Protector

PERSEPHONE: First discovered by mathematical analysis of perturbations in the orbits of certain known comets, 1972. First sighted 1984. Persephone is retrograde, in an orbit tilted sixty-one degrees to the ecliptic. Mass is somewhat less than Saturn.

Possible first exploratory visit to Persephone was by Alan Jacob Mion, in 2094. Mion’s claim has been cast into doubt by the lack of photographic evidence (his films were damaged by radiation, as was Mion himself; he had stripped shielding from his ship to save fuel) and by Mion’s claim that Persephone has a moon.

A more formal exploratory expedition was launched in 2170. Persephone was reported to have no moons and an atmosphere typical of gas giant worlds, rich in hydrogen compounds. The planet’s atmosphere would be worth scoop-mining if the planet itself were as available as Jupiter. There have been no further expeditions.

Damn, thought Truesdale. No moons.

He wondered if Bre

He located the report of the 2170 expedition and read it. With a little more trouble he found a condensed interview between Alan Jacob Mion and a reporter for Spectrum News. He was a boastful, flamboyant type, the kind of man who would take a year off to orbit a tenth planet, just to say he was the first. Not a careful observer. Perhaps his “moon” had been a comet head cruising past Persephone on a slow parabola.

He used his information terminal to send the material off to Police Headquarters.

Alice came back about 1800. “Vi

“I don’t blame her. No moons. All our beautiful logic, and no mucking moon.” He had spent the day trying to play tourist in a city that wasn’t designed for tourists. Waring was a working city.

“She wouldn’t have gone for it even if there’d been a moon. She said… well, I’m not sure she wasn’t right.” Alice’s weariness was not a thing of gravity. She did not drop sagging onto the bed. Her posture was straight, her head high. But in her eyes and her voice… “In the first place, this is all hypothetical, she said. Which is true. In the second place, if it were true, what would we be sending a poor, helpless goldskin fleet into? In the third place, this Snatcher business has been adequately explained as cases of the Far Look.”

“I didn’t get that.”

“The Far Look. Self-hypnosis. A Belter spends too long staring into infinity. Sometimes he wakes up in orbit around his destination without remembering anything after his takeoff. In fact, Vi

“Right.”

“She was on course during that four months she was supposed to be missing. The films in her ship prove it.”

“But the bribes. The Snatcher bribes the people he kidnaps.”

“We’ve got evidence of a couple of bribes. But they could be explained away. People using the Snatcher story to hide profits from a smuggling run — or something dirtier.” She smiled. “Or Vandervecken doctored the films on Norma Stier’s ship. I believe in the Snatcher, myself.”

“Hell, yes!”

“But Vi

“That didn’t occur to you?”

“No.”

“It’s not that startling. What are we talking about, a mass the size of Ganymede, or a little ball of rock like Vesta? Asteroids have been moved before.”

“Right… and he had unlimited hydrogen fuel, and he already had his gravity generator, and we’re already assuming he moved the Mahmed Asteroid. But he couldn’t have moved it far. Any metallic chunk we find out there is going to be Persephone’s moon, right? And he wouldn’t have moved it unless it was pretty telling evidence against him.”

“You’re still going up against him?”

Truesdale took a deep breath. “Yah. I’ll need your help to pick my equipment.”

“I’m coming with you.”

“Good.”

“I was afraid I’d have to drop it,” she said. “I don’t have the money to finance anything like this, and you didn’t seem… eager enough, and Vi

“It’ll still make a nice little honeymoon trip. And we’ll be the only humans alive who’ve seen the tenth planet. I suppose we can sell the equipment again when we get back?”

They got down to technical discussions.

It was going to cost.

Bre

… what can one say about Bre

But his mind. What goes on in his mind?

His chosen career — the career that has chosen him for its life’s work — is accomplished largely by waiting. Long ago he was prepared. Now he waits and watches, and sometimes he adds refinements to his preparations. He has his hobbies. The solar system is one of these.

Sometimes he takes samples. Otherwise he watches the moving lights of fusion drives with his eccentric substitute for a telescope. He catches fragments of news and entertainment broadcasts with sophisticated noise filtering equipment. Earth provides most of these fragments. The Belt communicates via lasers, and they are not aimed at Bre

Civilization goes on. Bre

In a news broadcast he learns of the death of Estelle Randall.

This raises an interesting possibility. Bre

Roy wasn’t sure what had wakened him. He lay quiet in the web hammock, feeling the ship alive around him.

The vibration of the drive was feel rather than sound. Two days of that, and he couldn’t sense it without concentrating. The sensation had not changed — he thought.

Alice was beside him in the other hammock. Her eyes were open, her mouth faintly frowning.

That scared him. “What is it?”

“I don’t know. Suit up.”

He grimaced. Suit up — she’d had him climbing in and out of that damn emergency suit for six hours of the first day. It was a man-shaped clear plastic bag with a zipper that ran from chin to knees, forking at the crotch. You could get into it in an instant, and it took another instant to plug that thick air-and-water tube into the ship’s lifesystem; but he’d caught the zipper a couple of times and got language one does not expect from one’s sex partner regardless of previous experience. “From now on you wear nothing but a jock strap,” she’d ordered. “And you wear that all the time. Nothing gets caught in that zipper.” The last couple of hours she was throwing the suit at him from behind, a crumpled ball he had to shake out and get into in ten seconds. When he could do it with a blindfold, she was satisfied.

“It’s your first move,” she’d said. “Always. Anything happens, get into that suit.”

He snatched the suit without looking, slid feet and hands and head in and zipped it two-handed and plugged into the wall. Another instant to pull the shoulder pack out of its recess, slip it on, pull the plug and plug it into that. Stored air filled his suit, tasting tasteless. Alice was still faster; she was ahead of him, swarming up the ladder.

She was in the pilot’s chair when be came through the hatch. “Nice going,” she said without looking around.