The Alien Trace [Cord 01] (25 page)

    "All right," he said. "As long as you have no objection to my checking the alarms."

    "I insist on it," O'as responded with grim humor.

    

    

    Cord prowled restlessly around the room.

    "This is getting no results," he said to his visitor.

    O'as placidly bit into a sandwich. She had brought lunch in for the two of them, but Cord's appetite had succumbed to inactivity.

    "I've been stuck here for three days and nobody has tried to kill me. We're wasting our time, and I'm bored."

    "You're just horny," O'as remarked. She had refused to allow him visits from anyone, even Julia.

    "Care to remedy that?" Expectant, he stopped pacing.

    "As a matter of fact-"

    She never got a chance to finish the sentence: the screen's beeping cut her off. O'as delayed hitting the respond button long enough to push Cord out of camera range. The security chief wanted no hint of Cord's good health to leak out.

    "Chief," said the voice of one of her staff, "we've got a problem in the cafeteria."

    Garatua's face darkened. "What do you mean, 'a problem'? A lover's quarrel? A spilled drink? Try to be specific, Leno."

    "Specifically, we've got a corpse and seven wounded. Attempted murder and suicide."

    "Balls of the Blue God," O'as muttered. "Half a lunch and no rest afterward-a sure formula for indigestion and an early grave. I'll be right down."

    "I'm coming with you," Cord insisted.

    The security head shrugged. "Why not? You can hardly get into trouble with half of security present."

    When "they burst into the cafeteria, it looked like a battlefield to Cord. People were scattered about, tables were overturned and broken, bottles and containers spilled their contents across puddles of blood. The bright-colored smears made an abstract painting of the floor. A medical team was present, loading the casualties onto gurneys. Several more, with minor injuries, were being assisted to the infirmary.

    "Thank the gods it happened after the lunch hour, or it would have been worse." Leno gestured toward a mound shrouded in white plastic. "He's over there."

    O'as stamped over and raised a corner of the sheet.

    "Industrial-use cutter," she remarked. "Anyone recognize him before he took his face off?"

    "Yeah. He's Lion Pars. He has his employee card, and others have identified him."

    "Well?" She hoisted a thick eyebrow.

    "He was a quiet little guy who worked down in maintenance. He didn't live up to his name. Everyone thought that was funny."

    Cord looked down at the oozing red slab that had recently been a face. How could life get so bad that a man would do that to himself?

    "So he just checked a cutter out of stores, came in here, and started shooting?"

    A wiry woman with long black hair approached O'as.

    "It wasn't like that at all," the woman said, not catching the sarcasm in the security head's voice.

    O'as turned sharply toward her, looking annoyed. "How was it, then?" O'as asked, her voice brittle.

    "He'd been depressed and worried for a long time-a month, maybe. We used to talk sometimes. He-"

    "Were you friends? Lovers?" Garatua interrupted.

    "No. Li didn't have friends. He had acquaintances."

    "Sorry. What were you going to say?"

    "He was frightened. Today he was talking to himself and always looking around, like this." The woman's eyes darted from side to side and seemed to twitch away from objects. As though he kept seeing things out of the corners of his eyes."

    "If he was carrying on that way, why didn't someone do something? Sounds like he was breaking up," Leno observed.

    Lion's co-worker looked at him pityingly.

    "You don't turn someone in because he's gone comet-riding and forgotten to get back in time for his shift. Li wasn't the kind to use Happi-High or Comet Dust much, so I thought he'd taken a little too much or maybe mixed them. Hey, you know how it is: if you aren't a regular, it's easy to make a mistake."

    "Make sure the meds get blood samples," Garatua told Leno. "We'll interview everyone he worked with, too. I'll search his unit myself. So what happened then?"

    Their informant continued, "He was sitting at a table- over there, the corner one-but he wasn't eating. He was talking to himself. He passed by me earlier, but he didn't say anything to me-probably didn't see me."

