Cold as Ice Read online

  "Rustum Battachariya, you live a solitary and introverted existence. Have you ever considered suicide?"

  Bat thought for a few moments. "Frequently. But only for others."

  The psychs fled the field, to argue whether that was a yes or no answer. They did not return.

  And during the next three months, Magrit discovered a great secret: What she had been saying about Bat was true, and more than true. Rustum Battachariya carried in his great round cannonball head every detail of every passenger transport system throughout the whole solar system. He loved games (provided they involved no physical exertion) and Megachirops' Super-Puzzle Network experience had made Bat expert in everything from chess to double-acrostic sonnets to hidden ciphers. In his view, complex transport scheduling was just another variety of puzzle.

  One day Magrit had gone to him as her last resort. She had a set of wildly conflicting requirements, a desired schedule that she and all of the department analysts had beaten out their brains on, with no result.

  Bat glared at the offending document. He was sitting on his specially made seat, like a great rolling ball of black-clad flesh that would have sagged and sunk in higher gravity. "A few moments of cerebration are in order, Madam Knudsen. And of silence." He blew out his cheeks, grunted, and half-closed his eyes.

  While he was thinking, Magrit roamed the office, finally picking up one of the more perplexing objects that littered it.

  "You are holding an infrared communications beacon." Battachariya must have eyes in the back of his head, because she was standing on the side of the chamber behind his chair. "Developed on Pallas, and the smallest one ever made. Be careful with it. There are only three other copies, all in the Ceres Museum."

  He had been scribbling on a scrap of paper, but now his fat, dimpled fingers went running across a keyboard, while at the same time he dictated verbal inputs to the computer.

  "Here." He sniffed, held out the paper, and indicated the output display. "You might see if that is satisfactory."

  Magrit had looked at the screen with no special hope. It took a minute or two for her to realize that she was seeing a simple and economical solution to her problem, one that met all of the scheduling constraints.

  "It's perfect."

  She was still holding the communications beacon. Bat took it gently from her hands. "It was trivial. But this device reminds me of something else." He spoke with—for him—unusual diffidence. "According to the passenger rosters, you will be visiting Ceres in two weeks?"

  "I guess so. I'm supposed to attend a meeting of transportation heads."

  "Then I wonder if you might do me a big personal favor. A Palladian genome-stripper is being held at the Ceres Museum, awaiting my collection instructions. It is an item developed by Belt scientists in the final days of the war. It masses less than half a kilo, and it is of course inactivated. But it is also fragile, and I have some reluctance to entrust it to orthodox transfer methods."

  He paused.

  "I'll bring it back to you, sure I will. Just let them know I'll be coming for it." (Magrit had resisted the temptation to repeat to Battachariya the conversation she had overheard a few days earlier, between him and one of her other analysts: "The only reason you never travel anywhere, Fat-Butt, is 'cause you can't pack all the blubber into a standard suit."

  "That is intolerable slander." Battachariya was unperturbed. "Why should I endure a peripatetic existence when you and my other witless minions are available to serve my needs?")

  Magrit Knudsen had received the genome-stripper permit from Battachariya and carried the solution of the scheduling problem away in triumph. Every branch head in the department had sworn that it couldn't be done. She knew that at the next staff meeting she would have something real with which to fight off attacks on Battachariya. At that moment she had decided—with relief—that she could drop any thought of firing him.

  And now, twelve years later, Magrit watched Bat interact with Gobel and reminded herself that he no longer needed her defense for anything. He was the acknowledged master of all tricky transportation problems, capable of levels of subtlety that left newcomers gasping.

  Except that such skill meant not a thing to the inspector-general. Yarrow Gobel followed his own audit agenda. He had plowed right through the authorizations and expenditures for Battachariya's work on transport planning, ignoring all jibes or distractions. Apparently he had found nothing out of line there, since that heap had been checked off and placed to one side, but now a final thick stack was being placed in front of him.

