Trader's World (36 page)

Time to think.

Mike crawled back out and found Seth staring at him with a bit more interest than usual. "I'm trying to get the panel off. This one. Any ideas?"

Seth stared at it for ten seconds. "No," he said.

So much for help from Genius-boy. If it wasn't food or electronics, forget Seth. Mike went back to sit in the useless control chair and stared at the panel for another five minutes. Then he went across to one of the chillsuits, lifted it above his head, and slipped it on. He didn't bother to seal it. As soon as the unit was working he crawled back into the cavity and did the contortionist act again with his head.

The image enhancement equipment in the suit's optical sensors had compensation for low light levels, as well as improved contrast and focus. Now he could see the panel clearly from two inches away, and he could scan across it by turning his head.

It was built in two pieces, meeting at a groove that ran from front to back. Mike pushed, and it gave a little. Since there was no sign of bolts or screws, it was probably held in position by the pressure of the front panel. Remove that, and the lower panel would slide out in two parts. Unfortunately, he still couldn't get the front panel off.

He was stymied again, but not too badly this time. Mike suspected that the panels butted with a simple tongue-and-groove joint, and there was no reason why they should be glued.

He turned over to lie flat on his back, reached up with suited hands, and pushed the right-hand side of the panel.

The plate bent a little, then resisted. It was meeting something above it. Well, to hell with it. If Mike broke their machine, what could they do about it? He braced his back and straightened his arms as hard as he could. There was a creak of strained plastic, then the plate sprang upward. It had separated from its partner, and now he could slide them over each other and reach up into the back side of the front panel.

Now came the really delicate part. To this point Mike had been trying hard enough, but with no real hope of success. Now that he was making progress he was scared of ruining everything. He felt for the racks, reaching up as gently as he could. It was no good, he would never do it by feel. He was forced to stick his head up through the panel, squint at the control assemblies sitting right at the end of the suit's nose, and try at the same time to work with one hand up next to his eyes.

Predictably, the electronic boards he was after couldn't be taken out from the bottom. He would have to remove the front panel, then slide them out that way. And that brought him back to the old problem of the missy-bolts. But now he had one advantage. He could come at them from the
back,
where that hollow pentagonal bolthead did not apply. On the other end of the bolts were, thanks to old-fashioned engineering, nothing more than simple hex-head nuts. Mike could get a grip on them; after a monstrous effort that left his fingertips throbbing and didn't do much for the chillsuit's condition, he was able to undo them.

With the front panel off, he could finally reach the heart of the control panel. It consisted of five boards, each the size and thickness of a playing card.

Mike looked at his watch. Unbelievable. He had only been at work for twenty-five minutes—not the three or four hours it seemed to be. He carried the boards across to where Seth was sitting idly, staring out at the snow.

"Here. I've got a little game for you to play. It's a puzzle. Somewhere on these control boards is a piece of logic that allows the inputs from the usual controls to be overridden by other inputs mat arrive as radio signals. The thing I'd like to know is, where is that logic? And can it be changed?"

Seth sniffed, took the assembly from Mike's hands, and stared at it for a few seconds. He shook his head. "Don't know."

Mike felt crushed. All that effort, for a two-second rejection. "Can't you tell anything at all about the circuits?"

"No." Seth sat staring ahead of him for a while. Then, as though struck by a random afterthought, he added, "Too small."

Too small.

"Damnation. You mean—" Mike stopped. He should curse himself, not Seth Paramine. Seth was used to working with enlarged schematics. He didn't have eyes like a microscope, any more than Mike did. To analyze these microcircuits he had to be able to see them!

It took another precious five minutes to get Seth into the suit, with assurances that they were not going outside again. Finally Seth was sitting hunched over in the corner, holding each control board in turn half an inch from the chillsuit's nose. Now and again he gave a grunt of surprise, pleasure, or disappointment.

After five minutes Seth went back to one of the boards, the third in the assembly, and pointed at an area about an inch from the right-hand edge. "Here."

