Spaceman's Luck and Other Stories

by George O. Smith

  He plowed right in: “And what in hell have you been doing?”

  “Chief, I’ve been—”

  “You put a make-team on some half-baked writer named Wood.”

  “Edward Hazlett—”

  “Because,” he yelled, “the first person you saw when you stuck your nose outside of Gordon Andrews’ apartment was Florence Wood!”

  “Well, Chief, you see—”

  “You perhaps suspected that she’d just walked through the wall of that apartment? And naturally you pulled out your hip-pocket crime laboratory and checked that umbrella tip for bloodstains before you threw it aside.”

  “Well, you see—”

  “Schnell, would you have been so damned gallant if she’d been an ugly old hag in a ratty dress carrying a dead halibut wrapped in an old newspaper?”

  “But you see—”

  “So you leap into gallant action, and after you’ve rescued the fair maiden from her watery grave, you suddenly find it desirable to use a department automobile to deliver the damsel home.”

  “But—”

  “Schnell, I’ll bet that Wood girl wasn’t any wetter than you were. And that’s how you put the long arm of coincidence to work?”

  * * * *

  It was more than coincidence. Florence Wood had been in that soaking rain and whipping wind for more than an hour. Any housewife would have corroborated my statement that only a prolonged soaking can achieve a truly wet-through-the-seams condition. Oh, Daddy Wood was just the guy to think of a stunt like saturating the seams and fibers of his daughter’s clothing by agitating the water supersonically at high amplitude, but, let’s face it, that would have beaten hell out of her soft white skin.

  As for the umbrella, the wound could indeed have been made by a rapierlike thrust. But a comparison between the depth of the wound and the length of the tip showed that the bottom of the wound could not have been reached without forcing part of the umbrella itself into the victim’s body. The face of the wound showed no such outsize penetration, hence the umbrella was not the sought-for weapon.

  At this point, Chief Weston’s telephone interrupted him and he snatched it up, bellowed his name, and then listened. Finally he snarled that it was for me and fairly hurled the handset at me.

  I caught it at the end of its cord and said: “Captain Schnell, Special Detail—”

  “Oh, I know it is you, Captain Schnell,” said the suave voice of Edward Hazlett Wood. “I just wanted to tell you that your analysis of the umbrella’s uselessness as evidence was quite brilliant. Also your logic in the matter of my daughter’s rain-soaked clothing was clever. I really don’t regret the chewing out you are getting. You deserve it. I was hoping to find you bright enough to avoid it. Anyway, can we expect you for dinner this evening?”

  “Yes,” I snapped, and hung up, thinking a few things that would have called for a terse reprimand about foul and abusive language if telepathy were administered by the Federal Communications Commission.

  “Wood?” snapped Chief Weston.

  “Yes.”

  “Date?” he snarled.

  I groaned. Wood did have the nasty telepath’s ability to maneuver me into a situation that I could not conveniently avoid.

  “When they start calling the office to pester you for dates—”

  “I know what I’m doing!”

  “So do I!” he yelled. “You’re doing nothing!”

  “Listen, Chief, I’ll admit the long arm of coincidence, but you’ll have to admit that when there’s trouble, I’m usually the first one to smell it.”

  “So how do you connect them up?”

  “Chief, I walk out of that apartment with your own words ringing in my ears. ‘Looks like the classical setup for a “perfect crime,”’ you said. And then I meet this girl who just happens to have a father who writes whodunits and is planning a series of books based upon the ‘perfect crime.’”

  “Maybe,” sneered Chief Weston, “the guy is a mind reader.”

  “I’ve given even that some consideration.”

  “So I hear tell.”

  “Any objections?” I asked.

  “Objections? I’ve got a lot of objections!” he howled. “This is a police department, not a soothsayers’ convention! We’re subject to enough criticism as it is. You needn’t have added the act that makes us look like a bunch of damned fools.”

  “But, Chief, I—”

  “So what do I hear tell?” He hauled the tray drawer of his desk open and pulled out one of the tabloids, opened to one of its hate-everything columnists. “Listen! ‘In recent years the legality of the famous witchcraft trials of the past has been subject to debate, with the result that these past convictions have now been declared “miscarriages of justice.” Posthumously, I must unhappily add. However, there has been little or no amendment to the laws against witchcraft, wizardry, charms, amulets and spells.

  “‘But brace yourselves, citizens. One of our younger and more brilliant captains of detectives has shown an interest recently in parapsychics and may be training to track down criminals by the application of extra-sensory detection. If this be true, the laws will have to be ruptured to permit him to secure evidence, since it is a tenet of the law that evidence must be secured through legal methods and processes.

  “‘Fortune Tellers of the World, Arise! You have nothing to lose but your crystal balls!’”

  Chief Weston slapped the paper down. “What do you think of that?”

  I said, “He’s just making noise. Telepathy has nothing in common with—”

  “I wish I could stop you from even thinking about telepathy!”

  “If you could,” I said calmly, “you’d have to be telepathic to determine when I had violated your dictum—and if you were telepathic, Chief, you’d have been on my side from the beginning.”

