Free Strings by Dave Duncan

ten million hectos. In official terms, that was exactly one billion dollars. Of course, a billion was not what it used to be, but even a media giant like WSHB could not throw that kind of change around lightly. Although Pandora had a hefty slush fund to call on, hefty was not omnipotent. Approval for expenditure on that scale had to come from higher up, and that meant politics. Frazer Franklin had friends who wanted him to get all the breaks, of course, old has-been though he was—Pandora almost laughed aloud every time she saw that scalp transplant of his. It was going to be as bald as its predecessor in another month or two.
    So she had been ramming through an emergency appropriation at the same time as she had been trying to confirm the story and also out-circle the office sharks. Even securing the data was proving to be tricky. She had told Wilkins that he would have to transmit the evidence to her on approval, and he had laughed in her new face—quite rightly so, of course. Getting more serious then, she had suggested that he forget his job, hop the lev, and nip down to Nauc with the coin. He had laughed even harder at that, claiming that then he would be cut up instead of cut out . He might have had a point there—WSHB’s accountants would go a long way to save ten million hectos.
    And she had no reliable rats in Cainsville. She doubted that anyone else did, either. Rats did not survive long in the Institute. They just vanished. So, even, did moles. Merely sending a man up there to contact Wilkins had required a good excuse, which had taken time to find. But ten million hectos needed verification of product.
    And time was precious. If 4-I made an announcement first, then Pandora’s scoop would be dead as the Ides of March.
    Of course, the Institute had its own time problems, which was why it had made no announcement yet. The missing explorers had been transmensed to Nile on April first, appropriately. They had planned to overnight until the next window, on the fifth. That was when they had come back dead. Today was the seventh already, and the next window must be due on the ninth, or there-abouts.
    She was certain that the Institute would prefer not to issue a statement until it had collected a lot more data, probably not until it had overnighted another team, and that meant the thirteenth at the earliest, if the period was exactly four days. Before then, 4-I would make nothing public—unless it learned about the leak. In that case it would move at once to preempt her and publish its own version.
    Pure luck had put Pandora within reach of Wilkins’s call. WSHB had a thousand such moles spotted around the world. Nine-tenths of them would never turn up as much as a borscht recipe in their lives, but once in a while a code would twitch in as a mole suddenly decided to rat. Then System would alert the senior news exec within reach. Normally that would have been Frazer Thin-on-top Frankie, but just by chance old F.F. had been interviewing a would-be starlet that afternoon, and the interview had already progressed to the point where F.F. had not been accepting calls. Thus Destiny had laid her hand on Pandora’s shoulder instead. Poor Frankie had apparently had a disappointing day all around—he had not even given the lad a training contract. He played dirty even with kids.
    So pure luck had taken a hand, but so had virtue, because Pandora’s section had been working on an Institute story for months. She had ample background ready to go. The media all took shots at 4-I quite regularly, of course, and had done so for years. Old Mother Hubbard always survived somehow, but now she was at the end of her string. There was no doubt that China was about to recognize the World Chamber. China was still the largest nation-state, the only one of any real size whose government had not collapsed into impotency under its debt load.
    If China backed the Chamber, then the long fight would be over, and the U.N. would cease to exist at