I’d had the taxi ride over to think that out, and of course it made sense. Gross hadn’t had either my additional minutes, or B’russ’r’s information upload, and just looked confused.
“Some of the isotope assay checked out,” I said. “And how do you build a pile of paper, and a barrel of ink, that has an isotope percentage match to, say, 1950 instead of 2300? You do it by running the entire molecular makeup through computer simulation, tracking it back in time, and coming up with a simulation giving you just the percentages you need for 1950. Then you make the 1950 recipe into a 1950-plus-350-years recipe—more simulation work—and build the paper from that. Done completely, it would be undetectable, because every isotope assay would check out. Why it wasn’t done completely, we don’t know. Apparently even the forger can’t manage that yet.”
B’russ’r rustled his wings, spreading them open just a bit and then shutting them, two or three times. Applause. “Flawless,” he murmured. I bowed just a trifle.
“There’s a job lot of computer-simulation experts, now,” Gross said. “It’s not as if this Leake person was going to be the only one in the galaxy. Or even the only one in the whole of City Two.”
“The forgery was stolen three nights ago,” B’russ’r said quietly. “Leake was shot dead tonight. This would call for rather a large coincidence.”
Gross snorted again. “Coincidences do happen, B’russ’r,” he said, and B’russ’r nodded, and said just before I could:
“So they do. Connected events also happen. One must learn to distinguish.”
At which point a tall thin woman in a tweed suit bustled up to Gross and said: “We’re done here except for final temp comparisons and assay. Okay for the M. E. to take him?”
Gross opened his mouth, sighed and shut it again. He turned to B’russ’r. “Would that be all right with you, now?” he said.
B’russ’r bowed politely. “Thank you for asking,” he said, just as if Gross had had any choice; once a Beri was there as consult, even self-called as B’russ’r clearly had been, he had official standing. Berigot noticed things—and had no prejudices. “Knave is of official standing as well. If all right for him, it is all right for me.”
Gross turned a little redder. “Wonderful, then,” he said. “Just wonderful. Knave, how is it for you? I mean to say, now: may we go ahead and do our work?”
“Go right ahead,” I said. “You have my cheerful permission.”
CHAPTER TEN
WHILE THE POLICE were bustling around removing the remains and making sure everything not nailed down had been photographed, measured, assayed or bagged, B’russ’r filled me in. Leake, it seemed, had been standing on his top terrace, apparently just relaxing at the end of a long virtual day, and some distance away a couple of Berigot had been sailplaning at the end of their real-world ones. One of them caught the muzzle flash of a handgun, and heard the sound—a slug gun of some sort. Within less than a second Leake had staggered back, taken a couple of shuffling steps forward with one arm out and the other hand grabbing at his chest or stomach, and pitched over the terrace rail. The two Berigot, who had started to fly to him at the first stagger, split; one went on to try to help the body on the ground, while the other landed immediately, some distance off, and called police—before joining his companion at the murder site.
I filled B’russ’r in, too. When he heard that I’d been shot at twice, he sucked in air, or what passes for air with a Beri, and looked shocked. “You told no one of this?” he said. “And there was no investigation?”
For a change, I was able to explain to him something he should have known. “If I’d started telling officials, I’d never have got rid of the officials,” I said. “I’d have had bodyguards, watchdogs, God alone knows what. Each one of which, at every second, would have stopped me from looking around and finding out something. And each one of which would have scared off the gun, and made him that much harder to locate.”
B’russ’r nodded. “And of course there were no investigations—no witnesses. The first in your rooms, the second on a street, and all anyone knew about that was that you fell down and had to be helped to a shop.”
“Exactly,” I said. Well, I’d managed to explain part of it before he did, anyhow. “But if there were any remaining doubt about the connection, we can now lay it to rest for good.”
Another nod. “I should think so,” he said. “In all cases a slug gun. Not the usual weapon, though not truly bizarre.”
“I should hope not,” I said. “I carry one myself.”
“I know,” B’russ’r said. “And a beamer. Without both of which, you have said, ‘I feel and am, undressed.’”
Information upload. The Beri seemed fully prepared to write my biography. Or of course my obit, if it turned out that way. At least I’d be assured of accuracy, I reflected—something few obits could claim.
This reflection was, somehow, not a comforting one. “Now—what are the chances of tracing the gun, through the bullets?”
“The two shots at you, hopeless,” he said after half a second. “One on a busy street, long gone. The other cleaned away by Totum and Robbies, several days’ trashloads ago, equally gone. The one in Leake—a great deal will depend on just what that bullet hit on the way in.”
“Let us hope only soft things, sufficient to stop it inside him but not deform it too much.”
One more nod. “Tell me, Knave,” B’russ’r said in what was for him almost a plaintive voice. “Would you have another of those cigarettes? I dislike to be a bother—”
“No bother at all,” I said, and fished out a pack and gave him one, and shook one out for myself.
