“Maybe he did tell somebody,” I said.
The Master nodded. “I think it probable,” he said, “that you have the sequence reversed. He did not tell someone, Gerald. Someone told him.”
Mirella said: “Euglane—no, hold it,” and stopped for five seconds. “Right. Took me a minute, it’s late. Cornelia Rasczak told him.”
“Told him his examiners were now real aliens—because she’d heard enough from Hester MacEvoy to put things together?” I said. “That’s going a little far.”
“I doubt Lance-Corporal Puffer means to go so far,” the Master said.
“Nowhere near,” Mirella said. “What she told him—there are real aliens. Period. Maybe she got afraid. Maybe she just thought somebody should take an interest.”
“If she had told him his examiners were real,” the Master said, “if she in fact knew of the examiners, which we cannot now establish—she would only have been confirming what he already felt. For him they were already quite real—a private matter, but a real one.”
“Right,” I said. “The idea that there were real aliens wouldn’t have been a surprise to him—because he knew there were real aliens: his examiners.”
“What he didn’t know,” Mirella said, “was that these examiners were also involved with other people. As far as he knew, they were aimed at nobody but him. Very private, very solo. That they were off talking to this MacEvoy—that was a whole other thing.”
I nodded. “All right,” I said. “And we know something else: we know why Cornelia Rasczak was killed.”
“Because she told him?” Mirella said. “Jerry, that makes no sense in the world.”
“In a way,” I said. “Because she told him—and that meant she might get to telling somebody else.”
“We have what we have looked for,” the Master said. “Something Cornelia Rasczak knew, that her killer did not want told—to anyone but Harris France, who didn’t matter.”
Mirella nodded. “Simple. Reasonable. I like it.”
I shook my head. “Damn it, something’s wrong,” I said. “Folla couldn’t have killed Cornelia Rasczak. He couldn’t affect—”
“He did not,” the Master said. “Except in the manner in which he killed Harris France.”
Mirella said: “Hey. This Folla is one ugly customer.”
“He persuaded somebody else to do the killing,” I said. “Right. And he got the somebody in and out by way of a Josephson junction.”
“I think not that last,” the Master said. “The scale makes it—in my judgment—impossible.”
“Scale?” I said.
“The effect, as we know it, involves very small distances, and very small objects. A quantum effect, to return to the quaint and ancient terminology. It would seem best to think of it not as a bridging of distances—as an effect involving space and time— but as something else, since it involves zero time, and apparently does not call for successive habitation of contiguous spaces—the electron concerned does not traverse the space between the two points. Think of it as information transfer.”
“The electron is the information?”
“That, too,” he said. “But think of the departure point, and the arrival—the target—point as loci of information. Each is a given, specific set of axes in three-dimensional space—clearly a unique package of information.”
I thought for a second. “All right,” I said. “So you need two bundles of information—two sets of data: the departure point and the target point.”
“Three,” he said. “You forget the object which is to be translated.”
“Three. So what does scale have to do with it?”
He sighed. “Gerald,” he said. “Use your mind. You can think, if you will think.” I said nothing whatever. “For very small objects, and very small target areas, there are a limited number of possible sets of information; an appreciable precision in arriving at the target area is quite possible. The larger the object, the more possible sets of information exist—since the number of those sets is proportional to the size of the object, and to the size of the target.”
I thought some more. “A large object needs more space to fit into—more possible sets of spatial axes. And a space a foot wide—a target space a foot wide—has more possible locations inside it than a space a micron wide.”
He nodded. “You can think,” he said, “when you choose to.” I said nothing at all, again; I nodded back. Why hand him further opportunities? Maybe he could get the nod. “This introduces uncertainty into the targeting,” he said. “For an object the size of a human being, and a target area the size of, let us say, a small house like that in which Harris France and Cornelia Rasczak lived, that uncertainty would be very large— a preliminary analysis gives figures on the order of a kilometer in diameter.”
I converted in my head: three-fifths of a mile. “A Josephson junction—”
“Would translate a human being from his departure point— or her departure point,” the Master added, bowing to Mirella, the piranha-fancier— “to a point inside a circle whose center would be, approximately, the France-Rasczak house, and whose diameter would be about a kilometer. A thousand yards or so, Gerald.”
“Not good enough,” I said.
“Not nearly good enough.”
I held up a hand. “Wait a minute,” I said. “My ship ended up in a parking orbit around Ravenal. That’s pretty good targeting.”
“So it is,” he said. “And quite possible: twenty kilometers one way or another might not matter seriously, since you could adjust orbit on arrival—as you undoubtedly did under instructions from Approach Control on-planet. Given a slight preference for an orbit further away than the optimal choice, there would be time and to spare for such adjustment; and you would never consider it. I called that placement ‘fairly precise’—and so it was. Fairly, not exactly.”
“I adjusted on Approach Control direction,” I said. “I always do. Everybody always does. Everywhere.”
“Of course,” he said. “The transfer could be depended upon to leave you close enough to adjust. ‘Close enough’ for space, going into orbit, can safely be several orders of magnitude larger than ‘close enough’ for a room inside a small house.”
