“Take him in,” one of the game-playing cops suggested. The game, intricate and devious, was a version of a Centaurian III practice. “We can revoke his vendor’s license.”
Ackers had, when there was nothing else to do, concocted and refined an indictment of Garth, a sort of lay analysis of the man’s mental aberrations. He enjoyed playing the psychoanalytic game; it gave him a sense of power.
Garth, Harvey
Prominent compulsive syndrome. Has assumed role of ideological anarchist, opposing legal and social system. No rational expression, only repetition of key words and phrases. Idee fixe is Banish the banishment system. Cause dominates life. Rigid fanatic, probably of manic type, since…
Ackers let the sentence go, since he didn’t really know what the structure of the manic type was. Anyhow, the analysis was excellent, and someday it would be resting in an official slot instead of merely drifting through his mind. And, when that happened, the annoying voice would conclude.
“Big turmoil,” Garth droned. “Banishment system in vast upheaval… crisis moment has arrived.”
“Why crisis?” Ackers asked aloud.
Down below on the pavement Garth responded. “All your machines are humming. Grand excitement reigns. Somebody’s head will be in the basket before sun-up.” His voice trailed off in a weary blur. “Intrigue and murder. Corpses … the police scurry and a beautiful woman lurks.” To his analysis Ackers added an amplifying clause.
…Garth’s talents are warped by his compulsive sense of mission. Having designed an ingenious communication device he sees only its propaganda possibility. Whereas Garth’s voice-ear mechanism could be put to work for All Humanity.
That pleased him. Ackers got up and wandered over to the attendant operating the file. “How’s it coming?” he asked.
“Here’s the situation,” the attendant said. There was a line of gray stubble smeared over his chin, and he was bleary-eyed. “We’re gradually paring it down.”
Ackers, as he resumed his seat, wished he were back in the days of the almighty fingerprint. But a print hadn’t shown up in months; a thousand techniques existed for print-removal and print alteration. There was no single specification capable, in itself, of delineating the individual. A composite was needed, a gestalt of the assembled data.
1) blood sample (type O) 6,139,481,601
2) shoe size (11 1/2) 1,268,303,431
3) smoker 791,992,386
3a) smoker (pipe) 52,774,853
4) sex (male) 26,449,094
5) age (30-40 years) 9,221,397
6) weight (200 lbs) 488,290
7) fabric of clothing 17,459
8) hair variety 866
9) ownership of utilized weapon 40
A vivid picture was emerging from the data. Ackers could see him clearly. The man was practically standing there, in front of his desk. A fairly young man, somewhat heavy, a man who smoked a pipe and wore an extremely expensive tweed suit. An individual created by nine specifications; no tenth had been listed because no more data of specification level had been found.
Now, according to the report, the apartment had been thoroughly searched. The detection equipment was going outdoors.
“One more should do it,” Ackers said, returning the report to the attendant. He wondered if it would come in and how long it would take.
To waste time he telephoned his wife, but instead of getting Ellen he got the automatic response circuit. “Yes, sir,” it told him. “Mrs. Ackers has retired for the night. You may state a thirty-second message which will be transcribed for her attention tomorrow morning. Thank you.”
Ackers raged at the mechanism futilely and then hung up. He wondered if Ellen were really in bed; maybe she had, as often before, slipped out. But, after all, it was almost three o’clock in the morning. Any sane person would be asleep: only he and Garth were still at their little stations, performing their vital duties.
What had Garth meant by a “beautiful woman”?
“Mr. Ackers,” the attendant said, “there’s a tenth specification coming in over the wires.”
Hopefully, Ackers gazed up at the file bank. He could see nothing, of course; the actual mechanism occupied the underground levels of the building, and all that existed here was the input receptors and throw-out slots. But just looking at the machinery was in itself comforting. At this moment the bank was accepting the tenth piece of material. In a moment he would know how many citizens fell into the ten categories … he would know if already he had a group small enough to be sorted one by one.
