“And when he had it nicely back into the year he’d picked, and then forward again to present time,” I said, “that was the recipe for the faked twentieth-century paper.”
“Clearly so,” the Master said. “The question is, of course: for whom was he doing this small job? And who was it who apparently grew afraid that he might weaken and speak to someone, and so has paid him so—very finally for doing it?”
“There is another question,” B’russ’r said. “Given the recipe, how in fact was the paper made? There exists no instrumentality capable of creating such a paper, to that degree of detail.”
“Whatever the instrumentality is,” the Master said, “it is clearly new—someone has invented something—and it is, as clearly, imperfect. Some of the isotopes were not correct for the purported dating of the paper.”
“I am given to wonder,” B’russ’r said. “Could the invention itself have led to the idea of the forgery? Having hit upon such a technique, would this person then have thought to use it in such a manner?”
Fencing was still going on, I noticed. “Unimportant,” the Master said casually. “If he thought of the forgery first, and then invented a method of accomplishing his task almost—though not quite—perfectly, or if he came upon the method, and then bethought himself of forgery as a profitable use—what difference can it make?”
B’russ’r rustled his wings. Small objection. “Any small fact about this person,” he said, “may serve to identify him. If we know his psychology, for instance—”
The Master gave his bark of a laugh. “You have allowed the twentieth century to infect you, B’russ’r,” he said. “Even today, Psychological Statics is not a science in the true sense. In those days, there were fools who believed that it was.”
I put in: “They didn’t call is Psychological Statics.”
I was annihilated without effort. “They had a number of names for the thing,” the Master said. “They never did call it by its proper name—which was, in that era, Nonsense.” He turned back to B’russ’r—no foolery now about getting a vague fix on him, but a direct glittering stare. “This miscreant will be found,” he said, “through his traces. He has left many, and it only remains to interpret them properly. His psychology is his own affair, and I wish him well of it.”
B’russ’r ducked his head a bit and spread his little hands. A shrug of sorts. “It may be so.”
Round one to the Master.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
THE FACT—THAT Leake had known all three of the wounded Berigot, and had met the latest one just before the shootings began—got discussed thoroughly. There were implications on implications, and between the four of us we built and demolished several large sand castles of theory. Robbin, who put in a word here and there, mostly questions, came up with the wildest one of the night: an unknown alien race that had planted the forgery because it contained statements that would slowly addle the minds of all human beings who encountered it.
I didn’t consider that one for more than a minute and a half, myself, and I think I spent seventy or eighty seconds longer on it than either B’russ’r or the Master did. It was certainly a showy idea, and it had its attractions for me on that ground if no other—but an alien race that had set out to addle the collective mind of humanity by planting one (1) manuscript by one (1) writer three full centuries old and more in one (1) library on one (1) planet seemed just a tad implausible. As advertising people have been finding out for more centuries than Heinlein’s real work has been around, there are far better and simpler ways to addle human minds.
But there were other notions—the first and best being the Master’s statement, early in our talk, that all the files belonging to Ramsay Leake, going back at least six years—a year before anything had begun—should get the most careful examination possible, and then some.
“It will be a daunting prospect,” B’russ’r said. “I agree that it should be done, if at all possible—but six years of computer files, for a computer expert like Mr. Leake, will represent many hours of work, even if codes can be had.”
“And,” I said, “if anything turns up I will, personally, be surprised as Hell.”
“I see both your points,” Master Higsbee said. “But no matter how we are daunted, we must proceed—and, though he has had years of time in which to destroy such files, and will know far better than most how to accomplish such destruction tracelessly and completely, we can hope that he slipped somewhere. Such things happen, and very often.”
“They do indeed,” I said. “It has to be done. But it’s the Hell of a job of work, for what I will bet is no return.”
But of course it didn’t have to be done. Robbin looked up dreamily from her fruits, tomatoes and goo. She took rather a noisy suck at the straw sticking out of her latest milkshake, and said: “He didn’t forget anything much. There’s a dated memo five years old somewhere, but it’s blank. That’s all there is, sorry.”
Days, possibly weeks, of work accomplished for us in one eyeblink. Nobody thought of doubting Robbin, though I wondered privately just how such information got to her. It seemed to me there were two possibilities:
1) Somehow, her wild talent had examined all the files, wherever the Hell they were and however encoded, while we sat there discussing them. This argued that her talent had more speed to it than computers did, not to mention an awesome gift for cracking codes.
2) Her wild talent had looked into the future, after we’d done all the hard work of examining the damned files, and told us what we’d have found when the job was done. This led to considerations that boggled my mind just a trifle: if we now took her word for the results, as we were doing, and didn’t go through the files, as we certainly weren’t going to do—what became of her picture of the future? In the real future, we wouldn’t have looked at the files at all—so how had she seen a future in which we had?
