Murder in the Urth Degree

by Edward Wellen

LET THERE BE DAY.”

Day was when he said it was. Periscoped sunlight obediently flooded the stateroom at the core of Terrarium Nine.

Keith Flammersfeld saw the light with still-closed eyes and knew that his little world remained safe and warm outside his eyelids. Lazily, he removed from his temples the interactive patcher that had put him into the video of Through the Looking-Glass that had just now faded from the screen of his computer/player.

He opened his eyes and sat up in his bunk and stretched. He loosed a jaw-cracking yawn, momentarily disappearing the chipmunk pouches that flanked his self-satisfied mouth. To keep up his muscle tone and stay in shape, he lay supine again and thought aerobic thoughts for a good five minutes. He was pushing forty, but he was pushing forty back.

Feeling fit after all that exercise, he sat up and swung around to put his feet on the carpeted deck. He checked his priorities: the call of nature could wait, the clamor from his stomach could not. He called for his tray.

It slid out of the bulkhead to fit just above his lap. He put away a healthy breakfast of fruits, vegetables, and grains—all grown right here inside Terrarium Nine. The tray sensed when the last of the food was gone and slid itself back into the bulkhead.

Flammersfeld stood up and got out of his pajama shorts. He tossed them into the revamper, stepped into the toilet cubicle and relieved himself, washed up, fizzed his mouth clean, and put on fresh shorts.

Two steps to the right took Flammersfeld to his office. He sat down at his master computer and tapped keys. The screen displayed a blank requisition form.

His face split in a huge grin as he typed two items and moused them into the right spaces. Tight facial muscles around mouth and eyes told him it was a malicious grin. At this awareness, he quickly slackened the grin into an expression of innocent merriment. Then, reminding himself that he was all alone aboard Terrarium Nine and that no one watched, he hauled again on the lines of the malicious grin.

He savored, then saved, the requisition. He was on the point of sending it to the home office on Earth, when he all but jumped out of his skin.

The lower right quadrant of the screen was displaying a reduced image of another monitor screen’s display.

This display labeled itself as coming from the work station in Buck Two. He put his own page on hold and filled the screen with the Intruding display.

He stared at it, feeling his eyes bulge.

Someone had entered his system and infected it with rabid doggerel.

Is the sun a milky bud?

Whence the shadows on my face? Why’s the sky as green as blood?

Who will win the Red Queen’s race?

Madness.

But even madness had to have a logical explanation.

Possible explanation number one, a computer virus. If true, it would have entered by way of the master computer, sole link to Earth and the universe. What would be the point of trying to trick him into thinking the message came from Buck Two’s slave computer, not from Buck One’s central memory? Merely the prankish pleasure of sending him on a wild-goose chase through Buck Two’s jungle? A small payoff for what would have to have been a major effort, cracking the vaccinated and regularly boostered Labcom system headquartered on Earth.

Possible explanation number two, a stowaway, presence hitherto entirely unsuspected by Flammersfeld and completely overlooked by all sensors. If true, the person would have had to slip aboard during resupply a full year ago. If such a one had survived all that while by living on the fruits and vegetables and grains grown in Terrarium Nine—though how that could be when Flammersfeld kept those precious items all carefully tagged and tabulated and tracked—why would that stowaway give his or her presence away at this point? Lonely and dying for companionship? Fallen ill and in need of help? Gone mad and about to attack? Having bided his or her time, now ready for a takeover bid?

Possible explanation number three, true madness—Flammersfeld’s own. Could Flammersfeld himself have programmed that display, say while dream-experiencing Through the Looking-Glass? Had cabin fever affected his brain, split his awareness?

Even as he stared at the screen the display changed. Another verse appeared, letter by letter, slowly, painfully, as though stiff and hesitant fingers were working in real time.

When Adam delved

Was it then I selved?

When Eve span

Was it then I began?

Flammersfeld tightened his mouth. Someone was in Buck Two.

He hurried to his bulkhead safe and punched the combination. The safe door swung open and he armed himself with the blaser he had never dreamed he might one day have to use.

