Threshold Page 4

  Rick Cummings's dry mouth and knotted stomach were the direct results of the little somethings he had stashed in the marsupial-type pouch of each Flanger—things he didn't want discovered. Secreted there were Leetles—half-inch-long beetles that tasted like lettuce and had an unmatched psychotropic effect on humans when ingested.

  Leetles were already contraband, even back on the Pegasus habitat. But Cummings had to have the Leetles, even if it was risky smuggling them in here. Without the Leetles, the real smugglers' prize, a third Olympian life-form he'd dubbed Brow, would die before he got one into the NAMECorp Lab Base. If you were the first to bring a new life-form to any NAMECorp Lab Base, the reward was staggering, and the no-questions-asked policy would protect him from embarrassing charges.

  After all, NAMECorp was his father's company. And bringing the Brows to Threshold was so outrageous, so amazing, so audacious and so lucrative that Cummings III just couldn't pass up the chance. The reward would augment his trust fund nicely. The coup would force his father to stop treating him like a teenager.

  And the Brows were . . . well, once you'd had one around, you didn't want to be without one. When Dad found out what the Brows could do, he'd understand why Rick hadn't taken them to a lesser Lab Base. Only the top levels of NAMECorp bureaucracy could be trusted with the secret of the Brows, and that ruled out long memo chains and interstellar communications nets.

  Rick Cummings needed to display the raccoon-pelted telepathic Brows to a select group, because a Brow who'd just eaten a Leetle could affect the mental processes of humans in any way its master chose. So this master was going to be very careful about which humans received a demonstration.

  It was too bad that the Leetles were contraband. It was clear that humans shouldn't be eating them, but it was necessary for Brows to eat them. Otherwise, the Brows would die.

  So Cummings's hands were sweating as he watched his flight deck put itself in neutral and waited for the green light. Then it was Show Time.

  One of his Brows sensed his nervousness and tried to climb into his lap. He had the three Brows on the flight deck and three Hangers in the cargo bay because, if he left the Brows to their own devices back there, they'd find some way into the Hangers' cages to get at the Leetles, eat all the Leetles in one sitting, and be sick.

  He couldn't have that. He'd fed each Brow one Leetle, and they were at peak performance levels, right where he needed them.

  He wasn't going to try to hide them. He was going to use them. That was the whole point of this exercise.

  He let the Brow climb into his lap. It looked enough like an Earthly raccoon to fool most people, who'd never seen a raccoon except on vid. So that was a help.

  With closed eyes, he stroked the Brow behind it ears and under its snout, which was shorter than an earthly raccoon's. While he did, he closed his eyes and visualized what he wanted the Customs official's visit to be like. He wanted to shake hands with the Customs official who came aboard and he wanted to sign his paperwork and he wanted everything to seem unremarkable. He wanted the one Brow to pass for a raccoon and the other two to be unnoticed— unlisted on the manifest. And he wanted the entire maneuver to proceed flawlessly.

  The Brow stretched out on his lap and began to whistle softly in pleasure, blowing little bubbles where its black lips met.

  He knew enough about working with Brows by now to be sure it was going to try to give him the result he'd shown it. Everything would be pleasant, friendly, and the Brow would ride out of here on his shoulder.

  When a Customs officer in blue uniform showed up with a computerized clipboard and asked for permission to come aboard, Cummings felt almost relieved.

  Either it would work or it wouldn't work. If it didn't work, and the Customs man insisted on quarantining the Hangers or discovered the Leetles or the Brows, then the Brows would starve to death and Cummings would be in jail for smuggling. He tried not to think about it. You projected the result you wanted to the Brows, and they matched it.

  But the Brow on Rick's lap sensed his concern that the man coming aboard might be a possible enemy. It climbed up on his shoulder, wrapped its ringed tail about his neck, and stopped whistling.

  Instead, it hissed once.

  In back of Rick Cummings, where the flight deck ended and the bulkhead began, something rustled: the other Brows were alerted by the hissing of the first.