  He merely glared at me. At this moment I should have been expecting the worst, and prepared to meet it. But please remember that there’s always that mental block against prying, especially when the United States mail is concerned. But now Edward Hazlett Wood was about to show me how a real extra-sensory sharpshooter clobbers his enemies.

  * * * *

  Weston’s secretary entered, carrying a package.

  I saw it, knew at once what it was, and groaned with despair. The only chance I saw of getting out of this was the forlorn hope that Weston would believe the package was a dig, probably mailed by the sniping columnist.

  It was cleverly contrived. The addressee’s name had been blurred and half-obliterated so that it couldn’t have been quietly dropped on my desk where I could have disposed of its damning contents quietly. It had, of course, come special delivery, urgent, immediate handling. If I were a believer in amulets, witches and spells, I’d have been of the opinion that an aura of urgency had been created about the box.

  Chief Weston’s secretary handed it to him with a mumbled suggestion that it seemed to be important, and perhaps it should be opened in hopes that the contents would convey information as to the identity of the owner.

  I said nothing.

  * * * *

  Inside the package was a fine crystal ball, a set of tarot cards with a thick book of explanations, and a second deck of cards the like of which most people have heard but few have actually seen. These were the square, circle, wiggly line cards used in parapsychic research.

  There was the damning evidence of a packing slip with my name clearly printed on it, and a rubber stamp notation that the merchandise order had been accompanied by a prepaid postal note.

  The timing was perfect. The problem of keeping that package on schedule all the way from its point of origin to its devastating delivery must have taxed Wood’s faculties, but he’d done it.

  Chief Weston’s choler rose visibly, and in a voice loud enough to be heard in Asbury Park, he yelled: “Schnell, did you—buy—this?”

  I was trapped. No matter what I said, it was calculated to get me into trouble. For in the petty cash box in the secre
tary’s desk was a petty cash slip made out in the amount of thirty-nine dollars and seventeen cents for a postal money order payable to the Aladdin Novelty Company of Bayonne, New Jersey. The signature was good enough for me to accept it myself. All along the line it had been nicely legal—or would have been if I’d really signed that petty cash slip.

  If it came to an argument, I’d have to perform miracles to prove my innocence.

  “Schnell,” said Weston in a cold, level voice, “you’ll get me a lead on the Gordon Andrews murder by tomorrow night or hand me your badge.”

  I fumed in silence because there was nothing to say.

  “Get out!”

  As I closed the door behind me, I heard the crash of the crystal ball hitting the wall. Luckily he hadn’t hurled it at the glass panel in his office door.

  My own phone was ringing as I approached my desk. I picked it up wearily and said, “Very clever, Mr. Wood. Very damned clever.”

  He said, “Your basic difficulty, Captain Schnell, is that you have sworn to uphold the law and are compelled to employ legal methods. You must always work within the framework of the law. You would not think of tampering with the United States mails, even to save yourself from an unjust charge.”

  “Wood, if I make a single move outside of the law, you’ll use it against me, won’t you?”

  “I’m afraid that’s the way it has to be. You play according to your rules and I’ll play according to mine.”

  “Well, now, Mr. Wood, in our philosophy there may be strength. Remember, upon the day that the forces of law and order must violate their own concepts in order to effect their own ends, on that day law and order ceases to be the goal of honest men.”

  “Spoken like an idealist!”

  Hanging up a telephone is not polite, but in this case hanging up did not snap the link of communication.

  V

  An angry man is a poor fighter. I sat shuffling papers on my desk, half of my intellect raging helplessly. Finally I forced myself to sit and read the papers on the desk, even though I knew every word on every one of them.

  One reported that Wood had been one of the less conspicuous partners in a very successful personnel-placement agency. I could have added a penciled note that a telepath should make a very successful personnel manager.

  Another said that Florence Wood was employed as a safety deposit vault clerk in the Third National Bank. This didn’t bother me. What the standard human gets out of staring at a solid phalanx of safety deposit boxes is a headache, not perceptive-gained information.

  There was a medical report that Wood had undergone a mild coronary occlusion some months ago which had hastened his retirement. I wondered whether his retirement had been hastened by a real coronary occlusion or whether he’d used his extra-sensory power to fake the symptoms and control the doctor’s instruments.

  Among the papers was a complete dissertation on the stab-wound in Gordon Andrews’ chest. There was no trace of any foreign body; the wound did not go all the way through the chest cavity. It was not clean cut, as if made by a sharpened weapon, but more like the semi-rounded end of an umbrella or a blunt, heavy spike. In the opinion of the medical examiner, the wound had been made with a rapid thrust, but it looked as if there had been no withdrawal. An inspection of the wound for traces of excess water (icicles) or carbon dioxide (dry ice) had failed to disclose any plausible weapon or projectile that could have evaporated or sublimed out of existence.

  I longed to suggest that a test be made for air. If a kinematic can create pyrotic effects by agitation of the molecules in something to be ignited, a good kinematic could make Maxwell’s Demon go to work for him. Like compressing a volume of air into a .38 slug and projecting it at revolver velocity.

