by Isaac Asimov
The comm chimed. Gratefully, he groped for the device on the sofa and thumbed ACCEPT.
“Lanra.”
“Boss, it’s Shola.”
Coren sat up straighter. “Yes.”
“I have the files you told me to get, the ones covering Rega’s investments—”
“Right. Did you go over them?”
“You told me not to.”
Coren waited.
At last, Shola sighed. “I did. I’m not sure what it means, though.”
“That’s all right. I can explain it. Did you find references to Nova Levis?”
“No.”
“Hm. They’ve been tampered with, then.”
“By who?”
Coren took a moment to appreciate the level of sincerity Shola managed. What a waste, he thought grimly.
“Our erstwhile pretender to the family estate,” he said.
“Rega’s son?”
“He’s no more Rega’s son than I’m the king of Solaria.”
“But the DNA matches—”
“All that can be faked, you know that. Come on, Shola, use your head. The data that would prove him a fraud was in those missing files.”
“Oh . . .”
When she remained silent for several seconds, Coren cleared his throat. “Not to worry. There are backups.”
“Really?”
“Rega was more careful than to keep only one copy of something, you know that.” He paused. “I should take care of this alone, just for security reasons, but that could compromise the validity of the documents in court . . .”
“Why go alone?”
“Who do I take? Someone lifted those files. Have any ideas who?”
“No, but—dammit, boss, I’ll go with you.”
“You’ve been managing security for the company in my absence. You’re my best agent.”
Shola made a dismissive noise. “How long could this take?”
“A day. I need to get into the residence in Kenya District.”
“Where the funeral was?”
“That’s the place.”
“Boss, I’m sure the company won’t self-destruct if both of us are absent for a couple of days.”
Coren smiled wryly. “Maybe.”
“I’ve known you too long, boss. You suspect someone, surely.”
“Who’s new? I was out of the loop for a couple of months.”
“Well, about four people,” Shola said. Coren doubted anyone else would have heard the note of relief in her voice. “Of those, the only one I could think that might be questionable would be Gansi Tellen.”
“Why questionable?”
“Previous employer was Imbitek.”
“And we hired him? Why?”
“He got cut loose when Mikels went to prison and Towne took over. Not just him, but most of the Imbitek security staff. He looked the safest bet and we needed to replace six people who left right after Rega announced his resignation from the election.”
“Hmm. Okay, you. Tomorrow night, we’ll catch the semiballistic and retrieve the files from Rega’s private cache.”
“What about Tellen?”
“Nothing yet. Give him some duty that’ll keep him occupied for a week. I’ll look into it when we’re finished with this.”
“All right. Where do you want me to meet?”
“At the station. I don’t want a data trail, so we’ll get our tickets at the gate.” Coren gnawed his lower lip. “Good work, Shola. Thanks.”
“Anytime, boss. See you tomorrow night.”
“See you then.”
The connection broke and Coren dropped the comm. He rubbed his face. He had really hoped he had been wrong about Shola. He hated it when he proved himself right this way. Cynicism had saved his life on occasion, and had certainly enabled him to do his job effectively, but it was no kind of philosophy for a happy existence.
He picked up the comm again and tapped in a number.
“Yes?” a familiar voice answered.
“It’s Lanra. Everything is set, everyone is in motion.”
“Very good,” Hofton replied. “I’ll inform Ambassador Setaris. Our people will be in place on schedule. Will you be in the clear?”
“That’s my intention. Remember to go masked. We still don’t know all Gamelin’s capacities.”
“Already anticipated. Tomorrow night, then?”
“Tomorrow night.”
Coren sat in silence for a time, working on the remainder of his scotch. At length, he went into his office and accessed his desk.
“Get me the DyNan personnel files for new employee, security section, Gansi Tellen.”
“Working,” the desk said. “Displaying file now.”
A screen extruded from the desk and text scrolled onto it.
“Good,” Coren muttered. “Call him at home, please. Secure protocols in force.”
Inspector Capel waited in a booth near the rear of the restaurant. He nodded in greeting as Coren approached. Coren slid in across from him. A waiter appeared almost instantly, and Coren ordered a nava.
Capel made a face. “You don’t really like that stuff, do you?”
“As a matter of fact,” Coren said. He fished a hemisphere from his jacket pocket and placed it on the table.
Capel eyed the object suspiciously. “Those are not exactly legal.”
“Precisely why they’re so useful,” Coren said. “No one expects upstanding citizens like us to use them.”
“I take it we need the privacy?”
“It can’t hurt.”
The nava arrived and Coren ordered a sandwich. Capel demurred.
“All right,” Capel said. “I’m here.”
“Thank you. I appreciate it. In about three hours, I’m boarding a semi-ballistic to Kenya.”
“Back to Looms’ house?”
“The very place. I’ve arranged to have a problem taken care of. In order for it to stick, I need something from you.”
“This doesn’t have a very nice sound.”
“The harmony is bad in spots,” Coren agreed, “but it resolves well. If the players all stick to the score.”
“I’m listening.”
Coren slid a disk across the table. “That contains files pertaining to a certain lab, and how it relates to Rega Looms and his children.”
