something stupid—hell, it may even be a device to distract us. I’m going to concentrate on the package. That I can handle.”
Nathan took back his copy of the conundrum, and returned to more mundane considerations.
“What did you promise this man you met?” he asked.
“Not a thing,” I assured him. “I was the perfect diplomat.”
“Is he dangerous?”
“How would I know? Dangerous to whom? That’s a stupid question if ever there was one!”
He didn’t seem offended. He was too preoccupied to be offended. “You’re going to be aboard all day?” he asked. I nodded in reply, and he turned to Karen. “Are you going out?”
“Later maybe,” she said. “When my shift ends.”
“Be careful,” he said.
She shrugged, but he wouldn’t let it go.
“I mean it,” he said. “There’s something in the air. Things are beginning to happen. They’re making moves. They aren’t going to stick a knife in your back—yet. But be careful.”
“Something is rotten in the State of...,” she said, sarcastically.
He didn’t reply. But they were both right. Something was rotten in this pretty little dictatorship which seemed to be working so well. I felt it. I knew it. There had to be something rotten...it wouldn’t be natural otherwise. If there’s one thing we has learned so far it was that all worlds had little surprises up their sleeves—for the colonies, for us.
“James Wildeblood must have been one hell of a clever bastard,” I commented, letting the stream of thought carry me on. “To take over a colony from scratch, come to total dominance, and establish a historical pattern that could hold perfectly for over a century. And he did it all in 33 years.”
`Well,” said Karen, “if anyone can figure out how, it ought to be you. On the survey team, he had your job.”
It was intended to be a simple nasty crack. But it was also true. It was a joke that pleased them all—Nathan, Karen...even Conrad. James Wildeblood and me. Evolutionary ecologists both. Ecologists and biochemists. He’d had experience like mine, a job not too dissimilar to mine.
And he’d also built an empire. Not to mention founding a dynasty.
You just can’t tell what kind of potential some people have.
CHAPTER THREE
I spent most of the day tracking the sample carefully through the standard series of analytical tests and a few extra ones. It was a complicated molecule belonging to a class of biological products not uncommon on Poseidon—prevalent, in fact, throughout the life-system. It was a kind of super-steroid. Simpler molecules in the group were used by the local organisms as reservoir molecules for nutrient storage, the more complex ones were usually physiologically active as hormones or as catalytic fellow-travelers in enzymic manufactory processes. My specimen was one of the largest molecules of the family, about eighty-percent pure—most of the pollutants being breakdown debris. Whatever process had been used to extract and isolate it had also knocked it about a little bit. That was only to be expected. The colony had nothing that could hold the faintest candle to the Daedalus lab. They were pretty clever to get eighty-percent—but then, James Wildeblood had been the man for the job.
Because it was such a large molecule the procedures took time. They practically ate up the day. It wasn’t exactly strenuous work but don’t ever let anyone tell you that computer-aided analysis with automatic measurement at every stage is labor-saving. It may save your fingers and it’s freed us forever from the embarrassment of the pipette, but you need eyes like a hawk and a brain in overdrive if you hope to keep up. I always tried to keep up—in the course of a couple of thousand mechanical operations something always slips a cog, and if you don’t catch it as and when you might as well start all over.
I missed the midday meal, but managed to extract myself in the early evening. Karen had been out to soak in a little fresh air (perhaps a little too fresh, as the unseasonal cold spell was still going strong) and had gotten back without having had a knife stuck in her back, despite Nathan’s premonitions.
“Well?” she said. “Cracked it wide open?”
“Making progress,” I told her. “I’m between experiments. I now know what it is.”
“But not....”
“...what it does. No. That’s the tricky one.”
“Have you enough of the stuff to let you find out?” put in Pete. “There didn’t look to be a vast quantity.”
“Plenty,” I assured him. “My equipment could run a million operations on a teaspoonful. It’s just time.... I’ll have to trace its physiological activity through the whole series of tissue cultures. Couldn’t lend me a couple of milliliters of fresh blood, by any chance?”
“Use your own,” he said—somewhat ungraciously, I thought.
“I’d lend them to you with pleasure,” said Karen, “only I’d be very apprehensive about getting them back. I dread to think what unholy things go on behind that closed door.”
“Ah well,” I muttered, philosophically, “if you can’t spare it....”
“What do you think it does?” asked Pete, steering the conversation away from a topic he found mildly distasteful.
“At a guess,” I said, “it boosts the bastards into orbit. Poseidon’s answer to the joys of spring. Or Wildeblood’s answer, I should say.”
“A narcotic?”
“Not in the literal sense of the word. Nor an ataractic. A psychotropic of some kind, though. Has to be. But moderately safe—it doesn’t impair the faculties or seriously endanger health. At the worst it accelerates the metabolism and shortens the lifespan somewhat, along with altering the chemical balance of the tissues in what seems to be a fairly haphazard manner.”
“That’s a pretty detailed guess,” he said.
I shrugged. “This drug isn’t listed in the survey team’s report. It’s a biological product but it’s not there. Why not? James Wildeblood was on that survey team doubling as ecologist and biochemist. He omitted it—and not by accident. He came back here with the colony, as a member of the executive, and within a decade he was the executive. Is it too much to believe that he had a trick up his sleeve and that this innocent white powder—or guilty white powder—is it? I reckon that he took over the colony by putting each and every member of it on a set of puppet strings.”
“He hooked them?” This from Karen.
“That’s what I think,” I confirmed. “As for the rest of the guess—well, I’ve examined quite a number of the colonists more or less at random. It seems only reasonable to assume that some of the slight anomalies I’ve measured are attributable to the drug—and, as an inevitable corollary—that the lack of any major anomalies means that the drug is relatively harmless. It probably breaks down pretty quickly in the body—I’ve never found it in a blood sample, although I’ve picked up some molecules which I now know to be its breakdown products. See?”
“You ever get tired of being such a hot-shot?” asked Karen.
I ignored her. “It’s all being checked out,” I said, aiming my face at Pete, who’d asked the original question. “I’ll leave things set overnight and come back tomorrow. I have a feeling, though, that all the mass of data I’m getting will turn out like the proverbial statistica1 bikini.”
“What’s a proverbial statistical bikini?” asked Pete. I glanced at Karen. She was dying to know but didn’t want to ask.
“Some anonymous wit once coined a phrase,” I said. “Statistics are like the two halves of a bikini. What they reveal is interesting but what they leave