Georgia on My Mind and Other Places by Charles Sheffield Page B

walked blindly and randomly, hardly aware of time or direction until increasing cold drove him home.
    Back in his own quarters, he activated a voyeur. Derli was still sitting on the divan. Somehow she knew. She stared right at the minute observation instrument and raised her hand in a wave.
    This time she was smiling, but Gilden saw no reproach or scorn on her face; only an understanding that for him some things were still impossible.
    He waved back, knowing that she could not see him. And then he settled down to work. He had an additional task now, as difficult in its way as the problem of the Sigil—and far more dangerous. There was one place where no sane voyeur would ever dare to look. In this case, Gilden had no choice.
    * * *
    He worked until close to dawn at a level of intensity that approached a trance. When he finally collapsed into bed the new problem ran on inside his head, distorted and paradoxical. And when Valmar Krieg marched into his bedroom early the next morning, Gilden saw his arrival as part of another cloudy dream sequence.
    “Derli says you’ve cracked it.” Valmar sat down uninvited on the end of the bed.
    The words sent Gilden’s heart into a mad race. Then he realized that the other man couldn’t possibly know what he had worked on through the night. Because Derli herself didn’t know. Krieg had to be talking about the Sigil and their ship.
    “I haven’t cracked it. But I do have ideas.”
    “Tell me.” Krieg held up his hand. “Don’t get the wrong impression. It’s not that I feel I can’t trust you, but I have to file my own status reports. I must know what you’re doing, at least in outline. How will you get your voyeurs into the Sigil ship?”
    “I won’t. It’s utterly impenetrable for solid objects without alerting the Sigil.” Thinking about technical questions calmed Gilden at once.
    “So how can you learn what’s inside?”
    “That’s a different problem. We can be fairly sure that the Sigil ship has its own internal monitoring system, probably with imaging components just the way that our ships do. So I don’t need to get my own voyeurs inside—I just have to control the Sigils’ own monitors. Then I have to get that information out.”
    “It sounds impossible.”
    “I’ve done it half a dozen times, back on Earth. The trick is to find an access point. That’s what I think I have. The Sigil ship is getting rid of excess heat down into the planetary surface. So I have an avenue. I can send pulses in by the same route and read their returns. After that it means lots of data analysis, none of it automatic. But I’m comfortable with that. The part I’m less sure of is my interaction with the Sigil ship’s computer systems. I have to plant my own code in there, hidden in a way that won’t be noticed, before I can control the ship’s monitors.”
    Krieg was thoughtfully stroking his red beard. “That doesn’t sound so hard. Logic is logic, universal.”
    “Maybe suspicion is, too. If the Sigils have enough triggers built in against interference they’ll spot me before I’m hardly started.”
    “So the sooner we know that, the better. Out of bed, and get to work. You weren’t brought all this way for a vacation.” But Valmar Krieg’s nod was one of satisfaction as he strode out.
    More sleep would be impossible anyway. Gilden, muzzy-headed, forced himself to take a hot and cold shower, and then to eat a full breakfast before he set to work.
    He had oversimplified the problem for Valmar Krieg to the point of imbecility, and at the same time deliberately made its solution sound more difficult. Gilden didn’t want anyone, most especially Krieg, aware of the sophistication of the tools he had developed over the past ten years. And no one must suspect that during the following days of intense dawn-to-midnight effort Gilden would be feeling his way through not one mental maze, but two.
    * * *
    Derli found him on the afternoon of the tenth day, asleep in the