It started innocently enough. No, strike that. Innocence was long gone. It started the usual way for me: I was sent for.
Did that sound strange? I suppose it was. There were very few of us, at least of those of us who had jobs worth having, who went to their work instead of having it come to them. I had to put up with it, though. A policeman’s lot was not a happy one.
My bedroom alarm sounded. My sleeping accommodations were strictly solo, even though the room was full sized. RHIP. “Rank hath its privileges,” as the ancients used to say. I did have rank. The alarm was quiet; I woke easily. That is, it was easy for whoever or whatever woke me, but on me it was murder.
When I was waked at night, it usually was.
I didn’t stop for details, just the place. There were few reliable witnesses, and I gave up listening to gory details when a ravishing and ravished blonde turned out to be a middle-aged male heart-attack victim.
My police bug looked just like a heli-cab, but it was a quick animal of metal and plastic with more horsepower than standard. That didn’t show. It also had manual controls and fuel cells, so I could leave the roadways. I never needed to. I was really not the adventurous sort.
The robot traffic controls phased me through non-stop. I got there fast, and most of the time that was enough. Either the killing was a spur of the moment thing, and thereby either very quick or very difficult, or somebody was so extremely clever as to tie a noose around his own neck. A figurative noose; we didn’t use the real thing any more. There were more humane ways of ultimate disposal, and in most cases restraining was a better solution, socially. That was not my worry.
This was going to be different. I knew it immediately; I felt it in my bones. Different, and a new kind of torment.
It could have been a sex crime. They’re always bad, but this smelt worse. The victim was male—I guessed his age at seventeen, possibly nineteen. He was either nude or naked, depending on whether he wanted to be that way. Had wanted to be that way. He lay on his right side, legs bent up acutely. It did not look like a foetal position; for one thing, his trunk was bent back rather than forward. One of his arms was under him, the other thrown back with the elbow bent in a way unbroken bones could not manage. He was heavily bruised, and his face was bloody.
His scalp had been shaved smooth. Bald.
I looked up. Cabs passed a few feet overhead, two or three going by within a few seconds. It was going to be interesting, finding out which of them had carried him here. I would have bet willingly that the corpse had been pushed or rolled over the railing of a taxi.
The stars, far beyond, twinkled at me, laughing.
I turned back to the boy. That’s all he was, that’s all he had been, a boy. He had been dead long enough so that rigor mortis had come and gone. The robosurg would find out quickly how long. His fingertips would tell who he had been. Then, a canvass of his family, his friends, his credit card account—that would be it. There would be questions to answer, of course.
I wondered how he had been killed. Oh well, the robosurg would find that out, too, and maybe give a clue about where. I wondered if he’d waited long to die. The expression on his face told me that he had known that he was being had. Many go limp, others stay stiff.
I wondered who had killed him. How could the murderer ever believe that he could get away from us, from me?
As the robots moved in and picked him up, I saw something: a wound in his abdomen, about twenty-five millimeters long, and narrow. A stabbing. I hadn’t seen one of those in—how long?—fifteen years.
He hadn’t necessarily died of it. The opening was small, and we didn’t have an awful lot of knives around with long, narrow blades. It was too low to have been aimed at a vital spot, anyway. It might have penetrated only into the flat belly muscles and done no important damage except cause bleeding. And pain.
There was little external blood. Either he had been washed, or he had been practically dead when he was stabbed.
The meat wagon lifted him away and I examined the alley again. We were outside the dome area of City proper, in the almost deserted warehouse storage sector. There was an amusement park near here—an amusement park in the new sense—and that accounted for the volume of cab traffic overhead.
It might also account for the murder. The unwritten law was repealed, but now and then it was still enforced. A post thirty-five husband still could easily take exception to his wife’s housebreaking a teen-age boy in the fashion that is as old as mankind, and, for that matter, most of the other high mammals.
Over the past twenty years, human feet had probably walked in this alley ten or twelve times, very likely less than that. I might have been the second. It was a robot area, a working place, not like the stevedore stages where the descendants of men whose muscles had once provided necessities for them and their families still play-acted the earning of a living.
A robot had found the body, its sensors had identified it as possibly human (confused, no doubt, by its failure to radiate heat), and it had requested a management decision. Management decisions were furnished by watchmen (custodial specialists) who responded to such calls—when, as and if there were any.
I would have to get a statement from the man. In the meantime, I went through the alley again. If I were asked what were the most important differences between human beings and robots, my profession would have forced me to say, “Robots are neat.”
Not always, but exceptions were accidental: leaking oil, possibly paint scraped off going around a corner where specified clearances did not obtain and the like. But essentially they were neat. They didn’t leave litter, like cigarette butts, nor were they careless. Nor stupid, if they were properly programmed.
My runner was parked at the end of the alley. I couldn’t enter unless I used my overriding controls, because there were no guide tracks here. I was hardened to such things by my occupation, and I didn’t mind a walk of a couple of hundred meters. (My secret was, it was easier to move around on the job than to spend time in a gymnasium—and much more productive.) I wanted light, so I went back to the bug and removed one of the headlights (that was another extra on a police machine) and carried it back on its extension cord.
The alley was bare and clean. The sheet metal roof of one of the low buildings was crushed where the body had fallen on it. In giving, it had protected the corpse, so I was grateful.
There was a fourteen month old fax sheet that I tonged up; most likely just wind-blow debris. I was ready to leave when I saw something else, lying near the spot where the corpse had been. It hadn’t been there when I came in—I had looked that area over carefully—so it might have been in or on the body, and dislodged when it was removed. It could have come from the murder scene. I tonged it.
A piece of paper. No, cardboard. About three or four millimeters wide, less than half that thick and some twenty millimeters long. One end was burned, the other had been torn. Far too small to carry a meaningful fingerprint, and the odds were that any fragments would be, at best, blurred. What manner of thing was it?
I directed routine autopsy and identification procedures, and advised that I would not want the results before ten the next morning. I went home and back to bed. On the way, I also directed that the alley be sealed off, and that robot cleaners be sent in with directions to turn over anything not necessarily found in such a place to my office. Which meant me.
Last, I left a “first-thing” call for my secretary. I didn’t know why, but I had a bothersome feeling. Call it a premonition, call it a male manifestation of the old maid syndrome (after all, I was a bachelor; at the age of forty-seven, a professional bachelor), call it anything you want, but as for me, it warned me to leave no tern unstoned and save up bricks for the seagulls, early in the game.
I went back to bed, but I couldn’t sleep. Perhaps I would have, but I couldn’t get my mind out of that alley, away from that boy.
Somebody once told me that I was a misogynist, a woman hater. I pretended to think about the idea, then announced that it was false, untrue, even libelous. I was impartial. I was not a misogynist. I was a misanthrope. I hated everybody.
I did. I hated people. Not persons, people, the milling, filthy mobs. There was so much good in the worst of us, and all that. But that part wasn’t in control when we got together in groups.
I never understood why the machine picked me for my job. In one way I did, of course. Who was better qualified than I to catch a murderer? But there were others who were cleverer, more quick witted and nimble tongued, better persuaders, with pleasanter personalities. Was it only because I was me, because I learned the lesson that I was diminished in the loss of any of my fellow men? Because I had had to learn that lesson?
Why did I so fear and hate all death—except my own?
I lay on my bed until dawn lighted my room. My apartment was my only ostentation. Larger than I needed, although by no means as large as my position entitled me to, high in the city above dome level and open to the morning sun. I had three full rooms: my four meter by three meter bedroom, my office (five meters long) and my “other‘’ room for necessary social functions, decorated as an old-fashioned living room.
The other paraphernalia beloved by my forerunners was disposed of. M’Pher, who had the position briefly just before me, actually had a human operate his bug—and that a special, oversize monster he called an “official limousine.” I did not have to add to my own honor and prestige, and therefore I reduced such things in keeping with my having work to do.
