Authors: Alan Dean Foster
A long workbench ran beneath the windows that overlooked the river. Here the lugubrious tributary of the Savannah flowed slow as black Jell-O. Hundreds of years ago the space between bench and windows might have been filled with hammers and saws, drills and awls, boxes of nails and spools of wire. In contrast, the skills of contemporary advanced technology demanded more mettle than metal.
Holding the thread steady in a portal beam Gator examined it closely while the projector ran a preludial analysis. “There’s a connector on one end. Reckon you noticed that already.” Whispr nodded. “Nonstandard contact, but my gear can adjust for that. The thread itself is interesting. Not a carbon derivative. Definitely metal. Lightweight even for something that’s just a bit of thread. That said, the actual composite could be any one of a thousand functional storage alloys. I don’t suppose you have a clue as to its chemical configuration?”
Whispr shook his head. His redone hair itched and his eyes still felt a little tight in their recently maniped orbits. “Uh, something-oxide?”
“Nothing like a little specificity to help a man out.” Gator sighed. “I suppose what it’s made of isn’t nearly as important as what’s on it. You need to know and I’m curious.”
Leaving the projector’s analyzer to finish its work Gator moved to another station farther down the workbench. As Whispr looked on, his host carefully slipped the thread into a tension capsule. Once it had been drawn taut with the connector end left free, Gator then gently inserted the capsule into one of several receptacles on the top of a gray box. On the instrument’s front panel a trio of green telltales immediately winked to life. Almost as rapidly they began to turn red, one at a time. In spite of his radically melded face Gator still managed a frown.
“That’s odd.”
“What’s odd?” Looking from host to box and back again while seeking enlightenment, Whispr found none in either location.
Without replying Gator removed the capsule from the gray box. Continuing down the long workbench he flipped open the transparent cover of a much smaller device and placed the capsule on the pad within. Once the cover was softly snapped shut he adjusted the controls that speckled a protruding panel on the instrument’s front. A pale blue glow filled the chamber and enveloped the capsule. Moments later a multidimensional, much enlarged image of the small cylindrical container and its inscrutable contents were projected into the room.
“Resolve subject matter.” Unlike his body there was nothing reptilian about Gator’s voice. It was full and mellow and occasionally bordered on the operatic. He glanced at his visitor. “This is how you read storage media while bypassing the connector. You go straight in and pull the information straight out. No messy intervening physical security to deal with.”
The capsule image vanished, leaving behind only the enlarged likeness of Whispr’s prized thread hovering before the two men. Drawn taut, it pulsed beneath the probing azure aura of the analytical beam that had been focused on it.
“Content resolution unsuccessful,” a synthesized voice declared.
For a second time Gator frowned. “Repeat procedure.” The same number of moments passed as previously, and generated the same disheartening response. “Explain failure,” he demanded curtly of the machine.
“Content is encrypted.”
The techrap looked relieved. “Is that all?” Moving to the workbench, he fingered additional controls. Two more pieces of equipment came to life; one to the right of the capsule-holder, the other that was built into the shelf beneath it. After a delay of a minute or so one, or perhaps both of them, beeped softly.
“Decryption failed.”
Was that a hint of confusion in the gray box’s synthesized voice? a perplexed Whispr wondered.
Leaning his back against the workbench and sliding his tail onto a vacant shelf Gator crossed leathery arms as he stared at the floating image of the uncooperative thread. “Military level?” he inquired aloud.
“No.” Gray box’s response was unexpected. “Beyond military. Beyond anything in my files or that I can access via the box. I can distinguish patterns within. But as soon as they are pursued, holes are encountered.”
“Utilize the patterns to construct temporary bridges.” Gator was now utterly involved in the probe, Whispr saw. Had the engineer possessed a brow, it would have been deeply furrowed.
“That has been tried. Thus far no bridging effort has proven successful.”
Gator nodded with satisfaction at this first sign of encouragement, however inconclusive. “ ‘Thus far.’ Keep at it unless and until you hit a wall.” Remembering that he was not alone, he looked over at the blank-faced Whispr and explained patiently.
