“I’d never heard of you people,” I said.
“Well,” he said, “we’re really rather quiet sorts.”
And then he gestured at the paper.
“Do take a look,” he said. “You may notice something interesting.”
“Before I do that,” I said again, “let me go back to all this about dimensions. We might not be looking at a question of different dimensions at all.”
“You’re assuming that this being was telling lies?” Euglane said. “It’s possible—of course it is. But as a primary assumption—”
My turn to interrupt. “I’m assuming he said exactly what he meant, and nothing else,” I said. “He didn’t say he was coming from other dimensions.”
“But surely—”
“There is a lot of empty space,” I said. “Even in crowded places, there’s a lot of empty space.”
“Between the atoms, to so speak,” he said.
“Everything we know,” I said, “is nine-tenths nothing. There are forces traveling that nothing, from one particle to another. But there doesn’t seem to be anything else. Ten per cent of the space has particles in it—speaking loosely. Quarks, subquarks, and all the things built of quarks—protons and electrons and so on, right up to us. The other ninety per cent—nothing.”
He nodded, very slowly. “I do see the point,” he said.
“It’s not a new idea,” I said. “It’s been out of fashion the last few centuries—space-four, which does call for a fourth spatial dimension, started people looking in another direction, so to speak. But even back before the Clean Slate War, some people had theories involving something, God knows what, existing in the empty space between what we can detect. In the ninety per cent.”
He stared at me. “How very ingenious,” he said. “Not at all the sort of thing a Giell would think of. An actual, physical universe, co-existing with this one, and undetectable by it.”
“At least,” I said, “there may have been such theories. Everything got so damn scrambled when the War happened—”
“So I understand,” he said. “A shame, to let such destructive emotions loose. But I do understand that humans are like that.”
“Some of us, and some of the time,” I said, and he nodded again. “Not ‘other dimensions’ at all, but just what this Folla said—other spaces.”
“Fascinating,” he said. “Though of course there’s no way to establish—”
“No way in the world,” I said. “At least, until Folla pops up again.”
“You think he will?” He looked eager, as closely as I could read his face. Not worried, not puzzled. Something new to experience, something new to look at.
“He met me,” I said. “Somehow or other, he picked up enough of the language to make himself both understood and confusing. He flipped me thousands of light-years in no time I could measure. He must have expended some sort of work on all that. Maybe he wants to follow it up—for whatever reason. Maybe he just wants to see what happened, or what my ‘friends and neighbors’ are like, from somewhere nearby. I think he’ll pop up—sooner or later.”
After which, of course, nothing whatever happened for six weeks.
PART TWO
HARRIS FRANCE
CHAPTER SEVEN
I mean, of course, that nothing happened involving Folla, or other dimensions, or other spaces. In fact, the Hell of a lot happened, and I was right in the middle of most of it.
Not the shooting, though. I was out of range for that, and I would have heard about it eventually, I suppose, but in fact I got the news about as fast as anybody did, except the victim. Until then, I was working with Master Higsbee on the idea of other spaces. The math for such a concept had been worked out before the Clean Slate War, “as a theoretical exercise, Gerald,” he said. “You must remember that the ancients had no idea anything existed that was completely unmeasurable.”
“If you can’t measure it, it isn’t science,” I quoted.
“Exactly,” he said. “A silly attitude, but quite typical of the time. The saying spread so widely and rapidly that we have, today, no idea who originated it. People seemed to like it.”
“Well,” I said, “they had some excuse. Even psychology works better when you can put the numbers in—that’s what Psychological Statics is all about.”
“Ah,” he said. “You enjoyed your talk with Euglane?”
I nodded. “An interesting fellow. It was while we were talking that this other-spaces notion bit me.”
“You were bitten well,” the Master said. “It is an idea too long laid aside, Gerald. Such other spaces would be wholly intangible—not even detectable as forces, particles or waves or whatever the ancients called such things—I don’t recall.”
“Wavicles,” I said.
He shrugged. “To be sure. Deciding that a compromise is an object. Typical.”
“Well—”
“An object that cannot be detected in any way cannot be measured,” the Master said. “Therefore, it was not science; therefore it could not exist.”
“We can’t measure space-four,” I said. “But the ancients didn’t know there was a space-four. They have some excuse.”
“They knew that Cantorian infinities existed,” he said. “Cantor, Dedekind, many others lived and died before space flight. Such infinities are not mensurable in any usual sense; they can be measured in terms of each other, but not in terms of any objects themselves not infinite.”
“Well,” I said, “they were the ancients, after all.”
“They were a strange collection of people,” he said. “But let us leave them, and apply ourselves to something more interesting—to this idea of other spaces.”
We discussed it up, down, and sideways, and kept running up against the central puzzle: how in Hell could we contact anything that existed in the ninety per cent of the universe that was, for us, nothing at all except a passageway for forces? We came up with some notions, many of them complicated and all of them too silly to bother you with—but if you don’t hunt for all the notions, silly or not, you are not going to find the good ones.
