The Goliath Stone by Larry Niven & Matthew Joseph Harrington

Author:Larry Niven & Matthew Joseph Harrington
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

XIX

Where neither their property nor their honor is touched, most men live content.

—NICCOLO MACHIAVELLI

Alice saw Lowdown that night too. She didn’t expect Wellman to be disappeared. She expected his deputy, Lisa Frost, to take over as AG when he retired for reasons of health. She started a security search of May Wyndham’s records and went to bed.

On Monday morning, Alice checked the results, then sent a message to May Wyndham’s old e-mail address. It hadn’t been used to send anything in years, but it had been a lifetime account, so she might still look in on it.

Subject: Launch system needed.

I work in DHS intelligence. Not all of us think the job consists of locking up people who object to us locking up people. The people at the National Appointee Sinecure Association are busy making the universe safe for robots, and we need something to get to the Rock before it gets to us. If you can help, I can get this approved as a Homeland Security Goal Project, and you will get paid.

RSVP.

Alice Johnson

That done, she went to the Games again and hunted up Mycroft Yellowhorse. She hadn’t been able to get a number or an e-mail for him at all.

The Indians were friendly, unless someone called them Native Americans, in which case there followed lectures about marginalization. (As a Wheaton-born third-generation U.S. citizen of Kurdish ancestry, who kept being called “Arab”-American, she had no inclination to do any such thing; they got along.) They did seem to have helpful intentions, but that was about all they had.

She asked a boxer, who’d just knocked out the Bulgarian heavyweight four seconds after the bell, “Where can I find Mycroft Yellowhorse?”

He grinned. “Unless you catch him at breakfast, you can either wait until dinner, or look for a cloud of dust. That’ll be where he was last.”

She told a woman in wrestler’s tights, “I’d like to get hold of Mycroft Yellowhorse.”

“Who wouldn’t? —Try the judges’ box. He likes to go grin at them.”

She got to the cordon around the box and called out, “Mycroft Yellowhorse?”

Several people looked frantically in all directions, then turned to glare at her. A security man said, “You might try the arcade. They blanked the high scores again last night.” He was smiling faintly. Interesting.

She rented a cart to get to the Village shopping mall, which she hadn’t seen yet.

She never did get to see all of it. The size record had once been held by a mall in Canada, but even West Edmonton didn’t have two Baskin-Robbinses.

After half an hour or so, and repeated checks of the numerous standing maps, she found the arcade, which was on a floor she’d missed before. She plugged in her cart outside it, ending the rental—there were plenty more when she wanted to leave—and went inside.

Her first thought was that she should have kept the cart. The arcade alone was about half the size of one floor of a normal indoor mall.

Her second was that the proprietor was a genius. Every

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.