CROSSING THE HALL, he found the operation-command room busy, in
a quiet and almost leisurely manner. Everybody knew what to do, and
was getting it done with a minimum of fuss. A group of men,
policemen and engineers, were huddled at a big table, going over
plans, on big sheets and on photoprint screens. More men, police
and maintenance people, gathered around a big solidigraph model of
the fourteenth, fifteenth and sixteenth levels, projected in a
tri-di screen. The thing was transparent, and looked almost
anatomical; well, Company House was an organism of a sort.
Respiratory system; the ventilation, in which everybody was
interested. Circulatory system; the water-lines. Excretory system;
sewage disposal.
And now it had been invaded by a couple of inimical microbes,
named Phil Novaes and Moses Herckerd, whom the police leucocytes
were seeking to neutralize.
He looked at it for a while, then strolled on to the banks of
viewscreens. Views of halls and vehicle-ways, mostly empty,
patrolled here and there by police or hastily mobilized and armed
maintenance workers. Views of landing stages, occupied by police
and observed from aircars. A view from a car a thousand feet over
the building, in which a few Constabulary and city police vehicles
circled slowly, blockading the building from outside. He nodded in
satisfaction; they couldn’t get out of the building, and as
soon as enough of the fifty-odd widely scattered locations from
which they might be operating could be eliminated, the police would
close in on them.
In one screen from a pickup installed over the door in the
gem-vault, he could see Morgan Lansky, Bert Eggers and two
detectives, coatless and perspiring, around the electrically warmed
tabletop, staring at the little rope ladder that dangled down
around the light-shade. In another screen, from a high pickup in a
corner of Harry Steefer’s office, the uniformed sergeant at
the desk watched Ernst Mallin and Ahmed Khadra fussing with a
screen, while Sandra Glenn sat on the floor talking to Diamond and
his three friends.
Harry Steefer sat alone at the command desk, keeping track of
everything at once. He went over and sat down beside him.
“Mr. Grego. We don’t seem to be making too much
progress,” the Chief said. “Everything’s secure
so far, though.”
“Have the news services gotten hold of it yet?”
“I don’t believe so. Planetwide News called the city
police to find out what all the cars were doing around Company
House; somebody told them that it was a shipment of valuables being
taken under guard to the space terminal. They seemed to accept
that.”
“We can’t sit on it indefinitely.”
“I hope we can till we catch these people.”
“Have you contacted Conrad Evins yet?”
“No. He’s not at home; here, I’ll show
you.”
Steefer punched out a call on one of his communication screens.
When it lighted, the chief gem buyer’s wide-browed, narrow
chinned face looked out of it.
“This is a recording, made at 2100, Conrad Evins speaking.
Mrs. Evins and I are going out; we will not be home until after
midnight,” Evins’s voice said. Then the screen
flickered, and the recording began again.
“I could put out an emergency call for him, but I
don’t want to,” Steefer said. “We don’t
know how many people outside the building are involved in this, and
we don’t want to alarm them.”
“No. Four men and one woman; the Fuzzies say there were
only two men, presumably Herckerd and Novaes, brought them here.
That means two men and a woman somewhere outside waiting for them.
And we don’t really need Evins, at present. It’s after
midnight now; we can keep calling at his home.”
Evins and his wife had probably gone to a show, or visiting.
Evins’s wife; he couldn’t seem to recall ever having
met her. He’d heard something or other about her . . . He
shoved that aside.
“Don’t they have little robo-snoopers they use to go
through the ventilation ducts?” he asked.
“Yes. Mr. Guerrin, the ventilation engineer, has a dozen
of them. He suggested using them, but I vetoed it till I could see
what you thought. Those things float on contragravity, and even a
miniature Abbot-drive generator makes quite an ultrasonic noise. We
still have two Fuzzies loose in the ventilation system; we
don’t want to scare them, do we?”
“No. Let them carry on. There’s a chance they may
come out in the gem-vault, if we don’t frighten
them.”
He looked across the room at the viewscreens. Khadra and Mallin
had their screen set up, Sandra had brought the Fuzzies over in
front of it, and Diamond seemed to be explaining about viewscreens
and audiovisual screens to the others. In the gem-vault screen,
Lansky and the others were leaning forward across the table,
listening. They had a couple of hearing aids, now, which Eggers and
one of his detectives were using. Lansky turned to make frantic
gestures at the pickup. Steefer picked up a speaker-phone and
advised everybody to pay attention to the gem-vault screen.
For one of those ten-second eternities nothing happened in the
screen. A moment later, a Fuzzy came climbing down the ladder. One
of the detectives would have grabbed him; Eggers stopped him. A
moment later, another Fuzzy appeared.
Eggers caught him by the feet with both hands and pulled him off
the ladder; the Fuzzy hit Eggers in the face with his fist. The
first Fuzzy, having dropped to the table, tried to get up the
ladder again; Lansky grabbed him. One of the detectives came to
Eggers’s assistance. Then the struggle was over, and the two
prisoners had been secured. Lansky was yelling:
“We got them both! We’re bringing them
up.”
Steefer yelled to the girl who was monitoring the screen to cut
in sound transmission and tell Lansky and one man to remain on
guard; Lansky acknowledged, and Eggers and one of the detectives
left the vault, each carrying a Fuzzy. In the screen from
Steefer’s office, they had an audiovisual of Moses Herckerd
on the screen; it was the employment interview film, and Herckerd
was talking about his educational background and former job
experience. Steefer was talking to the sergeant at his desk; the
latter beckoned Ahmed Khadra over.
“Good,” Khadra said, when Steefer told him what had
happened. “That’s all of them. We’ll run Herckerd
over for them when they come up, and show them Novaes.
They’re the two who brought them here tonight, the three we
have here all say so.”
“They’re still in here,” Steefer said.
“That leaves two men and a woman outside. I wonder . . . ”
“I think I know who they are, Chief.”
It was just a guess, of course, but it fitted. He had suddenly
remembered what he knew about Mrs. Conrad Evins.
When Leo Thaxter, now Loan Broker & Private Financier, first
came to Zarathustra ten years ago, a woman had come with him, but
she hadn’t been a wife or reasonable facsimile, she had been
a sister or reasonable facsimile. Rose Thaxter. After a while, she
had left Thaxter and married a company minerologist named Conrad
Evins, who, after the discovery of the sunstones, had become chief
company gem-buyer.
