Far-out Show (9781465735829) (28 page)

“We haven’t sent the signal to activate Zink
yet so it shouldn’t be a factor.”

“Shouldn’t, but that doesn’t mean for certain
isn’t. Bottom-most position, our secret spy and next-to-ultimate
solution could in fact interfere with any and all signals, maybe
making things worse instead of better – and from here we can’t be
sure and probably can’t find out for sure even when it’s happening.
If it happens. I need a tonic.” He tapped the side of his chair. A
panel there opened and he took out a capped container of liquid. He
opened that and drank it down. He put the container back where he
had taken if from and the panel closed.

Delmus was lost in thought. He shook himself
back to attention. “Zink is neat even with its restrictions. Its
signals confuse
Whizybeam
’s standard security and motion
detection systems so it can move around in the routinely monitored
areas and even tap into many of the ship’s systems without being
noticed and reported. Yet it will become inactive if it detects
anyone within a certain distance which should keep those on board
from seeing it in motion and realizing what it is. That’s
cleverness of a high order.”

“But as part of avoiding detection it has to
almost make contact with the components, no long-distance wireless
messages,” Ackack noted. “It can only make those connections at
three places on the entire ship. I have reservations about it but
it was our best option so I agreed to have it sneaky-sneaked
aboard.”

“I’m trying to remember the locations from
our briefing since we didn’t record the details that could be found
by the wrong guys and make trouble for us. It can connect at the
security pod, at a spot high on the wall of the hall near the door
to the main storage area, and in the hall outside substation B.
Right?”

“That’s what I remember. The substation B
location has become less workable since they made that space over
into the program edit room where they edit the material and send it
on to us.”

“When and if we need to take control I’ll
remember that and send it to one of the other spots as the
preferred connection location. It’s made to withstand their efforts
to disable it but not even knowing it’s there is best,” Delmus
said.

A harsh
beep
sounded.

“Some distressing but important information
update is ready.” Ackack tapped a button on the console and the
head shot image of Fervor, a male with a large number of long head
spikes that stood on end all over his pate giving him a peculiar
pincushion look, appeared on a section of the view-screen.

“This one’s still stirring things up. He made
his point the day of the first airing. Why can’t he let things be?”
Ackack grumbled.

“I hear the ones like him being called
geekocreepos
. That sounds about right to me. They don’t get
that we only said there’d be educational aspects to help sell the
idea of
The Far-Out Show
to the governors, we didn’t mean
there’d actually be anything the purists would agree would be
usefully educational. Besides, that was in our talk-talk to the
governors, not in anything we released to the public so even the
geekocreepos shouldn’t know about it. But was this a deliberate
leak? That one female governor who gets outvoted all the time
doesn’t like us.”

“She also won’t take any gifts under the
table. If you can’t buy a person and arranging a lethal accident’s
too risky for the payoff what can you do? It’s the same with this
Fervor guy. We can’t buy him and forcibly silencing him will start
too much of an uproar. We have to try to find a way around him.
Placate him and his buddies long enough for the audience to become
bored with them.”

“Or we find somebody else to blame for
promising educational aspects to the show to redirect the topic
into a shouting match that will make it an audience pleaser. They
don’t care what the shouting’s about as long as it’s loud and full
of cursing. Hey, I like my automatic thinking on that,” Delmus
said.

Ackack touched a button. The image of Fervor
pulled back to became a view of him speaking to a small group of
mostly young males and females outside the A.D.U. building. He wore
a loose tunic that was decorated with lightning bolt designs in
several colors, all aimed upwards toward his head.

Ackack freeze-framed that image and moaned,
“
Splinkflert!
Look at him! Wrapped up like that he stands
out. The audience will listen to his nonsense with half an ear
simply to get a look at somebody acting different. There ought to
be a law against attracting attention to yourself like that without
special permission.” He started the recording again.

Fervor said in a calm, reasonable tone. “It’s
not what we’d hope for but we know there’s always some fakery in
shows.”

His on-screen audience collectively
shrugged.

“There should be limits though. Not because
faking a little bit of material into hours and hours of mindless
shows makes outrageous profits for the production and distribution
companies – although you might want to think about that. No,
uncontrolled fakery undermines our confidence in everything we hear
in the public arena. Let’s be blunt about this. Too much faking,
and too well done faking – not that there’s a lot of that kind –
undermine our trust in the governors. If they allow this then they
agree that we shouldn’t believe the orders, restrictions, and
encouragements they put out regularly. It’s all
dismilquam
.
The governors are okay with
crilmentzee
as the way for us to
live and maintain order in our society.”

A harsh tone sounded. Ackack’s concern as he
touched buttons and Fervor was replaced by a head shot of Techim, a
young female with her short, knobby head spikes lined up as if in
corn-rows.

She showed no hint of a smile or an apology
as she said, “This is an interruption for a top priority message at
your insistence. We have lost all contact with
Whizybeam
.
Other technicians are working to determine what has happened and to
see when and if contact can be reestablished.”

“What could this mean?” Delmus asked.

“A major power failure is the most likely
cause,” Techim replied. “Small backup units might let them
talk-talk to those at other places on the ship and send commands to
the working systems even while they are cut off from any and all
outside the ship. We don’t know more than that there was an unusual
rapid sequences of changes followed by the total loss of the
signal.”

“Suspected cause of this failure, Techim?”
Ackack asked.

“They disabled the A.D.U. remote override
control systems. They deliberately weren’t given access to the full
schematics of the ship’s layout so they likely don’t know how some
systems are interconnected. It is not an intuitively sound
arrangement. They disconnect the restraints by patching around them
and, to their surprise, by doing that they shut themselves down.
That is how it was supposed to work.”

“Can they reverse the effect once they see
what’s happened?” Delmus asked.

