The details of that recollection brought up his spirits again and, he
reminded himself, the lesson had sunk in; had developed into his most
useful ethic. After his narrow scrape with Jason's quantum analyzer in
the Berlin incident, it hadn't taken long for a good, one-man detective
agency to locate Physlab Nine's frenetic genius, Moglaut. It had taken
longer to discover Moglaut's currency but, after much shadowing, the
'tec had come through handsomely. Lonnie, automatically applying his
fully-developed Ethic One, always considered it a nice sentimental touch
that the one-man agency's final case was successful.
Moglaut's price was a prim, brunette soprano who wore her eyes disguised
behind heavy tortoiseshell. The ill-cut garb she could afford added
greatly to her staid appearance, obscuring a certain full-bodied
litheness. She earned a throttled existence soloing at funerals and in
the worship halls of obscure, rigidly fanatic offshoot sects.
Her consuming passion was to be an opera prima donna.
Lonnie never tried to understand why Moglaut sat fascinated through
endless sin-busting sermons and lachrymose requiems. To hurry
afterwards, with the jerky motions, the glazed eyes of a zombie, to
subsequent rendezvous with the soprano at his suburban apartment. It was
entirely sufficient in Lonnie's philosophy that Moglaut did.
The soprano's continuing suburban cooperation was insured by Lonnie's
judicious doling out of exactly the cash to keep a tenth-rate opera
company barely functioning in a lesser quarter of Government City.
Oddly, he found it pleased him and from that grew his wide patronizing
of the Arts.
The immediate result of the situation he created and controlled so
deftly was Moglaut's production of a closed-plenum grid suit.
None of Gov-Pol, Gov-Mil or Gov-Econ labs found out about it; much less
Pol-Anx or Government itself. Moglaut did all the work in the tiny
complete lab Lonnie set up in the suburbs.
Lonnie didn't care what electronic witchery took place in the minute
spatial interstices between the finely-woven mesh of flexible tantalum.
Sufficient for him, the silvery white suit once donned and triple-zipped
through hood and glove-endings, he was immune to ordinary Earthly
phenomena; free to move about, do what he wished, untraceably. In it,
his words were not vulnerable to the sono-beam's eavesdropping.
Photo-electric and magneto-photonic watchdogs ignored him. Even the most
delicately sensitive thermo-couples continued their dreams of freezing
flame undisturbed. Jason's quantum analyzer couldn't pick up the
leavings of a glance--all that the suit permitted out into the physical
world.
The suit had its limitations, of course. Lonnie could see out, but the
suit could also be seen. That required sometimes intricate advance
planning to offset. Also, occasionally, manipulating the field of the
grid to permit mechanical contact with the physical world was a trifle
cumbersome but never annoyingly so. All it took was a modicum of
step-by-step thought and some care not to leave a personal trace for the
quantum analyzer to pick up. No actual trouble. And, finally, Moglaut
had warned that the compact power unit pocketed on the left breast had a
half-life of only thirteen years.
That left Lonnie placid. He took the suit for granted and used it for
what it let him do.
When something more was needed, he was convinced his philosophy would
provide it.
He didn't waste time trying to determine whether possession of the suit
or previous experiences leading to his insistence on its development
brought into focus the third ethic of his philosophy: "Rules One and Two
are valuable and have their use. But when the chips are really down, _do
it yourself_!" Instead, he toddled about personally acquiring the
trappings of omnipotent royalty with little thought for the means.
* * * * *
But while he was about that business, the very limitations of the grid
suit furnished an unending challenge to Moglaut's genius. And out of a
sideline experiment incited by that challenge came the disarmer which
Jason greeted with such fruitless glee.
Fruitless because, of course, before turning the disarmer over to Lab
Nine and Pol-Anx, Moglaut devised a new, infinitely stronger, more
versatile power pack for Lonnie's suit. A power pack controlled by a
simple rheostat in the palm of the left-hand glove, but whose energy
derived from the electron-kinetic properties of pent and shielded
tritium. Not simple. In fact, solving the problem of penning and
shielding tritium in a portable package delayed the appearance of
Jason's disarmer two whole years.
That power pack and the reciprocating properties of the fields of the
grid suit itself made a dilly of a combination. Before, the
closed-plenum mesh kept Lonnie from leaving traces. Now, anything once
embraced within the palpitating fields of the grid moved with and how
the suit moved; not in accord with the natural laws of the surrounding
continuum. That neat new attribute took care of the cubic yard or so of
Diamond Throne.
And the ravenous tritium was malignant. Let any external power be
applied against the plenum and it would be smashed, hurled back full
force upon its source.
Jason had an undiagnosed example of that when he got only part of his
man back from the Valley of Kings.
It was the power-pack-grid-suit combo that made a sleeping Buddha of the
servo-tracer on the night of Jason's call at Lonnie's mansion; bollixed
up the elaborate guards of the Peiping Temple of Mankind; and, when
Jason so openly displayed suspicion of the genius, made child's play of
what the newspapers headlined as "Scientist's Amazing Suicide Love
Pact."
Lonnie grinned, remembering the incident. Then other memories--things
he'd witnessed through a tight-beam scanner secreted in the suburban
apartment--crowded his mind; stirring him restlessly on the Diamond
Throne. Divesting himself of imperial appurtenances, he started for a
certain locked file in the den to check the specifications of available
per-diem empresses.
Making sure the triptych was snugly in place behind him, he paused to
flip the switch on the stereo cube. Maybe Messalina Magdalen or one of
the lesser ecdysiasts was presenting the perfection of her techniques
over the private channel at the moment, an event he would appreciate.
Instead, the private channel presented, as the cube glowed and cleared,
the same red, clawed landscape he'd shown to Jason months before. The
disembodied voice of the commentator on Mars--not the lyrical public
announcer, but the industrial economist who served the private
channel--picked up in mid-word: "... early to have much data on the
science and material resources this dead civilization possessed, but I
recommend that every Corporation in Induscomm Cabal should place a
technical party at Mars Equatorial as soon as possible. We shall now key
in with the public spacecast. Note the texture and color range of the
adornments and artifacts. I venture that these items will prove popular
among you who can well afford such rare treasures. However, subtlety in
acquiring them is suggested. While common clamor for Public ownership is
under control, overt provocation is not recommended. Here is the
cut-over ..."
The scene in the cube flashed and coalesced, dazzling Lonnie's eyes for
a moment. He was conscious of the landscape rushing "up"; of gigantic
walls and spires rising out of the obscurity of a quarried chasm to
tower briefly against the pink haze of the Martian sky, then expand to
give the impression of engulfing him before the scanner lens settled
under the center of a leaping, vaulted dome.
To Lonnie, the many-acred enclosure meant nothing with its shimmering,
stone-lace pillars, its tapestries that flamed with color or traced
ghostlike, barely discernible outlines on the walls. Nor did any thought
enter his mind of the exactness of the reflected color in the stereo
cube. Hands clenched into aching fists, he stood leaning forward;
striving by sheer will-power to span the void of space and force the
scanner lens closer to the truncated pyramid of steps atop which, on a
block of plain black stone, a dessicated mummy sat erect, hands folded
in its reedy lap and on its head a blazing, coruscating radiance.
A _Crown_!