a) The people who are entitled to an opinion on any subject are the people who have taken the trouble to have some grasp of the subject. Invitations are not issued to others; and shouldn’t be.
b) Courtesy to Berigot is shown in the presence of Berigot—none of whom inhabited the Art Café, or were likely to in the usual course of a week, say, food requirements for humans and Berigot being as different as they are. Courtesy to human beings who might not share Chandes Washington’s opinion of Berigot is shown by fairly polite speech—which he’d had, more or less. Not by shutting up about the opinion; or no one would ever be able to express any opinion whatever, for fear of being discourteous to someone nearby who might disagree with it.
I took in some more eggplant, swallowed some wine-or-whatever, and settled myself for a long period of not saying much. The sort of discussion Corri and Chandes had begun can go on for several weeks before the Chandes wing wears out its indignation, or the Corri wing wears out its highly superior loving-kindness. But this time, other factors came into play.
“Whatever you call them,” Chandes said suddenly, in reply to something from Corri I hadn’t properly heard—having so arranged my ears—”they’re odd, and they make the people in First Files Building odd, too. They were going around, just a few weeks ago, asking questions about someone who didn’t even work there. No connection with the place at all. I happened to be there on the argon search—you know about that, Corri?”
“Naturally occurring isotopes, surprisingly long lives, as traces in the atmosphere of Kingsley,” Corri Reges said, and nodded. I opened my mouth to ask six or seven questions—I’d never heard of argon isotopes, though I’d been on Kingsley once or twice—when Chandes said:
“That’s right. Some fellow called Beauthis.”
“Never heard of him,” Corri said. “I suppose there must be a reason of some kind—”
I was leaning forward, perilously close, as I noticed two entire minutes later, to my handy mound of spaghetti. “Beauthis?” I said carefully. Perhaps I’d misheard; it isn’t the simplest name in the world to pronounce.
“Gerald Beauthis,” Chandes said. “Or Garand.”
“Geraint,” I said, and he nodded.
“Oh,” he said. “Is this part of your investigation? I hadn’t thought so, because no one mentioned your name at all. They might have been from the late-Twentieth department, though, I do remember that one of them seemed vaguely familiar. A young girl of some sort.”
Ignoring the question of just how many sorts of young girls there might altogether prove to be in the universe, I said: “It’s all news to me, but I am interested. What were they asking?”
Chandes shrugged. “Something about concealed weapons,” he said. “They didn’t ask me much at all, because I hadn’t been there the previous Fourday, which is apparently when this Beauthis had been there, or been thought to have been there, or some such. And I wasn’t paying any sort of close attention—” How many sorts of close attention can be paid was another question I was willing to let slide right on by—”to what they asked any of the others. I had my own work to do.”
“By the way,” Corri said, “how is that coming? Is there actually a trace of such a thing? Occurring in nature?”
“Well,” Chandes said, and I broke in:
“I’d really like to hear about this Beauthis matter, if you don’t mind.”
Very impolite, and so probably outlawed by current social tensions.
Very unhelpful, too, because that was all Chandes Washington knew, and Corri Reges, when asked, didn’t even know that much, and had never, she told me, so much as heard the name Geraint Beauthis before.
Damn.
A frustrating evening, all in all, made more so by the fact that I never did learn anything more about naturally occurring, long-lived isotopes of argon, which are definitely supposed not to exist, and apparently do, at least on Kingsley.. The discussion eventually veered from Geraint Beauthis to someone named Bobathic, who worked in Third Artifact Building, and whose name Corri was reminded of by Beauthis’, and who had said something exceptionally nasty about Berigot the week before. She was using him as a horrible example to change Chandes Washington’s impolite ways, which didn’t work very well but took up a great deal of time and air, and the discussion sank right on back to its previous level, with indignation and loving-kindness fighting it out to a wholly predictable, and very distant, draw. I contributed a few small noises of comprehension and politeness here and there, and made mental notes on questions I was going to want to ask Ping Boom and B’russ’r B’dige and anyone else I could find over at the library.
After a long while, dinner was over, and I declined an invitation from Corri to accompany them on a walk through Bohr Park, which was nearby. They went off, and I went off, and I spent the night making up lists of questions.
Concealed weapons?
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
THE NEXT MORNING, bright and shockingly early—the library opened at nine, and I was actually at the door ten minutes before that—I began trying to get some answers. Even the first few turned out to be surprisingly hard to get.
The trouble was to find someone who knew the answers. This should have been easy—and if I’d started with Ping Boom or B’russ’r it almost certainly would have been. What I ran into, instead, was a an eager young fellow called Reddin Corrosopie, and Reddin was something just a hair special.
I was a little early for Ping, and didn’t want to bother B’russ’r with what was basically a single simple question: what had been the story on Geraint Beauthis and the concealed weapon? The library people—all right, the people of First Files Building, but I’ll try not to have to say it again—had made a very public business of asking around, and the bare bones of the story couldn’t very well have been a state secret anywhere.
Reddin Corrosopie was the Public Information clerk. Naturally, since this was Ravenal, they didn’t call him that. There was a sign over his desk, which was near the entrance where a mech had just swallowed my paltry coins for the entrance fee—a tasteful big thing, that said: First Files: Facts. But I got the idea, and ambled over to try my luck.
Reddin, I think, knew his name and the name of the building he was in. Otherwise—well, to say he didn’t have a clue is to flatter him with a butter-trowel. Reddin had never known a clue. He had never met a clue. He had never so much as sent a clue an anonymous Christmas card.
I introduced myself: “I’m Gerald Knave.” He looked at me with a perfectly blank little face, as handsome as a painting and as full of motion.
“Yes?”
It’s a response I have always had trouble with. I said: “Yes. I’m Gerald Knave. I’d like to ask you about Geraint Beauthis.”
“The author listings are in Catalog B,” he said. “Just to your left as you go straight ahead.”
“He’s not an author,” I said. “He was here the other week. There was a charge—concealed weapons in the building. I’d like to know about it.”
Reddin Corrosopie blinked at me. “He’s not an author?”
I shook my head. “Not as far as I know,” I said. “He was here, and there was a charge against him. I’d like to know what happened.”
He took a deep breath and frowned. “It seems to me,” he said slowly, in a flute-like voice, “that you’re telling me what happened. You said he was here and concealed something. Library property, perhaps. But that would be someone else’s desk. You might try Security.”
I took one myself. “I intend to try Security,” I said. “But I’d like to know just a little about what I’m trying first, if I can. Do you know what date he was here, and what the charge was, exactly?”
“What date who was here?” this Corrosopie said.
I should have wished him a good day and traded elsewhere. But I have a stubborn streak, and now and then it surfaces. “Geraint Beauthis.”
He blinked at me. He had large eyes that bugged out just a little, and a pale, almost transparent compl
exion. “The author?” he said.
“Author of what?” I said, and he told me, as I should certainly have known he was going to:
“The author listings are in Catalog B. Just to your left as you go straight ahead.”
“No,” I said. “Geraint Beauthis. The man who was here, in this building, the other week, and was charged with illegal weapons possession. It can’t happen very often; you must have heard something about it at the time.”
He blinked again. He combed long, thin fingers through his sparse blond hair. “Oh,” he said. “The man with the catapult.”
It was my turn to blink, not to mention gape. “The what?”
“The man,” he said. I took a deep breath.
“The man with the what?”
“Oh,” he said. “Catapult. You mean him.”
“It begins to look as if I might,” I said. “There was a man here with a catapult?” A catapult can certainly be a weapon; back in the preSpace Middle Ages people used to toss everything from boiling tar to flaming mattresses over castle walls by means of the things. But it had then been a rig eight or nine feet high and correspondingly broad, and weighing upwards of a ton. It was hard to imagine anyone at all trucking one past the library doors and into a reading room, and even harder to imagine him concealing one, even from the penetrating, if slightly bulging, eyes of Reddin Corrosopie.
