“But he did not give us our requested credits,” K’t’ank said. “Financial assets went to amusements instead of our research.”
“So he’s the guy who put the fun in funding,” Ramos said.
K’t’ank laughed uproariously. Dena winced.
“I wonder if I can get Potopos to take you two for a ride, too.”
“Cheerful, Malone,” K’t’ank said. “Do not be a tart cat.”
“That’s sourpuss,” Dena said. “Don’t cross-reference everything to your thesaurus.”
“It seemed to make little sense either way.”
“So does this case. Two plus two is adding up to zero.”
“I will study the details,” K’t’ank said. “The scientific fact must contain the truth.”
###
Dena returned to the precinct in the morning in great spirits. Though she still hadn’t been able to retrieve the floatchair, she was happy. Because K’t’ank had been so engaged with the formulae and data from Thompason’s files, he hadn’t bothered her at all. Her husband Neal had been thrilled to hear about the allowance coming from Alien Relations. The two of them had taken advantage of the quiet to have an uninterrupted cuddle session. Every moment was precious, since it was only ten weeks until the baby was due, and they’d still have to put up with K’t’ank’s kibitzing whenever they tried to make love.
On the other hand, K’t’ank was in a cranky mood.
“Do not hum,” he grumbled at her, as she poured herself a decaf. “It causes irritating vibrations in your diaphragm.”
“What’s the matter?” Ramos asked. You get up on the wrong side of the host this morning?
“Which side is the wrong side?” K’t’ank asked. “I am always inside.”
“It’s an expression,” Dena said. “Add it to your list of Things You Don’t Understand about Human Colloquialisms. Later. I could tell you were up all night doing research. What have you found?”
“Nothing!” The Salosian sounded frustrated. “I have searched through the files many times. If the statistics are true, nothing was wrong with the pool that should have caused the compression of Sesman and his vehicle. There was a study on buoyancy and forcefields. The findings are useless to our case. Most of the remaining pools are in the homes of the scientists whose names appear on the abstracts.”
“Our tax dollars at work,” Ramos said.
“So it had to be deliberate,” Dena said. She sipped the coffee. Without caffeine, it seemed a futile gesture, but she was firmly addicted to the taste. “But how? How do you rig a pool to eat someone?”
“You cannot, Malone. That is evident. It would have consumed those four women before.”
“They’re not all women,” Dena said. “Oh, forget it. If the pool was normal, what would it take to set off that reaction? Could it have been accidental?”
“Not with the parameters of the luxury vehicle that Sesman operated. It is ordinary.”
“The snooty types won’t like you to say that.” Ramos brought up the security recordings from the garage and fiddled around until he brought up the rooftop landing pad. The black arrow that was the Circo landed softly and rolled into the elevator. The view changed to a video pickup facing the parking space reserved for Sesman. “I mean, look at that! It’s streamlined to the nth degree! It’s got enough thrust to move a building! It’s gorgeous!”
The recording speed ran at the maximum the human mind could absorb. Dena peered at the screen. The sleek black car shot into the garage and parked. Sesman, in great shape in spite of his age, flung himself out of it. The garagebots on duty rolled by the bay like scurrying mice. Sesman hustled back, climbed in, and pulled it out of the space. The footage repeated again and again. Dena sighed. The car glided like an angel. Too bad it was crushed into a singularity in the bottom of a swimming pool.
“It is ordinary,” K’t’ank said dismissively. Both humans felt deflated. “You Terrans are peculiar in your assumption that there is something special in very minute alterations.”
“How minute?” Dena asked.
“Oh, well, the Circo Ex Eye Eye Eye…”
“That’s the Circo Thirteen,” Dena said.
“…that Sesman owned differs from the Homburg NCR Vee…”
“NCR Five.”
