He walked to the end of the planter and scrutinized the serviceway. Currently there were no vehicles stopped at the curb, but surely the jackers wouldn’t be dumb enough to hang around while the jack was in progress. Besides, there was no need to expose themselves at a sensitive moment. They could drive in and make the pickup at any time. The individual drug vials were factory-sealed. They could easily survive being buried in a little dirt without damage, their contents still active, for many days.
Even deep underground.
Climbing up into the planter, he started searching the bases of the various growths, trampling smaller foliage underfoot. Hafas and the others watched him uncertainly. Then Vyra stepped up onto the planter and joined in. A moment later Moses, too heavy to surmount the retaining wall, commenced a detailed inspection of the decoratively pebbled fringe.
“What are you looking for?” the baffled inspector asked the adjuster.
Manz spoke without looking up. “The jacked goods, of course. They’re down in here somewhere, unless they’ve somehow been passed further up the line.”
“Line? What line?”
“The relay line.” This time the adjuster did look up, gesturing back the way they’d come. “It’s the plants. Inspector. I don’t know how, much less why, but they’re some of your jackers.” He grinned. “How’re you going to cuff a philodendron?”
“I asked you earlier to explain yourself. Now you will, this minute, or by God I’ll haul your ass downtown!”
“Take it easy.” Manz made soothing gestures. He pointed off into the distance, back toward the atrium.
“Some kind of root came up through a hole it had cut in the shed floor. Or maybe it’s a vine, I don’t know. I’m an insurance adjuster, not a botanist. Came up right under the big container, so it never appeared on any of the shed’s internal vid pickups. That’s how the jackings took place without setting off any alarms or showing up on any of the internal vids. The entry holes were always made out of pickup view, probably directly under each case. The roots would take their own sweet time jacking the drugs, then perfect-seal the holes in the shed floor. Easy to make a seamless, invisible repair to composites. No need or reason to seal the holes in the cases.” He bent to shove aside a cluster of thick, ripple-marked spatulate leaves.
“The roots or vines or whatever the hell they are remove the drug vials one at a time, taking ’em down through the hole, back through the service space that separates the two floors of the shed, and probably on into some conduit space they’ve appropriated in the one part-hollow support pillar. Once underground and out of sight they move the jack along beneath the floor of the atrium. Probably made their own tunnel. I’ll bet if you haul some equipment in there and pull up some of those decorative floor slabs and dig down a little ways, you’ll find it.
“That leaves the problem of moving the jack to a safe pickup point. This being the last planter in the vicinity, I’m betting it has to end up here.” Again he nodded back the way they’d come. “I don’t know how long these root-things are, but they can’t be hundreds of meters or there’d be no room to fit ’em in the planters. So they have to transfer the jack, passing it along underground from the atrium to the next planter in line, then the next, and finally to here.” He looked over his shoulder.
“The jackers must just pull in here when the mood takes them and make the pickup. Nobody’s watching this serviceway. No reason to.” He paused to stare evenly at Hafas.
“This wasn’t done with mirrors, Inspector. It’s all real. I know; I watched it happen.”
“When you line all the pieces up like that, it makes a crazy kind of sense,” Hafas admitted, “except for one thing: how do you turn a bunch of plants into drug jackers? Much less teach part of a tree or bush how to use a sonic cutter and sealer and how to discriminate between an empty box and individual pharmaceutical vials.”
“I told you I’m not a botanist. I haven’t the faintest idea. I’ve been kind of wondering about that myself.” He glanced over at Vyra. “Find anything?”
Bent over and searching, she turned to him, wiping soil from her hands. “Sour smells. A couple of earthworms. Some beetles. None of them looked particularly guilty. I always thought you were certifiable, Broddy. Now I’m sure of it.”
He grinned at her. “Then why are you helping me look?”
“Because I’m certifiable too. Besides, the how makes a crazy kind of sense. It’s the why that still has me baffled.”
“No less than me, my little eggplant.” He straightened again, a strange look on his face, and turned to Hafas. “Inspector, do your duty.”
“I beg your pardon?”
With a sweeping gesture the adjuster encompassed the entire planter. “Arrest these plants! If that’s what they are.”
Vyra regarded him out of bemused violet eyes. “Broddy, don’t you think you’re reaching a bit here?”
“Maybe. But all this puts me in mind of a recent friend. I didn’t have the privilege of knowing him for very long, but he did some pretty impressive reaching himself. Across a number of light-years.”
Hafas was stumped and didn’t try to hide it. “You’ve lost me again.”
“We’ve all been lost here, Inspector. Gamboling blindly, that’s what we’ve been doing. No wonder these jackers have made us look like idiots. They’ve had some unanticipatable help.
