The Master would be, I told myself, a lot better than that; he always was.
I sighed. “Tell me about it,” I said. “All about it. Everything.”
CHAPTER NINE
I’m not going to tell you about it, not all of it. It would take more time than either of us has to spare, whoever you are and whatever spare time you have lying around. As far as I could get the picture without going over to Harris France’s house and poking around in it for a few hours, Euglane gave it to me, in detail.
I was going to have to go over there, and I knew it, but I wasn’t really fond of the idea. The police would be an occupying army, of course, and though I could probably run a good enough bluff to give me some standing, it would be the Hell of a complicated job to manage. It was just possible I could get some real standing, if I called a few people here and there, and once I had that I could check through the police files for anything they’d managed to turn up at the scene. Not satisfactory—I don’t like trusting anybody’s judgment but my own, having had some experience of what the average range of judgment is likely to be, anywhere in the universe—but it was going to have to do.
Meanwhile, I had to take Euglane’s report on trust. I didn’t like doing that, either, and filed it in my head under Provisional, but I got everything I could. What I’ll give you is a short tour of the high spots.
Many of which were barely spots at all. The couple had had no disagreements to speak of recently, and there were, Euglane assured me, no long-standing items smoldering away anywhere. “There are difficulties, of course,” he said. “Harris sometimes identifies Cornelia—identified Cornelia—with his mother, as many husbands do; and as his mother was not a pleasant woman there was friction. But not serious friction, nothing that seemed to point to real trouble. His major difficulties were outside that relationship. Much more general.”
They had involved, for God’s sake, alien beings. He’d had the idea that alien beings (beings who were both invisible and had, he said, no permanent shape, though they had identities and, in his head at least, voices) were watching him—not to harm him, exactly, nor to help him; they were (Euglane said) grading him daily on his performance in every area of his life. “As if his life were one long school-term, with constant exams and constant supervision,” Euglane said. “What the grading meant—what could result if, at some point, he received a C or an F or an A in some area for a given week or month—he has never been wholly sure; but it is important, he feels, that he do well, that his grades be good ones. He fears greatly some unidentified calamity if they should drop.”
“He must be in great shape just now,” I said.
“He’s very worried,” Euglane said. “Very disturbed—not that they will think he has done this thing—they will of course know, they’re always watching—but that he has done it, and they will disapprove. He is almost as much afraid of their disapproval—of poor grades—as he is forlorn at the loss of Cornelia.”
“It’s a shame we can’t ask them,” I said. “If the damn beings existed, they could fill us in on exactly what the Hell did happen.”
He nodded, and we moved on to other matters.
Harris France, when in one of his naps, slept like the dead. If you’d set off a reasonably large bomb within a few inches of his head (while somehow managing not to shred the head), he might have awakened. He might not, too. During the night, Euglane told me, he slept normally, and wasn’t terribly hard to awaken. But the naps were different.
“They’re escapes for him,” he said. “He needs them, and he has been having them often enough, the last month—perhaps five weeks—so that, to your human ancients, he’d look like a case of narcolepsy. They are not normal sleep—though he dreams in normal sleep, in these naps he is simply, as he expresses it, ‘turned off’; if there are dreams he has no memory of them, and I suspect that perhaps there are none. It might well appear, to someone without sufficient knowledge, that he is a narcolept.”
“But he isn’t?”
“Physically he’s normal,” Euglane said. “Or within normal limits for his age and condition—which is a little above human average. But the sleeping—well, we’ve been working on it. Before this, I thought another few weeks might see the end of it, the replacement of this sleeping by a different, less harmful and demanding, escape. The need for some such escape would be likely to last longer—by a factor of ten or twenty.”
“Sleep doesn’t seem all that demanding,” I said.
“It robs anyone of time,” he said. “Sleep is a good, in anything like normal amounts. It is a great good.”
“Knits up the ravel’d sleave of care,” I said. “Or something.”
He nodded. “Very expressive,” he said.
“I’m quoting an ancient,” I told him. “Shakespeare.”
“Ah,” he said. “Yes. I have read some of the plays and the poems. Not all. A terrible waste, you know.”
“A what?”
“Think of it,” he said. “What a psychiatrist the man would have made, if only he’d had the chance. But he had to settle for plays and poems.”
Well, it was a viewpoint I hadn’t run into before. I nodded and let it pass. “But getting more sleep than usual—”
“The body tries hard to adjust,” he said, “but adjustment’s difficult. Activity is needed, and not really available; there’s a lot of muscular motion during sleep, but of a very limited nature.”
That brought up something. “Maybe not all that limited,” I said. “Did France sleepwalk?”
“Not to his knowledge,” Euglane said, “and since he did not sleep alone—his naps occurred either when he was at work, in which case he would retire to a resting-area, a room that was always occupied by some officer or other lying down for a bit—or at home, where Cornelia would be present—he would have known; someone would have told him.”
“Always?”
“As far as I know,” he said, “and I think I would know; we’ve been working in some detail on this.”