“For every hole in an encryption pattern it is possible to construct a bridge based on the underlying nature of the encryption pattern itself. It might fall into place on the tenth attempt, or on the trillionth. But the number of possibilities is finite. While we’re waiting for the box to find one we might as well eat something. You like Italian?”
Never one to turn down a free meal, Whispr avowed as how he did.
Almost as distinctive and engrossing as Gator’s appearance was the sight of him using a special utensil to shovel penne pasta into his crocodilian jaws. They ate in the workshop. It would not have surprised Whispr to learn that Gator slept there as well, comfortably ensconced among his instruments and tools, his pet caimans and garails.
The gray box and its wireless attendants were still humming away trying to unlock the secrets of the thread’s contents when farther up the workbench the portal beam analyzer chimed for attention. Carrying his now almost empty plate of self-heating pasta Gator rose from where he was sitting and ambled over to study the readout. Having long since downed the last of his own meal Whispr watched as his intent host stared fixedly at the wisp of screen.
“Well, what’s it say?”
Though not words of magic, Whispr’s query broke the spell that seemed to have overtaken his host. Gator blinked and turned to him. “At the outset we encountered an oddity. Now I find that compounded by an impossibility.” Whispr’s response to this avowal consisting of blank incomprehension, his host hastened to explain. “It is the thread’s composition. It’s chemically absurd. It’s physically preposterous.
“Under normal pressure and temperature metallic hydrogen shouldn’t even exist.”
H
OURS PASSED, NIGHT DEEPENED, AND
the Alligator Man seemed to grow more and not less energized as one tantalizing clue about the mystifying thread after another was disclosed by his interlinked complex of instruments. Minuscule as they were, periodic revelations emerged only after long periods of analysis by multiple devices. As midnight snuck up on the two Melds and then fled, Whispr found himself having to struggle to keep from nodding off. Fortunately, a refrigerator in one corner of the workshop proved to be an inexhaustible font of chilled stimulants. So he was able to stay awake but grew increasingly edgy doing so.
Not Gator. The more he learned about the thread’s composition, if not its still impenetrable contents, the more determined he became to winkle them out.
“Look at this.” Holding a hard copy in front of the sleepy Whispr he shook the reusable paper violently. “According to the laws of physics and
metallurgy not only is the thread’s atomic structure unparalleled, it’s unreasonable. It shouldn’t exist.” Crocodilian canines ground against heavily maniped jaws. “Even if this thread contains no information of value, my friend, even if it turns out to be completely blank, the remarkable substance of which it is composed is worth a great deal. Any manufacturing concern in the world that deals in exotic metals would …” His voice trailed off, the need to articulate his thoughts overcome by the visions they had begun to inspire.
“Then,” Whispr ventured hesitantly, “you can see someone paying for it even if it can’t be opened or decrypted?”
Gator turned back to his hopeful guest. “I can see more than that.” He gestured at the workbench where the gray box and its companion devices were still struggling furiously to try to decipher the thread’s contents. “For one thing I can see that the time has come for us to work out an arrangement.” As he continued speaking every word echoed as if freighted with its own punctuation. “I have excellent commercial contacts. This is potentially big, my slender friend. Very big.” His gaze drifted ceilingward and elsewhere. “It is,” he paused for emphasis, “unsurpassingly
large
.”
It was at that point and on the cusp of incipient mutual celebration that the alarms went off.
Articulating an expletive that was more consciously reptilian than anything he had uttered thus far, Gator rushed to a battery of small projectors installed at the far end of the techrap. The images they displayed of hustling, disembarking armored squads were intimidating. As they were meant to be. The arriving cops were not trying to mask their presence. Spreading out from multiple transports they were approaching the complex rapidly and on foot. A pair of heavily armed police watercraft idled at a distance from the building in order to cut off any retreat via the river. Auto minihunters had perched themselves in the surrounding trees. All of this disheartening visual information arrived in the techrap courtesy of automated security pickups hidden among the dense vegetation and mounted on the backs of Gator’s modified free-roaming pets. They were well and truly trapped, a despondent Whispr decided.
Except they were not.
