The Collection (57 page)
"
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. He was not getting anywhere anyway, was he?
"
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, and 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 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 a: there were witnesses.
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.
Out 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 then 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
villians. Yew hate them, you hate them, you hate them.
"
Whispers.
"Now-now-now.
"
"Kill them, kill
them."
"A hundred ninety miles
across the flat planes. 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, hack
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 hangover 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 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 wherever 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 Deems 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 his 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
the ailing professor awake-and 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 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.
"
"What enemies did he have,
Perry?
"
"
None that I
know of. Honestly, Rod. Lot of people disliked him, but just an ordinary mild
kind of dislike. You know what I mean, the kind of dislike that makes 'em trade
at another book-and-reel shop, but not the kind that makes them want to kill
anybody.
"
"
And who, as far
as you know, might benefit by his death?
"
"Um-nobody, to speak
of," said Peters, thoughtfully. "I think his heir is a nephew on
Venus. I met him once, and he was a likable guy
.
But the estate won
'
t
be anything to get excited about. A few thousand credits is all I'd guess it to
be.
"