Terrarium Nine, in near-earth orbit, was a six-bucker—six concentric spheres built on R. Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic principle. A pseudo black hole at the center provided Earth-gravity for the innermost sphere. The calibrated pull diminished to nothing in the outermost sphere, where the zero-gravity lab was. Access was by companionway and lift. Terrarium Nine was large enough to make northern and southern companionways practical and efficient. The two-way lift, slightly bowed to bypass the pseudo black hole, ran along the axis, from polar airlock to polar airlock. The cage had handholds to facilitate orientation—rather, borealization or australization.

The Buck Two work station was in the northern hemisphere. Flammersfeld made for the lift, started to step in, then had a second thought.

He punched the lift to go north to Buck Two by itself, but entered a five-minute delay.

Swiftly he backtracked along the gently curving geodesic deckplates to the southern companionway, and raced up it to the hatch.

If someone lay in wait for Flammersfeld to emerge from the lift, and if that someone kept a shrewd eye on the nearby north companionway hatch, Flammersfeld, making his way around from the south, would come upon that someone from behind.

He glanced at his watch, sucked in, undogged the hatch. Blaser at the ready, he vaulted into Buck Two’s lesser gravity, where, in lunar soil with various admixtures of nitrates, plants flourished mightily.

He landed lightly, sought concealment in a ten-meter-high stand of slowly swaying rye. Held his breath, listened through the soft sough of programmed breeze, heard nothing. He’d outflanked the intruder; seemed safe to move out.

Made good time through chubby Swiss chard, enormous endives, plump peas, and bulky beans. In under four minutes he reached the stout sweet potatoes. Nearly there. The work station lay underneath the towering walnut tree dead ahead. Past that stood tremendous tomatoes, prodigious peppers, large lettuce, and corpulent cabbage; then a pile of mulch—and beyond all that the lift.

He padded carefully to the walnut and peered around the massive trunk. He saw plainly the computer station. No one was at it.

The tomato vines blocked his view of the lift area. Flammersfeld thrust against the soil for a giant leap. He caught one-handed hold, five meters up, of the stem of a thirty-meter tomato vine and hung there looking through and across vines and foliage while the blaser quested.

He heard the sudden coming-to-life hum of the lift.

That should make an ambusher take position. Flammersfeld had a commanding view of the lettuce and cabbage patches. An ambusher there would have a clear field to the lift and the northern companionway hatch. No one moved there.

The lift stopped and the door slid open. Flammersfeld looked for some stir somewhere. The blaser quested in vain. No one lay in wait.

He hung there, his face reddening with anger and frustration; the tomatoes were large as his head, so that it might have been one of them. A wild-goose chase after all.

Grimacing, he stuck the blaser in the waistband of his shorts and let himself down the vine hand under hand. Once on deck, he headed for the work station.

He stepped into a loop of vine and made a mental note to clear away debris and undergrowth first chance he got. Before he realized the loop was a noose, it had tightened around his ankle. Before he could bend to loosen it, he found himself whipped high into the air, where he remained dangling bouncily by his foot from the noose whose other end was tied to a springy bough of the towering walnut tree.

Rolling his eyes way up to look way down, he spotted the peg and the severed end of another length of vine that had held the bough to the deck. Where below was the trapper who had cut the tie?

Flammersfeld pretended to be helpless. He thrashed about, twisting, twisting in the continuously maintained light breeze. He made his voice sound panicky. “Help! Let me down! Please!”

Still the damned stowaway—for Flammersfeld had perforce settled on possible explanation number two—did not show his or her face.

Flammersfeld could not wait like this much longer; even with the inconsequential gravity of Buck Two, the noose was cutting off the circulation to his caught foot.

He gave himself one painful minute more; then, when no foe appeared, he drew the blaser from his waistband and sliced the vine.

As he fell he aimed the blaser deckward and thumbed the retro stud. The gelled-light effect slowed his fall enough to let him land rolling.

