The Mammoth Book of Golden Age SF

1. Five-Way Corpse

It started out like a simple case of murder. That was bad enough in itself, because it was the first murder during the five years Rod Caquer had been Lieutenant of Police in Sector Three of Callisto.

Sector Three was proud of that record, or had been until the record became a dead duck.

But before the thing was over, nobody would have been happier than Rod Caquer if it had stayed a simple case of murder — without cosmic repercussions.

Events began to happen when Rod Caquer’s buzzer made him look up at the visiscreen.

There he saw the image of Barr Maxon, Regent of Sector Three.

“Morning, Regent,” Caquer said pleasantly. “Nice speech you made last night on the—”

Maxon cut him short. “Thanks, Caquer,” he said. “You know Willem Deem?”

“The book-and-reel shop proprietor? Yes, slightly.”

“He’s dead,” announced Maxon. “It seems to be murder. You better go there.”

His image clicked off the screen before Caquer could ask any questions. But the questions could wait anyway. He was already on his feet and buckling on his short sword.

Murder on Callisto? It did not seem possible, but if it had really happened he should get there quickly. Very quickly, if he was to have time for a look at the body before they took it to the incinerator.

On Callisto, bodies are never held for more than an hour after death because of the hylra spores which, in minute quantity, are always present in the thinnish atmosphere. They are harmless, of course, to live tissue, but they tremendously accelerate the rate of putrefaction in dead animal matter of any sort.

Dr. Skidder, the Medico-in-Chief, was coming out the front door of the book-and-reel shop when Lieutenant Caquer arrived there, breathless.

The medico jerked a thumb back over his shoulder. “Better hurry if you want a look,” he said to Caquer. “They’re taking it out the back way. But I’ve examined—”

Caquer ran on past him and caught the white-uniformed utility men at the back door of the shop.

“Hi, boys, let me take a look,” Caquer cried as he peeled back the sheet that covered the thing on the stretcher.

It made him feel a bit sickish, but there was not any doubt of the identity of the corpse or the cause of death. He had hoped against hope that it would turn out to have been an accidental death after all. But the skull had been cleaved down to the eyebrows — a blow struck by a strong man with a heavy sword.

“Better let us hurry, Lieutenant. It’s almost an hour since they found him.”

Caquer’s nose confirmed it, and he put the sheet back quickly and let the utility men go on to their gleaming white truck parked just outside the door.

He walked back into the shop, thoughtfully, and looked around. Everything seemed in order. The long shelves of celluwrapped merchandise were neat and orderly. The row of booths along the other side, some equipped with an enlarger for book customers and the others with projectors for those who were interested in the microfilms, were all empty and undisturbed.

A little crowd of curious persons was gathered outside the door, but Brager, one of the policemen, was keeping them out of the shop.

“Hey, Brager,” said Caquer, and the patrolman came in and closed the door behind him.

“Yes, Lieutenant?”

“Know anything about this? Who found him, and when, and so on?”

“I did, almost an hour ago. I was walking by on my beat when I heard the shot.”

Caquer looked at him blankly.

“The shot?” he repeated.

“Yeah. I ran in and there he was dead and nobody around. I knew nobody had come out the front way, so I ran to the back and there wasn’t anybody in sight from the back door. So I came back and put in the call.”

“To whom? Why didn’t you call me direct, Brager?”

“Sorry, Lieutenant, but I was excited and I pushed the wrong button and got the Regent. I told him somebody had shot Deem and he said stay on guard and he’d call the Medico and the utility boys and you.”

In that order? Caquer wondered. Apparently, because Caquer had been the last one to get there.

But he brushed that aside for the more important question — the matter of Brager having heard a shot. That did not make sense, unless — no, that was absurd, too. If Willem Deem had been shot, the Medico would not have split his skull as part of the autopsy.

“What do you mean by a shot, Brager?” Caquer asked. “An old-fashioned explosive weapon?”

“Yeah,” said Brager. “Didn’t you see the body? A hole right over the heart. A bullet-hole, I guess. I never saw one before. I didn’t know there was a gun on Callisto. They were outlawed even before the blasters were.”

Caquer nodded slowly.

“You — you didn’t see evidence of any other — uh — wound?” he persisted.

“Earth, no. Why would there be any other wound? A hole through a man’s heart’s enough to kill him, isn’t it?”

“Where did Dr. Skidder go when he left here?” Caquer inquired. “Did he say?”

“Yeah, he said you would be wanting his report so he’d go back to his office and wait till you came around or called him. What do you want me to do, Lieutenant?”

Caquer thought a moment.

“Go next door and use the visiphone there, Brager — I’ll be busy on this one,” Caquer at last told the policeman. “Get three more men, and the four of you canvass this block and question everyone.”

“You mean whether they saw anybody run out the back way, and if they heard the shot, and that sort of thing?” asked Brager.

“Yes. Also anything they may know about Deem, or who might have had a reason to — to shoot him.”

Brager saluted, and left.

Caquer got Dr. Skidder on the visiphone. “Hello, Doctor,” he said. “Let’s have it.”

“Nothing but what met the eye, Rod. Blaster, of course. Close range.”

Lieutenant Rod Caquer steadied himself. “Say that again, Medico.”

“What’s the matter,” jibed Skidder. “Never see a blaster death before? Guess you wouldn’t have at that, Rod, you’re too young. But fifty years ago when I was a student, we got them once in a while.”

“Just how did it kill him?”

Dr. Skidder looked surprised. “Oh, you didn’t catch up with the clearance men then. I thought you’d seen it. Left shoulder, burned all the skin and flesh off and charred the bone. Actual death was from shock — the blast didn’t hit a vital area. Not that the burn wouldn’t have been fatal anyway, in all probability. But the shock made it instantaneous.”

Dreams are like this, Caquer told himself.

“In dreams things happen without meaning anything,” he thought. “But I’m not dreaming, this is real.”

“Any other wounds, or marks on the body?” he asked, slowly.

“None. I’d suggest, Rod, you concentrate on a search for that blaster. Search all of Sector Three, if you have to. You know what a blaster looks like, don’t you?”

“I’ve seen pictures,” said Caquer. “Do they make a noise, Medico? I’ve never seen one fired.”

Dr. Skidder shook his head. “There’s a flash and a hissing sound, but no report.”

“It couldn’t be mistaken for a gunshot?”

The doctor stared at him.

“You mean an explosive gun? Of course not. Just a faint s-s-s-s. One couldn’t hear it more than ten feet away.”

When Lieutenant Caquer had clicked off the visiphone, he sat down and closed his eyes to concentrate. Somehow he had to make sense out of three conflicting sets of observations. His own, the patrolman’s, and the medico’s.

Brager had been the first one to see the body, and he said there was a hole over the heart. And that there were no other wounds. He had heard the report of the shot.

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. Brager’s story could be true, in toto. 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 two 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?”

2. Terror by Night

That was the set-up that confronted Rod Caquer, and one can not 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.

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. Lot 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 said with a sigh.

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. 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 detectives 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.

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. You 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 of 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 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.

3. Blackdex

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’s 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 you 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 accurately 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.”

“Here’s a list of his friends, Perry.” Caquer handed Peters a paper. “Look it over, will you, and see if you can make any additions to it. Or any suggestions.”

The lanky inventor studied the list, and then passed it back.

“That includes them all, I guess,” he told Caquer. “Couple on there I didn’t know he knew well enough to rate listing. And you have his best customers down, too; the ones that bought heavily from him.”

Lieutenant Caquer put the list back in his pocket.

“What are you working on now?” he asked Peters.

“Something I’m stuck on, I’m afraid,” the inventor said. “I needed Deem’s help — or at least the use of his lathe, to go ahead with this.” He picked up from the bench a pair of the most peculiar-looking goggles Rod Caquer had ever seen. The lenses were shaped like arcs of circles instead of full circles, and they fastened in a band of resilient plastic obviously designed to fit close to the face above and below the lenses. At the top center, where it would be against the forehead of the goggles’ wearer, was a small cylindrical box an inch and a half in dismeter.

“What on earth are they for?” Caquer asked.

“For use in radite mines. The emanations from that stuff, while it’s in the raw state, destroys immediately any tranparent substance yet made or discovered. Even quartz. And it isn’t good on naked eyes either. The miners have to work blindfolded, as it were, and by their sense of touch.”

Rod Caquer looked at the goggles curiously.

“But how is the funny shape of these lenses going to keep the emanations from hurting them, Perry?” he asked.

“That part up on top is a tiny motor. It operates a couple of specially-treated wipers across the lenses. For all the world like an old-fashioned windshield wiper, and that’s why the lenses are shaped like the wiper-arm arcs.”

“Oh,” said Caquer. “You mean the wipers are absorbent and hold some kind of liquid that protects the glass?”

“Yes, except that it’s quartz instead of glass. And it’s protected only a minute fraction of a second. Those wipers go like the devil — so fast you can’t see them when you’re wearing the goggles. The arms are half as big as the arcs, and the wearer can see out of only a fraction of the lens at a time. But he can see, dimly, and that’s a thousand percent improvement in radite mining.”

“Fine, Perry,” said Caquer. “And they can get around the dimness by having ultra-brilliant lighting. Have you tried these out?”

“Yes, and they work. Trouble’s in the rods; friction heats them and they expand and jam after it’s run a minute, or thereabouts. I have to turn them down on Deem’s lathe — or one like it. Think you could arrange for me to use it? Just for a day or so?”

“I don’t see why not,” Caquer told him. ‘I’ll talk to whomever the Regent appoints executor, and fix it up. And later you can probably buy the lathe from his heir. Or does the nephew go in for such things?”

