Spaceman's Luck and Other Stories

by George O. Smith

  “But it would be frightfully hard to bamboozle a telepathic policeman, wouldn’t it?” she asked hopefully.

  I thought of my PSI-man, whose only mistake in the sealed room murder of Gordon Andrews had been in being so good that he’d actually disclosed the existence of a criminal who employed Psi faculties.

  “Wouldn’t that depend upon whether the policeman or the criminal was the more talented?” I parried. “But that supposes that the police force would have a corps of Psi policemen.”

  “Wouldn’t they?”

  “Honey-chile,” I said, “at the first thin hint that the Commissioner was even interested in the possibility of hiring someone who knew what the term ‘parapsychic phenomena’ really meant, there would be a universal howl against ‘Thought Police’ so loud that it would shatter the polar icecaps.”

  “But why?” she asked, bewildered.

  “They’d start screaming about ‘invasion of privacy,’ and cite the Bill of Rights, and that would be that.”

  “You mean that the law has laws against telepathy?”

  “No, it doesn’t say anything about telepathy,” I admitted, knowing what was to come next.

  “Well, then?”

  “Don’t sound so superior, Miss Wood. At the first attempt, the law would discover that it had a hell of a lot to say about telepathy and perception, since they’d definitely affect the interpretation of the Fourth and Fifth Amendments.”

  “I know the Fifth,” she said, “but how about the Fourth?”

  “Unreasonable and unwarranted search,” I told her.

  “But isn’t a man guilty when he’s guilty?”

  “I wish it were as simple as that.”

  “But why isn’t it?”

  “Little Miss Wood, you are now asking me to solve an ethical question that’s been unanswered for more than ten thousand years.” I smiled wistfully. “I am not—repeat not—big enough to answer the following question: ‘Shall a killer in the confessional, who has been given absolution by his God, subsequently be punished by his fellow man?’”

  “But what has that to do with it?”

  “Let’s have you answer one: ‘Could you truly bare your secret soul to God if you suspected that some prying human being was taking it all down on a tape recorder?’”

  “No, I suppose not.”

  “Then our ‘Thought Police’ would be standing as a human barrier between any man and his God.”

  “I suppose so—but couldn’t I tell?”

  “Tell?”

  “Tell whether someone was listening to my thoughts?”

  That was another stumper. Does the sign wear out any faster if it’s read? Can the radio transmitter be measured to tell whether the broadcast has any audience? Does the tree that falls in the forest barren of animal life generate the same wave-motion as it would if all the leaves were replaced by active eardrums? There are lots of analogs, but are any of them valid?

  I said, “If I cry out, how can I know whether I am being heard?”

  And in my mind I made my own reply. I thought in deep concentration: “How do you read me, Psi-man?”

  The response was zero-zero. And it meant—nothing. My Psi-man could have been following my every thought from the moment that my ringing telephone summoned me to Gordon Andrews’ apartment to the present instant, so far as I could tell. There was no feeling of intrusion, no feeling of presence.

  III

  Florence Wood giggled. “Going to stop the rain again, Captain Schnell?”

  The storm was still howling. In the near suburbs, the rain came in more gracefully draped sheets and the wind was not whirlpooled by the fluelike canyons between the buildings, but residential rainwater is just as wet per cubic centimeter as the metropolitan variety.

  “Maybe I should drive up over the lawn,” I suggested.

  “Daddy would blow a fuse.”

  “We might wait for it to let up.”

  “I’d rather not,” she said soberly. “It’s one thing to be driven home in a strange car during a cloudburst, but it’s something else to sit out here making it look as if I were paying off by making out.”

  It came as a pleasant surprise that she did not consider me a superannuated gaffer, and it was her youth that allowed her to discuss parapsychic phenomena without the tongue-in-cheek attitude of the older know-it-alls. I considered Florence Wood and realized that she was at least old enough so that I wouldn’t be jugged for cradle-robbing so long as I had a parental acceptance. And I did want someone to talk out the business of psionics without having someone wind me in a sheet and ship me to a shrinker.

