Kaspar's Box

"Sounds reasonable," Maslovic said. "Go on. You're doing fine."

"And along come these three unhappy farm girls, probably gonna be forced into arranged marriages and break their backs with work and havin' babies and all, and for some reason the stones react to them and them to the stones in a way nobody's seen before. Maybe they have, but I bet it's really rare. Power they can't tap in these not terribly bright but terribly unhappy young lasses. But the recruiters, the leaders, they know what it's all about. You stumble on the ultimate weapon, but the thing's on automatic and just fires randomly in all directions. Dangerous to all. But if you pick it up and treat it good and point it careful like, then it's your weapon. Sarge, you give most of the prisoners a whole bag of them stones and I bet not much happens. But you give one each to the three, and you put 'em together in the same room so they can act as one, and I think you got, well, some kind of biological amplifier. Now your three young ladies, under your control, can take over whole damned planets."

"Okay, but why Barnum's World?"

"Well, possibly just because Macouri was livin' there and already had a lot of influence and knew the lay of the land and who in the authorities can be counted on to look the other way. And when you got a city maintained by central automated computers, much like a ship like this one is, it's a wonderful test. Let's take over and reprogram the computers. Let's become the sole authority and power in Port Bainbridge. If it works, then you go on. Lots more worlds out there with far more people."

"Then why get them out of town so quickly?" Broz asked him. "It seems to me you'd want them there."

"Not until you had them under your control, and with them three I think it would take a while for anybody to get 'em under control. Until then, you risk tippin' your hand early, like discoverin' who it was that was chargin' all sorts of fancy stuff on invalid but accepted credit accounts. Their power's so natural they hardly even realized they was doin' it. No use in alerting the smart boys in authority until you were ready to take over their city. But you get 'em off in the swamps with folks like the woman in charge of much of the computer security for New Bainbridge, and you practice. Now you can spread your filthy religion and your naked power in a nice, safe, controlled progression. It was wheelbarrows they had me smugglin'. You put it to 'em. Macouri and his gang, that is. I bet they'll give it away if it's you tellin' them."

Maslovic looked at the others. "What do you think? Honest answers, please. If we put this to them, it'll have to be from total conviction. We want them to believe that one of the others cracked and bragged so they'll feel free to fill in the blanks. Darch?"

"Smacks a lot of mysticism to me," the tech responded. "All my life I been hearing friend-of-a-friend stories about telepaths and telekinesis and all sorts of psychic powers. Never actually met one myself, nor seen a convincing demonstration. The idea that three stupid little twits can just waltz in to where one of these stones is and suddenly cause it to be the amplifier to enormous power… I don't know."

"But you've seen it! We all saw it!" Broz pointed out. "Right here. It took our best efforts for days to execute a parallel system switch without crashing the ship. Otherwise who knows what nasty little worms they might have left in our main computers. And Captain Murphy said it, too-that a city like that one back there isn't much different than a ship like this."

"But the kind of specialized knowledge and skills needed to hack the system are way beyond what I can accept as intuitive. Nobody gets that kind of information from evolution," Darch maintained. "Those systems are so complex they're designed by computers even larger and more complex than the ones they build. If not a conscious plot against us, where did it come from?"