by Andre Norton
A group of men was coming towards me, shouting. Those in the lead began to run, waving their arms.
“It was murder!” one cried.
They had seen me throw Dulice down and I ran. This was not the time for difficult explanations. As an agent one has to make one’s own way out of difficulties. When the difficulties were of this type, an avoiding action was called for. Furthermore, while I argued Piert would act.
The hotel was quiet, the youth gone, possibly to get tea or coffee. I hurried to the room Mr. Dulice had hired and searched quickly. The metal box was not there. I went to my own room and traced back the way he must have gone, watching for likely hiding-places. There seemed to be none—or those I saw were too obvious for a mind of Mr. Dulice’s calibre to adopt.
I went out of the hotel. Dulice had appeared to go left and the road was almost bare of hiding-places until the next corner. Beyond the corner was a railed garden, small and sunk below street level. At the bottom of the steps was a metal box, shiny and new. I descended, brought it up, and unlocked it. The resonator safe in my pocket, I hesitated, then locked the box and returned it to its previous position. Piert was the type who would be aware of developments. He might know it was there, return to reassure himself or carry it off.
With everything I possessed on Earth stowed in my case I hurried out of the hotel, wondering if already too much time had been wasted. It would be wise to move on. Voices sounded along the street and three workmen came into view.
“That’s him!” one shouted, pointing at me.
They had been quick in tracing me—almost too quick. The other way along the street others were coming, a torch bobbing in their leader’s hands. Behind in the alley would be others. I wondered whether it was luck or whether Piert was present and had already acted.
I put down my case, waiting. The railwaymen were confident because of their numbers, yet hesitated to lay hands on me.
“We saw him throw the man down the embankment,” one said to another. “It was attempted murder, clear as daylight.”
I tensed my skin against their grasp but they only surrounded me, increasingly hesitant.
“Look,” I said, “I’m an ordinary man. I ran—who wouldn’t with a pack like you after him? If you think there’s been murder done, then go back and look for the body!”
“It’s a plan to get rid of us,” one said.
I laughed. “If you think so, some go back and some stay.”
“You’re trying to leave town,” another pointed out.
“So what? Who wouldn’t, after being chased like a thief?” They were silent, looking at each other. The enthusiasm of the first rush that had carried them after me was subsiding—some were beginning to doubt the truth of what they had seen.
“Perhaps we made a mistake . . .” one said.
“No. He threw him down, clear as daylight.”
“It’s a job for the authorities to look into,” a third suggested.
I did not want that. The wheels of authority turn slowly and Piert would be hundreds of miles away by the time it was decided there was indeed no body.
“He’s an ordinary looking kind of cove,” the first man said. “Maybe it was all an—an illusion—”
Another man had come down the street behind them, and stood on the perimeter of the circle in shadow.
“That’s your saloon in the open-air park down the road,” he shot at me over their heads.
It was. I had bought it as the world could prove. I nodded. Something in the timber of the voice—something lacking—chilled me, but I could not see him clearly over the surrounding heads.
The newcomer gave an exclamation. “He admits it! That’s why you’ll not find a body! I stayed behind, going down to see if the man was alive. He was dead. There’s no body now.” He pointed at me accusingly. “He came back, threw the body in his car and took it away. I didn’t try to stop him—he had a gun. He’s dumped both in the river in my opinion. It was quick work—but he had time to do it.”
The workmen looked at the speaker. “Yes, I did notice this chap stay behind,” one said.
Another nodded. “There’d be time to nip down to the bridge—”
I was afraid, then. Terribly afraid. They had lost an exact sense of the time that had passed. Worse, it might have been possible for me to have taken a body down to the river. Time had flown while I had been searching for the pedestal.
“It’s all lies,” I said. “I never had a gun.”
“That’s for a judge and jury to decide,” they said, and pressed closely round me.
We walked noisily through the town. I was surrounded, and shaken. This was the kind of thing no agent likes to happen. We like secrecy. We expect no outside aid—know indeed, that there will be none forthcoming—and the situation was ugly. There was enough proof against me to keep me tied up so long that Piert could be ten thousand miles away and then it would take half a lifetime to find him.
