Allen Steele - The Great Galactic Ghoul

In the midst of all the hysteria and saber- rattling, the investigation quietly continued, even if it had reached something of an impasse. By then, the bodies of the Dolan-Owlsleys and the Connor-Owlsleys had been recovered, and it was clear that they’d died when an explosion had ripped through the command center and hurled them into space. And although no one was yet certain what caused that explosion, it strongly appeared that the rig’s laser drill had ignited some volatile gas deep within the asteroid. So the only questions that remained unanswered were why no one in the command center had acted to prevent the accident in the first place, and also the whereabouts of other two crewmen.

Unfortunately, the ships that had responded to the mayday—the Gold Dust Woman , the Martian Pride , and the Ulysses —had to leave before the matter was resolved. All had missions that needed to be completed, and their original destinations were getting farther away with every passing day. So the bodies of the four dead crewmen were loaded aboard the Woman , the only one of the three vessels that was headed for Earth, and the recovery teams sealed the rig as best as they could. And then the TBSA and Pax ships made their departures from Eros.

Yet one person would eventually return to solve the mystery.

“I never believed in the Great Galactic Ghoul,” Quon Ko says. “Maybe it was fun for people to think some invisible space monster was responsible, but I couldn’t accept that. I have to work out there, y’know. There had to be another explanation.”

Over the next six months, while the Gold Dust Woman made the long trip home, its chief engineer continued to study the problem, putting together everything he and the others had learned while trying to supply the missing pieces. He studied the photos he’d shot, read the Explorer ’s logbooks, pored over schematics of the rig. Nothing new came to him, but Ko admits that it became something of an obsession and Captain Zimmerman eventually noticed that it was distracting him from his duties.

“Ko and I had a talk,” Henry says, “and I suggested that something might shake loose if he put it aside for awhile. It was sort of a roundabout way of telling him to get back to work, but he seemed to take my advice, because Lesley and I finally stopped hearing his theories over the dinner table… which, I gotta tell you, was a relief.”

Yet Ko only stopped discussing the Ritchie Explorer with the Zimmermans; he didn’t stop thinking about it. And the more he worked at the problem, the more he came to suspect that the two unsolved mysteries—the apparent negligence of the bridge crew, and the disappearance of Keith and Jane Wetherill-Owlsley—were somehow linked. It couldn’t be a coincidence that the two surface-operations technicians were both on EVA when the blast occurred. Not only that, but Pax regulations mandated that anyone working outside a spacecraft—even in the low-gravity environment of an asteroid—should use a safety line. So why was only one line tethered to the outside hatch?

Yet Ko didn’t come up with answers to any of these questions until after the Gold Dust Woman came home. And even then, it was only by accident.

Three days after the freighter parked at the L2 port on the lunar farside, Quon Ko was strolling through Descartes City’s crater floor arboretum when he happened to glance at a bulletin board next to a snack bar. His gaze passed over the various items tacked on the board; along with political ads and notices of lost pets, there were also posters for various clubs and social groups… and suddenly, Ko found himself looking again at one in particular, featuring a picture of a skinsuited figure hanging precariously by his hands from the edge of a lunar cliff, with only a thin nylon rope between him and death.

The poster was for the Descartes City Mountaineering Club, and offered instruction in both tethered and free climbing… and that was when Ko remembered something he’d seen when he was making his way through the Explorer’s crew quarters. A book on the floor, titled Basics of Rock Climbing .

“Just like that, I had the answer.” Ko snaps his fingers. “I knew why Keith and Jane were out on the surface while an emergency was going on, and why there was only one tether and not two.”

Quon Ko immediately pulled out his phone and scanned the number on the poster. A few seconds later, he was speaking with Jody Suarez, the club president. After Ko explained who he was and why he was calling, Suarez agreed to check the club’s membership records. Although he reported a few minutes later that the Wetherill-Owlsleys were not on its rolls, that didn’t necessarily mean they weren’t climbers. Port Armstrong and Tycho City had their own mountain-climbing clubs, as did Arsia Station on Mars, and even then it was possible that the missing couple hadn’t belonged to any of those societies.

“I asked him if he’d ever heard of anyone free-climbing on asteroids,” Ko says, “and for a second or two I didn’t hear anything. And then he came back and told me that, yeah, he’d heard about this sort of thing, and it was possible that this might have been what they were doing.”

Free-climbing—the art of rock climbing without safety gear—has been practiced on Earth for over a hundred years, but only lately has it made its way to the Moon and Mars, where ropes and tethers are mandated for anyone not on planetary surfaces or spacewalking with EVA maneuvering packs. In recent years, a new sport had been devised by enthusiasts: asteroid free-climbing, where one went EVA without lines or tethers, relying only on their hands, feet, and the asteroid’s minimal gravity to keep them from floating away.

“Both of the Wetherill-Owlsleys were surface techs,” Ko says, “which meant that they had plenty of opportunity to take up free-climbing. So that made me wonder. Maybe one of them had left the rig to go climbing and somehow got into trouble. That might have forced the other to go to the rescue, but in order to do so, he or she might have had to detach themselves from their own line.”

Even though he’s describing how he successfully deduced the solution of the mystery, there’s no smile on his face, but rather a wary skepticism that persists to this day. “If that were true,” Ko continues, “then maybe the rest of the crew was in the command center, watching the whole thing and not paying any attention to what the drill was doing. So when the laser hit the gas pocket, they’d already lost any chance they might have had to save themselves.”

His theory made sense to the Pax board of inquiry when they summoned him to testify. The TBSA had agreed to let Ko continue to cooperate with the investigation, which is what he wanted to do more than anything else. So when the Pax Astra dispatched a military vessel, the PASS Archangel Gideon , to Eros to finish the official investigation, Quon Ko went along as a consultant. Although this forfeited any chance of landing another chief engineer job for the next eighteen months, Ko was willing to return to the Ritchie Explorer .

“I wanted to find out what happened out there, once and for all,” he says. “I felt like I owed it to everyone who’d died that day.”

Another person participating in the Pax investigation was Lauren Moore, an astrophysicist from the University of Edinburgh. Dr. Moore had spent months studying old NASA data about Eros, and she had discovered an interesting anomaly that had been overlooked until then. When she described it to Ko while en route to Eros, he responded with his own conjecture, and the two of them realized that it might provide an explanation for Keith and Jane Wetherill-Owlsley’s disappearance, however far-fetched it might seem. But they didn’t reveal their theory to anyone else; they wouldn’t be able to test it until they reached Eros and went out on the surface for themselves, and they didn’t want to appear foolish if they turned out to be wrong.