by Earl
Stuart was still staring questioningly at my hesitation in leaving. In a flash, I made up my mind.
I pulled Stuart aside and in whispers told him my suspicions of poisoning. Just suspicions—I did not mention my hypervision and the certain facts it gave me. Dawning realization followed amazement on his face.
“Lord!” he said suddenly. “That butler—Adams—remember he was outside the door when we left? He seemed nervous, flustered. He always hated Torpaque, too, ever since Torpaque kicked him downstairs once in a drunken rage and put him in bed for a week. If that gin was doped——”
We left the room then, casually, telling Bangs we were at his service when the medical examiner came. But Stuart, at the second floor with no one in sight, turned away from the steps and strode to the back part of the floor. We descended the back stairs to the servants’ domain and into the liquor vault, compelling the guardian of the scullery to let us in by virtue of a ten-dollar bill. I roamed my eye over the jumbled conglomerate of decanters, flasks, bottles, pitchers and such spread over the table.
“There it is!” I pointed to a cut-glass decanter in whose bottom reposed a few drops of liquid. One glance at the color of the stuff told me it was the same supposedly pure gin that had been in Torpaque’s room an hour before.
Stuart pulled my hand back as I reached for the decanter.
“Fingerprints,” he warned. “Adams made a fatal mistake when he didn’t wash that decanter out! That is”—he smiled shortly—“if your suspicions are correct in regard to the gin being doped. It may all be nonsense.”
“It’s intuition,” I said noncommittally, shrugging.
Stuart picked up a towel, wrapped it around the decanter, and we left the liquor vault. We then confided in Bangs, nearly prostrating him at the suggestion of poisoning. When the medical examiner came, we told him the story and turned the decanter over to him and the police, who came soon after.
WE WERE all gathered in the death room. The police captain in charge approached Adams, who was stunned and heathly pale. I grasped the officer’s arm. I had suddenly fallen upon the damning evidence I needed.
“Not Adams,” I said. I pointed to Stuart. “He is the murderer! Adams’ fingerprints are on the decanter because lie alone handled it, but Stuart was the one who doped the gin!”
To make the ending brief, Stuart broke down the next day, after the drops in the decanter had been found to contain adrenaline. I said he was dead; he was electrocuted.
The motive, much to our astonishment, proved to be hatred, the same motive that he had attributed to Adams. Torpaque had, it seemed, once broken a bottle over Stuart’s head, in stupid drunkenness. Stuart had nursed the incident and seen how easy it would be to kill him. The adrenaline, a powerful heart stimulant, would so overtax the drunkard’s alcohol-throbbing heart as to kill him. The apparent charge would be death by drink.
But Stuart had even protected himself against the small chance of murder being suspected. He had doped the decanter just a few minutes before Adams came, who nightly at that time took the decanter below to the vault, to fill it with the club’s excellent gin. Stuart had cleverly built up his case to involve Adams circumstantially if poisoning were suspected—and with myself as alibi.
It was mere sleight of hand for him to spill the small phial of adrenaline solution into the decanter, with my eyes elsewhere and Torpaque too liquor-befuddled to notice.
Only one thing pointed to murder—just as a speck of copper salt will tinge water blue: the adrenaline had—to me, it is understood—tinged the gin a deeper and different color.
And—with murder out—only one person in the world could have seen the insignificant point that revealed the true murderer, when the case was so strong against another. You see, my friend, Stuart had adrenaline stains on his fingers—invisible stains that not he nor any one else could see, except me——
And now, my friend, I’ve talked enough. Have some more sherry?
DIAMOND PANETOID
AT LAST the spectrum chart gave a strong line in the gamma range, down near carbon.
“Ah-h-h!” gurgled Osgood, jerking over the lever of the automatic analyzer. At the same time he craned his long neck to the side port and eyed the tiny body that idled near their space ship some hundreds of feet away. It was not much different from the other countless planetoids composing Saturn’s ring system.
“What’s the excitement?” Wade Welton sat woodenly at his controls, stuffed with the ennui of space. His voice took on a more bored tone. “Don’t tell me it’s a bonanza, because they are extinct.
