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Spaceman's Luck and Other Stories

Page 19

by George O. Smith


  My own siren was clearing my way, driving motorists to the shelter of the side streets and parking places, and causing my fellow policemen to take charge blocks ahead to clear the path for the vehicle that had the right to exceed the city speed limit. My worthy opponent drove at sixty miles per hour at his own risk, trying to race me to the Third National Bank.

  Wood’s extra-sensory driving was no better than mine. The traffic pattern was clear to both of us. But who should know better than a policeman what the average motorist will do in the face of an emergency?

  He took the time now and then to hurl something at me, but this was not very effective. If you think not, figure how many things you can see and use as weapons while driving at sixty.

  And, too, he was also fighting the unfavorable end of a missile-problem called “terminal control,” which simply states that any guided missile approaching its target is subject to greater and greater interference by the enemy as it gets closer. Wood’s near-misses I ignored with a disdain calculated to make him furious, and his near-hits I blocked with an ease that proved my ability to outguess and outmaneuver him.

  I chuckled to myself, for Edward Hazlett Wood had been played off-balance. He’d committed the hysterical mistake of fighting me on my ground instead of his. He had thrust and I’d parried and advanced, forcing him to thrust again before he could recover. He’d been fighting in the very odd position of conducting a vigorous offensive while back-stepping in inexorable retreat. He should have run and run until he was clear enough to prepare a single telling blow.

  And so ultimately I came to the front of the Third National Bank in a screeching halt. I stepped under a falling cornice, neatly avoided a revolving door that tried to slice me, and side-stepped the bronze bust of Salmon P. Chase that toppled from its niche of honor above the door. I evaded the erratic rolling of a pencil, and I trod with unerring step on a circular patch of invisible stuff that was as slippery as the proverbial frictionless lubricant. The slick flowed forward and down over the stairs as I hurried below; I held myself erect above it by sheer will power.

  As I strode toward the safe-deposit vault, I thought exultantly: “You’re outpointed, Psi-man!”

  VI

  Florence Wood looked up from her little desk and cried, “Why, Captain Schnell! How nice to see you!”

  “Hello,” I said with a smile. “I hope you won’t mind my company for a while.”

  “I’m not likely to go for a stroll in—Captain Schnell! Don’t—”

  Seven and one-half tons of finely wrought and polished tool-steel alloy swung on delicately balanced hinges, coming to rest with the metal-to-metal sound of machined surfaces sliding into a perfect fit with its precision-matched receptacle. Its piston-fit made a pressure on our eardrums. Then the automatic switches took over and motors whirred in solid muffled harmony as the massive bars slid out of their nests into the polished slots.

  The ponderous operation that sealed the two of us off from the outside world behind a barrier of drill-proof and burglar-proof and blast-proof solidity concluded not with the mechanical fanfare it deserved, but with a gentle little click that was as final as the Word of God.

  “—do that!” gasped Florence Wood, weakly finishing her admonition.

  She stared at me.

  The knowledge that this bank vault door was equipped with a time-lock that would not permit it to be opened except in the interval between nine-fifteen and nine-thirty in the morning of any working weekday ceased to be mere information and became vitally important to Florence Wood.

  So did the secondary knowledge that the bank vault was also contrived in available volume to limit the breathable air. There was not enough to support the average human adult overnight until opening time tomorrow morning. Now there were two of them entombed in it—and she was one of them!

  “We’ll die!” she screamed.

  “Trust me, Florence?”

  She looked dubious. She was not at all willing to regard anyone as competent who was so foolish as to lock himself into a bank vault—and her with him.

  Florence was still struggling through her sea of mixed thoughts when the telephone rang. It was Chief Weston and he bellowed almost loud enough to hear through the yards of concrete and steel that separated us.

  “Schnell—what in the bloody hell have you done?”

  “I’ve shut the vault,” I said.

  “You’ll die!”

  “I doubt it.”

  “How do you propose to get out?” he demanded with heavy sarcasm.

