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Stories from the Verse
Con Version
Chapter 212: Brown 360
Table of Contents
Previous chapter: Cooper 67
“Do we knock?” Vashti asked. Derek thought a moment.
“No, we don’t knock. We pretend we’re expected, and let ourselves in. Hopefully the door is open, but if not, well--one thing at a time.”
The door was unlocked, and Derek led the way inside, calling as he entered, “Hello? Mister Granville. Derek and Vashti here; sorry for the delay, we got held up.”
Still maintaining his sensory presence in the other room, he heard Cutter demanding an explanation for their presence from Granville, but he simply pushed his way into the room.
“I’m sorry, you have company. Is this a bad time?”
It was obvious that Cutter wanted to say yes, but Granville beat him to the punch. “No, not at all. What have you got?”
“I’ve been working on those trinary bioprocessor designs, but I think at present it may be a dead end. We need to get those integrated circuits into production before we can move forward in that direction. I’m thinking Allied Electronics or maybe Radio Corporation of America are our best bets for those. Or American Telephone and Telegraph; they’re probably working on them at Bell Labs.”
Cutter suddenly became interested. “You seem to be quite well informed about this, for a boy your age.”
“Well, I’m older than I look,” he said, “and have a lot of unusual experience in the field.”
“Oh?”
“Some of it is classified; I worked for military intelligence for a while. I have to be careful what I say to whom--official secrets act, you understand.”
It was obvious that Cutter did not understand, but then, Derek didn’t intend for him to.
“Well, I wanted to keep you informed. So, Doctor Cutter, what brings you here?”
“I’m trying to find out what happened to the most current files about the computator.”
He shrugged. “When I left the office they were still there. I had them on my desk. I might have tucked them in a drawer or something. Anyway, I’m sure they’ll turn up, and if they don’t, well, I think we can probably recreate most of it from memory. After all, they’re our designs.”
Cutter seemed unhappy. He sort of snorted.
“Well, then, I won’t take up any more of your time, Granville. Let me know if they turn up. Let’s go, gentlemen,” and Cutter wheeled himself back toward the front door, his men scrambling to catch up.
“Thanks,” Granville said. “He didn’t seem very happy that I didn’t know where the files were. How did you know?”
Derek looked at Vashti, who answered. “We’ve been investigating. We believe that Cutter paid the arsonists to start the fire, so he could cripple BBS and steal the computer files to use in the launch of his new company, Cutter Computators. I removed the files from the building during the evacuation; we have them at home, but we knew that Cutter would be looking for them. He paid one of the fire investigators to try to get them from Engineering, so some of our files will be missing, but the important ones we’ve got.”
“You probably shouldn’t tell him, “Derek suggested. “He’ll be trying to figure out where they went, but at this point he has no leads, so probably he can’t do more than ask around and see what he can learn. I think we’re safe.”
“And when we get back to work?” Granville asked.
Derek shrugged. “We burn that bridge when we come to it. Good night, Mister Granville. Vashti?” And the couple left, closing the front door behind them.
As to the old stories that have long been here:
