Timegods' World Read Free

privacy of the monitoring module. Not impossible—it had happened. And certainly not natural. Of that, she was all too sure.

V
    THE SCIENTIST IN the pale blue tunic ran her left hand through her short-cut sandy hair, then tapped the light stylus on the console.
    Looking up for a moment around the small windowless room, she pursed her lips. The gesture gave her face an elfin cast, which vanished as she concentrated and touched the keyboard.
    On the screen before her, a title appeared in the formal script of Westra: “Project Vanish—Case III.”
    Her fingers played the keyboard again, and the angled script disappeared, replaced by a full-length view of a tall woman standing on a raised platform, surrounded by monitoring equipment. The subject wore a wide belt clustered with sensors over a plain singlesuit.
    Abruptly, the woman on the screen vanished, leaving the platform empty.
    The sandy-haired woman viewing the screen froze the image and
studied it. Then she backtracked the visual, instant by instant. In one scan, the subject was present. In the next she was not.
    Finally, the scientist touched the keyboard to remove the visual and replace it with the data from the monitoring equipment. The data readouts showed the same pattern. The subject’s disappearance was instantaneous. No faded signals, no attenuation, only an absolute cut-off simultaneous on all equipment through the entire monitoring range.
    The woman in blue pursed her lips again, ignoring the notation at the bottom of the arrayed data.
    “Subject A-102-Green failed to return. No body found. No explosions noted simultaneously with disappearance. No other coordinated energy phenomena. Chronological analysis inconclusive.”
    Her fingers touched the console, almost as if independently of her thoughts, and the index returned to the screen. For a time, she regarded the first page of the lengthy index.
    Evidence—that there was plenty of—but verifiable, measurable results indicating success? None to date—except her own personal observations, and they would not be considered objective, not to mention the questions they would raise.
    At last, she blanked the index and stood, a woman with an almost elfin, face, wearing the pale blue of a scientist. The severity of her hair and clothing hinted at the age she might have been. The smoothness of her complexion and the pale fairness of her skin indicated an age far younger than the expression in her eyes or the position which she held in the scientific hierarchy.
    She sighed so softly that the expression was nearly soundless as she pressed the stud which put the computer system on standby. Just as soundlessly, she rose and stood before the darkened console, her eyes sweeping over the equipment for a last time, as if such a search could uncover the key she continued to seek.
    Her steps were light, but slow, as they whispered her departure from the small modest office on an afternoon when most others had celebrated the holiday proclaimed by the emperor.

VI
    “ALL THE ANOMALIES center here.” The technician pointed to a circled area on the screen. “The general direction of movement is toward the planetary southwest—right along that line.”
    The officer frowned and gestured toward a series of triangles farther
along in the direction outlined by the technician. “I assume those represent our planetary stocks.”
    “Just what we have there, sir.”
    “How much metal and support gear there?”
    “About six months’ worth. That’s an estimate.”
    “And if whatever these things are freeze that, we lose six months of production equipment?”
    “More than that. Don’t forget we had to soft-land all of that, and we lost two of the landers doing it.”
    “Verlyt!” For a time, the slender man studied the screen and the gradual motions, and the abrupt temperature drops. Then he pointed again. “What’s here, if anything?”
    “That’s the break between the two networks.”
    “Could we direct the equatorial