“Here you were, unable to find a trace of the jackers or their modus no matter how hard your department tried, searching earnestly for special equipment, or experienced thieves, or maybe even trained animals, and all the time it was the shrubbery doing the snitching.” He hopped off the planter, turning to scrutinize the foliage.
“You heard me. Arrest ’em. Get some trucks in here, uproot the lot, and haul it all off to quarantine until we can sort out the complicit vegetables from the innocent ones.”
Hafas’s expression was grim. “All right, I’ll do it. But only because I don’t know what else to do. But you’d better be right about this, Manz, or I’ll … I’ll devise a new ordinance to bring against you. Because I’m not going to be made the butt of a thousand jokes all by myself. I’m going to want to have someone handy to stick out there in front of me when the media comes calling.”
“Fair enough,” the adjuster agreed as a cablelike tendril exploded from the damp earth of the planter to whip around his neck.
XV
A second tentacle wrapped about Manz’s waist, and a third coiled tightly around his right arm. The Minder automatically soared to its maximum altitude and hovered there, bobbing wildly as its owner was dragged flailing and kicking up onto the planter. Heavy leaves only partially muffled a string of violent, startled oaths.
Vyra rushed to intervene, but martial arts weren’t much use against something without a face or other immediately accessible vulnerable parts. A thick vine knocked her backwards, stunning her and leaving a red welt across her cheek.
It was left to Moses to react as Hafas raised his pistol. The humaniform lifted his fourth limb and aimed the tip. A line of bright red coherent light crossed the intervening space to impact on the tendril wrapped around Manz’s head. Surprisingly, it didn’t part, but a black scar did appear on the otherwise green surface. As it sloughed away, the mechanical adjusted his aim and targeted the coil around Manz’s waist.
A third burst freed the adjuster’s arm. Tendrils retracted, jerking and convulsing with impassioned green life. At the same time a weird moaning rattled through the air like an echo from distant damp catacombs. It was succeeded by garbled but ultimately intelligible phonetics.
“Yis’shin yeel sif’faph! Stop that … it hurts!”
Even Manz, who suspected more of what was going on than any of his companions, was suitably stunned. Some sort of trainability he’d expected. Actual communication was a possibility hardly to be countenanced.
“I’ll be thrice-befazzed,” Vyra murmured in astonishment. “They talk, too!” She squinted into the vegetation. “How many of you are there? Or do you recognize individuality of being?”
The burned tendrils lay coiled on the soil, twitching spasmodically. “We do not ‘talk.’ The fashioning of obscure movements with primitive eating organs does not constitute proper speech.”
“Telepathy.” Manz’s face was full of wonder. “Or some kind of as-yet-to-be-evaluated equivalent. That explains a lot.”
The inspector’s face was shining. Jackers or not, there in the Juarez el Paso Shuttleport a fortunate few found themselves communicating unexpectedly with the first nonhuman intelligence ever encountered. A realistic Hafas was confident the actual circumstances of this particular encounter would undergo a certain amount of thoughtful revision prior to inclusion in the official histories.
“Evet, it does. Continual communication with nothing to give them away. Nanosecond timing, impenetrable cover … hell, they’re their own cover. End product? The unsolvable crime.”
Vyra was nodding to herself. “And you can bet that whenever whoever’s behind this got tired of jacking Braun-Roche-Keck pharmaceuticals, they’d move on to something else. Meanwhile the landscaping here at the Port would undergo another ‘upgrading.’”
“Sure,” Manz agreed. “Somewhere there’s got to be a jewelry center in need of a face-lift.”
“Or the R&D arm of a major corporation,” the inspector chimed in, “that would like to relandscape its offices.”
“Your implications are unfair,” the peculiarly stilted voice responded. “Despite appearances and what you may think, we are not in favor of antisocial activities.”
“No?” said the adjuster. “You sure seem to have participated in a number of them recently. Unless you have some sort of unique referent for what you’ve been doing that escapes us, you ought to explain yourselves … whatever you are.”
“Not plants, as you seem to believe. We possess characteristics of both plant and animal life. You perhaps have encountered lower orders of similar life-forms on other worlds, or even your own.”
Manz looked to the Minder. “Analyze and respond.”
“Plantlike animals,” the sphere replied without hesitation. “Sea anemones are one example. There are others. They may be either food gatherers, or chlorophyllic, or both. Judging from the appearance of these, I would imagine the latter. Or they may be capable of deriving nourishment from both sources, as well as some we are not yet aware of. An intelligent derivative of lowly lichens, impossible to classify according to current taxonomic procedures. There is as yet insufficient data to pursue this line of inquiry.”
