“It’s called exercise,” Mirella said helpfully, and Euglane laughed.
“I suppose it is at that,” he said. “Humans are very odd, in any case. Their dreams, for instance.”
Mirella leaned forward. “Don’t Gielli dream?” she said. “I thought everything dreamed. Birds, fish, Berigot, people, anybody.”
Euglane frowned. “I don’t know whether Berigot dream or not,” he said. “I’ve never thought to ask. And if birds or fish dream, we don’t know it. Some animals appear to dream—or at least show muscular movement during sleep that can be interpreted as response to dream experience, though, once again, we simply don’t know; we can’t ask them.”
“And Gielli?” the Master put in.
“Oh, Gielli dream,” Euglane said. “We—go into a world. Not the real world—at any rate, not our waking world. We know a good deal about that world, though little of it makes connected sense.”
Mirella ate her last french-fry, rapidly. She looked fascinated. “You mean you all have the same dream?” she said. “Everybody dreams the same, every night?”
Euglane shook his head. His hands fiddled with each other over his vegetable plate—a suppressed desire to twine his arms? “Not at all,” he said. “We have different dreams—different experiences in that odd world. And they don’t—match up, so to speak. The world, the background, is consistent as far as we’ve ever been able to tell. But our individual experiences in it change from dream to dream, and from person to person—and there are small inconsistencies, vaguenesses.” He shook his head again. “That for each human dreamer, a different basic world, a different background exists—drawn from his individual experiences, hopes, fears, and different, even, for each dream—is the thing I’ve had the most trouble getting used to, in my work.”
The Master was nodding, slowly. Thinking. “But how is this accomplished?” he said after a second or so. “Is there a telepathic link of some sort? I had not known Gielli possessed that gift.”
“We’re not telepathic, no,” Euglane said. “We’ve always assumed that some basic substrate of intelligent operation, some general commonalty, provided the background, which the dreamer uses to express his own desires or fears in each dream. It may be so only for Gielli—or there may be another explanation entirely. There’s theoretical work being done, but we’re not going to come to any conclusion in a hurry. It’s—difficult to theorize in this area.”
The Master chuckled, and if I didn’t read his mind I read his chuckle, and said it for him: “If you can’t measure it—”
“It isn’t science,” he finished. “Exactly. In a dream there is little mensurable material. But dreams are real things—we experience them—and a science worthy the name will find a way to investigate them thoroughly. Some work, of course, has already been done.”
“That a dream is emotionally connected to the dreamer’s waking experience, yes,” Euglane said, “and we have begun to have some ideas about the kinds of connections made. A patient of mine has been very helpful over the past months—he sleeps a good deal, and reports dreams of almost Giell-like basic consistency.”
I said, without thinking: “Harris France?”
“I should not discuss any patient casually,” Euglane said. “I can’t answer such a question, Knave.”
Of course he couldn’t, and while I was apologizing Mirella said: “You’re Harris France’s doctor?” and shot me a look that was suddenly and absolutely poisonous.
He smiled at her, when he got her attention again. “I am,” he said, “and you’ll have to put it down to coincidence, Lance-Corporal. I certainly never arranged to meet Knave here—I was surprised to see him; it’s not, as I understand it, his usual haunt—and as certainly, not in the company of a police officer.”
“Hell of a coincidence,” Mirella said, suspiciously, and Euglane smiled again. Mirella hesitated, and then smiled back. “Jesus, I suppose it is,” she said. “But you have to admit, it looks funny.”
“Lance-Corporal,” Euglane said, “anything in the universe looks funny—if you look at it carefully enough.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Harris France’s name having been introduced, we couldn’t stay off the topic. But we tried not to discuss the murder itself, or whether France had been guilty of it—Euglane was sensitive enough to Mirella’s feelings to steer things away a little, and I wasn’t about to plunge in. We weren’t successful, but the try was made.