“For a limited time they can remove their
program changes and things should return to the way they were,”
Techim notes.

“How long a time?” Delmus asked.

“A
bimpledop
. About a quarter of a
revolution of that planet. Which is plenty of time to analyze
things, see the obvious solution, wail about how dumb and unfair it
is that things are arranged like that, then accept the conditions
and undo what they did to get back to the start point,” Techim
said.

“Is there anything we can do?” Ackack asked.
“Can we get through to them from this end to tell them what to do
to be sure they don’t wait too long?”

“No, they can’t hear us any more than they
can send to us but this would have shut down their life-support
systems too so they won’t put off fixing things for long. That was
part of the thinking about how to connect the systems. Sneaky but
it should be effective.”

“Okay, Techim, keep us aware of any changes.”
Ackack touched a button and the whole view-screen went blank.
“
Fampfuzzle
! This could ruin a lot of things. Now they know
at least some of what we could do to control them if they got
balky. Of course officially we fixed it that way so we could guide
Whizybeam
home even if a disaster wiped out the crew.”

“But now they have to give us back control
over their survival to survive.”

“For the short term maybe, but this will set
their techs tracing everything out and poking in all the sealed
corners. We agreed it was too dangerous to send them off without
full details about the ship stored for reference even if we made
that information really hard to find. The idea was that if they
needed it we’d be able to send them a message telling them how to
access that. It might not have worked but it sounded good enough to
get the governors to sign off on it. They want to keep the ship’s
design details secret as much as we do.”

“What do we do now?” Delmus asked.

“Wait. If we had a paid worrier I’d call him
in to pace for us.”

“Don’t get all glum about this. What’s the
worst thing that could have happened?”

“For some unknown reason they all died and we
aren’t able to bring anything back to examine it to find out why it
happened so we, or more exactly the governors, can keep it from
happening on every trip of exploration.”

“Not reassuring. What’s the next to the worst
thing that could have happened?”

“That planet’s inhabitants are way more
advanced than we thought and they’ve taken everything and everyone
captive. They are at this moment learning all about us, our
technology, and the route we used to reach their planet. They will
then plan when to reverse the situation and invade and conquer
Ormelex.”

“You don’t get how I want this to go, do you?
What’s the most reassuring thing that could have happened?” Delmus
asked.

“They patched, they crashed; they unpatch and
they return to the old normal.”

“Was that so hard? I have great confidence in
them. We knew there might need to be a lot of adapting to the
unexpected so we hired a bunch of top notch technicians as the
crew. Okay, technically the
Bang-Boom
guys did the selecting
and hiring but they used our money. We should occupy our minds with
productive thoughts until we hear from them. They’ll be so excited
to have survived that they won’t bother to object or complain.”

“You’re being more than usually unrealistic,
Delmus, but enjoy your fantasies.”

“Here’s an interesting distraction. Only one
company, P.D.Q., makes the hardware to travel through a
snaggiewarp. If this show works out as planned the demand for their
products will soar. It’d be nice to have a piece of that. My
pockets can never be too full.”

“You want to buy P.D.Q.?”

“Buy into it, not the whole company. If we
leak word about the problems they’re having with
Whizybeam
to select groups demand goes down and we get to buy in on the
cheap, although it certainly won’t be cheap. Then the ship returns
safe and happy. Demand goes way up, the value of our part of the
company goes way up.”

“Delmus, P.D.Q. is a major producer of a wide
range of technical systems. Even without the prospect of successful
ships to travel through a snaggiewarp in the near future any
investment in the company requires big money. Unless you’ve been
holding out on me, neither A.D.U. nor you or me personally has that
kind of money to invest.”

“Agreed but we have the advantage since we
know what’s being secretly developed so we could form an investment
group to pool resources and buy in.”

“You have a point,” Ackack said. He thought,
And you’ll probably do this behind my back and cut me out if I
don’t show enough enthusiasm right now from the start
.

“It’s critical to move fast but not attract
the attention of the big money guys. If the Peepees see our
interest they have the ready money to hurry and buy in and cut us
out in the process.”
You’re a danger to the plan because you may
be dumb enough to blab to them and believe their lies thinking
they’ll cut you in on the deal for suggesting it but they
won’t
.

“If it looks like far-space travel with
P.D.Q.’s systems is gonna fail big time I’d be tempted to leak some
word to the Peepees by other routes so they’d buy in and lose a lot
but it doesn’t make good business sense to damage our main money
backers until we don’t need them anymore.”

“Sacrifice satisfaction for longer term
goals. That sounds like something a clever fixer and manipulator
would do,” Delmus said.

“Thank you.”

Gopgop and Uldene sat in a circle of chairs
in the Power Players office with Elfwip, who fidgeted constantly,
and Carpan, who had distinctive extra large eyes.

Gopgop reminded him, “Elfwip, you're here in
your capacity as official group worrier.”

“That's all many think I'm good for,” Elfwip
whined.

“You're paid to do it and you do it really
well which relieves the rest of us of that burden,” Uldene
said.

“Too bad I'm not paid really well,” Elfwip
carped quietly.

Gopgop said, “Carpan, you're our pollster so
we expect you to have numbers about anything important that we ask
about.”

“I always have numbers to toss out,” Carpan
assured him.

“What are the A.D.U. Far Out Show numbers?”
Uldene asked.

“Through the roof. It's got great numbers so
they must be very worried,” Carpan replied.

“Explain that,” Uldene ordered.

Carpan shrugged. “The show's first episode
was a big hit so there are big expectations. They have to air new
and better episodes soon to hold the audience.”

“An audience that gets too tired of waiting
for new episodes may get bad feelings about the show and not turn
to it even when new material is finally aired. It's happened,”
Elfwip said sadly.