by Janet Morris
Vince hated that feeling more than any other.
How the hell was he going to find the Scavenger from here, if the Scavenger didn't want to be found? And was he right to be spending so much time on this, when they were parked starboard of the biggest potential problem ever to confront the Trust Territory?
He got up and left the com deck. This was a big ship. It was, in fact, a floating city. You could walk down its corridors with your arms spread wide and not graze the walls on either side. You could do almost anything here that you could do on Threshold—except find Keebler.
Damn, was it really that important?
Remson scratched his right arm, then his left. The feeling of irritation got no better. Rationally, if he was going to worry about anything peripheral, he should be worrying about NAMECorp's CEO, Richard Cummings, Jr.
But what the Relic pilot had said kept haunting him. Why hadn't they uncovered this matter of the black box previously? Or had they, and underestimated the value of the information?
He turned in the corridor and retraced his steps.
At the same com console, he called up the entire Ball file and searched for black box entries. He found seven, by different investigating authorities, including Reice.
So they'd just underestimated it. Now Remson might be overestimating it. But he trusted his gut. They'd underestimated it because South hadn't bothered to tell any of the investigators, including Reice, that he'd thought the box had worked.
Of course nobody at the time—or later—had been putting much stock in what the Relic pilot had to say. That was changing now.
Vince Remson glared at the screen and blanked it. He mustn't overreact now, simply because he was sure they'd underreacted in the past.
He tapped three keys, and his work station isolated itself from the others around it with a privacy field that looked as if it were made of silver gravel floating in midair. Couldn't be too careful.
In his cylindrical privacy field, Remson contacted his office on Threshold. "I want you to find the Scavenger. I don't care what it takes. Cut a deal with his lawyers, if you have to. He may have a black box built for him by an aftermarketeer named Sling, from the Loader Zone. I don't have more detail. If the Scavenger has the box, get it from him. If he doesn't, get the aftermarketeer to make another one, exact duplicate. And get it out here, fast. You can bring the Scavenger out if he's got the box, but I want the box. I don't want you to confiscate the Scavenger's property to get hold of it, though. Is that clear?"
Remson's staff was well trained. They'd do the best they could.
He hoped it would be good enough.
Remson dumped the privacy field and wiped all record of his transmission back to Threshold. There were times when security was the only rule. What if South was right?
What difference did it really make?
Vince Remson still had that itchy feeling as he headed for Mickey's stateroom. Croft ought to know about this.
But when he got there Croft was hunched over his desk, his head on one arm, free hand over his eyes, in the middle of a voice-only conversation with Cummings, Jr. It wasn't going well, from Mickey's body language.
Remson tiptoed out again. If Richard the Second had been a reasonable man, you might have asked him to donate his skills and resources to this effort. But Cummings wasn't a reasonable man. Nor a trustworthy one.
Vince Remson wouldn't have had Mickey's job for all the world.
He wandered around the decks until he found the observation lounge. It was crowded with off-duty folk. Normally most of these crewmen would have been at the bar, Remson knew, from other missions aboard the Washington.
But not this time.
Nearly two dozen people were standing around the observation port, a twenty-foot window onto realtime space.
And in that window, framed by the solidity of the ship's hull, was the Ball.
The Ball looked as if it were rising over the science station, the way the moon was rising over a mountaintop in one of Vince's Earth holographs. Beside the Ball, one of the teardrops was facing them head-on. In the foreground, you could see the curving underbelly of another. The third was out of sight.
A few people sipped beers. Most were just staring. Nobody was talking. Lute music from some forgotten century played in the background, lonely and languid, from an age when every impulse of the human mind had been worth noticing.
It had been a long time since mankind's shared consciousness was placid enough to produce such music. Listening to ancient music always made Remson wonder about the circumstances in which it had been created, the setting for which it had been appropriate.
This music sounded as if it should be played in a canopied boat gliding down a calm river toward a group of noble friends picnicking under a pavilion, with retainers standing by to attend to their whims.
It didn't belong in the same universe with an imminent invasion from the depths of space. It was music from a time when man was newly preeminent, and proud of it, when his battle with nature on Earth was just beginning to go well. It was music from a time when the control of hunger and cold and heat and pestilence was a triumph still out of reach, when any sound made was a sound that wafted up to heaven and God's ears.
In those days people had thought that beyond the clouds was a realm of angels and cherubs and spirits and glory man could not know in his physical form. All of Vince Remson's life had been spent in a culture which knew for sure that preeminent power was a matter of physics, that man was either God's instrument in the cosmos or the finest expression of the ordering principle of the universe.
By our power, we had been validated. By our triumph over all the forces of nature, we had become supreme. We were unchallenged in the universe.
Until now.
Vince Remson found himself standing just behind a lieutenant in a crisp uniform. The lieutenant felt Remson's gaze and looked over his shoulder.
"Sir. Nice to see you. We were just . . . looking."
"Me, too," Remson said. Now people were looking at him. The mood was broken. The sense of being one with this group of wondering souls, half-filled with apprehension and half with hope, evaporated.