He scrambled to his feet—and groaned as the numbed foot betrayed him. He put his weight on his good foot and looked around for another trap—or even an outright attack. He looked high up at the walnut tree’s branches and foliage, saw no figure or contraption above him, and put his back against the trunk. He bent to remove the noose from his ankle—and saw on the ground a few fragments of cabbage leaf.

His jaw dropped as the chilling realization hit him.

Then his lips thinned. Very well. He knew now what he was up against.

It was not any of the three possible explanations. It was a fourth—and it was probable and in a few minutes would be provable.

He laughed. To think of the poor miserable creature stalking him!

Then he grew grim. He had underestimated the creature. That it might have been responsible for the doggerel on the computer screen had not even occurred to him. Had to give the thing credit; lot more to it than he had thought. Still, now that he knew, he could handle the threat.

“All right, you bastard,” he muttered through his malicious grin, “you’re digging your own grave. “

He hobbled directly to the cabbage patch. He looked down at an empty space and nodded. There had been an uprooting, though some effort had been made to smooth the disturbed soil.

As if that could fool him! He knew perfectly well what had grown at this particular spot, what should still be growing here, what seemed now on the loose.

A closer look at the soil showed him a dotted line of milky green droplets running from the center of the empty space. He touched one. Sticky. He brought the finger to his nose and sniffed. His grin widened. The damned thing was truly damned. Did it know it had not long?

The trail was short; it ended abruptly at a nearby cabbage. A freshly ripped edge showed where a leaf had been tom off. His grin stretched to its utmost. The creature must be using the leaf to stem the flow.

The trail gone, Flammersfeld cast about for other signs.

He glanced at the nearby heap of mulch. He felt a twinge for having neglected it; he had let it decompose almost to compost. He stiffened. There seemed some difference in its makeup, some shifting of its components. It consisted half of tree limbs he had sectioned for study or trimmed and split into rough boards and half of discarded paper printouts. He thought the paper covered more of the heap than when he had looked at it last—more spread out, less neatly accordioned.

The creature might be hiding under there.

Flammersfeld held the blaser ready to fire.

With his free hand he jerked lengths of dank and moldy continuous-fold printouts away in long fluttering banners. He did not find his creature but did unearth what appeared to be a crude catapult, a thing of branches and vine and a ball of compacted soil held together with some vegetable glue. He also found a winding drum fitted with a crank—a winch; this also was fashioned of sectioned tree limbs and vine.

Both contraptions looked as if a child might have put them together—but they had worked. The catapult had shot the weighted end of a length of vine over a bough and the winch had pulled the bough down.

He rooted around a bit more and found something else—half a walnut shell big as his cupped palm. The size he was used to; what it held was—something else.

The creature had used the empty half-shell as a mortar to pound something vegetable into a resinous black sticky substance that had an aromatic tarry smell. A crude preparation, showing foam of spit.

Visions of amylase danced in Flammersfeld’s head. What would the idiosyncratic enzymatic action be in this case—on, what he felt sure he would find when he analyzed it, green pepper? Seemed clear that the creature had in mind a curare, an arrow poison. That was just what this substance appeared to be.

Flammersfeld found himself asweat. He needed a relaxant—but not this kind. This kind could relax him to death.

Better get the hell out of here. The creature was sure to bleed to death—but how soon? Flammersfeld found himself not so sure any more about a lot of things concerning the creature.

How could he not have seen its intelligence waken, its hate turn on him?

Still crouching, he faced about. For the first time, he looked around at this small world from another’s point of view.

From the cabbage patch, the computer screen was in plain sight. How much the creature must have learned simply by watching and listening to the work and the play!

This was not the time to wonder about that. This was the time to beat it before a small arrow flew or a small lance thrust.

Flammersfeld straightened and hobbled double-time to the open lift.

He breathed a sigh at having made it, and reached to punch the door shut and the lift down.

The killer must have slipped into the lift while the noose held Flammersfeld adangle.

