The lunchtime conversation was a mild disappointment to Gweanvin. She had hoped to learn something from Marchell about plans for the test, but obviously he knew no more and had guessed far less than she had.
After the normal amount of dawdling about after lunch, she returned to her work console and pretended to be absorbed by her task while she exteriorized once more and returned to the test chambers and the Bauble.
She found it still untouched but now there were sounds in the test chamber. Equipment was being brought in, she judged.
"This has to be turned slightly to the left," she heard someone say.
"That enough?" said another voice.
"Yes. Good. Now roll it closer. It has to be in contact with the Bauble."
"Okay . . . how's that?"
Gweanvin felt the contact. Something was touching the Bauble over about thirty per cent of one side of its surface. Aha! This was it! The interface system that she had to probe. She shifted all her attention to that part of the Bauble surface, but found nothing but touch-pressure. The interface was inactive.
"Hadn't we better switch it on and check for good contact?"
"No. We turn nothing on until the test begins. Don't worry about the contact. It's good, all right."
Footsteps moved away from the Bauble and the test chamber was silent once more.
Gweanvin used the delay for one last review of her contingency plans.
The Gordeen Consolidated building was not designed for the convenience of spy-saboteurs. Its outside walls were thick, tough, windowless. To leave in the normal manner meant going out on her balcony, semi-inerting, flying up through the scramble area to the roof exit seventy-one floors above, where one of the gates would check her identity and let her through.
Minimum exit time: ten seconds . . . if she ran into no traffic jams, and if the gates had not been alerted to detain her.
Still, that would be the best way out if she had time to use it. If not . . .
She opened a drawer of the console desk, considered its clutter of contents, took a light-pen out of it. She used the pen to streak a pair of trial vectors across the diagram on the console screen, and gazed studiously at the result.
The drawer's contents were such as most anyone might accumulate over a period of a few years on a job. Some items, such as the light-pen, definitely belonged there. Others, such as a zercrown and a couple of sheets of slightly worn warprag, did not belong but were readily explainable, in case anyone asked. The warprags, for example, she had swiped from one of the shops—which no one would mind—with the intention of taking them home to see how they would work as abrasives on gold sculpture, which she made in her spare time.
Also, most of the jumble of stuff in the drawer was as harmless and useless as it looked; anyone would have to take a very close look indeed to know that some of it was not.
Unfortunately, she mused, suspicion would have been aroused had she added a charged implant power-unit to the accumulation—and if things got really tight, she would doubtless need plenty of power in a hurry. She had an answer to that, of course, but it would have been better if . . .
There was a murmur of voices and footsteps down in the test chamber.
"If everyone will find seats," spoke an authoritative voice. "Thank you. Now, how are we on security, Marvis?"
"We're snug, Thydan," the voice of Marvis Jans replied. "The Gordeen people have done a good job of keeping this project tightly wrapped."
There was a murmur of appreciation, in which Gweanvin could make out Falor Dample's rumbled, "Thank you, Miss Jans."
"This room could not possibly be bugged, then?" demanded a voice she did not recognize.
"Not unless the Primgranese have developed an entirely novel technique," replied Marvis Jans with a touch of disdain, "which is most unlikely. And if they had, the likelihood of their both knowing of this project and getting an agent inside approaches zero."
"Okay, Marvis," chuckled the man she had called Thydan. "I have one specific question: what about Rayeal Promton?"
"All clear there, and I might say Rayeal is drawing more security attention than she merits simply because she happens to match a particular Commonality operator in age and basic genetics. Admittedly, the question, 'Could Rayeal Promton be Gweanvin Oster?' is a tempting one to consider . . . and it has been—but just because it is such an obvious one the Primgranese command would not have sent in the Oster woman on an assignment where . . ."
"They could have counted on us discounting our suspicions," put in Thydan, "for that very reason."
"Well . . . the important thing is that right now, she is forty-one floors above us working in her office and under observation from across the scrambleway."
