Medusa: A Tiger by the Tail

comm people knew who he was and exactly where he was at that point.”

“I could detonate this module, at least protecting our information.”

“t certainly hope not. Right now I’m the only one from the Confederacy that Morah or any of the others will trust at all. They know me, in one form or another. I’m right there with them. I’m Cal Tremon, Park Lacoch, and Qwin Zhang, but uncontaminated by Wardens. I’m the only man they’re going to believe, because I’m the only one they have expert evaluation of.” He laughed. “I don’t think you’re going to get to kill me anyway, old friend.”

“It is not my intention to do so unless the mission is compromised.”

“Maybe, maybe you just don’t know it. But it’s irrelevant.” He got up from the chair and moved back to the desk area, pulling down a pen and a pad of paper. He always used pen and paper for his notes rather than a terminal. You never knew who or what was listening in on a terminal, but if you ate your notes you knew exactly where they were and in what form. Old habits were hard to break now.

He was at it for some time, until, finally, slips of paper, cards, and scribbled notations were scattered all over the place. Finally he picked them up, looking them over, put them in an odd pile, smiled, then nodded. He reached up and pulled down the special comcode set.

“Open Security Channel R,” he instructed the computer. “Tightbeam, scramble, top security code. Let’s let them in on the fun.”

It took several minutes to establish communications through the various secret links over such vast distances, but because these signals traveled in the same oblique inter-dimensional way as the spaceships, communication was virtually instantaneous at this high-priority level. Once the phone was answered at the other end, that is, and all the information was matched to decode what was going in.

“Go ahead, Warden Control,” came a very slightly distorted voice from the speaker. “This is Papa speaking.”

“Hello, Krega! You sound tired.”

“I was sound asleep when your call came in, and I’m taking a couple of pills now to wake up. I assume this is some other special request you want—like the Cerberan thing?”

“No. This is my report. I have the strong feeling that something important is still missing, but I have no way of finding out what it is. Instead, I have assembled everything that I do know and all that my deductions lead to. I think I have enough information to allow us to act and I think time might be of the essence now. There is a war council going on in the Diamond right now, and I think our time’s about run out.”

“All hell’s breaking loose throughout the civilized worlds,” Commander Krega told him. “That sleep you got me out of was the first I’d tried in four days. It’s chaos! Supply ships routed wrongly, causing factories on a dozen worlds to shut down for lack of raw material, causing dozens more to have to ration food’ and other vital materials because the ships didn’t arrive. Even some naval units have opened fire on one another! The number of those damned robots—and the scale of the operation—is massive, Control! Massive! There must be thousands of them, all at different, usually routine posts along the lines of communications, shipping, you name it. Our Confederacy holds together by total interdependence. You know that.”

He nodded and couldn’t suppress a slight smile. So Morah had put Kreegan’s war into operation unilaterally, as well as mobilizing the vast political and criminal organizations the Four Lords controlled. “How are you holding out?” he asked, almost hoping for a really bad answer.

“We’re coping—but barely!” Krega told him. “We were prepared for this kind of thing, considering what we already knew, but the scale is beyond anything we imagined—and it’s devilishly clever. The people they took over are very minor, routine links in complex chains, but they’re at just the right point to make a minor mistake on a shipping order, or routing order, or even battle order. And so damn minor the mistakes are hell to track down. They didn’t go for the admiral, instead they went for a minor clerk who types up or sends out the admiral’s orders. We can hold now, but there are already food riots in many places and I doubt if we can stopgap this for long. You’re right about the time business. If you can’t give us an out, we’ve got no choice but to take out the whole Warden Diamond—now.”

“I’m not sure you can, Papa,” he said bluntly. “We missed it on these aliens. Evidence shows they’re every bit as strong or even stronger than we are. Hold on to your hat. You aren’t gonna believe all this.”

“Well, get going, then. But I’m not sure I go along with that military-strength idea. Logic argues against it.”

He smiled wanly. Why are aliens evil to a psychotic murderer? That question bothered the Charonese, who didn’t answer it. He could.

Evil is when a race casually contemplates genocide against another not because another race is a threat but because it is inconvenient.

He was about to begin his report when something occurred to him. “Papa? Tell me one thing I don’t know. Our other prime operative down there, this Dr. Dumonia. Who the hell is he, really?”

“Him? Former Chief, Psychiatric Section, Confederacy Criminal Division. Not under that name, of course. He devised a lot of the techniques we still use on agents like you.”

“And he retired to Cerberus?”

“Why not? He’s in a volatile profession, Control. All a psych ever sees are really sick minds. They finally just get fed up and can’t do it any more, or they crack themselves. He was a little of both. Well, we couldn’t kill him, after his invaluable services, and we couldn’t use a psych machine on him—he’s so good with one of those things he’s invulnerable to them. So we gave him a complete cover identity and he picked Cerberus, where he could establish a mild private practice and work when he felt like it on either criminal or normal people with problems. He’s pretty sour and disillusioned about the Confederacy, but he’s not fond of the Four Lords, either. This alien thing really got to him, so he came out of retirement and set up an organization for us.”

“I’m glad he stayed on our side.”

Krega laughed now. “He’d better. He’s got a few little organic devices similar to that transmitter we used with your people inside him, including a couple of a new design that he doesn’t know about. If he ever became a threat a remote signal from a flyby would splatter him from Cerberus halfway to the Confederacy.”

There was no real answer to that. After a moment of dead air, Control reshuffled his notes. “Ready to report.”

“Standing by to record. On my mark … Go!”

A great deal of the information in this report is deduction, not direct observation. However, I must point out firmly that every deduction made here is not only logical in the context of the Diamond and our known situation, each and every deduction holds true for all four worlds. I feel that the information presented as fact herein is true and correct and borne out by remote personal observation. Let’s begin by addressing the broad points of the extraordinarily complex and subtle puzzle that is the Warden Diamond itself.

Point 1: No matter what, it is obvious that the four Diamond worlds are not natural. Each of the four worlds was certainly within the known “life zone” before being transformed into its present state, but mere location in the life zone is not sufficient’to guarantee any conditions remotely survivable. This obvious terraforming process of all four would have been easily confirmed had normal scientific thoroughness been applied to the Diamond worlds, but since the appearance of the Warden organism, with its bizarre effects and by- products, such an examination was not possible in the early years and would be subverted by the locals at the present stage of development. Still, from sheer deduction it is obvious that the worlds were extensively terraformed, and I will offer but a few of the abounding examples to prove my point. For example, there is no evidence that any of the planets are the products of natural evolution. While there are different examples of the dominant life form on each world, there are no clear primal orders—each class of plant and animal is unique and in place.

Despite the fact that any naturally evolving life on the four worlds would have to have a common origin—the plants, for example, are too close to one another and to ones familiar to us—the dominant type of animal-life on each is without serious competition and without any sign that the other three forms existed except in minor phyla. Thus, the cold-blooded reptile dominates on the warmest planet, the insect is virtually alone on the lushest, as is the water-breather on the world that is mostly sea, and the large mammal on the coldest planet is the dominant form on both land and sea. In other words, despite a certain common origin, four different kinds of life dominate