Space Police

by Andre Norton

  But for all of his faults, Sub-Inspector Mordette needed only one hint to alert him. He’d gotten that hint from the tone of Calder’s voice. He grabbed James Bruce and snatched the small magnetic gun out of his hand before he had a chance to use it. Then, still holding the vice president with one ham-like hand, he looked to the Interplanetary detective.

  “He’s the murderer all right,” Inspector Calder said. “Take him away.”

  Sub-Inspector Mordette motioned toward the door and two of his men came in and took James Bruce out.

  “Now, what about it?” Mordette asked heavily. “What made him break like that?”

  “This,” said Calder. He held up the paper so that they could both see what had been carefully written on it.

  “What does it mean?” Mordette asked.

  “That’s the formula for the door he made,” Jair said. “It’s the same as the regular formula except for a slight difference which lowers its softening point. You see, Plexilite is a polymethyl methacrylate plastic, sometimes known as the plastic with a memory. In other words, it can be molded into one form and then, if you heat it, it will immediately revert to its original form.”

  “What does that have to do with it?”

  “Everything. You see, Mr. Bruce made the door exactly like the regular door, except that in molding it he put into the door an old-fashioned keyhole—something which hasn’t been used in a hundred years. He also molded a key to fit it and so was able to unlock and lock the door.”

  “But what happened to the keyhole and the key?”

  “Cooerl II,” Jair Calder said. “The call to the Mercurian was a plan to get him to pass along the hallway just after the murder. In doing so, he raised the temperature to about two hundred degrees centigrade—not warm enough to bother the other doors, but enough to make this one door ‘remember’ its original form, which was a door without a keyhole. And the key, which he’d dropped on the floor, became this.” Jair reached into his pocket and held up the small figure he’d picked up earlier. “What looks like etching is where he filed the key. In reverting, the filed edges were inside.”

  “The clue on the paper.”

  “Part of it,” said Jair. “Gru must have guessed when he saw his murderer and tried to write down the formula, or part of it. The six-sided figure he drew was probably part of the chemical symbol for the reaction between phenol and formaldehI’de—that being what Bruce added and which he purchased here in the hotel. The COO was undoubtedly part of the formula I’ve written here.”

  “But why?”

  “Plastics,” the inspector said. “Mr. Gru had made an appointment with a patent attorney concerning something he was going to call Ancolite. On the scratch pad upstairs was part of a formula which the murderer overlooked. Not the complete formula, but enough to be interesting.” He pulled the slip of paper from his pocket and unfolded the section which earlier he’d folded back. He read from it. “ ‘CO-Two A-N-O plus Si-O-Two plus C-six-H-five-O-H.’ It’s enough to indicate that Mr. Gru had apparently found a way to make a plastic primarily from air. This might easily put Plasticorp out of business.”

  “But—” began the manager.

  “Exactly,” said Inspector Calder. “James Bruce committed murder in order to save his corporation. But it was a wasted effort. I must turn this paper over to the government of Sirius II and they probably have a chemist who can reconstruct the formula. You see,” he added, turning to the sub-inspector, “you were quite wrong about nothing having changed in the past two hundred years. This was a crime which could not have happened then.

  “Which,” he continued, “brings us up to the point that James Bruce will, according to law, have to be tried on Sirius II. I’ll write a supplementary report, but you’ll have to file the main report. And I have no doubt that Mr. Bruce will be found guilty. After which, perhaps, there’ll be some action against Plasticorp.”

  “One thing puzzles me,” said Mordette, still finding something to worry him. “I’ve had no experience with this sort of thing. How shall I make the charge? The victim wasn’t a man, so homicide seems somehow wrong.”

  “Of course it is,” Inspector Jair Calder said briskly. “The proper charge is silicide.” He waved to the two men and walked out, once more looking sleepy.

  They waved back.

  3. The “Event Police” were under oath to safeguard history in the making. Josef Faber of the Service, learning his trade, incidentally learns why a “beep” ruled not only Terra but all the universe. This is a story of an organization fully prepared to smash any trouble before it started from five minutes to five centuries in the future!

