was I supposed to do?” I asked. “Report him to the gendarmes?”
“It was a risk. If they find an excuse to get mad with us they might just take it, you know. We’re not exactly popular. If they figure out a pretext to tell us to get the hell out we’ll be in a difficult situation. If they only knew how much authority we don’t have they might do it anyhow.”
“They won’t do that while they still think they stand a chance of persuading us that everything in the garden’s roses,” I said. “And besides which, they don’t know. Nobody saw me. So tell me about the paper. What’s it mean?”
“As to that?” he said. “I haven’t a clue. But what I have got is another copy of the puzzle.”
He reached into his jacket and pulled out a very similar bit of paper. He gave them both to me and I compared them. They were both handwritten in black ink, but neither the writing nor the ink was the same. The only difference was that Nathan’s copy had one more number on it. Just a pair of digits: 16.
“They obviously think you need more help,” I said. “They’ve given you an extra one. Who was it?”
“Miranda,” he answered, pensively.
That was a surprise. Miranda was one of the legions of cousins. Her surname wasn’t Wildeblood, or even Zarnecki, but she seemed well in, especially with Zarnecki. She seemed to have been assigned to Nathan in much the same way that Elkanah had been assigned to me—something which seemed to me to be monumentally unfair. Not only was she one of the masters while Elkanah was a servant but she was pretty and he was not. They seemed to have an altogether mistaken idea of the relative status of myself and Nathan.
“Why would Miranda be passing you bits of coded message?” I asked.
“The obvious answer,” he said, “is that she wants the key to the code. That, after all, is what she asked me, in her guileless fashion.”
“Didn’t she tell you what it was or why she was asking? Hell, she must have said something.”
Nathan shook his head. “She treated it as if it were a game. A kind of coquettish challenge. I thought it was a game. Something silly. Now I’m not so sure.”
“Zarnecki put her up to it,” I said. It was just an opinion formed out of prejudice. But I would have backed it with money.
“But why?” he said. “If your man doesn’t know the key, it can’t be his secret message. And if Zarnecki doesn’t have the key, it can’t be his. So whose is it? Or who’s lying to us?”
“Everybody’s lying to us,” I said tiredly. “Leave the damn thing until you’ve a spare moment. It may be important, it may be just something stupid—hell, it may even be a device to distract us. I’m going to concentrate on the package. That I can handle.”
Nathan took back his copy of the conundrum, and returned to more mundane considerations.
“What did you promise this man you met?” he asked.
“Not a thing,” I assured him. “I was the perfect diplomat.”
“Is he dangerous?”
“How would I know? Dangerous to whom? That’s a stupid question if ever there was one!”
He didn’t seem offended. He was too preoccupied to be offended. “You’re going to be aboard all day?” he asked. I nodded in reply, and he turned to Karen. “Are you going out?”
“Later maybe,” she said. “When my shift ends.”
“Be careful,” he said.
She shrugged, but he wouldn’t let it go.
“I mean it,” he said. “There’s something in the air. Things are beginning to happen. They’re making moves. They aren’t going to stick a knife in your back—yet. But be careful.”
“Something is rotten in the State of...,” she said, sarcastically.
He didn’t reply. But they were both right. Something was rotten in this pretty little dictatorship which seemed to be working so well. I felt it. I knew it. There had to be something rotten...it wouldn’t be natural otherwise. If there’s one thing we has learned so far it was that all worlds had little surprises up their sleeves—for the colonies, for us.
“James Wildeblood must have been one hell of a clever bastard,” I commented, letting the stream of thought carry me on. “To take over a colony from scratch, come to total dominance, and establish a historical pattern that could hold perfectly for over a century. And he did it all in 33 years.”
`Well,” said Karen, “if anyone can figure out how, it ought to be you. On the survey team, he had your job.”
It was intended to be a simple nasty crack. But it was also true. It was a joke that pleased them all—Nathan, Karen...even Conrad. James Wildeblood and me. Evolutionary ecologists both. Ecologists and biochemists. He’d had experience like mine, a job not too dissimilar to mine.
And he’d also built an empire. Not to mention founding a dynasty.
You just can’t tell what kind of potential some people have.
CHAPTER THREE
I spent most of the day tracking the sample carefully through the standard series of analytical tests and a few extra ones. It was a complicated molecule belonging to a class of biological products not uncommon on Poseidon—prevalent, in fact, throughout the life-system. It was a kind of super-steroid. Simpler molecules in the group were used by the local organisms as reservoir molecules for nutrient storage, the more complex ones were usually physiologically active as hormones or as catalytic fellow-travelers in enzymic manufactory processes. My specimen was one of the largest molecules of the family, about eighty-percent pure—most of the pollutants being breakdown debris. Whatever process had been used to extract and isolate it had also knocked it about a little bit. That was only to be expected. The colony had nothing that could hold the faintest candle to the Daedalus lab. They were pretty clever to get eighty-percent—but then, James Wildeblood had been the man for the job.
Because it was such a large molecule the procedures took time. They practically ate up the day. It wasn’t exactly strenuous work but don’t ever let anyone tell you that computer-aided analysis with automatic measurement at every stage is labor-saving. It may save your fingers and it’s freed us forever from the embarrassment of the pipette, but you need eyes like a hawk and a brain in overdrive if you hope to keep up. I always tried to keep up—in the course of a couple of thousand mechanical operations something always slips a cog, and if you don’t catch it as and when you might as well start all over.
I missed the midday meal, but managed to extract myself in the early evening. Karen had been out to soak in a little fresh air (perhaps a little too fresh, as the unseasonal cold spell was still going strong) and had gotten back without having had a knife stuck in her back, despite Nathan’s premonitions.
“Well?” she said. “Cracked it wide open?”
“Making progress,” I told her. “I’m between experiments. I now know what it is.”
“But not....”
“...what
