And in the next scoop it disappeared along with the dirt, into the converter.
Without hesitation the converter transformed it, with all its intricate wiring and miniaturized components, along with rocks and dirt, into pure energy.
And, noisily, the digging continued.
CHAPTER 17
In his London office Webster Foote studied with a jeweler's loupe— old-fashioned gadgets fascinated him—the gradually unreeling photographic record which eye-spy satellite 65, owned by Webster Foote, Limited of London, had taken during its pass 456,765, Nor-Hem-W.
"Here," his photo expert, Jeremy Cencio, said, pointing. "All right, my boy." Reaching, Webster Foote stopped the unreeling of the continuous positive; he swung a 1200x microscope into position at the locus, manually adjusted first a coarse and then the fine focus-he had a slight astigmatism in his right eye, so he utilized the left—and saw, on the film, what Cencio wanted him to see.
Cencio said, "This is roughly the region where Colorado and Nebraska and Wyoming come together. South of what once was Cheyenne, before the war, a major city of the United States."
"Oh indeed."
"Shall I animate this segment?"
Webster Foote said, "Yes. Please. And project it waliwise." A moment later, as the room lights darkened, a square appeared on the wall, projection of the segment of film. Cencio started the animating equipment, which altered the film from a still into a sequence of several minutes.
Enlarged by way of 1200x microscope, which intervened between the film and the animating construct, a scene, looked down at from above, of course, could be made out. A man and two leadies.
As he watched, Webster Foote saw one of the leadies prepare to kill the man; he saw the unmistakable move of its right manual extremity toward what he, as a professional, knew it carried at that spot of its mechanical anatomy. The man was about to be extinguished.
And then, like a puff, a sneeze of dust, one leady whisked out, and its companion whirled frantically in what technically was called a circus-motion pattern, all circuits at peak-velocity as it strove to locate the source of the destruct beam—and then it, too, condensed into disconnected motes that floated and drifted.
"That's all," Cencio said, and turned on the room light.
"That would be the demesne area of—" Foot consulted one of the police corporation's reference works. "A Mr. David Lantano. No, not a demesne; still in preparation. Not a full year, yet; so legally it remains technically a hot-spot. But under Lantano's jurisdiction."
"Presumably those are—were—Lantano's leadies."
"Yes." Foote nodded absently. "I tell you, my boy. Go over all the adjoining segments with the 400x lens until you find the source of the destruct beam that took out those two leadies. See who—"
The vidcom in his office pinged; it was his secretary, Miss Grey, and the signal, three winks of light along with the ping, meant that the call was urgent.
"Excuse me," Foote said, and turned to the full size vidset on which the call would be, by Miss Grey, relayed for his attention.
The face of Louis Runcible appeared, heavy, rather ruddy and fleshy, the old-fashioned rimless glasses . . . the dome of his head a little more bald since Foote had last seen him; a little less of the fine white hair combed across, ear to ear. "Your field rep," Runcible said, "told me to call you the instant anything unusual occurred in my business operations."
"Yes!" Foote leaned eagerly toward the screen, grabbed at the key of the aud-vid recorder to be sure this call was permanently registering. "Go ahead, Louis. What turned up?"
"Somebody murdered one of my engineers. Lasered him in the back of the head, while he was at the new site in Southern Utah. So your extrasensory perception was right; they're out to get me." Runcible, on the vidscreen, looked more indignant than frightened, but that, for him, would be natural.
"You can continue your ground-breaking without this man?" Foote asked.
"Oh sure. We're digging away. We didn't even find him until evidently an hour or so after it happened; no one noticed, with all the work in progress. Hig was his name. Bob Hig. Not one of my best, but not too bad, either."
"Keep digging, then," Foote said. "We'll of course send a field rep to the spot to examine the body of Hig; he should be there within half an hour, released by one of our substations. And meanwhile keep in touch. This may be their first move in a sequence." He did not need to specify who "they" were; both he and Runcible understood perfectly.