From the left near corner of the cage, where the killer had crouched unseen behind the door that did not slide flush, a frail arm thrust the sharpened and poison-tipped twig into the soft tissue of Flammersfeld’s left ankle.

Flammersfeld stared down at the sadly wise and wearily savage face.

“God damn you,” he said.

“You damn you.”

It was the first and last time he ever heard the rusty piping voice.

But he was not thinking about that. He was thinking about getting to the dispensary in time to work up an antidote. His heart pounding, he punched the lift shut and down.

His eyes were glazing and he did not look at the creature again until the lift stopped and the door opened. Then he kicked the creature out of his way and took two stumbling steps forward before he sprawled his length on the deck.

The killer could not stanch the flow of green blood and soon followed Flammersfeld across the dark threshold into the abode of the dead. But the killer had won what he wanted—vengeance and oblivion.

Inspector H. Seton Davenport of the Terrestrial Bureau of Investigation had expected to see anything but an inverted detective. Yet that was just what he walked in upon.

Dr. Wendell Urth, the Terran extraterrologists’ extraterrologist, had sounded strange when he voiced Davenport in. Davenport had caught a note of strain in the thin tenor delivery of “Enter!”

But Davenport had not dreamed that was due to Dr. Urth’s attempting a headstand. At least, that was what the learned ex-officio consultant to the T.B.I. appeared at first glance to be doing.

Second glance showed him that Dr. Urth was really engaged in rolling a hologram sun along the baseboards. And that he was doing so to light up the floor under the overhanging book-film shelves.

The blood rushing to Dr. Urth’s head made his naked eyes look even more hyperthyroid. That the eyes were naked and that the good doctor’s shirttail hung out told Davenport what was up—or down—or toward. Without taking another step, Davenport scanned the floor.

He spotted them not on the floor itself but on a bottom shelf they had bounced to. He took two steps and made a stretch and picked up what Dr. Urth was hunting for.

“Here you are, Dr. Urth.”

“Here I certainly am,” Dr. Urth wheezed. “Embarrassingly so.” Then he apparently replayed Davenport’s words and tone. He twisted the upside-down half of his body to face Davenport, squinted, and apparently made out what Davenport was holding. “Ah.” He straightened with a huff and a puff, and placed the solar-powered hologram sun on a pile of papers—it was evidently loaded to serve as paperweight as well as to help light the vast dim cluttered room.

Dr. Urth took the eyeglasses from Davenport’s outstretched hand. “Thanks.” Then he smiled a transforming smile, one that changed him from blinking owl to beaming Buddha. “But you have had your reward in seeing me make a spectacle of myself.” He polished the lenses with the shirttail, peered at and through them, then put them on. The ears did their part but the button nose did little to support the frame.

He gestured Davenport to a chair. Himself he settled in his armchair-desk with a sigh the seat echoed. He locked his hands over his paunch and looked expectant. The paunch enhanced the look of expectancy.

“This is about the death on Terrarium Nine?”

Davenport nodded. “ ‘Death’ is the working word for it. ‘Death’ is ambiguous enough for something we can’t seem to label satisfactorily. We can’t call it accident, we can’t call it murder, and we’re not ready to call it suicide.”

Dr. Urth shifted himself more comfortable. “Tell me the details.”

“It’s better and easier to show you.” Davenport drew from a capacious pocket a sheaf of holograms. He hopped his chair nearer Dr. Urth and leaned over to show him the holograms one by one, pointing and explaining.

“Here’s a close-up of Terrarium Nine taken from the investigating vehicle on its approach in response to the anomaly alarm. Flammersfeld, the lone experimenter aboard Terrarium Nine, had not transmitted the daily report to Earth headquarters at the scheduled hour, had not punched the All’s-Well signal at the appointed time, and had not responded to worried queries…Here are shots the responding officer took of both docking jacks before she made entry through north dock. You’ll notice a year’s worth of undisturbed space dust coats both jacks. That indicates no one docked since the last resupply—a full year ago…Here’s the death scene, located in the innermost sphere. “

Dr. Urth took this last hologram into his own hands for protracted scrutiny. Then he gave Davenport a quizzical look. “ Aside from telling me that Flammersfeld had just come down to his living quarters from Buck Two, bringing with him a cabbage either for study or for eating, that he stepped out of the lift and fell dead, having somehow taken a poison-tipped dart in his ankle, this hologram does not tell me all I need to know if I’m to help you label his death. What about the autopsy findings? What was the poison?”

