by Five Odd
Captain Rawlson was in full charge of his ship, and we were merely six passengers, theoretically. But the fact that we were a Unit, with the full backing of the U-A. in anything we did, and still stronger backing behind that made him nervous and ready to fall over himself in an effort to help us.
I was the spokesman, though Dick had told me what to say.
"If you and two of your officers come with us," I said, "while we call on these three people, we'll be able to find the right one."
"How?" the captain asked, bewildered. I couldn't answer that, so I turned to Dick. "Just by interpreting their reaction to seeing us," Dick said.
"But . . . what then?" asked the captain. He still wanted to give us all the help possible, but he couldn't arrest a man because we thought he looked guilty.
"I don't know," I said, taking over again. "It will depend on circumstances. At least after that well know whom to watch."
The captain still looked doubtful, but couldn't very well refuse. He and two of his officers came with us and we went in search of the three people on our list.
We called on the woman first, a Mrs. Walker. Rhoda Walker turned out to be an attractive widow of twenty-eight, very quick and alert and smart and metallic. She reminded me of Helen before Helen was cleared. Of course Helen herself wouldn't know about that.
The moment I saw her I thought we'd come to the right place. She looked not only the kind of woman who would commit a murder, but also the kind of person who would think up a scheme like that to do it.
Lorraine did the talking. "Sorry to trouble you, Mrs. Walker," she said pleasantly. "Someone just tried to kill me, and I wondered if you could help us to find out who it was."
"Kill you? Here in the ship?" the woman exclaimed.
Lorraine nodded. "Frankly, Mrs. Walker, we think it might have been you," she said in the same pleasant tone.
Rhoda Walker looked around the party. "I begin to understand," she said softly. "You're a Unit, going to Perryon. Someone doesn't want you to get there—as a Unit."
"That was the conclusion we reached," Lorraine agreed. "I believe you're returning to Perryon to marry again, Mrs. Walker?"
For the first time the woman showed surprise. "How do you know that?" she demanded.
"We're good at guessing," said Dick. "How old are you, Mrs. Walker?"
She looked at the captain, holding himself in the doorway with me. All the Uniteers had packed themselves into the small cabin. The three officers and I were looking in from the doorway.
"Do I have to answer these questions?" Mrs. Walker asked the captain.
He hesitated. "Please do, Mrs. Walker," he said at last "I may tell you—"
"No, you may not" said Dick quickly.
"All right" said the woman. She turned her head to look at Brent hovering behind her. "But kindly stay over there where I can see you all."
"Excuse me," said Brent politely, and slipped his hand down inside her fallsuit There was a very brief struggle, and Brent came away holding a tiny gun. Rhoda's suit had been torn open, showing a curiously robust brassiere. To wear a bra at all in space was unnecessary and unusual. However, the reason was now obvious. The gun had come from a tiny holster between her breasts.
"Now you will answer questions," said the captain with some satisfaction. "Carrying arms aboard ship is illegal. I can arrest you here and now."
"Go ahead," said Rhoda. She had already recovered her poise and was calmly fastening the top of her suit again.
"I'm sure you don't really mean that, Mrs. Walker," said the captain. "Incarceration aboard a spaceship is most uncomfortable."
Lorraine settled the issue by carrying on as if nothing had happened. "Dick asked how old you were, Mrs. Walker," she said.
'Twenty-eight. It's on the passenger-list if you cared to look."
"We have looked. I think you're about thirty-four.''
Rhoda shrugged but made no other answer.
"Your son is about fourteen," Lorraine remarked. "At least he would have been if he'd lived."
Rhoda jerked convulsively. "How do you do it?" she asked. She didnt really care—she asked that question to cover something else.
"Did you try to kill Lorraine?" Dick asked.
"No," said Rhoda.
Dick turned away. "It's true," he said. "She knows something, and well be back to find out what But meantime we want to find someone else. Let's go."
I opened my mouth to suggest that if Rhoda Walker knew anything we'd better get it from her here and now, for at least half a dozen good reasons. But I didn't say anything. Dick knew what he was doing.
Brent looked at the captain, waving the gun. "Do I give it to her or to you?" he asked.
"To me," said the captain, a trifle dazed. "You can get it from me at the end of the trip, Mrs. Walker."
"Come back some other time and see me socially," said Rhoda, as we went out
"Don't worry," said Dick over his shoulder. "We wilL"
I couldn't understand how it was done any more than the captain could. But I had the beginning of an idea.
The ordinary person, guessing, makes use of a lot of things he doesn't even know. Some of them are useful and liable to help him, while others are worse than useless and liable to give him the wrong answer every time. Take the. lucky fellow. He's weighed the chances unconsciously and always veers toward the thing which might pay off and away from the thing which is going to entail more risk than it's worth. Then take the unlucky fellow. He always has good reasons for doing the wrong thing. He can always find ways to lose money. Tell him the right thing to do, hell go away to do it and later youll find that between leaving you and doing the thing he's thought of some much better thing to do and has lost money, crashed his car, offended a customer, landed in jail or broken a leg.
