The true weapon was the rocket slug. The gun looked like a toy; flimsy aluminium, perforated down the barrel. Anderson might have thought it was a toy . .. but Anderson was bright. He got the point immediately. He turned to run.
McAllister shot him twice in the back.
He left by the front door. He grinned as he passed the displacement booth. Fifteen years ago there had been people who put their displacement booths inside, in the living room, say. But it made burglaries much too easy.
The alibi machine, the newspapers had called it then. They still did. The advent of the displacement booths had produced one hell of a crime wave. When a man in say, Hawaii could commit murder in Chicago and be back in the time it would take him to visit the men’s room, it did make things a bit difficult for the police. McAllister himself would be at a party in New York ten minutes from now. But first. . .
He walked around to the back of the house and stood a moment, looking into the picture window.
He’d thrown a paper tablecloth over Anderson’s body. Glass particles on the body would be a giveaway. He’d take the tablecloth with him; and how were the police to know that it was the third bullet, rather than the first, that had shattered the picture window? But if it was the first bullet, then the killer must have been someone Anderson would not let into the house.
McAllister fired into the picture window.
Glass showered inward. There was the scream of an alarm.
McAllister stood rooted. It was a terrible sound, and in these quiet hills it would carry forever! He hadn’t expected alarms. There must be a secondary system, continually in operation—Hell with it. McAllister ran into the house, picked up the tablecloth and ran out. Glass particles all over his shoes. Never mind. His shoes and everything else he was wearing were paper, and there was a change of clothing in the briefcase. He’d dump gun and all at the next number he dialled.
The altitude was getting to him. He was panting like a bloodhound when he closed the booth door and dialled. Los Angeles International, then a lakeside resort in New Mexico. The police could hardly search every lake in the country.
Nothing happened.
He dialled again. And again, while the alarm screamed to the hills, Help! I am being robbed. When his hand was shaking too badly to dial, he backed out of the glass door and stood looking at the booth.
This hadn’t been in any of the outlines.
The booth wouldn’t let him out. In all this vastness he was locked in, locked in with the body.
It was two hours before the helicopter from Fresno arrived. Even so, they made good speed. Only a police organization could get a copter in the air that fast. Who else dealt with situations in which one could not simply flick in?
The copter landed in front of the Anderson house, after some trouble picking it out of the wild landscape. Police Lieutenant Richard Donaho climbed out carefully as soon as the dust had stopped swirling. For the benefit of the pilot his face was unnaturally blank. The fear of death had taken him the instant the blades started whirling around, and it was only now leaving him.
With the motor off, the alarm from the house was an intolerable scream. Lieutenant Donaho moved around to the side of the machine, opened a hatch and switched in the portable JumpShift unit.
He stood back as men and equipment began pouring through. Uniformed men moved toward the house, spreading out. Donaho didn’t interfere. He wasn’t expecting anything startling. It was going to be cold burglary, the burglar vanished quite away.
It was a smallish one-storey house in a wild and beautiful setting, halfway up a mountain. The sun was still bright, though it had almost touched the western peaks. The sky was dark blue, almost lavender. Houses were scarce upslope, and far scarcer downslope. There were no roads. No roads at all. This place must have been uninhabited until twenty years ago, when JumpShift Inc. had revolutionized transportation.
The shrill of the alarm stopped.
In the sudden silence a policeman walked briskly from around the side of the house. ‘Lieutenant!’ he called. ‘It’s not burglary. It’s murder. There’s a dead man on the living room rug.’
‘All right,’ said Donaho. He called Homicide.
Captain Hennessey flicked in with the hot summer air of Fresno around him. It puffed out when he opened the door, and he felt the dry chill of the mountains. His ears popped. He stepped out of the belly of the copter, looking for the nearest man. ‘Donaho! What’s happening?’
Donaho nodded at the uniformed man, whose name was Fisher. Fisher said, ‘It’s around the back. Picture window shattered. Man inside, dead, with two holes in his back. That’s as far as we’ve got. Want to come look, sir?’
