Into the Fourth Universe

by Robert Wingfield

  The man standing beside him grabbed his arm. “Are you okay, sir?” he asked in a refined accent.

  “Oh, not again, please not again.” Tom’s legs gave way. “Why can’t these shitting universes leave me alone?”

  He passed out.

  The Magus takes a Holiday

  T

  here was a sudden snort and a fleshy thud. The Magus opened his eyes in time to see the Doku-man flying through the air like a doll and crashing into the Meat-Plant. He cautiously approached the crumpled heap. It seemed that the villain had performed his last assassination attempt. His neck was broken and in the small of his back was the distinctive shape of a doku hoof. The Magus picked up the laser rifle and checked it; still loaded and ready to fire. He engaged the safety catch and swung the weapon over his shoulder. “I’ll deal with the corpse later, if the nitro-vultures haven’t eaten it by then… By the way,” he regarded the milling herd, “which one of you did this?”

  One of the animals shook its head nonchalantly and turned its back on him.

  A few minutes later, the Investigator had retrieved his other weapons, pocketed a quantity of cash and was heading for the spaceport in a hover-taxi. The cabbie regaled him with the usual stories of what was wrong with the universe, and started providing a few cryptic jokes for him to try to work out, but suddenly fell silent when the Magus purposefully began to clean the barrels of the rifle. The trip was completed a little quicker than usual owing to the driver not taking the taxi-firm recommended ‘shortcut’ to double the travel time and the fare. The Magus made a mental note to use this technique in all future cab rides, and disembarked at the spaceport with slightly more cash than he expected.

  He strolled into the departure hall with the rifle over his shoulder. Instantly he was surrounded by security guards. “What’s going on?” He put his hands up.

  “Come with us please sir,” said one of the men. “And keep your hands and the rest of you where we can see.”

  “What?”

  “We mean no more teleporting, if you would be so kind.” He pointed to a sign over the doorway. ‘Teleportation in the Aerodrome is Verboten’.

  “That’s new.”

  “Yes, sir, we’ve had a spate of people hogging the best seats, ahead of priority boarders; old folks, people with children and rich lazy bastards.”

  “I see. Where are we going?” The Magus began to feel a little uncomfortable. Was this going to be another attempt on his life? He still had his arsenal, but the guards outnumbered him considerably, and they too carried lethal looking carbines.

  “The chief would like to see you, sir.”

  “Not Old Pete with the rubber gloves then?

  “No, he’s in the lab designing a new automatic orifice prober.”

  “That’s a big relief.”

  “Until he starts using it, sir.”

  The Magus was ushered into the Chief’s office. The man swivelled round in his Doku-leather chair. “Nice piece, old man,” he observed, noticing the rifle over the Magus’ shoulder. “Seems like things are looking up in the investigations business if you can afford something like that. Do you mind if I put it somewhere it won’t set off all the security alarms, or take the roof off?”

  The Magus nodded absently.

  “Oh, and I’ll have the gun in your coat, and the one in your shoulder holster. And the throwing knife in your boot.”

  “I haven’t got a throwing knife.”

  “You should get one, I never go anywhere without mine. Finally, I’ll have the pistol slipped into the back of your belt that isn’t there.”

  “It’s not there. I forgot to put it in.”

  “Fair enough. Now I assume you aren’t going to attempt to board a transport with this armoury on your person. I’m sure you know it has to go in the baggage hold.”

  “Of course. But I’m not after a flight.”

  The Chief leaned back. “Go on.”

  “I need some information about who has been in and out of the port in the last few days. I guessed you wouldn’t see me if I asked nicely, so I brought the arsenal to get me an interview.”

  “Cheeky bugger.” The Chief knew the Magus of old and had worked with him on a number of occasions. “I thought that after that last case you worked on—you know, the strip joint and those turbo-dolls, which led to you uncovering that corruption was rife in my staff—I told you I wasn’t going to help you anymore. I knew all about the illegal imports, but it kept the lads happy and the wages down. Now I’ve had to employ regular staff and pay them a living wage. You cost me, matey.”

  “This is actually important.”

  “Go on; I’m listening.”

  The Magus outlined his reasons for being there, but he did not tell the whole story; the first rule of being an investigator—only give out as much information as you have to. He conditioned his mind to come to terms with losing Rannie; after all, he had been on his own for longer than he could remember, before he met her. He was diverting his energies on conducting a logical investigation now.

  The chief absorbed the facts, his elbows on the table and chin in hands. He cleared his throat. “I’m sorry but as you know, that information is confidential. Since you forced me to sack half the team, I’ve had the audit watchdogs hounding my every move. Tough, but there it is. I can’t give you any info, not even to find out what happened to Ms Dearheat. Sorry for your loss, and all that. I suggest you try contacting the police.” He leaned back in his chair and put his hands behind his head. “Oh I forgot; you aren’t exactly popular with them either, are you? Something to do with that investigation of yours, which exposed a chain of laundries as a front for the distribution of bondage gear and dodgy holo-vids to the force, I believe.” He swivelled his chair, and gazed out of the window overlooking the busy port, effectively dismissing the Magus.