  JAMES BLISH

  Beep

  JOSEF FABER lowered his newspaper slightly. Finding the girl on the park bench looking his way, he smiled an agonizingly embarrassed smile and ducked back into the paper again.

  He was reasonably certain that he looked the part of a middle-aged, steadily employed, harmless citizen enjoying a Sunday break in the bookkeeping and family routines. He was also quite certain, despite his official instructions, that it wouldn’t make the slightest bit of difference if he didn’t. These boy-meets-girl assignments always came off. Jo had never tackled a single one that really had required him.

  As a matter of fact, the newspaper, which he was supposed to be using only as a blind, interested him a good deal more than his job did. He had only barely begun to suspect the obvious ten years ago when the Service had snapped him up; now, after a decade as an agent, he was still fascinated to see how smoothly the really important situations came off. The dangerous situations—not boy-meets-girl.

  This affair of the Black Horse Nebula, for instance. Some days ago the papers and the commentators had begun to mention reports of disturbances in that area, and Jo’s practiced eye had picked up the mention. Something big was cooking.

  Today it had boiled over—the Black Horse Nebula had suddenly spewed ships by the hundreds, a massed armada that must have taken more than a century of effort on the part of a whole star-cluster, a production drive conducted in the strictest and most fanatical kind of secrecy—

  And, of course, the Service had been on the spot in plenty of time. With three times as many ships, disposed with mathematical precision so as to enfilade the entire armada the moment it broke from the nebula. The battle had been a massacre, the attack smashed before the average citizen could ever begin to figure out what it had been aimed at—good had triumphed again over evil.

  Of course.

  Furtive scuffings on the gravel drew his attention briefly. He looked at his watch, which said 14:58:03. That was the time, according to his instructions, when boy had to meet girl.

  He had been given the strictest kind of orders to let nothing interfere with this meeting—the orders always issued on boy-meets-girl assignments. But, as usual, he had nothing to do but observe. The meeting was coming off on the dot, without any prodding from Jo. They always did.

  Of course.

  With a sigh, he folded his newspaper, smiling again at the couple—yes, it was the right man, too—and moved away, as if reluctantly. He wondered what would happen were he to pull away the false mustache, pitch the newspaper on the grass, and bound away with a joyous whoop. He suspected that the course of history would not be deflected by even a second of arc, but he was not minded to try the experiment.

  The park was pleasant. The twin suns warmed the path and the greenery without any of the blasting heat which they would bring to bear later in the summer. Randolph was altogether the most comfortable planet he had visited in years. A little backward, perhaps, but restful, too.

  It was also slightly over a hundred light-years away from Earth. It would be interesting to know how Service headquarters on Earth could have known in advance that boy would meet girl at a certain spot on Randolph, precisely at 14:58:03.

  Or how Service headquarters could have ambushed with micro-metric precision a major interstellar fleet, with no more preparation than a few days’ build-up in
the newspapers and video could evidence.

  The press was free, on Randolph as everywhere. It reported the news it got. Any emergency concentration of Service ships in the Black Horse area, or anywhere else, would have been noticed and reported on. The Service did not forbid such reports for “security” reasons or for any other reasons. Yet there had been nothing to report but that (a) an armada of staggering size had erupted with no real warning from the Black Horse Nebula, and that (b) the Service had been ready.

  By now, it was a commonplace that the Service was always ready. It had not had a defect or a failure in well over two centuries. It had not even had a fiasco, the alarming-sounding technical word by which it referred to the possibility that a boy-meets-girl assignment might not come off.

  Jo hailed a hopper. Once inside, he stripped himself of the mustache, the bald spot, the forehead creases—all the make-up which had given him his mask of friendly innocuousness.

  The hoppy watched the whole process in the rear-view mirror. Jo glanced up and met his eyes.

  “Pardon me, mister, but I figured you didn’t care if I saw you. You must be a Service man.”