Tn a minute. What was wrong with the displacement booth? Never mind, I see it.’
It was obvious even from here. The displacement booth was a standard model, a glass cylinder rounded at the top, with a dial system set in the side. Its curved door was blocked open by a chunk of granite.
‘So that’s why you needed the copter,’ said Hennessey. ‘Hum.’ He hadn’t expected that.
It was an old trick. Any burglar knew enough to block the displacement booth door before trying to rob a house. If he set off an alarm the police couldn’t flick in, and he could generally run next door and use the displacement booth there. But here—
‘I wonder how he got out?’ said Hennessey. ‘He couldn’t set the rock and then use the booth. Maybe he couldn’t use the booth anyway. Some alarms lock the transmitter on the booth, so people can still flick in but nobody can flick out.’
Donaho shifted impatiently. This was a murder investigation, and he had not yet so much as seen the body.
Hennessey looked down a rocky, wooded slope, darkening with dusk. ‘Hikers would call this leg-breaker country,’ he said. ‘But that’s how he did it. There’s no other way he could get out. When the booth wouldn’t send him anywhere, he blocked the door open and set out for . . . hum.’
The nearest house was half a mile away. It was bigger than Anderson’s house, with a pool and a stretch of lawn and a swing and a slide, all clearly visible in miniature from this vantage point.
‘For there, I think. He’d rather go down than up. He’d have to circle that stretch of chaparel. ..’
‘Captain, do you really think so? I wouldn’t try walking through that.’
‘You’d stay here and wait for the fuzz? It’s not that bad. You’d make two miles an hour without a backpack. Hell, he might even have planned it this way. I hope he left footprints. We’ll want to know if he wore hiking boots.’ Hennessey scowled. ‘Not that it’ll do us any good. He could have reached the nearest house a good hour ago.’
‘That doesn’t mean he could use the booth. Someone might have seen him.’
‘Hum. Right. Or... he might have broken an ankle anyway mightn’t he? Donaho, get that copter up and start searching the area. We’ll have someone in Fresno question the neighbours. With the alarm blaring like that, they might have been more than usually alert.’
Lieutenant Donaho had not greatly enjoyed his first helicopter flight, which had ended twenty minutes ago. Now he was in the air again, and the slender wings were beating round and round over his head, and the ground was an uncomfortable distance below.
‘You don’t like this much,’ the pilot said perceptively. He was a stocky man of about forty.
‘Not much,’ Donaho agreed. It would have been nice if he could close his eyes, but he had to keep watching the scenery. There were trees a man could hide in, and a brook a man might have drunk from. He watched for movement; he watched for footprints. The scenery was both too close and too far down, and it wobbled dizzyingly.
‘You’re too young,’ said the pilot. ‘You young ones don’t know anything about speed.’
Donaho was amused. ‘I can go anywhere in the world at the speed of light.’
‘Hell, that isn’t speed. Ever been on a motorcycle?’
‘No.’
‘I was using a chopper when they s
tarted putting up the JumpShift booths all over the place. Man, it was wonderful. It was like all the cars just evaporated! It took years, but it didn’t seem that way. They left all those wonderful freeways for just us. You know what the most dangerous thing was about riding a chopper? It was cars.’
‘Yah.’ ~
‘Same with flying. I don’t own a plane. God knows I haven’t got the money, but I’ve got a friend who does. It’s a lot more fun now we’ve got the airfields to ourselves. No more big planes. No more problem refuelling either. We used to worry about running out of gas.’
‘Uh huh.’ A thought struck Donaho. ‘What do you know about off-the-road vehicles?’
‘Not that much. They’re still made. I can’t think of one small enough to fit into a displacement booth, if that’s what you’re thinking.’
‘I was. Hennessey thinks the killer might have set off the alarm deliberately. If he did, he might have brought an off-the-road vehicle along. Are you sure he couldn’t get one into a booth?’
