Read The Ganymede Club for Free Online Page A

and bad copies, for thirty years. The bills in his hand were garishly colored, of improbably high denominations, and bore, across the top, the words Ganymede Interior Trading Company.
    Neely Rinker had come, Neely Rinker had gone. She was surely not from the Organization. But from the look of it she might have stiffed Julius Szabo.
    He could employ a lift-tube container to deposit the notes in his account, and learn in a day or so whether they were a legitimate form of Outer System currency. If they were not, their deposit was likely to arouse a good deal of unwelcome attention. Or he could make a descent to a bank level himself, and have an answer within the next hour.
    It would be impossible to think of anything else for a while. He might as well admit that, and waste a little more of an already wasted day.
    Julius opened his mortality computer and hid all but two of the bills within its largely empty interior. He returned to the lift tubes and rode one down, not to the nearest bank at the seventy-kilometer mark, but all the way down, until he was below ground level. And when he got there he headed not for the financial section, but over to the sprawling open kilometer of a multilevel shopping mall.
    The food stores offered selections from everywhere in the system. He chose a vending machine on a lower level and inserted one of his two notes. The machine was smart enough to make change or detect a counterfeit, but not to question why a customer would pay with a note big enough to purchase a thousand items.
    The machine swallowed the note and hummed softly to itself for a few seconds. The money apparently passed its rigorous inspection, because a bottle came sliding down along the rack to where Julius could reach it, along with a stack of change. He took the bottle and placed it, unopened, in a disposal bin. The money he stuffed into his pocket; then he started back toward the bank of lift tubes.
    He was halfway there when he became aware of a cluster of a dozen people in the broad mallway on his left, with many more converging to swell their number.
    None of his business. Safety lay in avoiding all forms of anomaly. But on the ground there, that flash of color within the cluster . . . He somehow found himself walking with the rest, standing at the edge of the crowd.
    "From there." Heads around Julius were craning up, following the arm of the woman speaker in front of them. Far above and right overhead, a stone balustrade reached out in a long rising arc to connect two of the mall's upper levels. "That's where it must have come from. A loose piece. I wouldn't like to be the one in charge of maintenance."
    Instinctively, the people around Julius backed up a few steps, afraid that something else might fall at any second. He moved in the other direction, closer to the huddled shape on the ground. It lay sprawled with one arm reaching out in front, as though pointing accusingly at the rounded, red-stained stone on the ground ahead. The cape of violet-blue covered her like a shroud. It was not enough to hide the deformed and crushed skull, or the mat of bloodied hair.
    Julius backed away. In his old life he had seen violent death so often that it did not sicken him in the way that it might affect most others. What he felt was more of a sense of hysterical improbability.
    Less than an hour ago, he and Neely Rinker had been talking of lives that might extend for almost three thousand years. But death cared nothing for probabilities. Death had arrived in the tiniest fraction of the time calculated as the life expectancy (one hour, or one twenty-six millionth of that time, said his mental calculator). In the real world, statistics made statements about averages and were useless in predicting individual events.
    But were statistics the issue here? Julius had a sudden sense of his own vulnerability. Neely Rinker had refused to tell him her personal ID number. She had sworn him to secrecy, without giving him any idea why. She had