  “That’s right. Take me to Service HQ, will you?”

  “Sure enough.” The hoppy gunned his machine. It rose smoothly to the express level. “First time I ever got close to a Service man. Didn’t hardly believe it at first when I saw you taking your face off. You sure looked different.”

  “Have to, sometimes,” Jo said, preoccupied.

  “I’ll bet. No wonder you know all about everything before it breaks. You must have a thousand faces each, your own mother wouldn’t know you, eh? Don’t you care if I know about your snooping around in disguise?”

  Jo grinned. The grin created a tiny pulling sensation across one curve of his cheek, just next to his nose. He stripped away the overlooked bit of tissue and examined it critically.

  “Of course not. Disguise is an elementary part of Service work. Anyone could guess that. We don’t use it often, as a matter of fact—only on very simple assignments.”

  “Oh.” The hoppy sounded slightly disappointed, as melodrama faded. He drove silently for about a minute. Then, speculatively: “Sometimes I think the Service must have time-travel, the things they pull . . . well, here you are. Good luck, mister.”

  “Thanks.”

  Jo went directly to Krasna’s office. Krasna was a Randolpher, Earth-trained, and answerable to the Earth office, but otherwise pretty much on his own. His heavy, muscular face wore the same expression of serene confidence that was characteristic of Service officials everywhere—even some that, technically speaking, had no faces to wear it.

  “Boy meets girl,” Jo said briefly. “On the nose and on the spot.”

  “Good work, Jo. Cigarette?” Krasna pushed the box across his desk.

  “Nope, not now. Like to talk to you, if you’ve got time.” Krasna pushed a button, and a toadstool-like chair rose out of the floor behind Jo. “What’s on your mind?”

  “Well,” Jo said carefully. “I’m wondering why you patted me on the back just now for not doing a job.”

  “You did a job.”

  “I did not,” Jo said flatly. “Boy would have met girl, whether I’d been here on Randolph or back on Earth. The course of true love always runs smooth. It has in all my boy-meets-girl cases, and it has in the boy-meets-girl cases of every other agent with whom I’ve compared notes.”

  “Well, good,” Krasna said, smiling. “That’s the way we like to have it run. And that’s the way we expect it to run. But, Jo, we like to have somebody on the spot, somebody with a reputation for resourcefulness, just in case there’s a snag. There almost never is, as you’ve observed. But—if there were?”

  Jo snorted. “If what you’re trying to do is to establish preconditions for the future, any interference by a Service agent would throw the eventual result farther off the track. I know that much about probability.”

  “And what makes you think we’re trying to set up the future?”

  “It’s obvious even to the hoppies on your own planet; the one that brought me here told me he thought the Service had time-travel. It’s especially obvious to all the individuals and governments and entire populations that the Service has bailed out of serious messes for centuries, with never a single failure.” Jo shrugged. “A man can be asked to safeguard only a small number of boy-meets-girl cases before he realizes, as an agent, that what the Service is safeguarding is the future children of those meetings. Ergo—the Service knows what those children are to be like, and has reason to want their future existence guaranteed. What other conclusion is possible?”

  Krasna took out a cigarette and lit it deliberately; it was obvious that he was using the maneuver to cloak his response.

  “None,” he admitted at last. “We have some foreknowledge, of course. We couldn’t have made our reputation with espionage alone. But we have obvious other advantages: genetics, for instance, and operations research, the theory of games, the Dirac transmitter—it’s quite an arsenal, and of course there’s a good deal of prediction involved in all those things.”

  “I see that,” Jo said. He shifted in his chair, formulating all he wanted to say. He changed his mind about the cigarette and helped himself to one. “But these things don’t add up to infallibility—and that’s a qualitative difference, Kras. Take this affair of the Black Horse armada. The moment the armada appeared, we’ll assume, Earth heard about it by Dirac, and started to assemble a counter-armada. But it takes finite time to bring together a concentration of ships and men, even if your message system is instantaneous.

