Astounding Science Fiction Stories: An Anthology of 350 Scifi Stories Volume 2 (Halcyon Classics)

by Various

  "Radio from New York says that a bomb missed LA and hit the ocean. That was a close one."

  Karnes nodded silently, and leaned back in the stewardess' seat to think.

  * * * * *

  No wonder Brittain had been so anxious to get out of New York.

  New York would be destroyed, but that was inevitable. The thing that had bothered him, his dilemma, was solved.

  Was this the real Earth that he lived in, or a museum that had been set up by the Galactics? If it was old Earth, then man would solve his present problems and go on to solve the problem of time travel and interstellar transportation. The present war would be just another little incident in the far past, like the battles of Gettysburg and Agincourt.

  * * * * *

  And if it were the museum Earth? No difference. For the Galactics had decided not to interfere. They had decided to let the race of Earth go on as it was--exactly as it had gone before. It made no difference, really. No difference at all. A perfect duplication of an original was the original, in every meaningful way.

  "Funny," said the pilot abruptly, "I'm not getting any signal from New York."

  Karnes took a deep breath and bit at his lower lip. But he did not look toward the horror that was New York. The city was gone, but the world was there--solid and real!

  You'd better expand your museum a little bit, boys, he thought. We'll need to include Mars and Venus before very long. And then the stars.

  * * *

  Contents

  NOR IRON BARS A CAGE...

  By Randall Garrett

  Her red-blond hair was stained and discolored when they found her in the sewer, and her lungs were choked with muck because her killer hadn't bothered to see whether she was really dead when he dumped her body into the manhole, so she had breathed the stuff in with her last gasping breaths. Her face was bruised, covered with great blotches, and three of her ribs had been broken. Her thighs and abdomen had been bruised and lacerated.

  If she had lived for three more days, Angela Frances Donahue would have reached her seventh birthday.

  I didn't see her until she was brought to the morgue. My phone chimed, and when I thumbed it on, the face of Inspector Kleek, of Homicide South, came on the screen. His heavy eyelids always hang at half mast, giving him a sleepy, bored look and the rest of his fleshy face sags in the same general pattern. "Roy," he said as soon as he could see my face on his own screen, "we just found the little Donahue girl. The meat wagon's taking her down to the morgue now. You want to come down here and look over the scene, or you want to go to the morgue? It looks like it's one of your special cases, but we won't know for sure until Doc Prouty does the post on her."

  I took a firm grip on my temper. I should have been notified as soon as Homicide had been; I should have been there with the Homicide Squad. But I knew that if I said anything, Kleek would just say, "Hell, Roy, they don't notify me until there's suspicion of homicide, and you don't get a call until there's suspicion that it might be the work of a degenerate. That's the way the system works. You know that, Roy." And rather than hear that song-and-dance again, I gave myself thirty seconds to think.

  "I'll meet you at the morgue," I said. "Your men can get the whole story at the scene without my help."

  That mollified him, and it showed a little on his face. "O.K., Roy, see you there." And he cut off.

  I punched savagely at the numbered buttons on the phone to get an intercommunication hookup with Dr. Barton Brownlee's office, on the third floor of the same building as my own office. His face, when it came on, was a calming contrast to Kleek's.

  He's nearly ten years younger than I am, not yet thirty-five, and his handsome, thoughtful face and dark, slightly wavy hair always make me think of somebody like St. Edward Pusey or maybe Albert Einstein. Not that he looks like either one of them, or even that he looks saintly, but he does look like a man who has the courage of his convictions and is calmly, quietly, but forcefully ready to shove what he knows to be the truth down everybody else's throat if that becomes necessary. Or maybe I am just reading into his face what I know to be true about the man himself.

  "Brownie," I said, "they've found the Donahue girl. Taking her down to the morgue now. Want to come along?"

  "I don't think so," he said without hesitation. "I'll get all the information I need from the photos and the reports. The man I do want to see is the killer; I need more data, Roy--always more data. The more my boys and I know about these zanies, the more effectively we can deal with them."

  "I know. O.K.; I've got to run." I cut off, grabbed my hat, and headed out to fulfill my part of the bargain Brownlee and I had once made. "You find 'em," he'd once said, "and I'll fix 'em." So far, that bargain had paid off.

  * * * * *

  I got to the morgue a few minutes after the body was brought in. The man at the front desk looked up at me as I walked in and gave me a bored smile. "Evening, Inspector. The Donahue kid's in the clean-up room." Then he went back to his paper work.

  The lab technicians were standing around watching while the morgue attendant sluiced the muck off the corpse with a hose, watching to see if anything showed up in the gooey filth. Inspector Kleek stood to one side. All he said was, "Hi, Roy."

  The morgue attendant lifted up one small arm with a gloved hand and played the hose over the thin biceps. "Good thing the rigor mortis has gone off," he said, "these stiffs are hell to handle when they're stiff." It was an old joke, but everybody grinned out of habit.

  The clear water from the hose flowed over the skin and turned a grayish brown as it ran down to the bottom of the shallow, waist-high stainless-steel trough in which the body was lying.

  One of the lab techs stepped over and began going through the long hair very carefully, and Doc Prouty, the Medical Examiner, began cleaning out the mouth and nose and eyes and ears with careful hands.

  I turned to Kleek. "You sure it's the Donahue girl?"

  He sighed and looked away from the small dead thing on the cleaning table. "Who else could it be? She was found only three blocks from the Donahue home. No other female child reported missing in that area. We haven't checked the prints yet, but you can bet they'll tally with her school record."

  I had to agree. "What about the time of death?"

  "Doc Prouty figures forty-eight to sixty hours ago."

  "I'll be able to give you a better figure after the post," the Medical Examiner said without looking up from his work.

  A tall, big-nosed man in plain-clothes suddenly turned away from the scene on the table, his mouth moving queerly, his eyes hard. After a moment, his lips relaxed. Still staring at the wall, he said: "I guess the case is out of Federal jurisdiction, then. We'll co-operate, as usual, of course." He looked at me. "Could I talk to you outside, Inspector Royall?"

  I looked at Kleek. "O.K., Sam?" I didn't have to have his O.K.; it was just professional courtesy. He knew I'd tell him whatever it was that the FBI man had to say, and we both knew why the Federal agent wanted to leave.

  Sam Kleek nodded. "Sure. I'll keep an eye out here."

  * * * * *

  The FBI man followed me into the outer room.

  "Do you figure this as a sex-degenerate case, Inspector?" he asked.

  "Looks like it. You saw the bruises. Dr. Prouty will be able to tell us for sure after the post mortem."

  He shook his head as if to clear it of a bad memory. "You New York police can sure be cold-blooded at times."

  The thing that was bothering him, as Kleek and I both knew, was that the FBI agent hadn't been exposed to this sort of thing often enough. They deal with the kind of crimes that actually don't involve the callous murder of children very often. Even the murder of adults doesn't normally come under the aegis of the FBI.

  "We're not cold blooded," I said. "Not by inclination, I mean. But a man gets that way--he has to get that way--after he's seen enough of this sort of thing. You either get yourself an emotional callous or you get deathly sick from the repetition--and then
you have to get out of the job."

  "Yeah," he said. "Sure." He quit rubbing his chin with a knuckle, looked at me, and said: "What I wanted to say is that there's no evidence that she was taken across a state line. Whoever sent that ransom note to the Donahue parents was trying to throw us off the track."

  "Looks like it. Look at the time-table. The note was sent after the girl was murdered, but before the information hit the papers or the newscasts. The killer wanted us to think it was a ransom kidnaping. It isn't likely that the note was sent by a crank. A crank wouldn't have known the girl was missing at all at the time the note was sent."

  "That's the way it seems to me," he agreed. The color was coming back into his face. "But why would he want to make it look like a kidnaping instead of ... of what it was? The penalty's the same for both."

  My grin had anger, pity, and disgust for the killer in it--plus a certain amount of satisfaction. Some day, I'd like to see my face in a mirror when I feel like that.

