• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 573 0

of which it was made but the exceptional effort the authorities had been expending to track him down. With a start he realized that the unusual amount of resources which had been deployed in that effort might have nothing to do with the fact that he had been involved in a robbery gone wrong but instead were directed solely toward recovery of the storage thread. The police, the government, might not be interested in him at all. In which case by returning the thread—anonymously, of course—the heavy pursuit might be called off. Return the thread now and he might be able to strike a deal.

She was still holding it between two fingers. He could easily snatch it away from her and bolt from the office. But no matter who was looking for it and no matter how important it might be, he remained tantalized by the potential it represented. He knew he wouldn’t be able to decide which way to jump until he found out what was on it.

As usual, greed overpowered common sense.

“Why are you looking at me like that?” Taking a guarded step backward, she noted uncomfortably that he was standing between her and the exit from the inlab.

“Sorry. I get lost in my own thoughts a lot.” He made himself smile. “Sometimes I have a hard time finding my way back. A friend once told me it’s a side effect from taking too many cheap meld drugs.”

The regret with which he spoke left her staring blankly for a moment. Then she reacted, with a smile of her own. It faded quickly as she returned her attention to the thread.

“You understand that if this is military and my equipment here does succeed in accessing the thread’s contents, the act of doing so might well set off an alarm ten times stronger than any traktac and send out a locator broadcast of its own?”

He had already come to the same conclusion. As well as another. If he snatched back the thread and fled, he would have to start all over again trying to find someone with access to instrumentation capable of penetrating its secrets. Mentally, he flipped a coin.

“Plug it in,” he said with conviction. “Let’s see what happens.”

Expressing satisfaction she turned away from him. With the dexterity of an accomplished physician she slid the thread connector first into the open flex receptacle. Immediately above it and as soon as contact was made, a telltale on the console flared to life.

10

Regrettably, the light was red. Frowning as she leaned toward the console, Ingrid murmured a succession of commands. Intermittently, the telltale would go out. On the occasions when it came back on, it was always the same disheartening color.

Whispr stood it as long as he could. “What’s happening?”

Intent on fine-tuning the instrumentation she barely glanced in his direction. “We have a connection, but my inlab isn’t reading any contents.”

“You mean the thread is vacant?” That didn’t make any sense, he thought. Why would anyone go to so much trouble to conceal an empty storage device?

“It’s not that,” she told him. “I can’t tell if it’s empty or full to the last byte. What I am telling you is that my equipment can’t read this medium, whatever it is.”

“How can you have a connection but not even be able to tell if there’s anything held in the volume?”

Stepping back from the console, a frustrated Ingrid gestured at it. “You don’t believe me? You ask it. I turned off the coding—it’ll respond to anybody’s voice.”

Accepting the challenge Whispr stepped forward and began mouthing commands at the console. It replied immediately, politely, and with the same blanket declamations of negativity that had greeted the doctor’s more precisely phrased inquiries.

“Maybe a more advanced reader …,” he mumbled unhappily.

“Perhaps. But as I told you, the electronics in my office are very up-to-date. They have to be, in order to keep up with the latest medical data. Furthermore, in addition to the public box the technical specs of my inlab are tied into all the other private ones in this building, including the hospital’s. We all share information and analytical capabilities. Everything except patient and associated privileged