The Counterfeit Heinlein

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The Counterfeit Heinlein Page 18

by Laurence M. Janifer


  That’s the thing that strikes you first: what there is, is a platform. There are no rooms, no walls, no ceiling, no closed spaces at all. Closed spaces can be arranged at will—the portable-wall shop I’d been in, which seemed the Hell of a long while into the past, probably has more Berigot customers than human ones—but they’re for special occasions of one sort or another. The Berigot don’t mind weather, in virtually any quantities, and live their lives out of doors.

  Objects that weather might damage—and there are fewer of these than you might think; hammocks, tables, desks, chairs (for human visitors) and the like are weather-proofed—used to be guarded by removable canopies, anything from cloth to metal. Now, especially for the more prosperous Berigot (like B’russ’r), the job is done by transparent fields, and a Beri apparently feels more comfortable with everything open and in sight. Theft is not a problem—as the Master had said, the Berigot have a different list of sins.

  But canopies are used ceremonially. too. B’russ’r had provided cloth for each of us, on frameworks over three light, but surprisingly comfortable, chairs. Sitting under a brightly colored canopy—these were printed with flower and leaf patterns, bright yellows and blues I took to be Denderus foliage—in the open air gives you an odd feeling that you’ve suddenly become Royalty, and are about to agree to sign the Magna Carton, or whatever it was. Not at all unpleasant, and luckily it was a fine afternoon.

  We were seated in a circle, near one corner of the platform. B’russ’r’s sleeping hammock was in another corner, with a small table near it supplied with lights and actual, physical books. His desk, surrounded by rickety-looking but (I’m sure) perfectly solid shelves holding more books, tapes, spools and the like, was in another, and what passes among Berigot for a washroom was established in the fourth. Kitchen arrangements were between hammock and desk.

  There was, of course, no stove. Berigot use fire in preparing food about as often as I use a duck press; what they use with constancy is, in fact, a set of what could pass for duck presses. They don’t cook their food, or even heat it, more than once a year or so; they press it flat, into a series of mashes, and though they do eat the mashes, they get a great deal of their nourishment from the expressed juices. The kitchen was a large table, with runnels along two sides, many squeeze-bottles, some plates and eating tackle, storage cabinets for food and spices, and an array of presses.

  Next to my chair was a tiny table with an ashtray on it. I took the hint, lit up, and offered a cigarette to B’russ’r. He accepted it gracefully, thanked me, and began to chomp away.

  “Before we begin,” the Master said, “it seems best to refer back to a small difficulty I am sure Gerald has been having.”

  Hell of an opening. I said: “What difficulty?” and he said:

  “Dr. Rouse is not, of course, a marksman. You will have realized this, I hope; you have become neglectful, but surely not neglectful enough to miss such bodily signs as a marksman would provide in any interview.”

  I took a flier, if the term is allowable on a Berigot platform. “Maybe he didn’t fire the shots,” I said.

  “Economy, Gerald,” the Master rasped at me. “We have posited a small group—in all probability three: a ringleader, an isotope expert, and a third party—possibly for the theft itself, as we now begin to assume that the isotope expert was in fact the person who wrote the actual manuscript.”

  “If he did that,” Robbin said, “he must be pretty good as a writer. I mean, even the little bit I heard sounded exciting, and the whole thing sounded like Heinlein to a lot of people who know a lot about sf, I mean.”

  “It must be a talent of his,” the Master said. “He might have used it better.”

  “To be sure,” B’russ’r said. “Counterfeiting a twentieth-century work is a disturbing act; it tampers with the past of your race.”

  “So it does,” the Master said. “And further tampering was planned; we can be deductively sure of that. But it will now not take place; the plan has been intermitted.”

  “About the marksmanship,” I said. “I did see it, thanks—but perhaps we’re wrong, and he is that good.”

  The Master smiled at me. “I remember saying that there was another possibility as regards the shootings,” he said. “It is less likely to occur to any of us; we assume purpose in the shootings, because we assume some feeling for the value of life in any person. But let us suppose he simply—did not care one way or the other. Would have been as willing to kill as to miss or maim—and simply accepted the results.”