The call terminated, Foote returned to the examination of the continuous film-strip made by the satellite.
"Any luck on pinpointing the origin of that destruct beam?" he asked Cencio. He wondered if there were any connection between the murder of Runcible's engineer and the taking out of these two leadies. It always appealed to him, tying separate events together; he enjoyed a pattern which wove all strands into harmony. But as the connection between these two despiteous events, however, even his extrasensory vision did not provide him with any knowledge. Perhaps in time . . .
"No luck," Cencio said. "So far."
"Are they trying to scare Runcible into stopping work in Utah?" Foote asked rhetorically, aloud. "Because that's hardly the way; Louis can lose engineer after engineer and survive. My god, with the weapons they have at the Agency, especially the advanced prototypes that Brose has access to—they could wipe out the entire site, all the men, leadies and machinery that loiter around there. And not just an engineer . . . not a top one at that." It made no sense.
"No hunch?" Cencio asked him. "No Psionic foresight?"
"Yes," Webster Foote said; he had an odd inkling. It grew in his mind until it amounted to a true precog revelation. "Two leadies dissolved," he said. "Then one of Runcible's construction crew in Utah lasered in the back of the head, the moment they start breaking ground . . . I foresee—" He broke off. Another death, he said to himself. And soon. He examined his round, ancient pocket watch. "It was the back of the head. Assassination. Look for someone in the Yance-man class."
"A Yance-man—murdered?" Cencio stared at him.
"Very soon now," Foote said. "If not already."
"And we'll be called."
"Oh yes," Foote said. "And this time not by Runcible but by Brose. Because—" And his extrasensory talent told him this; plainly. "It'll be someone Brose is depending on; this will upset Brose extravagantly—we'll get quite an agitated call."
"Let's wait and see," Cencio said, skeptically, "if you're right."
"I know I'm right as to what's going to happen," Foote said. "The question is—when?" Because his talent was very bad on timing, and he recognized this; he could be days, even a week off. But not much more than that. "Suppose," Foote said thoughtfully, "the murder of this person was not directed at Runcible. It just doesn't hurt Louis enough; he can't be the target." Suppose, he thought, although Hig was an employee of Runcible's, this is directed at Stanton Brose.
Was that so bad?
"Do you like Brose?" he asked his photo expert assistant in charge of all visual satellite-tracking data.
"I never thought about it one way or another," Cencio said.
Foote said, "I have. I don't like Brose. I wouldn't lift my left little finger to help him. If! could avoid it." But how could he avoid it? Brose, acting through General Holt and Marshal Harenzany, had an army of veteran leadies at his disposal, plus the advanced weapons archives at the Agency. Brose could get at him, at Webster Foote, Limited of London, any time he wanted.
But perhaps there was someone else, someone not afraid of Brose.
"We will know whether such a person exists," Foote said, "when and only when a Yance-man valuable to Brose is killed." As, with his parapsychological talent, he foresaw.
"What sort of person?"
"A new sort," Foote said. "Of the kind we have never seen." That, as far as he knew, did not exist.
I will sit here at my desk, Foote said to himself, and wait and hope to get a vidcall from fat, horrid old spiderish Stanton B rose
. Telling me in lugubrious terms that an essential Yance-man in his immediate circle has been dispatched, and in no crude, barbaric but on the contrary highly—as they like to phrase it—sophisticated manner. And when that call comes, I will go out on a two week binge.
He began the wait as of now. By his round, archaic pocket watch, nine a.m., London time. And, in just a minuscule way, he initiated the celebration: he took one small pinch, one for each nostril, of Mrs. Cluny's Superfine Preferred Mixture high-grade snuff.
On the main floor public corridor of the New York Agency, Joseph Adams, seeing no one in sight, stepped rapidly into a pay vidphone booth. He shut the door, managed to deposit the metal poscred coin.
"Capetown, please. The villa of Louis Runcible." He was shaking so badly that he could barely hold the aud receiver to his ear.
