The Counterfeit Heinlein

by Laurence M. Janifer

  “I’m looking for Detective-Major Gross,” I said. He nodded.

  “Why?”

  “Because I need to talk to him,” I said.

  “He’ll be back in a minute,” the fat man said. “What do you need to talk to him about? And who are you—start with that, all right?”

  He seemed almost friendly, for a police official. “Gerald Knave,” I said. “I’d like to ask him some questions about—”

  “Jesus H. Christ,” the fat man said. “You’re Knave? Hyman curses you out almost the same as if you were a citizen. He usually goes a lot lighter on strangers and tourists.”

  And I hadn’t really started to bother the man yet. “What has he got against me?” I said.

  The fat man shrugged, a miniature mountainous gesture. “No idea,” he said. “He thinks you’re a pest. Maybe you are a pest. I’m Dunc Yeager, by the way—Detective-Lieutenant.”

  I went across to his desk and stuck out my hand. “Nice to meet you,” I said. “I’m not any more of a pest than I absolutely have to be. I hate pests.”

  “Always nice to hear,” Yeager said, “assuming it’s true. Which I do not. You’re from where, now?”

  “Out of the everywhere,” I said, “into the here. As far as it goes, I’m from here—officially. I’ve been hired by the Library.”

  “The what?”

  I sighed. “First Files Building,” I said. “Ping Boom, Manuscript Division.”

  Yeager nodded. In a very patient voice, he said: “Hired to do what? If you don’t mind, of course.”

  “Hired to recover something,” I said. “A manuscript that seems to have been misplaced.”

  “And that takes you up here to talk to the Detective Division?” Yeager said. “Hyman is mostly homicide—so am I, for that matter. Not that we don’t get involved in other things, as needed—or as the mood takes us. Out of the everywhere—very pretty.”

  “A preSpace poet,” I said, and tried to remember which one. Tennyson? Eliot? Chaucer? “Pay no attention to it,” I said at last, giving up the search as a bad job. Perhaps Bitsy Bowyer would know. Or some other archaeologist. Or of course Master Higsbee. “I think Detective-Major Gross is working on a case that connects with my job.”

  Yeager had no eyebrows to speak of, but his forehead wrinkled as if he were trying to raise them. “You know what he’s working on?”

  “Ramsay Leake,” I said. “I saw him at the scene. Talked to him there.”

  “And since,” Yeager said. “I remember. I said—he curses you out a good deal. Now you want to—”

  The door slammed open and I turned around to see Gross coming in. His eyes looked just as big and protruding as ever. He slammed the door behind him, blew out his breath, and said: “You.”

  “I,” I said. “I’ve got some questions.”

  Gross snorted. “I have no answers for you,” he said. “I am not going to have any answers for you. I’ve work to do, Knave, and if you don’t mind—”

  “But I do,” I said mildly. “I’m not just some gink off the streets. I need some answers, and the Library needs—the First Files Building needs some answers, and B’russ’r B’dige needs some answers—”

  “Oh, God,” Gross said. He sat down behind the desk next to Yeager’s with an enormous sigh. “As if I had nothing else in this dark world to do. Look, now, Knave—”

  I stopped him with a gesture, palms out toward him. “We can argue for half an hour, and then get to the questions,” I said, “or we can get to the questions. If you’re in a hurry, I suggest cutting the argument part of it.”

  Another enormous sigh. “Knave, man, why won’t you just let us do our work?”

  “Because I’ve got to do mine,” I said. “Maybe you don’t have to talk to me too long—a lot of what I need is probably going to be in your files on the case. And other cases.”

  Yeager put in: “He wants the files. He wants us to open up the files.” There was blank astonishment in his tone. I nodded at him, affably.

  “Exactly right,” I said. “It would save the Hell of a lot of everybody’s time.”

  Of course, it wasn’t that simple—it never is.

  But after fifteen minutes or so of discussion, the last part of which was a list of the first few questions I had to ask, Gross heaved one last sigh and levered himself up off his chair.

  “Files,” he said. “You wait here. I’ll get you files, Knave. You can read them right here—Terry’s out, so just use that desk.” He pointed at the desk nearest the door. “I’ll have the damn stuff printed out. It will not leave this building. It will not even leave this God damned room.”

  “Ramsay Leake, and a little more,” I said. “Those Berigot, five years ago—”

  “Oh, dear God,” Gross said. “You’re still onto that?”

  I nodded. He went past me to the door.

  “There’s going to be a large pile of it,” he said.

  “That’s all right,” I told him, with a certain amount of resignation. “I’ve got time.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  THE FILES ON the Berigot shootings five years before turned out to be extensive. Gross came back with a sizable, indeed massive, printout which, he told me, was the contents and summary list for the files, not the files themselves. “You want to go through the whole thing, it ought to take you four or five days,” he said. “But you did tell us you had time.”

  “Is there a quicker way?” I said, hoping for the right answer.

  I didn’t get it, not right away. Gross said: “Not for us.”

  “I’ll tell the First Files people how helpful you’re being,” I said. “And B’russ’r.”