  The Investigator was still seated, trying to plan his next course of action, when the console on the Chief’s desk powered into life. The face of one of the security guards appeared. “Sir, can you have a look at this; we can’t get rid of them.” The Magus walked round to the other side of the desk and looked at the screen. A smile slowly spread over his face.

  The chief turned and saw his expression. “Is this something to do with you?” he asked suspiciously, pointing to a large herd of doku now milling around the main concourse. Security men were everywhere, trying to herd the creatures away from the check-in desks, but the whole area was in chaos. A terrorist attack or a nuclear strike would have been no problem, but random bovine movements were not in the instruction manual (especially as these movements were now all over the concourse).

  “I might be able to help get them out,” said the Magus slowly. “But only if I get the information I need.”

  “I don’t know how you did this, Magus,” the Chief sighed, “but you got me beat this time. What do you need to know?”

  “I need to see the passenger and cargo lists for all movements in and out over the last month.”

  “Nothing much then.” The Chief shrugged. “To give you access to the information you need, I will have to create a temporary Contract Posting as security liaison. You must sign a chit to say you promise not to tell anyone or send details to the local press on encrypted media without writing the password down on a ‘Post-it’ note; hopefully that will satisfy Audit.”

  “Contract Posting liaison eh? What daily rate are you offering?”

  “Don’t push it, sunshine. Get those bloody creatures away from the buildings for me and I’ll patch you in to the passenger movement records for the last week.”

  The Magus sat cross-legged in a field near to the space-port. The doku were browsing peacefully around him on the grass, having meekly followed him off the property as soon as he appeared. True to his word, the chief had provided the link into the transit records, and the Magus scanned them on his personal ‘j-Slab’ communications device. The system was currently analysing the patterns of travellers’
movements but he had additionally set it to include cargo, investigating the possibility that Rannie’s body had been taken off-world for some unfathomable reason. She was special in more ways than one (thoughts of how special gave him a pain in a part of his anatomy which should not have been a consideration in his present state of mind), so perhaps it was not him they were after, but her. Could she have been a carrier for something precious and unique (certainly not that embarrassing sexual disease she had given him after their first tryst; now totally cleared up since they settled down, of course).

  There were thousands of records of passenger movement and cargo manifests. Slimming them down was a problem, and enhancing the records to remove the crash helmets, false beards, wigs, body armour and yashmaks which seemed to be standard attire for 90% of the visitors, took some time with his limited processing power, but at last a picture of the Doku-man flashed up. He was wearing most of the above, plus a bush-hat complete with corks. It seemed he had arrived the previous day, having taken the shuttle from the nearby Epsilon cluster. The Magus recorded other passengers from those star systems and came up with a dozen suspects who had flown in for a few days and then returned. He checked further into their details. There were no apparent correlations. He followed another hunch and checked records of all people who had departed after he found Rannie; still nothing. He scratched his head and lay back in the grass, pondering his next move.

  A large wet nose snuffled his face. “Gerroff!” He sat up again and the j-Slab slipped off his chest on to the ground. The animal booted it into a Doku-pat. “Bugger!” The Magus made a grab for the device but was not quick enough to retrieve it before a large hoof was planted on top. “Oh for Phoist’s sake, push off you lot, why don’t you!” He clapped his hands to move the herd away. They stood and regarded him with polite disinterest. “Suit yourselves.” He shoved his way through the animals to the stricken Slab. It was buried deep in the manure. “Oh shit!” he muttered, fairly accurately. He fished in his pockets for one of the specialist j-Slab cloths he had bought at extortionate cost for wiping the screen, and tried to clean off the dung. It did not work. The packet had a special note on it,

  “Apologies but this j-cloth will not work on weighty staining such as quarrying rubble or definite arrangements of doku excrement. Please purchase the dedicated Pat-Pad for this resolution, part number…”

  The Magus snorted and extracted the device carefully from the mess. He stood uncertainly for a few seconds and then shrugged and wiped the screen on one of the hairy flanks. The machine beeped into life and the message ‘Are you sure you want to Hianna?’ flashed up.

  “What is wrong with this contraption?” He shook it, and the message changed to ‘Abort (A), Retry (R), Reedrate (ESC)’. It then gave a sigh and the screen went blank. The Magus cursed loudly and pressed the ‘restart’ button. Nothing happened. He threw it down in disgust. It bounced off the turf and he booted it back into the herd. “Bloody machines; what good are they?” The j-Slab gave a loud beep and powered up again. He retrieved it rather sheepishly from the jaws of one of the Doku, and gazed in disbelief at the name ‘Hianna Reedrate’ highlighted on a passenger list. “Now where have I heard that before? No matter. This may be a clue. Let me check what he (or she) has been up to.”

  Half an hour later he was barely any the wiser. This Reedrate person had apparently left the planet on the same day that Rannie had been killed. He (or she) had not arrived in the last few weeks though, and had no recorded address while on the planet. The registered destination, though, was a holiday gambling planet, tritely entitled ‘Paradice’. He recognised the name as being the preferred base of a few of his more wealthy clients. The Magus put a direct ‘Slab’ call through to an old friend who had recently sent him a postcard stating, ‘Weather gorgeous, tat-shops a-plenty, spending loads, wish you were here’, and booked himself on the next available ship in the right direction.

