The Case of the Perjured Planet

 

MARTIN LORAN

 

 

I

 

Flourishing the quill pen, Quist put a period to the last sentence which was more in the nature of an ink-blot, and glanced back over the page he had written, an expression of immense satisfaction on his face.

 

He finished rereading and looked towards the console speaker on the wall that was the mouth of the computer.

 

“What do you think of this, Bookworm?” He began to read from the manuscript in his hand. On the cover in neat lettering was the title: “Say It With Bullets”.

 

“It was a good day for getting wet. As good as any other day, like the one before when I had got just as wet and for just as good a reason. Rain was falling in a straight line down out of black clouds that hovered over the brown and damp-stained tenements. The fire escapes were like rusted bits of iron pasted onto the rotting boards by a sculptor who knew his stuff was junk. I was glad there wasn’t any wind. If there had been a wind I wouldn’t have got any wetter, but I would have enjoyed it less.

 

“I had been standing in the rain for two days watching the doorway across the street waiting for a car—not any car. A black sedan with white sidewalls and a three hundred horsepower engine hidden under a hood that made it look like any other black sedan of the same year and model. The engine wasn’t the only thing different about it. The other thing was the body in the trunk. Rusty O’Toole had fingered the car. . .”

 

“Fingered the car?”

 

Quist looked up. “Yes,” he said, a shade of irritation in his voice. “What’s wrong with that?”

 

Bookworm considered for a moment, with only the faint humming of the computer audible in the vast inner room of the ship. Quist imagined it to be an amused and superior hum, but he knew it was only his irritation that made it seem so. When Bookworm was amused, he chuckled, and anyway, he never seemed amused by anything Quist wrote.

 

“The term ‘fingered’ dates from the early twentieth century and refers specifically to the informing by one person upon another person in regard to some illegal act the latter may have performed. The term would not have been used to refer to some inanimate object such as a car. If you wish to use the proper idiom of the time, ‘given me a lead on’ would be the correct phrase.”

 

Quist let the paper drop from the fingers of his left hand. It lay accusingly on the table. “All right,” he said bitterly, “you write it then.” He realised immediately that he had made a mistake, but by that time the machine had already begun to hum over the problem which he had unwittingly fed into it. After a few seconds it stopped humming.

 

“I can let you have it in about an hour,” it said. ‘The title will be ‘Die Delilah, Die’. As to length . . .”

 

“No!” Quist said.

 

“You don’t like the title?”

 

“I don’t like the idea. Detective stories are my hobby, Bookworm. ‘Say It With Bullets’ is the only thing that’s kept me sane on this trip. You stick to your surveys and let me do the writing.”

 

The machine stopped humming, but in its usual mumble of noise Quist could detect a note that was not normal. He wondered if the machine was about to go wrong again, but discarded the idea. The interference mechanism had programmed a triple bank-overload blowout just the previous day and it wasn’t likely that another failure would occur so soon. The men who made up the tapes on the interference mechanisms had, on the whole, a fair understanding of the problems of being a librarian. This left only one likely reason for the Bookworm’s reaction. It was jealous.

 

* * * *

 

Cybernetically, the idea was ridiculous, but Quist had been on the Library circuit for more than twenty years. In that time he had gained a healthy respect for the activities of Fate. Given enough time and enough planets anything could happen. He glanced almost nervously at the huge machine that occupied one wall of his ship’s only cabin. There was a lot of knowledge in those memory banks, the accumulated wisdom of a million writers, human and non-human. Nobody could be very sure what went on inside the brain of a Bookworm, except perhaps another Bookworm—and he knew the nearest was more than five light-years away, over near Paradigm, where Tom Corbett was trying to sort out the problems of five planets that had somehow managed to reorientate their culture to dispense with written language.

 

Quist got up and drifted down the cabin to bis bunk. He felt odd. It took a few moments for him to sort out his emotions, then to put a name to them. Eventually it all added up—his irritation with Bookworm, the idea, crazy now, that the machine might be jealous. Quist recognized the signs—he was bored.

 

It happened occasionally. Not very often of course—most of the time he was too busy to think, let alone be bored. Librarian Service men were not, by the nature of their work, very often allowed to sit around and look at themselves. But this trip had been different. The planets so far visited on this swing had been dull. One landed, gave out the usual stack of new technical material and a few interesting novels, attended a dinner or two, dutifully looked at the new power station and then gratefully spaced out. He almost envied Tom Corbett his problems on Paradigm. Even a tricky job like that would be better than this milk run.

 

Bookworm bonged quietly and a few lights flashed on the face of the machine like first stars.

 

“Napoleon 6 in twenty-four hours, Quist. Do you want a report?”

 

Quist drifted back to his desk and sat down.

 

“Better let me have a look at it,” he said. “Another whistle stop, I suppose.”

 

There was no response from the Bookworm, though Quist thought he detected a point in its silence. He was well on the way back to his jealousy theory when the press stopped whining and a newly printed and bound copy of the survey report on Napoleon 6 slid out of the chute onto his desk. In the depths of the machine a flake of film slipped back into its slot among the millions of other flakes, and the reproducing camera grew quiet. Quist sighed back bis depression and opened the book.

 

* * * *

 

Half an hour later, he had successfully crossed the ocean of general remarks about the flora, fauna and strata of Napoleon 6, only to be cast up on a reef of statistics that filled the last third of the volume. He knew a little more about the place, but not much, and what he knew was not very promising. It would, he knew, be another dreary visit. Napoleon 6 was a dead-end world.

 

It had not always been that. Once, according to the details, it had been quite a place. Volcanic, severe Draysonianism in its orbit, a variety of animal life wide enough to make settling there a job for men with little respect for their health. Thirty years ago it must have been a regular monster of a world. But that hadn’t lasted. Softening up tough planets was like winning a fixed fight for colonists trained in terra-forming. Well, he might get away from the place inside a week, and there was always a chance that the next one would be better. Meanwhile, he could get on with the detective story. In the world of private eyes and beautiful blondes he felt more at home. At least there people did things.

 

The statistics in the back of the book were largely meaningless to him but he ploughed on doggedly. Vegetation, atmospheric density, geology ... he read a bit further, stopped, turned back, read again, then stared at the wall for a long time. He checked the index, then reread the charts for the third time, slowly and carefully. Something seemed very odd in the table of minerals found in the survey on Napoleon 6. Nothing important—just a little variation. He made a note to ask somebody about it when he got there, tucked a reminder in the back of his mind, and once again let his thoughts wander into creative channels. Too much of his time was spent with problems that required cold, hard deduction. He liked letting his imagination have a run. If only Bookworm weren’t so critical.

 

Quist picked up his pen and began writing.

 

“I saw the car coming slowly down the street, ploughing its way through sullen rain that danced on the ground like a troupe of tired stripteasers to the noise of a two-bit, two-piece orchestra. The piano was the slap of rain on black metal, the saxophone the muffled roar of the big engine. Then I wasn’t watching the car any longer. I wasn’t watching anything. I was falling off the balcony into the orchestra pit, which was very dark and a long way below, and the only music was the ringing in my ears.”

 

It wouldn’t be a bad book, Quist decided. He had the style down all right. Maybe the Central Library Board would even give him permission to publish it. Although, now that he thought about it, they probably wouldn’t.

 

“Quist,” Bookworm interrupted, “I’ve finished the first chapter of ‘Die Delilah, Die’. What do you think of this ...?”

 

* * * *

 

II

 

It was a new city, polished and smooth, slim and modern. There was nothing man-made on the planet older than thirty years, if you didn’t count the people who had come then, in their twenties.

 

Quist strolled through the streets, avoiding even the pedestrian express belts that linked the major sections of the city.

 

The buildings were white and grey and rose and light brown, all sand colours, soft colours, still colours. No reds, or blacks or purples; nothing to startle. A clean, antiseptic, beautiful city, which Quist found pleasant but not exciting.

 

He heard the noise, shouting and cheering and horns blaring, before he saw the parade. Turning a corner, as if the music were a scent he was following, he came upon the crowd lining both sides of the streets. The marchers, dressed in rough brown planet-fall suits, farmers’ overalls, and technicians’ smocks, carried banners and flags. The band was large and noisy and Quist recognised the national anthem. Like all national anthems it was less than indifferent music, painful to the ears of anyone who had no emotional associations with it.

 

Quist glanced at the flat silver band on his wrist. He had two hours before his meeting with the President. Time, he decided, to watch a parade.

 

After fifteen minutes standing in the crowd, he decided that parades were much the same anywhere, anytime. If there was anything special about this one, it was the lack of excitement among the crowd. They cheered, but without energy.

 

Quist watched for a while, wondering why the spectacle seemed so flat and lifeless. It wasn’t just the monotony of the floats, the dreary sameness of the faces that marched raggedly by, or the pointless om-pa-pa of the band—these were common to all parades. There was something else here, an element that grated on his mind, even worried him.

 

The man next to him was tall, brawny, a labourer with hands the size of metal grabs and a face like a retread. Quist glanced at him, then at the parade.

 

“Pretty poor, eh?”

 

The man turned his head slowly and looked down at Quist’s head, easily six inches below him.

 

“We like it,” he observed amiably.

 

“I don’t see why. A pathetic exhibition, I say. I’ve seen better in a Boy Scout’s camp on Earth.”

 

“We do things differently here,” he said. “This suits us.”

 

He turned back to the parade. A group of farmers was struggling by in rough march formation, spades at the ready. They looked embarrassed. Quist applied a little more pressure.

 

“Aren’t there any men on this planet? I never saw such a weak-kneed lot. Soldiers with shovels!”

 

A few people turned to look at him, but they spared him only a glance before turning their eyes once again to the parade. The ham-fisted one didn’t even respond this time. Realising he would get nowhere, Quist pushed through the crowd and back to the quietness of the side streets.

 

His theory had more support to it now, but some other details remained to be filled in. He moved quickly through the wide avenues that led off the main streets of the city, ignoring the smooth, clean, pastel facades of the new buildings, the unbroken areas of plasti-glass gleaming in the sun —the face of a city fearfully hiding something behind its bland appearance. Happily, Quist assured himself that it shouldn’t be difficult to lift the mask.

 

* * * *

 

It didn’t take long. Five minutes from the centre of the city, the mask began to slip. Streets, up to now wide and clean, became suddenly narrower, closing up in front of him into lanes along which dark and crooked buildings leaned their heads together and spoke in shadows. The sidewalk became concrete instead of plastic composition, and jutting edges tripped him. There were fewer people around, and they were different from those he had seen so far. They looked worried, happy, abstracted and, above all, busy—like, in fact, any crowd on any Earth city street. This was the sort of city he felt comfortable in.