  Gross, who had gone back to his desk after piling the absent Terry’s to incredible heights with faxprint paper, heaved a gigantic sigh. “You’re truly determined to make my life miserable, aren’t you, Knave?” he said.

  “Not really,” I said. “Just a small bit of it. And you can probably help make even that bit smaller. If you know the story on the Berigot shootings, tell me. B’russ’r and First Files will give you gold stars.”

  “They wouldn’t give me an eyeblink if I dropped down dead right here at this desk,” Gross said. “But I know the story—Lord, after you two pounded away at a connection, I went back and looked, all over again. Just to make sure I hadn’t forgotten something vital, you know—it’s been five years.”

  “But a Beri doesn’t get shot every day of the week,” I said. “A thing like that would stick in your memory.”

  “It did that,” he said. “We worked it, all three of them, for everything we had. Believe it.”

  “For instance,” I said, and he was off.

  * * * *

  THE FIRST BERI shot—G’ril Mnus, attached to the Manuscript Division as Chief Collator, Twentieth-Century—had been taking a night flight near her residence, on the outskirts of City Two. There was a Beri colony out to the North of the city proper, and G’ril lived alone, in one of the fancier nests or perches or whatever the Hell they are. I’ve seen them, and been invited into one of them, and this language I’m trying to use doesn’t have a word for them—never having needed one, because people don’t live like that.

  It doesn’t matter just what the place was, in any case, because she wasn’t in it. She’d felt the way I feel when I want to stretch my legs, only more so—as near as I can make it out. And she’d gone out to do a little swooping and diving, sailplaning around the neighborhood. Maybe stopping in to visit a friend, or drop into a neighborhood bar.

  They do have bars, more or less. Within reason. If you’re not too fussy about definitions.

  She was about four hundred yards from her place—just a step outside, to a sailplaning Beri—when something tore her right wing. She went into a ragged dive and tried to smooth it out for landing, but the wing wouldn’t grab air; she spun out of control and just did manage to bounce down, first on a tree-branch (oak, if it matters) and then on the local grass. A few bruises, but nothing really serious, and
that result was good luck and good sailplaning, both. G’ril was middle-aged by Beri standards—about thirty Standard years, but Beri years are shorter; the average life-span for Berigot, in Standard years, is about fifty-five—and in the sort of shape a regularly jogging human might be in at forty or so, given good habits, good diet and fine genes. A sailplaning expert, among Berigot, is about as odd as a jogging expert might be among people—people jog, and some jog better than others, and some can offer tips to newcomers, but that’s about it—but if there were such a thing as an Expert rating, G’ril would have had it.

  Whether her shooter knew that, or cared, nobody had any notion.

  What had torn a hole in G’ril’s right wing was a projectile of some sort. Careful examination, first in the local hospital’s Berigot wards and then by a small troop of police experts, fined that down to “small projectile”, and the force seemed to say slug gun rather than, say, blowgun dart.

  It was quickly established that G’ril was going to live, and that with some patching she’d get most of the use of her wing back. She’d “limp” a little, but she’d be able to get around, and some sailplaning would still be possible, after a spell of rehab. (She did change jobs—the rehab took time, and there was some reshuffling, and she ended in a wing devoted to Early Comity Settlements—but though her life had changed, it was not a total ruin.) While this was getting itself established, of course, police were out in force hunting for that small projectile.

  They had even more surprising luck than G’ril had had in her landing: they found the damn thing. Buried in the upper trunk of another oak, maybe fifteen feet from where she’d been when shot, and a little higher from the ground than G’ril said she had been at the time.

  The bullet track—it was a bullet, of course, and from a slug gun, and probably (we could now say) from the same gun that had killed Ramsay Leake—wasn’t very deep, but it gave the police an inkling of an angle of fire, and the height of the bullet-hole, the estimated height of G’ril when shot (and if it’s a fact, a Beri is trustworthy on it) and the distance from tree to scene of disaster, gave a better one. The shooter had, apparently, been on the ground, behind a small hedge, firing up into the night sky at a sailplaning Beri.

  Not as difficult as it sounds, given even a fairly cheap night scope. But the distance involved argued for a fairly powerful gun, and the bullet, though too deformed to be much of a help, argued the same.

  There were two lines of inquiry: enemies or rivals of G’ril Mnus, and evidence around that hedge. Neither line led anywhere in particular; G’ril’s Enemies list was as tiny as most Berigot lists are—they’re not much on personal relationships, of course, and professional rivalry among Berigot doesn’t seem to exist. They do whatever it is they do, each one of them, and, since any position anywhere affords endless chances of collecting information, they don’t jostle each other to get better positions.

  The ground around the hedge offered some scuffs and traces that might have been footprints and might have been almost anything else. No handy wrappers from things carelessly dropped, no cigarette butts stamped out nearby, no lovely thread of jacket or pants or skirt or sock caught in the hedge or anywhere nearby.

  This argued a certain amount of care and thought on the part of the shooter, but not necessarily very much; it might be he was just the neat type, and didn’t smoke or eat snacks, at least not while waiting to get off a shot.

