Gaudeamus

by John Barnes

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  So, anyway, John, you left, and then Melody left—I was sorry to have hurt her feelings, but what can I say, sometimes my own feelings surprise me, and I was never going to be interested in anyone else while Jenapha Lee’s around, and I can tell you don’t like her much so let’s not talk about that right now, ’kay?

  All right. Now, while you all were in there, somebody drove a Ford Ranger full of Gaudeamus pills right into the parking spot where you’d been, spiked its tires so it would just sit there, and phoned the Saguache County Sheriff’s Department. Since we’d just been fucked over but didn’t know it yet, and Susan Glasgow’s organization had been really fucked over too, it’s a tossup whether that truckload of goddies was the Glasgow group’s trick, or the Third Force. I’m betting the Third Force because of two things—first of all, it involved distributing something new and creating a demand for it, and that’s something Glasgow’s people hardly ever do, and secondly because it was subtle, almost like a practical joke, and everything I had seen of Glasgow’s folk, from storming the facility and shooting Hale to that completely clumsy, stupid attempt on me, by those two mibs on US285, had been crude and dumb and overdone.

  So the cleverness of this little prank argued that it wasn’t Susan’s group at all.

  We were just finishing up the set and I had those funny aches you get in your leg muscles when you dance to a bad drummer, because you’re always doing all these little jolts to compensate for him not being quite on the beat. Still, being merely a bad drummer, and a good programmer, Esau Irwin was the musical talent in the family, compared to the suck-dog awful guitar, lyrics, and vocals supplied by his brothers.

  I was looking forward to Hale getting here with that SR-8, because Jenapha Lee had me all worked up, and going to Albuquerque by flying saucer, we’d be able to get in some quality time in our room before we absolutely had to sleep. The meeting with Hale wasn’t till ten A.M. the next day.

  The lights came on, kerbang, and they chopped the band sound, zip, and all the local piggery swarmed in, plod plod plod. In their best body armor, with the attitude to match. They lined us all up and shouted questions at us. None of us acted really afraid like we were supposed to—after all, these were mostly people who had been one kind of druggie or another, currently or in the past, and they knew the drill. Pretty soon we were all being shoved onto a commandeered school bus to be dragged down to the county pokey, and that good mood I had had while I was dancing with Jenapha Lee was pretty much gone.

  Since I was with somebody who was with the band, I was in the first group they questioned. For about forty minutes we had to keep saying “never heard of it” and “I don’t know” whenever they asked about the Gaudeamus pill. It was kind of fun, though, to listen to the real innocents, the club owner and the bartender and so forth. They didn’t want anyone to know that there was a drug they’d never heard of, so they were either real vague or made stuff up, and that caused more questions, and the testimony got so far away from the truth so fast that I figured we were never getting caught.

  Then Hale showed up, waving all kinds of federal authority, and we all got out at about three in the morning. He’d brought an SR-8 out of Kirtland, and he took us back to Albuquerque in one big swoop over the dark San Luis Valley. Probably we were so high up that no one spotted us that time; I wondered how many times, though, the saucers had been seen.

  “Actually,” Hale said, “as saucers, not all that often. At least that’s what they told me while I was learning to drive one of these things—one more reason why I ought to thank you all, because these are really fun. But anyway, mostly saucers don’t fly low enough to be recognized as such. There’s a few big SR-17s and SR-6s, the things that make about half the bombing raids that people attribute to the Stealth, that practice low over the La Veta MOA, so they get seen. These SR-8s seldom have any reason to fly low. So we don’t get seen as saucers.

  “What we do get seen as is weird lights in the sky. The cloaking system is very imperfect, it just sets things up so the average path of light is around the ship and back out of the distorted air at a point about in line with where it went in. But some light doesn’t go on the average path and much of that off-track light gets diffracted. So people are always seeing oval shapes that have rainbow colors smeared along them, in bright sunlight, way up in the sky; it’s the sun refracted into a rainbow by our invisibility equipment. Not long ago we had a real dumb student pilot—uh, me, to be precise—on his first solo flight, get it locked into hover mode up by Salida, broad daylight, and some guy shot a whole videotape of this elongated oval with rainbow colors washing over it. Took me almost an hour to get it out of hover, so they got a lot of shots. Tonight, though, we’re only going to be seen if someone points binoculars right at us.”

