Foundation’s Friends

by Ben Bova

  From the left near corner of the cage, where the killer had crouched unseen behind the door that did not slide flush, a frail arm thrust the sharpened and poison-tipped twig into the soft tissue of Flammersfeld’s left ankle.

  Flammersfeld stared down at the sadly wise and wearily savage face.

  “God damn you,” he said.

  “You damn you.”

  It was the first and last time he ever heard the rusty piping voice.

  But he was not thinking about that. He was thinking about getting to the dispensary in time to work up an antidote. His heart pounding, he punched the lift shut and down.

  His eyes were glazing and he did not look at the creature again until the lift stopped and the door opened. Then he kicked the creature out of his way and took two stumbling steps forward before he sprawled his length on the deck.

  The killer could not stanch the flow of green blood and soon followed Flammersfeld across the dark threshold into the abode of the dead. But the killer had won what he wanted-vengeance and oblivion.

  Inspector H. Seton Davenport of the Terrestrial Bureau of Investigation had expected to see anything but an inverted detective. Yet that was just what he walked in upon.

  Dr. Wendell Urth, the Terran extraterrologists’ extraterrologist, had sounded strange when he voiced Davenport in. Davenport had caught a note of strain in the thin tenor delivery of “Enter!”

  But Davenport had not dreamed that was due to Dr. Urth’s attempting a headstand. At least, that was what the learned ex-officio consultant to the T.B.I. appeared at first glance to be doing.

  Second glance showed him that Dr. Urth was really engaged in rolling a hologram sun along the baseboards. And that he was doing so to light up the floor under the overhanging book-film shelves.

  The blood rushing to Dr. Urth’s head made his naked eyes look even more hyperthyroid. That the eyes were naked and that the good doctor’s shirttail hung out told Davenport what was up-or down-or toward. Without taking another step, Davenport scanned the floor.

  He spotted them not on the floor itself but on a bottom shelf they had bounced to. He took two steps and made a stretch and picked up what Dr. Urth was hunting for.

  “Here you are, Dr. Urth.”

  “Here I certainly am,” Dr. Urth wheezed. “Embarrassingly so.” Then he apparently replayed Davenport’s words and tone. He twisted the upside-down half of his body to face Davenport, squinted, and apparently made out what Davenport was holding. “Ah.” He straightened with a huff and a puff, and placed the solar-powered hologram sun on a pile of papers-it was evidently loaded to serve as paperweight as well as to help light the vast dim cluttered room.

  Dr. Urth took the eyeglasses from Davenport’s outstretched hand. “Thanks.” Then he smiled a transforming smile, one that changed him from blinking owl to beaming Buddha. “But you have had your reward in seeing me make a spectacle of myself.” He polished the lenses with the shirttail, peered at and through them, then put them on. The ears did their part but the button nose did little to support the frame.

  He gestured Davenport to a chair. Himself he settled in his armchair-desk with a sigh the seat echoed. He locked his hands over his paunch and looked expectant. The paunch enhanced the look of expectancy.

  “This is about the death on Terrarium Nine?”

  Davenport nodded. “ ‘Death’ is the working word for it. ‘Death’ is ambiguous enough for something we can’t seem to label satisfactorily. We can’t call it accident, we can’t call it murder, and we’re not ready to call it suicide.”

  Dr. Urth shifted himself more comfortable. “Tell me the details.”

  “It’s better and easier to show you.” Davenport drew from a capacious pocket a sheaf of holograms. He hopped his chair nearer Dr. Urth and leaned over to show him the holograms one by one, pointing and explaining.

  “Here’s a close-up of Terrarium Nine taken from the investigating vehicle on its approach in response to the anomaly alarm. Flammersfeld, the lone experimenter aboard Terrarium Nine, had not transmitted the daily report to Earth headquarters at the scheduled hour, had not punched the All’s-Well signal at the appointed time, and had not responded to worried queries…Here are shots the responding officer took of both docking jacks before she made entry through north dock. You’ll notice a year’s worth of undisturbed space dust coats both jacks. That indicates no one docked since the last resupply-a full year ago…Here’s the death scene, located in the innermost sphere. “

  Dr. Urth took this last hologram into his own hands for protracted scrutiny. Then he gave Davenport a quizzical look. “ Aside from telling me that Flammersfeld had just come down to his living quarters from Buck Two, bringing with him a cabbage either for study or for eating, that he stepped out of the lift and fell dead, having somehow taken a poison-tipped dart in his ankle, this hologram does not tell me all I need to know if I’m to help you label his death. What about the autopsy findings? What was the poison?”