  Was the shooter human, or Beri? Gross, and everybody else, opted for human, on no better ground than that Berigot didn’t do things like that; inventing a motive for one Beri to shoot another is an exhausting and fruitless business.

  The investigation went on through about two pounds of printout, but the sketch you’ve just had covers it; the rest is confirming detail.

  The second shooting, twenty-two days later, was an entirely different kettle of mania.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  THE TARGET AND victim was G’mancae B’dint, and G’mancae was a Figure of Importance. He was, in fact, B’russ’r’s boss, and G’ril’s as well—the Beri-liaison head of Berigot Services for First Files Building itself.

  He was elderly, as Berigot go—fifty-two Standard years old. He’d been working for the library most of his adult life, and knew the building and its contents almost as well as the building computers. He was respected among the Berigot, for his knowledge and for his willingness to share it with anyone who might ask, and among human beings for the same qualities, plus a natural friendliness that was far from a common Beri trait, to the degree he showed it. People liked G’mancae, and he seemed (insofar as a Beri could have emotions about anything but data) to like them.

  He’d been working that day, and as Berigot will he’d taken a short break to sailplane around the building. It’s the Beri equivalent of the trip to the water-dispenser, really—a fifteen-minute-or-so swoop here and there, and then a return to the demands of the day.

  He took the break just before three in the afternoon—fifteen, if you insist—opened a window and got out on the perch; and took off. He was considering a small change in a stack system for some late-Twentieth magazines—an ordering change that might, he thought, clarify some relationships among the magazines, that (he considered) hadn’t got enough attention. Still considering, he did a fast bank around the side of the building, toward the rear, riding a handy wind current up fifty feet or so and approaching the top of the building.

  The ordering change left him as he sailplaned; in the air, a Beri seems to have very little complex thought. Cares drop away, and all sorts of ravel’d sleeves are knit up. He’d given himself up to the joys of sailplaning almost entirely when his left wing was ripped open.

  G’mancae wasn’t as lucky as G’ril had been; the shock froze him, and he dropped like a stone, whirling helplessly. As he neared the ground (he said later) he tried to control the fall with his right wing, but he didn’t have time or room by then. He hit the greensward on his back, at an angle.

  The impact broke several of the radiating bones that serve Berigot as basic support instead of a spinal column. There was a burst of pain, and he lost consciousness.

  A human—Paul Antrim, working in the stacks—happened to be at a water-dispenser on the third floor, and looking out a window. He saw G’mancae drop past him, and rushed out of doors. It was Antrim who called out others, and got emergency med help to the scene; G’mancae was lying in a hospital hammock, still unconscious, within thirty minutes of his fall.

  They’d taken every possible precaution, but though the broken bones eventually healed, there had been nerve damage that couldn’t be repaired; G’mancae’s left wing was not going to be usable again. Most of the damage had come in the fall; the wing itself, and the tendon and nerve systems underlying it, were as patchable as G’ril’s had been; but the fall had snapped controlling nerves in the back, and for Berigot those nerves don’t regenerate.

  That was a tragedy, and a tragedy of sizable proportions; a Beri who can’t sailplane is prone to every sort of melancholia and depression. But G’mancae fought back, and took a post, a couple of months later, as consultant to First Files, a much less demanding job, and managed to rebuild his life.

  The police had less success. Gross was beginning to feel very frustrated, he told me, and I could sympathize: at first glance, the shooting of G’mancae had looked like a break.

  There was never any serious question whether the two shootings were connected; of course they were. Two Berigot, shot with slug guns, within a month of each other, would have been one of those coincidences people tell reverent stories about, if they hadn’t been connected. And this one was in daylight, in a nice public place—people were always going in and out of First Files, and the building had enough windows to stock your average small city.

  But people weren’t, it seemed, always going in and out of the back of the library building—there weren’t any doors back there. Just a sort of small greenflower greensward, with some scattered trees and walking-trees in the mi
ddle distance, a hundred yards or so away. It was occasionally used as a picnic area by people connected with the building, but not that day—of course.

  And the windows weren’t exactly mined with spies and sentries. People in libraries are reading books, as a rule—or consulting files, or some such damn thing. They will occasionally glance out a window for a few seconds, if only to rest their eyes by changing focus; but in all of Grand Central Library, exactly one (1) set of eyes, Paul Antrim’s, had seen G’mancae fall. And nobody had seen his shooter.

  It became even more obvious that the shooter hadn’t been seen when police scoured the greensward for clues: footprints, cigarette butts, dropped wrappers (well, maybe this time) and the like. They found only one usable clue there, but that was the bullet itself—in the greenflower, about a hundred and ten feet from the building.

  Further from it than G’mancae had been.

  The Beri had been shot either from a window of First Files, or from the roof. The windows were eliminated—not quickly, because the Hell of a lot of library workers, library visitors and the occasional tourist had to be questioned, but very thoroughly, and very completely.

  But things looked even more hopeful then, for a brief while: the building had had a finite number of people in it or coming through it anywhere around the critical time, a number smaller than the population of City Two (which was the basic pool of suspects for the G’ril shooting—plus tourists and travelers), and after all, who could get up on the roof?