“He paid the fine?”
“He did, and has made no trouble since, if we except the business of the catapult.”
I thought a little more. “Just what is his job?” I said.
The Master chuckled. “He runs a family business,” he said. “A fax-paper manufactory.”
I gave that a little silence. “So he might know how to make paper that would pass for mid-Twentieth stock,” I said. “Given that he could work the isotope business, of course.”
“It is not frighteningly difficult to do so,” the Master said. “A competent worker in any one of several fields might be able to do such a job—given materials with the proper isotope assay percentages, of course. But yes, Gerald, he would certainly know how; fax-paper is of course a different material, but there are close manufactory ties.”
I reached back into preSpace classical humor for a reply. “Ver-ry interesting.”
He gave me his laugh—a single sound that was a cross between chuckle and bark. “I thought you might feel so,” he said. “By the way, Gerald, Robbin Tress has some news for you as well, in my talk with her by phone this morning.”
“About Geraint Beauthis?” I said.
“I cannot be certain,” he said. He gave his laugh again. “She has told me that the ringleader—at any rate, the person who managed the forgery, and also helped to carry out both the forgery and the theft—is someone who has met Gerald Knave.”
I stared at the phone. “She what?”
“So she says,” the Master’s rasp told me. “Of course, Robbin knows no more than that—she cannot even say whether the person involved is someone you have met recently, or someone you have known for years.”
“Right,” I said. “If psi powers were dependable—if psi powers are what she’s got—my grandmother would have wheels. Or something.”
“Exactly, Gerald,” he said. “But that is what she now feels, and I pass it to you for what value you may find in it.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
I GOT OFF the phone with my head spinning. I now had more facts—from the Library and from Master Higsbee, not to mention little Robbin Tress—if Robbin’s feelings were to be accepted as facts, and why the Hell not? They always were facts.
This Beauthis was in the spotlight, that much for certain. I hadn’t met him yet, but I was going to meet him very soon if I could manage it, and maybe Robbin’s feeling was subject to just a little time slippage.
And if not—I went over the list of people on Ravenal I had met. From Reddin Corrosopie, who was about the most recent, to the landlord of the building I was living in, who was the first person I’d met in more than an official, impersonal way when I’d got to Ravenal this time round.
Then I started adding people I’d met on previous visits. Robbin couldn’t tell how long my acquaintance with this X had been, only that there was one. How she knew that, I could not imagine; but my imagination had nothing to do with what was quite definitely a fact. And I had met a lot of people on Ravenal over the years, when I sat down and thought about it for a bit. Jamie Arthur, for instance, with whom I’d had a dinner date a few hours after I’d first been shot at.
But Jamie had no connection I could imagine with this particular case. He was one of the few experts on the society and behavior of one of the odder non-human races around, the Tocks, and we’d spent the evening trading Tock stories, of which there are several thousand worth telling at any given time. I filled him in on some recent doings of their King and Queen, who are old friends of mine, and he filled me in on the latest theories regarding what Tocks knew and how they knew it. They’re a highly intelligent race, but they aren’t one-tenth as human as the Berigot, and not one-thousandth as understandable.
Full of interest and fascination, and a nice fellow—but no connection. Not a chance.
Mac, for instance. Charles Hutson Bellemand MacDougal—murderer, forger and thief?
Nothing sounded less probable.
On the other hand...
Naw.
* * * *
THE PUZZLE KEPT growing new pieces. Most puzzles do, as you work at them, but in most cases the pieces do seem to belong to the same puzzle you started with, more or less. In this case, every new piece looked as if it were part of some entirely new puzzle.
This seemed to make for a certain amount of confusion. I spent a little time trying to assort matters reasonably, while cobbling myself up a light lunch of toasted City Four Smoked cheese on large rolls, with thin-sliced onions and tomatoes, and some Kona coffee because Kona married well with the cheese—about which I promised myself I was going to have to find out some more.
