Flight of the Maita Supercollection 3: Solving Galactic Problems Collector's Edition (84 page)

"I don't really
know what it's about," Marm answered. "There were some very
suspicious shortages in supplies. They didn't make any sense to me,
but I have kept a special lookout for them. It's part of my job to
see we always have equipment and supplies for all the labs in this
building as well as for the classrooms and the clinic. I found a
sort of basic pattern in the thefts, but it still doesn't make much
sense so I took it to Klen, the head of this section. He said he'd
investigate and would see what it's about. That was four days ago.
Klen told me yesterday at midmeal he found something he couldn't
understand, but there were several people here who would have a lot
of explaining to do.

"The ones in
question aren't in research or medical staff – I never thought they
were – but seem to be stealing the stuff for some reason he
couldn't fathom. He was planning to face them with his evidence to
try to resolve the mess without any scandal after he made his
rounds of the research facility he was in charge of. There was to
be no one there working yesterday because it is the twentieth day.
We do checks and statistics and all of that routine every twenty
days so only a skeleton maintenance crew is on premises.

"Klen made it
plain he knew who took the missing items. They would have to
replace the equipment and supplies or pay for them and would have
to seek employment off of Hospital.

"He was trying
to avoid a scandal.

"Klen didn't
wake up this morning. His students – he teaches the residents every
second day – came to the security offices to report Klen hadn't
come to starting call and they were becoming concerned as there was
no message on the board about the class. He has never missed SC in
nine years here! He didn't answer anything and his rooms were
closed from inside. Sec had to break into his rooms. He was dead.
Massive hormonal failure.

"I keep checks
on all the doctors in this section. That's my only actual job,
other than constant inventory and maintenance control. There was no
reason for the death. There was nothing wrong with his glandular
systems and I can show you the readouts from just twelve days
ago.

"He was
murdered. There is no one who could have possibly had a motive
except those who he caught in theft."

"You have no
knowledge of which people were committing the thefts?" Kit
asked.

"No, only which
ones it wasn't," she replied. "There are some hundreds of employees
not on medical staff. I suppose it had to be maintenance personnel,
though. No one else was here yesterday. There were no classes."

"How was he
killed?" Tab asked. "Do you have anything for us?"

"There are some
hundreds of ways to bring about death in that manner among us
Feach," she answered. "The supply cabinets are full of those
things. Most of them are natural compounds the body produces to
counteract its own deficiencies. The way they act is when the body
produces sudden bursts of certain hormones it releases the
compounds at about the same time so one doesn't almost literally
burn up the organs. The body may produce a few thousand molecules
of it in an exact balance to the excess hormone release. If even a
few milligrams are given at one dose the result is coma and
death.

"They are very
hard to trace – even impossible. If the ones who gave the stuff to
him knew what they were doing it will be a compound that is
self-destructive over a very short period of time. That's how these
modifiers work."

"I take it you
consider yourself to be the next target now that we've blundered in
here?" Kit asked.

"If you mean am
I afraid that I'm selected for murder, yes," she replied. "They
wouldn't know if I was fully in Klen's confidence and he quite
possibly told them I had given original evidence to him."

"I'll take you
onto my ship," Kit promised. "You'll be safe enough there. We'll
have to get our hands on everything Klen had to work with. We'll
have to get into his papers and we'll have to know what things were
missing and when they were taken. We'll have to know everything you
know about this. My ship is programmed to ask the questions and to
record your answers for us to consider later. We'll go through
Klen's notes and such if you will make them available?"

"Klen kept
everything here on computer," she answered. "If you can find the
proper key the information he had is still there. He would have
coded it as to access, though. He didn't want any scandal. It's
possible he didn't keep any of the information in any way. It's the
kind of thing one wouldn't easily forget."

"Kit, take her
to T Six as soon as she shows us all the places he worked and where
his rooms are. I'll try the computer tricks I know and maybe I can
find a key," Tab suggested. "Marm, do you think the information is
in a code and could you give us a clue as to the key?"

"The
information wouldn't be coded itself, it would only be a matter of
finding how to extract it. I can't say what the key would be, but
it was often a phrase from one of his old books," she answered.
"The trouble is he collects – collected – books and had thousands
of them. There are a couple of hundred in his office."

Marm showed
them a map of the section where the two labs Klen used were
located, where the supplies were found missing, a list she had
already prepared as to when the losses were discovered, where
Klen's personal office and rooms were and anything else she thought
may be needed. Then Kit took her to T6 while Tab went to Klen's
offices and slipped inside. He simply used a built-in lead to the
electronic lock, which let him in. He noted the lock had been
opened very recently. Only a couple of hours earlier. It identified
the user of the key and it recorded the information.

He checked with
Kit through their link to have him ask Marm if she or anyone else
she was aware of was in the office.

Not that she
knew of. They didn't know where the key was Klen always kept in the
lab. It hadn't been among his cards.

Tab hoped the
culprit didn't know how to erase what he wanted from the computers.
It wasn't likely if it was input in coded access designation. They
couldn't even find it without some very sophisticated equipment.
That equipment was built into both Tab and Kit.

The one who
entered had obviously taken the key so that one – or ones – were
also in his rooms to kill him. They got the key from the lab to get
into the office for the key to Klen's rooms.

Tab told Kit to
ask how long Klen's death took.

About an hour
and a half to three hours. He would have become unconscious within
minutes of receiving the poison – meaning they had used the key
last night, not this morning. They weren't with him when he died,
but were there when the security officers broke into the room.
Check with sec about who was there.

He found the
computer terminal and plugged in. The good thing about information
in a computer which wasn't itself in code was that another machine
could read it – when the machine doing the reading was "computer
wise." Tab was himself a machine and was as "computer wise" as
anyone could be!