Perry Peters shook his head. “Nope, he wouldn’t know a lathe from a drill-press. Be swell of you, Rod, if you can arrange for me to use it.”

Caquer had turned to go, when Perry Peters stopped him.

“Wait a minute,” Peters said and then paused and looked uncomfortable.

“I guess I was holding out on you, Rod,” the inventor said at last. “I do know one thing about Willem that might possibly have something to do with his death, although I don’t see how, myself. I wouldn’t tell it on him, except that he’s dead, and so it won’t get him in trouble.”

“What was it, Perry?”

“Illicit political books. He had a little business on the side selling them. Books on the index — you know just what I mean.”

Caquer whistled softly. “I didn’t know they were made any more. After the council put such a heavy penalty on them — whew!”

“People are still human, Rod. They still want to know the things they shouldn’t know — just to find out why they shouldn’t, if for no other reason.”

“Graydex or Blackdex books, Perry?”

Now the inventor looked puzzled.

“I don’t get it. What’s the difference?”

“Books on the official index,” Caquer explained, “are divided into two groups. There’s a severe penalty for owning one, and a death penalty for writing or printing one. The mildly dangerous ones are in the Graydex, as they call it.”

“I wouldn’t know which Willem peddled. Well, off the record, I read a couple Willem lent me once, and I thought they were pretty dull stuff. Unorthodox political theories.”

“That would be Graydex.” Lieutenant Caquer looked relieved. “Theoretical stuff is all Graydex. The Blackdex books are the ones with dangerous practical information.”

“Such as?” The inventor was staring intently at Caquer.

“Instructions how to make outlawed things,” explained Caquer. “Like Lethite, for instance. Lethite is a poison gas that’s tremendously dangerous. A few pounds of it could wipe out a city, so the council outlawed its manufacture, and any book telling people how to make it for themselves would go on the Blackdex. Some nitwit might get hold of a book like that and wipe out his whole home town.”

“But why would anyone?”

“He might be warped mentally, and have a grudge,” explained Caquer. “Or he might want to use it on a lesser scale for criminal reasons. Or — by Earth, he might be the head of a government with designs on neighbouring states. Knowledge of a thing like that might upset the peace of the Solar System.”

Perry Peters nodded thoughtfully. “I get your point,” he said. “Well, I still don’t see what it could have to do with the murder, but I thought I’d tell you about Willem’s sideline. You probably want to check over his stock before whoever takes over the shop reopens.”

“We shall,” said Caquer. “Thanks a lot, Perry. If you don’t mind, I’ll use your phone to get that search started right away. If there are any Blackdex books there, we’ll take care of them all right.”

When he got his secretary on the screen, she looked both frightened and relieved at seeing him.

“Mr. Caquer,” she said, “I’ve been trying to reach you. Something awful’s happened. Another death.”

“Murder again?” gasped Caquer.

“Nobody knows what it was,” said the secretary. “A dozen people saw him jump out of a window only twenty feet up. And in this gravity that couldn’t have killed him, but he was dead when they got there. And four of them that saw him knew him. It was—”

“Well, for Earth’s sake, who?”

“I don’t—Lieutenant Caquer, they said, all four of them, that it was Willem Deem!”

4. Rule of Thumb

With a nightmarish feeling of unreality Lieutenant Rod Caquer peered down over the shoulder of the Medico-in-Chief at the body that already lay on the stretcher of the utility men, who stood by impatiently.

“You better hurry, Doc,” one of them said. “He won’t last much longer and it take us five minutes to get there.”

Dr. Skidder nodded impatiently without looking up, and went on with his examination. “Not a mark, Rod,” he said. “Not a sign of poison. Not a sign of anything. He’s just dead.”

“The fall couldn’t have caused it?” said Caquer.

“There isn’t even a bruise from the fall. Only verdict I can give is heart failure. Okay, boys, you take it away.”

“You through too, Lieutenant?”

“I’m through.” said Caquer. “Go ahead. Skidder, which of them was Willem Deem?”

The medico’s eyes followed the white-sheeted burden of the utility men as they carried it toward the truck, and he shrugged helplessly.

“Lieutenant, I guess that’s your pigeon,” he said. “All I can do is certify to cause of death.”

“It just doesn’t make sense,” Caquer wailed. “Sector Three City isn’t so big that he could have had a double living here without people knowing about it. But one of them had to be a double. Off the record, which looked to you like the original?”

Dr. Skidder shook his head grimly.

“Willem Deem had a peculiarly shaped wart on his nose,” he said.

“So did both of his corpses, Rod. And neither one was artificial, or make-up. I’ll stake my professional reputation on that. But come on back to the office with me, and I’ll tell you which one of them is the real Willem Deem.”

“Huh? How?”

“His thumbprint’s on file at the tax department, like everybody’s is. And it’s part of routine to fingerprint a corpse on Callisto, because it has to be destroyed so quickly.”

“You have thumbprints of both corpses?” inquired Caquer.

“Of course. Took them before you reached the scene, both times. I have the one for Willem — I mean the other corpse — back in my office. Tell you what — you pick up the print on file at the tax office and meet me there.”

Caquer sighed with relief as he agreed. At least one point in the case would be cleared up — which corpse was which.

And in that comparatively blissful state of mind he remained until half an hour later when he and Dr. Skidder compared the three prints — the one Rod Caquer had secured from the tax office, and one from each of the corpses.

They were identical, all three of them.

“Um,” said Caquer. “You’re sure you didn’t get mixed up on those prints, Dr. Skidder.

“How could I? I took only one copy from each body, Rod. If I had shuffled them just now while we were looking at them, the result would be the same. All three prints are alike.”

“But they can’t be.”

Skidder shrugged.

“I think we should lay this before the Regent, direct,” he said. “I’ll call him and arrange an audience. Okay?”

Half an hour later, he was giving the whole story to Regent Barr Maxon, with Dr. Skidder corroborating the main points. The expression on Regent Maxon’s face made Lieutenant Rod Caquer glad, very glad, that he had that corroboration.

“You agree,” Maxon asked, “that this should be taken up with the Sector Coordinator, and that a special investigator should be sent here to take over?”

A bit reluctantly, Caquer nodded. “I hate to admit that I’m incompetent, Regent, or that I seem to be,” Caquer said. “But this isn’t an ordinary crime. Whatever goes on, it’s way over my head. And there may be something even more sinister than murder behind it.”

“You’re right, Lieutenant. I’ll see that a qualified man leaves headquarters today and he’ll get in touch with you in the morning.”

“Regent,” Caquer asked, “has any machine or process ever been invented that will — uh — duplicate a human body, with or without the mind being carried over?”

Maxon seemed puzzled by the question.

“You think Deem might have been playing around with something that bit him. No, to my knowledge a discovery like that has never been approached. Nobody has ever duplicated, except by constructive imitation, even an inanimate object. You haven’t heard of such a thing, have you, Skidder?”

“No,” said the Medical Examiner. “I don’t think even your friend Perry Peters could do that, Rod.”

From the Regent Maxon’s office, Caquer went to Deem’s shop. Brager was in charge there, and Brager helped him search the place thoroughly. It was a long and laborious task, because each book and reel had to be examined minutely.

The printers of illicit books, Caquer knew, were clever at disguising their product. Usually, forbidden books bore the cover and title page, often even the opening chapters, of some popular work of fiction, and the projection reels were similarly disguised.

Jupiter-lighted darkness was falling outside when they finished, but Rod Caquer knew they had done a thorough job. There wasn’t an indexed book anywhere in the shop, and every reel had been run off on a projector.

Other men, at Rod Caquer’s orders, had been searching Deem’s apartment with equal thoroughness. He phoned there, and got a report, completely negative.

“Not so much as a Venusian pamphlet,” said the man in charge at the apartment, with what Caquer thought was a touch of regret in his voice.

“Did you come across a lathe, a small one for delicate work?” Rod asked.

“Um — no, we didn’t see anything like that. One room’s turned into a workshop, but there’s no lathe in it. Is it important?”

Caquer grunted noncommittally. What was one more mystery, and a minor one at that, to a case like this?

“Well, Lieutenant,” Brager said, when the screen had gone blank, “what do we do now?”

Caquer sighed.

“You can go off duty, Brager,” he said. “But first arrange to leave men on guard here and at the apartment. I’ll stay until whoever you send comes to relieve me.”

When Brager had left, Caquer sank wearily into the nearest chair. He felt terrible, physically, and his mind just did not seem to be working. He let his eyes run again around the orderly shelves of the shop and their orderliness oppressed him.

If there was only a clue of some sort. Wilder Williams had never had a case like this in which the only leads were two identical corpses, one of which had been killed five different ways and the other did not have a mark or sign of violence. What a mess, and where did he go from here?

Well, he still had the list of people he was going to interview, and there was time to see at least one of them this evening.

Should he look up Perry Peters again, and see what, if anything, the lanky inventor could make of the disappearance of the lathe? Perhaps he might be able to suggest what had happened to it. But then again, what could a lathe have to do with a mess like this? One cannot turn out a duplicate corpse on a lathe.

Or should he look up Professor Gordon? He decided to do just that.

He called the Gordon apartment on the visiphone, and Jane appeared in the screen.

“How’s your father, Jane?” asked Caquer. “Will he be able to talk to me for a while this evening?”

“Oh, yes,” said the girl. “He’s feeling much better, and thinks he’ll go back to his classes tomorrow. But get here early if you’re coming. Rod, you look terrible; what’s the matter with you?”

“Nothing, except I feel goofy. But I’m all right, I guess.”

“You have a gaunt, starved look. When did you eat last?”

Caquer’s eyes widened. “Earth! I forgot all about eating. I slept late and didn’t even have breakfast!”

Jane Gordon laughed.

