The Venus Belt (17 page)

I grinned. “I’m married to a Healer; she swore me to undying secrecy. Find out anything interesting?”

“What did you expect? Some bacillus-brain’s perverted a basically d
e
cent technology, useful in controlling domestic animals or giving po
r
poises and temporary amputees mobility. I’d heard rumors, but...” He slammed his palms on the desk, pushing himself erect. “Come across the hall and see for yourself.”

The room was taken up by an oversize iron lung. Through the plastic observation port a young woman wearing coveralls was visible, a small area on the left side of her skull shaven clean for attachment of a familiarly sini
s
ter nanoelectronic device. Scott fussed with the machinery, a
d
justing dials microscopically with an air of weary concern.

“Stasis, isn’t it?” I asked. “She looks just like the other one.”

He swiveled to face me, his already angry manner hardening further. “
What
other one?”

I explained about the girl aboard the
Bonaventura
,
discovering in the pr
o
cess that I was telling him a lot more about my own affairs than I’d inten
d
ed. Some Healers have that effect. “So I suggest you talk to Dr. Pololo. Not only does he feel the same way you do about this, but he’s probably going quietly nuts with his ship grounded.”

He snatched a ‘com pad from the wall, punching numbers. Over his shoulder I saw a chimpanzee answer—at Gunter’s Landing, the star-filled sky icy black through the broad windows behind her. “Sarah, where do I find
Bonaventura
’s sawbones when he’s not busy committing malpractice?”

She laughed. “Most of the crews out here are still aboard, trying not to overload our transient facilities. This weather’s causing all kinds of snarl.” She held a thick sheaf of hard copies to the pickup, then threw them back on the desk. “Know anyone who wants forty tons of slightly overripe ba
m
boo shoots?”

“Excuse me,” I began, then braced myself for another wisecrack from Scott, “but isn’t it dangerous for you people out there in the crater? After all, a solar flare—”

“One of your less-successful operations, Doc, or just a gruboon? Li
s
ten, pal, the walls around the Landing are a lot better protection than any plastic atmospheric envelope. Now, how about both of you going away. I’m swamped.”

As she switched off, the paramedic dashed in, crossword puzzle da
n
gling from his fingers. “It’s an epidemic! Another clown out here wants to see you, Doc. Can you stand the grueling pace, or should I break out the uppers?”

“Show him in, and show yourself out. And Dave, try to keep your kni
t
ting out of sight.” He indicated the puzzle on the pad screen. “We might as well
attempt
to maintain appearances.”

“Anything you say, Chief.” He glanced down at the puzzle. “What’s a seven-letter word for ‘uncouth barbarian’?”

“Y-E-R-S-E-L-F,” supplied the Healer.

“Wise-ass,” the paramedic muttered disrespectfully. “Hey—that’s it! Or does a hyphen count as an extra letter?”

“If you
dash
out of here, right now, I won’t tell on you. Git!”

A moment later the rubbery slap of smartsuit feet in the hall outside announced the arrival of a familiar furry form. “Win Bear. We’ve got to stop meeting like this.”

“Francis, I’ve had enough humor just now to—to keep me in
stitches
for a week. We were just trying to call you.”

“Oh? Well, a
Tursiops
at
Le Petit Prince
beat you to it.” The gorilla paused, removed his wire-rims, and polished them. “Dr. Scott, I unde
r
stand you’ve got another brain-bore victim. The last one didn’t survive Win’s amateur surgery.”

“So I’m told.” He pointed to the stasis-tank. “I’m not sure this one’s much better off. Suspended this way, I can’t operate on her, and the i
n
stant I shut the field down, we’ll start losing her again.”

Francis peered into the chamber over the tops of his glasses. “Young, female, human—exactly like the other. Right-handed, judging from the placement of the bore.” He reached into a pocket and extracted his little tin of cigarillos. I accepted, Scott refused with a professionally disa
p
proving scowl. “I’ve had a chance to learn a little from the necropsy. This is an e
x
tremely sophisticated device we’re up against, an electronic par
a
site, really.”

“Why do you say that?” I applied my Bic to both cigars.

“Because, said the gorilla, “it’s more than just a simple implant. It
grows
.”

“
What?
” Scott gasped. I wasn’t far behind him.

“That’s right, not unlike the way in which a damaged smartsuit heals i
t
self. But this thing leaches iron, trace copper, I don’t know what else, right out of the blood, always extending its hold. I found at least a hu
n
dred areas of the brain it had connected itself to. Makes me ill to think about it. Did you get pics on this one?”

Scott leaned against the stasis-tank, shaking his head. Beneath his pr
o
tective grouchiness was a little less professional detachment than I’d guessed. “She was sinking too fast. Those warped, perverted—”

“You can’t shoot x-rays, or whatever, inside the tank, right?”

He gave me that
look
physicians cultivate for mere laypersons ventu
r
ing medical opinions. “Without stasis, we’ve got perhaps five minutes. Any su
g
gestions”—he glared at me again—”from
qualified
observers?”

Francis answered: “I don’t even know what’s killing this one, although that blasted thing in there could do it a dozen different ways. What are the indications?”

“Generally depressed everything—respiration, pulse, EEG, endocrine, lymphatic, even bone marrow, for Albert’s sake. It’s like—”

“Like she was being
shut off
”
I barged in. “And don’t give me that ‘qual
i
fied observer’ crap. I worked twenty-seven years in a related specia
l
ty—
homicide.
”

“All right, all right.” Scott looked at me with dawning respect, while Francis chuckled, rummaging around for an ashtray. “Any sugge
s
tions—from anybody?”