  Davenport shook his head. “That’s what’s strange. You’d think a biochemist of Flammersfeld’s standing would have brewed it in his lab, in test tubes, without impurities. But this was a weird kind of curare crudely prepared. The investigator found some of the guck in a walnut shell that she discovered in a pile of trash in Buck Two.” He handed Dr. Urth another hologram. “Here’s a shot of that.”

  Dr. Urth gave half a nod, half a shake. “I see that, but what are these things?”

  Davenport looked where Dr. Urth pointed. “Oh, yeah; them. They seem to be a toy winch and a toy catapult. The engineer we consulted says they’re no great shakes but they work. Maybe Flammersfeld was in his second childhood. “

  Dr. Urth grunted doubtingly. He went back to the death-scene hologram. He pointed a stubby finger to a green-black mass. “This is the cabbage?”

  Davenport grimaced. “Bad. Pretty well rotted by the time our investigator got there. Stank up the place, she said, so-after taking protection shots-she incinerated it.”

  “Bad.”

  “Yes, putrid.”

  Dr. Urth eyed the TBI inspector censoriously. “I was not speaking of the cabbage, I meant the officer’s action. She should have preserved the evidence no matter how offensive she found it.”

  Davenport neither defended nor blamed the officer. Like her, he saw the cabbage not as evidence but as happenstance. “Perhaps.”

  “No perhaps about it,” Dr. Urth snapped. His paunch showed momentary agitation, then subsided with his sigh. “Well, it can’t be helped now. But I do wish I could have had a closer look at that cabbage. There’s something queer about it.”

  Davenport grinned. “No problem. This is one of the new SOTA holograms. See the bubble-mice sealed in the left and top edges?”

  Dr. Urth noticed for the first time two beads of air that almost met at the top left corner of the hologram film. His eyes lit up. “You mean that if I get a stereotaxic fix on the cabbage the cabbage will enlarge?”

  “Exactly. By pinching the edge you can move the bubble-mouse along. Coordinate the mice to enlarge and automatically enhance the area you want to observe in greater detail. There’s a limit, of course, but you’ll see quite a lot more than you do now.”

  Dr. Urth pinched the mice along till he had the cabbage area blown up by a magnification of five.

  He looked long and hard, and at last removed his glasses to wipe tears of strain from his eyes. “Much better, but still lacking. My complaint is not about the resolution but about the object pictured. The cabbage remains blurry thanks to decomposition. I must admit that even had the officer preserved it so that you could put it before me I would be hard put to make out much more. That does not mean that its destruction is not a great loss. It should have been possible to determine its exact composition by autopsy.”

  Davenport stared. “ Autopsy? Of a cabbage?”

  Dr. Urth nodded curtly. “Autopsy. I choose my words carefully.” His mouth twitched suddenly and he unbent unexpectedly, his voice mock-serious. “I
do not see-aitch-oh-you my cabbage twice.” He grew fully serious again. “It’s clear that something got out of hand-the experiment, the experimenter, or both.”

  Davenport was still working on the autopsy business. What was Dr. Urth getting at?

  Dr. Urth sighed and handed back the death-scene hologram. He gave a slight shiver, then shot Davenport a look as if wondering whether Davenport had noticed.

  Davenport kept a poker face.

  Dr. Urth breathed an easier sigh. “This calls for mulling over.” He turned a grave face and a twinkling eye on his visitor. “What would you say to a finger of Ganymead?”

  “I’d say hello.” Davenport had heard of Ganymead but had never seen it, much less tasted it. He knew it to be extremely rare and extremely expensive and he knew many communities prohibited it. He was not about to ask Dr. Urth how Dr. Urth had come by it. “I’m game.”

  He did not feel so game when Dr. Urth drew two containers and two glasses from a liquor drawer of the armchair-desk and one of the containers proved to hold fingers.

  Dr. Urth shook two fingers out and stood one, fingernail down, in each glass.

  Davenport looked and shuddered.

