AFTER TOO MANY sleepless nights, Dr. Eccles Pandora was running on little blue wheels—chemical wheels, one every two hours. Anything that brushed against her nerves made them twang so loud that she was surprised when other people did not look around. As long as she concentrated, she was fine, but at the slightest trace of relaxation she began to drift off into weirdly rippling hallucinations. She would survive, though, and playbacks of the clips had convinced her that the overload was adding a special luster to the coy sparkle that was her own distinctive style.
About fifteen minutes more would do it. Then champagne and celebration. The plaudits would be flowing, the world at her feet. When she would get to bed, she neither knew nor cared. This was her triumph, her apotheosis. Move over, gods, Pandora had just inherited Olympus.
"Stand by!" said the voice in her ear.
She dug fingernails into her palms and straightened up in her chair, forcing away the wavering shimmer that was trying to settle between her and the studio. She ran smoothing white hands over silver silk, then reached for the glass hidden under the table at her side. The damnable thing was empty, so she palmed one more blue disk and forced it down dry.
Ready for the big windup.
It had gone without a flaw.
The cameramen fussed in the gloom before her, gesturing for infinitesimal changes in the lighting. Up in the control room, Maurice gave her a thumbs-up. A classic, this would be. People would be watching this a hundred years from now. Universities would grant doctorates for analyses of what she had wrought tonight—of how Pandora changed the world.
In the tiny cage of the monitor, her image was concluding the interview with the xenologist from Harvard, Dr. Whatsisname. He had not contributed anything factual, but he had been so excited he could hardly speak, and that had come across beautifully.
The billion-dollar coin had been worth every hecto, every cent. A viewpoint inside the skiv would have been better, of course, and more than one viewpoint would have improved the artistry. The coin had come from one of the fixed cameras inside the dome—they thought it was van Diemen Dome, but that did not matter—and it had been beautifully positioned to watch the door of the skiv.
Higginsbotham had vouched for its authenticity—WSHB's resident expert on trickery swearing that if it was a fake, he would emasculate himself by hand. "After I do," she had warned him.
And the technicians had done a lovely job on cutting and extracting close-ups. Lovely, lovely, lovely. Stop that! Concentrate! She glanced at the monitor, where a female hygiene ad was running. Thus was history financed . . .
Concentrate!
She had begun with a few teasing references to the search for extraterrestrial sentience, with a brief clip of some brainy types from the Sagan Institute.
None ever found, they had said.
Stay tuned, she had told them.
Establish friendly contact, they had advised.
But what, she had asked, if they're killers, too?
The coin had shown nothing of Nile itself—the Nightmare Planet she had named it—but Moscow had told them what they needed. The mycologist van Schoening had come from Moscow, a consultant brought in to study the fungoid vegetation. He had been supplied with all sorts of preliminary data by 4-I, and had left all that lying in his office. It had not come cheap, but what the hell? Surely Dr. van Schoening Mikailovitch would have died happy, had he known that he was making his secretary a rich man.
So there had been interviews with planetologists from JPL about Nile, a dark and poisonous world where rain never reached the surface, a surface of slaggy black rocks hot enough to cook meat.
There had been an interview—she had done that one live—about the toadstool and puffball vegetation. That had perhaps not been a total success; the woman had used too many big words. Of course, the resemblance to terrestrial fungi was merely "convergent evolution of saprophytic organisms"—meaning they lived on a fallout of organic debris from the airborne algae in the cloud layer. Pandora had cut that off as soon as she had established that fungi could be edible. Food is food. Likely there was something there eating the yeasts and mushrooms. So there was no water? Let them drink beer.
And then she had moved on to the record from the coin—the skiv being retrieved and hauled up on the crane; the scurrying, shouting, near-hysterical people climbing all over it and peering in the windows; Dr. Devlin Grant making a total ass of himself. He had always been one, of one sort of another.
And then . . .
Pièce de résistance!
Then the skiv doors had been opened, with more excitement and shouting until the bodies had been brought out. Pandora had demanded close-ups and had been prepared to scream for them, but Maurice had agreed without a murmur, bless him. The Institute medics had not even put sheets over the stretchers, so bless them also—and she had given the viewers a good look at two naked male bodies, slashed and ripped, with their heads battered to pulp. Strong, strong stuff!