“Follow me.” Hissing a single code word his host shut down the security pickups and turned away. Devoid of options or ideas, Whispr complied. If Gator thought that in the panic and confusion his guest might forget a certain
small sliver of specious metal, he was mistaken. Whispr followed, but not before flipping up the transparent cover of the analyzer and recovering possession of the study capsule that now contained the thread. Hurrying to keep up with his host he alternately ran and hopped as he placed the capsule back in the secret security compartment in the sole of his right shoe.
If nothing else the arrival in numbers of the authorities at Gator’s establishment confirmed that the thread
had
to be the object of their attention. Such extensive forces would never be deployed by the city or the state just to pick up a single questionable homicide suspect. Multiple squads of heavily armed police would not have been sent out to arrest someone like himself on suspicion of participating in an ordinary murder. Their appearance only lent reinforcement to Gator’s preliminary assessment of the thread’s value.
If only, Whispr told himself as he followed his host down through a flawlessly camouflaged trapdoor in the workroom floor, he had some idea of what was
on
the damned strand of metal. As far as its ostensibly unique composition was concerned that was of less interest to him than it evidently was to his host. Whispr really could not have cared if the thread had been fashioned from arc-welded fairy wings.
Had his admittedly limited scientific knowledge extended farther into the realms of physics and metallurgy he might have realized that fairy wings were more likely constituents than the reality.
Since Gator’s house and techrap complex were built on pylons out over the water Whispr was not surprised to encounter a slice of river in the compound’s basement. In light kept deliberately dim that barely illuminated the patch of dark water, long streamlined shapes gradually resolved themselves into living creatures. Lying largely submerged, they were the contours of nightmare. Though the prospect in the basement resembled a clichéd scene from a bad horror vit he was not afraid. In an age when animals as well as humans had been subjected to every imaginable kind of advanced melding one truly could no longer judge a book by its cover or the reactions of a creature from its appearance.
Slightly awash, a sturdy platform extended outward from the bottom of the last step. A flick of a concealed switch accordioned the stairway upward until it lay flush with the underside of the residence. At Gator’s command two of the largest floating shapes, driven by lazy sweeps of enormously powerful tails, approached the platform. Unlike those of other
crocodilians their ebony scutes stood up like those of a dragon. The black caimans in Gator’s basement, however, were not creatures of imagination. They were very real. A squinting Whispr could just make out the control box that had been melded to each of their spines just aft of the skull. He had expected to see something of the kind. What he had not anticipated was the other equipment that was fastened to the broad, armored backs.
Gator was already in the water. “Hurry up! My decoys are already out in the river. They should draw the boats and airborne hunters away and hold their attention long enough.”
“Long enough for what?” Hesitating only briefly, Whispr eased himself into the black water. Kept perpetually in shade by the house above, it was unexpectedly cool.
If he had known he was going to be spending this much time running from the police through water, he mused, he might have asked Chaukutri for a fin meld.
“Long enough for us to get away,” Gator told him.
Further verbal instruction proved unnecessary. Whispr simply emulated his host’s actions as the Alligator Man removed and donned gear from the long narrow container secured to one caiman’s back. Mask for the eyes, compact oxygen extractor and minirespirator for the lungs. Puzzlingly there was no sign of foot fins, webbed gloves, or an underwater scoot. As he soon found out, these appurtenances would not be needed.
The rubberized grip ring that had been melded to the caiman’s back just above its shoulders was sturdy and wide. Because of the caiman’s sluggish metabolism the ring’s presence did not harm it. Slipping the oxygen extractor’s respirator into his mouth, Whispr fumbled with the mask. He barely had time to clear it before Gator gestured to him (or maybe at him) and plunged downward atop his own scaly mount.
Lying down and forward Whispr let his body stretch out along the caiman’s spine as his saurian steed took him beneath the surface. Guided by signals from Gator the pair of powerful six-meter-long crocodilians and their human riders passed beneath the plastic overhang that formed the lower exterior rim of the compound and shot out into the open river. The pressure of water pushing against his mask prevented Whispr from guessing whether they were traveling upstream or down.