Murder in Orbit Read online

  “Sorry, frog,” I said at last, putting away my materials. “I’d hate to think you died in vain. But the truth is, you and I are just not connecting today.”

  Crossing to the message board, I picked up the light pen and left a note in large, glowing letters:

  Dr.T.—

  I hit another snag in my research—out wandering around while I try to figure it out.

  —Rusty

  That was absolutely true, of course, as long as I didn’t specify which “research question” I was trying to figure out.

  Now what?

  I thought maybe I’d try to find Cassie and see if we could do some more investigating together. I’m not sure that two heads are really better than one, but they’re certainly less lonely.

  I realized that gave me a good excuse to get back into people’s labs: “Excuse me, but I’m looking for my girlfriend. I have to get back to the colony now, and I can’t find her. Is she in here?”

  Where to begin? I had six labs to choose from, and each of them had something that could do with a little investigation.

  I decided to start with Dr. Durkin’s lab. It was unlikely I would find Cassie there, but I was anxious to know what had happened after the fight with Ron.

  I pressed the button beside Dr. Durkin’s door.

  No one answered.

  I tried the door. The lab was unlocked.

  I hesitated only a moment before deciding to go in.

  Someone had made a minimal effort to clean the place up. Most of the furniture was upright again, and some of the debris had been swept into piles. But for the most part it was still a shambles.

  I kicked aside a test tube rack and walked toward the back of the lab. I couldn’t see any sign of Ron. I wondered what had happened to the poor little guy.

  The basic floor plan for all seven labs in the BS Factory is pretty much the same. The main section is a large research room, where the head scientist, his or her assistants, and a few interns like myself do most of their work. Floor tracking and modular wall designs allow each scientist to divide the lab to suit personal taste and needs. They can create anything from small darkrooms to clean-air facilities that can prevent foreign particles as small as a few microns from entering an area and contaminating an experiment. Each lab also has a washroom, a few cubicles where the underlings have some desk space, and a private office for the lead scientist.

  I poked my head into the washroom. The floor was stained with blood. A stack of bloody towels in the far corner served as further reminder of the grisly fight that had taken place here earlier that morning.

  I looked in the cubicles. They were empty.

  I crossed the lab and stood at the entrance to Dr. Durkin’s private office. I hesitated for a moment, then knocked.

  No answer.

  I pressed the speaker button. “Dr. Durkin?”

  No answer.

  Again I hesitated. I guess I wasn’t born to be a snoop. The idea of stepping uninvited into someone’s private office was really bothering me.

  I reminded myself of the body in the waste tank, telling myself that something was dreadfully wrong around here, and I had to get to the bottom of it.

  That was the noble excuse for investigating Dr. Durkin’s office. But if I am really honest with myself, I have to admit that there was another reason. I was desperate to figure out what was going on before I had to go back to the colony that afternoon. I didn’t think I would be able to face Dr. Puckett if I hadn’t figured things out myself by then.

  I came up with a compromise: If Dr. Durkin’s office was unlocked, I would go in and investigate; if it was locked, I would leave it alone and not try to break in.

  It was unlocked.

  “Dr. Durkin?” I called again as I stepped through.

  No answer.

  I looked around. I was standing in a medium-sized room. To my right stood a large plastic desk, littered with papers. On the wall behind it hung several framed photographs and documents.

  The room had two more doors. I checked them. One led to a private bathroom. The other was locked.

  In the center of the room, resting on a metal table, was a large box made of thick plastic. The sides were red. The top was clear. A thick strip of some kind of caulking had been used to seal the top to the sides, so that the box was airtight.

  Inside, looking peaceful and quiet, lay Ron the chimp.

  I could feel tears well up in my eyes. It didn’t seem fair. Ron had been such a sweet little guy. And then this had to happen.

  I just didn’t get it.

  A sudden noise jolted me out of my mood. (It’s funny how quickly fear can replace sorrow.) The door on the far side of the room—the one that had been locked before—was sliding open.

  I ducked behind the table and held my breath. I really didn’t want to be caught here.

  The position made my bad hip uncomfortable. I wanted to move, but I didn’t dare.

  I heard the light, brushing steps that characterize someone walking in low gravity and the sound of the door sliding back into place. An odor of antiseptic, heavy and clinging, caused me to wrinkle my nose.

  The footsteps crossed the room and stopped at the desk. I held my breath, hoping that was where they would stay.

  After a few moments my curiosity got the better of me, and I peered around the lower corner of the table. (Another thing I learned from Macdonald of Terra: When you’re trying to spy on someone, keep your head low.)

  It was Dr. Durkin. He was half covered with bandages (and the parts of him that were still visible didn’t look that good, either). He stood at his desk, flipping through a sheaf of papers. It took me a while to interpret the strange expression he had on his face. (The bandages didn’t help any.) At first I thought it was anger. Then I decided it was desperation.

  Finally I realized that it was fear.

