It occurred to him that a good place to look might be in some of the other species’ data stores. Anyway, it might be worth a little time spent at the terminal to see if he could find them.
He started with the Petty-Primes, and an hour’s hard work later he had to admit he had drawn a blank. However unreliable the damn translation programs were, Giyt was pretty sure he’d converted every possible name for the terminals into the dots and strokes of the Petty-Prime script and all he’d had for his pains was a lot of garbage about the numbers of immigrants and the volume of goods shipped back and forth.
It had seemed like a possible shortcut, but it wasn’t working. Giyt sighed and went back to the human data files.
But even the Library of Congress store was less than illuminating. Yes, somehow or other, long ago, Huntsville Inc. had pried a grant from some foundation or other to finance the airy-fairy project of interstellar exploration. Yes, they’d launched a dozen or so miniature ion rockets, one to each of the most promising nearby stars…
But then what? How did they get from the tiny, slow, unmanned probes to the instant transportation of the Sommermen portal?
That was where the story clouded over. Dr. Fitzhugh Sommermen worked for Huntsville, that was definite. He had been conducting researches on the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen simultaneity effect—and doing it very expensively, in low Earth Orbit, paid for by another of Huntsville’s free-flowing grants. The reason for his being in orbit the report said, was that it was necessary to avoid interference from Earth’s surface gravity. Then somehow—this was when it all got misty and uncertain—he had come back from one session in orbit with the prototype of his portal device in his lander.
The rest of the story, for security reasons, was classified secret. But what “security reasons”? Military? But military security implied an enemy, and what enemy was involved here?
The questions were not getting answered, they were proliferating.
The obvious next place to look was in the Tupelo files of the Extended Earth Society, but when Giyt accessed them he was no farther along. Maybe there was something there, but every interesting file turned out to be secured. A password was needed.
That was neither a surprise nor a problem; not for Evesham Giyt, who had a hundred ways of getting past such obstacles. The first was to check every terminal on the island that might have access to the protected system to see if someone might have been stupid enough to leave his password in its default setting—its extension number, his name, something like that. He wasn’t surprised when that didn’t work; even Wili Tschopp wasn’t quite that dumb. Another way of gaining entry was to select a terminal that was privy to the closed file and flood it with extraneous messages. That was how Giyt had financed his college education, going through the university president’s terminal to enter the financial files; they would normally have questioned his status, but with the president’s terminal bogged down it could not give the reply that would have denied Giyt access.
On Earth that no longer worked; net users had become a good deal more sophisticated since Giyt’s college days. But here on Tupelo—
It took less than five minutes for Giyt to get into the closed files. But when he was there he was still nowhere.
The trouble was that even the secured files were still unreadable for him. He found plenty of entries that concerned the portal or the Sommermen terminal or any of the other variations he could think of on the term, but, just as with the Petty-Primes, they dealt only with what particular shipments had arrived or departed on particular days. And even those were enciphered.
What did it mean, for instance, when an entry read: “President TARBABY stocks: 1533 JUNIORS, 114 GRABBAGS,. 11 SUPERS”? Or “Need 16 gross additional HAIRNETS”? Not to mention the wholly incomprehensible transmissions like “GREEKS 53 FLYSWATTERS, COPTS 2600-plus RUTABAGAS all sizes, others not identified.”
Giyt blanked the screen and sat back. He could, of course, ask Hagbarth what all this stuff meant, but that would mean telling Hagbarth he’d snooped into the files . . . and, anyway, the mere fact that it was all encoded meant that it probably was something Hagbarth wouldn’t want to talk about.
Giyt hated to admit defeat, even when only curiosity was involved. He knew that if he were on Earth he could probably get into the master system there. But he wasn’t. Here on Tupelo there was no continuous contact with Earth, only the burst transmissions that went to and from Earth when the EPR portal was open. He had no firsthand knowledge of that stuff, since neither he nor Rina, of course, had any reason to communicate with anyone back on Earth.
But as it turned out, about that he was wrong.
VIII
The climate of the planet Tupelo is uncomplicated, if sometimes drastic. There are relatively few major hurricanes, perhaps because of the lack of large landmasses, which means relatively few collisions between dry, continental, high-pressure air masses and humid maritime lows. However, disturbances from the planet’s intertropical convergence zone may from time to time drift north or south and propagate some severe storms. Generally speaking, Tupelo’s one inhabited island, which lies quite close to the planet’s equator, avoids hurricanes because there is relatively little Coriolis force at those latitudes. There are, however, exceptions.
Giyt discovered that his wife had been communicating with Earth when she asked him for a favor. “Shammy, hon, I have to go to the store. I’d appreciate it if you’d come along.”
That was a little surprising, because Rina knew that her husband wasn’t fond of shopping, but then she went on, “It’s a nice day for a walk,” she wheedled. “Anyway I need you to help me pick out a birthday present for my sister’s husband.”
Then he was really astonished, since he hadn’t known she had a sister. Rina was curiously defensive about it, too.
“Oh, yes,” she said, “she’s living in Des Moines. So I dropped her a line, just to let her know where I was and what I was doing.”
“You sent a message to Des Moines?”
“Well, sure. Shammy. She’s the only sister I’ve got. Wasn’t that all right?”
Giyt wasn’t quite sure of the answer to that. It had been his belief that they had cut their ties with Earth entirely—that is, not counting his private stashes of mad money, available any time he chose to draw on them. “Anyway,” she went on, “there was an answer from her in the last transmission—wait a minute. I’ll show you.”
She poked at her terminal, and in a moment her sister’s face appeared. The woman on the screen didn’t look a lot like Rina, Giyt thought: older, sterner, sharper-featured. But she was smiling as she said, “Well, Rina, you could have knocked me dead. Imagine you settled down at last! And married to an important man, at that—a mayor, for heaven’s sake!”
Rina stopped it there. “The rest is just personal stuff,” she said, sounding embarrassed. “We had a lot to catch up on because, you know, she didn’t much care for my, uh, lifestyle. So we sort of lost touch for a while. Anyway, her husband’s birthday’s coming up. I’d like to get him something. The trouble is, I don’t know him well enough to know what he’d like, so if you wouldn’t mind . . .”
Giyt didn’t mind. He did have a pretty full afternoon ahead of him—the commission meeting first, and after that there was a scheduled transmission from Earth, but with live people coming in this time so that he would have to go to the terminal to greet them. No problem there, though. Giyt had become very relaxed about the commission meetings, now that he’d actually read up on the reports ahead of time. And even better, he had a tangible announcement for the Kalkaboos.