“Anyway the Trosti foundations are a form of shadow government by now, though apparently the Patrol has been suspicious for some time. But it was only when they made the slipup on the Queen that enough of their plans were revealed here to give the law a loose end.”
“I know they have an outlaw experimental station here with the retrogressed monsters,” Dane said. “But is that all?”
“It might have begun so. Then they discovered something else.”
“The rock!”
“Ore,” corrected Rip, “and a very special kind. It is useful in esper work—a conductor for low-level telepathy, able to step up that and other esper talents to a remarkable degree. It exists on several planets, but it was not recognized until they built the retrogress machines and probably is one of those chance discoveries that happen as a side effect of a main experiment when the scientist in charge is intrigued enough to follow it up. There is reason to believe that most of this experimentation had been going on right here. They wanted Trewsworld. The holdings were a threat to any open work. Hence the monsters, which were developed and released gradually to drive the settlers out.”
“The Patrol knew this and didn’t act?”
“The Patrol suspected. Then we came in. The Trosti man at the port wanted us silenced. But short of killing us off, he couldn’t do that. The captain appealed to the Board of Trade representative, and since the Patrol was in on that appeal, they had their opening. Though the Trosti had the Council here very much tied to them, they did not have any control over the Patrol. Where the Council tried to make things hot for us, once the captain had made his statement, the whole thing blew up in their faces, like a gas ball.
“And, as a gas ball, it was a knockout for them. They probably knew it, thought they could buy some time to ship their important records off-world by loosing the monsters—”
“We did that—or rather the brach did.” Dane cut in with his story of the force field barrier and the fact he had overheard the jacks’ talk of the monsters being drawn north by the other box. “But those prospectors”—he remembered suddenly—“if they weren’t Trosti men, how did they—Or,” he ended, “did they know about the rock?”
“Our guess is that they had some kind of new detect, and it registered enough of the unusual radiation from the ore to make them believe they had found something. They took samples, but it must have been from a vein the Trosti crowd had mapped, and they were killed, the rock taken. It was a quick job and another botched one. I would say that lately the Trosti has not been too well served by its people. That elaborate affair of shipping the box on the Queen—”
“Yes, and if they already had the ore and such boxes here, why take the chance of shipping another in?”
“One of the minor mysteries. Perhaps, this—our box—was from another one of their labs, sent in for checking. And it must have been from a place where there was need for extra cover, so that it had to be sent so. It was their bad luck that we had the brachs and the embryos in the cargo and that their man died.
If he had made it undetected to port, all he would have had to do was rip off the mask and disappear. But it was a chance, and there must have been some pressing need to take it. When the Patrol backtracks we may know why someday—unless this will all be top security.”
“Trosti—hard to believe that Trosti—”
“That statement will be echoed on a good many different worlds.” One of the Patrolmen broke into their exchange. “Trouble is that the discoveries they did make for the benefit of the worlds on which they set up are generally so beneficial that we will have to have direct proof that those were only a cover or we can’t go against public opinion—plus the fact that they will summon top legal talent and be able to fight a delaying action in every court we take them to. We are hoping that this, now being the most open of their secrets, will give us evidence—records, tapes, enough to smash this foundation, with clues to uncover leads to others.”
“If we get there in time,” Dane pointed out. “They could ship out the most important material and destroy the rest.”
His head was starting to ache again. Perhaps the remedies of the Patrol medic were not as long lasting as he hoped. He could understand the need to conquer time, which was driving the captain, all of them on board. Also, they had no idea of what defenses beside the distort were in the basin. There was the control beam that had negated the power of the other flitters and brought them down at the will of the enemy. And such could be used to deliberately crash a ship. The jacks need only have one of those in order, and their pursuers would lose before any fight began.
There were plenty of other weapons to snap them out of the sky at the press of a button. Unfortunately, memory presented too many in all their savage details to Dane. But once more it might have been that his thoughts were as plain to his companions as if his forehead was a transparent visa-screen.
“They can’t use a control beam if they are readying for a takeoff,” Rip observed thoughtfully. “That would interfere with a blast, set them off course from the first fire-down—”
“Even if they don’t use that, I can name about five other defenses,” Dane returned bleakly. He leaned his aching head back against the wall and closed his eyes.
“Have a suck.” Something was thrust into his hand, and he glanced down to see he was holding a tube of E-ration; the heat cap had been twisted off so that a small thread of steam arose. For the first time Dane realized he was very hungry. He raised it to his mouth, his hand shaking a little, and squeezed the paste, warm enough to spread a welcome heat as it passed downward, into his mouth. It was a very long time, he thought, since that meal at Cartl’s holding, even longer since he had eaten regular food at established intervals.
But the E-ration, though it gave a man nothing to chew on and lacked much flavor, did banish hunger. And this time he was not limited to a quarter of a tube. He had a whole one to himself, while those about him were eating, too.
“The brachs?” For once memory worked as he swallowed the first mouthful.
“Have theirs.” Rip nodded toward the rear of the cabin. The light was limited, but Dane could see an E- tube protruding from each horned snout.
“What about them?” he asked a little later as he squeezed the last drop from the tube and rolled it into a tight ball.
“The kits are at the lab, being given Veep Treatment,” Rip answered. “But the female insisted upon coming with us. There has been a lot of excitement over them. If the brachs are degenerate intelligent life, then Xecho is going to have a problem. And it would seem that is true. It will probably be obligatory to do what can be done to return them to their proper intelligence—upsets a lot of history and will be quite a headache to all concerned.”
“Are they esper at all?” Dane wondered.
“We don’t know just what they are—yet. The lab has dropped all other experiments and is concentrating on them. It may be, since the principle of the retrogress machine is linked with the esper-inducing ore, that anything with a slight degree of such power has that power heightened. That’s another headache—”
“Ha—” That was the Patrol officer. He held out his wrist, and on it was a detect, not unlike the one Tau had carried, except more compact and much smaller. “Radiation of the right type, two degrees west—”
“Right!” Jellico made the correction in their course. “How far?”
“Less than two units. It is leaking through a shield.”
Dane saw the captain’s head give a little jerk. A moment later Jellico reported, “The brachs say there’s a ground transport of some kind, two of them, moving under us.”