You are here: Webley Page > The Spirit of Exmas Sideways > Part 4Sat 24 Dec 212 A.L., 08:39 O'Clock
I pushed the button the third time that day. "Life is -- " Happyface vanished, replaced by a fogbound chimp. "Who is it?"
I shook my head. "A surprised Win Bear. Curley Koman, I presume?"
"Guilty," came the reply, half-drowned by the hissing of a shower. I was surprised. Most chimps hate water and prefer aerosol pelt shampoos. "Come in and make yourself comfortable. I'll join you in a minute."
There came a click. I followed the door into a room cluttered with tools and gutted paratronics. The wall opposite, a floor-to-ceiling 'com screen, appeared covered with glossy photos, all of one subject, a public library, sometimes tax-supported, sometimes profit-making, which seemed to have counterparts in many versions of Laporte/Fort Collins. In some photos windows were missing, sandstone blackened by fireblast. In some the place looked like a candle left under a sunlamp, soft at the edges, puddled at the foundation. In a few the building was fine, but every leaf and blade of grass was gone, leaving bare earth. Others showed nothing but a rubble-strewn lot.
"You're looking at the graveyards of a hundred billion people." The bath-robed proprietor of this gruesome gallery emerged from another room toweling his head. "I've been out of touch with the world, sleeping sixteen hours. Working overtime nine weeks straight does things to my metabolism. I woke up earlier to messages from you, Deejay, some Healer, and one of the Trustees, all about Seaton Mott's achieving open-mindedness the hard way."
I turned. The Healer would be Loranna Raukerk, gathering background on her inconsolable client. "Which Trustee?" As if I didn't know.
He tossed the damp towel onto a chair arm, lit a cigarette, and sat. "You've got me. I make a point never to remember the name of anyone who introduces himself by title. We could find out, but a long Exmas message from my mother recorded over it while I was sleeping in."
I sighed with a need for sleep myself. "You've heard about Mott, you know why I'm here," I refused his offer of a chair, "What were you and Deejay up to around eighteen last night?"
"That's easy, testing Laumer's Hypothesis." He indicated the photos. "That's where all this came from: fiberoptic probes made through a minibroach while the machinery autocycled from one continuum to the next."
"Laumer's Hypothesis?"
"Out of an infinity of possibilities," he quoted, "a majority of Earths will have been destroyed by biological or thermonuclear warfare."
I nodded, understanding. "I always thought surviving civilizations would be rare, myself." The chimpanzee nodded back. "One reason," I went on, "that the President and Deejay were anxious to salvage the United States I grew up in. It may not be much, but it's all it's got."
"You said it, not me. I guess the judge is still out on Laumer, but, as you can see for yourself, Mr. Bear, we've had some mighty powerful testimony in favor of the S.C.U.M. Syndrome."
This time I didn't ask, just raised my eyebrows.
"A poor thing," he shrugged, "but mine own: 'Selective Cultivation of Unfit Mentalities', a corollary to Wilson's S.N.A.F.U. principle. In any hierarchy, nobody has any reason to promote the interests of anyone more honest, capable, or intelligent than they are. Ergo, the higher you look on the organizational ladder, the less honest, capable, and intelligent any individual is likely to be. Scum floats to the top, and, in cultures with governments, the scum have their fingers on the thermonuclear trig -- "
BRAAAPSH! That's the closest I can get to it. Koman had been cut off by a hailstorm of projectiles smashing through his front window, ripping stitches in the door. He went down levering a pistol from his bathrobe pocket. My S&W Model 58 materialized in my hand. I pointed it at a maroon 211 Varga riding across the lawn on its inflated skirt as it spewed slugs into the house. The .41 Magnum bellowed, leapt, bruised the web of my thumb as it splashed windshield fragments into the driver's compartment. Koman got in half a dozen semi-automatic comments before he dropped his gun and collapsed. The Varga spun, righted itself, and vanished down the block.
I yelled "Healer!" at the apartment's emergency programming, then made a call of my own, asking a single question. The answer was "no".
By this time, Koman had lost consciousness. Breathing and pulse were okay. Help was coming. Some things were the same here as in the States: the hovercraft would turn out to be stolen. I'd failed to bag the assassin. Nonetheless, I felt proud of myself for the first time in a long while. The call had been to Ham Charles. His people had been watching Deejay's place around the clock. She hadn't set a toe outside; probably on downtime like her assistant. Others were being watched, as well. Some apparently knew how to shake a tail -- no particular talent was needed for that in a culture where shadowing a suspect was an unperfected art -- they'd lost track of Littleshin and Bertram both. It didn't matter. I still couldn't prove who'd pulled the trigger on Mott, but I was certain I had the problem damn near solved.