 

Signs of the old Napoleon became obvious almost immediately. On a wall he found the tattered fading remains of a poster, dating from the bad old days. It was largely obliterated by later signs but Quist recognised the familiar pattern. There was the face of Marcus Obolensky, ravaged, fissured like old marble, a stern unsmiling mask. The message was simple, in plain black type: The Old Man Says BUILD.

 

Quist looked at the poster and began to understand better what had made Napoleon 6 a habitable planet. The Old Man Says BUILD. It was good press relations, worked out perhaps by a man without training, based on an instinctive understanding of human nature, but good press relations all the same. The figurehead, paternal, demanding, stern but compassionate. If you failed, you had to face the anger of those cold grey eyes. If you succeeded, you might feel that rough hand laid on your shoulder, perhaps even a word of commendation, from the man who, almost single-handedly, had built this world. If the old man said “Build”, you built.

 

Further down the road, past the poster, Quist saw a break in the line of buildings, and there the city proper dwindled into suburbs, running out onto the black basalt plain that made up most of the continent. He headed for the place, noticing that people were fewer here and that there was a new smell in the air, acrid, pungent—the smell of burning.

 

Wooden trestles barred the road, but they were old and weathered. He pushed them aside and walked to the end of the roadway. At the end he stopped, and looked down into the mouth of doom.

 

Like a ragged grin, the fissure curved around on either side of him, the exposed edges of the rock like those of an unhealed scar, sharp and crusted. It was a hundred yards wide, perhaps more. At the bottom, what looked like a mile below, Quist sensed a dark rolling, the slow movement of oily smoke. The smell he had noticed on the streets welled up in the hot still air, staining it with yellow fumes. Quist stepped back, but kept looking.

 

The fissure was interesting, but other things about it were more interesting still. Now that the initial shock was over, he noticed that the crack was more than just the memento of a giant earthquake. About fifty feet down the side of the opposite cliff, he saw a buttress jutting from the rock. It leaped out over the abyss, presumably connecting up with his side of the crack. Moving closer to the edge, he saw another buttress, and then more, a string of them regularly spaced all along the cliff. Quist recognised their use, though he had to look to find a name. They were sutures, stitches of iron and concrete strong enough to hold a world together.

 

Treading the no-man’s-land between the last of the buildings and the lip of the crack, Quist examined the place at length, trying to fit it into his picture of Napoleon 6. It had taken tens of thousands of man-hours to make those buttresses, and possibly a few hundred brave men lay down at the bottom among the fumes and the perpetual dark. It was a task that nobody would have suggested could have been done but they had done it. Yet the labourer in the crowd watching the parade had had the drive and pride of a jellyfish. Did this sort of spirit die in thirty years, the spirit that refused to recognise the world-cracking rights of an earthquake, and proceeded to stitch its crust back together again?

 

Then there was the business of the magellanium. He had mentioned the matter to the government liaison officer who had come to meet him at the ship, mainly out of curiosity. There was probably a good and simple explanation of why it had not been listed in the table of elements found in the geological survey of Napoleon 6. Quist had just not been able to think of it. The liaison man had seemed surprised, even frightened by his query. Most of the things that bothered Quist about Napoleon 6 were not facts. You had to be a librarian to see them—and it helped to be a librarian who liked detective stories.

 

The buildings past which Quist was walking had become more rickety now. This was old deserted land, studded with abandoned houses still showing the marks of earthquake and fire. He wondered where he had seen this sort of place before, then remembered with a smile. Old warehouses, abandoned vacant allotments—it was all copybook private-eye country. Here Sam Spade and Phillip Marlowe had hunted their quarries like relentless nemeses. Here they found the bodies of beautiful women strangled with their own stockings, or ratty informers ready to die, but only after they had choked out the last enigmatic clue.

 

Quist glanced over his shoulder, then wondered why. Perhaps he was starting to believe his own plots, but there was a definite feeling in the air that . . . what? That he was being watched? It was ridiculous. Next thing he would be imagining other, sillier things, like the possibility that someone would take a shot at him. He breathed in to laugh, but the laugh never came. Instead, there was a sharp brittle sound that echoed down the grey and narrow street, and a shock that threw him to the ground.

 

Quist looked down incredulously at the blood staining the now tattered sleeve of his coat. Before he fainted, his mind had time to be grateful that the marksman had read detective stories, too. The first shot was always a warning.

 

* * * *

 

III

 

The pain came almost immediately, and Quist knew then that it wasn’t a bad wound. Squinting warily from behind a low wall where he had wriggled for cover, he struggled out of his coat and examined the jagged gash in his arm.

 

He had been lucky. The bullet—a lead slug, he guessed; nothing so sophisticated as an impulse shell—had ripped through the upper part of his sleeve without touching him. But then it had gouged a long furrow in his forearm. It was bleeding freely and his whole arm was beginning to throb.

 

In the books, Quist remembered, the detectives always tore up their shirt, stuffed a wad of cloth across the wound and waded in to clean up the criminals. Struggling to remain conscious, Quist realised that the old private-eyes were somewhat tougher than he was. The combination of shock and pain made him dizzy and ill. He leaned weakly against the wall and watched the blood seep down to soak his coat. The world began to black out.

 

Then somebody was bending over him, fingers were pulling at his coat, turning him over. He struggled, but the hands that held him were too strong. Through the haze he felt the prick of a needle and something acrid puffed under his nose. The dizziness began to fade and a face swam out of the mist—bearded, solemn, but not menacing.

 

“Who...?”

 

The man did something to Quist’s arm, closed a case on the ground beside him and slipped it into his coat.

 

“Addison,” he said shortly. “How do you feel?”

 

“Rotten.” Quist tried to sit up, but failed. Still, he felt better—the pain was fading.

 

Addison stood up. He was tall, angular, with the abstracted motion of a tall water-bird. Quist noted his clothes and tentatively categorised him as sedentary, perhaps academic, almost forty....

 

“You’ll be all right now,” he said shortly. “I’ll be seeing you.”

 

He was a few yards away before Quist realised he was going.

 

“Hey! Come back ...”

 

But he was gone among the ruins.

 

Quist looked at his arm where a white plastic cocoon covered the wound. His bloodstream tingled with anti-shock, antiseptic and a stimulant. Addison had done a particularly neat job of patching up the man he had shot. Or had he shot him? Quist doubted it, though there seemed no other explanation.

 

He sat leaning against the wall, trying to make some sense of it. Then he looked at his watch, quickly rose and made for the city. Even a bullet wound was no excuse to keep the President waiting.

 

* * * *

 

When he was young, Marcus Obolensky had been handsome. He had never really forgiven the world for that.

 

The early years had been good, but he had been too young to appreciate his luck. By the time he knew he was handsome, his looks had begun to slip away, each new diminution adding a further layer of hatred to his armour against the world. At fifty-three, he had been ugly inside and out, callous, brutal, hated by everyone who knew him. When the Colonisation Crews ran up against the roaring volcanic giant of Napoleon 6 with its ungovernable earthquakes and wild Draysonian orbit, a dozen men had suggested him for Planetary Controller. There had been no arguments at the meeting, not even from Obolensky. He had expected something like this. It fitted in with what he thought of the world.

 

Then, just to be difficult, Obolensky decided to tame the planet. The idea began out of contrariness, then developed into an obsession that drove him to the edges of endurance and beyond for fifteen years. One by one, his body’s vital functions collapsed, only to be revived again by drugs or artificial organs. He died five times in seven years, and by the end of the eighth he had no more fear of death than has a tree. Faced with a leader so impossible of categorisation, the people of Napoleon 6, doubtful of their ability to overthrow him or to cause his death, fell back on their oldest standby and adored him. Overnight, he became The Old Man, Father, Ogre, God.

 

The god sat at his desk and read slowly through the report his secretary had given him. There was much in it of interest and he read carefully. The stained-glass window behind him threw bands of coloured light across the paper, the pattern of red and white it made echoing his own feelings, calculation and anger crossing and recrossing in his mind.

 

At the end of the report, he folded the paper carefully, then refolded it again and again. The document aid on his desk took it delicately between its metal teeth and nibbled it into a pile of dust which flared into ashes an instant later. Obolensky did not blink at the light of the fire. He was thinking.

 

“Is he still outside?” His voice was like the grate of metal on rock.

 

The secretary nodded.

 

“Send him in. And then get Klava.”

 

“General Klava is in ...”

 

Obolensky looked up. For an instant the young man saw deep into the eyes that reflected Marcus Obolensky’s mind. He said nothing more.

 

At the door, he motioned to Quist and went back to his office. Quist watched him go, wondering at the pale face and the look of dreadful fear in the young man’s eyes. Then he turned and walked into the Presence.

 

* * * *

 

Obolensky looked up.

 

“Mr Stephen Quist. Librarian—that’s officially. Unofficially, Ambassador Extraordinary for the Galactic Assembly, Special Envoy and all-round planetary trouble-shooter. Officially a bookman. Unofficially, a social engineer.” Obolensky spoke his sentences precisely, his tone as efficient and cold as the eyes that bored into Quist like a diamond drill. Quist stood at ease, calmly returning the gaze. “I have met only one other Librarian. That was three years after planet-fall. He had his own ideas regarding the development of Napoleon Society. However, they didn’t square with mine. What’s on your mind, Mr Quist?”

 

Quist considered for a moment. “Officially? Well, I’m here to deliver some books. That’ll take a few days of course: consultations with your library administrations; computer survey of your complete stock of subjects and titles then printing of the books required in sufficient numbers. A few days is all I’ll require.”

 

“I’ll arrange the appointments you need and you will be advised. Everyone concerned will extend full co-operation. We need new books, particularly technical books.”

 

“Perhaps a few books on mining and engineering?”

 

Obolensky’s gaze did not waver. His lips remained in a firm line slashed across his ragged face. He did not answer immediately. “Yes, Mr Quist,” he said. “Yes, those—and others.”

 

Quist nodded and allowed himself a faint smile.

 

“I hope you will be pleased with my selection,” he said.

 

“Do you think I might not be?”

 

“No reason to think that, sir. Although, of course, a Librarian’s job is not to please.”

 

Obolensky let the remarks sink in, but made no response.

 

“Was there anything else, Mr Quist?” he said eventually.

 

The Librarian studied the man thoughtfully. His appearance was deceiving. He looked old, the thin body and the veined hands giving a faint impression of vulnerability, as if the cold strength of the man were only a shell which could be easily shattered. Quist thought—he knew—such an idea was foolish. There was no weakness in him.

