Departures

LES MORTES D’ARTHUR

When I wrote this story in early 1984,I used as my guide to the names of the features on Mimas the map in the back of the NASA publication Voyages to Saturn. These names, however, had not yet been formally approved by the International Astronomical Union. Mimas’ biggest crater ended up being named for the moon’s discoverer rather than being based on the Arthurian theme that dominates the rest of its nomenclature. “Les Mortes d’Herschel,” however, doesn’t make much of a title, so I’ve decided to leave well enough alone.

The slope the spacesuited runner was climbing would have been impossibly steep, even on Luna. The tracking camera relayed her image to the studio a few kilometers away. “Lovely, isn’t she?” murmured Rannveig Aasen.

“She certainly is,” Bill Bennett agreed. “Moving with grace on a very low gravity world is a skill few people have occasion to acquire.”

As if to prove his point, the runner made a slight misstep. Instead of gliding smoothly forward, she bounced a good five meters up off the ground. She had the presence of mind to hold her pose for the eleven seconds it took for her to return.

“That could happen to anyone,” Bennett said sympathetically. “Mimas’ surface gravity is only.008g. To put that in perspective for you folks back home, Luna pulls more than twenty times as strongly.” The transmitter flung his words and picture across one and a third billion kilometers toward Earth. At light speed, they would reach perhaps that many sets an hour and a half later with the slightly misleading legend “Live-from Saturn” superimposed.

The girl reached the summit without further mishap. She paused for a moment before the large bronze bowl there, then reached up and thrust the rod she carried in her right hand over the edge of the caldron. A great sheet of yellow-orange flame, twice as tall as a man, sprang into being.

“It’s a hologram, of course,” Rannveig said, “the same principle that makes stereovision possible. Mimas is almost nothing but ice, and has no atmosphere at all. But it still makes me want to reach out and warm my hands over it.”

“Me, too,” Bennett said. “We’ll return to our coverage of the sixty-sixth Winter Olympic Games in a moment, but first these words.” Bennett disappeared from the monitor screen, to be replaced by the Interplanetary Broadcasting Company’s keynote symbol for this part of the games: an ancient black-and-white Voyager image of Mimas, with the great crater Arthur dramatically shadowed near the terminator.

When the commercial break was done, the camera cut away from the broadcasters to the icy plain at the foot of Arthur’s central peak for the opening parade of athletes. Bright blue eyes twinkling, Rannveig Aasen undid the belt that held her in her chair, pushed off, and caromed around the studio like an insane billiard ball with a cometary tail of long blond hair.

The director howled curses into her earphone, but she always managed to keep an eye on the monitor and did not miss a beat in her commentary. “The two men and two women at the head of the procession, the ones in the light blue and white spacesuits, are the Greek contingent,” she explained for her distant audience. “Greece has been part of United Europe for more than a hundred fifty years now, but still fields an independent team at every Olympic Games, in keeping with its place of honor as the homeland of the Olympic ideal.”

Bennett listened to her with nothing but admiration, a word also describing his feelings as he watched: the female form does not sag at all in.008g.

The terrestrial portion of the Winter Games was being held at Klagenfurt in United Europe that year, so the athletes crossed the ice in their national groups in French alphabetical order. That put the United States-or rather, Etats-Unis-near the front, just after the Chinese Empire, instead of toward the end.

“This is the first time in four Olympiads that the Americans have sent a team-if I can call one man and one woman a team-to Mimas,” Bennett remarked. “They haven’t had much low-g training and aren’t expected to contend for medals, but it’s good to see them competing here again. Private contributions raised enough money for two berths aboard the Arab World ship Nasser.”

Several larger groupings passed-Eastern Europe, the Anzac Federation, Japan, Luna. The team from the Arab World looked smart in spacesuits of green, white, and black. “Security is tight here,” Bennett said, “thanks to threats from Israeli, Turkish, and Armenian nationalists.”

Moscow had fielded a strong group. So had Siberia. There were a couple of Swiss athletes in red suits with white crosses. They had traveled with the United Europeans in the same way the Americans had with the Arabs. United Europe, as the host nation, came last, just behind the contingent from Zaire.

Rannveig was finally back in her seat. “Personally,” she said, “I think the United European uniforms are busy.”

“So do I.” Bennett nodded. “But then, they almost have to be, since they’re blending so many sets of former national colors. Some of the rivalries that went with those old colors aren’t dead yet, either, and the newer one between United Europe and Eastern Europe is also no laughing matter, I’m afraid. You Europeans are a contentious lot,” he said to Rannveig, who came from Oslo.

“No, we’re not,” she replied in mock anger.

“You certainly are.”

They pythoned it back and forth for another minute or two before Rannveig started the wrap-up of opening-day coverage, remarking, ”Our viewers may be wondering why only a relative handful of teams are represented here, as compared with Klagenfurt.”

“Cost is the villain,” Bennett said. “Fares from Earth to the Saturn system still run over fifteen hundred ounces of gold. That’s one of the major reasons we’ve seen so little from the United States in recent years, for example. If spaceflight were cheaper, we’d see many more nations participating.”

“Something to look forward to, perhaps, in games to come.” Rannveig closed out: “Thanks for joining us for the opening ceremonies from the Mimas Winter Olympic venue. Tomorrow we’ll be bringing you first-round coverage of the most spectacular of all Olympic events, the five-kilometer ski jump. Program your sets to ‘Olympics’ now, so you won’t miss a moment of the action. See you then.”

The old Voyager picture of Mimas reappeared on the monitor. This time, though, a bright red line superimposed on the image showed the ski-jump track descending from the summit of Arthur’s central peak-the largest athletic arena in the solar system. Ten kilometers away, a red oval showed the landing area.

“That went off very well,” the director said, adding, “all things considered,” with a pointed glower Rannveig’s way. She paid no attention, leaning back in her chair to let a makeup man scrub her face clean.

Bennett did the same, enjoying the damp sponge on his forehead, cheeks, and chin. He was very little changed when the ministrations were over: an open-faced, light brown man in his early thirties; burnsides, popular after a lapse of fifty years, looked good on him.

So did his engaging smile, even if it was a touch smug at the moment. He had a right to feel self-satisfied. IBC did not hire many Americans; most were too parochial to do well outside their own small bailiwick, and few spoke anything but English or Spanish. But his French, once again the dominant international tongue, was fluent as any native speaker’s; to his own way of thinking, at least, he had a better accent than Rannveig did.

“Care for a drink?” he asked, and she gave an eager nod.

They swung hand over hand from the rings set in the hallway ceiling toward the bar. Brachiating was the easiest way to get around on Mimas; the gravity was really too weak for walking, especially indoors, but just enough to make free-fall-style gliding impractical, too. “I wonder why we ever came out of the trees,” Rannveig said, darting ahead.

The studio was part of the same complex that housed the Olympic athletes. The two broadcasters sped past pressure doors and spacesuits in niches: like any structure exposed to vacuum, the Olympic village was divided into hundreds of gastight segments. The front door to every suite was a bulkhead in its own right.

Once she had hooked her feet under the brass rail, Rannveig ordered aquavit with a beer chaser. Bennett chose rum and Coke; since the rediscovery of the original formula in the ruins of Atlanta, Coca-Cola was all the rage again.

The drinks came in squeeze bulbs with nipples, as they would have in free-fall. An incautious lift would have sent the contents of glasses flying.

The monorail shuttle returned to the Olympic complex from the parade ground. Athletes and coaches began drifting into the bar. Most of the competitors, knowing they would have to be at their best tomorrow, were moderate. Their mentors had fewer compunctions. The Muscovite coach, in a red and gold sweater, and his Siberian counterpart, who wore his team’s snowy white, challenged each other to a duel of vodka. Empty squeeze bulbs accumulated in epic numbers around them.

