Protector

She said, “So he was right.”

He knew just what she meant. “I wouldn’t have gone to the law. I couldn’t have turned down the money. Alice, he thinks of the whole human race that way. On wires. And he’s the only one who can see the wires.”

Alice’s face was almost a snarl. “I won’t let a man think of me that way.”

“And he takes samples. To see how we’re doing, where we’re going. I suppose his next step is a selective breeding project.”

“All right, what’s our next move?”

“I don’t know.” He sipped at his brandy. Wonderful stuff; it seemed to turn to vapor in his mouth. The Belt ought to export it. It’d be cheap in fuel: all downhill.

She said, “We’ve got three choices, I think. First is to tell everything we know, first to Vi

“Will they listen?”

“Oh—” she waved a negligent band. “They’ll publish, I think. It’s a new slant on things. But we don’t have any proof. We’ve got a theory, and it’s got a gaping hole in it, and that’s all we’ve got.”

“What did he eat?”

“Right.”

“Well, we can try it.”

Alice thumbed a call button. When the waiter slid over in a whisper of air, she punched for two more brandies. She said, “Then what?”

“… Yah.”

“People would listen, and talk it over, and wonder. And nothing would happen. And gradually it would all blow over. Bre

“We’d never know. We’d be yelling into a vacuum.”

“All right. Second choice is for us to drop it now.”

“No.”

“Agreed. Third choice is to go after him. With a Belt police fleet, if they’d back us. Otherwise, alone.”

He thought about it, sipping brandy. “Go where?”

“All right, let’s think about that.” Alice leaned back with her eyes half-closed. “He headed out toward interstellar space. He stopped in the cometary belt, well beyond Pluto’s orbit, for a couple of months — came to a dead stop, which must have cost him plenty in fuel — then went on.”

“His ship went on. If he’s here now, he must have sent the Pak drive section on without him. That leaves him with the Pak control cabin and a Belt singleship.”

“And fuel. All the fuel he wants, from the maneuvering reserve tanks in the drive section. They were filled before he took off.”

“All right. We assume he found a way to grow the roots for food. Maybe he took some seeds from the cargo pod before he left Mars. What does he need now that he doesn’t have?”

“A home. A base. Building materials.”

“Could he have mined the comets for those?”

“Maybe. For gasses and chemicals, anyway.”

“All right. I’ve been thinking about this too,” said Truesdale. “When you speak so glibly of the cometary belt, do you think you’re talking about a ring of rocks like the asteroid belt? The cometary belt is a region of convenience.” He spoke with some care. The brandy was getting to his tongue. If he mangled some complicated word she would only laugh. “It’s where the comets slow up and hover and fall back toward the sun. It’s ten to twenty times the volume of the solar system, and most of the solar system is in a plane anyway. There’s hydrogen in most of the compounds in a comet’s tail, isn’t there? So Bre

She watched him narrowly. “You’re giving up?”

“I’m tempted. It’s not that he’s too big for me. He’s too small. His hiding place is too mucking big.”

“There is another possibility,” she said. “Persephone.”

Persephone. And how the hell had he forgotten that there was a tenth planet? Still — “Persephone’s a gas giant, isn’t it?”

“I don’t know for sure, but I suppose so. It was detected by its mass, its influence on the orbits of comets. But the atmosphere could be frozen. He could hover until he’d burned a hole through the frozen layers, then land.” She leaned forward across the table. Her eyes were intense, and deep brown. “Roy, he had to get metals from somewhere. He built some kind of gravity generator, didn’t he? And he must have done some experimenting to get it. Metal. Lots of metal.”

“From a comet head, maybe?”

“I don’t think so.”

Truesdale shook his head. “He couldn’t mine Persephone. A planet that big has to be a gas giant — with a molten core. It’ll heat itself; it’ll have a gaseous atmosphere. He couldn’t land in it. The pressure would be, well, Jovian.”

“A moon, then! Maybe Persephone’s got a moon!”

“… Why the hell not? Why shouldn’t any random gas giant have a dozen moons?”

“He spent two months at rest, making sure he could live out there. He must have located Persephone and studied it with his telescopes. When he was sure it had moons, that was when he cut loose from the Pak drive section. Otherwise he’d have come home and turned himself in.”

“That sounds right. He may have been growing tree-of-life root… He might not still be there.”

“He’d have left traces. Were talking about a moon now. There’d be a scar where he landed a fusion drive, and big gaping scars where he dug his mines, and buildiiigs he’d have to abandon, and heat. He could cover up some of the damage, but not the heat, not on some little moon way the hell beyond Pluto. It would have gone into the environment, and fouled up superfluid effects, and vaporized some of the ices.”

“We’d have proof,” said Truesdale. “Holograph pictures. At worst we’d have holos of the scars he left on Persephones moon. Not just a half-cocked theory.”

“And at best?” She gri

“Have at him!”

“Right on.” Alice raised her brandy. They clinked the blown glass snifters carefully, and drank.

The fear of falling brought him half awake, and the familiar sensations of a hangover did the rest. He sat up on a bed like a pink cloud: Alice’s bed. They’d come here last night, perhaps to celebrate or to seal a bargain, perhaps just because they liked each other.

No headache. Good brandy leaves a hangover, but not a headache.

It had been one of the better nights.

Alice wasn’t there. Gone to work? No, he could hear her in the kitchen. He padded into the kitchen on bare feet. She was frying pancakes in the nude.

He asked, “Did we really mean it?”

“Now you get to taste Belter cooking,” she said. She handed him a plate with a stack of pancakes, and when he grabbed it wrong they bounced and floated, just like in the advertisements. He managed to catch them, but the stack came down skewed.

They tasted like pancakes: good pancakes, but pancakes. Maybe you had to include the nudity of the cook to make it Belter cooking. He poured imitation maple syrup, and made a mental note: send Alice some bottles of Vermont maple syrup, if she stayed in the Belt, if he ever reached Earth alive.

He asked again. “Did we really mean it?”

She gave him a cup and a jar of freeze-dried coffee with an Earth brand. “Let’s find out about Persephone first. Then we can decide.”

“I can do that myself, at the hotel. Route you the information the way you sent it to me yesterday. Save you some work.”

“Good idea. Then I can brace Vi

“I’m wondering if a goldskin fleet would let me come along.”

She sat in his lap — feather-lightly, but a lot of girl, as much girl as a man could need. She looked him in the eyes. “Which way are you hoping?”

He thought about it. “I’ll come if your superiors let me. But I’ll put it to you straight: if I can set the goldskins on Vandervecken’s tail, I’ve proved that he can’t manipulate me. As long as Vandervecken knows it, that’s all I care about.”

“I… suppose that’s fair enough.”

They left the apartment together. Alice’s apartment was part of what seemed a cliff dwelling, apartments carved into a wall of the deep hydrate-mining scar that was Alderson City. They took a tube train back to Waring, and parted there.