The workmen told each other they had seen me do it, gaining confidence. “I still think there’s been some mistake,” one objected.
They silenced him. The mistake had been mine, coupled with bad luck that sent the late gang off work at that very moment when Dulice had pitched down on to the live rails.
They pressed closer as we neared the police station. “Where’s that man who saw him take the body?” one asked. They needed to reassure themselves now.
“I’m here,” the voice said.
It was slightly flat, yet somehow absolutely normal.
“Ah, you saw him,” the man said, satisfied. “You’ll have to tell the police. You’re new here, eh?”
“I was going to the station to see if there were any late trains stopping.” The newcomer was behind me, beyond the fringe of the crowd.
“No expresses stop here all night,” someone said.
There was silence, then one said, “You’ll need to give evidence. We didn’t see him come back. What you saw is important. What’s your name?”
“Peart,” the man said. “Samuel Peart. I was at the hotel.”
I knew then that Piert had engineered it and lied to convict me and wanted me to know. That was like him. He must have the satisfaction of knowing that I knew, thus doubling his own triumph. In that was his revenge for Iago and Diesnar and for all the others of his type I had hunted down.
“You’re a stranger here?” one asked again.
“Yes.”
He put the human sound of triumph into his voice, knowing I should hear it and understand and thus hate tenfold my defeat.
It was awkward. We agents like things to be kept quiet. We do not like a town stirred to awareness of our presence and actions. But things had gone too far. At that moment only a dozen workmen possessed the fringe of this knowledge, excluding Piert and myself. Of their number one doubted. The others were still so surprised they needed to reassure each other.
I halted and turned around. The newcomer was the youth of the hotel. “I didn’t have time to take the body away, Mr. Peart,” I said evenly. “But I did have time to find—and open—the box Mr. Dulice took.”
It meant nothing to the workmen. For a second I savored the terror which instantly replaced Piert’s satisfaction and which could be sensed with a feeling of almost physical impact. He had been clever, getting a job at the hotel. Then I pressed the lever of the pedestal.
Piert’s outline wobbled, shrank inwards, and he dissipated away into faint green vapor which drifted and vanished like cigarette smoke on the evening air.
“Strewth!” a workman breathed.
I walked through them and ran. My feet made no sound. I heard their shouts as I reached my saloon but lost them as I drove for the valley. It had been an untidy case, I thought, but the workmen would end up doubting their own eyes.
I lifted my vessel, a mere lattice structure of girders thin as wire, from the water, set it on the bank and put up the force screens. My human shape, replica of the life-forms amid which I had moved, began to vanish. I glide
d into the vessel, set now for the Dog Star.
We police from Sirius do not like outlaws to prey upon unsuspecting worlds, however remote.
5. Verkan Vail, who policed not backward or forward in time but across it—keeping the citizens of his particular world in line when they went visiting into other level civilizations—was presented with a new type of quarry in the nighthound from Venus. But the case was only routine for a Paratime Trooper.
H. BEAM PIPER
Police Operation
“. . . there may be something in the nature of an occult police force, which operates to divert human suspicions, and to supply explanations that are good enough for whatever, somewhat in the nature of minds, human beings have—or that, if there be occult mischief makers and occult ravagers, they may be of a world also of other beings that are acting to check them, and to explain them, not benevolently, but to divert suspicion from themselves, because they, too, may be exploiting life upon this earth, but in ways more subtle, and in orderly, or organized, fashion.”
Charles Fort: Lo!
JOHN STRAWMYER stood, an irate figure in faded overalls and sweat-whitened black shirt, apart from the others, his back to the weathered farm-buildings and the line of yellowing woods, and the cirrus-streaked blue October sky. He thrust out a work-gnarled hand accusingly.
“That there heifer was worth two hund’rd, two hund’rd an’ fifty dollars!” he clamored. “An’ that there dog was just like one uh the fam’ly; an’ now look at’m! I don’t like t’ use profane language, but you’ns gotta do some’n about this!”
Steve Parker, the district game protector, aimed his Leica at the carcass of the dog and snapped the shutter. “We’re doing something about it,” he said shortly. Then he stepped ten feet to the left and edged around the mangled heifer, choosing an angle for his camera shot.