And a few weeks went by. And I did other things—renewed an acquaintance here and there, went to a meeting of a club I’m a member of—spun time out, in other words, in the company of my friends and neighbors. And then, early one evening, Euglane called me.
I was, in fact, dressing for dinner, and looking forward to it, since a rosebud named Gjenda Cass, an expert in some arcane aspects of physical chemistry (which was not, for me, her major attraction, but I have no prejudice against physical chemists), had agreed to share it with me, and had suggested a restaurant I’d never tried.
“It’s rather a new idea, Knave,” she’d said, “and I think you’ll like it.”
I am all for new ideas, or at any rate some of them, and I was looking forward to suggesting to Gjenda some rather old ideas of my own, later on in the evening. I was putting some plain black studs into a lovely and expensive off-white shirt when the phone blipped at me.
I went and got it, keyed in Remote and said: “Hello?” as I put in another stud.
“I need you,” a voice said. Not, unfortunately, Gjenda’s.
“Euglane?” I hadn’t heard from him, nor had I called him; Master Higsbee and I had been off on another track, and I assumed that, if Euglane had any news about other dimensions, alien beings or the like, he’d be in touch. Until something happened, I wasn’t on any deadline.
“I dislike to ask it, Knave,” he said, “but I need to see you as soon as possible.”
His voice was still pleasant, just a bit gruff, but there was a lot of strain in it. “What’s happened?” I said.
He made an odd sound. In a human being I’d have called it a moan, and maybe it was one. “Death and destruction,” he said. “I am at home. You remember the address?”
Euglane hadn’t struck me as the kind of person who was given to random hysteria. I checked my watch. All right. “Give me forty minutes,” I said, and
hung up without waiting for a reply.
Damn. There was just time to find Gjenda at home, I hoped, and I got back on the phone. Gjenda answered, and she did not take it well, and I was in too much of a hurry to smooth things over.
Well … perhaps some other time, physical chemistry.
Thirty-six minutes later—dressed in a casual jumper, with my dinner clothes still lying around my hotel room—I rang the little bell-announce, and Euglane opened the door just as quickly as before. I wondered briefly if he hid himself right behind the damn door when he was expecting visitors—twice I’d been early, and twice there’d been no delay at all. But probably not; call him speedy and hospitable.
His arms were fully extended—relaxed—but his legs weren’t; when tightened up he had rather short, almost stumpy legs, capable of carrying him nicely upright. He didn’t look much different, if you passed the eyes, which were wide and staring, and didn’t notice the fact that he was breathing just a bit raggedly.
I said: “What’s happened?” and stepped inside. He shut and locked the door behind me, and leaned against it, facing me in the entry hall.
“His name is Harris France,” he said, “and I’m horribly afraid that he’s killed someone.”
I nodded, and went on into the big living room I’d seen before He followed me, and when I sat down on the same couch he sat down in the same big chair. He twined his arms over his head. I nodded again.
“Let’s take it a step at a time,” I said. “It will make more sense that way. Who is this Harris France, who do you think he’s killed, why do you think so, and why aren’t you sure?”
That seemed an exhaustive enough list to start with; it left out only the question: Why me? which could wait a few minutes. Euglane stared at me, his arms twining and untwining. Nervousness? Panic? Worry?
“Of course you’re right,” he said. He let his arms fall. Far down by the carpet, his hands clenched and unclenched. “I’ll try to—I have a patient, whose name is Harris France. He presented with symptoms of—well, never mind, never mind. We’ve been working for six months. Almost exactly six months. Progress has been slow; he has some—intractable beliefs. Apparently intractable. They interfere with his perception of the normal world, and—Knave, this isn’t getting us anywhere.”
“In order to get anywhere,” I said, “it is necessary to start from somewhere. I’ve got to find out where the somewhere is.”
“Right,” he said. “Right. He came here this afternoon. Not his usual appointment, but he called and said he had an emergency. I was able to clear an hour. He told me that his companion was lying dead in their home.”
“He killed his companion?” I said.
The arms went up, twining again. “He doesn’t know,” Euglane said. “He told me he felt sleepy—it’s an escape for him, it’s been happening for a month or more now. He went to his bed and lay down, and remembers nothing. He thinks he slept about three hours. That would not be unusual. When he woke and went into his living room, he found her body. He told me she had been killed by a beamer, fired from a distance of between four and eight feet, tightest focus and maximum power. The beam had gone through her heart. He knows little more. He called me, he says, within minutes—when he was able to function at all. The shock was massive.”
“He noticed a good deal, for a man in a state of shock,” I said. “Weapon, range, focus, power. He must have spent some time examining the body.”
