“Yeah, but they don’t have my infectious personality.” The adjuster looked on as the inspector coaxed his instrumentation. Four minutes later the workstay disgorged a hardprint containing the information desired. Hafas withdrew it, examined it for superficial errors, and passed it over to his guest.

“Here. Good luck with it. We didn’t have any. If you’re looking for individuals with prior convictions of any kind, much less confessed addicts or anyone with personality problems, you won’t find ’em on there.”

Manz examined the list briefly before shoving it into a pocket. “I don’t expect to.”

“Then what are you looking for?” Hafas was eyeing him intently.

His visitor uncrossed his legs preparatory to leaving. “Whatever your people missed.” He smiled agreeably as he rose.

Hafas took no offense. Leastwise he didn’t show any. Instead he rubbed tiredly at his eyes. “Manz?”

The adjuster paused at the door, his two mechanicals in close attendance. “Tewfik?”

“Do me a favor. Find something we can use. Anything. But do it quietly, okay? I have enough to do trying to explain my section’s failures without having to explain yours as well.”

Manz wagged a finger at him. “We haven’t failed yet, Inspector. Haven’t been here long enough to fail. Give me a little time.”

Hafas wasn’t exactly praying as his visitors departed, but he was working hard at wishing them more than mere good fortune. Personally and professionally, he was badly in need of a break.

Once out in the corridor beyond the inner offices, Moses essayed an observation. “Upon first encounter I believed Inspector Hafas to be an unusually stable individual for one long engaged in police work. I now see that I must revise that evaluation. He struck me just now as fatigued and nervous, a bad combination for one in his profession.” They turned a corner.

“Repeated unsolvable thefts brazenly conducted within one’s jurisdiction can put abnormal pressure on any officer of the law. He’s under a lot of strain, Moses.”

“You know, sir, there are times when you sound uncannily like me.”

“Bullshit. That’s just your overactive imagination working.”

“I have no imagination, sir, overactive or otherwise. It is impossible to program imagination into a mechanical. It remains a wholly human attribute the cyberneers have as yet been unable to synthesize.”

“Well, then, your intuition unit is overheating. I don’t sound anything like you.” He glanced up at the Minder. “Do I ever sound like him?”

The Minder replied emotionlessly, as always. “Are you referring, sir, to actual auditory qualities or to selective phraseology?”

“Skip it.” They were leaving the building, and his mind was beginning to skip-trace other matters.

The room was full of elaborate instrumentation that hummed softly as telltales flashed in cryptic sequence. Manz’s queries led him to the back of the chamber, where a young man in a cleansuit was kneeling to examine the interior of a table-sized, deactivated component. Fiberops and clusters of bundled chips and spheres were visible beneath his sensitive fingers, which poked and pried methodically at the electronic viscera.

Moses regarded them with particular interest as Manz halted behind the technician.

A fringe of brown hair framed a ruddy, freckled face. Despite the proximity of his visitors, the youngster ignored them utterly, wholly engrossed in his work.

“Excuse me,” Manz finally had to say.

“What, hello.” Rising, the tech stared at Manz out of implant-distorted eyes. They might help in his work, the adjuster thought, but they gave him a distinctly bug-eyed appearance. Freckled hands moved ceaselessly, like nervous mice. “Can I help you?”

Courteous enough, Manz decided. Of course, he hadn’t asked him any questions yet. “You used to work for Borgia I&E?”

“As of seven months ago, yes.” Bug-eyes blinked, a disconcerting sight. “Are you with the authorities? They already questioned me once. I don’t know anything about anything.”

“Don’t jump to conclusions. We’re not with the police. We’re carrying out a government survey of relocated personnel. Checking on fair employment practices, that sort of thing. We do random follow-ups on involuntary career changes in selected professions. Your name came out of the hat.”

The tech turned back to the unit he’d been working on. “I’m pretty busy here, and I don’t like leaving this exposed to the air. Can’t you give me a form to fill out later, or something?”

“This survey’s not that formal. I’ll just be a minute. Would you mind telling us why they let you go?” He indicated the Minder. “This device will record your responses.”

The tech stared with interest at the Minder. “That’s a new model, isn’t it?”

“Sure, but you don’t have time for small talk, remember? Naturally your responses will be kept strictly confidential. Did the police already ask you this?”

“Yes.” The tech sighed. “I was fired, that’s all.”

“Without any explanation?”

“Oh, there was an explanation, sure, but I didn’t buy it.”

“Did the police ask you about that?”

“Sure. I told them it involved a personality conflict.”

“Did it? Remember, this is being recorded.” Manz indicated the Minder again.

The tech stared at the hovering sphere. “Well, there was a personality conflict, all right, but there was a lot more to it than that. I didn’t believe Arsolt’s explanation for a minute.”

“Arsolt?”

“Mike Arsolt.” The tech adjusted a tuning slide on the tool he was holding. “The guy who gave me the bad news.”

“I see. If you believe your situation involved more than just personality conflict, why do you think you were fired? Again, this is strictly for government records. Any information you can supply might save someone else a job sometime,” he added encouragingly.

“Well … part of my work involved composing and submitting the budget for the crew I supervised. I kept getting it back with cuts I considered unreasonable. I mean, you can’t do your work properly without decent equipment.”

“I couldn’t agree with you more.”

Sensing a kindred spirit, the tech became a little more voluble. “So just to satisfy myself, I ran a scan on overall company expenditures. Because of what I do, I could access all corporate records. It seemed to me that an awful lot of money was going into pure R&D. There were huge allotments for extraordinary, unspecified expenditures … that sort of thing. So I figured maybe some executive was skimming funds. You read about that sort of thing happening all the time in big, closely held companies.”

“You certainly do. You think someone at Borgia was diverting company funds for private use?”

“I don’t know. I was just trying to justify my own section budget, you know? It just struck me that a lot of money was being applied to some really nebulous debits without generating any visible return, and if the company could waste money on mysterious schemes of an unspecified nature, then they could damn well afford to fund their support groups.”

Manz made himself sound casual. “I don’t suppose you were ever able to learn the nature of any of those projects?”

“Are you kidding? If a company can’t cosset its own R&D, it can’t have any secrets. Specifics weren’t kept in general corporate files.

“Anyway, when I tried to use the information I’d gathered about what seemed to me to be excessive spending on nonproductive activities, to get my crew properly funded, that’s when I was terminated. Without any other explanation than that I was a ‘disruptive influence’ due to ‘personality conflicts.’ Personally, I think I was fired for being a conscientious employee. Lot of good it did me.

“When I pressed Arsolt on it, he said the necessary paperwork had been signed off by Monticelli himself. Not that that means anything. The Cardinal probably initials a hundred forms a day without reading more than the titles of a few of them. I don’t hold it against him. It was Arsolt’s call. He was my supervisor.” The tech smiled diffidently. “Is that any help? I really have to get back to work. I don’t want to lose this job, too. I like it here.”

“That should do it,” Manz told him. “Thanks for your cooperation.”