“You dope! Well, hurry around, and I’ll have something ready for you when you get here.”

“But—”

“But nothing. How soon can you start?”

A minute after he had clicked off the visiphone, Lieutenant Caquer went to answer a knock on the shuttered door of the shop.

He opened it. “Oh, hullo, Reese,” he said. “Did Brager send you?”

The policeman nodded.

“He said I was to stay here in case. In case what?”

“Routine guard duty, that’s all,” explained Caquer. “Say, I’ve been stuck here all afternoon. Anything going on?”

“A little excitement. We been pulling in soap-box orators off and on all day. Screwballs. There’s an epidemic of them.”

“The devil you say! What are they hipped about?”

“Sector Two, for some reason I can’t make out. They’re trying to incite people to get mad at Sector Two and do something about it. The arguments they use are plain nutty.”

Something stirred uneasily in Rod Caquer’s memory — but he could not quite remember what it was. Sector Two? Who’d been telling him things about Sector Two recently — usury, unfairness, tainted blood, something silly. Although of course a lot of the people over there did have Martian blood in them…

“How many of the orators were arrested?” he asked.

“We got seven. Two more slipped away from us, but we’ll pick them up if they start spouting that kind of stuff again.”

Lieutenant Caquer walked slowly, thoughtfully, to the Gordon apartment, trying his level best to remember where, recently, he heard anti-Sector Two propaganda. There must be something back of the simultaneous appearance of nine soap-box radicals, all preaching the same doctrine.

A sub-rosa political organization? But none such had existed for almost a century now. Under a perfectly democratic government, component part of a stable system-wide organization of planets, there was no need for such activity. Of course an occasional crackpot was dissatisfied, but a group in that state of mind struck him as fantastic.

It sounded as crazy as the Willem Deem case. That did not make sense either. Things happened meaninglessly, as in a dream. Dream? What was he trying to remember about a dream? Hadn’t he had an odd sort of dream last night — what was it?

But, as dreams usually do, it eluded his conscious mind.

Anyway, tomorrow he would question — or help question — those radicals who were under arrest. Put men on the job of tracing them back, and undoubtedly a common background somewhere, a tieup, would be found.

It could not be accidental that they should all pop up on the same day. It was screwy, just as screwy as the two inexplicable corpses of a book-and-reel shop proprietor. Maybe because the cases were both screwy, his mind tended to couple the two sets of events. But taken together, they were no more digestible than taken separately. They made even less sense.

Confound it, why hadn’t he taken that post on Ganymede when it was offered to him? Ganymede was a nice orderly moon. Persons there did not get murdered twice on consecutive days. But Jane Gordon did not live on Ganymede; she lived right here in Sector Three and he was on his way to see her.

And everything was wonderful except that he felt so tired he could not think straight, and Jane Gordon insisted on looking on him as a brother instead of a suitor, and he was probably going to lose his job. He would be the laughing-stock of Callisto if the special investigator from headquarters found some simple explanation of things that he had overlooked….

5. Nine-Man Morris

Jane Gordon, looking more beautiful than he had ever seen her, met him at the door. She was smiling, but the smile changed to a look of concern as he stepped into the light.

“Rod!” she exclaimed. “You do look ill, really ill. What have you been doing to yourself besides forgetting to eat?”

Rod Caquer managed a grin.

“Chasing vicious circles up blind alleys, Icicle. May I use your visiphone?”

“Of course. I’ve some food ready for you; I’ll put it on the table while you’re calling. Dad’s taking a nap. He said to wake him when you got here, but I’ll hold off until you’re fed.”

She hurried out to the kitchen. Caquer almost fell into the chair before the visiscreen, and called the police station. The red, beefy face of Borgesen, the night lieutenant, flashed into view.

“Hi, Borg,” said Caquer. “Listen, about those seven screwballs you picked up. Have you—”

“Nine,” Borgesen interrupted. “We got the other two, and I wish we hadn’t. We’re going nuts down here.”

“You mean the other two tried it again?”

“No. Suffering Asteroids, they came in and gave themselves up, and we can’t kick them out, because there’s a charge against them. But they’re confessing all over the place. And do you know what they’re confessing?”

“I’ll bite,” said Caquer.

“That you hired them, and offered one hundred credits apiece to them.”

“Huh?”

Borgesen laughed, a little wildly. “The two that came in voluntarily say that, and the other seven— Gosh, why did I ever become a policeman? I had a chance to study for fireman on a spacer once, and I end up doing this.”

“Look — maybe I better come around and see if they make that accusation to my face.”

“They probably would, but it doesn’t mean anything, Rod. They say you hired them this afternoon, and you were at Deem’s with Brager all afternoon. Rod, this moon is going nuts. And so am I. Walter Johnson has disappeared. Hasn’t been seen since this morning.”

“What? The Regent’s confidential secretary? You’re kidding me, Borg.”

