“Honey, alter the trajectory on this piece, but not the spin. The spin is holding in the valuable stuff. We’ll push this thing toward the inner solar system, and keep good track of it. Got it?”
“Got it.”
I’m staring at one of the “gloves” I picked up. I’ve got it in a vacuum container, and shock mounted. It’s real delicate: A couple of the others just turned to dust as I picked them up. I’ve got one in a baggy, and I’m running materials tests on the dust of another. In retrospect, going for that piece of net wasn’t such a bad idea. That’s the only piece that retained its toughness all these years.
“Do we know where the meteor came from?”
“TC has given us a pretty optimistic report ... in some ways.”
“What ways?”
“The location sphere is 50% at its peak and not huge, considering this is the Kuiper Belt we’re talking about.”
“That’s not good, that’s great! And the bad news.”
“It’s way off the elliptic, and moving out.”
I raise my hands in the air and shake them like I’m talking to some deity, “Why me? Before this damn Earth business, this is exactly what I was hoping for.
“How long to get there and back home?”
“It’ll be two years to get the sphere and back to the inner solar system ... plus whatever time it takes to search for the source and explore it, presuming we find it. We’re still only at 50-50 of finding anything there.”
“Can we do it with a probe?”
“Remember that the probes aren’t constant acceleration the way we are. Unless the probe’s findings are to be a gift to your yet-to-be-created posterity, it’s a one-way, flyby trip for the probe, and it’ll have to be the main one, modified, nothing else has the fuel. And since it can’t search a pattern within the volume, the odds go way down.”
“When will that get there?”
“In about ten years. We could sling it off Jupiter, which would cut it to about seven years.”
“No, that doesn’t sound like a good idea. That becomes a traffic control journey and too many people would know the trajectory.”
I stare at the glove some more.
The glove was clearly a cheap flexible covering for something. I call it a glove because it reminds be of the innumerable gloves I’ve seen discarded at construction sites. Hell, when the walker tipped over, I left a half dozen behind myself at the meteor. They had been covering tools and sensors that weren’t being used. Whoever left these behind wasn’t thinking twice about them. But for me they are priceless, literally priceless. These are proof positive that we aren’t alone.
I laugh and say out loud, “I think I’ve added a card to Van Cleeve’s short deck. It looks like there really are Dark Ones!”
Then I think more to myself, “Now how do I take advantage of what I’ve found here? In truth, this has been my wildest dream, to find life, but now that I’ve found it, what do I do?”
I stir from my reverie.
“Speaking of trajectories, Honey, how’s the financial trajectory plotting coming?”
“I got a report in last hour. I can display it for you.”
“Do so.”
I pull my eyes from the glove to look at the display. There are fifty or so squiggles, “What have we got here?”
“These are net worths. We plotted about five hundred people and two hundred companies that are associated with you in some way. This is a distillation. There are about forty control cases in this display and ten we think are suspicious. However, we computers still stand in awe of human abilities at pattern recognition, so we don’t think we’ve discovered all there is to see in this data.”
“Normalize for exponential growth.”
The lines flatten out and change color code. Most are relatively flat. One is clearly sinking erratically, but with an upward kink a year ago.
“Who’s the submarine?” I say, “Wait, let me not guess: that’s my nephew.”
“Correct. The last kink is a bridge loan we suspect Phertipton helped him float, but we can’t confirm that.
“Show me his cash flow and short-term credit.”
It’s an ugly picture, but all too common, the youth has burned through a lot of cash in a short time.
“Show me his parents’ trajectories.”
I see a steady lines with a couple deep kinks five and ten years ago.
“When did his folks find out about this?”
“Find out about what?”
“Their son’s dissipation, and this lawsuit.”
There is a pause, “That’s not been checked yet. They are--”
“Both need to hear about this suit,” I say emphatically, “They are not going to be happy about Phertipton turning their child into a shill for a con game. They may not be able to stop this thing directly, but we can start driving a wedge between Phertipton and Zedakia.”
“Got it.”
“But that’s not the whole problem.”
I study the data further. There is a curve in the center, but it’s oscillating like a sine wave, “Who’s that?”
“That’s Lester Walsh, your lawyer, one of the controls.”
“Control you say? I’d say that’s a control all right, a line fully controlled by someone hiding something. Let’s bring up a full display on Uncle Lester here.”
Lester’s data is substantial, as one would expect of a successful lawyer working with rich clients. It was also well secured. Honey informs me it took a long time to generate it, and it’s taking me a long time to get my head around it.
On this first pass it looks entirely respectable but as I’m reviewing the data, I keep seeing in my mind that sine wave in the linearized net worth growth. The only thing that could explain a smooth curve like that was feedback. Somewhere, somehow, someone with a massive reserve is feeding Lester’s net worth with just the right about of money to keep it looking respectable, and well clear of any computer-monitored triggering points. But I draw a blank on this first pass, there are holes in the data, but no glaring inconsistencies.
“Honey, this data looks good, but it’s queer as a three dollar bill. I want you to dig deeper. In the meantime, Lester is the threat, not Jack.”
“Lester?”
“Lester! At least until I get a satisfactory explanation for his net worth curve. It’s been engineered specifically so you computer types and bureaucrats with better things to do won’t see a problem with it. Someone’s backing Lester, and there’s more to him than what appears in this report. Check carefully for links between him and Phertipton.
“You’re looking for a ‘spigot’, Honey--one or more sources that feed lots of money into Lester’s financial system when the net worth is running below target, and little money when the system is above target. Got it?”
“Got it! It’s ingenious. That’s what’s fun about working with you, Bull.”
I go back to looking at the glove. What am I going to find at the source of this meteor fragment: What I’ve been calling the Honeycomb Comet? Can I afford to search for it? Can I afford not to?