  A Man touches Base

  A

  young man leaned on his spade and wiped the sweat from his brow. “I suppose I shall have to make this place my own now. There’s nothing much I can do with the ship anyway.” He glanced down from the hillside. The smoking remains of his space-craft, at one end of a newly-made very-badly-landed-ship-shaped clearing, nestled in the woods below him. “I was hoping the locals would be able to help me,” he ruminated, “Get a few spares or something, but I guess I’m about six months too late. A pity; in all the stories they write about commercial travellers, there’s usually a farmer whose only daughter is a nubile, sex starved young thing, ready to jump your bones; and if you can’t find one where you crashed, you limp on, dragging your poor broken body over vast distances until you do find one.” He sighed. “Not here though. Perhaps fifty years ago…”

  The bodies he had found were nearly buried and hidden in months of vegetation growth. They did not appear to have suffered any decomposition, which had surprised him, but then there was something about this planet which was not completely normal. He was unaware that it had only been terra-formed in the last half-century after a previous, aggressive strip-mining operation. He had decided to bury the corpses anyway. “I’m not sure that I want to fall over them every time I come up here,” he mused.

  The soil had been relatively easy to dig, and now that it was back in place, it seemed as though the grass was already re-growing back over the sad mound. He gazed across the valley, and shrugged. “Back to the homestead now; but it’s going to be a quiet life. I suppose I can try to raise help on the transmitter I salvaged from the ship, or perhaps have another go at repairing the E-dar to see if I can detect any nubile life-forms roughly my shape within walking distance.”

  He arranged some of the white stones he had dug up in the excavation into the letters S and T on the grave, and then upended the trolley over the top to protect it from the elements. “Thanks, guys, for leaving me the homestead. I do like it here. I’ll do what I can to carry on the work where you left off, and maybe someone will eventually stop by to rescue me. After all, surely the company will miss me and send out search teams…”

  The sun was still shining when he returned to the collection of low buildings he had discovered soon after crashing. He had been disappointed to find that the owners were not at home, but settled in with what he could salvage from his ship. He then had poked around until he found details of the former occupants. Being a basically decent man, he resolved to pay them for the food he had eaten and possibly help around the farm to work his lodging. He hoped they might be in contact with the outside world and could summon a rescue, or at least have a young and nubile daughter. His job as a zero-atmosphere window salesman was somewhat frustrating, but as the days waiting in isolation turned into weeks, he would have been glad to return to it. After that though, the place started to work its way into his system. He found himself regularly relaxing on the veranda with an excellent fruit brandy, his feet on the safety rail, simply enjoying watching the wildlife. He also began exploring, and found some small fields of crops which needed tending, so he took a hoe from the shed, and tended them. He found a distilling apparatus in one of the outbuildings and added a few more of the sugar plants to restart the fermentation process. There were plenty of books giving him the details of how to run the place, and a video diary (once he had cracked the security by typing in the highly secure password, ‘Suzanne’) which gave him more details of who the occupants were and what they were doing there.

  * *.*

  A month or so after his ship-wreck, he found footprints and wheel marks, and had followed a trail leading away from the nearest field to the top of the escarpment overlooking the valley. There he discovered the remains of the owners, biodegrading nicely now, and after liberating an electronic key from the man and packing a pile of medical equipment back into a rather strange leather bag which seemed to have no bottom, had used a spade retrieved from the said article to lay its former owners (he assumed) to rest.

  After a shower from the warm waterfa
ll which supplied the nearest lake, he returned to the house and inserted the key in the safe he had so far been unable to open. He drew a breath at the sight of a jewelled star inside. He tried to pick it up but it burnt his hand, so he used a couple of sticks to lay it on the table. He then turned his attention to the stored ‘paperwork’. This only consisted of the deeds to the valley and a few video blocks he resolved to watch when he got bored. He put it all away again, went back outside and poured another brandy – it was strange how relaxed it made him feel. “This is the life,” he soliloquised. “The only bit missing is a good woman to attend to the manly urges, and then everything would be perfect… but I suppose I’m going to have to forget all that squelchy nonsense for a while. This really is very good brandy. I’ll perhaps just have another.”

  The swing rocked gently in the cooling breeze and the man dozed off in the sun.

  *.* *

  It was evening when he awoke. He automatically gazed up at the hillside when the old couple were buried. “What’s that?” There was a glint of gold slightly below the grave he had made, a reflection from the low sun. He was wide awake now, and curious. He grabbed one of the solar powered torches from the rack outside the door, and started on the trail back up the hill.

  Darkness was settling into the valley as he reached the summit, but the rise still basked in a warm glow. A soft breeze drifted up towards him, and he shuddered as he caught a whiff of a heady perfume. “Now where was that reflection coming from? Was somebody up here, watching me? Hope it’s that daughter. Perhaps the old folks weren’t alone after all, and the girl is lying low in case I was a commercial traveller. Sensible creature; I like her already.”