“What’s that call-number of Evins?” he asked
Steefer, and when Steefer gave it, he repeated it to Khadra.
“When those other Fuzzies come in, call it. It’ll be
answered by an audiovisual recording. See if the kids recognize
him.”
Steefer looked at him, more amused than surprised. “I
wouldn’t have thought of that, myself, Mr. Grego. It seems to
fit, though.”
“Hunch.” If anybody respected hunches, it would be a
cop. “I just remembered who Evins was married to. Rose
Thaxter.”
“Yeh!” Steefer muttered something else. “I
know that, too; I just never connected it. It all hangs together,
too.”
For a couple of minutes, they were both talking at the same
time, telling one another just how it did hang together, and
watching the screen from Steefer’s office. Eggers and the
detective were coming in, still coatless, carrying a Fuzzy apiece;
the one Eggers was carrying was trying to get the gun out of the
lieutenant’s shoulder-holster.
Of course it hung together. Somebody in the gang had to have
exact knowledge of the layout of the gem-vault, which Evins, and
very few others, could provide. The arrangement of the
ventilation-ducts wasn’t classified top-secret; anybody in
Evins’s position could have gotten that. They had to have a
place to keep the Fuzzies, big enough to build a replica of the gem
vault and of the ventilation system. Well, there were all those
vacant factories and warehouses out in the district everybody
called Mortgageville. The ones Hugo Ingermann had been acquiring
title to, with Thaxter as dummy buyer. How Herckerd and Novaes had
been roped in wasn’t immediately important; catch them and
question them and that would emerge. Ten to one, Rose Thaxter, Mrs.
Conrad Evins, was the connecting link and mainspring.
The Fuzzies in Steefer’s office were having a reunion.
Khadra and Mallin and Sandra were trying to get them to look at the
communication screen. He turned to Steefer.
“Get some men to Conrad Evins’s place; make a
thorough search, for anything that might look like evidence of
anything.”
“They won’t be there.”
“No. They’ll be in one of those buildings over in
Mortgageville, and we don’t know which one. I’m going
to call Ian Ferguson.”
He told Ferguson quickly what he suspected. The Constabulary
commandant nodded.
“Reasonable,” he agreed. “I’ll call the
city police for help; we’ll close the place off so nobody can
get in or out and then we’ll start making a search.
It’s only about two thousand square miles, and there are only
about three hundred buildings on it,” he added. “I
think I’ll call Casagra, too, and see how many Marines he can
give me.”
“Well, take your time searching; just make sure anybody
who’s there now stays there. We’ll give you what help
we can as soon as we can.”
He looked up at the screen from Steefer’s office. Khadra
had called Evins’s home, now, and he could hear Evins’s
recorded voice stating that he wouldn’t be home before
midnight. The Fuzzies evidently recognized him. It was also evident
that they didn’t like him.
“And put out a general alert to pick up Evins, Mrs. Evins,
and Leo Thaxter, and I don’t think you need to worry about
how much noise you make doing it.”
“And Ivan Bowlby, and Raul Laporte, and Spike
Heenan,” Ferguson added. “And any or all of their
hoods.” He thought for a moment. “And Hugo Ingermann.
We may finally have grounds for interrogating him as a suspect.
I’ll call Gus Brannhard, too.”
“And Leslie Coombes; he’ll be a help.”
“All right, everybody!” Steefer was calling out with
his loudspeaker. “We have all the Fuzzies out; now
let’s get the show started!” Then he rose and went
around the desk.
Khadra was on the communication screen from the Chief’s
desk:
“They made that fellow Evins, all right. He was one of the
gang. Who is he?”
“Well, he used to be the Company’s chief gem-buyer,
up to fifteen minutes ago, but now he has been discharged, without
notice, severance pay or recommendation.” He thought for a
moment. “Captain, are those Fuzzies’ feet dirty?”
he asked.
“Huh?” Khadra stared at him for an instant, then
nodded. “Yes, they are; gray-brown dust. Same kind of dust on
their fur.”
“Uhuh; that’s good.” He rose and went to the
big table and the solidigraph, where Steefer was already talking to
a dozen or so men. He saw Niles Guerrin, the ventilation engineer,
and pulled him aside.
“Niles, the insides of those ducts are dusty?” he
asked.
“The ones that carry stale air to the
reconditioners,” Guerrin replied. “Dust from the air in
the rooms . . . ”
“They’re the ones we’re interested in. Now,
these snoopers, robo-inspectors; could they pick up tracks the
Fuzzies make, or traces where they’ve brushed against the
sides of the ducts?”
“Yes, sure. They have a full optical reception and
transmission system for visible light and infra-red light, and
controllable magnifying vision . . . ”
“How soon can you get them started, from the gem-vault and
from the captain’s office in detective
headquarters?”
“Right away; we’ve set up screens and controls for
them in here; did that right at the start.”
“Good.” He raised his voice. “Chief! Captain
Hurtado, Lieutenant Mortlake; do-bizzo. We’re going to fill
the ventilation system with snoopers, now.”
PHIL NOVAES LOOKED at his watch. It was still 0130, the damned
thing must have stopped, and he was sure he’d wound it.
Holding his wrist to catch the dim light from above he squinted at
the second-hand. It was still making its slow circuit around the
dial. It must have been only a few seconds since he had looked at
it last.
“Herk, let’s get the hell out of here,” he
urged. “They aren’t coming out at all. It’s been
an hour since the last two went in.”
“Thirty-five minutes,” Herckerd said.
“Well, it’s been over an hour since the other three
went in. Something’s gone wrong; we’ll wait here till
hell freezes over . . . ”
“We’ll wait here a little longer, Phil. We still
have fifty million in sunstones to wait for, and we want to get
those Fuzzies and shut them up for good.”
“We have better than fifty million already. All
we’ll get’ll be a hole in the head if we stay around
here any longer. I know what’s happened, those Fuzzies have
gone out some other way; they’re running around loose,
packing sunstones . . . ”
“Be quiet, Phil.” Herckerd reached to his shirt
pocket to turn on his hearing aid and put his head to the
ventilation duct opening. “I hear something in there.”
He snapped off the hearing aid, listened, and snapped it on again.
“It’s ultrasonic, whatever it is. Probably vibration in
the walls of the duct. Now just take it easy, Phil. Nobody knows
there’s anything happening at all. Grego’s the only man
in Company House that can open that vault, and he won’t open
it for a couple of weeks, at least. All the stones from
Evins’s office were put away yesterday. It’ll take that
long before anybody knows they’re gone.”
