No Contest

“I’ll be damned,” the operator said, and he called up the ground crew. The EBE didn’t need a team to haul her in on tethers. She had no tethers. She simply touched down on a flat-topped, cushioned cart and two ground crewmen wheeled her immediately into the windowless hangar.

Simonec hustled in, unable to believe his luck. One less blot on his unofficial record—the bureaucracy didn’t like officers who lost expensive equipment, even when they were officially not responsible for the equipment. Even if the equipment did not officially exist.

“Man, I’d love to know what she’s been doing all this time,” he said as a crewman plugged her in for diagnostics. He jogged up the stairs to the top level, where the control room was situated under a dome of glass panels that gave it an unobstructed view, to guide difficult landings visually.

“What’s she got?”

The crew chief grimaced. “She’s clean. And I mean clean. Even the GPS trail was erased.”

Simonec knew he ought to be satisfied, under the circumstances, to have his equipment returned at all. Still…

“That pisses me off.”

“Yeah,” the crew chief said thoughtfully.

“Who do they think they are?”

“Those DOHS heads think they run the whole government now,” the crew chief said. “There’s something big brewing on our turf, so why not tell us about it?”

“Yeah? How come?” Simonec demanded indignantly, reminding himself to start using better military protocol.

“Hell, my watch can record a GPS trail,” the crew chief said. “Next time we should just clip it onto the EBE and see where it goes, heh heh heh.”

“Yeah.” Simonec chuckled, too, just as insincerely. “It’s a nice watch.”

“It’s not regulation. Sorry, sir,” the crew chief said. “It’s a calculator, too.”

“Really? Must have been expensive.”

“Naw! Look.” He held up his wrist and displayed the watch face, with the words LearnForFun printed in a circle. “Got it from the LearnForFun network when I upgraded my cable package. It’s cool, but not valuable.”

“Wouldn’t kill you to lose it.”

“Naw.”

“Hmm.”

“Yeah.”

The colonel nodded, then said, “Yeah.”

“Yeah?” the crew chief asked meaningfully.

“Yeah,” the colonel said, eyes darting.

The crew chief grinned mischievously. “Yeah!”

There wasn’t time to reconsider the unspoken conspiracy. An order came through before the postflight maintenance on the EBE l was complete. The next mission was to launch just after sunset.

The EBE 1 was ready, and she launched on time.

“All systems functional,” the crew chief told the colonel. “She’s working fine, although she’s registering some sluggishness in the controls. Like maybe she’s a few ounces heavy or something.”

“Enough for anybody to notice?”

“Naw.”

The system notified them that control of the EBE 1 was being assumed by a user with top-level security access. This had become routine.

“I sure hope they won’t notice,” Simonec said.

“Yeah,” the crew chief added.

Harold W. Smith frowned at the control window and brought up the specs on the EBE 1. The airship wasn’t handling with the same agility as she had the day before. As she maneuvered to her destination coordinates, he skimmed the specifications and engineering test notes. Humidity, the test result indicated, could cause sluggish response from the unit, as was common with any lighter-than-air ship. But the problem wasn’t humidity, not in the southern Arizona deserts.

There were other engineering notes. Temperature fluctuations were blamed on tiny helium leaks. A bug in the system might cause the unit to reset the baseline helium fill depending on the buoyancy at system startup. Inside the air-conditioned hangar, perhaps, there had been a leak and reset.

Smith accepted that. What choice did he have? There wasn’t anything he could do to investigate it further without sacrificing mission security. Why waste time and energy worrying about something that wasn’t apparently of consequence and over which he had no control?

That made him stop and think.

What if the entire mission were such an exercise in futility?

What if this problem wasn’t a problem at all? What if he could never solve the mystery—then what would he do?

Harold W. Smith chastised himself for digressing. The mission wasn’t just about the mystery of who pulled CURE’s strings; it was about how much the Sun On Jo knew about CURE. Once he was satisfied as to the extent of their knowledge, he could decide what to do. His first instinct would typically have been to initiate the shutdown of CURE and the annihilation of the Sun On Jo. Heartless, but necessary.