“Apparently not,” Camhorn said. “So how did they get the YM-400 off the ship?”
“They had a small boat loaded on board with them. That’s a supposition, so far; they left very few traces of their activities. But it’s the only way the thing could have been done. They had obtained exact information of the transport’s plotted route and time schedule. At a calculated point, they picked up the two cases of YM, rerouted the ship, timed and planted their explosives, disconnected the alarm system at the entry lock, and left in the boat. Naturally, another ship was moving along with the freighter by then, waiting to pick them up. That’s all there was to it.”
“You make it sound simple,” said Camhorn.
“The difficulty,” said Gus Fry, “would be in preparing such an operation. No matter how much money these people could lay on the line, they must have spent several months in making the necessary arrangements without once alerting the port authorities.”
“They had enough time,” Camhorn admitted reflectively. “YM-400 has been shipped for a number of years in the same manner and over the same route.”
“I’ve been wondering,” Fry remarked, “why this manner of shipping it was selected.”
Camhorn smiled briefly. “When was the last time an automatic transport was hijacked, Gus?”
“Fifty-seven years ago,” Fry said. “And the method employed then wouldn’t have worked on a modern transport, or under the present check system.”
“Well, that’s part of your answer. Automatic shipping risks have become negligible. The rest of the answer is that we’ve avoided too obviously elaborate safeguards for YM-400. If we put it on a battleship each time it was moved, the technological espionage brethren would hear about it. Which means that everybody who might be interested would hear about it. And once the word got out, we’d start losing the stuff regardless of safeguards to people who’d be willing to work out for themselves just what made it so valuable to the Overgovernment. As it is, this is the first sample of YM-400 to go astray in the thirty-two years we’ve had it.”
“Two thirty-four kilogram cases,” Fry said. “Is that a significant amount?”
“I’m afraid it’s an extremely significant amount,” Camhorn said wryly.
Fry hesitated, said, “There’s something very odd about this, Howard. . . .”
“What’s that?”
“I had the definite impression a few hours ago that you were almost relieved to hear about the transport.”
Camhorn studied him for a few seconds. “As a matter of fact,” he said, “I was. Because of one thing. If this hadn’t been obviously a criminal act, humanly engineered—if the transport, say, had simply blown up en route or vanished without giving an alarm . . .”
“Vanished without giving an alarm?” Fry repeated slowly. “Without human intervention?”
“If,” said Camhorn, “any least part of the YM-400 it was carrying had been radioactive, I wouldn’t have been surprised to learn something like that had happened. But, of course, the shipment was stable. And stable YM-400 has shown no more disturbing potentialities to date than the equivalent amount of pig iron. If it ever develops them, the research programs connected with the substance will be indefinitely delayed. They may have to be abandoned.” He gave Fry his lazy smile. “Does that explain my apparent relief, Gus?”
“More or less,” Gus Fry said. “Would it be a calamity if those particular programs had to be abandoned?”
“The Overgovernment would consider it a calamity, yes.”
“Why?”
“If and when,” said Camhorn, “the bugs get worked out of YM-400, it may ensure our future control of space against any foreseeable opposition.”
Fry kept his face carefully expressionless.
“So, naturally,” Camhorn went on, “we’d prefer to keep dissident groups from playing around with the substance, or becoming aware of its possibilities.”
Fry said, “There seems to be at least one dissident group which has much more complete information about YM-400 than, for example, the Interstellar Police Authority.”
Camhorn shook his head. “We can’t say how much they really knew, Gus. The theft might have been arranged as a speculative operation. There’s enough loose money in large quantities around to make that quite possible.”
Fry grunted. “Do you have any definite suspects?”
“A great many. Unfortunately, there seems to be at least some probability that the people involved won’t turn out to be among them. However, those lists will provide an immediate starting point. They’re being transferred to the IPA today.”
“Thanks,” Fry said sourly.
“I wouldn’t do it if I didn’t have to, Gus. Our Research investigators can’t begin to cope with a number like that. They will cooperate with you closely, of course.”