"I'd like to be sure she'll stay there," grumbled the man who had asked about bugs.
"That can be arranged—if you think it's necessary," said Marvis.
"Good. Arrange it."
Thydan said, "One point that bothers me about Miss Promton is that she has speculated accurately on the nature of this project and has discussed her speculations rather freely."
"She's a very bright girl," Marvis broke in. "If I were in her position, I would probably have drawn the same conclusions. And she has been discreet in her indiscretion—only with people such as her boss, and agents such as Don Plackmon and myself. Obviously she's playing give-the-security-boys-a-hard-time. We're used to stirring up a little resentment."
"If I may put in a word," rumbled Falor Dample. "Miss Promton's contribution to the project has not been a small one. Without her, that Bauble we're looking at might still be only on the drawing-board. That doesn't strike me as something to expect from an enemy agent."
"In any event," said Marvis, sounding impatient, "if the test which we might get around to after a while is a success, Monte can tell us very quickly if Rayeal Promton or anyone else on Narva is a Primgranese infiltrator."
"Good point," replied Dample. "Why don't we get on with it?"
"Very well," agreed Thydan. "Marvis, you'll alert Plackmon to keep Miss Promton confined?"
"Taken care of."
"Good. Mr. Dample, as chairman of Gordeen Consolidated, I believe the honor of pushing the button is yours."
And that, very suddenly, was it. The loss of her preferred escape route could not concern Gweanvin now. No tenseness over that or anything else. The task at hand required totally relaxed attention.
She entered fully into the Bauble for the first time. It felt different from Primgranese Baubles, partly because this one carried no idents of previous ego-field entrants, and partly because it was different on the physiochemical level. She felt an instant of relief at finding no idents there. If somebody around the lab had broken the rule forbidding entry in the Bauble she would now be open to telepathic contact with that person, and he could have blown the whistle on her.
Immediately she turned her attention to the portion of the surface touching the interface. Glowing bright traceries filled her mind. Beautiful! But this was no time for esthetic appreciation. What were the shapes of those traceries? What made them? How did they function?
And what did they remind her of? Some natural structure . . . She allowed herself no awareness of seconds passing. Taking time to observe that this was taking too long would have made it take even longer.
When Thydan spoke, his voice came dimly to her, and its content made no impression: "Readings indicate optimum operation. Now I'll comm Orrbaune to turn on their end."
Were the traceries like the optical-synapse interface? The summation of thousands of retinal cell messages into a coherent visual scene? . . . No . . . Something else . . .
Auditory! The complex interconnections of cilia nerves, involving feedbacks and resonances and a dozen other phenomena that enabled a listener to distinguish subtle variations in pitch and quality of sound. That was it! . . . In part, and not exactly.
Gweanvin kept at it until the whole picture clarified. She knew the nature of the interface and could guess from that the parameters of the comm system behind it. She could break contact right now, sabotage the Bauble and head for home at the earliest opportunity. It would be easy enough to get a vacation after the test proved a "failure", and back in the Commonality she could write out detailed instructions on how to build a Bauble-to-Bauble comm system . . .
* * *
And that system wouldn't work. That realization came almost intuitively from her grasp of the characteristics of the interface. It wouldn't work.
Which wasn't the same as saying it couldn't work. It could. An ancient automobile with a defective starter could work, but wouldn't—until someone gave it a push to start it. The same was true of this system. There was near-complete randomness of orientation of the tiny, fine-texture fields of the interface traceries. This would prove extremely resistant to any flow through the system, too resistant for a flow to move.
But given the right kind of push, the fine-texture fields would align and resistance would vanish.
What kind of push, though? And by what . . . or whom?
Gweanvin could not even guess at the answer to the first of these questions. But the answer to the second was obvious.
She could not pull out of the Bauble yet, she realized. A vital question was still unanswered. She had to stay . . . perhaps until it was too late to pull out at all . . .