B’russ’r stuck the thing through his filter and began to chew. Well, Sherlock Holmes had his needle, whatever it was filled with—deadly nightshade, I think. I suppose B’russ’r could have his chomping tobacco. Night had pretty well fallen, and the tower Leake had called VT was a dark thin finger against a darker sky. From Ravenal, and somehow it’s fitting, there isn’t much in the way of constellations, just a scattering of stars, only a few of which have names rather than catalog numbers—all in all, though, about twice the number visible from even a good spot on Earth. A few were out, and the big yellow-orange solo moon as well.
“Do you know,” B’russ’r said, “it would be fascinating if there actually were some connection between all of this and the shootings of my people five years ago.”
Fascinating, I said, might not quite be the word. Myself, I rather liked “impossible”.
“Surely not that,” he said, chewing away.
I tapped ash. “Well—highly improbable,” I said, backing off a bit. “What connection could there possibly be? A slug gun—but two slug guns, over a five-year-period, is no great shock.”
“Still—” he sighed through a mouthful of Inoson (I suppose) Chewing Pleasure Tube.
“If I could so much as imagine a connection,” I began, and then of course I did. “Tell me, B’russ’r,” I said. “In what areas of the library did those three Berigot work? I mean, when they were shot, not where they are now.”
“Of course,” he said. “I will check, and let you know tomorrow morning.” He actually chuckled. Berigot don’t laugh much—which may of course be a consequence of information upload. “Early tomorrow morning,” he added.
“I’ll be waiting for it,” I said. “Just imagine—all the pieces part of the same puzzle.”
B’russ’r chuckled again. “The idea attracts,” he said. “It has a certain elegance.”
It had more than that for me. It had the promise that perhaps, just perhaps, the Master would not have thought of it first.
Of course, there was always little Robbin. No one knew what Robbin Tress might come up with at any given moment.
But I was after any faint sign of parity with my colleagues. I am not often surrounded by people all of whom are brighter than I am—which may be a statement about the world, and may be a statement about the kind of choices I make. Through
out this job, I kept meeting them.
Such a thing is probably very good for my soul. I hope it is good for something, because it does my ego, in whose care and feeding I am devotedly interested, no damn good at all.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
I SPENT RATHER a difficult night, tossing and turning a good deal. I rang the Master, filled him in on Leake, and laid out the connection with the Berigot shootings of five years before. He took the news of that connection in silence, for the most part—which meant that indeed he hadn’t thought of it first. He promised to tell little Robbin as soon as he could call her, which would be the next morning around eleven.
“She is of course upset,” he told me. “The meeting did that, and might have been expected to do that. Nevertheless, it may have been good for her. A small taste of normal life.”
I took a deep breath, about to say mildly that discussion of a forgery and a theft, with Master Higsbee and a Survivor, was the Hell of a definition of “normal life”, but I never got the chance. That rasp of a voice said: “Finished,” and the Master hung up.
And after that there was little but tossing and turning. Tossing, that is to say, an interesting salad with an interesting dressing—six or seven varieties of lettuce, thin-sliced radishes, slivered celery and a dusting of grated almonds, in oil and raspberry vinegar—and turning very carefully, three or four times, a small array of loin lamb chops as well, basted in salt, mint and a very little garlic, this deliberately left out of the accompanying salad.
A little more coffee, some of the remaining cheese (notably a variety I’d just found on Ravenal, something the local shop described as “City Four Smoked”, which was helpful but nowhere near helpful enough), and I was ready to face an appalling fact: until someone came through with some data (the police, possibly, on the bullet—B’russ’r, on the Berigot who had been shot—anyone else on anything else), I had nothing to do but think.
I have no objection to thinking; after all, it is seldom fatal. But though I know perfectly well that, in most situations, the sensible thing to do is to follow the old, old rule—”Don’t just do something—stand there”—I am not temperamentally equipped to do that very gladly. Standing there while you figure out, not just something to do, but the right something to do, is almost always correct. But it isn’t fun, and it isn’t easy.
Here, however, there was one additional difficulty. When I began to think, it dawned on me that I was thinking about something that did not, really, make a very great deal of sense.
Ping had hired me for a very specific job, as he’d said: to find and recover the manuscript of Heinlein’s The Stone Pillow. But it wasn’t Heinlein’s manuscript; it was a forgery, though certainly a good one. Why bother to find it and recover it?
If Ping had wanted to leave it to the locals, of course, the question became: Why not? The thing had a value as a curiosity, and finding out how the theft had been managed would be educational for the Library; whatever loophole had allowed the little band of thieves in could then be plugged.
Recovering the manuscript would be educational as well—for the thieves, and for prospective thieves. The fact that Ping could trace and recover a stolen object might just lessen the number of future stolen objects.
More, as Ping himself had said, the thing had been an extremely good forgery. It would certainly be educational for whole groups of people to find out exactly how it had been managed. That might, almost, be reason enough—education of that kind.
But education was all right as an explanation only if it came cheap enough—which I don’t. Ping had reached out to hire Gerald Knave, which meant that he had something more serious in mind, and I was damned if I could imagine what.
Nor could I imagine, no matter how I marshaled what facts I had (not enough), why the thing had been stolen at all. It was a forgery, known to be a forgery generally; lots of people were quite familiar with the fact. A good deal of work and time had gone into the theft—that much had been clear since I’d seen the room and talked with B’russ’r for the first time. Who would have bothered—and why?
