Masters of the Galaxy

by Mike Resnick (ed)

  “Come on, Jake,” she said. “You know we’re short-handed, and besides, he’s an alien. This is a human world; human murders take precedence.”

  “Not with me,” I said. “Not this time.”

  “We’ll work on it,” she promised. “Just not exclusively.”

  “I know. That’s why we’re going to do it the way I said.”

  “A full exchange of information, right?” she said.

  “Right.”

  “I’ll be the conduit for the department. How often should we talk?”

  “Every two days for now. More or less often as the trail gets hotter or colder.”

  “Deal.”

  Suddenly I started shivering.

  “Time to leave the room?” she asked.

  “Yeah, I think so. I’ve ID’d him. I’m not going to learn anything else from staring at him.”

  We left the room. The basement didn’t have much air circulation, and there was an occasional water stain where the composite wall joined the floor, but it was still considerably warmer than the room that held the corpses.

  “Where did you find him?” I asked.

  “You know a place called the Spacers’ Rest, down on Pericles Street?”

  “Yeah, I’ve been there once or twice. That’s where he got it?”

  She shook her head. “No. That’s where we found him. But he was killed somewhere else and dumped there.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Forensics puts the time of death at two hours before midnight,” said Selina. “I asked what the margin of error was. They said four minutes either way.”

  “So?”

  “So there was a street carnival in front of the Spacers’ Rest until half an hour before midnight. If he’d been killed there, dozens of people would have seen him.”

  “Any shedding of skin cells, marks on the body, anything to show he’d been dragged?” I asked, but I knew it was a dumb question. You want to stand out like a sore thumb? Drag a dead beachball through the streets at night.

  “No,” said Selina. “And he wasn’t carried, either. There’d be traces of skin, of fabric, of something, if he had been. It figures that he was killed, tossed in some kind of vehicle, and dumped.” She frowned. “I wonder: why there?”

  I thought I knew, but since it was just an educated guess it didn’t qualify as information, so I kept it to myself. “Did they find anything on Max?”

  She shook her head. “Just his passport and some cash,” she answered. “I think we’re done with them. You can pick them up on the way out.”

  “So whoever killed him didn’t even bother to make it look like a robbery,” I said.

  “Maybe he was in a hurry.”

  “Maybe,” I said without much conviction.

  “And he didn’t give you any hint about who had hired him or who he was tailing?” she asked again.

  “No.”

  “Did he say whether either of them was human?”

  “Not a word.”

  “You’ve got your work cut out for you,” said Selina.

  I noticed that the less we knew about the case, the more it was my work rather than our work. It didn’t even bother me. Max had been my partner, not theirs.

  “There’s nothing more for me to see here,” I said. “I think I’ll go back to the office. I’ll check in tomorrow morning to see if the lab has come up with anything.” But I knew they wouldn’t. Those guys don’t miss a thing. If they haven’t found it in the first hour or two, there’s nothing to find.

  “All right, Jake,” she said. “Try to get some sleep.”

  “There’ll be plenty of time for sleep after I catch the bastard who killed Max.”

  “I didn’t know you were that fond of him.”

  “He was my partner,” I said. And he trusted me. He left everything he knew behind because I promised him a new life as a detective. I never promised him it would be over in just two months. I knew it wasn’t my fault. But it would be a long time before I could convince my gut. I couldn’t even start until I nailed his killer.

  I figured the first order of business was to toss the office and see if Max had left any hint of who had hired him. For some offices, that would have been an all-day job. For my little hole in the wall, it took about fifteen minutes. There was no trace of our client. I figured I could probably send a couple of the chairs down to forensics and have them go over them with all their high-powered equipment, but what the hell would I do when they told me our most recent visitor was wearing brown, or blue, or black? Besides, that presupposed he sat down, and Max had made it sound like such an urgent job that for all I knew he walked in, made his offer, and left thirty seconds later.

