“My equipment could run a million operations on a teaspoonful. It’s just time.... I’ll have to trace its physiological activity through the whole series of tissue cultures. Couldn’t lend me a couple of milliliters of fresh blood, by any chance?”
“Use your own,” he said—somewhat ungraciously, I thought.
“I’d lend them to you with pleasure,” said Karen, “only I’d be very apprehensive about getting them back. I dread to think what unholy things go on behind that closed door.”
“Ah well,” I muttered, philosophically, “if you can’t spare it....”
“What do you think it does?” asked Pete, steering the conversation away from a topic he found mildly distasteful.
“At a guess,” I said, “it boosts the bastards into orbit. Poseidon’s answer to the joys of spring. Or Wildeblood’s answer, I should say.”
“A narcotic?”
“Not in the literal sense of the word. Nor an ataractic. A psychotropic of some kind, though. Has to be. But moderately safe—it doesn’t impair the faculties or seriously endanger health. At the worst it accelerates the metabolism and shortens the lifespan somewhat, along with altering the chemical balance of the tissues in what seems to be a fairly haphazard manner.”
“That’s a pretty detailed guess,” he said.
I shrugged. “This drug isn’t listed in the survey team’s report. It’s a biological product but it’s not there. Why not? James Wildeblood was on that survey team doubling as ecologist and biochemist. He omitted it—and not by accident. He came back here with the colony, as a member of the executive, and within a decade he was the executive. Is it too much to believe that he had a trick up his sleeve and that this innocent white powder—or guilty white powder—is it? I reckon that he took over the colony by putting each and every member of it on a set of puppet strings.”
“He hooked them?” This from Karen.
“That’s what I think,” I confirmed. “As for the rest of the guess—well, I’ve examined quite a number of the colonists more or less at random. It seems only reasonable to assume that some of the slight anomalies I’ve measured are attributable to the drug—and, as an inevitable corollary—that the lack of any major anomalies means that the drug is relatively harmless. It probably breaks down pretty quickly in the body—I’ve never found it in a blood sample, although I’ve picked up some molecules which I now know to be its breakdown products. See?”
“You ever get tired of being such a hot-shot?” asked Karen.
I ignored her. “It’s all being checked out,” I said, aiming my face at Pete, who’d asked the original question. “I’ll leave things set overnight and come back tomorrow. I have a feeling, though, that all the mass of data I’m getting will turn out like the proverbial statistica1 bikini.”
“What’s a proverbial statistical bikini?” asked Pete. I glanced at Karen. She was dying to know but didn’t want to ask.
“Some anonymous wit once coined a phrase,” I said. “Statistics are like the two halves of a bikini. What they reveal is interesting but what they leave concealed is vital.”
It didn’t get its usual grudging laugh. I guess it’s a rather esoteric joke.
“So okay,” said Karen, sarcastically. “How come your research magnificent is going the same way?”
“By tomorrow,” I said, “I’ll have the thing labeled and all its multifarious properties isolated. I’ll have measured its chemical and physiological activities to the fifth significant figure. But what I still won’t know is what Cyrano de Bergerac originally charged me with finding out.”
“Which is?”
“Where it comes from. Its chemical cousins are scattered far and wide in everything which grows or crawls on this planet’s face. I can’t even make a respectable guess as to whether it’s plant or animal. All I know is that it’s from someplace Wildeblood looked. I’ll search his survey reports for a suspicious hole, but I’ll lay odds I won’t find one. He’ll have covered his tracks perfectly.”
“And so,” said Karen, “the big question remains unanswered. So what have we got?”
“Not a lot,” I said. “Let’s see what Nathan can make of it. If anyone can make capital out of it, he can. One of Philip’s secrets is a secret no more, at any rate. And, of course, there is the general pragmatic point.”
“What’s that?” she asked.
“Well,” I said, “we now know how to become emperors. Pick our planet, and we can take it over. We could even have one each, or maybe a little galactic empire.”
Pete’s mouth was open a little, though he knew it wasn’t serious.
“Let’s you and me invade Earth,” suggested Karen. “I have this plan, see, for setting the world to rights....”
“Not Earth,” I said, shaking my head sadly.
“Why not?”
“Problems of supply,” I said. “Also demand. Earth is suffering from a surfeit of puppet-strings already. It has to be a colony—a virgin colony. I doubt if we could take over this one at such a late stage, unless we actually took over Philip’s source of supply. Starting up our own factory in opposition would just lead to all-out war. We’d have to be there at the very beginning, just like James Wildeblood.”
“Wildeblood and Machiavelli and Alexander the Great,” muttered Karen.
“Wait a second,” said Pete. “That isn’t so funny, you know.”
“You mean you want to hitch yourself to a new colony and become a dictator?” I said, still not serious, though a little thought echoed in the back of my mind that it wasn’t so inconceivable, and if that was what he did want—or Karen, or Nathan—then maybe it wasn’t so funny....
But that wasn’t what he meant.
“No,” he said. “Not my scene. What I mean is: if, here and now, somebody started up in opposition to Philip...leading to all-out war. Why do you think the guy that gave you the drug wants to know where it comes from? Think for a minute.”
I thought. It didn’t really need a minute. It was obvious. Only sometimes, when your mind’s full and buzzing, you can overlook the obvious.
“If this drug is the secret of Philip’s power-base,” I said, returning to the safety of “if” because we were with reality again, “then any opposition, to be meaningful opposition, would need to know it. And once they did....”
We’d come to find out how the colony was doing, to give it a helping hand. We were supposed to be working in the interests of the whole population. But how do you do that? How do you work in everybody’s interest, when you find a divided society, masters and servants—controllers and controlled—at its crudest level, maybe pushers and junkies. How do you walk into the middle of a game of chess, or an all-in brawl and say: “Right, folks, we’re here to make things better for everyone.”
No wonder Philip was worried about us, and having
