It was very unlikely that there would be witnesses to the flight, or that in these weak, piping times of peace there would be a radar watch as in days of yore. In point of fact, there was none.
~ * ~
Two days in space; now two weeks on the Moon. Almost instinctively Peyton had allowed for those two weeks from the first. He was under no illusions as to the value of homemade maps by non-cartographers. Useful they might be to the designer himself, who had the help of memory. To a stranger, they could be nothing more than a cryptogram.
Cornwell showed Peyton the map for the first time only after takeoff. He smiled obsequiously. “After all, sir, this was my only trump.”
“Have you checked this against the lunar charts?”
“I would scarcely know how, Mr. Peyton. I depend upon you.”
Peyton stared at him coldly as he returned the map. The one certain thing upon it was Tycho Crater, the site of the buried Luna City.
In one respect, at least, astronomy was on their side. Tycho was on the daylight side of the Moon at the moment. It meant that patrol ships were less likely to be out, they themselves less likely to be observed.
Peyton brought the ship down in a riskily quick non-grav landing within the safe, cold darkness of the inner shadow of a crater. The sun was past zenith and the shadow would grow no shorter.
Cornwell drew a long face. “Dear, dear, Mr. Peyton. We can scarcely go prospecting in the lunar day.”
“The lunar day doesn’t last forever,” said Peyton shortly. “There are about a hundred hours of sun left. We can use that time for acclimating ourselves and for working out the map.”
The answer came quickly, but it was plural. Peyton studied the lunar charts over and over, taking meticulous measurements, and trying to find the pattern of craters shown on the homemade scrawl that was the key to— what?
Finally Peyton said, “The crater we want could be any one of three: GC-3, GC-5, or MT-10.”
“What do we do, Mr. Peyton?” asked Cornwell anxiously.
“We try them all,” said Peyton, “beginning with the nearest.”
The terminator passed and they were in the night shadow. After that, they spent increasing periods on the lunar surface, getting used to the eternal silence and blackness, the harsh points of the stars and the crack of light that was the Earth peeping over the rim of the crater above. They left hollow, featureless footprints in the dry dust that did not stir or change. Peyton noted them first when they climbed out of the crater into the full light of the gibbous Earth. That was on the eighth day after their arrival on the moon.
The lunar cold put a limit to how long they could remain outside their ship at any one time. Each day, however, they managed for longer. By the eleventh day after arrival they had eliminated GC-5 as the container of the Singing Bells.
By the fifteenth day, Peyton’s cold spirit had grown warm with desperation. It would have to be GC-3. MT-10 was too far away. They would not have time to reach it and explore it and still allow for a return to Earth by August 31.
On that same fifteenth day, however, despair was laid to rest forever when they discovered the Bells.
They were not beautiful. They were merely irregular masses of gray rock, as large as a double fist, vacuum-filled and feather-light in the moon’s gravity. There were two dozen of them and each one, after proper polishing, could be sold for a hundred thousand dollars at least.
Carefully, in double handfuls, they carried the Bells to the ship, bedded them in excelsior, and returned for more. Three times they made the trip both ways over ground that would have worn them out on Earth but which, under the Moon’s lilliputian gravity, was scarcely a barrier.
Cornwell passed the last of the Bells up to Peyton, who placed them carefully within the outer lock.
“Keep them clear, Mr. Peyton,” he said, his radioed voice sounding harshly in the other’s ear. “I’m coming up.”
He crouched for the slow high leap against lunar gravity, looked up, and froze in panic. His face, clearly visible through the hard carved lusilite of his helmet, froze in a last grimace of terror. “No, Mr. Peyton. Don’t—”
Peyton’s fist tightened on the grip of the blaster he held. It fired. There was an unbearably brilliant flash and Cornwell was a dead fragment of a man, sprawled amid remnants of a spacesuit and flecked with freezing blood.
Peyton paused to stare somberly at the dead man, but only for a second. Then he transferred the last of the Bells to their prepared containers, removed his suit, activated first the non-grav field, then the micropiles, and, potentially a million or two richer than he had been two weeks earlier, set off on the return trip to Earth.
On the twenty-ninth of August, Peyton’s ship descended silently, stern bottomward, to the spot in Wyoming from which it had taken off on August 10. The care with which Peyton had chosen the spot was not wasted. His aeroflitter was still there, drawn within the protection of an enclosing wrinkle of the rocky, tortuous countryside.
He moved the Singing Bells once again, in their containers, into the deepest recess of the wrinkle, covering them, loosely and sparsely, with earth. He returned to the ship once more to set the controls and make last adjustments. He climbed out again and two minutes later the ship’s automatics took over.
Silently hurrying, the ship bounded upward and up, veering to westward somewhat as the Earth rotated beneath it. Peyton watched, shading his narrow eyes, and at the extreme edge of vision there was a tiny gleam of light and a dot of cloud against the blue sky.
Peyton’s mouth twitched into a smile. He had judged well. With the cadmium safety-rods bent back into uselessness, the micropiles had plunged past the unit-sustaining safety level and the ship had vanished in the heat of the nuclear explosion that had followed.