  Max didn’t have a desk of his own, because the chair hadn’t been invented that he felt comfortable on, when he sat down, he preferred to sit on the floor and couldn’t have been seen (or seen anyone) from behind a desk. I checked all my own desk drawers, but there was nothing to show who had hired him. I was stymied. Finally I contacted Selina again.

  “Yes, Jake?” she said as her image appeared before me. “I hadn’t expected to hear from you before morning. Have you found anything?”

  “Not a thing,” I answered. “Can you check and see how many bludgeon murders have been committed in town this month?”

  “I’m ahead of you,” she said. “Three. But two of them were what I’d call amateur. A woman smashed her husband’s head open with a lamp, and a couple of drunks got into it down by the spaceport and one of them opened the other’s skull with a bottle of Cygnian cognac.”

  “Waste of good drinkin’ stuff,” I commented. “What about the third?”

  “That was your partner.”

  “Okay, thanks,” I said. “I shouldn’t have bothered you. It’s a little early to be grasping at straws.”

  I broke the connection, took a hit from the canister I keep in my desk drawer, and decided I might as well start gathering Max’s effects so I could ship them back to Alpha Gillespie. I had turned one drawer of the desk over to him. There wasn’t much in it: a citation his department had awarded him a few years ago back on Alpha Gillespie, a laser pistol I’d given him that he never took out of the office, an alien tool he used to clip his fast-growing claws, a couple of other things. I took them all out of the drawer and laid them neatly on the desktop. Then I pulled out his ID and the cash I’d picked up at headquarters and placed them on the desk as well.

  And then I saw it. I should have spotted it down at the station, but I’d been in a hurry to get back to the office. Max had twenty Democracy credits, and a few Maria Theresa dollars, but stuck in there were five bills, each for one hundred New Warsaw drachmas. I hadn’t seen any New Warsaw currency in maybe fifteen years. It was probably legal somewhere, maybe even here, but it was as rare as human currency got.

  “Computer—activate,” I said.

  “Activated,” replied my desktop machine.

  “Give me a list of the currencies that are legal tender on Odysseus.”

  “Democracy credits. Far London pounds. Kilimanjaro shillings. Maria Theresa dollars. Rabolian quinxes. New Stalin rubles.”

  The computer fell silent.

  “That’s all?”

  “That is all.”

  “What about New Warsaw drachmas?”

  “They are not a legal currency on Odysseus.”

  “Are they legal in the Alpha Gillespie system?”

  “Checking…no.”

  So he hadn’t brought them with him from home.

  “Will the currency exchange at the spaceport honor New Warsaw drachmas?”

  “Checking…no.”

  “Thanks. Deactivate.”

  So now I had a lead. It wasn’t much of one, but it was the only one I’d come up with. I contacted Selina Hernandez again.

  “What’s up, Jake?” she said.

  “I’ve got some New Warsaw drachmas to spend,” I said.

  “Not on Odysseus, you don’t,” replied Selina.

 
“Yes, I do. Who’s likely to accept them?”

  “I have no idea, Jake.”

  “Can you find out?”

  “Probably, but it’ll take awhile,” she said. “I’m a cop. I can’t just walk up to the people who trade in them and ask. We’ll have to go through our usual unreliable sources.”

  “If you’d start right away, I’d appreciate it.”

  “Jake, it’s the middle of the night.”

  “Who pushes illegal currency in the daylight?” I said with a smile.

  “All right, all right,” she said. “I’ll pass the word to our people, and they can pass the word to theirs.”

  “Thanks, Selina.”

  “Thanks be damned. That’ll cost you a dinner when we nail the killer.” She paused. “Wait. You already owe me one. Okay, one dinner, two desserts.”

  “Sure,” I said. “Your place or mine?”

