The Rock Rats

CHAPTER 21

Through the week-long trip on the Harper, Amanda sensed a strangeness in her husband, something odd, different, something she couldn’t put her finger on. He seemed—not distant, exactly—certainly not distant: Lars spent almost the entire journey in bed with her, making love with a fierce intensity she had never known before. And yet, even in the midst of their passion there was something withdrawn about him; something that he was hiding from her. She had always been able to read his thoughts before: one look at the set of his jaw and she knew. He had never held anything back from her. But now his face was impassive, his expression guarded. His deepset blue eyes showed her nothing.

It frightened Amanda to realize that Lars was keeping a secret from her. Perhaps more than one.

Once they arrived back at their quarters on Ceres and began unpacking their travel bags, Amanda decided to confront the issue directly.

“Lars, what’s the matter?”

He was stuffing a handful of socks and underwear into his bureau drawer. “The matter?” he asked, without looking up at her. “What do you mean?”

“Something’s on your mind and you’re not sharing it with me.” Straightening up, he came back toward her at the bed. “I’m thinking of everything that we have to do. The insurance, restocking the warehouse, getting Starpower back.”

Amanda sat on the bed, next to her opened bag. “Yes, of course. And what else?”

His eyes shifted away from her. “What else? Isn’t that enough?”

“There’s something more, Lars. Something that’s been bothering you since we left Selene.”

He looked down at her, then turned his attention to his travel bag again, started rummaging through it, muttering about his shaving kit.

Amanda put her hand atop his, stopping him. “Lars, please tell me.”

He straightened up. “There are some things you shouldn’t know, dear.”

“What?” She felt shocked. “What things?”

He almost smiled. “If I told you, then you would know.”

“It’s about Martin, isn’t it? You’ve been this way ever since your meeting with him.”

Fuchs took a deep breath. She could see his chest expand and then deflate again. He pushed his bag aside and sat next to her on the bed.

“All through our trip back here,” he said, his voice heavy, low, “I’ve been trying to think of a way that we can stop him from gaining complete control of the Belt.”

“So that’s it.”

He nodded, but she could see that there was still more. His eyes looked troubled, uncertain.

“He wants that. He wants complete control of everyone and everything out here. He wants absolute power.”

Amanda blurted, “What of it? Lars, we don’t have to fight against him. We can’t! You’re only one man. You can’t stop him.”

“Someone has to do it.”

“But not you! Not us! We can cash in the insurance money and go back to Earth and forget about all this.”

With a slow shake of his head, Fuchs said, “Perhaps you can forget about it. I can’t.”

“You mean you won’t.”

“I can’t.”

“Lars, you’re obsessed with a foolish macho delusion. This isn’t a battle between you and Martin. There’s nothing to fight about! I love you. After all these years, don’t you know that? Don’t you believe it?”

“It’s gone beyond that,” Fuchs said grimly.

“Beyond …?”

“He’s killed people. Friends of ours. Ripley. The men and women aboard the ships that have disappeared. He’s a murderer.”

“But what can you do about it?”

“I can fight.”

“Fight?” Amanda felt truly frightened now. “How? With what?”

He held up his thick-fingered hands and slowly clenched them into fists. “With my bare hands, if I have to.”

“Lars, that’s crazy! Insane!”

He snapped, “Don’t you think I know it? Don’t you think it horrifies me down to the bottom of my soul? I’m a civilized man. I’m not a Neanderthal.”

“Then why… ?”

“Because I must. Because there’s an anger in me, a fury that won’t let go of me. I hate him! I hate his smug certainty. I hate the idea that he can push a button and men are murdered millions of kilometers away while he sits in his elegant mansion and dines on pheasant. And fantasizes about you!”

Amanda’s heart sank. I’m the cause of all this, she realized all over again. I’ve turned this sweet, loving man into a raging monster.

“I’d like to smash his face in,” Fuchs growled. “Kill him just as he’s killed so many others.”

“The way you killed that man in the Pub,” she heard herself say.

He looked as if she had slapped him in the face.

Shocked at her own words, Amanda said, “Oh, Lars, I didn’t mean—”

“You’re right,” he snapped. “Absolutely right. If I could kill Humphries like that, I’d do it. In a hot second.”

She reached up and stroked his cheek as gently, soothingly as she could. “Lars, darling, please—all you’re going to accomplish is getting yourself killed.”

He pushed her hand away. “Don’t you think I’m already marked for murder? He told me he would have me killed. You’re a dead man, Fuchs. Those were his exact words.”