The two of them argued more or less amiably as they drank.

The Muscovite spit Slavic consonants at his opposite number. The Siberian replied in French, letting Bennett follow his half of the conversation. For a czarist nobleman, Russian was fit only for talking with servants, infants, and pets.

“It seems hardly fair for peasant upstarts to have better accommodations than we do,” he said.

The Muscovite coach answered. The Siberian rolled his eyes. “ ‘All quarters are equal,’ indeed. Merde-why has the Olympic committee placed us where we cannot even see the competition area?”

No one could see the competition area; the window in the bar was the only one in the Olympic village. The Muscovite must have pointed that out, because the Siberian said, “It is the principle of the thing, though principle, I suppose, is something a Marxist cannot be expected to understand.”

The Muscovite’s only comment to that was a belch. He fell asleep a few minutes later. His counterpart’s triumphant smile also quickly dissolved in snores.

Except for one Jew, the members of the Arab World’s team were teetotalers. They sipped fruit juice and passed a pipe back and forth.

A ski jumper was turning cartwheels in midair. Rannveig touched Bennett’s hand. “Look at the loonie showing off.”

“You can hardly blame her. This is the only place where she can compete against Earth people on even terms-Mimas makes everyone strong.” He finished his drink. “Do you mind if I drift around a bit?”

“Heavens, no. Have a good time. I certainly intend to.” She looked at him archly. “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t enjoy.”

He grinned. “That doesn’t leave much out.” They had ended up in bed a couple of times during the trip to Mimas, more out of boredom and simple propinquity than anything else. It had been fun, but nothing on which to build a grand passion.

The ski jumper from Luna landed on her head, laughing. “Was that half a turn too many or too few?” Bennett asked her.

“I sort of lost track up there,” she said. She looked at him curiously, trying to place him. Most of the athletes were still in the tight pullovers and hose they had worn under their space-suits, which made his conservative green velvet doublet, tunic, and Paisley neck scarf stand out by comparison. “I know!” she exclaimed after a moment. “You’re from IBC!”

He admitted it. She insisted on buying him a drink. Not much happened in the controlled environment of Luna, so stereovision was even more popular there than it was on Earth. “I’m just a media addict,” she said.

“Nonsense,” he said gallantly. “How could you get into that kind of shape sitting in front of a set all the time?” He bought the next round himself, and the one after that; he was sure his expense account was stretchier than hers.

He glanced over and saw Rannveig deep in conversation with a big man as blond as she was. Another Scandinavian, was his first thought, but then he noticed the fellow was wearing the eye-searing blue, red, and green of Eastern Europe. They did not seem to be having any problems getting along, though.

Nor was he, with the girl he had met. A promising evening all the way around, he thought.

“And now,” Rannveig said, “I’d like to introduce our expert analyst, Angus Cavendish, bronze medalist for United Europe in the five-kilometer ski jump in the 2192 Winter Games.”

“I thank ye very much,” Cavendish said. He was a small, dapper man in his early forties, just beginning to gray at the temples and on his cheeks. The Scots burr with which he flavored his French should have given his voice an air of impressive deliberation. It probably would have, too, if he spoke a little slower, but he was too excitable for that. He always reminded Bennett of a tape recorded at eight centimeters a second and played back at sixteen.

“Tell us, Angus, what’s the most difficult thing about this event?” Bennett asked. He had the slightly too good feeling hangover pills always brought.

“The training for it,” Cavendish said at once. “For where d’ye find the like conditions in the inner solar system? It’s only the rich countries can afford to ship their skiers out here for the sake o’ the exercise: the Arab World, Luna, Japan, Siberia.”

“Then how do you account for your own medal?” Rannveig asked.

“Me, lass? I was assistant engineer on a supply ship to the Mimas Saturn station and borrowed my skis from a computer tech there. You look down the rosters of the teams and you’ll find a great lot of spacers among ‘em. We’re the ones who come to Mimas on our own business and learn a bit while we’re here.”

Following the script they had roughed out, Bennett said, “Why don’t athletes from nations that can’t afford to send them here train on the moons of Mars? Those have an even lower surface gravity than Mimas.”

“So they do, but they don’t have Arthur; they’re too puny. Look here, now.” The screen behind the broadcasters displayed the trademark image of Mimas. Cavendish used a pointer. “The crater is a hundred thirty kilometers across and ten deep, with the central peak six kilometers high. The body that struck Mimas to make it must have been ten kilometers across (almost the size of Deimos, mind); if it had been any bigger, it would’ve cracked the moon apart.”

“From what you’ve told us, then, I take it the technique for jumping on Mimas is quite different from the one skiers use back on Earth,” Rannveig said.

The screen showed the ninety-meter jump at Klagenfurt. A skier appeared at the top of the slope, pushed off, and went into her tuck. “There’s the first difference already!” Cavendish cried. “You can’t simply tuck and run here or you’re done for in the jump. At 008g, you see, you don’t build up the velocity even in five kilometers that you do in the ninety meters on Earth. You have to use poles all the way down.”

“But there are risks in that too, aren’t there?” Bennett asked.

“That there are. In the low gravity, each push sends you off the slope. The more you bounce about, y’see, the less time there is to be pushing. You have to dig in at just the right angle to come down again quick as you can. If you’ve done it right, you spring off at the end with about the same speed as off the ninety-meter hill back home-near a hundred kilometers an hour.”

As if on cue, the jumper in the monitor screen launched herself into space. “With the local gravity so low, you’d think you’d almost be able to jump clean off Mimas,” Rannveig said.

“ ‘Tisn’t so,” Cavendish snorted. “The escape velocity’s over a hundred seventy meters a second; you scarcely reach the sixth part of that. Nay, with the ramp angled up at forty-five degrees, you take about four minutes to sail up two and a half kilometers-three and a half over the floor of Arthur. Then it’s down again. Overall, you’re flying between nine and ten minutes.”

“It must be a marvelous view,” Bennett said.

“That it is.” The line was planned, but Cavendish’s eyes went genuinely misty. “You think you can see forever; in fact, it’s about thirty-five kilometers.”

The screen behind the Scotsman showed the jumbled vista of the crater floor. Small pits and mounds of ice began lazily flowing out of the picture at the edges; what remained grew larger and larger. “Of course, eventually you have to think about landing,” Bennett said.

“So you do,” Cavendish said dryly. “There’s the rub. You hit the slope at more than a hundred and ten kilometers an hour, and you don’t dare tumble. They have subsurface pipes to heat-if that’s the word I want-the landing zone a hundred degrees or so, up to -30° centigrade, same as the runway. Still, rip your suit and you’re gone. Almost every games, it seems, they add a name or two to the memorial plaque at the peak of Arthur.”

“Is it worth it, then?” Bennett asked. That line was in the script, too, but he meant it. Risking one’s life unnecessarily struck him as insane.

Cavendish’s reply caught him by surprise. It came from the man, not the commentator: “Lad, for the feeling you get when you’re up there, why, dying’d be a small price to pay.”

There was a moment of dead air before Rannveig took up the slack, saying quietly, “All the athletes here today would agree with you, Angus.”

The broadcast going back to Earth cut away from the studio to the pressurized lodge at the top of the runway. Like the Olympic village complex below, it rested on pylons sunk in the ice. The camera focused on the airlock door, which opened to let out the first contestant.

She wore the deep blue of the Anzac Federation; her clear faceplate showed intense concentration on her features. “This is Marge Olbert,” Rannveig said. “She’s twenty-six, from Canberra, a junior ecology officer aboard the Wirraway, one of the Anzac Line’s asteroid-belt freighters.”