 

“Yes, there is one thing. I noticed something odd about the table of elements listed on your latest geological survey—the one, I believe, that was prepared in response to the Galactic Assembly’s mineralogical survey request. Perhaps you could tell me why there was no magellanium reported on the list.”

 

The silence was as cold and still as the white light from the window.

 

“Why should there have been?”

 

“Are you familiar with the survey?”

 

“I’ve read it.”

 

“And?”

 

“It seemed quite in order.”

 

Quist shrugged his shoulders. “There are parts of it I don’t understand.”

 

“Mr Quist, are you a geologist?”

 

“No.”

 

“You aren’t an expert in this field?”

 

“Of course not.”

 

“Well, you have full authority to consult the experts, including the geologist in charge of planetary survey. In other words, the Assembly representative on Napoleon. All reports, findings and records are also at your disposal. Would there be anything else, Mr Quist?”

 

“No, sir. Thank you for your time.”

 

“It has been a pleasure meeting you, Mr Quist. I hope your mission on Napoleon will prove rewarding.”

 

“I’m sure it will. My job is always rewarding. I never get tired of delivering books. Good day, sir.” Quist smiled at the old man and bowed slightly.

 

Obolensky nodded a reply and Quist turned and walked to the door. He paused as he was about to pull the door shut behind him. The old man’s eyes were still on him, like two cold points of light. “The Library Service doesn’t just supply technical and scientific books, of course. Our purpose is to provide a complete balance of cultural material, including fiction.” He paused. “Have you ever read any detective stories?”

 

“No.”

 

“I’ll include some in my selection, sir. They can be most rewarding.” Quist closed the door behind him.

 

Walking down the hall, he glanced back and saw the nervous young man peering out of his office. When he got outside the building, Quist thought about what he should do next

 

In the end it was an easy decision. The first thing he had to do was get an office.

 

* * * *

 

IV

 

“An office?” The caretaker’s face went through a variety of expressions ranging from greed to fear, and settled finally on something approximating doubtful interest. “I think we might have a spare suite, but I’ll have to check.” He smiled thinly and went into his little cubicle.

 

The door closed, and a moment later Quist heard the sound of a teleview being keyed. Politely moving out of earshot, he looked around.

 

Office buildings were much the same no matter where one went in the Galaxy. Architects might scheme, developers curse, decorators weep, but an office building was nothing but an overblown beehive, and there was nothing one could do about it. Not that the architects of Napoleon 6 had tried too hard. The mortality rate on buildings was such that construction for show was worse than worthless. Buildings were made thick and quick, in that order. Piers riveted them to the rock, metal frames held them rigid. The rest was pure show and not many architects even made the effort to inject a little aesthetic quality into their work. Concrete was the main material, raw and uncovered, still marked with the lines of the frame-work. The floors were rubberoid, the light fittings imbedded in the wall and covered with thick glass eyelids. Everything sweated; even the air was clammy. Quist had never seen anything so sleazy. It was just what he wanted.

 

The caretaker came out of his office and closed the door. Quist had no doubt that his call had been to Obolensky’s office and that somebody there—that pale young secretary perhaps—had supplied him with a line to hand this inquisitive Earthman. He felt a little sorry for the young man. He was in for a busy week.

 

“We do have one suite, on the fifth floor. Two rooms. Quite a nice view.”

 

“I’ll have a look at it.”

 

They went up in a lift that looked like a diving bell. Quist looked at the sweating metal and made a note to wear thick socks and sweaters when he moved in. His “suite” was almost as bare as the corridors. Quist looked out of the narrow window at the view, a sorry panorama of wet, grey rooftops. He smiled, and gazed back at the room. A desk, two chairs, a filing cabinet, some curtains. Perfect. He looked around, wondering what was missing. Of course: “I need a carpet. Something old, threadbare, a bit dusty.”

 

The caretaker looked at him oddly, opened his mouth to make some remark, then stopped, apparently remembering his orders. It wasn’t his business. The Old Man had said “Humour him.” So ...

 

“I’ll arrange it,” he said. “When do you want to move in?”

 

“Right away.”

 

“Right away? But . . .” There was a pause. “Very well.” The caretaker left.

 

* * * *

 

Quist stood at the window and looked out on the city. Not an especially good city, but not an evil one either. Just ordinarily sick, ordinarily happy. There ought to be plenty of people there who needed a private-eye.

 

He sat down at his desk and swung the seat experimentally. It squeaked as it should. The drawers of his desk were empty, except for some dried-up fruit skins in the bottom one. He took them delicately out and dropped them over the window ledge. Only one thing belonged in the bottom drawer of bis desk—a bottle of bonded bourbon. He stared up at the grey ceiling of his office and wondered what bourbon tasted like.

 

After half an hour, he looked at his watch, then took a notebook from his pocket. It was still sharp-edged and a little damp from Bookworm’s press. He opened the first page and ran his finger down the rows of figures and symbols that covered it. His mind, trained for years in instant calculations of considerable complexity, began to turn over the numbers, digesting them, determining the pattern. After a moment he made a note on his pad, completed a series of quadratic equations and scribbled down a single figure. Then he glanced at his watch.

 

The sound as he crumpled the piece of paper and threw it into the wastebasket was the only one in the hushed office. The screwed-up paper unfolded a little, like the scrabbling of an insect against the metal sides of the bin. Then there was silence. Quist waited.

 

There was a knock at the door. Quist didn’t move. It opened, and small nervous footsteps came across the floor of the anteroom. The inner door opened slowly. Only then did Quist open his eyes and look up. His maths then were not too rusty. His first client was right on time.

 

A little man came through the door like a rat out of his hole. First, a thin sly face extended itself on a skinny neck a few inches into the room and a pair of weak grey eyes peered nervously around. Quist received only a cursory glance, no more than the man gave to the desk or the dusty curtains.

 

Satisfied that nothing immediately threatening lurked in the office, he sidled through the door and smiled at Quist, a thin sly smile like his face. He carried a rolled umbrella and wore faded leather gloves that he drew off awkwardly like a young girl taking off her stockings.

 

“You’re the Librarian, Mr Quist?” The little man kept his eyes averted and twisted his gloves convulsively.

 

“Yes.”

 

The eyes continued to dart around the room, as if following a vagrant fly. “The teleview advertisement said you were offering your services as a detective.”

 

“Yes, that’s right, Mr...”

 

He ignored the inquiry. “I don’t exactly need your services, Mr Quist, but I think I may have something I can offer you.”

 

* * * *

 

Quist said nothing, waiting for him to go on. The man continued the flicking dance with his eyes, waiting for Quist to say something.

 

“All right,” he said, “what is it you want to offer me?”

 

“First, I want to be sure you’re interested. You see, there is a certain amount of risk in my coming here. I don’t wish to pursue the matter further if we can’t come to a suitable arrangement.”

 

“How can we come to any arrangement until I know what you are offering and what you want?”

 

“Well put, Mr Quist. Exactly. And how can we come to an agreement unless I know what you want?”

 

“Let’s stop fencing with each other, shall we? Tell me what’s on your mind. What are you selling?”

 

“I don’t know much about Librarians, Mr Quist, but it’s quite obvious that distributing books isn’t your only job, otherwise you wouldn’t be in this office. You’re investigating us—this planet. Why?’

 

“I think you know the answer.”

 

“I have an idea as to the answer, that’s all.”

 

“And you want to sell me your idea?”

 

“Something more concrete than that. I have a package. At the moment it’s in a traveller’s storage locker. I want to sell you the contents of that package.”

 

“Why do you think I would be interested?”

 

“Because it’s my idea that what’s in that package is the key to what you’re looking for.”

 

“And the price?”

 

“First of all, safe conduct off Napoleon. This is big, Mr Quist. I, myself, am not sure of all that’s involved, but I’ve had plenty of time to think out the angles. You see, I made my . . . well, my discovery almost a year ago. I had no intention of doing anything with it until you arrived. Then I realised that you, as a free agent of the Universal Assembly would no doubt be interested in my secret. When you ran that advertisement, I knew you must have suspicions of some kind about the veracity of the Napoleon government. Perhaps I’m wrong, of course. Perhaps what you’re looking for has nothing to do with my little package, but I think you’ll be interested just the same.”

 

“You were telling me the price.”

 

The little man moved around from side to side in his chair and smiled faintly with one side of his mouth. “A hundred thousand credits—and as I said, safe conduct from Napoleon.”

 

Quist nodded. He still had not met his gaze, but Quist studied the thin crooked face, its oily condition, an indication of how rarely it was washed. A hundred thousand credits was nothing to Quist or the federation. He could give that away with no more than a single line justification in his expense book. The question was whether he really believed the man had something—in which case the money was fair exchange—or whether he was simply a con man, in which case Quist would be wasting his time. He thought for a further ten seconds and then made his decision.

 

“All right, I agree. Where’s the package?”

 

The little man’s manner became even more nervous and apprehensive than before. He actually turned around in his seat to look behind him. There was nothing there.

 

“I’ll have to bring it to you. Not here. It’s best we meet in a public place, I think. Then, when you’ve examined the parcel, I can accompany you to your ship. You’ll have to take me to your ship, Mr Quist. It’s the only safe place.”

 

“I’ll guarantee your safety.”

 

“Thank you. Thank you. Look, I’ll meet you at the Natural History Museum. That’s at the central plaza. I’ll meet you in the geological section, in the gallery. In three hours. Don’t be late, Mr Quist.”

 

Quist smiled. “Don’t lose the package.”

 

The man didn’t respond at all to the joke. He stood and turned to the door. “I must go now. Three hours, Mr Quist.”

 

When the little man had gone, Quist took the book out of his top drawer. He flipped a couple of pages and made a few notations on a piece of paper. Things were going on schedule in a way which might have been satisfying if it had not been quite so dull. Still, it didn’t do to hurry the scheme of things. If Bookworm said that these were the equations—and he had been quite insistent, in his overbearing, authoritarian way that they were, though more than a little annoyed by what he called Quist’s “crack-brained” scheme—then that was good enough for him. If a Librarian couldn’t trust his Bookworm, then who could he trust? Except perhaps his own intuition.

 

Quist swung his chair and looked out through the grimy curtains. That was the final problem, when you got right down to it. You could do a reasonably good job of keeping the universe going just by relying on computers like Bookworm. You might even make some improvements if you were lucky. But time after time he found that while he was feeding the data into the computers and correlating the answers, some man somewhere had gone ahead and solved the problem with a hairpin and a bit of string. Quist was a realist. He knew, as well as anyone, the fallacies of the humanist arguments. But he had been around the Universe long enough to have a healthy respect for the ability of man somehow, often without knowing why, to come up with the right answers to his problems. The belief had got him into a dingy office on Napoleon 6, waiting for somebody to knock on the door.