  “So I was just lucky?” I said. “Twice?”

  “Luckier than you have seen,” he said. “You were someone he meant to kill. You might prove dangerous; Ping Boom had undoubtedly spoken of you somewhere, and praised your abilities—no surprise, as he had determined to hire you. The killer tried twice—and after that, with Ramsay Leake dead and a police investigation as well as your own in progress, he did not dare further attempts. He must have needed badly to silence Mr. Leake; once that was done he could only hope you would not succeed. He had missed twice with you, and could not chance a third attempt.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “And perhaps Mr. Leake would have been lucky as well, had he not been at the top of his tower,” the Master said. “It is easy to kill by accident; it is still easier to miss. You were missed twice, though narrowly.”

  “Damn narrowly,” I said.

  “Mr. Leake may not have been hit in a vital spot,” he said. “The shot did hit him, and he staggered and went over to the ground. It does not matter; vital spot or no, it was murder.”

  “And the Berigot—”

  “Were hit where any shooter could hit them, in the wide wingspan,” he said.

  “So Rouse just potted away blindly?” I said.

  “He wanted to rid the Twentieth wing of three Berigot he felt would be overly careful, or overly suspicious, when a new manuscript came into the wing. He knew them, of course, as he would know any worker in the Twentieth wing, and made his judgments. He cleared the ground; two of them changed assignments, and the third, the youngest and, therefore, least influential of the group, he felt might be left with minimal danger to the plan.”

  “A horrible plan,” B’russ’r said.

  “Just so,” the Master said. “Lives were damaged. One was taken. And all for eventual monetary profit.”

  “Money is an awful thing,” Robbin said, and the Master turned to her with a gentle smile.

  “No, dear girl, money is not terrible. Money is not the root of all evil, and no one but a fool ever said that it was.” He paused, and B’russ’r nodded a little sidewise at him. Taking no chances.

  The Master shrugged politely, and B’russ’r said: “What your Bible says, in good translation—indeed, in any translation I have encountered—is: The love of money is the root of all evil.”

  “True,” the Master said. “Money is useful. It is an invention of great value. It can express friendship, or love, or simple agreement, or a hundred other things. It can serve as a transfer medium for materials of all kinds. It is not evil. But the love of it—the feeling that it has value of itself, and should be piled up, and admired, and revered—that is an evil, and a great one.”

  “Money is to buy things with,” Robbin said, “if you have to. There are even other ways to get things, a lot of the time—people give them to you because they like you, or because they want to, a lot of reasons. Maybe it’s better when you don’t need the money part of things, and if you do you just need it, that’s all, you don’t have to go and do bad things for it.”

  “Heinlein himself said, over and over,” B’russ’r said, “that money problems never exist for a man unafraid of them. There is always an honest way to gain it, he said, if necessary by digging waste pits.”

  Robbin nodded. “I’d hate that,” she said. “But I could do it, if I had to. Maybe in a little while when I’m better, and if I have to, I mean.”

  I broke in. “Has Gross reported in yet?”
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  “Not to me,” B’russ’r said, and the Master shook his head.

  “He would have no reason to call me in preference to one of you,” he said.

  “Well, that’ll come,” I said. “About connections, now—”

  “It can be established that Dr. Rouse and Dr. Washington had an acquaintance, and a friendly one, six years ago,” the Master said.

  “Well, that’s a first step.”

  “It can also be established,” B’russ’r said, “as far as a negative can be established, that the acquaintanceship—the friendship—stopped very suddenly just over five years ago, and has not been resumed.”

  “A careful fellow,” I said. “Just a hair too careful—that cutoff is a red flag.”

  “Not the sort of thing to take to a jury,” the Master said, “but to the knowledgeable eye, certainly indicative.”

