By the time Giyt got home again he felt reasonably sure that if the recall vote included all the eeties on Tupelo, he would probably win in a landslide. It didn’t, of course. But, all the same, it was a cheering thought, at a time when such thoughts were scarce.
Rina greeted him at the door, looking flushed and pleased with herself. “I’ve got something to show you, Shammy. Come in here a minute.”
What she had to show him was her screen, which was displaying a freeze frame of eight or nine human beings, all looking either solemn or angry or just dejected. “It’s that Shura Kenk’s deportation hearing, hon. It took a little hunting, but I found it. Only I don’t think it’s much use for what we want, because there aren’t any lawyers there, either.”
She touched a key and the picture began to move, Giyt gazing wonderingly at it. It wasn’t much of a trial, if that was what it was supposed to be. Not only weren’t there any lawyers, there didn’t seem to be any witnesses, either. Former Mayor Mariam Vardersehn was sitting in what appeared to be the chair, while Hoak Hagbarth was reading a list of accusations concerning Shura Kenk. Who sat in a straight-back chair, listening but hardly speaking; she was the one who looked dejected, and had reason enough.
There did not seem to be a lot of justice being dispensed at this hearing. Even the complainant, the twelve-year-old Grayhorn boy, wasn’t present. When Hoak Hagbarth had finished, the half a dozen others in the room—Silva Cristl and three or four others Giyt recognized to be from the fire-house prominent among them—whispered among themselves for a moment or two. Then Cristl nodded to the mayor. “Looks like she’s probably guilty, Mariam,” she said, “and anyway what can we do? The eeties wouldn’t have any respect for us if we let somebody like that stay here. So she has to go.”
That was it. All that was left was for Mayor Vardersehn to pronounce the sentence. “Since a jury of your peers has found you an undesirable presence on this planet,” she lectured, “you are hereby given forty-eight hours to collect—what?” As Hagbarth was whispering to her. “Oh, sorry, I was thinking of something else. You’re given sixty-seven Earth hours—two Tupelo days, that is—to collect your belongings and report to the portal for return to Earth. The session is concluded.”
“What do you think, Shammy?” Rina asked anxiously as the screen went black.
He said, “I think it’s a classical frame-up.”
“Well, yes, but did you notice something else? Do you remember what Lupe said, that Kenk claimed the real reason they were out to get her was something about the Pole?”
Puzzled, Giyt looked at her. “But she didn’t say anything about the Pole.”
“Right, hon. Like that old Sherlock Holmes story, you know? Dr. Watson asks him what was interesting about the dog barking. And Holmes says, why, just the fact that it didn’t bark at all. Do you see what I mean? Shura Kenk didn’t mention the Pole at her hearing.”
XXII
The physical plant on Tupelo’s polar continent comprises fourteen main manufacturing domes scattered over nearly four hundred square kilometers. These are in general linked by covered passages, supplemented by robot ground-effect vehicles to transport materials back and forth. In addition to the main complex there are eleven additional sourcing sites. These are mineral mines, where robot moles sniff through reefs of ore and extract it for processing, and refineries, where the ore is cooked into pure metals, then batch-processed into whatever alloys are required for scheduled production runs in the factories. In addition there are six relatively small oil and natural-gas wells, providing fuel for the polar continent’s dedicated power plant as well as feedstock for its chemical factories.
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.
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?