  “Just ask Edward Hazlett Wood—the Psi-man in our midst.”

  “Schnell, if you get out of there alive, I’m going to ask for your resig—”

  “If I get out of here alive, you’ll need every faculty I have to keep our Psi-man jugged for good.”

  “You and your extra-sensory—”

  “Chief, get it through your thick skull that I am so convinced I’m right that I am betting my life on it!”

  “And can you tell me why he is going to give himself away to rescue you?”

  “Because I have his daughter right here beside me.”

  “Schnell—”

  “Stop yacking, Chief. Call me when Wood arrives. I have an emotional problem on my hands down here.”

  “How do you know Wood’s coming?”

  “He’s been following my every move by telepathy,” I said. “And he’s been trying to block me all the way. Oh, he knows all right.”

  Then I hung up to stop a lot of senseless gab. I turned to Florence, who was just beginning to understand what I had said and what it meant to both her and her father. She stood there with shocked eyes regarding me, and with one hand pressed back against her teeth. She said, “I don’t believe it,” in a barely audible voice.

  “It’s true, and I’m sorry it’s true,” I told her.

  “It can’t be true.”

  “That’s what you’d like to believe,” I said softly. “But the fact remains that your father is a killer.”

  “I’d rather die.”

  “Florence, the choice between death and dishonor is not yours to make. Whether you live or die is up to your father, who is guilty of placing you in this awkward position by turning his talents to evil.”

  She stared at me. “But—how could you—?”

  “There was no other way but to bait this trap emotionally.”

  “So cold and cruel—”

  I nodded. “So were the pioneers who saved one last bullet for their wives.”

  How could I tell this hurt girl that I had looked time and again into the minds of killers and found them far worse than the deeds they committed? When the official record states that upon such and such a date, so and so was punished for his crime, how is he punished for the harm he did to those who placed their trust in him? I hate them because they force me to reveal them for what they are, making me an agent of their betrayal.

  The phone rang again. “Yeah, Chief?”

  “Schnell, Wood’s just arrived. What shall I tell him?”

  “Don’t bother. He knows it all.”

  “Schnell, granting that you are right, why should he show his hand when he knows—or could easily find out—that the time-lock setting mechanism is on your side of that vault door?”

  “Sure it is,” I replied. “But it’s covered by a sheet of five-ply safety glass.”

  “Use your revolver!”

  “Chief, reprimand me for a violation of regulations if you must, but let me point out that only an idiot would wear a gun when he’s pitting himself against a Psi-man.”

  “Got everything figured out, haven’t you, Schnell?”

  “Chief,” I said, “this affair started in a sealed room, and now it’s going to end in one.”

  I yanked on the telephone and pulled it out of its connection block, snapping that link of communication. Then, to satisfy Edward Hazlett Wood, I hurled the instrument as hard as I could against the safety glass. The telephone bounced as if I had thrown it agai
nst six solid feet of battleship plate armor.

  I thought: “Psi-man, you are trapped!”

  He thought: “I’ve killed before, Schnell. Why shouldn’t I profess helplessness and innocence, and accuse you and the whole Police Department of the stupid and wanton death of my beloved daughter?”

  “Because you’ve erred, Psi-man Wood.”

  “Ah, now I have proof! You’re a Psi-man, too!”

  “Who—me?” I thought without a visible change in my expression for Florence Wood to see. “You’re the one who erred, Wood. You neglected the rules.”

  “Bah—the law! Stupid law—”

  “Not so stupid, Wood. The law is really very sensible. It’s strong, Wood, and it fosters the strength that comes of following it. So you see, Psi-man Wood, by never, never making any overt use of my talent, by never admitting that I know more than any clever man can see and deduce from what he knows—it has now become quite obvious to Chief Weston that if any such shenanigans as extra-sensory manipulation of this bank-vault door take place—you’re the only one suspected of parapsychic power!”