She had taken a brief detour through the men's life stories and then zeroed in on the missing woman, ecologist Gill Adele. WSHB's library had turned up a half-decent file shot, too. Cute little twist—any half-decent surgeon could have made something really great out of her face. Missing . . . presumed carried off by . . .
. . . wait for it . . .
. . . the ultimate! . . .
Cave men in space—zoom in on Devlin Grant holding a stone hand-ax, crusted with dried blood and brains.
Pandora had called witnesses on that ax, too. Early Acheulian, the experts had agreed, an example of cultural convergence. What they had meant was that if one battered up a rock to put sharp edges on it, one finished up with a battered rock with sharp edges on it.
Her ear said, Ping! She jumped. Signal light on camera one . . .
She smiled to the Folks Out There. "So now we come to some different sorts of questions. The pictures we showed you were made on April fifth, and this is the eighth. As yet the International Institute for Interstellar Investigation has made no announcement about these tragic deaths. In three days it has released no information at all about Nile or its sinister inhabitants. We obtained our data from unofficial sources. You have heard how important this discovery is—'epoch-making' was the word, wasn't it? So why is it being kept secret?
"Why the cover-up?
"Why did the next of kin in all three cases refuse to talk with us?
"To help us with these questions, we have Doctor—"
For a moment her head went blank—total whiteout. Panic burned in her throat like acid. Such a thing had never happened to her before, in twenty years' broadcasting. The prompter blurred before her eyes.
"Jenkins Wanda," her ear said.
"Dr. Jenkins Wanda, Professor of Political Science at the University of New Orleans." She recovered and carried on, keeping her hands clasped to hide the trembling. Too little sleep, too many pills! But not long to go—she must not falter.
A chair containing Jenkins Wanda appeared on the other side of the table. Jenkins was a dream. A tall and striking black woman, she was as smooth and deceptive as a jungle stream. She had suggested most of the questions they had selected, offering up some startling implications and innuendos that even Pandora herself had not seen.
"Good evening, Wanda."
"Good evening, Pandora."
"Now, Wanda, you've been watching . . . " Gaining strength as she swung back into action and squeezed out a few last drops of adrenaline, Pandora started serving the lines.
Jenkins returned the expected responses. " . . . but, of course, after thirty years it is a shock to find evidence of sentient life. Of course, after so long the Institute is old and hard-arteried. Of course, its experts could panic . . . " And so on.
"Now," Pandora said, leaning into a Between Ourselves mode, "you may recall a curious thing that happened yesterday. The Director of 4-I . . . " Behind her, she knew, a mirage cut of that disastrous press conference would be reminding viewers of Hubbard's catastrophe, and the human celery she had left behind, leaning on the lectern.
"Oh, I think you're right," Jenkins said, although Pandora had actually made no statements at all. "The original intention was to announce what you have shown tonight—the discovery of sentience on Nile. There can be no doubt of that. Obviously Dr. Hubbard then changed her mind. Something or someone changed her mind, but too late to cancel the announced reception. So she improvised that absurd excuse about appointing her grandson as a deputy director. Quite clearly, the director herself has panicked, also. The confusion seems to run right through the Institute's organization, from top to bottom. She made a public idiot of herself yesterday. She is getting on, you know," she concluded with a slyly feline smirk that even Pandora could envy.
Pandora had thus been granted a clear fairway for the next drive. She swung. "But why, Wanda? First contact with a sentient species is staggering news, a historic event. We all know that the transmensor allows us only very brief access to other worlds, so we have very little time. Surely we should be making the greatest possible effort to learn more about these stone-age beings, whatever they are. Why, we don't even know yet what they look like! So why this cover-up by the Institute? Why did Director Hubbard panic and change her mind about making an announcement?"
With an eerily sinister smile, Wanda prepared to sink the ball. "Well, remember, Pandora, that Hastings Willoughby himself, the Secretary General, was also at that meeting yesterday. I think it's a fair guess that it was he who ordered the cover-up, because what may seem to be a very academic scientific discovery will certainly have a real impact on global politics."
For a moment she lingered playfully on the lip of the cup: such scandalous incompetence had been revealed by the triple tragedy, that a major shake-up . . .
