never seen nor experienced anything at all, let alone that sort of stuff.”
“I think, possibly with the device, possibly in spite of it, we had our first confirmed contact between an Ancient Ones planetary brain and sentient life as we know it. There can only have been one thing in any of their minds at that moment—escape, flight, even panicky flight. Get away, go anywhere but here and we’ll work out the details later. They all were almost screaming in that energy grid or whatever it was they and we summoned up, and the desire was so clear, so simple, so basic, so unambiguous, and so in the data stream, that it could not be misinterpreted. The computer understood it on that level and got them out of there.”
“But to where?” Ari asked him, aghast. “And how?”
“Matter to energy is easy. We’ve been doing that since the discovery of fire,” O’Leary replied. “Energy to matter is a trick we’re still only playing with in the lab in very basic ways. Of course, plants do it all the time, and, to some extent, other living organisms do as well, but again, it’s not on the level of creating a new Adam and Eve, and certainly not on the level of turning, say, one of us into energy instantly, recording the code to reverse it as some kind of energy header, then shooting it somewhere else via some sort of dimensional gateways we can’t imagine, and reassembling, probably perfectly, on the other side. There’s chaos, y’see. Just enough randomly goes wrong to create either an imperfect copy or almost always a dead one. Add to that the losses inherent in any transmission and reception procedure, and you see why we’ve not come close. They figured it out, somehow. Got around chaos mathematics, got around transmission losses. It’s why you see their cities and such all over but you never see any sign of spaceports and the like. They didn’t need ’em. They just gave their world computers the address, no matter where it was, and it digitized and squirted them there easy as you please.”
Jules Wallinchky sighed. “All right, Inspector, you’ve had your fun. You didn’t come here to show us that, which I have little if any interest in, or to give us lessons in physics and archaeology.”
O’Leary smiled. “In that, sir, you are only half right. I did indeed come to tell you that story, and by it to illustrate that we’ve had little trouble getting Hadun’s people at their base world to speak volumes to us, even more when they see him disappear. Much of the computer record is currently still beyond our reach, but they recorded that little fling they had with the City of Modar, and they’d not taken the time to delete it from the frigate’s storage. More importantly, we have a nice view of the transactions with certain Rithians of the Ha’jiz Nesting. A fellow of your acquaintance named Teynal hadn’t yet had the time to have his mind laundered. There was considerable confirmation left in there, and we knew the codes to get at it from the Hadun tapes. They had to be in full possession of their faculties, y’see, to make the swap in the boat. In other words, sir, you finally overstepped yourself. I’ve no doubt you can prolong things, but if you can beat this one, then you are what Josich wanted to become and we might as well have it out in the open. I don’t think you are that powerful, though, as mighty as you are, or you’d never have let us land.”
“I’ll destroy this, and my other collections, before I’ll allow anyone else to own them,” Jules Wallinchky warned, his mouth dry, his mind still calculating.
The Inspector shrugged his massive shoulders. “Go ahead. I’ll lend you a knife right now and you can slash away. Or you can just order your two pretty androids there to do it. If, indeed, they are androids and not broken, mutilated, and reprogrammed people. If it’s discovered that they are not what you say, then nothing in the Realm can save you.”
Wallinchky hardly heard his threat. “You would actually allow the utter destruction of all those works?” he said unbelievingly. “Those—Those are immortal. The sum total of genius and beauty from Old Earth for thousands of years past. Your heritage as well as mine. What do mere mortal lives mean compared to them? Hundreds, perhaps thousands, have died to preserve or to capture them. Wars were fought in ancient times over some of them. And you can so casually dismiss the likelihood of them being now gone forever?”
O’Leary shrugged. “Well, now, I wasn’t the one who said I was gonna destroy ’em. Most of them are legal. All the ones out here now, I wager, have good, solid bills of sale. That’s how you can flaunt ’em. That means I can’t stop you doin’ anything you want with your own property. But, y’see, most folks will never see the real things. If they’re interested at all, they’ll see them in holographic viewings or purchase perfect copies. Most are too fragile to keep moving, particularly over these distances and worlds and conditions. So, go ahead.”
“You think I won’t do it?”
“It’s a waste, but there’s nothing I could do to stop you anyway. But if these things are as precious as you say, then it’s on your head that they’re destroyed, and yours alone. I’d say that those who do appreciate or envy these things would do one thing for you if you did. Even the best crooks and villains fade into oblivion, along with the heroes, too. But the man who destroyed half the great art of Old Earth for spite—now, that’s a name that would go down despised and disgusted till Judgment Day. What sort of a barbarian, they’d ask, would destroy all that in a fit of frenzy? How he must have hated beauty, too.”
Jules Wallinchky looked the giant cop right in the eyes. “You bastard,” he said.
“The two most fierce barbarian conqueror races of our kind were the Mongols and the Celts,” O’Leary replied with a slight smile. “And I’m the worst half of each one.”
“I assume that the two of you didn’t just walk in here alone, either,” the boss said, probing.
“Well, yes and no. Let’s just say that you could probably stay here quite a while, but you can only go where we wish you to go. That goes for everyone here, by the way. Since your planetary defenses are extremely good, you could, of course, remain here in some comfort, but we’ve blocked communication and we’ll interdict anything in and out, and you’re very much off the beaten path, so any attempts to come here will be noted. You can kill yourself, and everyone else including us, I suppose, although what would be the point of it? And if we didn’t come out, then they’d eventually be forced to lob things into this compound whether we were killed or merely prisoners, and that would again destroy all this art and culture. I could be wrong, but I rather think you don’t have much choice.”
“But I don’t need to decide my course of action immediately, and they’ll do everything to keep from blowing up this artwork,” Jules Wallinchky responded, thinking very analytically. “Since the trigger is doing something to you, then we have to show them that you’re all right. There are weapons on both of you sufficient to knock you cold, and those sweet little girls over there are strong enough to get even you back to your ship, perhaps with a maglev trolley we use to move sculpture and other heavy objects. I think you can spare us all by going back there of your own accord. Transmit and receive all you like, but don’t try taking off. The defense grid will prevent it.”
“But what good will this do?” O’Leary asked him.
Wallinchky was a great poker player. “That, Inspector, is for you to dwell on. But I will have no enemies inside here who can transmit or see what if anything I do decide to do, and you will be in contact with your people so they won’t come in. Now, sir—if you need anything, provisions, blankets, whatever— feel free to ask one of the girls or call it in. It might be a while before we go further.”
Genghis O’Leary obviously had thought through almost every angle except this one, and his cheeks were getting red from anger, while his eyes looked as if they could drill holes in the others. Still, he and his silent, masked companion got to their feet and moved toward the door and the long hallway back.
“Oh, Inspector—I should warn you. If the girls have to take either or both of you out, you’ll be delivered to your ship stark naked, the both of you, and with your knees smashed. It’s an old custom.”
There was another glower, but they went, the two “androids” following intently behind, ready to do their master’s bidding.
Ari wasn’t impressed. He was scared to death. “I told you we couldn’t get away with this! You should have let surrogates handle it like always!”
“Like you? Stop your knees from knocking, boy. They’re telegraphing nonsense to your brain. There was no way I could permit third parties to get hold of the Pleiades. No way. No, son. Take heart from that old bastard Kincaid. If he could escape us and Hadun’s boys, get them to take him where he wanted to go, then get out and call for reinforcements in the middle of a planet of enemy psychopaths, then this isn’t any big deal. They’ve tipped their hand, nephew. They blew this one. Right now they created their own stalemate, just to get a couple of guys inside to size up the situation. They saw little, and had to bluster. Now we have to examine our possibilities.”
