He tapped the screen black and brooded. The bland innocence of Ginny’s every move was not reassuring, it only meant he was getting ready for something-or he’d already done something and Betalli had missed it.
Missed it. Missed it. If he had, he had and would continue to miss it, his eyes sliding over and over the place.
He sighed and went shuffling into his sleeproom, stretched naked under the killights, and litanyed himself to sleep.
Ginbiryol Seyirshi adjusted the magnifier to a comfortable height, took a standard Eye from its pod and began peeling back its rough black skin.
He didn’t like exposing his secrets this way-the extensive modifications he’d devised for the EYEs that made them as undetectable as dreams, that enabled them to collect emotions as well as full sensory data from his targets. When the Omphalites wanted him to do this work onplanet, under the recorders of the Foundation, he wouldn’t. He hadn’t argued with the Council or the Chom, he simply said no and refused to amplify his refusal.
He began preparing the EYEs exactly according to the plan he had worked out for the subversion of Bol Mutiar, humming contentedly as he constructed then tucked in new elements. What was effective for Bol Mutiar was even more so when applied within the closed system of the ship. The Omphalites had overlooked that-or if they hadn’t overlooked it, they expected to be able to control the EYEs and him. He smiled. They’d lost control the minute they’d transferred him here with his prosthetic arm intact. If he’d been in charge, he’d have removed that arm, replaced it with one he could be sure of. They’d scanned it, of course, and found nothing except the minute forces that controlled its movements. And they’d left him with it. Fools.
He attached a notepad to the EYE, ran the program and input additional instructions, using his own intensely compressed prog-langue. When he was finished, he zipped up the EYE, set it in a vault tray, and took another EYE from its pack.
He worked steadily until his midday meal, lay down on a cot he toed out of the floor, and took a long nap. When he woke, he went back to work on the EYEs.
Betalli bent over the screen, running over and over the sections where Ginny was altering the EYE programs, trying to work out just what he was doing, calling up the inputs and studying them until he was forced to admit he didn’t understand what he was seeing; he loathed the kephali that ran most ships and many cities, he didn’t trust them, thought of them as whores giving out to anyone who tickled their pads, hostile whores who took a perverse delight in tempting men into destructive situations. He had no choice now, he had to turn the program analysis over to the kephalos and try to prevent the results from going to anyone but him.
He set the analysis going, then replayed the dayend records. He watched Ginny put the EYE he was working on into its slot in the vault tray, pack up his tools, watched him hold out his arm for the android escort and go placidly off to his cell.
The second android lifted the tray of EYEs and, carrying them delicately, took them to the heavy vault that Betalli had installed in the workroom. The android set the tray on its insulated shelf, tugged the door shut and set the time-lock, then settled in front of the vault, keyed into guard mode, ready to burn anything that moved in the 180 curve of his watch area.
Smooth. Not a glitch anywhere he could see, nothing he could smell, taste, nothing but a cold certainty that Ginny was plotting something. What? That scratched at him, an irritant that wouldn’t go away…
He touched the screen black, stripped and went into his cleanroom, sat in the heat until his brain was baked, then lay brooding under the killights until he finally managed to shut down his mind and sink into a dream-ridden sleep.
7
Three hours into shipnight Ginny twitched, opened his eyes. He got to his feet, crossed to the fresher, drank a glass of water, then returned to the cot. He bent down, took hold of the cot edge with his prosthetic hand, twisted the hand slightly and pushed down. A moment later he lowered himself heavily to the mattress, swung his feet up, and went placidly back to sleep.
In the vault two of the EYEs stirred, began to throb.
The tiny spherical nodes slipped through slits in their skins, rose a hand-width above the tray and hovered above the discarded husks, minute lasers sealing the escape holes. The naked EYES slid down behind the tray, clung to the plastic; they hummed briefly, spun a chameleon field about themselves and effectively vanished.
Betalli sat, watched Ginny work on the EYEs.
The report from the kephalos lay at his elbow; he hadn’t read it in detail, but on the surface its conclusions were reassuring. The additions were a series of commands to internal elements whose capacities were not fully apparent. That might have been worrying, but the report went on to state that the additions were entirely passive, that they needed an outside trigger to begin operating. And there was no way Ginny had access to such a trigger.
He began a slow search of the workroom, then probed at Seyirshi.
Nothing.
Other than the toolfields, the only forces operant in that room were the minute motors and fields woven though Ginny’s prosthesis.
He scowled at the arm, at the lacy schema of struts and wires. No connection with the outside. No apparent connection. He considered removing that arm. There was no way to get it off without damaging some very sensitive linkages, crippling the man and canceling his usefulness. Yes, he thought. I can’t have it off, but I can put a read on that arm. If it does anything at all beyond its ordinary output, I’ll have it off, I don’t care what the Savant says.
Ginny looked up as a third android touched his arm. “A moment,” he said. “I cannot stop right now.”
The android stepped back and waited until Ginny set the EYE on the tray. It took hold of his prosthetic arm, swung him around, straightened the arm out. It slit Ginny’s sleeve, glued a sensor strip to the pseudoskin, released the arm, and walked out.
Ginny touched the dangling sleeve, sighed. “Dear me,” he said aloud. “How annoying.” He used a small laser to cut it away, then went back to work.
Three hours into the shipnight, the free EYEs clinging under the table woke and pulsed.
Inside the vault two more EYEs woke, slid out of the skins and went to ground behind camouflage fields, waiting for the vault to be opened.
Ginny slept the six hours he allotted himself without moving. He woke, exercised, ate, went back to work.
Betalli watched and fretted, went over and over the records of the previous nights, over and over the report from the kephalos. He’d missed something. He knew it. Ginny would never submit this docilely to control. But there was nothing. Nothing at all.
Betalli wasn’t sleeping well, even under the killights in the sterile security of the saferoom. In his worst nightmare he woke and found himself staring up into Ginny’s smiling face, watching Ginny’s hands pour filth on him.
He doubled the watch androids, left three in the workroom every shipnight, sent one into Ginny’s sleepcell with instructions to burn him if he did anything at all out of the ordinary.
And all this time Ginny plodded stolidly along, never deviating from the path he’d laid down back on Arumda’m.
On the tenth day there were only five EYEs left. Ginbiryol Seyirshi did some special work on these, more modifications to the circuitry, more complex instructions added to the standard program.