And then she dropped it neatly: however short-lived it might have to be, contact with another intelligent species would certainly cause the human race to close ranks at last. The World Chamber with its elected delegates would prosper, because it was the only body with a legitimate claim to represent the human race. The United Nations, a discredited and outmoded collection of ineffective governments, would wither to dust. Hastings Willoughby and Hubbard Agnes would be drowned in a political tidal wave, and they knew that.
A lovely piece of work, Pandora thought. Of course, it was only valid if one did not know too much about Chamber elections, but she could save that problem for another day, another show, another night . . . Gods, but she was tired!
Wanda had finished her razor job on Hubbard Agnes and was waiting for the next question. Was there a next question? Pandora fluttered her eyelids as though they were not made of lead and sneaked a glance at the prompter. No, they were finished.
"Dr. Jenkins Wanda, Professor of Political Science at—at—Wanda, thank you very much for being with us this evening."
"It was my pleasure, Pandora." Jenkins dissolved into the air.
Now, just a few closing words . . .
Ping!
Maurice was giving her the sign for a commercial! What the hell was that for? But Pandora's well-honed instincts spoke up to assure the world that she would be right back. She was hoarse.
The signal light went off.
"Maurice!" She began to push herself up out of her chair and then realized that the floor might not be steady enough to stand on.
"Ten more minutes, Panda." Frazer Franklin's voice! She would know it anywhere, even in an earpatch. "We have a—"
She leaped to her feet. Swaying, glaring up at the control window, she started to scream. "Frankie, you stay out of my—"
"We have a rebuttal, Pandora."
"Rebuttal? What in the name of God is there to rebut?" She was too tired. There was nothing left. That damned-to-a-thousand-hells pervert and his accursed friends had no right to tamper with her triumph. "I won't," she said. "I won't—"
A chair appeared, with occupant.
Pandora collapsed back on her seat and for a moment could only gape. "You!" she said. "Oh, sweet merciful . . . "
It was the human celery; except that someone had taken him in hand and the luminescent green was gone. His hair was combed. He was wearing a pearly-gray jump suit in a frilled bow-bedecked style that was just being adopted by the frantic-fringe youth cults and would not reach the adult world until late summer at the earliest. Damn him, but he could get away with it! It played down his binder-twine skinniness, at the cost of making him seem even younger than he must be. The size of him . . . But his sandaled feet ended a couple of centimeters below floor level, she noticed. Was that Maurice's doing, or was someone at 4-I trying to shaft the kindergarten deputy? And weren't his cuffs riding just a little high at ankle and wrist?
Pandora wanted to laugh, and dared not start in case she never stopped again. Human sacrifice! She had uttered challenge at the gate, and the knight had ridden forth to slay the foe. Oh, jewel beyond price! Perfection—the final touch to add to her glory.
"Cedy! Does your grandmother know you're out this late?"
He flushed, and Pandora finally managed to bring his face into focus. Great Heavens! This was even better than she could have dreamed of. She felt a tremor of almost sexual excitement run through her. Her fatigue vanished in the thrill of the chase—of the kill. Bless you, Frankie! The final dish tonight, ladies and gentlemen, is human head, served hot and weeping.
"What happened to your nose, Cedric?"
"I had a run-in with some exotic plant life." It was puffed and purple and probably packed with surgical gauze, because his voice sounded as though he were speaking underwater. By the next day he would have black eyes, also.
It was all just so delicious.
The massacre of the innocent.
But she had watched that kid face a mob the day before. For an amateur, a beginner relying only on native courage, he had done not badly at all, until Pandora herself had sharpened an experimental claw on him. She knew his chinks, maybe better than he did. Very likely better than he did—there could not have been many women in so brief a life. Quite likely only the one.
His eyes flickered sideways to look at nothing, and then moved back to Pandora. Of course he was seeing someone else in the same room he was in. To him Pandora was the projection, the intrusion. But the great unseen audience would perceive such flickers as shiftiness, and they showed his lack of training.
She glanced at the monitors. She had about ten seconds to soften him up. It was not essential, but genius never overlooked an opportunity.
"It's too bad about that," she said. "Your nose." She dropped her voice to Husky, Full Strength. "Because you're a very good-looking young man."
He had been about to say something else. His mouth opened and stayed that way.
"I wish you were here in the flesh. We could have gotten together afterward, maybe?" She sighed. "Oooh, I would have liked that."
