We Install

by Harry Turtledove

  “We don’t see police around here every day,” the receptionist remarked. By the way she looked at Kling, she might have just noticed him on the bottom of her shoe. If he had an hour’s pay for every time he got that look, he could have quit the force a long time ago. She also sounded dubious as she went on, “What’s this all about?”

  “It’s in connection with the hoxbombing a few days ago,” Kling answered.

  That made her sit up and take notice. The crime was all over the news. Such things weren’t supposed to happen on Lacanth C. Well, what was crime but something that wasn’t supposed to happen but did anyway? “How are we involved in that?” she asked.

  “I’d rather discuss it with one of your principals, if I could,” Kling said coolly. He might have gossiped if she were friendlier. He was as human as anybody else on Lacanth C except the Furballs … and even they were closer to apes than angels.

  Dr. Brigid Singh was a small, precise blond woman who wore a tailored lab coat. “Oh, yes, I remember that brain,” she said. “We’re always pleased to acquire them, however we do it.” The Snarre’t didn’t encourage humans to learn more about their technology. Some of the deals Intelligent Designing made were probably under the table.

  “Have you still got it?” Kling asked.

  “I don’t believe so. Let me check.” Dr. Singh spoke to a terminal. She turned the display so Kling could also read it. “Unfortunately, we don’t. That’s getting on towards a year ago now. The brain was old then, which has to be why the Snarre’t traded it to Mr. Cravath. And brains never do as well with us as they do with their creators. We lost this one within thirty days.”

  “Well, hell,” Kling said. What he thought was considerably less polite. “Did you learn anything worthwhile from it?”

  “We think so. That’s proprietary information, though.” Dr. Singh was polite, anyhow. If she weren’t, she would have told him it was none of his goddamn business.

  “Proprietary. Right,” he said. “Did you learn anything from it that has anything to do with the hoxbombing at all? No information stays proprietary in the middle of a criminal probe.” That wasn’t strictly true, not if the people who wanted to hide things had a good lawyer. But it came close enough.

  Brigid Singh shook her head. “No, Sergeant. Please accept my assurances that we didn’t.”

  Kling decided he would accept them—for the time being. He went off to the crime lab. One look around was plenty to remind him that Intelligent Designing wasted more money than the department spent. People like Dr. Singh probably looked down their noses at the lab almost as much as the Snarre’t did. But, even if it cut corners, it did pretty good work.

  “Any signs of hoxbomb material on the pocket I got from van Gilder?” he asked the tech on duty.

  “I don’t think so,” she said. “Let me check.” She spoke to the computer, then nodded to herself when it coughed up an answer. “Nope. Far as we can tell, it’s clean.”

  “Okay. Thanks.” John Paul Kling wondered what to make of that. The lab did pretty good work, yeah. When it came to genetic material, though, the Furballs did better. Everybody and his stupid Cousin Susie knew that. Of course, the Snarre’t had reasons of their own for wanting to find Scrambled Egg 7 in Petros van Gilder’s pocket. If he hoxbombed the Cravaths, their people were off the hook. How far could he trust any positive they got?

  I’ll burn that bridge when I come to it, Kling thought. Then he wondered how he was supposed to cross if he burned the bridge. Things were really screwed up when you couldn’t trust your own clichés.

  “Ah, yes.” Louie Pasture looked as pleased as a toleco chewing pintac leaves. “The human did it. We have a match. We have an unmistakable match, a double match. Scrambled Egg 7, or I’m a Baldy. The humans can’t argue with us.”

  “Their detective said their laboratory didn’t find any,” Miss Murple told him.

  Louie Pasture emitted a rude smell. “Oh, yes, and a whole fat lot humans know about these things, too.”

  “They aren’t dumb,” Miss Murple said. “They don’t do things the way we do, but they aren’t dumb.”

  “When it comes to stuff like this, they are.” The lab tech pointed to a vat with a soft yellowish glow. “That wouldn’t be there if my bacteria didn’t detect Scrambled Egg 7. I got a smell check from the sniffer, and confirmed it with the light emitters. I don’t waste time with the droppers and reagents and I don’t know what all other kinds of foolishness the Bald Ones use. I have the right bacterial strains, and I don’t need anything else.”