Besides, I was fat and forty—and bald. Such things merely made me look ridiculous. Amend that. More ridiculous.
I was sitting on the side of my bed, trying to decide whether to give up my pretense and admit that I was awake, or force myself to lie down again, when the ’vise chime sounded. It would have to be Betty, answering my call. I said “Hello” and she came on. There was no picture; I didn’t hold with having a ’vision pickup in the bedroom. Primarily because I let myself go to seed. I was no vision, just a sight.
Her voice was bright, cheerful, stimulating and therefore altogether an obscenity at that hour. “What’s up, boss?” she asked, as if she damned well didn’t know. This time I’d fix her, her and her antique mania. I’d gone through the same phase myself, a long time ago, and I remembered the perfect phrase:
“We’ve got a live one.” Ideal, mid-twentieth trite verbiage.
I could almost hear her strip gears mentally, whatever that meant (it was another of those expressions, having to do with putting a machine hors de combat somehow). Of course, she was a person. Her secretary was a robot. She boggled at the expression I used, then recognized it as indicating that we had a critical emergency.
An emergency, naturally, was any situation which required immediate correction. A critical emergency was one where things would get worse rapidly, while a non-critical did not promise further decay.
“What sort?”
I did like her. She was smart, reliable, flexible and even quite attractive. Luckily, she never found out how to make the most of her good points. Homicide department was no place for happily married people. Homicide department was no place for happy people. At least, we never had any.
“Kid. Boy, specifically. Post puberty, pre full physical growth maturity. Estimated age, seventeen, plus two minus one. Violent murder. Abdominal stab wound, marks of beating. Precise cause of death undetermined. Found by robot in warehouse area.”
“No chance of accident?”
“He had been stripped as naked as a peeled egg. Not a stitch on him, no trace of his clothing. Dumped from a copter. Oh, yes, his head was shaved. All his hair, except his eyebrows.”
“Just his head?”
I thought back. “Yes.”
A long pause, while she thought Freudian thoughts. I knew she would come to the same conclusion I had when she saw the body.
When she was ready, I continued, “I asked for a report at ten, but it’s probably finished now. I ordered a quick freeze until the next of kin can take the delicti off our hands, of course.” She didn’t need to answer, so she didn’t. What I was describing was as routine as eating breakfast.
I left her there and went into the bath. The shower came on as she spoke to me again, but the ’phone compensated by increasing volume. Naturally, I didn’t have a ’vision pickup in the bath, either. Many did.
“Any ideas?” she asked.
“Only the obvious, and it’s still quite possible.” A jealous husband, or more likely boy friend. A man whose woman was cooling off, and who resented finding out why. But why the beating? Ninety per cent of the time, anyone caught with another male’s female just runs.
It might have been that he’d had no way to escape. Or he could have made the mistake of getting caught with his pants only half off. If there were a fight, that kind of fight, though, it should have lasted long enough to account for all the damage. He looked as if someone, or some two or more, had kicked him around while he was helpless.
Betty didn’t say another word while I washed and shaved. When I entered my office, her full-length image was on the screen. She didn’t look at me. She faced me, but she had dialed a different picture and now she manipulated a hand control so that she could turn the subject around and examine all sides, all features.
Finally she switched it off. “I go along with everything you said,” she agreed. No mean admission. She meant what I had thought as well as what I had spoken. I had four secretaries before I found one who would fight with me to my satisfaction. Not physically, of course; we rarely see each other personally.
The last commissioner of homicide, M’Pher, had had a mammoth organization. Mammoths couldn’t have been too well organized—they were extinct. So when I was pulled in from the outside I made changes.
Where there had been at least twenty persons reporting directly, there was now one secretary. The number of people in my department, compared to the wildest dreams of a commissioner in the early days of scientific investigation, would not have been believed. And in the fact that I had managed to reduce the administration materially—well, that hadn’t happened since Gideon.
I had the same kind of artillery Gideon had.
I hadn’t let anyone go. Good men were hard to find and dedicated men almost impossible. That was the truth, even with twenty-five or thirty to apply for every valid job that opened. Here was I, in a real position, and I didn’t even ask for it! Hah!
The number of cases per capita of population wouldn’t have been believed a few years back, either. It was small. Murder was not popular, these days. There were a good number of reasons. One of them was that murder wasn’t easy to get away with any more.
There was a time, say in the troubled twentieth, when many killings simply weren’t recognized. That was practically ended when a trained post-mortem of body and surroundings was made for each and every death. There had to be some kind of use for all the surplus manpower.
Investigation was improved, step by step. Robots were handy: they could pick up a specimen without contaminating it with their own life processes. In this case, except for the watchman who confirmed the finding of the body and checked to insure that it was probably dead, no human hand had touched the corpse since the murderer pushed it out of his cab.
I assumed that he did have a cab, but that was safe. The number of private machines in this part of City was so small as to be negligible, not more than twenty or thirty thousand, including those like mine that were official duty cars, used by servicemen or inspectors for the various public systems.
City was a big place. The northern extreme was called Bangor, the other end Key West. It wasn’t continuous, of course. The segment that was my beat covered what used to be northern Rhode Island and eastern Massachusetts, centering more or less over Taunton.
We had many domes, not one. Everything from Warwick through the Attleboros came under one patchwork monster, and an irregular trail staggered off northward to the Boston complex, while another hooked east over Taunton to Fall River, New Bedford and parts of Cape Cod.
All this was my beat. I was commissioner. I investigated every murder that took place, up to a dozen a year.
Only a dozen. Two hundred years ago, when the population was a third of what I had, there might have been two or three dozen a year just in Boston.
There was more to the reduction of homicide than just having plenty of policemen. Part of it was, well, public relations. Press agentry, they used to call it. “Murderers get caught.” The lesson started in grammar school.
“Killers can’t get away.” Oh, some still tried, and any kind of investigation was less than perfect. But if somebody did manage, he certainly couldn’t go around bragging.
That was what I did with my excess personnel. Training. Visiting schools, athletic clubs and any and every place where the young held out. When an adult needed retraining, he’d be turned over to someone perhaps more forceful than I. He was restrained very effectively. Right from scratch.
Just as I was.
I set my department up on a cell basis. Most cases I didn’t deal with myself, except to meddle around at the start. There was an old question: Quis custodiet ipsos custodies? I did. The machine watched me. I didn’t care who watched the machine.
I had been sitting back, watching Betty. Let us be frank: she was an old maid. I was an old bachelor, which sounded a lot nicer, but to all practical ends added up to equivalents. Betty and I understood each other. But just the same we liked each other, so I imagine we were friends.
She’d never had a man. Certainly not full time, and I suspected never at all. She was no prude, however. If she had been neo-Vic, she wouldn’t have been able to take the hard knocks her job gave her. That “modesty” nonsense that was so dominant in public thinking was, to us, for the birds.
She had been examining our customer. I was curious to find out what she had noticed that I hadn’t, how her opinions agreed with mine and where they differed. As I said, she was strong-willed, and if she didn’t see things the same way I did, she’d let me know. Quickly, sharply, and without any pretense of respect. I could have loved her. I probably did, but I needed her too much to admit it.
I watched her, not him. I had seen him, even though he hadn’t been set up for display then. I had seen him as he had been found, and I didn’t want to change my mental picture until I had extracted all the data from it that was to be had.
I hadn’t touched the body. I didn’t expect to, for all of that. Most likely, no human hands would ever contact it again.
Betty switched to me and asked, “Do you want me to punch in my own description?”
Of course I did, and she knew it. She was doing so.
Her asking was an apology for not speaking to me immediately. I was perfectly content to wait. I punched the order-transmit stud and asked for the identification of the body.