Instead, we followed the Master’s lead. “About this whole situation,” he said, “the unanswered question—and for the most part the unasked question—is, simply: motive. There appears to be none for the murder.”
“Motive,” Mirella said flatly, “is for stories. People kill people. Sometimes nobody knows why.”
Euglane shuddered. “They do indeed,” he said. “But there is always a motive—a reason. It may not be obvious—and it may not be the reason the—the killer imagines it to be. But it is not simply an action at random.”
“Of course not,” the Master said. “If we assume that Harris France is the killer, then his motive must somehow be discoverable. If we assume otherwise—and I am not doing so, save for theory’s sake,” he added, turning to Mirella with a small, and surprisingly gentle, smile, “then a motive must lie somewhere in the life of Cornelia Racszak. That, too, must be discoverable.”
“Or the whole thing is simply nuts,” Mirella said. “If he did it—and I say if,” she said with a big smile for the Master, “for the sake of a theory, okay?—then maybe he is just plain nuts. If somebody else did it, so why not if it is just theory, then maybe the somebody was also just a nut. Nuts happen. Believe it.”
Euglane nodded soberly. “As the expert on—ah—nuts,” he said, “so far as there’s any expertise involved—this is the one thing that cannot be.”
“Nuts don’t kill people?” Mirella said. “Maybe you don’t get out enough, Euglane. Maybe Giell nuts don’t kill people.”
“Gielli do not, in fact, kill,” Euglane said mildly.
“Lovely place your planet must be,” Mirella said. “What is it, Rosscapow?”
Euglane laughed. “Ruskpoir,” he said. “It seems to be pronounced many ways among humans.”
“Whatever,” Mirella said. “No killings. Boy.”
“Oh, we have our troubles,” Euglane said. “But in this case—among humans—a nut did not do this thing. That much is certain.”
Mirella nodded, equably enough. “You can prove this?” she said.
“I can,” Euglane said. “If Harris France committed this act, then I can testify that he is not a nut, and was not at the time of the act.”
“Well—”
“And if he did not,” Euglane went on calmly, “then the care involved in—ah—boxing Harris France argues sanity and balance on the part of the boxer.”
Mirella blinked. “Boxing?”
I said: “Framing. Slang sometimes gets away from him.”
“Framing is slang?” Mirella said. “I thought all this time it was just usual.” She shook her head. “Live and learn,” she went on. “But a nut can plan careful. Maybe he is a very clever nut.”
“The windows were sealed,” Euglane said. “The doors were bolted or chained shut. The weapon was either not found, or carefully cleaned, its counter changed, and fully recharged after the act. No trace of the framer remains.” He spread his hands. “A—a nut may be careful,” he said, “but he will leave traces. He will leave—a signature of some sort. It may not be sufficient to indicate his identity clearly—but it will indicate the presence of someone.”
Mirella looked very doubtful. “This always happens?”
“It is a consequence of energy focus,” Euglane said. “For a—a highly disturbed person, much energy must be spent in maintaining a workable relationship with reality. The energy thus spent is robbed from other sorts of care. For humans, it is expressible in terms of focus tensor relationships: Rome’s Theorem. There exist only so many dimensions—theoretical
dimensions, Knave, heuristic conveniences only—in which human action can be planned or take place. Some must be dedicated to the relationship with reality, and the more disturbed the person, the more dimensional structure is taken up by that effort.”
“Well, if it’s mathematics—”
“It is mathematics,” Euglane said. “In fact, it is Psychological Statics.”
“Okay,” Mirella said. “So it wasn’t any other nut. So it was our nut, and the Hell with him. It was our boy, what I said.”
“But Harris France is not highly disturbed,” Euglane said.
Mirella gave him a very short laugh. “He was seeing you,” she said. “So this makes him normal?”
Euglane sighed. “Many people are troubled,” he said. “They are not highly disturbed.”
Mirella shrugged. “I take your word for it,” she said. “So he had a reason. So we will find the reason.”