“He had one in his pocket,” this Corrosopie said. “Security thought he might damage something with it.”
I revised my mental picture. Clearly there was such a thing as a small, or model, catapult, suitable for carrying around in a handy pocket. “Do you know when it happened?”
“In the afternoon,” he told me.
I sighed. “The afternoon of what particular day, would you happen to remember?”
“I don’t have to remember,” he said. “Security will have it all listed.”
“Right,” I said. “It’s Security’s listing I’m after. But it would be nice to know what day to tell them to check for it.”
“Fourday,” he said, “three weeks ago. Or four weeks ago. I think it was Fourday, some day like that.”
It seemed to me likely that Threeday would be a day like that. Or Sixday. Eightday wouldn’t be a day like that only because Ravenal had no such thing as an Eightday. I sighed once more.
“You’re sure about the catapult?” I said.
“Sure, I’m sure,” Reddin Corrosopie told me. “I don’t forget things very easily.”
I let that pass. I let almost everything pass, in fact, and asked him if he had heard about someone called Gerald Knave, who had been hired by Ping Boom of Manuscripts to work for First Files Building on a special assignment. I made it as detailed and thorough a question as I could manage.
“Oh, that,” he said. “That’s got nothing to do with this fellow who had the catapult. Sure I heard about Mr. Knave.”
“I’m Gerald Knave,” I said. “I mentioned that before, but you were thinking of something else at the time.”
“I was?” he said.
I nodded. “You were,” I said firmly. “And I’d like one bit of information from you.”
“Oh, sure, Mr. Knave,” he said.
I asked him for the code for First Files Building event retrieval, and he gave it to me. He directed me to a query room where, he told me, one bank of computers would accept that code. He told me which bank, and how to find it.
Everything he told me was accurate. I have seldom been so surprised.
* * * *
EVENT RETRIEVAL GAVE me the basic story; I keyed in Geraint Beauthis and catapult and let the thing hunt, and in about four seconds it stopped humming, clicked, and asked me did I want a print, or would I take the data on screen? I told it to go right ahead and print, and in a minute or so more it spat out three sheets of fax paper at me. I thanked the thing politely, shut it off, and went away to read and reflect. Something, I felt, did not make sense; which made this piece of the puzzle, if it was actually a piece of the same puzzle, just like almost all the other pieces.
I’ll leave off routing and access codes and the like, about a page of numbers, letters and symbols, all told:
* * * *
NOTIFICATION REPORT:
Mr. Geraint Beauthis (1122-067-ABN6Px, GP file AV194) notified this day that carrying a weapon concealed in First Files Building without specific permit is an offense. Notifiers: Ptl. Harra Gleme, Ptl. 2 Rob Alan Deniende.
Weapon: 1 catapult, pocket version. Reported to be in left pocket jacket, report accurate.
Armament for catapult, steel pellets 1/4 inch diam, 30, found in right pocket jacket.
WEAPON SPECIFICATIONS: See p 3
RATIONALE GIVEN: Mr. Beauthis had purchased catapult as gift for birthday of a nephew. He took possession without packaging, to allow ease of transport. Catapult was fired twice in shop where purchased (Maxim’s Objects) as test of mechanism, accuracy and range. Mr. Beauthis did not intend firing catapult in building, or at any other location.
RATIONALE CHECK: Made.
RATIONALE A/R: Accepted.
DISPOSITION: Mr. Beauthis was formally notified. He undertakes to deposit any future weapons with First Files Facts clerk on duty if transporting weapon within building.
* * * *
EVERYBODY HAS NEPHEWS, and everybody buys toys for them. The youngster might put some school chum’s eye out with his new rig, but that was his worry, and the chum’s, and perhaps Geraint Beauthis’; it wasn’t mine.