“Why are numbers written as a series of letters? Never mind. It is clearly one of your foolish human conceits. They differ by less than two percent of aerodynamic profile. Its engine is ridiculously overpowered for its use. The color was within a single shade to last year’s model. Why would that cost an estimated fifteen percent more?
“Status,” Ramos said. “Everyone likes to have the latest thing.”
“It wasn’t an accident,” Dena said. “That’s obvious. So, who hated him enough to rig a booby trap? And how?”
The image of Captain Potopos appeared in the middle of the console screen. His dark eyes fixed on Dena.
“Malone, can I have a word with you? In my office.”
“Ooooh,” Ramos said, his eyes dancing. “You got to go see the principal.”
“Shut up,” Dena said, bracing herself to rise from her chair.
Potopos was seated behind his desk with his hands folded. That was bad news. She glanced around the room. No one else was present, at least in person, so it wasn’t a dressing-down for department relations.
“What do you need, sir?” she asked.
He lowered his big, black eyebrows and peered out at her from under them. She held firm. It wasn’t necessarily a reprimand. Sometimes he kept a straight face before giving her good news. Then he glanced toward the corner. Dena followed his gaze. The floatchair leaned at an angle against the wall, as if it had gone on a bender and was ashamed of itself.
“Afraid you’re going to have to report that unit as defective, Sergeant.”
Dena turned back to meet his eyes, but he glanced away.
“What happened, sir?” she asked. “I’m going to have to tell them something.”
“I, uh, I took it home last night. I thought it had more power than it did. Let’s just say that the weight-bearing qualities weren’t up to the job.”
“It’s a one-seat model, sir,” Dena said.
He raised his eyebrows meaningfully. Dena felt herself blush. Potopos and his wife were reputed to have a pretty interesting relationship, and it wasn’t strictly limited to the two of them. Dena wanted desperately to ask what had happened involving the chair, but the captain cut her off with a gesture.
“What happens in the Potopos household,” he said firmly, “stays in the Potopos household.”
“Yes, sir,” Dena said, disappointed.
She made her way back toward the squad room, then stopped, as something the captain had said fitted into the details they had been studying.
“What is it, Malone?” K’t’ank asked. “Your internal organs are quivering. That means excitement.”
“Wait a minute,” she said.
She tapped Ramos on the shoulder, knowing the look of triumph on her face would be better suited to a cat who had just eaten the biggest canary in town.
“It wasn’t the pool,” she said. “It was the car.”
“But who did it?”
“You saw him,” Dena said. “Or, rather, you didn’t.”
###
The crippled floatchair had limped back to the penthouse at about half-speed. It listed at a drunken angle, but Dena tried to look dignified and stern from its depths. She felt like an armchair detective from the old vids. She was tempted to affect a foreign accent, but it was too late for that. And Ramos made a terrible sidekick.
Thompason, Tamm, and Ramos stood behind her. The four inhabitants of the luxury apartment and Mrs. Sesman sat on velvet-covered divans facing her. The infinity pool glinted to Dena’s left.
“This is absurd,” James Longmore said, glaring at Dena. “Do you think this is some sort of drawing room mystery in which you assemble the suspects and lay out your case until one of us confesses?”
“Yes, sir,” Dena said. “That’s exactly what this is.”
“Oh, honey,” Margan said, clutching her husband’s arm. “How thrilling!”
“Enough, Margan,” Obed Amini said, with a glare at his wife. “One of us is about to be accused of murder!”
“I know! I hope it’s me. I’ll be the envy of everyone on my social network circle!”
“Did you kill him?” her husband demanded.
“No. I liked him. But think of the headlines! They’d trend from here to Saturn.”
Anita Longmore gave a distasteful glance toward the pool. “Do we have to sit here next to that thing? It killed our friend!”
“We’ve done our research,” Ramos said. “The pool had nothing to do with it. It was an innocent bystander, just like you.”
“Then what caused the catastrophe?” James Longmore demanded.
