Departures

The voice cut off, leaving behind only the impersonal hisses and pops of background noise.

The director cued Be

“Welcome once again to the Mimas venue of the sixty-sixth Winter Games,” he said. “Competition, of course, has been suspended after yesterday’s tragic events. When and if it will resume remains unknown; that largely depends on whether the cold-blooded killer who so callously took the lives of three athletes can be detected and apprehended. For any of you who may not have been with us yesterday, here is Ra

“Thank you, Bill,” she said gravely. She summarized the previous day’s jumps. Behind her, the big monitor screen reran in quick succession the deaths of al-Kuwatly, Shepilov, and Guizot. Ra

“How could such a thing happen?” Be

Moving smoothly in the low gravity, the security chief came over and sat down by the two broadcasters, then strapped himself in. “Thank you for being with us at this difficult time. Tell, me, if you will, where did your precautions break down?”

Katayama grimaced, not caring for the blunt question. He was a stout, hard-faced man with iron-gray hair. After a moment’s thought, he said, “I am afraid this will seem self-serving, but much of the failure took place on Earth, when a killer was allowed to board a ship for Mimas. Once that happened, his or her success was probably inevitable.”

“How can you say that?” Ra

“Yes, that is so,” Katayama said. He spoke slowly; he was very tired but was still picking his words with care. “Explosive guns and missile weapons are easy to detect. With lasers, sadly, the same is not the case. Laser tubes are too ubiquitous. They are at the heart of your stereovision equipment, of still-picture holocameras, of computers’ sca

“Even so,” Ra

“Let me point something out, Ms. Aasen,” Katayama said coolly. Ra

Off-camera, Be

“A very intelligent question, sir.” The security chief nodded. “Unfortunately, the answer is no. We were in dark phase at the time of the attack, with the only light outside the area of competition coming from Saturn’s other moons. They are either small or distant or both, and in any case received only a bit more than one percent of the sunlight per unit area than Luna does. And exactly because it is in synchronous orbit, the satellite is over six hundred kilometers above us. Perhaps computer processing of its images will show more. That is our best hope, I think.”

Be

The security chief’s smile was like a shark’s. “In vacuum, of course, there is no flash,” he said, as if to a foolish child. “We only see beams of light because they shine through dust and vapor floating in air. I wish it were otherwise, but it is not.”

“Thank you, Major Katayama,” Be

As the commercials began, Katayama departed, looking pleased with himself. Ra

Be

“Do you think so?” she said doubtfully, but she looked a little happier.

When they returned to the air, they replayed the tape claiming responsibility for the attack. “For the reaction of the Second Irgun, IBC correspondent Jorge Martinez visited the group’s headquarters in Buenos Aires,” Be

The tape filled the monitor screen. Along with a flock of other reporters, Martinez was standing in front of a gray stone building in a run-down part of the city. Out came a slight, curly-haired man with a mustache too big for his face and fierce, ever-watchful eyes. “The Second Irgun’s spokesman is known only as ‘Menachem,’ “ Martinez said quietly.

They watched ‘Menachem’ begin to read from a card he pulled out of his hip pocket: “We applaud the blow against the Arabs who have stolen our homeland from us, but we did not strike it. That is all we have to say.”

“What proof do you have for your denial?” one of the reporters shouted.

‘Menachem’ fixed him with an icy glare. “I have said that is all we have to say.” Then, with the air of a man making a great concession, he went on, “Had it been us, we would have chosen Itzhak Zalman, the apikoros who loves his masters better than his people and joined the Arab team. His time may yet come, if not on Mimas, then when he returns.” He went back into the headquarters building, slamming the door behind him.

“Not the most convincing denial on record,” Ra

“Hardly,” Be

“If not the Second Irgun, though, who benefits from the killings? Savage as they were, they have succeeded in embarrassing the Arab World, thanks to the disclosure of Shukri al-Kuwatly’s illegal suit.”

“There you’re right, Ra

“Yes; al-Kuwatly would have been the leader at the end of the first day of competition,” Ra

“In the rash of speculation surrounding him, however, we shouldn’t lose sight of the other two athletes who were slain. Our sincerest condolences go to the families and friends of Dmitri Shepilov and Louis-Philippe Guizot, who also fell victim in this savage attack.”

“As happens all too often in acts of terrorism, it is the i