“And what have your human masters sent you to tell us, Castorian Exeter?”
“They are not my masters, and they gave me no instructions. Such would not be proper, nor would they believe me willing to follow them. I merely offered to speak with you and to determine, if possible, why so many of their ambassadors have suffered, uh, accidents.”
“They were clumsy.”
“They were human,” Exeter said, “but they cannot help that.”
“Clumsy. Human. The words are interchangeable.”
“Add dangerous to your synonyms, Proctor.”
Leri tensed. “Is that a threat?”
“It is a fact, Honored One. The humans will do whatever they feel they must to get what they want. If you obstruct them, you will find them as dangerous as they are clumsy.”
“You are threatening us! Leave! Leave our planet immediately!” Leri spat a fireball at him.
Exeter spat a fireball back at her. “A simple trick, Proctor. Is that how the ambassadors had their accidents?”
Leri whistled humorously, suddenly glad to have this Castorian to deal with rather than the stupid humans. “Perhaps their suits were inadequate,” she said.
“And perhaps you treated them rather harshly – by their standards, not yours,” Exeter added quickly.
“Shall we discuss it, Castorian Exeter?”
“That seems reasonable.”
“Good. Tell us first what makes you believe that Castorians have souls.”
◊ ◊ ◊
Lucky stood on the hill in the fading light and shook his head sadly. He was by no means a talented hunter, but these scientists were even worse. They showed almost no signs of becoming effective with the laser rifles. In eleven local hours the two teams he was assisting had only managed to kill four musteroon. They had taken countless shots and scattered several other herds but brought down no more meat. With the rate of success they had been having for the past ten days, they would all starve to death very quickly.
How did I let myself get talked into this, he wondered? As if in answer to his question, Marsha joined him on the hill.
“Did you live up to your name today?” she asked him as she took his arm.
“I’d have to live up to Benjamin,” he said with a slight shake of his head, “because there’s no luck to be made here.”
“You give up too easily.”
“It’s been ten days, Marsha! For walking in space! How long do we have to give these chipheads?”
“As long as it takes,” she said quietly. “And don’t call them that. They’re good people, and they’re trying hard. You just have to remember that this is very new to them.”
“Well, it’s new to me, too, but I can see right now that if we armed them all and sat them down in the middle of a herd, most of them would still starve to death.”
She squeezed his arm and gave him a mysterious smile, knowing that she shouldn’t tease him, but unable to resist the temptation. “Then we’ll have to help them as best we can until some relief arrives.”
He pulled slightly away and looked at her carefully. “Did we get an answer, Mars?”
“We did. My father’s sending help. He asked us to stay until they get here. Then we’re to proceed on to Hiifi-11.”
“Two points for your father. But what in the galaxy is Hiifi-11? Or is that a secret?”
“No secret, my love, but not an easy place to find.”
“Like not in our standard galactic directory,” Lucky said with a shiver. “Like a military base, right?”
“Right. Are you cold?”
“I am now.” He looked down the hill with a grim smile. At least the chipheads knew how to butcher what they had killed. “Let’s go back to the ship.”
“Maybe we should see Delightful Childe first,” Marsha said as they started walking down the hill. “He said he would be leaving as quickly as possible.”
“What? These people can’t survive on their own yet, Mars. He should know that.”
“He does, my love, and he’s leaving what supplies he can to supplement the hunting. However, Father’s message was explicit. Delightful Childe has to leave now.”
“But that’s stupid!”
“No it’s not. It’s war.”
“So all these people, all these innocents from the planet where you were born, their survival doesn’t count for anything.”
Marsha laughed. “Listen to you! You were the one who was willing to fly out of here and let Delightful Childe cope with the problem. Now you’re saying someone has to take responsibility? Why the change? You beginning to like these people or something?” She knew the answer, but she wanted to make him say it.
“Got me. I was wrong before, that’s all. There’s not one of these people I really like, with the possible exception of Doctor Hachihaguri, but there are none of them I’d abandon when they’re in such obvious trouble. You laughing at me for that?”
“I’m laughing because I love you and I –“ Marsha paused and cocked her head. “Do you hear that?”
The echoes of hundreds of angry, shouting voices drifted faintly through the still twilight from over the next rise where Graycloud and Nazzarone rested side by side.
“Sounds like trouble of some kind, but still doesn’t make sense, Mars.”
“Then we’d better hurry. I suspect they found out the Nazzarone is leaving.” Marsha dropped his hand, and they started running along the wide trail the musterroon had worn through the thin soil.
8
FOR SEEMINGLY ENDLESS WEEKS the Ukes’ major code, the Q-2, splintered and chipped under Cryptography’s relentless efforts, but it refused to break.
Mica began a project of refining Cryptography’s intercept methods and kept the information pouring into the databanks. Despite the continuing sense of uneasiness she felt around Rochmon, she was glad she had accepted the transfer. She liked the creative tension in Cryptography. She also liked the people and had even grown to admire Bock, who seemed to be everywhere at once and always on duty.
