by Set Wagner
“What was he carrying?”
“Only the flexor. He had his work clothes on, and his pockets were empty. We found what he had been carrying in Fowler’s possession.”
“Is that why everyone assumes he was the killer?”
“That is one of the clues. The other one is the fact that the flexor was still in Fowler’s hand and not fully charged.”
“Well, you said flexors were used frequently.”
“Yes. That’s why we charge them every morning. And on the twenty-sixth, Fowler’s work didn’t require the use of a flexor.”
“Tell me, Larsen,” I began slowly, “do you personally believe that Fowler killed Stein?”
Larsen looked down at how his huge fists pressed the desk and quickly relaxed them. “No, I don’t think so, because Fowler was my friend. But I must believe what I saw. You do understand, don’t you?”
“Not at the moment,” I answered, standing up. “Can you give me a map of the base and its surrounding areas?”
He opened the lower drawer of his desk, took out the map I had asked for, and handed it to me. “It’s current. It shows the places where we found the trailer—and the bodies.”
“Where are you keeping the bodies now?”
“In the morgue below the infirmary.” Larsen sighed and then added in a businesslike tone, “The room with the server is in this building, next to the vestibule, to your right. Stop by there and register your information so you can be assigned a personal code. This way you will have access to all information on file—with the exception of that kept in restricted personal-code data banks.”
“How can I get access to that?”
“Only by gaining formal permission from the owner of the information.”
“Is this requirement valid for you too?”
“Yes, even for me, with the exception of a few extreme situations. Even then, I must comply with many clearly defined formalities.”
“Who has the right to maintain these restricted data banks?”
“Odesta, Reder, and Vernie.”
“What about Fowler and Stein?”
“Stein had one, but we found out he had completely deleted it. He must have done this from his computer at the biosector, but we couldn’t determine exactly when because the rest of his computer’s hard drive had been deleted as well.”
I headed to the door, absolutely sure that Larsen purposely delayed mentioning these facts, as if they didn’t matter. Was that to make them seem irrelevant—or to draw my attention to them?
“I forgot to mention something, Simon.” Larsen’s voice stopped me. “Maybe it’s not important, but it’s very peculiar. Besides Stein’s personal belongings, Fowler was carrying another item. Not in his pocket with the other stuff: he was holding it in his left hand.”
“What did it look like?”
A miniature effigy of a human head. Stein’s head.”
Chapter 12
I spent about two hours in the server room and left equipped with a personal code, a restricted data bank, and a lot of probably unnecessary information. Once outside, I unfolded the map Larsen had given me. I looked for directions to the infirmary, choosing a route that would pass through the parking lot Larsen had mentioned.
Because I was already familiar with the type of shuttles parked there, I ignored them and concentrated on the parking lot itself. It was narrow and long and could be seen only from the garages and the eastern ridge, beyond which Fowler’s trailer had been hidden. The western ridge was much lower and couldn’t be seen from the administrative building, laboratories, or the medical building because of the randomly positioned storage units.
I cut directly between two of the storage units and saw Elia when I came around the biolaboratory. She was sitting on a bench near the entrance, apparently expecting me, because she rose impatiently as soon as she noticed me. I just kept walking at the same even pace.
“Guess you’re not the kind of man who would bother to walk faster for just a woman,” she remarked sarcastically when I approached her.
“Not so,” I objected casually. “There are women I would even run for.”
“Are you saying I’m not one of them?”
“Yes, you are not one of them. At least not yet.”
She provocatively tossed her long hair. “You give me such high hopes, Inspector!”
“Perfectly reasonable hopes,” I added.
“Let’s go,” she suddenly urged me. “Berg—Larsen—got in touch with me a little while ago. He saw you leaving the administration building and ordered me to take you to Fowler and Stein.”
“Don’t be so impatient.” I smiled. “I’m in no rush to visit the other world.”
Elia shook her head in disgust. “You’re joking about very sad and dangerous matters, and you’re far too young to blame that only on professional callousness.”
She looked in my eyes and, convinced she had embarrassed me thoroughly, sauntered off. I followed her. Soon the infirmary came into view, a squat stone building attached to the relatively monumental medical facility.
“This looks like something the Yusians didn’t build.”
“No. We built it.”
“But why?”
“That’s exactly why—so it wouldn’t be Yusian,” she answered. “As the medical specialist at the base, I personally decided that any one of us who gets sick would much rather be treated in a real human environment.”
When we reached the infirmary, it took Elia a full minute to enter the complicated code that finally opened the door. “The morgue is downstairs,” she said. Then she turned the central lights on before stepping back to add, so quietly I could hardly hear her, “Fowler was my friend. I don’t want to see him—like that.”
“OK”—I nodded—“but where can I find you later? We have to talk.”
“At the same spot, on the bench.” Elia closed and locked the door behind her. “You can automatically access the code by pushing that button on the left!” she called from outside.
I went downstairs and reluctantly opened the door to the morgue. Cold. Freezing cold and a silence only death can produce. I went in. The floor squeaked with every step, announcing my disrespectful intrusion. I was coming to visit two men deprived of an earthly grave, to examine their corpses, to lean over them, trying to interpret their final facial expressions.
They lay next to each other in transparent sarcophaguses—surprisingly different despite their similar uniforms and shoes. Two human beings with an individuality apparent only from outside. Apparent despite the similar, humble positions of their corpses: placid arms laid on their light-colored shirts, unnaturally straightened legs, and knees pressed against the thin material of their stiffly pleated trousers. Their eyes were closed and sunk deep in their sockets and their faces white and remote, irrevocably immobile. The disturbingly bright emblem of the Eyrena base contrasted sharply with the collars buttoned around their shrunken necks, like an ID tag on a laboratory animal.
I moved one step closer. On the temple of one of the men was a deep dark cut: that must be Fowler. The fingers of his left hand were still bent, as if grasping the Yusian effigy of Stein even now. Somebody must have bent them open with a hard sharp instrument because there were bruises on his palm along the thumb and finger joints. But who had been so impatient to open those fingers? And so heartlessly brutal in that impatience?
I looked into Fowler’s face. His features were almost boyish, with a pug nose and mildly contoured lips that seemed to preserve the memory of one final, unfinished word. His forehead was broad and smooth, and his eyebrows and hair were a pale blond, light to the point of looking humorous—but now adorning a nightmare. His tall, gaunt body yet had something rugged about it that provoked sympathy, even trust, as if he could never do anything malicious. I tried to imagine him sneaking through the woods to kill a colleague from behind, but I couldn’t. It was even harder to picture him bent over Stein, taking his belongings—and why? Why would he need them?
The wound on his temple confirmed that he was hit from a short distance, but the way the scar came to a point at the forehead revealed that he had turned his head in the direction of the shot, or whatever they call the discharge from a flexor. Had he heard something that made him turn? If he had aimed the flexor at himself and pulled the trigger, logically he would have instinctively turned away from the discharge. Nobody, not even a person committing suicide, wants to see his own death or disfigure his own face. True, his face wasn’t disfigured, but the entry wound was very close to the eye, only a centimeter away.
I was already unbearably cold. My teeth were chattering, my hands blue, but something kept me from rushing through this. I felt vaguely obligated to examine these silent and motionless bodies thoroughly, maybe just because they couldn’t reproach me or demand my attention. I slowly approached Stein, a middle-aged man of average height and weight. No unpleasant features but nothing striking about him either. This kind of man doesn’t often arouse strong emotions in others, but when he does, they are always extreme because they arise only from his actions. No sympathy or antipathy toward his physical appearance would soothe such emotions. In death his plain face had taken on a determined, almost impetuous, look. He must have been in a hurry to get somewhere. To the defractor maybe? If the murders had taken place before noon, the early forest noises and motions could have drowned out the sound of an approaching killer. Or was the killer walking beside him and then suddenly fell behind?
I opened the sarcophagus, leaned over Stein, and carefully lifted his dark-haired head. There was the gaping wound on the back, framed by jagged edges of the broken cranium. I had not seen a flexor discharged yet, but there was no doubt that the killer fired from about ten meters away using a wide-angle beam. That would explain the size of the wound. And if the killer had chosen the wide-angle beam at such a short distance, that meant he wasn’t sure of his aim. Due to lack of experience? Or did he hesitate because he didn’t want to do it? Or maybe because Stein was running, running among the singing, dancing trees.
I left the morgue and ran upstairs, holding my breath so my teeth wouldn’t chatter. I shook myself to get warm and also to escape the influence of what I had just seen, the grim parody of life that the cold preserved. Elia was sitting on the bench, lazily tracing designs on the asphalt with her shoe. She looked slender and vulnerable under that alien sun hanging above us like a malicious, molten gold face.
I stopped in front of her, my arms dangling helplessly, and stared at the emblem on her collar. Slowly she looked up at me. The skin on her forehead was so delicate I could see the thin tracing of her veins. My eyes met hers, tense and too hard for a woman, and I was suddenly painfully aware that she needed my immediate help. But there was nothing I could do because the hardness in her beautiful eyes was there to stay, as permanent as the cold silence I had just left.
“Come.” Elia smiled bitterly as if she read my thoughts.
I sat next to her, feeling Ridon’s heat, and impulsively pressed my palms against the plastic surface of the bench. The cold was slowly leaving my blood, as was my pointless sentimentality.
“You mentioned Fowler was your friend,” I began, turning to Elia. Did my voice sound so shaky because of sincere sympathy—or a calculated desire to make her be open with me?
“Yes.” She nodded sadly. “A very good friend.”
“Do you want to tell me about him?”
“Some insignificant but spicy story so that you, with your keen psychological insight, can draw important conclusions about his personality? Is that what you want to hear?”
“Look, Elia, the man is accused of murder.”
“So? That doesn’t matter to me.”
“But you say he was your friend. You contradict yourself.”
“Why, in your opinion, can’t I consider someone a friend even if he is a murderer? I would also kill under certain circumstances. And I have no doubts you would too.”
I didn’t say anything.
“But anyway,” Elia said, with a sigh, “I’ll tell you my ‘spicy story,’ if you insist. So, you have already met Vernie. I don’t know how and why he ended up here, but he is not a happy man. We were still in the starship when he went to pieces—during the first hours of the journey. That’s why, if we could call somebody around here a hero, it would be Vernie! He went to pieces but never hit bottom because, as it turned out, Vernie doesn’t have a bottom to hit. He collapsed, crumbled into his countless weaknesses, fears, obsessions, and depressions. And, believe it or not, he managed to put these pitiful pieces back together again! To steady himself, to move, talk, work, and believe me, he does a pretty good job of it!”
Elia suddenly laughed. I didn’t join her, because I didn’t find anything funny in her words, other than their pompous imagery.
“Yes, Terry,” she continued, “that’s Vernie: impressive in the constant struggle with his own worthlessness—a struggle he wins, although not always honestly. I wonder how you would feel if, knowing what a flimsy construction he is, you were to grab him, fully consciously, and shake him with your strong hands?”
I tried to answer, but she made a gesture to stop me.
“Listen, listen, and draw your conclusions, Inspector! After we landed here, it so happened that all of us but Vernie became victims of the euphoria. Naturally we all panicked, but this was maybe the best moment of his life. Although he had discredited himself in the starship, finally he was the hero, excelling us in some way. Do you understand?”
“I understand,” I answered, overtaken by the feeling that our conversation was intentionally, provokingly unethical. “I do, and—”
“You are waiting for the spicy story about Fowler?” Elia laughed again.
“Yes, I’m waiting, Elia. Unfortunately, I have to wait, to tolerate your posing. So, if I do have any professional callousness, to a certain degree I owe it to people exactly like you.”
My harsh words had the desired effect.
“Well, OK,” she muttered uncomfortably, “enough with the introductions and—with the posing. To make a long story short, early one morning, about a month after we arrived, Fowler left the lodge before the others, taking Vernie’s jacket by mistake. When Vernie found out, he was so worried that he wanted to rush upstairs to his apartment. We had to break the silence so necessary for us to ask him if he wasn’t feeling well, but he didn’t answer. After a while, he calmed down. But later, when Ridon rose, he fell into the same frenetic state that all of us had almost overcome by then! So all of us witnessed his belated breakdown.”
“Everyone but Fowler, right?” I added.
“Yes. Fowler didn’t return until noon. When he learned what had happened, he showed us a small bottle. Despite Vernie’s confusion, Fowler told us that he found the bottle in the pocket of Vernie’s jacket and it contained pills of Sizoral. Do you know what Sizoral is used for?”
“No, I don’t know.”
“Sizoral is a medication for stomach diseases and is prohibited on Earth because of its side effect on the nervous system. Years ago there was a campaign against it.”
“So Vernie brought it to Eyrena without special permission?”
“Exactly!” Elia confirmed. “But that’s not the point.”
“What is the point?”
“Appearing slow witted at the right moment always sharpens reactions from the person you are interrogating,” my boss always says, and Elia clearly proved him right again.
“But how can you not get it?” she exploded. “Sizoral was the reason Vernie seemed to be immune to the euphoria! This is important! He was pretending that he was superior to us, while the prosaic truth was simply that he has an irritable stomach and was secretly taking a prohibited medication!”
Her voice changed abruptly, became calm, even sad. “The story was unimportant to us, Terry, but you should have seen how it affected Vernie, how humiliated he felt.”
“So humiliated that for revenge he not only kills Fowler but in addition fastens the m
urder of Stein on him. Is this the point of your story?”
“That’s nonsense! Vernie knew perfectly well that Fowler was extremely kind and compassionate by nature, that it wasn’t easy for him to be so cruel.”
“It wasn’t easy, but he did it anyway. And why?”
“Because of the Yusians, of course!” Elia surprised me with her answer. “Unfortunately, we are not alone anymore, Terence, either here on Eyrena or on Earth. We humans have to maintain a certain level, and those of us who show weakness, who fall below that level—oh, damn it! We can’t always offer them help and pull them up. Just the opposite! If their weakness threatens our common future, it’s better to hit them now, because only cruelty can mobilize such a person—can awaken some kind of resistance in him. Compassion, generosity, and delicacy—all these make you weak and meek. And that means they’re no help.”
“I see. So now we have to help each other by using hits and kicks. OK, what if, despite our efforts, those we hit can’t manage to rise to that ‘certain level’? What do we do then?”
“Then we bend again and erase them, the way you erase compromising and dangerous traces!” As she said this, Elia trampled a few nonexisting “traces” on the asphalt.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“What for?”
“That you have to look for excuses as far as the Yusians.”
“Nonsense! Andrew Fowler doesn’t exist anymore, and for that reason, he doesn’t need anybody’s excuses. I just explained to you why he did this to Vernie, although the cruelty wasn’t typical for him at all. For God’s sake, he would defend even plants! Once, for example, he got into an argument with Reder about some trees. He accused Reder of making holes in the trees with his flexor out of hatred, not because they were needed. Yes, Fowler was almost unnaturally compassionate.”
“And unnaturally absentminded,” I noted. “Why else would he have taken somebody else’s jacket, especially since Vernie is much shorter than he is?”
“Because of his tension while waiting for the rise of Ridon, Terry.”
“Do you remember who stopped Vernie when he wanted to go up to his apartment?”