The lieutenant was busy making sure Remson understood that no one here was idling away time meant to be spent otherwise.
"Everybody's taken to coming up here, to acclimate themselves to the situation."
"And what do you think the situation is, Lieutenant?" Remson asked.
The officer squared his shoulders. "Sir, I think we have a great opportunity here, but we've got to be on our guard. We're prepared for any eventuality, of course."
You couldn't argue with the pragmatic understatement on the man's lips or the hard, ready gleam in his eye.
Remson said softly, "I'm sure the Secretary General will be glad to hear that the morale of the ship is high," and extricated himself. He was making them uncomfortable. The lieutenant would retell the story of his encounter with the Assistant Secretary General for the rest of his days, inane as Remson's words had been.
Remson found himself scratching his arms as he left the observation lounge. Whatever was wrong, he hadn't solved it yet.
Otherwise he wouldn't feel as if all the hairs on his arms were waving in a nonexistent breeze.
He hoped the lieutenant was right. He hoped they were ready for this encounter with the teardropshaped ships from some far-off place. The ships clearly were ready for them.
CHAPTER 11
Skinning the Cat
Keebler slunk through the Loader Zone as if he were a fugitive. Nobody was chasing him through the cargo bays and bars and whorehouses of Threshold's underbelly, but somebody might be following him.
Keebler passed two camel-lipped Epsilonian whores with beads woven into the hair on their humped backs. "Maybe later, honey," he said to the one who swished her hips at him and made kissing noises. No use insulting anyone.
The Loader Zone was the only place on Threshold where a man could at least hope to lose himse
lf. There were no false ceilings here, just bare struts hung with lights. So you could see where the surveillance cameras were, and they were only where somebody had paid to put them.
Down in the Zone, every nation had an interest in keeping things off the record. You could work here, if you were a subhuman or a bioengineered species, without the sort of red tape you needed to work up where the ceilings had holographic skies on them and everybody paid a services tax that kept out the riffraff.
The riffraff down here paid a head tax for temporary work cards that kept ConSec off their necks. Maybe you couldn't get everything in the Loader Zone, but you could breathe down here. You could get into a street fight and not end up in psych-evaluation. You could sign on to crew a ship to almost anywhere.
But Keebler was only half thinking of shipping out while he still could. He was free and he was angry, and he was going to teach these Threshold bureaucrats a thing or two.
Maybe even a thing or three. His lawyers had put the fear of litigation into those smug bastards up there. And that was just the beginning.
Keebler stopped in three bars before he found the one he wanted—the one with the aftermarketeer in it.
This bar was homey enough to have been at any good trading station, outsystem. You could get any legal want satisfied here, and a whole lot of wants that weren't exactly legal.
Keebler wanted his black box back. "Now, sonny, b'fore I decide y' tried to steal m' property ..."
The aftermarketeer named Sling didn't turn to face Keebler. He looked up into the mirror behind the bar and shook his head so that his single earring gleamed. "What is with you guys? I don't want anything to do with you, Keebler, not anymore. Not since I found out you come complete with Con-Sec lieutenants and Customs jocks. You and South are a matched set of fools, and I'm allergic to fools."
Keebler nearly grabbed the kid and spun him on his stool. But cunning prevailed.
Keebler hopped up onto the stool beside Sling and said, "If y' weren't so damn talented, sonny, nobody'd be houndin' ye. Y' should chuck this line o' work, sonny, and come outsystem wit' me, where your cree-ay-tivity'll be 'predated."
"Yeah?" Sling was working on a pyramid of beer glasses. He looked over at Keebler and shook his head. "There ain't enough money in the universe to get me to go across the street with you, you daffy old Scavenger."
"That's 'crazy old coot't' you, sonny. Wanna bet?"
Sling liked to bet.
"Bet what?" said the aftermarketeer.
"Wanna bet that box ye made me did more than folks were tellin' us it did? Wanna bet that iffen you and me went out to that Ball, say t'night, we'd see somethin' worth a fortune? Somethin' that'll make you and me the richest and famousest men in the whole universe?"
"What are we bettin'?" Sling wanted to know.
"My ship against yers."
Keebler's ship was still in quarantine, but Sling didn't need to know that. Anyway, Keebler's lawyers were going to get the ship back for him. Get everything back for him. This Threshold bureaucracy had gone too far, finally, and Keebler, according to his lawyers, was about to become richer than his wildest dreams by the mechanism of a lawsuit against the Trust Territory. Famous just came with the turf.
Sling slowly sipped his blue beer. "Lemme get this straight: You'll bet me your ship against mine that, if we go out to Spacedock Seven, it'll make me rich and famous, just like you, right?"
"That's it, sonny. God's own truth. If I win, you win. If I lose, you win. So what you got to lose?"
"What's the catch?"
"I need my black box, sonny."
"That goddamn black box is going to be the death of me. We took it apart one night...."
Keebler knew better than to ask who. "Put it back t'gether, sonny. Right now. Or there's no bet."
"No problem," Sling said, sitting back. "You're sure there's nothing illegal here now, old man?"
