And Now the News

by Theodore Sturgeon

  She laughed. “You can’t see that?”

  He shook his head.

  She leaned forward, capturing him with her eyes and her urgency. “You are home, where you belong, in space, with all of safe immensity around you, and it’s the way you live, and work, and sleep … and suddenly, right there, there’s a planet under you!”

  It hit him so suddenly, he gasped and actually strained upward to get away from the floor, the great pressing obtrusive bulk of Earth. “You’re not falling,” she whispered into the heart of his terror. “It’s trying to fall on you!”

  He closed his eyes and clutched at the table and forced himself to reorient. Slowly, then, he looked at her and managed to grin. “You’ve got yourself a boy,” he said, “Let’s get out of here, Captain.”

  My dear Chris and Gerda: I do declare I have never had my life turned so upsy turvy all at once in my life. What with you getting married so quick like that and then Mr. Magruder finding you that wonderful job but I still dont know what’s so wonderful about New Zealand of all places. Still if your happy.

  Then on top of that Billy running out to marry Tess Milburn like that just because you two did it I don’t understand, I always thought Billy had his own ideas and couldn’t be led, its as if somebody just pushed a button and bang he did it, come to think of it that’s the way he decided to go after the Academy thing and he says it was you started him on this soap carving even. What with keeping the marriage secret until he graduates and trying to find a new bar of soap in the house I do declare I don’t know where I am.

  Speaking of Mr. Magruder which I was, he’s no longer with me, just paid up his month and left without a howdy do. I hear he’s with Mrs. Burnett over to Cecil Street, all she has is that little house and that hopeless son who designs cameras and whatnot and hides in his room all the time, which is pretty insulting after all I did for him eight solid years.

  Well my dears take care of yourselves and send pictures of you and your pet sheep or goats or whatever it is you crazy kids are into.

  Much love,

  Mom.

  Subscript by Etheric Radio

  Operator Grout X 3115

  CAPTAIN GERDA STEIN

  2ND CHRISTOPHER STEIN

  YOUR THIRD PREPARED LETTER DISPATCHED TO MIZ BINNS AS PER INSTRUCTIONS ALSO SHEEP FARM PHOTOS SUPPLIED. MAGRUDER SENDS REGARDS AND SAYS HE HAS A LIVE ONE IN THE BURNETT KID. PASS THE WORD. SEE YOU IN TEN YEARS OR SO.

  GROUT

  AUCKLAND NEW ZEALAND

  TERRA (SOL 3)

  TERC 348

  QUAD 196887

  OCT 384

  (Untranslatable)

  13996462597

  Dead Dames Don’t Dial

  IT WOUND UP WITH A MURDER, with someone being careless with a knife, and with a wonderful brawl. But it began very quietly, like:

  “Get over to Maggie Athenson’s,” said Brophy.

  Howell’s eyes opened slowly. “Why?” he yawned. “Do you mean to say she’s demanding police protection again?”

  “She is,” grunted the detective lieutenant. “Get your shoes on. Or do you plan to sneak up on somebody?”

  “I thought the chief said the Athenson babe had sent out her last false alarm?”

  “Maybe she has. She’s pulled three blanks so far, and cost the city a pile of dough. This time she gets nothing whether she likes it or not.”

  “I thought you just told me to go over there,” said Howell. He was small, thin, slow. That is, he seemed slow. There were times—but this wasn’t one of them.

  “I did, and that’s what I mean by nothing.”

  Howell reached for his other shoe. “Thanks.”

  “We told her no more municipal bodyguards,” Brophy expanded. “We’ll send a man anyway. But she won’t know it. We’ll send a man just in case she really has something to be scared of. Just because we got a homicide law.”

  “Yeah, but why me?”

  “It seems that Sister Maggie has been having business dealings with a character named Cassidy.”

  “Careful Cassidy?” Howell’s pale blue eyes popped.

  Brophy nodded.

  “Well,” said Howell. “My boy Cassidy. You’re a pal, Brophy. A nice false alarm to trip me into a false arrest. Cassidy trapped an assistant D.A. into false arrest one time—remember? And he’s back chasing ambulances. What do you want me to do—drag Cassidy in here yelling his head off and then find myself changing tires on cruise cars? Who hates me up front, anyway?”

