The Rock Rats

CHAPTER 35

Much to Hector Wilcox’s misgiving, Douglas Stavenger inserted himself into the hearing. Two days before the hearing was to begin, Stavenger invited Wilcox to dinner at the Earthview restaurant. Wilcox knew it was not a purely social invitation. If the youthful founder of Selene wanted to be in on the hearing, there was nothing the IAA executive could do about it without raising hackles.

Stavenger was very diplomatic, of course. He offered a conference room in Selene’s offices, up in one of the towers that supported the dome of the Grand Plaza. The price of his hospitality was to allow him to sit in on the hearing.

“It’ll be pretty dull stuff, mostly,” Wilcox warned, over dinner his second night on the Moon.

“Oh, I don’t think so,” said Stavenger, with the bright enthusiasm of a youth. “Anything involving Martin Humphries is bound to be interesting.”

So that’s it, Wilcox said to himself as he picked at his fruit salad. He’s following Martin’s trail.

“You know, Mr. Humphries won’t be present at the hearing,” he said.

“Really?” Stavenger looked surprised. “I thought that Fuchs was accusing him of piracy.”

Wilcox frowned his deepest. “Piracy,” he sneered. “Poppycock.”

Stavenger smiled brightly. “That’s what the hearing is for, isn’t it? To determine the validity of the charge?”

“Oh, yes, of course,” said Wilcox hastily. “To be sure.”

Fuchs had not slept well his first two nights in Selene, and the night before the hearing began he expected to be too jumpy to sleep at all, but strangely, he slept soundly the whole night through. Pancho had come up to Selene and treated him to a fine dinner at the Earthview Restaurant. Perhaps the wine had something to do with my sleeping, he told himself as he brushed his teeth that morning.

He had dreamed, he knew, but he couldn’t remember much of his dreams. Amanda was in them, and George, and some vague dark looming danger. He could not recall any of the details.

When his phone chimed he thought it must be Pancho, ready to pick him up and go with him to the hearing room.

Instead, the wallscreen showed Amanda’s beautiful face. Fuchs felt a rush of joy that she had called. Then he saw that she looked tired, concerned.

“Lars, darling, I’m just calling to wish you well at the hearing and to tell you that I love you. Everything here is going quite well. The prospectors are giving us more business than we can handle, and there hasn’t been a bit of trouble from any of the HSS people.”

Of course not, Fuchs thought. They don’t want to raise any suspicions while this hearing is going on.

“Good luck in the hearing, darling. I’ll be waiting for you to call and tell me how it turned out. I miss you. I love you!”

Her image winked out, the wallscreen went blank. Fuchs glanced at the clock on his bed table, then swiftly ordered the computer to reply to her message.

“The hearing begins in half an hour,” he said, knowing that by the time Amanda heard his words the meeting would almost be starting. “I’m sorry I didn’t bring you with me. I miss you, too. Terribly. I’ll call as soon as the hearing ends. And I love you, too, my precious. With all my heart.”

The phone chimed again. This time it was Pancho. “Rise and shine, Lars, ol’ buddy. Time to get this bronco out of the chutes.”

Fuchs was disappointed that Humphries did not show up for the hearing. On thinking about it, though, he was not surprised. The man is a coward who sends others to do his dirty work for him, he thought.

“Hey, look,” Pancho said as they entered the conference room. “Doug Stavenger’s here.”

Stavenger and half a dozen others were sitting in the comfortable wheeled chairs arranged along one wall of the room. The conference table had been moved to the rear wall and set out with drinks and finger foods. A smaller table was at the other side of the room, flanked by two chairs already occupied by men in business suits. One of them was overweight, ruddy, red-haired; the other looked as lean and jittery as a racing greyhound. They each held palmcomps in their laps. The wallscreen behind the table showed the black and silver logo of the International Astronautical Society. Two clusters of chairs had been arranged in front of the table. George and Nodon were already seated there. Fuchs saw that the other set was fully occupied by what he presumed to be HSS personnel.

“Good luck, buddy,” Pancho whispered, gesturing Fuchs toward the chairs up front. She went back to sit beside Stavenger.

Wondering idly who was paying for the food and drink that had been set out, Fuchs took the chair between Big George and Nodon. He had barely sat down when one of the men seated up front announced, “This hearing will come to order. Mr. Hector Wilcox, chief counsel of the International Astronautical Authority, presiding.”

Everyone got to their feet, and a gray-haired distinguished-looking gentleman in a Saville Row three-piece suit came in from the side door and took his place behind the table. He put a hand-sized computer on the table and flicked it open. Fuchs noticed that an aluminum carafe beaded with condensation and a cut crystal glass rested on a corner of the table.

“Please be seated,” said Hector Wilcox. “Let’s get this over with as efficiently as we can.”

It begins, Fuchs said to himself, his heart thudding under his ribs, his palms suddenly sweaty.

Wilcox peered in his direction. “Which of you is Lars Fuchs?”

“I am,” said Fuchs.

“You have charged Humphries Space Systems with piracy, have you not?”

“I have not.”

Wilcox’s brows shot toward his scalp. “You have not?”

Fuchs was amazed at his own cheek. He heard himself say, “I do not charge a corporation with criminal acts. I charge a person, the man who heads that corporation: Martin Humphries.”

Wilcox’s astonishment turned to obvious displeasure.

“Are you implying that the acts you call piracy—which have yet to be established as actually occurring—were deliberately ordered by Mr. Martin Humphries?”

“That is precisely what I am saying, sir.”

On the other side of the makeshift aisle, a tall, dark-haired woman rose unhurriedly to her feet.

