The Human Blend - Alan Dean Foster [71]
“Why’d you do that? Your equipment can’t read the thread. It’s no good to you.”
“Or to you.” As she replied, she heard a tiny voice in her head shouting. What do you think you’re doing? You’re all alone here, everyone else has probably gone home, this guy isn’t big but he’s strong and desperate, and you’re confronting him over—what? The unknown?
Employing much harsher and less politely acceptable silent musings, Whispr was wondering much the same.
“You can’t stop me getting it back. It’s my property. I’ll find something. I can use a chair, if I have to. I’ll break it open.”
It struck her abruptly and unexpectedly that a single trailing letter constituted the only difference between thread and threat. Banishing the less than noteworthy insight from her thoughts, she surprised herself by continuing to refuse to buckle to the demand of her taller, probably stronger visitor.
“I mean it when I say that I don’t know if there’s anything on that thread. But I feel that after everything I’ve done for you that I now have an equal right to know if there is. I’ve helped you twice now. You say you’ll pay me. I have no guarantee of that.” She indicated the receptacle. “You can pay me with knowledge. More fulfilling to me, cheaper for you. And there is this similarity of manufacture between the thread and the device I removed from the girl’s head. It’s important to me to understand and to resolve that. It’s a matter of medical knowledge.”
“I might trust you more if I could see that ‘device’ you keep talking about.” Whispr held his ground. “Where is it?”
“Elsewhere.” She improvised hurriedly. “It’s not currently accessible. It doesn’t matter. I have records of it that I can utilize for direct comparison. There’s no need for you to concern yourself with its location.” It was her turn to eye the receptacle. “I want to know what, if anything, is on that thread. You want to know what, if anything, it’s worth. If we continue to work together we can achieve mutually beneficial and nonconflicting aims.”
“ ‘Work togeth …’ ” He gaped at her. The woman staring back at him was smart, she was a successful nonmeld physician, she was pretty—she might as well be from a different universe. He shook his head slowly but forcefully. “I just finished ‘working together’ with an old friend. Now he’s dead. Partly because we worked together. Doesn’t that scare you?”
She swallowed. “Yes. Yes, it scares me.” Having taken the first step off the precipice she found herself continuing to plunge helplessly. “But I don’t care. I’ve only ever seen one other thing like that thread, and neither of them make any sense. I don’t know for sure how much yours might be worth, but a part of me won’t rest until I understand one or both of them better than I do now. I’ll try to explain this to you, Whispr—I don’t have any choice in the matter. Now that I’ve seen them, I have to understand them.” She paused and stared hard at him. “It’s called ‘science.’ ”
Whispr reflected that to someone like himself and to most of his friends, such an attitude would be called “senseless,” but he kept the thought to himself. “Supposing for the moment that I might consider going along with something like this—why should I?”
She thought fast. “You don’t have access to the kind of expensive, specialized scientific equipment that I can call upon in the name of ‘research.’ I don’t have access to the kind of, uh, specialized resources that you do. We each have detailed knowledge in our respective—fields. Maybe I can figure out the secrets of this storage medium without you. Maybe you’d eventually be able to do the same without me. But there’s no guarantee of either one working, and we have a much better chance of learning what we want to know if we pool our resources.”
He shook his head in disbelief. “I wouldn’t have figured you for someone who would take a chance on someone like me.”
“Neither would I,” she responded unapologetically,