[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Amazing Stories April 1963.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
It didn't happen twice a year that Gustavus Robert Fry, Chief
Commissioner of the Interstellar Police Authority, allotted more than
an hour in his working day to any one appointment. However, nobody in
the outer offices was surprised to learn that the chief expected to
remain in conference until noon today, and was not to be disturbed
before then. The visitor who had been ushered in to him--without
benefit of appointment--was Howard Camhorn, the Overgovernment's
Coordinator of Research. It was a meeting of political mastodons.
Portentous events would be on the agenda.
Seated at the desk in his private office, Gus Fry, massive,
strong-jawed, cold-eyed--looking precisely like the power-house,
political and otherwise, which he was--did not feel entirely at ease.
Howard Camhorn, sprawled in a chair half across the room from the
Chief Commissioner, might have passed for a middle-aged, moderately
successful artist. He was lanky, sandy-haired, with a lazy smile,
lazier gestures. But he was, by several degrees, the bigger VIP of the
two.
Camhorn said, "There's no question at all, of course, that the space
transport your boys picked up is the one we're interested in. But is it
absolutely certain that our Ym-400 is no longer on board?"
Fry shrugged. "It's certain that it isn't in the compartment where
it was stored for the trip--and the locks to that compartment have
been forced. It's possible that whoever removed the two Ym cases has
concealed them in some other part of the ship. That would be easy to
do, but...."
Camhorn shook his head. "No," he said. "Nobody would benefit from that.
I'm afraid we'll have to resign ourselves to the fact that the stuff
has been taken."
* * * * *
Fry said, "It looks like it. The police search will go on until your
own investigators get there, but there's no reason to believe anything
will be found."
"The ship's course had been reset so that it was headed into unoccupied
space?"
"Yes," said Fry. "It was only by a very improbable coincidence that
an IPA boat happened to spot it. The transport's new course wouldn't
have brought it anywhere near a traffic lane, inhabited planet, or
normal patrol route. Three weeks later, when its fuel was exhausted,
the planted explosives would have blown it up without a chance that the
wreckage would ever be detected."
"How about the cargo? Have you heard about that? Was it otherwise
intact?"
"As far as we can tell. The shippers will check everything in detail
when the freighter gets back to port. But it's a good guess that the
Overgovernment's Ym-400 is the only item missing."
* * * * *
Camhorn nodded. "A group which was planning to pick it up wouldn't be
very interested in ordinary loot. That seems to make it conclusive." He
wrinkled his nose reflectively. "Modus operandi?" he asked.
"Two possibilities," Fry said. "They had themselves loaded aboard with
the cargo, or they intercepted the transport en route and entered it in
flight."
"Which do you like?"
"The first. In fact, the other is hardly a possibility. Even the IPA
couldn't get aboard a modern automatic freighter between ports without
setting off an explosion of alarms in every flight control station on
its course. No such alarm was recorded. And there is no indication of a
forcible entry."
"So our thieves had themselves loaded on," said Camhorn. "Now, Gus,
I've always been under the impression that the check system which keeps
stowaways out of the automatic transports was foolproof."
The IPA Chief shrugged. "It's been foolproof so far. But not because it
was impossible to circumvent. It's simply that circumventing the check
system would add up to so enormously expensive a proposition that the
total cash value of a transport and its cargo wouldn't be worth the
trouble. These people definitely were not considering expenses."
"Apparently not," Camhorn said. "So how did they get the Ym-400 off the
ship?"
"They had a small boat loaded on board with them. That's a supposition,
so far; they left very few traces of their activities. But it's the
only way the thing could have been done. They had obtained exact
information of the transport's plotted route and time schedule. At a
calculated point, they picked up the two cases of YM, rerouted the
ship, timed and planted their explosives, disconnected the alarm system
at the entry lock, and left in the boat. Naturally, another ship was
moving along with the freighter by then, waiting to pick them up.
That's all there was to it."
"You make it sound simple," said Camhorn.
"The difficulty," said Gus Fry, "would be in preparing such an
operation. No matter how much money these people could lay on the
line, they must have spent several months in making the necessary
arrangements without once alerting the port authorities."
"They had enough time," Camhorn admitted reflectively. "Ym-400 has been
shipped for a number of years in the same manner and over the same
route."
"I've been wondering," Fry remarked, "why this manner of shipping it
was selected."
Camhorn smiled briefly. "When was the last time an automatic transport
was hijacked, Gus?"
"Fifty-seven years ago," Fry said. "And the method employed then
wouldn't have worked on a modern transport, or under the present check
system."
"Well, that's part of your answer. Automatic shipping risks have become
negligible. The rest of the answer is that we've avoided too obviously
elaborate safeguards for Ym-400. If we put it on a battleship each time
it was moved, the technological espionage brethren would hear about it.
Which means that everybody who might be interested would hear about it.
And once the word got out, we'd start losing the stuff regardless of
safeguards to people who'd be willing to work out for themselves just
what made it so valuable to the Overgovernment. As it is, this is the
first sample of Ym-400 to go astray in the thirty-two years we've had
it."
"Two thirty-four kilogram cases," Fry said. "Is that a significant
amount?"
"I'm afraid it's an extremely significant amount," Camhorn said wryly.