New Lensman Part 9

'Any trace of Harness yet?'

'No. None. He's disappeared completely. One of the men from Fauth, one of the ones who had disappeared, and we hadn't found, took a s.p.a.ceship to Tellus early this morning.'

'You didn't get him?'

'No. Hanovich thought they had all escaped through the Sanctuary. He didn't put out arrest warrants on them, so by the time anyone caught the name, the man had arrived at NYC and was gone.'

'That sounds like more proof that the meteor wasn't an accident,' Larry commented. 'They kept us busy and then got out at the last moment. Keep Hanovich looking for Harness, though.'

'Right. The next one won't get away.'

'Well, I doubt if any agents are left. The last one probably left when it appeared the meteor would be successful. They may be coming back, though. Have Security give all new entrants ... no, all entrants, new or old, a thorough check. Do you know if Hanovich checked those gumdrops?'

'Gumdrops?' Ron asked, puzzled.

'Griffin's group left behind some rather unusual items. Hanovich made a list of them but hadn't checked them out. Gumdrops were one of the items.

'I'd like to see that list. It might give me an idea about what we're up against.'

'See Hanovich,' Larry said. 'Also call Harv Reinfield and tell him to keep quiet about his job.

Remember that you'll be broadcasting and may be monitored. OK?'

'Right.'

'See you tomorrow when I get back.'

'Good hunting.'

The moon creeper woke Pete up a few hours later as Copernicus was calling Harvey Reinfield. The conversation went about as expected.

'Harvey, this is Ron Love,' the Mayor of Copernicus said. 'Did you find anything?'

'No,' answered Harvey.

'Pete Miller should be out there in about twenty hours. You can tell him anything when you talk to him over the interphone.'

'Anything,' Pete noted, meaning anything except the truth, and the interphone bit was so the people back home could make up a story accordingly. The normally private conversation over the moon creeper radios would be picked up and relayed by the satellite.

'OK, I'll see what I can do,' answered Harv and signed off.

Pete started to go back to sleep, and then said to the creeper, Remind me in the morning to ask for a bunch of floodlights, when I talk to Copernicus Control. I see we got around the ridge. Are we on the track out to Mayer yet?'

'We will be on the trail in half an hour,' answered the moon creeper.

'Wake me if we hit any new large creva.s.ses,' Pete said and went back to sleep.

CHAPTER NINE.

SURVEILLANCE.

The Copernicus s.p.a.ceport was closed during the meteor's impact The first s.p.a.ceship to be allowed to land at the s.p.a.ce port after the impact did so because of its emergency status. It had lifted off from Tellus. A few moments later its communications officer reported to Copernicus Control that a pa.s.senger had had a heart attack. Since Copernicus on Luna was the most convenient low- gravity port equipped to handle the situation, the s.p.a.ceship returned there and pre-empted all other traffic.

The s.p.a.ceship landed on a dock in the crater. The dock, refrigerators, shielding and all, lowered in its shaft, down into a subsurface chamber. Airtight, reinforced concrete and alloy steel doors closed over the top of the shaft. The dock was pressurized and an ambulance transporter entered the inner chamber from a large airlock. A ramp lowered from the s.p.a.ce ship and the vehicle drove up into the hold, where a small group of people were waiting. The driver got out.

'You're Dwaino?' one man addressed him.

'Yes.'

'We're fortunate you hadn't left when they discovered the meteoroid,' he said, and introduced the others. 'This is the patient.' He gestured toward a man on a stretcher. 'We're the members of his party. His mistress, his bodyguard/valet, and I'm his personal physician. We drop the other two in the work party going around the crater to open the west entrances,' he said, gesturing to the two vacuum-suited members of the group.

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They loaded the ambulance and left. A few minutes later the dock was cleared, the air in it pumped back into its reservoir and the s.p.a.ceship returned to the surface. It left.

