They laughed. Hunt settled himself more comfortably amid a haze of blue smoke. 'How about yourself, Felix?' he asked. 'Life still being kind to you?'
Borlan spread his arms wide. 'Life’s great.'
'Angie still as beautiful as the last time I saw her? Kids okay?'
'They’re all fine. Tommy’s at college now-majoring in physics and astronautical engineering. Johnny goes hiking most weekends with his club, and Susie’s added a pair of gerbils and a bear cub to the family zoo.'
'So you’re still as happy as ever. The responsibilities of power aren’t wearing you down yet.'
Borlan shrugged and showed a row of pearly teeth. 'Do I look like an ulcerated nut midway between heart attacks?'
Hunt regarded the blue-eyed, deep-tanned figure with close-cropped fair hair as Borlan sprawled relaxedly on the other side of the broad mahogany desk. He looked at least ten years younger than the president of any intercontinental corporation had a right to.
For a while the small talk revolved around internal affairs at Metadyne. At last a natural pause presented itself. Hunt sat forward, his elbows resting on his knees, and contemplated the last drop of amber liquid in his glass as he swirled it around first from right to left and then back again. Finally he looked up.
'About the scope, Felix. What’s going on, then?'
Borlan had been expecting the question. He straightened slowly in his chair and appeared to think for a moment. At last he said:
'Did you see the call I made to Francis?'
'Yep.'
'Then…' Borlan didn’t seem sure of how to put it. '… I don’t know an awful lot more than you do.' He placed his hands palms-down on the desk man attitude of candor, but his sigh was that of one not really expecting to be believed. He was right.
'Come on, Felix. Give.' Hunt’s expression said the rest.
'You must know,' Gray insisted. 'You fixed it all up.'
'Straight.' Borlan looked from one to the other. 'Look, taking things worldwide, who would you say our biggest customer is? It’s no secret-UN Space Arm. We do everything for them from Lunar data links to-to laser terminal clusters and robot probes. Do you know how much revenue I’ve got forecast from UNSA next fiscal? Two hundred million bucks… two hundred million!'
'So?'
'So… well-when a customer like that says he needs help, he gets help. I’ll tell you what happened. It was like this: UNSA is a big potential user of scopes, so we fed them all the information we’ve got on what the scope can do and how development is progressing in Francis’s neck of the woods. One day-the day before I called Francis-this guy comes to see me all the way from Houston, where one of the big UNSA outfits has its HQ. He’s an old buddy of mine-their top man, no less. He wants to know can the scope do this and can it do that, and I tell him sure it can. Then he gives me some examples of the things he’s got in mind and he asks if we’ve got a working model yet. I tell him not yet, but that you’ve got a working prototype in England; we can arrange for him to go see it if he wants. But that’s not what he wants. He wants the prototype down there in Houston, and he wants people who can operate it. He’ll pay, he says-we can name our own figure-but he wants that instrument-something to do with a top-priority project down there that’s got the whole of UNSA in a flap. When I ask him what it is, he clams up and says it’s ‘security restricted’ for the moment.'
'Sounds a funny business,' Hunt commented with a frown. 'It’ll cause some bloody awful problems back at Metadyne.'
'I told him all that.' Borlan turned his palms upward in a gesture of helplessness. 'I told him the score regarding the production schedules and availability forecasts, but he said this thing was big and he wouldn’t go causing this kind of trouble if he didn’t have a good reason. He wouldn’t, either,' Borlan added with obvious sincerity. 'I’ve known him for years. He said UNSA would pay compensation for whatever we figure the delays will cost us.' Borlan resumed his helpless attitude. 'So what was I supposed to do? Was I supposed to tell an old buddy who happens to be my best customer to go take a jump?'
Hunt rubbed his chin, threw back his last drop of scotch, and took a long, pensive draw on his cigar.
'And that’s it?' he asked at last.
'That’s it. Now you know as much as I do-except that since you left England we’ve received instructions from UNSA to start shipping the prototype to a place near Houston-a biological institute. The bits should start arriving day after tomorrow; the installation crew is already on its way over to begin work preparing the site.'
'Houston… Does that mean we’re going there?' Gray asked.
'That’s right, Rob.' Borlan paused and scratched the side of his nose. His face screwed itself into a crooked frown. 'I, ah-I was wondering… The installation crew will need a bit of time, so you two won’t be able to do very much there for a while. Maybe you could spend a few days here first, huh? Like, ah… meet some of our technical people and clue them in a little on how the scope works-sorta like a teach-in. What d’you say-huh?'
Hunt laughed silently inside. Borlan had been complaining to Forsyth-Scott for months that while the largest potential markets for the scope lay in the USA, practically all of the know-how was confined to Metadyne; the American side of the organization needed more in the way of backup and information than it had been getting.
'You never miss a trick, Felix,' he conceded. 'Okay, you bum, I’ll buy it.'
Borlan’s face split into a wide grin.
'This UNSA character you were talking about,' Gray said, switching the subject back again. 'What were the examples?'
'Examples?'
'You said he gave some examples of the kind of thing he was interested in knowing if the scope could do.'
'Oh, yeah. Well, lemme see, now… He seemed interested in looking at the insides of bodies-bones, tissues, arteries-stuff like that. Maybe he wanted to do an autopsy or something. He also wanted to know if you could get images of what’s on the pages of a book, but without the book being opened.'
This was too much. Hunt looked from Borlan to Gray and back again, mystified.
'You don’t need anything like a scope to perform an autopsy,' he said, his voice strained with disbelief.
'Why can’t he open a book if he wants to know what’s inside?' Gray demanded in a similar tone.
Borlan showed his empty palms. 'Yeah. I know. Search me-sounds screwy!'
'And UNSA is paying thousands for this?'
'Hundreds of thousands.'
Hunt covered his brow and shook his head in exasperation. 'Pour me another scotch, Felix,' he sighed.
Chapter Four
A week later the Mercury Three stood ready for takeoff on the rooftop of IDCC Headquarters. In reply to the queries that appeared on the pilot’s console display screen, Hunt specified the Ocean Hotel in the center of Houston as their destination. The DEC minicomputer in the nose made contact with its IBM big brother that lived underground somewhere beneath the Portland Area Traffic Control Center and, after a brief consultation, announced a flight plan that would take them via Salt Lake City, Santa Fe, and Fort Worth. Hunt keyed in his approval, and within minutes the aircar was humming southeast and climbing to take on the challenge of the Blue Mountains looming ahead.
Hunt spent the first part of the journey accessing his office files held on the computers back at Metadyne, to tidy up some of the unfinished business he had left behind. As the waters of the Great Salt Lake came glistening into view, he had just completed the calculations that went with his last experimental report and was adding his conclusions. An hour later, twenty thousand feet up over the Colorado River, he was hooked into MIT and reviewing some of their current publications. After refueling at Santa Fe they spent some time cruising around the city on manual control before finding somewhere suitable for lunch. Later on in the day, airborne over New Mexico, they took an incoming call from IDCC and spent the next two hours in conference with some of Borlan’s engineers discussing technicalities of the scope. By the time Fort Worth was behind and the sun well to the west, Hunt was relaxing, watching a murder movie, while Gray slept soundly in the seat beside him.