“Ah, then she’ll have some work at very low gravity,” Cavendish said. “A plus for her.”

The starting light went from red to green. Marge Olbert dug her poles into the ice. “A good push-off!” Cavendish cried. “See, she’s still low enough to take a second shove. That’s the way to do it-keep the polework as near parallel to the runway as you can!”

The ski jumper landed, pushed, flew; landed, pushed, flew. Each thrust of the ski poles added to her velocity; so, little by little, did Mimas’ weak pull. “Oh, excellent form-she’ll be close to that hundred-kilometer-an-hour mark,” Cavendish said.

Marge Olbert was rocketing down the slope now. “A shame we’re in vacuum,” Bennett said. “The wind shrieking by Ms. Olbert would give the audience an added sense of her speed.”

Cavendish chuckled. “They can tell she’s going fast, never fear.”

She used her poles powerfully on the short upslope at the end of the run, gave a last great spring, and launched herself into the void. Red numbers appeared on the monitor: 97.43.

“A splendid takeoff velocity,” Cavendish said. He unobtrusively checked a chart he was holding in his lap. “She’ll be out past ten and a quarter kilometers. The women’s record only 10.6. Could well be the longest women’s jump of the first day. She’ll give the other lassies something to think on.”

The flick of a switch brought the transmission from Olbert’s suit radio into the studio. “Oh, my,” she was saying again and again. “Oh, my.” A reminiscent grin spread over Cavendish’s face.

Marge Olbert was soaring up toward her maximum altitude when coverage cut back to the slope, where another jumper had already begun his run. “They’ll be going about every five minutes,” Bennett explained, “so one will be landing, another just past high point, and a third jumping at about the same time.”

“That’s right, Bill,” Rannveig said. “On the runway now is Jozef Jablonski of Eastern Europe.” Bennett wondered at the sudden warmth in her voice until a close-up showed the face of the man she had been with the night before. She went on, “He’s twenty-nine, an air force captain from Gdynia; his hobbies include basketball, chess, and wargaming.”

Not all of that was on Jablonski’s personal data sheet. Bennett smiled a little.

“He’s a strong-looking brute,” Cavendish said. Rannveig jerked her head, whether in agreement or indignation Bennett could not tell. The Scotsman carried the narration: “Good form into the upslope-aye, a mighty push there, and now the leap… 101.74 kilometers an hour! A fine first jump; it’ll go well past eleven kilometers.”

A tight telephoto showed the expression of almost religious awe that Jablonski was wearing as he sailed high over the frozen surface of Mimas. “With a shot like that, you don’t need words,” Cavendish murmured.

The monitor split into thirds, simultaneously tracking Marge Olbert hurtling down toward her landing, Jablonski nearing apogee, and the next contestant on the runway, a Siberian woman who crossed herself before she began her descent.

Dream-smooth, the girl from the Anzac Federation touched down, steadying herself with her ski poles. “Here’s her distance, now,” Cavendish said. “It’s 10,290 meters-a splendid opening jump.” As Marge Olbert killed her momentum on the reverse slope beyond the landing zone, a crawler came out to pick her up and take her back to the Olympic village. Her raised fist said she knew what she had done.

Then Jozef Jablonski was landing, not as gracefully as his predecessor but safe enough. Red numbers superimposed on his image gave the length of his jump: 11,149 meters. “Astonishing that only a four-kilometer-an-hour difference in takeoff velocity will produce so much extra distance,” Rannveig said. She did not sound astonished; she sounded proud.

“It’s enough to send Jablonski over two hundred meters higher than Marge Olbert, and keep him over the ice twenty seconds longer,” Bennett said, echoing the quick calculations one of the technical people was feeding into his earphone.

One after another, the jumpers flew through their parabolas. With sixty-eight competitors in all, the first round was scheduled to last nearly six hours. As Cavendish had guessed, Marge Olbert’s distance kept holding up, though the girl from the United States, making her first jump off Earth, startled everyone by coming within seventeen meters of it. On the men’s side, Jozef Jablonski stayed in solid contention, if not among the very leaders.

They were down to the last half dozen competitors when Bennett remarked, “So far we’ve had one of the safest first days ever for the Mimas venue-only a couple of minor spills and no serious injuries. What do you think accounts for our good fortune, Angus?”

“Nothing but luck, so far,” Cavendish said. “If we’re as well off after all three days of jumping are done, then we’ll have something to brag about.”

The dismissal irritated Bennett, but at that moment another jumper soared off the ramp. His annoyance instantly turned to excitement. “Look at that!” he exclaimed. “We’ll have a new leader if Shukri al-Kuwaffy lands safely!”

“He was a favorite, aye,” Cavendish said, “but who would’ve thought he’d have a takeoff velocity of 103.81 kilometers an hour? That comes to a jump of over 11,580 meters, enough to put him in front by more than 40 meters. Watching his form, I own I didn’t think he’d be off so strong.”

Back at the top of the runway, a Muscovite in red and gold waited for the starting light. Rannveig said, “It has to be disheartening for Dmitri Shepilov to stand up there knowing what his predecessor has just done.”

“I suspect he’s been through worse,” Bennett commented, reading from Shepilov’s data sheet. “He comes from a guards regiment of Muscovite ski troops, and he saw combat against the Siberians in the Ural skirmishes a couple of years ago. After that, a ski jump should be small potatoes.”

“I wonder,” Angus Cavendish said with a grin.”Then it was only the eye of his sergeant on him, not the whole of Earth and Luna.”

Shepilov’s speed down the ramp was slower than al-Kuwatly’s at every checkpoint, but still respectable. He launched himself at just over a hundred kilometers an hour, a jump that projected out close to an even eleven kilometers.

Coverage of the next athlete, a man from United Europe, was brief; attention switched away to al-Kuwatly, who was heading down toward his landing. “I don’t look for any trouble from him,” Cavendish said. “He’s still half a kilometer up, almost two minutes away from putting his skis to the ice, but already he’s in good position, as he should be. Nothing’ll go wrong here.”

The slow-motion shots of what happened next would be replayed endlessly. Seeing everything live, Bennett was chiefly conscious of how fast sportcasting banality turned to horror. He had actually been laughing at Cavendish, for no sooner were the Scotsman’s words out of his mouth than they were all watching al-Kuwatly’s hands open and his ski poles drift away.

Everyone in the studio stared in consternation at the sudden misty globe around al-Kuwady’s head, the rime forming on his faceplate and the sides of his helmet. “His suit’s failed!” Rannveig cried, a split second ahead of Bennett and Cavendish.

They could do nothing but watch. Had it been he up there, Bennett knew he would have been thrashing wildly, clawing at his helmet to try somehow to maintain the pressure. But the jumper from the Arab World held the posture he had been in at the moment of disaster. Only very slowly did his bent arms begin to straighten and slump to his sides.

As a veteran spacer, Cavendish was the first to recognize what that meant. “Murder!” he shouted. “That’s a killed man up there, else he’d be making shift to save himself.” He might have been reading Bennett’s mind, but he generalized where the younger broadcaster had not.

Al-Kuwady’s flight path did not, could not change. Trailing vapor, he plunged toward the landing slope. He hit the ice like a thrown cloth doll, then bounced and tumbled bonelessly. If he had not been dead already, the impact would have killed him.

Sickened, Bennett turned away from the big monitor screen behind the broadcasters. As a result, he was the only one of them looking at the bank of screens to one side that showed what all the active cameras were picking up. He saw Dmitri Shepilov raise his right arm; it looked as if the Muscovite was starting to point. Then vapor spouted from his helmet, too. “Shepilov’s hit!” he cried.