The last big find, Wanderwell’s fourteen-foot nugget of gold, was three years ago. It took him fifteen years to find it, too. You and I have been at this game for two years—thirteen years to go for our luck, by the law of averages. Searching the rings for pay dirt—bah, wasted lives. We would better be pirates.”
“Wasted lives. Going in ‘rings’ sort of.”
“Joke,” said Welton pithily. “Mind if I laugh later?”
Osgood hawked the spectrum chart, eyes eager. As the pencil of soft X rays, under guidance of his skilled hand, probed into the twenty-foot planetoid, its reflections trembled ghostily in the milk-luminous chart. But not as complicated X-ray patterns. A spectroscopic robot converter weighed each incoming quantum and mechanically translated it into dark line, or Fraunhofer, spectra.
Like amoeba, which gulp up bits of matter, digest part and toss back the rest, the atoms absorbed the X beams, used what they could by the immutable laws of matter, and regurgitated the remainder. This atomic excreta, returned to the source, was different for each different atom. The Fraunhofer converter, like a movie screen, molded visible design from invisible radiation. One skilled in spectroscopy could read these designs like the pages of a book.
All this with the speed of light. Osgood rotated the handle of the X-beam projector, the “X gun,” with the expertness of a machine gunner, and read the fluctuating, melting Fraunhofer designs out of the corner of his eye. It was his private theory that he could keep one eye on the chart and one on the aimed-for planetoid separately, like a chameleon.
He sighed soulfully, spun the X gun toward the other end of the elongated rock. “Thought I had a carbon gamma, but it was that ornery calcium gamma. 4226.7 Angstroms, of which I am heartily sick. This particular stretch of ’toids seems to be highly calcified, like a lot of filthy cement. Why not an honest carbon gamma, ye gods above me?”
“Or below you. Lad, there is no up or down in space.” Welton extended a hanging tube to his nose and took a deep draft of oxygen, to clear his head of the drowse that sat upon him. Suddenly he snorted. “Carbon gamma, eh? You’re still hoping we’ll find that five-foot diamond ’toid, I suppose. Look, Archibald Quinley Osgood, they searched for King Solomon’s Mines for three thousand years on Earth, in an area of a hundred square miles, and never smelled it. Old ’toid-hopper Pete said the diamond ’toid he saw and couldn’t haul away with his weak motors was in the Crape Ring, Zone 488, which is ten miles wide and eleven thousand, five hundred miles long, a mere hundred and fifteen thousand square miles. Doomsdays would tick by like seconds while you searched for that.”
OSGOOD watched another gamma line shadow fitfully into the luminous chart, hover uncertainly, and then sharpen into a gamma calcium. He swore eloquently, if softly. “Old Pete specified two other things, though, that narrow the search down. He saw it near the inner edge of the Crape Ring, and it was blazingly visible, at times, from fifty miles away—like a firefly in a swarm of gnats.”
“Besides, Old Pete is a scatter-brained oxy dope,” Welton continued his declarations. “He spent forty years hopping ’toids. Got to doping himself with oxygen as a stimulant. He was sitting there with a bottle of it, while talking to us—like a drunkard. The bottle was talking. Oxygen and liquor are both the same—you’re drunk on it. His diamond ’toid is a figment of his burned-out brain—a myth.”
“Still, I hope we don’t ‘myth’ it.”
&n
bsp; “Choke,” Welton groaned drearily.
“Stop,” Osgood said sharply. “What?”
“Stop, I said. The ship, I mean. Hurry.”
Welton hesitated, then reached for the controls. Osgood might be a rank optimist about diamond ‘toids, but he was not the kind to call for an unnecessary stop. “Stop in reference to what?” Welton teased. “To Saturn? Then I’d have to go backward. To the Sun? Then we’d strike out cater-cornered. To Titan? Hm-m-m, skip that one.”
Osgood’s brittle stare brought a mock whine to Welton’s voice.
“Aye, aye, cap’n. But what have you X-ed?”
Osgood wiggled a thumb at the chart. A stark black rod gashed the shadow play of fleeting Fraunhofer lines. Its permanence and thickness betokened a large quantity of whatever reflected this wave length.