“Wish I was. You ought to be glad you’re off duty. Maxon’s been raising seven brands of thunder for us to find his secretary for him. He doesn’t like the Deem business, either. Seems to blame us for it; thinks it’s bad enough for the department to let a man get killed once. Say, which was Deem, Rod? Got any idea?”

Caquer grinned weakly.

“Let’s call them Deem and Redeem till we find out,” he suggested. “I think they were both Deem.”

“But how could one man be two?”

“How could one man be killed five ways?” countered Caquer. “Tell me that and I’ll tell you the answer to yours.”

“Nuts,” said Borgesen, and followed it with a masterpiece of understatement. “There’s something funny about that case.”

Caquer was laughing so hard that there were tears in his eyes, when Jane Gordon came to tell him food was ready. She frowned at him, but there was concern behind the frown.

Caquer followed her meekly, and discovered he was ravenous. When he’d put himself outside enough food for three ordinary meals, he felt almost human again. His headache was still there, but it was something that throbbed dimly in the distance.

Frail Professor Gordon was waiting in the living room when they went there from the kitchen. “Rod, you look like something the cat dragged in,” he said. “Sit down before you fall down.”

Caquer grinned. “Overeating did it. Jane’s a cook in a million.”

He sank into a chair facing Gordon. Jane Gordon had sat on the arm of her father’s chair and Caquer’s eyes feasted on her. How could a girl with lips as soft and kissable as hers insist on regarding marriage only as an academic subject? How could a girl with—

“I don’t see offhand how it could be a cause of his death Rod, but Willem Deem rented out political books,” said Gordon. “There’s no harm in my telling that, since the poor chap is dead.”

Almost the same words, Caquer remembered, that Perry Peters had used in telling him the same thing.

Caquer nodded.

“We’ve searched his shop and his apartment and haven’t found any, Professor,” he said. “You wouldn’t know, of course, what kind—”

Professor Gordon smiled. “I’m afraid I would, Rod. Off the record — and I take it you haven’t a recorder on our conversation — I’ve read quite a few of them.”

“You?” There was frank surprise in Caquer’s voice.

“Never underestimate the curiosity of an educator, my boy. I fear the reading of Graydex books is a more prevalent vice among the instructors in universities than among any other class. Oh, I know it’s wrong to encourage the trade, but the reading of such books can’t possibly harm a balanced, judicious mind.”

“And Father certainly has a balanced, judicious mind, Rod,” said Jane, a bit defiantly. “Only — darn him — he wouldn’t let me read those books.”

Caquer grinned at her. The professor’s use of the word “Graydex” had reassured him.

Renting Graydex books was only a misdemeanor, after all.

“Ever read any Graydex books, Rod?” the professor asked. Caquer shook his head.

“Then you’ve probably never heard of hypnotism. Some of the circumstances in the Deem case— Well, I’ve wondered whether hypnotism might have been used.”

“I’m afraid I don’t even know what it is, Professor.”

The frail little man sighed.

“That’s because you’ve never read illicit books, Rod,” said Gordon. “Hypnotism is the control of one mind by another, and it reached a pretty high state of development before it was outlawed. You’ve never heard of the Kaprelian Order or the Vargas Wheel?”

Caquer shook his head.

“The history of the subject is in Graydex books, in several of them,” said the professor. “The actual methods, and how a Vargas Wheel is constructed would be Blackdex, high on the roster of lawlessness. Of course, I haven’t read that, but I have read the history.

“A man by the name of Mesmer, way back in the Eighteenth Century, was one of the first practitioners, if not the discoverer, of hypnotism. At any rate, he put it on a more or less scientific basis. By the Twentieth Century, quite a bit had been learned about it — and it became extensively used in medicine.

“A hundred years later, doctors were treating almost as many patients through hypnotism as through drugs and surgery. True, there were cases of its misuse, but they were relatively few.

“But another hundred years brought a big change. Mesmerism had developed too far for the public safety. Any criminal or selfish politician who had a smattering of the art could operate with impunity. He could fool all the people all the time, and get away with it.”

“You mean he could really make people think anything he wanted them to?” Caquer asked.

“Not only that, he could make them do anything he wanted. And by that time, television was in such common use that one speaker could visibly and directly talk to millions of people.”

“But couldn’t the government have regulated the art?”

Professor Gordon smiled thinly. “How, when legislators were human, too, and as subject to hypnotism as the people under them? And then, to complicate things almost hopelessly, came the invention of the Vargas Wheel.

“It had been known, back as far as the Nineteenth Century, that an arrangement of moving mirrors could throw anyone who watched it into a state of hypnotic submission. And though transmission had been experimented with in the Twenty-first Century, it was in the following one that Vargas combined and perfected the two into the Vargas Wheel. A sort of helmet affair, really, with a revolving wheel of specially constructed tricky mirrors on top of it.”

“How did it work, Professor?” asked Caquer.