The green light on my wall that meant the computer was operating flashed, and the datascreen lighted. The words appeared: “Subject not registered.” I pushed cancel, then query. Was it a malfunction?
The reply to query came immediately. The datascreen lighted again. “Subject not registered.”
I ordered a new identification search, and waited. Before, the time needed had varied between barely perceptible and a half second. Now it stayed on in the green. Ten seconds, twelve, fifteen, After twenty-two seconds, the screen lighted again. “Subject not registered.”
“Subject not registered” That meant there was no record anywhere on Earth, accessible to the computer, of the person, who had become our dead body. No birth certificate (which would have carried fingerprints), no school records, no credit cards, nothing.
Betty watched her screen, too. They were hooked up in parallel when we talked, so that both would have the same supplementary information. Her face was pale. Mine was probably white.
“Data request, all missing persons who come within ninety percent of characteristics of subject.” In other words, how many people were there whose whereabouts we didn’t know, who might have been mistaken for the dead boy? That would take a few seconds. It did. Seven. The list of names ran up the screens, and the machine had been generous. After each name, a percent. The first was ninety-seven point thirteen, the last ninety point zero one.
“Betty, this time we earn our keep. Oh, yes, under the circumstances, I think I’m justified in putting our wonder boy—or boy wonder—under permanent hold.” I did. I didn’t do it often—never if the identification was quick unless there was something that looked strange, or some data that might be needed.
After all, cemetery space was scarce. It certainly wasn’t fair for a person to lock up almost a hundred kilos of perfectly reusable biological materials after he was done with them. Normal disposal was by cremation, with the ashes turned over to the next of kin if he wanted them. That way, most of the substance was reclaimed from the exhausted gases. Most of the time what was left wasn’t wanted either, and the whole thing was recycled.
When there was a question, though, it was a good idea to keep the evidence on hand.
The work and expense of embalming were substantially lessened. It was once a difficult, expensive and time-consuming process, and the structure and mechanics of the body were so extensively changed that the advisability, from a practical standpoint, wasn’t great. Anciently—very anciently—processing the remains took over a month. All the internal organs were removed and the entire thing was treated with bitumen. (The word “mummy” meant pitch. Did you know?)
By early modern times, say the late eighteenth to early twentieth centuries, this treatment was faster and better. So much better that a post-mortem performed on John Paul Jones a century after his death verified the original physician’s opinion. It was still rare for a body to be treated this way and quite expensive. It would be honest also to say that it was rare for the treatment to be that effective.
For us it was very fast and cheap. A coffin was taken from stock, a glass tube, open at one end and a flattened ellipsoid in cross section. The corpse was put inside, the tube filled with salt water and its open end sealed with a glass plate fused in place.
The specimen was irradiated, not in a pile but in a high voltage electron gadget, so that body, supporting fluid and transparent coffin were sterilized. Glass was impenetrable by microorganisms, and the boy would not require further attention until he was removed for incineration, or the glass broken.
I turned to Betty. The list of names still glowed on the datascreens. “Well?” I asked. She looked at the list, then back at me. She weighed facts and considered alternatives, including resignation. She gave in.
“Suppose I take half,” she volunteered.
“Good girl.” It wouldn’t be fun. She’d be ’vising people, telling them that, although according to the computer it couldn’t be their son, brother or sweetheart we had, we were establishing identity for a body, and would they care to make a positive identification, either negative or affirmative? It would not be true to say that tact was required. Tact wouldn’t be enough. A strong stomach would be necessary.
I took the top half of the list. They’d be closer misses, since the descriptions more nearly tallied.
In a few minutes the body would be ready. I waited for the door chime. (Yes, I was keeping it in my apartment. Where else?) I set it up so that the scanners viewed it up from about the diaphragm. If it had been female, I’d have dollied in on the upper shoulders.
My predecessor, old M’Pher, had been neo-Victorian, or at least he let the neo-Vics run him, and he had any bodies that were bottled dressed first. I didn’t. Not to save the cost of clothing, but because there might be an injury, a scar or a birthmark that clothing would hide. A couple of centuries back, a spy—in case the word is strange, it means a kind of political criminal—was caught because he tried to substitute for a person who had been circumcised. The spy hadn’t.
The kid wasn’t pretty in the tube. His face still showed stark terror. He must have waited, expecting death, perhaps for hours or even days. He was ugly with bruises, from one of his eyes that had been blackened on down to his wrists and ankles that were rubbed raw. He had been gagged, too.
It was a shame. Not for what he was—I never believed that he was first class citizen material—but for what he might have been.
He floated in the water. It was somewhat salty, to match his natural blood chemistry. That way there wouldn’t be any tendency for water either to seep into the body or leach out. We didn’t want him swelling or shriveling. There wasn’t any chemical need for water, but it supported him. If he were left lying in an empty tube, his weight would flatten tissues, change his appearance. That doesn’t happen to living people, because they don’t really stay still in one posture long. But he would.
As soon as Betty was tied in, so that she could project the same picture of him that I showed, I asked for the names and ’vise numbers of the next of kin. It was just as bad a job as I was afraid it would be. There were altogether too many who wanted to believe the worst.
There were even more who were too curious, who wanted to take over the remote pickup and run their own examinations. I didn’t dislike persons, but I hated people. I was not squeamish. I didn’t care if I embarrassed every neo-Vic in the country; if it would have helped me find his killer I would have showed his bare backside and equally naked frontside to every man, woman and child in Greater North America. But I still didn’t like either the carelessly inquisitive nor the sensation seeker.
In the end, it was negative. I asked for the next ten per cent, but these I took in groups, with a conference bridge on the ’visor circuits. It meant that I couldn’t see faces, but there were other benefits to be realized from it.
There is a distribution curve, a “bean” curve, that meant that as the number of percentage points of similarity decreased, the number of possibilities—missing people—would increase rapidly toward a peak. From seventy per cent down, we sent postcards, with three dimensional photographs. We kept right on going down to cellar level, covering every person missing on planet Earth for the last hundred fifty years. I even got one.
I sent a note to the Asteroid Legation, as well. It shouldn’t have been possible for him to be an off-worlder, a Moon boy or conie, because we should have received records of his coming in, with passport photos and ID prints, but I couldn’t reject mere improbabilities. After all, we were supposed to be unstoppable.
It would be plenty bad if we didn’t find the killer; but if we couldn’t even find out who the victim was, it’d be much worse. I wouldn’t have to worry about it long. At least not professionally, because it’d be someone else’s problem. I wouldn’t be commissioner any more.
I knew someone who would like that very much.
The department would be hit where it would be hurt the most, in the reputation. Our success in preventing crimes was responsible for much of our success in solving them. The last time a murder had gone detected and unsolved, it had started a landslide with thirty-three separate removals in a single year.
“Removals” was a euphemism.
One factor that made it difficult to hide a crime was our speed and efficiency in identification. A person’s fingerprints were recorded at birth. Then they were checked every six months when he turned in his credit card. At the ages of five, seven, ten, fourteen, eighteen, twenty-two, twenty-eight, thirty-five and fifty, his Bertillon measurements were recorded for statistics.
Money was a commodity most people, except antique nuts, never heard of. The reason was that our society was too rich to afford it. We had something better.
True enough. Go way back when—say to medieval or renaissance times. People were poor. The way we looked at it, even the rich were poor. The Borgia and Medici families couldn’t afford strawberries in January. The amounts of gold and silver available were almost constants. The accumulation from year to year was tiny. Back then, with people generally without wealth, it was feasible to melt down the metals and make money—tokens of value—from it.
Actual wealth increased year by year, faster than the people to share it. It came partly from exploitation of new sources, partly by profit realized on past investments, partly from better use of man’s muscle and brain power. Ships, for instance, sailed faster, were more likely to reach port and carried larger cargoes. The greater profit encouraged heavier investments.