Davenport shook his head. “That’s what’s strange. You’d think a biochemist of Flammersfeld’s standing would have brewed it in his lab, in test tubes, without impurities. But this was a weird kind of curare crudely prepared. The investigator found some of the guck in a walnut shell that she discovered in a pile of trash in Buck Two.” He handed Dr. Urth another hologram. “Here’s a shot of that.”

Dr. Urth gave half a nod, half a shake. “I see that, but what are these things?”

Davenport looked where Dr. Urth pointed. “Oh, yeah; them. They seem to be a toy winch and a toy catapult. The engineer we consulted says they’re no great shakes but they work. Maybe Flammersfeld was in his second childhood. “

Dr. Urth grunted doubtingly. He went back to the death-scene hologram. He pointed a stubby finger to a green-black mass. “This is the cabbage?”

Davenport grimaced. “Bad. Pretty well rotted by the time our investigator got there. Stank up the place, she said, so—after taking protection shots—she incinerated it.”

“Bad.”

“Yes, putrid.”

Dr. Urth eyed the TBI inspector censoriously. “I was not speaking of the cabbage, I meant the officer’s action. She should have preserved the evidence no matter how offensive she found it.”

Davenport neither defended nor blamed the officer. Like her, he saw the cabbage not as evidence but as happenstance. “Perhaps.”

“No perhaps about it,” Dr. Urth snapped. His paunch showed momentary agitation, then subsided with his sigh. “Well, it can’t be helped now. But I do wish I could have had a closer look at that cabbage. There’s something queer about it.”

Davenport grinned. “No problem. This is one of the new SOTA holograms. See the bubble-mice sealed in the left and top edges?”

Dr. Urth noticed for the first time two beads of air that almost met at the top left corner of the hologram film. His eyes lit up. “You mean that if I get a stereotaxic fix on the cabbage the cabbage will enlarge?”

“Exactly. By pinching the edge you can move the bubble-mouse along. Coordinate the mice to enlarge and automatically enhance the area you want to observe in greater detail. There’s a limit, of course, but you’ll see quite a lot more than you do now.”

Dr. Urth pinched the mice along till he had the cabbage area blown up by a magnification of five.

He looked long and hard, and at last removed his glasses to wipe tears of strain from his eyes. “Much better, but still lacking. My complaint is not about the resolution but about the object pictured. The cabbage remains blurry thanks to decomposition. I must admit that even had the officer preserved it so that you could put it before me I would be hard put to make out much more. That does not mean that its destruction is not a great loss. It should have been possible to determine its exact composition by autopsy.”

Davenport stared. “ Autopsy? Of a cabbage?”

Dr. Urth nodded curtly. “Autopsy. I choose my words carefully.” His mouth twitched suddenly and he unbent unexpectedly, his voice mock-serious. “I do not see-aitch-oh-you my cabbage twice.” He grew fully serious again. “It’s clear that something got out of hand—the experiment, the experimenter, or both.”

Davenport was still working on the autopsy business. What was Dr. Urth getting at?

Dr. Urth sighed and handed back the death-scene hologram. He gave a slight shiver, then shot Davenport a look as if wondering whether Davenport had noticed.

Davenport kept a poker face.

Dr. Urth breathed an easier sigh. “This calls for mulling over.” He turned a grave face and a twinkling eye on his visitor. “What would you say to a finger of Ganymead?”

“I’d say hello.” Davenport had heard of Ganymead but had never seen it, much less tasted it. He knew it to be extremely rare and extremely expensive and he knew many communities prohibited it. He was not about to ask Dr. Urth how Dr. Urth had come by it. “I’m game.”