  “The Service’s counter-armada was already on hand. It had been building there for so long and with so little fuss that nobody even noticed it concentrating until a day or so before the battle. Then planets in the area began to sit up and take notice, and be uneasy about what was going to break. But not very uneasy; the Service always wins—that’s been a statistical fact for centuries. Centuries, Kras. Good Lord, it takes almost as long as that, in straight preparation, to pull some of the tricks we pulled! The Dirac gives us an advantage of ten to twenty-five years in really extreme cases out on the rim of the Galaxy, but no more than that.”

  He realized that he had been fuming away on the cigarette until the roof of his mouth was scorched, and snubbed it out angrily.

  “That’s a very different thing,” he said, “than knowing in a general way how an enemy is likely to behave, or what kind of children the Mendelian laws say a given couple should have. It means that we’ve some way of reading the future in minute detail. That’s in flat contradiction to everything I’ve been taught about probability, but I have to believe what I see.”

  Krasna laughed. “That’s a very able presentation,” he said. He seemed genuinely pleased. “I think you’ll remember that you were first impressed into the Service when you began to wonder why the news was always good. Fewer and fewer people wonder about that nowadays; it’s become a part of their expected environment.” He stood up and ran a hand through his hair. “Now you’ve carried yourself through the next stage. Congratulations, Jo. You’ve just been promoted!”

  “I have?” Jo said incredulously. “I came in here with the notion that I might get myself fired.”

  “No. Come around to this side of the desk, Jo, and I’ll play you a little history.” Krasna unfolded the desktop to expose a small visor screen. Obediently Jo rose and went around the desk to where he could see the blank surface. “I had a standard indoctrination tape sent up to me a week ago, in the expectation that you’d be ready to see it. Watch.”

  Krasna touched the board. A small dot of light appeared in the center of the screen and went out again. At the same time, there was a small beep of sound. Then the tape began to unroll and a picture clarified on the screen.

  “As you suspected,” Krasna said conversationally, “the Service is infallible. How it got that way is a story that started several centuries back. This tape gives all the dope. You shoul
d almost be able to imagine what really happened . . .”

  II

  Dana Lje—her father had been a Hollander, her mother born in the Celebes—sat down in the chair which Captain Robin Weinbaum had indicated, crossed her legs, and waited, her blue-black hair shining under the lights.

  Weinbaum eyed her quizzically. The conqueror Resident who had given the girl her entirely European name had been paid in kind, for his daughter’s beauty had nothing fair and Dutch about it. To the eye of the beholder, Dana Lje seemed a particularly delicate virgin of Bali, despite her western name, clothing and assurance. The combination had already proven piquant for the millions who watched her television column, and Weinbaum found it no less charming at first hand.

  “As one of your most recent victims,” he said, “I’m not sure that I’m honored, Miss Lje. A few of my wounds are still bleeding. But I am a good deal puzzled as to why you’re visiting me now. Aren’t you afraid that I’ll bite back?”

  “I had no intention of attacking you personally, and I don’t think I did,” the video columnist said seriously. “It was just pretty plain that our intelligence had slipped badly in the Erskine affair. It was my job to say so. Obviously you were going to get hurt, since you’re head of the bureau—but there was no malice in it.”

  “Cold comfort,” Weinbaum said dryly. “But thank you, nevertheless.”

  The Eurasian girl shrugged. “That isn’t what I came here about, anyway. Tell me, Captain Weinbaum—have you ever heard of an outfit calling itself Interstellar Information?”

  Weinbaum shook his head. “Sounds like a skip-tracing firm. Not an easy business, these days.”

  “That’s just what I thought when I first saw their letterhead,” Dana said. “But the letter under it wasn’t one that a private-eye outfit would write. Let me read part of it to you.”

  Her slim fingers burrowed in her inside jacket pocket, and emerged again with a single sheet of paper. It was plain typewriter bond, Weinbaum noted automatically: she had brought only a copy with her, and had left the original of the letter at home. The copy, then, would be incomplete—probably seriously.