With wealth increasing, the need for symbols of value overstepped the availability of precious metals. Substitutes were found, sometimes even produce like tobacco, but paper was the first adequate replacement. By the twentieth century it pushed gold out of circulation. By then silver had become too useful for such a valueless purpose.
Paper money had started on its way out before it was really in, replaced by a couple of new inventions applied to something older than the Merchant of Venice: credit. The computer could do the work of uncountable clerks, do it fast, do it cheap and do it with little likelihood of error. Especially when credit cards were used.
Credit cards. They became the universal symbol of worth. An unsung genius started using them to print with magnetic inks, so the computers could read them without human assistance and error.
Once they were issued by practically every company, just as once almost any bank had printed its own money. With a credit card for each purpose, for use in a single store or to purchase auto fuel from a single chain of vendors, they multiplied unchecked until one person might carry a dozen or twenty of them.
Then they became a Government monopoly, and our prime weapon, outside of the people on our staff. Everyone breathed a sigh of relief, except maybe the birchers and stilyegi (that was during their time). Now each person carried one. It was purposeless to steal one, because for any purchase of value it was still necessary to scrawl a signature, and the life of the card was limited.
The cards weren’t all the same, by any means. Mine was blue and yellow. Depending on the way I put it in the slot, I could charge purchases either to my own account or my department. Others had the same feature, but their charges were reviewed by their superiors.
Most people had the plain green cards of the private citizen, or the red of restricted credit, and there were the yellow of the pensioner and white of the minor child.
They were handy for us. Whatever anyone purchased, in services or material objects, was charged by them. A person couldn’t view a fax sheet outside his home, mount a walkway, take a cab or buy a disposuit without a card. That meant he couldn’t make a getaway or disguise himself without leaving a printed record.
Unlike taxis, there was no charge for walkways. But safety’s sake required limited access, and before a person could get on the moving belts, he had to slip his card into a slot. That way the computers know just how many people there are on each route, so they can adjust speeds and directions to prevent traffic problems. True?
There were violet credit cards, that were used by machines to make purchases.
The credit card was the real weapon against the criminal.
Incidentally, when I said “criminal,” I meant murderer. I was a specialist.
My admission chime sounded from the front door. “Open,” I ordered, and Betty came in. This was the third time that she had been in my apartment office in the fourteen years she had worked with me, and the fifth time we had met face to face.
I was expecting her. I figured she was as bothered as I was.
She walked to the boy. His tube coffin was standing in the corner of the room, away from the wall. It was on a bearing so that it could be turned freely, and she pushed it to start it revolving. “Pity,” she said, her first word since she entered.
I wondered why. Did she, like me, resent the world losing the possible benefits he might have brought, had he lived out his life? Did she feel sympathy for the boy’s parents, his possible brothers and sisters, or his probable girl friend? Or was it the evidence of sadism, the inflicting of pain and injury on him because it was sweet to his torturer?
I wouldn’t ask. I was afraid that it might be simply the loss of a male, of the affection and sex she might never have known, when she could have made such pleasant use of them.
I did not criticize her hunger. We who worked for homicide were miserable, wretched people, sick of the world and sick with the world. Was I in my own heart afraid that if I were not so twisted as I was, I would no longer know happiness? I was too full of the milk of human kindness, and in me it had gone sour.
She stepped back. “He was bound and gagged while he was still alive.”
Not only that, he had fought to get loose. His wrists were raw and bloody, and his ankles were bruised from struggling, and the gag had torn his mouth. He might have been unattended for some time after his capture.
His body had been washed. He had been at least partially covered some time during his torture, because the traces of blood over his abdomen showed a curious weave pattern where it had glued material to his body. It could have been a tarp or something of the sort, instead of clothing.
The wound was over eight centimeters below the navel. Whether or not it had been made to kill it had been made to cause pain, so it had been kept well away from the critical areas, such as the heart. He must have been lying flat on his back, because the blood had run down to the crotch and then down again to whatever surface he had been lying on. In back, he showed red all the way up to the nape of the neck.
His scalp was shaved. That was curious. No—I was curious; that was strange. Betty confirmed my thinking. “Possibly a symbolic castration.”
“Um,” I agreed; then: “I wonder why the symbolism? There was nothing at all preventing the real thing.” True. He had been gagged, and therefore unable to scream any more in agony than in terror. He had been bound, and could neither fight nor escape. He had undoubtedly tried all three.
I ordered a credit-card check of all copters that had crossed the warehouse area less than two days before the body was found, against a list of the relatives, friends, etc., of missing people. That would take hours of computer time, but it was a must.
The key to the problem was the identity of the victim. I wrote off my first guess, that it was a sex-linked crime.
If the corpse was supposed to remain an unknown, the clothing might have been removed because it would tell too much. It would not have been possible to provide other raiment, because the purchase would be traceable. Credit cards were used for everything from bubble gum to asteroid ships, and it was impossible to buy anything and not leave a record of who bought it.
I was bothered by something, bothered very much. I had come to a conclusion, made a deduction from valid facts. What annoyed me was that I didn’t know what it was.
What was I hiding from myself? And why was I hiding it?
I was the introspective sort. I knew that; it made my life a hell on Earth. The only thing I really knew right then was that I was getting a world’s record headache.
A jim-dandy skull splitter. The description occurred to me, and gave me another source of wonder. Why was I starting to spout these ancient gems of hackney? I had outgrown my own antique mania twenty-five years ago.
I must have looked tired, because I hadn’t slept. I skipped breakfast, too, but that was nothing. I missed a lot of meals and still stayed fat.
The fax dispenser chimed and started to read out. The chime meant that information of interest to me was included; other than that, I’m keyed for random read-outs, since I am heavy on coincidences and long chances (except gambling).
I didn’t look at it. It was already mid-afternoon, and there was so much that I hadn’t done. There was a report on the body to read; I was trying to find a murderer without knowing what had killed the victim, and when. The fax sheets could be of no interest. There was only one thing of importance to me in this bitter world, and that was to get my man.
Or have him gotten. I released the case to the entire department. If I’d been a telepath, I could have felt the sigh of relief and the salivation of eagerness from the dozen or more warped souls who were the artillery of homicide. They were like me: there would never be rest while the job was to be done.
I was the commissioner. It was my right to take over a case when it interested me, or to let whomsoever I would have the joy. That was about the only pleasure that any of us felt, ever—the thrill of the chase. I wondered, casually, what the German word would be for the pleasure of the hunt. Something incorporating Jagt, I suppose, and Lust “Jagtlust,” most likely.
Now I gave the puzzle to everyone. Immediately the datascreen showed me that one, two, an undetermined number, were picking-up the reins. The body started to turn as eager eyes began their examination, hoping that there was some mote of a clue that had escaped the old man.
The restrictions on the observations of outsiders hardly applied to department members. I hoped, for the sake of the boy, that there were no remnants of modesty. Somehow, and I wished I knew why, I was quite sure that, even alive, no one would have called him shy or expected any kind of treatment to embarrass him—or hoped to find any other decency, either.
Betty went to my other room and got me a drink, probably one of those mid-twentieth horrors that were so popular again, a martini or screwdriver or something. I didn’t know what, but it was big and had a high proportion of alcohol. I wasn’t a drinking man. Ordinary vices didn’t entertain me, nor did I retain my fondness for antiques.
I didn’t suppose Betty drank much, either, but she was enamored of relics of days gone by, as well as the hope of some day having a male of her own. This that she gave me was big and cold. She called it a “zombie.”
I suppose that I looked dead enough to qualify—but it wouldn’t have been a department matter, since I hadn’t been killed. Not that there wasn’t somebody willing.
