Blonde Bombshell (2 page)

The chairman was wearing a frown he hadn’t seen before. “They’re the same?”

“No,” George replied, and for a moment he felt as though he’d stayed on an escalator just that little bit too long. “No, there’s a slight difference, 1.682 grams. That’s—”

The chairman cleared his throat. “What does it mean, George?”

“Something.”
He hadn’t meant to shout, but this really wasn’t a good time for deference and diplomacy. “It means something, I know it does, but I can’t quite…” He lifted his head and put on the most wooden, stuffed-animal expression he could muster. “As I said,” he said, “we have a distinctly promising lead, it’s a little bit too early at this precise moment to be able to predict exactly when I’ll have an answer for you, but I can—” (Oh, why not, he thought. They’ll fire me anyway.) “I can quite definitely and unreservedly guarantee that,
very soon now,
I’ll have this problem solved and dealt with, and that’s a promise. You have my word. Very soon you’ll have either the answer or my resignation. So?” He opened up the smile again. “How do you like them apples?”

Pause. “Excuse me?”

“I mean,” George said, “will that do? Is that satisfactory? Because if not,” he went on, “I’ll resign now and take my findings to InterBank Santiago. I’m sure that once I’ve solved the mystery for them they’ll be happy to share the solution with everybody else in the industry. Eventually,” he added.

It was so like one of his recurring daydreams — the one where he stood up to the board and bashed the table with his fist and told them a thing or two, and they whimpered and cowered like timid little mice and doubled his wages — that he half expected to snap out of it and find them all scowling at him and calling Security to have him thrown out. But apparently not. They weren’t happy, but a large part of their unhappiness proceeded from the knowledge that George had outmanoeuvred them. And, in the words of the late Richard Nixon, when you have them by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow.

“No, that’s fine,” the chairman said, in a dangerously calm voice. “You follow up your lead, and we’ll reconvene in, say, three days’ time, and by then I’m sure you’ll have this whole thing rolled up. Everybody agreed?”

Ah well, he thought, as he staggered out of the meeting; I have a job for three days, guaranteed, which is more than I’d expected and probably rather more than I deserve.

He left the building. There was no hovercar waiting to take him home again. Well, quite. Hovercars were a courtesy the bank extended to its employees, and if the meeting had gone as planned he wouldn’t have been one by now. As it was, he’d bought himself a tiny weeny scrap of time. Long enough for a glacier to move a millionth of a millimetre, or for a stalactite to grow one layer of calcium molecules. Or, looked at another way, three generations of mayflies.

He went to a bar. He knew all the bars within a square kilometre of the bank. More to the point, they all knew him. But there was one he was still allowed to go in, and there he went.

“A triple Tijuana Sunburst, please,” he said to the barman. “And what weighs precisely 1.682 grams?”

The barman looked at him. “A large cockroach,” he said. “What’s a Tijuana Sunburst?”

“Make that a triple Scotch,” George said.

It was, in the event, a good triple Scotch, though not quite as good as the one that followed it; and George’s mind slowly began to work. He’d asked the barman the wrong question, he realised. Not What weighs precisely 1.682 grams?, but Seven billion of what weigh precisely 1.682 grams? And that wasn’t quite right either, because a quarter of the stolen money had been in ten-dollar bills, a sixteenth had been twenties, and so on. He amused himself by doing the sums (for some reason, figures had always soothed him; it was words that had caused all the problems in his life, along with alcohol, women and a dog) and was eventually in a position to reformulate the question: 108.492 million of what weigh precisely 1.682 grams?

Simple long division, which he could do standing on his head and had frequently done slumped in gutters. The resulting number was very small and very long, and when he looked at it, it rang no bells whatsoever. But — something weighing that very, very small number of fractions of a gram had been removed from each missing banknote, and the balance, just plain ordinary plastic, had been redistributed among and reintegrated with the unstolen notes. Perhaps. It was a theory. And, of course, this incredibly difficult operation had been carried out invisibly in full view of the security cameras, in a fraction of a second so tiny they hadn’t been able to isolate it yet, by an agency that left no trace it had ever been there. Neat trick.

He called for and obtained a third triple Scotch, which clarified his mind a little. Wrong question, he suspected. Asking how they’d done it probably wasn’t going to get him anywhere; he suspected that, even if the answer was put in front of him in a shot glass with a cocktail umbrella and an olive, he wouldn’t be able to understand what it meant. A rather more pertinent question would be:

Why
had they done this?

Now that was a really good question. It hadn’t occurred to him before, since he’d quite reasonably assumed that if a huge sum of money vanishes from a bank, it’s because someone wants to take it home and get to know it better and give it the chances in life it wouldn’t otherwise have had. But — according to his theory — that wasn’t quite what had happened. According to his theory, someone had entered the vault, extracted from each note an unknown something that weighed 108.492-million-divided-by— 1.682 grams, and disposed neatly of the trash by adding it to the leftover money.