But Mica was totally unprepared when Bock, dark and angry, came roaring up to her one morning, shaking a reel of captape in her face as though Mica should understand why.
“What in the bed of fornicating Castorians is this supposed to be?” Bock demanded, holding the tape within inches of Mica’s nose.
Mica bristled for an instant, then remembered who she was dealing with. She stepped back slightly and reached for the tape, turning it so she could read the label. “Just what it says, I suppose. That’s the most recent tape of Uke transmissions picked up by ComScan on Reckynop. Is there something wrong, Bock?”
“Is Rochmon horny? Of course theere’s something wrong, you idiot. This tape has been edited!”
“Not by my staff,” Mica said firmly. “We only receive, copy and dump. Where did you get that tape?”
“An urchin sold it to me this morning! Where I always get my tapes – straight from Depository, of course.”
“Then you’d better talk to them.”
“I think we’d both better talk to Rochmon,” Bock said in a suddenly quiet voice.
Mica knew immediately what Bock was thinking and didn’t like it. Bock knew that she was an honor trustee, and now Bock was thinking there was cause.
“Is he here?” Mica asked. “I haven’t seen him yet this morning.”
“If he’s not, we’ll get him here.” Bock turned and headed toward the corridor that led to Rochmon’s office.
Mica signaled a subordinate to assume command and followed Bock as quickly as she could. There was no way her staff could have edited the tapes. They didn’t have the time, or the equipment, or the opportunity. Besides, for someone to have edited the tapes, the coded contents of the messages would have to be clear to them.
For the first time since Admiral Stonefield had laid the extra duty on her, she understood why. If someone had edited the tapes, that someone already knew the Ukes’ codes, knew them well enough to make quick deletions or changes
. Suddenly Mica realized that they could be dealing with the worst kind of Uke agent, one who had been planted years before and was only now being used. She shivered and almost ran into Bock.
“He’s here,” Bock said, giving her a strange look.
Within minutes they were sitting at the console in Rochmon’s office as he started the tape.
“There’s the first edit,” Bock said when a series of clicks and chirps paused abruptly and then resumed again.
Rochmon stopped the tape. “How do you know it’s not a just a flaw in the tape? Or in receiving?”
“Listen some more.”
After listening for three or four minutes it was obvious even to Mica that the gaps on the tapes were going to be difficult to explain as anything other than editing. In all of her experience, she had never known a piece of communications equipment to cause problems like that, nor had she ever heard transmission gaps so clean. As her mind raced through every possibility, she glanced over to Rochmon and realized he was watching her.
“Editing,” she said simply. “But by whom? And when?”
“Good questions,” Rochmon said as he turned off the tape. “Add where to your list, and we’re on the right track.”
“Reckynop,” Bock said suddenly.
Rochmon and Mica both turned to her.
“It has to be, don’t you see? I’m sorry for jumping on you like that, Mica, but it didn’t hit me until just this moment. We tape the messages as received, then load them in the databank –“
“Sometimes simultaneously,” Mica offered.
“Exactly.”
“You mean you don’t think it happened at this end?” Rochmon asked.
“We don’t know that for sure, sir,” Mica said before Bock could respond, “but it would be much easier to tamper with the data before it reaches us than to alter it once it has been received and logged.”
“You’d have a hard time convincing me that it’s happening at ComScan on Reckynop.” Rochmon knew he had to consider that possibility, but he would need more than a little evidence to take it seriously. “Brill Whitdworf runs that station, and she’s one of the toughest by-the-book people we have.”
“That doesn’t mean a damn thing,” Bock said.
“It had better. Half of what makes this department work is trust in one another’s judgments.”
“Bock’s right, sir,” Mica said with more conviction than she felt. “But so are you. It doesn’t make any difference how tight an operation Whitdworf runs. And it does make a difference that you have to trust the head of every ComScan unit.”
“Are you suggesting something happened between here and there? That is the most ridiculous thing I ever –“
“No it’s not, Bock. Listen to me for a minute. The windows we get to Matthews are too few and too short to use them for routine code traffic, so it all comes to us by relay. Every bit of it. If the Ukes control just one relay station, or even just a key person in one station, they could control all the data we receive. It’s that simple.”
“How many relays do we normally use?” Rochmon asked quietly.
“Three. But for the past two weeks we’ve had to use five to get around the interference from the Margaritte Cloud.”
“Which means one of the two new relays –“
“Three new relays, sir. We’ve been using the south polar route because there’s less interference that way.”
“Then one of the three new relays is suspect,” Rochmon said.
“They all are,” Bock added. “We have no way of eliminating any of them.”
There was a long pause as each of them considered the implications of what they had deduced. Finally Rochmon looked at each of them and asked, “Suggestions?”
“It’ll take a test…with a built-in trap,” Mica offered, “but it will be difficult to set one up without warning whoever is responsible.”
“Not if we had the Q-2 code,” Bock said quietly.
“Lots of things would be easier if we had that damn code, Bock. The question is, what can we do without it?”
“I think we almost have it.”
Rochmon and Mica both looked at her with surprise.