“He would recognize such things rapidly,” Euglane said. “He’s a Detective-Colonel with the Homicide detachment of the police.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
It took a little while, but some facts emerged. Let me give you a few of them in summary, just for openers:
Harris France: age 53, career police officer, current rank Detective-Colonel, head of Homicide Four (which was the—reasonably extensive—Lavoisier section of Ravenal Scholarte, plus twenty square blocks of expensive houses, and a small park) for City Two. Twenty-two years with the police, steadily climbing the ladder. Bright, a little slow physically, medium height and a tad overweight. Living with Cornelia Rasczak for the past nine years; before that he’d been a bachelor, with a few short-term liaisons here and there but nothing serious. He’d had some kind of unhappy love-affair in his early twenties, and the details, Euglane told me, were private—“if at all possible,” he added.
“I won’t pry if I don’t have to,” I said. As it happens, I never did have to. “This Cornelia—”
“Rasczak,” he said. “Yes. She’s the one whose body he just found.”
I nodded. By then we had coffee in front of us. Euglane had pulled his arms in, and kept extending them and pulling them back. It was a little disconcerting, but at least both arms changed at the same time. I wondered if he could extend only one, and put the question aside for a more peaceful moment.
“He wouldn’t have heard the beamer,” I said. “Even awake, with a shut door between them, he might not have heard it. But he would have heard somebody come in. When he went to sleep, nobody else was in the house?”
“Just Cornelia,” he said. “Knave, I’m not used to violence. It’s not—a part of our natures, really. Gielli are not hunters, not eaters of animal life.”
“It isn’t easy,” I said. “But surely some of your patients—”
“Troubles in ideation,” he said. “Emotional difficulties. There is violence in the mix, of course there is. For humans, violence is a given, like rigidity or love. But it’s—a factor. Not an object in itself. It’s an idea, a drive.”
“Not a thing lying right out there in actual, physical, bloody existence,” I said.
“Exactly,” he said. His arms shrank and lengthened, rapidly. “I tried to persuade Harris to stay. I told him I would get help, we would discuss this fully, we would conclude—something. I was—not very effective.” His arms twined. His eyes shut and opened. “Knave, I was ill. Physically ill.” He made that sound again, the moan. “Violence,” he said.
I nodded. “I’m a little easier with it,” I said. “You don’t have to carry this by yourself. You can hand it off. And just by the way—why haven’t you handed it off?”
“But I called you.”
“I don’t mean me,” I said. “I don’t know what I’m doing here, in fact. The police will know—probably know already—”
“He called them from this house,” Euglane said. “He explained that the shock had been very great, and he had had to come here and talk for a bit before being able to make the call. He had wanted to try to find out what had happened, he said. But we could not find that out, Knave.”
“The police will,” I said. “He was an important man there. They’ll be extra-careful. They’ll figure it out. You don’t need me.”
“You don’t understand,” he said. “The police—this will be a subject for the news readers. Of course it will. And the police will be anxious to make clear that Harris committed this horror. They will do everything possible to convict him.”
I opened my mouth, thought for half a second, and then nodded. “They’re afraid of being accused of covering up for one of their own,” I said. “If everything looks clear and simple—”
“They’ll fight to keep it simple,” he said. “Yes. It’s because he’s an important police figure that we can’t leave it to them to investigate thoroughly enough. They’ll see what they want to see—as humans do a good deal—and that will be the end of it.”
“So you want me to investigate.”
“I want you to find out what really did happen, Knave,” he said. “Someone has to.”
I did not rush eagerly into agreement. I knew a few police officials in City Two, and they were no fonder of me than most police officials are, anywhere. I am not a detective by trade, and taking apart a murder was not my favorite occupation.
“There’s no doubt it was murder?” I said at one point.
“No doubt at all,” Euglane said. “The only beamer found in the house belonged to Harris, and had not been
fired in several weeks. He had had it on a practice range then. It was fully charged. The beamer that—that blotted out Cornelia’s life was not to be found in the living room, according to Harris. His own beamer was in the bedroom, in his holster, hanging over a chair.”
“He’s sure he didn’t use that one, clean it, recharge it, erase the counter, and put it back before he—woke up?”
Euglane shook his head. His arms quivered a little, retracted, then extended again. “He’s sure of nothing,” he said. “But I’m sure. Harris might conceivably perform some single, directed act without full consciousness. A series of complex acts—cleaning, recharging, revising the shot counter, returning the beamer—would be impossible. Absolutely.”
I nodded. “All right, then,” I said. “No suicide, no accident, or where’s the weapon? Either Harris got rid of it—could he have done that?”
“If he got rid of it in some simple, direct way, yes,” Euglane said. “Knave, you see why I need you. You’re thinking. Analyzing events.”
“I’m saying the obvious things,” I told him. “There must be detectives on Ravenal, professional people who could—”
“With no ties to the police?” he said. “With no need to see the police view, no matter what the facts? I doubt it.”
“It really isn’t my sort of—”
“There would be payment, of course,” he said. I gestured at him.
“Payment isn’t the thing,” I said. “But I might not help as much as a professional could.”
“Please try,” he said. “Harris will need you. And I—I am undone by this. I will need you, Knave.”
Gjenda saying she needed me would have been a lot more pleasant. But what the Hell could I do? Plead a previous engagement?
And maybe the Master would help out. I might be better than a detective. Better than the local police, no question.
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