"Seven dollars for the first—" the operator said; it was a leady, highly efficient and brisk.
"Okay." Quickly he shoved a five and two ones into the slot, and then, as the connection was put through, Adams, with a convulsive, hasty but thorough motion, covered the vidscreen with a handkerchief; he had now blocked the visual portion of the transmission, leaving only the aud.
In his ear a female voice said, "Miss Lombard, Mr. Runcible's secretary; who is calling, please?"
Joseph Adams said hoarsely, not having to alter deliberately his voice to make it unrecognizable; it emerged that way on its own, "I have an absolutely urgent message for Mr. Runcible's ears alone."
"Who is this, please? If you—"
"I can't do it," Joseph Adams grated. "Maybe the line is tapped. Maybe—"
"What is it, sir? Could you speak up, please? And the visual signal doesn't seem to be coming through at all. Could you reconnect in a better channel?"
"Goodbye," Joseph Adams said. I just can't take the chance, he thought in fear.
"I'll put you through, sir; if you'll just wait—"
He hung up the receiver.
Removing the handkerchief, still shaking, he got to his feet, left the public vidphone booth. Well, he almost had done it. Tried; I did try, he said to himself. So close.
Then a wire? Or a special registered 'stant mail letter, no name signed, letters cut from homeopapes.
Can't, he realized; can't ever do it. Darn sorry, Louis Runcible; the bonds are too strong. The ties; they're too long, old, tight. I have introjected them and now they act as a part of me; they live here inside, within me. Life-long. Now and now on.
He walked unhastily, feeling a membrane of numbness transport itself with him, hovering as he walked up the corridor away from the vidphone booth. Back to his own office. As if nothing had happened.
Nothing had. It was gall-bitter truth: nothing, nothing at all.
So it would progress on its own, the thing. Force he did not understand, substantial but remote, eluding, butterflylike, his perception even at the edge: shapes that winged across the sky of his life and left no trail, no sensation; he felt blind and afraid and helpless. And still he walked. Because it was natural. And, for him, there was nothing else.
And as he walked, it moved. Stirred; he felt it roll forth. Coasting in a direction which was unveering: straight ahead.
CHAPTER 18
Across the cropped green lawn, temporarily abandoned now because this was night and the leady gardeners had gone off elsewhere into storage sheds and immobility, the machine coasted on rubber, hard wheels; it made no noise, orienting itself by the rebound of the radarlike signals which it emitted at a frequency not customarily utilized. The signals had begun to return now in a succession which informed the machine that the large stone building—the tropism of phase one of its homeostatic but many-sectioned journey—lay properly on its path, and it began to slow until at last it bumped soundlessly against the wall of the building, came to rest for a moment as the next stage of its cycle rotated, in the form of a cam, into position.
Click. Phase two had begun.
By means of suction discs extended from stiff radii of a power-driven revolving central shaft the machine ascended the vertical surface until it arrived at a window.
Entering the building by means of the window posed no problem, despite the fact that the window, in its aluminum frame, was securely locked; the machine simply subjected the glass to sudden enormous heat—the glass became molten, dripped away like honey, leaving a wide, empty hole dead center, where the core of the heat beam had been directed. The machine, with no difficulty, traveled off the vertical, over the aluminum frame—
And, poised momentarily on the aluminum frame, it performed phase four of its total operation; it exerted the precise pressure on the rather soft metal that a two-hundred-and-twenty pound weight, if resting there, would create; the frame yielded, bent until warped— satisfied, the machine then crawled on vertically once more by means of its radii of suction cups, until it reached the floor of the room.
An interval passed in which the machine remained inoperative, at least from external appearances. But within it seletoidal switches opened and shut. At last an iron oxide tape moved past a playback head; through an audio system current passed from transformer to speaker and the machine abruptly said in a low, muffled, but whiny voice, "Damn it." The tape, expended, fell into a reservoir within the machine and was incinerated.
