Departures

Bennett sped through the murder of al-Kuwady at fast forward; the athlete from the Arab World had never known he was in danger. Shepilov, though… Bennett got up, holding tight to the arm of his chair to keep from drifting to the ceiling. He studied the hologram from several angles, and became more convinced than ever that the Muscovite’s arm motion had been deliberate.

And if it was-Bennett interfaced the stereovision set with the big IBC computer. It took several false starts before he got the machine to do what he wanted: to give him a printout showing what section of Mimas’ surface Shepilov had been trying to point at.

The circle that came out shaded in the printout was north of the jumpers’ flight path, much closer to the landing area than to the runway. Depressingly, it was also about two kilometers across. But Bennett did not stay depressed for long. Major Katayama had been grousing about trying to cover 3,800 square kilometers; Bennett only planned to examine a bit more than three.

He checked his spacesuit’s systems with the caution of a neophyte, then cycled through an air lock and bounded down onto the surface of the moon. Looking about, he could almost have thought himself on Luna. Dirty ice looked very much like rock, and one set of jumbled craters much like another.

Yet there were differences, after all. Aside from the very low gravity, the sun, while still too bright to look at, was hardly more than an incandescent point in the sky. And one could never see several moons at once from Luna-not natural ones. Enceladus, Dione, Rhea, and orange Titan all showed visible disks, though none could compete with even the attenuated sun as a light source.

Remembering Angus Cavendish’s comments on the jumpers’ form on the runway, Bennett tried to stay as low to the ground as he could while he loped along. Even so, his motion was swift and almost dreamlike. He began to understand, however dimly, the feeling the athletes had as they soared into space.

The reporter steered by the inertial compass in his helmet. To his surprise, he saw people with lights moving about in the area he had decided to search. One of them saw him, too, and came bounding his way. A challenge rang in his earphones: “Who the devil are you, and what are you doing snooping around here?”

“Bill Bennett, IBC,” he replied, and added pointedly, “I might ask you the same question.” But the words were hardly spoken when he saw that all the people he was approaching wore the robin’s-egg blue spacesuits of Security.

“Bennett, eh?” The guard was close enough to peer through his faceplate. “So you are,” she admitted, lowering her side arm. “I think you’d better come talk to Major Katayama.”

The security chief greeted Bennett with a smile as chilly as Mimas’ ice. “ How did you find out where we were searching?” he demanded.”If one of my people has been blabbing, I ‘ll send him out here without a suit.”

Bennett explained his method. He saw Katayama relax slightly. The broadcaster tried to retake the offensive: “Suppose you tell me why you decided to look here.”

“I don’t have to tell you a damn thing,” Katayama said. Bennett was aware of how true that was; it had been a good many years since what had once been called freedom of the press got more than lip service from officials. Public relations, though, still mattered. Katayama relented.

“Basically, we used a more sophisticated version of what you did,” he said. “Once we had autopsy data, we could plot the trajectories of the beams that killed the three jumpers. This is where the lines came together. All the same, we still have a couple of square kilometers to go over.”

Bennett hid his smile. The security chief’s technique hadn’t narrowed the area down much better than had his own. “Any luck so far?”

“We’re still busy.”

No, Bennett translated. “Do you mind if I join you?” he asked.

After a brief hesitation, the Security chief shook his head. “Suit yourself. You might be lucky; who knows?”

Katayama’s people were working in pairs. One would leap twenty or thirty meters off the surface, shining a spotlight down onto the ice to light a large area for the other team member to examine. The spots were brighter than the feeble sun, and illuminated inky shadows that might otherwise have made perfect hiding places. The security personnel also carried metal detectors.

Without any such special gear, Bennett had to do the best he could using his helmet lamp and his eyes. He quickly learned not to look straight down; being mostly ice, Mimas reflected seventy percent of the light that struck it, more than enough to dazzle.

There were enough minerals in the ice to give the terrain some color beyond pure, cold blue-white. Some chunks-was that the word, Bennett wondered, or would “rocks” be better?-were grayish, others brown. The broadcaster nearly shouted for Katayama when he saw a rusty streak. But it had nothing to do with blood. It was only a tiny inclusion of iron ore, trapped for ages in the surrounding ice.