The lunch was perfectly satisfactory. The assorting process, even helped along by the calm, contemplative work of doing the dishes, was less so; when I finished I was full, but my head was still empty.
One thing had dawned on me. If Robbin said the main forger and thief was someone I had met on Ravenal, then it was; I could take that to the bank and borrow money on it. But the job had certainly involved more than one person—it would have taken more than one to make up the paper as well as the writing on it, to get the thing somehow into the artifacts once belonging to Norman W. Nechs, and to lift it from the damn library.
Maybe I had only met the ringleader, the General of this very odd campaign. There might be a Colonel or a Major and possibly even a foot-soldier waiting around out there, who could be met at any time.
And maybe I had met a Colonel. God alone knew, for sure.
So I got back to the phone, and began the weary work of finding some of them—or at least finding a few people who looked like candidates for those posts. I’d asked Master Higsbee to inquire after the other members of the final dig team, but he’d been busy inquiring after sixteen other people, not to mention digging into the Leake murder in whatever way he found convenient; he hadn’t had time for the dig folk just yet.
But I had time, I had nothing but time. And they weren’t at all hard to find; in fact, all three I hadn’t yet seen were still, or again, on Ravenal, which was at the very least a handy sort of coincidence. Freda Hocksher was doing a year of teaching at one of the local universities—part of the Scholarte, of course, but I can’t recall which part—Lavoisier, I think. Paula Shore had just returned, a week or so before, from another dig, this time somewhere in what used to be Chicago, which had meant (she told me later) a special crew, with underwater equipment of all sorts.
And Grosvenor Rouse was where he usually was, I discovered. Bitsy Bowyer had told me that Gro was really a bit old for digs, though he loved the work, and it seemed that he didn’t do much of it any more. He was now full-time, as he had been part-time for some years, Consulting Archaeologist for the damn Library.
Not in the same department as Ping Boom, of course. Not even on the same floor. But right there in the same damn building.
Naturally, I called him first, and he agreed to see me within the hour. I scheduled Paula Shore for the next morning, and Freda Hocksher for the afternoon—all three of the final dig crew were anxious enough to help, once I’d explained what I was asking about, and none of them seemed frantically busied with day-to-day life.
It may be simply that reconstructive archaeologists don’t get frantically busied like other people. They’ve learned to take the long view, likely as not.
* * * *
GROSVENOR ROUSE HAD an office on the fifth floor of the library, one flight from the top. The office was filled to the brim with Gro Rouse, more printed books than I had seen in one place since I can remember, and what looked like an immense scattering of junk.
Of course it wasn’t junk, it was artifacts—some of them nicely preserved in glassex cases, the Hell of a lot of them just scattered over every available surface, collecting dust and fingerprints, I suppose. One or two of the items seemed to be from Alphacent, a world I knew fairly well, but almost all of them looked Earthlike.
There was a computer-reader setup on a desk, almost buried in artifacts and a s
mall blizzard of papers, and there were some chairs scattered around, not many. Gro Rouse took up the rest of the place, and when I came in and shut the door behind me, I felt as if I didn’t have the room to take a deep breath.
He was large and round and light-brown—a sort of dusty tan, actually—and essentially hairless, though he’d tried to make up for that with a pair of eyebrows bushy enough to cast shadows. He wore rimless spectacles, old-fashioned as all Hell, and little blue eyes peered at me through the lenses. His mouth looked as if it had once tried to be kind and generous and friendly, and had been severely repressed; he had big lips the color of fresh liver, and, when he smiled, a set of the largest and whitest teeth on the planet. The smile was not worth waiting for, I discovered after a couple of samples; it was quick, big and cold.
His voice was a bass rumble. “You’re Knave?” he said as I shut the door.
“Yes, Sir,” I said. He reminded me forcibly of a very demanding Professor I’d once had in Tensor Flight Mechanics, and I had to fight to keep from sounding apologetic, about anything at all.