The ambulance followed the maze of underground tunnels beneath the landing area. It pa.s.sed through airtight doors, which opened and closed automatically in its path, and finally through a final airlock to the surface. It crossed a thousand yards of surface and then was under the roof of the main entrance to Copernicus wall. Here the work party was marshalling for its trip around through the North Pa.s.s. The ambulance stopped and waited for equipment in the entrance's airlock to move out.

The two vacuum-suited men, who had been riding outside the vehicle, got off. Minutes later they were volunteering their services to the work party foreman. Short-handed; he immediately put them to work.

The ambulance continued through the airlock to Customs.

The Customs officers were very thorough. They unloaded the ambulance, collected pa.s.sports and processed the members of the party. Automatic machinery processed the baggage and ambulance. The pa.s.sports were returned with a magnetic identification/credit card and the ambulance reloaded.

Just before the driver closed the airtight door, a Customs Officer leaned over the vehicle and asked, 'Headed for the Hospital?'

'Yes.'

The Customs Officer thumped the surface of the ambulance. The sound covered the click of a magnet attaching itself. 'Good, I'll call ahead and tell them you're on your way.'

The ambulance pulled out.

The following morning when the Mayor arrived at his office, Lt. Larry McQueen was waiting. They went inside.

'Uranium Inc. was a dead end,' Larry said as he sat down. 'I talked to the plant superintendent.

He told me that the Griffin group arrived on a special s.p.a.ceship. No point of origin given. They had special company badges. It seems that Uranium Inc. has this special group of inspectors, who are not to be questioned nor interfered with, on pain of immediate dismissal. They commandeered a transporter of their own and most of them came here. Those remaining behind at Fauth were secretive, and isolated themselves from the rest of the personnel there. They made a number of trips back and forth. The last was that one Sunday morning. They left on another special, non- company ship.'

'At my request the superintendent called the Tellurian office. They couldn't help. The badge numbers he reported hadn't been issued. Their security personnel promised to investigate and report any results to The Hill, for what that's worth. I checked their quarters. Completely clean.

Nothing.'

Larry shrugged and changed the subject. 'How did you make out with Miller and Reinfield?'

'Reinfield said he hadn't found anything,' Ron answered. 'I don't know whether to believe him or not.'

'When will he be dug out?'

'About a week.'

'What!'

'The first west entrance won't be open until late this after noon. It'll take a day or so to get a creeper with equipment out there. A couple more to salvage his creeper. Then a day to get back here and get another creeper.'

'We can't wait a week!' Larry said. 'Can't you use a transporter instead of a creeper and speed things up?'

'A transporter's too light to pull the load of digging equipment.'

'Look, let's suppose for a moment that that meteor had been successful,' Larry argued. 'About now the Solarian Patrol Tracking Network would be working like mad trying to handle the commercial operations of the Solar System on top of their normal working load. Normally, they just monitor them.' Larry shook his head. 'It would be at least a week before things were under control. If it were necessary to include Grand Fleet maneuvers during that period, it would be the biggest mess you ever saw. So that means that whatever they're planning will come this week, probably within the next couple of days. They'll either try something else on Copernicus or have to meet the Grand Fleet on more equal terms.

'Now let's suppose tomorrow Copernicus is attacked and somehow destroyed. Let's further suppose these outsiders find the moon base first. Uranium Inc. or some other infiltrated company would make a "mineral discovery" near it. s.p.a.ce ships would bring in "mining equipment". There would be no inspection, Copernicus Control would be gone and the other sector controls, if not gone too, would be too busy to handle this sector properly. Within a month there could be a secret base, 3637

armed and ready, here within a quarter million miles of Tellus.

'Harv has to find that base now, as soon as possible, so the Patrol can at least watch it,' Larry concluded. 'A week is too long to wait. They've probably already got an alternate plan of attack or something else in the works for us.'

The Mayor was impressed by Larry's outburst. Larry had not given him the impression of being a person who cries 'Wolf!' without good reason, consequently he gave the matter serious consideration.

'I wonder ...' Ron said after a few moments thought. 'We have one of the original mooncars in our museum. Just a minute.' He flipped on the intercom. 'Margurite, get me Jim Patton.'