I drank and in a few minutes went to sleep in a chair. One reason why I didn’t often use alcohol was that I reacted to it as to any other anesthetic.
I dreamed. The corpse there in my office was laughing at me. No, he didn’t come to life or anything, but I knew he was laughing. I recognized him both as a type and as an individual. He represented a class that I didn’t care for, a specific brand of young hood, but like all the rest of the genera, cheap, vile and violent, without respect for the person and property of another, with regard only for the immediate gratification of his own desires.
I was almost glad he was dead. Of all the people I hated, his was the kind I despised most of all. My kind. As I had been, not as I was.
He was more than just a type, though. He was an individual, and I knew him. I knew him and he knew me, and he floated there, laughing at me.
I knew more about him than Betty did, even though she had all the information I did. There was something specific that led me to understand the dead boy. The only trouble was, I didn’t know what it was.
I didn’t know.
I dreamed, and in my dreaming I went back to the alley where he had been found. I looked up, and far away the stars laughed at me. Even then, I knew, I could have turned to the corpse and said, “He’s—.” I wanted to laugh back at the heavens, because even then I had penetrated their secret, I had known what they knew.
What was it I knew?
I didn’t know. The corpse wouldn’t tell me. The stars wouldn’t tell me.
“Mica, mica, parva stella; Miror quaenam sis tambella; Splendens eminis in illo; Alba, vaelut, gemma caelo” Was that it, the secret of the stars? No scarcely. After all these years, my Latin wouldn’t even have been correct, anyway. And that was about the first thing I learned, thirty-odd years ago; in English, it went, “Twinkle, twinkle, little star—.” I knew it in that language.
I woke. Betty was gone. I walked over to the subject and stared at him, eye to eye. I would be damned if I’d let him beat me. It would please him for me to lose at my little project of finding his killer. I had the sneaky feeling that he and I had less than sympathy for each other. Amend that. Would have had.
The pain, the torment and fear, the agony of his dying were still written in the contortions of his face, in his clenched fists and staring eyes.
I punched the key for the robosurg’s report, and let it run once across the datascreen without any pauses.
On the second trip, I went through each item carefully, looking for something there that bothered me. It had found its way into the back of my mind and joined the other facts that were assembled, and added its voice to the Greek chorus that was there, laughing at me.
They were laughing along with the stars, and the corpse, and his killer.
I would be damned if I’d let them beat me, any of them. I’d be replaced as well; that was nothing. The honor and prestige of my job did not taste good to me: I’d had them too long. I lied. How I lied. The department had become my life.
The fax sheet was what I was afraid it would be. Headlines from one side to the other: mystery body puzzles police.
I told myself that it was really high praise. We were expected now, as a matter of course, to have the solution in only hours. This was almost a day old! I wondered why fax sheets seemed almost to ignore the dead boy, in order to heap calumny on my head.
They could keep it up for weeks, too. It wasn’t often that they got any kind of story, and in homicide it had been years since the report of an elimination had not been released within minutes of the arrest of the criminal. There was another factor, too. The editor was a man who did not love me. He was M’Pher, who had been homicide commissioner for only a few months when the machines had removed him and inserted me.
My memory flashed back to grammar school days. That was something the years changed little, the children assembling away from their homes for classes. The system would have been cheaper abandoned, but the results would not be good. People had to learn to live together, and the schools were the only place that taught that.
Automation had brought back what was once known as “cottage industry,” except that we didn’t have enough cottages to be worth counting. A man’s apartment was his castle, and also his workshop, whether he put words on tape or performed microrepairs on one-of-a-kind electronics circuits. Or tied dry flies for fishing, for all of that.
A child was brought into the world through the affection, intention or negligence of its parents, and lived with them alone until it was six years old. It played in supervised areas perhaps, and went with its mother or father shopping sometimes and that was all. (At that it was lucky, compared to earlier generations where father was just a strange commuting creature who came home after dark, left to catch a train before dawn and slept with mother.)
I thought about my own indoctrination lectures. The homicide commissioner then was many steps farther back than M’Pher, and his picture decorated the hall. We were told stories about the department’s cunning, perseverance, craft and perspicacity.
We were taught very carefully how important it was that we respect other people, and not do them damage either willfully or through negligence.
We were taught that the one real crime was not asking for help if we needed it, failing to recognize the shortcomings—quick temper, exaggerated responses, vindictiveness—that meant that we needed psychiatric aid, to prevent our wanting to kill or maim. We were taught that, if we would not live with our fellow men, perhaps we should live away from them, say beyond the asteroids.
I was one in whom the lectures did not bear fruit. Betty was another. I knew where there was a third, close to me, laughing at me.
He laughed the louder at that. No, not him. I was laughing. It was my own amusement, my own sarcasm, my own bitterness, that I was imputing to the corpse. He hadn’t felt anything, anything at all, in days. Had he? What was so important about that question?
I ran through the report again, looking for something. Yes! A paragraph, starting with the comment that there was some indication of recent sexual activity—scarcely news: when a healthy male dies violently, he often has an ejaculation—but semen reserves were not depleted. Then the kicker, three words that should have been in flickering red: “Sperm motility—zero.”
I laughed now, at my unconscious. So that was his secret!
The fax sheets had a time with me. Within three days they were calling for my “voluntary” resignation. After a week, they dropped the voluntary part of it, and in ten days they had forgotten about resigning. Had M’Pher forgotten that that was the only way my job can be vacated? Scarcely, because he wasn’t machine-picked, and he was ousted by the computers.
M’Pher was a political appointee. He had his place only while the person the machines wanted wasn’t available.
Retraining wasn’t an overnight deal.
It was a week before the idea penetrated to some creep that if one person could get away with murder, two could. He either wasn’t as smart or as lucky as my unknown killer. In his case the announcement of the apprehension of the killer was made within seconds of the news of the crime.
It gave the fax sheets more ammunition against me.
They were altogether too violent. M’Pher was editorializing on the front page about my incompetence, and the inability of a machine to pick the right man for such an important job.
The fax sheets dropped below decent minima. I had ceased reading them, just let the ribbons of plastic issue from the slot and disappear into the waste box.
With all the weapons the department has, such as free and unlimited access to computer data and systems, to the records compiled all over the face of the Earth during the last fifty years, to the fussy analysis equipment and examination procedures that almost pick the memory of a single molecule, the most important single factor went completely unnoticed.
That factor was the people manning the department. The unhappy, twisted, tormented satires of humanity who made it their life to track down the broken vessels who shatter the lives of others. We ran, night and day, without pause. We hated each other, we hated humanity, and all because we, each of us, hated ourselves.
Hate was the tension that made us go. It was the force that propelled us, as a stressed mainspring had once driven the movement of a watch. Or better, as the Romans had once twisted to drive the catapults, the ballistas and onagers that were their weapons of war against fortified cities. What was the name applied to all kinds of throwing devices powered that way? I forgot. No, I didn’t, either. The word was “torquati.”
But that’s what we were, the artillery of homicide department.
Run, killer, run. You’re a person, and we’re only machines. Run, killer. Run. We’ll still follow.
Run, killer. We hate you.
Now the fax sheets hated me. They hated me so much less than I hated me, they could scarcely matter.
Run, killer! You give us something to live for. Run!
Time was to be. I was patient, my customer was patient. His sympathy may not have been with me, nor mine with him, but he would be satisfied. If not, let him tell me. There was no point in premature action; I had a trail to uncover, and it was pleasant not to fight time.
Besides, I was amused at my department. The trick perspective played on them was strange.
The usual reason for dumping a body was that it could not be hidden. Not so this time! Disposing of a person’s remains was not easy. But it could be done. I had done it myself, a half dozen times or more. It was my hobby, trying to outguess the computer, and I was no amateur. Three times I succeeded.