  One corner of Urth’s rosy mouth lifted. “Ganymead is a binary. The fluid part activates the solid part. The ‘fingernail’ is a crystallization. Watch.”

  He poured an amber fluid out of the other container into one of the glasses and as it splashed the nail the finger melted. The whole became a clear violet with a bouquet that tickled the senses. Dr. Urth transformed the other finger, handed one of the glasses to Davenport, and lifted the other in a toasting gesture.

  Davenport answered with a lift of his own glass, sniffed, then sipped. Tantalizingly delicious, deliciously tantalizing. He saw that it could be dangerous-a taste too easily acquired for something not so easily acquired.

  The smooth but strong drink seemed to turn Dr. Urth philosophical. “ Actually, Ganymead comes not from Ganymede but from Callisto. So many things are misnomers. What’s in a name, Davenport? I should have yours-I’m the couch potato, the settee spud, the Murphy-bed murphy. At most, a rambler rose-tethered as I am to the University campus. You’re the one with the gypsy in his soles, the man in the field. Davenport, you’re a misnomer.”

  Davenport permitted himself a smile. Davenport’s nose was shaped for wedging into tight spots; a youthful altercation had left a star-shaped scar on his right cheek. Yet a fellow could get his fill of the field, lose his taste for adventure, and-while cherishing his memories of encounters of the close kind-look almost with envy at the cloistered academic who adventured with his mind. Perhaps the Ganymead had turned him philosophical-or prone to babble-too; he was about to express his feelings about life when Dr. Urth saved him.

  Dr. Urth had taken a last sip, had raised the glass to his eye to look through its emptiness, and now set it down with regretful finality. “Back to work. To give Flammersfeld’s death its proper name, we must first understand what Terrarium Nine is all about, what Flammersfeld was in the business of.”

  He raised a forefinger, though Davenport had given no sign of breaking in.

  “I know you think you know, but please bear with me while I tell you what I think I know. Let me state the obvious and posit the known-nothing is so overlooked as the obvious and nothing is so mysterious as the known. “

  Davenport sweepingly brought his palm up in sign of turning everything over to Dr. Urth.

  Dr. Urth just as graciously gave a nod. “To forestall ecological disruption, Earth has laws against releasing genetically altered plants and animals into the terrestrial environment. Such experiments must take place off-planet. Hence, the Terrariums-at last count, a dozen?-in near-earth orbit. A collateral benefit is zero gravity, which facilitates such techniques as electrophoresis-the rapid continuous-flow fractionating of concentrated solutions of proteins in a high-intensity electric field. “ He cocked an eye at Davenport. “Your turn. What do you think you know about Terrarium Nine and Flammersfeld’s experiments?”

  Davenport shrugged. “All I know about Terrarium Nine is that it was constructed and commissioned six years ago and that Flammersfeld was its first and only personnel. All I know about Flammersfeld is that he was a hard worker who never took a break; he routinely turned down R and R-according to his superiors in the home office he said he got all the relaxation he needed by interactive video, and in fact at the time of his death Through the Looking-Glass was in his computer/player -and he was working concurrently on two unrelated projects. Plus he had plans for the future-his last, though unsent, requisition was for swine embryo and eagle eggs. “

  Dr. Urth wrinkled his brow, then resettled his glasses. “I would like to see his notes on the two unrelated projects you mentioned.”

  Davenport looked uncomfortable. “That may be impossible.”

  Dr. Urth’s mouth tightened. “Is there a clearance problem? If so, good day.”

  Davenport hastened to say, “It’s not that, Dr. Urth, not that at all. I believe you have cosmic clearance.”

  That mollified Dr. Urth. “Then what is the problem? Did Flammersfeld destroy his notes?”

  “Not that, either. It’s just that he seems to have been paranoidally secretive. His notes are in his computer’s memory, but locked behind passwords that we haven’t broken-yet.”

  “I admire your optimism, sir, but optimism-while admirable even when it is foolish-is pie in the sky, a future repast; it does not feed us now.”

  Davenport reddened.

  Dr. Urth relented. “Two unrelated projects; you know that much. You may know more than you think you know-that is, if you can give me the titles of the two projects. His superiors at the home office to whom he reported must have had some idea of what he was working on if they were to approve his requisitions.”