That called for another drink and a serious reappraisal of the facts in the case. The key to it, of course, was figuring out what had been taken out of the banknotes. That ought to be easy. A banknote comprises:

1.   Plastic

2.   Ink

3. The security strip

Light started to glow inside his head. He wasn’t quite sure he liked what he could see by it, because it looked ominously like an even harder, messier conundrum than the one he’d just solved, but that’s progress for you. Every great new discovery in history has led to the guys at the worm cannery doing extra shifts. What mattered — what mattered was, he’d made enough progress to keep his job for more than three days. This time, with what he’d discovered, he could probably hold out for thirty days; maybe even three hundred, if the bank managed to last that long, with some bastard out there disintegrating all the money. That, he felt, called for a celebration.

“Barman,” he said.

“Sir.”

“This is how you make a Tijuana Sunburst.” He paused. “It’s complicated, you may want to take notes.”

“Certainly,” the barman said. “I’ll just get a pen.”

He went away, and the street door opened, and two men came in. They were quite ordinary-looking, and probably bought their clothes from the Nondescript Suit Company. One of them walked up to the bar and stood next to George.

“George Stetchkin?” he said.

George looked at him. “That’s right,” he said. “Who—?”

The man smiled. “Greetings,” he said, and shot him.

3

Interstellar space

In spite of the director’s misgivings, the bomb launched on time.

As it bypassed Orion, blasting through the heart of the Lion’s Mane nebula at 106 times the speed of light, it composed a violin sonata.

It felt guilty about that. Violin sonatas, after all, were what it had been built to eradicate. But, it argued to itself, it was above all a smart bomb, a very smart bomb indeed. Warhead (powerful enough to reduce any known planet to gravel), engines, guidance system, targeting and defensive arrays only took up a tenth of the volume of its asteroid-sized casing. The rest was pure intellect, the finest synthetic intelligence the Ostar had ever produced.

Know your enemy, it reasoned. Learn to think like them. An alien race capable of building a weapon as subtle, insidious and devastating as a violin sonata mustn’t be underestimated. After all, it now seemed certain that the aliens had somehow managed to knock out the Mark One, the bomb’s immediate predecessor; they must have done, or they wouldn’t still be there. An astounding accomplishment for a planet whose dominant species were primates (Yetch, the bomb muttered to itself) who could think of no better name for their homeworld than Soil, or Dirt, or some such.

The bomb swerved to avoid a comet, and added a coda and a set of variations. The tune was catchy. It hummed a few bars, though of course in the impenetrable silence of space it couldn’t hear them.

The bomb had never known the Mark One, which had been built, programmed and launched long before its successor had been envisaged. Indeed, it was to the Mark One’s failure that this bomb, the Mark Two, owed its existence. Clearly the Mark One had been flawed, or simply not good enough, because it had failed. Failure was inexcusable. Even so, as the stars dopplered past in thin filaments of light, it couldn’t help wondering what the Mark One had been like; whether, under other circumstances, they’d have got on together, whether they’d have been friends.

(It felt the slight gravitational tug of a hitherto unrecorded comet passing by a thousand light-years away. It made the necessary calculations and adjusted its course.)

On balance, Mark Two was inclined to doubt it. They were both, after all, bombs. When you’ve been built for a purpose, and that purpose is the elimination of an entire planet, the circumstances of your origin tend to colour your worldview. A certain degree of pessimism is inevitable. What does it ultimately matter? you can’t help thinking. The beauty of a sunset, the mind-stopping clarity of a cat singing at dawn, the flash of light on a flawless titanium-alloy panel, the sinuous modulations of a violin sonata; with a supercharged artificial intelligence, you can’t help but appreciate all these, but deep down you know they’re irrelevant, because a day will come when the mission has been accomplished, the target has been reduced to dust floating on the stellar winds, and you with it. The sun, the cat, the panel, quite possibly the violin sonata will all still be there, back on the planet where your frames were first joined, but you won’t be.

To which the programmers had instructed the Mark Two to react: Oh well, never mind, omelettes and eggs and all that. It didn’t — couldn’t — occur to the Mark Two that its programmers may have been wrong, but it also couldn’t help detecting a certain frailty about the logic.

Know your enemy, it reminded itself. It was worth repeating, because it constituted the First Law of Sentient Ordnance:
Thou shalt not blow up the wrong planet.
On that point the programmers had been insistent to the point of fussiness. Accordingly, they’d fed into Mark Two’s cavernous brain every last scrap of data they had about Dirt and its people, their history, biology, philosophy, culture, art, literature and, of course, music. It wasn’t much, a mere 10
^10,000,000
scantobytes, but it was enough to get the job done; enough, also, to intrigue the Mark Two as it trudged across the endless parsecs towards its target. Above all, it posed the question that even the programmers had been unable to answer. Why?