“The wearer of a Vargas Wheel helmet had immediate and automatic control over anyone who saw him — directly, or in a television screen,” said Gordon. “The mirrors in the small turning wheel produced instantaneous hypnosis and the helmet — somehow — brought thoughts of its wearer to bear through the wheel and impressed upon his subjects any thoughts he wished to transmit.

“In fact, the helmet itself — or the wheel — could be set to produce certain fixed illusions without the necessity of the operator speaking, or even concentrating, on those points. Or the control could be direct, from his mind.”

“Ouch,” said Caquer. “A thing like that would—I can certainly see why instructions in making a Vargas Wheel would be Black-dexed. Suffering Asteroids! A man with one of these could—”

“Could do almost anything. Including killing a man and making the manner of his death appear five different ways to five different observers.”

Caquer whistled softly. “And including playing nine-man Morris with soap-box radicals—or they wouldn’t even have to be radicals. They could be ordinary orthodox citizens.”

“Nine men?” Jane Gordon demanded. “What’s this about nine men, Rod? I hadn’t heard about it.”

But Rod was already standing up.

“Haven’t time to explain, Icicle,” he said. “Tell you tomorrow, but I must get down to— Wait a minute. Professor, is that all you know about the Vargas Wheel business?”

“Absolutely all, my boy. It just occurred to me as a possibility. There were only five or six of them ever made, and finally the government got hold of them and destroyed them, one by one. It cost millions of lives to do it.

“When they finally got everything cleaned up, colonization of the planets was starting, and an international council had been started with control over all governments. They decided that the whole field of hypnotism was too dangerous, and they made it a forbidden subject. It took quite a few centuries to wipe out all knowledge of it, but they succeeded. The proof is that you’d never heard of it.”

“But how about the beneficial aspects of it,” Jane Gordon asked. “Were they lost?”

“Of course,” said her father. “But the science of medicine had progressed so far by that time that it wasn’t too much of a loss. Today the medicos can cure, by physical treatment, anything that hypnotism could handle.”

Caquer, who had halted at the door, now turned back.

“Professor, do you think it possible that someone could have rented a Blackdex book from Deem, and learned all those secrets?” he inquired.

Professor Gordon shrugged. “It’s possible,” he said. “Deem might have handled occasional Blackdex books, but he knew better than try to sell or rent any to me. So I wouldn’t have heard of it.”

At the station, Lieutenant Caquer found Lieutenant Borgesen on the verge of apoplexy.

He looked at Caquer.

“You!” he said. And then, plaintively, “The world’s gone nuts. Listen, Brager discovered Willem Deem, didn’t he? At ten o’clock yesterday morning? And stayed there on guard while Skidder and you and the clearance men were there?”

“Yes, why?” asked Caquer.

Borgesen’s expression showed how much he was upset by developments.

“Nothing, not a thing, except that Brager was in the emergency hospital yesterday morning, from nine until after eleven, getting a sprained ankle treated. He couldn’t have been at Deem’s. Seven doctors and attendants and nurses swear up and down he was in the hospital at that time.”

Caquer frowned.

“He was limping today, when he helped me search Deem’s shop,” he said. “What does Brager say?”

“He says he was there, I mean at Deem’s, and discovered Deem’s body. We just happened to find out otherwise accidentally — if it is otherwise. Rod, I’m going nuts. To think I had a chance to be a fireman on a spacer and took this celestial job. Have you learned anything new?”

“Maybe. But first I want to ask you, Borg. About these nine nitwits you picked up. Has anybody tried to identify—”

“Them,” interrupted Borgesen. “I let them go.”

Caquer stared at the beefy face of the night lieutenant in utter amazement.

“Let them go?” he repeated. “You couldn’t, legally. Man, they’d been charged. Without a trial, you couldn’t turn them loose.”

“Nuts. I did, and I’ll take the responsibility for it. Look, Rod, they were right, weren’t they?”

“What?”

“Sure. People ought to be waked up about what’s going on over in Sector Two. Those phonies over there need taking down a peg, and we’re the only ones to do it. This ought to be headquarters for Callisto, right here. Why listen, Rod, a united Callisto could take over Ganymede.”

“Borg, was there anything over the televis tonight? Anybody make a speech you listened to?”

“Sure, didn’t you hear it? Our friend Skidder. Must have been while you were walking here, because all the televis turned on automatically — it was a general.”

“And — was anything specific suggested, Borg? About Sector Two, and Ganymede, and that sort of thing?”

“Sure, general meeting tomorrow morning at ten. In the square. We’re all supposed to go; I’ll see you there, won’t I?”

“Yeah,” said Lieutenant Caquer. “I’m afraid you will. I — I got to go, Borg.”

6. Too Familiar Face

Rod Caquer knew what was wrong now. Also the last thing he wanted to do was stay around the station listening to Borgesen talking under the influence of — what seemed to be — a Vargas Wheel. Nothing else, nothing less, could have made police Lieutenant Borgesen talk as he had just talked. Professor Gordon’s guess was getting righter every minute. Nothing else could have brought about such results.