“So the Josephson junction didn’t get anybody inside that house,” I said.
“It did not,” the Master said.
“Then we’re back where we started,” I said. “We have an impossible crime—a locked room with no entrance and no exit.”
“Not quite back where you started,” Mirella said.
“Why not quite?” I said.
The Master chuckled even before she answered. “Now,” she said, “you have me. I am convinced. One more head to figure things out.” She gave me a grin. “And just maybe not such a bad head, either.”
It was the night after that that the dreams started.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Call them nightmares. They qualify—I have had a few over the years, though I don’t make any big point of remembering them. As I said, when I do remember a dream, it’s usually too silly to repeat.
The nightmares didn’t come every night, and there was never more than one in a given night. If I sat down and described them, you wouldn’t be impressed; nightmares are very personal experiences, and what had me sitting bolt upright in bed, staring and sweating in the dark, might not be anything for anybody else but a curiosity. People standing with their backs to me turned around and showed faces that belonged to other people, or to no people I’d ever thought of before. Things nodded and toppled from high, uneven stacks. Alarm sirens went off, turned into voices, and sang old songs at me.
The third time this happened, I managed to keep a grip on myself. I didn’t sit up in bed. I didn’t wake up at all—I very carefully and determinedly didn’t wake up.
In the dream—I was in a hollow, rounded space, a red-brown space that was dimly lit and had few specifics—I said: “All right, Folla. Enough. Quit the gaming and talk.”
; A voice I remembered said: “Statement: you will aid me.”
The terror of the dream—and never mind it—didn’t disappear, but it was manageable. I said: “Aid you with what?”
“You will construct an object for me,” the voice said. “I request payment. A service—”
“Of Path, Ltd,” I said. “You’re presenting a bill?”
“You were transferred to your chosen destination,” Folla said.
“I didn’t ask you to do that,” I said. “I said, let’s discuss this. You flipped me here on your own.”
“True,” Folla said. “Accurate. Shall I return you to your previous location?”
“I’m not asking for that, either,” I said. “I’m here. You used something to get me here—”
“Junction,” Folla said. “It has been called a tunnel diode. Of a different sort.”
“It exists, on a large scale?”
“It exists, in terms of its own,” Folla said. “It can be used. For what you call large distances only, or very small distances also. Distance does not exist, except in your spaces. An object of the right size can be removed to spaces in which distance does not exist, and returned to your spaces.”
“Of the right mass?” I said. Distance does not exist—that much made a vague sort of sense; I thought of the Master telling me to think of the junction process as information transfer.
“Mass is a quality of your spaces,” Folla said. “Of the right size.”
This was not making as much sense as I’d hoped it might make, but maybe I could find out a little more. “Can I do this?” I said. “Remove an object and return it?”
“Not at present,” Folla said. “You do not know how.” Almost true, but not quite; in any case, unhelpful, and then I had no more chances. “Statement repeated and enlarged: you will build an object for me.”
“What kind of object,” I said, “and what will it do?”
“Reply in series. One: I will specify clearly,” Folla said. “Two: what it does is not your concern.”
I took a deep breath. I wasn’t breathing air, but something much thicker, and very dark. “You want to come in to our spaces,” I said. “Why?”
“That also is not your concern,” Folla said. “I will leave now. Your waking is occurring. Sleep soon again, and I will then specify.”
Everything, it began to come to me as I woke, was now part of the same set of puzzles. From Folla to the murder of Cornelia Rasczak to the death of Harris France—and including a variety of dreams and insanities—all the pieces were now connected.
This is usually a help. Trouble arises, most of the time, when you can’t find the connections between pieces of the puzzle. But this time, the connections were perfectly clear—or as clear as they could be, given a) that we were dealing with alien beings we could neither describe nor explain, and b) that we were dealing with dreams, which nobody has ever been able to describe or explain very well.
This time, I told myself, all the pieces were connected—but all the pieces was shaped like Klein bottles.
I fumbled around for the usual while, and came fully awake after the usual delays, and decided to build a breakfast around a coffee with the hardest-to-spell name I have ever run across: Keyserlingck, which is a variety originally from Queensland, and which has been replanted and lovingly tended on three or four worlds. I only have to spell it when putting in an order, and I order it in large batches. That morning, I only ground enough of it for three cups, got some eggs and a lot of bacon, went and found the pepper-mill, and sat down to eat and mull.
I seldom use pepper in great quantities, except at breakfast—a couple of fried and basted eggs thickly crusted with fresh pepper will act as efficiently as a cold shower, and a lot more pleasantly, if you like having your tongue tingled. By the time I was calming my tongue with the Keyserlingck, I was as awake as I get, and trying to assort the facts we had into something sensible.
Folla wanted to get in to our spaces. His purposes were unknown, but had to be assumed to be bad ones, given his other actions. He could only enter our spaces if somebody built him a machine of some kind—but it was a machine that had to be fairly easy to build, because he’d asked a woman in a wheelchair, without technical training or, I was convinced, a very sharp or well-focused mind, to build one.