Amanda closed her eyes. There was nothing she could do. She knew that her husband was going to fight, and there was nothing she could do to stop him. She knew he would get himself killed. Worse, she saw that he was turning into a killer himself. He was becoming a stranger, a man she didn’t know, didn’t recognize. That frightened her.

“And to what do I owe the pleasure of your visit?” asked Carlos Vertientes.

He’s a handsome devil, Pancho thought. Aristocratic Castilian features. Good cheekbones. Neat little salt-and-pepper beard. He really looks like a professor oughtta, not like the slobs and creeps back in Texas.

She was strolling along the Ramblas in Barcelona with the head of the university’s plasma dynamics department, the tall, distinguished physicist who had helped Lyall Duncan build the fusion propulsion system that now powered most of the spacecraft operating beyond the Moon’s orbit. Vertientes looked truly elegant in a dove-gray three-piece suit. Pancho was wearing the olive green coveralls she had traveled in.

Barcelona was still a vibrant city, despite the rising sea level and greenhouse warming and displacement of so many millions of refugees. The Ramblas was still the crowded, bustling, noisy boulevard where everyone went for a stroll, a sampling of tapas and good Rioja wine, a chance to see and be seen. Pancho liked it far better than sitting in an office, even though the crowd was so thick that at times they had to elbow their way past clusters of people who were walking too slowly. Pancho preferred the chatting, strolling crowd to an office that might be bugged.

“Your university’s a shareholder in Astro Corporation,” Pancho said, in answer to his question.

Vertientes’s finely-arched brows rose slightly. “We are part of a global consortium of universities that invests in many major corporations.”

He was slightly taller than Pancho, and slim as a Toledo blade. She felt good walking alongside him. With a nod, she replied, “Yup. That’s what I found out when I started lookin’ up Astro’s stockholders.”

He smiled dazzlingly. “Have you come to Barcelona to sell more stock?”

“No, no,” Pancho said, laughing with him. “But I do have a proposition for you—and your consortium.”

“And what might that be?” he asked, taking her arm to steer her past a knot of Asian tourists posing for a street photographer.

“How’d you like to set up a research station in orbit around Jupiter? Astro would foot three-quarters of the cost, maybe more if we can jiggle the books a little.”

Vertientes’s brows rose even higher. “A research station at Jupiter? You mean a manned station?”

“Crewed,” Pancho corrected.

He stopped and let the crowd flow around them. “You are suggesting that the consortium could establish a manned—and womanned—station in Jupiter orbit at one-quarter of the actual cost?”

“Maybe less,” Pancho said.

He pursed his lips. Then, “Let’s find a cantina where we can sit down and discuss this.”

“Suits me,” said Pancho, with a happy grin. Waltzing Matilda.

George looked sourly at the screen’s display.

“Four hundred and eighty-three days?” he asked. He was sitting in the command pilot’s chair, on the bridge; Nodon sat beside him.

Nodon seemed apologetic. “That is what the navigation program shows. We are on a long elliptical trajectory that will swing back to the vicinity of Ceres in four hundred and eighty-three days.”

“How close to Ceres?”

Nodon tapped at the keyboard. “Seventy thousand kilometers, plus or minus three thousand.”

George scratched at his beard. “Close enough to contact ’em with our suit radios, just about.”

“Perhaps,” said Nodon. “If we were still alive by then.”

“We’d be pretty skinny.”

“We would be dead.”

“So,” George asked, “what alternatives do we have?” Nodon said, “I have gone through all the possibilities. We have enough propellant remaining for only a short burst, nowhere nearly long enough to cut our transit time back to Ceres to anything useful.”

“But the thruster’s bunged up, useless.”

“Perhaps we could repair it.”

“Besides, if we use the propellant for thrust we won’t have anything left for the power generator. No power for life support. lights out.”

“No,” Nodon corrected. “I have reserved enough of the remaining propellant to keep the power generator running. We are okay there. We won’t run short of electrical power.”

“That’s something,” George huffed. “When our corpses arrive back in Ceres space the fookin’ ship’ll be well lit.”

“Perhaps we can repair the rocket thruster,” Nodon repeated.

George scratched at his beard again. It itched as if some uninvited guests had made their home in it. “I’m too fookin’ tired to go out again and look at the thruster. Gotta get some shut-eye first.”

Nodding his agreement, Nodon added, “And a meal.”

Surveying the depleted list on the galley inventory screen, George muttered, “Such as it is.”