Page 38 - Three Adventures

Deflator Mouse

willingly let them go over budget, lavishing layers of lacquer on their
little toy. It wouldn’t perform many of the full-scale version’s primary
tasks, but that didn’t matter. The best military minds in the country
needed something new and shiny, in a dramatic presentation with
sound and lights, to assure them that the public’s money was being
well-spent. A lot of the staff’s energy had, in fact, been diverted in
the past three weeks to preparation for the demonstration: specially
printed hand-outs, projected computer graphics, committees for
hospitality and programming. Deflator Mouse could not be ignorant
of the event. Beveledge flipped through his desk calendar, gaining a
cinematic appreciation of the fleetness of time. What kind of security
did the Salamander model have? Too late at night to call Lampson;
too late to call Rabinowitz, the man in charge.
Rabinowitz? Wasn’t he on the short-list? Beveledge pulled out the
relevant personnel file. Lance Rabinowitz: University of Arizona,
industrial design; six years with NASA on space-station feasibility
studies; two years on the CIA’s abortive Submersible Siphon project
before coming to Litmus; married, one child, mortgage on a house in
the Valley; wife a Vietnamese immigrant. Red flag on that one,
thought Oscar. Was Lance in the war in Southeast Asia? No, too
young. Too insipid to have sympathies in any direction. Foreign
travel? Three trips to Mexico since coming to Southern California.
Aha! If he had a Soviet controller, that’s where they’d meet. Didn’t
Lee Harvey Oswald try to worm his way into Cuba via Mexico City?
Or was he working for the CIA then? Beveledge was vague on recent
history, but his suspicions of Rabinowitz came into sharp focus.
The director closed up his office and headed for the old dirigible
hangar. Walking down the deserted hallways of the three-story office
building, he found his attention divided between concatenated
contemplations of conspiracy and the odd bits of noise leaking out
from under closed doors and down through ceiling vents. Captain
Jack Lampson had swept the area earlier in the day, including
Beveledge’s office; no bugs or bombs had come to light. When the
last person left at night, the security duty officer switched on infra-
red sensors and motion detectors. An urban guerilla would need at
least the skill of the Viet Cong silently sneaking down the Ho Chi
Minh Trail to get through the defenses of Litmus Industries. But
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