Twenty minutes later, he was back on his property. He was tired and his muscles ached under Earth’s gravity. He slept well.
Twelve hours later, in the earliest dawn, the police came.
~ * ~
The man who opened the door placed his crossed hands over his paunch and ducked his smiling head two or three times in greeting. The man who entered, H. Seton Davenport of the Terrestrial Bureau of Investigation, looked about uncomfortably.
The room he had entered was large and in semidarkness except for the brilliant viewing lamp focused over a combination armchair-desk. Rows of book-films covered the walls. A suspension of Galactic charts occupied one corner of the room and a Galactic Lens gleamed softly on a stand in another corner.
“You are Dr. Wendell Urth?” asked Davenport, in a tone that suggested he found it hard to believe. Davenport was a stocky man with black hair, a thin and prominent nose, and a star-shaped scar on one cheek which marked permanently the place where a neuronic whip had once struck him at too close a range.
“I am,” said Dr. Urth in a thin, tenor voice. “And you are Inspector Davenport.”
The Inspector presented his credentials and said, “The University recommended you to me as an extraterrologist.”
“So you said when you called me half an hour ago,” said Urth agreeably. His features were thick, his nose was a snubby button, and over his somewhat protuberant eyes there were thick glasses.
“I shall get to the point, Dr. Urth. I presume you have visited the Moon…”
Dr. Urth, who had brought out a bottle of ruddy liquid and two glasses, just a little the worse for dust, from behind a straggling pile of book-films, said with sudden brusqueness, “I have never visited the Moon, Inspector. I never intend to! Space travel is foolishness. I don’t believe in it.” Then, in softer tones, “Sit down, sir, sit down. Have a drink.”
Inspector Davenport did as he was told and said, “But you’re an…”
“Extraterrologist. Yes. I’m interested in other worlds, but it doesn’t mean I have to go there. Good lord, I don’t have to be a time traveler to qualify as a historian, do I?” He sat down, and a broad smile impressed itself upon his round face once more as he said, “Now t
ell me what’s on your mind.”
“I have come,” said the Inspector, frowning, “to consult you in a case of murder.”
“Murder? What have I to do with murder?”
“This murder, Dr. Urth, was on the Moon.”
“Astonishing.”
“It’s more than astonishing. It’s unprecedented, Dr. Urth. In the fifty years since the Lunar Dominion has been established, ships have blown up and spacesuits have sprung leaks. Men have boiled to death on sun-side, frozen on dark-side, and suffocated on both sides. There have even been deaths by falls, which, considering lunar gravity, is quite a trick. But in all that time, not one man has been killed on the Moon as the result of another man’s deliberate act of violence—till now.”
Dr. Urth said, “How was it done?”
“A blaster. The authorities were on the scene within the hour through a fortunate set of circumstances. A patrol ship observed a flash of light against the Moon’s surface. You know how far a flash can be seen against the night-side. The pilot notified Luna City and landed. In the process of circling back, he swears that he just managed to see by Earthlight what looked like a ship taking off. Upon landing, he discovered a blasted corpse and footprints.”
“The flash of light,” said Dr. Urth, “you suppose to be the firing blaster.”
“That’s certain. The corpse was fresh. Interior portions of the body had not yet frozen. The footprints belonged to two people. Careful measurements showed that the depressions fell into two groups of somewhat different diameters, indicating differently sized spaceboots. In the main, they led to craters GC-B and GC-5, a pair of—”
“I am acquainted with the official code for naming lunar craters,” said Dr. Urth pleasantly.
“Umm. In any case, GC-3 contained footprints that led to a rift in the crater wall, within which scraps of hardened pumice were found. X-ray diffraction patterns showed—”
“Singing Bells,” put in the extraterrologist in great excitement. “Don’t tell me this murder of yours involves Singing Bells!”
“What if it does?” demanded Davenport blankly.
“I have one. A University expedition uncovered it and presented it to me in return for— Come, Inspector, I must show it to you.”
Dr. Urth jumped up and pattered across the room, beckoning the other to follow as he did. Davenport, annoyed, followed.
They entered a second room, larger than the first, dimmer, considerably more cluttered. Davenport stared with astonishment at the heterogeneous mass of material that was jumbled together in no pretense at order.
He made out a small lump of “blue glaze” from Mars, the sort of thing some romantics considered to be an artifact of long-extinct Martians, a small meteorite, a model of an early spaceship, a sealed bottle of nothing scrawlingly labeled “Venusian atmosphere.”
Dr. Urth said happily, “I’ve made a museum of my whole house. It’s one of the advantages of being a bachelor. Of course, I haven’t quite got things organized. Someday, when I have a spare week or so…”
For a moment he looked about, puzzled; then, remembering, he pushed aside a chart showing the evolutionary scheme of development of the marine invertebrates that were the highest life forms on Barnard’s Planet and said, “Here it is. It’s flawed, I’m afraid.”