“Here it is,” the attendant said, pushing the report to him.
Type of utilized vehicle (color) 7
“My God,” Ackers said mildly. “That’s low enough. Seven persons—we can go to work.”
“You want the seven cards popped?”
“Pop them,” Ackers said.
A moment later, the throw-out slot deposited seven neat white cards in the tray. The attendant passed them to Ackers and he quickly riffled them. The next step was personal motive and proximity: items that had to be gotten from the suspects themselves.
Of the seven names six meant nothing to him. Two lived on Venus, one in the Centaurus System, one was somewhere in Sirius, one was in the hospital, and one lived in the Soviet Union. The seventh, however, lived within a few miles, on the outskirts of New York.
Lantano, David
That clinched it. The gestalt, in Ackers’ mind, locked clearly in place; the image hardened to reality. He had half expected, even prayed to see Lantano’s card brought up.
“Here’s your pick-up,” he said shakily to the game-playing cops. “Better get as large a team together as possible, this one won’t be easy.” Momentously, he added: “Maybe I’d better come along.”
Beam reached the anteroom of his lab as the ancient figure of Paul Tirol disappeared out the street door and onto the dark sidewalk. The young woman, trotting ahead of him, had climbed into a parked car and started it forward; as Tirol emerged, she swept him up and at once departed.
Panting, Beam stood impotently collecting himself on the deserted pavement. The ersatz TV unit was gone; now he had nothing. Aimlessly, he began to run down the street. His heels echoed loudly in the cold silence. No sign of them; no sign of anything.
“I’ll be damned,” he said, with almost religious awe. The unit—a robot device of obvious complexity—clearly belonged to Paul Tirol; as soon as it had identified his presence it had sprinted gladly to him. For… protection?
It had killed Heimie; and it belonged to Tirol. So, by a novel and indirect method, Tirol had murdered his employee, his Fifth Avenue front man. At a rough guess, such a highly-organized robot would cost in the neighborhood of a hundred thousand dollars.
A lot of money, considering that murder was the easiest of criminal acts. Why not hire an itinerant goon with a crowbar?
Beam started slowly back toward his lab. Then, abruptly, he changed his mind and turned in the direction of the business area. When a free-wheeling cab came by, he hailed it and clambered in.
“Where to, sport?” the starter at cab relay asked. City cabs were guided by remote control from one central source.
He gave the name of a specific bar. Settling back against the seat he pondered. Anybody could commit a murder; an expensive, complicated machine wasn’t necessary.
The machine had been built to do something else. The murder of Heimie Rosenburg was incidental.
Against the nocturnal skyline, a huge stone residence loomed. Ackers inspected it from a distance. There were no lights burning; everything was locked up tight. Spread out before the house was an acre of grass. David Lantano was probably the last person on Earth to own an acre of grass outright; it was less expensive to buy an entire planet in some other system.
“Let’s go,” Ackers commanded; disgusted by such opulence, he deliberately trampled through a bed of roses on his way up the wide porch steps. Behind him flowed the team of shock-police.
“Gosh,”
Lantano rumbled, when he had been roused from his bed. He was a kindly-looking, rather youthful fat man, wearing now an abundant silk dressing robe. He would have seemed more in place as director of a boys’ summer camp; there was an expression of perpetual good humor on his soft, sagging face. “What’s wrong, officer?”
Ackers loathed being called officer. “You’re under arrest,” he stated.
“Me?” Lantano echoed feebly. “Hey, officer, I’ve got lawyers to take care of these things.” He yawned voluminously. “Care for some coffee?” Stupidly, he began puttering around his front room, fixing a pot.
It had been years since Ackers had splurged and bought himself a cup of coffee. With Terran land covered by dense industrial and residential installations there was no room for crops, and coffee had refused to “take” in any other system. Lantano probably grew his somewhere on an illicit plantation in South America—the pickers probably believed they had been transported to some remote colony.