  Brophy laughed. “Get on it, Howell. You know Cassidy and you know how he operates. You’ve never pinned anything on him. But twice already you’ve stopped him before he could start. Maybe this time you can put him away. It’s worth the effort.”

  “Careful Cassidy,” growled Howell. “The guy with fifty-two aces up his sleeve and a clean, clean nose. All right, Brophy. What’s the pitch?”

  Brophy glanced at the desk. “You know where Maggie lives. That big apartment hotel, the—uh—Cheshire. There’s a drugstore across the street, and you can see the entrance easily from there. The harness bull’s watching the side and the back of the Cheshire. All you have to do is see if anyone suspicious goes in or comes out.”

  “An assignment,” scowled Howell. “Why couldn’t it be a bar? Lend me a cigarette.”

  With a slightly larger-than-life-size expression of patience, Brophy passed him a cigarette. “Why do I put up with you, Howell?”

  Howell lounged out the door. “Because,” he said over his shoulder, “I’m the best man you’ve got.”

  “That,” said Brophy to the opposite wall, after the small man was gone, “is the truth.”

  It was a fairly large drugstore, with entrances on two streets. The open bronze gateways of the apartment hotel across the street were flooded with light and easy to watch from a small display window and from any of the long line of telephone booths.

  Howell stopped outside, and the street light threw his shadow—shaped like a question mark—on the corner of the building. An unkind lieutenant once said that Howell’s stance was a picture of his state of mind.

  There was no one on the street, and no one in the entrance of the apartment hotel. Howell yawned and strolled into the store, and down toward the booths. A clerk kept pace with him on the other side of the counter.

  Howell wondered how a man could actually bustle at 1.3 miles per hour. When they reached the tobacco section the clerk asked if he could help him, sir?

  “Yes,” said Howell. “Lend me a match.”

  The match was delivered, while the clerk suspended himself in a sort of racing crouch, awaiting further orders. “Anything else, sir?”

  Howell eyed him dourly. “Have you got anything that’ll make a fellow relax?”

  “Oh, yes, sir!” said the clerk eagerly, springing toward the pharmaceutical department.

  “Take some,” said Howell.

  He ambled back to the phones. One booth was occupied. Howell stopped short—a small change of pace indeed for him—when he saw who was in it. The man came out as Howell watched. He was a big man, wide-faced, smooth; pressed and pleated and expansive. He wore tan, all tan—light tan, dark tan.

  “Very harmonious,” said Howell. “Whatcha doing, Mr. Cassidy—making a date?”

  “Howell,” said the other, without enthusiasm, “what brings you out with your shoes on? Been to a formal?”

  “To tell you the truth,” said Howell, “I was trying to make up my mind over a smorgasbord tray and blew a fuse, so I came here to get something for my head. I was wondering, to repeat myself, whether you were making a date just now.”

  “Since you ask me,” said Cassidy, “I was trying to. The line’s busy.”

  “Since I asked you, you won’t try to make the date. Right?”

  “Right,” said Careful Cassidy.

  “Good,” said Howell, and yawned again. “Then I can go home.”

  “Beneath your tattered, patched pair of heads,” said Cassidy, “beats a noble brain. How mu
ch do you know about how much, Howell? I mean by that, just where the hell is any of my business your business?”

  “What do I know? Let’s see,” said Howell. “You are very careful about the way you order your food, dress yourself, talk, and work your lousy swindles. You are carrying a gun under your left armpit, which means that you are also carrying a permit for it, which means that I would make a serious mistake if I searched you. You are in this neighborhood because Maggie Athenson, who is loaded with loot, lives in that minaret over the way.”

  “Good old Maggie,” said Cassidy.

  “You were about to commit—ah—no mistakes,” continued Howell. “Particularly the mistake of hiring anyone to do important business for you. Since Maggie Athenson changed her insurance of a hundred-odd G’s in favor of her estate instead of a beneficiary, and since a business deal with you is backed up by a codicil in her will—”

  Now, Howell had not known this at all, but he knew it now—not from any expression on Careful Cassidy’s broad bland face, but by its utter absence. It was a long audacious shot in the dark, but he knew his man, and he knew that Maggie Athenson was a natural for just that kind of a fall.

