“If it’s getting this personal, I thought maybe you might want us to approach it through Garsten,” Michelle said. “He is the family lawyer, after all.”
“You’ve already talked to Garsten. He says he doesn’t know anything. . . .” Ohira’s voice trailed away while a distant loudspeaker announcement echoed tinnily in the background.
“Not about whatever Jack might have known, no—” Michelle agreed. She realized that Ohira had been thinking aloud more than inviting comment, dropped what she had been about to add, and waited.
“This man Garsten sounds very strange to me,” Ohira said finally. “For years he worked with Mrs. Heber’s previous husband as a business partner. And she brought Garsten in as her family’s lawyer, yes?”
“So Doug Corfe says.”
“So she and Garsten are good friends, presumably. But he tells you that he knows nothing about what this man Jack Anastole knew, who was his partner and her husband? That seems a very unlikely situation to me, Michelle. Not believable at all. I don’t think I trust him, this Mr. Garsten.”
Michelle was not inclined to argue. She’d had a feeling of something not being right ever since her conversation with Garsten, but it had refused to take on concrete form. Now Ohira had crystallized it for her. “What do you want me to do?” she asked.
This time there was a pause. Michelle knew how Ohira worked. He had already made his mind up what he wanted to do. She could sense him searching for an angle.
“Taki’s best friend, Kevin, is also affected by this. I’m really an uncle to both of them. So we have to look after the family, eh? So what I want you to do is, follow up on this Mrs. Heber wherever it leads, and keep information to yourself. If you get into any kind of trouble, then as long as everything’s legal, you’ll be okay. I’ll say you were working for me.”
It was what Michelle had wanted: a clear directive and indication that they agreed. She nodded into the phone. “Okay, I guess that’s it from me. Is there anything else?”
“No, that’s all. They’re calling seats now, so I got to go anyway. It sounds as if you need to see this tape.”
“That was why I wanted to catch you. We can get right on with that now. When are you due back?”
“Just tonight in LA. I’ll be back late tomorrow.”
“Okay, we’ll talk more later in the week. Enjoy the flight.”
The phone buzzed again as soon as Michelle put it down. She picked it up again. “Yes?”
It was Wendy, the receptionist. “Stanley Quinze is on the line again. I tried to get a number from him, but he insisted on holding.”
“Okay, I’ll take it. And could you try and get Doug Corfe at Neurodyne for me? Let me know if he’s not there.”
“Will do.”
* * *
For a long time, Kevin and Taki had been intrigued by the thought of getting mecs to fly. In their experiments, they concentrated, naturally, on the smaller models in their collection, thinning the casings to fragile shells and taking out all nonessentials to reduce weight. They designed flexible wing systems based on insect patterns, which used leverage to exploit the improving power-weight relationships that came with diminishing size and stored mechanical energy recoverably in elastic structures.
A further problem was with the dynamics: of somehow matching the speeds of slow human neural processes, evolved to suit the needs of slow, lumbering bodies, with the high-speed motions appropriate to insect-world physics. And even with some real insects, for example bees and mosquitoes, it turned out that the frequency of wing beats was a result of resonance, and was actually higher than the rate of the nerve impulses driving the system.
Their solution was a “software gearbox”: a microprogram that would translate one cycle of operator-muscle contraction and relaxation—or at least, what was perceived as an operator’s muscles working—into a hundred or more precoded wing beats. Hence, each voluntarily initiated beat would cause a set series of instructions to execute over and over at a rate too fast to follow individually. Since the boys wanted their four regular limbs to be available for normal use, they had programmed the wing drive to link to the neural circuits associated with the shoulder blades. Flying would thus follow from a learned process of precisely controlled “shrugging.” That was the theory, anyway.