Well, why not? We’d had the bodies in permanent hold a half century or more. The odds were that the killers had gone to their own rewards, and there was certainly nothing to be gained by keeping the clay of their victims around. Our reputation for efficiency was a lot older than our efficiency was.
Time drew near. The brief was drawn up, the warrants prepared and filed under “tentative, hold” and the court trial was scheduled. A summary was ready to be dropped in the hands of the district attorney. There was only one trouble. The murder for which the trial was the result hadn’t been committed. The killer I would have prosecuted hadn’t killed. His victim still breathed.
That was an awful problem for a homicide commissioner, but I solved it manfully.
I also scheduled the murder, and I was ready to provide the victim.
Time had come. I stood before the corpse and laughed in his face. Then I issued my invitations.
That was social usage. It certainly wasn’t normal for one to go to another’s home; the ’vision screens were as good as personal confrontation, or even better. If a person was a nuisance, he could be shut off. This, on the other hand, would be easier on me, and private, as well.
My datascreen lighted; it was signaled by an amber light. The machine was taking action on its own, and my heart stood still. I looked at the panel. “Disapprove your actions.” That was simple.
I punched in, “Will you stop them?”
“Reply withheld.”
I knew what expression was written on my face—hatred—but I felt relief trickle through and melt the horror that I had felt. Perhaps I was a pawn of the machine, myself, but I, too, was a player in this game. I would lay my wager!
The stage was set. My other room was redecorated. I would continue my play.
The three of them came at the appointed time: Betty, my secretary; his honor, O’Moore, the high mayor; and M’Pher, my predecessor, the editor. They sat down and looked around and stared at each other.
Betty’s eyes widened in surprise at the changes in the room, just as they had narrowed in hatred at the sight of thin, ascetic M’Pher. M’Pher was most astounded. “I never dreamed you had such good taste,” he admitted.
I only whispered thanks. By his standards, I didn’t have good taste. To me, antiques were merely items wrongfully spared destruction. The room was furnished in what, two centuries ago, had been called “American Colonial.” It was mid-twentieth phony. The furniture was supposed to look as if it were made of wood, light colored maple, and the upholstery resembled printed textiles. M’Pher sat by a table where an antique flintlock pistol lay.
“Be careful of that, will you? It’s functional.”
“You mean, you could load and fire it?” When he looked at me, I could see the four F’s in his eyes. Forty, fat, feeble and foolish. I admitted to all of them—at least the appearance. I had been commissioner for sixteen years, however. I had had more than one adversary. “It’s already loaded.”
“Oh.” He recoiled slightly, then examined it closely, but without touching it. He was mesmerized, like the mythical bird hypnotized by a serpent.
I wasn’t sure whether he believed me or not. I cared less. He had had the pistol drawn to his attention.
His honor sat opposite me, and Betty was at my right hand. That was fitting and proper. “Dulce et decorum” I thought, and smiled at the rest of the quotation.
The only set of circumstances where it was proper to invite one’s superior to a home was to tender a resignation. It was neither necessary nor proper for M’Pher to be present, but I would bend propriety into a pretzel this night. M’Pher was so happy of the chance to rub salt in a wound, he accepted eagerly.
When my guests were seated, I brought refreshments. That was not customary; it was poor taste for a person’s boss to accept his hospitality just as the rug was being pulled out, but O’Moore took the glass. He and I had always gotten along; he didn’t like me, but I’d always done a good job until now, and I wasn’t a politico, trying to springboard from my place to his.
While they still had their glasses up, I excused myself and left the room. I went back pushing a tube. I was sorry to ruin their appetites that way. I didn’t realize that anyone, especially a former commissioner, could be so squeamish.
“He’s naked!” M’Pher snapped, looking at Betty. She was innocence. “Why, sure enough, he is. Until you said so, I hadn’t noticed.”
M’Pher blushed. The red color was not becoming; his regular gray suited him much better. So he was neo-Vic. I wondered why. That prudish act was very common, as well as the mania for antiques. Neither one was comprehensible. I wondered if M’Pher cluttered up his apartment with chain mail.
He had his chance to dominate the conversation, and let it go. It was my turn again. O’Moore looked sick.
I said, simply enough, “I am sorry to go on record as stating that the killer of this boy will not be brought to trial.”
“If you hadn’t been such a bungling jackass,” M’Pher snapped at me, “he would have been caught. I’m glad you’re man enough to announce your incompetence.”
I stared at him. I had practiced the expression of blankness with an admixture of incredulity and a seasoning of curiosity. I said, “I beg your pardon?”
His expression was just as readable, but scarcely pre-arranged—open, utter hostility and burning hate. “I said, I’m glad you admit your incompetence! My readers will be glad to know that the homicide department is changing its head.”
Who hated me more, he or I? He put a great deal of value on the position I’d taken away from him, far more than was justified, and after all these years he’d never have a chance to get it back. “I am very sorry.” I still had to be meek and mild. “I made no admission of the sort. I merely stated that the killer of this boy will not, can not, be brought to trial.”
“Isn’t that the same thing?”
“By no means. It’s simply that the killer is outside our jurisdiction. He’s dead himself.”
Betty was fastest on the uptake. “You’ve caught the killer!” Her face was eager, alert, happy. She was a good one. She was happy for me in success, and eager to support me in my difficulties.
“Sorry.” I kept my blank expression. Then, quietly: “But I know who he was. Rather, who one of the killers was.”
The four faces in front of me showed four expressions. Betty’s, simple joy; O’Moore was incredulous, and happy too; M’Pher showed pained astonishment, as if he’d just discovered that he had swallowed his cigar. The other face showed only the pain that was the last thing it was ever to record.
M’Pher suddenly wanted to change the subject. “Can’t you get that thing out of here?” He meant the corpse. This neo-Vic modesty was a strange phenomenon, just as complicated and unrealistic as the real thing back during the late eighteen hundreds and very early nineteen hundreds.
During the original Victorian period, the word “leg” was never breathed; for people, “limb” was substituted, and for poultry “drumstick.” A “chair” became a “seat,” because it drew attention to the portion of the anatomy that rested on it to refer to it so crudely.
Nevertheless, public buildings were decorated with statues of young men (but not young women) with not even a fig leaf brief, and boys went swimming in neighborhood rivers in the same unconfining natural costume.
“Why?” I asked, as ingenuously as Betty. I saw that what bothered M’Pher was her presence. She saw it too, and started to push back toward the corner where she would have been less obviously present. But I stopped her with a subtle gesture—she knew me well. “He’s not embarrassed. I don’t think he’d blush even if he were alive—which he hasn’t been for some time.”
“That’s impossible,” Betty objected. “There was almost no decomposition.”
I nodded. “True. I took a different angle, though. What bothered me most was why his scalp had been shaved. It was inviting to presume that he was caught in the act of love and killed by a husband, brother or boy friend.
“The trouble was, he was dead before he was stripped. There are traces of blood on his abdomen, which acted as an adhesive between his skin and his covering. When the material was pulled away, a pattern was left which we can still see. Incidentally, the material was a very rare plastic.”
The three of them looked to me for an explanation.
“When he was stabbed, the knife also carried fibers into the wound, where they were found during the autopsy. He was dressed in cotton.”
“Cotton? Isn’t that a plant product, one that is used in some kind of industry?” O’Moore had recovered his stomach and become curious.
“Nowadays it is just an industrial raw material. It has a plant origin, but it is a plastic. A natural plastic, rather than synthetic. This particular cotton was doubly unusual. It was what was called a ‘stretch fabric’
“Up to about seventy-five years ago, cotton and wool were processed mechanically into fabrics which were woven as cloth and made into apparel. Really cheap disposable plastic and paper clothes ended that, along with laundries.”
“I see.”