  Still looking at the middle distance over Cassidy’s wide tailored shoulder, he continued, “And since said deal has mysteriously fallen apart we would be very interested if Maggie Athenson suddenly dropped dead of, say, Twonk’s disease.”

  “What’s Twonk’s disease?”

  “A failing of the armpits,” said Howell. “I only know two more things. If you had been able to keep that date tonight—which you obviously won’t—you would have a reservation on something which travels high and fast, probably south. Now you’re going to have to cancel it.”

  “What’s the other thing?”

  “My feet hurt.”

  Cassidy shook his head admiringly. “You know a great deal for a man who couldn’t possibly have any evidence of any kind of any of the things you suggest—except maybe your feet hurting.”

  “I don’t need evidence to know these things,” Howell pointed out. “It’s a feeling I have—feet and all. Oh sure, I’d need evidence if I was going to prove anything. But since nothing is going to happen now, nothing needs proving. So let’s all go home and go to bed.”

  “A splendid idea. Goodnight to you, Howell.”

  “After,” finished Howell, “I have made a phone call.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yup. The same one you were making.”

  “Howell: you’re not detaining me?” asked Cassidy hopefully.

  “I am not. I remember what happened to that assistant D.A. who played like that. I’m merely asking you to stand by while I have a word with our apprehensive friend Maggie Athenson. We’ll both sleep better if we know she’s well and happy.”

  “Good,” said Cassidy. “It hurts me to have you suspicious.”

  “I don’t doubt it,” Howell said. “Lend me a dime.”

  Cassidy thumbed a dime out of his tan topcoat. Howell stepped into the end booth, brushing past Cassidy as he did so. Cassidy was packing a gun, all right.

  Howell dialed Maggie Athenson’s number. There was a pause, and then the phone burped a busy signal at him.

  “Busy,” Howell called.

  “Still?” asked Cassidy. “Good old Maggie. Chatty as ever. She’s probably asking for a boy in blue to camp outside her door.”

  “She’s already done that.” Howell reinserted the dime. This time he got a ringing signal.

  And got it. And got it.

  “Now she doesn’t answer,” said Howell, coming out of the booth.

  “Maybe she’s gone to bed.”

  “Uh-uh. The phone was busy fifteen seconds before I rang. No one’s going to move from his phone into his bed in fifteen seconds.”

  He stood in thought for a moment, his weak-looking eyes on Cassidy’s pink face. There was nothing there.

  “Look!” Cassidy pointed through the display window.

  Howell whirled. A man dived out of the lighted doorway opposite, skidded, pounded up the pavement to a yellow convertible which, in seconds, came to life. It roared and then spun into the street, tail down, tires burning. It breezed through a red light at the first intersection, turned right and disappeared.

  Cassidy turned from the sight and began to speak, but the detective was gone. Cassidy turned, swung back, and then saw Howell outside in the middle of the street, shading his eyes against the streetlight, as he peered after the convertible. He came back into the drugstore.

  “Who was it?” asked Cassidy.

  “Later,” grunted Howell, and piled into a booth. He left the door open, dialed. “Brophy,” he said. Then, “Brophy? Trace a yellow Caddy convertible, Illinois license YD sixty-ninety-seven, heading north from here. What for? Passing a red light, of course. I’ll proffer the charge. Hold him until I can get there to do it. What? Oh—that. I’m on it now. All right.”

  “I didn’t know you could move that fast,” said Cassidy.

  “Speed is my secret weapon,” said Howell. “I smell homicide. Let’s go see Maggie, who won’t answer her phone so suddenly.”

  “Must I? I have things to do.”

  “No, you must not. But come on. This can’t have anything to do with you.”

  “Why, sure.” Howell thought he was going to smile, but he did not.

  They crossed the street and entered the apartment hotel. A man with beetling brows and a heavy jaw stood behind the desk. Howell went to him. The man raised his eyes with reluctance from the book he was reading, and moaned with a rising inflection, a sound which probably meant, “Yes?”

  “Did you see someone run out of here a minute ago?”

