She was waiting for Ruiz in his room when he returned from his afternoon walk along the beach. He came in all the way, tracking sand, and closed the door behind him. He’d been burned black by the sun, but otherwise his “vacation” hadn’t done him much good. He looked gaunt and drawn and tired, and he knew it. He drew his robe more closely around his bony shanks and asked, “How did you get in?”
“I told them at the desk that I was your daughter,” Mizz Maybury said. “They said I could wait for you here.”
She was sitting erect on his bed, a small, vulnerable figure in a short travel poncho and sandals, her hands folded in her lap. Square, competent hands, Ruiz noticed. He caught himself looking at her legs, still round and muscular despite all her months on the Moon.
“Daughter!” he snorted. “Granddaughter, more likely!”
He shuffled over to the wall vendette in his paper slippers and punched himself an iced fruitbeer. “Something cold to drink?”
Unexpectedly, she burst into tears. “Oh, Dr. Ruiz, you don’t know what it’s been like since you left!”
He waited until she was over it, then handed her a glass. “I can imagine,” he said dryly. “You know you shouldn’t be here.”
He noticed a small round patch on her head, about the size of a fivebuck, where her close-cropped dark hair seemed to be a little shorter. Fools, he thought. Fools and incompetents.
“Can’t you do
“They’re not interested in my opinions,” he said. “My opinions are an inconvenience to them.”
“I was there when one of your calls came through. Dr. Mackie wanted to talk to you, but they wouldn’t let him. He
“I don’t have access to any of the new data about the Cygnus Object,” Ruiz said. “All I know is what I read in the faxes.”
“I’ve seen those,” she said. “They don’t say anything about the five smaller bodies. They can’t pretend
“Smaller bodies?” Ruiz brought his head up sharply. “Mizz Maybury, maybe you’d better start from the beginning.” He went over to the drawer and got his battered old pocket computer. He sat down on the bed beside her, cocking his head to listen.
She had just filled him in on the essentials when there was a heavy pounding and a harsh voice shouting “RB!” and somebody kicked the door open.
Two large, meaty young men burst into the room. Their hands were empty, but there was the bulky shape of weapons belts under their shirttails.
Ruiz half rose from the bed.
“Hold it, Gramps!” one of the men said. He crossed the room with a bound and gave Ruiz a shove in the chest.
Maybury made a little choking sound.
“What’s this about?” Ruiz asked in a steady voice.
The man looked both of them over, not bothering to answer. He was towheaded and pale, with narrow blue eyes. Maybury flushed at his scrutiny. Ruiz felt vulnerable and silly in his short robe with his knobby knees showing through.
The second man, a thick-necked fellow with a flattened nose, was pulling out the antenna of a communicator and talking into it. “We got ’em both. No sweat. The girl was in bed with him.”
“I wasn’t—I—” Maybury began. The towhead grabbed the computer from Ruiz and tossed it to his partner.
“Evidence,” he said. The other man put the computer in a shiny black shoulder bag.
“Okay, Gramps,” the towheaded one said. “Put on some clothes. You’re taking a trip.”
“Aren’t you supposed to show me some identification?” Ruiz said, sounding almost amused. “And read me the little homily about good citizens cooperating voluntarily with the government’s efforts to establish their reliability?”
The RB man sighed. “You wanna make trouble? Come on, move it!”
Ruiz got dressed under their watchful eyes. Maybury sat on the bed, eyes downcast, her face pale. By the time Ruiz was ready, she had gotten her trembling under control. The arbee with the flat nose grasped her roughly above the elbow and hauled her to her feet.
“Hands off her!” Ruiz snapped, his eyes smoldering dangerously. His intercession only got Maybury a painful, bone-grating squeeze.
“Take it easy, Gramps,” the other man said. “Awright, let’s go.”
Two hours later they were sitting in a windowless office north of Washington, D.C. Somebody in authority had thought them worth the expense of a suborbital flight in a military craft—and worth all the broken windows and deafened vacationers in Nevada before they got above the atmosphere.
“What are we going to do with you, Dr. Ruiz?” General Harris inquired from across an acre of polished desk. “And now you’ve gotten this young lady in trouble.”
His little beak of a nose was pinched and red in the sloping cliff that was his face. He drummed his fingers on the desk top.
“Trouble?” Ruiz said in a controlled voice. His eyes burned, red-rimmed, in a tired face. “Maybury was paying a kind visit to an old friend and former associate.”
Maybury said nothing. She sat in the big chair, hands in her lap, looking around the blank walls of the office.
“Giving—or receiving—restricted information is a Federal crime,” the general said. He pressed a button, and Maybury’s recorded voice came through a hidden speaker, telling Ruiz about the orbiting spark and the astonishing course change that had put the planet from Cygnus in orbit around Jupiter. Harris let it run for a minute, then switched it off.
“My Reliability Index hasn’t been lowered, as far as I know,” Ruiz said. “And Maybury has never received official notification that I’ve been barred from the receipt of observatory data.” He leaned back and waited.
“In security matters, a post facto determination can be made,” the general said. “As a matter of public policy—”
“As a matter of public policy, you’ve decided to use me, haven’t you,” Ruiz said. “Otherwise I’d be in a cell right now. Let’s stop the nonsense, General. What do you want?”
The general hemmed. Then he hawed. Then he looked at Maybury. He reached for a button.
“Maybury stays,” Ruiz growled. “She’s been bullied and harassed and braindipped. And now she’s going to hear what you have to say.”
“You’re a stubborn and cantankerous old man, Dr. Ruiz.”
“Never mind the flattery.”
“We want you to go along on the Jupiter expedition.”
Ruiz caught his breath. Then he said carefully, “Want to get me out of the way, do you? So that I can’t stir up any embarrassment for you while we’re discovering what that thing orbiting Jupiter is?”
The general’s lips tightened. “You’re determined to make things as difficult as possible, aren’t you.”
“Yes.”
They locked eyes for a moment.
“We want an observer on the spot,” Harris said finally. “Somebody with an independent turn of mind. We’ll be drowning in observational data. We’ll need value judgments.”
Ruiz smiled sourly. “And I’ll be conveniently away from Earth while things are turning up.”
“We don’t want to lock you up, Dr. Ruiz. You’re a very important man.”
“Thanks for being blunt, General,” Ruiz said dryly. “I thought you’d never get around to that.”
“We can’t risk any public unrest,” the general said blandly. “You of all people ought to have learned that by
