Murder in Orbit by Bruce Coville Read Free Book Online

can’t use someone else’s code. They’re secret!”
    Dr. Puckett tsked . “Don’t be so naive, my dear,” he said gently. “It happens every day. The thing is, ninety-nine percent of the time when someone’s code number is abused, it’s done by someone else well known to that person. So while a list of who used the system may not give us our killer, it should certainly help us narrow down our search. Since we’re starting with 25,000 suspects, that seems like a worthwhile thing to do. Now, man your battle stations. We’ve got work to do!”

Chapter 7
    Make a Face
    I followed Helen and Cassie out of Dr. Puckett’s office, back through the book-lined waiting room, and into the compound’s private research facility.
    I was properly impressed. Space is at a premium out here (kind of ironic when you think about it), and while none of us is really cramped, we all have to make some concessions in the way we live.
    I was beginning to find out that Elmo Puckett didn’t make concessions. His lab was enormous, filled with banks of computer terminals, dozens of monitors, and enough equipment to make it look more like a supply house than a working laboratory.
    â€œWhat do you do with all this stuff?” I asked in astonishment.
    â€œA little of this, a little of that,” said Helen with a shrug. “Elmo has a lot of interests.”
    Maybe being involved in this mystery was making me suspicious of everyone, but I had a feeling she was being purposefully vague. I pushed the thought away. The last thing I needed right now was another mystery.
    Following her instructions, I stationed myself at a terminal and logged on. When Dr. Puckett established contact with me a moment later, Helen moved away to work with Cassie on their assignment.
    Following Dr. Puckett’s instructions, I quickly became engrossed in a program that was very much like a game. When I described it to my grandfather later, I learned it was just a high-tech version of a technique police have used for decades: the composite picture.
    Here’s how it worked: I would select a facial feature—a nose, for example. Then the screen would display several noses, all sizes and shapes. I would study them and indicate the one that seemed most like the nose of the man in the tank. (Considering the condition of his face when I first saw him, this wasn’t always easy.) The surprising thing was, not only did the program help me create a picture of the face, it actually seemed to work as a memory jogger. The longer I worked, the more clearly I was able to recall what I had seen in the tank the day before.
    Unfortunately, recalling and re-creating turned out to be two different things. After about an hour I had chosen a facial shape and filled it in with eyes, nose, and mouth. But while each individual item looked about right, for some reason I couldn’t get the picture to come together. I was starting to get pretty frustrated. Fortunately, the program had several fine-tuning mechanisms. By fiddling with the proper dial, I could adjust the distance between the eyes, or the width of the nose. If I didn’t like the change I made, I could just turn the dial back, and the image on the monitor would readjust itself—which is a lot easier than erasing and starting over on paper.
    Even so, I finally got so fed up that I began goofing around with the most refined image I had managed to come up with. (Of course, I saved it first, so that I could go back to it once I was done feeling so cranky.)
    I started by enlarging the nose. It wasn’t long before I had the poor guy looking like a pelican. Not a very respectful way to treat the deceased, I guess, but I figured it wouldn’t make that much difference to the poor guy at this point. Next I began playing around with his skin color, and then his ears. Soon I had this really wonderful lop-eared, blue-skinned creature on the screen.
    That was when