Space On My Hands

by Fredric Brown

  Caquer thought, suppose Brager is lying. It still doesn’t make sense. Because according to Dr. Skidder, there was no bullet-hole, but a blaster-wound. Skidder had seen the body after Brager had.

  Someone could, theoretically at least, have used a blaster in the interim, on a man already dead. But —

  But that did not explain the head wound, nor the fact that the medico had not seen the bullet-hole.

  Someone could, theoretically at least, have struck the skull with a sword between the time Skidder had made the autopsy and the time he, Rod Caquer, had seen the body. But —

  But that didn’t explain why he hadn’t seen the charred shoulder when he’d lifted the sheet from the body on the stretcher. He might have missed seeing a bullet-hole, but he would not, and he could not, have missed seeing a shoulder in the condition Dr. Skidder described it.

  Around and around it went, until at last it dawned on him that there was only one explanation possible. The Medico-in-Chief was lying, for whatever mad reason. That meant, of course, that he, Rod Caquer, had overlooked the bullet-hole Brager had seen; but that was possible.

  But Skidder’s story could not be true. Skidder himself, at the time of the autopsy, could have inflicted the wound in the head. And he could have lied about the shoulder wound. Why — unless the man was mad — he would have done either of those things, Caquer could not imagine. But it was the only way he could reconcile all the factors.

  But by now the body had been disposed of. It would be his word against Dr. Skidder’s —

  But wait! — the utility men, two of them, would have seen the corpse when they put it on the stretcher.

  Quickly Caquer stood up in front of the visiphone and obtained a connection with utility headquarters.

  “The two clearance men who took a body from Shop 9364 less than an hour ago — have they reported back yet?” he asked.

  “Just a minute, Lieutenant … Yes, one of them was through for the day and went on home. The other one is here.”

  “Put him on.”

  Rod Caquer recognized the man who stepped into the screen. It was the one of the utility men who had asked him to hurry.

  “Yes, Lieutenant?” said the man.

  “You helped put the body on the stretcher?”

  “Of course.”

  “What would you say was the cause of death?”

  The man in white looked out of the screen incredulously.

  “Are you kidding me, Lieutenant?” He grinned. “Even a moron could see what was wrong with that stiff.”

  Caquer frowned.

  “Nevertheless, there are conflicting statements. I want your opinion.”

  “Opinion? When a man has his head cut off, what two opinions can there be, Lieutenant?”

  Caquer forced himself to speak calmly. “Will the man who went with you confirm that?”

  “Of course. Earth’s Oceans! We had to put it on the stretcher in two pieces. Both of us for the body, and then Walter picked up the head and put it on next to the trunk. The killing was done with a disintegrator beam, wasn’t it?”

  “You talked it over with the other man?” said Caquer. “There was no difference of opinion between you about the — uh — details?”

  “Matter of fact there was. That was why I asked you if it was a disintegrator. After we’d cremated it, he tried to tell me the cut was a ragged one like somebody’d taken several blows with an axe or something. But it was clean.”

  “Did you notice evidence of a blow struck at the top of the skull?”

  “No. Say, Lieutenant, you aren’t looking so well. Is anything the matter with you?”

  That was the set-up that confronted Rod Caquer, and one cannot blame him for beginning to wish it had been a simple case of murder.

  A few hours ago, it had seemed bad enough to have Callisto’s no-murder record broken. But from there, it got worse. He did not know it then, but it was going to get still worse and that would be only the start.

  It was eight in the evening, now, and Caquer was still at his office with a copy of Form 812 in front of him on the duraplast surface of his desk. There were questions on that form, apparently simple questions.

  Name of Deceased: Willem Deem

  Occupation: Prop, of book-and-reel shop.

  Residence :Apt. 8250, Sector Three, Clsto.

  Place of Bus.: Shop 9364, S. T., Clsto.

  Time of Death: Approx. 3 p.m. Clsto.

  Std. Time

  Cause of Death:

  Yes, the first five questions had been a breeze. But the sixth? He had been staring at that question an hour now. A Callisto hour, not so long as an Earth one, but long enough when you’re staring at a question like that.

  But confound it, he would have to put something down.

  Instead, he reached for the visiphone button and a moment later Jane Gordon was looking at him out of the screen. And Rod Caquer looked back, because she was something to look at.

  “Hello, Icicle,” he said. “Afraid I’m not going to be able to get there this evening. Forgive me?”

  “Of course, Rod. What’s wrong? The Deem business?”

  He nodded gloomily. “Desk work. Lots of forms and reports I got to get out for the Sector Coordinator.”

  “Oh. How was he killed, Rod?”

  “Rule Sixty-five,” he said with a smile, “forbids giving details of any unsolved crime to a civilian.”

  “Bother Rule Sixty-five. Dad knew Willem Deem well, and he’s been a guest here often. Mr. Deem was practically a friend of ours.”

  “Practically?” Caquer asked. “Then I take it you didn’t like him, Icicle?”

  “Well — I guess I didn’t. He was interesting to listen to, but he was a sarcastic little beast, Rod. I think he had a perverted sense of humor. How was he killed?”

  “If I tell you, will you promise not to ask any more questions?” Caquer asked.

  Her eyes lighted eagerly. “Of course.”

  “He was shot,” said Caquer, “with an explosive-type gun and a blaster. Someone split his skull with a sword, chopped off his head with an axe and with a disintegrator beam. Then after he was on the utility stretcher, someone stuck his head back on because it wasn’t off when I saw him. And plugged up the bullet-hole, and —”

  “Rod, stop driveling,” cut in the girl. “If you don’t want to tell me, all right.”

  Rod grinned. “Don’t get mad. Say, how’s your father?”

  “Lots better. He’s asleep now, and definitely on the upgrade. I think he’ll be back at the university by next week. Rod, you look tired. When do those forms have to be in?”

  “Twenty-four hours after the crime. But —”

  “But nothing. Come on over here, right now. You can make out those old forms in the morning.”

  She smiled at him, and Caquer weakened.

  “All right, Jane,” he said. “But I’m going by patrol quarters on the way. Had some men canvassing the block the crime was committed in, and I want their report.”

  But the report, which he found waiting for him, was not illuminating. The canvass had been thorough, but it had failed to elicit any information of value. No one had been seen to leave or enter the Deem shop prior to Brager’s arrival, and none of Deem’s neighbors knew of any enemies he might have. No one had heard a shot.

  Rod Caquer grunted and stuffed the reports into his pocket. He wondered, as he walked to the Gordon home, where the investigation went from there. How did a detective go about solving such a crime?

  True, when he was a college kid back on Earth a few years ago, he had read detective stories. The detective usually trapped someone by discovering a discrepancy in his statements. Generally in a rather dramatic manner, too.

  There was Wilder Williams, the greatest of all the fictional detectives, who could look at a man and deduce his whole life history from the cut of his clothes and the shape of his hands. But Wilder Williams had never run across a victim who had been killed in as many ways as there were witnesses.
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br />   He spent a pleasant — but futile — evening with Jane Gordon, again asked her to marry him, and again was refused. But he was used to that. She was a bit cooler this evening than usual, probably because she resented his unwillingness to talk about Willem Deem.

  And home, to bed.

  From the window of his apartment, after the light was out, he could see the monstrous ball of Jupiter hanging low in the sky, the green-black midnight sky. He lay in bed and stared at it until it seemed that he could still see it after he had closed his eyes.

  Willem Deem, deceased. What was he going to do about Willem Deem? Around and around, until at last one orderly thought emerged from chaos.

  Tomorrow morning he would talk to the Medico. Without mentioning the sword wound in the head, he would ask Skidder about the bullet hole Brager claimed to have seen over the heart. If Skidder still said the blaster burn was the only wound, he would summon Brager and let him argue with the Medico.

  And then — Well, he would worry about what to do when he got there. He would never get to sleep this way.

