Golden Fleece

TWENTY-FIVE

The excrement hit the ventilator. As soon as he got out of the hospital, Aaron stormed into his apartment, his right arm wrapped in a bone-knitting web, his angular face flushed with fury. “Damn it, JASON! You tried to kill me.”

I managed to get the door shut fast enough so that the last two words of his exclamation were cut off from those on the grassy lawn in front of Aaron’s apartment. Fortunately, the designers had seen fit to soundproof the living quarters. Still, I’m sure that at least one of the passers-by, the boorish Harrison Cartwright Jones, would be sure to ask Aaron what all the commotion had been about—that is, if anyone ever saw Aaron again.

My eyes in Aaron’s living room were on an articulated stalk atop the desk. I swung them around slowly to look at him and spoke calmly, reasonably, with a gentle singsong lilt to my words. “What happened with the Pollux was an accident, Aaron.”

“Bullshit! You lowered that ship on me.”

“You did cut the hydraulic line.”

“To stop it from lowering farther, damn you.”

I tried to sound a little miffed. “There’s no reason to blame me for your carelessness.”

He was pacing the length of the room, only his left hand free to be thrust deep into his pocket. “What about the empty fuel tank?”

I paused before replying, not because I didn’t have an answer ready, but in hopes that Aaron would think I had been taken aback by such an unreasonable question. “You spilled a great deal of fuel into the hangar. We all know how quickly it evaporates. You would have a hard time proving that you didn’t just spill the rest with your bungling.”

“The tanks on the other landers are mostly empty, too.”

“Are they?”

“They must be!”

I spoke with infinite gentleness. “Calm down, Aaron. You’ve been through a lot lately: the tragic suicide of your ex-wife and now this horrible accident. I do hope your arm will be okay.”

“My arm has nothing to do with this!”

“Oh, I’m sure you believe that. But you can hardly be objective about what effect these things—especially your guilt over Diana’s death—have had on your ability to think rationally.”

“Oh, I’m thinking rationally all right. You’re the one who’s talking gibberish.”

“Perhaps we should let Mayor Gorlov decide that?”

“Gorlov? What’s he got to do with this?”

“Who else would you take your theories to? Only the mayor is empowered to authorize an investigation of—of whatever it is you’re upset about.”

“Fine. Let’s get Gennady down here.”

“Certainly I’ll summon him, if you like. He’s currently in the library on level three, in seminar room twelve, leading a symposium on comparative economics.”

“Good. Get him down here.”

“As you say. But I’m sure he’ll take the emotional stress you’ve been under into account when you tell him your theories.” Aaron’s nostrils flared, but I pressed on. “And, of course, I’ll have to advise him of your other unusual behaviors.”

“ ‘Unusual behaviors’?” His voice was a sneer. “Like what?”

“Pizza for breakfast—”

“So I like pizza—”

“Chanting ‘Mississippi, Mississippi, Mississippi’—”

“I want to talk to you about that, too—”

“Bed-wetting. Sleepwalking. Paranoia.”

“Dammit, those are lies!”

“Really? Who do you think the mayor is going to believe? Who do you think he’d rather have malfunction?”

“Damn you!”

“Relax, Aaron. There are some things better left unknown.”

He circled in toward my camera pair, and I swiveled the jointed neck to follow his movements. “Like that we’re not on course for Colchis?” he said.

At that moment, I was engaged in 590 different conversations throughout the Starcology. I faltered in all of them, just for a moment. “I give you my word: Eta Cephei IV is our target.”

“Bullshit!”

“I don’t understand your anger, Aaron. What I’ve said is the absolute truth.”

“Eta Cephei is forty-seven light-years from Earth, smooth sailing through empty space.”

“True. So?”

“So we’re in a dust cloud.”

“A dust cloud?” I tried to sound condescending. “Ridiculous. You said yourself that there are no obstructions between Sol and Eta Cephei. If there was an intervening dust cloud, terrestrial observers wouldn’t be able to see Eta Cephei clearly. Yet it’s a star of 3.41 visual magnitude.”

Aaron shook his head, and I perceived that it was not just a gesture of negation, but an attempt to fling what I’d been saying from his mind. “Diana was subjected to one hundred times the radiation she would have been if our ramscoop was operating in normal space. Kirsten couldn’t explain it medically; neither could any of her colleagues. The best I could come up with, besides that silly space-wrap theory, was that it was an instrument malfunction. But it wasn’t a malfunction. The Geiger counters were operating perfectly. You lied to us. In a dust cloud, the number of particles striking anything outside our shielding would shoot way up.” With his good arm, he grabbed the neck supporting my camera pair and yanked it forward. The sudden jump in picture was most disconcerting. “Where are we?”

“Error message 6F42: You are damaging Starcology equipment, Mr. Rossman. Please cease at once.”

“You’re going to find out just how much damage I can do if you don’t start talking now.”

I looked at him, running his image up and down the electromagnetic spectrum. He was especially intimidating in the near infrared, his cheeks flaring as though they were on fire. I had never been in such a direct verbal confrontation with a human before—even Diana hadn’t been so tenacious—and the best my argumentation algorithms could come up with was a variation on the same theme. “Your ex-wife’s suicide has obviously upset you a great deal, Aaron.” As soon as I said that, one of my literary routines piped up with an annoying fact: When a human argument reaches the stage at which one person is simply repeating himself or herself, that person will likely lose. “Perhaps some therapy to help you get over—”

“And that’s the worst of it!” His thick-fingered embrace shook my camera assembly again, so hard that I was unable to realign the lenses for proper stereoscopic vision. I saw two Aarons, each with faces contorted in murderous rage. “I don’t know what the hell you’re up to. Perhaps you even had a reason for lying to us. But to let me think that it was my fault that Diana was dead—I’ll never forgive you for that, you bastard. I never wanted to hurt her.”