‘No, I’m not.’ The pilot looked down, considering. ‘It’s too damn steep for a ground-effect vehicle. He’d leave tyre tracks.’
‘What would they look like?’
‘Oh, God. You mean it, don’t you? Look for two parallel lines, say three to six feet apart. Most tyres are corrugated, and you’d see that too.’
There was nothing like that in sight.
‘Then, I know guys who might try to take a chopper across this. Might break their stupid necks, too, That’d leave a trail like a caterpillar track, but corrugated.’
‘I can’t believe anyone would walk across this. It looked like half a mile of bad stairs back there. And how would he get through those bushes?’
‘Crawl. Not that I’d try it myself. But they don’t want me for the gas chamber.’ The pilot laughed. ‘Can you see the poor bastard, standing in the booth, dialling and dialling—’
Lucas Anderson had been a big man. He had left a big corpse sprawled across a sapphire-blue rug, his arms stretched way out, big hand clutching. They had been dragging a dead weight. One of the holes in his back was high up, just over the spine.
And men moved about him, doing things that would not help him and probably would not catch his killer.
Someone had come here expressly to kill Lucas Anderson. He would have some connection with him, in business or friendship or enmity. He might have left traces of himself, and if he had, these men would find him.
But the alibi machine might have put him anywhere by now. With a valid passport he could be in Algiers or Moscow.
Anderson’s bookshelf of his own works showed some science fiction titles. His killer could, have been a spaceman—and then he could be in Mars orbit by now, or moving toward Jupiter at lightspeed as a kind of superneutrino.
Yet they were learning things about him.
The cleaning machines had come on as soon as the alarm had been switched off. An alert policeman had got to them before they could do anything about the mess.
There was no glass on the body.
There was no glass under the body either.
‘Now, that’s not particularly odd,’ the man in the white coat said to Hennessey. ‘I mean, the pattern of explosion might have done that. But it means we can’t say one way or another.’
‘He could have been dead when the shot was fired.’
‘Sure, or the other way around. No glass on him could mean he came running in when he heard all the noise. Just a minute,’ the man in the white coat said quickly, and he stooped far down to examine Anderson’s big shoes with a magnifying glass. ‘I was wrong. No glass here.’
‘Hum, Anderson must have let him in. Then he shot out the window to fox us, and set off the alarm. That wasn’t too bright.’ In a population of three hundred million Americans you could usually find a dozen suspects for any given murder victim. An intelligent killer would simply risk it.
Someday, Hennessey thought when the black mood was on him, someday murder would be an accepted thing. It was that hard to stop. But this one might not have escaped yet.. .
‘I’d like to get the body to the lab,’ said the man in the white coat. ‘Can’t do an autopsy here. I want to probe for the bullets. They’d tell us how far away he was shot from, if we can get a gun like it, to do test firing.’
‘If? Unusual gun?’
The man laughed. ‘Very. The slug in the wall was a solid fuel rocket, four nozzles the size of pinholes, angled to spin the thing. Impact like a 45.’
‘Hum.’ Hennessey asked of nobody in particular, ‘Get any footprints?’
Someone answered. ‘Yessir, in the grass outside. Paper shoes. Small feet. Definitely not Anderson’s.’
‘Paper shoes.’ Could he have planned to hike out? Brought a pair of hiking boots to change into? But it began to look like the killer hadn’t planned anything so elaborate.
The dining setup would indicate that Anderson hadn’t been expecting visitors. If premeditated murder could be called casual, this had been a casual murder, except for the picture window. Police had searched the house and found no sign of theft. Later they could learn what enemies Anderson had made in life. For now—
For now, the body should be moved to Fresno. ‘Call the copter back,’ Hennessey told someone. They’d need the portable JumpShift unit in the side.
When the wind from the copter had died Hennessey stepped forward with the rest, with the team that carried the stretcher. He asked of Donaho, ‘Any luck?’
‘None,’ said Lieutenant Donaho. He climbed out, stood a moment to feel solid ground beneath his feet. ‘No footprints, no tracks, nobody hiding where we could see him. There’s a lot of woods where he could be hiding, though. Look, it’s after sunset, Captain. Get us an infrared scanner and we’ll go up again when it gets dark.’