“Suppose those Fuzzies got out somewhere else. My God,
they could have come out right in the police area.” That
could have happened; he wished he hadn’t thought of it, but
now that he had, he was sure that was what had happened. “If
they did, everybody in the building’s looking for
us.”
Herckerd wasn’t listening to him. He’d turned off
his hearing aid, and was squatting by the intake port, peeling the
wrapper from a chewing-gum stick and putting the wrapper carefully
in his pocket. Another piece of foolishness; no reason at all why
they couldn’t smoke here. He listened with his hearing aid
again. The noise, whatever it was, was louder.
“There’s something in there.” He pulled the
goggles down from his cap and took out his infrared flashlight.
“Don’t do that,” Herckerd said sharply.
He disregarded the warning and turned the invisible light into
the duct. There was something moving forward toward the opening; it
wasn’t a Fuzzy. It was a bulbous-nosed metallic thing,
floating slowly toward him.
“It’s a snooper! Look, Herk; somebody’s wise
to us. They have a snooper in the duct . . . ”
“Get the stones in the box! Right away!” Herckerd
ordered.
“Ah, so there was something went wrong!”
He snapped the suitcase shut, shoved it into the box on the
contragravity lifter, and fastened the lid, then snapped the hook
of his safety-belt onto one of the rings on the lifter. There was a
crash behind him, and when he turned, Herckerd was holstering his
pistol. Then he, too, snapped his safety-strap to the lifter, and
pulled loose the two poles with hooked and spiked tips, passing one
over and slipping the thong of the other over his wrist.
“Full lift,” he said. “Let’s
go.”
He fumbled for a second or so at the switch, then turned it on.
The whole thing, lifter, box, and he and Herckerd, were pulled up
from the ledge and swung out into the shaft.
“What did you have to shoot for?” he demanded,
pushing with his boathook-like pole. “Everybody in the place
heard you.”
“You want that thing following us?” Herckerd asked.
“Watch out; watermain right above!”
Maybe the snooper was just making a routine inspection; maybe
Herckerd had finally panicked, after all his pretense of calmness.
No. Something had gone wrong. Those damned Fuzzies had gone out the
wrong way, somebody’d found them . . . There were more pipes
and conduits and things in the way; he remembered the trouble
they’d had getting past them on the way down. He and Herckerd
had to push and pull with their poles and for a moment he thought
they were inextricably stuck, they’d never get loose, they
were wedged in here . . . Then the lifter was rising again, and he
could see the network of obstructions receding below, and the white
XV’s on the sides of the shaft had become XIV’s, so
they were off the fifteenth level. Only five more levels and a
couple of floors to go.
But he could hear voices, from loudspeakers, all around:
“Cars P-18, P-19, P-20; fourteenth level, fourth floor,
location DA-231.”
“Riot-car 12, up to thirteen, sixth floor . . . ”
He swore at Herckerd. “Sure, it’ll be a month before
they find out what’s happened!”
“Shut up. We get out of the shaft two floors up, to the
left. They have the shaft plugged at the top.”
“Yes, and walk right into them,” he argued.
“We’ll lift into them if we keep on here;
we’ll have a chance if we get out of this.”
They worked the lifter around the central clump of water and
sewer and ventilation mains, pushing away from it and then hooking
onto handholds and drawing the lifter into a lateral passage,
floating along it for a hundred feet before Herckerd could get at
the lifter controls and set it down. Then he unsnapped his
safety-strap and staggered for a moment before he found his
footing.
It was a service-passage, wide enough for one of the little
hall-cars, or for a jeep; maintenance workers used it to get at
air-fans and water-pumps. They started along it, towing the lifter
after them, looking to right and left for some means of egress.
There should be other vertical shafts, but they would be covered,
too.
“How are we going to get out of this?”
“How the hell do I know?” Herckerd retorted.
“How do I know we’re going to get out at all?” He
stopped for a moment and then pointed to an open doorway on the
left. “Stairway; we’ll go up there.”
They crossed to it. From somewhere down the bare, dimly-lighted
passage, an amplified voice was shouting indistinguishable words.
The passage connected with another, or a hallway. They
couldn’t go ahead; that was sure.
“We can’t get the lifter through.” He knew it,
and still tried; the lifter wouldn’t go through the narrow
door. “We’ll have to carry the suitcase.”
“Get the box off the lifter,” Herckerd said.
“We can’t carry that suitcase ourselves; they’d
catch us in no time. Get the suitcase out of it.”
The box, four feet by four by three, with airholes at the top,
had been necessary when they had the Fuzzies to carry; they
didn’t have to bother with them now. He opened it and lifted
out the suitcase. No; they couldn’t carry that, not and do
any running. It was fastened with screws to the
contragravity-lifter. Herckerd had his pocket-knife out, with the
screwdriver blade open, and was working to remove the brackets.
“Well, where’ll we go . . . ?”
“Don’t argue, goddamit; get to work. Is there any
extra rope ladder in that box? If there is, we’ll use it to
tie the suitcase on . . . ”
Over Herckerd’s shoulder, he saw the jeep enter the
passage from the intersecting hall a hundred feet away. For an
instant, he was frozen with fright. Then he screamed, “Behind
you!” and threw himself through the open doorway, stumbling
to the foot of a flight of narrow steel steps and then running up
them. A pistol roared twice just outside the door, and then a
submachine gun let go, a ripping two-second burst, a second of
silence, and then another. Then voices shouted.
They got Herckerd. They got the sunstones, too. Then he forgot
about both. Just get away, get far away, get away fast.
There was a steel door at the head of the stairs. Oh, God,
please don’t let it be locked! He flung himself at it,
gripping the latch-handle.
It wasn’t. The door swung open, and he stumbled through
and closed it behind him, hearing, as he did, voices coming up from
below. Then he turned, in the lighted hallway beyond.
There was a policeman standing not fifteen feet away, holding a
short carbine with a thick, flaring muzzle, a stunner. He crouched,
grabbing for his pistol. Then the blunderbuss muzzle of the stunner
swung toward him at the policeman’s hip. He had the pistol
half drawn when the lights all went out and a crushing shock hit
him, shaking and jarring him into oblivion.
THE OPERATION-COMMAND ROOM was silent. When the voice from the
screen speaker ceased, there was not a sound for an instant. Then
there was a soft susurration; everybody in the place was exhaling
at once. Grego found that he had been holding his own breath. So
had Harry Steefer; he was exhaling noisily.