  He thought about Jane, and went to sleep.

  After a while, he dreamed. Or was it a dream? If so, then he dreamed that he was lying there in bed, almost but not quite awake, and that there were whispers coming from all corners of the room. Whispers out of the darkness.

  For big Jupiter had moved on across the sky now. The window was a dim, scarcely discernible outline, and the rest of the room in utter darkness.

  Whispers!

  “ — kill them.”

  “You hate them, you hate them, you hate them.”

  “ — kill, kill, kill.”

  “Sector Two gets all the gravy and Sector Three does all the work. They exploit our corla plantations. They are evil. Kill them, take over.”

  “You hate them, you hate them, you hate them.”

  “Sector Two is made up of weaklings and usurers. They have the taint of Martian blood. Spill it, spill Martian blood. Sector Three should rule Callisto. Three the mystic number. We are destined to rule Callisto.”

  “You hate them, you hate them.”

  “ — kill, kill, kill.”

  “Martian blood of usurious villains. You hate them, you hate them, you hate them.”

  Whispers.

  “Now — now — now.”

  “Kill them, kill them.”

  “A hundred ninety miles across the flat plains. Get there in an hour in monocars. Surprise attack. Now. Now. Now.”

  And Rod Caquer was getting out of bed, fumbling hastily and blindly into his clothing without turning on the light because this was a dream and dreams were in darkness.

  His sword was in the scabbard at his belt and he took it out and felt the edge and the edge was sharp and ready to spill the blood of the enemy he was going to kill.

  Now it was going to swing in arcs of red death, his unblooded sword — the anachronistic sword that was his badge of office, of authority. He had never drawn the sword in anger, a stubby symbol of a sword, scarce eighteen inches long; enough, though, enough to reach the heart — four inches to the heart.

  The whispers continued.

  “You hate them, you hate them, you hate them.”

  “Spill the evil blood; kill, spill, kill, spill.”

  “Now, now, now, now.”

  Unsheathed sword in clenched fist, he was stealing silently out the door, down the stairway, past the other apartment doors.

  And some of the doors were opening, too. He was not alone, there in the darkness. Other figures moved beside him in the dark.

  He stole out of the door and into the night-cooled darkness of the street, the darkness of the street that should have been brightly lighted. That was another proof that this was a dream. Those street-lights were never off, after dark. From dusk till dawn, they were never off.

  But Jupiter over there on the horizon gave enough light to see by. Like a round dragon in the heavens, and the red spot like an evil, malignant eye.

  Whispers breathed in the night, whispers from all around him.

  “Kill — kill — kill —”

  “You hate them, you hate them, you hate them.”

  The whispers did not come from the shadowy figures about him. They pressed forward silently, as he did.

  Whispers came from the night itself, whispers that now began to change tone.

  “Wait, not tonight, not tonight, not tonight,” they said.

  “Go back, go back, go back.”

  “Back to your homes, back to your beds, back to your sleep.”

  And the figures about him were standing there, fully as irresolute as he had now become. And then, almost simultaneously, they began to obey the whispers. They turned back, and returned the way they had come, and as silently …

  Rod Caquer awoke with a mild headache and a hung over feeling. The sun, tiny but brilliant, was already well up in the sky.

  His clock showed him that he was a bit later than usual, but he took time to lie there for a few minutes, just the same, remembering that screwy dream he’d had. Dreams were like that; you had to think about them right away when you woke up, before you were really fully awake, or you forgot them completely.

  A silly sort of dream, it had been. A mad, purposeless dream. A touch of atavism, perhaps? A throwback to the days when peoples had been at each other’s throats half the time, back to the days of wars and hatreds and struggle for supremacy.

  This was before the Solar Council meeting first on one inhabited planet and then another, had brought order by arbitration, and then union. And now war was a thing of the past. The inhabitable portion of the solar system — Earth, Venus, Mars, and two of the moons of Jupiter — were all under one government.