‘Good.’ More time for the killer to move . . but there were only half a dozen houses he could try for, Hennessey thought. He could get permission from the owners to turn off their booths for a while. Maybe.
‘But I don’t believe it,’ Donaho was saying. ‘Nobody could travel a mile through that. And. the word from Fresno is that the only unoccupied house is two miles off to the side!’
‘Never a boy scout, were you?’
‘No. Why?’
‘We used to hike these hills with thirty pounds of backpack. Still. .. hum.’ He seemed to be studying Donaho’s face. ‘Is Anderson’s booth back in operation?’
‘Yes, You were right, Captain. It was hooked to the alarm.’
‘Then we can send the copter home and use that. Listen, Donaho, I may have been going at this wrong. Let me ask you something . . .’
Most of the police were gone by ten. The body was gone. There was fingerprint powder on every polished surface, and glass all over the living room. Hennessey and Donaho and the uniformed man named Fisher sat at the dining table, drinking coffee made in the Anderson kitchen.
‘Guess I’ll be going home,’ Donaho said presently. He made no reference to what they had planned.
They watched through the window as Lieutenant Donaho, brilliantly lighted, vanished within the glass booth.
After that they drank coffee, and talked, and watched. The stars were very bright.
It was almost midnight before anything happened. Then, a rustling sound. .. and something burst into view from upslope, a shadowy figure in full flight. It was in the displacement booth before Hennessey and Fisher had even reached the front door.
The booth light showed every detail of a lean dark man in a rumpled paper business suit, one hand holding a briefcase, the other dialling frantically. Dialling again, while one eye in a shyly averted face watched two armed men strolling up to the booth.
‘No use,’ Hennessey called pleasantly. ‘Lieutenant Donaho had it cut off as soon as he flicked out.’
The man released a ragged sigh.
‘We want the gun.’
The man considered. Then he handed out the briefcase. The gun was in there. The man came out a
fter it. He bad a beaten look.
‘Where were you hiding?’ Hennessey asked.
‘Up there in the bushes, where I could see you. I knew you’d turn the booth back on sooner or later.’
‘Why didn’t you just walk down to the nearest house?’
The lean man looked at him curiously. Then he looked down across the black slope, to where a spark of light showed one window still glowing in a distant house. ‘Oh, my God. I never thought of that.’
Emergency Society
Uta Frith
It was emergency time again. Everybody got together their red-and-white-striped gear, their heart-shaped First Aid boxes, their miniature emergency weapons kits. Some people also reached down such extras as umbrellas, gas masks, diving suits, asbestos overalls, spiked shoes, stilts, and the like—but these were optional.
Everybody loved emergency time, especially the children. It was a time for dressing up, for action, and there was always the chance that something absolutely new, something really surprising would happen.
Spinelli, recently retired from public office, chose to stay at home, close beside his radio and his huge, glowing television set. On-the-spot newsflashes were being transmitted continuously. The excitement was terrific, as it always was when emergency time had been announced.
What would it be this time? Bets were placed, computers and public opinion polls were consulted. Astrologers pronounced remarkable divinations, newspapers gave authoritative reports from special correspondents. Intuitions were widely exchanged. Everybody, but everybody, had a pet hypothesis. Some people firmly believed that the worst—that is, whatever they feared the most—would undoubtedly come to pass. Some maintained the belief that it would happen to the others, not to them. A large group was convinced that punishment was imminent for all wrongdoers and that general repentance should prevail.
As Spinelli remembered from his own youth, such intense and active entertainment was no more than dreamed of by the theatrical and cinema industries of the distant past. The anticipation alone counted for more than any circus spectacular presented by a Roman emperor. The people themselves were in the arena, arbitrary spectators and actors, victims or victors determined by the mysterious plans of the Council.
Antigrav : Cosmic Comedies by SF Masters Page 7