Color was rising in his face like that red stuff in thermometers. His knuckles had gone stark white. Good.
"I must admit that I'm curious," Pandora said. "You do have the advantage of me, you know."
"Ad-Advantage?"
"You already know what I look like stripped, don't you? I can only guess about that strong young body of yours."
The color all drained out again, leaving the swollen nose like a petunia on a snowbank. His lips mouthed something that might been "Bitch."
"Tell me: are you well . . . proportioned? You're one of the tallest men I've ever met, and a girl can't help wondering—"
Ping!
"And finally, friends, to wrap up tonight's astonishing revelations, we have here the famous Hubbard Cedric. Good evening, Cedric."
He had to swallow twice before he could return her greeting.
"Cedric, of course, is with the Institute. Only yesterday his grandmother snatched him off the company basketball team and appointed him deputy director for Media Relations, which was quite a surprise to all of us . . . and to you, too, I think, Cedric?"
He nodded.
She waited.
"Yes." Anger and hatred burned in his eyes. She felt a sudden lurch of desire—those damned pills always did that to her. But she did enjoy her men young. She loved to lead them on . . . and on . . . watching their lust rise until it was an agony, until they were driven beyond endurance, either lashing out in frenzy or suddenly humiliating themselves by ending before they had begun—that was glorious. And to start with one who already felt such savage anger . . .
Business before pleasure. Concentrate!
"And tonight Cedric has been sent along to give us the official word from his gran—from the Institute. Haven't you, Cedy?"
"That's correct, Dr. Eccles."
She shivered at the intensity of his contempt. It was arousing her. She would be doing the blushing next. "Do call me Pandora, please. All right, then, why has the Institute been keeping this story secret? Why has it not admitted the truth before now?"
"What truth, Dr. Eccles?"
"Evidence of sentient life forms!"
Then she saw the triumph flower in those big gray eyes, and all the world seemed to explode in alarm bells.
"There is no evidence of sentient life forms."
"No evidence?" She must play for time—but she must also speak without any sign or doubt, or hesitation. "Are you suggesting that the records we showed tonight are faked?" Not that! Oh please, not that! The people are missing, their families are mourning—it can't be a hoax. Please, God, let it not be a hoax.
"No. The coin was stolen, but it was genuine. Everything you showed was genuine."
Relief! And before she could speak, he plunged ahead. He had been well briefed.
"But you only saw a tiny portion of the data. We have evidence from more than twenty cameras, not just one, and from other sources also. For example—"
"But the window was open on April fifth?" She must get the ball away from him. If she could pull the kid off his rote briefing, then he would flounder.
"Yes." He paused a fraction of an instant, and she pounced.
"So the Institute has had three whole days to start producing fake records. How can we possibly trust anything you show us?"
No—they had thought of that. "I'm not offering to show you any records."
More relief! Could it be that the whole rebuttal nonsense had been the long whelp's own idea? She raised her brows in Obvious Skepticism. "So we are expected to take your word for it?"
"For now you'll have to."
She was running the predicted track, damn it! But she had no choice of move. "And why should we?"
"Because this is under investigation as a criminal matter."
"Criminal?" That one threw her on the ropes, and in fact she had fallen back in her chair. "You are planning to arrest these stone-age inhabitants of—"
"It was murder!" His eyes glinted with genuine, youthful outrage. "A horrible, premeditated murder. That's why I can't show you the holos. The records have been seized—attached, I mean—by the authorities, as evidence." Then he smirked at her and waited expectantly.
"What authorities? You're not suggesting that the cave men on Nile have police?" No, levity was the wrong tack. She was blundering. Criminal crap! "Never mind that for now. You've got two dead men and a missing woman to explain, boy. Whodunit? Was there a fourth person in that skiv?"
He shook his head and settled in to tell the story, a faint smile of triumph on his big mouth. "Have you ever heard of—" He took a deep breath. "—cuthionamine lysergeate?"
"No, but I'm sure I'm about to."
"It's a poison. It's powder, but the fumes are deadly. It drives people mad."
"Fungus derivative, Pandora," said her earpatch.
"What sort of mad?" she asked. She was so weary. Even one conversation was almost too hard to handle, without having to work out why Maurice was blathering about fungus derivatives.