No one had paid any attention to Louis-Philippe Guizot, the jumper who came after the Muscovite. Perhaps because he was from United Europe, Bennett’s yell made Rannveig check another of the side screens for his safety. Guizot was only a few hundred meters from the takeoff ramp when his image was also shrouded by fog. “On, no!” Rannveig cried, and covered her face with her hands.

Bennett learned to hate Mimas’ low gravity. Shepilov had been near the apex of his jump when he was hit; he flew on, a corpse, for five dreadful minutes before crashing on the landing slope as al-Kuwatly had before him. It was even worse with Louis-Philippe Guizot. Propelled by the leap he had taken before the assassin struck, he soared above Mimas as if still alive, then spun down in a hideously lazy descent.

“This is madness!” Bennett said.”Who but a madman could think to mar the Olympic Games with violence? Even in war-torn ancient Greece, the Olympic truce held good; the modern games have been the victim of attack only twice, and the last time was more than a hundred years ago.”

The director spoke in his ear. His voice went hard as he relayed the news to his distant audience: “We have just received a radio transmission claiming responsibility for the atrocity that has taken place here today. Here is a recording of that transmission.”

The tape was scratchy; the transmitter must have been a tiny one, and Saturn’s radio emission chopped up the signal. But it was perfectly understandable. “As it is the Olympic language this year, I shall speak French,” a man’s voice said. It had a faint guttural accent and was full of irony and a good humor that chilled Bennett, “Shukri al-Kuwady was but the beginning. We of the Second Irgun vow to continue our war against Arab tyranny until the Star of David once more flies above Israel. We regret the need to harm others, but those who share pleasures with oppressors must also share their fate. A very good day to you all.”

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

The director cued Bennett through the earphone: “Three, two, one-all right, you’re on.” The light above the camera lens turned red.

“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 Rannveig Aasen with a review of what took place.”

“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. Rannveig said, “Examination of the bodies has shown that each of the three athletes was murdered by a burst from a high-powered laser weapon. They were killed instantly; none, of course, had any chance to defend himself.”

“How could such a thing happen?” Bennett said. “As we noted before, security is supposed to have been tight. With us now is Major Katayama Hitoshi, head of Mimas security. Come join us, Major Katayama.”

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?” Rannveig challenged. “Surely you searched everyone’s baggage for arms of all sorts. I know mine was opened, and Bill’s, too.”

“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’ scanning devices, and in dozens of other everyday tools. Skilled terrorists find it all too simple to improvise deadly weapons. It is an unfortunate fact of life.”

“Even so,” Rannveig persisted, “why didn’t your force of guards keep the assassin from reaching cover, or track him down after he did his work?”

“Let me point something out, Ms. Aasen,” Katayama said coolly. Rannveig bridled, but he went on before she could interrupt: “I have twenty men here. As your colleague Mr. Angus Cavendish pointed out on an earlier broadcast, at the peak of a jump an athlete can see for thirty-five kilometers, which means he can be seen and shot at from that distance. The area of a circle with a radius of 35 kilometers is more than 3,800 square kilometers, or about 190 square kilometers per guard. I hope you see my difficulty.”

Off-camera, Bennett winced. Katayama was not an easy man to shake. The broadcaster had no intention of giving up without a fight, though. He asked, “Have you had any luck with photos from the observation satellite in synchronous orbit above Arthur?”

“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.”

Bennett gave up. Katayama seemed to have all the answers, and a depressing lot they were. Rannveig, however, was still smarting from the rebuff she had taken. She said, “Forgive me for one last question. Why didn’t any of your guards spot the flash of the laser when it was fired?”

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,” Bennett said quickly.”We’ll be back with more after these messages.”

As the commercials began, Katayama departed, looking pleased with himself. Rannveig shook her head in disgust. “Well, he put me away, didn’t he? That’s what I get for forgetting my homework.”

Bennett touched her hand. “Don’t worry about it. It’s the same question almost everybody on Earth would have been asking himself.”

“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,” Bennett said. “Here is his report.”

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,” Rannveig commented.

“Hardly,” Bennett said. “The only thing to say in its behalf is that the Second Irgun is not in the habit of ducking the blame for its terrorist acts. The notorious Baghdad bombings of a few years ago are a case in point.”

“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, Rannveig,” Bennett said. “Cheating is almost as old as the Olympics, I’m afraid; drug use and such things as electronically rigged fencing foils go back to the twentieth century. Al-Kuwady’s suit is just the latest in a long line, and one of the more ingenious. It was discovered to have a gas vent opening in the small of his back-in effect, a small reaction motor to add to his speed down the runway. With a surface gravity as low as Mimas’, even a few extra centimeters per second could have been decisive.”

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

“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 innocent who suffer,” Rannveig agreed. “That’s true not only of the men who died yesterday but also, in a lesser way, of all the athletes who came to Mimas in hopes of victory and instead find themselves encompassed by tragedy. For the competitors’ reaction to yesterday’s events, let’s go to Angus Cavendish.”

“Thank you, Rannveig.” The Scotsman was sitting at the Olympic village bar.”With me here is Itzhak Zahnan, the Arab World jumper who, as you heard, has been threatened by the Second Irgun.” Also with them, unmentioned but plainly visible, was one of Major Katayama’s security guards, a sidearm on her hip. Cavendish said, “Tell me, Itzhak, what are your thoughts on the menacing statement read by Menachem?”

Zalman, ironically, looked rather like a younger version of the terrorist leader, but his face was more open, calmer. He spread his hands.”I’d sooner accept the present as it is than live in the dead past. I’ve been threatened before. You can’t let it worry you or it’ll affect your performance.”

“Spoken like a true competitor,” Cavendish said. “Let me ask this, then: how do you feel about what your teammate al-Kuwatly had done to his suit?”

“He was a fool,” Zalman said flatly. “I knew nothing about that, and I can still hardly believe it. My own jumping suit conforms to every standard. What good is a medal you’ve cheated to win?”

“Aye, that’s a poser, though there’s some who don’t care, I’m sorry to say. Am I right in thinking you’re doing your best to stay in condition during the delay in the jumping?”

“Oh, of course. I can’t go out on the ramp, naturally, but I’m doing both stretching and weight work. The weight rooms have been packed.”

“What’s the atmosphere there?”

“About what you’d expect-nervous. After all, none of us knows whether the person working out beside him is a killer.” Zalman thought for a moment, amended his last statement: “No-one of us does.”

“ You’ve put your finger on the true calamity of these games,” Cavendish said. “Olympics may have been disrupted before this, but never by people connected with them. Thanks for joining us, Itzhak, and best of luck when the competition resumes.”

Zalman nodded soberly. “I will take all the luck I can find, thank you. Being who I am, I need it.” He bounced away.

Cavendish said, “We’d hoped to have a member of the team from Moscow with us, but they’ve all declined to speak on camera. Joining us instead is Nikolai Yezhov of Siberia. Welcome, and thank you for being with us today.”

“My pleasure.” Yezhov’s French had less of an accent than Cavendish’s. Short, stocky, and solid, he looked formidable in his spotless white tunic with the cross of Saint George on an embroidered patch on his left shoulder.

“Did ye know Shepilov well?” Cavendish asked.

“Not very, I’m afraid.” Aristocratic contempt showed briefly in the Siberian eyes. “The Muscovites always stick close to themselves. Not cultured.”

“Er, yes.” Cavendish changed the subject in a hurry; from a Russian-speaker, “not cultured” was the kind of insult that started fights. The Scotsman said, “What reaction have ye noticed among the athletes to word of al-Kuwatly’s suit?”

