The Return of Nathan Brazil

was recorded after his disappearance and that of New Pompeii—and he could hardly have mounted such a campaign after he, we must assume, died. No, the rest of the story’s in there someplace—I know it. Somebody, somebody big, wanted the record preserved, thought it was important enough for that, yet so dangerous that this individual buried the information so completely that most researchers would reach a dead end. The computer refuses to correlate it with the rest. In order to dig the information out, someone must ask precisely the right questions.”

In the age of paper you could have dug out the information with a large team of researchers. And Tortoi Kai could have had thousands of people poring over the written documentation, trying to correlate it with what they already had. Probably they would have found the key. But the idea never occurred to her. After all, that was what computers were for.

Supervisor Billie, to whom such a procedure also would not occur, and for the same reason, tried to think. Anything so well obscured probably implied the Presidium. He suggested it.

She shook her head. “No, that’s a dead end, too. I considered a Com Police link but I’ve searched the files for ten years afterward with every name I had and could find nothing.”

Billie was not a stupid man, nor an unimaginative one. “What about—more than ten years?” he mused slowly.

She shrugged. “What use is that?”

The supervisor was warming to the task. After years of attention to administrative detail, he felt he was once again taking part in the adventure of history.

“Let’s try a given,” he suggested, still speaking slowly, deep in thought. “From your work it is apparent that there are still loose ends to be traced, loose ends that could save the labs time and lives. But how can there be loose ends? We have the whole story, all that was entered in the files—but only up to the experiment! Hence, something must have happened afterward. Why cover up a public theory and a dem-onstrably fatal failure at all? Why do so unless the experiment did not fail? ”

Kai gasped. “But… that’s Impossible! We know—”

“Only half the story,” he corrected her. “Now, let’s go to the console and see what factors we might use for data correlation.”

Billie walked to his office and sat in a padded chair facing the console screen. Kai stood beside him. “Free association,” he said. “Go!”

“Antor Trelig… sponge… New Pompeii… New Harmony… Gil Zinder… Nikki Zinder…” She continued, rattling off as many of the possible key words as she could recall. As she uttered them they appeared on the monitor. Then the supervisor called up the names of all Councillors and their representatives who were invited to Trelig’s demonstration.

He asked for correlation with Presidium posts later and other jobs.

The correlations took seconds but the printout was still spewing minutes later. Together the two historians pored over the massive output. By the early morning of the next day, after a sleepless night, they had some interesting puzzles and some new trails.

“Look—this Councillor Alaina,” he pointed to her. “She was Secretary of Com Police on the Presidium when Trelig held his demonstration—she didn’t attend, though. Just sent her assistant. Good thing for her—later she became Council President! And see?” His eyes moved down eleven meters of print, paper flying. “Here! It was she who announced the sponge-cure formula to the world some thirteen years later. A sponge cure! The syndicate broken. And here was Trelig, with whom she was connected thirteen years before, head of the sponge syndicate —as she, as Secretary of Police, had to know. And what two posts are best for burying anything?” He paused but Tortoi Kai was already ahead of him, at the console.

“Correlation!” she demanded. “History of research on a cure or arresting agent for the drug ‘sponge’ later than 1237.” The date would bar retrieval of the early research on the subject.

The computer came up with the answer after a surprising delay, but it confirmed their theories very well.

In the thirteen years between Antor Trelig’s disappearance and President Alaina’s announcement of the sponge breakthrough, there was no research of any sort on the subject. The syndicate itself nipped that in the bud. A cure had been produced without work of any sort by a powerful individual connected with the earlier Trelig incident.

Supervisor Billie beamed, although now the investigator would probably get tough. They were down to the deliberately disguised material. Until they had everything just right it would be a guessing-game with the computer.

“Where was the sponge cure developed?” Kai asked, also excited.

unknown,the machine replied.

“Who developed it?”

COMPUTER.

“Whose computer?” Tortoi asked.

ZINDER’S.

Pursuing their leads was still like pulling teeth, though, until they had the information to ask the right question.

“What year was it developed?”

UNKNOWN.

“What year did the computer give it to Councillor Alaina?”

1250.

She heard the supervisor slowly exhale behind her. So there it was. Gil Zinder’s computer had given the powerful woman the sponge cure some thirteen years after the computer was supposed to have been destroyed.

“What is the location of Zinder’s computer today?” Kai asked.

DESTROYED BY COM POLICE ACTION, 1250 SEE COM POLICE RECORDS FOR 9-2-1250.

“We got it!” the supervisor whooped.

* * *

The records were clear. One day thirteen years after its disappearance, Zinder’s computer and the planetoid into which it had been built reappeared at their former coordinates. Com Police received a call for assistance from a New Harmony shuttle, and everything they learned went straight to then-President Alaina’s desk. One look and she sped to the area.

The ship had contained three aliens of unknown type and eleven stunningly beautiful women. Except for hair and eye color, all of the women looked exactly alike. But nine of them had large, graceful horse tails.

“The Olympians!” Tortoi Kai exclaimed.

Of the aliens, one was a blue-skinned creature whose human torso was topped by a devil’s horned head and who sat atop goatlike legs; another resembled two fried eggs sunny-side up and oozed around creating tentacles as needed from the orange sacs atop its body. The third, which was only dimly perceived, appeared to be an energy creature of pale red, resembling a hooded cloak in which nobody could be seen.

And President Alaina received answers. At the demonstration, Zinder double-crossed Trelig at the last minute by activating a field—based on his theories—that removed New Pompeii from reality. But unexpectedly the planetoid was drawn like a magnet to orbit a strange planet—the Well World—one composed of hexagonal biospheres, each containing its own unique, dominant lifeform. The world’s computer transformed anyone reaching its surface into one of the dominant creatures—as the blue satyr said he had been changed—along with Trelig, Trelig’s assistant Ben Yulin, the Zinders (father and daughter), and Mavra Chang, who had been Alaina’s personal representative. After years trapped on the Well World’s surface, Chang and the blue satyr Renard, Ben Yulin, Nikki Zinder, and a few others made it back to New Pompeii, whereupon Yulin took command of the computer. Yulin then remade most of the people on New Pompeii into what he considered to be beautiful love- slaves. At the cost of Chang’s life, Chang’s group managed to kill Yulin and break his hold on the transformed women, then flee to the Com. The sponge cure had been a last legacy of Zinder’s computer.

“So Zinder was right all the time,” the supervisor breathed. “There was a