“Behind you,” declared the tendriled alien emotionlessly.

The inspector and the single PA guard raced around one end of the planter while Manz and Vyra took the other. Weapons drawn, they confronted the startled pickup man and his driver as the first was slipping jacked vials into a gardener’s tool case.

“Freeze or die!” snarled the inspector. The driver of the little vehicle immediately threw both hands skyward. Seeing leveled weapons to his left and right, his desperate companion took the only unbarred path, plunging straight into the planter.

He never made it out the other side.

Two tendrils wrapped around his legs and brought him crashing to the ground. Another plucked insistently at the case full of pharmaceuticals. When the pickup man obstinately refused to let go of the container, the tendril removed it forcibly … together with the man’s arm, extracted at the socket.

Rushing around the other end of the planter, the inspector slowed, swallowing when he caught sight of the screaming pickup man dangling from one pair of powerful tendrils and his arm from another.

“Jesus …” He flipped open his com. “Rachel! Yeah, it’s me again. We’re out by the service road south of Port Administration. Get an ambulance in here, fast. No, I’m okay. So are the Braun-Ives people. But somebody else isn’t. I’d like to keep him alive to answer questions.”

Manz put a hand on the inspector’s shoulder. The pickup man’s condition did not trouble him. Not with Antigua’s death still fresh in his own memory. “We have the driver.”

“I know,” the inspector replied, “but you know what court’s like. The more witnesses for the prosecution, the better.”

The adjuster indicated the pickup man whose flight had been precipitously amputated. “He’s an underling. He may not know anything.”

“Maybe.” Hafas looked uneasily at the harmless-seeming foliage. “If he won’t tell us what he knows, we can always have the Cetians interrogate him.”

“Good idea, but I wouldn’t waste a lot of time on these two. I’d rather watch Cardinal Monticelli try to explain himself to his offworld guests. Our guests, now.”

“Yes. The appropriate scientific authorities will have to be notified. They’ll go virtual for a piece of this. But they’ll have to wait their turn.” He stood a little straighter. “Extraordinary discovery or no, the people’s justice comes first.”

“Evolution on your world seems to have taken a different course than on ours,” Manz was telling the Cetians. The ambulance had arrived and the unconscious pickup artist, his wound stoppered and his arm packaged for later reattachment at the public’s expense, had been hustled off along with the more compliant driver.

“It would seem so,” F’fay’pas agreed. “There are few highly mobile creatures on our world, and even fewer with solid endoskeletons. Yet the examples you describe of life here similar to us seem as primitive to me as our mobile life-forms would doubtless seem to you.”

“Yet despite your physical handicaps you’ve achieved a high level of civilization without recourse to machinery,” Vyra commented.

“As you can see, we manage to get along without it. At least, we did until now. Artificial constructs that do one’s bidding are a continual source of amazement to us. By the same token, we find it difficult to understand how you can successfully communicate by means of modulated sound waves.”

The guard Manz had dispatched earlier chose that moment to return from his errand, a large sack slung over one shoulder. As he dumped it on the edge of the retaining wall, he glared murderously at the placid adjuster.

“This had better be worth it, sir. I had to take an awful lot of jokes on the way back here.”

“You’ve made an important contribution to interstellar relations, man.” Manz unsealed the sack and flinched back from the pungent contents. Then he grabbed a handful and tossed it into the center of the planter. Several more followed. New passersby who had missed the earlier confrontation looked on with interest.

“Is this material anything like the ‘scarce’ compounds Monticelli’s been promising you?”

“Some water, please,” F’fay’pas requested. Vyra found a delay switch and manually flipped it. Embedded sprinklers came to life, washing the powdery substance into the soil.

“Yes,” came the positive reply moments later. “It is not concentrated, but the vital basics are present. Then such material is not difficult to obtain, as we were told?”

“Not at all,” Manz assured the interlocutor. “Lobster’s a rare delicacy to us, but tasty arthropods might be quite common on your world. You didn’t have to virtually indenture yourselves to Monticelli to get this. If you’d only had the courage to reveal your presence here, the government would’ve been glad to supply all your needs. R&D complexes would’ve fought over the right to assist you.

“As for trading this offworld, I don’t think it’s quite what generations of physicists had in mind when they were wracking their brains trying to come up with a practical means of interstellar travel, but I don’t see any reason why it shouldn’t be beneficial to both our species.” He grinned. “I’m sure something of equivalent value can be found on Ceti.”

For a long time F’fay’pas did not reply. When he finally did, it was to question the speaker. “This is not a contrived falsehood? An attempt to deceive?”

Manz tried to sound (no, to think) as affirmative as possible. “It’s the truth, my vegetative friend. I’m sorry that your experience with my kind subsequent to your initial contact with the designated Antigua has been so disappointing. All I can tell you is that we’ll do our best to try to make up for it.”