“Cerium,” Osgood informed. “Looked like the iron E-line first. 5269.6. but it shoved over to 5274. Must be about a ton of cerium there. Oof! Why all the deceleration all of a sudden!” When he had picked himself off the floor, he went on grumpily, “You knew I had my belt off.”
“You did?” Welton grinned.
Osgood’s lanky bone bag had draped itself constrictorlike around a stanchion.
“Sorry, Archie, thought you’d put it back on.”
“Lay off the oxygen.” Osgood growled, but it was a good-humored growl. “Swing ho. Welton. We’re not landing on a feather bed.”
Eyes at the all-vision periscope, Welton touched off appropriate blasts and expertly swung the ship in tight circles around the planetoid which Osgood had been gunning with his X beam. The half-muffled fury of blasting rockets drummed into the cabin like strokes of a super rivet hammer. Their powerful thrust rammed the ship off its original course with sledge blows of reaction. Rocket power was hardly gentle in its application, with Welton at the controls.
But Osgood knew that few pilots could save as much time and fuel in frictionless space as this one.
“The reason for the sudden deceleration.” informed Welton belatedly, “is because this little ’toid happens to have a clockwise rotary motion all of its own, in contrast to our counterclockwise motion in the plane of the rings. Instead of giving it a bit of a chase around its track, I turned head-on and blasted backward. Let it come to us. Result—three ounces of fuel saved, and fifteen golden minutes. Now we’re eagling it.”
When the eagle’s circle had narrowed sufficiently, Welton gave the required blast to set their ship in parallel motion to the planetoid.
“Cerium,” stated Osgood while lie zippered shut his neck piece, “commands a good price in the commerce of to-day. Especially since its use in long-range television. A ton of ten-per-cent ore would pay for this hop three times over.”
He stood still while Welton fitted the glassite helmet over his head and smeared instant-drying rubber cement over the zipper runs at shoulders and neck. After clamping an oxygen bottle to Osgood’s back and connecting the triple tubes, Welton came around to the front of the grotesque figure in micro-mesh rubberized silk.
“Better be a pay load out there. Archie. We’ve been out a month. Another day and Titan will be prancing past opposition with us. That means a two-week wait for it again, or else a layover on Rhea, the system’s worst hothouse. Besides, with our transmitter on the blink it’s dangerous to be so far from home. What would we do if our motors said ‘uncle’ ?”
Osgood raised his eyebrows querulously behind the glassite.
“I said you’re a chump!” shouted Welton.
“No, I’ll walk,” mouthed Osgood elaborately, grinning. He picked up the portable mass-atom analyzer, and shuffled toward the lock. In another minute he had passed out of Welton’s sight, to reappear a moment later from the side port. Little spurts of red-orange flame from the reaction pistol marked his companion’s trail to the planetoid thirty feet away.
IT WAS a mere fragment of rock, jagged and irregular, as were most of the other millions of ring planetoids—twenty feet long, six across, strangely flat and smooth on one side. Planet dust they were, if the theory were correct that at one time Saturn had had a satellite within two and a half diameters of its surface, which it had torn apart with its tremendous gravitational influence.
In composition they were mainly mixed rock matter, poor in the heavier elements. But some among the uncensused billions were treasure chests of the ores of gold, platinum, radium, or were the matrix of rubies, emeralds, and rare stones unknown on Earth.
Now and then a ‘toid hopper would return to civilization towing a mass of gold equal in weight to his ship, or a lump rich in beryllium, actinium, jewels, and be a financial Croesus for the rest of his life. Now and then, too, the explorer would not return at all. It was the age-old game of treasure hunting with new rewards and new dangers. And it was a lawless game. The rings of Saturn held many a secret crime. The ‘toid hoppers returning with bonanzas may and may not have been the original finders.
Legends had sprung up about this adventurous calling. Legends of great feats, travels, ‘toid monsters, fabulous clusters of precious metals. One of them was the fable of a diamond ‘toid, one solid mass of that valuable mineral five feet across. No one had ever towed it in, however. Old Pete, haunter of the Titan space docks, claimed to have spotted it on his last trip out. Weak motors, barely able to drag him and his ship to civilization, were his excuse for not tailing it in.