Another sigh. “Unfortunately,” Euglane said, “as someone conversant with the details of his life, Lance-Corporal, I must tell you that you won’t; it isn’t there.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
I credit Euglane with it: Mirella stayed calm, and even friendly. By the time the discussion broke up, she and Euglane were laughing like old friends. The Master joined in, spinning a couple of small stories Mirella found hysterically funny.
I didn’t: they involved ancient history—mine. And by the time Mirella drove me home, she had almost stopped making little jokes about one incident or another. We shook hands at the hotel door, like the friends we were becoming, and she said: “Hey, don’t take this wrong, my mind is not changed—but good luck, Knave.”
“Thanks,” I said. “Neither is mine. I’ll call you.”
By then we had exchanged phone numbers. I went upstairs, realized there was nothing to do till morning, and went to sleep. Morning arrived at its usual speed, and as unpleasantly as it usually does, and I spent most of it at a police station, gathering facts. None of them conflicted with the ones I’d gathered previously, and none of the new ones looked at all helpful. After a quick sandwich lunch at something advertising itself, inaccurately, as a deli, near the precinct, I pulled out my pocket piece and began making calls.
The pass I had, courtesy Guin Jenn (and Michael Morse), allowed me to go and see Harris France, but I didn’t want to crash in to his jail quarters unannounced, and I wanted any cooperation, both from him and from the jail personnel, I could manage. So I cleared everything by phone, found out that France was at home and willing to greet visitors, flagged down a passing cab and headed for the jailhouse.
When Ravenal isn’t being traditional, it’s being state-of-the-art, and then some. The jail was buffed and ridged solid, and very heavy, metal, with a big front hologram door, and windows that were transparent fields—the whole thing, obviously, under a single umbrella field so the metal walls wouldn’t go red-hot by noon every sunny day. The umbrella field passed people, though it cut down heavily on atmosphere-mediated heat and UV, and I went on through without noticing anything—I knew the field had to be there, and found out in some later conversation or other that it was, but Ravenal tends to be unobtrusive about its small wonders—and pushed the plate that opened the hologram door.
Inside, there was a single large room with a high ceiling, and a heavy-looking metal desk square in the middle of it. Doors at the back and sides led somewhere, but none of them was marked. A lumpy fat man in a police uniform sat behind the desk, looking at me with no expression whatever on his dark face.
“I’m here to see Harris France,” I said, walking up to the desk as gently and calmly as possible.
His voice was small and high. “And you are?”
“Gerald Knave,” I said. He asked me to prove it, and I fished out a variety of cards and, just to nail things down, the letter from Michael Morse I’d been carrying around. He looked the collection over, not quickly but not with undue hesitation, nodded and said: “Second door on your left. Wait for the buzz, then slap the plate. Third floor, fourth cell down the corridor.”
“Has he had a lot of visitors?” I said.
“Wait for the buzz, then slap the plate,” he said. So I did.
The cell looked comfortable, as cells go. Everything in plain sight, of course, and the door was no hologram but old-fashioned glassex. Harris France had a cot, a small table and chair (both bolted down to the floor), a washstand and small toilet, and a metal bar angled in one corner to use as a clothes rack. There was a plain dark-grey jumper hanging from it, and he was wearing another one that looked identical.
He was sitting in the chair, facing the door—a big, broad-shouldered man, an inch or two over my six feet even, with large brown eyes that looked surprisingly expressive for a police official—they seem to run to the small, hard marble kind— and a mop of iron-grey curly hair. He looked through the glassex door and said: “Who are you? Knave?”
“Knave,” I said. “How do I get in to talk to you?”
He grinned. “You don’t,” he said. “Speaker system’s pretty good, and somewhere down the corridor you’ll find a chair. Drag it back here and sit down.”
I said: “What about privacy?”
“There isn’t any,” he said, and grinned again. “My lawyer can get in, or my doctor. Otherwise, friend, this is the way it is. Pretty good system, as a matter of fact.”