Yezhov’s smile seemed genuinely amused. “The only sin is to be found out, is it not?”

Every question Cavendish asked was getting him into trouble. Gamely, he tried again after a glance at Yezhov’s fact sheet. “This is your first time off Earth, nay?”

“Oh, certainly. I was a simple stereovision installer in Kolyma, by the Sea of Okhotsk, a weekend skier, I think the saying is, when the Little Father honored me by including me on this year’s team.”

“Aye, just as ye say, ‘a weekend skier.’ “ Cavendish finally let himself smile. The czar’s recruiting and training methods were notoriously effective, and started at about age six. “A coincidence, then, that you took the Siberian downhill championship four years ago and have held it ever since?”

Yezhov’s expression was bland. “Yes, as a matter of fact, or at least my first win. The favored skier broke his leg in a fall, opening the door for me.”

“How lucky for you.” Cavendish sighed. Despite his best efforts, Yezhov remained opaque. He might claim greater sophistication than his Muscovite counterparts, but he was no more forthcoming. Cavendish thanked him again for appearing, then passed the show back to the studio with obvious relief.

Rannveig handled the sign-off. “We’ll be returning you to your regular programming now,” she said. “Stay tuned to this station for developments as they break. When and if competition resumes, of course, you’ll see all of it here.” The monitor cut to a commercial.

Glancing at it, Bennett said, “Meanwhile, our advertisers are out slitting throats because they just lost five hours of guaranteed high ratings.”

“I wish Katayama had said more,” Rannveig said, adding with a curl of her lip, “He was so busy pointing out how none of this was his fault that I think he hardly cares whether he ever catches up with the killer.”

“If his precious satellite didn’t show him anything, he’s got damn-all to go on,” Bennett said. “No wonder he’s asked for copies of our tapes.” He paused. “I wonder… think back to Shepilov. Didn’t it seem to you that he’d spotted something in that split second before the laser got him?”

“What if he did? Our job is to report, not to investigate.”

“There’s still a bit of a different tradition left in the United States. I’ve never had much of a chance to go ferreting things out, but I think it would be interesting to try.”

She shrugged. “If your idea of fun is trying to do the same thing the professionals are doing, don’t let me stop you. But I expect I’ll have a better time with Jozef than you will staring at tapes.”

“You’re probably right,” Bennett admitted. Rannveig’s expression said she was sure she was right. She detached her seat belt and bounded out of the studio. Faintly envious of her carefree attitude, Bennett made a copy of yesterday’s event and fed it into a stereovision set.

In a way, watching death for the second, third, or twentieth time was harder than seeing it when it actually happened. There was always the dreadful, futile impulse to cry “Look out!”

Bennett sped through the murder of al-Kuwady at fast forward; the athlete from the Arab World had never known he was in danger. Shepilov, though… Bennett got up, holding tight to the arm of his chair to keep from drifting to the ceiling. He studied the hologram from several angles, and became more convinced than ever that the Muscovite’s arm motion had been deliberate.

And if it was-Bennett interfaced the stereovision set with the big IBC computer. It took several false starts before he got the machine to do what he wanted: to give him a printout showing what section of Mimas’ surface Shepilov had been trying to point at.

The circle that came out shaded in the printout was north of the jumpers’ flight path, much closer to the landing area than to the runway. Depressingly, it was also about two kilometers across. But Bennett did not stay depressed for long. Major Katayama had been grousing about trying to cover 3,800 square kilometers; Bennett only planned to examine a bit more than three.

He checked his spacesuit’s systems with the caution of a neophyte, then cycled through an air lock and bounded down onto the surface of the moon. Looking about, he could almost have thought himself on Luna. Dirty ice looked very much like rock, and one set of jumbled craters much like another.

Yet there were differences, after all. Aside from the very low gravity, the sun, while still too bright to look at, was hardly more than an incandescent point in the sky. And one could never see several moons at once from Luna-not natural ones. Enceladus, Dione, Rhea, and orange Titan all showed visible disks, though none could compete with even the attenuated sun as a light source.

Remembering Angus Cavendish’s comments on the jumpers’ form on the runway, Bennett tried to stay as low to the ground as he could while he loped along. Even so, his motion was swift and almost dreamlike. He began to understand, however dimly, the feeling the athletes had as they soared into space.

The reporter steered by the inertial compass in his helmet. To his surprise, he saw people with lights moving about in the area he had decided to search. One of them saw him, too, and came bounding his way. A challenge rang in his earphones: “Who the devil are you, and what are you doing snooping around here?”

“Bill Bennett, IBC,” he replied, and added pointedly, “I might ask you the same question.” But the words were hardly spoken when he saw that all the people he was approaching wore the robin’s-egg blue spacesuits of Security.

“Bennett, eh?” The guard was close enough to peer through his faceplate. “So you are,” she admitted, lowering her side arm. “I think you’d better come talk to Major Katayama.”

The security chief greeted Bennett with a smile as chilly as Mimas’ ice. “ How did you find out where we were searching?” he demanded.”If one of my people has been blabbing, I ‘ll send him out here without a suit.”

Bennett explained his method. He saw Katayama relax slightly. The broadcaster tried to retake the offensive: “Suppose you tell me why you decided to look here.”

“I don’t have to tell you a damn thing,” Katayama said. Bennett was aware of how true that was; it had been a good many years since what had once been called freedom of the press got more than lip service from officials. Public relations, though, still mattered. Katayama relented.

“Basically, we used a more sophisticated version of what you did,” he said. “Once we had autopsy data, we could plot the trajectories of the beams that killed the three jumpers. This is where the lines came together. All the same, we still have a couple of square kilometers to go over.”

Bennett hid his smile. The security chief’s technique hadn’t narrowed the area down much better than had his own. “Any luck so far?”

“We’re still busy.”

No, Bennett translated. “Do you mind if I join you?” he asked.

After a brief hesitation, the Security chief shook his head. “Suit yourself. You might be lucky; who knows?”

Katayama’s people were working in pairs. One would leap twenty or thirty meters off the surface, shining a spotlight down onto the ice to light a large area for the other team member to examine. The spots were brighter than the feeble sun, and illuminated inky shadows that might otherwise have made perfect hiding places. The security personnel also carried metal detectors.

Without any such special gear, Bennett had to do the best he could using his helmet lamp and his eyes. He quickly learned not to look straight down; being mostly ice, Mimas reflected seventy percent of the light that struck it, more than enough to dazzle.

There were enough minerals in the ice to give the terrain some color beyond pure, cold blue-white. Some chunks-was that the word, Bennett wondered, or would “rocks” be better? — were grayish, others brown. The broadcaster nearly shouted for Katayama when he saw a rusty streak. But it had nothing to do with blood. It was only a tiny inclusion of iron ore, trapped for ages in the surrounding ice.

Bennett squatted to peer into a cave. He spied the edge of something green, hidden almost out of sight. He did not let excitement run away with him. Green beryllium compounds-emeralds, if you like-were a fairly common part of the stew of light elements from which Mimas had been made.

But if it was a crystal, it was very large and regular. Excitement shot through Bennett as he looked more closely-no crystal ever had writing on it!

He scrambled into the cave and reached down for it. The cold bit at his gauntlets, which were not as well insulated as his boots. He did not mind, though, not when he was holding an expended heavy-duty charge cube in his hands.

Then he keyed his suit radio, and Security personnel converged as if drawn by a magnet. They scoured the cave from one end to the other, and discovered two more of the plastic cubes, both better concealed than the one Bennett had found.