  And then the time-lock setting dials clicked around, their tiny noise muted by the glass door. They came around until they pointed to the present time. Then came the louder manipulation of outside dial lock, the heavy click of massive tumblers, and then the solid turning sound of wheel and mighty lever. The vault door swung open.

  Outside, a pale and speechless man faced me, looking at his daughter. Weston was shaking his head, but the confusion was clearing. Weston was a good man, quite willing to operate without a full explanation, so long as there was a reasonable probability that some reasonable explanation would come later. The president and four vice-presidents of the bank stared at their vault door in dismay, wondering how anyone could from now on rely on any protection if the best of the vault-maker’s art could be opened with such ease.

  And Florence. She started forward with a glad cry, but stopped in mid-stride as she realized the full truth. In those fractions of a second, she became the full, mature adult who had been hurt, and who knew that hurt and pain are not the end.

  She stopped a full yard from him and whispered, “Daddy—you did—it!”

  He looked at her out of frantic eyes. “I didn’t! I didn’t!”

  Chief Weston took a pair of handcuffs from one of the uniformed cops and held them up in front of Edward Hazlett Wood’s eyes. “Coming quietly, Wood, or must I weld them on you?”

  Stunned, knowing that any move he made I would block, the murderer turned to go.

  I was going to have quite an interesting intellectual problem to solve. I was going to have to testify that I was clever enough to trap an extra-sensory criminal without displaying my own extra-sensory talent. It wasn’t just a matter of putting a possible ending to my official usefulness to the forces of law and order if the facts became known. One word of suspicion against Captain Howard Schnell and some clever defense attorney would raise a wholly reasonable doubt as to which Psi-man opened that vault door.

  And being sworn to uphold the law, and enforce the law within the framework of the law itself, I’d have to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help me God!

  But, according to the same sensible law, not unless I was specifically asked.

  And to answer Edward Hazlett Wood’s question: The perfect answer to the perfect crime committed by the perfect criminal is a perfect retribution.

  The End

  *********************************

  The Troublemakers,

  by George O. Smith

  Galaxy April 1960

  Novella - 17683 words

  I

  The living room reflected wealth, position, good taste. In size it was a full ten feet by fourteen, with nearly an eight-foot ceiling. Light was furnished by glow panels precisely balanced in color to produce light’s most flattering tint for the woman who sat in a delicate chair of authentic, golden-veined blackwood.

  The chair itself must have cost a fortune to ship from Tau Ceti Five. It was an ostentation in the eyes of the visitor, who viewed it as evidence of a self-indulgent attitude that would certainly make his job more difficult.

  The air in the room was fresh and very faintly aromatic, pleasing. It came draftlessly refreshed at a temperature of seventy-six degrees and a relative humidity of fifty percent and permitted the entry of no more than one foreign particle (dust) per cubic foot.

  The coffee table was another ostentation, but for a different reason than the imported chair of blackwood. The coffee table was of mahogany—terrestrial mahogany—and therefore either antique, heirloom, or both, and in any combination of cases it was priceless. It gave the visitor some dark pleasure to sit before it with his comparison microscope parked on the polished mahogany surface, with the ease of one who always parked his tools on tables and stands made of treasure woods.

  There were four persons. Paul Hanford swirled brandy in a snifter with a series of nervous gestures. Mrs. Hanford sat in the blackwood chair unhappily, despite the flattering glow of the wall-panels. Their daughter, Gloria, sat in such a way as to distract the visitor by presenting a target that his eyes could not avoid. Try as he would, his gaze kept straying to the slender, exposed bare ankle and the delicate, high-arched foot visible beneath the hem of the girl’s dress.

  * * * *

  Norman Ross, GSch, was the visitor, and he subvocalized his tenth self-indictment as he tore his gaze away from Gloria Hanford’s ankle to look into Paul Hanford’s face. Ross was the Scholar of Genetics for the local division of the Department of Domestic Tranquility and he should have known all about such things, but he obviously did not.