  Onto the flight deck came the blue-uniformed Customs officer, and Cummings smiled at him.

  The man, eyes on his clipboard, smiled, too.

  "Richard Cummings III?" said the florid official, still smiling absently as he looked up. Welcome sparkled in his eyes. "We hope you had a pleasant flight."

  "Flawless, Officer," Cummings said, nodding, still exuding as much happiness as he could manage.

  "Anything to declare, sir?" asked the Customs man diffidently, nearly chuckling, as if he'd made a joke.

  The Brow's tail tightened around Cummings's neck as he stood up. "Nothing that's not already on the manifest I transmitted." He stroked the Brow's tail. "My pet, of course, who's had all his shots, and the Flangers whose paperwork we expedited. They're here for the conference, and I'm certainly happy to be delivering them in person." It didn't matter what he said, as long as it was nonconfrontational.

  The other Brows were simply not going to exist. Neither were the Leetles. Cummings was determined to win this one.

  "Well, I'll just have a quick look back there, sir, and you're on your way."

  "Let me come with you," Cummings offered and, still with the first Brow balanced on his shoulder, led the official back to where the Hanger cages were.

  In the cargo hold of the 300T freighter, the cages looked tiny, lonely, insignificant.

  "See?" Cummings said, pulling down one peepscreen with a touch: "Safe and sound."

  The Flanger stared at the peepscreen with mournful eyes and bit its nails. But it seemed to smile as it did so. Cummings smiled until his face ached. The tail of the Brow on his shoulder was twitching.

  The Customs man said, "Seems to be good condition, sir," and then walked on to the next cage.

  When the officer had peeped into the remaining cages and determined that the other two Flangers were alive and well, he handed Cummings the manifest to thumbprint.

  Cummings checked it, pushed his thumb against the touch-sensitive square, and was rewarded with another official smile.

  The Customs officer then pulled a hard copy from the handheld's slot. He offered it to Cummings with a flourish. "Here you go, sir. Have a nice stay on Threshold. We're rather overrun lately, with all these folk in for the conference and the Muslim pilgrimage at the same time. So you don't need to take this to the office. We're waiving a pro forma interview, since your documentation's impeccable and I've done my on-site."

  "Wonderful, Officer. The sooner I have these Flangers in the Lab Base facility, the happier I'll be."

  Happy was the key word, after all. He paced the Customs official out of the cargo hold and all the way to the outer lock, where he stood, stroking the Brow's tail, as the man waved a jaunty farewell before he got in his open truck and drove away.

  Free and safe, home at last. Cummings looked up and down the NAMECorp docking bay. No other Customs people or troublemakers in sight. He checked his chronograph: the NAMECorp truck would arrive any minute, to pick up the Flangers and take them to the Lab Base.

  And he, his three Brows, and the Leetles in the Hangers' pouches were safe on Threshold, with duly executed entry notations in their Customs file and hard copy to boot.

  As Cummings saw one of his father's trucks approaching, he put away the hard copy that allowed him to bring in "life-forms—4/type: flangers (3); raccoon (1)."

  He could almost feel the fat reward slide into his bank account. He could almost hear his father's amazed admiration when the Lab Base techs told him what the Brows could do.

  This was going to be more fun than eating Leetles, although he might do a little of that, too, once the gravid
mothers hatched up a new crop.

  CHAPTER 6

  Scavenger's Horde

  Riva Lowe took one look at the scruffy Relic pacing back and forth behind a one-way mirror and closed her eyes.

  Customs was a stinking job sometimes, like now when you had real trouble and not enough priority to deal with that trouble effectively. Riva Lowe should have been high in the diplomatic service by now, dealing with people of consequence. But she wasn't.

  And it must be her fault. There was something she'd done, consistently, to limit her options. She was smarter than most, more dedicated than most, but she was also underperforming compared to most of the people she'd gone to school with. She was as hard on herself as she was on others, and if that—her knack for calling things as she saw them and demanding competency in exchange for respect—was what was holding her back, then there wasn't much she could do about it.

