Orphan's Triumph

FIFTY-ONE

WITH THE SPOOKS’ HELP, I met Howard Hibble the next day, at the Tressen National Museum of Natural History, a logical place for a person of Howard’s peculiar predilections to visit. I found him in a basement storage room that reeked of formaldehyde.

Howard was standing on tiptoe, reading labels of shelved specimens, when I closed the door behind us and locked it.

Howard said, “What a great place! Couldn’t you just spend the day?”

“Howard, we have twenty minutes before your Ferrent tail figures out that isn’t you upstairs in the library.”

Howard reshelved a jar packed with trilobites the size of kosher dills, then sighed. “That’s not the only clock that’s running.”

“What have you heard?”

“Nothing. That’s the problem. We have no idea how the Pseudocephalopod will use its new Cavorite. Our best alternative is to do unto It before It does unto us.”

“Which we want to help you with.”

“We?”

“I’m retired now.”

“I heard that. They say the dental plan’s awful.”

“I take it that the Tressel Cavorite fall didn’t land in the middle of nowhere. If it had, you would have just snuck down here, mined what you needed, and snuck away. Without telling the Tressens a thing.”

Howard’s eyes widened. “You think I’d do that?”

“Not think. Know.”

He sighed. “The Joint Intelligence Directorate wouldn’t let me.”

“Assuming we can deal with the fall’s location, wherever it is, what will it take to get the meteorites out?”

“Weapons-grade Cavorite behaves like it’s less dense even than the Stone Hills Cavorite we mine on Bren. Each meteorite’s as light as a tennis ball, so they don’t burrow or burst on impact, like nickel-iron meteorites would. The fall took place forty thousand years ago, give or take. But the environment around it is static. We estimate that forty-two percent of the bolides remain at or near their individual points of impact, exposed on the surface. We designed these terrific ’bots that would scuttle around the surface and harvest them like tomatoes.”

“Where are your ’bots now?”

“ Pasadena.”

“ California?”

“Actually, there’s just the prototype. It cost as much as a main battle tank.”

I sighed. “Could people just go around and pick the rocks up off the ground?”

“That would be simpler, wouldn’t it?”

“How long would that take?”

He shrugged. “Depends on how many pickers you have. If you had a thousand pickers, a week or so. Once the bolides were gathered to a central point, one Scorpion could fly in, pick up the whole kaboodle, and be gone inside an hour.”

I narrowed my eyes. “That’s too easy.”

Howard sighed. “I haven’t told you where the Cavorite fell.”