Cedric adjusted himself in the chair, moving stiffly. What other injuries were hidden under that fancy tailoring? Bruises, welts? Pale skin with red weals—no, she must keep her mind on business.
Obviously he thought he had her now. "In women it causes extreme confusion and certain libidinous tendencies."
"Oh, gimme a break! Who's been teaching you the big words? It makes them horny, you mean?"
His Adam's apple jumped. "I guess so. It has that effect on men, too, and it also makes men violent. Women usually less so, and after a few hours it rots the higher centers of the brain, and it causes a mental degeneration and regression, and in a day or so it will kill—depending on the concentration, you know."
"So the Gill woman killed the men?"
"It's obvious she must have killed at least one of them."
"And where did she get the stone ax?"
"van Schoening made it."
"Oh, really!" Pandora tried a laugh, and it sounded screechy even to her. She needed time to think—days. "Well, tell us the official story, then. You've seen these forbidden records?"
Again he registered satisfaction—the interview was following the script he had been given. "No. All I can tell you is what I've been told. There will be a trial, and the jury will get the evidence. But this seems to be what happened. The skiv went—was transmensed—to Nile on April first, with the ecologist Dr. Gill, and Dr. van Schoening from Moscow, who was an expert on funguses, and a ranger, Dr. Chollak John, as operator. You know all that. Well, everything went fine for two days. They drove around, taking pictures and collecting samples. They found nothing unusual. They did not go outside, because of the heat and because the air is not breathable."
"We know all that."
"You don't know the rest of it. It was on the fourth. That was when the poison hit. It was very sudden. Dr. Chollak and Dr. van Schoening started to fight. Chollak won, because he was younger and bigger."
Through the deadening fog of fatigue and confusion and anger, that image registered with Pandora. "He won the woman? He raped her?"
Cedric pulled a grimace as well as he could around his swollen nose. "It wasn't rape. We wanted to spare the families this—but Dr. Gill was affected as much as the men were. Partly she provoked the fight. I have to mention that, because of what happened later. After the fight, Dr. van Schoening went into the lab room at the back of the skiv. He took out some rock samples and made a hand ax."
This time Pandora let the laugh come, to show scorn. Then it became ridicule. She howled. She felt tears come, it was all so silly. After all her work and all the evidence, to have this bimbo come along and spin cobwebs on her shiny triumph . . . Maurice shouted something in her earpatch, and she did not listen. And then she saw the amazed expression on the kid's face and coughed herself into silence.
"I told you that the poison causes mental regression," he said sternly. "It can have that effect, depending on which parts of the brain it affects. He regressed. There were lots of better weapons around—he even used a hammer at one point—but he smashed at a rock until he got an edge on it. Then he went into the room where the other two were, and he battered Chollak to death."
Obviously Cedric himself believed that crud, and he was young enough and innocent enough to be very convincing to the viewers.
"That's when you get your rape scene!" he said.
"Pan," Maurice told her. "Cuthionamine lysergeate is extracted from fungus. The external atmosphere was overpressured."
Cedric was waiting for comment. Pandora was floundering between his story and Maurice's nonsensical babblings in her ear. When she did not speak, Cedric continued.
"And then the second murder. Yes, it had to be the woman. She got revenge."
"And then went out to find a cop?"
He shook his head, his calm rebuking her stupid levity. "Then she began hunting—she seemed to realize that something was wrong. The poison is so random that it's possible she could still think after a fashion, even if she could not control her emotions. You understand?"
"Hunting? What had she seen worth hunting?"
He blinked. "Sorry—I didn't mean that sort of hunting. She began ransacking the skiv. Because this was the third day, remember? The poison hadn't shown up earlier. There had to be some sort of booby trap, or time bomb, to release it then."
"And what did she find?"
Cedric showed wariness again, as if he had been warned of bad footing ahead. "We don't know. She was holding it tight against herself, and none of the pictures showed exactly what it was. But she tried to throw it outside. She opened the—"
"Well!" Pandora spoke loudly. The time had come to win back control of the interview. "You think she found some sort of time lock that had spread poison? It must have been small, this contraption, or they would have seen it sooner. You haven't explained why she didn't just toss it in the disposal chute, or seal it up in a sample locker."
