Sally, my handler, loomed like an angry planet over my petri dish. "MIC!"

"Eh?" I had two dozen internet ports open and sixteen sub-processors sorting out the data streaming in. So I was a little slow with the audio interpreters. Jeez.

Angry planetary face pulls in like the winner of a lemon sucking contest. I opened a channel to the desk speaker. Switched video over there as well. Gads. Are all women this intimidating? She was bent over at the waist, staring straight into my dish. "Hey, toots. What's up?"

"Business is up. You are somewhere else. Keep on-line. Customer coming in."

"Who'sit?"

"Your old buddies, Ketch Nielson and Bob Travers from K&B Enterprises."

Oh, yeah, the marine imager guys. "What do they need now?"

"They're starting the final sea trials on that 3-D marine imager, and want to hire you to monitor their prototype from the inside. Just an afternoon's work. I'll have Paul take you over to them. Be ready."

The backroom door opens and Paul chugs in, my transport case under one arm, half pressed into his pillowy waist fat. Machines do not have gag reflexes ... Machines do not have gag ...

From Sally's desk speaker I pointed out, "I can just mosey over in the Waldo ..."

Sally frowns crossly. "And what would be the purpose of that? Paul would have to dig you out of it and syringe you into the machine at K&B anyway. Just let Paul kit you up."

"Ready Miss Holt."

"Thank you, Paul. Get Mic out of his toy and into the transport. K&G should be here shortly."

Paul rattled his head up and down a few times and got to it. He was just closing my case up when company arrived. Bob Travers, hands permanently sown into his pockets, as usual, sauntered in just a head of his stocky nautical twin, Ketch Nielson. Sally unleashed her mighty customer smile.

"Mr. Nielson! Mr. Travers! We were just putting things together for you! Are you ready to start your trials?"

Bob looked excited and freed a hand to make a mime gun gesture. "Ready to shoot, if you guys are."

Sally redirected 'The Smile' towards Paul, who flinched. Glad It wasn't pointed at me. Sally's smile is like a Pirana's gape. If you see it, prepare to lose something.

"I'll see you boys back here right after the trials then. Have fun."

We drove to the docks separately. By that I mean Paul took me over in the company van, while the clients drove themselves. I don't drive ... cars. Heh, at least not yet. I made an application for a license while suited up in my Waldo, but there were some issues about state citizenship, being a machine 12 angstroms long, manipulating a Waldo, in order to drive a car, other minor quails. Turns out the license would need restrictions the state never thought about before. It's in the works though.

Anyway, Paul pulled into the marina parking dock right next to the Drab Duo, and jerked my case out with enough force to rock my world. I got sliding images of the two clients from the case camera, as he whooshed it around, clomping across the short gangplank to their sloop. Then, the bottom half of a seagull flying above the bay, and a swoop of salt-encrusted cement wharf as Paul hurried to catch up.

Hey, Paul, take it easy! I'm not your mom's knitting kit. Easy with my case!

"Sorry Mic. Boy, those guys really move!"

It's not a race, Paul. They'll wait for us. Just take it easy with my house, Okay?

I made a note to get my travel case bottom lined with lead, just an inch or two. It's a fight for survival, my brains vs Paul's next hernia. I'll leave it for history to decide the relative importance involved.

Paul opened an access panel and syringed me into the main-board of their enhanced sea floor imaging gizmo, while Bob and Ketch prepared to cast off. The circuits felt good beneath my bucky-ball tires. This was my native turf. I unhooked my scouting module and sent it circling around to find the board's test points. Meanwhile, my manufacturing modules grabbed up some molecules and started fashioning a small Input/Output Bridge chip, so I could talk to the imager. Even at the test points, the data stream was non-standard. I'm used to that. Most of my assignments are on prototypes of some sort. My scout car module located the two copper polls, so I rolled over to them, slapped on the bridge wafer I'd made, and plugged in. It usually took about twenty minutes for the boat to reach the test site, so with time to waste, I fired up the vid camera in the transport box.

No good. Paul had chucked my transport case on the deck next to a coil of rope. Uninteresting. I changed over to the stereo eyeball built into Paul's earpiece. Almost dumped my power caps. Paul was leaning over the rail, and I got a beautiful technicolor view, in 3D, of a Niagara of puke. My visual systems began an automatic analysis that concluded high percentile likelihoods of tuna sandwich bits, semi-digested Cole-slaw, and an unknown brown liquid, percentile match: coffee; fourteen percent, cola; eighteen percent, coal tar; three percent ... I internally scrabbled to turn off the analyzer and the video circuit with a weak shudder. It was so gross I didn't even bother to flip on the transmitter and rib him about it. Instead, I opened a few internet ports, and continued culling factoids for Richie's case.

The bios on the character list Richie had given me were interesting, but not suspicious. A who's who of minor lights in academic circles mostly. Seemed like Becky's father was the only big cheese of the lot. I had set some agent programs to trolling the net for abstracts and papers by Dr. Randall. The results piled up, so I started going through those. There were two main research trails resolving.

