Universe 5 - [Anthology]

by Edited By Terry Carr

  “Mr. Wide,” St. Louis said, “this is Doc Westing.”

  “A pleasure, Doctor,” Wide said in a thick but impressive voice. “You have come, I hope, to stay until my own physician returns?”

  “I’m afraid there has been a mistake,” I told him. “I am a bio-mechanic, with no experience in robot repair. My patients—”

  “Are human. Indubitably, Doctor. It is not for me, nor for Mr. St. Louis, that your services may be required. I frequently entertain human guests at my table.”

  “I see,” I said. I was about to ask why his guests should require the services of a bio-mechanic when St. Louis caught my eye. His eloquent look told me more plainly than words could that I would be wise to hold my peace until he explained later.

  “You are clearly fatigued, Doctor,” Wide was saying. “Perhaps you will permit my associate to show you to your room, and afterward give you a tour of the house.”

  I admitted I could do with some freshening up.

  “Then I will expect you for dinner.”

  As the sliding doors of the elevator closed behind us, St. Louis grinned and gestured toward the control panel. “See those, Doc? Push one. Your room’s on three.”

  I pressed the button marked 3. The elevator remained immobile.

  “They’re phonies; leave it to Arch.”

  Addressing no visible person he said loudly, “Take ‘er down, Fritz. Plant rooms.” The elevator began a gentle

  “I’m afraid,” I began, “that I don’t—”

  “Like I said, the buttons are phonies. Sometimes the cops want to bother Mr. Wide when he’s down in the plant rooms or up in the sack thinking great thoughts. So I herd ‘em in here, press the button, they see it don’t work, and I take off that access plate there and start playing around with the wires. They’re dummies too, and it works good on dummy cops. Like it?”

  I said I supposed such a thing must often be useful, which seemed to please him; he treated me to his characteristic grin and confided, “We call it the St. Louis con, or sometimes the old elevator con. The real deal is the house has a built-in cyberpersonality, with speakers and scanners all over. Just ask for what you want.”

  “I thought,” I ventured as the elevator came to a halt, “—I mean, weren’t we going up to my room?”

  “I’m showing you the mushrooms first,” St. Louis explained, “then you’ll have a clear shot upstairs until dinner, and I’ll have a chance to do some chores. Come on, they’re worth seeing.”

  We stepped out into semidarkness; the ceiling was low, the room cool and damp and full of the smell of musty life. Dimly I could make out row upon row of greenhouse benches filled with earth; strange, uncouth shapes lifted blind heads from this soil, and some appeared to glow with an uncanny phosophorescence. “The mushrooms,” St. Louis said proudly. “He’s got over eighteen hundred different kinds, and believe me, he gets ‘em from all over. The culture medium is shredded paper pulp mixed with sawdust and horse manure.”

  “Amazing,” I said.

  “That’s why he wants you here,” St. Louis continued. “Wide’s not only the greatest detective in our Galaxy, he’s also the greatest gourmet cook—on the theoretical end, I mean. Fritz does the actual dirty work.”

  “Did you say Mr. Wide was a detective?”

  “I may have let it slip. He’s pretty famous.”

  “What a striking coincidence! Would you believe it, St. Louis, my own best friend—”

  “Small Universe, isn’t it? Does Street cook too?”

  “Oh,” I said, “I didn’t know you knew him; no, Street’s hobby is collecting old machines, and scientific tinkering generally.”

  “Sometimes I wish Wide’s was, but he cooks instead. You know why I think he does it?”

  “Since no one but a human being can eat the food, I can’t imagine.”

  “It’s those add-on units—you noticed how big he was?”

  “I certainly did! You don’t mean to say—”

  St. Louis nodded. “The heck I don’t. Add-on core memory sections. His design is plug-to-plug compatible with them, and so far he’s sporting fourteen; they cost ten grand apiece, but every time we rake in a big fee he goes out and buys his brains a subdivision.”

  “Why, that’s incredible! St. Louis, he must be one of the most intelligent people in the world.”

  “Yeah, he’s smart. He’s so smart if he drops something on the floor I got to pick it up for him. But it’s the image, you know. He’s eighty inches around the waist, so he figures he’s got to do the food business. You ever hear of Truffles et Champignons à la Noel Wide? He makes it with sour cream and sauerkraut, and the last time he served it we almost lost two clients and an assistant district attorney.”

  “And he’s giving one of these dinners tonight? I’m surprised that anyone would come.”

  St. Louis shrugged. “He invites people who owe him a favor and don’t know; and then there’s a bunch who’ll turn up dam near regularly—some of the stuffs pretty good, and it’s a sort of suicide club.”

  “I see,” I said, rapidly checking over the contents of my medical bag mentally. “Am I correct in assuming that since, as you say, there is a great deal of cooking done in this house, you are well supplied with baking soda and powdered mustard?”