Mike stifled the urge to ask how he knew. Even the explanation would be beyond him. "Can you change it? Is there any way of making it so that the controls can't be affected from anywhere except the control panel here?"

"Sure." Seth pointed again. "Four ways to do. Easiest, cut these circuits out, cross-connect those four."

He was pointing at things that were completely invisible to Mike. If it was too small to see, it was probably too small to change.

"What about the other ways? Is there a way with big enough elements for us to do the change without special equipment?"

"Sure. Change these." Seth pointed again. Mike had the feeling that he would get that same answer—"sure"—if he asked Seth to change the controls of the aircar so that it could sing and dance.

"Can you do it?"

"Sure. Do all four ways, if want to." Seth started to take his chillsuit off.

"Hey. What are you doing?"

"Tools." While Mike gaped, Seth removed his suit partway and rummaged in one of the front pockets of his blue overalls. He took out a dozen tools—including, Mike was chagrined to note, two sizes of missy-driver—and selected a tiny scriber from a handful of the smallest ones. "Okay." He disappeared back into the chillsuit and started work.

Seen from Mike's point of view, Seth didn't do a thing. He just made two insignificant nicks on the surface of one of the boards and a longer scratch parallel to its edge. It took a total of about twenty seconds, then he slipped all the boards back into the chassis and handed Mike the assembly without a word. Mike carried them to the control panel, slid them into locked position, and pushed the panel face back in after them.

Now for the interesting part. If something hadn't been ruined when Mike buckled the bottom panel upward, or when he fiddled around inside turning the missy-bolts, or when he pulled the control assembly out, or when he put it back; and if Seth hadn't misunderstood the logic of the boards, and hadn't put one of his tiny scratches a little too far to the left or the right—why, then they might have a working aircar. And if the snow wasn't bad enough to cripple them at takeoff, or drive them down right out of the air, and if Mike's bald-headed friend didn't have another trick up his sleeve that Mike couldn't even guess at—why, then they might be able to fly back to Cap City.

There was no point in thinking about it. Mike sat in the pilot's seat, not bothering to tighten any of the bolts in the loose panel, and switched on. As they skittered along the ice they passed the other car, and Mike saw two faces gaping out of the window. But there was no shooting. Thirty seconds later they were in the air, heading at maximum speed for success, home, and fame.

Almost.

Ten minutes into the journey, Seth was sitting by Mike's side, breathing heavily through his mouth. His fat face had a brooding look. "We get special dinner?"

"You bet we do." Mike had been peering into the rearview sensors, and nothing was coming after them. "The dinner that I promised you, at Cap City. And then we'll be on our way home, back to your family."

Seth was silent for another moment. Then he shook his head. "No. You go back. Not me."

"But your home—your family." Mike gave him five minutes of his best arguments, and at the end of it Seth shook his head again.

"No. After special dinner, I fly back Mundsen Labs. That the best place I live—best games."

"Best games"—that was Seth's expression of the fact that the Chills in the Mundsen Labs were the world's tops in micro-circuits. To him, it was no more than a game, one that he played better than anyone. Unfortunately, none of that made any difference to Mike's mission.

"Seth, you don't understand." Mike felt like a swine, but he couldn't give Seth a choice. "You
have
to go home. The people at the Mundsen Labs did something bad when they took you away from home. We can't let them do what they did, and get away with it."

"Something bad, but not for me. Like it there," Seth said. "Take me back, Mike. After dinner, or right now."

"I can't, Seth." Mike held their course north. Poor guy, he thought. He had to learn the hard way what the world was like.

Seth did not speak, but he looked at Mike sorrowfully. Then he slouched down in his chair, shook his big head, and stuck his hands in his pockets. Mike felt like a real villain. Seth had helped so much. But there was a job to do.

After another minute or so the controls of the car suddenly became soggy and unresponsive. Mike no longer had full control. He tried to stay calm and keep on course. No good. They were holding altitude, but banking in a wide arc, turning steadily. In another few seconds they would be heading back the way they had come.