  Magrit winced. The stack contained Battachariya's discretionary account. Or what, in her mind, she thought of as his indiscretionary account. It showed the items of expenditure for which no budget had been allocated. It had not been audited for nearly five years. It was, when Magrit Knudsen descended to the reality level, the reason she had come here. She had approved every item on that list, at least in principle. Her signature was on them. In practice, she had no idea of what most of them were, but she could guess.

  That was apparently not true for Inspector-General Gobel. He was frowning in perplexity at the tables of expenditures and at the entries that sat beside each.

  Finally he raised his head and stared at Rustum Battachariya. "Most of these purchases and requisitions do not correspond to anything on the chart of accounts for the Transportation Department. They appear to be for—" the expression on his face changed, to one that Magrit had never seen before "—for Great War relics, and for war records."

  It was not an explicit question, so Bat chose to be awkward again and treat it as a statement. He stared very hard at the inspector-general's face and said nothing. There was a long silence, until Magrit could not resist jumping in.

  "There is a supplementary list of approved expenditures specific to Coordinator Battachariya's department. I'm sure that all of the items you are looking at are covered by that set."

  Gobel turned his chilly attention to her. "Then it should be obvious to you that I need that list. And I also require the memoranda that show how such an anomaly came into existence."

  "The list is on the computer here. The original memoranda are over in my office. I can go along and get them if you like. Naturally, we are cooperating fully."

  He nodded slowly. "I am sure you are. But while you are finding the memoranda, Mr. Battachariya and I will review the materials described in these documents. In detail."

  The two men stared at each other, ignoring Magrit. She sighed and headed out of Bat's office toward the suspension tube that would carry her five hundred meters up to the main department. How much explanation would be necessary—or sufficient—to satisfy Gobel? Some of those data and equipment requests had seemed strange even to Magrit's tolerant eyes. Only Bat could justify them. All Magrit could do was to look for her written records and hope that they were accurate enough and complete enough to satisfy a nitpicker like the inspector-general.

  The discretionary account went back such a long way. Long ago, even before she brought the genome-stripper back from Ceres, Magrit had learned that there were other deeps within the brooding mind of the Great Bat. His office might appear to her and others as a random junk heap, but to him every item in it had its own place, value, and significance.

  Half of Bat Cave was devoted to relics of the Great War. Battachariya was a war buff, although of a curious kind. The general Ganymedean view of the war was that it had been a disaster of enormous cost, but also that it had served as a pivotal event necessary before the move from Earth-centered to system-centered human psychology could take place.

  Bat cared nothing for nostalgia, philosophy, or historical imperatives. He saw the war differently. Although the Inner System had suffered far more casualties, in his mind it was the Belt that had sustained the greater, and perhaps irretrievable, loss. The war had arrived at a time when Belt technology was bursting out toward a period of incredible fertility of invention. All of that had been blown to bits. Many Belt discoveries had been dest
royed, along with their creators. But not all of them were necessarily lost forever. Bat was convinced that their secrets might yield to careful analysis and systematic search. It was the puzzle to exceed all puzzles.

  Through the branch, he had made tiny investments in old records, ones that Magrit could justify, if necessary, as evidence of former patterns of passenger movement around the Belt. He had studied the faded printouts in the seclusion of Bat Cave and finally requested that a certain orbit be close-scanned for objects of specific description. Magrit had approved the search. The wreckage of the Belt freighter located there contained design procedures and samples of an unknown class of bonding adhesives, superior to anything currently available.

  Magrit Knudsen had been praised for the discovery. She had refused credit and made sure that the true source of the accomplishment was acknowledged. Bat was a department hero—for a few days; then his arrogance and pomposity again became too much for most people to stand.