“And you want to discuss this business of the Heinlein manuscript,” he said. “Very well, Knave: discuss.”
I felt like telling him the dog had eaten my discussion, but I fought the feeling. “It isn’t a Heinlein manuscript, Sir,” I said.
“Damn it, I know that,” Rouse said. “The damned thing is a forgery. A sell. A piece of misdirection. Someone thought—well, who cares about old science-fiction? I can get away with anything here. But they forgot about the isotope patterns, boy. They did indeed.”
The Master called me Gerald, and Robbin called me Sir, and now I was being called Boy, which seemed worse than the other two. Rouse was about sixty, so he did edge me by some years—but not enough for Boy; though I’d have taken it without strain from anybody over ninety-three.
“Knave, Sir,” I said. “And of course I know about the forgery—that’s why I was called in.” As an expert, damn it, I nearly added.
“Sure you do,” Rouse said. “And so do I, and what the Hell is the problem, boy? I found it, I helped dig it up, it isn’t the real thing, and there’s an end. No?”
Well—”No,” I said. “For you, Sir, the big question is: How did it get there?”
“Get where?” he said. “To the exhibit case? We brought it here, boy. Straight out of its case. A large barrel, if I recall, and I do.”
“No, Sir,” I said. “How did it get into the large barrel, that’s the question. Because it wasn’t in existence back when the barrel was sealed up by the Survivalist—”
“Norman W. Nechs,” he said.
“Right you are, Sir,” I said. “The isotope assay proves that. It was made much later—made in present time, more or less. So it couldn’t have been dug up inside the barrel.”
Rouse nodded at me. He had a massive head on that round massive body, and it moved slowly, and not much. “Ha,” he said. “Unless someone else had come along first, and planted it there. Left it for us to dig up. Assumed no one would ever question a thing, the fools, whoever they were.”
I cleared my throat. You can follow me around for years and never hear me do that except when having a cold. I wasn’t having a cold just then. “Well, Sir,” I said, :”I think the dig crew—the door-openers—would have noticed if there’d been any previous digging up of the site.”
“Doormen,” Rouse said. “We call them doormen. God alone knows why, but we do. Even the women—some of them are—we call them doormen.”
“Yes, Sir,” I said. “They’d have noticed, wouldn’t they?”
His head moved again. A nod, I think. “Hell, boy, we’d all have noticed. Nobody lives around there—where we dug. Nobody’s lived around there for a hundred years. We found animal markings—paws, claws, that sort of thing. We expect that. A lot of drift, tumble, anything that can happen to dirt and rock left alone a while. Digging would have left signs. We’d have seen those, and they weren’t there.”
“Then nobody could have planted the manuscript inside that barrel?” I said.
“Oh, Hell, I suppose not,” he said. “Someone switched it for the real thing later on. During transport to the library. While it was sitting around waiting for transport. Something like that—had to be something like that, boy.”
“Knave,” I said. “Gerald Knave. And—what could it have been switched for? There is no Heinlein manuscript of The Stone Pillow. Heinlein said there wasn’t.”
“How the Hell should I know?” he said. His head waggled. “He was some nut. He wrote science-fiction. He might have said anything.” He snorted. “Good Lord, boy, how else could the thing have happened? It had to be that way.”
I shook my own head. “It didn’t,” I said. “There was no other manuscript called The Stone Pillow to substitute for it. The thing had to be put in place between the time the barrel was dug up, and the time the manuscript was seen by—well, Sir, by more than the dig crew.”
Rouse snorted again. “That,” he said, “is impossible. You’re telling me that one of the techs opening the barrel slipped this forgery into it. Why, none of them would have the knowledge or the resources to commit a forgery that would cozen a six-year-old child.”
“Perhaps not,” I said. “I don’t know them. But one of them might have been paid to do the job. Or—well, one of the dig crew might have done it. You were all there, all very quickly after the barrel was opened—”
“Of course we were, boy,” he said. “We had an interest in it. You can understand that. Anyone can understand that.”
