O Pioneer! (23 page)

The autofactories themselves receive these raw materials and fabricate them into whatever is required for the use of the inhabitants of Tupelo, or for export to their home planets.

—
BRITANNICA ONLINE
, "
TUPELO
."

Shura Kenk not only hadn't said anything about the Pole at her hearing, she hadn't said anything at all. Nevertheless Giyt took his wife's words seriously. He had decided long since that although Rina's reasoning was sometimes a little hard to follow, she was usually right.

So he sat himself down to recheck everything there was in the databank about the polar factories. A lot of the information was in what Hoak Hagbarth had presumably thought to be secure files. That wasn't much of a problem to Giyt. What was a problem was what he had discovered on his first look at Ex-Earth's business correspondence. A lot of the most potentially interesting material employed code words for whatever it was talking about. What was even more of a problem was that he didn't know what he was looking for.

At the end of two hours of digging he had found out more than he ever wanted to know about the products of the Earth factory at the Pole. In recent months the machines had turned out a bewildering variety of cookware and clocks, underwear and utensils, dolls and toys in a dozen varieties, construction materials, personal hygiene products, bed linen, cutlery—all routine stuff, as far as Giyt could see. It all appeared to be properly accounted for, too. Bills of lading showed that the goods had gone into the robot subs that carried them to the island and then either to the hypermarket or, as export goods, to the portal for shipment to Earth. Almost all the runs were small. That wasn't surprising; that was the special virtue of an autofactory. At need you could produce, say, six gross of carpenter's nails if you wanted them, and you could make them in a dozen different sizes. For that matter, you could make a single nail if you happened to want just one. You could make just about anything at all, as long as the manufacturing specifications were in the factory's memory and the raw materials were at hand. And all the specifications were there. There was file after file of manufacturing protocols for endless lists of components for endless items—most of them incomprehensible to Giyt. What, for instance, was the purpose of one file, apparently unerased because forgotten, which contained a complete set of stats for eetie body odors?

That one Giyt could not figure out. Were the colonists perhaps planning to create a line of dolls to export to the eetie planets—because they were programmed to odor-respond only to eeties? It seemed like a dumb idea to Giyt. If the Centaurians or the Kalkaboos wanted anything like that they were perfectly capable of manufacturing the things themselves. Or—he thought ruefully—maybe it wasn't all that dumb. If someone as resourceful as himself couldn't figure out what they were doing with the data, maybe leaving it unerased was quite smart.

When he checked on what the factory was currently making, he got another surprise. All the screen had to say on the subject was a legend: Currently under manual control.

That didn't make any sense at all. Autofactories weren't ever run by manual control, except maybe in the brief periods when someone like Giyt's father was teaching the machines how to assemble a particular device. Assuming the polar factory was that quaintly old-fashioned. Which Giyt couldn't really believe it was.

Then he discovered another curious thing. Checking the production runs of the last month's output he noticed that the factories seemed to have been idle for quite a lot of the time.

That was, at the least, an inefficient use of facilities. If nothing else, the factory might as well have been churning out more clocks and toy airplanes to go back to Earth. But there it was. Production was apparently halted for days on end, more than once, though raw materials seemed to have continued to flow in.

He leaned back, taking a sip from a cup of cold coffee, regarding the screen. Maybe Shura Kenk had been on to something. Was something odd really happening at the Pole? And whatever it was, who was doing it? Hagbarth was the leading candidate, of course; but what was the man up to?

Just for curiosity's sake—and because he was stabbing into the files at random, anyway—he spent a quarter of an hour trying to find out what some of the eeties might be doing with their own factories at that moment. He chose the Petty-Primes, because he had already broken their basic protocols, but all he found out was that they were making 512 of one listed item and 4,096 of another, but what those items actually were he had no idea.

Still . . .