The two men in the gray whipcords of the State police, seeing that Parker was through with the dog, moved in and squatted to examine it. The one with the triple chevrons on his sleeves took it by both forefeet and flipped it over on its back. It had been a big brute, of nondescript breed, with a rough black-and-brown coat. Something had clawed it deeply about the head, its throat was slashed transversely several times, and it had been disemboweled by a single slash that had opened its belly from breastbone to tail. They looked at it carefully, and then went to stand beside Parker while he photographed the dead heifer. Like the dog, it had been talon-raked on either side of the head, and its throat had been slashed deeply several times. In addition, flesh had been tom from one flank in great strips.
“I can’t kill a bear outa season, no!” Strawmyer continued his plaint. “But a bear comes an’ kills my stock an’ my dog; that there’s all right! That’s the kinda deal a farmer always gits, in this State! I don’t like t’ use profane language—”
“Then don’t!” Parker barked at him, impatiently. “Don’t use any kind of language. Just put in your claim and shut up!” He turned to the men in whipcords and gray Stetsons. “You boys seen everything?” he asked. “Then let’s go.”
They walked briskly back to the barnyard, Strawmyer following them, still vociferating about the wrongs of the fanner at the hands of a cynical and corrupt State government. They climbed into the State police car, the sergeant and the private in front and Parker in the rear, with his camera on the seat beside a Winchester carbine.
“Weren’t you pretty short with that fellow back there, Steve?” the sergeant asked as the private started the car.
“Not too short. ‘I don’t like t’ use profane language,” Parker mimicked the bereaved heifer owner, and then he went on to specify: “I’m morally certain that he’s shot at least four illegal deer in the last year. When and if I ever get anything on him, he’s going to be sorrier for himself than he is now.”
“They’re the characters that always beef their heads off,” the sergeant agreed. “You think that whatever did this was the same as the others?”
“Yes. The dog must have jumped it while it was eating at the heifer. Same superficial scratches about the head, and deep cuts on the throat or belly. The bigger the animal, the farther front the big slashes occur. Evidently something grabs them by the head with front claws, and slashes with hind claws; that’s why I think it’s a bobcat.”
“You know,” the private said, “I saw a lot of wounds like that during the war. My outfit landed on Mindanao, where the guerrillas had been active. And this looks like bolo-work to me.”
“The surplus-stores are full of machetes and jungle knives,” the sergeant considered. “I think I’ll call up Doc Winters, at the County Hospital, and see if all his squirrel-fodder is present and accounted for.”
“But most of the livestock was eaten at, like the heifer,” Parker objected.
“By definition, nuts have abnormal tastes,” the sergeant replied. “Or the eating might have been done later, by foxes.”
“I hope so; that’d let me out,” Parker said.
“Ha, listen to the man!” the private howled, stopping the car at the end of the lane. “He thinks a nut with a machete and a Tarzan complex is just good clean fun. Which way, now?”
“Well, let’s see.” The sergeant had unfolded a quadrangle sheet; the game protector leaned forward to look at it over his shoulder. The sergeant ran a finger from one to another of a series of variously colored crosses which had been marked on the map.
“Monday night, over here on Copperhead Mountain, that cow was killed,” he said. “The next night, about ten o’clock, that sheep flock was hit, on this side of Copperhead, right about here. Early Wednesday night, that mule got slashed up in the woods back of the Weston farm. It was only slightly injured; must have kicked the whatzit and got away, but the whatzit wasn’t too badly hurt, because a few hours later, it hit that turkey flock on the Rhymer farm. And last night, it did that.” He jerked a thumb over his shoulder at the Strawmyer farm. “See, following the ridges, working toward the southeast, avoiding open ground, killing only at night. Could be a bobcat, at that.”
“Or Jink’s maniac with the machete,” Parker agreed. “Let’s go up by Hindman’s Gap and see if we can see anything.”