The unlucky fellow has some sort of command that everything he does must turn out wrong. He tells you so himself. Everything I do turns out wrong. He says that twenty times a week. That or something like it
Now the Uniteers have absolutely no bias any way. Even when they make blind guesses, the guesses are really blind, not modified by desire or hope or fear. And when they have reason to think a thing might be so, they know What the reason is, how likely it is, and how to check it
How Lorraine had guessed Rhoda Walker was going back to Perryon to marry again I didnt know. Her guess was right, but probably Lorraine would still have got some of what she wanted if it had been wrong. Then Dick asked how old she was—marking time perhaps, but her reaction had told Lorraine that she was older than she pretended. Meantime Brent had been hovering about unobtrusively, watching Rhoda closely. Perhaps she had made a tiny movement toward the gun. After that Lorraine had made another good guess, a little off the target—and instantly realized that it was off the target and shot again.
Like fortune-tellers, Lorraine and Dick hadn't had to
guess about particular things. They told her some of what they had guessed.
And Dick had led us away as soon as he was completely certain that Rhoda wasn't the assassin. There was something else we could get from her, he said. The fact that he hadn't tried meant that he didn't want to get it—not yet.
The second person we called on was a false lead. I won't go into details. The Unit questioned him closely and made a lot of intelligent guesses about him, but he wasn't the man we were looking for.
Jack Kelman, the last suspect, was surprised to see us, but friendly enough. He was a small, restless man, restless enough not to be able to relax even in free fall.
"Sure, shoot," he said. "I got nothing to hide."
lone was sniffing. "Perfume," she said.
None of the rest of us could smell anything. Ione's sense of smell had been sharper than that of the rest of us before she'd been cleared, and it still was.
"Helen!" said Dick sharply.
That was cover. Helen moved, but it was Brent again who threw himself on Kelman.
Again there was a gun. This time it was fired. At one p
eriod it had been pointing at Lorraine, but when it went off, still in Kelman's hand, with Brent holding his wrist, it blew the lower half of Jack Kelman away.
The women got outside quickly. Being cleared they probably couldn't be sick even at such a sight Nevertheless, none of them had any desire to stay and watch.
"Let's get back to Rhoda Walker's cabin," said Dick.
The captain protested. A man had been killed. There were things to be done ...
"If you don't want more than one death on your ship," said Dick, "let's get back to Rhoda Walker's cabin."
The captain made no further protest
Rhoda Walker was floating in the middle of her cabin. She hadn't been shot, she'd been strangled. If anything, the sight of her was less pleasant than Kelman had been. A desperate and fruitless attempt to make her look like the victim of a sexual assault hadn't improved her general appearance.
The captain, Dick and I reached quick agreement. The captain obviously didn't share my suspicion that Brent could have taken Kelman's gun away from him as easily as he had taken Rhoda's—without the gun going off. It was easily established that it had been Kelman's hands which had choked the life out of Rhoda. And the captain was ready—in fact eager—to believe that Rhoda or Kelman or both had made the attempt on Lorraine's life.
Thus the matter was quickly settled, officially.
As Dick said later: "There wasn't much we could have learned from them, Edgar. They were smaU-time crooks hired to do a job. Look how easily they panicked. The people who hired them certainly wouldn't have allowed them to know much. It was more important to get them both out of the way."
"So you gave Rhoda a chance to go to Kelman, warn him, tell him we suspected her and be murdered for her trouble?" I suggested. "Not to mention giving Kelman a chance to go for his gun and get himself accidentally shot?"
"If we hadnt handled it that way," said Dick simply, "how could we have handled it?"
I began to see why people distrusted the Units and insisted on having unit Fathers in charge.
3.
Having been told so plainly that someone didn't want us on Perry on, we nevertheless reserved judgment and didn't conclude that it must be the Traders. It was quite possible that the people who didn't want us there had a stake in the North-South dispute we were supposed to be going there to settle.
The wars in Lflliput arose over the momentous question—whether to break eggs at the smaller or larger end. Swift meant to be satirical in choosing this as a cause for war, but satire has a habit of being less satirical than the truth.
Perryon's main point at issue, we discovered when we arrived, was whether Terran or galactic history should be taught in schools.
Benoit City was the main town in the north and Sedgeware the capital in the south. Benoit City Council declared that since Perryon was a new world the children would be much better off with an understanding of the current state of the galaxy than with knowledge of the old, dead, useless lore of Earth. Sedgeware immediately retaliated with a course in Terran history from the earliest days to the present, saying that Earth was the mother world and people without knowledge of their heritage were primitive savages.
Presently books on Earth were unobtainable in Benoft City and information about the colonies was difficult to procure in Sedgeware.
Then the people of chilly Benoit City took to wearing new, fanciful clothes which had only one thing in common— none of them resembled anything ever worn on Earth. Since the people of Earth had at one time or another worn everything which constituted sensible clothing for the human race, the people of Benoit City had quite a job to find anything radically different, and often had to go to enormous extremes, just to be different. Meantime the people of warm Sedgeware wore nothing which wasn't of precise Terran cut, and while the women got by all right in summer clothes the men sweltered in double-breasted suits and felt hats.