The numbers made him think of those other cryptic inventory numbers he had observed long ago. He searched for that file again, and when he found it he glumly regarded the lists of tarbabies and grabbags and rutabagas and copts. They meant no more to him than they had the first time he saw them. But numbers were numbers, so Giyt did what he had done successfully so many times before. He set up a program to look for coincidences anywhere in the files of Ex-Earth, in the stats from the factories themselves, in the personnel files of Hagbarth and his wife—anagrams, birthdays, anniversaries—anything that might match the numbers.

When fatigue finally drove him to lie down for a little rest he let the program run. He had trouble getting to sleep. He didn't seem to be getting anywhere. But he had no place else to go.

When Rina woke him to tell him that his presence was requested to greet the incoming Kalkaboo delegation, she had two other items of news. The Slugs had finished repairing their drains, and now they could use their own toilet again. And Hagbarth's petition seemed to have plateaued out: "He's stuck at eighty-nine signatures," she said with satisfaction. "He needs eleven more, and I don't think he's getting them."

It didn't take long to see that the Kalkaboos were officially greeted—only a small ceremony, with minimal fireworks—and then, almost immediately, the next delegation was due.

They were the Petty-Primes. There were a lot of them—eighty or more, Giyt guessed, so that it took three portals full to get them all to Tupelo. The Responsible One and his entire family were joyously bustling around, affectionately greeting every one of the scores of arrivals by name. It took forever. Mrs. Brownbenttalon seemed amused. The Delt General Manager and the Kalkaboo High Champion were stolidly patient and the Principal Slug, of course, was a Slug. It was only Giyt who fretted over the length of the proceedings; and then, when all three batches of VIPs had arrived, the Responsible One had something else to keep everyone there. There was a meter-high platform, more like a picnic bench than a stage, and the Responsible One lined up fourteen of the most important members of the delegation on it as a sort of receiving line. One by one, every non-Petty-Prime in the crowd was walked past. There wasn't any hand-shaking, exactly—too much danger of crippling a tiny Petty-Prime paw in a huge human fist or sharp Centaurian claw. So they merely touched digits and exchanged greetings.

It was the kind of meaningless event that Giyt would have done his best to avoid. He didn't want to hurt the Responsible One's feelings, though. The little creature had been kind. Besides, exchanging a few meaningless courtesies took very little conscious thought. Giyt went right on thinking about the polar factories as he patiently plodded along the line. For a moment he considered taking the Responsible One aside—or Mrs. Brownbenttalon or one of the other mayors—and asking if they had heard anything, well, peculiar about human goings-on in the polar complex. But it might be an embarrassing question for them. Anyway, what could they know?

As he left the line he saw Hoak Hagbarth and his wife just entering it, between a Centaurian female and a pair of Delts.

That gave Giyt a new thought. The trouble with the Pole, with all its mines and autofactories, was that it was nearly nine thousand kilometers away. He thought of Hagbarth's amiable offer, made back in those long-ago days when Hagbarth was still being amiable, to fly him up there on the suborbital rocket for a sightseeing trip. He wondered if he could find anything useful if he went there in person. Then he wondered if that offer was still open. Probably not. Besides, it would mean leaving Rina alone to face whatever nastinesses the Hagbarths might think up next.

He nodded his farewells to the eeties he knew and went home, his mind still turning over all the questions and worries that did not seem to find any solution. And when he sat down at his screen he found that at last he had been given a break.

Something had turned up in the program he had left to run. When all the numbers had been crunched, it turned out that the number of the things code-named copts was precisely the difference between the number of chiplets reported on hand at the beginning of the month and the number reported as used in the manufacture of all the items the factory produced that month.

There was no doubt about it. Far more chiplets were being imported than ever went back into the dolls and gadgets the Earth human polar factory ever shipped out, and the numbers were not small.

Someone was stealing. And that someone could only be Hoak Hagbarth.

Giyt sat back, considering what to do next.

If this had been one of the great corporations he had occasionally worked for on Earth, his job would have ended right at that point. All that would have been left for him to do was to turn the information over to the head of security. Chiplets were smaller than sequins, but they cost money. Big money; some formerly trusted employee would soon be facing a spell in jail.

