Ark

33

Holle came to fetch Grace from the restaurant, and took her out of the building to where a small convoy of armored vehicles was waiting. “We do several runs a day between here and Gunnison. This is the next to go.”

Here too was Zane Glemp, a little younger than Holle and Venus, thin, pale, intense under his shock of black hair. He wasn’t in a Candidate uniform, and looked as if he wouldn’t have been right in it anyhow. He was carrying a laptop computer. Holle had suggested he ride with Grace to Gunnison, where he had work to pursue, and talk to her on the way.

So Grace found herself sitting alone with Zane in a self-drive vehicle, with thick glass windows and a closed aircon system, sandwiched between two heavy-duty trucks, each of which bristled with weapons. The vehicles set off at a brisk speed, fast enough to push Grace back in her seat, and she grabbed at a rail.

Zane had been unfolding his laptop. “Are you OK?”

“I’m just not much used to speed. I spent most of my life walking, and the last six years on a cruise ship. A motor launch is about as much acceleration as I ever got used to.”

He brought up a map on his laptop screen. “This is the way we’re going.” It was a drive of maybe a hundred and fifty kilometers through mountain country, south from the Hoosier Pass through Buena Vista and Poncha Springs, and then west through Monarch to Gunnison. “They’re mountain roads but the military have strengthened them and put in barriers and they’re pretty good. It’s safer to get through the open country fast, but you do get thrown around. Here…” He showed her how to tighten her restraints.

“Why is it safer to go fast?”

For answer he pointed out of the window. Beyond the thick wire fence that lined the road, the country was littered with people, looking out of tents and shacks as the convoy went by. In some places they seemed to be trying to farm, with furrows scratched in the thin dirt, plots jealously guarded. Elsewhere they just sat silently by the road. Children watched blank-eyed as the vehicles passed.

“Sometimes they take potshots,” Zane said. “Or they try to block the road. There’s a system of watchtowers between Gunnison and Alma. If there’s trouble, you get heavier units coming from either terminus, or from Twin Lakes or Monarch.”

“It looks like it’s been raining people.”

“Well, Colorado’s a big country, but we ran out of room a long time ago. The sea’s not far from Gunnison itself, actually. When the wind is right you can smell it. The engineers worry about salt corrosion of the spacecraft and the gantries. But they had the same problem at Canaveral.” Zane’s face was oddly expressionless, as if he was not quite engaged with the world, with her. “You’re here to ask me about Harry Smith.”

“Yes.” Zane was evidently a more complex personality than Holle or Venus. Grace tried to work out a way in. “He was killed by a pulse unit.”

“A mock-up, yes.”

“I’m new to all this. I don’t know what a pulse unit is.”

On his screen he produced a cutaway diagram of an object like a vase, with a round body and a flared throat, sitting in a cylindrical casing. The top was sealed by a plate. “You understand that the Orion launch stage is propelled by a series of nuclear explosions.”

She stiffened. She hadn’t known that. What the hell was she getting into here? “Go on.”

“The idea is to shape each explosion so that it doesn’t just blast out its energy in all directions, but channels its energy and momentum transfer to the spacecraft’s pusher plate.” He mimed with his hands. “Which is like a big cymbal sitting over the throat of the pulse unit, up here. So when the bomb goes off the energy is confined by the radiation case around the charge, which is a shell of uranium, then it is passed up through this channel filler of beryllium oxide in the throat, and thus it’s focused onto the propellant slab-this lid of tungsten at the top. You understand this all happens in an instant, it’s all blown to atoms, but the setup lasts just long enough to direct the bomb energy. The tungsten slab vaporizes, and it’s that product that flies up and hits the pusher plate.

“The early nuclear engineers found out some interesting stuff about how objects vaporize when hit by a nuclear charge. If you have a pancake-shaped object, like this tungsten slab, you get a cigar-shaped plasma cloud. That’s because the center vaporizes first and kind of leads the way. Conversely, if you have a cigar-shaped object it turns into a pancake-shaped cloud, as the energy works its way up the length of the thing. The cigar cloud is better for us, because you get your momentum transfer focused on a small area. You can demonstrate all this with bomb design software, we dug up some of the old code from the 1950s and implemented the algorithms with modern methods. And that’s why this design-”

“It’s something like this that killed Harry Smith.”