A few moments later he was explaining to Patton that he wanted to use the vehicle. 'Can it be put in operating order?'

The curator of the museum was scandalized. 'It is in operating order!' he replied.

'Good, when can I get it?'

'You'll have to fill out a temporary loan request, submit it to the committee on ...'

'I'm the Mayor! You fill out the form! And jam it through your own committee. I'll send someone over in an hour to pick it up. And it better be ready or you'll be wondering where your funds went next quarter,' Ron said, and turned the visiphone off. He looked at Larry, relaxed, and smiled.

'The whole d.a.m.n world is form happy. Sometimes I wonder if anyone here does anything else. Someone in the mooncar can take a load out to Mayer A in about eight hours. They can dig out Harv, give him the mooncar and finish the job of digging out the creeper at their leisure. Miller's creeper can bring everything back. I'll pick a good man to take the mooncar out.'

'Good. Were you able to get any action out of Hanovich on the lists?'

'He promised me an updated list the first thing this morning.'

'G-1?'.

'Yes?' the flat voice of the office computer answered.

'Is an updated list of objects from the Griffin group available in Central Files?'

'Yes.'

'Display the top sheet,' Ron instructed the computer, and looked at the plate on his desk. 'Larry, your name is on the access list. Would you like a copy?'

'Yes.'

A moment later Ron handed Larry a reproduced copy of the list. Larry read rapidly through it. It was considerably shorter than either of the previous two lists. Much of the requisitioned material had been found and all of the items left behind had been examined.

'I see that the gumdrops were plastic explosive,' Larry said, looking up. 'A rather odd one, though. I missed a couple of other items. May I examine the critical points lists you asked for at the Board of Directors meeting?'

'Definitely, but let's get you squared away with the Central File computer,' Ron said.

The Mayor opened a special computer file for Larry. The computer made copies of Larry's handprints for comparison with previously held data from his identification/credit card. It requested certain additional personal data and then had Larry select an identification phrase as his personal key to cla.s.sified material and other closed files. A second phrase was chosen that would close off access to all sensitive information and alert Security that the person using it was an imposter, or under duress, or in need of their aid.

'It's an innovation Hanovich came up with,' Ron said, when Larry commented on it. 'Handprints can be copied and identification phrases can be tortured out of people. This gives the victim a chance to warn us and let us know he has been kidnapped or whatever, and gives us a chance to catch the subst.i.tute. It's too bad we didn't use it earlier.'

At Larry's request the Central File computer also a.s.signed him a shielded, blocked office in City Hall to use. He went there, after leaving the Mayor, and spent the rest of the morning studying lists and checking the computer files. He noticed Rog Philips' annotations on the critical points list, and called him.

When Pete woke up they were traveling on the Northwest Trail. He checked time and position. There had not been any new changes to the trail so far, other than a few minor meteor holes. He was tempted to have the moon creeper step up the speed, but then he would he running faster than his creva.s.se detector could stop him. Better safe than dead. Instead he instructed the creeper to 'whistle up Copernicus Control.'

'Copernicus Control,' the man on duty answered.

'This is Pete Miller on my way to Mayer A to dig out Harvey Reinfield,' Pete said. 'In the supplies you send out, add a dozen or so floodlights with stands.'

'I gather you expect that it will take more than a week to dig him and the creeper out?'

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Copernicus Control said.

'Yeah, it depends on the size of the slide, and how deep he is.'

'OK.' said Copernicus Control. 'Suppose we also send out an inch-worm rescue tube?'

'A what?' asked Pete.

'An inch-worm rescue tube. You've seen the digging machines used to make the tunnels here at Copernicus. They dig a pilot hole, clamp onto the sides of it, and pull the big cutting face up to the rock wall. When the big cutting face catches up to the pilot hole, the little cutter uses the big machine's ma.s.s to cut another pilot hole in the rock. It's called an inch-worm because it inch- worms its way through the rock, see?'

'Yeah,' said Pete.