“No thanks,” Ackers said. “Let’s get going.”
Still dazed, Lantano plopped himself down in an easy chair and regarded Ackers with alarm. “You’re serious.” Gradually his expression faded; he seemed to be drifting back to sleep. “Who?” he murmured distantly.
“Heimie Rosenburg.”
“No kidding.” Lantano shook his head listlessly. “I always wanted him in my company. Heimie’s got real charm. Had, I mean.”
It made Ackers nervous to remain here in the vast lush mansion. The coffee was heating, and the smell of it tickled his nose. And, heaven forbid—there on the table was a basket of apricots.
“Peaches,” Lantano corrected, noticing his fixed stare. “Help yourself.”
“Where—did you get them?”
Lantano shrugged. “Synthetic dome. Hydroponics. I forget where … I don’t have a technical mind.”
“You know what the fine is for possessing natural fruit?”
“Look,” Lantano said earnestly, clasping his mushy hands together. “Give me the details on this affair, and I’ll prove to you I had nothing to do with it. Come on, officer.”
“Ackers,” Ackers said.
“Okay, Ackers. I thought I recognized you, but I wasn’t sure; didn’t want to make a fool of myself. When was Heimie killed?”
Grudgingly, Ackers gave him the pertinent information.
For a time Lantano was silent. Then, slowly, gravely, he said: “You better look at those seven cards again. One of those fellows isn’t in the Sirius System … he’s back here.”
Ackers calculated the chances of successfully banishing a man of David Lantano’s importance. His organization—Interplay Export—had fingers all over the galaxy; there’d be search crews going out like bees. But nobody went out banishment distance. The condemned, temporarily ionized, rendered in terms of charged particles of energy, radiated outward at the velocity of light. This was an experimental technique that had failed; it worked only one way.
“Consider,” Lantano said thoughtfully. “If I was going to kill Heimie—would I do it myself? You’re not being logical, Ackers. I’d send somebody.” He pointed a fleshy finger at Ackers. “You imagine I’d risk my own life? I know you pick up everybody … you usually turn up enough specifications.”
“We have ten on you,” Ackers said briskly.
“So you’re going to banish me?”
“If you’re guilty, you’ll have to face banishment like anyone else. Your particular prestige has no bearing.”
Nettled, Ackers added, “Obviously, you’ll be released. You’ll have plenty of opportunity to prove your innocence; you can question each of the ten specifications in turn.”
He started to go on and describe the general process of court procedure employed in the twenty-first century, but something made him pause. David Lantano and his chair seemed to be gradually sinking into the floor. Was it an illusion? Blinking, Ackers rubbed his eyes and peered. At the same time, one of the policemen yelped a warning of dismay; Lantano was quietly leaving them.
“Come back!” Ackers demanded; he leaped forward and grabbed hold of the chair. Hurriedly, one of his men shorted out the power supply of the building; the chair ceased descending and groaned to a halt. Only Lantano’s head was visible above the floor level. He was almost entirely submerged in a concealed escape shaft.
“What seedy, useless—“ Ackers began.
“I know,” Lantano admitted, making no move to drag himself up. He seemed resigned; his mind was again off in clouds of contemplation. “I hope we can clear all this up. Evidently I’m being framed. Tirol got somebody who looks like me, somebody to go in and murder Heimie.”
Ackers and the police crew helped him up from his depressed chair. He gave no resistance; he was too deep in his brooding.
The cab let Leroy Beam off in front of the bar. To his right, in the next block, was the Interior Building… and, on the sidewalk, the opaque blob that was Harvey Garth’s propaganda booth.
Entering the bar, Beam found a table in the back and seated himself. Already he could pick up the faint, distorted murmur of Garth’s reflections. Garth, speaking to himself in a directionless blur, was not yet aware of him.
“Banish it,” Garth was saying. “Banish all of them. Bunch of crooks and thieves.” Garth, in the miasma of his booth, was rambling vitriolically.