I tried once more. “Knave, Sir,” I said, feeling more and more like the schoolboy I had once been, very long ago. “Gerald Knave. It’s my name, Sir.”
He stared at me. “Damn it,” he said, “I know it’s your name, boy.” I sighed and gave up, more or less silently. “But what you’re telling me is impossible. I know those people. To think that one of them would do such a thing—I tell you, there has to be another explanation.”
I shrugged. “The trouble is,” I said, “there really isn’t. How many techs were there doing the job of opening that thing?”
“Three,” he said instantly. “It usually is—nothing terribly demanding about that job, nothing to require an expanded crew. They’ve done that sort of work before, many times before. All but Machias, of course—he was new then. I think it was his first assignment after training.”
I had an interesting thought, and didn’t let it show on my face. Instead I asked for the names of the techs, and where they could now be found. Rouse gave me the names at once, then fished around on his desk, pushing paper piles here and there, and pulled out a sheet of printed fax paper.
“Assignments list,” he said. He read off current job assignments for the three people, told me where the jobs would have them located, and said: “Well, boy? Anything else?”
I had six hundred questions, and asked none of them. “If I need to come back, Sir, I’ll inquire first, of course.”
Another snort. “You damn well will,” he said. “And make an appointment, and keep it. I’m a busy man, boy. Busy.” He waved a hand at the piles of papers.
“I can see that, Sir,” I said, “and thanks for your time.”
It took me fifteen minutes, once I was out of there, to return to my normal age and weight.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
I SPENT THE rest of the afternoon talking to techs, bothering them at their work—and getting very little worth the bother, damn it. I see no reason to report on the conversations I had with Filomene Hass or Roget de Lisle—I might mention de Lisle’s pride in what he was dead sure was ancient-French ancestry, and may have been for all I knew; God knows I am not an expert on the splinter cultures of preSpace Earth—but nothing in either talk was of any use, and very little of it was of any interest to speak of.
Drang Mathias, on the other hand, deserves a little mention. In his own way, he was as colorful a character as Gro Rouse had been.
“I’m not going to be
stuck in this dead-end job forever,” he told me, pugnaciously. He was a pugnacious type, a medium-tall man with a lumpy build and exceptionally broad shoulders. We were sitting in one of the lab rooms—either the one in which Norman W. Nechs’ barrel had been opened, or a reasonable facsimile—and Drang Mathias was doing about as much sitting as two or three average people. He was sprawled over a lightweight plastic chair, with his feet up on another one, and one arm cocked casually behind him on a bare lab table.
“Well, I should hope not,” I said. I’d known the man all of twenty seconds.
“I’m going to be a wheel,” he said. I stared at him.
“A what?”
“A wheel,” he said. “An important person. A mover and a shaker.”
Local slang, I thought with some relief; a man announcing he was going to turn into a wheel was not something I ran into every day, and I was just as glad to find out that it wasn’t so. (It turns out, by the way—if you care—that it isn’t local slang. Ravenal had had a craze for late-Twentieth slang eight or nine years before, and some of the terms, like “wheel” and “mover and shaker”, had stuck. Apparently on preSpace Earth there were lots of people turning into wheels.)
“Good for you,” I said. “What I wanted to talk to you about—”
“Head up a department some day,” Mathias said. “Disposal, maybe. Not much work, when you’re the head of the thing. Everybody else does that. And what’s in my way? A couple of exams. A little study, I will go through the exams like—like—”
“Like a wheel,” I said, and he nodded.
“Right,” he said.
“I’m sure you will,” I said. “But it’s about an opening you did a few years ago that I wanted to—”
“Opening?” he said. “Dull work, always is. Lots of precautions, but nothing ever happens. Get the thing open, whatever it is, take out the junk, whatever that is, sign out your time. Can’t even pad a worksheet much—too many other people around.”
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