"Her brain was half jelly by then. She put on her EVA suit, but she forgot the helmet. She must have used an override code to open the airlock, because normally it wouldn't let her out without approving the readings on her suit monitor. She would have died at once, and the outer door was self-locking . . . "
Pandora began to speak, but he shouted the end of the sentence.
" . . . and the inside door she propped open with her helmet!"
That was the sort of pathetic detail that Pandora did not need.
"Wrap it up!" was the order from her earpatch.
But she could not wrap it up and let all this hokum spoil her lovely special. She had pulled out the rug, and she was not going to let them lay it again so easily.
"Well, so that's the Institute's version, is it? But you're only reporting what they've told you, and you have no evidence!"
He flushed and just shook his head.
"Conveniently, the evidence is all sealed away by the law. Whose law applies there, on Nile?" Again she saw wariness.
"Cainsville law. And that comes under a special agreement between the U.N. and the government of Canada." He tried to say "extraterritorial" and stumbled over it.
She saw an opening and flogged her tattered brain through it. "What government of Canada? Well, never mind. Isn't it convenient, though? The Institute has its own security people looking into this supposed murder. The evidence is all locked away for months, by which time the string to Nile will have been lost. So no one will ever know the truth! Very handy! How many other secrets has the Institute buried over the years?"
Hubbard Cedric had opened his mouth to say something. He started to stammer, and his face went chalky pale. That was puzzling. If she had not been so battered and flattened, she might have tried to follow that up.
"And I don't suppose there will be any more expeditions going to Nile in the meantime, just in case they might run into some stone-age beings?"
Maurice was jabbering at her. "Pandora, if it was a voice-operated airlock . . . "
Cedric was gabbling: "There will be evidence! Tomorrow!" A joyful gleam came into his eyes. "The window'll be open again tomorrow, and we're going to go and recover Dr. Gill's body. It should be lying right where the skiv was parked. There's a responder on her suit, so we can locate her. And whatever it was she found should be right there, too!"
"When you say 'we' . . . "
The years fell away; the grin would have graced a twelve-year-old. "I've been promised I can go along! No overnighting, just a quick trip. I wasn't in Cainsville before this happened, see, so I'll be an independent witness when they find the body."
"You? Independent? You think that you're independent?"
"You are calling me a liar, Dr. Eccles?"
"I'm saying that you're not my idea of an independent witness."
He shrugged, exultant. "Well, I am. I happen to be honest! There are some of us honest men around, you know. And I'm going along with Dr. Devlin, and tomorrow evening we're going to hold a press conference. Tune in and see what we found!"
They were stealing her triumph. She wanted to scream. Maurice was babbling in her ear, and the king-sized cherub was openly smirking at her. They'd had days to plan some sort of trickery to hide the truth. Of course there were sentient aliens out there! Hastings Willoughby had ordered a cover-up. Hubbard Agnes had buried much worse truths than that in her time.
"You and Devlin? Just the two of you?"
He shrugged. "Maybe a ranger, or another witness."
"I'll tell you what witness!" Pandora shouted, suddenly inspired. "A truly independent witness. Me! I'll come along and keep your friends honest. Show me! I dare you!"
The big kid started to laugh—and stopped, his mouth hanging open. Then his head twisted around and he glared at the blank space he had watched earlier. The nape of his neck was as hairless as a baby's.
"You're joking!" he told it.
He turned back to Pandora, suddenly red and glowering and mutinous. "You really want to come?"
For a moment she wondered if she might have stepped into—no, this rube could never fake a reaction like that. "Yes, yes!"
He pouted. "They say there's one spare seat. Be at Cainsville at 0800."
Triumph! Victory snatched again from the jaws of whatever . . . . "Okay?" Hubbard Cedric asked grumpily.
"I'll be there!"
Without even a good-evening, he started to rise. He and his chair vanished.
That was a surprisingly abrupt ending.
Pandora found the blur that was the camera, although she could not bring it into focus. The room was swaying and weaving, and there was a throbbing sound in her ears. "Well, it's certainly been an interesting evening! Maybe tomorrow we'll know some more . . . and . . . wish you all a very . . . all wish . . . "
"Relax. You're off."
The signal light had gone out.
It was over, thank God. Over. She felt sick.
She tried to stand, and darkness poured into the room and the floor tilted. Take another pill—no, don't.
How curious! She thought she might be going to faint.
Not surprising. She was not as young as she looked.