Sat 24 Dec 212 A.L., 12:00 O'Clock
The Healer -- Raukerk again, who seemed to be the only Healer in Laporte not on vacation -- had departed, leaving Koman safe in his bed. The media had crawled back under their rocks. I was in my car around the corner, unblessed by their attention, playing with the 'com again. I'd put out a bulletin on the Varga to NeverSleep, Securitech, and every other outfit I could think of, including Griswold's, the ones so tough they burn before they loot. Brrr.
Still no trace of Clarissa, but I'd had another anonymous call: "Now you know we mean business. If you want to see your girl alive again, book a ticket to the Kingdom of Hawaii and forget the Mott case."
I couldn't think. Hours without sleep and not much food had zombified me. I wasn't doing Clarissa or myself any good. I went home to Genet Place and blacked the windows for an hour of sleep in a cold, lonely house.
Sat 24 Dec 212 A.L., 20:00 O'Clock
I was awakened, it seemed almost the second I dozed off, by a call from Littleshin. "Detective, you're ignoring -- you're in bed!" Sitting behind his desk, he looked like he'd been up all night.
I peered at my Seiko. I hadn't set the alarm, or I'd slept through it. Eight hours had passed. I propped myself on an elbow. "That's a hell of a deduction. Ever think about the detective biz?"
"I warn you, don't make me angrier. I have influence, and friends with a long reach. You'll be looking for a new line of endeavor anyway, once it's understood that, through your negligence -- "
"Not letting you breathe down my neck every five minutes?"
He ignored me. " -- Dora Jayne Thorens has fled unpunished."
"What the hell are you talking about?" If he was right, why hadn't I heard from NeverSleep? Getting rid of him, I tried to contact the physicist at her apartment. Not even an answering program. She wasn't at her lab. Disturbing Koman -- his wounds were less serious than I'd first believed, and Confederate medicine works fast -- I found the recuperating chimp didn't know where Deejay was, either. That made two missing women, Clarissa, and -- In the darkened room, I tensed, feeling a hand on my naked shoulder.
"Win?"
"Ghaaa -- Clarissa, never do that to somebody with a full bladder." Ordering the lights on, I rolled over. Missing Woman Number One lay beside me in our bed, frowning against the light.
"I'm trying to sleep," she groaned, "I thought I turned the alarm off. Do you have any idea what time it is?"
"Do you have any idea how you worried me, disappearing like that? Some freak's out there with a machinegun and your mother said ... I mean I thought you'd decided -- "
"I didn't disappear, I simply referred my appointments to a colleague to help you with this investigation. You didn't think I'd desert you?"
"Of course not," I lied, wrapping my arms around her. A considerable amount of time passed before I asked, "How did you have in mind to help me?"
She grinned. "I've already begun. Based on my experience as a Healer, I thought the women you'd talked to might tell me things, woman to woman, they'd never tell you, no matter how good a detective you are. For instance, did you know that Alberta Mott and her brother -- "
"Sorry, I know that already. Try again."
She raised eyebrows. "I am impressed. If Miss Mott were half a century younger, I'd even be jealous. Well, how about the fact that Littleshin offered last month to intercede with the Trustees on Deejay's behalf?"
I sat up. "That I didn't know. From Deejay? I wonder if it has anything to do with Littleshin's talk with Freeman -- no, that was only last night." I pulled covers aside and put my feet on the floor. "I'll need a Coke or coffee or something if we're going on with this. Want anything?"
"Coffee. I'll even get up and watch you make it." She rose, without a robe -- one advantage to efficient central heating -- and followed me to the kitchen. "It didn't have anything to do with anything, except that, in return, he informed her, she need only submit to him sexually."
Dumping grounds in the sink, I began a ritual with the coffee maker which my hands knew better than my brain. "And Deejay, angry and embarrassed at a kind of blackmail rare in the Confederacy, refused."
Clarissa nodded. "I helped her disappear for her own safety. For most of last night, after you left her place, I hid her in my medical van and didn't answer the 'com. Now she's staying at Mother's."
"Meaning Ham sat all night watching an empty apartment. That oughta look great on the bill I send Miss Mott." I paused, trying to remember what came next, stopped thinking, and let my well-trained body go for the paper filters. "Your mother, hmm? Deejay might have been safer with Littleshin."
"There never was any love lost between you and Mother, was there?"
"Can't lose anything," I muttered, "that wasn't there to begin with."
Somewhere between losing count of the number of coffee scoops I'd ladled into the basket and slopping water over the countertop from a carafe designed by the fun-loving folks that gave us the dribble-glass, I realized I now had all the facts I needed to do something final about this case. The next step would be to make several telecom calls. Some things never change.
Sat 24 Dec 212 A.L., 23:50 O'Clock
It was corny, but I couldn't think of a better way. Deejay met Clarissa and me at her lab, along with Miss Mott, Littleshin, Bertram, Charles, bundled up against the cold, and Koman, with his arm in a sling. The scientists had their instructions and went straight to the machinery, which resembled, more than anything, a scale model oil refinery draped in several thousand yards of copper macrame. There wasn't enough room to realize there wasn't enough room. And I still hadn't found an Exmas present for Clarissa.