“Your honor, I am Mr. Humphries’s personal assistant, and on his behalf I categorically deny this charge. It’s ludicrous.”

Big George hopped to his feet and waved the stump of his arm over his head. “Y’call this ludicrous? I di’n’t get this pickin’ daisies!”

“Order!” Wilcox slapped the table with the flat of his hand. “Sit down, both of you. I will not have outbursts in this hearing. We will proceed along calm, reasoned lines.”

Verwoerd and George resumed their seats.

Pointing a bony finger at Fuchs, Wilcox said, “Now, sir, if you have evidence to sustain a charge of piracy, let us hear it. We’ll look into the responsibility for such acts after we ascertain that they have actually happened.”

Fuchs slowly rose, feeling a trembling anger in his gut. “You have the transcription of the battle between my ship, Starpower, and the ship that attacked us. You have seen the damage inflicted on Starpower. Mr. Ambrose, here, lost his arm in that battle.”

Wilcox glanced over his shoulder at the ruddy-faced IAA flunky, who nodded once. “Noted,” he said to Fuchs.

“That same ship earlier attacked Mr. Ambrose’s ship, Waltzing Matilda, and left him and his crewman for dead.”

“Do you have any evidence for this, other than your unsupported word?” Wilcox asked.

“Waltzing Matilda is drifting in the Belt. We can provide approximate coordinates for a search, if you wish to undertake it.”

Wilcox shook his head. “I doubt that such a search will be necessary.”

“Earlier,” Fuchs resumed, “several others vessels were attacked: The Lady of the Lake, Aswan, The Star—”

Verwoerd called from her chair, “There is no evidence that any of those ships were attacked.”

“They disappeared without a trace,” Fuchs snapped. “Their signals cut off abruptly.”

With a smile, Verwoerd said, “That is not evidence that they were attacked.”

“Quite so,” said Wilcox.

“In most of those cases, the asteroids that those ships claimed were later claimed by Humphries Space Systems,” Fuchs pointed out.

“What of it?” Verwoerd retorted. “HSS ships have laid claim to many hundreds of asteroids. And if you examine the record carefully, you will see that four of the six asteroids in question have been claimed by entities other than HSS.”

Wilcox turned toward the lean assistant on his left. The man nodded hastily and said, “Three of them were claimed by a corporation called Bandung Associates and the fourth by the Church of the Written Word. None of these entities are associated with HSS; I checked thoroughly.”

“So what this hearing boils down to,” Wilcox said, turning back to Fuchs, “is your assertion that you were attacked.”

“For that I have evidence, and you have seen it,” Fuchs said, boiling inside.

“Yes, yes,” said Wilcox. “There’s no doubt that you were attacked. But attacked by whom? That’s the real question.”

“By a ship working for HSS,” Fuchs said, feeling he was pointing out the obvious. “Under the orders of Martin Humphries.”

“Can you prove that?”

“No employee of HSS would take such a step without the personal approval of Humphries himself,” Fuchs insisted. “He even had one of my people killed, murdered in cold blood!”

“You are referring to the murder of a Niles Ripley, are you not?” asked Wilcox.

“Yes. A deliberate murder to stop our construction of the habitat we’re building—”

Verwoerd interrupted. “We concede that Mr. Ripley was killed by an employee of Humphries Space Systems. But it was a private matter; the killing was neither ordered nor condoned by HSS. And Mr. Fuchs personally dispatched the killer, in a violent act of vigilantism.”

Wilcox fixed Fuchs with a stern gaze. “Frontier justice, eh? It’s too bad that you executed him. His testimony might have supported your case.”

Feeling exasperated, Fuchs said, “Who else would benefit from all these criminal acts?”

With a wry smile, Wilcox said, “I was hoping you could tell me, Mr. Fuchs. That’s why we’ve gone to the expense and trouble of holding this hearing. Who is responsible here?”

Fuchs closed his eyes briefly. I don’t want to bring Amanda into this. I don’t want to make this seem like a personal feud between Humphries and me.

“Do you have anything else to offer, Mr. Fuchs?”

Before he could reply, George got to his feet again and said, very calmly, “Everybody on Ceres knows that Humphries is tryin’ to squeeze Fuchs out of the Belt. Ask anybody.”

“Mr…” Wilcox glanced down at his computer screen. “Ambrose, is it? Mr. Ambrose, what ‘everybody knows’ is not evidence in a court of law. Nor in this hearing.”

George sat down, mumbling to himself.

“The fact is,” Fuchs said, struggling to keep from screaming, “that someone is killing people, someone is attacking prospectors’ ships, someone is committing terrible crimes in the Asteroid Belt. The IAA must take action, must protect us…” He stopped. He realized he was begging, almost whining.

Wilcox leaned back in his chair. “Mr. Fuchs, I quite agree that your frontier is a violent, lawless place. But the International Astronautical Authority has neither the power nor the legal authority to serve as a police force across the Asteroid Belt. It is up to the citizens of the Belt themselves to provide their own protection, to police themselves.”

“We are being systematically attacked by Humphries Space Systems personnel!” Fuchs insisted.

“You are being attacked, I grant you,” Wilcox responded, with a sad, condescending smile. “Most likely by renegades from among your own rough and ready population. I see no evidence linking Humphries Space Systems to your problems in any way, shape or manner.”

“You don’t want to see!” Fuchs raged.

Wilcox stared at him coldly. “This hearing is concluded,” he said.

“But you haven’t—”

“It’s finished,” Wilcox snapped. He stood up, grabbed his computer, clicked its lid shut and tucked it into his jacket pocket. Then he turned and strode out of the room, leaving Fuchs standing there, frustrated and furious.