"We'll take your ship out there," Keebler offered slyly. "How could there be anythin' wrong with that? You 'n' me, just cruisin' out toward the sponge lanes, with that ol' black box that couldn't be illegal or somebody'd have taken it away from ye by now, right?"
"I dunno..."
"Let me tell y' about m' ship, sonny," Keebler wheedled. He knew he'd won. Sling was drunk enough, and Keebler had made the bet rich enough. He wanted to go see what was out there so bad he could taste it. He needed to go. He had told Sling the truth, as far as he went.
Sling might end up rich and famous. Stranger things had happened. Those aliens out there were Keebler's aliens, the way he saw it. The tranquilizers they'd given him in the psychiatric ward had made him see that there was nothing to be afraid of.
He'd been on a vector with these aliens his whole life. They'd come here to see him, not any of these Threshold fools. Keebler just needed to keep his mind focused on the real truths of this l'il ol' mystery.
As he saw them, those truths were these:
The Ball was a gift from the aliens.
The aliens had put it into his mind that if he towed the Ball to Threshold, he'd be rich and famous.
The aliens had never hurt him.
The aliens wouldn't hurt him.
The aliens had never lied to him.
The aliens wouldn't lie to him.
The aliens had been guiding him to this moment.
They wanted to meet him.
They'd helped him figure out what kind of box to have Sling make.
Therefore, the box would work.
Either South had lied to him, or the box just hadn't been ready to work.
The box would work.
Keebler would go out there and the aliens would greet him, in front of everybody, with open arms.
He'd be their chosen liaison with all the trading planets of the United Nations of Earth.
Rich and famous was what he was going to be.
He'd be the man that gave humankind its chance to meet a superior civilization.
No bunch of bureaucrats was going to steal his thunder.
And they were trying. They'd taken his spacecraft away. They'd tried to take his freedom away.
They wanted all the glory for themselves.
But Keebler was too canny for them.
As he lurched out of the bar beside the aftermarketeer, to pick up the black box before they shipped out for Spacedock Seven, Keebler was sure he'd outfoxed the lot of them.
When you had a superior civilization on your side, you were bound to find a way to win out in the end.
Sling kept asking Keebler, "Are you sure there isn't somethin' else you got to tell me, old man?"
And Keebler kept assuring Sling, "You know all you need to know, sonny. The mysteries o' the universe are out there waitin' fer us. You and me's gonna be the most famous team o' explorers to ever suck a mother's teat."
You just had to keep Sling well enough oiled with blue beer, and then the kid was downright reasonable.
Maybe Keebler would take Sling with him when he went off as envoy to the race from beyond the white hole.
One thing about a superior civilization was that they were going to want a superior-type human to be their guide to mankind's itchy-fingered, sneaky ways.
And Micah Keebler was going to be that guide. If he could get out there in time. If he could remember that the aliens weren't here to hurt anybody.
They were here to make Keebler—and now his sidekick, Sling—rich and famous beyond the kid's wildest dreams.
Keebler vaguely regretted that it was Sling and not the other kid, South, who was going to be with him on this historic journey.
But Sling was the one with the black box.
When Sling put the black box on his bench and ran it through a self-test, Keebler knew that everything was going to be just fine.
The box beeped and gave them a green light, and Keebler said, "Well, come on, sonny. Hurry up. Fame and fortune is awaitin'."
And Sling said, "Take it easy, old man. I'm comin'. I can't wait to win this bet."
; But it was Keebler who was going to win. A little voice in his head kept telling him that in no uncertain terms.
All the riches of the stars and all the fame in the universe were about to be his. Finally.
Funny how he hadn't remembered that the aliens had been talking to him all along.
But when they reached Sling's ship and got clearance for takeoff, Keebler stopped wondering about how come the aliens hadn't made themselves clear from the beginning.
He was lucky he'd been chosen. Lucky he'd been fishing that hole when he was. Luckiest man alive.
And if his hands were shaking a little when he fastened his crash harness in the seat next to Sling's, at least the kid didn't notice.
You had to be willing to risk a little to become rich and famous. To become as rich and famous as Keebler was going to be, you had to be willing to risk a lot.
As Sling's ship shot out of its slip toward Spacedock Seven, Keebler told himself that he wasn't afraid.
Not anymore.
CHAPTER 12
Meet a Monster from Outer Space
Mickey Croft's head was spinning as he prepared to step aboard the alien craft—if "craft" was the word—sent to collect him.
The craft was a sphere, translucent as a soap bubble. From where Croft stood waiting, alone in the open air lock of the USS George Washington, the bubble was clearly empty.
The soap-bubble craft, perhaps thirty feet in diameter, glimmered with rainbows of softly colored swirls as it wafted toward the lock. Not drifted, as one would expect in space. Nor speeded, purposefully, as if on a dire mission. Wafted, as if being driven by a breath, by a zephyr. The only breath out there beyond the air lock was the breath of God.
Croft struggled to suppress the impulse to put up his gloved hands before his helmeted head to forfend the coming of the bubble.
He failed. His hands went up. He couldn't see it anymore. Ergo, so far as his senses were concerned, it wasn't there.