  With all the delay from getting arrested and released, we didn’t get to our hotel rooms till past five A.M., so we rescheduled to meet late the following afternoon. Then at nine-thirty the phone rang, and it was Hale, and he said a limo was coming out for us, we had to meet right away. Jenapha Lee and me got dressed in about two, and the van was already sitting there in the hotel drive when we got down there. The Irwins came tumbling out a minute later, and we were on our way. Naturally the driver wouldn’t have a clue what was up, and all of us were exhausted, so we all got some extra sleep—not near enough—while he drove us out to the facility.

  So far on this long-running job, the pay was consistently good, the work was consistently interesting, and what it really was, was murder on your sleep.

  As soon as we had gathered, All Thumbs set down his cigar—

  Hell, yeah. Do you know how many of the chemical compounds in tobacco are neurologically active, and how many are immunologically active, and how many are both? Anything that’s had its biology re-engineered to eat Earth food is going to respond to Earth tobacco, and apparently All Thumbs’s species, or maybe every species from his planet, is cancer-proof, or they can fix cancer, or for all I could tell from the one explanation he ever gave me, maybe they do get cancer but they enjoy it.

  Anyway, he sure likes big old stinking cigars, the kind that guys smoke when they’re trying to compensate, that go with bleached blondes, Harleys, and tailored black suits. So, like I was saying, All Thumbs set down his cigar and said it was good of us all to come, and like that.

  He’s got a weird little voice that he makes with a bladder like a bagpipe with a slot-whistle in it, totally separate from his lungs and his digestor (which is something different from a digestive tract or an esophagus-stomach-and-intestines, but he hasn’t quite explained it to me in a way I can picture yet). So he can eat, smoke, drink, and excrete one of those weird little balls that he has instead of shit, all while still talking. You’d love being in his species, John. You’d never have to shut up.

  I’m doing all the talking, this time, because I’m the one that knows everything. Same argument you use with your students, bud.

  So. Okay, the story’s gotten up to where All Thumbs meets with the Irwins, Jenapha, me, and Hale. You got anything else to stick in, or can I let the guy set his cigar down and start talking? Cool.

  He started off with saying that he appreciated our being there and then said he wanted to give us some news, starting with some from Hale, and then moving on to more surprising things that he knew. We were going to take the evidence in order of rising dramatism, to promote clear thinking—I gather his species thinks that you start with the dullest stuff first and work your way to the most shocking because, somehow, that’s supposed to result in the best ideas. Maybe like something Melody told me in an email, the more surprising information is, the more it changes your thinking. Oh, yeah, we’re friends again, John, she’s a classy forgiving lady and I like her a lot, just not that way. So anyway I think what it is, if I get it right, is that All Thumbs’s people try to make their changes bigger and bigger with each new piece of information, which seems backwards to me—I believe in closing in on an answer—but mayb
e that’s why he’s the Ranger and I’m Tonto, you know? I guess it would mean they keep innovating further into the process, you know?

  So even in an emergency meeting, with All Thumbs, he always starts with the smallest and least-surprisingest piece of news (yeah, it’s a word now), and that was why, apart from it being a big shock, I think we all about shit our pants when he said, “Lena Logan has vanished. Disappeared completely. Even with my resources, I can’t find her. Anything that killed her, even if she had been instantaneously vaporized at high temperature, should have resulted in a signal my equipment would have detected, and there has been no signal since she went up to Crestone on a special mission. Yet if she’s alive, it’s even more mysterious. She has a microscopic implanted transponder, which signals in radio, Gaudeamus-pulse, neutrino, and graviton. The device could be disabled, but I don’t believe that she herself would know how, and no other human would know to look for it, I don’t think. To find it, they would have to take her apart and look at each piece under a microscope, and in that case, they’d have killed her and I’d have received a signal. Improbable as it is, the most likely thing is that she is being held in a pocket universe, or has been taken into one and then killed.