  It soon became clear that Dr. Durkin couldn’t find whatever it was he was looking for. After a moment he threw the papers into a drawer. He sat down at his desk and tapped a few keys on his keyboard. The printer started to whir. Several fresh sheets of paper shot out of a slot in the wall and landed in the basket on the upper corner of his desk. Dr. Durkin snatched them up, gave them a quick glance, and hurried out of the room.

  The door slid shut. I waited a minute or two, to be sure he wasn’t going to come right back in, then stood up. I almost fell back down. My hip was letting me know it didn’t appreciate the abuse I had just given it.

  I limped over to Dr. Durkin’s desk and slid into his chair. The drawer where he had tossed the papers was locked. I checked the keyboard. It was still on.

  That meant the password was already logged in.

  I typed in the “Repeat previous operation” command.

  The computer obliged by spitting out another stack of papers.

  Feeling incredibly smug, I snatched the papers, stuffed them into my tunic, and got my butt out of there.

  I hadn’t gone far when I ran into Cassie.

  “Rusty!” she cried. “Thank God. I’ve been looking for you. We’ve got to get back to the colony as quickly as possible.”

  The tone in her voice made my stomach clench. “What’s wrong?”

  “It’s Elmo,” she whispered.

  Suddenly I saw that there were tears in her eyes.

  “What? What about Elmo? What’s going on?”

  She took a deep breath. The words came out in kind of a sob.

  “I think he’s dead.”

  Chapter 19

  The Interview

  The trip back to the colony was pretty grim. Cassie stared straight ahead without saying a word. I concentrated on piloting the scooter and let the silence hang heavy and unbroken between us.

  What had happened, as near as we could make out, was that the exertion involved in leaving his lair and traveling to the BS Factory had been too much for Elmo Puckett’s overworked heart. Two hours after he returned to ICE-3, Helen Chang had found him floating lifelessly behind his desk. />
  She had called for medical assistance, of course. And then she had put in a call to Dr. Twining.

  Which was how the information had gotten to us; shortly after Helen’s message came in, Cassie had wandered back to Dr. Twining’s lab looking for me. She saw at once that he was terribly disturbed, so she asked him what was wrong. He had filled her in on the situation while preparing a large piece of medical equipment he needed to take back to the colony with him.

  His scooter was just ahead of us now; we had run into him again at the docking area, where he was trying to wrestle the piece of equipment, which turned out to be a treatment table designed for use in null-grav situations, into his ship.

  “Rusty, give me a hand with this,” he ordered gruffly. “If I can get it over to the colony quickly enough, I may be able to save a man’s life.”

  The problem wasn’t that the table was heavy, of course; in the reduced gravity of the BS Factory it weighed next to nothing. It was just that it was so big—a box-shaped thing at least two meters long and a meter square at the ends.

  When we finally got it into his scooter, Millie cleared him for takeoff almost immediately.

  It had been a strange scene. As of yet, Dr. Twining was unaware of our connection to Dr. Puckett. So as far as he was concerned, when I helped with the table I was just assisting him with an urgent task. He had no idea that it probably seemed even more urgent to Cassie and me than it did to him.

  Well, he would find out soon enough. I hoped he wouldn’t be too mad about the deception. But it had been Dr. Puckett’s idea to begin with—and the loading area really hadn’t seemed like the right place to set things straight.

  “Do you think he has a chance?” asked Cassie as we followed Dr. Twining’s ship into the landing area.

  I didn’t know what to say. I wanted to be warm and comforting, to say, “Don’t worry, it will be all right, I’m sure he’s going to make it.” But that was a lot of garbage, and I knew it.

  The thing was, I couldn’t bring myself to say the truth, either—which was that the odds were Dr. Puckett was gone already.

  It didn’t make any difference. Inside we both knew that, too.

  Dr. Twining didn’t wait for us at the Spindle, of course. He moved on to Dr. Puckett’s office as quickly as possible. I imagine the emergency system had already commandeered an elevator for him, making it possible for him to move almost directly from his ship to the hub.

  It took Cassie and me a little longer. When we finally got to the office, Dr. Chang was waiting in the book-lined foyer where I had first met her, just three days before.

  “Dr. Twining is with him now,” she said grimly. “He asked me to leave the room.”

  She sounded offended.

  I felt bad for her. Even so, I thought Dr. Twining was probably smart to have sent her out.

  Here’s why: Before he began his career in research, Antoine Twining had spent several years as a practicing physician in a college community. When he started there, he had made the naive assumption that letting scientifically trained people observe a treatment situation would not be a problem.

  “It didn’t take me long to learn that professional behavior frequently flies out the window when someone you care about is dying,” he told me one afternoon when we were talking about his past experiences. “The last straw came the day I was trying to start a woman’s heart with shock treatment.” He paused, as if he was remembering the scene. “She was convulsing, naturally, and her imbecile of a husband—who had a doctorate in biology, mind you!—this imbecile flung himself across her body crying, ‘You’re killing her! You’re killing her!’ Well, that was the third time I almost lost a patient because I was distracted by a husband, a wife, or whatever, and I vowed never to let them stay in the room with me again.”

  Of course, Helen didn’t know any of that.

  Cassie sat down beside her and was just starting to speak when we heard thumping from beyond the doorway. My imagination painted a picture of what was going on in there.

