfied. “It must be our night for wake-up calls,” she said to me. “I got a buzz from the monitoring system that there was some kind of malfunction in the automatic-docking mechanism.” She looked thoughtful for a moment. “Come to think of it, it's a good thing I got here ahead of you. You might have been in real trouble if I hadn't.”

Just what we needed: more trouble!

“Well, go ahead and get your stuff,” said Millie. “I'll be busy here for quite a while yet.”

“You're a real pal, Millie,” I said.

“Yeah, I know. Me and the rest of the dogs. Man's best friends. Scram before I hit you with a wrench.”

We scrammed.

“You were brilliant,” I said to Cassie, once we were out of earshot.

She shrugged. “I had to be. You think that woman is the salt of the earth. I'm not willing to trust
anyone
in this place until we figure out what's going on.”

I decided to drop the subject.

“So where do we go now, Sherlock?” she asked.

“Let's start with Dr. Twining's lab.”

“Haven't you had enough time there?”

“Not quite,” I said, leading the way down the hall. “A year wouldn't be enough, if I wasn't looking for the right thing. Ten minutes should do it now.”

“Aren't we mysterious?” muttered Cassie.

I didn't say anything. If I was wrong, I was going to look awfully stupid. Since I was tired of looking stupid, I thought I'd just wait and see where I really stood before I said anything this time.

So instead of opening my mouth, I opened the door to the lab.

Then I opened my mouth.

Actually, it opened itself as my jaw headed to my knees.

I had expected the place to be deserted. Instead, I found myself face to face with a very agitated Dr. Antoine Twining.

“Rusty!” he cried. “Thank heavens you're here. I've got to talk to you!”

He didn't even look mad.

Just terrified.

Chapter 21

Dr. Twining

“I had a feeling you were going to figure this out before the day was over,” said Dr. Twining.

He was sitting on one of the lab stools, next to the large treatment table I had helped him bring over to the colony earlier that afternoon. His coffeemaker was sitting on top of the table, and he had just poured himself a cup—his seventh or eighth of the evening if the level in the carafe was any indicator.

He asked if we wanted some.

“We'll pass,” I said, answering for both of us. I wasn't taking any chances.

Dr. Twining looked hurt. “I'm not that kind, Rusty,” he said. “I hoped you would understand that.”

“I do. I think. But at this point I'm still figuring better safe than sorry.”

Cassie looked from Dr. Twining to me, totally mystified.

“Don't worry,” I said to her. “It'll all be clear soon enough.”

“How did you figure it out?” asked Dr. Twining.

I shrugged. “A little bit of this, a little bit of that. It was the hands that finally put it all together for me. They were all wrong.”

Dr. Twining sighed. “I was afraid of that. I could have taken care of that, if it hadn't been such a rush job.”

He straightened out his long frame. “Not that I would have wanted to. That's why I'm so glad you're here. This has gone on long enough. It has to come to a stop. Now. Tonight. Before something worse happens.” He hesitated, then added, “Some of the others are involved with things that are downright dangerous.”

“Dr. Durkin?” I guessed.

Dr. Twining nodded. “Someone has to stop Pieter before it's too late. If it's not too late already.” He rose from his chair and began pacing back and forth in front of us. “It's a very confusing issue. I'm in this mess now because I just couldn't give up on some questions. Yet I feel strongly that Pieter has to do what I wouldn't: He's got to give up his research. It's just too dangerous.”

The first guess had worked. I thought I would try another. “That's what you two were arguing about the other day.”

Dr. Twining nodded. “Certainly. Of course, the whole thing is really her fault when you come right down to it.”

“Her?” I asked, suddenly mystified.

He shrugged. “Well, if you go way back, you could put the blame on the company, I guess. They should know you can't put limits on research, can't tell people ‘You can learn only this much, and no more.' But she was the one who took advantage of the situation.”

It wasn't like Dr. Twining to be so obscure. I decided it was a combination of the caffeine buzz he had given himself and the emotional strain he had been under.

That didn't make things any more clear, though. A minute ago I thought I had the whole thing figured out. Now my head was starting to spin again. “Wait a minute,” I said desperately. “You're getting ahead of me. What ‘she' are we talking about?”

Dr. Twining actually stopped pacing and smiled. “You still haven't finished the puzzle, have you, Rusty? You've got the method, but not the motive.”

He rubbed his hands over his face, as if by that gesture he could wipe away some of his nervousness, his exhaustion, his guilt.

“It's very simple, really. We wanted to work. She made it possible.”

“Who?” I asked again.

“Her!” he said, more loudly. He sounded terrified this time, and for an instant I wondered if he was losing his mind.

By the time I realized he was actually pointing at someone behind me, it was too late. Dr. Twining had gasped in shock and begun to slump forward.

Time seems to slow down in a situation like that, maybe because you play it over and over again in your head later on, so that all the little details you normally miss become achingly clear. Even now I can remember the way his mouth opened and closed on the way down, as if he was trying to think of what to say next … the way the top of his head looked as it struck the treatment table … even the way the coffeepot arced slowly through the air when his arm sent it sliding off the table and onto the floor.

But most of all I remember the sight of the red stain that was already starting to spread around the small, clean hole where the laser had sizzled out through the back of his lab coat.

I spun around. But the door, which had opened while we were talking, had slid shut again.

I looked back toward my mentor. A fist-sized lump seemed to have found its way into my throat in the instant that had passed since his last words.

Cassie was already at his side, kneeling over him, to see what could be done.

What could be done, of course, was nothing.

Once she realized that, she turned away from the body and vomited. When she was done, she stood up and said, “I hate you, Rusty.”

For once I was smart enough to realize that what one was saying was not necessarily what one meant.