“His Circo XIII,” Dena said. “For it to have caused that reaction on contact with the pool’s forcefield, it had to have been loaded with superdense materials that upset the wall’s balance. The load in it had to exert the pull of almost half a gee of extra gravity to trigger the reaction.”
“But that’s impossible,” Laila Sesman said. “We flew here in that car. There was nothing that heavy in it, unless you count my cosmetics case. How could it possibly carry that much weight? Wouldn’t we have felt it?”
“The car couldn’t have levitated if that mass was on board when you arrived,” K’t’ank said. “My calculations are precise. The addition had to be placed within after.”
“But you couldn’t put a moon’s worth of mass in a car. Where did it come from?”
Thompason had assisted the police in every way since the investigation had begun. Dena saw no reason to hang him out to dry.
“Mr. Thompason purchased a number of items for the hotel in case its clientele might request it,” she said, careful of her phrasing. “One of the things on the list was an antigravity generator. This chair has an antigravity generator. They’re really small these days. Gravgens are used on starships to create Earth-type habitats. For a small ship, they don’t have to be big, but it’s a lot more powerful than a lift for a floatchair.”
“But that would have lifted it, not sunk it,” Amini said.
“It was set on reverse,” Dena said.
“How could it hold that much?”
“There are practically no limits on the heft the Circo XIII could lift,” Ramos said. “If you could fit them in there, you could take everybody in the hotel for a ride, but it’d be like a clown car. It could carry the drive for a while until the gravity it was generating overwhelmed the Circo’s engine.”
“How much more? Enough to overload the infinity pool’s forcefield?
“Absolutely,” K’t’ank said. “More than forty percent over enough.”
“But why didn’t he notice it when he got in?”
“If the car didn’t have to levitate, then you might not notice it at first,” Dena said. “But as it warmed up it would haul you back toward it, hard. Driving it on a surface, the Circo didn’t have to use the antigrav engine, but it could still move forward.”
“That was why he couldn’t control the car,” Longmore said, horrified. “He was fighting gravity in the storage compartment.”
“He might not even have been conscious when he went into the pool,” Ramos said. The others all shivered.
“Is that why the chair is damaged?” Thompason asked, pointedly.
“Exactly,” Dena said. “We, er, tested our theory. Sorry about that.”
“But why did Sesman do it?” Longmore asked. “Why did he go along with a stunt that killed him?”
“He didn’t know it would be fatal,” Dena said. “He only thought it would be funny.”
“He was betrayed by the person he roped in to help him with the joke,” Ramos pointed out.
“Who was that?” Anita Longmore asked. “Surely not one of us. I don’t know how to reverse the polarity on an antigravity generator.”
“And we all liked him,” Amini pointed out.
“It does not appear that the problem is with those who know him now,” K’t’ank said.
Dena nodded. “It was with people who knew him before. He seems to have a great reputation among his current circles. But perhaps not with those who have known him in the past.”
“None of us sabotaged the car!” Longmore insisted. “I want to see the security footage. It must show us the person who is responsible.”
“You’re right about that,” Dena said. Thompason gestured toward the wall to his right. The projected artwork shimmered and vanished, to be replaced by the videos that Dena and K’t’ank had watched nearly a thousand times now.
“There’s no one there,” Margan Amini said.
“That’s right,” said Dena, feeling smug.
“But we saw no one!”
“Exactly!” Dena said, feeling more like an armchair detective than ever. They liked to make those obvious-sounding exclamations. “And why did you see no one?”
“Because there was no one to see?” Amini suggested. “The garagebots were the ones who sabotaged the car?”
“No. Because the recordings were tampered with. And who has override codes?”
“Well, I do,” Thompason said, shrugging. “And Tamm, of course. But we both have alibis. Don’t we?”
Suddenly, Tamm grabbed the back of Dena’s floatchair and raced it in the direction of the infinity pool. Dena was thrust back against the chair’s thick padding, unable to wriggle out of it and free herself. He was going to throw her in! The antigrav engine might trip off the forcefield. She would be crushed!
