Possible Tomorrows

by Groff Conklin (Ed. )

  I unstrapped Lorraine’s things and myself and started after her.

  She was in the so-called bath when I reached the so-called bathroom. One bathroom was allocated to the six of us.

  If you want to make some money and be blessed by thousands of spaceship travellers, get busy and think up some satisfactory way of getting washed in free fall. The ordinary toilet functions aren’t too badly catered for, but when it comes to taking a bath human Ingenuity so far hasn’t distinguished itself.

  You could quite easily be sprayed by water, like a shower, but when the water bounces off you in all directions, and off the walls, and back again, how are you going to escape drowning? Water and air in space are the very devil. Surface tension is enough to keep droplets of water together, not enough to keep big globules in one piece. When you touch water it runs all over you.

  The only way to take a bath is this. You put on an air-mask and go into a tank full of water, with a complicated water-lock to enable you to get in and out without taking all the water in the tank with you.

  Lorraine was in the tank. Her discarded clothes hung from a strap. Apparently she hadn’t remembered leaving her things with me.

  I left them on another strap and was just leaving when I heard a muffled tapping.

  I was puzzled. Why should Lorraine be tapping the inside of her tank? Unless she’d taken in with her something hard with which to do the tapping it must be quite painful, banging the inside of a metal tank with bare knuckles against water resistance.

  The tapping went on, insistent.

  I tried the water-lock. Naturally it didn’t move.

  I tapped back. There was a pause, then the tapping inside resumed, quicker and stronger.

  Not content with forgetting things, Lorraine seemed to have locked herself into a water-tank. I grinned again.

  Then I saw that the tank was locked on the outside.

  These tanks are like ordinary bathroom doors—they have a catch inside. But there was also a lock, used presumably when a tank was empty or out of order or being used for something else. Someone had locked Lorraine in.

  I looked in another bathroom. There was a key in the lock of its bath. I removed it, took it back and tried it on the lock of Lorraine’s tank. It fitted.

  Lorraine came out dressed in an air-mask and grabbed her towel and fallsuit. “Be a gentleman, Edgar,” she said. “Retreat.”

  “Why?” I asked. “Don’t they remove all your inhibitions when they clear you?”

  “Yes,” she said primly. “But you still have yours.”

  “I’m not leaving you alone anyway,” I said more soberly. “Someone’s trying to kill you. And he might try again.”

  Lorraine stared at me for a moment. After that she wasted no time in getting herself dried and into the fallsuit. Then we went in search of the rest of the Unit.

  This was the Unit’s first job.

  They very soon reached the conclusion that my guess was right and that someone had really tried to kill Lorraine.

  The tiny facemask can manufacture air for about fifteen minutes. But for the accident of Lorraine leaving her towel behind no one would have gone near the bathroom for at least half an hour. At the end of that time someone would have asked “Where’s Lorraine?” and after another quarter of an hour it would have been established that I’d seen her going to have a bath. We’d go looking for her, find the tank unlocked by this time, of course, with Lorraine drowned inside it. We’d have presumed that her mask was faulty.

  If Lorraine hadn’t realized almost as soon as she got into the tank that she’d left her things behind, and tried to come out to go and get them, she wouldn’t have discovered that she was locked in until I’d been and gone.

  The chances were altogether too much in favor of Lorraine being drowned for the incident to be anything but a carefully-planned attempt at murder.

  Dick left us for a while to get information and a passenger list from the captain. When he came back the Unit went to work again.

  I wasn’t in this. I sat in the room and listened, but I couldn’t help them and I didn’t understand much of what was going on. Someone would begin to say something, then stop. Lorraine and Dick would speak at once. Brent would begin something, Helen would take it up, Dick would shake his head. Lorraine would look up suddenly, lone would interpret the look and for a moment they’d all be chattering excitedly.

  It didn’t look at all impressive at first Then you realized that every time anybody stopped speaking, a whole process of thought had been followed out and discarded.

  You see it happening sometimes with people who have quick minds and know each other very well. Someone begins to ask something, after a word or two another begins to answer, then the first speaker interrupts, satisfied.

  I once saw a class of bright schoolboys running a competitive quiz. One question and answer went like this:

  “A man asleep one night dreamed that—”

  “The answer is, how could he—”

  “That’s right”

  The Unit worked like that. They didn’t have telepathy and they didn’t need it Language and knowledge of each other’s processes of thought were enough.

  Dick had to do more talking than anybody else, because the others had much more difficulty in understanding what he was thinking than he had in understanding them. However, even Dick generally didn’t have to say very much before the others grasped what he was driving at.

  Having reached the tentative conclusion that the most probable motive for the attempt to murder Lorraine was that the Traders did have interests on Perryon and didn’t want the Unit to investigate there, they turned their attention to the passenger list It contained quite a lot of information about the people on board. Nevertheless, I didn’t think for a moment that the Unit would be able to establish the identity of the assassin just from that.

  They thought so, however. They came up with three names and declared confidently that the assassin must be one of these three. They, didn’t give their reasons. Then we went to see the captain again.

  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 we’ll 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 p
leasant 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 tom 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 aims 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 didn’t 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 we’ll 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, he’ll go away to do it and later you’ll 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 didn’t 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.”

  Ione 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 period 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 small-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 hadn’t 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 Lilliput 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 Benoit 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.