  Davenport brightened. “I don’t have the titles at the tip of my tongue, but I do remember that he was seeking a cure for hemophilia and that he was looking for the-uh-direction sensors in plant cells.”

  Dr. Urth patted his paunch as if he had just had a good feed. “Excellent. Hemophilia. Bleeder’s disease. Disease of kings-e.g., the Romanovs of Czarist Russia. Women pass it on through a recessive X chromosome but do not themselves have it. Profuse bleeding, even from the slightest wound. In a test tube, normal blood from a vein clots in five to fifteen minutes; hemophiliac clotting time varies from thirty minutes to hours. A natural for zero-gravity research. While the sheer bulk of total plasma would rule out its fractionation by electrophoresis at zero gravity, the same does not hold for minor components, such as clotting factors.”

  His voice pitched even higher in his excitement. “Yes, yes. And Flammersfeld’s other project is another natural for zero-gravity research. The plant world presents an intriguing puzzle: how does a plant sense the direction of gravity? Plants tend to grow in a vertical direction-but we have yet to find the cellular direction sensors. Yes, yes. We have our answer. “

  Davenport stared at Dr. Urth. “We have?”

  “It’s as obvious,” Dr. Urth said sharply, ‘‘as the nose on my face.”

  Maybe that’s why I don’t see it. Davenport muttered mentally. But he put on a pleasant mask. “You said it’s easy to overlook the obvious.”

  “You’ve been listening, at least.” Dr. Urth made himself a monument of patience. “Listen now to a bit of verse.

  “‘The time has come,’ the Walrus said,

  ‘To talk of many things:

  Of shoes-and ships-and sealing-wax-

  Of cabbages-and kings-

  And why the sea is boiling hot-

  And whether pigs have wings. ‘ “

  Dr. Urth looked at Davenport and smiled. “You don’t know whether to laugh or snort at such utter nonsense. Well, laugh. We humans need a leavening of levity; there can be too much gravity.”

  Davenport did not laugh, but then he did not snort. “That’s from a child’s book, isn’t it?”

  “Indeed. The child in Charles Lutwi
dge Dodgson was named Lewis Carroll. The verse is from his Through the Looking Glass. “

  “Flammersfeld’s interactive video!”

  “The same.”

  Davenport shook his head. “How does it tie in?”

  “It ties in first with an even older nursery rhyme.

  “‘Old King Cole

  Was a merry old soul,

  And a merry old soul was he;

  He called for his pipe,

  And he called for his bowl,

  And he called for his fiddlers three.

  Every fiddler, he had a fiddle,

  And a very fine fiddle had he;

  Twee tweedle dee, tweedle dee, went the fiddlers.

  Oh, there’s none so rare

  As can compare

  With King Cole and his fiddlers three!’ “

  This time Davenport could not help laughing. And after a moment Dr. Urth joined in.

  Davenport sobered first and non-judgmentally waited for Dr. Urth to subside.

  Dr. Urth sounded all the more serious when he picked up where he had left off. “The rhyme about King Cole was in Lewis Carroll’s mind-consciously or unconsciously-when Carroll wrote the Walrus’s speech. ‘ King Cole’-cole as in cole slaw-split naturally into’ cabbages and kings.’ And came back together in Flammersfeld’s mind as a protoplast fusion of cabbage seed and royal blood. “

  Davenport fumbled the death-scene hologram to light and stared at the magnified cabbage. “You mean this thing…?”

  Dr. Urth nodded. He pointed to a spot atop the cabbage. “Very like a crown gall, wouldn’t you say?”

  “I wouldn’t-since I don’t know the first thing about crown galls.”

  “Then take my word for it. There are two kinds of living cells: eukaryotic and prokaryotic. A eukaryotic cell is nucleated; that is, its nucleus walls in its chromosomes. A prokaryotic cell is less organized; that is, its chromosomes drift freely in the cytoplasm, in among the organelles. Enter Agrobacter-short for Agrobacterium tumefaciens. Agrobacter’s innards hold the Ti plasmid-a tiny loop of DNA-some two hundred genes long. Agrobacter can hook a plant cell and inject the Ti plasmid into the nucleus. Once inside, a twelve-gene length-called tDNA, for transfer DNA-cuts loose from the Ti plasmid and becomes part of the plant cell chromosome. The tDNA genes then program the plant to nurture Agrobacter.”