 

Somebody knocked on the door. It sounded like the knock of a beautiful blonde, about five feet four, with a full figure, a seductive smile, and a twinkle in her eye.

 

Quist swung his chair back to the desk and called out “Come in.”

 

She was blonde, about five feet four, with a full figure, a seductive smile and a twinkle in her eye. Her figure, Quist noted, was mathematically proportioned to a degree that would make Bookworm’s description “not spectacular” technically correct. Then he glanced at her face and brightened a little. Even the Bookworm could be wrong sometimes. Her eyes were grey, not blue.

 

She sat down in the chair opposite him and looked at him levelly across the desk.

 

“Are you the man who advertised on the video?”

 

“A lot of people advertise on the video. I offered to find lost people, get you out of trouble if you were in it, without getting into gaol if possible. If that’s what you want, I can probably help you.”

 

She smiled. It was a good smile, a little prim but not without warmth. A smile you could get to like, in time.

 

“Probably?”

 

“I can’t work miracles, I’m only human.”

 

“You’re from Earth.”

 

“Earthmen are just as human as anybody else. More, if anything.”

 

She leaned forward a little. The skin of her throat was clear and pale, and a little blue vein pulsed quietly somewhere under the first few layers.

 

“I don’t believe it,” she said, smiling again.

 

“I don’t care if you believe it or not. I’m a man trying to do a job. Is that so hard to believe?”

 

She stood up slowly and walked around the desk to the window. If she had meant the action to give Quist a better idea of what vast areas were covered by the definition “not spectacular”, then she succeeded. He watched her until she disappeared out of the corner of his vision, but stopped himself with an effort from turning. She remained standing behind him at the window. He looked at the wall and tried not to think of things hitting him at the base of the skull.

 

“It’s not hard to believe you’re doing a job,” she said. “It’s the kind of job you’re doing that interests me.”

 

Something touched him at the base of the skull, but it wasn’t a blackjack. Her fingers stroked the hair on the nape of his neck and Quist forced himself not to shiver. Jerking his head forward, he swung the chair hard, so that she had to step back quickly to avoid being hit. Backed against the curtains, her hair burned at the edges with a bright golden glow from the light outside. She looked hard and competent, but also at that moment, very beautiful.

 

“Look,” Quist said, “I don’t know who you are or what you’re doing here, but I haven’t got time to play games with crazy women. If you have a job you want done, then tell me and I’ll do my best to do it. If you’re just here for fun, then I suggest you go somewhere else where the getting is easier and it isn’t going to cost you fifty credits a day plus expenses.”

 

The girl seemed about to say something, but kept quiet. Without looking at him again, she crossed the dusty carpet and disappeared through the inner door. A moment later the other door closed very hard, and footsteps diminished down the corridor. Quist sat still for a long time, then got up and went to the window. The curtain blew in as if holding back something invisible outside. He closed the window with a slam and went back to the desk. Then he waited. Ten minutes.

 

* * * *

 

The man, when he came, was much as Quist had expected him to be. His footsteps in the corridor were enough warning. They plodded, not unhurried, but unhurriable. One shoe squeaked, pitifully, like a weak and feeble mouse.

 

He paused outside the door for a long time. By craning his neck, Quist could see his shadow thrown on the dusty glass. Short, square-shouldered, but a little stooped; a feeling of bulkiness about the arms and chest. When the door opened, Quist knew what to expect. Policemen are much the same all over the Universe.

 

He came through the anteroom with a slow glance to left and right, not cautious, just curious. If there had been five armed men waiting for him there, he would not have cared. Armed men he could handle. His face, rough-skinned and lined was that of a man who had seen a lot of brawls. There were no scars—he was too good a fighter for that—but the fights showed just the same.

 

At the door he stopped, looked around, then turned his eyes to Quist. He watched him at length, but without interest, and Quist looked back, noting the loose, rather shapeless suit, the clean but unfashionable collar, the hands, square and hairy that hung at his sides. The room became very quiet.

 

“I liked you better as a blonde,” Quist said.

 

“What?” The man’s face registered nothing, but his voice had a thread of shock that confirmed Quist’s theory immediately.

 

“I said, ‘I liked you better as a blonde.’”

 

“Meaning...?”

 

“Meaning that I’d be a pretty poor detective if I couldn’t tell the difference between a real policeman and a girl in a Dyker Change Suit and a rubber mask. Why don’t you get that off? It must be a hundred degrees inside there.”

 

The figure of the man in the doorway seemed to sag a little. One hairy paw grasped the other, and Quist watched with a sort of horror as it peeled away the flesh from it, revealing a thinner, whiter hand beneath it. Cleaned of the rubber, her hands went to her head and the rough-lined face of the policeman crumpled and contracted into a wrinkled ball. The girl shook her head so that the hair flaired out into a cloud, and breathed deeply.

 

“At least one hundred,” she said. “And sweaty, too.”

 

“Why do you keep using them?”

 

“What else is there?”

 

The rest of the policeman character disappeared as she peeled off the suit. Underneath she wore the same tight jacket and culottes that Quist had admired earlier. “Not spectacular,” Bookworm had said. He was right, Quist knew, but . . .

 

“I don’t know all that much about criminology,” Quist said. “But I seem to remember that the newest wrinkle is a kind of polarising cloth that you can sensitise to give back almost any gradation of shade and colour you want. You just put on a suit and mask of this stuff, treat it to make you look like anything you want, and the problem is solved. Not as uncomfortable as the Dyker, and a lot harder to detect.”

 

The girl rubbed her back, massaging feeling into her muscles.

 

“That webbing is agony.” She leaned back. “How do they get the movements right? Just a suit isn’t going to make you move like a man, or stand like him.”

 

“If you want trade secrets, you’ll have to pay for them,” Quist said. “What are you doing here?”

 

“Checking. What else? You’ve been under surveillance ever since you arrived.”

 

“I know.”

 

She frowned. “Are we that bad?”

 

“I’ve seen worse,” Quist lied.

 

“Criminology hasn’t got very far on Napoleon,” she said. “We don’t have nearly enough criminals.”

 

“I wouldn’t say that.” He paused. “I’m starting to wonder if everybody on the planet isn’t a criminal.”

 

“That’s silly.”

 

“Is it?”

 

They exchanged a long glance with no concessions on either side.

 

“Well, there’s no point in my being here now,” she said finally.

 

Quist stood up. “I’ll send you a copy of the specs for that suit I told you about”

 

She said nothing.

 

“And give my regards to Mr Addison.”

 

She frowned. “Mr Addison?”

 

“The man who’s been following me. A tall man with a beard.”

 

Her face was puzzled and amused at once.

 

“I’m the agent who’s been following you,” she said. “And I think you know I couldn’t fake extra height and a beard.”

 

Quist felt his mind begin to spin. If the tall Mr Addison was not an agent, then who was he? He did not hear the door open and close, the footsteps disappear down the hall. When he turned, the girl had gone. He never saw her again.

 

Quist stared at the door for a moment and then frowned. He had a sudden feeling that he had made a mistake. What was the point of the policeman masquerade? When he thought about it, there could be only one point: because, they really wouldn’t have expected to fool him, and even if they had . . .

 

He scrabbled in his drawer for the book and turned the pages hurriedly. After he had made his notations, he stared at the figures morosely. No, there wasn’t any doubt. Even when you had the formula, you couldn’t anticipate everything. It all depended on probability, and you could only properly figure one move at a time—with certainty, at any rate. Until he knew which one of a number of probabilities occurred at any given time, he could not plot the results to be expected from the occurrence.

 

All that this rationalisation of his failure meant was that he had simply been distracted at least fifteen minutes too long. The girl had been a plant, a sop to his vanity, a trap that had worked. Because there wasn’t any doubt about what was going to happen, or that he would be too late to do anything about it.

 

They were going to kill the little man before he got to him. Quist cursed himself with great sincerity and ran out of the office.

 

* * * *

 

V

 

The museum was new, but its design was the traditional block of Napoleon 6, grey, slab-sided, thick-walled, solid. It lay like a beached whale across two city blocks, hulking against the sky over Quist’s head. He looked up at the huge grey wall, crazed with cracks from minor earthquakes, and swallowed down the feeling that the whole thing was about to fall on him. Then, without checking his figures again—he knew them too depressingly well already—he walked up the wide steps and into the building.

 

The smell hit him at once. It was the smell of all museums, the must of dry bones and damp wood, of rock and hides, sweat and stale air. He glanced around at the foyer, but there was nobody in attendance. The door to the interior was open. He went inside. He saw at once that the museum of Napoleon 6 was not an ordinary one. Nothing, he was finding, was quite what it seemed on this planet. Forgetting his job for a moment, he looked around the huge main hall that took up a good part of the building’s mass. From around the walls a thousand eyes looked back at him, some in agony, some without feeling, all without life. The museum was not only a storehouse of knowledge. It was a reminder of what it had cost to colonise Napoleon 6, a cost only measurable in human lives.

 

There were a thousand ways to die on Napoleon 6. All of them were commemorated in the museum.

 

In the centre of the hall, raised a few feet in the air on a dais, was a ragged, air-bubbled ball of natural glass, liquid red in the dull light from the high and dusty windows. He moved closer, curious. There were blobs in the glass—irregular dark patches that somehow seemed familiar. He looked closer still.

 

The blobs were men.

 

None of them would have known what hit them. The gout of molten glass, blown from a vent in the side of the mountain they were scouting, had caught them forever in their last agony, and left them preserved like flies in amber. Through the glass their faces stared out at his, uncomprehending.

 

There were more. Skeletons bound in the embrace of hardened rock, their bones jutting out like those of the earth itself, corpses calcined by salts and dissolved by acids; models and diagrams of what happened when molten lava wiped out a whole city, or families were sprayed by the poisonous fumes of sulphur or phosphorus. Obolensky’s hand was evident in the displays. As long as he was Boss, nobody would forget what it had cost to win Napoleon 6.

 

Quist took one last look around the grim graveyard and went up the staircase that curved round the wall of the gallery. The little man had said he would be in the gallery. Perhaps, if he were lucky, he would still be alive.

 

As he went up the stairs, the feeling of being watched intensified. It could be the dead eyes of the exhibits—but it seemed different. He glanced around, saw nothing, and went on.

 

The gallery was different. Here, there was less emphasis on death and destruction. There were the more traditional glass cases, trays of gems and shells. Quist peered around but the place was empty. Quietly, he went on down the silent aisles. At the end, he turned to look over the rail at the hall below.