    "Did you hear what he was saying?"

    "It was bizarre. He kept repeating that things were creeping around after him."

    Things. The word hung in the air, almost visible.

    "Things?" Garatua echoed without enthusiasm.

    "He didn't say what he meant. Frankly, I wouldn't have wanted to know," the woman answered.

    Everyone knew what she meant…

    "Thanks. Give your name and number to Leno. We may need to talk to you again. Come on," Garatua told Cord.

    "Where are we going?"

    "I want to see Lion's psych profile. And interview the people in his department."

    They stopped at a privacy-shielded com-screen, used Garatua's special access code, and learned more about the subject's mind and life than his own mother had known. Most of the terminology was gibberish to Cord, but his companion translated.

    "Repressed to a factor of five, as the girl said, acquaintances, not friends. No real sexual outlets. Liked to take long walks in the outdoors-a bit difficult on this world. Religion-Fourth Zen Anabaptist Church. That accounts for much of the guilt and fear. Prefers being alone. Painstaking and methodical, a delicate balance between stability and howling insanity."

    "I understood personnel were screened to eliminate undesirable elements and potential problems," Cord said.

    "They are. And according to his profile, there was little likelihood that Pars would tip over into instability. Granted, he was weird, but the psych-tech's opinion is that he'd go on being a little weird and not very happy but doing his job all right. Which is all the company asks."

    "The psych-tech made a mistake."

    "So it appears," O'as admitted.

    

    

    They were down on the lowest level of the complex. The port grew its own food under artificial light, using waste products to feed gigantic hybrid plants. Alien-to Cord, at least-bushes and stalks towered over them as they spoke with the dead man's department head.

    "Lion's job was to maintain the farm's environment. He checked the irrigation and fertilizer channels, the lighting and so forth. Most of the harvesting and planting is automated, and he had nothing to do with that. But keeping the temperature and light cycles stable and monitoring the watering and feeding is a major effort. When you're feeding as many as we do, those things are critical. We could live on Mehiran food for some time and stay pretty healthy, but a port can't afford to depend on external food supplies. And on some worlds, we couldn't digest the proteins and starches at all."

    "What sort of person was he?"

    The supervisor examined a half-ripe berry the size of Cord's fist before answering.

    "Not easy to know. Quiet but pleasant. Or was. I can't believe he'd try to kill anyone else. Himself, yes. I can believe that. Unless…"

    Neither Cord nor Garatua prompted him. Cord was sure the man would refuse to say more if they tried to push him.

    "… unless he began to see them as not human. Or humanoid-I beg your pardon," the human added to Cord.

    "We were told that Lion talked about 'things'-creatures, perhaps. Did he speak to you about them?"

    "Not much, and not at all lately. A few weeks ago he said something about things hiding in the maintenance tunnels. we laughed it off, and after that he wouldn't say any more he got so he didn't like going into the tunnels alone. Out of orbit? Sure, but lots of people have a crimp one way or another."

    Gazing around the cavernous space, dim even with the plant lights, Cord could understand Lion's crimp. The plants' huge leaves rustled with the soft breeze from a ventilator. In the silence, such sounds were almost sinister. Did Lion take 'ong walks in this man-made "out-of-doors"? Or was he threatened by this towering primeval forest?

    "You wouldn't happen to have a cutter down here, would you?" O'as was asking.

    In the semi-gloom it was not easy to see the embarrassed flush on the man's face, but it could be read in his movements and his voice.

    "I won't try to fool you. We do have one-you're going to find it's the one he used up there." He stumbled over the words, trying to explain. "We kept it because it's easier to have it here than to make trips to stores. When Li got twitchy about the tunnels and started taking the cutter with him… well-we needed him. If he dusted out, we'd be shorthanded. But I swear I never knew he'd take the cutter out of the department. I wouldn't have let him do that, no matter how many aliens were after him."