  She opened her eyes and the five-hundred-year-old pilot was still there. She should, at least, be working on the truly sensitive matters at hand. This beard-shadowed, shaggy-headed fellow in a museum-quality uniform ought to be the concern of some other department—any other department.

  But she'd let Mickey Croft push this Captain South onto her desk in exchange for ... what? A favor owed, and some time with his modeler. She'd scrolled the file on this South, and there wasn't any reason to hold the Relic if he could pass a physical.

  Not, that is, if you discounted Reice's abrasive first encounter. Riva Lowe knew Reice better than most, and that meant that she was willing to give South the benefit of the doubt. Reice would hash out the pecking order with an automated waiter in a coffee shop if you left him to his own devices.

  "Reice," she said absently, not taking her eyes off the man pacing like a zoo animal before her because, like an animal, he seemed to know that she was there. Throughout his ten-stride circuits of the room, his eyes never left the wall between them, which was mirrored on his side and reinforced high-impact glass on hers.

  "Yeah, boss," said Reice in his inimitable fashion, managing to lace the words with provocation.

  Still she didn't turn. "Get this man to the medics and have them do a full physical work-up. If he's plague-free and not a carrier of any small organisms restricted here, give him a provisional ID card, some sort of work permit with a low credit advance against whatever his back pay will turn out to be. Check with ConSpaceCom and get them computing that number."

  "A work permit?" Reice sounded as if he thought she'd lost her mind.

  "A work permit." Her nails dug into the briefcase she held. "With a parole notation so he'll have to check in every two weeks. There's no telling how long it will take ConSpaceCom to find a way to fleece him out of however much money he's got coming."

  "These Relics can be dangerous, Riva. Are you sure you want to—"

  She turned on Reice. "I can be dangerous," she told Reice as she brushed past him. "Don't forget that. Especially when I'm this busy." She headed for the door leading out of the gray cubicle, from which prisoners could be viewed while being interrogated beyond the mirrored wall.

  She hated police stations: They were all alike; the presumption of guilt by the mere fact of presence was so strong, she could taste it.

  That poor Relic was in for a very hard time. She didn't see any reason to make it more difficult.

  But Reice wouldn't let things stand: "Ma'am, I'm not sure that's all we need to do about Captain South."

  "That's for the medics to decide, isn't it? Whether he's competent. If he's not, he'll be in therapy for a bit and you and I can discuss his status at leisure." When I get my more pressing matters attended to.

  Croft had told her to bury the Relic in paperwork. Giving him a full med work-up would do just that. "I've discussed this with Deputy Secretary Remson," she said warningly, "and he concurs. We don't want to attract any attorneys, if you get my drift."

  "I do, but—" The ConSec lieutenant wasn't convinced.

  Riva Lowe resented the need to discuss this any further. There were always lawyers lurking in police stations. Everyone who was brought in for even the shortest detention deserved representation. Croft specifically wanted to avoid legal tangles where this Relic was concerned. Reice should be savvy enough by now to understand.

  "Be nice to him, Reice. If you can't remember how, fake it. We don't want him upset with the way we've treated him here. We don't want to charge him with anything. We want to get South over to Med without wasting a single moment more than is absolutely necessary, and with no police record, not even a parking ticket. Is that clear?"

  "Clear." Unhappy. Unconvinced.

  And Reice's footsteps said he was going to follow her out the door and argue.

  So Lowe turned to face him one more time. "I've got to go now. Check back with me at the end of your shift. I'll be done then and you can report your progress over a cup of coffee."

  Reice's tight, dark face relaxed. But they were still both on duty.

  "Yes ma'am," he said, with only a hint of a smile.

  And she left him there, fleeing through the busy station with its auto-debriefers and its criminal processing cubicles full of unhappy people, to find her blue Customs car waiting.

  She told it to take her to her office at Blue Mid Wheel, Spoke 8, where she'd instructed her real problem to meet her twenty minutes ago.