  The man moaned with a falling inflection. Howell ignored these tonal subtleties and took the accompanying nod for an answer.

  “Who was it?”

  “A man.”

  Howell opened and closed his mouth, and behind him Cassidy chuckled. Howell showed his badge. “Where was he going?”

  “Out,” said the man.

  “Can’t get a word in edgewise here,” said Howell to Cassidy. To the clerk, “Do you know the guy?”

  The man shook his head and went back to his book. Howell went on tiptoe, which made him wince, and peered over the counter at the book. It was Little Women by Louisa May Alcott.

  “Come on, Cassidy,” he said disgustedly.

  They went to the automatic elevator, and Howell pushed the button marked 12.

  “Fourteenth,” said Cassidy.

  “Thanks,” said Howell, pushing the ‘stop’ button and then 14.

  “Thanks for what?”

  “I wondered if you knew just where Maggie’s apartment was but I didn’t want to ask you.”

  “You’re real downy,” said Cassidy with admiration. “But you could have asked me. I know old Maggie well. And—I have nothing to hide.”

  “Yes,” said Howell, which might have meant anything.

  The elevator stopped. Howell let Cassidy lead the way down the hall to an apartment door. He checked Cassidy’s hand as it approached the bell-push and, extracting his fountain pen, speared the button with the butt end of it.

  “I like your gloves,” he said. “Chamois. Same stuff they use to take fingermarks off brasswork.”

  Cassidy chuckled again.

  There was no answer. Howell rang again, and again. He turned suddenly to face Cassidy, but the big man’s face was blank and untroubled. Howell squinted at the lock, and took out a bunch of keys, from which he selected three.

  “This won’t work,” he said. “It never does.” He tried the first. It didn’t. “I’d hate to pull that lacework bulldog downstairs away from his reading. He chatters so.” He tried the second key. The door opened.

  There was a low, wide living room and a bedroom to the left. In the corner of the living room was a desk. On it were a cradled telephone, a great deal of fresh blood, and what appeared to be a tumble of sticky, red-brown hair.

  Howell’s breath his
sed out. Cassidy said, “Poor old Maggie.”

  Maggie was not old. However, she would certainly get no older than she was now. She was slumped in the chair, her head on the desk. She had been a handsome woman in her late thirties. Looking down on what had happened to her head, Howell reflected grimly that no one could say she didn’t have brains.

  “Cassidy?”

  “Mm?”

  “Lend me your handkerchief.”

  Cassidy raised his eyebrows but handed over the handkerchief. Howell took it in one hand and his own in the other, and gently lifted the phone off its cradle. With his pen he dialed Brophy.

  Holding the phone by its two ends, he spoke into it.

  “Maggie was right after all. Yeah. Thirty-eight or larger. Yeah. Back of the neck. Not a chance. Him? He has an alibi. Me. Hold him? I can’t hold him. Yeah—I’ll stick around until you get here with the squad. Right.” He hung up.

  Cassidy said, “Right under your nose. Hell, Howell, that’s a shame.”

  Howell squinted vaguely at him. “I know. Your little heart bleeds for me. You know what I think you are? I think you’re a material witness.”

  “No, you don’t. Look it up in your book. The co-discoverer of the body is not a material witness when the discoverer is a police officer.”

  Howell sighed. “Lend me a cigarette.”

  Smiling slightly, Cassidy took out a new deck of smokes. On his key ring was a small knife. He slid the blade out and meticulously slit the bottom end of the cigarette package, knocked it against the back of his hand, and passed it to Howell. The detective looked at it.

  “So careful,” Howell said. He took a cigarette.

  “Well,” said Cassidy, “I’ll be running along. Tough luck, Howell,” he added, nodding toward what was left of Maggie Athenson.

  Howell went to the door with him, seeing to it that Cassidy did not touch the knob. “Don’t leave town, Cassidy,” he said.

  Cassidy did smile, this time. He said nothing, and left. Howell opened and closed his hands, looked at them, sighed, and sat down to wait for the squad. And to think.

  Two hours later they were back at headquarters. Howell’s stocking feet were on the windowsill. Brophy strode up and down the room, mauling the case report by swatting it angrily against the desk every time he passed it.