  And so I said, “If it will smooth things a bit, I’ll umbrella you to the door and make official explanation to the stern and anxious parent.”

  “That we’ll enjoy,” she giggled. “Daddy always says that he doesn’t have to be a mind reader to advise against what my boy friends have in mind. It’ll be fun to face him with a—policeman.”

  Darkly, I said, “Most folks don’t look upon me as the fun-loving type. Policemen aren’t always welcome, you know.”

  “Oh, Daddy will enjoy it. He writes a bit. He’ll never be another Ellery Queen, but he will enjoy talking to a real live captain of detectives.”

  At this point a lot of favorable things took place at once, such as the arrival of another convenient letup in the storm, the mad rush and the ringing of the doorbell, the opening of the door and some gasped introductions as we stood in a little hallway dripping puddles of rainwater on a small rug.

  “Police Captain—?”

  “Howard Schnell.”

  “But Florence isn’t—?”

  I laughed at Mrs. Wood. “Not at all. This is just the rescue of a very wet maiden in distress. When we’re not shooting bank robbers, we also help little old ladies—and lovely young girls—across streets. All in the day’s work, you know.”

  Mrs. Wood hauled Florence off, saying something about hot showers and dry clothing, while Mr. Wood regarded me with interest.

  * * * *

  He beat all the way around the bush, trying to ascertain without actually asking pointblank whether I could spend a few moments, and, if so, would I like a drink.

  One must not anticipate, so I waited until he’d made his meaning clear. Then I accepted his offer of some bourbon, refused his offer of a cigar and settled myself into the chair he waved at.

  I tasted the highball, smiled in approval, and opened the conversation by saying, “Your daughter tells me that you write, Mr. Wood.”

  He smiled wistfully. “Well, I’m not at the stage where the mere announcement that I am working on a novel causes an immediate pre-publication sale of seventy thousand copies. You see, I’m still trying to work out a good association gimmick.”

  “A what?”

  “An association gimmick. The name Erle Stanley Gardner, for instance, always means a story about Perry Mason and the inevitable courtroom scene full of legal fireworks. Rex Stout has his Nero Wolf, the fabulous detective who lets his secretary do all the work.”

  “And,” I added, “John Dickson Carr writes about Gideon Fell, who is an expert at solving sealed-room mysteries.”

  “Exactly!” he said. “I’ve a series of gimmicks all planned, but I really need a strong, out-of-the-ordinary character to go along with them. You see, I propose to write a series of stories about ‘perfect crimes.’”

  “I’m not smart,” I said. “I’ve always assumed that the so-called ‘perfect crime’ would be one in which the criminal walks off scot-free with the loot under one arm and the girl on the other.”

  He said, “From your point of view, a true ‘perfect crime’ would be one in which no clue existed, including the fact of the crime itself—except those clues that were deliberately planned by the perpetrator for some purpose of his own. That is your own angle, isn’t it?”

  I nodded. Indeed it was, and it had been expressed in precisely the same words that I had used in speaking to Chief Weston.

  “Howe
ver,” he went on blandly, “you’ll agree that a clue is usually the result of a mistake, or failure to plan completely, or the result of some accidental circumstance.”

  “Right.”

  “But in a ‘perfect crime’ there would be no error, no mistake.”

  “Yes, but aren’t you backing yourself into a hole that you’ve lined with fish hooks yourself?”

  “Not at all,” he replied. “Clues must be cleverly contrived, created, and established in such a way that the episode is ultimately known to be crime and not labeled misadventure, suicide, or the like. Otherwise,” he said with a genial smile, “we’re writing about a ‘perfectly justifiable homicide’ instead of a ‘perfect crime.’”

  I nodded again.

  “And, of course,” he finished, “these clues must also provide precisely the correct amount of information so that the motive of the criminal is not only fulfilled, but exposed—if not to one of the characters in the book, at least to the reader.”