She stayed. But at the same time she started her body through a previously planned program of activities that could be carried out with minimal mental supervision. Her hands twisted off the top of the light-pen and her fingers deftly plucked out the instrument's control assembly and minipower unit. Next, the zercrown was brought out of the drawer, slid over the point of the light-pen, and taped in place.
"Orrbaune's switching on immediately," Thydan reported. Gweanvin kept her attention spread over the interface glow, watching for any change.
Now her fingers were wiring the device with strands of superconduct equipped with ready-weld tips. The two loose ends were then attached to insulated probe-needles.
The interface was beginning to alter in an area near its center. Something was happening there. Gweanvin moved in tightly on this area. Yes, it really was something like a push coming from the other side . . .
Her hands had left the finished device on the console and had picked up the two sheets of warprag. Her body had stood up and was walking toward the door.
. . . and in a way the push resembled a magnetic field. It was swinging the fine-texture fields into consistent orientation. But how was it doing this, specifically?
Her fingers separated the two sheets of warprag, and her hands slapped the exposed active surfaces into position, overlapping the edge of the door and the door frame. Absently, like a well-rehearsed piano player with a wandering mind, she watched her hands press firmly against the sheets, imbedding their grip. Only a powerful smashing could force the door from the balcony side while those warprags remained in place.
. . . Ah! She was getting it! Monte was coming through! And for the instant he was too occupied opening up the interface to notice what lay beyond. Gweanvin watched him work. She saw how it was done . . .
Her body had returned to the console. Her hands picked up the probe-needle contacts of her device and plunged them through the flesh under her ribs on her right side, seeking and finding the terminals of her main power pack imbedded there.
. . . Anger! A flash of anger now and she would have the job finished. But emotions, while controllable, work more slowly than clean thought. The split-second required to work up a burst of rage was too long. Monte spotted her. Damn! Her rage flooded out in a quick spurt and was gone. And so, of course, was contact with Monte . . .
* * *
"Security break!" Thydan was yelling. "It's Gweanvin Oster! I caught a thought from Monte! The Bauble's dark!"
Gweanvin grinned as she pointed her device at the wall of her office opposite the door and activated it. A thin, superhot laser-beam flashed from the zercrown, cutting a curving slash in the wall as the device kicked in her hand. For an instant her shieldscreen turned on automatically to protect her from the intense backflare. She had pulled out of the ruined Bauble, but was keeping a light contact with its sound-sensitive surface segments which, not being destructible by emotional overload, were still functioning.
"I'm going after her," came a grim bark from Marvis, as Gweanvin re-aimed and made another curving cut through the wall. The curves came together at two points, and a two-foot-wide slice of metal-mass teetered for an instant and fell outward.
Gweanvin had semi-inerted and slipped through the opening long before the chunk of wall reached the ground. She streaked upward from Narva as fast as atmospheric resistance against her shield screen would permit.
"Alert the Guard!" came Thydan's voice. "She's out of the building and getting away!"
"What happened to the Bauble?" came the rumble of Falor Dample.
"How should I know?" Thydan returned bitterly. "Among those major contributions of hers you were just praising was a twist she didn't bother to tell you about! I'm trying to get a report relayed from Monte. Maybe he knows what happened."
Gweanvin allowed herself six seconds of unswerving upward flight before taking evasive action. She figured on that much leeway before the Guardsmen could mount an effective response to the alert at upper-atmospheric levels. Out in open space, which she was fast approaching, they could react quicker, but so could she. She kept her laser device ready for use. It was clumsily small as a hand weapon and wasteful of energy, so low in resistance as to act as a virtual short-circuit across her power implant. It was no match for a zerburst pistol, though it worked on the same principle. She hoped she could get away without using it again.
"Monte says she knows how to work the interface!" came Thydan's alarmed voice. "And she may be listening to us! Let's get out of this room!"