He did not feel so game when Dr. Urth drew two containers and two glasses from a liquor drawer of the armchair-desk and one of the containers proved to hold fingers.

Dr. Urth shook two fingers out and stood one, fingernail down, in each glass.

Davenport looked and shuddered.

One corner of Urth’s rosy mouth lifted. “Ganymead is a binary. The fluid part activates the solid part. The ‘fingernail’ is a crystallization. Watch.”

He poured an amber fluid out of the other container into one of the glasses and as it splashed the nail the finger melted. The whole became a clear violet with a bouquet that tickled the senses. Dr. Urth transformed the other finger, handed one of the glasses to Davenport, and lifted the other in a toasting gesture.

Davenport answered with a lift of his own glass, sniffed, then sipped. Tantalizingly delicious, deliciously tantalizing. He saw that it could be dangerous—a taste too easily acquired for something not so easily acquired.

The smooth but strong drink seemed to turn Dr. Urth philosophical. “ Actually, Ganymead comes not from Ganymede but from Callisto. So many things are misnomers. What’s in a name, Davenport? I should have yours—I’m the couch potato, the settee spud, the Murphy-bed murphy. At most, a rambler rose-tethered as I am to the University campus. You’re the one with the gypsy in his soles, the man in the field. Davenport, you’re a misnomer.”

Davenport permitted himself a smile. Davenport’s nose was shaped for wedging into tight spots; a youthful altercation had left a star-shaped scar on his right cheek. Yet a fellow could get his fill of the field, lose his taste for adventure, and—while cherishing his memories of encounters of the close kind—look almost with envy at the cloistered academic who adventured with his mind. Perhaps the Ganymead had turned him philosophical—or prone to babble—too; he was about to express his feelings about life when Dr. Urth saved him.

Dr. Urth had taken a last sip, had raised the glass to his eye to look through its emptiness, and now set it down with regretful finality. “Back to work. To give Flammersfeld’s death its proper name, we must first understand what Terrarium Nine is all about, what Flammersfeld was in the business of.”

He raised a forefinger, though Davenport had given no sign of breaking in.

“I know you think you know, but please bear with me while I tell you what I think I know. Let me state the obvious and posit the known—nothing is so overlooked as the obvious and nothing is so mysterious as the known. “

Davenport sweepingly brought his palm up in sign of turning everything over to Dr. Urth.

Dr. Urth just as graciously gave a nod. “To forestall ecological disruption, Earth has laws against releasing genetically altered plants and animals into the terrestrial environment. Such experiments must take place off-planet. Hence, the Terrariums—at last count, a dozen?—in near-earth orbit. A collateral benefit is zero gravity, which facilitates such techniques as electrophoresis—the rapid continuous-flow fractionating of concentrated solutions of proteins in a high-intensity electric field. “ He cocked an eye at Davenport. “Your turn. What do you think you know about Terrarium Nine and Flammersfeld’s experiments?”

Davenport shrugged. “All I know about Terrarium Nine is that it was constructed and commissioned six years ago and that Flammersfeld was its first and only personnel. All I know about Flammersfeld is that he was a hard worker who never took a break; he routinely turned down R and R—according to his superiors in the home office he said he got all the relaxation he needed by interactive video, and in fact at the time of his death Through the Looking-Glass was in his computer/player —and he was working concurrently on two unrelated projects. Plus he had plans for the future—his last, though unsent, requisition was for swine embryo and eagle eggs. “

Dr. Urth wrinkled his brow, then resettled his glasses. “I would like to see his notes on the two unrelated projects you mentioned.”

Davenport looked uncomfortable. “That may be impossible.”

Dr. Urth’s mouth tightened. “Is there a clearance problem? If so, good day.”

Davenport hastened to say, “It’s not that, Dr. Urth, not that at all. I believe you have cosmic clearance.”

That mollified Dr. Urth. “Then what is the problem? Did Flammersfeld destroy his notes?”