He couldn't
find much. There was some little information about the kinds of
supplies that were missing, but nothing further. These machines
were direct programming so there wasn't a chip or crystal or disk
with the information on it waiting to be found. That meant the
killer somehow knew how to erase things – or Klen hadn't put it in
the computer to be found.

The door
clicked and Tab dodged down below the desk. It was Kit.

"I left her
with T Six," Kit reported. "She was told we would radio in
questions if we needed answers. T Six will handle all that.

"What have you
found?"

"Our quarry
knew how to find the information and how to erase it or Klen didn't
put it into the computer. Any ideas?"

Kit had T6 ask
Marm how anyone could have gotten encoding information from Klen.
There seemed to be no way.

"Then the
information was never put into the computer," Tab stated. "Well,
Marm said Klen based things on his books."

Tab reviewed
the little information from the computer that was input since Marm
told Klen about the missing equipment, then began looking at the
titles of the books on the shelves.

"There was a
reference in the computer. A footnote without any apparent reason,"
he explained. "Ah! Here it is!"

He took a thick
book from the shelf and rifled quickly through the pages, then went
through more slowly. There was another section and page number in a
margin on the title page of a chapter so he searched through the
text for that section.

"This is
probably what he ... I don't know. Maybe it doesn't have any
connection."

"I might help
some if I knew what it is," Kit suggested.

"'The Effects
Of Genetic Manipulation – Stage Three,'" Tab read. "'The third
operation we must consider is to emplace a selective increasion in
certain chromosomal coders (See sec. four chap. eight) which will
result in exceptional strength of the affected organs, thus the
meatier parts of certain food animals can be increased. 'It has
been proposed that general musculature and bone structure can be
greatly increased for survival on a heavier planet, or that lung or
gill capacity can be increased in lesser atmospheres, but much
attention must be paid to the side effects of such manipulation. It
is far too often the case that the negatives far outweigh the
positives in destroying the evolutionary balances. One must note
that evolution has generally taken millions of years to produce an
organism that thenceforth depends upon a balanced form. i.e.
increasing musculature demands increasing the food supply to that
mass while increasing food supply demands increasing caloric,
mineral and nutrient intake, which means digestive and circulatory
systems must undergo change at the same time. It thus becomes
obvious that changing any one trait necessitates the changing of a
number of other traits to continue balance.

"'There are
strong dispensations and restrictions on research of these
subjects. It is suggested anyone entering into these areas
carefully check with EC.'

"Tell you
anything?"

"Let's list
when the equipment was stolen as close as we can tell to see if
it's the kind of equipment that could be used in genetic
manipulation. Then we'll have to find out who and why," Kit
replied.

Kit asked T6 to
determine from Marm if it was that kind of equipment. It was.

"Okay, we know
it was taken from the reptilian section, that it's all equipment
used in genetic engineering and the thefts were first noticed on a
basis that seems to be every seventy to seventy two days," Tab
reported. "I think Marm's the careful type who would notice the
missing junk pretty quickly.

"What happens
every seventy days or so?"

"It would seem
to me they take it when a ship's leaving so we should check which
ships left the day the theft was found or the following day," Kit
suggested. "I can access that through this computer terminal right
here."

Kit plugged
into the system, then withdrew.

"It will be
reptilians so a ship from Morkeltic was here every single time
within the space we're looking for. It's the only reptilian one
that fits.

"What do you
know about them?"

"We'll have to
go to Morkeltic after we see how many of them are here," Tab
replied. "If we can establish safety for the other people here we
can look for the why. I don't ... TR, what are the coordinates for
Morkeltic?"

TR and T6 were
monitoring everything the detectives said or did so TR immediately
sent back the coordinates.

"What's in that
area?" Tab asked. "Something a good stable people would find worth
doing this for?"

"I don't know,"
TR replied. "It could be something that's valuable only to them. I
can't connect genetic engineering ... yes I can! There's the rarest
thing in the galaxy out there! It's on a heavy planet, too!
Psiltripium!"

Tab groaned.
Psiltripium was the rarest of all elements, was tremendously heavy
and was the only thing nearly so heavy that was stable for more
than milliseconds. It had qualities that were still not known and
was the finest focus object known for the gravitics used in
spaceships.

"Then someone
is trying to genetically engineer ... surely not their own race?!"
Kit cried.

"You never
know," Tab answered. "There are twenty some-odd Morkeltics on
Hospital right now. Let's find our murderers, then head for their
world to stop this foolishness."

They carefully
checked the movements of all the Morkeltics over the past hundred
and ninety days, which was about the time the thefts were first
known by Marm. There were a total of seven who could have been
involved in the thefts, but they all had alibis for the time of the
murder. They were attending an employees' meeting that was
recorded. There wouldn't be any way to counterfeit those records.
The recorders were made on Freenz and were as close to foolproof as
anything manufactured could be.

"Where does
this leave us?" Kit asked.

"We have to
find someone else with a motive for murder or we have to learn how
it was done by the Morkeltics," Tab replied dryly. "This probably
wasn't so difficult a thing.

"T Six, ask
Marm exactly how the poison was administered."

There was a
short pause, then T6 sent, "It wasn't injected or pressured through
the skin or they would have found residue so it was included in
something he ate. It wasn't hot food because the stuff would have
broken down."

There was
another pause.

"It would have
been encapsulated and given to him in something cold in all
likelihood," T6 continued. "Klen was known to enjoy frozen sweets
before he retired. There's a unit in his room to keep them. A lot
of the reptiles will take something cold before retiring, it
seems."