 

Somebody moved down there in the pit, among the exhibits. Quist strained his eyes but there was no way of picking the man out from the shadows that surrounded him. He stepped back from the rail until he was out of sight from below, then moved quickly around the gallery to the other side. The floors, thick concrete covered with matting, muffled his footsteps. With luck, the man would think he was exploring the upper levels and not realise Quist had seen him.

 

It took him a minute to get back to the floor of the main hall. At the foot of the steps he stood in the shadows pinpointing the source of the movement. It had been to his right, about halfway along the wall, by a lump of rock inside of which were welded the bodies of three men. Inching along the wall, he slowly moved into a place where he could see the man who stood in the gloom beside it.

 

He saw the little man first. He lay like a suppliant, face down before the cratered stone. Predictable to death, he still wore the same gloves, the same worn suit.

 

Beside him stood the man Quist knew as Addison. In his hand he held the brown paper parcel Quist had come here to get. He was turning it over in his hands, looking at the wrapping as if he hoped to see through the paper and into the interior. Quist studied his face, half lit from the light above. It was an odd face, almost impossible to categorise. Not like the faces of other men on Napoleon 6. With a momentary shock, Quist decided that the face it most resembled was his own.

 

Addison finished his examination of the parcel and slipped it inside his overcoat. It was quite a small parcel, hardly big enough for even a little man to die for. Odd, he would never have picked Addison for a murderer—in fact, he could not figure Addison at all. The doubt kept him hanging back for a few seconds, debating how he should approach the situation.

 

The delay was fatal. In those moments, Addison stepped out into the hall, moving a few vital yards from Quist.

 

“Addison!”

 

His voice echoed in the high hall, and Addison bolted. Quist ran towards him, but the bearded man was like a rabbit, dodging among the exhibits with a speed that Quist could not match. He was two yards behind him at the door, and when he got to the top of the steps, he had already disappeared into the crowd on the streets.

 

Quist stood for a moment on the steps, cursing, then went back to the body of the little man. It needed only a short examination to find that he had been killed with a blow to the side of the head, an almost casual attack that probably would not have killed most men, or even stunned them. Looking down at the limp body, Quist felt a touch of pity. He had not been born to live a long time.

 

Meticulously, he went over his clothes. There were the usual bits and pieces—money, handkerchief, a key ring. He glanced at the key ring, then turned it over in his fingers. Three keys—and a shred of plastic still hooked on the ring. He recognised it as the stub of an identification tag, but the rest of the tag had gone. Somebody had not wanted him to know who the little man was.

 

Quist hunted around in his memory of the system used on Napoleon 6. An id tag was just the copy of a tab kept in the Central Records Bureau. Not everyone knew that—civil liberties were still paid some lip service—and there was a chance that the person who had destroyed the tag had not remembered the copy in the files. It was a chance worth taking. If he could find out the little man’s name and where he came from, some of the charade might begin to make sense.

 

He left the museum and hurried across town, his mind busy with the problem set by the ripped identification tag. Who had torn it off? The question, he realised, was the same as a much larger one—who had killed the little man? The obvious answer to both was Addison. And yet that had a false ring to it. Somehow, Addison was . . . not the type? Quist queried the words, but found no fault in them. Addison was just not built like a murderer, mentally or physically.

 

Quist felt one of his theories coming on. There was a way this could be proved. But he would have to hurry.

 

The population register building was as unobtrusive and anonymous as the museum was bizarre and vast. Squeezed between two other office blocks, it cowered in the shadows, poking one shy corner of its facade out into the slanting afternoon sun. The streets around it were fairly clear, without any sign of Government agents. That was good—so far, his theory was working.

 

Inside, there was an information desk, with nobody behind it, and a pair of double doors leading into a long room full of filing cabinets. A few people worked at the cabinets, sorting and filing the same small plastic tabs that the little man had had on his key ring. The only difference was that these were longer, the extra space taken up by the complex punch-code holes of a data-processing system. By Earth standards, this sort of filing was centuries out of date, but on Napoleon 6 it still had its uses.

 

Ignoring the clerks, he browsed along the aisles, glancing over the cabinet tops at the other people in the room. They seemed normal enough, men and women going about a job they hated with the only approach they could reasonably adopt towards it—bored absorption. He had discounted almost all of them, when a familiar movement of a shoulder caught his eye. He stopped and watched Addison sorting through a drawer of cards.

 

He had expected to find Addison here—had depended on it in fact, to prove his theory. Despite the appearances of the little man’s death, it had not been Addison who had killed him. Government agents had done it, perhaps while the blonde girl was distracting him in his office. Addison had found the body, probably only a few moments before Quist arrived.

 

It had to be that way. If Addison had killed the man, he would have seen the identification tag and known who he was. But if a Government agent had taken it and Addison had only found the body, his first impulse would have been like Quist’s—check up at the Bureau. Addison had done well so far, but for the first time Quist thought he understood what made the bearded man tick, what he was after.

 

Quietly, he moved along the aisle to where the man stood, absorbed in his task. Addison didn’t hear him until he was only a few feet away, too close for him to run away again.

 

“Hello,” Quist said. “Read any good detective stories lately?”

 

* * * *

 

VI

 

If Addison was surprised, he didn’t show it. Without looking at Quist, he carefully noted down the details from the card in his hand, dropped it into his pocket, and slid the drawer shut. Only then did he look up.

 

“Did you say, detective stories?”

 

“That’s what all this is about, isn’t it?” Quist asked.

 

“I thought you’d never guess,” Addison said, smiling.

 

“It took some time, but I caught on.” Quist looked around the office. “Can’t we find some place more private?”

 

Addison glanced about worriedly. “Yes, I was just thinking .. .”

 

He stopped, looking past Quist’s shoulder at the main door. Quist turned. Outside the slightly frosted glass he could see men clattering up the steps—men in green uniforms. The police.

 

“Up here,” he called to Addison, pointing to the steps leading up to the second floor of the office.

 

They ran for the stairs, shouldering people out of their way. There was a shout behind them, then the unmistakable hiss of a pistol. With a sound like a whip crack, a beam passed over their heads and scorched a hole in the wall somewhere over to their right. Quist ducked, and ran harder than ever for the stairs.

 

There were seven stairs before the flight turned into the next floor, but it looked like seven miles to the fugitives. Quist pounded up, shoving Addison ahead of him like luggage. The tall man stumbled, but Quist’s hand kept him steady, catapulting him around the corner to safety. Then Quist fell on top of him. Behind them there was another blast, and the stair balustrade disintegrated into a mass of bubbling plastic. By that time it was too late. They were on the top floor.

 

The office they ran into was empty except for a startled junior assistant. Ignoring her, Quist and Addison grabbed a heavy filing cabinet, manhandled it to the stairs, and toppled it downwards, where it jammed across the turn, making an effective blockade.

 

The girl looked at them in stunned amazement.

 

“You can’t...” she began.

 

“Yes?” Addison snarled.

 

“Nothing,” the girl said weakly.

 

“Then shut up.” The last words were said over his shoulder as he hauled himself onto the window-sill and shoved the window open with his foot. He glanced at Quist.

 

“Up here.”

 

They crawled out onto the outside sill. Below them, police milled about in the streets, but all their attention was focused on the ground floor. Quist and Addison wasted no time in wondering how long it would be before somebody looked upwards and saw them inching their way along the parapet. There were enough things to worry about in just staying alive.

 

If the stairs had seemed seven miles high to Quist, then the parapet was seventy miles long. Each inch took an eternity, every breath sounded loud enough to attract the attention of the whole crowd below. But then the corner was a foot away, another step—and they were there. Ahead of him, Addison leaped the gap between the office and its next door neighbour, bent double, and scuttled across the roof. Quist followed him. They collapsed into the darkness of a steep stairway leading down into the building, and tried to get their breath back.

 

“Hadn’t we better get moving?” he asked after a moment. “They’ll be looking over here shortly.”

 

Addison unwound his jointed length from the floor.

 

“They won’t find us. I know this place from back to front. Down here.” He disappeared down the stairs. At the foot was a heavy door. Addison ignored the lock and leaned heavily against the frame. It creaked, then sagged visibly away from the door. He pushed it open.

 

“They’re all like that in these places. The quakes have put almost every building out of plumb.”

 

He waited until Quist was through, slipped into the corridor, then let the door swing shut again. They were in the dusty hall of what looked like a hotel. Numbered doors lined it, and the smell of must and staleness was thick in his nose. Addison walked a few yards along the corridor, glanced up and down checking his bearings, then launched himself with all his weight at the wall. Quist blinked in astonishment. A sound made him look back to the door. Slowly, like the contracting of an eyelid, the door frame was straightening up. The door, rising again into the vertical, swung shut with a satisfying crash as the frame grabbed it in a vice-like grip. Quist tried it experimentally. It was firm, locked from this side, so tightly in fact, that it might never have been opened.

 

“That’s a handy trick.”

 

Addison dusted his hands: “You have to know these places,” he said. “The walls are all out of plumb, but if you figure the stress points, you can shift almost anything around. They’ll come to this door, find it locked, and assume we’re well on our way.” He looked around. “This is a bit public, though. We can hide out on one of the lower floors.”

 

As Quist had guessed, it was a hotel, but old and deserted. They found a room full of furniture hulking under grey dustcloths, and sat down to wait for dark.

 

“Question time,” Addison observed, collapsing onto a bed. A cloud of dust rose around them like a nimbus, making him, and by association, the whole thing seem unreal and unlikely.

 

“There are a few things I’d like to know,” Quist admitted.

 

“Like: Who I am. What am I doing here. How did I find out about you. Did I kill Sharkey...”

 

“Sharkey?”

 

“Your little man with the package. The answer, by the way, is no.”

 

“I didn’t think you did. But you got the package.”

 

Addison pulled the parcel out of his pocket and laid it carefully on the bed beside him.

 

“I did. We can talk about that later. First things first.”

 

Quist looked at it, then back to Addison.

 

“I know most of the ‘first things’, I think. Who you are— your name is Melville Addison, age thirty-seven, employed as research reader in the School of Economics & Sociology at Napoleon University. You are here because you stumbled on my reason for being here, and for advertising myself as a private investigator. And the reason you stumbled onto that is that you have an unusual hobby.”

 

Addison sat up slowly. “How did you find out about that?”

 

“Easy. There aren’t many people on Napoleon interested in detective stories.”

 

“You don’t miss much,” Addison said. “I thought you were totally in the dark.”

 

“I was, until a few hours ago. Then I started to think how odd it was that you could follow my movements so easily. It couldn’t be that you were a good shadow—it wasn’t that easy. It had to be that you understood what I was doing. And if you understood that, you had to be a detective-story fan. How long have you been on the track?”