  And in the end I was not leafing the reports or reading them. I was really staring at the wall. Specifically, I was staring at the calendar without paying much attention to it, and as I came out of my reverie I realized that I’d been absorbed in a little red smudge on one of the dates.

  Association is a funny process. The combination of calendar and red blob stared at hazily had finally brought my mind around to thinking of February the fourteenth, which honors a patron saint who has absolutely nothing to do with Jimmy Valentine, who was reputed to have been a very fast man with the combination of a safe, especially the type of safe that Gordon Andrews kept his money in because he did not trust banks, which may have been a good idea considering that Florence Wood worked in a bank vault, and her father.…

  I jumped out of my office chair just as it tilted over backward. If I hadn’t jumped, I’d have split my skull on the radiator under the window behind me.

  A heavy brass-edged ruler came up from the desk and swung in a whistling saber swipe at my face. I ducked in time to let the cut pass over my head; it clipped a few upstanding hairs. When it reached the end of its stroke, I wrested it out of Wood’s control just to prove that an alert local force could exert more power than a distant kinematic force. Naturally I could. Leverage, of course.

  Next came a metal-to-metal clicking sound; it was the police positive in the upper left-hand corner of my desk. I thought strongly, “Psi-man, you lift that gun and fire it at me through the desk drawer, and the angle and everything will be enough evidence to change Weston’s opinion from angry rejection of all Psionics to a cold, calculated, vengeful agreement with everything I’ve suggested.”

  The clicking stopped coming from the desk drawer and resumed in smaller kind from the little desk lock in the tray drawer of the desk.

  These desk locks can be picked with a bent hairpin, but picking takes time. Everything takes time. At any rate, it did indeed take Edward Hazlett Wood a finite time to juggle the little brass tumblers, turn the main cylinder, retract the sliding bolt, withdraw the desk tray to unlatch the side drawers, pull open the upper left-hand drawer and extract my police positive from its holster with its mechanism entering the firing cycle—which itself takes time.

  By which time I’d vacated my office and was starting across the outer office floor in the brisk, stiff-legged walk of a man in a hurry to go a long way fast.

  Wood was stalled. I thought: “Make like a poltergeist, Psi-man—and convince everybody that you exist!”

  The outer office was a bustle of the usual police activity. But Wood did not have the ability to invade another mind and take over. At least, not one of the men in the office suddenly had a fit of homicidal mania with Captain Schnell listed as the first victim.

  And so I made Weston’s office and shoved my head in through the outer door and yelled: “Weston—Third National Bank—and make it fast!”

  I turned and headed outside as Weston started the usual top-brass routine of wanting to know all of the infinitely variable reasons why he should leave his office at all, let alone right now. With no one to fire delaying questions at, and with a growing realization that he was not going to learn a thing by sitting there in fulmination, he followed.

  I paid no more attention to him once I knew he was on his way.

  I had my own hands full.

  * * * *

  Considering the general reliability of the average internal combustion engine in the face of neglect, abuse and the natural ravages of weather, the automobile engine is a brute-force mechanism completely unable to support a psychosis. I was, however, appalled to discover just how many little thumb-valves, levers, wires, doo-dads, cams, gizmos and kadodies there are, each of which must be adjusted within ridiculously narrow limits before the so-called brute-force mechanism will deign to turn a gear. But again, and luckily, making adjustments and maladjustments takes time. And by the logical rules of classical mechanics, the simple maladjusting turn of a screw valve takes no longer to return to adjustment provided the restorer is as bright and as quick as the wrecker.

  We worked our way through it like a pair of fencers or ju jitsu professionals going through the formal ritual of opening their engagement.

  He fastened on the starting system, but I li
cked him cold on that one because the ignition key controls the starter relay switch and I could handle both with one hand.

  He tried to block the starting relay, but the armature had started before he arrived with his kinematic barrier and the solid mechanico-electrical power carried the armature home.

  He made a futile attempt to flummox up the laws of Mr. Ohm, but he did not have the power to prevent amperes from flowing from the battery into the starting motor. By the time he thought of gumming up the bendix, the gear had meshed against the flywheel and the engine was turning over.

  He tried to flood the engine, but I held the choke valve just as I wanted it. He fiddled with the breaker-points and I blocked that until one of the cylinders fired. That kicked the whole engine into life and made the engine far too rapid to control, moving member by moving member. This caused his attention to turn to the needle valves, but as fast as he turned them out, I turned them back in again. He hit the choke again and I parried his thrust.

  The engine kicked over, caught, spluttered and backfired, and then went into an erratic running that smoothed out slightly as it warmed. I wasted no time; I kicked her into gear and took off in a jack-rabbit start with my siren wailing.

  Exultantly, I thought: “Can you hit a moving target, Psi-man?”

  Yes, you can stop an internal combustion engine turning at three thousand revolutions per minute by yanking off the ignition system. But not when your opponent is doing everything in his power to prevent you, and not when both of you are traveling at sixty or more miles per hour and you have a rougher driving course than he.

  * * * *