“What’s going on?” Beam asked. “What’s the latest?”
Garth’s monologue broke off as he focussed his attention on Beam. “You in there? In the bar?”
“I want to find out about Heimie’s death.”
“Yes,” Garth said. “He’s dead; the files are moving, kicking out cards.”
“When I left Heimie’s apartment,” Beam said, “they had turned up six specifications.” He punched a button on the drink selector and dropped in a token.
“That must have been earlier,” Garth said; “they’ve got more.”
“How many?”
“Ten in all.”
Ten. That was usually enough. And all ten of them laid out by a robot device … a little procession of hints strewn along its path: between the concrete side of the building and the dead body of Heimie Rosenburg.
“That’s lucky,” he said speculatively. “Helps out Ackers.”
“Since you’re paying me,” Garth said, “I’ll tell you the rest. They’ve already gone out on their pick-up: Ackers went along.”
Then the device had been successful. Up to a point, at least. He was sure of one thing: the device should have been out of the apartment. Tirol hadn’t known about Heimie’s death rattle; Heimie had been wise enough to do the installation privately.
Had the rattle not brought persons into the apartment, the device would have scuttled out and returned to Tirol. Then, no doubt, Tirol would have detonated it. Nothing would remain to indicate that a machine could lay down a trail of synthetic clues: blood type, fabric, pipe tobacco, hair... all the rest, and all spurious.
“Who’s the pick-up on?” Beam asked.
“David Lantano.”
Beam winced. “Naturally. That’s what the whole thing’s about; he’s being framed!”
Garth was indifferent; he was a hired employee, stationed by the pool of independent researchers to siphon information from the Interior Department. He had no actual interest in politics; his Banish It! was sheer window-dressing.
“I know it’s a frame,” Beam said, “and so does Lantano. But neither of us can prove it… unless Lantano has an absolutely airtight alibi.”
“Banish it,” Garth murmured, reverting to his routine. A small group of late-retiring citizens had strolled past his booth, and he was masking his conversation with Beam. The conversation, directed to the one listener, was inaudible to everyone else; but it was better not to take risks. Sometimes, very close to the booth, there was an audible feedback of the signal.
Hunched over his drink, Leroy Beam contemplated the various items he could try. He could inform Lantano’s organization, which existed relatively intact… b
ut the result would be epic civil war. And, in addition, he didn’t really care if Lantano was framed; it was all the same to him. Sooner or later one of the big slavers had to absorb the other: cartel is the natural conclusion of big business. With Lantano gone, Tirol would painlessly swallow his organization; everybody would be working at his desk as always.
On the other hand, there might someday be a device—now half-completed in Tirol’s basement—that left a trail of Leroy Beam clues. Once the idea caught on, there was no particular end.
“And I had the damn thing,” he said fruitlessly. “I hammered on it for five hours. It was a TV unit, then, but it was still the device that killed Heimie.”
“You’re positive it’s gone?”
“It’s not only gone—it’s out of existence. Unless she wrecked the car driving Tirol home.”
“She?” Garth asked.
“The woman.” Beam pondered. “She saw it. Or she knew about it; she was with him.” But, unfortunately, he had no idea who the woman might be.
“What’d she look like?” Garth asked.
“Tall, mahogany hair. Very nervous mouth.”
“I didn’t realize she was working with him openly. They must have really needed the device.” Garth added: “You didn’t identify her? I guess there’s no reason why you should; she’s kept out of sight.”
“Who is she?”
“That’s Ellen Ackers.”
Beam laughed sharply. “And she’s driving Paul Tirol around?”
“She’s—well, she’s driving Tirol around, yes. You can put it that way.”
“How long?”
“I thought you were in on it. She and Ackers split up; that was last year. But he wouldn’t let her leave; he wouldn’t give her a divorce. Afraid of the publicity. Very important to keep up respectability… keep the shirt fully stuffed.”
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