 

Addison moved restlessly around the room as he spoke. “Only a few months. I shipped out here eight years ago to take up a chair at the University. For a while, it was a conventional enough job, but after a while I began to notice . . . well, gaps, if you know what I mean. Places where there were things missing, attitudes that just didn’t exist. Nothing obvious, just little omissions that you wouldn’t notice if you weren’t by nature a little suspicious.”

 

“Like Holmes,” Quist said.

 

“The dog that didn’t bark? Yes, that’s it. The clue that wasn’t there was the best clue of all.”

 

“With me,” Quist said, “it was the geological survey. Magellanium wasn’t listed, but, of course, it should have been. There’s always magellanium, though usually not enough to make mining it worthwhile. It looked to me as if somebody was bending over backwards to make sure that nobody did any mining here—did anything in fact to draw attention to the place.”

 

“I noticed the people most,” Addison said. “That close-mouthed attitude among some of the older ones, the way they step so carefully in their conversation. They’re hiding something—and the whole planet is starting to get this syndrome, even though most of them can’t know what it is they’re hiding or what they’re frightened of.”

 

Quist nodded. “I saw one of their parades. It was depressing. They’ve lost all their gaiety, their pride. They’re frightened. But what of? I don’t understand.”

 

Addison delved into his pocket and extracted a slip of plastoid. “This might help.” He tossed it to Quist, who looked at it with interest.

 

“The little man’s id card. I forgot that’s what we were looking for.”

 

“I know the punch code,” Addison said. “He came from Pittfalks, one of the mountain towns. From the way he talked and dressed, I’d say he’d been there most of his life. It’ll be a good place to start looking.”

 

“Before we start looking,” Quist said, “hadn’t I better look at the parcel our late friend had?”

 

Addison picked it up from the bed and dropped it into Quist’s lap. His face lost some of its humour. He looked grim.

 

“I’ve already looked inside,” he said.

 

“And?”

 

“See for yourself.”

 

* * * *

 

Quist worried off the string and unrolled the crumpled paper. Inside the parcel was a lump of black volcanic rock, stained with streaks of rust and a few threads of natural glass. He looked at Addison, puzzled. “This is it? Rock?”

 

Addison shook his head. “It splits. See the crack?”

 

There was a narrow fissure under Quist’s fingers. He pried at it until the rock cracked neatly across.

 

Inside was a doll.

 

Or at least it looked like a doll. It was small, with simplified features, articulated arms, made of some soft flesh-like material that did not seem to have been harmed by the molten rock that had washed over it. But as Quist studied the manikin, he saw other things he could not account for.

 

If it were a doll, the construction was surprisingly complex. In a few places, the plastoid had shredded away from the frame and inside he could see a maze of machinery as complex as that of a watch. And there was the face. It seemed odd—but he didn’t know why. He glanced up at Addison.

 

“A doll?” he said.

 

“Something like that. I don’t know. When I’ve had time to test it I’ll...”

 

“What do you think it is?”

 

“I don’t know what to think. Initially I was intrigued. Now I find myself terrified.”

 

Quist looked at the man in surprise. “Terrified?”

 

Leaving the bed, Addison moved to where Quist sat, and took part of the rock shell from the parcel on his lap. He crumpled a piece from the edge and rolled it in his fingers.

 

“I don’t suppose you noticed this,” he said quietly. “Igneous rock, not especially interesting unless you study it. But I know a bit about geology. This is far from typical of that black basalt that passes for landscape out here. This is softer, rotten in parts, almost soil when it’s wet.”

 

Quist began to understand.

 

“Older, then?”

 

“Much older. It dates back . . . well, I can only guess. But my estimate would be that the rock, and of course, the doll— it must follow—are something like half a million years old.”

 

* * * *

 

VII

 

Quist and Addison crouched in the shadows, peering along the dim tunnel that stretched ahead of them for at least a hundred yards before fading off into the gloom. Water dripped from the roof continuously, an occasional fat drop landing in Quist’s hair, or worse still, coursing down his spine.

 

If Addison minded the discomfort, or even noticed it, he made no sign. Addison, Quist was beginning to realise, had the nature of a master criminal, even if his profession was a quiet one. Not everyone had the nerve necessary to follow up his theories the way Addison had, nor to risk nine sorts of police action in a hare-brained scheme such as the one they had hatched together in the hotel room. Quist thought about the plan a little more, then quickly changed his mind to other subjects. It was too frightening to think what might happen if it failed.

 

“I can’t see anything,” Quist said. “How about you?”

 

“No. It seems quiet enough—but let’s wait a little longer.”

 

There was a spell of damp dark silence, broken only by the plink of water into the puddles on the floor, and an occasional squeak, far away and remote, which belonged, Quist supposed, to a bat. Only bats would be unimaginative enough to find these catacombs pleasant.

 

“It seems safe enough,” Addison said eventually, stepping forward into the tunnel centre. Quist followed him and peered into the dark.

 

“How far up is the station?”

 

“A hundred yards. Maybe less, I don’t recall too well. I used to come down here a lot once. I remember . . .” He stopped, glanced at Quist, and cleared his throat. “Well, we won’t go into that. Follow me—and remember, no noise.”

 

They stumbled along the narrow tubular tunnel, fumbling with their feet for the path and trying to avoid the black pools of water that covered much of the ground. After he had stepped up to his ankles in two of them, Quist gave up and sloshed gamely forward, ignoring anything smaller than a lake.

 

The floor had once been bitumen, or dressed stone, but it had been cracked and crazed by so many quakes that any semblance of evenness was lost. The walls were not quite as bad, perhaps because most of them were lined in plastoid into which the wiring and stanchions had been set. Sagging patches in the lining showed that the rock behind it was not always firm, but it was only in a few places that the walls themselves had broken.

 

Under his feet, Quist felt the floor change subtly, become a little more level and less cluttered. He looked up. Ahead of them, just visible in the dim light, was a narrow platform jutting out into the tunnel. Doors yawned on the far side of it, exposing steps leading up, he supposed, to the surface. Standing at the platform, forlorn, faintly ridiculous, was what looked to Quist like a big, battered bird cage.

 

“Is that it?” he asked incredulously.

 

Addison looked piqued. “Perfectly sound really. These things were built to withstand earthquakes.”

 

Quist grabbed a stanchion and shook it. Somewhere deep in the mechanism, a spring parted with a despairing metallic sigh. He looked pointedly at Addison.

 

“It’ll be all right, you’ll see.” He hauled himself up onto the footplate and examined the dim interior. “Besides, we don’t have much choice. They’ll be watching everything else.”

 

Quist shook his head, first at the tram, then at the undeniable fact that Addison was right about security precautions. The police would have guards out everywhere. It was only a bare possibility that none would be on this old underground scenic railway. Abandoned for several years, it offered about their only chance of getting to Pittfalks, and any chance, no matter how remote, was worth taking. Muttering an incantation that might, to less rational ears, have sounded like a prayer, he hauled himself into the vehicle and glumly took a seat.

 

“Ready?” Addison called.

 

Quist didn’t answer, but took a firmer grip on the rail in front of him. In the cabin, Addison breathed deeply and pulled a lever.

 

The effect was immediate and startling. Riveted in his seat, Quist felt every hair on his body abruptly spring into the vertical, as if a mild electric generator had been plugged into the base of his spine. He yelped. All around the passenger cabin, sparks leaped like blue devils from rail to rail, lighting the ormolu elegancies of the brass decoration in an eerie violet glow. Underneath the floor, something was imitating a giant meat mincer devouring a live rhinoceros, a sound that made every spring and rivet in the cage howl with vibration.

 

Before the sound had risen to even half its potential resonance, Quist was on his feet and heading for the door, but he had only gone two steps when the world abruptly turned upside-down. Desperately, he watched the walls begin to lean, the floor to tilt. Grabbing a stanchion, he hung on almost calmly as the cabin moved from vertical to horizontal, then into a complete roll. Dust, mud, water, bits of wood, and a few pounds of miscellaneous components showered down on him as he stood, shakily, in the centre of the cabin trying to find enough energy to scream.

 

Somewhere in the miscellany of movements going on around him, Quist detected a hint of forward motion. From the cabin door, Addison beamed out at him.

 

“We’re off,” he said. “Make yourself comfortable. We’ll be there in no time.”

 

Ten minutes later, Quist had combed most of the rubbish out of his hair, and rediscovered the use of his knees. He was even finding the journey mildly interesting. Once its frozen machinery had been rammed back into action, the scenic tram ran quite well, sliding along in the centre of the tunnel on its cushions of electromagnetic current that were smoother than any wheels. Addison’s command of gear-changing was sketchy, and such occasions were usually like minor earthquakes, but for the most part he made up for his ignorance with tremendous flair. Watching the walls howl by at some sixty miles an hour, Quist had to admit that this way of getting to Pittfalks had much to recommend it.

 

Squeezing into the cabin, he leaned back against the wall and watched the dark mouth of the tunnel rise endlessly to devour them.

 

“How far is it?” Quist called.

 

“Maybe one hundred miles—I’m not sure. Most of the scenic spots are farther ahead, and the tunnel twists about a little just there. But we seem safe enough. The police might...”

 

He stopped abruptly.

 

Quist followed his gaze. There were lights in the tunnel ahead.

 

“Police?”

 

“Who else would be down here?” Addison said.

 

Quist nodded bleakly.

 

“Any suggestions?” Addison asked.

 

“My book doesn’t cover this,” Quist said. “We’ll have to play it by ear.”

 

They exchanged a long glance. Then Addison reached for the control lever and dragged it back as far as it would go. Under them, the machine leaped like a startled horse, and lunged forward down the tunnel. Noises which had been simple rattles grew suddenly into thunderous shudderings that threatened to tear the machine apart. Quist grabbed a handhold, braced himself, and crashed his foot through the front window. It sagged, the plastic frame fell from its rotten surround, and a blast of cold damp air hit him in the face. Half-closing his eyes against the wind, he sent three shots down the tunnel in the general direction of the lights.

 

In the brief flash from the explosive bullets, he glimpsed three men standing in the tunnel, one of them with a lamp, the other two holding guns. Obviously a routine patrol sent down to check on a remote possibility. The tram was almost on top of them now, and Quist gambled that they would be too surprised to offer much resistance. He snapped off two more shots, and this time saw the lamp discarded in the centre of the tunnel. A moment later they had overrun it. Two shots smashed into the back of the cab, but neither did any damage, and soon they were well out of range.

 

* * * *

 

Addison gasped out the breath he had held for at least a minute. “We were lucky,” he said.

 

“Yes. We were—that time,” Quist said. “I don’t fancy our chances with the next lot.”