"Deejay and Curley are warming the broach," I told the invited guests. I'd informed Littleshin I was about to nail Deejay, Bertram I was going to exonerate her, and Miss Moot that her secret would remain safe only if she showed up. Ham came on what's known in the trade as General R.J.&F. "They're holding it to a small aperture, less than half an inch, using fiberoptics and this 'com display to show us what's on the other side."
"Young man," Miss Mott protested, "is all this nonsense necessary?" We were back to young man again. Clarissa could stop being jealous. We all stood elbow to elbow around a three-foot screen. Five or six paces behind us, the largest stretch of open floor in the room, the actual aperture glowed between a pair of six-foot coils that loed like they'd been invented by Nikola Tesla in partnership with M.C. Escher. Between us and the tiny, brilliant circle of blue light representing the edge of the aperture, was a tangle of 'com equipment. The screen swirled with the beginnings of an image: howling wind, the blinding glare of an Arctic-style blizzard. The Siberian Express had arrived on the high plains of Colorado.
"Dorothy Gale was right," I continued, ignorŠring Miss Mott, "There's no place like home -- thank heavens. We're looking at the exact spot we're standing, as it exists in another world. In the absence of C.R.P.&L., the storm's moved down from Laramie, as you can see. The uncontrolled snow in Fort Collins is much deeper, and the streets completely deserted." It was true. Along Confederation Boulevard, known as Shields Street in the world we observed, and Guy Fawkes Esplanade, West Elizabeth Avenue, coextant with the southeast corner of the university, not a creature was stirring in the gray morning light, not even a snowshoe rabbit. Cars stranded along the street were reduced to amorphous humps by a yard-deep covering of yech.
"This," Freeman Bertram asked with a shiver, "is where you're from, Win?"
"All that's necessary," I replied, turning, "for me to step from this world into that one, is to spin that dial," I indicated a control at the base of the central apparatus, "widening the broach."
Littleshin spoke, "Demonstrating what I've maintained all along, that only Thorens and her accomplice could have shot Seaton the way it was done, opening the broach, firing through the aperture, and closing it afterward."
"On the contrary," I told him, "I'm here to show, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that Mott was not killed through a broach, as first appeared."
That brought a satisfactory volume of gasps and murmurs, so I went on. "A broach can only reach from one world into another, just as you see here. It would take two broaches to reach back into this world, and, at the moment, there aren't two broaches operational in the whole Confederacy. The killer is an individual who should have known that, which is why I suspected him right from the beginning, although I couldn't prove it until now." I drew my revolver. "Mott was murdered from a distance, all right, but from a distance of no more than seventy-five yards, from the private drive of his estate, with an ordinary telescopically-sighted pistol."
I saw Ham Charles nodding to himself. He'd gotten it.
"But," Miss Mott complained, "what about -- "
"The powder marks?" I finished, "After your brother was shot, his body lay cooling in the freshly-falling snow. The murderer went away and came back two hours later, neatly erasing the first tracks he'd made with the fan-blast of his hovercraft. Only then did he walk up, deposit powder 'burns' on the back of his victim's head, using a blank cartridge from which he'd removed the wadding, and telecom for help in order to divert suspicion from himself. Of all the detectives in Laporte he might have called, he chose me because he was sure an American, personally -- but not technically -- familiar with broach technology, would jump to the desired conclusion."
Littleshin began turning an interesting shade of purple halfway through my little speech. Now he erupted. "This is an outrage! Do you have any idea how long you'll be paying restitution for slandering my reputation?"
I grinned at him. "Might as well make it libel, too, because I'm going to hand Miss Mott a written report. You'll be interested to know I suspected you, Littleshin, even before you mentioned broaches and tried to implicate Deejay. I saw bare metal glinting on the receiver of your pistol, where the scope mounting hardware had scraped the black finish before being removed.
Bertram shook his head. "That's a terribly small clue, Win, on which to base the supposition of murder."
"Great oaks from little acorns. Besides, I'm an American. I'm used to looking for a particular motive that wouldn't make sense to the average Confederate. Everybody told me Seaton Mott was as reactionary about rejuvenation as he was about everything else. That meant his days -- or at least his remaining years -- were numbered. Littleshin, here, had always expected to inherit chairmanship of the Board of Trustees from him."
"But," Miss Mott objected, "to murder an old friend for a mere -- "
"I know. It never fails to amaze me, either, how people do the most selling out for the smallest dabs of power. I've watched lifelong friends tear each other to figurative shreds and never speak to each other again, over the presidency of the local P.T.A. It's a disease. Learning that Mott had changed his mind and planned to undertake rejuvenation, Littleshin decided to remove him. He'd been disappointed once already by Deejay. He knew his desire for her was futile, so he selected a manner of dealing with his old friend which would place the blame on her, killing two birds with one stone."
