Flight of the Maita Supercollection 3: Solving Galactic Problems Collector's Edition Page 61

  Maita uses a bell tone before and after what it says on the speakers (*) while Thing uses the middle "C" tuning fork sound ([ – ]) before and after its speech to keep them separate. Maita, thus Thing, also used the floater's system to speak, though it could speak through any of the systems on TR or T6 as easily.

  *You're going to be drawn into something dumb, Thing. I feel it.*

  "Why, Maita!" Tab chided. "How could you say such a thing? Besides, Z isn't here to defend himself!"

  *So I'll tell him about it! His positions tend to usually be indefensible in any case!*

  [ I'M going to be drawn into something? ME!? Hellloooo! ]

  They were close friends and used these little jabs and insults as a game. Thing had an IQ too high for even the machines like Maita to define so usually won though it was sometimes defeated through illogic. That was where Z's lack of logic was most useful in their games.

  Thing climbed from the floater onto Tab's shoulder where it wrapped its tentacles around his head.

  [ Why don't you make Tab furry, Maita? It would be so much more comfortable! ]

  "His brain circuits are already plenty furry," TR snapped back. "Or is that just fuzzy?"

  "Fastcom message!" T6 suddenly interrupted. "I'll read it out as it comes. It's from Fortney.

  "'T-K Detective Agency, Perfect Three, code TRD sixty.

  "'Go to Hospital. Emergency. See Feach called Marm reptilian anatomy section. Protect her. There is something very sinister there. There has already been a death I feel is murder. That is intolerable on Hospital.'

  "It's signed Lorlee. I take it Maita knows who Lorlee is?"

  *She's taking over the embassy thing there on Fortney. Come back aboard, Thing. We'll have to postpone the reunion for now. You can all come to EC on Medate nine if possible. I'm having a get-together.*

  TR and Tab waited until Thing was off the ship riding on Kit's shoulder. Kit put it on the floater, then went into T6. TR and T6 rose swiftly out of the atmosphere and were on their way toward Hospital. They would arrive in a short time in TTH14 so would use the lapse between their speed and normal travel time to try to find what was supposedly wrong there. If the emergency were dangerous and immediate they would go aground immediately. They could always claim they were somewhere close when they got the message.

  TR and T6 stayed in close shared contact in orbit to try to contact Marm. It was a very slow process. She didn't seem to want to talk with anyone so TR contacted Fortney while T6 tried to get from her what the problem was.

  Suddenly T6 ordered, "Let's go in! Now! We should have been told not to try anything other than direct contact. Calling her was a mistake. It puts her in grave danger of being murdered herself. Lorlee forgot to say that in her original message."

  "Where is she?" Tab asked.

  "The college of reptilian anatomy, building R nine, on the first floor if she's on the fastcom," TR replied. "T Six, keep her at the comset and talking until the guys are there. Switch to radio. They have a transceiver there.

  "Kit, Tab, get on the floaters and be ready to go in fast. The flashing light on the map in the holovid screen is where the room she's using for the com is located in the building. There are two entrances – there and there. Tab left, Kit right.

  "Get in the hold to be ready to move out before T Six and I land. Move!"

  Tab ran to the hold where he got aboard the floater waiting there and put up the velocity protector shields. The port cycled opened after a moment and he was out at tremendous speed. He saw Kit coming in as he approached the building. Kit headed toward one entrance as Tab made for the other. They jumped from the floaters as soon as they were inside and moving slowly enough. As they raced toward the room where Marm was using the fastcom unit the few people in the hall stepped to the side, then turned to stare.

  They entered the com room. Tab stepped to one side and quickly closed the door. From there, Tab covered the room while Kit went to the windows to opaque them so nothing would be visible from outside. Marm watched as the com told her the operatives were there so she could cooperate with them. She shut the set off and looked at Tab, then at Kit.

  "Did you screw this up all by yourselves or did Lorlee do it in her own inimitable way?" she asked. "I hardly think your secret investigation will be so secret after this!"

  "We won't make excuses," Tab apologized. "It's way too late for that! Tell us what this fiasco is about."

  "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 fine
st 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."

  "We'll get any that are still in the freezer and bring them back here to test for the stuff," Kit suggested. "Tab can come after Marm and meet me in whatever lab she likes."

  There was a pause, then T6 sent, "Lab three. It's not in use and is interior so you can see she isn't disturbed."

  Kit nodded and they went out.

  The murder would have never been proved if the reason for Klen's death weren't suspected. They found the hormone suppressor compound in all of the ices in the freezer. Marm explained she liked ices before retiring, too. They cooled her system and made her drowzy – a common effect among reptilians.