“Well, that’s it,” the Chief said.
“I’m glad they took Novaes alive, anyhow. It’ll
be a couple of hours before he’s able to talk.” He
picked up his cigarette pack, shook one out for himself and offered
it.
Moses Herckerd wouldn’t do any talking; he’d taken a
dozen submachine gun bullets.
“What’ll we do with the sunstones?” the voice
from the screen asked.
“Take them to the gem-vault; we’ll sort them over
tomorrow or when we have time.” He turned to the open screens
to city police and Colonial Constabulary. The non-coms who had
been on them were replaced by Ralph Earlie and Ian Ferguson,
respectively. “You hear what was going on?” he
asked.
“We got most of it,” Ferguson said, and Earlie said,
“You got them, and you got the stones back, but just what did
happen?”
“They had a contragravity-lifter; they used it to get up
one of the main conduit shafts, and then they got into a
maintenance passage on the fourteenth level down. One of our jeeps
caught them; Herckerd tried to put up a fight and got shot to
hamburger; Novaes ran up a flight of stairs and came out in a hall
right in front of a cop with a sono-stunner. When he comes to,
we’ll question him and check his story with the
Fuzzies,” he said. “How are you doing at
Mortgageville?”
“We have the place surrounded,” Ferguson said.
“They might get out on foot; they won’t in a vehicle.
We have three Navy landing-craft loaded with detection equipment
circling overhead, and Casagra has a hundred Marines along with my
men.”
“I can’t help on that, at all,” the
Mallorysport police chief said. “I have all my men out making
raids, and if you don’t need that blockade around Company
House any more, I want the men who are there. We have Ivan Bowlby,
Spike Heenan and Raul Laporte, and we’re pulling in everybody
that’s ever had anything to do with any of them, or Leo
Thaxter. We don’t have Thaxter, yet. I suppose he’s at
Mortgageville, along with the Evinses, waiting for Herckerd and
Novaes to bring in the loot. And we have Hugo Ingermann, and this
time he can’t talk himself out. We got Judge Pendarvis out of
bed, and he signed warrants for all of them; reasonable grounds for
suspicion and authority to veridicate. We’re saving him for
last; we’ve just started on the small-fry.”
There wasn’t any question in his mind that Leo Thaxter was
involved in the attempt on the gem-vault. Whether Bowlby or Heenan
or Laporte had anything to do with it was more or less immaterial.
They could be questioned, not only about that but about anything
else, and anything they admitted under veridication was admissible
as evidence against them, self incriminatory or not.
“Well, I’m going over and see what they’ve
been getting from the Fuzzies,” he said. “There ought
to be quite a little, by now.” He glanced up at the screen
from Steefer’s office; half a dozen people were there now,
and he was surprised to see Jack Holloway among them. He
couldn’t have flown in from Beta Continent since this had
started. “I’ll call back, or have somebody call,
later.”
Crossing the hall, he joined the group who were interviewing the
five Herckerd-Novaes-Evins-Thaxter Fuzzies. Juan Jimenez was there,
so were a couple of doctors who had been working with Fuzzies at
the reception center. So was Claudette Pendarvis. Jack Holloway met
him as he entered, and they shook hands.
“I thought there might be something I could do to
help,” he said. “Listen, Mr. Grego, you’re not
going to bring any charges against these Fuzzies, are
you?”
“Good Lord, no!”
“Well, they’re sapient beings, and they broke the
law,” Holloway said.
“They are legally ten-year-old children,” Judge
Pendarvis’s wife said. “They are not morally
responsible; they were taught to do this by humans.”
“Yes, faginy, along with enslavement,” Ahmed Khadra
said. “Mandatory death by shooting for that, too.”
“And I hope they shoot that Evins woman first of all;
she’s the worst of the lot,” Sandra Glenn said.
“She’s the one who used the electric shock-rod on them
when they made mistakes.”
“Mr. Grego,” Ernst Mallin interrupted. “I
don’t understand this. These Fuzzyphones are simple enough
for any Fuzzy to operate; all they need to do is hold the little
pistol-grip and the switch works automatically. Diamond can talk
audibly, but he simply cannot teach any of these other Fuzzies to
use it. You don’t have your hearing aid on, do you? Well,
listen to this.”
Diamond used his Fuzzyphone; he spoke quite audibly. When he
gave it to any of the others, all they produced was,
“Yeek.”
“Let me see that thing.” He took it from Diamond and
carried it over to the desk; rummaging in the top middle drawer, he
found a little screwdriver and took it apart. The mechanism seemed
to be all right. He removed the tiny power-unit and exchanged it
for a similar one from a flashlight he found in the Chief’s
desk. The flashlight wouldn’t light. He handed the Fuzzyphone
to Mallin.
“Give this to one of the others, not Diamond. Have him say
something.”
Mallin handed the Fuzzyphone to one of the pair whom Lansky and
Eggers had captured in the vault, and asked him a question. Holding
the Fuzzyphone to his mouth, the Fuzzy answered quite audibly.
Three or four of the humans said, “What the hell?” or
words to that effect.
“Diamond, you not need talk-thing to make talk like Big
One,” he said. “You make talk like Big One any time.
You make talk like Big One now.”
“Like this?” Diamond asked.
“How does he do it?” Mrs. Pendarvis demanded.
“Their voices aren’t audible, at all.”
“You think the power-unit gave out, and he just went on
copying the sounds he was accustomed to make with the
Fuzzyphone?” Mallin asked.
“That’s right. He heard himself speak in the audible
range, and he just learned to pitch his voice to imitate his own
transformed voice. I’ll bet he’s been talking audibly
for weeks, and we never knew it.”
“Bet he didn’t know it, either,” Jack Holloway
said. “Mr. Grego, do you think he could teach other Fuzzies
to do that?”
“That would be kind of hard, wouldn’t it?”
Mallin asked. “Does he really know, himself, how he does
it?”
“Mr. Grego!” the police sergeant, who was still
keeping half an eye on the communication screen, broke in. The
Chief wants to know if you want to go to the gem-vault and check
the contents of that suitcase.”
“Has anybody else checked it?”
“Well, Captain Lansky has, but . . . ”
“Then lock it up in the vault; I don’t have to do
that. The Nifflheim with it. I’ll check it tomorrow.
I’m busy, now.”
