Suddenly Kai recalled the Markovians. A galaxy-wide race of beings who had arisen so long ago they must have been the first intelligence to develop after the Creation explosion. They left tantalizing structures on worlds billions of years dead, yet no minor artifacts of any sort. And beneath each of their planets was an artificial layer, up to two kilometers thick, a mysterious quasi-organic computer, purpose unknown.
If Zinder was right, then the Markovians may have had no need for artifacts of any kind—their food, their art, their furnishings, anything they wanted they had only to wish for. Perhaps the computer gave whatever they desired to them.
The records implied that Zinder believed that to be the answer to the Markovian riddle. He had even postulated that our own worlds were generated by a Markovian-created singularity, a singularity of a far different sort than that at the heart of black and white holes. The place where the rules were made—and enforced. A secondary singularity in imitation of the greater one that maintained the Markovians.
But the Markovians were long dead. Zinder believed that they had reached such a point that they were absorbed into the god who created their own Universe. They had become gods themselves, and had risen to join their father.
Right or not, Zinder’s theories accounted for a lot. Even eliminating the metaphysics, Tortoi Kai thought, suppose he’d been right about the basics? Antor Trelig, the would-be emperor of the galaxy, had believed Zinder right, had believed him right enough to have kidnapped his daughter, moved his project to Trelig’s own world, and been confident enough to arrange a show of power.
But something had gone wrong.
The science teams jumped on the problem within hours of Tortoi Kai’s discoveries. Although tremendously skeptical of Zinder’s metaphysical theories, they nonetheless admired his grasp of esoteric science, his evident massive genius, and they recognized, as did Kai, that Trelig had believed it would work and someone high up had been so convinced it had worked that Zinder’s unfortunately incomplete notes—even the fact of his existence—were sealed in the security computers.
The scientists alerted by Tortoi Kai had Zinder’s theories and his math but not his computer—the concept for which he managed, somehow, to hide from everyone—or the results of any of his experiments. Trelig had seen to that, obviously.
What had happened on New Pompeii? Tortoi Kai worked at that problem while the science teams were hurriedly using their seven hundred years of subsequent know-how to learn if Dr. Gilgram Zinder really had something.
But Tortoi Kai wasn’t satisfied. Despite the accolades falling her way, she went to her superior, Warn Billie, with her worries. Her supervisor, a kindly, balding little old man who fit perfectly the stereotype of the stuffy academic historian, listened attentively.
“I don’t like the extent of the burial of this information, Supervisor Billie. It’s far too deliberate, done by someone with a keen knowledge of how to fool even a researcher with a good computer.”
Billie nodded then said, “But a man like Trelig would naturally take such pains.”
“No, not Trelig,” she responded. “From what I can see he had been so fanatic that, if this were his doing, there wouldn’t be a trace of information in the files. Besides, it couldn’t be Trelig since much of the information was recorded after his disappearance and that of New Pompeii—and he could hardly have mounted such a campaign after he, we must assume, died. No, the rest of the story’s in there someplace—I know it. Somebody, somebody big, wanted the record preserved, thought it was important enough for that, yet so dangerous that this individual buried the information so completely that most researchers would reach a dead end. The computer refuses to correlate it with the rest. In order to dig the information out, someone must ask precisely the right questions.”
In the age of paper you could have dug out the information with a large team of researchers. And Tortoi Kai could have had thousands of people poring over the written documentation, trying to correlate it with what they already had. Probably they would have found the key. But the idea never occurred to her. After all, that was what computers were for.
Supervisor Billie, to whom such a procedure also would not occur, and for the same reason, tried to think. Anything so well obscured probably implied the Presidium. He suggested it.
She shook her head. “No, that’s a dead end, too. I considered a Com Police link but I’ve searched the files for ten years afterward with every name I had and could find nothing.”
Billie was not a stupid man, nor an unimaginative one. “What about—more than ten years?” he mused slowly.
She shrugged. “What use is that?”
The supervisor was warming to the task. After years of attention to administrative detail, he felt he was once again taking part in the adventure of history.
“Let’s try a given,” he suggested, still speaking slowly, deep in thought. “From your work it is apparent that there are still loose ends to be traced, loose ends that could save the labs time and lives. But how can there be loose ends? We have the whole story, all that was entered in the files—but only up to the experiment! Hence, something must have happened afterward. Why cover up a public theory and a dem-onstrably fatal failure at all? Why do so unless the experiment did not fail? ”
Kai gasped. “But… that’s Impossible! We know—”
“Only half the story,” he corrected her. “Now, let’s go to the console and see what factors we might use for data correlation.”
Billie walked to his office and sat in a padded chair facing the console screen. Kai stood beside him. “Free association,” he said. “Go!”
“Antor Trelig… sponge… New Pompeii… New Harmony… Gil Zinder… Nikki Zinder…” She continued, rattling off as many of the possible key words as she could recall. As she uttered them they appeared on the monitor. Then the supervisor called up the names of all Councillors and their representatives who were invited to Trelig’s demonstration.
He asked for correlation with Presidium posts later and other jobs.
The correlations took seconds but the printout was still spewing minutes later. Together the two historians pored over the massive output. By the early morning of the next day, after a sleepless night, they had some interesting puzzles and some new trails.
“Look—this Councillor Alaina,” he pointed to her. “She was Secretary of Com Police on the Presidium when Trelig held his demonstration—she didn’t attend, though. Just sent her assistant. Good thing for her—later she became Council President! And see?” His eyes moved down eleven meters of print, paper flying. “Here! It was she who announced the sponge-cure formula to the world some thirteen years later. A sponge cure! The syndicate broken. And here was Trelig, with whom she was connected thirteen years before, head of the sponge syndicate—as she, as Secretary of Police, had to know. And what two posts are best for burying anything?” He paused but Tortoi Kai was already ahead of him, at the console.
“Correlation!” she demanded. “History of research on a cure or arresting agent for the drug ‘sponge’ later than 1237.” The date would bar retrieval of the early research on the subject.
The computer came up with the answer after a surprising delay, but it confirmed their theories very well.
In the thirteen years between Antor Trelig’s disappearance and President Alaina’s announcement of the sponge breakthrough, there was no research of any sort on the subject. The syndicate itself nipped that in the bud. A cure had been produced without work of any sort by a powerful individual connected with the earlier Trelig incident.