  “If it’s got to do with food we’ve got tons of it.”

  “Then there’s nothing to worry—’

  I was interrupted by the sound of the elevator doors, and Wide’s deep, glutinous voice: “Ah, Doctor, you have anticipated me—I wished to show you my treasures myself.”

  “Mr. St. Louis tells me,” I said, “that you have mushrooms from all over the Universe, as well as the Manhattan area.”

  “I do indeed. Fungi from points exotic as Arcturus and as homely as Yuggoth. But I fear that—great as my satisfaction would be—it was not to expatiate upon the wonders of my collection that I came.” He paused and looked out over the rows of earth-filled benches. “It is not the orchid, but the mushroom which symbolizes our society. I used to grow orchids—were you aware of that, Doctor?”

  I shook my head.

  “For many years. Then I acquired my eighth unit of additional core.” Wide thoughtfully slapped his midsection—a sound deeply reverberant, but muted as the note of some great bronze gong in a forgotten catacomb of the temple of Thought. “I had no sooner gotten that unit up, than the insight came to me: No one can eat orchids. It was as simple as that: No one can eat orchids. It had been staring me in the face for years, but I had not seen it.”

  St. Louis snorted. “You said you came down here for something else, boss.”

  “I did. The client is here. Fritz admitted her; she is waiting in the front room with a hundred thousand credits in small bills in her lap.”

  “Want me to get rid of her?”

  “There has been another apparition.”

  St. Louis whistled, almost silently.

  “I intend to talk to her; it occurred to me that you might wish to be present, though Dr. Westing need not trouble himself in the matter.”

  A sudden thought had struck me: If, as it had appeared to me earlier that evening, Street had had some ulterior motive in sending me to this strange house, it was quite probable that it had to do with whatever case currently engaged Wide’s attention. I fenced for time. “Mr. Wide, did I hear you say ‘apparition’?”

  Wide’s massive head nodded slowly. “Thirteen days ago the young woman’s ‘father,’ the eminent human scientist Louis C. Dodson, disappeared. Since that time an apparition in the form of Dodson has twice been observed in his old laboratory on the three thousand and thirteenth floor of the Groan Building. Miss Dodson has retained me to investigate Dodson’s disappearance and lay the phantom. You appear disturbed.”

  “I am. Dodson was—well, if not a friend, at least a friendly acquaintance of mine.”

  “Ah.” Wide looked at St. Louis significantly. “When was the last time you saw him, Doctor?”

  “A little l
ess than two months ago, at the regular meeting. We were fellow members of the Peircian Society.”

  “He appeared normal then?”

  “Entirely. His stoop was, if anything, rather more pronounced than usual, indicating relaxation; and the unabated activity of the tics I had previously observed affecting his left eye and right cheek testified to the continuing functioning of the facial nerves.”

  I paused, then took the plunge. “Mr. Wide, would it be possible for me to sit in with you while you question his daughter? After all, death is primarily a medical matter, and I might be of some service.”

  “You mean, his ‘daughter,’” Wide said absently. “You must, however, permit me to precede you—our elevator is insufficiently capacious for three.”

  “He’s hoping she’ll object to you—that’ll give him an excuse to threaten to drop the case,” St. Louis said as soon as we were alone. “And that elevator’ll hold five, if one of ‘em’s not him.”

  I was thinking of the death of my old acquaintance, and did not reply.

  * * * *

  Alice Dodson, who sat on the edge of a big red leather chair in front of Wide’s desk, was as beautiful a girl as I had ever seen: tall, poised, with a well-developed figure and a cascade of hair the color of white wine. “I assume,” Wide was saying to her as St. Louis and I emerged from the elevator, “that that diminutive glassine envelope you hold contains the hundred thousand in small bills my cook mentioned.”

  “Yes,“ the girl said, holding it up. “They have been microminiaturized and are about three millimeters by seven.”

  Wide nodded. “Arch, put it in the safe and write her out a receipt. Don’t list it as an addition to the retainer, just: ‘Received of Miss Alice Dodson the sum of one hundred thousand credits, her property.’ Date it and sign my name.”

  “I’ve already given you a retainer,” Miss Dodson said, unsuccessfully attempting to prevent St. Louis’s taking the envelope, “and I just stopped by here on my way to the bank.”

  “Confound it, madame, I conceded that you had given us a retainer, and I have no time for drollery. Tell us about the most recent apparition.”

  “Since my ‘father’ disappeared I have entered his laboratory at least once every day—you know, to dust and sort of tidy up.”

  “Pfui!” Wide said.

  “What?”

  “Ignore it, madame. Continue.”

  “I went in this morning, and there he was. It looked just like him—just exactly like him. He had one end of his mustache in his mouth the way he did sometimes, and was chewing on it.”

