Read The Ganymede Club for Free Online Page B

traveled all the way from Ganymede, where mortality computers were as available as they were on Mars. Had someone else followed close behind her? Someone to whom Neely's secret was even more important?
    Julius headed straight for home. He waited until a lift tube with no other passengers was available. He was nervous through every second of the ascent, waiting for an unprecedented power failure that would drop him to his death. He did not begin to relax until he was once more safely in his apartment with all his defenses primed.
    Even then, he found it impossible to eat. He made himself a strong drink, went to sit by the window, and mocked his own weakness. Almost certainly, Neely Rinker's death had been a stupid accident; but even if it were not, they had been after her , not Julius Szabo or Danny Clay. She had picked his name almost at random from the directory. Probably no one else knew she had visited him. He could even argue that from his point of view, her death was a benefit. All knowledge of the visit had been destroyed at the moment when Neely Rinker's skull was flattened.
    He felt an urge to call his special service, but for what? He had nothing to tell them.
    It was long past sunset, far past the hour when he usually went to bed. Julius felt no desire for sleep. He made himself another drink, stronger than the first, and returned to sit by the long window.
    The stars were as bright as always, undimmed at this altitude by even a trace of atmosphere. Phobos was visible as a fast-moving silvery point, sweeping from west to east across the Martian sky. He stared at it. Trouble, if it came, would derive from his own past, not from Neely Rinker's. He was just as safe now—or as unsafe—as he had been at this hour yesterday. The odds had not changed. The only thing different was his own mental attitude.
    He frowned out at the night, pulled abruptly from his reverie. Something had happened. What?
    It took a few moments to see it, to realize that what he had noticed was an absence of something. Phobos was no longer visible. But it could not have disappeared so quickly beyond the horizon.
    As he watched, it winked back into view. Something had briefly occulted the little moon, some object between him and Phobos. There was no natural body that could have come between them, so it must have been an aircraft. But that implied a craft of such immense size that it could shield Phobos for at least five full seconds. No aircraft was that big—Phobos vanished again, then, just as quickly, reappeared—or that mobile.
    Unless—
    Julius leaned forward. Unless it was close. And under active control.
    In the final half-second he saw it: a flattened and spinning, star-occulting shape that hung briefly to adjust its position, then rushed toward the window. He had no time to move. He saw the impact of the remotely piloted vehicle, and watched inch-thick, shatterproof plastic stretch and bow inward.
    The wall was tough, designed to withstand heat, cold, and air pressure, but not a scything force of many tons per square centimeter. The spinning blade cut through the window and exploded as it did so. A five-meter section of plastic vanished.
    Julius was not hurt by the explosion, but the outward burst of air took him with it. He was suddenly in a hard vacuum, falling, falling, falling. The air was bursting out of his lungs as he struggled to orient himself. He saw, far off, the lights of distant buildings.
    No fear of hitting them. He was dropping vertically, a full half kilometer to the flat roof of the next building level. The impact would certainly kill him, unless he died first of lack of oxygen.
    How long? His flair for calculation, functioning even now, fed him the answer. Half a kilometer drop in Mars gravity with no air resistance—he would hit after falling for sixteen and three-quarter seconds. He would still be alive and conscious at the moment of impact. He must do everything that he could to land feetfirst and try to save his