“That’s why I checked this tape out of Depository. Spaulding and I stumbled across what looks like a new cycling key yesterday, but we wanted to verify it with this tape. I got so angry when I realized the tape had been edited, that for the moment I forgot all about the key.”
Rochmon’s eyes reflected his excitement. “How close do you think you are?”
“Close enough so that I think we can break it even with an edited tape.”
“How long?”
Bock snorted. “You know better than to ask that. As long as it takes. Two days? A week? I don’t know. But it won’t take more than a couple of days to know if we’re really on the right track.”
“And when you break it, we get two rewards instead of just one,” Rochmon said with a grim smile. “We get to tape the main channels of Uke information, and we get to catch ourselves a traitor.”
Or a spy, Mica thought, unwilling to say the word aloud.
◊ ◊ ◊
Sjean watched with an uneasy sense of satisfaction as the equations again filled the screen. She had copied Ayne Wallen’s files as a routine precaution, fearing that he might very well dump all of them after Caugust fired him. She had been right about that. With typical Tyawese efficiency he had purged the computer of everything under his operating code except an arrogantly annotated copy of his resume. But she had been wrong to delay checking Ayne’s files to see what they contained.
They had lost two months of valuable time working in directions that his equations emphatically indicated would lead them nowhere. Yet now that she had found the equations and begun to grasp their significance, Sjean wished she had been able to copy Ayne’s thoughts as well as his files. There was too much missing there, too many assumptions behind the equations and implications within them that were totally unclear to her.
But Ayne’s basic theory was as plain and simple as the empty equations before her were beautiful. If his equations proved to be appropriate and accurate, reciprocal action at a distance offered a path of research with far more possibilities of success than everything Drautzlab had done in the past five years on simultaneous action at a distance.
What had fooled her at first was the asymmetrical nature of the middle equations. That apparent imbalance had fooled her so well that she had quickly dismissed them as scratchscreen work and gone on to scan the rest of his files. Minutes later as she had paused to examine some curious datafields, she had that odd feeling which hits every research scientist once in a great while – the feeling that she had skipped over something important – something very important.
Now she knew what that something was, and it was time to inform Caugust. It startled her when he answered his own vidphone. “I hate to bother you, sir, but I believe I’ve found some extremely important equations in Wallen’s files.”
“Explain,” Caugust said in his usual terse way.
“If your terminal is clear, I’ll copy them to you first.”
“Ready.”
Sjean punched in Caugust’s code, hit the transfer button and seconds later heard him say, “I have them, Birkie. What do they mean?”
“Well, sir, if I’m correct in my preliminary analysis, they mean that Wallen found another way to approach the action at a distance problem – a radical way, to be sure, but one which certainly has a nice curve on its theoretical surface.”
There was a pause as Caugust scanned his screen. “What is that reverse symbol down in the, uh, sixth set I guess it is?”
“I wondered about that, too, until I read through the middle section. It appears to be Wallen’s symbol for the negative exponent that Guntteray theorized would have to exist to account for the dilation of mass at the moment of ignition.”
“Thought we ruled that out last year.”
“We did, sir, but only in the standard equations. We
never had to evaluate it in this kind of relationship.”
“But if the exponent is negative…”
“The effect will eventually be reversed,” Sjean said with a sudden sense of certainty. “Which means that if these equations test out, they could very well lead to an ultimate weapon which shoots backward and causes a reciprocal action rather than a simultaneous one.”
Caugust combed his heavy white beard with his fingers as he again scanned his screen. Then his face broke into one of his rare, wrinkled smiles.
“Looks like you hae a new project, Birkie. I’ll get Noel to supervise your other projects. Keep me posted on your results.”
He signed off before Sjean had a chance to respond. As much as she liked the old man, he frustrated the physics out of her sometimes. She didn’t want to abandon her other projects, but she didn’t want to give this one to anyone else either.
For the second time since Ayne had left, Sjean was sorry that he had been stupid enough to get himself dismissed. Then she looked at the equations and knew that he had unwillingly given Drautzlab more of his genius than he had ever intended to share. However obnoxious the rest of his legacy was, she knew in a deep, irrational way that he had made one extremely significant contribution to Drautzlab’s efforts.
Now it was up to her to move that contribution toward the Ultimate Weapon and Sondak’s final goal of permanent peace within the galaxy.
◊ ◊ ◊
Delightful Childe screamed first in Vardequerqueglot, then in gentongue, then in UC Standard, but the face on his viewscreen remained impassive. “What in your mother’s ooze do you want us to do?”
“Return and render aid,” the checkdroid said.
“But we haven’t left yet! Aren’t you listening to me? We are still here on Alexvieux Five. However, we are planning to leave as soon as possible because we were ordered to leave. Our conscience is clear that we have done all we can and that further assistance for these people is forthcoming.”
“Return and render aid,” the checkdroid repeated.
“Agreed,” Delightful Childe said with a sudden idea. “Then what shall we do once our aid is no longer needed?”
Double Spiral War Trilogy Page 9