Zane hesitated. Evidently he was happier with the technical stuff. “Harry was supervising a few of the Candidates involved in the test. There was meant to be a controlled detonation with conventional explosives to demonstrate some of the principles. Somebody loaded in ten times the nominal charge strength. The way the explosion was shaped-it smashed the containing bunker wide open. It killed Harry, and one other man.”

“You think it was deliberate, then?”

“Oh, yes. Somebody engineered this to kill Harry; I’m sure the other guy was only caught by accident.”

“Except it wasn’t an accident.”

“No.”

“How many people on the project could have set that up?”

Zane shrugged. “A handful of ground engineers. But none of them knew Harry well, which is the point, isn’t it? Of the Candidates, Matt Weiss or myself, without independent help. Many of the others could have done it with support, they’d know the principles.”

“Venus Jenning, perhaps.”

“She’d have needed help with the details.”

“So that leaves you and Matt.”

“I guess.”

“Venus told me about her relationship with Harry.”

Zane’s face went blank. “And you want to hear the same from me?” “I know it’s difficult. Just tell me how it started.”

It had been the day of the 2036 accident that had almost killed Zane’s own father. “That was the lowest point. That was the opportunity to exploit.” He told her something about that first sexual encounter, which was similar to what Harry had done to Venus, her first time. It sounded like a practiced technique. But Zane told this oddly, describing the incidents and actions with passive verbs, entirely impersonally.

“Did he tell you he loved you?”

“That remark was made.”

“Did he ask you if you loved him?”

“The question was asked.”

“ Did you love him?”

“There was a problem to be solved.”

Grace stared at him. She had met many bruised people in the course of her life; it was a bruising world. But Zane was exceptional. “Do you think any of the others loved him?”

“Matt loved him, I think, Matt Weiss. Matt told me so, once. He was drunk.”

“Did you ask anybody for help? Did you tell anybody what was going on?”

“He asked the father,” he said oddly. Then, a double-take: “I asked my father.”

“And?”

“He said a Candidate for the Ark crew should sort out such issues himself. He said such a victim was dirty and unworthy.”

She pressed him for more details, and he replied in the same abstracted, impersonalized way.

For Zane there had been no sudden fracture of his relationship with Harry, no revealed lies, no blowup, no rejection, as there had been for Venus. Zane had never taken control. The relationship had gone on and on, the sex. Yet there had been an ultimate crisis.

“Harry said he’d protect you. But in the end he failed, didn’t he? You were deselected.”

“There was a psych test. Zane Glemp is technically capable but emotionally unintelligent. That was what the doctors said.”

“So in the end Harry didn’t fulfill the bargain. All that sex, all the creeping around, your father’s anger-the shame you must have felt. Despite all that he didn’t deliver the one thing you wanted, a place on the crew.”

“Perhaps that was never possible. His influence was always more negative than positive, the ability to stop people with a bad report rather than confirm a place.”

“It was all a lie, then. You hated him for it,” she said, pushing. “You hated him for blackmailing you, for not delivering you a place on the Ark. You had means and motive to kill him.”

“There was no hate. There was nothing. Murder was not necessary.” And instinctively she believed him. Zane was a victim, not an perpetrator; he could never have taken control, as Venus had, and as the killer evidently had.

“Then if you didn’t kill him, who? It sounds as if it must have been Matt.”

“I don’t know.”

“But logic suggests-”

“Logic?” For the first time he turned to look at her directly; his eyes were surprisingly soft, full of character. “To see the logic, ask yourself what Matt wanted. And, indeed, what Harry wanted. We’re here. Gunnison.”

The car was slowing. Grace peered out of the windows, curious. The sky had cleared to reveal a deep blue, and the old town was a pretty place of clapboard buildings, surrounded by pine trees and with the Rockies floating on the horizon. But it was overwhelmed by Project Nimrod, crowded with fresh-looking prefabricated buildings and industrial facilities, gantries, rails, pipelines that bridged the road, immense storage tanks that were plastered with frost even in the August heat. She thought she recognized a rocket gantry, slim and upright, with propellant hoses dangling.

The car pulled up at the foot of a massive building, like a factory, a rectangular block maybe thirty meters wide and three times as tall. A tangle of cylindrical tanks and immense coiled springs were contained within a framework of scaffolding.

“So where’s your spacecraft?” She had been expecting something like the moth-shaped space shuttle orbiters in the photos Gary Boyle used to show her.

He smiled and pointed at the large industrial building. “That’s it.”