“Child, you mean.”
“No. Children. Plural.”
“You mean that . . . person . . . has a legitimate claim?”
“Jerem has a claim. It’s legitimacy has been compromised. Those documents will explain. What I need from you is follow-up.”
“All those raids a couple of months ago weren’t enough?”
“I don’t think so.”
The sandwich arrived. Coren took a bite and chewed thoughtfully.
“The proverbial shit is about to fly,” he said finally. “Whoever has set Jerem Looms to reclaiming his heritage wants more than trade concessions on Earth. I don’t have the resources to investigate the police. Maybe you do. But at this point, I’ve given up resolving this through legal channels.”
“I should arrest you now, Lanra,” Capel said.
“You won’t. You understand what I’m telling you. Jerem Looms has enough claim to make it stick and become the head of DyNan Manual Industries. That will bring everything we thought we cleaned up right back into our midst—and more, besides. You know and I know that if this becomes an open investigation and the system is brought to bear, corruption will proliferate and no solution will be found in our lifetime. I can take care of this without compromising any legal authority on Earth. What I need afterward is a thorough investigation of the institutions and people contained in those files. You know perfectly well that this may be our best chance of stopping a disaster before it begins.”
Capel’s eyes narrowed. “So I won’t arrest you?”
“All you’ve got right now is hearsay. You know what I intend to do, but that’s not proof, and nothing has happened. Besides, it wouldn’t do ei
ther of us any good in the long run. And that’s what I’m talking about. The long run.”
“Let’s assume you’re right. What next?”
“DyNan is about to undergo a small coup,” Coren explained. “My second in the security department is bad. I’m setting things up for her to be replaced. The man stepping into her job—and probably mine—is named Gansi Tellen. He’s new to DyNan, but I went over his jacket—he’s good, he’s clean, and he’s honest. I spoke to him earlier. I’m asking—work with him. Don’t make him an enemy.”
“I’ll reserve judgment, but I see no problem with that.”
“If something goes wrong,” Coren said, tapping the disk between them, “there’s sufficient evidence here for you to arrest Shola Bran, my second. Do so. At the very least, see that her license is revoked. Also, if something goes wrong, contact a Spacer named Hofton at the Auroran Embassy. He knows as much, if not more, about this than I do. Work with him.”
“Aurorans . . . Does this have anything to do with the death of that Spacer, Chassik?”
“Oh, I wouldn’t doubt it at all. And if I were you, I’d reserve judgment about that, as well.”
Capel slipped the disk into his jacket. “I don’t know what you’ve gotten into, Lanra, but I do not envy you.”
“You may end up envying me.”
Capel shrugged. “How long do I wait?”
“You’ll know by tomorrow noon at the latest.”
“I don’t like this.”
“You’d like the alternative even less.”
Capel gestured at the hemisphere. “I think we’re done. That might draw attention if it’s on too long.”
Coren switched the device off and put it away. The two men said very little while Coren finished his sandwich. When he stood, Capel got up and extended a hand. Silently, they shook. Capel looked sad and appreciative and, unexpectedly, respectful. He left the restaurant first.
Shola waited at the ticket booth at Union Station. Coren greeted her as he always had, slipping easily into the usual banter, and purchased two tickets on the next semiballistic the Kenya District. For her part, Shola kept up the banter just as easily, all the way up to boarding.
No one spoke during a semiballistic flight, and for that Coren was grateful. He closed his eyes and waited.
Mia flipped from one passage to the next. She felt trapped between passages, not altogether sure she understood them—how could she really grasp them, they were so far removed from her own time?—but she could not escape the conviction that, after millennia, they spoke to her of things which had yet to change if she could only see their true forms beneath the new clothes of a different era.
Here disinterest vanishes and a demon becomes manifest—the spirit of each for himself. A sightless monster howls and scrabbles in the darkness. Anarchy lurks in that void.
Wild figures, half-animal, almost ghosts, prowling in the darkness have no concern with universal progress, neither the thought nor the word is known to them, nothing is know to them but the fulfillment of their individual cravings. They are scarcely conscious, having within them a terrifying emptiness . . .
She let the pages roll by from beneath her thumb to the next page that had claimed her attention, convinced that they reflected each other, made each other sensible in a way she still could not quite grasp.
The work of the wise is one thing and the work of the merely clever is another. The revolution came to a stop. The instant a revolution runs aground, the clever tear its wreckage apart.
The clever, in our century, have chosen to designate themselves statesmen, so much so that the word has come into common use. But we have to remember that where there is only cleverness there is necessarily narrowness. To say, “the clever ones” is to say, “the mediocrities”; and in the same way to talk of “statesmen” is sometimes to talk of betrayers.
Mia worried at a knuckle and finally snapped the book closed. “ ‘The Miserable Ones,’ indeed,” she murmured, staring at the title. She glanced at her desk screens. The flow charts she had pulled from the encryptions in the endpapers made a convoluted but traceable path from Earth to the blockade and through various points among the ships, where everything came and went on Nova Levis as though a military interdiction was merely thicker air to shove through. If the numbers were to be believed, traffic in and out of the planet had decreased by less than forty percent since the line went up. That was hardly a sanction at all. Luxury goods had accounted for nearly forty-eight percent of trade goods prior to the blockade. The necessities still flowed.