In the Assembly the North delegates always voted for complete independence of Earth and the Southerners fought tooth and nail anything which broke the ties with Earth. Soon it was impossible to have a joint assembly at all, and two new Senates sat in Benoit and Sedgeware.
The first acts of violence arose over street names. Benoit City started it by changing all street names which savored of Earth—High Street, Fifth Avenue, Broadway, Main Street, King Street, Queen Street, Willowbank. Sedgeware changed all its streets to names of Terran towns. Then maurauders in Benoit City defaced the pure-Perryon street names and raiders in Sedgeware tore down the Earth names.
After that it wasn't long before any party of Southerners found in Benoit City were assumed to be there to commit sabotage. Soon after the first fights, the first deaths were reported...
When we arrived, the two factions weren't far short of open war. And that was all it was about
In Benoit City on the day we arrived Lorraine and I stood at the window of the former governor's residence and watched people pass outside. We could hardly believe our eyes.
A child of five, sex unknown, went past wearing what looked like a model spaceship. A girl hobbled past in a dress shaped like a waterpipe. A man wore a box-shaped garment about his hips and a shirt in the shape of a sphere. The sphere idea was quite common. Apparently the perfect sphere was passed as non-Terran. The next man we saw wore what looked like a big cannon-ball about his middle and smaller cannon-balls everywhere else. A girl came along in the first skintight outfit we'd seen, with holes cut for her naked breasts to stick through. The idea, we guessed, was that this must be true Perryon style because it certainly wasn't anything else.
"Wonder if it's safe to walk outside looking like we do?" Lorraine murmured. "Or must I get a square bra and rectangular panties?"
This wasn't necessary, we found. The split wasn't because the North hated Earth and the South loved it The Northerners weren't fighting with Earth, they were fighting with the South Perryonians over Earth.
We spent the first week at the residence in Benoit City and the second week in Sedgeware. We suspected that the Perryonians would be counting almost to the second the time we spent in the North and in the South, ready to squawk if one was favored over the other.
For Perryon was proud of us. We were the planet's first Unit Even in Benoit City it was realized that we weren't there to rule Perryon on Earth's behalf, but to help the world independent of Earth. We did a few little jobs in the first few days that helped a lot—small stuff as far as a Unit was concerned, but very useful to the local people, and they were grateful.
We managed to settle a labor dispute, far example, simply by interpreting one side to the other. We showed the engineers who were going to dam a river exactly where and how to do it and solved a troublesome case for the Benoit City police. These were just spare-time jobs, but they got a lot of publicity which didnt do our status in the community any harm.
So far we didn't interfere in the North-South arguments. We wanted to know more before we tackled that problem. Nevertheless, we were actually asked by the two Senates to act as liaison officers, and performed our first duties in a manner not too unsatisfactory to either side.
In the course of our local research it was easy to look for evidences of Trade activity. We found about what we expected. The Traders dealt with Perryon, obviously—all sorts of goods which hadn't paid duty were to be seen both in Benoit City and in Sedgeware.
But we didn't find any evidence that Perryon was the Traders' base.
We knew already that none of the Traders' ships were on any official register. People had been bribed to describe them, and the information thus gained indicated that the Traders' ships were small and specially built to be easily hidden. They weren't to be found on any world masquerading as ordinary cargo ships. When not in use they were probably buried in deep holes specially made for them in deserted spots, holes which would be covered carefully while the ships were away so that no aerial survey would reveal anything.
So we knew we weren't going to see any large, suspicious, tarpaulin-cover
ed objects in back yards, objects which would turn out to be unregistered Trader ships. We were looking for more subtle indications than that
And we didn't find any. There was no sign on Perryon of Trader money, for example.
There's no point in making a kill unless you can benefit by it Criminals through the ages have been notoriously unable to hang on to their loot until the hue and cry has died down before emerging as rich and powerful citizens.
We investigated all the people on Perryon who seemed to have a lot of money. That was easy, for there were about six of them.
Perryon was a poor planet and would probably always be a poor planet Her natural resources weren't high, and the world had only been colonized because it was so similar to Earth. It was a comfortable world to live on, probably the most comfortable after Earth of all the worlds so far settled. But if Perryon didn't have the discomforts of Fry on and Gersten and Parionar, it didn't have their rewards either.
A rich man stood out on Perryon like a sore thumb. All the men we investigated, except one, had brought heir money to Perryon and how they had made it could be easily checked. The one exception was a financial genius who was making money like Henry Ford—only since he was operating on Perryon instead of Earth, cars weren't enough and he had to run businesses in electronics, engineering, publishing, textiles, mining, banking and a dozen other things. We checked Robert G. Underwood very thoroughly without finding any hint that his coffers might be swelled by Trader profits.
Toward the end of the second week, Dick and I were
discussing things at the residency in Sedgeware. Outside on the lawn Brent, lone and Helen were sunning themselves. Lorraine was in town conferring with the police chief. We worked very closely with the police of both Benoit City and Sedgeware.
Since their clearing and training lone and Helen had become almost dumb. And Brent had been dumb anyway. Dick and Lorraine did most of the Unit's talking between them, though occasionally when some Unit representative had to be sent somewhere merely to make an appearance and pick up facts Helen or lone was sent,
