“Honey, alter the trajectory on this piece, but not the spin. The spin is holding in the valuable stuff. We’ll push this thing toward the inner Solar System, and keep good track of it. Got it?”
“Got it.”
Bull stood staring at one of the gloves he’d picked up, shock-mounted in a vacuum container. He didn’t call them that because they had five fingers; they didn’t. Rather, they were clearly flexible coverings for various things, like all the innumerable gloves he’d seen used and often discarded at construction sites—in fact, like the several cheap gloves he himself had left behind when his walker tipped over inside the meteor, which while it was upright had been covering tools and sensors that weren’t being used.
“Do we know where the meteor came from?”
“TC has given us a pretty optimistic report … in some ways.”
“What ways?”
“The location sphere is 50% at its peak and not huge, considering this is the Kuiper Belt we’re talking about.”
“That’s not good, that’s great! And the bad news?”
“It’s way off the ecliptic, and moving out.”
Bull raised his hands in the air and shook them, like Tevye talking to G-d in Fiddler on the Roof. “Why me? Before this damn Earth business, this is exactly what I was hoping for.”
Then, to Honey, “How long to get there and back home?”
“This is actually backtracking somewhat, so it’ll be two years to get there and back to the inner Solar System … plus whatever time it takes to search for the source and explore it, presuming we find it. We’re still only at 50-50 for finding anything there.”
“Can we do it with a probe?”
“Remember that the probes aren’t constant-acceleration the way we are. Unless the probe’s findings are to be a gift to your yet-to-be-created posterity, it’s a one-way, fly-by trip for the probe, and it’ll have to be the main one, modified. Nothing else has the fuel. And since it can’t search a pattern within the volume, the odds go way down.”
“When will that get there?”
“In about ten years. We could sling it off Jupiter, which would cut it to about seven years.”
“No, that doesn’t sound like a good idea. That becomes a traffic control journey and too many people would know the trajectory.”
Bull stared at the glove in its vacuum container some more.
It was very delicate. A couple of the others just turned to dust as he picked them up, but he’d collected that dust from the second one and was running materials tests on it. The fourth was still in its plastic sample bag. When he’d gone back for the rope that he’d seen, he couldn’t find it. Probably the passage of the walker had shifted the rubble to hide it.
In retrospect, collecting that piece of net hadn’t been such a bad idea. It was the only piece that had retained its toughness all these years.
Whoever left the gloves behind wasn’t thinking twice about them. But for Bull they were quite literally priceless.
“These are proof positive that we aren’t alone,” he thought. Then he laughed and said out loud, “I think I’ve added a card to that short deck Van Cleeve plays with. It looks like there really are Dark Ones!”
Bull pondered silently again. “Now how do I take advantage of what I’ve found here? In truth, this has been my wildest dream, to find life, but now that I’ve found it, what do I do?”
He stirred from his reverie. “Speaking of trajectories, Honey, how’s the financial trajectory plotting coming?”
“I got a report in last hour. I can display it for you.”
“Do so.”
He pulled his eyes from the glove to look at the display. There were fifty or so squiggles. “What have we got here?”
“These are net worths. We plotted about five hundred people and two hundred companies that are associated with you in some way. This is a distillation. There are about forty control cases in this display and ten we think are suspicious. However, we computers still stand in awe of human abilities at pattern recognition, so we don’t think we’ve discovered all there is to see in this data.”
“Normalize for exponential growth,” Bull suggested.
The lines changed color coding and most flattened out. One sank erratically, with an upward kink a year ago.
“Who’s the submarine?” asked Bull. “Wait, let me not guess: That’s my nephew.”
“Correct. The last kink is a bridge loan we suspect Valence helped Zed float, but we can’t confirm that.”
“Show me his cash flow and short-term credit.”
It was an ugly picture, but all too common. The youth had burned through a lot of cash in a short time.
“Show me his parents’ trajectories.”
Two lines were highlighted, fairly steady except that each had a couple of deep kinks five and ten years ago.
“When did his folks find out about this?”
“Find out about what?”
“Their son’s dissipation, and this lawsuit.”
There was a pause. “That’s not been checked yet. They are—”
“Both need to hear about this suit,” Bull declared emphatically. “They’re not going to be happy about Valence turning their child into a shill for a con game. They may not be able to stop this thing directly, but we can start them driving a wedge between Valence and Zed.”
“Got it.”
“But that’s not the whole problem.” Bull pointed at a curve in the center, oscillating like a sine wave. “Who’s that?”
“That’s Lester Walsh, your lawyer, one of the controls.”
“Control, you say? I’d say that’s a control all right, a line fully controlled by someone hiding something. Let’s bring up a full display on Uncle Lester here.”
His data was substantial, as one would expect of a successful lawyer working with rich clients. It was also well secured. Honey informed Bull that it took a long time to generate Walsh’s data. “It’s taking me a long time to get my head around it,” Bull responded.
On his first pass it had looked entirely respectable, but Bull’s mind kept seeing that sine wave in the linearized growth of Lester’s net worth. The only thing that could explain a smooth curve like that was feedback. Somewhere, somehow, someone with a massive reserve had been feeding the lawyer’s net worth just the right amount of money to keep it looking respectable and well clear of any computer-monitored triggering points.
Other than that, there were holes in the data, but no glaring inconsistencies.
“Honey, this data looks good, but it’s queer as a three-dollar bill. I want you to dig deeper. In the meantime, Lester is the threat, not Jack.”
“Lester?”
“Lester! At least until I get a satisfactory explanation for his net worth curve. It’s been engineered specifically so you computer types and bureaucrats with better things to do won’t see a problem with it. Someone’s backing Lester, and there’s more to him than what appears in this report.
“Check carefully for links between him and Valence. You’re looking for a ‘spigot’, Honey—one or more sources that feed lots of money into Lester’s financial system when the net worth is running below target, and little money when the system is above target. Got it?”
“Got it! It’s ingenious. That’s what’s fun about working with you, Bull.”
Bull went back to looking at the glove. What was he going to find at the source of this meteor fragment, the thing he’d been calling the Honeycomb Comet? Could he afford to search for it?
Could he afford not to?