  "He was hoping the body wouldn't be found until it was too late for us to know that it was a rape killing. And that means that he knew that he would be on our list if we did find out that it was rape. Otherwise, he wouldn't have bothered. If I'm right, then he has outsmarted himself. He has told us that we know him, and he's told us that he's smart enough to figure out a dodge--that he's not one of the helplessly stupid ones."

  "That should help to narrow the field down," he said in a hard voice. He felt in his pocket for a cigarette, found his pack, took one out, and then held it, unlit, between the fingers of his right hand. "Inspector Royall, I've studied the new law of this state--the one you're working under here--and I think it'll be great if it works out. I wish you luck. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to call the office."

  As he went out to the desk phone, I gave him a silent thanks. Words of encouragement were hard to come by at that time.

  I turned and went back towards the clean-up room.

  She didn't look as though she were asleep. They never do. She looked dead. She'd been head down in the sewer, and the blood had pooled and coagulated in her head and shoulders. Now that the filth had been washed off, the dark purple of the dead blood cells showed through the translucent skin. She would look better after she was embalmed.

  Doc Prouty was holding up a small syringe, eying the little bit of fluid within it. "We've got him," he said in a flat voice. "I'll have the lab run an analysis. We're well within the time limit. All we have to do is separate the girl's blood type from that of the spermatic fluid. You boys find your man, and I can identify him for you." He put the syringe in its special case. "I'll let you know the exact cause of death in a couple of hours."

  "O.K., Doc. Thanks," said Inspector Kleek, closing his notebook. He turned to one of the other men. "Thompson, you notify the parents. Get 'em down here to make a positive identification, and send it along to my office with the print identification." Then he looked at me. "Anything extra you want, Roy?"

  I shook my head. "Nope. Let's go check the files, huh?"

  "Sure. Can I ride with you? I rode in with Thompson; he'll have to stay."

  "Come along," I told him.

  * * * * *

  By ten fifteen that evening, we had narrowed the field down considerably. We fed all the data we had into the computer, including the general type number of the spermatic fluid, which Dr. Prouty had given us, and watched while the machine sorted through the characteristics of all the known criminals in its memory.

  Kleek and I were sitting at a desk drinking hot, black coffee when the computer technician came over and handed Kleek the results at ten fifteen. "Quite a bunch of 'em, Inspector," he said, "but the geographic compartmentalization will help."

  Kleek glanced over the neatly-printed sheaf of papers that the computer had turned out, then handed them to me. "There we are, Roy. One of those zanies is our boy."

  I looked at the list. Every person on it was either a confirmed or suspected psychopath, and each one of them conformed to the set of specifications we had fed the computer. They were listed in four different groups, according to the distance they lived from the scene of the crime--half a mile, two miles, five miles, and "remainder," the rest of the city.

  "All we got to do," Kleek said complacently, "is start rounding 'em up."

  "You make it sound easy," I said tightly.

  He put down his coffee cup. "Hell, Roy, it is easy! We've got all these characters down on the books, don't we? We know what they are, don't we? Look at 'em! Once in a while a new one pops up, and we put him on the list. Once in a while we catch one and send him up. Practically cut and dried, isn't it?"

  "Sure," I said.

  "Look, Roy," he went on, "we got it down to a fine art now--have for years." He waved in the general direction of the computer. "We got the advantage that it's easier to sort 'em out now, and faster--but the old tried-and-true technique is just the same. Cops have been catching these goons in every civilized country on Earth for a hundred years by this technique."

  "Sam," I said wearily, "are you going to give me a lecture on police methods?"

  He picked up his cup, held it for a moment, then set it down again, his eyes hardening. "Yes, Roy, I am! I'm older than you are, I've got more years on the Force, I've been working with Homicide longer, and I outrank you in grade by two and a half years! Yes, I figure it's about time I lectured you! You want to listen?"

  I looked at him. Kleek is a good cop, I was thinking, and he deserves to be listened to, even if I don't agree with him.

  "O.K., Sam," I said, "I'll listen."

