And-new orders from my colonel! A search and devour mission. Two lobsters! Nineteen hundred hours. Jack London Square. I logged my confirmation with a grin. She hadn't forgotten!
And one last item. The paymaster had authorized the bounty check for the worm I'd flash-frozen from the chopper. One million caseys. I stared at the display screen for a long moment. I really was going to have to do something about all those credits. Nobody had ever told me I was going to get rich in the United States Army. Maybe Alan Wise should join the Special Forces.
Nah.
The only position he was qualified to fill was bait. But the money worried me.
It was too much.
According to the newspapers, the economy was in dreadful shape. Everybody said so-and they had the numbers to prove it. All I knew was that the President had committed to getting as much dead cash back into circulation as possible-and that meant lots of bounty and reclamation programs-but there were a lot of civilians screaming about that too. They said this was one more example of big government looting the private sector.
Translation: they weren't getting their share.
But, hell-the worm bounty wasn't limited to members of the military. Anyone who wanted a million caseys could go out and kill as many worms as he could find. The government would cheerfully pay up. The Montana office even paid in cash-all you had to do was deliver the mandibles.
No, it was something that Dr. Fromkin had said a year ago. He'd said that with a steadily shrinking labor force, the casey was doomed to inflate. I wondered if these big bounties were proof of it. I hadn't paid too much attention at the time because I hadn't had enough caseys to worry about. Now, however... I probably ought to do something with this cash while it was still worth something-but I wanted to do something with the money that made sense.
Something that would help the human race win the war. Except-I already knew, better than most people, that the human beings could not possibly win this war. We'd already lost; most of us just didn't know it yet.
No, the best that humanity could hope for was not victory, but survival.
Hm....
I punched for DIRECTORY. Yes, there was a local office of Lunar Five Enterprises in Berkeley. A white-haired woman answered the phone. Yes, she said, the Lunar Colony was officially reopenedand yes, construction on the two L-5 stations had resumed. As a matter of fact, the project was operating under the authority of the North American Unification Treaty, and as such was able to draw funding from public corporations in Canada, the United States, the nation of Quebec, both Mexicos, and the Isthmus Protectorate.
Did I care to invest? she inquired. She flashed me a list of the companies currently involved.
I could have climbed through the screen and kissed her.
I studied the list for half an hour-did some exploring through the network for background information-and eventually decided to buy a nice large piece of a Boeing Olympus-class high-orbit shuttle. The more spaceships we had, the better. There was stock available in the Apollo, the Hercules, and the Vulcan. No, those were already funded to the point of construction. I wanted this investment to make a difference. It cost just a little under three million to start a new shuttle. I decided to spread my cash three ways and start construction on the Pegasus, the Athena, and the Ganymede. I swept half of the rest of the money into the Kilimanjaro catapult and the other half into the Beanstalk Project. The latter looked like a long shot to me, but the payoff was very attractive. If the orbital elevator worked, the cost of lifting one kilo of mass into orbit would drop from five thousand caseys to five. All you'd pay for was the electricity, and you'd get most of that back on the way down.
The Paymaster's office could handle the necessary paperwork. The advantage to using the U. S. Army brokerage is that the commission is held to a scale rate, and your taxes are paid automatically. These particular investments, though, fell under the Resource Incentive Program and no taxes could be assessed on reinvested funds-so almost all that cash got put to work and Uncle Sam's share was limited to the handling charge. I set up a recycling trust with instructions that any and all future bounty payments were to be automatically invested in the same areas, authorized and confirmed, signed off and put the whole thing out of my mind. Alan Wise be damned.
I finished by dropping a quick note into my mother's mailbox letting her know that I had named her as beneficiary.
I logged off-realized I was already late to Dr. Fletcher's session-and headed down to the lab section. I slipped quietly into the back of the theater; all the chairs were filled so I found myself an inconspicuous place on the side to stand. There were a lot more uniforms in the audience than last time. This must be important. There was a lot of brass present.
Down below, Tiny was already hard at work. The worm's claws moved thoughtfully over the controls of the problem. This particular puzzle had a lot of interlocking rods and sliding blocks. It was almost too complex to visualize.
According to the outline Fletcher had sent me, these problems were designed by a computer program and could be manufactured to almost any degree of difficulty. So far, they had not come up with a problem that Tiny could not solve. The longest the worm had ever taken had been six hours.
Right now, an overhead clock showed the elapsed time was seventeen minutes. According to the agenda, this was supposed to be an "easy" problem.
The chime sounded, the cage popped open-and Tiny grabbed the rabbit. A white rabbit. Seventeen minutes, thirty-seven seconds. The rabbit did not have time to squeal.
Dr. Fletcher touched her controls and the panel with the puzzle slid closed. She said, "I know that many of you have seen our earlier demonstrations, you know what Tiny is capable of. If we were to give it this puzzle again, Tiny would remember exactly the sequence of moves to open it, and would probably take no more than thirty seconds. Now-" She typed something into her keyboard, waited, frowned, typed again and looked up.
"Our second specimen," she continued, "was captured near Superstition Mountain in Southern Arizona last month. It was close to death from dehydration and hunger. That area is not particularly kind to the gastropedes. We've found a number of their carcasses in the area. We think they wander down from the northern part of the state; there have been sightings in the high country. Had this one not been so weak, capture would have been out of the question, as the creature already massed nine hundred kilos. As it was, two men were killed and three others injured-and the creature was almost destroyed. We call this second specimen `Lucky'." She added, "We think that Lucky may be a female-but we aren't certain." She touched a control and another panel in the chamber below slid open. "I am now going to introduce Lucky to the chamber."
There were audible gasps when Lucky appeared. According to the briefing book, this was the biggest worm in captivity. The beast slid into the chamber like a bus filling a row of parking places.
The two worms goggled their eyes at each other, chirruped and trilled. They circled each other like boxers
"We believe this is a ritual behavior," said Fletcher. "Perhaps a kind of meeting dance."
The two worms suddenly leapt at each other and writhed together like snakes, turning and tumbling across the floor of the chamber. First one, then the other, was on top. It looked almost like a combat to the death.
"The first time we put them together," Fletcher noted, "we thought they were trying to kill each other."
Suddenly, the two worms froze in position. They were wrapped rigidly around each other. They held like lovers at climax; their bodies were as tense as steel.
"We call this state communion. It is as close to a sexual behavior as we have yet seen in the gastropedes." She looked like she wanted to add something else, but was holding back. "The length of communion tends to vary. So far, our experience has been that the more often two worms are exposed to each other, the shorter any individual episode of communion will be. We have four worms we're working with here. We've found that the first exposure is usually the longest. We have some theories about this, but none that we're willing to discuss at this point, let alone endorse." She glanced down into the chamber. "Ah, I see that they're complete-"