Damon Knight - Orbit 21

“Well,” said Holmes. “Good morning.”

“Hello.” I sat. I stared at her closely. She ordered breakfast innocently enough, and we ate in silence. Afterwards she said:

“Tell me, am I your only suspect?”

I saw she intended to have it out. I said shortly, “I think you put it there.”

“Genoa Ferrando fits the qualifications as well as I. So does Alice Waite. Why do you think it was me?”

I told her the tale of the long search, gave her all the pieces of the puzzle that she had left behind, put them together for her. It took quite a while.

At the end of it she smiled. “That isn’t very much,” she said, and left the room.

I took a long, deep breath and wondered what was going on. My head was spinning, my vision was a field of pointillistic dots: had my breakfast been drugged? Was I full of some sinister truth serum, thus to tell her everything I knew? Oh, I was becoming frightened, no doubt of it; yet I certainly did feel dizzy—I shrugged off the thought. Before me Saturn was a huge crescent of swirled cream and green. I watched for a long time as it and its delicate minions continued to turn, arcs and curves and ellipses of light, slow and inevitable and majestic, like the music Beethoven might have written had he ever seen the sea.

That night I couldn’t sleep for dreaming.

The next morning I awoke sober and cold. I made my way up to the observatory.

She was there, working again with Charles. “Will you please try directing with some semblance of accuracy,” she said to him waspishly as I opened the door.

She watched me enter, smiled politely. “Mr. Doya,” she said. She put her head down to the eyepiece, then looked at me again. I was just below her. “Would you like to take a look?”

“Sure,” I said.

“Want to see the rings first?”

“Sure.”

She pushed buttons on a console beside her. The telescope and its vertical strip slid down, and there was a low, vibrating whir; though I could barely sense it, clearly the entire chamber was revolving. Holmes leaned forward and looked into the eyepiece, pushed buttons with her eye still to it.

“There.” She pushed a final button and got up. I sat and looked in. The field was jammed with white boulders, irregular ice-asteroids.

“My.” Even as close as we were in the satellite, with the naked eye the rings appeared to be a solid white sheet.

“Isn’t it a nice view?”

“How big are they?”

“From a few kilometers diameter, down to icicles.”

“It’s amazing what a thin plane they stay in,” I said.

“Oh, yes. It’s a great example of gravity at work. I find it fascinating—a force the workings of which we can describe and predict with minute accuracy, without understanding in the slightest way. Here, the Cassini Division is a good display of the rigor of gravity’s laws. All the ice debris is kept in a plane about twenty-six kilometers thick. Then about forty thousand kilometers from the planet, there’s a ring four thousand k’s wide, where nothing will stay in orbit.” She pushed buttons and the field became a flurry of white, like a snowstorm, I imagined. When it cleared again there was the white rubble, still closely packed— and then, straight as a ruler, the boulders ceased and black starry space began. I was about to exclaim at this when one of the boulders, long and narrow like a beam, caught my eye. It occurred to me that she was showing me her quarry. . . .

“You know,” I said casually, “some physicists on Mars have determined that the columns of Icehenge came from here.”

“Yes,” she replied. “A ring of ice boulders, made from ice taken from a ring of ice boulders. How nice.”

I laughed, and continued to look into the eyepiece. “Some would say that fact tends to support the idea that a resident of the Saturn area built Icehenge.”

“So they might, but it’s just circumstantial evidence. Hasn’t Nederland shown how easy it would have been for Vasyutin and his crew to pass by here?” Her voice was unconcerned. “Your whole case against me is circumstantial.”

“True, but you can make a good case if there are enough circumstances.”

“But you cannot prove your case, no matter how many circumstances.” I pulled my head back to look at her, and she was smiling. “And if you can’t prove it, you can’t publish it, since it accuses me of a crime. I am fascinated by the monument, I have told you that, and it is amusing that you believe I built it; but both I and the monument have enough troubles without a connection being made between us. If you make one, I will assuredly see that you are destroyed.”

I cleared my throat. “And if I find proof—”

“You will not find proof. There is none to be found. Be warned, Mr. Doya, I will not tolerate having my name associated with it.”

“But—”

“There is no proof,” she said, patiently but insistently. We hung in silence and I could feel myself blushing. Was this why I was here, and all that preceded it a preparation, lending force to her warning? The thought angered me, her self-assurance angered me, everything she had done angered me; and as an angry idea came to me I spoke it.

“Since you are so sure of this, perhaps you would, um, help me close my investigation?” She stared. “The Waystation Institute for Higher Learning wants to sponsor another expedition to Pluto, to investigate questions I and others have raised.” I was making this up, and it was exciting. “Since you are so certain I will never find anything implicating you, perhaps you’d be interested in funding it, to lay all questions to rest? . . . and as a favor in return for my visit?” I nearly smiled at that.

She saw it and smiled in return. “You think I won’t do it.”

“I hope you will.”

After a long pause she said, “I’ll do it.” And then, with a casual wave of her hand: “Now you must excuse me, I must return to my work.”

After that conversation we seldom saw each other. I wasn’t invited to dinner that evening, and after a long wait I had one of the little square robots bring a meal. For the next three days I was on my own; Holmes sent not a single message, and I didn’t want to talk to her. I began to believe that supporting another expedition to Pluto disturbed her more than it had seemed. On the other hand, there was the old truism to consider, that every hoaxer wants to be discovered, eventually. . . .

One night I dreamed that Holmes and I were in a weightless, locked room: her hair waved around her nude shoulders like snakes, and she shrieked, “ Don’t go on! Stop!” I woke up immediately, sitting up with twisted bedsheets clutched in my hands, and after a while laughed uneasily; Holmes was prevented from violating my dreams, because it frightened me so badly that I would wake up.

The next day I was still thinking about a locked room. I wandered through the satellite, looking methodically for any sections that were closed off. There was one—an arc of the circle had a hallway to pass through, but above it was a section I couldn’t enter. It took a lot of wandering around that area to make sure, and when I was, my curiosity grew.

That night my dreams were particularly violent; though Holmes never appeared in them, they were disturbing enough. My father was in several, always about to leave for Terra, always asking me to come with him. . . .

The next morning I decided to break into the closed arc. In a room down the hall from mine there was a console of the satellite’s computer; I sat down before it, and went to work. It only took me half an hour of sifting through satellite layout diagrams to find the locking codes I wanted. I scribbled down a few numbers and left the console.