  It wasn’t pretty.

  Personally, I was just as glad to be outside.

  The noise stopped.

  “Are the other medics in there?” Cassie asked.

  Helen shook her head. “They had already given up by the time Dr. Twining got here.” Her voice was trembling, but other than that she kept herself under control.

  More thumping.

  Then, several minutes later, the door opened.

  Dr. Twining floated out, shaking his head sadly. “I’m sorry,” he whispered.

  Cassie began to wail.

  Dr. Puckett’s body was strapped to the treatment table Dr. Twining had brought with him from the BS Factory. The table itself was held to the floor by electromagnetic devices in its base. I assumed this was one of the reasons he had brought the thing with him; it can’t be easy to work on a heart patient in zero gravity.

  Dr. Twining had closed Dr. Puckett’s eyes and folded his hands over his chest.

  I floated near the table, looking down at my friend. I had known the man for only three days, but I felt as if something had been ripped out of the inside of me.

  Helen and Cassie floated nearby, their arms linked around each other. Dr. Twining waited quietly near the door. He was going to take the body with him when he left so that it could be prepared for final services.

  I knew from the look on his face when he came back into the foyer that he had been surprised to find Cassie and me there. But it clearly wasn’t the right time for questions. I imagined I would have some heavy-duty explaining to do later.

  That didn’t make any difference right now. My attention was focused on the corpse strapped to the table.

  It didn’t look like Elmo Puckett anymore, of course. Puckett the man had been too filled with life for an uninhabited body to ever truly look like him.

  Still, it was his shape and form, or nearly so, and it hurt to look at it. I say “nearly so” because the twin distresses of heart attack and convulsive therapy had left their marks.

  Even so, I stared at the body as if I was trying to burn it into my brain—as if somehow that would help me keep Elmo as a part of me.

  It was like looking at a volcano that had gone suddenly dormant. I kept expecting the body to open its eyes and make some insulting remark about people who were too stupid to know when a man was just taking a nap.

  But it didn’t.

  And it wasn’t going to.

  Maybe if we hadn’t been so upset, it would have been easier for us to see the most important thing about the body. In my own defense, I want to say that it’s hard to think clearly when you feel like there’s a five-hundred-pound rock sitting on your chest.

  Even so, for the amount of time I spent looking at that mountainous body, that round face, those smooth, pink hands folded over the chest, I should have put things together sooner.

  After a while Dr. Twining cleared his throat—a little signal that we had had enough time, and he wanted to be about his business.

  We moved away from the body. Dr. Twining touched a switch on the table and turned off the electromagnets. He was able to lift the table with one hand, of course. But he did ask me to help him guide it through the door.

  “I want to talk to you later,” he said as we moved through the foyer. His voice was soft, but very intense. I wasn’t sure if he was angry or just curious.

  Two paramedics waited outside the door to help with the table.

  I moved back inside to be with Helen and Cassie.

  The rest of the day passed in a kind of blur. I remember Helen telling us that she had talked to Hank Smollin, but that he hadn’t been much help. He had been fired from the BS Factory six months ago and really didn’t know what might be going on over there now. He did mention that while at first he couldn’t figure out why he had been fired, he decided later it was for asking too many questions. He thought there might have been something funny going on over there.

  This did not qualify as big news.


  Finally, reluctantly, the three of us separated to go to our own homes.

  Things were relatively quiet at the apartment. My parents gave over most of the dinner table conversation to Elmo’s death, which was the biggest thing to happen in the colony for some time. I pretty much kept my mouth shut. They didn’t know I had been working with the man, and I didn’t think this was the time to tell them. In fact, I just didn’t feel like talking.

  I tried to call my grandfather (my father had unlocked my line again), but he was off at a writers’ conference. All I got was a recording of his smiling face, telling anyone who called to try again in a few days.

  I remembered the papers I had duplicated in Pieter Durkin’s office, which I had been carrying with me ever since. I spread them out on my desk. They were filled with complicated formulas and drawings of several related cell forms. Something about them bothered me, but even with my background in biochemistry, I couldn’t make any real sense of them. I needed some background information before I could connect them to anything.

  Frustrated, I turned on the evening broadcasts, which were full of information about Elmo’s life and work. They showed (several times) an interview he had granted just a year ago. As usual, he had refused to be photographed. But the clip did include several segments shot over his shoulder, his voice explaining what he was doing as his hands tapped out equations on his trusty computer.

  Basically, it was stuff I knew. After all, the man had been a “living legend.” The media had been doing articles and features about him for years. I watched it anyway. If nothing else, I knew Dr. Puckett would enjoy the fuss he had created by passing away.

  But something about the interview kept nagging me. Finally I downloaded it, then ran it several times for myself.

  His hands. What was it about his hands?

  It wasn’t until I was trying to go to sleep that everything finally clicked into place.

  When it hit me I jumped out of bed so fast that I knocked over my chair. Then I gave myself one of those clichéd slaps on the forehead.

  But I figured I deserved a solid whack.

  I couldn’t believe what a dunce I had been.