CROSSING THE HALL, he found the operation-command room busy, in
a quiet and almost leisurely manner. Everybody knew what to do, and
was getting it done with a minimum of fuss. A group of men,
policemen and engineers, were huddled at a big table, going over
plans, on big sheets and on photoprint screens. More men, police
and maintenance people, gathered around a big solidigraph model of
the fourteenth, fifteenth and sixteenth levels, projected in a
tri-di screen. The thing was transparent, and looked almost
anatomical; well, Company House was an organism of a sort.
Respiratory system; the ventilation, in which everybody was
interested. Circulatory system; the water-lines. Excretory system;
sewage disposal.
And now it had been invaded by a couple of inimical microbes,
named Phil Novaes and Moses Herckerd, whom the police leucocytes
were seeking to neutralize.
He looked at it for a while, then strolled on to the banks of
viewscreens. Views of halls and vehicle-ways, mostly empty,
patrolled here and there by police or hastily mobilized and armed
maintenance workers. Views of landing stages, occupied by police
and observed from aircars. A view from a car a thousand feet over
the building, in which a few Constabulary and city police vehicles
circled slowly, blockading the building from outside. He nodded in
satisfaction; they couldn’t get out of the building, and as
soon as enough of the fifty-odd widely scattered locations from
which they might be operating could be eliminated, the police would
close in on them.
In one screen from a pickup installed over the door in the
gem-vault, he could see Morgan Lansky, Bert Eggers and two
detectives, coatless and perspiring, around the electrically warmed
tabletop, staring at the little rope ladder that dangled down
around the light-shade. In another screen, from a high pickup in a
corner of Harry Steefer’s office, the uniformed sergeant at
the desk watched Ernst Mallin and Ahmed Khadra fussing with a
screen, while Sandra Glenn sat on the floor talking to Diamond and
his three friends.
Harry Steefer sat alone at the command desk, keeping track of
everything at once. He went over and sat down beside him.
“Mr. Grego. We don’t seem to be making too much
progress,” the Chief said. “Everything’s secure
so far, though.”
“Have the news services gotten hold of it yet?”
“I don’t believe so. Planetwide News called the city
police to find out what all the cars were doing around Company
House; somebody told them that it was a shipment of valuables being
taken under guard to the space terminal. They seemed to accept
that.”
“We can’t sit on it indefinitely.”
“I hope we can till we catch these people.”
“Have you contacted Conrad Evins yet?”
“No. He’s not at home; here, I’ll show
you.”
Steefer punched out a call on one of his communication screens.
When it lighted, the chief gem buyer’s wide-browed, narrow
chinned face looked out of it.
“This is a recording, made at 2100, Conrad Evins speaking.
Mrs. Evins and I are going out; we will not be home until after
midnight,” Evins’s voice said. Then the screen
flickered, and the recording began again.
“I could put out an emergency call for him, but I
don’t want to,” Steefer said. “We don’t
know how many people outside the building are involved in this, and
we don’t want to alarm them.”
“No. Four men and one woman; the Fuzzies say there were
only two men, presumably Herckerd and Novaes, brought them here.
That means two men and a woman somewhere outside waiting for them.
And we don’t really need Evins, at present. It’s after
midnight now; we can keep calling at his home.”
Evins and his wife had probably gone to a show, or visiting.
Evins’s wife; he couldn’t seem to recall ever having
met her. He’d heard something or other about her . . . He
shoved that aside.
“Don’t they have little robo-snoopers they use to go
through the ventilation ducts?” he asked.
“Yes. Mr. Guerrin, the ventilation engineer, has a dozen
of them. He suggested using them, but I vetoed it till I could see
what you thought. Those things float on contragravity, and even a
miniature Abbot-drive generator makes quite an ultrasonic noise. We
still have two Fuzzies loose in the ventilation system; we
don’t want to scare them, do we?”
“No. Let them carry on. There’s a chance they may
come out in the gem-vault, if we don’t frighten
them.”
He looked across the room at the viewscreens. Khadra and Mallin
had their screen set up, Sandra had brought the Fuzzies over in
front of it, and Diamond seemed to be explaining about viewscreens
and audiovisual screens to the others. In the gem-vault screen,
Lansky and the others were leaning forward across the table,
listening. They had a couple of hearing aids, now, which Eggers and
one of his detectives were using. Lansky turned to make frantic
gestures at the pickup. Steefer picked up a speaker-phone and
advised everybody to pay attention to the gem-vault screen.
For one of those ten-second eternities nothing happened in the
screen. A moment later, a Fuzzy came climbing down the ladder. One
of the detectives would have grabbed him; Eggers stopped him. A
moment later, another Fuzzy appeared.
Eggers caught him by the feet with both hands and pulled him off
the ladder; the Fuzzy hit Eggers in the face with his fist. The
first Fuzzy, having dropped to the table, tried to get up the
ladder again; Lansky grabbed him. One of the detectives came to
Eggers’s assistance. Then the struggle was over, and the two
prisoners had been secured. Lansky was yelling:
“We got them both! We’re bringing them
up.”
Steefer yelled to the girl who was monitoring the screen to cut
in sound transmission and tell Lansky and one man to remain on
guard; Lansky acknowledged, and Eggers and one of the detectives
left the vault, each carrying a Fuzzy. In the screen from
Steefer’s office, they had an audiovisual of Moses Herckerd
on the screen; it was the employment interview film, and Herckerd
was talking about his educational background and former job
experience. Steefer was talking to the sergeant at his desk; the
latter beckoned Ahmed Khadra over.
“Good,” Khadra said, when Steefer told him what had
happened. “That’s all of them. We’ll run Herckerd
over for them when they come up, and show them Novaes.
They’re the two who brought them here tonight, the three we
have here all say so.”
“They’re still in here,” Steefer said.
“That leaves two men and a woman outside. I wonder . . . ”
“I think I know who they are, Chief.”
It was just a guess, of course, but it fitted. He had suddenly
remembered what he knew about Mrs. Conrad Evins.
When Leo Thaxter, now Loan Broker & Private Financier, first
came to Zarathustra ten years ago, a woman had come with him, but
she hadn’t been a wife or reasonable facsimile, she had been
a sister or reasonable facsimile. Rose Thaxter. After a while, she
had left Thaxter and married a company minerologist named Conrad
Evins, who, after the discovery of the sunstones, had become chief
company gem-buyer.