    Garatua snorted in derision, but Cord's attention was riveted.

    "Say that again, please."

    "Huh? What?"

    "About aliens being after him. Was that what he believed? Not 'things' but aliens?"

    "Lion had this theory that the things were aliens trying to infiltrate the port. Rumors about 'things' are common-in every spaceport there are tales of mutated giant spiders and worms-or worse-in the lower levels."

    "Port legends," O'as agreed. "No truth to any of it. Like city stories about the insane mother who put her baby down the disposal chute-" She stopped abruptly.

    "The funny thing is," the supervisor went on, "Lion didn't imagine oversized spiders or worms, and on some planets it would be rational to believe aliens were trying to break in. I don't know exactly what he saw in the tunnels, but he did see a big bird outside, once. But it was night, and I guess he was seeing things."

    "A big bird?" O'as repeated.

    "Bigger than a man, with a sharp, curved beak. Since he saw it outside the buildings, and at night, it didn't seem so weird. We thought it was a real Mehiran creature." He looked at Cord expectantly.

    Cord shook his head, swinging his heavy scalplock. "There's nothing on Mehira that fits the description."

    "How long had he been out of orbit?" O'as asked.

    "Like I said, it's been a few weeks since he got the idea that there were things down here following him. It's only the past week he's actually 'seen' them. Before he just thought they were there."

    "Uhh," O'as grunted. "Well, thanks. You've been helpful." She turned and stalked off.

    "Hell of a fine woman," the superintendent muttered to Cord. "Not too talkative, not too skinny. You say what you like about Kameans, but that girl's got grit."

    "You should tell her so," Cord said. The superintendent looked as though he had a certain amount of grit himself.

    "I sure would like to, but I'm not much good at meeting people. That's why I'm down here farming."

    "It's not hard. In a day or two, why not go up to security to ask her how the investigation is going. Then tell her what a good job you think she's doing. That would get you acquainted."

    "I guess it would. Thanks. Maybe I'll do it."

    Cord went after O'as. In the dim emptiness, he began to walk faster. It was a relief to find her waiting at the trans tube.

    "What next?" Cord asked her.

    "We check his unit." She jumped in the trans tube. Cord was only a step behind.

    

    

    The unit was compulsively tidy. A shelf held tapes-mostly of the self-improvement variety-and some family portrait holopix and a religious object or two. Garatua poked around. Cord sniffed the air. It was stale.

    He found all the rooms in the spaceport somewhat musty, since the complex contained no windows. The building was sheathed in the black material that made it impervious to attack and accident; it used an efficient ventilation system instead of the Mehirans' haphazard method of opening windows. Still, however sophisticated, mechanically circulated air is not the same as a refreshing breeze. The atmosphere of Pars's room was even less fresh than usual, Cord noticed. He looked for the ventilating duct. While O'as went through Lion's belongings, Cord dragged a chair over to the wall. Standing on the chair to examine the duct, he discovered the reason for the room's closeness.

    "There's something in here," Cord told the security chief.

    She stopped her search of the wardrobe to join him.

    "I don't like to hear that word 'thing,' " she said. "There's been too much talk about 'things' already."

    "It looks like a notebook," Cord said, using a thumbnail to loosen one of the screws holding the grille in place,

    The screws came free easily: they had been removed and replaced often. Garatua took the book from Cord and opened it. "It's a diary," she announced.

    Cord stepped off the chair and sat next to O'as on Lion's neatly made bed. He watched her skim the pages, looking for a pertinent entry. "Listen to this," she commanded.

    " 'I knew I wasn't imagining it. I thought there were things down there, watching, watching, always watching me, but really there's only the one. It's nasty and slimy but it's frightened of me-that's because it knows what a cutter is. I shot at it and missed. It flattened out so fast the ray hit the wall, and I'll have to explain about that when the next maintenance crew comes around. Then it slid into a duct and I didn't follow it.' "