Damn.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
A THOROUGHLY WASTED couple of hours, all in all. I spent some time trying to fit a toy catapult into a plot to break into the damn building to get the Heinlein forgery, and came up with nothing much. I spent some more time trying to figure out if a toy catapult could fire a slug, ready-deformed, with enough force and at a long enough range to have fooled the local police, and came up with two answers: a) Almost certainly not, unless it were one Hell of a powerful toy, and b) Even if so, why in the name of God would anybody want to do such a thing, when slug guns were, after all, not frighteningly hard to lay hold of?
Not that this process of thought eliminated Geraint Beauthis from consideration as a possible player. After all, forgers and thieves have nephews, too, and doubtless buy their nephews toys now and then.
But I will not deny that it was a disappointment. I never had any doubt of the tale as told to me by the event retrieval computer; if the building cops said they had checked things out, they had checked things out. I’d had enough experience with the piles of reports on the Beri shootings to trust them for routine of that kind. I did in fact go over to Security and ask them a few questions, and I won’t trouble you with any of that, because none of it conflicted in any slightest damn detail with what you’ve already seen. I made the stop at Security in the interests of thoroughness, and shouldn’t have bothered.
I was not, in short, any forwarder at all. Maybe, I told myself, the Master and Robbin would have something nutritious for me to chew on. There had been enough time for him to consult with her, and I scurried back to my apartment and found that my phone-message system was blipping and blinking. Mornings are not my best time, and I’d forgotten to put the thing on transfer page; my pocket piece had never got the news.
I sat down and pushed the Accept button, and the Master said to me, via recording:
“Gerald, call me at once. There is news.”
The message beep gave the time as 10:48, nearly two hours before. I cursed, dialed the number, and waited through three blips.
The Master’s rasp said: “Who?”
“Gerald Knave,” I said.
“Forgetful, Gerald,” he said. “You should program transfer page automatically when leaving your phone.”
Well, I should. “Yes, Sir,” I said.
“I have some data on Geraint Beauthis,” he said.
I nodded at the phone. Maybe the Master could get the air pressure changes as my head moved. Or the sound of my head
moving. “So have I,” I said. “I’ve been to the Library.”
“Ah,” he said. “Then you know of the nephew. But my news is other.”
“There doesn’t seem to be much there,” I said. “What have you got?”
“The failure to comply seems interesting, Gerald,” the Master said in that rasp. “You may agree.”
“Go ahead,” I said.
“The subject of compliance was a stock of paper—about half a ream. The paper dates from the mid-twenty-first century, and was manufactured in a small facility near the city of Canberra, on Earth.”
I sat holding the phone for a while, thinking about it. The date of the paper was a shade too late to make it useful for the Heinlein forgery, but only a shade—and it had been made on Earth. “Beauthis had this paper?” I said.
“It is the policy of our government to requisition such things,” he said. “They serve various purposes—museums, research, testing and so forth. The paper had been held by Mr. Beauthis and his family for generations, and had been well protected for the past hundred years or more.” He cleared his throat. You have never heard such a sound. “Mr. Beauthis had never made a great public show of his property, but it had never been wholly secret; the authorities heard of it, and requisitioned it. Mr. Beauthis appears to have been quite vehement in his refusal.”
I nodded again. “He felt that the stuff belonged to him,” I said. “His property, not the government’s.”
“Exactly, Gerald,” the Master said.
“And he went to prison over half a ream of blank paper?” I said.
“He thought of it as a family heirloom, I believe.”
I nodded. “What finally happened?”
“Mr. Beauthis was sentenced to a prison term of two months, and the paper was confiscated.” He cleared his throat again. It’s not a sound I’ve ever got used to. You might come close to it by programming an especially noisy sidewalk sweeper, one of the things with wire brushes, to run slowly over a moaning pack of gerbils covered with dry leaves. “He accepted the sentence, which was then commuted to a simple fine and a prison term of three days—quite usual in the case of someone with a job to lose.”
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