  “They’ll say your bacteria are wrong. Or they’ll say you planted the hoxbomb material. They don’t want to believe one of their own could be guilty.” Miss Murple didn’t want to believe one of her own could be guilty, either. She recognized the possibility all the same.

  Louie Pasture gave forth with an even ruder odor. “Yeah, nothing’s ever their fault. Now tell me another one.”

  Humans thought Snarre’t were sneaky. Snarre’t thought humans were self-righteous. As often as not, both species were right. “I’ll pass the report on to their detective,” Miss Murple said. “He won’t like it, though.”

  “Too stinking bad,” the tech retorted. “Long as they give the unlicked cloaca what he deserves, they don’t have to like it. They just have to do it.”

  “Well, you’re right,” Miss Murple said.

  “But I’m innocent!” Petros van Gilder squawked.

  “You’re under arrest anyway,” Sergeant Kling answered. “I don’t much like this, but I’ve got to do it.”

  “I didn’t do anything to the Cravaths. I didn’t have any reason to do anything to them,” the scooter salesman said.

  “You’re a business rival. Maybe that’s reason enough. It would be for some people.” Kling nodded to the uniformed cops who’d come with him. “Take him away. We’ll see what happens when he goes to trial.”

  “Right, Sergeant,” the police officers said. They led van Gilder out of the dealership and into a rara avis on Lacanth C: a fully enclosed car. Doing the perp walk wouldn’t help his business any, even if he got off in the end. Sergeant Kling swore under his breath. Sometimes things felt neat and tidy when he closed a case. This wasn’t one of those times.

  Which didn’t necessarily prove anything. Sloppy cases could be as solid as elegant ones. But he liked clean patterns, and he didn’t have one in front of him. Well, maybe things would neaten up later.

  Next interesting question was where Petros van Gilder got the hoxbomb in the first place. Unless he had a biochemical lab or some trained Snarre’i bacteria back at home—and he didn’t, because the police had searched the place—the thing had to come from somebody else.

  From a Furball, Kling thought. Maybe from the Furballs his Snarre’i opposite number was already suspicious about.

  But even if that was true, what did it mean? Did van Gilder approach them so he could do something horrible to a competitor? Or did they want to do something horrible to a human for reasons of their own? Why would they? Did Cravath do something to them?

  Those were all interesting questions. Kling had answers for exactly none of them. He—or rather, the DA—didn’t have to prove motive, of course. Opportunity would do, especially if nobody else had that opportunity. That felt sloppy, too, though.

  He wondered what he could do about it. Only one thing occurred to him: see what was in the endless hours of surveillance video. Even with computer help, he’d spend a lot of time in front of the monitor for a while. He looked forward to that the way he looked forward to a salpingectomy with nerve enhancement.

  Which didn’t mean he wouldn’t have to do it, like it or not. It was all part of the day’s work. It was why the city put credit in his account twenty times a year. Routine did solve cases. It wouldn’t have become routine if it didn’t. That didn’t make it any less a pain in the ass, only a necessary as opposed
to an unnecessary pain in the ass.

  Kling was opposed to all kinds of pains in the ass, necessary and unnecessary. He wondered why the hell he’d ever thought being a cop was a good idea. Somewhere back down the line, he’d been pretty goddamn stupid.

  Now, instead of being stupid, he’d be bloody bored. Monitoring surveillance video? About as exciting as pulling up a chair and watching a blank screen. Who didn’t know better than to do anything openly nefarious—or even openly interesting—where the cameras were rolling? The Snarre’t used different surveillance methods, but over on that side of Latimer you literally couldn’t fart without somebody knowing about it.

  Back to the office. Kling went through the digital stream from van Gilder’s scooter dealership first. He had to identify everybody who came in. The computer helped a lot there. It had—or at least was supposed to have—ID photos of all the humans on Lacanth C. Matching them to faces should have been a piece of cake for software engineers.

