Dark as Day

19 TIME WITH THE OGRE…

The witch of Agnesi was inspected, fueled, and ready to go. Jack Beston, arriving minutes before their scheduled departure, said only one thing to Milly.

“Travel time with Ganymede surface gravity as ship’s acceleration would take too long, so I’ve set us for one-gee Earth. Okay?”

At Milly’s startled nod — what choice did she have? — he vanished into his own suite of rooms and closed the door. His disappearance suited her fine. It was not his absence that worried her, so much as his possible presence. As for the acceleration, one Earth gravity was six times what she had grown up with on Ganymede and far more than she had ever experienced before. She would probably feel like she was made of lead, but if it meant getting there quicker she could take it. She went across to the pilot interface. “How long will we take to reach the Odin Station at Jovian L-5?”

The pilot included a high Level Four Fax, embodied as a dignified man with a smooth face and a touch of gray at the temples. He frowned as though thinking about Milly’s question, although the answer could have been provided by the computer in microseconds. “Assuming that I receive no requests for change of acceleration, the scheduled travel time including mid-point turnover is eight-point-six days. Perihelion distance will be three hundred and eighty-nine million kilometers.”

“But that will take us inside the Belt.”

“Quite true. We will travel closer to the Sun than many of the asteroids. However, with our onboard matter detection systems there is absolutely no danger of collision. Can I help you with anything else?”

“Not at the moment.”

“Then I hope that you enjoy the flight. If there is anything that I can do to make it more pleasant, don’t hesitate to ask. And now, please take a seat. The drive is scheduled to go on in thirty seconds, but cannot do so unless all passengers are suitably positioned.”

Milly went to sit down and strap herself into one of the cabin’s swing chairs. She had been surprised by the pilot’s answer, but she should not have been. The acceleration due to Sol at Jupiter’s distance was only a couple of hundredths of centimeters per second per second. Given a drive capable of accelerations of a Ganymede gravity or more, orbits around the Outer System were practically point-and-shoot. The passage from Jovian L-4 to Jovian L-5 would fake The Witch of Agnesi arrowing across between Sol and Jupiter, on a near straight-line trajectory. At turnover point the ship would be almost exactly equidistant from the planet and the Sun.

She lay back in the padded seat. A few seconds more, and the ship was moving. The force that Milly felt was surprisingly gentle. If this was all she had to take there would be no problem at all. From the port on her left she saw the Argus Station, apparently rotating around an axis that directly faced Milly. She realized that the Argus Station was not actually moving. The ship was turning into position. And suddenly, while that thought was still in her head, a powerful force seized her and thrust her hard against the supporting chair.

So this was one Earth gravity. She felt as though she could hardly breathe. Her breasts, always in her opinion too large, became more than a cosmetic problem. They were heavy weights pressing against her ribs. And she was supposed to endure this for — how long? — more than eight days, the pilot had said.

Milly closed her eyes. Eight minutes would be too much. She lay in misery for an indefinite period, until she heard another sound in the cabin. She opened her eyes.

Jack Beston was standing in front of her. He didn’t seem to be suffering any strain at all.

“Here.” He was holding out a vapor syringe. “One Earth gravity for a week or so won’t do you any physical harm, but there’s no point in feeling uncomfortable. Just remember not to try to move too fast for the first few hours.”

Milly didn’t have enough breath to speak. She took the syringe. If this was part of some deep Ogre-ish plan to render her unconscious so that Jack could have his way with her, then she was his and good luck to him. In her present condition, being unconscious was better than being awake.

“Not there.” Beston gripped the syringe and re-directed it to a place on Milly’s neck. She, uncoordinated and with her hand weighing a ton, had somehow pointed the syringe at a part of the chair support behind her head.

“You want it to act as quickly as possible,” he went on. “So an artery is best — and anywhere in the body works a lot better than a shot into the seat cover.”

It was a joke of sorts, and Milly wanted to smile. She made the effort, and felt the skin of her face move and stretch in odd directions. What it looked like was anyone’s guess. She allowed him to direct the placing of the syringe nozzle and pressed the plunger when he said, “Now, push.” She felt the spray cold against the side of her neck.

He waited a few seconds, peering down at her, “How do you feel now?”

“Just the same.” But she didn’t. For one thing, she had spoken, an act which had seemed impossible only a minute ago. Her breasts felt like breasts again, not like lead weights on her rib cage. She released the straps that held her in the seat and began to stand up.

Jack Beston put his hand on her shoulder. “Not yet. Sit here and rest for a couple of hours, let your body get used to things. Then I’ll take you to the exercise room.”

She had noticed the elaborate facility on her first quick tour of the ship, and dismissed it as the foible of a man with more money than sense. “Are you going to exercise?”

“Both of us are. Very gently, and very carefully for the first day or two. Muscle build-up under higher gravity comes amazingly fast, but it’s very easy to develop a sprain or tear tissue.”