“There are answers, of course, and answers for the answers; there always are.” A science-fiction writer, preSpace (not Heinlein, and I am damned if I can put a name to him or her), had written that line, and I’d treasured it for years. There were answers to the questions posed by either explanation of little Robbin’s talent. That the answers led to more, and hairier, questions was of course expectable, this being the kind of universe it is.
And none of the answers, and none of the resulting questions, have a damned thing to do with Ramsay Leake, or three wounded Berigot, or a manuscript that hadn’t, in fact, belonged to Norman W. Nechs. It’s a fascinating field of study—and there are people on Ravenal to this day studying away at it—but it belongs in some other report. The results of her talent, as described, did, and do, belong in this one.
We agreed Leake’s files didn’t have to be combed through—not by us. Detective-Major Gross could do the job, and we wished him joy of it, but we could go right on to something else.
The question was, of course: What else? and there wasn’t much disagreement. B’russ’r and Master Higsbee were handed the tough job, and the thankless one—combing for any link between Leake and anyone at all involved with the dig, with the unsealing of the damned barrel, or with the manuscript. Master Higsbee volunteered the information—I had no idea where he’d got it, or when, but I’d as soon question a Ravenal datafile—that Leake had not been a reader of science-fiction, and had thought it, he’d once told somebody or other, “amusingly primitive”. But whether he knew some of the Ravenal Misfits in other connections we couldn’t be sure, and the combing would start at once, for them and for anyone else even remotely in the picture.
The job was tough, just because it had so many damn details about it. And it was thankless, because the chances were very large that no connection that meant anything was going to be found; whoever was behind all this had been careful right through, as far as we could tell, and there was no reason for him, her or them to show a streak of carelessness as regarded Leake. The man was, after all, dead, which argued that somebody wanted secrecy preserved, and was wil
ling to extend himself a little to ensure it.
But it had to be done—and this time Robbin didn’t have one of her helpful little visions. We were stuck with actually doing it.
I, on the other had, was going to go right on talking to people. Paula Shore first, and then Freda Hocksher. And somewhere in there, another talk with Grosvenor Rouse, to which I did not look forward.
And some of the Misfits as well—Mac, for one, and probably Corri Reges and Chandes Washington and Bitsy Bowyer for three more. I had some more facts now, which led to sixty or seventy new questions to ask.
All in all, a busy day coming up. With Paula Shore right at the start of it. A babe, I had been told, if not quite a completely satisfactory babe.
I spent the evening thinking up questions to ask a babe, and crafting several fine approaches to a variety of subjects involving manuscripts, digs and science-fiction. I managed to persuade myself to get some sleep, and though I can’t tell you what dreams I had—when I do remember dreams, they’re too silly ever to repeat—I must have had some, because I woke myself up, somewhere around 3 A. M., shouting: “Where are Heinlein’s isotopes?”
It was not a question I could answer, so I went back to sleep.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Paula Shore’s office was as different from Gro Rouse’s as two offices could be. It did have a desk in it, and a computer-reader, some casual impedimenta, and three chairs. The casual impedimenta were six or seven pieces of paper (neatly arranged in a tiny stack), two 3D photos of objects I couldn’t identify—out of some dig or other, clearly—lying on the desk, and a large stone mug filled with tea, also on the desk and convenient to Paula Shore’s left hand. It had two people in it, Paula Shore and Yours Very Truly.
It had nothing else in it at all. The place was picked as clean as a bone; personal objects, clutter of any sort, were more conspicuous by their absence than anything whatever had been in Gro Rouse’s crowded room full of knick-knacks and Rouse. The word I’m groping for is “sterile”, and when I saw the place, and saw Paula Shore, it was clear to me at once why Drang Mathias hadn’t called her a real babe. There was nothing at all wrong with her—au contraire, as they say; she was a little woman of about 27, but her figure was lovely, her face elfin and earnest (which is a fetching combination) behind very large, horn-rimmed glasses so old-fashioned they were charming, her hair wavy and raven-black.
And she was very nearly not there at all.
It wasn’t anything physical. It was her mood and her manner; she was as thoroughly turned off as if she’d had a little switch on her back frozen in the down position. And while it might have been me—I’ve had some odd effects on a few people, now and then—I don’t really think it was; I think something had frozen that switch for her years before, and she’d simply carried bravely on, going through the motions.
She said: “I understand you wanted to see me, Mr. Knave,” and though few people Mr. me—I seem to be just Knave to most of the world, exceptions like little Robbin and the Master (and, God help us, Gro Rouse) duly noted—I didn’t even think of correcting her. Whatever the programming was, I was willing to live with it. It was, it seemed to me, programming—not choice.
I told her I did indeed, and it was about the dig she’d been on four years before, with Grosvenor Rouse, and Bitsy Bowyer, and—
“Dean Rell and—oh yes, Freda. I do remember that. There was such a fuss made about the artifacts, you know.”
I thought my best approach was—now that, having seen her, I had scrapped all the approaches I’d had saved up for her—not to mention Drang Mathias and his story at all, until and unless I had to. So I said, blandly: “Fuss?”
