He and Maddy had been grilled for an hour by four Sky City security staff. John knew each of them personally and hoped that they saw him and Maddy as no more than the accidental discoverers of the body. But a full and careful questioning was inevitable. At what time had they entered the simulation chamber? At what time did they operate the air lock? Why had they chosen that particular lock, out of date and normally out of use? Had they seen anything or anyone in the tunnel before Maddy caught sight of the black plastic bag? Had either of them heard anything?
To that last question John was tempted to give a sarcastic answer. What can you possibly hear when you are floating in a vacuum?
He remained polite and cooperative. The security officers had no choice but to ask their questions, it was standard procedure. Unfortunately, neither he nor Maddy could offer a scrap of useful information. They had not touched the corpse, or moved it from where they found it, or seen anything out of the ordinary.
John knew, as Maddy did not, that the location of Lucille DeNorville’s body had other implications. The killer, either before or immediately after the murder, must have tampered with the central data bank that governed the maintenance of Sky City. Otherwise, routine service by cleaning machines would have found Lucille within a few days. Without such service the discovery might have gone unnoticed for years. John could not recall the last time that he, or anyone else, had gone directly from the simulation facility to open space.
The security staff confirmed John’s suspicion. The air lock maintained an electronic log of the date and time of its use, and there had been just two previous openings in the past three years. The first was four days before Lucille DeNorville vanished. The second was on the actual day of her disappearance.
That raised a question in John’s mind: Why had the murderer failed to do the obvious thing and taken the body to release it in open space? Why leave Lucille DeNorville in a location where, even if it took months or years, the corpse would ultimately be found?
The security officials had no answers. They departed at last for the medical center. Their leader, Alyssa Sisk, had ordered an autopsy even though the cause of Lucille’s death seemed clear. She had died when her skull was bludgeoned. The other wounds and the sexual mutilation had taken place after death.
Alyssa and John had been friends for eight years. She told John and Maddy that they were free to stay in the private security office for as long as they liked, but formally she warned him that he must remain on Sky City for the next twelve hours in case more questions came up. Alyssa was gray and drawn and tended to repeat herself. Living with the murders night and day had been hard on her.
When John and Maddy were finally alone and with their suits off, she slumped on a blue padded chair and he sat opposite. Food had been provided at the beginning of the meeting, but neither had even glanced at it. A low table between them bore a collection of cooked dishes, now all cold.
“You don’t have to stay, you know,” John said. “Alyssa Sisk’s instructions apply only to me.”
Maddy’s slight nod was her only sign that she knew John was still in the room. The discovery of the corpse had turned her into a different woman. Every shred of vivacity and resolve had vanished.
“I’m sure you have other work waiting,” he went on. “Down on Earth, or with the Aten asteroid capture people, or something else on Sky City. Everybody these days always has too many things to do.”
Still she said nothing. John had zero confidence that he knew how to deal with distraught women. When she did not reply, not even with a nod or a look, he felt that he had to find a way to fill the dismal silence. It didn’t matter if he sounded lightweight and trivial — it might even be better that way.
He told himself, Talk! If she can’t, you have to.
He said, hardly knowing what words would come out of his mouth, “When I think you’re doing nothing, like now, I bet that’s not true at all. On the flight up you were sitting and evaluating people and what they do, and I had no idea what you were thinking. I didn’t realize you were thinking at all.” Just as I have no idea what you are thinking now. “Even when it’s logical for people to have the same thoughts, they often don’t. When I first applied for a position on Sky City, we were told that we would work on building the shield and it was presented as the only worthwhile task in the solar system. We were saving humanity from a guaranteed future disaster. I’m sure that’s true, and I nodded as much as any of the others. But it wasn’t the reason I wanted to come.”
Maddy looked up and raised an eyebrow. It could be an expression of inquiry — or disbelief.
John went on, “I was born on the Canadian border, but I was on vacation in Washington state visiting my aunt and uncle when the supernova hit. My sister was already grown up and married and living back East, and she made it through all right, but we never heard from my parents again. I stayed on with Aunt Sue and Uncle Jake. They were too busy putting things back together after Alpha C to worry a lot about me, so I was pretty much left to myself. I spent my time backpacking in the Cascade Mountains. I just loved exploring and rock climbing. When I finally got hauled in from the mountains and had to work with the learning machines, my heroes were Columbus and Drake, Amundsen and Peary, Mallory and Whymper and Hillary. I saw myself like them, king of some new frontier — until I realized there was nothing left to explore. The blank spots on the map were recent; all the remote regions had been explored and mapped long before the supernova. Every desert had been crossed, every island had been charted and surveyed, every mountain had been climbed, solo and in groups, with and without oxygen. There was rediscovery and reconstruction to be done in South America and Africa and Australia, but that’s not the same as discovery.”
He was boring her to death, he just knew it. He was all ready to apologize when Maddy grabbed his hand, squeezed it, and said, “Go on. Please.”
It wasn’t the response he’d expected. He had nothing more to say. There were things you didn’t talk about, and there were things you couldn’t talk about. Maddy Wheatstone sat squarely at the intersection of the two. He wasn’t much of a talker at the best of times. But Maddy was staring at him imploringly.
John took a deep breath and spoke of the things you didn’t talk about. “I was in despair. I was seventeen years old and I thought I had reached a dead end. I didn’t see any future for myself as an explorer, because even if there had been anywhere on Earth left to explore, nobody could afford to support luxuries like polar expeditions. Space exploration was dead. The one Mars expedition had been a disaster, and there was no chance there would ever be another. Alpha C had put an end to that.
“So I gave up and trained to be an engineer. There was more than enough work for me then; we had to rebuild the whole world. I didn’t climb any mountains, and I didn’t go to the poles or to Jupiter. But I did walk the high steel four thousand feet above Tokyo, and I rode the span of the ninety-kilometer arch across the Messina Strait, and I planted the deep caissons in the Mariana Trench. I told myself that was sufficient, that I didn’t miss the thrill of the old dreams, of being where no one had ever been before. And for a long time, what I had was enough. Then Giorgio Hamman fired me. He pushed me into space, and I finally found what I’d been looking for. The new frontier wasn’t on Earth at all. It was out here, building the shield. Not exploration. Application.” He wanted to tell her of the thrill of it, hanging beyond Cusp Station a hundred and fifty thousand kilometers from Earth, with a straight fall through the insubstantial fabric of the shield if your drive system failed. But he could not summon the words. At last he said, “If Edmund Hillary were alive today, he wouldn’t be struggling up the South Col of Mount Everest. He’d be out on the shield perimeter with us, living in a suit for weeks at a time, drinking recycled water, eating his own reprocessed wastes . . .”