Katayama held out his hand for that one. Reluctantly, Bennett surrendered it. “It’s one of the standard sizes,” he said, “but not a type I know.” He was looking at what were presumably instructions on the side of the cube. They were written in the Roman alphabet, but in no tongue he recognized. Whatever the language was, it went in for wild combinations of consonants.

“Made in Praha,” the security chief said. He seemed more willing to be informative now that Bennett had done something useful for him. Seeing that the name meant nothing to the broadcaster, he actually unbent far enough to explain: “Prague, you would call it, I think.”

“An Eastern European brand, then.”

“Yes.” Katayama fairly purred. “We have some interesting new questions to ask, wouldn’t you say?”

“You certainly do. Shepilov must have seen the light leakage here when the killer fired at al-Kuwady. Pity the cave roof kept the observation satellite from picking it up.”

“Yes. Still, we make progress.” Katayama put his people back on the search to see if there was anything else to be found. Bennett helped for a while, but lightning did not strike twice. He headed back toward the Olympic complex.

One disadvantage of spacesuits was the difficulty of getting out of earshot. Katayama’s voice rang in his helmet as if the security chief were still standing beside him: “Don’t use this until you get clearance from me. Do you understand?” When Bennett tried to ignore the order, Katayama snapped, “Acknowledge!”

“Acknowledged,” the broadcaster said sulkily, but most of his pique had evaporated by the time he returned to the Olympic village. Katayama had not said anything about poking around on his own.

When he got back to the studio, he checked a list he already knew pretty well. It confirmed what his memory told him. Most of the Eastern European jumpers had had their turns toward the middle or end of the first day’s run. They would not have had a lot of time to make any murderous preparations, and there would have been enough people about so that they could hardly have counted on not being noticed when they went to use an air lock.

He frowned. The conspicuous exception was Jozef Jablonski. Rannveig was not going to like hearing that. Unfortunately, she was probably going to, if not from Bennett, then from Katayama. If the broadcaster could follow his nose this far, so could the security chief.

As it happened, he got a chance to broach the subject when Rannveig came over to share a table with him at dinner. She bristled, just as he had known she would. He spread his hands placatingly. “I’m not telling you what I think, only what I found,” he said, and wondered whether he was lying. “But we can both guess what Major Katayama will make of it. In his shoes, I’d do the same. Who else would use an obscure brand of charge cubes made in Prague but an Eastern European?”

“Someone trying to put the blame on one.” Bennett made shushing motions; she had spoken so loudly that heads had turned.

He said, “Security men won’t look at it like that; they shave with Occam’s razor. Do you know what your, ah, friend did after he jumped? Does it leave him in the clear?”

“No,” she said, her voice low now, and troubled. “He told me he went back to his room and fell asleep. He was laughing at me; he said I’d kept him awake too long the night before.”

“Not good.”

“No,” Rannveig said again. Bennett could see her wondering. She had, after all, met Jablonski only the other day. But then she shook her head, as if coming to a decision. “I can’t believe it. He’s just too-open-to kill from ambush. And what about the tape from the Second Irgun?”

“They denied it,” he reminded her. “That’s not like them; usually they’re only too happy to take credit for their outrages.”

“But why would Jozef want to kill any of the men who were shot?” she demanded. “What’s the point? What would it gain him?”

“What would it gain anyone?” he asked. Neither of them could find a answer.

Bennett did not tell anyone but Rannveig about the find north of the jumpers’ flight path, and he had no reason to think she had noised it about. Nevertheless, rumors of all sorts raced through the Olympic village overnight. At breakfast Bennett heard claims that three different people had been arrested; one of them was drinking a bulb of coffee not three meters from him at the time.

He also heard that Jozef Jablonski was a secret Jew, which probably would have infuriated the skier from Gdynia; that the assassin was a renegade ronin from Japan (now there was a delightful prospect, he thought); that Moscow was about to declare war on Siberia or the Arab World or Eastern Europe or the Chinese Empire-which it did not border. But then, Moscow was always about to declare war on someone.

Brachiating back to the studio, Bennett almost ran into Itzhak Zalman. As they both slowed to avoid the collision, the jumper winked and said, “So tell me, have I been elected Pope in there yet?”

“Twice,” Bennett said solemnly. As the athlete burst out laughing, he added, “Some of them also have you as a member of the Second Irgun, with Menachem’s threat part of your masquerade.” He thought he saw Zalman’s amusement slip for a moment, then told himself he was letting his suspicions run away with him. Pretty soon he wouldn’t be able to look in a mirror and trust the face he saw.

How much the rumors about arrests were worth was proved when the second round of jumping was canceled again. The program that went back to Earth was correspondingly short. Because Bennett had been muzzled, there was next to nothing to say beyond repeating as many variants on “The investigation continues” as a skilled team of scriptwriters could concoct.

“Well, there’s the easiest day of work I’ve had in a while,” Angus Cavendish said when the shortened broadcast was over. “I think I’ll check out a suit and do a bit of walking about. I haven’t had the chance to play sleuth like you, Bill.”

“Where did you hear about that?”

The Scotsman laid a finger by the side of his nose. “A wee birdie told me.”

“A birdie in a Security suit?” That was Rannveig.

“However you please.” Cavendish grinned.”Come with me, if you care to, and share the glory when we find the kern to blame for all this.”

“Thank you, but no. Whatever Bill may fancy himself as, I’m no detective.”

Cavendish turned to Bennett. “Are you game, Sherlock?”

“Why not? I’m at loose ends.”

“Good. Nothing like a few brisk laps around the village to get the blood going.”

Bennett tried to swallow a groan. That meant Angus was going to run the legs off him. The Scotsman was older, but he was also in better shape, more used to spacesuits, and had his bronze medal to prove himself a master at effective motion on Mimas. Rannveig, curse her, was giggling as she left the studio. The only exercise she was likely to get was more fun than anything you could do in a suit.

“Twenty-five laps suit ye?” Cavendish asked when they were outside. When they were by themselves, they spoke English, but his burr was still strong.

“Whatever you say,” Bennett answered.

“Shall we be off, men?” The Scotsman bounded away. Bennett followed. Cavendish held back to let him stay close. “Don’t forget to kick up your oxygen flow,” he warned. “Remember, you’re working hard.”

“I know,” Bennett said. His breath was loud in his helmet; he would be panting soon. Cavendish’s breathing sounded perfectly even in his earphones. He gritted his teeth and tried to keep up, but he kept bounding too high off Mimas and metaphorically spinning his wheels while he waited to descend.

The view on the far side of the Olympic village showed the moon as it had been for billions of years before men had come to it: a giant lump of ice, much bombarded by cosmic debris in its early days. The far side of the village looked much like the near, although it had nothing to match the big view window in the bar and although most of the air locks led out toward the competition site. Bennett hardly glanced at the enormous, boxy structure as he puffed along behind Cavendish.

The Scotsman had gone around a good many times himself before he grunted. “What a queer thing that is,” and did his best to come to a quick stop-not easy with the velocity he had to shed. Still, he did better than his companion, who stumbled to a halt a quarter of a kilometer beyond him.

“What’s the matter, pull a muscle?” Bennett asked. That would be funny, to have Cavendish’s athletic body let him down.

But the Scotsman answered, “Nay, lad, nay,” and pointed at the side of the building. Following his finger, Bennett saw a ring of frost high on the wall.

He wondered if it indicated a problem, but laughed at himself for the thought. “It’s probably been there since the village was built,” he said.

“No,” Cavendish said at once, “because I didn’t see it when I was here as a jumper. I made the laps then, same as we’re doing now.”

“That’s crazy. Nothing ever changes in vacuum. Are you sure you haven’t just forgotten?”

“I am.” Cavendish sounded so positive, Bennett had to believe him. “Bloody odd, I call it.” With a shrug, he resumed his interrupted exercise. He shook his head the next several times the two of them bounded by the curious patch.