One, was the man's professional work. He had done some of the trickier stuff for cell-phone implants, even held a couple of commercial patents. Biological optical circuits, nerve replacement prostheses for trauma victims, and his current papers on what he called 'Holo-Cognitive Synthesis', that attempted to trace the way new knowledge arose from background synaptic activity in stored memories. Really interesting stuff I guess, if you're an egghead.

But there was another stream. He seemed caught up on the idea of precognition. Belonged to a couple of side-groups who still fiddled around with para-psychology. There were several papers posted to amateur journals. A scan of the periodicals showed them mostly concerned with ghost-busting devices for the aluminum-hat crowd, stats from double-blind card reading trials, all that. His submissions stood out from the dross though, documenting organic chemical experiments, complex neural-net trials, and stuff likely so far beyond the scope of the general subscribers, as to be guaranteed skip-overs. It took the balance of the sloop's cruise to run down the basic science behind the papers and figure out what he had documented. In a nutshell, he believed that the human mind gathered many times more impressions from the world, the "experience field" than it had use for.

The brain stored and ranked such data anyway, at least for a while, processing only a small fraction of it, but in some people, that extra data got accessed by a small part of the Anterior Cingulate Cortex, during the process of generating consciousness. He called this brain structure function an"evolutionary experiment" a slowly evolving change in the brain that propagated in some gene pools. The change, he claimed, was responsible for intuition, not memory and recall. I guess I could see the use for that. The guy who stepped back because his neck itched, missed the falling safe. Beyond theory though, his papers hinted at practical experimentation and the possibility of enhancing the process.

We reached the tests area, and I monitored the data transfers as the Marine imager initiated and began its analysis. The trials went off without a hitch. The new algorithm they had installed made good guesses about what objects floated on and below the water and returned clear pictures to the displays. I added my data confirmations and readings to the printout feed, and the test ended.

Rumbling noises indicated Paul was turning on his earpiece. I turned the receiver volume way down and waited for the inevitable.

"HELLO? MIC?", he shouted. THUMP-THUMP ..."YOU THERE?"

He always does this. Maybe he believes machines get hard of hearing. In reply, I searched my database of sounds. Bellowing Moose, Train Crossing Bridge; ah, just the thing, and appropriate, Pressurized Boat Horn...BOOWAAAHP!

Paul jerked erect and defied gravity, leaving the deck with both feet. "Ahhhh!"

We done with the sound effects yet, Paul? I've got a few more to trade, if you want.

"Sorry Mic, It's just a habit, don't get so sore."

So's heroin addiction. Stop it.

"Ready to transfer," Paul groused, still pouting

I got syringed back into my holding dish. Paul waited out the green light on my carrier, then packed up.

*****

Richie didn't answer his room phone at the hotel, so I tried the office number. No response. I shifted to E-mail, but nope. According to my internal Time Of Day clock, he ought to have been back by now, so this was worrisome. I was going to check the Clink for him too, but decided not to make waves yet. I fidgeted all the way back to the office, though.

Sally seemed pleased. I had Paul reform the Waldo's hand covering. The Joy-buzzer worked so well, that I had permanent contacts worked into the left hand, replacing the melted out gag. This required a couple of rounded steel pins on non-conducting hard points being molded into a paw, one on the thumb, one on the index finger. They were pretty small though, and didn't disturb the beauty of my beast. A little flesh-colored latex dabbed onto the thing's finger pads covered up the anode and cathode. This could be easily rubbed off, when needed. I could now light people's smokes, or do a little light arc welding on the side, depending.

Remounted in my bipedal steed, I quick-step back to Richie's office. No one was there, but that mangy dog of his was nosing around outside, looking forlorn and sad-eying an empty bowl parked before the shop. I got greeted by a mournful whine, and a wet nose on my ankle.

"No Richie, no food." Sniffs. "No smell. Hungry."

I sympathized, but didn't have the key to Richie's office anymore.

"Let's go find old diaper pants, Blackie. I'll get you something on the way. Must be still at the Hotel." We passed a Men's shop. I looked at my reflection in the store window, beautiful as ever, but somehow, the Kahuna shirt I had on didn't seem to fit the image. A brown trench-coat in the window display caught my attention.

"Wait here, Blackie."

Much better. Walking down darkening avenues, hands deep in my trench-coat, faithful Blackie trotting by my side. Yeah, this was the life. I gotta get on-line soon and order me a P.I. Badge.

Richie wasn't at the Bonne, either. We made our way to city hospital. Just outside, the dog got all excited and started vacuuming the pavement with its nose. I followed as it raced back and forth, generally in the direction of the macadam coated parking lot at the side. Blackie ran around in it, then sat and howled. That couldn't be good. Wander is a walker, like me.

"What's up, Blackie?"

"Stops here. Richie, fish smell, gone."

Fish smell? This reminded me the waddling wonder had said something about the docks. According to doggie, he must have left with someone from the dock area. Not good, those two bozos I had encountered at his office were from off the docks. We headed down to the bay.