Ghosts of Ganymede

5. The Mystery Deepens

The medical examiner who performed the official autopsy on the body of Big Bill Barlow was a gaunt, gloomy-faced Mercurian with teak-dark skin and eyes like hot gold coins. He received Star Pirate and the Venusian in a cramped and dusty, airless little cubicle of an office. The desk was buried under a snowfall of papers and the windowpane so fogged by dust and grime that you could not have told by eye alone whether it was day or night outside. Star came to the point at once, as he had apparently interrupted the doctor during his lunch hour.

"Yep, strangled," grunted the medical examiner, munching juicily on a ham sandwich. "Powerful feller, the murderer—dang powerful. Feller’s throat was literally crushed."

"By human hands?" inquired Star. The doctor, whose name was Hurgo, stared meditatively at a taded, ten-year-old calendar which hung on the wall, chewing on a succulent slice of pickle.

"Jovian might of done it," he said at last. "Heavy gravity planet like Jupiter makes 'em stronger than other fellers. But I doubt it. The victim—what's his name ? Barlow? — was a big man, too; thick neck like a bull. And from the way the muscles of his throat were mashed and mangled —" here he paused to pick his teeth with a sliver of wood, while Phath looked sickly out of the bleared window and began to wish he had waited in the dirty lobby below—"mashed and mangled, I say . . . nope, not even a Jovian could have done it."

"With a strangling cord? A rope, maybe?" pressed Star Pirate keenly. The coroner blinked bland gold eyes at him, and glugged down a swig of cold black coffee into which he first poured a large and liberal slug of Mercurian brandy.

"You're think' mebbe this Barlow feller was garrotted, heh?" he guessed shrewdly. "Not a chance, young feller ... it would have taken a woven-steel hawser and a power-winch to have done such a job on Barlow's throat. Believe me!"

When the two adventurers got downstairs, Phath took a deep breath of fresh air and felt the minor surge of sickness pass. He wondered—but only briefly—whatever in the name of thirty space-devils possessed a man, to make him wish to become a coroner and spend his time messing around with cadavers.

"Where now, chief?" he inquired somewhat more cheerfully.

"Now we find ourselves a lawyer," said the rangy redhead, "and post bail for Scotty McGuire."

The milky-skinned Venusian examined his comrade with an albino-pink gaze. "You don't figure Scotty did this guy Barlow in, then, right?"

"Of course not," scoffed Star. "Barlow was three times McGuire's weight, with hands like a couple of hams and biceps as thick as most men's thighs. Even dead drunk, he could have mopped the floor with three Scotty's. Uh, I've no doubt the wiry little Scotsman can hold his own in a barroom brawl, but—did you see his hands? Small as a woman's. It is not physically possible that he inflicted such wounds with those hands as were found on Barlow's throat ... you remember what Dr. Hurgo said ... 'mashed and mangled' ..."

Phath looked sick, swallowed with difficulty, and suggested they change the subject. Star grinned to himself and restrained from making the quip he longed to make.

Three days later, their second task completed, they called the mechanic at the field, learned their ship was ready. Then, after a quick lunch at the Spaceport Cafe, they went to the field, where the Jolly Roger, newly outfitted with her sparkling fresh copper receptor coils, awaited them; they blasted off and headed south across the many miles and miles of thick, quaint jungles of curious trees which covered most of the surface of tropic Ganymede.

The queer, tall, nodding growths of pale, flabby balsa-solt fiber were not so much trees as giant stalks of vegetable which resembled celery as much as any other earthly analog. The fibrous trunks sucked up moisture from the rich soil and converted it to nutritious tissue which the Ganymedian colonists served at table, either baked in thin, chewy cutlets, or cubed in succulent stews and ragouts, or boiled into thick, creamy soups.

The flavor, a bit too bitter for Earthlings, was mostly favored only by the colonists, and the stuff was seldom shipped off-world.

Phath set the Jolly Roger down in a small, raw clearing crudely hacked from the weird forest of pallid, nodding stalks. Here stood a small shack of prefabricated plastic panels, and a couple of small outbuildings, one of them a shed with sheet-metal sides and roof which looked to be large enough to house the Sweet Sue, and, as later came out, did in fact serve as a hangar for the battered, rusty little two-man tug when she was resting up between space-ventures.

In the rear of the plastic shack the two caught a glimpse of a sizeable patch of cultivated soil arranged in neatly hoed rows, where grew potatoes, onions, carrots, green peppers, what looked from this distance to be lima beens, lettuce, beets and tomatoes. There were also a couple of rows of ripe golden corn, a small but heavy-laden apple tree, and a patch devoted to watermelons and canteloupes.

"Guess they do all right for themselves here," observed Phath. As chef and general factotum of Star’s secret base, he grew the same fruits and vegetables, but in hothouses and hydroponics tanks, as Haven's atmosphere, temperature and supply of sunlight were not as good as those to be found here on jungle-clad Ganymede.

The two got out of the cabin of their craft and started to walk across the raw, muddy clearing towards the crude little shack, but came to a halt when a slim figure emerged onto the little porch and showed them the glistening, brassy prong of a proton needle. The weapon was held by a slender, tanned girl in her twenties with a curly mop of honey-blond hair, a dusting of freckles across her small nubbin of a nose, and clear steady gray eyes that did not waver as she confronted the two men. She was slim, with long legs, and wore a loose, dark red sweater and tan slacks. Even in these drab garments, her figure was enticing, thought Star to himself with an appreciative gleam in his emerald eyes.

"You can stop right there," the girl said stoutly, "and turn around. Go back to your ship, get in, and take off. Can't you leave Uncle Scotty alone? He's worn out with mourning Uncle Bill’s death, and I worry about his health. If you Patrol officers have to pester him with more of your eternal questions, call us on the televisor phone!”

"I'm not a Patrol officer, Miss Barlow," Star said, "I'm the man that arranged your uncle's bail. They call me ... Star Pirate."

The blonde girl paled, gasped, swayed for a moment, staring. Then the proton needle sagged, savered, dropped, and she looked about to faint. Star raced to help her, but the lithe and nimble Phath got there first and eased her gently to the flooring of the porch.