“What’s that call-number of Evins?” he asked
Steefer, and when Steefer gave it, he repeated it to Khadra.
“When those other Fuzzies come in, call it. It’ll be
answered by an audiovisual recording. See if the kids recognize
him.”
Steefer looked at him, more amused than surprised. “I
wouldn’t have thought of that, myself, Mr. Grego. It seems to
fit, though.”
“Hunch.” If anybody respected hunches, it would be a
cop. “I just remembered who Evins was married to. Rose
Thaxter.”
“Yeh!” Steefer muttered something else. “I
know that, too; I just never connected it. It all hangs together,
too.”
For a couple of minutes, they were both talking at the same
time, telling one another just how it did hang together, and
watching the screen from Steefer’s office. Eggers and the
detective were coming in, still coatless, carrying a Fuzzy apiece;
the one Eggers was carrying was trying to get the gun out of the
lieutenant’s shoulder-holster.
Of course it hung together. Somebody in the gang had to have
exact knowledge of the layout of the gem-vault, which Evins, and
very few others, could provide. The arrangement of the
ventilation-ducts wasn’t classified top-secret; anybody in
Evins’s position could have gotten that. They had to have a
place to keep the Fuzzies, big enough to build a replica of the gem
vault and of the ventilation system. Well, there were all those
vacant factories and warehouses out in the district everybody
called Mortgageville. The ones Hugo Ingermann had been acquiring
title to, with Thaxter as dummy buyer. How Herckerd and Novaes had
been roped in wasn’t immediately important; catch them and
question them and that would emerge. Ten to one, Rose Thaxter, Mrs.
Conrad Evins, was the connecting link and mainspring.
The Fuzzies in Steefer’s office were having a reunion.
Khadra and Mallin and Sandra were trying to get them to look at the
communication screen. He turned to Steefer.
“Get some men to Conrad Evins’s place; make a
thorough search, for anything that might look like evidence of
anything.”
“They won’t be there.”
“No. They’ll be in one of those buildings over in
Mortgageville, and we don’t know which one. I’m going
to call Ian Ferguson.”
He told Ferguson quickly what he suspected. The Constabulary
commandant nodded.
“Reasonable,” he agreed. “I’ll call the
city police for help; we’ll close the place off so nobody can
get in or out and then we’ll start making a search.
It’s only about two thousand square miles, and there are only
about three hundred buildings on it,” he added. “I
think I’ll call Casagra, too, and see how many Marines he can
give me.”
“Well, take your time searching; just make sure anybody
who’s there now stays there. We’ll give you what help
we can as soon as we can.”
He looked up at the screen from Steefer’s office. Khadra
had called Evins’s home, now, and he could hear Evins’s
recorded voice stating that he wouldn’t be home before
midnight. The Fuzzies evidently recognized him. It was also evident
that they didn’t like him.
“And put out a general alert to pick up Evins, Mrs. Evins,
and Leo Thaxter, and I don’t think you need to worry about
how much noise you make doing it.”
“And Ivan Bowlby, and Raul Laporte, and Spike
Heenan,” Ferguson added. “And any or all of their
hoods.” He thought for a moment. “And Hugo Ingermann.
We may finally have grounds for interrogating him as a suspect.
I’ll call Gus Brannhard, too.”
“And Leslie Coombes; he’ll be a help.”
“All right, everybody!” Steefer was calling out with
his loudspeaker. “We have all the Fuzzies out; now
let’s get the show started!” Then he rose and went
around the desk.
Khadra was on the communication screen from the Chief’s
desk:
“They made that fellow Evins, all right. He was one of the
gang. Who is he?”
“Well, he used to be the Company’s chief gem-buyer,
up to fifteen minutes ago, but now he has been discharged, without
notice, severance pay or recommendation.” He thought for a
moment. “Captain, are those Fuzzies’ feet dirty?”
he asked.
“Huh?” Khadra stared at him for an instant, then
nodded. “Yes, they are; gray-brown dust. Same kind of dust on
their fur.”
“Uhuh; that’s good.” He rose and went to the
big table and the solidigraph, where Steefer was already talking to
a dozen or so men. He saw Niles Guerrin, the ventilation engineer,
and pulled him aside.
“Niles, the insides of those ducts are dusty?” he
asked.
“The ones that carry stale air to the
reconditioners,” Guerrin replied. “Dust from the air in
the rooms . . . ”
“They’re the ones we’re interested in. Now,
these snoopers, robo-inspectors; could they pick up tracks the
Fuzzies make, or traces where they’ve brushed against the
sides of the ducts?”
“Yes, sure. They have a full optical reception and
transmission system for visible light and infra-red light, and
controllable magnifying vision . . . ”
“How soon can you get them started, from the gem-vault and
from the captain’s office in detective
headquarters?”
“Right away; we’ve set up screens and controls for
them in here; did that right at the start.”
“Good.” He raised his voice. “Chief! Captain
Hurtado, Lieutenant Mortlake; do-bizzo. We’re going to fill
the ventilation system with snoopers, now.”
PHIL NOVAES LOOKED at his watch. It was still 0130, the damned
thing must have stopped, and he was sure he’d wound it.
Holding his wrist to catch the dim light from above he squinted at
the second-hand. It was still making its slow circuit around the
dial. It must have been only a few seconds since he had looked at
it last.
“Herk, let’s get the hell out of here,” he
urged. “They aren’t coming out at all. It’s been
an hour since the last two went in.”
“Thirty-five minutes,” Herckerd said.
“Well, it’s been over an hour since the other three
went in. Something’s gone wrong; we’ll wait here till
hell freezes over . . . ”
“We’ll wait here a little longer, Phil. We still
have fifty million in sunstones to wait for, and we want to get
those Fuzzies and shut them up for good.”
“We have better than fifty million already. All
we’ll get’ll be a hole in the head if we stay around
here any longer. I know what’s happened, those Fuzzies have
gone out some other way; they’re running around loose,
packing sunstones . . . ”
“Be quiet, Phil.” Herckerd reached to his shirt
pocket to turn on his hearing aid and put his head to the
ventilation duct opening. “I hear something in there.”
He snapped off the hearing aid, listened, and snapped it on again.
“It’s ultrasonic, whatever it is. Probably vibration in
the walls of the duct. Now just take it easy, Phil. Nobody knows
there’s anything happening at all. Grego’s the only man
in Company House that can open that vault, and he won’t open
it for a couple of weeks, at least. All the stones from
Evins’s office were put away yesterday. It’ll take that
long before anybody knows they’re gone.”