  “It is a little more indicative than you may assume,” B’russ’r told me—carefully not saying anything about the Master’s assumptions. Well, he was learning; he’d even asked for permission first, before providing that quote from the Bible. “There exist occasions at which Dr. Rouse’s attendance was quite usual, when he was on-planet. Even rigidly fixed; he has been a creature of habit, as it is said—odd to think of habit as having offspring or creations.”

  “And?”

  “And it can be shown that, if such occasions had as an attendee Chandes Washington, during the past five years Dr. Rouse did not attend.”

  A little too careful, right. And: “You’ve done the Hell of a lot of work, awfully damn fast, to come up with that,” I said.

  “It required doing,” B’russ’r said. Not a preen—Berigot don’t preen. A statement of fact.

  Or—just maybe—the beginnings of a preen. Berigot were learning, bit by bit, that there were such things as personal emotions.

  What they’d be like in, say, fifty years I had no idea. But it did look to be an interesting fifty years to be around the race.

  “Well, it certainly got done,” I said. “Damn it, I heard Chandes Washington talking about an isotope search. It was perfectly obvious, and I passed it up.”

  “Such small slips occur,” B’russ’r said gently. “You can scarcely be said to be at fault.”

  “The truth is,” I went on, nodding my thanks at the Beri, “everything about this entire exercise has been obvious.”

  “I would scarcely say—” B’russ’r began.

  “Rouse was obvious,” I said. “Most important figure at the dig. A man with a fantastically sizable load of self-importance. Just the type you’d expect to try passing off a counterfeit for a job lot of other people—who, of course couldn’t be expected to know better, they weren’t Gro Rouse.”

  “Character alone—” B’russ’r said.

  “And a perfect memory for the dig,” I said.

  B’russ’r nodded. “Indeed.”

  “I kept being told that a Misfit couldn’t have done the job—too much respect for Heinlein—and nobody else could have—not enough background. The answer was obvious: the man without background—Rouse—used a Misfit who had it, Chandes Washington. Who had the technical know-how, too. As for having too much respect—as you were pointing out, Master,” I said, “there are people, sad though the fact is, who have much more respect for money than they do for any human being, living or dead.”

  “Quite so,” Master Higsbee said. “It was, of course, his familiarity with Heinlein that made the choice of subject for the forgery simple.”

  “Familiarity, and contempt,” I said. “And the sailplaning was obvious. Damn it, what good is a field that only looks to a height of six feet? Given a nice dark night—which it was, remember, dead of night at that—a bunch of dark sailplane wings, and dark clothing—”

  “They had to have the hammock dyed black,” Robbin said dreamily. “Hammocks don’t come in black. There’s a little shop downtown somewhere, and they had it done there.”

  I blinked. The Master and B’russ’r nodded. All three of us had made the necessary mental note: a dye shop or tailor shop of some sort, downtown. It would not be an impossible job to check that out; a hammock dyed black—a Berigot hammock, I assumed, available anywhere, or any hammock large and strong enough—wouldn’t be a job any shop would have been asked to take on every day. The order would turn up in somebody’s memory, and on somebody’s records.

  Silly of them not to do their own dyeing, but Rouse et Cie probably felt it was too small a risk to bother about.

  “Given all that, the sailplaning was perfectly obvious,” I said. “It just took us a while to see it. And the motive for the whole thing—for everything from the shootings five years ago, through the forgery and theft, to Ramsay Leake the other day—was just as obvious, once you got a straight look at it.”

  “One thing,” the Master said, “was, and remains, less than obvious. Somehow, the thieves passed through that window, without breaking it and without leaving traces. I would have said that, for glassex, that is not a possible occurrence.”

  I very carefully did not grin. I had set up the conversation hoping that the Master would say something just like that, and by God he had said it.

  “That,” I said, “is the most obvious part of it all. It’s been staring us in the face right from the start. From the first minute I stepped into the Special Exhibits room.”

  B’russ’r looked politely interested, which is the way a Beri looks when facts he’s involved with are about to be supplied.

  The Master looked surprised. I had not seen that expression on his square and determined face in something over sixty-one months, and it was worth waiting for.