“Not that, either. It’s just that he seems to have been paranoidally secretive. His notes are in his computer’s memory, but locked behind passwords that we haven’t broken—yet.”

“I admire your optimism, sir, but optimism—while admirable even when it is foolish—is pie in the sky, a future repast; it does not feed us now.”

Davenport reddened.

Dr. Urth relented. “Two unrelated projects; you know that much. You may know more than you think you know—that is, if you can give me the titles of the two projects. His superiors at the home office to whom he reported must have had some idea of what he was working on if they were to approve his requisitions.”

Davenport brightened. “I don’t have the titles at the tip of my tongue, but I do remember that he was seeking a cure for hemophilia and that he was looking for the—uh—direction sensors in plant cells.”

Dr. Urth patted his paunch as if he had just had a good feed. “Excellent. Hemophilia. Bleeder’s disease. Disease of kings—e.g., the Romanovs of Czarist Russia. Women pass it on through a recessive X chromosome but do not themselves have it. Profuse bleeding, even from the slightest wound. In a test tube, normal blood from a vein clots in five to fifteen minutes; hemophiliac clotting time varies from thirty minutes to hours. A natural for zero-gravity research. While the sheer bulk of total plasma would rule out its fractionation by electrophoresis at zero gravity, the same does not hold for minor components, such as clotting factors.”

His voice pitched even higher in his excitement. “Yes, yes. And Flammersfeld’s other project is another natural for zero-gravity research. The plant world presents an intriguing puzzle: how does a plant sense the direction of gravity? Plants tend to grow in a vertical direction—but we have yet to find the cellular direction sensors. Yes, yes. We have our answer. “

Davenport stared at Dr. Urth. “We have?”

“It’s as obvious,” Dr. Urth said sharply, ‘‘as the nose on my face.”

Maybe that’s why I don’t see it. Davenport muttered mentally. But he put on a pleasant mask. “You said it’s easy to overlook the obvious.”

“You’ve been listening, at least.” Dr. Urth made himself a monument of patience. “Listen now to a bit of verse.

“‘The time has come,’ the Walrus said,

‘To talk of many things:

Of shoes—and ships—and sealing-wax—

Of cabbages—and kings—

And why the sea is boiling hot—

And whether pigs have wings. ‘ “

Dr. Urth looked at Davenport and smiled. “You don’t know whether to laugh or snort at such utter nonsense. Well, laugh. We humans need a leavening of levity; there can be too much gravity.”

Davenport did not laugh, but then he did not snort. “That’s from a child’s book, isn’t it?”

“Indeed. The child in Charles Lutwidge Dodgson was named Lewis Carroll. The verse is from his Through the Looking Glass. “

“Flammersfeld’s interactive video!”

“The same.”

Davenport shook his head. “How does it tie in?”

“It ties in first with an even older nursery rhyme.

“‘Old King Cole

Was a merry old soul,

And a merry old soul was he;

He called for his pipe,

And he called for his bowl,

And he called for his fiddlers three.

Every fiddler, he had a fiddle,

And a very fine fiddle had he;

Twee tweedle dee, tweedle dee, went the fiddlers.

Oh, there’s none so rare

As can compare

With King Cole and his fiddlers three!’ “

This time Davenport could not help laughing. And after a moment Dr. Urth joined in.

Davenport sobered first and non-judgmentally waited for Dr. Urth to subside.

Dr. Urth sounded all the more serious when he picked up where he had left off. “The rhyme about King Cole was in Lewis Carroll’s mind—consciously or unconsciously—when Carroll wrote the Walrus’s speech. ‘ King Cole’—cole as in cole slaw—split naturally into’ cabbages and kings.’ And came back together in Flammersfeld’s mind as a protoplast fusion of cabbage seed and royal blood. “

Davenport fumbled the death-scene hologram to light and stared at the magnified cabbage. “You mean this thing…?”

Dr. Urth nodded. He pointed to a spot atop the cabbage. “Very like a crown gall, wouldn’t you say?”

“I wouldn’t—since I don’t know the first thing about crown galls.”