By the time they went back in to clean up, though, he seemed to have stopped worrying about it. Bennett, on the other had, was still chewing on it as he stepped out of the shower cubicle in his quarters. That was a piece of plumbing that had required less adaptation to Mimas’ conditions than he would have expected, though a stream of warm air, not gravity, kept the water moving.

Naturally, the phone chimed while he was drying himself. In his annoyance, he forgot to cancel the video feed. Rannveig nodded appreciatively. “As good as I remembered.”

More pleased than embarrassed, he draped himself in his towel. “What’s going on?” he asked, adding, “I thought you’d be with Jablonski.”

“He’s being questioned,” she said bleakly.

“Oh. I’m sorry.”

“So am I.I still think he’s innocent, but there’s evidence that points at him and none leading anywhere else, so what choice does Katayama have? I don’t blame you for finding the charge cubes, or anything childish like that. And that reminds me-you really are turning into a first-class troublemaker, aren’t you?”

“Am I? How?”

“Itzhak Zalman’s asked for political asylum.”

“He has? My God, with whom? Why?”

“With the Chinese, of all people; I think the Chinese coach must have been the first person he saw after he decided his cover was no good anymore.”

“His cover?” Bennett floundered.

Rannveig gave him an incredulous look.”You mean you don’t even know? He panicked when you told him there was a rumor about him being a member of the Second Irgun-because it happens he is a member of the Second Irgun.”

“I will be damned,” Bennett said. That had never occurred to him. “I suppose Katayama’s grilling him, too.”

“He’d like to, but the Chinese coach hasn’t let Zalman out of her suite; she’s up on her hind legs over diplomatic immunity.”

“That won’t last, not in the face of murder,” Bennett predicted. He could understand the Chinese coach’s worry, though; no quarter was given on either side in the clandestine war between the Arab World and the exiled Israeli nationalists.

Bennett dressed, then called Katayama. The security chief came on the line after a delay of a few minutes. His face was impassive, but there was something like warmth in his voice, and the fact that he was talking to Bennett in person showed how the broadcaster’s stock had risen. “Well, Mr. Bennett, you’ve helped me twice now. What can I do for you?”

“What’s the story with Itzhak Zalman?”

Katayama’s smile touched only his lips. “News travels quickly, I see. We have a recording in which he states he planned no violence, only a loss of face for the Arab World upon the disclosure of its slipshod security procedures. The value of this statement, of course, remains problematical. We would like to interrogate him in greater detail, but, ah-”

“I’ve heard.” Bennett nodded. “What about Jablonski?”

“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.

Bennett thanked him and let him go; no point in using up his store of goodwill by keeping the Security chief away from his job for half an hour. There had been something else the broadcaster had been thinking of doing when Rannveig’s call drove it out of his head. He snapped his fingers in annoyance, trying to remember.

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?” Bennett snapped, sensitive to anything that sounded like a racial slur. Then he recognized the idiom. “Nevermind,” he said lamely. “Would you call me back when you find out what it was?”

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

Having done everything he could think of, Bennett settled down to wait for the return call. He checked the computer for a listing of entertainment programs and found on one of the stereovision channels a docudrama he hadn’t seen.

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 Bennett feel colder than anything on Mimas had.

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 funny thing, that,” he said, unconsciously echoing Cavendish.

“Is it dangerous?” Bennett asked. “That’s what I was worried about.”

“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 Bennett the name.

“Thanks,” said the broadcaster, he had to stop himself from adding the Anzac’s infectious “mate.” He broke the connection and went back to the stereovision docudrama with the nagging feeling he was missing something, maybe something important.

“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. Bennett, I am not at your beck and call. I am trying to do an important job, and your interference does not help. Now, and quickly, what is it?”

“I beg your pardon,” Bennett said sincerely, “but I wonder if you might answer me one question.”

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.

Bennett explained. As he did, he half expected his jerry-built structure of logic and wild guesses to come crashing down on his head and leave him looking like an idiot. Katayama listened in silence, not showing what he was thinking.

When Bennett had finished, the security chief ran a hand through his hair. “I take it you write thriller plots?” he said at last.

“No.” Below the camera’s angle of vision, Bennett clenched his fists. This was what he had set himself up for, trying to help…

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. Bennett,” he said, and hung up.

In.008g it was impossible to pace, but bouncing off the walls, floor, and ceiling, as Rannveig had in the studio, was not the worst way to get rid of tension. Bennett had worked up a good sweat by the time the phone chimed again. “Hello?” he panted.

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.”

Bennett and Rannveig took their places in the IBC studio. When the red light on the camera flashed on, Bennett began, “A very pleasant good day to you out there, wherever you may be. There have been a number of important developments since we spoke with you last.”

“That’s right, Bill,” Rannveig said. “We expect this to be the last day of shortened coverage of the games. The jumping should resume tomorrow.”

“The arrest of Jozef Jablonski has lifted a great burden of fear from everyone’s shoulders,” Bennett agreed. Rannveig nodded, a little glumly; Bennett went on, ”The evidence against Jablonski is overwhelming. The site from which the killer fired from ambush has been discovered, and the discarded charge cubes found there were manufactured in Eastern Europe. It is most unlikely that anyone from another country would have had such an obscure brand in his or her possession.”

“Moreover, Jablonski cannot account for his whereabouts at the time of the murders,” Rannveig said.”He is currently being subjected to intensive interrogation, and his confession is expected shortly by Major Katayama.”

Bennett said, “As you can imagine, ladies and gentlemen, the people most relieved are the athletes themselves. For some of their reaction, let’s go to Angus Cavendish.”

“Thank you, Bill,” the Scotsman said. As before, he was sitting at the bar-getting to be quite a fixture there, Bennett thought. Almost everybody there was watching the stereovision set in a corner of the room, and thus at the moment watching themselves watching themselves. For any news more reliable than rumor, they depended on the IBC broadcasts as much as Earth did.

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?” Rannveig said.

“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 winners. For Monsieur Zalman this is not true, is it not so?”

“An interesting point you bring up, lass.” Cavendish had the minutiae at his fingertips. “As a matter of fact, there is a precedent. In the Summer Games of 2104 a woman from the United States defected to Indonesia after the first two events of the modern pentathlon. She won a silver, and took it under Indonesian colors.”

“Ah.” Marge Olbert hesitated, then went on. “I only hope they have arrested the right man. This Second Irgun, it is supposed to be very bad, no? If somehow there is a mistake, that would not be good.”

“There’s confidence Itzhak Zalman had naught to do with the killings,” Cavendish said. “Even if there weren’t, he’s been too closely guarded for his own protection to let him go off doing mischief.”

“I hope you are right,” the Anzac jumper replied. She left, and Cavendish interviewed several other athletes. They were all of them polite, but none said a great deal.

“That’s one of the abiding problems of sports journalism,” Rannveig said when the show came back to the IBC studio. “The clich?s were invented in the twentieth century, and they’ve been repeated ever since.”

“Perhaps we can get a fresher perspective from a competitor with a different background,” Bennett said. He made the call he had set up the night before. “Thank you for joining us again, Monsieur Yezhov.”

The Siberian dipped his head in a courtly gesture of acknowledgment. “Not at all,” he said, his French excellent as usual.

“Would you care to give us your reaction to the arrest of Jozef Jablonski?”

“I was, to be frank, surprised: he seemed a very decent fellow, though I did not know him well.” Yezhov paused, considering his next words.”But if he is truly the one who perpetrated these abominable deeds, then I am glad to see him in custody. I look forward to the recommencement of the games.”