 

Addison frowned. “They’ll probably wait somewhere in the glass caverns. The tunnel’s so twisted there that we couldn’t go fast if we wanted to.”

 

“Is there any place nearer where we can get off the track?”

 

“No. There aren’t any stations this far out. People used to make a day trip out here to the caverns. It was . . .” He stopped. “What sort of ammunition does that gun have?” he asked.

 

Quist took a clip from his pocket and held it up for Addison’s inspection. With his thumb, he squeezed out one of the hundred projectiles the clip held, letting the match-head sized bullet roll onto his cupped palm.

 

“High velocity explosive, detonate on impact. Why?”

 

Addison indicated the walls of the tunnel sliding by outside the cabin. For the first time, Quist noticed that the polished rock was interspersed with streaks of volcanic glass, flowing like milky emerald across the porous black stratum.

 

“Would it go very deep into this?”

 

“A foot, maybe ...”

 

“That should do it. Load up a full clip and be ready to shoot when I tell you.”

 

Quist opened his mouth to ask the inevitable questions, but Addison had cut in the throttle again, and the sounds of tortured machinery made conversation impossible. He crouched down, just under the draught from the window, and waited with resignation.

 

Soon there was a new quality to the light in the tunnel. Looking up, Quist saw that the roof was becoming loftier and more transparent, a vaulted gallery that glowed greenly with filtered sunlight. A moment later they swung into a vast dome. The cave was a huge bubble blown in the mass of natural silica that made up this part of the planet, allowing Quist to see glimpses of the world outside; but distorted glimpses, swimming like images in a crazy mirror, sicklied into grotesques by the green light of the glass. Green light filled the cabin like water, lapping the cabin and their faces.

 

Skimming above the tracer line, the ancient tram rocked and rattled across the cavern in a shallow curve that could take it in a swing around the bubble, then out through a narrow tunnel a few hundred yards across the flat floor. Once they were in there they were trapped. Quist looked up at Addison, anticipating his plan. Addison looked around, pointed to Quist’s gun and nodded. Steadying his hand against the rearing motion of the cabin, he sighted at the far side of the cabin, took a deep breath, and fired.

 

The first shots were ranging ones only, sparkling in a random pattern over the face of the glass. Quist allowed for the cabin’s more subtle oscillations, sighted again, and this time held the trigger down. A stream of tiny explosive projectiles slashed into the glass wall, each one a tiny hammer blow driving a wedge of heat and vibration deep into the shell of silica. The dome began to ring, a howling off-key tintinnabulation that drowned out even the groaning mechanism of the tram. In front of them, the wall of the dome was looming nearer. Quist could see the fissures his shots had made, note every separate flash as the bullets exploded inside the glass.

 

But it was still intact. Jamming another clip into the gun, he set it to “Maximum penetration”, and blazed away. The wall loomed up. He could feel the shock waves of the explosions, the heat of melting glass on his face. Addison twisted the controls one last inch and heeled the tram over. With a scream of safety circuits, it left the rail and wobbled crazily towards the wall, balanced on its rickety electronic legs. Quist closed his eyes, ducked, and emptied the gun into the wall. Then he waited for the crash. But there was none. The grinding crunch started, then ceased almost immediately. Bits of debris showered down on him, and something hot brushed his hand. Then he was blinking in the sunlight. Squinting through the door, he saw farmland and haystacks skimming past a few feet from him. He stood up limply.

 

Behind him, the green glass dome, once a lidded eye that had peered suspiciously out at the countryside, now stared black-pupilled at the startled landscape, its iris starred with black blood-shot cracks. As he watched, the cracks widened, connected, and with a grinding like a steel skyscraper collapsing, the eye caved in.

 

Quist watched horrified, as the dome disintegrated into a smoking pile of dust and rubble, leaving a crater into which the upper parts of the mountain were beginning to slide. Addison glanced at the spectacle, and turned back to the controls.

 

“Yes, I thought something like that might happen.”

 

He wrenched suddenly at the lever and heaved the tram over a stone fence, leaving a few feet of brass stanchion jammed between some of its upper stones. Quist, his stomach turning over, hung grimly onto a rail and watched the fields go flying past only a few feet from his eyes. The tram’s repulsors, designed for the relatively gentle work of supporting the vehicle in a smooth cylindrical tunnel, were heaving like exhausted beasts at the demands Addison was making on them. Each time he hauled the lever around to skim past a tree trunk, or dragged it back to leap a farm house, the generators howled at a higher and more frenzied pitch.

 

Addison bent down and shouted in Quist’s ear.

 

“Not too far now—only about five or six miles as the crow flies.” He grinned—maniacally, Quist thought. “I say, isn’t this fun?”

 

For once in his life, Quist had nothing to say.

 

* * * *

 

VIII

 

They didn’t quite make it to Pittfalks, but looking back at the crater of the glass dome, now only dimly visible on the horizon, and the nearer ruin of the tram lying against a tree, smoke trickling from its burnt-out generators, Quist was forced to admit that the old rattle-trap had done very well. Then he turned away and addressed himself to the immediate problems of scaling the rough and nasty road to Pittfalks.

 

From the plain, Pittfalks Hill rose like a huge castle— black, volcanic and sinister. Patches of earth sown with greenery clung to its sides, but most of the mountain was glossy black rock, overlaid with the grey porous foam of pumice and ash. At the top, the town hung like a shabby collar around the neck of the hill, dribbling raggedly down to the lower levels in landslides of slums and rubbish tips. There was only one way to get to it, along a narrow twisting road whose ash surface was so ravaged by rain that it had all but eroded away. Struggling up the one-in-five grade, their shoes full of cinders, Addison and Quist were almost ready to wish that the tram had held out a few miles more.

 

Collapsing wearily onto a rock, Quist looked back down the road towards the fields they had crossed.

 

“Can you see anything?” Addison asked.

 

Quist shook his head.

 

“They’re out there somewhere I suppose. We can only hope they don’t know exactly where we’ve gone to. Breaking out of the dome must have put them off a bit.”

 

Addison grinned reminiscently at Quist’s mention of the dome and, fired with enthusiasm, stepped up his walking pace. Quist hauled himself up off the rock, cursed all enthusiasts, and set out after him.

 

Pittfalks was every bit as sinister as the mountain on which it was built. Wooden shacks clung to the steeply slanting hill, canted like grotesque wading birds on their unequal legs, while blockhouses of ash adobe stood among them, slowly disintegrating into mounds of grey-black mud. The few people they saw shambled about without interest, as grey and lifeless as the ash among which they lived.

 

Addison looked bleak. “The address is 7 Resub Street,” he said.

 

Quist looked around. There was only one street and they were in it. They walked along the middle of the road, found a shack with a number, then backtracked until they found seven. It was typical of the town, a leaning wreck of a house whose timbers had been bleached by the weather to a ghostly grey. The door hung open on its hinges, but dust drifts on the verandah showed that nobody had taken advantage of the silent invitation to come in.

 

“I don’t think we need knock,” Quist said, pushing aside the door, which promptly collapsed.

 

Inside, the house’s one room was drifted deep in ash that stirred silently as they walked through it. Under the coating of dust, they could see signs of recent habitation—a portable stove, a tumbled pile of woven stuff that might have been a bed. Sharkey had only been in the city a few weeks, but already the dust had taken over, obliterating almost every sign of his presence. Quist felt obscurely sad for the little man. He was doomed to be forgotten. Every mark he made was brushed away by an unkind fate as soon as his back was turned. Except in his effect on other people, he did not exist at all. Perhaps that was why he had come to Quist with the relic. It gave him the faint promise of stature, the opportunity to be, if only briefly, a human being. But even that had failed, and he had sunk again, for the last time, beneath the grey surface of his destiny.

 

Addison was poking around at the back of the hut, probing behind the piles of musty garbage.

 

“There’s something here,” he said quietly, hauling back a leaning pile of rubbish.

 

Behind the crude camouflage was a trapdoor set into the floor. Quist mentally checked his picture of the house’s design. It was built lower than the others, and in one spot it did touch the ground, though the appearance was similar to the others that were raised on stilts above the ash. It could be accidental that this house was one of the few that could have a cellar. Or it could be very ingenious planning. Quist suspected the latter. There was entirely too much brain work evident in the placing of the trapdoor to make it a likely accident.

 

Addison probed at the trap and levered it upwards, revealing a square of total blackness. Quist’s torch probed into the hole, brushing a sagging length of shoring timber and a crumbling wall of rock.

 

“It probably isn’t safe,” Addison said doubtfully.

 

Quist steadied himself against the wall and backed gingerly down the ladder inside the trapdoor. His smile was sardonic.

 

“Scared?” he asked, and disappeared into the darkness.

 

Addison opened his mouth to reply, closed it again, and followed the other man.

 

Groping in the darkness, Quist wondered what he was doing here. All his training cried out against taking such a step, but something about this case was making that warning voice harder to hear and easier to ignore. Addison was mostly to blame of course. The man was insane—or perhaps just an enthusiast on a scale Quist had never encountered before. Whatever its ramifications, his disease was catching. Backing down the rickety ladder into a pit that might offer anything from asphyxiation under tons of wet ash, to a spider bite, Quist belatedly realised that he had come down with a bad case of galloping hunt-fever. He could only hope it wasn’t fatal.

 

At the fifth step, Addison felt wet ash under his feet and gratefully took out his torch. The chamber was small and damply claustrophobic. Timbers of considerable dissolution held back the walls, most of them ash-veined with crumbling volcanic rock. Above him, he could see the faint square of the trapdoor, but the other exit appeared to be a narrow sloping gallery leading off at the other end of the chamber.

 

His light revealed only a few yards of tunnel before a turn cut off the beam.

 

“You wouldn’t stop now,” Addison said anxiously, “would you?”

 

Quist shook his head and started down the tunnel.

 

At the turn, they discovered nothing more interesting than another chamber, almost identical to the first. He flashed his light about, and saw walls similar to those in the other cellar. It was only by accident that he happened to glance down towards the floor. When he did, he saw the grave.

 

It was a precise and workman-like piece of digging, sharp-edged enough to have been measured with a ruler. He moved cautiously to the edge and looked down. The bottom was not immediately visible, but it seemed to be empty. Addison was watching him nervously.

 

“Is there ...”

 

“No, it’s empty,” Quist said. “Or it seems to be. I’ll . . .”

 

He took one step closer. It was only when his foot sank easily into the soggy lip of the hole, that he realised how soft the ash was. Hurriedly he pulled back, but by then the whole edge of the grave was crumbling. He called out frantically, but there was nothing Addison could do. Briefly he saw the beam of his torch flash across the roof of the chamber as it flew from his hand. Then he was tumbling into a pool of blackness.