  But back in the old bloody days, people must have felt as he had felt in that atavistic dream. Back in the days when Earth, united by the discovery of space travel, had subjugated Mars — the only other planet already inhabited by an intelligent race — and then had spread colonies whereever Man could get a foothold.

  Certain of those colonies had wanted independence and, next, supremacy. The bloody centuries, those times were called now.

  Getting out of bed to dress, he saw something that puzzled and dismayed him. His clothing was not neatly folded over the back of the chair beside the bed as he had left it. Instead, it was strewn about the floor as though he had undressed hastily and carelessly in the dark.

  “Earth!” he thought. “Did I sleep-walk last night? Did I actually get out of bed and go out into the street when I dreamed that I did? When those whispers told me to?”

  “No,” he then told himself, “I’ve never walked in my sleep before, and I didn’t then. I must simply have been careless when I undressed last night. I was thinking about the Deem case. I don’t actually remember hanging my clothes on that chair.”

  So he donned his uniform quickly and hurried down to the office. In the light of morning it was easy to fill out those forms. In the “Cause of Death” blank he wrote, “Medical Examiner reports that shock from a blaster wound caused death.”

  That let him out from under; he had not said that was the cause of death; merely that the medico said it was.

  He rang for a messenger and gave him the reports with instructions to rush them to the mail ship that would be leaving shortly. Then he called Barr Maxon.

  “Reporting on the Deem matter, Regent,” he said. “Sorry, but we just haven’t got anywhere on it yet. Nobody was seen leaving the shop. All the neighbors have been questioned. Today I’m going to talk to all his friends.”

  Regent Maxon shook his head.

  “Use all jets, Lieutenant,” he said. “The case must be cracked. A murder, in this day and age, is bad enough. But an unsolved one is unthinkable. It would encourage further crime.”

  Lieutenant Caquer nodded gloomily. He had thought of that, too. There were the social implications of murder to be worried about — and there was his job as well. A Lieutenant of Police who let anyone get away with murder in hi
s district was through for life.

  After the Regent’s image had clicked off the visiphone screen, Caquer took the list of Deem’s friends from the drawer of his desk and began to study it, mainly with an eye to deciding the sequence of his calls.

  He penciled a figure “1” opposite the name of Perry Peters, for two reasons. Peters’ place was only a few doors away, for one thing, and for another he knew Perry better than anyone on the list, except possibly Professor Jan Gordon. And he would make that call last, because later there would be a better chance of finding his daughter Jane at home.

  Perry Peters was glad to see Caquer, and guessed immediately the purpose of the call.

  “Hello, Shylock.”

  “Huh?” said Rod.

  “Shylock — the great detective. Confronted with a mystery for the first time in his career as a policeman. Or have you solved it, Rod?”

  “You mean Sherlock, you dope — Sherlock Holmes. No, I haven’t solved it, if you want to know. Look, Perry, tell me all you know about Deem. You knew him pretty well, didn’t you?”

  Perry Peters rubbed his chin reflectively and sat down on the work bench. He was so tall and lanky that he could sit down on it instead of having to jump up.

  “Willem was a funny little runt,” he said. “Most people didn’t like him because he was sarcastic, and he had crazy notions on politics. Me, I’m not sure whether he wasn’t half right half the time, and anyway he played a swell game of chess.”

  “Was that his only hobby?”

  “No. He liked to make things, gadgets mostly. Some of them were good, too, although he did it for fun and never tried to patent or capitalize anything.”

  “You mean inventions, Perry? Your own line?”

  “Well, not so much inventions as gadgets, Rod. Little things, most of them, and he was better on fine workmanship than on original ideas. And, as I said, it was just a hobby with him.”

  “Ever help you with any of your own inventions?” asked Caquer.

  “Sure, occasionally. Again, not so much on the idea end of it as by helping me make difficult parts.” Perry Peters waved his hand in a gesture that included the shop around them. “My tools here are all for rough work, comparatively. Nothing under thousandths. But Willem has — had a little lathe that’s a honey. Cuts anything, and accurate to a fifty-thousandth.”