  On Battachariya's second data request, the department had been a little more generous with funds. The subsequent search had yielded no new invention, but the Ceres Museum had paid handsomely for the little antique Von Neumann. It was the original model, used in the mining of the Trojan asteroids before Fishel's Law and Epitaph—"Smart is Dumb: It is unwise to build too much intelligence into a self-replicating machine"—became accepted dogma. Everyone thought that the particular Von Neumann model had been exterminated, but this one was still functioning after forty years of drifting in space. The museum put it on display . . . in a triple-sealed, inert enclosure. Deprived of raw materials, the Von Neumann was not judged dangerous.

  By Battachariya's fourth success, no one questioned his hobby, or the anomaly of Great War-related expenditures within a transportation department. If anyone had, an economic analysis would have shown investments repaid by discoveries a hundred times over.

  But the departmental memoranda were another matter. Looking at the scanty file as she returned through the suspension tube, Magrit had the feeling that Bat's war-relic activities had been not so much approved and planned as simply grown. She was too experienced to let nervousness show, but the last steps back into Bat Cave were not easy ones. She paused on the threshold, looking around the chamber and trying to see it through the inspector-general's probing eyes. The granular paneled walls and ceiling, the recessed solar-spectrum lighting, and the soft but impenetrable grey floor did not draw her attention. What Magrit sought were items and emphases exclusively Battachariyan.

  She stared along the narrow, ugly chamber that formed both living quarters and office. The Bat Cave was only three meters high and four wide, but it was at least thirty deep. The useful width was diminished by bookcases and file cabinets that ran along both the right and left walls. They carried thousands of unbound sheaves of dusty printouts, the results of Belt Sweeper surveys, all placed apparently at random.

  At the far end there was a small, well-equipped kitchen and the great mound of Battachariya's bed. To reach that point, a visitor must pass through a central corridor wide enough to admit Bat's own bulk. That corridor was flanked by tables and benches covered with a chaos of gadgets and machinery, many of them incomplete or fused to uselessness.

  It was a unique collection, a cornucopia of Great War relics and debris. The one thing missing—Magrit could see it clearly now, as she had not seen it for years—was any evidence of passenger transport schedules. Evidence, in fact, of Bat's official duties. Yarrow Gobel's gimlet eye, no matter how sharp, could not see inside Battachariya's head, where those schedules were securely tucked away. What he could see was evidence of diverted attention, lax supervision, misuse of department funds . . .

  Magrit had left the two men sitting at the table where Gobel had stacked the transport requisition reports. She had expected to find them sitting there still. The reports had apparently not been moved, but Bat was halfway along the room. Gobel was at his side, peering into some sort of viewfinder.

  "I have the records you requested." Magrit tried to sense the atmosphere as she advanced into the room. She failed. Bat was as impassive as ever, and Gobel's turtle face did not seem built to show human expression. He took his eye at last from the viewfinder and turned to face her.

  "Thank you." And now Gobel was suddenly giving off an emotion that Magrit Knudsen could read. Annoyance. He took the folder she proffered and placed it under his arm. "With your permission, Administrator Knudsen, I will take this with me for review and return it to you tomorrow." He walked past Magrit, heading for the door.

  "But the review of the supplementary list—"

  "—is in my hands." Gobel turned back to Battachariya. "Eight o'clock?"

  "Choose the time for your convenience. I will certainly be here."

  "Then eight o'clock." Gobel was gone, without a word to Magrit.

  "What have you been saying to him?" She turned to Bat. "When I left, he was just unsympathetic, but now he's mad at you."

  "That is untrue." Bat was easing the viewfinder back into its case. His moonlike, swarthy face wore a rare look of gratification. "He is not angry with me, not in the slightest. It was your return that provoked his animosity."

  "All I did was bring him the memos he asked for."

  "True. It was not what you brought that caused annoyance. It was the simple fact of your return." Battachariya had moved to a pile of listings, and he removed one. "Since the inspector-general has left for the moment, may I bring another matter to your attention?"

  Bat's sideways mental leaps always lost Magrit. Today he seemed more obscure than usual. She stared blankly at the listing that he handed her. It reported on a Sweeper survey of parts of the Belt. The search had been completed two years ago, but the results had only recently been forwarded to Bat from the Ceres data banks.