I continued, “Fibers from his clothing adhered to his skin, as well. He was washed after his death, to loosen his coverings primarily. That’s why his chin and hands were left bloody. However, microscopic traces remained.”
“So what?” M’Pher blustered.
“In itself, nothing. There was even a cotton warehouse near where he was found. But the fibers on the corpse did not match any there, so he had not been in that building.”
I paused. It was still not time to move quickly. This was not the time nor the place for a confrontation and accusation. My victim would not be bullied. “That was strange. He had had natural fiber clothes. That’s worn only in the asteroids. His lower legs and feet showed dust from tanned leather, but they don’t wear leather shoes or boots even there!
“His clothes must have been taken because they could be identified. That raised another area for speculation.”
M’Pher interjected an explosive opinion about wild guessing. I let him talk, but ignored him otherwise, as did the three other watchers. No, we did not really ignore him. Nobody had glanced my way in some time.
Recounting the chase, I felt my own pulse racing with remembered excitement as my trail warmed for me, and I felt that three of the four others felt the same stimulation. The fourth didn’t respond to me at all. He just watched M’Pher accusingly, as I had set him up to do, without moving a muscle.
“Why was his head shaved? It could have been psychological castration. Back when we had wars, girls who fraternized too much or too profitably with invaders were sometimes punished after liberation by having their heads shaved. They were symbolically de-sexed.
“On the other hand, why bother with symbolism? There was no need for substitute. He was a total prisoner. He was completely helpless.
“He was gagged; he could neither shout nor scream.
“He was tied down hand and foot; he could neither fight nor run.
“He was without food or water about two days. There was no shortage of time or opportunity.
“Judging by the evidence, he lay on his back, his hands and feet bound together and lashed down to ring bolts. Would that be about right, M’Pher?”
He looked at me, his eyes wide and bright. My prey knew whom I hunted. “Why ask me? How should I know?”
“He was tied with fiber robes, rather than wire or plastic. He was beaten, but likely that was what he expected if he were caught. He may well have participated in the same sort of thing himself.”
M’Pher interrupted, “How can that be? We don’t have that kind of murder any more.”
“Oh? You know what kind of killing it was?” The room was so quiet, aside from my words, that all five of us seemed to have stopped breathing.
“I—oh, of course not! How could I? Do you think I did it?”
“Scarcely.” I smiled. “I’ll write you off as fully exonerated in his death.
“Getting back to his haircut, I asked myself one thing more. If his hair also was removed because it would aid in identification, what characteristics could it have that would be a revelation?”
Betty answered, “I don’t see what, unless it were green. Or—” Her eyes widened.
I walked to the upright coffin. “See his scalp. Notice the suntan.” The mayor and Betty looked; M’Pher didn’t leave his chair.
Betty turned to me and said one word: “Bircher.”
I nodded yes. A bircher.
Not a member of the John Birch Society. That had dried up and blown away during the Sino-Soviet war. But the name lived on, just as the Cosa Nostra, the Black Hand Society (Mafia) of Sicily had been turned from a defense purpose to terrorist ends, just as the Ku Klux Klan had been subverted by a self-interest second generation.
Birchers and stilyegi. Over a hundred years ago. The gang war that rocked America and shook the world, and resulted in the reaction that gave us our present stability and peace. “Wanna fight? Go to the asteroids and take on Mother Nature’s homicidal deep space sister!”
The stilyegi. A Russian word, given to an American group.
The descendants of the beat generation, the great-grandchildren of the zoot-suiters; their trademark an unshorn head, their emblem a switchblade knife.
They were the owners of the narcotics trade, and the proprietors of almost every house of ill fame in the country. Those that they didn’t own were small-time hick affairs.
The birchers, they were the rivals of the stilyegi, neither better nor worse but the same, hoodlums and hooligans. They had to be different, so they specialized in hi-jacking and armed robbery. They shaved their heads except for a single, very narrow stripe of hair that ran straight back from the forehead, a fashion that was once worn by some native Americans, some tribes of warlike Indians.
They claimed to be American Indians. More than that, they shouted of their bravery, their virtue, their loyalty, how they protected the country from alien without and corrupter within. They lied. They were no more protectors of the country than crows were guardians of the cornfields.
Where the stilyegi wore a sloppy uniform of jeans and sweatshirt and considered it unsmart for either to be clean, and carried their sharp knives in their pockets, the birchers wore leotards, skin tight coverings of a single layer of stretch fabric, as many square inches as possible translucent, and short military jackets. They carried their weapons, bayonets, openly in sheaths at their waists and wore heavy field or engineer boots.
All were thugs. If they had eliminated only each other their war would have been without significance.
The corpse in the tube had been a bircher. His scalp was suntanned except for a band about twenty millimeters wide. He had been knifed, so he may have been the victim of a stilyegi assassination or the executed captive from a battle. He may have been killed by an initiate stilyegi, who thereby got his hands so dirty that the clan would never fear his going straight.
“The knife did not kill him.” That had been the opinion of the robosurg, with a proviso that he would have died from the wound in minutes, had something else not finished him. The robosurg didn’t know what had killed him. It had not been a natural cause of death, the failure of one of his vital physiological systems.
I continued, “I imagine that the knife was just another torture by his captors. He was tied, and the blade may have been pushed into his belly and left for him to cut his way free. If he could figure out how. He couldn’t.”
Betty, O’Moore and the boy waited for me to continue. M’Pher’s eyes opened at my guess. It was a pity, in a way; he had been telling the world so long that I was a helpless, bumbling booby, that he had come to believe it himself. Oh, that my enemy would always so underestimate me!
“What killed him, then?” Betty was curious. Even the corpse seemed to be listening to my words.
“Same thing that preserved him, of course.” I wanted to be opaque for a few more minutes.
M’Pher’s expression didn’t change. The other two brightened.
“He had a girl friend. More than that, she was pregnant by him. He didn’t tell her where he was off to, only that he had an idea how they could make a real killing.” I smiled. “A killing was made, but not what he anticipated. He never came back, and of course they were never married.
“She carried his child, and kept faith in him. Judging by the records again, she was the only one who did. Nevertheless, she refused to give the child up for adoption. The son grew to maturity, and when in due course of events she passed away, the only legacy their child inherited was having his name listed as next of kin for a long-vanished bircher.
“Their granddaughter inherited no more, nor did I, their great-grandchild.” I looked deep into M’Pher’s eyes. “I wasn’t surprised to receive a card from the bureau, asking if I would care to make an identification, but it did start me thinking.” I poured myself a drink, and stood beside my ancestor. “It always bothered me, that I recognized him when I looked at him, but I never knew who he was. I got to wondering how would he look say thirty years older than he was. I was thinking that way when I looked into a mirror.
“He is—was—skinny and eighteen. I am fat and forty-seven.” I felt their eyes going back and forth between us, adding up the similarities in color, in facial features, in general build.
“I don’t know if he got into this on his own, or if he walked into a trap. The stilyegi were supposed to have a blood initiation sometimes, and this might have been a handy way to get the blood.” I shrugged. “Maybe my ancestor found a key that would get him into a space module and got caught prowling.
“You know what happened. We don’t use that kind of ship any more at all. They weren’t used very long, but they were handy. The cheapest kind of space travel ever developed.” They had seen the pictures; the ships were only long tubes, some three meters in diameter, with wide noses and wide sterns. The robot controls were in the fore cone, the drive machinery in the tube and the tail only supported the craft on the apron. Cargo came in individual containers each shaped like a wedge of cake. A wedge with a bite taken from the point, to conform to the core tube.
They were wonderful economically. The trouble was, when they fired up, the engines irradiated the modules and junked too much cargo. Just as the laboratory irradiating equipment preserved a stiff in a tube. The ships also had a tendency, once in a while, to fry personnel. Even personnel in protected bunkers quite a way away, although that was rare.