Bennett’s heart was pounding in the effort to stay natural. “Are you-” he began, then broke off at the sound of a knock on the outer door of Yezhov’s suite.

“I shall ignore that,” the Siberian said politely.

“No need,” Bennett assured him. “We don’t want to inconvenience you when you are kind enough to talk with us; we’ll cut away and then come back to you when you’re finished. If your visitor’s business isn’t too personal, though, perhaps you might leave the vision link open with us while you turn down the sound so we can tell when you’re coming back.”

“A capital idea. I shall do as you suggest.”

Yezhov reached out for the volume toggle, then turned his back on the phone camera and glided toward the door. Instead of going to a commercial or a taped segment, though, the director kept the Siberian’s image in the big screen behind Bennett and Rannveig.

“Welcome to those watching all over Earth,” Rannveig said quickly. “We apologize for starting our coverage late, but-”

At that moment, the Siberian touched the door control switch. The door slid open. A security guard thrust a pistol in Yezhov’s face. Half a dozen more, including Major Katayama, rocketed past him into his suite. One doubled back to wrench the Siberian’s hands behind him and clap manacles on him; the rest began tearing the place apart. Somehow the impact of everything was greater because on the screen it all took place in silence.

“-at this moment you are watching the capture of Nikolai Semyonovich Yezhov, the assassin whose crime has marred these Winter Games.” Rannveig went on, “I’m proud to say that my colleague here at the IBC sports desk, Bill Bennett, played a key role in Yezhov’s arrest. How did that happen, Bill?”

“Let’s wait a moment before going on with the details, Rannveig,” he said. Modesty was not what held him back; far from it. He felt full to bursting with triumph. But the story came first. “Here’s our camera crew arriving at Yezhov’s door. Let’s watch as the security patrol searches the suite.”

The picture on the screen behind the broadcaster shifted from the view out of Yezhov’s phone to one from the IBC crew. One of the Security women tore down a rug on the far wall of the suite to reveal a circular scar, two meters wide, cut in the metal and ceramic and inelegantly patched.

“There you see how the killer avoided being spotted or perhaps even being captured at an airlock when he returned to the Olympic village after he had committed his three murders. He did not use the locks either to leave or enter the village complex. Instead, he cut his way out of the building with a laser torch, undoubtedly the same one he used to kill Shukri al-Kuwatly, Dmitri Shepilov, and Louis-Philippe Guizot. Once he had the opening cut out, he simply jumped to the ice below and went to his ambush point.”

“Of course.” Rannveig nodded. “A fall of forty meters here is nothing, the same as less than a half a meter on Earth.”

“That’s right, and the return jump is the same-easy for anyone in Yezhov’s excellent condition. To go without being noticed, all he had to do was close the door to his suite; like all doors here, it’s gastight, so there would have been no pressure drop outside his rooms to give him away. Afterward, sealing compound let him repair the damage he’d done, as we can see now.”

“Where did he go wrong, then?”

“Over something he had no way to hide. Some of the water vapor and C02 that escaped from his suite condensed against the side of the building. The slab he’d cut out was free of the crystals-once replaced, it looked like a bull’s-eye. But it was on the side of the village away from the jumping, where hardly anyone ever goes. And even it they did, they’d think the deposit of ice had been there forever. Angus Cavendish knew better, though.”

“I suppose he was also aided by Siberia’s national colors,” Rannveig said, thinking fast on her feet. “His white spacesuit would have made him hard to spot both on the ground and from the observation satellite.”

“Yes.”

While they talked in the studio, the Security team was examining the case of the stereovision set in Yezhov’s room. The IBC camera crew caught a technician’s exclamation: “There’s tampering here, no doubt about it.”

“Take it to the lab,” someone else said. “If there’s more inside, we’ll have nailed down where he got his laser tube.”

“Yezhov said he installed stereovisions in, where was it, Kolyma,” Rannveig remembered.

“Unh-hunh,” Bennett said. “That was something else that should have made us take a hard look at him, but didn’t.”

“Why should it have?” Rannveig asked. The question was not just for the audience but for herself. Bennett simply had not had time to explain everything to her, although she was coming through like a trouper.

He said, “Kolyma was one of the biggest slave-labor camps in the days of the old Soviet Union. From what I’ve been able to learn, that’s still true in czarist Siberia-and slaves need guards.” Both Siberia and Moscow, he felt sure, would censor this part of the broadcast, but the rest of the world needed to know. He would never have found out himself if he had not seen the show about Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn the day before.

On the screen behind the broadcasters, Nikolai Yezhov directed an ironic bow toward Major Katayama, his head being the only part of him still free to move. “My compliments,” he said with as much aplomb as if they had met at a banquet rather than as killer and captor. “I take it the announcement of Jablonski’s arrest was for my benefit and not sent on to Earth?”

Katayama nodded brusquely. “You admit this, then?”

“My dear sir, at this stage of affairs, what good would it do me to deny it?”

The security chief grunted. “Not much. Do you have anything to say before we deal with you?”

“May I request a lawyer?” Both Yezhov and Katayama smiled at that; the world was a harder place than it had been a couple of hundred years before. Having been caught, the Siberian could not expect to live long.

“Get on with it,” Katayama told him.

“Yes. How should I put it? Perhaps that I chose to strike a blow for Holy Mother Russia against the godless Marxists who still disgrace us all by holding Moscow. We in Siberia have cast them down; even China and Eastern Europe overthrew their ilk years ago. I do not care if peace was sworn; between us and them there can be no peace.”

That led inevitably to Katayama’s next question: “If your fight was with Moscow, why did you also kill the other two, and why cover your tracks?”

Now Yezhov looked at the Security chief as at any fool. “To avoid embarrassing my country, of course. Too many people in the world would not understand how honor compelled me to act as I did.”

At last something angered Katayama. When he answered, Bennett could hear in his words the revived tradition of bushido that had gone with Japan’s emergence as a military as well as an economic power in the late twenty-first century. “There is no honor in shooting men from ambush,” he said implacably.

He turned to the Security people who held the Siberian, snapping, “Get him out of here.”

The camera crew followed them down the corridor and almost ran into the coach of the Siberian team, who came swinging from one ceiling handhold to the next like a desperate ape. When he spotted the camera, he almost threw himself in front of it. He started speaking in Russian, a true measure of how upset he was.

He checked himself after half a sentence and began again in French: “I must say, on behalf of Siberia and the czar, that what Nikolai Yezhov has done is the act of a solitary madman. I condemn him as strongly as any man alive; my heart goes out to the dear ones of the men-all the men-whose deaths he caused. Our Russian brothers of the People’s Republic of Moscow must know the firmness of the treaty of Sverdlovsk-”

He went on for some time. After a while he began repeating himself, but the director did not cut him off. The chance that his apology might be heading off a war was too real to disregard, and the urgency behind that apology made for incomparably dramatic stereovision.

The Siberian coach finally finished and departed to give his condolences to his Muscovite opposite number, his head still hanging in shame. The director’s finger stabbed toward Rannveig; the camera in the studio swung her way.

She said,” Once again the specter of nationalism has wounded the Olympic Games, the games that should be the chief symbol of cooperation between nations. Nation-states have existed for more than six hundred years now. If they haven’t yet learned to live together in that time, will they ever?”

“I think that may be too dim a view, Rannveig,” Bennett said. “Your own United Europe is a case in point, and Eastern Europe, and the Arab World. Step by step, we make progress.”

“But will it be enough?”

He shrugged. “The only answer is that we’re here. We haven’t managed to blow ourselves up, quite. And tomorrow, in spite of everything, the Games begin again. That’s worth remembering, you know.”

“Cut,” the director said.