  It probably would have been faster to use a vacuum tube, but she already had the car. In it, she could catch up on some paperwork and tell her office to update her. Which it did. There was an early notation of a strange reading during a preliminary scan of an incoming NAMECorp ship, but it wasn't substantiated by the subsequent inspection by one of her best officers. She signed off on the document and then on the next, and the next, hardly reading them.

  When she was done with that, she asked for the results of the scans she'd requested on her real concern: a scavenger's spacedocked salvage.

  The scans made no sense whatsoever, not in ultraviolet, infrared, heat, X-ray, or any other signature mode. Not unless there was nothing at all within the skin of the salvaged remnant. But the skin wasn't any kind of alloy that Customs equipment could identify.

  "Wonderful," she said aloud. Then she read on: none of the cratology programs had found a shape or a density inside the salvaged container. None of the signature readers reported anything. No available technology could indicate anything whatsoever about the container except that it was there, about a metric ton of it, and that it was spherical and that it reflected light waves in a manner consonant with a class of metal alloys.

  Oh goody, the mystery was deepening. She hoped to hell the plot wasn't thickening. If the scavenger in question was going to be pushy about his importation rights, this wasn't the time for it. If this was some kind of trick by a faction hopeful of disrupting the conference, or some Muslim scam to avoid the decree that kept off-world pilgrims from trekking any further insystem than Threshold, Mickey Croft would have her head.

  But before that, she'd have the scavenger's head. One thing Customs could do, if it wanted, was take a very long time processing something. She didn't need to make a determination one way or the other about this scavenger's find. She simply had to begin examining it and let that examination take as long as possible.

  She ought to be able to handle that; she had a strain of inscrutable Oriental cunning in her ancestry.

  But scavengers could be difficult. She reached to her right, without looking, and fingered the autobar. Into the compartment below the bar dropped a caffeine/sugar drink with a mood-stabilizing component.

  The drink would do the work of a three-course lunch, and she'd be ready for the scavenger.

  But she wasn't, when she got back to her office to see him.

  Something about the South case was bothering her, more than it should, if it were simply Reice overreacting to a possible threat and doing his courtship display at the same time. Reice was the last sort of entanglement she needed, as long as she was still considering herself upwardly
mobile. Which she was. And South was . . . what?

  Sad. Lost. Pathetic. Volatile. Reice hadn't been wrong about that. She could still see the ancient captain pacing behind that glass, looking like some tiger or lion, all coiled tension and wasted energy.

  Med would deal with him. Riva Lowe knew what a sick man looked like, and Joe South wasn't sick. He was . . . primitive in a disturbing way that no medical exam was going to pinpoint. . . .

  Faced with the scavenger waiting in her office, she pushed thoughts of South away. South wasn't going to take up another picosecond of her time.

  This man was.

  In the Blue Mid Customs office, with its government-issue standards and flags and pictures of Mickey Croft shaking her hand, the scavenger before her desk was like something that should have died with Captain South's century.

  He was . . . dirty.

  He was old and dirty.

  He was old and dirty and raggedy and he ... smelled.

  The scavenger had a huge head with a yellow-white ponytail and red ears. His face was craggy and either tanned or flushed from excessive alcohol consumption. The dirt smeared so thickly on his coveralls made it hard to read the mission patches on the coverall's arms.

  It must be grease, Riva decided, as she realized that she was staring at him wordless and openmouthed.

  "I'm waitin' fer the D'rector," the scavenger said, swivelling from his thick waist in the visitor's chair to look her over. "But I sure would appreciate a cup a' somethin'."

  His shoulders reminded her of a wrestler's. His eyes were watery and pale. His lips were so chapped that they had actual cracks in them and the cracks were bright red under big brown flakes of dead skin. Behind his lips, his teeth were yellow, and green, and spotted with black. Riva Lowe looked away, at the nice, clean UNE flag to

  one side of her desk, and then at the Customs standard on the other side. Then she took a deep breath. "You're looking at the Director. And I'm sure my man outside will be glad to get us both some tea."