Or did that follow? He couldn’t affect our spaces directly— but he could affect our dreams, at the least by walking into them and acting in them. (Sometimes, apparently, as a small dog. Why a small dog? Why a young girl carrying the dog?) Could he make Hester MacEvoy brighter? Could he persuade her mind that she could walk around and move with full ease? And if he could, would her mind rule her body enough to get her doing that? Sleep-learning, after all, was perfectly possible— but could ease of movement, after damage, be sleep-learned? He’d promised Hilda a new sense; had this been an honest promise—and what could he have done with, or for, Hester MacEvoy?
Somewhere, the back of my head told me, somebody had said or done or seen something that answered those questions. Possibly it had been me. The back of my head often tells me things like that—I think it means to be helpful, but for some damn reason it is almost always forced to be cryptic. Union rules, probably.
On the other hand, it may just enjoy puzzling the Hell out of me.
Whatever it was that answered the questions, I couldn’t locate it. All right, what were the other pieces?
Cornelia Rasczak had been shot by a beamer, at fairly close range, inside a locked room. Walls solid, windows sealed, two doors bolted and one chained shut. Somebody had got into that room, done the deed, and got out again.
I’d thought of removing the whole front door, but that wouldn’t work—the hinges would have to have shown something in the way of damage (or very fresh paint). And the door would still be chained to the wall—though if it had been removed, it could probably have been swung around enough to permit entry, leaving the chain fastened.
It would be the Hell of a job, and it would take some fairly heavy machinery—but, as I’d seen at the France house, that might not have been a problem: witnesses would have been hundreds of yards away, and blocked off by walking-trees.
Suppose you removed the whole front wall?
It was a lovely, even a charming idea. It lasted about fifteen seconds, until I started wondering how you’d replaster and repaint the place when you put the wall back, without leaving obvious traces. Of course, the whole house might have been repainted…
While Harris France lay asleep on the ground floor? True, there are paints that don’t have any kind of strong or lasting odor…
But the operation would have taken hours of time, and been a major project for a small construction firm. Almost anything else would have been simpler. Planting a bomb in the house would have been simpler.
Come to think of it, why hadn’t the killer simply planted a bomb in the house, and gone away?
Well, for one thing, a bomb would have killed both Cornelia and her husband. Harris France was going to die anyway, but at the time Cornelia was killed the murderer had thought a jury would do that job for him—if not kill France, transfer him to the Colony, out of everybody’s way for good.
And maybe a bomb was harder to come by than a beamer. Lots of people owned beamers—anybody could, and though City Two was fairly peaceful, as cities go, there were dangerous neighborhoods, and nervous people, here and there, the two sets not necessarily contiguous. But few people owned handy bombs—or could cobble them up out of easily available materials.
And maybe the killer didn’t want to do more than he had to—“he” being a term of pure convenience. Call him a minimalist.
Maybe, too, a bomb would have been blamed on somebody who wasn’t Harris France. Investigation wouldn’t have stopped with an obvious killer, because there wouldn’t have been an obvious killer. Murder and suicide by bomb is a rare deed, and accident even rarer.
All right: how had he got in and out of the house?
No chimney. No c
ellar.
No way.
CHAPTER THIRTY
Harris France.
There was no mystery about his death: his examiners— alias, recently, Folla et Cie—had talked him into putting a noose around his neck.
But though that was clear enough, there were things that weren’t.
France’s alien examiners had been around for years—as I understood it, they’d been with him long, long before Euglane had entered the picture. He’d been having more trouble living with the fact of his examiners recently—the last six months or so—which was why he’d gone to see Euglane. He’d had other troubles, of course—people do—and as time went along, the presence of the examiners—the strain their constant inspection had certainly been for him—had made every other problem a lot worse.
So Euglane had found out about the examiners fairly recently—but France had apparently known about them, and known them, for most of his life.
Euglane, I thought, had missed a bet—he’d looked at the reports of alien beings his patients had for him, and he’d looked hard. But he’d looked once. France’s examiners had been an illness—but they hadn’t stayed an illness, not entirely. They’d become real.
All of psychology is metaphor—nobody’s ever seen an id, or weighed an ego. The examiners had looked like one more metaphor of a metaphor, and so they had been, once. But—just like dreams, now and then—some metaphors can come true, and France’s examiners had.
Question: were they—had they become—Folla and company?
That they were now associated with Folla was certain— nothing made sense otherwise. At least, they had been used by the aliens; and though France had certainly had delusions on his own, delusions Folla and company had walked into, it was a little too much to assume that some brand-new being had pushed France into suicide.
I couldn’t imagine what difference it made, but France’s examiners couldn’t be Folla himself. Folla was clumsy; he didn’t know enough about humans to have pushed even a victim like France, ready for any sort of pushing that had Examiner pasted on it, with any great success. (There might have been fifty aliens doing the scouting, and then the pushing, and there might only have been one—making himself a crowd in France’s dreams—the night-time dreams, the ones he needed his naps to recover from. He didn’t dream at all during his escapes, as Euglane had told me long ago; that, I saw, was why they’d been escapes.)
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