They turned, after a while, into a rutted dirt road, which deteriorated steadily into a grass-grown track through the woods. Finally, they stopped, and the private backed off the road. The three men got out; Parker with his Winchester, the sergeant checking the drum of a Thompson, and the private pumping a buckshot shell into the chamber of a riot gun. For half an hour, they followed the brush-grown trail beside the little stream; once, they passed a dark gray commercial-model jeep, backed to one side. Then they came to the head of the gap.
A man, wearing a tweed coat, tan field boots, and khaki breeches, was sitting on a log, smoking a pipe; he had a bolt-action rifle across his knees, and a pair of binoculars hung from his neck. He seemed about thirty years old, and any bobby-soxer’s idol of the screen would have envied him the handsome regularity of his strangely immobile features. As Parker and the two State policemen approached, he rose, slinging his rifle, and greeted them.
“Sergeant Haines, isn’t it?” he asked pleasantly. “Are you gentlemen out hunting the critter, too?”
“Good afternoon, Mr. Lee. I thought that was your jeep I saw down the road a little.” The sergeant turned to the others. “Mr. Richard Lee; he’s staying at the old Kinchwalter place, the other side of Rutter’s Fort. This is Mr. Parker, the district game protector. And Private Zinkowski ” He glanced at the rifle. “Are you out hunting for it, too?”
“Yes, I thought I might find something, up here. What do you think it is?”
“I don’t know,” the sergeant admitted. “It could be a bobcat. Canada lynx. Jinx, here, has a theory that it’s some escapee from the paper-doll factory, with a machete. Me, I hope not, but I’m not ignoring the possibility.”
The man with the matinee-idol’s face nodded. “It could be a lynx. I understand they’re not unknown in this section.”
�
��We paid bounties on two in this county, in the last year,” Parker said. “Odd rifle you have, there; mind if I look at it?”
“Not at all.” The man who had been introduced as Richard Lee unslung and handed it over. “The chamber’s loaded,” he cautioned. “I never saw one like this,” Parker said. “Foreign?”
“I think so. I don’t know anything about it; it belongs to a friend of mine, who loaned it to me. I think the action’s German, or Czech; the rest of it’s a custom job, by some West Coast gunmaker. It’s chambered for some ultra-velocity wildcat load.”
The rifle passed from hand to hand; the three men examined it in turn, commenting admiringly.
“You find anything, Mr. Lee?” the sergeant asked, handing it back.
“Not a trace.” The man called Lee slung the rifle and began to dump the ashes from his pipe. “I was along the top of this ridge for about a mile on either side of the gap, and down the other side as far as Hindman’s Run; I didn’t find any tracks, or any indication of where it had made a kill.”
The game protector nodded, turning to Sergeant Haines.
“There’s no use us going any farther,” he said. “Ten to one, it followed that line of woods back of Strawmyer’s, and crossed over to the other ridge. I think our best bet would be the hollow at the head of Lowrie’s Run. What do you think?”
The sergeant agreed. The man called Richard Lee began to refill his pipe methodically.
“I think I shall stay here for a while, but I believe you’re right. Lowrie’s Run, or across Lowrie’s Gap into Coon Valley,” he said.
After Parker and the State policemen had gone, the man whom they had addressed as Richard Lee returned to his log and sat smoking, his rifle across his knees. From time to time, he glanced at his wrist watch and raised his head to listen. At length, faint in the distance, he heard the sound of a motor starting.
Instantly, he was on his feet. From the end of the hollow log on which he had been sitting, he produced a canvas musette-bag. Walking briskly to a patch of damp ground beside the little stream, he leaned the rifle against a tree and opened the bag. First, he took out a pair of gloves of some greenish, rubberlike substance, and put them on, drawing the long gauntlets up over his coat sleeves. Then he produced a bottle and unscrewed the cap. Being careful to avoid splashing his clothes, he went about, pouring a clear liquid upon the ground in several places. Where he poured, white vapors rose, and twigs and grass crumbled into brownish dust. After he had replaced the cap and returned the bottle to the bag, he waited for a few minutes, then took a spatula from the musette and dug where he had poured the fluid, prying loose four black, irregular-shaped lumps of matter, which he earned to the running water and washed carefully, before wrapping them and putting them in the bag, along with the gloves. Then he slung bag and rifle and started down the trail to where he had parked the jeep.