“But—you mean he’s been in space all this time?” Betty asked.
“That’s right. Protected against dehydration by a blanket of frozen air.
“The stilyegi had some red-hot contraband, including some weapons that may have been connected with crimes, and some loot that had so many people looking for it that it wasn’t safe to dispose of.
“They got to somebody in control and fouled up a robot so that instead of heading for Mars, it looped out in a long orbit past Jupiter. I know who, but he’s dead.
“Either the boy here was just looking for loot, or he somehow got the idea that there was something going on. Maybe they set a trap for him, to bloody the hands of a couple of their apprentices. Anyhow, the stilyegi got him. Probably violently. The robosurg reports that he got a concussion somehow in the back of his skull that must have resulted in temporary unconsciousness.
“They had access to a cargo modulus, where they had stashed their stuff. They couldn’t let him go, because he was a bircher. He’d either try to arrange a hi-jack, or even go to the police. Either way the stilyegi were out. Some of them could wind up getting hanged.
“Somebody had an idea, so they tied him down in the pod and put the knife into him. Before or in between, they worked him over. Then they left him there. He was awake when he died. He was probably awake while he was being beaten, too, but that’s neither here nor there. Incidentally, he died one hundred and eighteen years ago.”
Betty’s eyes expressed a blank, and his honor was trying to think of a way to word the question he felt.
I had to finish explaining. “There was no need for the crime to be discovered. Well, yes, there was. But it was a psychological need rather than physical necessity. If a person died now, it’s practically impossible to conceal the fact—because of credit cards.
“If a person goes too long without any charges, we take a look-see. Also, every six months, everybody has to turn his card in and get a new one. When he does that, his fingerprints are recorded.
“Besides, there’s no way for the average person to dispose of a body. Dead human beings don’t keep very well. After a while they start to smell. Appartments haven’t had food preparation centers now for almost a century, and people simply don’t have the large deepfreezes that were once common, where flesh could be stored indefinitely.
“A person can’t even chop a corpse up and flush it down the water closet. The sewage outflow is monitored for just such contingencies.
“This corpse didn’t present that problem. It was in a state of preservation, lying in a shipment module at about absolute zero in a spaceship theoretically lost in space. Somebody couldn’t let things go on that way.
“I suppose I’m naive, but I had thought that the stilyegi were gone. That they vanished at about the same time as the birchers. That wasn’t the truth, however. This body was brought home to haunt me by a living stilyegi. A hundred years ago, the birchers got the upper hand. They were in the majority, to begin with, and they had an advantage: more sympathy from the public and the police.
“When the handwriting was posted on the wall, a group of the stilyegi took action. They acted smart. They got haircuts, and they bought better fitting suits. I suppose some of them joined the birchers, even. Without its brain trust, the stilyegi—that is, the visible stilyegi—ran out of steam and folded.
“With the stilyegi gone, the birchers found themselves up against it. Perhaps they were not as clever. Maybe the top ranks were absorbed into the underground that the others left. Anyway, the birchers had nobody to protect America against—and they had the entire population, and now the police too, down on them.
“They had, before, had some sympathy from the citizenry and the police, but that was really all revulsion against the stilyegi. With them only a memory, the birchers couldn’t stand up too long against a united population.
“The stilyegi weren’t gone. They were underground. In a disgust of respectability, they passed on their gains from one generation to another, and added to them with stealth and cunning—but with no more respect for others than they had ever had.
“They bought themselves positions of respect and honor. Public jobs, where they were the trusted. One of them almost made the grand coup, the one job in this sector that would have given them a literal license to kill, but the machine wouldn’t hear of it and put its own man in the post.” I stared at M’Pher, letting him know that each additional word that I spoke, now, would be a stone added to the anchor I was tying to his feet.
There was just one difficulty! He was immune to me. He had never killed.
The mayor spoke again. “But there are still stilyegi?” He was shocked just as I had been.
“That’s how the freighter got retrieved. The boss of the original job had a record of what he had done. The ship was in a long orbit, it would not be back conveniently close to Earth for more than a century, but that was all right. It would give the weapons and the loot a chance to cool off.
“He passed the information on to his son, eventually his grandson and finally his great grandson got the word. He had access to a ship, and had a hand-picked crew of three. They intercepted the freighter and remote-guided it down to an undeveloped area on the far side of the moon.
“Not the moon of Earth—Phobos of Mars. They triggered the warming equipment, so they wouldn’t have to thaw out the cargo, and after a couple of hours entered. I presume they were surprised to find the body. I don’t know what thoughts ran through the mind of the leader of the salvage group. Maybe he subconsciously detected the resemblance between my ancestor and me.
“The opportunity was too good to miss. It was a golden chance to discredit me, because obviously I would never be able to identify the corpse. Neither could I find the killer. He was dead himself! The body was thawed with the rest of the capsule, so they wrapped it in a tarp, fused the edges to keep out microorganisms and moved the body into their own ship.
“Then they dumped the body, warmed up their scriptwriters, and waited for things to run their course.”
They were staring at me, now, quietly. Except for one; his eyes never left M’Pher.
“Oh, yes, I have excellent relations with the asteroid people. The conies. Their homicide inspector is a relative of mine. And of his.” I nodded at the corpse. “He doesn’t have as many murders as I do, so he has plenty of time to meddle in other things. Just as, here, I am guilty of trespass.
“He found the ship. One pod had been opened, and in it, along with the remainder of the loot, he found a bloody floor, a stilyegi knife and the clothing that had been removed from the corpse. He found a cargo manifest under a crate. It was signed by a ‘MacPherson.’ Your ancestor?” M’Pher stared at me. It was a captive stare, and I didn’t like it. I like the chase, not the capture. Wasn’t he going to fight me? No wonder the machine hadn’t changed my plans.
“You gave yourself away,” I told him. “You attacked me in your paper with altogether too much virulence. You’ve never made any secret of hating me—I was the one who stood between you and the power you’ve coveted. You must hate me even more than I do.”
When he made it clear that he would not reply, I drove another nail. “As soon as it dawned on me that this wasn’t a recent crime, I started to wonder who was profiting. By the third editorial, I was so curious about you that I checked the trip recorder of your private car, your new limousine. I was quite surprised to find you, of all people, visiting the amusement park the night before our friend was found. And that was the only recorded trip where you ordered your machine to fly low and slow.
“There was another thing, too. I suppose you washed the boy in part to prevent his dirtying the car. Fine, but you didn’t wash the car.
“Along with your other antique pursuits, you smoke those vile cigars. You light them with paper matches.” I held up the tiny piece of cardboard I’d found in the alley. “When you pushed him out the door, his hand scraped this up from the floor or seat.”
His lips moved; he swallowed. My heart beat wildly. Perhaps the machine was wrong.
He snatched the ancient pistol, pulled back the hammer, pointed it and fired. But not at me!
He aimed at the boy his great-grandfather had helped Jail.
The gun exploded, chopping off his hand, as I had made sure it would do. The shattered tube of steel that had been the barrel threw itself across the room like an orchid made of metal and smashed the glass tube into splinters, throwing the corpse out onto my carpet.
I put a tourniquet around the pulped stum of M’Pher’s arm, and Betty sent for a medic, but there wasn’t enough time. M’Pher lived only a couple of minutes. He wanted to die. I wasn’t sure why, but I felt that he would rather not live than go on knowing he had been beaten by someone for whom he had expressed such profound contempt. I had wanted to die. I had tried, again, to be killed, but the machine had beaten me one more time. Beaten me, but not all the way. The victory was not unmixed. I felt something of myself expire, become no more a part of me, deep inside.
How ironic! I had wanted to kill myself, and all I succeeded in destroying was my will to die!