He retreated into his own quarters, leaving Milly to wonder what manner of man she was dealing with. Was he interested in her personally, as Hannah Krauss insisted? If so, he showed no signs of it. Was he an Ogre, as everyone insisted? Then he was an Ogre on its best behavior.

Milly had to wait two days before she could answer those questions. The Witch of Agnesi flew steadily on, its acceleration never changing. Milly’s body gradually adapted to the unprecedented acceleration field. She moved slowly and carefully, and reminded herself that humans had evolved in a force field like this. Jack Beston remained for most of the time in his own quarters, and Milly kept to hers. They met twice a day to eat, to exercise — gently, at his insistence — and to talk about nothing. He was fidgety and restless, but uncommunicative.

Milly was not bored. She was too worried for boredom. She was busy obsessively analyzing and re-analyzing her own work, wondering if she had made some blunder that the others at the Argus Station had failed to catch, wondering if she would go down in history as a major discoverer or as one more footnote testifying to an alien signal that wasn’t. If she did take a break it was to wander over to the ports and stare out. When they reached turnover, the Sun, the ship, and Jupiter would lie almost exactly in a straight line. Already she could see the Sun’s intense glare out of one port, and Jupiter’s full face out of the one opposite. Ganymede, where her relatives lived and where until recently she had made her home, was never visible. The solar system felt very empty. She felt very alone.

Late on the afternoon of the third day, Jack Beston appeared and asked her if she would have dinner with him in his private quarters. She couldn’t think of any reason to say no, so she agreed, but when the time came and she knocked on the door leading to his cabin, she felt highly uncomfortable. As she entered the sitting room she had to remind herself that so far as he was concerned she had never been here before.

She wandered around, offering compliments on the well-designed furniture and expensive decor. At last he said, “You know, back on Argus Station I have a reputation for being paranoid about security. I’m not, really, about anything but the project itself. Zetter’s the security freak, not me. But when I bought this ship it came with a monitoring system already installed for the private quarters.”

Did that mean he knew she had been snooping around? It must. She stared at him. His face had a brooding expression, but he didn’t sound upset at her — certainly not as upset as Milly felt. “I’m sorry. When I came aboard, I wondered — I’ve never been on a ship anything like this before, so I just—”

“Don’t apologize. Do you know what I look for in a person who applies to work on the Argus Project? Insatiable curiosity, about everything in the universe.” He waved her to a seat by the low table and dropped to sit cross-legged on the cushions opposite. He smiled a grim smile. “Of course, when certain other people display that type of curiosity, I don’t like it at all. I don’t mean you, Milly. Have you scanned the news outlets recently?”

“No. Not since we left Argus Station.”

“Well, I have. We sent word that we had a possible signal from the stars to just two places: Odin Station, and the Ganymede Office of Records. The signal that went to Ganymede was enciphered and should have been locked away. But somebody leaked it, and somebody cracked it. There’s a blurt about us on the Paradigm Outlet. Most of it is made-up nonsense, as you’d expect, but it says we have a message from aliens. Your name is mentioned. It’s going to be a pain in the ass until all this dies down. A hundred media chasers will be after you.”

“What do I tell them?” In her whole life, Milly had never met a single individual from any outlet.

“You refer them to me.” Jack Beston’s green eyes took on a gleam of anticipation. “I’ll give them more than they bargained for. I’ll offer them information — if they’ll tell me where the Ganymede leak came from.”

“Are you sure it was the Ganymede office? The signal you sent to the Odin Station wasn’t enciphered.”

“It didn’t need to be. Odin Station is locked as tight as the Bastard’s ass. He’d kill anyone on his project who leaked this kind of information, because even though he lost on the initial discovery he’s hoping to get there first with interpretation.”

“I thought the race was over.”

“Not until we know what the signal means!’

“Then why did you send any message at all to Odin Station?”

“A calculated risk. We need the Bastard’s inputs for verification. It’s either that, or sit around for years while we change orbit position. And I’m too impatient to wait for things.” He followed Milly’s eyes, to where an array of little servers were creeping through from the kitchen and positioning themselves by the low table. “Well, the hell with all that. I didn’t ask you to dinner to obsess about work. Let’s eat. Help yourself.”

Milly wondered what to expect as she opened the server lids. Her earlier inspection of the kitchen suggested a level of cuisine beyond anything she had ever encountered. It was a relief to find exactly the same kinds of food that she had grown up with.

No, put it differently. This looked like what she was used to. Milly placed a minimal amount of food on her plate. She thought of Hannah’s warning, the seduction of new female workers, and Jack’s own I’m too impatient to wait for things. If he were planning to put a move on her, was he above adding a little psychotropic additive to affect her mood? She speared a small green bean on her fork and tasted it.