“What about your brother?” I said. “Or—”
“Or my wife,” he said. “All right—or somebody’s wife. A prisoner has to give up something. Minor arrests, there are other cells, cells that do let people walk in. This isn’t a minor arrest. They did what they could for me—for comfort. Some.” He grinned at me. He seemed to be taking things very well; or, of course, he was putting on a show for his invisible alien examiners.
I went and found a chair and sat down facing the glassex cell door. Any other prisoners, in the cells on either side, were out of sight, and didn’t chip in. Maybe the floor was empty except for France; I hadn’t noticed anybody in the cells I’d passed. Maybe prisoners up here were just polite.
“You know why I’m here,” I said.
He shrugged. “Not exactly,” he said. He got up from his chair—he had to slide out from under the overhanging table—and stretched. “I know Euglane sent you, and I know you have a letter from Mike Morse. Impressed Hell out of Robert—he’s the duty guard here.”
“Euglane didn’t actually send me,” I said. “He asked me to look into things. I’m looking. It’s the Hell of a strange situation.”
He nodded. “I’m told I didn’t do it,” he said. “I don’t remember doing it—I’m a blank for the whole thing—and I—” His face changed. He became sober. The big blocky face looked hard, and only the eyes stayed soft. “I can not, just can not, imagine a reason for doing it.”
“So Euglane was saying.”
“I don’t mean me,” he said. “I mean anybody. People have enemies—what the Hell, I’ve been in uniform a long time, and I’ve seen every kind of killing there is. Everybody has enemies.” He paused. “Cornelia didn’t,” he said.
I nodded. “Somebody did it.”
“I know that,” he said. “Believe me, I know that. But I—can not imagine it. A reason to—to kill—Cornelia—” He stopped and took a couple of breaths. “Sorry,” he said, to me or to his examiners. “But there isn’t one. There simply isn’t.”
“Somebody,” I said, “somewhere, thinks there is.”
“Oh, Jesus, I know how I sound,” he said. He slid into his chair again. “I’ve heard people who sound like that—she was an angel, everybody loved her, she didn’t have an enemy in the world, nobody could do this thing—” He shrugged. “People say that all the time. About Cornelia it was true. She helped people.”
“Neuropsychologist,” I said.
“Right,” he said. “A clinical neuropsychologist—not research, she dealt with therapists and patients. Do you know what that is? A lot of people don’t.”
“Vaguely,” I said
. “I’ve read up a little.”
“A neuropsychologist,” he said, “works with the physical results of damage to the brain or central nervous system. Damage you’re born with, or damage that happens to you. Sometimes it’s people who can’t use their arms or legs—or eyes, say. Sometimes it’s something else—you know that disease where people suddenly start to curse or say weird things? They have muscle jerks, they repeat things sometimes?”
“Tourette’s Syndrome,” I said. “I’ve heard of it.”
“Neuropsychologists work with that, too,” he said. “There’s been brain damage, there’s a physical cause. We still don’t know enough about it, but they’re working on it.”
“Like a therapist,” I said. “Retraining muscles, or whatever’s called for.”
“Much more than a therapist,” he said. “Figuring out what can be retrained, and what paths are open—what can be done about the paths that are closed off in the brain or the nerves— she sets guidelines for therapists. Among other things. I mean she did set them.” He stopped and took another breath. “Sorry. God damn it.”
I said: “You’ve got a right to feel something.”
“You’re trying to help,” he said. “No reason to load my griefs on you.” Another pause. “Anyhow, she helped people. She didn’t do anything else, not really.”
I nodded. “Well—professional rivals? A dissatisfied patient? What was her private life like?”
“Professional rivals—no way,” he said. “Maybe, somewhere, there’s a neuropsychologist disturbed enough to want to knock off people who have the jobs he wants. But he’d have to be very, very weird. No.”
“Patients? A therapist she rode too hard, maybe?”
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