Aces High Page 0,64
do have to try.
He closed the newsstand early that day, and went home. Floating in the cold waters of his tub, awash in dim red light, he considered his options. There was only one, really. The Network could save humanity from the Swarm Mother. Of course, there would be a price. The Network gives nothing away for free. But Jube was sure that Earth would be only too glad to pay. Even if the Master Trader demanded rights to Mars, or the moon, or all of the gas giants, what was that weighed against the life of their species?
But the Opportunity was light-years off, and would not return to this system for another five or six human decades. It must be summoned, the Master Trader must be informed that a sentient race with enormous profit potential was threatened with extinction. And the tachyon transmitter had been lost with the Embe and the singleship.
Jhubben must build a replacement.
He felt hopelessly unequal to the task. He was a xenologist, not a technician. He used a hundred Network devices he could not begin to build, repair, or even comprehend. Knowledge was the most precious commodity in the galaxy, the Network's only true currency, and each member species guarded its own technological secrets zealously. But every Network outpost had a tachyon transmitter, even primitive worlds like Glabber that could not afford to buy starships of their own. Unless the lesser species had the means to summon the great starships to their scattered, backward worlds, how could trade take place, how could planets be bought and sold, how could profits accrue to the Master Traders of Starholme?
Jube's library consisted of nine small crystalline rods. One held the collected songs, literature, and erotica of his homeworld; a second his lifework, including all his researches on Earth. The others held knowledge. Surely the plans for a tachyon transmitter would be in there somewhere. Whatever knowledge he accessed would be noted, of course, and its value debited from the value of the researches here on Earth, but surely it was worth it, to save a sentient race?
There would be expenses, he knew. Even if he found the plans, it was unlikely that he would have the necessary parts. He would have to make due with primitive human electronics, the best he could obtain, and probably he would be forced to cannibalize some of his own equipment. So be it; he had equipment he had never used: the security systems that guarded his apartment (extra locks would do), the liquid metal spacesuit that he could no longer squeeze into, the coldsleep coffin in the back closet (purchased against the contigency of a thermonuclear war during his tenure on Earth), the games machine . . .
There was a more serious problem. He could build a tachyon transmitter, he was sure of it. But how to power it? His fusion cells might be sufficient to punch a beam through to Hoboken, but there were a lot of light-years between Hoboken and the stars.
Jhubben rose from his tub, toweled himself off. He knew much of what had happened when the Sleeper went after Ekkedme's body. Croyd had told him, a week after that grim afternoon Jhubben had spent flushing the remains of his Embe brother back to the salt sea from which they had all risen, at least metaphorically. But none of it seemed to matter when the swarmlings landed.
Now it mattered.
He padded into his living room and opened the bottom drawer of the buffet he'd purchased from Goodwill in 1952. The drawer was full of rocks: green, red, blue, white. Four of the white rocks had bought this building in 1955, even though the old man in the green eyeshade had only paid him half of what the stones were worth. Jube had always used this resource sparingly, since no more stones could be synthesized until the Opportunity returned. But the crisis was here.
He was no ace, he had no special powers. These would have to be his power. He reached down with a thick fourfingered hand, and grabbed a handful of uncut sapphires. With these, he would locate the Embe singularity shifter, to power his transmission to the stars.
Or-at the very least-he would try.
IF LOOKS COULD KILL
1986
IF LOOKS COULD KILL
By Walton Simons
Picking out the right victim was always murder. They had to have plenty of cash to make the kill worthwhile, and it had to be done in an isolated place. The rent was due and killing somebody of