Tendrils thrashed about. Since F’fay’pas didn’t explain his behavior, it was left to his visitors to try to interpret it. “Maybe they’ve had enough water.” Vyra moved to shut the sprinklers off.

“Or else they’re just plain excited,” Manz declared, fascinated by the fluid movement of the multiple tendrils. “F’fay’pas, can you tell what we’re thinking at any time?”

The tendrils relaxed. “No. Our range is limited, and it is difficult to extract coherent thoughts from your minds. Your thoughts are different from ours. Less linear. You are not easy to understand. I do not know why.”

He felt strong fingers on his arm. “I’m enjoying this little chat as much as you are, Broddy, but has it occurred to you that at any moment our cheery Mr. Monticelli is likely to be informed that this jacking has been bungled?”

“His people will wait a while longer before giving up on their pickup team, Ms. Kullervo.” Hafas was relaxed, at ease. “Only when they’re positive something’s gone wrong will they relay the bad news.”

“Even so,” she replied, “we don’t want to give him or any of his colleagues a chance to take wing.”

The inspector smiled knowingly. For once he was the one who knew what was going on. It made for a nice change.

“My department’s had the key executives of Borgia, Troy, and Fond du Lac under surveillance ever since they were first suspected of complicity in the jackings. I’ve already called in and had the watch on Borgia’s offices intensified. We can pick him and his immediate assistants up at any time.”

“How about now?” Manz suggested. “It would make my office a lot happier knowing you had some prime suspects in custody, instead of simply under surveillance.”

“I was going to wait to see if anyone else showed up, maybe with a shovel and pick, but I guess I can leave that to someone else.” Hafas murmured to the officer at his side. The man nodded as he listened.

While the inspector passed on instructions, Manz leaned against the planter retaining wall. “I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to prune a rosebush again with a clear conscience, but I just want to say that as a human, I’m sorry for the confusion. Now that we know who we’re dealing with, we’ll straighten all this out. I’ll probably be seeing you again.”

“We look forward to the exchange,” the interlocutor told him, further startling all of them by waving a tendril by way of goodbye. It was a gesture they must have picked from watching people at the Port, Manz mused. What they did their watching with was still a matter for conjecture. He knew you didn’t need eyes to see. Just ask any sightless person.

You’re all sightless, but you don’t know it. You fumble about and think that you’re seeing, but your perception is masked by your own misconceptions. They fog your conclusions. That’s the main problem with humankind. You suffer from cataracts of the cognition.

XVI

Monticelli’s floor was the proverbial hive of activity, only in this case actions involved the methodical destruction of everything from recently received periodicals to entire files whose records stretched back ten years or more. Grim-faced employees carried out their supervisors’ directives as they wondered among themselves about the reasons.

In his private suite Monticelli moved purposefully to the large picture window. A touch on a hidden control, and the large sheet of reinforced glass slid aside a little less than a meter to admit fresh air and a few puzzled insects. Monticelli was not interested in the city air, nor was he planning any foolish leap into oblivion.

Reaching out and down, he fumbled with a spotlight until it snapped out of its holder. Behind the flat bulb lay a touch-sensitive lock. As soon as he keyed in the combination, the metal plate to which the light-holder was welded clicked aside.

Putting a safe on the outside of your office, several floors up, was one way to ensure one’s privacy.

He removed the contents, which consisted of a small plastic case full of critical hardprints and several information storage discs, and slipped them into a heavy-duty plastic bag imprinted with the logo of the hypermarket down the street. It made for an innocuous package.

Closing the external safe, he shut the window behind himself and barked in the direction of the vorec-activated pickup. “Where’s the cretin who’s supposed to have the latest figures from the Port? Time is particularly important today, people, and we’re fast running out of it. As long as everyone does their job, this emergency will turn out to be nothing more than a temporary setback.”

It was much more than that, of course, but by the time terminated employees and outraged stockholders came to that realization, he would be offworld, beyond the reach not only of JeP jurisdiction but that of any Earthly authority.

Out in the upper offices of Borgia I&E, techs and clerks slaved on methodically. They might have been spurred to even greater efforts had anyone thought to check the street outside.

A long-bed, six-wheel JePPD van full of heavily armed officers was about as inconspicuous as a snowman in downtown Phoenix on a July afternoon. The driver swung into a municipal parking place well off the cyberstrip that ran down the center of the street, and his tense passengers hustled the rest of the way to the target building on foot. A second identical vehicle was unloading on the opposite side of the structure. Curious pedestrians blinked at the rapid deployment force, noted the grim expressions on the faces of the flak-suited men and women and the kinds of weaponry they carried, drew inevitable conclusions, and hurried a little faster on their way. Those traveling in the same direction as the squads slowed and abruptly remembered particulars that demanded their attention elsewhere.