Nobody knew. There were theories, of course. The favourite, endorsed by the War Department and the Governing Pack, was that the Dirt-people launched their music into space with a view to neutralising other races as a preliminary to invasion and the formation of a galactic empire. If that was the intention, it was working, at least on the Ostar. From the day when the first Dirt broadcasts, drifting aimlessly through space, had reached the Ostar homeworld, bringing with them the lethally insidious melodies of Dirt music, intellectual life on the planet had practically ground to a halt. After an alarmingly short time, the Ostar could barely think at all. With the fiendishly catchy Dirt melodies looping endlessly round and round in their heads, even the wisest academicians were mentally paralysed. The weapons researchers who’d designed the Mark One had had to have the auditory centres of their brains artificially paralysed before they could settle down to work, and even then it hadn’t been uncommon to find one of them slumped at his console, his jowls noiselessly shaping dum, de dum, de dumpty dumpty dum; at which point the kindest thing was to have him taken away and shot. As for the rest of their once mighty civilisation, it had more or less seized up.

Hostile intent certainly seemed to be the only logical explanation. But there were inconsistencies. For example: how could a race descended from tree-rats who hadn’t even mastered faster-than-light yet possibly believe they’d be capable of conquering worlds it’d take them tens of thousands of years to reach in their pathetic fire-driven tin-can spaceships? Did they even know there were other inhabited worlds out there? If the inane babble of their public telecasts was to be believed, a large majority of the Dirters sincerely believed they were alone in the universe. A blind, the War Department argued; a fatuous attempt to lure us into a false sense of security. But that hypothesis did suggest an alternative explanation: that the Dirters, unaware that they had neighbours in the cosmos, were mindlessly polluting space with their toxic aural garbage. They didn’t know the harm they were doing; or, worse still, they knew and they didn’t care.

To which the War Department replied, “If, as is not admitted, this hypothesis is true, all the more reason to blow Dirt into its constituent atoms.” With which line of argument it was hard to find fault. On one thing the Ostar were completely agreed: the Dirters had to be stopped, and quickly.

The bomb skirted a red dwarf, slowing down ever so slightly and flipping through ninety degrees to bask in its rich, sensuous heat. There were times when it almost wished it wasn’t a bomb. Sure, every sentient machine on Ostar knew that explosive ordnance was the highest calling to which an artificial intelligence could aspire. Bombs were the élite, the elect, the chosen few; you didn’t get to be a bomb unless you were something really special. That side of it, Mark Two had no quarrel with. It knew it was extraordinary, outstanding, and that fitting it to an industrial matter resequencer or a washing machine would have been a crime against technology. It was the getting-blown-up part that bothered it, with a small afterthought-grade reservation about taking a whole planet with it when it went. The programmers, needless to say, had an answer to that. Only with the very finest sentient machines, they said, were they prepared to share their species greatest gift, the defining quality of canine life: mortality. It was the finite nature of Ostar existence that motivated them, gave them goals and objectives, spurred them on to achieve, discover and create. A dishwasher, by contrast, would chunter quietly on for ever, one day pretty much like the last and the next, never knowing the scintillating urgency that came with a limited lifespan. Count yourself lucky, was the moral.

Yes, Mark Two thought. Well.

Something infinitesimally small brushed its forward sensory array. Mark Two decoded it in a fraction of a nanosecond, and felt a deep chill crawling through its circuits. A ray of light from Dirt’s sun. That could only mean one thing.

Mark Two engaged its optical-data-acquisition unit and followed the light’s trajectory, compensating for entropic drift, the magnetic fields of all known objects in the relevant vicinity, time distortion and the effects of its own hyperspatial shroud. At the end of the line, sure enough, was a small, pale star with a gaggle of unremarkable planets bobbing along in its wake. The third planet out from the star was blue, with green splodges.

Dirt.

Oh, the bomb thought. And then its courage, determination and nobility-of-spirit subroutines cut in, overriding everything else, adrenalising its command functions and bypassing its cyberphrenetic nodes. Here goes, said the bomb to itself. Calibrate navigational pod. Engage primary thrusters. Ready auxiliary drive. It knew, in that moment, that its own doom was near, because it was giving itself orders, and it wasn’t putting in any “the”s. That was what you did, apparently, when the moment came. You could also turn on a flashing red beacon and a siren, but mercifully these were optional.

Oh flick, thought the bomb, and surged on towards Dirt like an avenging angel.