I thought of a small list of ways for a man to sleepwalk without anyone’s knowing about it, including the man himself. But they were all a little tricksy, and I’d look into them later. “It’s about nine o’clock now,” I said. We’d been at it for hours by then. “What time did he wake up to find Cornelia Rasczak?”
“He told me he checked his watch within seconds—professional habit, I suppose,” Euglane said. “It was then—as you say it—four-thirty-seven A. D. Sixteen-thirty-seven, we say here.”
“P. M.,” I said, and he nodded. “What did he do? I mean for the next few minutes. Everything.”
He had, Euglane said, stared for an undetermined time, perhaps a minute. Beyond checking his watch he hadn’t moved. When he did he’d gone to her, seen for certain that she was in fact dead—he hadn’t had any doubt of it, the charred wound over her heart, perhaps an inch and a half in diameter, was a fairly good convincer—and, though he’d dropped to his knees and touched her, mostly around the head and face and hair, he hadn’t moved her body at all.
The wound had made him check his beamer, and he’d gone back to the bedroom and done that, taken it out of its holster and read the counter, checked the charge and put it back.
Then he’d called Euglane and come over. He’d taken a cab, being a little afraid of doing his own driving.
“Nothing else?” I said.
“Nothing, until he started to leave. I wish he had cried, then or when he arrived here. He did not.”
“He was dressed when he woke up?”
“Yes. That was usual for his naps. He didn’t even remove shoes, just lay down.”
“All right,” I said. I sighed. “Tell me: why the Hell does he think he might have done this? Somebody got in—he wouldn’t have heard that—killed her and got out.”
“When he called me, he was only distraught over the death. The violence. The loss,” Euglane said. “When he went to the door to leave, he saw that it was not only locked, but chained from the inside. He t
ook a minute or so then, to check the windows. He’s fully air-conditioned, and the windows were shut and locked; some are sealed shut, and none were open or readily openable. None had been broken.”
“Wonderful,” I said. “We have a classic locked room.”
“If Harris did not himself commit the crime.”
“Just possibly, even if he did,” I said. “If he sleepwalked— he’d have to get rid of the beamer simply. Unchaining the door, say, and chaining it up again, anything like that—would that have been too complex a job for him?”
Euglane thought for a minute, his arms twining. “I’m not sure,” he said.
“So either the beamer is somewhere in the house—or he managed to get it out while sleepwalking—or somebody else got in and out like a ghost. Or, of course,” I added, “like an alien being.”
Euglane nodded. “Just so,” he said.
CHAPTER TEN
I’ve read a fair number of Classic detective stories—I have had a scrappy sort of Classical education—and I’ve run into a lot of locked rooms. They were very popular, back before the Clean Slate War—for readers, of course, who had never heard of space-four.
They were not so popular out in the real world, then or now.
Nor, I told myself on the way back home, were they going to be popular with me. Locked rooms come in two sizes: tricksy, and accidental. This didn’t look like an accident, unless Harris France had done the deed and automatically locked up after himself, once he’d disposed of the damn beamer, which sounded unlikely. And if somebody were being tricksy, I had no real love for the job of unraveling the tricks, which was likely to take time, thought and effort, all of which I would be much happier spending on almost anything else.
Well, the basic rule about poking into any murder of any kind is, you start with the victim. Comparatively few people are killed by total strangers, and the victim’s list of friends, relatives and acquaintances will usually contain the name of her killer. All you have to do, of course, is cobble up that list, and then eliminate everybody on it except the killer. Simplest thing in the world. I had found out a little about Cornelia Rasczak from Euglane, and I was going to find out some more when morning arrived.
When I got back to my hotel room, it was nearly eleven at night—twenty-three hundred, if you like it that way. After putting away my unused dinner outfit, I began to realize that I was hungrier than usual; neither Euglane nor I had thought of finding anything to eat or drink over the hours, except a few cups of coffee apiece. Room Service runs all night, but I wasn’t going to have to depend on it, having stocked the place during my first days. I made myself a small pile of beef-and-cheese sandwiches, and a pot of Sumatra Mandheling coffee, and tried to think while I took it all in.
After about forty minutes, it came to me that this was a useless enterprise. I had six thousand new facts in my head, few of them at all sorted or arranged, and as I began to feel less hungry I also began to feel more weary. Well, the morning would do, I thought; without some standing in the case I couldn’t go prying either into the France house or into the police files, and there was no way of getting any standing that night.
The damn locked room would wait, then, like Cornelia Rasczak, while a) my brain caught up with the facts it had been fed, and b) it got to be a reasonable hour to start calling people. I took myself off to bed, and went into sleep as if the whole of Ravenal, or at least the City Two Fourth Police Detachment for Homicide, had hit me over the head.
When I woke up, I blamed the beef and cheese. I do remember a dream now and again, but when I do it’s always too silly to repeat. But there’s a reason for telling this one.
I had dreamed I was sitting in a large lobby somewhere. Possibly a hotel lobby, possibly the lobby of some office building or even apartment tower, but whatever the Hell it was, it was built on the grand scale. It stretched for miles in every direction, and the ceiling seemed to be about forty feet high.