“Suppose those Fuzzies got out somewhere else. My God,
they could have come out right in the police area.” That
could have happened; he wished he hadn’t thought of it, but
now that he had, he was sure that was what had happened. “If
they did, everybody in the building’s looking for
us.”
Herckerd wasn’t listening to him. He’d turned off
his hearing aid, and was squatting by the intake port, peeling the
wrapper from a chewing-gum stick and putting the wrapper carefully
in his pocket. Another piece of foolishness; no reason at all why
they couldn’t smoke here. He listened with his hearing aid
again. The noise, whatever it was, was louder.
“There’s something in there.” He pulled the
goggles down from his cap and took out his infrared flashlight.
“Don’t do that,” Herckerd said sharply.
He disregarded the warning and turned the invisible light into
the duct. There was something moving forward toward the opening; it
wasn’t a Fuzzy. It was a bulbous-nosed metallic thing,
floating slowly toward him.
“It’s a snooper! Look, Herk; somebody’s wise
to us. They have a snooper in the duct . . . ”
“Get the stones in the box! Right away!” Herckerd
ordered.
“Ah, so there was something went wrong!”
He snapped the suitcase shut, shoved it into the box on the
contragravity lifter, and fastened the lid, then snapped the hook
of his safety-belt onto one of the rings on the lifter. There was a
crash behind him, and when he turned, Herckerd was holstering his
pistol. Then he, too, snapped his safety-strap to the lifter, and
pulled loose the two poles with hooked and spiked tips, passing one
over and slipping the thong of the other over his wrist.
“Full lift,” he said. “Let’s
go.”
He fumbled for a second or so at the switch, then turned it on.
The whole thing, lifter, box, and he and Herckerd, were pulled up
from the ledge and swung out into the shaft.
“What did you have to shoot for?” he demanded,
pushing with his boathook-like pole. “Everybody in the place
heard you.”
“You want that thing following us?” Herckerd asked.
“Watch out; watermain right above!”
Maybe the snooper was just making a routine inspection; maybe
Herckerd had finally panicked, after all his pretense of calmness.
No. Something had gone wrong. Those damned Fuzzies had gone out the
wrong way, somebody’d found them . . . There were more pipes
and conduits and things in the way; he remembered the trouble
they’d had getting past them on the way down. He and Herckerd
had to push and pull with their poles and for a moment he thought
they were inextricably stuck, they’d never get loose, they
were wedged in here . . . Then the lifter was rising again, and he
could see the network of obstructions receding below, and the white
XV’s on the sides of the shaft had become XIV’s, so
they were off the fifteenth level. Only five more levels and a
couple of floors to go.
But he could hear voices, from loudspeakers, all around:
“Cars P-18, P-19, P-20; fourteenth level, fourth floor,
location DA-231.”
“Riot-car 12, up to thirteen, sixth floor . . . ”
He swore at Herckerd. “Sure, it’ll be a month before
they find out what’s happened!”
“Shut up. We get out of the shaft two floors up, to the
left. They have the shaft plugged at the top.”
“Yes, and walk right into them,” he argued.
“We’ll lift into them if we keep on here;
we’ll have a chance if we get out of this.”
They worked the lifter around the central clump of water and
sewer and ventilation mains, pushing away from it and then hooking
onto handholds and drawing the lifter into a lateral passage,
floating along it for a hundred feet before Herckerd could get at
the lifter controls and set it down. Then he unsnapped his
safety-strap and staggered for a moment before he found his
footing.
It was a service-passage, wide enough for one of the little
hall-cars, or for a jeep; maintenance workers used it to get at
air-fans and water-pumps. They started along it, towing the lifter
after them, looking to right and left for some means of egress.
There should be other vertical shafts, but they would be covered,
too.
“How are we going to get out of this?”
“How the hell do I know?” Herckerd retorted.
“How do I know we’re going to get out at all?” He
stopped for a moment and then pointed to an open doorway on the
left. “Stairway; we’ll go up there.”
They crossed to it. From somewhere down the bare, dimly-lighted
passage, an amplified voice was shouting indistinguishable words.
The passage connected with another, or a hallway. They
couldn’t go ahead; that was sure.
“We can’t get the lifter through.” He knew it,
and still tried; the lifter wouldn’t go through the narrow
door. “We’ll have to carry the suitcase.”
“Get the box off the lifter,” Herckerd said.
“We can’t carry that suitcase ourselves; they’d
catch us in no time. Get the suitcase out of it.”
The box, four feet by four by three, with airholes at the top,
had been necessary when they had the Fuzzies to carry; they
didn’t have to bother with them now. He opened it and lifted
out the suitcase. No; they couldn’t carry that, not and do
any running. It was fastened with screws to the
contragravity-lifter. Herckerd had his pocket-knife out, with the
screwdriver blade open, and was working to remove the brackets.
“Well, where’ll we go . . . ?”
“Don’t argue, goddamit; get to work. Is there any
extra rope ladder in that box? If there is, we’ll use it to
tie the suitcase on . . . ”
Over Herckerd’s shoulder, he saw the jeep enter the
passage from the intersecting hall a hundred feet away. For an
instant, he was frozen with fright. Then he screamed, “Behind
you!” and threw himself through the open doorway, stumbling
to the foot of a flight of narrow steel steps and then running up
them. A pistol roared twice just outside the door, and then a
submachine gun let go, a ripping two-second burst, a second of
silence, and then another. Then voices shouted.
They got Herckerd. They got the sunstones, too. Then he forgot
about both. Just get away, get far away, get away fast.
There was a steel door at the head of the stairs. Oh, God,
please don’t let it be locked! He flung himself at it,
gripping the latch-handle.
It wasn’t. The door swung open, and he stumbled through
and closed it behind him, hearing, as he did, voices coming up from
below. Then he turned, in the lighted hallway beyond.
There was a policeman standing not fifteen feet away, holding a
short carbine with a thick, flaring muzzle, a stunner. He crouched,
grabbing for his pistol. Then the blunderbuss muzzle of the stunner
swung toward him at the policeman’s hip. He had the pistol
half drawn when the lights all went out and a crushing shock hit
him, shaking and jarring him into oblivion.
THE OPERATION-COMMAND ROOM was silent. When the voice from the
screen speaker ceased, there was not a sound for an instant. Then
there was a soft susurration; everybody in the place was exhaling
at once. Grego found that he had been holding his own breath. So
had Harry Steefer; he was exhaling noisily.