  * * * * *

  "O.K., then." He took a breath. "Now, we got a system here that works. The nuts always show themselves up, one way or another. Most of 'em have been arrested by the time they're fourteen, fifteen years old. Maybe we can't nail 'em down and pin anything on 'em, but we got 'em down on the books. We know they have to be watched. We got ninety per cent of the queers and hopheads and stew-bums and firebugs and the rest of the zanies down on our books"--he waved toward the computer again--"and down in the memory bank of the computer. We know we're gonna get 'em eventually, because we know they're gonna goof up eventually, and then we'll have 'em. We'll have 'em"--he made a clutching gesture with his right hand--"right where it hurts!

  "You take this Donahue killer. We know where he is. We can be pretty sure we got him down on the books." He tapped the sheaf of papers from the computer with a firm forefinger. "We can be pretty sure that he's one of those guys right down there!"

  He waved his hand again, but, this time, he took in the whole city--the whole outside world. "Like clock-work. The minute they goof, we nab 'em."

  "Sam," I said, "just listen to me a minute. We know that ninety per cent of the men on that list right there are going to be convicted of a crime of violence inside the next five years, right?"

  "That's what I've been tellin' you. The minute--"

  "Wait a minute; wait a minute. Just listen. Why don't we just go out and arrest them all right now? Look at all the trouble that would save us."

  "Hell, Roy! You can't arrest a man unless he's done something! What would you charge 'em with? Loitering with intent to commit a nuisance?"

  "No. But we can--"

  I was cut off by a uniformed cop who stuck his head in the door and said: "Inspector Royall, Dr. Brownlee called. Says they picked up Hammerlock Smith. He's at the 87th Precinct. Wants you to come down right away if you can."

  I stood up and grabbed my hat. "Sam, you can sit on this one for a while, huh? I've been waiting for Hammerlock Smith to fall for two months."

  Sam Kleek looked disgusted. "And you'll see that he gets psycho treatment and a suspended sentence. A few days in the looney ward, and then right back out on the street. Hammerlock Smith! There's a case for you! Built like a gorilla and has a passion for Irish whisky and sixteen-year-old boys--and you think you can cure him in three days! Nuts!"

  I didn't feel like arguing with him. "We might as well let him go now as lock hi
m up for three or four months and then let him go, Sam. Why fool around with assault and battery charges when we can wait for him to murder somebody and then lock him up for good, eh, Sam? What's another victim more or less, as long as we get the killer?"

  "That's what we're here for," he said stolidly. "To get killers." He scratched at his balding head. "I don't get you, Roy. I'd think you'd want these maniacs put away, after your--"

  He stopped himself, wet his lips, and said: "O.K. You go ahead and take care of Smith. Get some sleep. I'm going to. I'll leave orders to call us both if anything breaks in the Donahue case."

  I just nodded and walked out. I didn't want to hear any more.

  But the door didn't close tightly, and I heard Kleek's voice as he spoke to the computer tech. "I just don't figure Roy. His wife died in a fire set by an arson bug, and he wants to--"

  I kept on walking as the door clicked shut.

  * * * * *

  I was in my office at nine the next morning, after seven and a half hours of sleep on one of the bunks in the ready room. The business with Hammerlock Smith had taken more time than I had thought it would. The big, stupid ape had been in a vicious mood, reeking of whisky and roaring insults at everyone. His cursing was neither inventive nor colorful, consisting of only four unlovely words used over and over again in various combinations with ordinary ones, a total vocabulary of maybe a dozen words.

  It had taken four cops, using night-sticks, to get him into the paddy wagon, and Dr. Brownlee had finally had to give him a blast of super-tranquilizer with a hypogun.

  "Boy, Inspector," one of the officers had said, "don't let anyone ever tell you some of these guys aren't tough!"

  I was looking over the written report. "What about this kid he accosted in the bar? Hurt bad?"

  "Cracked rib, sprained wrist, and a bloody nose, sir. The doc said he'd be O.K."

  "According to the report here, the kid was twenty-two years old. Smith usually picks 'em younger."