“Dr. Rouse was very particular about them,” she said. “He wanted to be there when the container was breached. Of course I knew that wasn’t usual practice—not at all, one never is, it’s left to the technicians entirely—but he thought an exception might be made. He wanted me to ask to be present.”
Well, it was like getting information from a computer, with the slight difference that this computer was perfectly capable of deciding to lie to you. I mean, without your having programmed that sort of antic into it first. Punch in a question, and an answer popped out. I remembered a planet I’d been on once, where the clean-room superstition about computers—no dust allowed, and damn little breathing—had taken firm hold, and made life inconvenient for everybody. Paula Shore’s bare office gave me an echo of it.
“Dr. Rouse wanted to be there,” I said. “So he asked you to ask to be present. That sounds just a little odd.”
“He felt he didn’t want to—’swing his weight around’ in the labs,” she said. You could hear the inverted commas dropping around the slang phrase. “If I were permitted to be present, then Dr. Rouse would be as well; that seemed obvious. But I am much younger in the field than Dr. Rouse, and so have much less influence. He determined that it would be better that I ask for the exception. It was not, in any case, granted.”
“But you didn’t particularly want to be there,” I said.
“I had no reason to be there,” she said. “My job had been done. There was some curiosity about the contents of the artifact—a large container of some sort, though I don’t recall exactly what—”
“A barrel,” I said. “Under slight pressure, and containing manuscript, and some metal object.”
She gave me a nod. It wasn’t at all the brisk, robotic nod I expected, but a perfectly human movement of her head. “Thank you; was it really?” she said. “In any case, there was some curiosity—but scarcely enough to wish to breach normal practice.”
“But Dr. Rouse felt something more.:”
“I imagine he must have,” she said. “I should think Dr. Rouse would be the one to ask about that, Mr. Knave.”
“You don’t have any idea what it might have been?”
“The metal, perhaps,” she said. “Dr. Rouse is something of a—collector.” I had the feeling she’d substituted the word for a more acid one at the last second, possibly Bitsy Bowyer’s pet, “jackdaw”. “He might have wanted to see it, perhaps even to bargain for custodianship of it; he apparently enjoys displaying such things.”
I remembered Rouse’s cluttered office, with the few artifacts I thought I could place, from Alphacent, and the many apparently from Earth. “He does have a good many items in his office,” I said.
“He has said he—gets something from seeing them, touching them. A species of knowledge; he has called it that.” She shrugged; a little abrupt, but still quite a human shrug. “It may be something of the sort. But he also enjoys the display.”
“Well,” I said, “some people do. Collectors—people who just enjoy old things. Special things. Souvenirs.” I was babbling, and not quite realizing it—not at that second. I was sitting in that bare office, looking at Paula Shore, and listening to her, in a way.
But I was also in several other places, all at once. Pieces were connecting all over my head, and I was getting ideas.
Right at that moment, I had no damned idea what the ideas were. I seldom do, at that point; I only know I have them, and when I get a little time and room I can sit down and look for them, and take them to wherever in my head I can manage to clear a little space, so I can get them all nicely identified, classified and sorted.
Paula Shore had said something—about the barrel, about Gro Rouse, about artifacts in general or digs in general; sooner or later I’d know just what—and the something had echoed something else I’d heard, and thought about—and had set pieces connecting all over. I knew who had managed the forgery, headed up the theft, shot at three Berigot—and killed Ramsay Leake.
I knew how it had all been done—well, in that area there were still some sizable holes, but they were holes I thought I could fill, given some time for thinking, and some hard thinking.
I even thought I knew why it had all been done—which was (I felt) the most unusual part of the whole business.
All I needed—I told myself,
while Paula Shore said something about the drive for collecting things being a relic of our remote simian ancestry, somehow or other—was a little time, and I would know what it was I knew.
Just at that moment, all I knew was, I knew it.
No—I knew one more thing. I knew the core of the whole thing—the single fact that lit up all the other facts.
The core was: Nothing made any sense whatever.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
WELL, IT WAS really too much to hope for. When I left Paula Shore’s office, I found a vacant spot, pulled out my pocket piece, and punched in the code for Master Higsbee.
If he’d neglected to instruct his machine to forward to his pocket piece—well, as I say, it was really too much to hope for. The Master, God damn it, doesn’t do things like that. I would pay six times the fee Ping Boom was paying me, just offhand, if he only would, just once, and I could know about it.
But the phone beeped twice, telling me it was forwarding, and then blipped once. It was in mid-second-blip when the Master’s rasp said: “Who?”
“Gerald Knave,” I said. “We must talk.” And as I said it, I began to know what the Hell it was we’d be talking about. The things I knew started to filter through to me, and I discovered what they were. It had taken days to get to the point at which I knew something—but only minutes, thank God, to get from there to actually finding out what it was I knew.
He was patient. “Gerald, I am assorting a great many data. Can conversation wait until there is time available?”
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