  "Is this something Gobel asked you about?"

  "Not at all. The inspector-general knows nothing of it. I was reviewing this survey before his arrival interrupted my work. Now I wish to draw your attention to this item."

  His pudgy finger jabbed at a dozen lines of written description halfway down the page. "Read that. Carefully."

  Magrit read. One of the Sweepers, the machines responsible for continuous surveillance of potential hazards to navigation as far out as Uranus, had located and examined a man-made object. It was a piece of a deep-space ore freighter, the Pelagic, which had been converted for passenger transport near the end of the war. The vessel had been attacked and disintegrated. The Sweeper had found one small fragment, which happened to include an intact flight recorder. A querying of the recorder showed that the Pelagic was a Belt vessel carrying a total of ten passengers and crew at the time of the ship's destruction. The nature of the damage and the weapon that inflicted it were described.

  Magrit read it through twice. "So a Sweeper found a bit of space debris left over from the war. What about it? There must be millions of them."

  "There are indeed. The Sweeper recorded the approximate position and velocity for future tracking, but it did not recover the fragment from orbit, nor did it destroy it. I would like your permission for recovery to be initiated at once, and the flight recorder sent here."

  "What will it cost?"

  "That estimate is not yet available. But it will be significant, since the position is poorly known." It was wrong for a supervisor to lose her temper visibly with someone who worked for her. Except sometimes. Except like now, when nobody else was here.

  "Bat, I don't know why I bother. Where's your goddamned sense? You have the inspector-general breathing down your neck and aching to find something he can stick you with. He hasn't seen one thing in writing that says you ought to have any interest in war relics. So while he's actually poring over your records, you want to stick some new fund request right up his nose. What do you propose to tell him when he comes back tomorrow to go over your requisitions?"

  Arrogant was right. Pompous was right. But add crazy, too, because Battachariya was smiling at her serenely. "Inspector-G
eneral Gobel will not return here tomorrow."

  "He sure said he would."

  "No. He said that he would return your file tomorrow, and see me at eight o'clock. That is eight o'clock tonight. For dinner. I have promised goulash, which, as you know, is a specialty of mine. As for the list that so concerns you, he examined it while you were gone and pronounced himself fully satisfied."

  In the inverted world of Bat Cave, where subordinates did what they liked and logic hung by its heels from the ceiling, you took an incorruptible, tunnel-visioned inspector-general and seduced him with promises of goulash.

  But Bat was continuing. "Yarrow Gobel is, as should have been apparent to you from the expression on his face when he first saw the items on the discretionary account, a Great War aficionado. Far more so than I. He is convinced that the Belt was in the final days developing a secret weapon, a device that would have won the war for them had not something gone dreadfully awry. I will, of course, mention to him over dinner the fragment of the Pelagic and my interest in recovering it." He tapped the sheet he was holding. "And given his predilection, it is inconceivable that he will disapprove funding when I show the evidence and explain its possible significance."

  Magrit went across to Bat's huge padded chair and plunked herself down in the middle of it. Bat had to be a genius or an idiot. The trouble was, he thought he was a genius. And so did she. "You might start by explaining its significance to me. I'm the one who has to find the cash. And I don't see any reason to spend one cent on dragging back a lump of a ship that was blown apart twenty-five years ago."

  "That can only be because you did not read the report as carefully as I requested. Rather than asking you to peruse it yet again, I will summarize the salient facts. First, the Pelagic was a Belt vessel. Not merely made in the Belt, but operated for the Belt during the war. To confirm that fact, I checked Inner System records. There is no evidence that the Pelagic was ever captured or controlled by the Inner System.

  "Second, the damage report on the remaining fragment of the Pelagic leaves no doubt as to the weapon that inflicted it. The Pelagic was destroyed by a particular type of smart missile known as a Seeker."