Departures

“I’ve heard.” Be

“About what you would expect. He denies any knowledge of the killings, says he was alone, asleep, and that if he were guilty he would have a better alibi.” A slight lift of one eyebrow showed how often Katayama had ran into that sort of infinitely regressing logic.

Be

He was on the point of giving up when it came back to him. He punched the chief maintenance engineer’s number.

He did not get the head of the engineering department; that worthy had no reason to drop what she was doing on account of his call. The assistant he talked to was a blond young man whose Anzac-flavored English was amusingly different from Cavendish’s. He described the frost he and the Scotsman had seen.

“We’ll check it out, mate, never fear. Don’t get browned off,” the engineer said cheerily.

“What was that?” Be

“Will do, mate. G’day to you.” The screen went dead.

Having done everything he could think of, Be

The show was based on the works of a great twentieth-century author, and harrowingly realistic. Characters got killed off one after another; even the hero ended up in a cancer ward. The blizzards made Be

He jumped at the chime of the phone. Switching off the stereovision was something of a relief. The Anzac engineer looked out of the screen at him. “Thanks for the call, mate. Bloody fu

“Is it dangerous?” Be

“Shouldn’t be. Can’t cipher out how the hell it got there, though-it would’ve taken enough outgassing to suck all the air from a set of rooms, but we’ve had no exploding guests, for which I’m bloody grateful, I can tell you.”

“Whose rooms would it have been?”

“I’ll have to check, mate. Let me feed the outside wall coordinates into the computer…”He turned away and fiddled with a keyboard for a minute or two. “Here we go,” he said, and gave Be

“Thanks,” said the broadcaster, he had to stop himself from adding the Anzac’s infectious “mate.” He broke the co

“There!” He could have kissed the ugly, unshaven zek on the stereovision screen. He broke a fingernail punching Katayama’s phone code. The woman he talked to had been one of the Security people closest to him when he found the expended charge cube; she smiled and went to fetch her chief without any argument.

This time Katayama took longer to come to the phone. When he finally did, he growled, “No matter what you think, Mr. Be

“I beg your pardon,” Be

The Security chief heard him out. “Yes, of course that’s still true,” he said, as if surprised anyone needed to ask. “I suspect it will be true two hundred fifty years from now, too; some things don’t change. Now, I wonder if you’d tell me what possible importance there is to that.” He framed the last sentence as a request, but it came out a command.

Be

When Be

“No.” Below the camera’s angle of vision, Be

But Katayama was saying, “I can find out quickly whether or not you are right-no small virtue, in my line of work.”

“Will you call me back?” the broadcaster asked tensely. He knew he had had to do as he did, but he hated the idea of being excluded as soon as things came to a head. He still had too much of the old American reporter’s itch to be in on the action instead of just talking about it.

Katayama, on the other hand, had no use for reporters unless they served his own purposes. “I make no promises, Mr. Be

In.008g it was impossible to pace, but bouncing off the walls, floor, and ceiling, as Ra

His disheveled appearance managed to wring a blink out of Katayama. “What have you been doing?” the Security chief asked, then said at once, “Never mind; I am not interested in knowing. I have called to tell you what you are going to do. Listen carefully.”

Be

“That’s right, Bill,” Ra

“The arrest of Jozef Jablonski has lifted a great burden of fear from everyone’s shoulders,” Be

“Moreover, Jablonski ca

Be

“Thank you, Bill,” the Scotsman said. As before, he was sitting at the bar-getting to be quite a fixture there, Be

Cavendish alluded to that point: “I’d think almost all the athletes on Mimas are tuned to us now. Along with the set here, there’s another in the weight room, and of course in all the suites.”

“Who’s that with you, Angus?” Ra

“Marge Olbert, the first-round women’s leader. Tell me, Mademoiselle Olbert, what are your feelings now that an arrest has been made?”

“I am, how does one say it, full of relief,” she replied in halting French.

“Eager to jump again, are you?”

“But yes, naturally, and I hope to do well, it could be to win a medal.” Her sudden and unexpected smile transformed a rather plain face into a pretty one. “And if I do, at the least they will know what flag to fly for me when I am on the platform of the wi