The machine, on its small hard-rubber wheels, again rolled forward, again orienting itself batlike, by its radar emanations. To its right lay a low table. The machine halted at the table and seletoidal switches once more opened and shut. And then the machine extended a pseudopodium, the end of which it pressed firmly against the edge of the table, as if, for a moment, it had involuntarily eased itself of the burden of its own excessive weight, had rested there before going on. And now it went on. Carefully. Because the ultimate tropism, the man, was not far off. The man slept in the next room; the machine had picked up the sound of his respiration and the emanations of warmth from his body. Attracted by both, tropisms of each sort operating in synchronicity, the machine turned in that direction.
As it passed a closet door it paused, click-clicked, and then released an electrical impulse corresponding to the Alpha wave of a human brain—of, in fact, one particular human brain.
Within the closet a recording instrument received the impulse, deposited it as a permanent record sealed within a locked case buried deep within the wall, inaccessible except through extensive drilling or by the proper key. The machine, however, did not know that and if it had it would not have cared; it did not inquire into these ramifications; they were not its proper concern.
It rolled on.
As it passed through the open doorway into the bedroom it halted, reared back on its hind wheels, extended a pseudopodium which deftly—but at the loss of several seconds—lodged a single strand of artificial cloth-fiber into the brass lock fittings of the frame. This done to its satisfaction it again continued on, pausing once to excrete three hairs and a fleck of dried scalp material; otherwise it had no need to interrupt its double tropism toward the man asleep in the bed.
At the edge of the bed it stopped entirely. The most intricate part of its overall cycle now came, by means of a rapid series of switch openings and closings, into play. The case forming the hull of the machine radically changed shape as a slow, fastidiously regulated warmth softened the plastic; the machine became thin, extended, and then, this accomplished again tipped back onto its rear wheels. The effect, had anyone seen it, would have been comic; the machine now swayed like a snake, barely able to maintain its balance—it came to the verge of falling first to one side and then to the other, for, slender and elongated as it was, it no longer possessed a wide resting base. However, it was too busy to preoccupy itself with the problem of its lateral oscillations; the master circuit which controlled it, the clock, as the wartime technicians who had built it had called that assembly, endeavored to obtain something more vital than upright balance.
The machine, having completed its mobile, ambulatory phases, based on the doubly reinfor
cing tropisms of heat and respiratory rhythm, was attempting to locate exactly the beating heart of the man asleep in the bed.
This, after an interval of minutes, it accomplished; it locked its percept system, focused on the beating heart: the stethoscopic effect of its sensors registered deep within it, and then the next phase came swiftly. It could not hesitate, now that the beating heart had been located; it had to act at once or not at all.
It released, from an aperture at its upper lid, a cyanide-tipped self-propelling dart. Traveling at extremely slow speed, so that corrections of its trajectory could be achieved even at the last fractional second, the dart made its way from the upended machine, veered slightly as signals from the machine indicated the need of a minor correction—and then its needle nose penetrated the chest of the sleeping man.
Instantly the dart ejected its freight of poison.
The man, without waking, died.
And, at his throat, a complicated but extremely fine band, as fine as gold wire, but containing a variety of functioning electronic valves and surge gates, emitted an elaborate series of radio signals which were without time lapse accepted by larger units bolted to the underside of the bed. These larger units, triggered off by the fine-spun collar which had reacted immediately upon the cessation of blood circulation and heart action, at once sent out their own signals.
An alarm—audibly—sounded; the room clanged with the racket. In other parts of the villa leadies hopped into activity, churning windmilllike at full throttle toward the upstairs bedroom. A further signal tripped an automatic coded call to leadies stationed on the grounds outside the building; they, ceasing to be immobile, sprinted toward the building, lined up at the wall by the bedroom window.
The man's death rattle had awakened fifty diverse leadies comprising his entourage, and every leady, guided by the rapid impulses from the larger units bolted to the underside of the bed, thanostropically converged on the scene of the assassination.