I thought about it. “As long as she’s in stasis, she’s okay, if you want to call that living. Try and help her, she dies, because that
thing
is orde
r
ing her to. It’s not the
patient
you guys should be working on, but that goddamned hunk of nanocircuitry.”

Scott snorted. “That’s a complicated, deadly little toy. You can’t just—”

“Who’s opinionating outside his professional competence now?” Fra
n
cis stepped into the office across the hall and stubbed his cigar out in Scott’s wastebasket. “I agree with Win. We need a specialist.”

“I know a cybernetic engineer,” I volunteered, “although she never planned on ending up that way. If we spent one of this girl’s last five minutes scanning the device that’s killing her, then couldn’t you put her back on hold until we figured out how to exorcise it?”

“Your patient, Healer,” Francis said.

“No, I’m not,” retorted Scott, “but this child here doesn’t have much hope, no matter what we do.”

***

Lucy wasn’t difficult to find. The Admiral Heinlein Arms informed me that she’d one-upped me in the pocket-pager department—didn’t even need pockets. Three words and she was on her way, my apprentice sulkily in tow. Fifteen minutes later, there was a real crowd around the stasis-tank, the Healers focusing at least half their perplexed attention on Lucy’s fascinating condition.

“We’re ahead on one count,” she observed. “They made the case tran
s
parent. All I need’s a little elbow room—I got talents them fellers Gray an’ Bell an’ Edison never even dreamed about.”

“Not to mention Don Ameche.”

“Shut up, Winnie.” She shooed us all into the corridor. Neither Scott nor his assistant appeared too happy being pushed around on their own turf. We piled up in the doorway, elbows in each other’s ribs, while Lucy scooted up as close to the tank as her conical bulk allowed. Her “arms” b
e
gan to telescope until her manipulators rested on the floor. Then, as her torso lifted, she tilted against the observation window, hung there a few moments, then lowered herself to the floor again.

“Okay, ever-body, take a gander.” Like my brand-new smartsuit, Lucy’s hide had been a plain, undecorated silver-gray. Now it began to lighten, showing some color. I recognized the image of the brain-bore in its plastic shell, magnified thirty or forty diameters. It looked like a tra
n
sistor radio with its back open.

“See anything looks familiar?” She pointed out a central processor, su
r
rounded by a dozen other chips.

The capacity of this thing must have been enormous. “This here’s a Lonestar Instruments 4311-C. An’ here’s a paira Nanodata 6517s. Tells me plenty, right there.”

Francis thrust his way into the tiny room, dug deep in a pocket and held an object, dangling from its loose wires, under Lucy’s figurative nose. “For whatever it’s worth, here’s the bore I removed aboard the
Bonavent
u
ra
.”

“Well, call me a tie-dyed quark. Circuitry looks about th’ same. But then agin, this other one here’s still runnin’. That’n of yours is deader’n a dem
o
crat.” The image on her exterior changed, becoming far more schema
t
ic. “Hey, Scotty, gimme fifteen seconds with th’ stasis-power off. That oughta be enough t’trace th’ logic.”

Scott squeezed into the room. “You’re sure that’s sufficient? I don’t want to have to do this twice. And, Mrs. Kropotkin,
don’t
call me Scotty.”

“Don’t call me Mrs. Kropotkin! I’m Lucy—even if I do look like an Apollo capsule. Fifteen seconds oughta be fine—a lot of me runs in nan
o
seconds these days, an’ the rest’ll hafta catch it on th’ instant replay.”

Scott stood by the end of the tank and flipped the safety cover off a switch while Lucy cranked herself back into position. “
Now!
” Nothing spe
c
tacular happened; I don’t know what I’d been expecting: weird purple rays, maybe theramin music; the Healer flipped the toggle off again and locked the cover down.

“Okay,” said Lucy, “stray neutrinos, mag-fields, various other seconda
r
ies, comin’ up!” A new, indecipherable overlay began taking shape on her illustrated surface, parts of it in colors I don’t think I’d ever seen before. One by one, Lucy traced the whorls, isolating elements of the brain-bore’s function. “Got it! A minute or two t’dicker with th’ thing, an’ it’ll shut itself down, steada that little girl in there. Anybody got a drink?”

Dave gave Lucy a skeptical look, then glanced at Scott, who nodded. A half-gallon baggie materialized from a file drawer, along with a small stack of metal cups. “The chief has me file it under L,” said the paramedic, “b
e
cause it—”

“Stands for Liquor?” Koko guessed.

“Or Old
Lysander
?”
ventured Lucy, referring to her favorite brand.

“Or rots your
liver
?”
offered Francis.

“No, because Dave
loves
it so much” the Healer explained. “It takes his mind off crossword puzzles. Tell me, Lucy, how do you intend to drink it?”

“A good question,” I agreed. “I thought you relied on datachips to sa
t
isfy your vices.”

Lucy emitted an electronic harumph. “You boys’d better mind yer manners. An’ get me an eyedropper, Dave. I ain’t equipped t’handle cups.” She accepted a careful drop or two, then modestly turned her back. “Guess I’m a cheap date now. Ah! Right in th’ old nutrient solution!” She turned around to face us once again. “Say, what’s th’ matter, ain’t anybody else drinkin’?”

***

I never did understand the brain-bore’s circuitry, just that it could be reprogrammed in a relatively short time once Lucy started “talking” to it. The real break was a radio link through which the victim presumably r
e
ceived occasional new instructions.

“Hold on a minute.” I grabbed Lucy’s arm as she and Scott and Francis headed back for the stasis-tank. “Doesn’t that imply that whoever tried to kill me through a conditioned assassin might have been aboard the
Bonave
n
tura
in person? I mean, after the first attempt failed...”