 

* * * *

 

The pool of blackness was wet. His impressions of the fall were garbled and agonised, but the main one was of its brevity. A few seconds tumbling down the hole, clawing at the sides and pulling clods of soggy ash down into his face, had changed almost magically to a tumbling descent in a light of blinding suddenness. Then, at the foot of this, abrupt subsidence into liquid; green drowning liquid.

 

Spluttering, Quist struck for the surface, forcing his laboring lungs to hold out against the pressure. He came into the air like a blowing whale, inhaled gratefully, and floundered for his bearings. Through his stinging eyes he saw the edge of the water, a pool’s balustrade, and struck out for it, hauling himself up on to the dry path and gasping until he got his breath back. Then he looked around.

 

He had landed in a pool. More like a lake really, because its edges curved away from him in a series of intricate arabesques to lose themselves in the gardens. Or what had once been gardens. Now they were a jungle of vines and weeds that rioted across the paths, shouldering the marble slabs out of their way with slow arrogance. The lake was choked with fallen leaves and slime, and behind him, Quist could see where he had fallen by the gap torn in the green film of vegetation that had gathered on the surface over the years.

 

Above him, the roof, glowing with opalescent light, curved away like a white sky enclosing the whole chamber. He followed its curve as far as he could, then continued it in his imagination as it became a sheer wall down which the gardens cascaded a thousand feet to the ground. From outside it looked like a mountain—inside, it was a hanging garden that dwarfed anything he had ever seen.

 

Stunned, Quist sat on the path and looked about. New impressions crowded in on him, of the gardens and their strange configuration, unlike anything Earthly, of the plants, their pattern, garbled now by long disuse, but still oddly alien in their texture and colour.

 

Alien.

 

That would explain a great deal.

 

Slowly, Quist felt the heat in his blood dying. It had been fun while it lasted, but now he had solved the mystery and it was time to get back to work. Wistfully he took one look at the gardens, at their weirdly beautiful sky; then he started his search for a ladder.

 

* * * *

 

IX

 

The scene in Obolensky’s office was vastly different from that of a few days ago. Gone was the drama and awe. Now the room looked like any office, the men in it like men anywhere who had a problem and were trying to solve it. The greatest change was in Obolensky. From a towering figure the President of Napoleon 6 had crumbled to a tired old man. For years he had been running on his reserves, and now he was ready to collapse. Recognising this, Quist had scouted the other members of his staff and picked out a few candidates who might do for future presidents. They were waiting outside for his signal. But that particular drama would have to wait.

 

Obolensky leaned back in his chair, his eyes closed. Quist tried to think of something suitable to say, but bis mind suggested nothing. Quietly he took another sheaf of reports and photographs from the desk and leafed through them.

 

When Obolensky found that the secret of Napoleon was out, he had not resisted Quist’s demand for the original survey reports of the first colony. They ran to hundreds of bales, boxes and packets, papers detailed enough to make even a survey team envious. It would take years to evaluate all of the information. Quist could only pick at the edges and send back to Earth what he considered to be vital data.

 

The first papers in his hand were geological tables analysing the seismographic survey of the plains, indicating where other remains were likely to be found. Many of them gave unusual readings. Quist was astonished at the number of sites. The whole planet was alive with remains—half of the land must have been under cultivation and settlement, yet not a sign remained. It was impossible to imagine the horror of the seismic disturbance that had ravaged the planet and engulfed a whole civilisation in lava and ash. Even the photographs could only suggest the extent of it.

 

The gardens, Quist found, were just a hint of what lay under the surface. In his hands he held photographs of cities, power stations, docks, airports, all of which had been cleared away, photographed, then covered again.

 

He dropped the pile onto the desk.

 

“I can’t believe it!” he said incredulously.

 

Obolensky opened his eyes slowly, unlidding them with infinite weariness. “Why is it so incredible?”

 

“But a whole civilisation ...”

 

“If you had been on Napoleon back in the early days, you might have understood. It was a tough world—the toughest; those volcanoes were unbelievable. They could easily have engulfed a civilisation. They nearly got us, too.”

 

“How long after you landed did you find the ruins?”

 

“Almost as soon as we arrived,” Obolensky said, “but it was only a bit of pottery and few walls. We assumed it was Vegan; they came down through these systems at one time. Then, about six months later, we came across the first city.”

 

“It would have been a lot easier if you had reported it.”

 

“We couldn’t—not then. We’d worked day and night for half a year to establish ourselves on the planet. Hundreds had died. We couldn’t give it up then, not for a lot of ruins. So I made the decision. The excavations were filled up, the people who found it bound to secrecy. The false report we filed seemed to satisfy the Bureau. We thought we’d got away with it.”

 

“You did, for a while,” Quist said, “but sooner or later someone would have discovered what was going on. The ethnologists for instance. I wouldn’t be surprised if one of them hadn’t discovered signs in neighbouring systems of settlement around here. They would have run a check soon, and the same thing would have happened.”

 

Obolensky looked up, his eyes pale and lifeless.

 

“I take it you intend to recommend that Napoleon be quarantined?”

 

Quist nodded, feeling like an executioner.

 

“But you’ll be amply provided for. There are any number of worlds out here that would suit you. Most of them more pleasant than Napoleon.”

 

There was no reply from Obolensky. Slowly he turned and looked out of the window at the distant black basalt plains. Quist knew what he was thinking. Napoleon 6 was no paradise. It was vicious, uncomfortable, deadly. But it was home. Nothing could ever replace it. Unless…

 

Quist filed his idea away, and settled down to sorting through the material.

 

The interior of the ship looked almost new to Quist when he climbed back into the cabin. At his entrance, Bookworm broke into an uncharacteristic blaze of lights, flickering his indicators up and down the spectrum in a brief coruscation.

 

“Glad to see me, Bookworm?”

 

“The phrase has no meaning for me, Quist. I am a machine. Machines have no emotions, emotions being merely . . .”

 

Quist grinned. “Sure,” he said, slapping its casing companionably. “Save the commercial. I’ve got a job to do. Write me a book.”

 

Somewhere inside the computer, memory banks swung silently into place, connecting up to the printing centre deep in its interior.

 

“What about, Quist?”

 

Quist leaned back in his chair, and stared reflectively at the ceiling.

 

“It’s about colonisation,” he said. “I’ll dictate an outline.”

 

Half an hour later it was finished. Taking a freshly printed copy off the top of the pile, Quist examined it critically. The cover screamed at him: “Fighting World”, by H. de Witt Prendergast. He leafed through it.

 

Ajax is the toughest planet I’ve ever heard of, and I’ve seen plenty. My first hours there were brutal, bloody, almost bad enough to cost me my life. I listened incredulously to the howl of the banshee bears outside as they tore at each other in their savage mating battles. The blood . . .

 

There was more.

 

“Is there really a planet like this, Bookworm?”

 

“Yes, of course. You told me you wanted it to be authentic.”

 

“Where is it?”

 

“Out about four light-years from here, in the Imperial sector. Mind you, I have deviated a little from the survey reports—dramatic licence, you know—but substantially it’s true. I wouldn’t advise you to emigrate, if you know what’s good for you.”

 

“There’s no risk of that But I have an’ idea that Obolensky and his people might just nominate Ajax as their choice of a new world when referendum time comes round.”

 

He loaded up with a pile of the newly printed books and hauled them to the door.

 

“I’ll spread these around. Off-load the rest. I’ll get someone to pick them up. And better warm up the engines—I can’t wait to get away from here.”

 

* * * *

 

It took a few hours to spread the books around where they would be “discovered” by chance in piles of technical material and novels. Knowing the people of Napoleon 6, he was sure the book’s popularity would spread quickly, and what was more important, into the right places. When he was finished, he returned gratefully to the ship. It had been a hard few weeks. The thunder of the engines during take-off was almost a lullaby. He drifted—then woke with a start.

 

“Bookworm,” he said, sitting down at the console, “I’m going to write my report.”

 

“Now? You usually put it off for months.”

 

“Those were the old days. I’m a new man. Record.”

 

“Recording.”

 

Quist took a deep breath.

 

“In pursuance of instructions, I landed on Napoleon 6— give the co-ordinates, Bookworm—for the purposes of distributing literature and technical material . . .”

 

There was more, much more. Descriptions of the interview with Obolensky, the shooting, the meeting with Addison. Then the meat:

 

“Investigating the situation on Napoleon 6 was rendered almost impossible by the extreme wariness of the people, and the conspiracy of silence imposed on those in charge, by Obolensky’s personal popularity. I, therefore, decided to try a surprise-system based on certain facts discovered during private researches into literature of the twentieth century.

 

“During that period, a type of fiction known as the ‘detective story’ became popular. In some areas, as much as sixty per cent of the population were continual and dedicated readers of these so-called ‘whodunits’.”

 

“Who ... what?” Bookworm muttered.

 

“Look it up,” Quist said, “and keep recording.

 

“Forced by the popularity to produce more and better detective stories every month, writers of this fiction formulated, by trial and error, a set of rules and conventions that could be used as motivations and behaviour patterns for their characters. After decades of elaboration and exploration, these patterns became stylised to a degree unknown even in the rigid rules of opera. Detective stories became totally predictable, the random element being the actions of the criminal and his motivations, both of which were discovered by the protagonist using the ritual patterns of the form.

 

“However, despite the popularity of such forms, few people thought to put into practice the ideas of these writers. It was this idea which suggested the form of my inquiries on Napoleon 6. After running the available data through the computer, I extracted a series of tables illustrating the probabilities based on various reactions on the part of those I wished to contact. I then hired an office, advertised myself as a ‘private detective’ and waited for their reaction.

 

“As expected, it fell within the range of normal fictional reactions, proving that the writers of these stories had, by continual refinement, hit on an almost automatically exact method of information recovery from the random mass of a civilisation. The very people I wished to meet were drawn, by perfectly reasonable curiosity, to contact me. These included the police, and by computing the exact time when their diffidence and caution was likely to be overcome by their curiosity, I was able to anticipate their arrival to the minute. The rules governing other contacts were similarly viable under experimental conditions.”

 

“Quist,” Bookworm broke in. “You’re up to something.”

 

“What do you mean?” Quist said, groping under the console for a file he had placed there a week ago.

 

“You know, this isn’t like your normal reports. It’s . . .”

 

“Just record it,” Quist said, dumping the parcel down in front of him.

 

“In view of the success of this plan,” he went on, grinning now, “I suggest that details of it be circulated to all librarians on active service. I have prepared a schedule of the system and intend to read it into my report.”

 

“The title,” he went on, opening the file, “is ‘Say It With Bullets’.”