“Nobody else will,” said Fry. “I’ve come to the conclusion that our current populations are the least cooperative people in the history of the race.”
Camhorn nodded. “Naturally.”
“Naturally? Why should they be? Most of them are a little short of living space—unless they’re willing to put up with frontier conditions—but otherwise humanity’s never had it so good. They’re not repressed; they’re babied along—nine-tenths of the time anyway. They do just about as they damn well please. Thirty percent of them won’t turn out a stroke of honest work from the beginning of their lives to the end.”
“True enough. And you’ve described an almost perfect setting for profound discontent. Which is being carefully maintained, by the way. We don’t want humanity to go to sleep entirely just yet. Gus, how much do you know personally about YM-400?”
“Nothing,” said Fry. “Now and then some rumor about it comes to the IPA’s attention. Rumors of that kind go into our files as a matter of course. I see the files.”
“Well, then,” said Camhorn, “what rumors have you seen?”
“I can give you those,” Fry said, “in a few sentences. YM—or YM-400—is an element rather recently discovered by the Overgovernment’s scientists; within the past few decades. It has the property of `transmuting space-time stresses’—that’s the rumor, verbatim. In that respect, it has some unspecified association with Riemann space phenomena. It has been located in a star system which lies beyond the areas officially listed as explored, and which at present is heavily guarded by Overgovernment ships. In this system is an asteroid belt, constituting the remnants of a planet broken up in an earlier period by YM action. And three,” Fry added, grinning wolfishly, “I can even bring in a factual detail. I know that there is such a guarded system, and that it contains nothing but its star and the asteroid belt referred to. I could give you its location, but I’m sure you’re familiar with it.”
Camhorn nodded. “I am. Any other rumors?”
“I think that sums them up.”
“Well,” Camhorn said judiciously, “if the IPA is to be of much use to us in this investigation, it should be better informed than that. The rumors are interesting, though satisfactorily inaccurate. YM-400, to begin with, is not a single element. It’s a compound of several elements of the same series. The symbol attached to it is quite meaningless. . . .”
“For security reasons?”
“Of course. Now, with one notable exception, all elements in this series were discovered during the Overgovernment’s investigation of Riemann space properties in the two intragalactic creation areas we have mapped to date. As you may recall, that program was initiated forty-five years ago. The elements we’re talking about are radioactive: half-life of up to an hour. It was suspected they had a connection with the very curious, apparently random distortions of space-time factors found in the creation areas, but their essential properties made it impossible to produce them in sufficient quantity for a sufficient length of time to conduct a meaningful examination.
“Ymir, the last element of this series, was not discovered in the same areas, or at the same time. It was located ten years later, in stable trace-quantities in the asteroid belt you’ve mentioned, and to date it has not been found anywhere else. Ymir is a freak. It is chemically very similar to the rest of the series and has an unstable structure. Theoretically, its presence as and where it was found was an impossibility. But it was recognized eventually that Ymir produces a force field which inhibits radioactivity. Until the field is interfered with the element is stable. . . .”
“What interferes with it?”
Camhorn grinned. “People. Until it’s deliberately tampered with, Ymir is changeless—as far as we know. Furthermore it will, in compound, extend its inhibiting field effect instantaneously to three other elements of the same series. A very fortunate circumstance, because Ymir has been found only in minute amounts, and unknown factors still prevent its artificial production. The other three elements are produced readily, and since a very small proportion of Ymir retains them in stable—or pseudostable—form, they can be conserved indefinitely.”
“That’s the YM-400 compound?” Fry asked.
“That’s it.”
Fry said thoughtfully, “Perhaps I should remind you, Howard, that this conversation is being recorded.”
Camhorn nodded. “That’s all right. Now that we know someone else is in possession of sixty-eight kilograms of YM-400, we’re confronted with radically altered circumstances. The loss incurred by the theft isn’t important in itself. The Ymir component in such a quantity is detectable almost only by its effects, and the other components can be produced at will.