"But how," Bertram frowned with concentration, "could he have been at the estate killing Seaton while he was in his office, talking to me?"
I shook my head. "He talked to you from the estate, on his pocket 'com, probably mounted on a photo tripod to remove the characteristic shakiness. You assumed he was in his office because you saw trees behind him. It wasn't a view through his window, but from the driveway where he waited to kill Mott. For what it's worth, I have castings of deep tripod marks which his and other hovercraft failed to obliterate entirely."
Sat 24 Dec 212 A.L., 23:57 O'Clock
A glance at Littleshin told me he was almost soup, so I turned up the heat. "If that doesn't satisfy anybody, what do you say we take his gloves off and turn down his collar? He's got to have some cuts and scrapes from all the glass we dumped on him when he attacked Curley and me. How about it, Merse, old boy, show us your owie?"
That was it. Suddenly, Littleshin leaped toward the broach, slapping at the aperture knob. The brilliant blue-white circle expanded. A savage gust of unmoderated winter swept into the lab with a few short-lived snowflakes. Littleshin plunged through the broach. Bertram, Miss Mott, and Ham drew their weapons, attempting to stop him. I took a quick step into their line of fire and let off a shot of my own, over his head, to speed him on his way. The room thundered with the magnum report.
"Close it, Deejay, now!" I watched the aperture diminish even before I'd finished shouting. The silence which followed was long, as bitter as the cold the other side of the broach. I discovered I was still thinking, somewhere in the back of my mind, about finding an Exmas present for Clarissa.
"Young man," Miss Mott began at last, her tone indignant, "one would gather, from what you have said, that your United States is an unpleasant place, compared to the Confederacy ... "
I refrained from answering, not even giving her a nod, fed up with Confederate sanctimony, unwilling to acknowledge that the place I'd come from, where I'd been born, was all that bad. I knew it was, but that was different.
"You permitted," she went on, "encouraged Littleshin to escape to that place. However unpleasant, it seems a trivial punishment, considering what he did. I want to know why -- before you send me your bill."
"Miss Mott, I don't know whether it'll make you feel better, it depends on how much you value revenge. Before you got here, I Deejay opened that broach, not onto my home world, but onto a place where humanity was recently destroyed by biological warfare. The buildings and so on are still intact."
"The chosen world," Ham Charles grinned, "had to be one where a blizzard was raging, accounting for the deserted streets." I nodded. Ham hadn't been in on the deception, but he caught on fast.
"Arrests in the Confederacy are a touchy business," I repeated, "I didn't have enough evidence against Littleshin to convict him of jaywalking."
"But ... " Bertram goggled and spluttered, not a pretty sight.
"What about the tripod marks in the snow I mentioned?"
He added head-bobbing to the goggling and spluttering, making it worse.
"I lied."
Ham Charles laughed out loud.
"However, given enough metaphorical rope," I went on, "Littleshin convicted and sentenced himself: to an extremely brief lifetime, marooned in a deadly environment. Life, as Curley's answering machine informs us, is an intelligence test -- which Littleshin failed -- Beeeep!"
That seemed to satisfy them, to the point they were all talking at once, Bertram and Charles slapping me on the back. Taking Clarissa by the hand, I ignored everyone's congratulations to look into her eyes.
"I was afraid, Win," she started before I could, "You attract violence. I didn't want you dying in some fight necessitated by your profession."
"I thought it was my lack of gainful employment," I told her, "I'll look for something else day after tomorrow. That'll be my Exmas present to you. I was afraid I'd lost you altogether. I never want to feel that way again."
"Drat! I'm not making myself clear, Win. I don't want you to quit detecting. Worse than any risk, I hated the way you were losing your ... your direction. Your self-esteem. The determination and vigor I see in you now is more than enough present for me. You've regained your identity, your ... "
I grinned. "My manhood?"
Not liking the way I put it, but unable to deny the truth, she nodded. "I, er, I haven't had time to find you an Exmas present, either, darling. But someone else was thinking of us. I told my mother, a little prematurely, that we were making up our differences. She left for Luna in a huff -- by invitation -- using a ticket provided by the President of the Confederacy. I confided in Jenny, Win. I was so afraid that, sooner or later, feeling the way you did, you'd fall victim to some self-inflicted misfortune -- "
"Like Littleshin did?" I looked at my watch. Three minutes after midnight. Exmas had sneaked up on us while we weren't looking. She nodded.
"Well, Goldilocks," I told her, nuzzling blond curls, "that's the way it happens, sometimes. As you'll discover as soon as I get you home and back to bed, sometimes you eat the Bear, and sometimes the Bear eats you."
THE END
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