  He said, “You can hardly blame yourselves, you know,” although he did not really believe it.

  “But what have we done wrong?” asked Mrs. Hanford in a plaintive voice.

  Scholar Ross shook his head and caught his gaze in mid-stray before it returned all the way to that alluring ankle. “Genetics, my dear Mrs. Hanford, is a statistical science, not a precise science.” He waved vaguely at the comparison microscope. “There are your backgrounds for seven generations. No one—and I repeat, no one—could have foreseen the issue of a headstrong, difficult offspring from the mating of characteristics such as these. I checked most carefully, most minutely, just to be certain that some obscure but important conflict had not been overlooked by the signing doctor. Doctors, however, do make mistakes.”

  Gloria Hanford dandled her calf provocatively and caused the hem of her skirt to rise another half-inch. The scholar’s eyes swung, clung, and were jerked away again.

  “What’s wrong with me, Scholar Ross?” she asked in a throaty voice.

  “You are headstrong, self-willed, wild, and—” his voice failed because he wanted to lash out at her for her brazen and deliberate display of her bare ankle; he struggled to find a drawing-room word for her that would not wholly offend the hapless parents and ultimately came up with—“meretricious.”

  Gloria said, “I’m all that just because I enjoy a little fun?”

  “You may call it fun to scare people to death by flying your aircar below roof level along the city streets, but the Department of Air Traffic says that it is both dangerous and illegal.”

  “Pooh!”

  Paul Hanford said, “Gloria, it isn’t that you don’t know better.”

  Mrs. Hanford said, “Paul, how have we failed as parents?”

  Scholar Ross shook his head. “You haven’t failed. You can’t help it if your daughter is a throwback—”

  “Throwback!” exclaimed Gloria.

  “—to an earlier, more violent age when uncontrolled groups of headstrong youths formed gangs of New York and conducted open warfare upon one another for the control of Tammany Hall. Those wild days were the result of unregistered, unrestricted, and uncontrolled matings. Since no attempt was made to prevent the unfit from mating with the unfit, there were many generations of wild ones—troublemakers. It is not surprisi
ng that, with such a human heritage, an occasional wild one is born today.”

  * * * *

  The scholar took another surreptitious (he hoped) glance at the bare ankle and said, “No, you are not directly to blame. We know you wouldn’t spawn a troublemaker willfully and maliciously. It’s just an unfortunate accident. You must not despair over the past—but you must spend your efforts to calm the troubled future.”

  “What should we do, Scholar Ross?” asked Paul Hanford.

  “I have to speak bluntly. Perhaps you’d prefer the ladies to leave.”

  “I’ll not go,” said Mrs. Hanford firmly, and Gloria added, “I’m not going to let you talk about me behind my back!”

  “Very well. As Scholar of Genetics, I am head of the local Division of Domestic Tranquility. I would prefer to keep my district calm and peaceful, without the attention of the punitive authorities, and I’m sure you’d all prefer this, too.”

  “Absolutely!” said Paul Hanford.

  “Now, then,” said Scholar Ross, “for the immediate problem, we’ll prescribe fifty milligrams of dociline, one tablet to be taken each night before retiring. This will place our young lady’s frame of mind in a receptive mood to suggestions of gentler pursuits. As soon as possible, Mr. Hanford, subscribe to Music To Live By and have them pipe in Program G-252 every evening, starting shortly after dinnertime and signing off shortly after breakfast. Your daughter’s dinnertime and breakfast I mean, and the outlet should be in her bedroom. It is not mandatory that she heed the program material all the time, but it must be available to set her moods. Finally, upon awakening, a twenty-five milligram tablet of nitrolabe will lower the patient’s capacity for anticipating excitement during the day.”

  He paused for a moment thoughtfully, and added as if it were an aside, “I’d not go so far as to suggest that you—her parents—make a conscious effort to avoid listening to periods of Program G-252, but I’d definitely warn you not to fall into the habit of listening to it.”

 

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