  “Dr. Westing, Wide said, turning to me, “you knew Dodson; what mood does that suggest? Concupiscent? (We must remember that he was looking at Miss Dodson.) Fearful?”

  I reflected for a moment. “Reflective, I should say.”

  Miss Dodson continued: “That’s all there was. I saw him. He saw me—I feel certain he saw me—and he started to rise (he was always such a gentleman) and” —she made an eloquent gesture—”puff! He disappeared.”

  “Extraordinary.”

  “Mr. Wide, I’ve been paying you for a week now, and you haven’t gone to look at the ghost yet. I want you to go in person. Now. Tonight.”

  “Madame, under no circumstances will I undertake to leave my house on business.”

  “If you don’t I’m going to fire you and hire a lawyer to sue for every dime I’ve paid you.

  “However, it is only once in a lifetime that a man is privileged to part the curtain that veils the supernatural.” Wide rose from his huge chair. “Arch, get the car. Doctor, my dinner for tonight must be postponed in any event; would you care to accompany us?”

  During the drive to Dodson’s laboratory I ventured to ask Miss Dodson, with whom I damply shared the rumble seat of Wide’s Heron coupe, her age. “Eight,” she replied, lowering her eyes demurely.

  “Really? I had observed that your attire is somewhat juvenile, but I would have taken you for a much older girl.”

  “Professor Dodson liked for me to be as young as possible, and I always tried to make him happy—you know, for a robot you’re kind of a cuddle-bear.”

  It struck me then that if Miss Dodson were, in fact, to take Wide off the case, I might recommend my friend Street to her; but since for the time being Wide was still engaged, I contented myself with putting an arm gently across her shoulders and slipping one of my professional cards into her purse.

  * * * *

  “As you see, Doctor,” Wide explained when we had reached the three thousand and twelfth floor, “Dodson both lived and worked in this building. This floor held his living quarters, and Miss Dodson’s—they shared most facilities. The floor above is his laboratory, and to preserve his privacy, is inaccessible by elevator. As this is your home, Miss Dodson, perhaps you should lead the way.”

  We followed the girl up a small private escalator, and found ourselves in a single immense room occupying the entire three thousand and thirteenth floor of the building. Through broad windows we could see the upper surface of the storm raging several miles below; but this was hardly more than a background, however violent and somber, to the glittering array of instruments and machines before us. Between our position by the escalator and the large clock on the opposite wall three hundred feet away, every inch of floor space was crammed with scientific apparatus.

  “I left the lights off,” Alice Dodson remarked in a shaken voice, “I know I did. You don’t suppose that he—”

  “There!” St. Louis exclaimed, and following the direction indicated by his outthrust finger, I saw a black-clad figure bent over a sinister machine in the center of the laboratory. While St. Louis muttered something about never going out on a murder case without a gun again, I seized a heavy isobar from a rack near the door.

  “You won’t need that, Westing,” a familiar voice assured me.

  “Street! What in the world are you doing here?”

  “Earning my pay as a consulting detective, I hope. I am here at the instigation of Mr. Noel Wide.”

  Miss Dodson, still apparently somewhat shaken, looked at Wide. “Is this true?”

  “Certainly. Madame, because you found me at my desk when you called, you supposed me inactive; in point of fact I was, among other activities, awaiting Street’s report.”

  “You were working the crossword in the Times! Your house told me.”

  “Confound it! I said among other activities.”

  “Here, now,” Street intervened. “Quarreling lays no spooks. From the fact that you are here, Wide, I assume there has been some recent development.”

  “There has been another apparition. Miss Dodson will tell you.”

  “Since my ‘father’ disappeared,” Miss Dodson began, “I have entered his laboratory at least once every day— you know, to dust and sort of tidy up.”

  “Pfui!” Wide interjected.

  Seeing that both Street and Wide were giving Miss Dodson their complete attention, I took the opportunity to speak to Wide’s assistant. “St. Louis,” I asked, “why does he make that peculiar noise?”

  “Every once in a while he gets too disgusted for verbal, and wants to write out a comment on his printer—”

  “Why? Interior printers are fine for notes, but I’ve never heard of using them to supplement conversation.”

  “Oh, yeah? Did you ever try to say: *#@&!°!!?”

  “I see your point.”

  “Anyway, he doesn’t like women mucking around a house, but his printer don’t work; he got clarified butter in it one time when he was trying to make Currie Con Carne mit Pilz à la Noel Wide, so when he tries to feed out the paper he makes that noise.”

  “You say,” Street was asking Miss Dodson, “that when you saw him he was sitting? Where?” —

  “Right there,” she said, indicating a low casual chair not far from us.

  “But, as I understand, in both the earlier apparitions he was lying down?’

  The girl nodded voicelessly.

&nb
sp; “May I ask precisely where?”

  “The f-first time—pardon me—the first time over on a day bed he kept over there to rest on. The s-second—”