  * * * *

  Mr. Wood relaxed and sipped his own drink. From somewhere aloft, a number of individually insignificant traces added up to fairly reliable evidence that Florence and Mrs. Wood were about to return. I gathered that the cross-questioning had allayed any parental suspicion.

  I said, “One thing you haven’t mentioned,” and paused for effect. “To the Hindu, ‘perfection’ means the inclusion of an almost imperceptible flaw so that its maker cannot be accused of presuming to be as good as God. Is your ‘perfect crime’ to be perfect in the eyes of the criminal, or in the eyes of the police?”

  He said, “Ah, Captain Schnell, that is indeed one of my bothersome problems.”

  Mrs. Wood came into the room, followed by Florence. The girl had lost the soaked-gamin look. She was transformed by modern alchemy into a poised young woman who forced me to revise my estimated eighteen several years upward. She nodded affably at her father, smiled at me and then came over because she noticed that my highball glass was empty.

  I thanked her, and she smiled wide and bright as she asked, “Has Daddy been giving you the details of his impossible bandit?”

  “Well, in a way.”

  Mr. Wood said, “I’m sort of like the standard television father—incapable of adding two and two without the close supervision of the female members of my family.”

  “I—that is, we—keep telling Daddy he should hire Superman for a hero.”

  “You’ve changed,” chuckled Mr. Wood.

  “Changed?”

  “Yesterday you advocated that I hire a detective with telepathy and a sense of perception.”

  “We discussed it on the way home,” said Florence.

  “Superman?” I asked.

  “No, this extra-sensory business,” said Florence.

  Mr. Wood inquired, “Are you interested in parapsychology, Captain Schnell?”

  “I’ve been interested in the subject for a good many years,” I answered.

  “Would the public accept it, I wonder,” he mused.

  Mrs. Wood said, “A lot of people read psychic books.”

  Mr. Wood said plaintively, “I don’t want to write psychic books. I want to write whodunits. But it would solve my problem, wouldn’t it? My series would consist of crimes that would be perfect, except for the introduction of a Master of Psionics who tells the story in the first person singular, and who solves the crime by parapsychic power.”

  “It might read better if you made your extra-sensory character the criminal,” I suggested.

  He shook his head. “Wouldn’t do at all. A criminal with extra-sensory talent would always win out over the police. There have been only a very few successful stories written in which the criminal got away.”

  “Maybe he wouldn’t,” I said.

  “But how could he possibly fail?”

  “He might get sloppy.”

  “Sloppy! Mind reading every anticipated move?”

  “Or bored.”

  “Bored!”

  “One often leads to the other,” I told him with a smile. “Which is just my policeman’s way of thinking. From the policeman’s point of view, you’re overlooking one rather important angle.”

  “Indeed? Well, you must tell me all about it.”

  “Okay,” I said. “My point is that you should not view this as a single incident in the life of an extra-sensory who has turned his talent to crime, but rather take the overall view. For instance, we can write the life history of our Psi-man in broad terms. As a schoolboy, he was considered extraordinarily lucky at games of chance and skilled in games of manual dexterity; he stood high in schoolwork and at the same time managed to do it without working very hard. By the time he enters high school, he realizes that his success is due to some sort of ‘sensing’ of when things will be right. This increases the efficiency of his talent and he surges forward and would have become top-of-class if he hadn’t discovered that brilliance in recitation made up for a lack of handed-in homework.

  “In other words, nothing stands as a real challenge to him. His talents surmount the obstacles that confront his fellow man. He could collect corporations or be a labor leader, President or bum. Anything he wants can be gotten without much fuss. Our Psi-man is primarily interested in a statistical income sufficient to support him to the dictates of his ambition. The trick is to achieve, say, twenty grand per annum, in such a way that the manipulation is never discovered.

