The Human Blend - Alan Dean Foster [68]
She wasn’t sitting at home on her couch munching popcorn and watching an entertainment vit, she told herself. She was participating in one. Like the rest of real life there was no fast forward and no rewind. She could continue, hit ERASE or …
“Give those to me.” She extended a hand and tried to ignore his knowing smile.
Deactivation proved less difficult than she feared. The band the traktacs broadcast on was straightforward and easy to find. While she had never had occasion to perform such work herself, the requisite mechanical means were at hand—as they would be in the office of any recognized and bonded physician. It was just never used because such interference with official police instrumentation was …
She concentrated on the work.
Her AI handled the necessary programming. Once that was completed it was a matter of subjecting each tiny pellet to the appropriate modulation by the inlab’s instrumentation. As each small but critical adjustment was completed she would pass the now harmless position locator back to the man from whose torso it had been removed.
When she handed over the last one he held up the glassine bag, carefully and slowly counted its contents, then pocketed it and looked back at her. For a brief moment he did not look either melancholy or forlorn. He looked dangerous. Maybe murderous dangerous. But the sensation passed quickly.
There are all kinds of entanglement, she thought. Including emotive ones. As a physician she had to cope with them every day—though they usually involved a patient’s reactions and not her own.
“How do I know you did anything except put these under a bright light?” he asked her.
She slipped into her best doctor-knows-all mode. “You don’t. You have only my word for it that, as a physician, I fulfilled my end of the bargain.”
She could see him debating with himself. Then he smiled—tightly, showing no teeth as usual, and passed back the thread. Taking it, she exhaled softly. Until that moment she had not realized how afraid she was that he was going to take it and run. Or worse. She suspected he did not because he wanted, he needed, to know as much as she did what, if anything, lay stored within the hair-thin strand of outrageous silvery metal.
Returning again to the instrumentation best equipped to answer that question she started to push the end featuring the miniconnector into the self-adapting flex receptacle—and found herself hesitating. Whispr was watching her closely.
“What is it? What’s wrong?” He indicated the waiting console. “Why aren’t you trying to see if it will plug in?”
“I have reason to wonder whether or not the contents might be something illegal.” She met his gaze without flinching. “Especially if it does turn out to be valuable.”
Her visitor might occasionally be slow of speech but there was nothing sluggish about his mental faculties. They suggested someone who rather than being stupid took time and care to think before he spoke.
“What about the similar thing you said you took out of a girl’s head? The thing that was part of a bad meld? Was it illegal?”
Now there was a notion deserving of contemplation. “I—I didn’t actually give it much thought. It was just something peculiar that didn’t belong. It was the strangeness of it that interested me. I never really considered whether it might be illicit or not. I just thought it was an atypical component of a bad job.”
He nodded toward the thread she was holding. “Maybe that’s all this is. Strange and atypical doesn’t mean illegal. It’s enough for you to know that I got it from somebody who didn’t need it anymore.”
Clearly that was all the explanation she was going to get out of him. It would have to suffice—for now. “Another possibility, and one that’s even more likely, is that it is of military origin.”
That would explain a lot, Whispr realized. Not only the strange metal