  “Really?” he said, after the briefest of pauses. It had come to him that I’d led him right into this, and he was deciding whether or not to resent it. “From the very first moment?”

  “It was the first thing I noticed,” I said. “The glass.” He opened his mouth, shut it again, sighed briefly, and nodded. B’russ’r said:

  “The glass?”

  Robbin was looking at me, fascinated. It was the Hell of a story.

  “It was glass,” I said. “Not glassex. No way to get through glassex—but the whole damn wing is as Twentieth as possible. Old-style locks on the windows. Glass in the windows and on the cases. I saw it. I noticed it—my God, you couldn’t help but notice it.”

  There was a little silence.

  “I have seen those windows myself, and several times,” B’russ’r said. “Glass. I should have made the connection. I did not.” He rustled his wings, sadly. “Now, unbreakable glassex—”

  “Can’t just be broken—taped first, to avoid bits falling on the floor or down to the ground—and a new pane puttied in. But glass can—if you bring the putty and the pane with you.”

  “In the hammock,” Robbin said breathlessly.

  “In the nice dyed hammock we’ll be able to trace,” I told her.

  The Master frowned. “The putty would be new,” he said. “Dry by the time anyone saw it, of course, but new. An examination would show that. And nobody would have checked putty on the outside of the damn window, after all—which is where it had to be, or they couldn’t have gotten out of the room. They had to put the new glass in from the damn perch, from the outside.”

  “Like all glassex windows,” B’russ’r said. “The locks weren’t touched: the pane was most carefully shattered, and then replaced, impossible with glassex.”

  “And the case—because they could only carry the one pane—”

  “Glass being heavier than glassex,” the Master put in.

  “—showed signs of tampering,” I said. “Because there, they did have to get through the locks.”

  “Perfectly clear,” B’russ’r said.

  “Obvious, in fact,” I said. “And the fact that the damn window wasn’t glassex was—too damn obvious to see.”

  CHAPTER FORTY

  THE THIRD MEMBER of the party, by God, also turned out to be someone I’d heard of, though not, for
a change, someone I’d met. Rouse had managed to talk a Patrol officer in the damn library into helping out with the theft—money, what looked like a very safe way of doing the job, and of course Rouse’s influence with the library, to help just a bit in the future career of Ptl. Harra Gleme.

  I’d run across the name, I knew, somewhere before—but it took me eight full minutes to remember where. She’d been one of the officers who had notified Geraint Beauthis that his damn catapult was not allowed in the library. She’d also been the young female officer Chandes Washington had said he remembered, vaguely—as being attached to the Twentieth-century wing. He remembered her, all right—he’d robbed the wing with her—and when she’d turned up to notify Geraint Beauthis, he’d mentioned her to me distantly, without even a name. Why not? There was no connection.

  It was almost too neat to be believed. But—again—obvious when you thought about it; if you were Rouse, and wanted to pick up a confederate for a fast job that required few brains but a strong back, an officer in the library, right there in the target wing, was your obvious first choice.

  That word “obvious” ran through everything like a red thread. Robbin was fascinated by it all—it had turned out to be the Hell of a story—and B’russ’r took it all in, filed it in his nervous system, I suppose, and went on with his life.

  The Master and I felt like damn fools, but I think he hid it better. I’d surprised him with the business of the glass windows, and he knew perfectly well he had no business being surprised by that, any more than I had any business not seeing the fact for so long. But by the time I left Ravenal he was back to normal—normal for Master Higsbee.

  “We have all learned a good deal,” he told me in my living room. I’d offered to come to him, but he’d said it was good for him to get out into the world when opportunity offered; an old blind man ran the danger of turning into a recluse, he told me. “This has been a stage in your progress, Gerald, and though it presented you with difficulties you should have overcome more easily—which is of course regrettable—you will in the end be the better for it. You have learned from this experience, I hope. But you must continue learning. And if you find it possible, it would be a kindness to an old and helpless blind man if you could manage somehow to advise me of your progress, or the lack of it, from time to time.”

 

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