CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

CROSSING THE HALL, he found the operation-command room busy, in a quiet and almost leisurely manner. Everybody knew what to do, and was getting it done with a minimum of fuss. A group of men, policemen and engineers, were huddled at a big table, going over plans, on big sheets and on photoprint screens. More men, police and maintenance people, gathered around a big solidigraph model of the fourteenth, fifteenth and sixteenth levels, projected in a tri-di screen. The thing was transparent, and looked almost anatomical; well, Company House was an organism of a sort. Respiratory system; the ventilation, in which everybody was interested. Circulatory system; the water-lines. Excretory system; sewage disposal.

And now it had been invaded by a couple of inimical microbes, named Phil Novaes and Moses Herckerd, whom the police leucocytes were seeking to neutralize.

He looked at it for a while, then strolled on to the banks of viewscreens. Views of halls and vehicle-ways, mostly empty, patrolled here and there by police or hastily mobilized and armed maintenance workers. Views of landing stages, occupied by police and observed from aircars. A view from a car a thousand feet over the building, in which a few Constabulary and city police vehicles circled slowly, blockading the building from outside. He nodded in satisfaction; they couldn’t get out of the building, and as soon as enough of the fifty-odd widely scattered locations from which they might be operating could be eliminated, the police would close in on them.

In one screen from a pickup installed over the door in the gem-vault, he could see Morgan Lansky, Bert Eggers and two detectives, coatless and perspiring, around the electrically warmed tabletop, staring at the little rope ladder that dangled down around the light-shade. In another screen, from a high pickup in a corner of Harry Steefer’s office, the uniformed sergeant at the desk watched Ernst Mallin and Ahmed Khadra fussing with a screen, while Sandra Glenn sat on the floor talking to Diamond and his three friends.

Harry Steefer sat alone at the command desk, keeping track of everything at once. He went over and sat down beside him.

“Mr. Grego. We don’t seem to be making too much progress,” the Chief said. “Everything’s secure so far, though.”

“Have the news services gotten hold of it yet?”

“I don’t believe so. Planetwide News called the city police to find out what all the cars were doing around Company House; somebody told them that it was a shipment of valuables being taken under guard to the space terminal. They seemed to accept that.”

“We can’t sit on it indefinitely.”

“I hope we can till we catch these people.”

“Have you contacted Conrad Evins yet?”

“No. He’s not at home; here, I’ll show you.”

Steefer punched out a call on one of his communication screens. When it lighted, the chief gem buyer’s wide-browed, narrow chinned face looked out of it.

“This is a recording, made at 2100, Conrad Evins speaking. Mrs. Evins and I are going out; we will not be home until after midnight,” Evins’s voice said. Then the screen flickered, and the recording began again.

“I could put out an emergency call for him, but I don’t want to,” Steefer said. “We don’t know how many people outside the building are involved in this, and we don’t want to alarm them.”

“No. Four men and one woman; the Fuzzies say there were only two men, presumably Herckerd and Novaes, brought them here. That means two men and a woman somewhere outside waiting for them. And we don’t really need Evins, at present. It’s after midnight now; we can keep calling at his home.”

Evins and his wife had probably gone to a show, or visiting. Evins’s wife; he couldn’t seem to recall ever having met her. He’d heard something or other about her… He shoved that aside.

“Don’t they have little robo-snoopers they use to go through the ventilation ducts?” he asked.

“Yes. Mr. Guerrin, the ventilation engineer, has a dozen of them. He suggested using them, but I vetoed it till I could see what you thought. Those things float on contragravity, and even a miniature Abbot-drive generator makes quite an ultrasonic noise. We still have two Fuzzies loose in the ventilation system; we don’t want to scare them, do we?”

“No. Let them carry on. There’s a chance they may come out in the gem-vault, if we don’t frighten them.”

He looked across the room at the viewscreens. Khadra and Mallin had their screen set up, Sandra had brought the Fuzzies over in front of it, and Diamond seemed to be explaining about viewscreens and audiovisual screens to the others. In the gem-vault screen, Lansky and the others were leaning forward across the table, listening. They had a couple of hearing aids, now, which Eggers and one of his detectives were using. Lansky turned to make frantic gestures at the pickup. Steefer picked up a speaker-phone and advised everybody to pay attention to the gem-vault screen.

For one of those ten-second eternities nothing happened in the screen. A moment later, a Fuzzy came climbing down the ladder. One of the detectives would have grabbed him; Eggers stopped him. A moment later, another Fuzzy appeared.

Eggers caught him by the feet with both hands and pulled him off the ladder; the Fuzzy hit Eggers in the face with his fist. The first Fuzzy, having dropped to the table, tried to get up the ladder again; Lansky grabbed him. One of the detectives came to Eggers’s assistance. Then the struggle was over, and the two prisoners had been secured. Lansky was yelling:

“We got them both! We’re bringing them up.”

Steefer yelled to the girl who was monitoring the screen to cut in sound transmission and tell Lansky and one man to remain on guard; Lansky acknowledged, and Eggers and one of the detectives left the vault, each carrying a Fuzzy. In the screen from Steefer’s office, they had an audiovisual of Moses Herckerd on the screen; it was the employment interview film, and Herckerd was talking about his educational background and former job experience. Steefer was talking to the sergeant at his desk; the latter beckoned Ahmed Khadra over.

“Good,” Khadra said, when Steefer told him what had happened. “That’s all of them. We’ll run Herckerd over for them when they come up, and show them Novaes. They’re the two who brought them here tonight, the three we have here all say so.”

“They’re still in here,” Steefer said. “That leaves two men and a woman outside. I wonder…”

“I think I know who they are, Chief.”

It was just a guess, of course, but it fitted. He had suddenly remembered what he knew about Mrs. Conrad Evins.

When Leo Thaxter, now Loan Broker Private Financier, first came to Zarathustra ten years ago, a woman had come with him, but she hadn’t been a wife or reasonable facsimile, she had been a sister or reasonable facsimile. Rose Thaxter. After a while, she had left Thaxter and married a company minerologist named Conrad Evins, who, after the discovery of the sunstones, had become chief company gem-buyer.

“What’s that call-number of Evins?” he asked Steefer, and when Steefer gave it, he repeated it to Khadra. “When those other Fuzzies come in, call it. It’ll be answered by an audiovisual recording. See if the kids recognize him.”

Steefer looked at him, more amused than surprised. “I wouldn’t have thought of that, myself, Mr. Grego. It seems to fit, though.”

“Hunch.” If anybody respected hunches, it would be a cop. “I just remembered who Evins was married to. Rose Thaxter.”

“Yeh!” Steefer muttered something else. “I know that, too; I just never connected it. It all hangs together, too.”

For a couple of minutes, they were both talking at the same time, telling one another just how it did hang together, and watching the screen from Steefer’s office. Eggers and the detective were coming in, still coatless, carrying a Fuzzy apiece; the one Eggers was carrying was trying to get the gun out of the lieutenant’s shoulder-holster.