No one in the office. Lock the door or not? It would be a little suspicious, but the extra couple of seconds while the secretary rattled away would give him time to change what's on the screen. But the secretary wouldn't have any reason to be curious about what he was working on, and no one else was likely to come in except Dr. Whittier, his partner in crime. He left it unlocked.
He put a data cube in the desk niche and said, "Commence Minotauro." A blur of numbers and words scrolled up the wall. He took a keyboard out of the drawer and waited. A couple of times a minute, the scrolling stopped and a query blinked. He typed a quick word or number and the scrolling continued.
After about ten minutes, the wall made a sound like a tree frog and went blank. Mission accomplished. He put his thumb over the "off" button and said, "Review data, Aurora Bell."
Blocks of statistics, paragraphs of biography. "Faster, one hundred percent," Ybor said. He could read very fast with the drug's help.
Whittier was going to be disappointed. Dr. Bell either covered her tracks well or didn't have much of a past. Parking tickets and one for speeding. Now, this bit about her husband might be useful ...
The door made a faint ticksound and Ybor thumbed the display off. He half turned toward the door.
It wasn't Whittier; it was Malachi Barrett, the chancellor. He stepped away from the door and said, "Here." A uniformed policeman swiveled in with gun drawn; aimed, and fired.
Sergeant Rabin
It was a good clean shot, right into the biceps. The man was able to pull the dart out, but that didn't make any difference. He got partway out of the chair and then fell back, dazed.
"You are under arrest. Anything you say may be used as evidence. A copy of this proceeding will be provided for your defense attorney.
"Let it be noted that the drug 71 Tikan has been administered. Your testimony will be reviewed in that light.
"Ybor Lopez, you are charged with information theft and unauthorized decryptation. Do you wish to deny the validity of these charges?"
Ybor tried to look up at him but his head slumped. Then his whole body sagged forward and he fell out of the chair.
Rabin kneeled down and turned him over. His eyes had rolled back so that only the whites were visible. He felt for a pulse under the jaw.
"What's happening?" the chancellor asked. "Does this usually happen?"
"No, sir. I think it's a drug interaction. Seventy-one Tikan is psychotropic, and if the offender has taken some other psychotropic drug ... shit. There goes his pulse." He chinned a microphone switch. "Dispatch, this is Rabin in 16-dash-304. We have a code nine here, need help fast. Heart stopped." After a few seconds a female voice said they were on their way. Rabin had already begun cardio-pulmonary resuscitation.
After a minute of rhythmic shoving on the man's chest, alternating with breathing into his mouth, he asked Barrett, "Sir, can you do CPR?"
"Uh, no. I'm afraid not." He made an ineffectual gesture with both hands. "I've been meaning to take the course ... "
Another minute. "Find someone who can. I may need help." It was hard work, and Rabin was out of shape. He'd heard of people having heart attacks themselves while administering CPR. He didn't want to be part of an ironic newspaper story.
Barrett didn't go straight out the door, but first stepped over both of them to take something off the desk. Then he went out into the corridor and started knocking on doors and shouting at people.
"Code nine" meant that a suspect needed immediate medical attention. Sometimes the rescue unit dragged their feet a bit, since suspects were usually guilty, and a dead suspect meant less work all around.
Rabin was starting to have chest pains, which he knew were psychosomatic, when a middle-aged black man kneeled down next to him. "Need help?" Rabin nodded and rolled away, gasping.
He leaned back against the desk and watched his replacement: slower, but pretty good, considering that he'd probably never done it on a live person before. Of course this person was only somewhat alive.
Not armed, at least not obviously. So why had he been ordered to dart him on sight? If he was dangerous, why risk sending the chancellor along to identify him?
Could the dart have been switched—did he inadvertently fire a killer dart rather than a talker? No, he'd loaded the weapon himself when the call came in.
The dart was on the floor. He leaned over slowly, still hyperventilated, and picked it up. The charge cartridge was green-blue-green, 71 Tikan. He got a plastic bag out of his utility kit and dropped the cartridge in and put it in his pocket.
Other evidence. He stood up slowly and checked the desk. A keyboard, but nothing up on the wall. No crystal or cube in the readers. A notepad and stylus. He pushed the "previous message" corner of the notepad and got a crude drawing of a naked woman and a neatly printed phone number.
He wrote the number down in his notebook. Ma'am, you're being investigated in conjunction with a serious information crime. No, don't bother getting dressed. I'll just handcuff you to this bed here.
Chancellor Barrett stepped into the office. "Sir, what was it you took from the desk here?"
"Desk? Oh, nothing. Nothing ... I was just checking the notepad there."
"But I—"
"Nothing, Sergeant Rabin."
"Yes, sir." The old bastard, it must have been a cube or crystal from the reader. Whatever this guy was working on.
It put Rabin in an interesting situation. Under oath, or drugs, he would have to testify that he'd seen the chancellor take something from the desk. Did the chancellor realize that? Was the chancellor corrupt enough to threaten his job? His life?
"I was mistaken, sir. I thought I saw ... it was a confusing moment." The older man put a hand on his shoulder and squeezed, wordlessly.
The rescue unit, two men and a woman, came crowding in. They relieved the black man, ripped open the suspect's shirt, applied two inductor pads to his chest, and cranked his heart. He flopped around and coughed and retched. They had to repeat it twice before his heartbeat stablilized.
The woman stood up. "Should we take him to the cardiac ward or the secure ward?"
"Secure ward," Rabin said. "Have them find out what drug he's on. This was a 71 Tikan reaction."
"Probably a DD," she said. She made a gesture and her two helpers rolled the man onto a stretcher. They rushed him out the door.
The chancellor thanked the black man, Professor Pak, and ushered him out.
"Sir, if you don't need me, I'd better follow the ambulance."
"Of course, Sergeant. Thank you."
On the way to where he'd double-parked, Rabin called dispatch and said he was ambulance-chasing, headed for the secure ward at North Florida. He had to shout to be heard over the ambulance's shriek.
The historian
The sudden wail shattered his concentration. He watched the ambulance lift and sail down the street, followed by a squad car. What department was that building? Physics?
He capped the old-fashioned fountain pen and took a sip of his tea. He liked to work here, on the edge of the student food court, because nobody would sit down and say, hey, you writin' a book? There were distractions, but usually if it was sirens, they were of the female variety.
He opened the memorybook and typed in a date. It had every Gainesville newspaper from the Civil War onward. He reread an article for the dozenth time and continued writing: