by Paul Preuss
“Well, if you…”
“Just for a minute,” she said sharply; his hurt feelings would heal.
She walked quickly down the daylit corridor in which the other murder had taken place, looked at the pressure-lock door at its end, checked the orientation of the buildings outside.
On the way back she made a quick trip up a staircase, walked down another hall, poked her head into an office into which someone was moving new furniture. She ignored the curious stares of those around her. Senses of which they had no imagining were probing and storing in memory everything she laid eyes on.
Barely a minute had passed before she was back under the central dome with Polanyi. “Let’s see the model now.”
“All right, Inspector. If you’ll give me a moment…” Polanyi fiddled with the tripod mount of the holo projector, then adjusted its beams. “Here we are.” He keyed the projector. Daylight vanished, and the people around them with it. Sparta and Polanyi were invisible to each other.
Around them had formed a visually perfect reconstruction of Town Hall shortly after local patrollers had arrived on the scene of the crime. “The night of seventeen Boreal, twenty hours, eighteen minutes—that’s local time in sols,” said Polanyi, from somewhere in darkness, “which would correspond to fifteen September on Earth, about two A.M. UT.”
The display case was open, its crystal hemisphere tilted back to expose in the crossed beams of overhead spotlights the blank cushion where for almost ten years the renowned Martian plaque had rested. Around the case stood several tripods, some with additional lights, others carrying instruments whose snouts peered at the empty cushion.
Nearby, on the floor, was an overturned chair—and a body.
“Dewdney Morland,” said Polanyi.
Sparta walked forward. The whole virtual building responded to her movements; she came closer to the body of the man on the floor until it was at their feet.
“Twenty-two caliber, high-velocity uranium slug entered at the base of the skull, exited upper forehead,” said Polanyi’s disembodied voice. “Clean entry and exit wounds, powder burns indicating shot was fired from less than a meter away. An execution.”
“Why a uranium slug?”
“Couldn’t say, but it’s a common load on Mars. The patrollers claim the extra mass gives stopping power at a distance in low gees. Local folklore.”
“You haven’t found the bullet.”
“No, nor the one that killed Chin. Nor the pistol.”
“The killer must have located them with a counter and picked them up,” Sparta said. Uranium slugs were made from spent reactor fuel; they carried slight residual radioactivity.
She bent her attention to the victim, peering at the holographic body on the floor. Morland was a thirty-five-year-old xenoarchaeologist who had been studying the Martian plaque under high visual magnification and in various other wavelengths. He was overweight, with a scruffy blond beard that climbed his cheeks in patches and hair that hung in tangles past his collar. His clothes were expensive organics, baggy tweeds which had apparently not been recently cleaned. A pouch of tobacco had spilled on the floor by his side, and his right hand gripped a pipe.
“Rotate, please,” she said.
The invisible Polanyi invisibly fingered the holo projector’s controls. The projection turned slowly, the building seeming to sway with it, so that the body could be viewed from every angle. The apparently solid masses of the display pedestal and instruments slid through Sparta without tactile impression.
“Underneath too, please.”
The scene tilted strangely away, and Sparta was looking up from beneath the floor at Morland’s body where it lay face down.
“Not completely relaxed, but no sign of fear,” she said. “The pose suggests he had no suspicion of what was about to happen.”
“What do you make of that?” Polanyi’s voice was distant and hollow.
“I don’t know what to make of it. Maybe he was tense because of what he was seeing through his instruments.” She paused. “How much do we really know about Morland?”
Sparta rarely asked rhetorical questions, but she hoped Polanyi would start thinking in less conventional directions than he’d taken so far.
What Sparta herself knew about Morland, while detailed, lacked focus. The man’s archaeological reputation, a minor one, had been based on only three papers—although he’d published dozens—which attempted to deduce the nature of prehistoric tools from the marks they’d left on the artifacts they’d been used to shape. Morland had written about calendar lines scratched by Cro-Magnons on reindeer bones, about scraped ears of maize found in Anasazi garbage pits, and about masons’ marks on Syrian neolithic shrines. No precise examples of the tools and methods he had posited had been found, but his arguments were persuasive and no one had disputed them. Journeyman scholarship.
Mars had been new territory for him, a leap from the study of primitive technologies on Earth to the study of an alien technology so advanced it was not understood. Although the elemental composition of the Martian plaque was known—titanium, molybdenum, aluminum, carbon, hydrogen, traces of other elements—the techniques by which these had been alloyed into a compound far harder and stronger than diamond were a mystery. Equally mysterious were the methods by which the plaque had been machined with script; this was the question Morland had been pursuing.
It was a question other researchers had studied without success. This, the hardest alloy ever discovered, had been shaped by tools harder still, if by any tools at all. Morland had convinced the Council of Worlds Cultural Commission that he could do no harm to the plaque—no problem with that, who could?—and had persuaded them that he might add some trivial details to humankind’s knowledge of it.
“We’ve recorded his data banks,” said Polanyi.
“Have another look at them,” she said. “And see what else you can dig up. That’s enough of Morland for now.”
The building tilted and skittered under Polanyi’s controlling fingers, until it was upright. Without moving, they were suddenly moving swiftly down the corridor Sparta had investigated earlier.
“The other victim…”
The view halted instantly—had the illusory walls had mass, they would have splintered from inertia—and there was the second body, lying on its back with arms and legs spread wide in a pool of bright blood.
“Dare Chin,” said the lieutenant. “Darius Seneca Chin. One of the best liked of the original settlers of Labyrinth City.”
“The assistant mayor, working late because Morland couldn’t do what he needed to during business hours, and somebody had to keep an eye on him,” Sparta said tonelessly.
“That’s accurate.”
“And where was the mayor that night?”
“The mayor’s been on Earth for two months. Leadership conference, I believe.”
Chin was a tall man, sparely built, with black hair and a handsome face more deeply lined than his thirty-five years would have suggested. His dark brown eyes were open; his expression was one of interested surprise, not fear. He was dressed in the practical, heavy brown canvaslike polyweave fabric favored by Martian old-timers.
“Uranium slug again?” Sparta said.
“Through the heart. This time at a distance. Tossed him eight meters.”
“Not merely an executioner, then. An expert shot.”
“A professional, we think,” said the Lieutenant.
“Maybe. Maybe an enthusiastic amateur, a gun lover, someone with a cause.” The crime had been committed for a cause, that much she knew. “He came down the stairs back there?”
“Yes, those go up to the second floor near his office. He was working on a batch of civil cases. We have his…”
“I’ll get to it later,” she said. “His office is visible from the street?”
“Yes. Old Nutting—that’s the patroller who walked by outside just a couple of minutes before the estimated time of the murders—said the whole building was dark except
for Morland’s work lights under the dome and Chin’s office lights on the second floor. That and a few corridor lights. Anyway, she could see them both clearly, alive and well. Lydia Zeromski was with Chin. They were arguing.”
“They didn’t care who saw them?”
He smiled. “There’s a saying here, Inspector: people who live in glass houses don’t give a damn about stones. About privacy, that is.”
“Never?” She was skeptical.
“They have window shades when they want them.”
Sparta knew from the reports that the patroller, a veteran near retirement, had sworn she’d seen no one else in the building except those three. From seeing the real building and its nighttime holo reconstruction, Sparta knew the patroller could easily have been wrong—someone could have been hiding motionless in the shadows; the distortion of the glass was sufficient to disguise even a human shape.
“I’d like to speak to her this afternoon.”
“The patrol office is in the executive building. You can set up a meeting on the way back to my office.”
Sparta would go through the motions, but she knew what she would learn. For one thing, Nutting’s rounds were as regular as clockwork, against all accepted security practice—Nutting had fallen into laziness and a lifetime’s habit, and her movements about the neighborhood had no doubt been timed by the killer in advance.
It was easy to sympathize with the old woman. Compared to a night on Mars, Antarctica is Tahiti, and normal people stayed inside if they could. Sparta could understand why the patroller—old enough to feel the cold in her bones even through her heated suit—would delay leaving the warmth of the office, would put off sealing her pressure suit to walk the cold, sandy streets of the town until the last minute. The killer had probably been waiting in one of the pressurized tubes that connected with the Town Hall until she passed.
Three minutes after the patroller passed the lighted building, alarms went off in the patrol office—hardly a hundred meters from the scene of the crime. The first alarm sounded when the Martian plaque was moved. Most of the other alarms—sniffers, movement detectors, pressure detectors in the floor, and so forth—were already disarmed in deference to Morland’s work, but additional alarms went off when the outer door of the airlock at the main entrance of the building was opened before the inner door had closed, permitting a temporary pressure drop inside.
So the robber had been wearing a pressure suit too; he or she had fled the scene not through the warm corridors but through the freezing streets.
“Let’s look at the airlock.”
“Not much to see, Inspector.” Polanyi manipulated the holo controls and carried them spastically to the big bronze-rimmed doors of the main airlock—and then through the doors to the outside.
In the sand outside the airlock there were only smooth windblown rills and a few vague depressions, nothing suggesting a clear footprint. A few meters away, the entire scene faded into a black void at the edge of the holo.
“Seems there was a wind blowing.”
“A light breeze by local standards.”
Sparta peered at the holographically frozen ridges in the fine sand. Her visual capacities far exceeded the resolution of the holo recorder, so her eyes were almost useless here—as were her nose and tongue, with their capabilities for chemical analysis. The crime was two weeks past. Perhaps if she had been on the real scene, in real time… “You’re right, Lieutenant. Not much to see.”
“This is pretty much the extent of our reconstruction. We figured the killer went outside because the way back through the corridors was blocked by the patrollers responding to the first alarm. Or maybe there was an accomplice outside.”
“Maybe,” said Sparta. Without evidence, she did not make hypotheses.
“The local patrollers did a good job,” said Polanyi, loyal to the locals he had to live with. “They responded in minutes. What you’ve seen is what they found. No murder weapon. No witnesses. No unusual prints or other physical evidence.”
“Thanks, you can turn it off.”
He did so. Instantly they were standing in the bright and busy center of Town Hall.
Ten minutes later, they were back in Polanyi’s cramped and overlit office. “Now shall I run down for you the likely ones? The three with opportunity?”
“Please.” Let him do his job; she would draw her conclusions later.
She already knew the Martian plaque had been taken that particular night, and not, for example, the night before or the night after, because the robbery had been timed to coincide with the destruction of the Culture X records on Venus and elsewhere throughout the inhabited solar system. Simultaneously the prophetae had unleashed their secret death squads in a mass attack—attempting to murder everyone who might remember the texts well enough to reconstruct them. A dozen scholars had died on Earth. Here on Mars, Dewdney Morland was the intended victim, Dare Chin only an innocent bystander.
One man, the most important of all, had been missed in this assault against the crown jewels of xenoarchaeology. Aboard Port Hesperus, Professor J. Q. R. Forster had barely survived the bombing attack on his life and was now protected by heavy Space Board security.
Polanyi was talking. Sparta reminded herself to listen.
“…permanent population of almost ten thousand,” he was saying. “At any given time there could be at most a couple of thousand tourists on the planet. We were able to account for all 438 of the registered guests at the Mars Interplanetary Hotel and the six other licensed accommodations in Labyrinth City that night. If there were other strangers in town nobody saw them, and in a town this small that’s a good trick. So we concentrated on the locals.”
On the desktop videoplate a young woman’s face appeared. Bold eyes, wide mouth, with blond hair tied at the nape. Despite the apparent delicacy of bone that characterized a long-term resident of the Martian surface, the woman looked competent and tough.
“This is Lydia Zeromski,” the lieutenant said. “A truck driver who works the pipeline run. She was Darius Chin’s girlfriend—one of them, anyway—the one seen in his office a few minutes before the murders. Nobody saw her leave.”
“Her?” Sparta was skeptical. “She would have had to go downstairs, shoot Morland, swipe the plaque, and then turn and shoot Chin when he came to investigate.”
“Not impossible.”
“If she was after the plaque, why make a fuss first?”
“Well, if she wasn’t the killer, she could have been an accomplice,” Polanyi said stiffly.
“Lieutenant, she doesn’t have a record.”
“Beaned a guy with a pipe in a bar once. He didn’t press charges.”
“Guns?”
“Well … none registered.”
“Other relationships?”
“None known.”
Sparta grunted. “Next.”
“This man.”
Zeromski was replaced on the screen by a smooth-faced man in his late thirties. His blond hair was fine and pale, almost colorless, and clipped so close to his head that his pink scalp shone through. She recognized him without trouble.
“Wolfy Prott—Wolfgang Prott, that is—the manager of the Mars Interplanetary Hotel. It’s an open secret that the hotel has been the scene of illegal trading in Martian ‘souvenirs’—mineral samples, fossils, even artifacts. Prott was assigned to Mars a year ago by the Interplanetary chain.”
“Zurich based…”
“Right. Prott’s been working for them about ten years—Athens, Kuwait, Cayley on the moon—first in their PR department, then in sales, then as assistant manager. This is his first stint as manager. He’s got a rep as an off-hours pickup artist.”
“His pattern?”
“Tourist ladies in the wine shops, rarely on his own premises—and he’s mostly stayed away from local women. Maybe he’s afraid of the local men.”
“And he can’t account for his whereabouts that night.”
“Claims he was asleep in his suite in th
e hotel. But he was seen leaving the lobby a few minutes before the murders, wearing a pressure suit. An hour after the murders, he was having a nightcap with his own barkeeper.”
“That alibi’s so weak it’s ridiculous.”
“He was up to something … whatever it was.”
“Not murder.”
“Oh, but one more thing,” Polanyi couldn’t disguise a touch of self-satisfaction. “Wolfy’s known to be an expert shot with a target pistol. There’s a range in the lower level of the hotel, and he’s his own best customer.”
“Any of his pistols missing?”
“Well, we’re not sure how many he…”
“Fine,” she said coolly. “Who else have you got?”
This was the face she had hoped not to see, a dark and handsome face, elongated and delicate, a young man’s face with deep brown eyes, crowned with black and curling hair. His lips were parted in a smile that revealed straight white teeth. He was wearing a standard pressure suit.
Alas, Polanyi had not eliminated him from the list. “Dr. Khalid Sayeed, Council of Worlds planetologist. Less than an hour before the murders, Sayeed and Morland were shouting at each other in the bar of the Interplanetary…”
“Khal… Dr. Sayeed was shouting?”
“A vigorous disagreement, anyway. Something about the terraforming project. Morland went straight from the hotel to Town Hall. Sayeed claims he went to his apartment—it’s near the shuttleport—but we can’t corroborate that.”
Sparta studied Khalid’s picture intently. He was a year younger than she was, Blake’s age, and she hadn’t seen him since she was sixteen years old; he’d aged well, grown into a poised and confident adult.
Like Sparta and Blake, Khalid was a member of the original SPARTA, the SPecified Aptitude Resources and Training Assessment project, founded by Sparta’s parents in an attempt to demonstrate that the multiple intelligences inherent in every child could be enhanced to levels the world regarded as genius. Khalid was one of SPARTA’s great successes, intelligent and sophisticated, multiply talented, dedicating his career to the improvement of human welfare.