Welton watched the bloated vacuum suit, inhabited by his friend, crawl slowly and carefully over the microbe world of rock. He looked like a gigantic black frog in the dull Saturn shine. Feeling suddenly quite alone, Welton fished with the radio receiver for something to relieve the dead silence. That was one of the worst features of ‘toid hopping, he reflected, that bottomless feeling of isolation. Conditions being better than average, the sputter of static gave way to music from a Rhean station.
Osgood clumped in after an hour, with an aura of frigidity that cooled the cabin uncomfortably. Welton stepped the heater up and unzippered him.
Osgood fumbled himself out of the suit. “Coldproof, eh? Like a sieve.” He beat his arms and stomped his feet lustily, warmed up his tongue with vituperation upon the heads of vacuum-suit manufacturers.
“Come, come, results?” Welton kicked the space suit into a corner after storing the half-empty oxygen bottle in the hull closet open to the vacuum.
“Homy little place. Nice view. Wade boy. there’s nothing like standing even-Steven with the rings and looking out over the vast sea of planetoids—like a smooth dance floor fading into the stars, rimming Saturn with two shining cusps. Like sentinels standing guard over a battlefield we have Titan, Rhea and four other moons, blazing in the glory of eternal night. We have——”
“You have it—bad. Now what about the cerium, if?”
“Wade, my boy. there was the Sun, a superdiamond among a rajah’s jewel chest, spearing its warm, comforting rays across nine hundred million miles of space to you and to me. Think of it. Then Earth, the best of worlds, a tiny emerald whose pristine purity put to shame the other glories. Ah, dear Earth! Long since we have seen its fertile fields, its grassy slopes, its——”
“Many dopes, like you. Quit stalling, Archie. Is it or ain’t it?”
“What?”
“The cerium!”
“Don’t bellow so. I have been far removed from mundane things. This rude awakening—— Oh, the cerium. Well, it ain’t. It’s there all right, plenty of it, but low-grade ore and scattered all through the ’toid. No concentrates, except buried. Wouldn’t be worthwhile to grub for it, though. So, onward.”
WELTON’S string of chagrined curses had begun in the middle of Osgood’s speech and extended, with growing excellence, through the operations of strapping himself into his seat, rocketing the ship away, and setting a course several hundred yards above the plane of the rings. “That’s about the thousandth one we’ve passed in the past month, and the seventh examined, but none worthwhile. You’d think one of these damned pebbles would cough up. This is the
toughest run we’ve had yet. Aren’t we going to go back with even a chunk of lousy copper?” It went on in this vein for a time.
Osgood waited until the bitterness had gone from Welton’s voice. “Wade, my boy, we are now operating under the law of averages. Every time I do my gunning from now on. the chances are piled up in our favor, since we’ve played out the losing side cleaner than Buddha’s bones. In fact, after this man-size run of bad luck, we should hit Old Pete’s diamond ’toid.”
“Death took a holiday: why don’t you and your optimism? Figure out how the laws of chance would work if Old Pete’s diamond ’toid was one of those meandering kind that creep up in a ring, weave back and forth, and even shuttle across to another ring. I dare you.”
Osgood always took a dare. He began mumbling. “Outer Ring A, a hundred and seventy-one thousand miles O. D., ten thousand miles wide. Cassini’s Division, between A and B, is three thousand miles. Ring B. a hundred and forty-five thousand miles O. D., sixteen thousand wide. Mileage a thousand between B and C. Ring C, this one, about eleven thousand, five hundred miles wide, with——”
“Why all that? Figure by total number of planetoids, estimated at upward of a trillion in the three rings. With a wandering ring planetoid, it’s one in a trillion.”
“I’m figuring the time element.” Osgood continued his frown-faced murmurs. “Rings total forty-one thousand, five hundred miles. Thickness about ten miles. All round numbers, you know. Total mass of planetoids is one twenty-seven thousandth of Saturn’s, or one quarter of Earth’s Moon, so——”
“At twenty minutes per each, on the average,” supplied Welton scathingly, “it would take just forty million years to exhaust the law of chance at its worst.”
Osgood looked hurt. “Well, I was figuring——”
“If all the five billion inhabitants of the solar system scoured the rings at the same time, it would still take three days to catalogue them.”