The trouble was that it didn't add up.

True, the fiscal systems for the human colony had been pretty badly designed and worse run. That was why Giyt had had to fix them, and ultimately why he became mayor. But what was Hagbarth going to do with a couple thousand stolen chiplets?

He could re-export them to Earth and sell them there, sure. They would be worth quite a lot. But that meant having confederates in the Ex-Earth organization on Earth. And anyway the sloppiness in the fiscal systems that let him cover up that theft could just as easily have been subverted in some simpler way—say, to divert credit balances to a dummy account like Giyt's own.

Rina came in, yawning, to bid him good night, and then got a good look at him. She came alert. "Shammy, what is it?"

"Minute," he said, double-checking, just to make sure. The machines were surpassingly good at arithmetic, but you never knew.

He did know. There were no mistakes. "Look at this," he commanded, and when. Rina had taken in what was being displayed on the screen she looked less triumphant than puzzled.

"Why, Shammy? Why would he go to all that trouble when he could just steal the money the same way you—well, you know what I mean."

"I do. I thought the same thing myself, but there it is. What I don't know is what to do about it."

"Why,"' she said, stooping to kiss him good night, "sure you do, hon. You're the mayor. Mayors are supposed to up hold the law. So do it."

Do it.

She was right. Apart from any personal satisfaction he might get out of it, Hoak Hagbarth was a criminal and he ought to be brought to justice.

But brought to justice how?

That was a harder question. He could report the matter to Ex-Earth. But who would he be reporting to? Almost certainly Hagbarth had confederates back there on Earth, probably in Ex-Earth itself, and wasn't it likely they would be the ones to receive the report? Perhaps he could spread the word to the American law-enforcement agencies. But what would they care about something that happened on Tupelo?

So he had some very valuable information, but who could he tell it to?

Just as he was puzzling over this, another message appeared on his screen. The Earth delegates were arriving. There would be six of them, the notice informed him, and when he checked the names he saw that only one of them was an American. That, of course, was because this time it was the old United Nations, not Ex-Earth, who had supplied these ambassadors.

But that one American was Dr. Emilia Patroosh, the woman who had gone with him to Energy Island; and so Giyt had his answer to at least one question.

He got to the portal just as its golden glow collapsed. Besides the obligatory eetie mayors, twenty or thirty Earth humans were waiting to greet them. Most of them, he saw with some surprise, seemed to come from the fire company, both Hagbarths among them. Olse glanced at Giyt as he arrived and gave him a small, reproving shake of the head.

But she didn't speak, because both the Hagbarths had more important things on their minds. As soon as the transmission was complete, Hagbarth leaped down from his post in the control loop and advanced on the six Earth delegates, all smiles, hand outstretched to reach any other hand it could reach. He wasn't the only one. A dozen of the other Earth humans, Olse included, were moving purposefully to greet the newcomers.

The plenipotentiaries were an oddly assorted lot for Tupelo. One was a tall, mournful-looking woman with purple-black skin and a bright bandanna over her head—a Maasai from Kenya, according to what the roster had said. There was an elderly Swiss man and an even older Korean one; one Egyptian, one New Zealander . . . and Dr. Patroosh.

She was the one who counted. Giyt tried to push his way toward her . . .

And got nowhere. A large hand gripped his arm and a voice from behind said, "Want to do something useful for a change, Giyt? Give us a hand with the goddamn baggage."

It was Wili Tschopp, looking unfriendly. Giyt tried to pull his arm free, without success, as Tschopp was tugging him toward the stack of bags and cases. "Let go," Giyt said. "I want to talk to Dr. Patroosh."

"But she don't want to talk to you, Giyt," Tschopp said reasonably. "Look, she's gone already."

And she just about was; Hagbarth was deferentially helping her into one of the waiting carts and getting in beside her. Most of the other ambassadors were boarding carts as well, except for the tall Maasai woman, searching through the baggage for something of her own, pausing to look at them curiously. "What's the trouble?" she asked, her voice surprisingly deep.