"So Bertie is your great friend because you are his super tool?" Her voice was quiet and outraged, but the anger was no longer directed at Juan.
"No! I've studied the memory effect. The idea itself came from analysis of my own medical data. Even now that we have the gimmick, only one person in a thousand could be affected by it at all. There's no way Bertie could have known beforehand that I was special."
"Ah. Of course," she said, and was silent. Juan hated it when people did that, agreed with what you said and then waited for you to figure out why you had just made a fool of yourself.... Bertie is just very good with connections. He had connections everywhere, to research groups, idea markets, challenge boards. But maybe Bertie had figured out how to do even better: How many casual friends did Bertie have? How many did he offer to help with custom drug improvements? Most of that would turn out to be minor stuff, and maybe those friendships would remain casual. But sometimes, Bertie would hit the jackpot. Like with me.
"But Bertie is my best friend!" I will not blubber.
"You could find other friends, son," said William. He shrugged. "Back before I lost my marbles, I had a gift. I could make words sing. I would give almost anything to get that back. And you? Well, however you came by it, the talent you have now is a marvelous gift. You are beholden to no one other than yourself for it."
Miri said softly. "I—I don't know, Juan. Custom meds aren't illegal like twentieth century drugs—but they are off-limits for a reason. There's no way to do full testing on them. This stuff you're taking could—"
"I know. It could fry my mind." Juan put his hands to his face, and ran into the cold plastic of his goggles. For a moment, Juan's mind turned inward. All the old fear and shame rose up ... and balanced against the strange surprise that out of the whole world, this old man could understand him.
But even here, even with his eyes closed, his contacts were still on, and Juan saw the virtual gleam of the breadcrumbs. He stared passively for several seconds, and then surprise began to eat through his funk. "Miri ... they're moving."
"Huh?" She had been paying even less attention than he had. "Yes! Down the tunnels, away from us."
William moved close to the mouse hole, and pressed his ear against the stone wall. "I'll bet our little friends are taking your dungballs to wherever the first one went."
"Can you get some pictures from them, Juan?"
"...Yes. Here's one." A thermal glimpse of a glowing tunnel floor. Frothy piles of something that looked like finely shredded paper. Seconds passed, and a virtual gleam showed dimly through the rock. "There's the locator beacon of the first crumb." It was five feet deeper in the rock. "Now it has a node to forward through."
"We could lose them, too."
Juan pushed past William, and tossed two more breadcrumbs down the hole. One rolled a good three feet. The other stopped after six inches—and then began moving "on its own".
"The mice are stringing nodes for us!" All but the farthest locator beacon were glowing high-rate bright. Now there were lots of pictures, but the quality was poor. As the crumbs warmed in the hot air of the tunnels, the images showed very little detail except for the mice themselves: paws and snouts and glowing eyes. "Hey, did you see the splinter sticking out of that poor thing's paw?"
"Yes, I think that's the one I saw before. Wait, we're getting a picture from the crumb they stole to begin with." At first, the data was a jumble. Still another picture format? Not exactly. "This picture is normal vision, Miri!" He finished the transformation.
"How—?" Then she gave a sharp little gasp.
There was no scale marker, but the chamber couldn't have been more than a couple of feet across. To the eye of the breadcrumb it was a wide, high-ceilinged meeting room, crowded with dozens of white-furred mice, their dark eyes glittering by the light of a ... fire ... in the middle of the hall.
"I think you have your ‘A', Miriam," William said softly.
Miri didn't answer.
Rank upon rank of mice, crouched around the fire. Three mice stood at the center, higher up—tending the flame? It wobbled and glowed, more like a candle than a bonfire. But the mice didn't seem to be watching the fire as much as they were the breadcrumb. Bertie's little breadcrumb was the magical arrival at their meeting.
"See!" Miri hunched forward, her elbows on her knees. "Foxwarner strikes again. A slow flame in a space like that ... those ‘mice' should all be dead of carbon monoxide poisoning."
The breadcrumbs were not sending spectral data, so who could say? Juan visualized the tunnel system. There were other passages a little higher up, and he had data on the capacity of the inlets and outlets. He thought a few seconds more and gave the problem to his wearable. "No ... actually, there is enough ventilation to be safe."
Miri looked up at him. "Wow. You are fast."
"Your Epiphany outfit could do it in a instant."
"But it would've taken me five minutes to pose the problem to my Epiphany."
Another picture came in, firelight on a ceiling.
"The mice are rolling it closer to the fire."
"I think they're just poking at it."
Another picture. The crumb had been turned again, and now was looking outwards, to where three more mice had just come in from a large side entrance ... rolling another breadcrumb.
But the next picture was a blur of motion, a glimpse of a mostly empty meeting chamber, in thermal colors. The fire had been doused.
"Something's stirred them up," said William, listening again at the stone wall. "I can actually hear them chittering."
"The dungballs are coming back this way!" said Miri.
"The mice are smart enough to understand the idea of poison." William's voice was soft and wondering. "Up to a point, they grabbed our gifts like small children. Then they noticed that the dungballs just kept coming ... and someone raised an alarm."
There were still pictures, lots of them, but they were all thermal IR, chaotic blurs; the mice were hustling. The locator gleams edged closer together, some moving toward an entrance about three feet above the gully floor. The others were approaching the first hole.
Juan touched the probe gun against the wall and pulsed the rock in several places. He was getting pretty good at identifying the flesh-and-blood reflections. "Most of the mice have moved away from us. It's just a rearguard that's pushing out the breadcrumbs. There's a crowd of them behind the crumbs that are coming out by your head, William."
"William, quick! The FedEx mailer. Maybe we can trap some when they come out!"
"I ... yes!" William stood and pulled the FedEx mailer from his bag. He tilted the open carton toward the mouse hole.
A second later there was a faint scrabbling noise, and William's arms moved with that twitchy speed of his. Juan had a glimpse of fur and flying breadcrumbs.
William slapped the container shut, and then stumbled backwards as three more mice came racing out of the lower hole. For a fleeting instant, their glowing blue eyes stared up at the humans. Miri made a dive for them, but they had already fled down the path, oceanward. She picked herself up and looked at William. "How many did you get?"