  “Now, human beings don’t have the technology for small, controlled pocket universes yet, and that technology is very strictly off-limits for a primitive/candidate world like this one, so something very serious is going on, no matter how we look at it. Almost certainly some organization from off your world is taking direct measures against my work here.

  “Let me sketch my feelings as I believe they are relevant to this.” He went to the whiteboard, grasped a drymarker between the three thumbs on his left hand, and lettered rapidly, changing colors as needed. He does that a lot; his people process a lot more in the emotions and a lot less in logic than we do, but they have very precise emotions, and their emotions are more parallel and less series than our thoughts, so to translate what he’s feeling to how we’re thinking, he draws matrices and graphs. You get used to it.

  He puffed a small cloud of smoke, drew on the cigar, puffed again, placed the tip of the green marker to the board. “I see Lena Logan’s disappearance and its most probable cause as change with two major opposed directions and a host of minor directions”:

  changing the situation in our favor if we catch them, that’s a serious violation which will allow me to use my full powers to take them out of the game permanently.

  changing the situation against us 1. they clearly think they can kidnap key native personnel with impunity

  2. and so far they are right and

  3. They may well be right because

  4. They know more than we do, so that it may

  5. either be

  5a. a potential real negative change or

  5b. at least a temporary perceptual negative change, altering our judgment in inaccurate directions.

  changing in four directions orthogonal to our desires 1. after so long a period working with Lena Logan, her welfare affects my emotional balance

  1a. negative for clarity

  1b. but positive for determination.

  2. Several of you also have personal attachment to Lena Logan which will affect you emotionally

  3. all of us feel empathy toward her and may think unclearly if we learn she is

  3a. being tortured

  3b. frightened or anxious

  3c. seriously injured.

  4. It is necessary to consider the possibility of betrayal by Lena Logan and I find this extremely distressing to imagine due to long association and close emotional bonds; therefore

  4a. I shall not consider the idea adequately, leaving me with

  4b. a nagging concern that I am not really considering all possibilities as I should.

  All Thumbs puffed out a cloud of smoke and stared at the ceiling. “I’m approximating the major emotional trends on this matter,” he added. “My feelings are actually much more complex. While I recover my composure, perhaps, Mr. Hale, you could …”

  “Sure.” Hale clicked on a big screen and showed us two episodes of Gaudeamus I had missed, both from the last week. In one of them, there was a Xegon Gaudeamus machine, again, perched in the crook of a tree above Harris McParris and O. B. Joyful as they jogged by. When you clicked on it, the whole screen flashed white, a big red word KAPOP! appeared, and below it there was CRESTONE … LAST RECORDED LOCATION … A.T. PHONE HOME!

  In the other, a list on a bulletin board, when you clicked on it, was a list of seven short entries. Lena Logan was the only one still readable; next to her name, it said, “And then there was one.”

  “But Susan Glasgow is still alive,” Kermit said, sounding deeply bewildered.

  “She was until a couple of hours ago,” Hale said grimly. “Living in that penthouse in Manhattan. But at eight o’clock A.M. Eastern time this morning, she fell, probably from her penthouse window, possibly from its balcony, to the sidewalk in front of her building. Her body was naked, with hedge clippers, twelve-inch carbide hacksaw blade, two-pound rubber mallet, five-eighths-inch case-hardened cold chisel, and toilet plunger all driven into or through her body in the same ritually significant places as in the other victims of the Hardware Store Killer. Also like the other victims, autopsy revealed that she was shot in the head first, with some very small caliber very high velocity weapon—as always, something that approximates a BB shot moving at Mach 8 entered her right eye and exited through her brain stem, cratering the back of the office chair in her penthouse, presumably where she was sitting when killed. And as before, no bullet was found, leading to speculation that it may have been made of ammonia ice, since traces of ammonia were found in its path.