  And so it was … but it was a piece of cake with the occasional pebble in the dough. People were just flat-out better than machinery at recognizing faces. Evolution had been working on it a lot longer than software engineers had. (And hadn’t the Snarre’i detective said something like that, in another context?) Instead of naming a name, sometimes the computer would spit out two or three or six and let Kling figure out whose photo that really was.

  Sometimes he could—and sometimes he damn well couldn’t. So he would have several possibilities here and there, and he’d have to track down which of them really had seen van Gilder back most of a year earlier. Half of them wouldn’t remember, and half of the other half would lie. Long and bitter experience made him sure of that.

  Just to make things even more enjoyable, van Gilder had dealt with Snarre’t, too. Human technology fascinated some of them. If they decided riding overgrown drumsticks wasn’t cool any more, they went scooter shopping. If they didn’t visit Jack Cravath, they visited Petros van Gilder. Often, they visited both of them.

  Algorithms for computer recognition of Furballs were light-years behind the ones for recognizing humans. Evolution didn’t give John Paul Kling a hand with the aliens, either. He called his opposite number to see what the Snarre’t could do.

  Miss Murple didn’t even try to sound happy. “How am I supposed to recognize Snarre’t if I can’t smell them?” she demanded.

  “Sorry,” the human detective said. “We don’t record smell. I’m not sure we can record it.”

  “I understand that,” Miss Murple said. “But it’s possible—it’s likely—that you expect too much from me. I hope I’m a reasonably good investigator. I don’t work miracles, though.”

  “Well, neither do I,” the human said. “Can you recognize any of your people by sight alone?”

  “Maybe.” Miss Murple didn’t want to say even that much. It would build up the Baldy’s hopes. She was much too likely to dash them again right afterwards.

  He kept trying. He had the virtue, if that was what it was, of stubbornness. “Audio goes with the visuals,” he said.

  “That may help—a little,” she admitted, and sighed. “Well, go ahead. Transmit. This will be dull, won’t it?”

  “I sure think so. I’d be amazed if you didn’t,” he said. “Our species are different, but they aren’t that different.”

  One thing she quickly discovered: she couldn’t identify anybody on a phone screen. There were times when she had trouble telling her own kind from humans. If that didn’t say the job was hopeless, nothing ever would.

  “Wait!” she told Kling. “You can make these images larger, can’t you?”

  “Oh, sure,” the human detective said. Snarre’i records, like Snarre’i communication generally, were much more involved. The Bald Ones just looked at things and sometimes listened to things. Snarre’t experienced sensory records as if taking part in them themselves.

  Miss Murple sighed again. “I’d better come over to your side of town to view them properly, then. Can we do this after nightfall?”

  The worm in her head interpreted the noise the human made as yet another sigh. “All right,” he said. “Come ahead. I’ll wait for you. You understand I wouldn’t usually be working then?”

  “Yes,” Miss Murple said. “One of us is going to be unhappy. I would rather not be the one.”

  “Well, you’re upfront about it, anyhow. Have it your way,” her counterpart said. “Come before it gets too late, if you possibly can.”

  “I will do that.” Miss Murple broke the connection with nothing but relief.

  She enjoyed the smooth rhythm of her caitnop’s strides as it hurried toward the humans’ police headquarters. She had to wear eyecovers even after sundown, because the Bald Ones lit up their district so they could pretend daytime never ended. The caitnop narrowed its eyes to cut down the glare. She stroked the carefully bred creature, and reproached herself for not giving it eyecovers, too. She hoped it wouldn’t come to harm.

  Humans on scooters stared at her. She’d ridden scooters a few times. To her, the motion seemed unnaturally smooth. And the machines stank of metal and plastic. If Sharon Rock and Joe Mountain wanted one so badly, they were welcome to it, as far as she was concerned. What did a scooter do that a caitnop or drof didn’t except break down at random? There wasn’t any yummy scootershit to gather up, either.

  She had the caitnop wait in the best-shadowed spot she could find near the police headquarters. Things proved even brighter inside the human-filled building than they were outside. Even with eyecovers, she started getting a headache.