  “At first our Psi-man plans meticulously. But soon this process seems unnecessary because the poor ignorant homo saps don’t even know they’re being conned. He has no hard surface against which to whet his nervous edge, and so he begins to play games. He leaves clues, at first to ascertain the true level of his fellow man’s intelligence and ability. Next he leaves conflicting clues to see which way the poor dopes will jump. In a world that scoffs at parapsychic phenomena, he leaves clues to support the theory that only an extra-sensory criminal could have done the dastardly deed. Will one of the ignorant apes recognize the truth? If he does, will he be in a high position, or will he be one of the diligent ones who fetch coffee for the guy in the upper office? If the work of a Psi-man is recognized, how will our bright policeman go about it, and what will he do with the evidence after it’s been shown to him?

  “And so, Mr. Wood, our Psi-man criminal has become bored because there is no one in the world to challenge him, and he gets sloppy through his growing contempt for the antlike activities of his fellow creatures. At last he shows himself, deliberately taunting them to take action against him. And that,” I concluded, with a nod at him, “might be the ‘perfect crime’ in which your extra-sensory criminal finally exposes himself.”

  “But why,” Mrs. Wood asked in perplexity, “would such a talented person turn to crime—or do you think that all extra-sensory people—”

  I turned to smile at her. “Mrs. Wood, I was not speaking of extra-sensory people as a statistical body. I was referring to one particular character.”

  “I find him hard to believe in.”

  “On the contrary, my dear,” said Mr. Wood, “Captain Schnell has drawn an amazingly accurate thumbnail sketch of our Psi-man, and I daresay that he could go on and on, filling in more minute details.”

  “Oh, yes, indeed,” I said. “But I must leave it up to the professional writer to tell what the brilliant policeman does when he recognizes the work as that of an extra-sensory. For instance, does he become bold enough to mention it to Chief Weston, or to Commissioner Stone? Or will he confine his discussion to the company of a rain-soaked young woman so circumstantially available and coincidentally willing to discuss Psionics?”

  “Captain Schnell,” breathed Florence Wood, “what on Earth are you talking about?”

  “Your father,” I said.

  Mr. Wood stepped into the breach. “Captain Schnell was dramatizing for your benefit, I’m sure. Because Captain Schnell knows very well how impossible it is to surprise a telepath into revealing himself.”

  Florence Wood’s expressio
n changed to a mildly bothered smile. “It certainly sounded as if he were accusing you of something.”

  “You mean—like—mind reading?” he asked with a big belly laugh that closed the subject.

  IV

  By most of the rules of society, both Mr. Wood and I were guilty of gross gentility. He greeted me overtly as the welcome guest and needled me with a show of patronizing tolerance as he implied that my basic interest was in Florence.

  To match him, I accepted his hospitality and made use of the proximity to spy on him and his family.

  There are ways and means of making a pretended deaf-mute reveal himself—the human being does not live who will not leap halfway out of his skin at the shock of an unexpected revolver shot, no matter how well trained he is at feigning deafness.

  As for surprising a telepath, I knew it wouldn’t work, but I had to try it anyway. I put both Mrs. Wood and Florence through a number of mental hurdles. To this, Mr. Wood took a quietly tolerant attitude. He understood and was prepared to accept as healthily normal a certain amount of lust and carnal conjecture in the minds of males who were interested in his daughter. He forgave me for mentally insulting his wife because he knew that my mental peregrinations were only aimed at determining whether his wife was telepathic. Finally he came out flatly and told me to stop wasting my effort, because neither Florence nor Mrs. Wood had a trace of extra-sensory power. Their lack of shocked or outraged response was not a case of the well-trained telepath divining my intention and planning a blank response.

  Furthermore, Mr. Wood asserted that neither of them knew of his extra-sensory faculty, that he fully intended to keep it that way, and that I should know damned well that such stunts wouldn’t work in the first place.

  And so I continued to enjoy a dinner now and then, and occasionally the company of Florence.

  Ultimately the lack of progress brought Chief Weston’s nervous system to the blowup point. He called me in and I went, knowing that trouble cannot always be avoided, and when it can’t, it’s just plain sense to kick out the props and have done with it.