up last year, it seems.The professor has been
waiting for some time, sir.'
'I'll see him later,' Cesare said, clicking the
intercom off and going back to the Reader's Digest
'Hell, I don't know what it is.'
'I think it fell off an S.S.T.'
The patrolman rubbed his chin.The other cop was
poking a stick at the bundle lying across the old
tractor.The thing was about three metres long and
one in diameter, and whatever it was its colours
kept shifting and changing, and whenever anything
touched it, it got hot.The tip of the stick smoked.
'Who should we tell about this anyway?' said the
cop with the stick.He wanted to have this cleared
up as quickly as possible and get away from the
smell of pigs coming from the barn across the yard.
'I guess the F.A.A.,' said the other, 'or maybe the
Air Force.I dunno.' He took off his cap and fiddled
with the badge, breathing on it and polishing it on
his sleeve.
'Well I'm claiming compensation, whoever it
belongs to,' Bruce said as they went back to the
house. 'That's a lot of damage that thing's
done.That'll cost a few bucks to set right.That
tractor was nearly new, you know.I'm telling you;
nowhere's safe now with those S.S.T.s.'
'Hmm.'
'Uh-huh.'
'Hey,' Bruce said, stopping and looking at the two
cops with a worried expression on his face, 'do
you know if Liberia registers S.S.T.s?'
Professor Feldman sat in the outer-outer office in
Cesare's suite at the top of the I.M.C.C. building in
Manhattan and looked through the abstract of his
report for about the eightieth time.
The secretary, a clean-cut young man with an IBM
9000 desk terminal and a M.23 submachine gun,
had shrugged his shoulders sympathetically after he
had at last been persuaded to call through to
Cesare's office.The professor said he would just
have to wait, and went back to his seat.There were
seven other people waiting to see Cesare apart
from himself.Two of them were Air Force generals
and one was the foreign minister of an important
developing country.They all looked nervous
without their aides, who were kept in the outer-
outer-outer office to avoid crowding.According to
the others, they had been waiting there, seven or
eight hours each day, five days a week, for at least
the last three weeks.
This was the professor's first day.
The factory ship moved through space in one of the
dust-rich arms of the main galaxy, its net-fields
like great, invisible limbs stretched before it,
gathering its harvest like a trawl and funnelling the
ensnared material into the first-stage Transmuters.
In the mess of the Third Clean-Up Squad, things
were going badly for Matriapoll
Trasnegatherstoleken-iffre-gienthickissle, jnr.He
had almost completed a full circuit of the room
without touching the floor when a collapsible chair
collapsed beneath him, and now he had to go back
to the start and begin all over again with one paw
tied behind his back.The other members of the
Squad were making bets on where he would fall
and screaming insults.
'7833 Matriapoll and Mates to briefing room
fourteen!' blared the mess-room speaker.
Normally Matriapoll would have welcomed this
interruption, but he was on top of the speaker
trying to grab hold of a light fixture at the time, and
the shock of the speaker suddenly bursting into life
beneath him made him lose his grip, and he
thumped down onto the floor to the accompaniment
of hoots and laughter.
'Bastards,' he said.
'Come on, Matty,' chuckled his Mates, Oney and
Twoey, their tiny, dextrous hands quickly untying
his arm and dusting him down.They straightened
his clothes and bustled out in front of him as
Matriapoll paid what he owed to the others in the
Squad and then left for the briefing room.
The Air Force didn't know what it was either, but
it wasn't anything of theirs, they were sure of that.
They certainly weren't going to be paying any
compensation.But they decided to take the thing,
just to see what it was.
The Air Force came in a big truck that didn't quite
make the turn off the road onto the farm track, and
knocked down a metre or two of fencing.Bruce
said he'd sue.
They took the bundle away wrapped in asbestos.
At the Mercantsville Airbase they tried to find out
what the object was, but apart from deducing that -
from the way it felt - there was something inside
the oddly-coloured outer covering, which now
appeared like mother-of-pearl, they didn't make a
great deal of progress.
Somebody in I.M.C.C. got to hear about the object
and the Company offered to open it, or at least
make a further attempt, if the Air Force would let
them have it.
The Air Force thought about this.The mysterious
bundle was resisting all attempts to open it or even
see inside.They had tried metal tools, which