And it wasn’t only the theft. I’d been shot at, twice. Ramsay Leake had been shot at once, with more permanent results. Five years before, three Berigot had been wounded. All this was certainly part of the same picture, wasn’t it?
But the picture made no sense whatever.
I contemplated all that for a while, and arrived nowhere at all. So I began to contemplate smaller matters—technical matters.
And when I began to assort those, it struck me that one thing needed a great deal of thinking about. Norman W. Nechs had (by assumption) been a real person, with a real history of sorts, into which the Heinlein forgery could be fitted neatly and without too much strain.
Had he taken a great deal of finding? I mean: Heinlein had certainly been a popular author, selling millions upon millions of his books. A Heinlein fan might almost have been assumed, given the date alone. Not quite—it is a fact, though a sad one, that even in his lifetime there were people who’d never heard of him—but that the man had been a Heinlein fan of some sort was at least a fair guess.
But had Nechs been any sort of special fan, any sort of collector? Had there been a lot of real manuscripts, first editions, autographed photos, whatever in that armored hole along with The Stone Pillow?
The people who had dug out the hole would of course know. (And had they dug out The Stone Pillow? Had they added it themselves? Had it been added just a bit later, when the whole pile was being examined and catalogued—and, if later, with or without their connivance?) But who were these people, where were they, and could they be asked? More, could they be asked by me, or was I going to have to be, to get any answers, some sort of Official Ravenal Grand Central Library Detective?
When it dawned on me who might have the answers to such questions, I found myself smiling broadly. I had not seen the man in some time, and it was going to be a pleasure to make the acquaintance of Charles Hutson Bellemand MacDougal all over again.
Unfortunately, Mac is a morning person. At ten-thirty P. M. (which Mac, who has about four times the normally-sized Scientific Mind, would certainly call twenty-two-thirty, however silly that sounded), I could only shelve the thought for the morrow, and take myself off to bed in at least a cheerful and expectant mood.
I did draft a list of questions first, and leave them next to the phone. I am not in the least a morning person, and when I did call Mac, I told myself, it would be well to have a reminder right there regarding what I was calling him about.
And, for that matter—I am really not a morning person—what my name was.
CHAPTER TWELVE
MORNING, GOD DAMN IT.
I got up. I shaved. I dressed. I made faces at myself in the mirror until I could see well enough to count both eyes and only one nose. I made breakfast on the usual automatic pilot, and ate it just as unconsciously, barely knowing what it was. I think, most breakfasts, I could drink instant coffee and never so much as resent it.
And I began, slowly, to think about the telephone. Calls to wait for. Calls to make. I knew perfectly well what sort of delays I was going to run into with Detective-Major Hyman Gross, so I pushed multi on the phone body, set Line A for Receive, and dialed Ravenal Scholarte Locator on Line B.
Locator wanted to give me Mac’s public-relations line—any man with two Nobels, even on Ravenal where Nobels do happen, has a public-relations line—but I knew what words to say in what order, and the sweet-voiced mech finally unbelted and told me he was just finishing a class in black-body interactions, and would get my message within a few minutes. I swear I could hear regret in the mechanical voice, unable to be more precise than “a few minutes” because human beings just would not be predictable to the millisecond.
So I said something regretful, and thanked the mech, and hung up, leaving the equipment set for multi. (I always thank mechs, of all sorts. I am not sure what a proper definition of “life” is, but I do feel, whatever the definition finally
turns out to be, it is probably better to treat everything as if it were alive, from your Totum to your toothbrush.) And it was actually Mac who phoned first.
“What—in the name of the seven simpering Demons of Maxwell’s Magnificent Purgatorio—are you doing on Ravenal, without bothering to tell me about it?”
It’s one of those names, as I’ve said. It’s one of those voices, too, a rolling baritone that sounds as if its owner simply gets pleasure out of producing it. “A quick stopover,” I said. “Visiting a few people, and not disturbing others. And then something came up.”
“Who have you been visiting, who has not been me?” he said. “I have you to thank for two of the most interesting moments of my life so far, and when you actually do manage to find Ravenal—and we must be dull for you, after your usual haunts—you don’t even bother to phone me.”
I said: “I did bother to phone you, Mac. You’re returning it.”
“Technicalities,” he said. “Not that I want to denigrate the notion of technicalities, Knave, they’ve been responsible for a Nobel. What’s more, one of mine. All the same—well, what is it that’s come up, at least? New alien beings? New troubles for Marietta? Who was, by the way, one of those two moments I mentioned a minute or so ago.”
I knew that. I knew the other moment, too, and did not regret her quite as much as I regretted Marietta. But Mac was someone with whom you did not compete, not if you were sane—and merely human. “Nothing nearly so exciting,” I said, “and the woman involved is Robbin Tress, perhaps not exactly your sort of moment.”
A small silence. Mac riffling through the file cards in his mind, of which he has an exceptionally large set. “A fascinating person, from all accounts,” he said. “I’ve never had the chance to meet her, Knave. But what could Robbin Tress have got herself involved in? The woman is almost a recluse—a carefully befriended and surrounded recluse, to be sure, but still—”
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