Jack Beston was watching closely. “Are you all right? You’ve hardly taken any.”

“I suppose that I’m a bit surprised.” Milly gestured with her fork at her plate. “This is fine, but it’s the same sort of food as we used to eat at home.”

“You mean it’s too plain, rather than high-class?”

“Well, I wouldn’t say that.”

“But you might think it.” Jack had loaded his plate with about ten times as much as Milly, though so far he hadn’t taken a single bite. “I’m sorry, but when it comes to eating I’m a low-brow. I think I developed my food tastes early in life, and I wasn’t born rich. I had richness thrust upon me.”

“I know.”

“Hannah told you?”

“Right.”

“You’ve not taken enough food to feed a mouse. And so far you have nibbled on one very small bean. What else did Hannah tell you?”

Milly put down her fork. “Since you insist on asking, she warned me to be very careful. You have a habit, she said, of making passes at women on your staff, especially ones who are new. And I’m the most recent arrival.”

He was staring at her and nodding his head thoughtfully. This was probably where she got fired.

“So you’re nervous,” he said, “and that’s spoiling your appetite?”

“Maybe.”

“And maybe there’s more to it than that.” Jack reached across the table to take her hand, but she pulled it back out of reach. He nodded. “You really are nervous. Maybe you are worried about the food and think there could be something wrong with it. Now I’m going to tell you a few things, Milly Wu, and whether you believe me or not, and whether after I talk we sit here and eat a civilized dinner together, or whether you leave and lock yourself in your cabin for the rest of the trip, is up to you. Either way, I won’t hold it against you.

“First, I do find you very attractive, and I have since your original interview. Also, I know I have a reputation, and there’s some truth to what Hannah told you. But I wish Hannah had told you something else. I have never, ever, tried to use position or money or influence to pressure someone into having sex if she doesn’t want to. I’m not interested in any form of coercion. Also, I have never tried to drug a person, man or woman, to do anything for any reason.”

He paused and Milly saw that his hands, still extended across the table, were trembling. “Hannah didn’t tell me most of that,” she muttered. “I’m glad you did. And I believe you.”

“Good. Because now we reach the hard part so far as I’m concerned. I told you I find you attractive, and I do. But if you had come on strong to me tonight and suggested that we have sex — I’m not saying that you ever had any such thought — I’m sure I would have been a big disappointment. Can’t you see that I’m tense and nervous as hell, and have been for days, and that it has absolutely nothing to do with you? I asked you to dinner to get my mind off something else.”

“The visit to Odin Station?”

“You can be more specific than that. It’s not the station I’m worried about. It’s Philip. You know — the Bastard.”

“I know. But I’ve never heard you use his name before.” Milly was feeling a lot better, even as his discomfort seemed to grow. “But I don’t understand. I thought we were in an unbeatable position. We discovered the signal, and we announced the discovery. He doesn’t even know where to look.”

“We’ll have to tell him that, to get verification.”

“But the signal direction is just a tiny fraction of what we have learned. We’ll still be far ahead. What can he possibly do to change that?”

“If I knew, I’d be a lot less worried. Do you have an older sister?”

“No. Two younger ones, and a young brother.”

“You’re lucky. The oldest ones always believe they’re the boss. Philip is just a couple of years older than I am, but right from the time we were little kids, in everything we ever did, he always managed to work it so he came out ahead — even when the whole project was my idea. It’s the same now. He’s got me so psyched that I’m convinced he’ll do it this time, even though I can’t think of any way it can possibly happen.”

It was strange. Watching him across the table, Milly saw a different Jack Beston. He was the Ogre, the hard taskmaster who cracked the whip over everyone and everything on the Argus Project at Jovian L-4. But he was also a nervous little kid, scared of what his devious older brother might do to spoil his plans. Milly felt like putting her arms around him and telling him that everything would work out all right.

That would be, for a dozen different reasons, a mistake. It’s when you feel sympathy for the Devil that you’re in trouble. Milly believed everything that Jack had said to her, with the possible exception of his impotence. On that subject a man was not a reliable source. But she did go so far as to reach out across the table and pat his hand.

“You’ll win. I’m sure of it.” She bent over and began to lift covered dishes onto the table. “I’m sorry I was suspicious about the food, and to tell the truth I was starving before I came in here. I think it’s the effect of the higher gravity, our bodies are trying to double their muscle mass in a few days.”

Milly pushed Jack’s plate out of the way. “That’s all cold, you need to start over.” She took a clean plate for him, opened the covered dishes, and began to serve both of them liberal helpings of everything. “We’ll eat now, and since you want distraction I’m going to give it to you. You asked about my family. Well, they’re the least interesting group in the System. I’ll tell you about Uncle Godfrey and Aunt Mary, and Ginger and Sara and Lola and dopey Cousin Peter, and I’ll go on until you beg for mercy.”