“Then take my word for it. There are two kinds of living cells: eukaryotic and prokaryotic. A eukaryotic cell is nucleated; that is, its nucleus walls in its chromosomes. A prokaryotic cell is less organized; that is, its chromosomes drift freely in the cytoplasm, in among the organelles. Enter Agrobacter—short for Agrobacterium tumefaciens. Agrobacter’s innards hold the Ti plasmid—a tiny loop of DNA—some two hundred genes long. Agrobacter can hook a plant cell and inject the Ti plasmid into the nucleus. Once inside, a twelve-gene length—called tDNA, for transfer DNA—cuts loose from the Ti plasmid and becomes part of the plant cell chromosome. The tDNA genes then program the plant to nurture Agrobacter.”

Dr. Urth paused a moment for breath and—Davenport thought—for dramatic effect.

“Now I come to the point of all this. The insidious parasite Agrobacter causes a tumorous swelling—a crown gall.” Dr. Urth’s voice rose in wrath. “Can you imagine? That nasty procedure was Flammersfeld’s elaborate way of fitting his poor little intelligent hybrid King Cole with a crown!”

Davenport gazed upon the image, saw only a rotted cabbage, and tried to picture it as it had been in life—a being with reasoning power, and therefore memory and foresight; with feelings, and therefore the need to love and hate. It would have been mostly head, the face framed in leaves. He shivered. For a flash he visualized its round face superimposed upon Dr. Urth’s round face, another bud of Buddha. He glanced at Dr. Urth.

Dr. Urth looked melancholy. It hit Davenport that Dr. Urth had been a child prodigy. Dr. Urth would have fellow feeling for freaks of any kind. Dr. Urth must have felt his look and sensed his thoughts, for Dr. Urth met his gaze and smiled sadly.

“We all—ourselves and our matrix—are interference patterns. So it comes natural to think of crossing this with that. It’s the nature of the beast—meaning the universe. All in all, it’s just as well Flammersfeld and his creature died when they did—if not as they did. We humans need a minimum of levity; there can be too much gravity. But Flammersfeld went too far, interfered too much.” His brow darkened. “ And meant to go on interfering. Remember his last requisition—for swine embryo and eagle eggs? And remember the line from Lewis Carroll—’whether pigs have wings’? We humans need a minimum amount of gravity; there can be too much levity.” His face closed. “That’s it, then.”

Davenport put the holograms away and got up to go. “Thanks for your help, Dr. Urth.”

Dr. Urth waved that away. He bounced to his feet and shook hands.

His voice halted Davenport on the threshold. “Inspector.”

Davenport turned around. “Yes, Dr. Urth?”

“About my fee…”

Davenport smiled. “I wondered when that would come.”

“Now you know. It comes now. A few trifles.”

“You know I’ll do my best. They are?”

“First, two bits of information to satisfy my curiosity. When you get back to New Washington, kindly stop by Near-earth, Ltd., and retrieve the file on Terrarium Nine. See if you can find out from Flammersfeld’s requisitions, and other documents, the genetic history of the cabbage and of the hemophiliac blood.” He smiled. “I’ve a mind bet that the cabbage was a savoy cabbage and that the blood came from a descendant of the House of Savoy.”

Davenport blinked. “Savoy? Why would Flammersfeld have specified savoy cabbage and Savoy blood?”

“For the same reason that impelled James Joyce to frame a view of Cork in cork—the sense of fitness.”

Davenport thought about that, then shook his head.

“If you don’t mind my saying so, the sense of fitness can carryover into madness.”

Dr. Urth hooded his mouth with a pudgy hand. “You take my point so exactly that I almost hesitate to name the balance of my fee.”

Davenport eyed him warily but felt compelled to say, “Name it.”

“Arrange for the researcher who has taken over Terrarium Nine to cross tortoise with cricket.”

Davenport tried to imagine what that would look like. “What on earth for?”

“So when I lose my eyeglasses a frame made of the shell will lead me to them—by the chirp.”

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