  She muttered an obscenity and broke the connection. I knew I wasn’t going to sit around the office until she contacted me with the information. It could take days, and since it would be coming from criminals who were cadging favor with the cops there was no reason to bank on its accuracy. I had my own sources and I had a lot more faith in their information. I started considering the problem as logically as I could. Obviously Max had been paid with New Warsaw drachmas. Max was an unsophisticated little alien who’d only been on three worlds in his life—and that included two months on Odysseus and three days on Graydawn. He had no idea what currency was legal and what wasn’t, so he had no problem accepting it. But the guy who passed the currency had to know. It may have been worthless on Odysseus, but it was worth something on any planet that traded in it, so he wasn’t just paying Max with play money. Now, I could run a check and see how many worlds accepted New Warsaw drachmas, but it could be hundreds, maybe thousands, and that didn’t even count the worlds of the Inner Frontier, which accepted damned near everything. So since I couldn’t work on its source, I’d work at the other end. Clearly he was willing to spend his drachmas here. Okay. Who besides a clueless little alien would accept them? Men knew better. The very best that might happen if they were caught trading in illegal currency is that it would be confiscated. The worst is that they would be confiscated for a few years of hard time. But the Alien Quarter was just beyond the spaceport. Most of the aliens on Odysseus lived and worked there, spent and earned their money there, and probably had no compunction about accepting New Warsaw drachmas. After all, it was a human currency, and they were paid in so many human currencies, what was one more? Also, they were near the spaceport, so if they had to unload the money in a hurry, or if they were leaving themselves, they could get it off the planet before the authorities knew they had it.

  Finally, Max was a beginner, but he was no fool. He had to figure the one place he might not be spotted was the Quarter. It may have been thin, it may have been tenuous, but it felt right, and it was still the only lead I had. I pulled the New Warsaw drachmas out of the neat pile I’d made on the desk, stuck them in my pocket, activated the security system, told it that Max was no longer part of the company and to wipe his retinagram and bonescan from its memory, and headed off to the Alien Quarter.

  I arrived there ten minutes later, still with no idea of what to do if someone took the cash when I offered it. Rough him up? What if it turned out that twenty aliens of different species would take the cash? Where would that leave me? You can think about consequences and permutations just so long in my business. Then you either act, or you get acted upon.

  I decided to act.

  Odysseus doesn’t have any waterfront dives, because it doesn’t have any shipping or fishing industry. But the Alien Quarter makes a pretty good substitute. The cops don’t like to enter it, and the residents do what they can to encourage that attitude. It’s the only place on the whole damned planet that’s open 24 hours a day (well, 22, actually; we don’t have 24 hours on Odysseus).

  The only illumination on the streets comes from the interiors of the bars, drug dens, and alien whorehouses—and you don’t want to get too far from them at night, because there are a lot of aliens lurking in the shadows, and most of them can see a hell of a lot better in the dark than a Man can. The few legitimate stores probably spend half their profits on security—force fields, stun gates, shock windows, even the occasional alien watch-creature. Men can walk through most of the Alien Quarter with impunity by day, but they’d better have a damned good reason for being there after dark—and even then they’d better be pretty good at taking care of themselves.

  The first thing I did was hunt up Baro the Grub. I don’t know what planet he comes from, but his skin is smooth and oily like a worm, and his body is maybe eight feet tall and cylindrical, with a torso that takes up close to three-quarters of it. The Grub knew just about everything that went on in the Quarter, and he was happy to spill it if the price was right. I don’t know what motivated him. He never drank or drugged. There were a few lady grubs in the Quarter, but the word on the street was that he had nothing to do with them. I don’t know; maybe he just felt a need to be part of the economic life of the city. Maybe he went home, wherever home was, and enjoyed stacking his money in neat piles. Made no difference. He was as good a source as I’d ever come across. I found him at his business office—a little alleyway between two derelict buildings.

  “Hi, Grub,” I said.

  “I’ve been expecting you, Jake,” he hissed in his sibilant voice. “Ever since I heard you partner was killed.”

  “You know about that already.”