The Bell hung suspended from a slender wire, soldered delicately onto it. That it was flawed was obvious. It had a constriction line running halfway about it that made it seem like two small globes, firmly but imperfectly squashed together. Despite that, it had been lovingly polished to a dull luster, softly gray, velvety smooth, and faintly pock-marked in a way that laboratories, in their futile efforts to prepare synthetic Bells, had found impossible to duplicate.
Dr. Urth said, “I experimented a good deal before I found a decent stroker. A flawed Bell is temperamental. But bone works. I have one here”—and he held up something that looked like a short thick spoon made of a gray-white substance—”which I had made out of the femur of an ox. Listen.”
With surprising delicacy, his pudgy fingers maneuvered the Bell, feeling for one best spot. He adjusted it, steadying it daintily. Then, letting the Bell swing free, he brought down the thick end of the bone spoon and stroked the Bell softly.
It was as though a million harps had sounded a mile away. It swelled and faded and returned. It came from no particular direction. It sounded inside the head, incredibly sweet and pathetic and tremulous all at once.
It died away lingeringly and both men were silent for a full minute.
Dr. Urth said, “Not bad, eh?” and with a flick of his hand set the Bell to swinging on its wire.
Davenport stirred restlessly. “Careful! Don’t break it.” The fragility of a good Singing Bell was proverbial.
Dr. Urth said, “Geologists say the Bells are only pressure-hardened pumice, enclosing a vacuum in which small beads of rock rattle freely. That’s what they say. But if that’s all it is, why can’t we reproduce one? Now a flawless Bell would make this one sound like a child’s harmonica.”
“Exactly,” said Davenport, “and there aren’t a dozen people on Earth who own a flawless one, and there are a hundred people and institutions who would buy one at any price, no questions asked. A supply of Bells would be worth murder.”
The extraterrologist turned to Davenport and pushed his spectacles back on his inconsequential nose with a stubby forefinger. “I haven’t forgotten your murder case. Please go on.”
“That can be done in a sentence. I know the identity of the murderer.”
They had returned to the chairs in the library and Dr. Urth clasped his hands over his ample abdomen. “Indeed? Then surely you have no problem, Inspector.”
“Knowing and proving are not the same, Dr. Urth. Unfortunately he has no alibi.”
“You mean, unfortunately he has, don’t you?”
“I mean what I say. If he had an alibi, I could crack it somehow, because it would be a false one. If there were witnesses who claimed they had seen him on Earth at the time of the murder, their stories could be broken down. If he had documentary proof, it could be exposed as a forgery or some sort of trickery. Unfortunately he has none of it.”
“What does he have?”
Carefully Inspector Davenport described the Peyton estate in Colorado. He concluded, “He has spent every August there in the strictest isolation. Even the T.B.I, would have to testify to that. Any jury would have to presume that he was on his estate this August as well, unless we could present definite proof that he was on the Moon.”
“What makes you think he was on the Moon? Perhaps he is innocent.”
“No!” Davenport was almost violent. “For fifteen years I’ve been trying to collect sufficient evidence against him and I’ve never succeeded. But I can smell a Peyton crime now. I tell you that no one but Peyton, no one on Earth, would have the impudence or, for that matter, the practical business contacts to attempt disposal of smuggled Singing Bells. He is known to be an expert space pilot. He is known to have had contact with the murdered man, though admittedly not for some months. Unfortunately none of that is proof.”
Dr. Urth said, “Wouldn’t it be simple to use the psychoprobe, now that its use has been legalized?”
Davenport scowled, and the scar on his cheek turned livid. “Have you read the Konski-Hiakawa law, Dr. Urth?”
“No.”
“I think no one has. The right to mental privacy, the government says, is fundamental. All right, but what follows? The man who is psychoprobed and proves innocent of the crime for which he was psychoprobed is entitled to as much compensation as he can persuade the courts to give him. In a recent case a bank cashier was awarded twenty-five thousand dollars for having been psychoprobed on inaccurate suspicion of theft. It seems that the circumstantial evidence which seemed to point to theft actually pointed to a small spot of adultery. His claim that he lost his job, was threatened by the husband in question and put in bodily fear, and finally was held up to ridicule and c
ontumely because a news-strip man had learned the results of the probe held good in court.”
“I can see the man’s point.”
“So can we all. That’s the trouble. One more item to remember: Any man who has been psychoprobed once for any reason can never be psychoprobed again for any reason. No one man, the law says, shall be placed in mental jeopardy twice in his lifetime.”
“Inconvenient.”
“Exactly. In the two years since the psychoprobe has been legitimized, I couldn’t count the number of crooks and chiselers who’ve tried to get themselves psychoprobed for purse-snatching so that they could play the rackets safely afterward. So you see the Department will not allow Peyton to be psychoprobed until they have firm evidence of his guilt. Not legal evidence, maybe, but evidence that is strong enough to convince my boss. The worst of it, Dr. Urth, is that if we come into court without a psychoprobe record, we can’t win. In a case as serious as murder, not to have used the psychoprobe is proof enough to the dumbest juror that the prosecution isn’t sure of its ground.”
The Best From Fantasy and Science Fiction Fifth Series Page 25