Her comm chimed.
“Yes?”
“It’s Yalor,” her aide said. “Can we talk?”
“Come by my cabin.”
A few minutes later, Mia admitted Ros Yalor. He spotted the bound volume of Les Miserables lying on her desk and stood over it, gazing down with a bewildered near-reverence. Books, Mia reflected, are generally outside common experience; books like this are nearly alien objects—apocryphal, arcane, somehow magic, and not quite real.
“Do you have something for me?” she asked finally.
“Um . . . yeah. Reen’s off-duty time seems to be spent mainly with Illen Jons. A lot of time in her cabin. When they go out, it’s either to the officers’ lounge or over to one of the Keresian ships. I haven’t been able to follow them there, obviously, but four hours ago I picked Reen up without her, going through the machine shops next to the recon patrol docks.”
Mia looked at the flow chart still displayed on her desk screen. “What did he do there?”
“I didn’t get too close. But he waited for nearly forty minutes. A tech sergeant showed up then and they spoke, and Reen left. I thought about following Reen, but I stuck around. About ten minutes later, a row of supply trucks rolled into the dock.”
“Containing what?”
“Nothing. They were empty. Half an hour later, a ship docked. The tech sergeant met the pilot and the two of them started unloading a cargo. Packages—I couldn’t see what was in them, but they filled the train. The pilot went back to his ship, and the tech sergeant removed the trucks.”
Mia thought for a moment. “Tech Sergeant Uliskis.”
Yalor started. “Exactly. How—?”
“The routes through the regular cargo bays seem to be dodges. A lot of them get through, but they always plan on them getting caught. That’s why we never find much of any consequence in them—food stuffs, fabric, data. Always nice when it gets through, but nothing vital. The real smuggling is going through the recon docks—military, secured areas, with Reen controlling the surveillance. I needed proof.”
Mia tapped keys on the desk. Data shifted on her screens. “That—” she pointed “—is a list of officers ordering and receiving copies of these things.” She held up the book. “All of them are recon. All of them are cleared for overflights on Nova Levis. All of them have access to the seven docks listed here—” she pointed at another screen. “These are what I culled from the encrypted data in the endpapers of the books I took from Corf. There’s a network of connections throughout the blockade, but they all funnel into these seven docks. All of them are recon patrol. Finally, I have this.” She indicated a third screen. “The books were all purchased through the same supplier. The names were different on all the orders, but the payment came out of one source. That source uses the same bank as Commander Reen. Reen maintains a joint account in that bank.”
“With who?”
“A Keresian named Lavis. Till recently, he was a personal aide to the Solarian ambassador on Earth.”
Yalor looked confused. “How . . . where . . . ?”
“You thought what? I was just an out-of-favor field operative transferred out here for disciplinary reasons?”
Yalor frowned. “No, I—”
Mia laughed. “Forget it. Actually, the hardest part was finding the bank account. It’s held under a corporate blind. But someone has to sign the receipts.”
“So there’s a contact on Earth supervising that e
nd . . . and Reen here supervising incoming and outgoing . . . and a cadre of corrupted recon officers actually moving the merchandise . . . it still doesn’t quite add up.”
“What’s wrong?” Mia asked.
“Well, I can understand what Nova Levis wants, what they’re importing. But what’s coming back out?”
“And where is it going? Good question.”
“Do you have a good answer?”
“A good suspicion . . . but I don’t want to say anything till I know. There are only a few places where Tech Sergeant Uliskis could stash contraband near that dock. How long ago did you leave him?”
“Half-hour at most.” He glanced at his watch. “Twenty-three minutes.”
Mia closed up her desk. “I want a look inside those trucks.” She opened a drawer and took out a holster and blaster. “Are you armed?”
“A stunner,” Yalor said.
Mia handed him another holster. She shrugged off her jacket and slipped the rig on over her shoulders. She zipped her jacket and waited for Yalor to do the same.
He looked uncertain. “What if—?” he began.
“We’re going to be prowling around a thief’s property,” Mia said. “How do you think he’ll react if he catches us?”
Yalor put on the shoulder rig.
Mia squeezed through the space between two columns, into a short, low-ceilinged platform above an equipment locker. Below, Yalor’s train of drone trucks stood near the hatch. Voices came from within the locker. Mia palmed her stunner and leaned out to peer into one of the open trucks.
Neat rows of long blue packages filled the last car. As Mia stared at them, she experienced an intimation about their nature that made her shudder.
A shadow reached out from the locker and she pulled back.
The tech sergeant and another man came out and began removing the packages. Each of them hand-carried about six of the objects. She rejoined Yalor.
“Once they seal that locker,” she whispered, “we might not be able to get in without setting off an alarm.”
“What do you want to do?” he asked.
Mia considered. “I don’t see anyone but those two. I’m going down.”
“Let me,” Yalor said.
“You think you’re a better thief than I?”