  Kling was considerate enough to wait for her in a dark room. Would she have given a Baldy the converse courtesy? She doubted it. “Let’s have a look at these images,” she said without a great deal of hope.

  The screen where the human displayed them was much larger than the one on the phone. The sound quality was much better, too. All the same, Miss Murple was so conscious of the alien presentation, she was sure she wouldn’t be able to identify any of the Snarre’t on the video.

  She was sure, but she was wrong. She thought she would have recognized Joe Mountain if he weren’t with Sharon Rock. But Sharon Rock, even by herself, even without her preposterously sexy aroma, would have been unmistakable. If she wasn’t a perfectly made female, Miss Murple had no idea where she fell short of the ideal. Seeing her made the Snarre’i detective all too conscious of her own shortcomings.

  Kling sat there watching the stunner without being stunned. Miss Murple would have thought Sharon Rock could stimulate even someone of a different species. Evidently not. The lifey performer had said she and Joe Mountain liked to get away from the constant attention their own kind gave them. She must have meant it.

  “These are the Snarre’t who bought a scooter from the parent of the hoxbombed infant,” Miss Murple said, and then, “Why don’t you dispose of the malformed thing, anyway? It’s horrible.”

  “To look at, yeah,” Kling said. “But its brain seems to work.” Miss Murple bared her teeth. It didn’t seem reason enough. The human detective went on, “I will tell you something interesting about these images. Do you see the jacket on the chair behind van Gilder? Behind the human suspect, I mean?”

  “I see something on the chair. Is it a, uh, jacket?” Miss Murple said. The worm in her brain had trouble with words like that, words that stood for things human used and her own kind didn’t.

  “It’s a jacket, all right,” the Baldy said. “And unless I’m very much mistaken, it’s the jacket with the pocket that had the hoxbomb material inside.”

  “Really?” Miss Murple said. Kling nodded instead of spreading his fingers, but she knew what that meant. She watched a little more. “There is no sign that the Snarre’t are tampering with the jacket in any way.”

  No sooner had she spoken than the human on the screen said, “Excuse me for a moment. I have to go void some waste.” T
hat was how the worm in Miss Murple’s head turned his words into Snarre’l, anyhow. He hurried away, leaving Sharon Rock and Joe Mountain alone in his bare little office.

  No sooner had he gone than Joe Mountain picked up the jacket. “What a silly thing,” he said. “See what happens when you don’t have hair?” He admired Sharon Rock’s soft, silky pelt. Well, who wouldn’t?

  “Bald Ones are pathetic beasts,” Sharon agreed. Miss Murple found herself thinking the performer was right. But what did that have to do with the price of grubs? Sharon Rock gestured imperiously to Joe Mountain. “Let me see that thing.”

  “Here. You’re welcome to it.” He handed it to her.

  The human detective stared at the video screen with Miss Murple. “Do the Snarre’s hands go in the pocket? Hard to be sure, isn’t it?”

  The Snarre’. He hasn’t the faintest idea who Sharon Rock and Joe Mountain are. Maybe he’s lucky. “It is hard, yes,” Miss Murple said. “Can we get a better view? Will that give us what we need to know?”

  “Can’t tell till we try,” the human answered. He spoke to the plastic-stinking computer as if it were alive. It responded as if it were alive, too. The image of the jacket and then of that one pocket slowed down and grew till it almost filled the screen. It stayed center, too, no matter how Joe Mountain and Sharon Rock moved it. This technology might be inorganic, but it was formidable in its own way. “Hold it right there!” her opposite number said sharply, and the image froze.

  “Well, well,” Miss Murple said. Two of Sharon Rock’s fingers—the fur on them was noticeably darker and thicker than it was on Joe Mountain’s—did find their way inside that flap of cloth. “Isn’t that interesting?”

  “Interesting. Yeah.” Kling told the computer to take special note of that sequence. Miss Murple had no idea how it would, but she believed that it would. The human gave his attention back to her. “Looks like it wasn’t our boy after all.”