  “I’m Baro the Grub,” he said, as if that explained everything. I pulled out a hundred-credit note and one of the New Warsaw bills. “This is for you to keep,” I said, handing him the former. “And this is for you to look at.”

  He glanced at it briefly, then handed it back.

  “Who trades in this currency?”

  “You want The Purple God.”

  “Is that an alien or a location?” I asked.

  “A bar, three blocks down this street, on the right.”

  “Thanks, Grub.”

  “Understand,” he said, “I am not saying you will find the being who passed this money, merely that you yourself will find beings there who will accept it.”

  I thanked him again and headed off. I walked down the damp pavement—it hadn’t rained, but for some reason the pavement was always damp in the Alien Quarter. I kept listening to the sound of my own footsteps and wondering how many others were listening to them too. It gets on your nerves after awhile—like, say, 30 seconds. You can see into all the tawdry joints that line the street, but when you look straight ahead or into an alley you can’t see a damned thing.

  I spotted two Lodinites approaching the spot where the Grub had said The Purple God was. I couldn’t read the alien sign, but it was the only bar on the block. As I was walking toward it a huge 500-pound Torqual staggered out, covered with a foul-smelling mixture I took to be vomit and something even nastier, and collapsed not five feet from the entrance. A pair of three-legged Molarians, spinning down the street with that graceful walk of theirs, pivoted around the body and pirouetted into the bar. I got there a moment later. I looked down at the Torqual, and couldn’t tell if he was dead or alive. I made a mental note to call the cops if he was still there when I came out, then scratched the note out; the cops weren’t going to come down here in the middle of the night, just to cart a dead alien off to the morgue. Finally I got tired of staring at the Torqual and entered the joint. I won’t say that everyone stopped talking and stared at me as I walked up to the bar, but it sure as hell felt like it. It was so rare to see a lone Man down here after dark that they were too startled to block my way.

  The first thing I noticed was a table suspended from the ceiling where a couple of levitators were drinking. The walls had holos of alien scenes that made no sense to me, but right behind the bar there was one holo I recognized: a portrait of Conrad Bland, the greatest killer in the history of the human race. Some of the
customers were meticulously neat. Others littered the floor with spilled drinks and containers. The drinks on the tables were of every color and odor imaginable. There was food on the tables; some vegetable, some animal, some alive and squealing in terror.

  I made my way to the bar, and the bartender, a furry Lodinite, walked over and said something in gibberish. “Put on your t-pack,” I said, indicating the translating device I saw lying on a shelf next to half a dozen oddly-shaped containers of some smoky blue liquid.

  “That won’t be necessary,” he said in heavily-accented Terran. “I just wanted to see if you had bothered to learn my language.”

  “If I ever visit Lodin XI, I will,” I said.

  “I do not believe you.”

  I shrugged. “That’s your privilege.”

  “What are you doing here?” demanded the bartender. “This is the Alien Quarter. Your metabolism cannot handle anything we serve.”

  “You’d be surprised what I can handle,” I said. I pointed to the bottles with the blue fluid. “I’ll have one of those.”

  Once the crowd saw that I was ordering a drink, and not here to slaughter one or more of them, they lost interest in me. The Lodinite stared expressionlessly at me for a long moment, then got a bottle and brought it over. “How much?” I asked.

  “30 credits,” he said. “Or eighteen Maria Theresa dollars.”

  I shook my head. “All I’ve got is this,” I said, pulling out one of the New Warsaw bills.

  “Where did you get that?”

  “I get around.”

  “It is illegal to possess New Warsaw drachmas,” said the Lodinite.

  “No,” I corrected him. “It’s illegal to exchange them.”

  “What’s the difference?”

  I pulled out a 20-credit note. “This is the difference.”

  “I don’t understand,” he said.

  “You tell me who spends or accepts New Warsaw drachmas, and you get to keep it.”

  “My life is worth more than 20 credits,” he replied. Which meant he knew someone who dealt in drachmas. Someone who was perfectly willing to kill him if he started naming names.