“Well, that’s it,” the Chief said.
“I’m glad they took Novaes alive, anyhow. It’ll
be a couple of hours before he’s able to talk.” He
picked up his cigarette pack, shook one out for himself and offered
it.
Moses Herckerd wouldn’t do any talking; he’d taken a
dozen submachine gun bullets.
“What’ll we do with the sunstones?” the voice
from the screen asked.
“Take them to the gem-vault; we’ll sort them over
tomorrow or when we have time.” He turned to the open screens
to city police and Colonial Constabulary. The non-coms who had
been on them were replaced by Ralph Earlie and Ian Ferguson,
respectively. “You hear what was going on?” he
asked.
“We got most of it,” Ferguson said, and Earlie said,
“You got them, and you got the stones back, but just what did
happen?”
“They had a contragravity-lifter; they used it to get up
one of the main conduit shafts, and then they got into a
maintenance passage on the fourteenth level down. One of our jeeps
caught them; Herckerd tried to put up a fight and got shot to
hamburger; Novaes ran up a flight of stairs and came out in a hall
right in front of a cop with a sono-stunner. When he comes to,
we’ll question him and check his story with the
Fuzzies,” he said. “How are you doing at
Mortgageville?”
“We have the place surrounded,” Ferguson said.
“They might get out on foot; they won’t in a vehicle.
We have three Navy landing-craft loaded with detection equipment
circling overhead, and Casagra has a hundred Marines along with my
men.”
“I can’t help on that, at all,” the
Mallorysport police chief said. “I have all my men out making
raids, and if you don’t need that blockade around Company
House any more, I want the men who are there. We have Ivan Bowlby,
Spike Heenan and Raul Laporte, and we’re pulling in everybody
that’s ever had anything to do with any of them, or Leo
Thaxter. We don’t have Thaxter, yet. I suppose he’s at
Mortgageville, along with the Evinses, waiting for Herckerd and
Novaes to bring in the loot. And we have Hugo Ingermann, and this
time he can’t talk himself out. We got Judge Pendarvis out of
bed, and he signed warrants for all of them; reasonable grounds for
suspicion and authority to veridicate. We’re saving him for
last; we’ve just started on the small-fry.”
There wasn’t any question in his mind that Leo Thaxter was
involved in the attempt on the gem-vault. Whether Bowlby or Heenan
or Laporte had anything to do with it was more or less immaterial.
They could be questioned, not only about that but about anything
else, and anything they admitted under veridication was admissible
as evidence against them, self incriminatory or not.
“Well, I’m going over and see what they’ve
been getting from the Fuzzies,” he said. “There ought
to be quite a little, by now.” He glanced up at the screen
from Steefer’s office; half a dozen people were there now,
and he was surprised to see Jack Holloway among them. He
couldn’t have flown in from Beta Continent since this had
started. “I’ll call back, or have somebody call,
later.”
Crossing the hall, he joined the group who were interviewing the
five Herckerd-Novaes-Evins-Thaxter Fuzzies. Juan Jimenez was there,
so were a couple of doctors who had been working with Fuzzies at
the reception center. So was Claudette Pendarvis. Jack Holloway met
him as he entered, and they shook hands.
“I thought there might be something I could do to
help,” he said. “Listen, Mr. Grego, you’re not
going to bring any charges against these Fuzzies, are
you?”
“Good Lord, no!”
“Well, they’re sapient beings, and they broke the
law,” Holloway said.
“They are legally ten-year-old children,” Judge
Pendarvis’s wife said. “They are not morally
responsible; they were taught to do this by humans.”
“Yes, faginy, along with enslavement,” Ahmed Khadra
said. “Mandatory death by shooting for that, too.”
“And I hope they shoot that Evins woman first of all;
she’s the worst of the lot,” Sandra Glenn said.
“She’s the one who used the electric shock-rod on them
when they made mistakes.”
“Mr. Grego,” Ernst Mallin interrupted. “I
don’t understand this. These Fuzzyphones are simple enough
for any Fuzzy to operate; all they need to do is hold the little
pistol-grip and the switch works automatically. Diamond can talk
audibly, but he simply cannot teach any of these other Fuzzies to
use it. You don’t have your hearing aid on, do you? Well,
listen to this.”
Diamond used his Fuzzyphone; he spoke quite audibly. When he
gave it to any of the others, all they produced was,
“Yeek.”
“Let me see that thing.” He took it from Diamond and
carried it over to the desk; rummaging in the top middle drawer, he
found a little screwdriver and took it apart. The mechanism seemed
to be all right. He removed the tiny power-unit and exchanged it
for a similar one from a flashlight he found in the Chief’s
desk. The flashlight wouldn’t light. He handed the Fuzzyphone
to Mallin.
“Give this to one of the others, not Diamond. Have him say
something.”
Mallin handed the Fuzzyphone to one of the pair whom Lansky and
Eggers had captured in the vault, and asked him a question. Holding
the Fuzzyphone to his mouth, the Fuzzy answered quite audibly.
Three or four of the humans said, “What the hell?” or
words to that effect.
“Diamond, you not need talk-thing to make talk like Big
One,” he said. “You make talk like Big One any time.
You make talk like Big One now.”
“Like this?” Diamond asked.
“How does he do it?” Mrs. Pendarvis demanded.
“Their voices aren’t audible, at all.”
“You think the power-unit gave out, and he just went on
copying the sounds he was accustomed to make with the
Fuzzyphone?” Mallin asked.
“That’s right. He heard himself speak in the audible
range, and he just learned to pitch his voice to imitate his own
transformed voice. I’ll bet he’s been talking audibly
for weeks, and we never knew it.”
“Bet he didn’t know it, either,” Jack Holloway
said. “Mr. Grego, do you think he could teach other Fuzzies
to do that?”
“That would be kind of hard, wouldn’t it?”
Mallin asked. “Does he really know, himself, how he does
it?”
“Mr. Grego!” the police sergeant, who was still
keeping half an eye on the communication screen, broke in. The
Chief wants to know if you want to go to the gem-vault and check
the contents of that suitcase.”
“Has anybody else checked it?”
“Well, Captain Lansky has, but . . . ”
“Then lock it up in the vault; I don’t have to do
that. The Nifflheim with it. I’ll check it tomorrow.
I’m busy, now.”