Jack Chalker - Kaspar's Box

He had the money, but it would take far too much to pull something like this off, and to what end? To see the inside? To say goodbye to the Three Ditzy Colleens? Hardly.

Nope. You’d have to go in by air somehow, and silently at that, then land quiet as a mouse on one of them attic dormers, then find one that you could neutralize the alarms for and then open and squeeze in undetected. You’d need night vision, a couple of good ferrets to scout ahead, and personal shielding just in case you stepped on the wrong floorboard and they came looking just to check.

Magnetic field levitators would be out, they’d surely be detected by this setup. Parachute, then, from someplace a few blocks away and at night. The good old ways. In fact, except for the night vision and the ferrets, the best way to do it at all would be with as little technology as possible. Folks who could afford this kind of super protection paid to guard against every damned piece of potential burglary in all creation, but often forgot that folks often could do things without all those machines. A bit of diversion—say, a runaway elephant or somesuch charging at the gate—and it wouldn’t be that impossible to get in.

Getting out would be a different and more complex matter.

What are you thinking about this for, you old fool? he scolded himself. You said yourself that there’s no rhyme or reason to doin’ it, no profit, only the gravest danger. And he was certainly in poor physical shape for such an operation.

Damn it! That’s what made the damned challenge so appealing!

And when you’re caught, Murphy, what do you tell ’em then? They’d put your brain through a wringer with one of them stones of theirs, find out what an old idiot you were, then scrub your brain clean as a whistle and you’d wake up in a trash dumpster someplace not even rememberin’ that you ever done it.

Idly he wondered just how many of those gems they had, and whether or not all of them were in use or stuck in boxes someplace. Just a few dozen of them wouldn’t depress the collector’s market but would set him up nice for life.

He couldn’t forget the effect on that young sergeant, though, looking into just that one. But it showed that you had to basically touch one, or be very close to it, and look into it in order for it to work its voodoo. No getting around touching, but you sure as hell didn’t need to look into the damn thing’s cursed eyes.

It seemed so strange, standing here in the middle of genteel civilization, thinking of those girls and such things as those gem necklaces. It wasn’t the idea of losing his soul to the devil—if he had one, the devil long ago owned it outright. But he preferred not to meet the old bastard until he had to.

So what the hell are you doin’ here, you blasted idiot?

At just that moment he sensed that he was not alone in the alleylike back lane. It wasn’t anything he could see or hear or smell, but there was some old survival sense that told him that he was being observed, and not through some remote camera or sensor. Someone, something, was right here with him, watching, waiting, and, somehow too, he felt that it knew him.

He tried to seem natural, looking eventually up one direction and then back the other. Nothing. Nothing but some of the inevitable big bugs and other creepy crawlies that were too much a part of this world to even be banished from these sorts of neighborhoods.

He knew, though, that he wasn’t imagining it. Life and death more than once had depended on him accepting these feelings, and more than one promising young scoundrel he’d known had died by dismissing them.

The back doors and windows? Maybe, but the feeling didn’t seem that remote, nor did the stone walls lining both sides of the alley lane make for good, consistent angles from which to observe an intruder. Robotic systems would be used for security by folks with this kind of money and status; maybe some suspicious, noisy pet with big teeth as well. This wasn’t that. It was more like the sense you got in a jungle when you knew that the snake was just two meters from your neck and ready to pounce. And since nothing that large and intelligent and dangerous would be allowed outside private grounds and certainly would never get this far into the city without tripping all sorts of animal control sensors, that meant a mind.

But where? The brickwork seemed unbroken, the tops of the walls and fences were high but not high enough to conceal somebody like that, and certainly there was nobody in the middle of the road.

Suddenly a male voice whispered to him, so close that he jumped.

“Captain, go down the street to the end, make a left. Someone will meet you at the end of the block.”

He went from jumping to freezing solid, and then he turned and slowly, warily, looked closely again. Nobody. Nothing.

He started walking down to the end of the block, casually, but rather obviously in a hurry, taking out his hip flask as he did so and going a wee bit faster with each step. He got to the end, took a hard swallow, looked around, saw nobody yet, took another, and then began walking down the street as directed. At this point, he was too committed to run, and too curious and involved to want to.

Near the end of the block was a lamppost and an ornamental tropical tree. As he approached the tree, a figure seemed to ooze right out of it.

“Captain Murphy, what in the world are you doing here?”

He stared at the small figure for a moment. “Why, it’s Lieutenant Chung, isn’t it? I could ask the same of you.”

“I can’t believe you’d miss them or worry about them at this point,” she said, shaking her head. “Not you .”

He looked a bit sheepish and shrugged. “I know, I know. But there was just somethin’ about them, somethin’ that was wrong, if you know what I mean. Volunteers is one thing, even young girls, but them devil jewels—they was runnin’ the show. I don’t like that sort of thing. Never held with it. Besides, somethin’ in the whole stinkin’ mess just got me Irish up. Hundreds of years the damned Limeys run our old land, worked us on our own home soil like slaves, treated us like no better than animals. We threw ’em out finally. Got fed up with it. I’ll be damned if I see some other group doin’ the same damned thing again.”

His answer surprised her. She hadn’t thought him even that deep. “My people had a similar experience with the Japanese so I can sympathize. Still, what were you going to do?” she asked him. “Be a new hero of your people? Rush in, blow open the iron gates, find them and steal them back?”

He seemed to sag a bit, and sighed. “Somethin’ like that, I guess. Or maybe not. I dunno, really, what I was thinkin’ of doin’, or what I might be able to do. But I had to see if there weren’t somethin ’, y’see. And,” he added, needling a bit, “it didn’t look like there was anybody else that cared.”

“We’ve been here ever since they were brought in,” the lieutenant told him. “That’s why we couldn’t stay with you. That way, we were an obvious and public danger to whoever went to so much trouble to get them.”

“You saw who took ’em, then?”

She nodded. “We know a fair amount at this point, although not nearly enough. We didn’t have to put a one-on-one tail on them, you see. There was enough chemical tracer in the bath wash in the courier ship that I could probably eventually trace them down within a couple of parsecs of this planet if need be.”

Murphy glanced back up the street towards the compound. “So what do they look like, these devil folks?”

“Ordinary. I don’t think they’re behind this at all. Just tools, like the girls and many others. Rich folks playing at being naughty. Their kind’s always been with us. Some can be quite dangerous, fanatics who have become lost in their own fantasy world, but they can be dealt with. Oddly, they are usually intellectuals with good contacts and influence. We would rather not have to harm them if we can avoid it, but they must be dealt with.”