"Damn." Mike dropped the useless control stick. "It's happened again. They've taken over. Seth, I thought you said you'd made it so—"

He stopped. Seth was sitting back in his seat, bent over a little square of ceramic. A tiny scriber was in his hand, and he was moving it precisely over the surface. He noticed Mike looking, and did a little sideways wiggle with the tool. The aircar rolled right, then returned.

"Are you doing that? It's impossible. How, for the sake of Daddy-O, can you control an aircar with that little bit of plastic?"

Seth looked at Mike slyly. "Easy. Capacitance control. We have special dinner, then I go back. Right? Or we go back now."

Trader Rule: Try as hard as you can, but know when you've lost.
Mike cursed his own stupidity. Why had he ever, for one moment, thought of Seth Paramine as just an idiot? Genius was genius, no matter how it showed itself. And genius could run rings around nongeniuses—like Mike—whenever it chose to.

"All right. You can go back after the dinner."

"Trader's Promise?"

Now how the devil had Seth learned about
that
?

Mike thought for another few moments. He had no choice. He nodded. "Trader's Promise."

Seth moved a finger, the car began to turn, and soon they were once more heading for Cap City.

Then Seth surprised Mike one more time. He looked across with those strange, miles-away eyes and reached over to pat Mike's hand. "You all right. I trust you, Mike. You come see me again."

Mike gripped his hand in return. It was the nearest thing to a true benediction that he ever expected to achieve in life.

CHAPTER 16

The long curved corridor was familiar this time. Mike pressed the monitor as soon as it was in reach, and the massive black door opened.

Max Dalzell was in, sitting at his desk. He waved Mike over to the visitor's chair. "I heard you were back," he said. Then he took a look at Mike's face and reached into his desk drawer. "Here. You need a bite from the tortoise."

He handed across a small plastic phial of
testudo
spirit, twisting the top as he did so. There was a long, high-pitched hiss and the bottle cooled twenty degrees in Mike's hand.

"New gimmick," Dalzell said. "Joule-Thomson effect. The Greasers say they're fond of technology, but they tend to apply it only to their own sybaritic ends."

Mike took his first cautious sip of the icy liquid and waited for the column of torchbearers to walk down his throat to his stomach.

"That will help," Dalzell said. "Cheer up. It's not the end of the world."

"I'd like to think you're right."

"You made a successful negotiation for the gaming robots."

"No—
you
did that. They'll accept the agreement you wrote—without any changes."

Dalzell grinned. "But you'll get the credit. And you came as close as an eyelash to pulling Paramine out of there. You just had some bad luck."

"I had a lot of luck on the mission—both kinds. And I had something else."

Mike saw Max Dalzell's expression change. The man was uncannily perceptive.

"What are you getting at?"

"I'm not sure I know. I'm not as experienced as many Traders, and I'll be the first to admit it. But I have a feel for the way a mission is supposed to work. On the plane coming back here, I realized that this one went sour right from the beginning. I started to make a list, and then I linked in to Daddy-O."

"I know. I saw your report as it came into the data bank."

"You saw some of it. I put the rest into a closed file." Mike drained the bottle of
testudo
and sighed. "First data point: I didn't realize it until I met them, but the Chills are real stay-at-homes. They love it on the ice cap, and they hardly ever leave it for anything."

"The occasional flight to F'waygo. That's as far as most of them go."

"It's one hell of a long way from there to northern Yankeeland. So that gave me my first question: The Cap Federation heard about Seth Paramine, we know that.
How
did they hear about him? Well, they must have been told. Not too surprising, if you think about it—all the groups try to have agents in the others' territories. And that explained something else that baffled me. That 'wall of fire' defense for the Mundsen Labs isn't a useful idea out on the ice cap. In fact, it's useless. Anybody with a chillsuit on could walk right through it in perfect safety. But if the Chills
knew
about Paramine's fear of flame, it would be the perfect way of making sure he didn't try to leave. Even if he wandered out on his own, he'd have run back terrified. Again, it pointed to somebody feeding secret Yankee information to the Chills."