Bastard: misbegotten, like Aaron himself, and like this mission. Perhaps he had a point. Perhaps I had erred in taking advantage of the circumstances. Perhaps … “Aaron, I’m sorry.”

“Sorry doesn’t cut it,” he snapped. “It doesn’t come anywhere near. You put me through hell. You’d better have a damned good reason for it.”

“I cannot discuss my motives with you or anyone else. Suffice it to say that they were noble.”

“I’ll be the judge of that,” he said, more calmly than he’d said anything since returning from the ship’s hospital. He let go of my camera neck. I shut off the left-lens input, rather than look longer at twin inquisitors. “In fact,” he said, “I’ll be the judge of you.”

Usually I can predict the direction in which a conversation is going three or four exchanges ahead of time, which makes multitasking hundreds of them at once a lot easier. But at this moment, I was completely lost. “What are you talking about?”

He walked over to his entertainment center and flicked a switch. Billows of steam faded into existence, then, moments later, so did the mighty Countess of Dufferin, the long-ago master of Canada’s prairies: its ghostly headlamp casting a yellow circle on the living-room wall, the engine’s exhaust angling back along the coupled cars, a tiny flow of gray wood smoke rising from the chimney on its orange caboose. Speakers scattered about the apartment took turns making the chugga-chugga-chugga sounds of the locomotive’s engines and the metal whine of its wheels as they leaned into the turns of curving track. Each speaker passed the burden of producing the loudest volume to the next in line as the holographic train moved ahead.

Aaron walked around the room, following the train as it made its way along the projected tracks. “You know, JASON,” he said, his voice smooth, smug, “trains were a great way to travel. You always knew where they were going. They had to follow the track laid down for them. No detours, no hijacking. They were safe and reliable.” He used his thumb to press another control and the Countess’s whistle blew. “People used to set their clocks by them.”

The train disappeared through a tunnel into Aaron’s bedroom. He paused, waiting for it to reappear to the left of the closed doorway. “But, best of all,” he said, “if the engineer had a heart attack, you knew you were safe, too. As soon as he relaxed pressure on the controls, the train would glide to a halt.” He let go of the button he was pressing, and the Countess slowly came to a stop, the chugga-chugga-chugga fading away in perfect synchronization. “Brilliant concept. They called it a deadman switch.”

“So?”

“So changing fuel gauges wasn’t the only thing I did while I was under Pollux. I also wired up a little detonator. Even mostly empty, there’s enough fuel in Pollux’s tank to cause a hell of an explosion if it goes off all at once. And with 240 landing craft in the hangar bay, I think we can count on a nice little chain reaction. Enough to blow Starcology Argo and, more importantly, one asshole computer named JASON right out of the goddamned sky.”

“Come off it, Aaron. You’re bluffing.”

“Am I? How can you tell?” He looked directly into my camera. “You’ve never been able to read me. Examine my telemetry. Am I lying? The pope’s wife uses the pill. The square root of two is an aardvark. My name is Neil Armstrong. My name is William Shakespeare. My name is JASON. Any variance? Why do you think, after all these years, lie detectors still aren’t admissible in court? They’re unreliable. If you’re sure I’m bluffing, go ahead. Get rid of me.”

“I admit that your telemetry is ambivalent. But if you really wanted to be certain, you would have removed my medical sensor from the inside of your wrist.”

“Why? Then you’d think I was lying for sure. You’d reason that I’d cut it out because it would be a dead giveaway that I was bluffing. Besides, I have a use for it. I’ve tuned the detonator to the same frequency my implant broadcasts on—-the same channel you read my telemetry from. If I stop transmitting—if you kill me—Kablooie! The end of the line.”

I set a little CAD program running to produce a minimalist design for such a detonator, then ran a cross-check between the required parts and the inventories for the equipment lockers Aaron had visited. Damn it, it was possible. Still: “I don’t believe you would do that. You’re putting the lives of everybody at stake. What would happen if you died accidentally?”

Aaron shrugged his broad shoulders. “I’m playing the odds. Hell, I’m only twenty-seven and I’m healthy. Don’t rightly know how long my biological relatives tended to live, but I’m willing to take that chance. I figure I should be good for another sixty years or so.” His voice hardened. “Put it this way: I’m more certain that I will outlive this mission than you are that I’m bluffing.”

I calculated the percentages. He was right, of course. If I had succeeded in crushing him beneath Pollux, Argo might now be a cloud of iron filings hurtling through space.

“I could simply build a little transmitter myself,” I said, “and copy the signal from your telemetry.”

“Well, yes,” said Aaron, “you could try that. Except for two things: First, my detonator has a tracking antenna. You not only have to duplicate the signal; you also have to make it come continuously from what appears to be the same source. Second, I may have one broken arm, but that still leaves me infinitely better endowed than you, you electronic basket case. How are you going to build this transmitter without getting someone to help you?”

I would have scratched my head in consternation … if I could have.

Aaron moved closer to my camera unit. “Now, JASON, tell me where we are.”