“Malone! Reverse polarity!” K’t’ank shouted.
That was it! Dena clapped her palms down on the padded controls. The chair lurched backward, almost throwing her out of it. It knocked Tamm sprawling. She steered it in a tight turn over his body, turned off the antigravs and made the heavy piece of furniture drop down onto his chest. Ramos leaped forward and slammed cuffs on the man’s hands, almost the only parts of his body sticking out from underneath the floatchair.
“He doesn’t have an alibi,” Dena said, to the stunned inhabitants of the room. “Because no one saw him.”
“Brilliant!” K’t’ank crowed, when they were back in the station house. Tamm was stowed in a cell awaiting his legal representative. “I mean, I am brilliant. I found the data that led to the solution of the crime.”
Dena didn’t contradict him.
“Why him?” Captain Potopos asked. “How would he know what kind of damage he could do with a drive, and why did he have it in for Sesman?”
“K’t’ank found it in his records, Captain.”
“He has an advanced degree in astrophysics from Alpha Centauri University,” K’t’ank announced. “He applied to ANCHOR for a grant to do field emissions research. I gleaned thousands of records until I found the notation of the interview. Sesman was the one who turned him down. He probably recognized the instability of Tamm.”
“Mrs. Sesman confirmed it,” Dena said. “He wasn’t able to get funding anywhere. He took a job with the hotel because he has the necessary security clearances and technical know-how. Sesman liked people. He probably recognized Tamm and asked if he’d help him with a prank. Tamm saw it as his chance.”
“Nice work, both of you,” Potopos said, then glanced toward Dena’s bracelet. “I mean, all three of you. I’m giving a briefing to the press in an hour. I want you there. K’t’ank’s a big hit with the press. They want to ask him questions.”
“I am glad they appreciate my wisdom,” K’t’ank said. “It is good relations for Salos.”
“Can I run home for a little while first, sir?” Dena asked, eagerly.
“What for, Malone?”
She grinned. “My husband just messaged me to say that my floatchair’s been delivered. I want to take it out for a test spin. I’ll be back ASAP, sir, I promise.”
Potopos looked hopeful,
but drew himself up.
“Just don’t dunk it in any pools on the way back,” he said.
***
Best-selling science fiction and fantasy author Jody Lynn Nye describes her main career activity as "spoiling cats." When not engaged upon this worthy enterprise, she has published over forty books and novels, largely humorous, some in collaboration with notes writers in the field, such as Anne McCaffrey and Robert Asprin, and over 110 short stories. Her latest books are Myth-Quoted, nineteenth in Apsrin's Myth-Adventure series; and View from the Imperium, a sort of Jeeves and Wooster in space.
Her website is www.jodylynnnye.com.
About the Editor
Alex Shvartsman is a writer, anthologist, translator, and game designer from Brooklyn, NY. His short stories have appeared in Nature, InterGalactic Medicine Show, Daily Science Fiction, Galaxy’s Edge, and a variety of other magazines and anthologies. In addition to the UFO series, he has edited Coffee: 14 Caffeinated Tales of the Fantastic and Dark Expanse: Surviving the Collapse anthologies. His web site is www.alexshvartsman.com.
Acknowledgments
We’d like to thank everyone who pitched in to produce this book: associate editors James Aquilone, Cyd Athens, James Beamon, Frank Dutkiewicz, Michael Haynes, and Nathaniel Lee; copy editor Elektra Hammond, book designer Melissa Neely, graphics designer Emerson Matsuuchi, cover artist Tomasz Maronski and many others whose talent and hard work made this a better book. Special thanks to Anne Roberti and Bryant Happ for their invaluable support of this project.
Also from UFO Publishing:
Coffee-infused stories, short enough to read on your coffee break.
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Available at www.ufopub.com and from fine booksellers everywhere.
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