  “Everything was exactly the way the Hardware Store Killer has done it in the past. Her clothes were cut off her in irregular swatches with a box knife or something similar, and stuffed into her toilet, again exactly like all the other victims, who were also killed at home, and whose clothing was also stuffed into the toilet in the master bedroom. After the ritual mutilations, all of which were after her death, as in all other cases, she was thrown out the window or off the balcony—both possible places are close together and both were left open, and from such a great height, they can’t calculate the path of her fall. She seems to have been carried to the place from which she was thrown, rather than dragged. She was a small woman, about a hundred five pounds, and we know that the Hardware Store Killer must be a very large man and quite strong; chances are he just grabbed her up, ran with her across the room, and threw her.”

  “So the Third Force strikes again,” Jake said. “Shit, I hated her, but what an awful way to go—”

  “The Third Force,” Kermit said dully.

  “Who else?” I asked.

  He looked utterly bewildered. “I guess you’re right. A Third Force, though. Jesus, hey.” He looked around, and finally said, “Yeah, it has to be a Third Force.”

  “Why is this so important to you?” Hale asked.

  “Because up till a few seconds ago I would have said there’s no such thing as the Third Force. Or rather because up till now, I was the Third Force.” He bent forward, as if looking at the table, and said, “I haven’t been strictly following our agreements. I was the Hardware Store Killer. The first five Hardware Store murders were all mine.”

  Everyone was staring at him blankly.

  “When All Thumbs explained the rules to me, I thought, well, fuck, I know Lena doesn’t want them killed, but they’re her friends, not mine, and if it would make a stronger case to save the Earth—besides, I was just fuckin’ pissed—I mean, shit, I’d’ve knocked off Squanto and every other ‘white man’s friend me-good-Indian,’ too, way back, if I’d had the chance. So I just used some of our special equipment in an unauthorized way now and then. I still wouldn’t have told you, except that I’m not the one that killed Susan Glasgow. And I have no idea who did, or whether he might go gunning for Lena, or maybe he already has her.”

  While we we
re still stunned, Kermit explained pretty much what I had guessed before about the Hardware Store Killer. If you’re going to kill several women, and you want the FBI and police to chase wild geese instead of you, you might as well pretend to be a serial killer. And if you want to be the world’s most effective one, borrow yourself one of All Thumbs’s transporter-booth style Gaudeamus machines, find out exactly where and when each target will be all alone, and blink into existence in each time and place.

  The murder weapon was a gadget Kermit built himself, a little midget rail gun that kicked a frozen ammonia pellet up to very high speeds. Kermit had used that purposely weird weapon, not because he thought it would be undetectable, but because he was sure it would kill instantly, so that all they’d feel was a moment’s surprise when a very large Indian materialized in the room. And it was a bonus that trying to find out who made the weapon would keep the police busy.

  Before Kermit killed the first one, Annabeth Trinidad, he went to thirty different hardware stores in several different cities, buying his list; he had produced the list by stabbing his finger at random into tool catalogs. “It’s not that hard to come up with stuff that’s very symbolic if you think about it,” he said. “The average skinny white boy that becomes a serial killer is acting out a code built around real common obsessions from his whitebread culture. Toilet, clothes, psychologically loaded spots on the body. So I just worked up a mix and match and figured a few man years would go into trying to interpret it. Not too different from letting a chimp throw paint on canvas and then giving it to art critics. They think it’s intended to be meaningful, so they’re going to see things there.”

  I got to tell you, John, it froze my blood, the way Kermit smirked when he said that “Someplace out there some poor profiler is going totally nuts.”

  But now someone had imitated the Hardware Store Killer, getting the details so right—according to Hale’s copy of the FBI report—that no one seemed to even faintly suspect that it was anyone different.