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.”