Partnership by Anne McCaffrey, Margaret Ball Page A

chose to answer the first part of Blaize's goading speech rather than the second. "Oh, but I've no intention of trying to make it on my savings, dear coz."
    "What, then?"

    "Metachips," Polyon said meditatively, "are very expensive. Not to mention that they're in short supply."
    "Tell me something I don't know," Blaize invited him.
    "I plan," said Polyon, "to... improve on the current rationing system."

    Unnoticed in her corner, Alpha nodded thoughtfully. Polyon had a good point. Metachips were exceedingly scarce and costly, and for good reason.
    The metachip manufacturing process involved at least three different acids so hazardous to the environment that most planets refused to harbor the plants, despite the unquestioned financial benefits. Shemali, in-46

    AnmMcCaffny & Margaret Baft,

    PARTNERSHIP

    47

    hospitable, cursed with the perpetual biting north wind that had given the planet its name, with its one land mass dedicated to a maximum-security priso^
    was the only major metachip inanufacturing site in existence; ShemaU, where nothing you did could make the environment much worse, and where the workers bought their lives one day at a time by laboring in the metachip plant

    Because who else could you use, in the final analysis, but convicts already under sentence of death?
    One of the acids involved, when used in the quantities required for manufacturing, released a gas whose effects on human tissue were slow, painful, deadly...
    and so far, irreversible. Alpha was an expert on those effects; her research at Central Med had been devoted to trying various drug therapies to reverse the effects of Ganglicide. She might have had a major paper out of the work if the school's Ethics Committee hadn't got so upset about her testing methods... Alpha clamped her lips down on the flare of anger that possessed her.
    That was all in the past. The present was Polyon and his plan, which he was explaining to Blaize with a wealth of patronizing detail about die adverse effects on the economy of the present rationing system.

    "It's ridiculous to have metachips distributed by a committee of old men and do-gooders," he declared.
    "Sure, the military is entitled to Erst cut at the chips, but after our applications have been satisfied, the remaining chips ought to go where they'll do the most good."

    "1 thought that was the object of the rationing system," Blaize remarked. "Companies get Social Utility Marks for their intended use of the metachips, and the chips are distributed in proportion to the SUM.
    What's wrong with that?"

    "Unrealistic," Polyon said promptly. "They're using chips for single-body operations like repairing kidneys or replacing damaged spinal nerves, when the same chips rould R° m*°> on> applications that thousands of people could use at once. Dorg Jesen would pay millions for a handful ofmetas and a promise of steady supply."

    Blai/e began to laugh. "Dorg Jesen? The feelieporn jyng? That's your idea of a SUM?"

    "Millions," Polyon repeated himself. "And if you don't believe I can think of a socially useful function for all that cash—
    "That," said Btaize, "I can believe. But just how do you think you'll sneak the feelieporn application past the advisory board?"

    "I see no reason why the matter should ever come before the board. QA testing for the metachips is one of the areas Governor Lyautey asked me to supervise.
    Disposal of the chips that fail QA will presumably also fell within my duties." He looked so smug that Alpha felt the need to puncture his self-satisfaction.

    "I wouldn't plan on selling defective chips to Dorg Jesen if I were you," she interrupted Polyon's gloating.
    "He's been known to rearrange the features of people who interfered with his business." Her shiver wasn't assumed; one of her first tasks in med research had been to diagram the facial injuries on a girl who'd refused Jesen's offer of employment Alpha had eventually made a complete inventory of the damage, together with holosims of