There were people passing by, though not many, but I recall only a fellow in middle age, with a dark-grey jumper and a pair of pince-nez. I had seen pince-nez once in real life, at a costume ball, and three or four times in museums. He wore them just as if he put them on every damn morning.
I didn’t talk to him—he was just one of the busy people going by. I was sitting on a white-painted bench in the middle of this expanse of lobby, and I was waiting for a bank president to come and tell me what my savings account was at the moment. For some reason, it was important to me to know this.
I felt impatient, but not violently impatient. I sat, and looked around the lobby, and only fumed very mildly, and silently.
Then I heard someone come up behind me, and when I turned my head I saw a girl about twelve years old, with a small and hairy dog on her head. She said: “I’m from the bank,” and I said:
“Bankers don’t wear dogs. What have you done with the real banker?”
The dog looked at me, and said: “I’m the real banker.”
I was not surprised. I nodded at the dog and said: “Show me some identification.”
“My name is Folla,” he said, “and your account has a hole in it.”
“It can’t have,” I said.
“A man with a beamer burned a hole in your account, and the money leaked out,” the dog said. The little girl wearing him giggled. I said to her:
“It isn’t funny, beamers can be dangerous.”
Then I said to the dog: “That account was inside a locked safe. No beamer could have burned through.”
“The safe was opened,” the dog said. “He pulled off the front with a wire.”
“Oh,” I said. “That’s different. Who has my money?”
“I do,” he said, “and I’m keeping it.”
“But it’s mine,” I said.
“Not here,” the dog said. “Everything here belongs to me.”
“Oh,” I said.
That’s the dream. The emotional tone—which, as you may have noticed yourself, has nothing to do with the events of a dream; in dreams you can watch grisly murders and laugh, and see a box of marshmallows and run screaming—the emotional tone was very calm. In the dream, I was accepting everything that happened as more or less normal.
When I woke up I thought I could explain it all, even a dog named Folla—after all, Harris France had had some delusions about aliens, and I’d recently met one. Why Folla should have turned up as a dog on the head of a twelve-year-old girl I couldn’t say, but dreams are like that.
And I went on with my life, which turns out to have been a mistake.
It didn’t look like a mistake then. I got up and slowly persuaded myself that I was awake, and while I was having a small and lovingly self-prepared breakfast I began to punch up numbers on the phone.
I know a few people on Ravenal who have influence even on Ravenal—a Ravenal address will give you influence almost anywhere else, no matter who you are, because there’s a general feeling that Ravenal people Know Things. In fact, a lot of them do, and new-style Nobels are almost as common on the planet as the greenflower that carpets most of its parks. The first one I called was at a conference on Haven II, but the second turned out to be in. It was ten-thirty by then, and she’d just got home from work, which had started for her, I discovered, at two in the morning.
Her name is Guinevere Jenn, and she’s a neurosurgeon. Her day starts early as a rule, but not all that early; there’d been an accident with a taxi and a pedestrian just after midnight, and though the pedestrian wasn’t her affair—two broken legs, a cracked rib or two and a variety of things to patch—the taxi-driver was: bone splinters into the right side of the brain. He’d bashed himself very solidly with a metal crate he’d been carrying next to him in the front seat, when he’d swerved to avoid the walker, and piled into a stone building front at (traffic estimates from Watcher films—City Two has its light-posts fully stocked with cameras) something near eighty miles an hour.
“Simply silly,” Guin told me over the phone, sounding tir
ed, and every bit of her sixty-odd Standard years old. “A crate that size should have been in stowage, in the trunk.” Guin has little patience for normal human idiocy, which is one of the things I’ve always liked about her.
“Well, maybe the trunk was full up,” I said. “People carry things next to them all the time.”
“Large metal crates?” Guin said. “I spent seven hours picking splinters. He’ll survive—I think he’ll survive—but there are going to be residuals. Sizable residuals.”
“Well,” I said, “he’ll know better next time.”
“Next time,” she said, “won’t happen. If he can walk, a year from now, I’ll be massively surprised. If he can drive a taxi—if he can drive a tricycle— I’ll be damn well astonished.”
“Well,” I said, “he’s still breathing.”
“So he is,” she said. “And if he keeps on breathing—this is not an exact science I’ve got here, Knave—it’ll be more than the fool deserves. Eighty miles an hour—more, because the swerve slowed him—on a public street. Ridiculous. What prompts the call? I’m a bit fagged out here.”
“I know,” I said, “and I’m sorry, but I need a little help.”
“For God’s sake,” she said. “You haven’t gone and damaged somebody again, have you?”
“Nothing like that,” I said. “But you did a job once on Michael Morse, didn’t you? Got some kind of plaque—I saw your name in a news feed, and read about it.”
She chuckled. Indulgently. “How nice of you,” she said. “Yes—an aneurysm. Nasty, but not particularly—special, you know. But if you work on a public figure, people do seem to notice.”
“I’d appreciate it,” I said, “if you’d call him for me. I’ve got myself into something, and the M. G. of the City Two police could be a big help.”
“Knave,” she said, with another little chuckle, “what have you done that calls for interference from the police Master General?”
“Not a thing,” I said, “not a single damn thing,” and explained.
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