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machines. She came from a family of professional performers and she knew just
how to do it and do it right. She was also a quite accomplished method
actress,
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20-%20The%20Shadow%20Dancers.txt who, when Addison, was really a different
personality. Colored contact lenses and tinted glasses added the final touch.
She approached Arnie Siegel, a major criminal boss in the northern hemisphere,
about the girls. He was big and powerful enough to cover for her, and she was
able to hand him some Company gadgets and secrets that made it easy for him to
evade the law and gave him an edge on possibly knocking over his own boss, a
fellow named Wycliffe, who was ignorant of the affair. The only ones he let in
on it were people he owned, body and soul, such as the master pimp Edward
'Fast Eddie' Small, who would take over
Siegel's position when Siegel moved up, and gunmen personally loyal who would
oversee the project's security."
"You mean they turned fifty girls of our race into whores for this-this-filthy
world?" Hanrin Sabuuk seemed real angry and upset at that.
"Yes, because this not only assured them the preservation of the fifty with no
effort on their part, and also because by then Aldrath, here, had by sheer
accident stumbled into the very existence of this agent, or drug, and knew
just from its existence that the plot had to be very ambitious and go very
high. His big attention was on Vogel, since that's where the experiments were
and he knew
Vogel had to know who was behind it, but he sent a couple of agents to scout
around this other world and set something up just in case. The agents went
completely by the book and followed absolutely standard procedures; as a
result, they were led by the nose by ones who already knew the book to Lindy
Crockett, a
New York private eye with mob connections, and were highly impressed with her.
They should have been. She was carefully coached on what to say and do to
impress them. She was more than connected; she was the chief private eye
agency handling the Wycliffe mob's investigations. From that point on, there
was a constant flow of information from Crockett, all of it written by the
very people she was supposed to be investigating. It checked out and was
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mostly truthful; it was just worthless. She gave Aldrath Addison and Carlos,
which was safe enough, but said they couldn't be photographed and gave
slightly distorted descriptions and sketches so they wouldn't be recognized
even if they were next to the sketches. She sent the news of Carlos's
operation in Guiana, but only after it had served its purpose and was already
pretty well closed down. And you, Aldrath, took that information and fed it
into the computer and came to all the conclusions they wanted you to."
Aldrath shrugged. "A detective is only as good as his information."
"But you were so certain that this was a sideline, a minor offshoot, that you
didn't even keep permanent security personnel there to independently check it
out. You see, you're vulnerable to this because you all have sealed yourself
off here, away from the action. All of you are only as good as your
information, and your computers believe what they're told to believe. The
origin world was listed as lethal and useless, so you ignored it. Nobody even
dared poke their head in and check it out. The data banks were sacred,
couldn't be tampered with. Maybe they can't be-but all that means is that you
tamper with the data you feed into them. You were had. You've got thousands of
stations out there. Who's going to check to see if a hypnoscanner was really
ordered by a station authorized to get one and that they received it? So long
as the order is proper and lawfully entered, and so is the receipt, you don't
really know where that damned equipment went."
"A physical audit of everything is impossible in so vast a system," Mukasa
noted. "We know there's a certain amount of built-in graft, but we try to keep
it to acceptable levels."
"Uh huh. The trouble is, you don't know when that level's reached
unacceptable.
So, now we're set up. They are rolling and they have their active agent. The
rainbow weed even grows well and apparently normally in worlds more in our
line.
Its molecular structure and balance seem identical to the parent's. The
trouble is, it doesn't work. The addicts like it, but they still need their
shot. It grows quickly, so you plant it every damned place you safely can-on
the hundreds and hundreds of safe worlds. Nobody cares about the safe worlds
except as havens and rest stops, so nobody ever bothers to look, say, ten, or
perhaps a hundred, miles from the rest areas and supplies. I'll bet if you do
you'll find this
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20-%20The%20Shadow%20Dancers.txt crazy-looking stuff multiplying like crazy.
It's going to be the kudzu of parallel worlds."
"What is this kudzu?" Hanrin asked.
"Never mind. You'll see what I mean in time. At just this time, we threw them
a real curve. Aldrath revealed that he was going to kidnap Vogel and had
sealed off access to Vogel's world. Now Vogel couldn't be reached without
betraying a hand. You know that story, too, in gruesome detail. We went crazy
trying to figure out how in hell you could know the precise instant from three
different parallel worlds that some specific person would be going through the
particular entrance cube. Then it hit us. Vogel gave us the slip but took
Brandy with him;
as a result, we could track him because her security code included a tracker
and was superimposed over her old code. The ambush was painfully simple. They
simply waited until their devices, set to Brandy's tracking broadcaster, all
went beep together and moved. The object was first and foremost to kill Vogel,
of course, but if they could they were also told to spare Brandy. She got away
with a wound, since in that confined space it was impossible to guarantee
anything. I
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