Caquer walked on blindly through the Jupiter-lighted night, past the building in which his own apartment was. He did not want to go there either.

The streets of Sector Three City seemed crowded for so late an hour of the evening. Late? He glanced at his watch and whistled softly. It was not evening any more. It was two o’clock in the morning, and normally the streets would have been utterly deserted.

But they were not, tonight. People wandered about, alone or in small groups that walked together in uncanny silence. Shuffle of feet, but not even the whisper of a voice. Not even—

Whispers! Something about those streets and the people on them made Rod Caquer remember now, his dream of the night before. Only now he knew that it had not been a dream. Nor had it been sleepwalking, in the ordinary sense of the word.

He had dressed. He had stolen out of the building. And the street lights had been out too, and that meant that employees of the service department had neglected their posts. They, like others, had been wandering with the crowds.

“Kill — kill — kill — You hate them…”

A shiver ran down Rod Caquer’s spine as he realized the significance of the fact that last night’s dream had been a reality. This was something that dwarfed into insignificance the murder of a petty book-and-reel shop owner.

This was something which was gripping a city, something that could upset a world, something that could lead to unbelievable terror and carnage on a scale that hadn’t been known since the Twenty-fourth Century. This — which had started as a simple murder case!

Up ahead somewhere, Rod Caquer heard the voice of a man addressing a crowd. A frenzied voice, shrill with fanaticism. He hurried his steps to the corner, and walked around it to find himself in the fringe of a crowd of people pressing around a man speaking from the top of a flight of steps.

“—and I tell you that tomorrow is the day. Now we have the Regent himself with us, and it will be unnecessary to depose him. Men are working all night tonight, preparing. After the meeting in the square tomorrow morning, we shall—”

“Hey!” Rod Caquer yelled. The man stopped talking and turned to look at Rod, and the crowd turned slowly, almost as one man, to stare at him.

“You’re under—”

Then Caquer saw that this was but a futile gesture.

It was not because of the men surging toward him that convinced him of this. He was not afraid of violence. He would have welcomed it as relief from uncanny terror, welcomed a chance to lay about him with the flat of his sword.

But standing behind the speaker was a man in uniform — Brager. And Caquer remembered, then, that Borgesen, now in charge at the station, was on the other side. How could he arrest the speaker, when Borgesen, now in charge, would refuse to book him? And what good would it do to start a riot and cause injury to innocent people — people acting not under their own volition, but under the insidious influence Professor Gordon had described to him?

Hand on his sword, he backed away. No one followed. Like automatons, they turned back to the speaker, who resumed his harangue, as though never interrupted. Policeman Brager had not moved, had not even looked in the direction of his superior officer. He alone of all those there had not turned at Caquer’s challenge.

Lieutenant Caquer hurried on in the direction he had been going when he had heard the speaker. That way would take him back downtown. He would find a place open where he could use a visiphone, and call the Sector Coordinator. This was an emergency.

And surely the scope of whoever had the Vargas Wheel had not yet extended beyond the boundaries of Sector Three.

He found an all-night restaurant, open but deserted, the lights on but no waiters on duty, no cashier behind the counter. He stepped into the visiphone booth and pushed the button for a long-distance operator. She flashed into sight on the screen almost at once.

“Sector Coordinator, Callisto City,” Caquer said. “And rush it.”

“Sorry, sir. Out of town service suspended by order of the controller of Utilities, for the duration.”

“Duration of what?”

“We are not permitted to give out information.”

Caquer gritted his teeth. Well, there was one someone who might be able to help him. He forced his voice to remain calm.

“Give me Professor Gordon, University Apartments,” he told the operator.

“Yes, sir.”

But the screen stayed dark, although the little red button that indicated the buzzer was operating flashed on and off, for minutes.

“There is no answer, sir.”

Probably Gordon and his daughter were asleep, too soundly asleep to hear the buzzer. For a moment, Caquer considered rushing over there. But it was on the other side of town, and of what help could they be? None, and Professor Gordon was a frail old man, and ill.

No, he would have to— Again he pushed a button of the visiphone and a moment later was talking to the man in charge of the ship hangar.

“Get out that little speed job of the Police Department,” snapped Caquer. “Have it ready and I’ll be there in a few minutes.”

“Sorry, Lieutenant,” came the curt reply. “All outgoing power beams shut off, by special order. Everything’s grounded for the emergency.”

He might have known it, Caquer thought. But what about the special investigator coming in from the Coordinator’s office? “Are incoming ships still permitted to land?” he inquired.

“Permitted to land, but not to leave again without special order,” answered the voice.

“Thanks,” Caquer said. He clicked off the screen and went out into the dawn, outside. There was a chance, then. The special investigator might be able to help.

But he, Rod Caquer would have to intercept him, tell him the story and its implications before he could fall, with the others, under the influence of the Vargas Wheel. Caquer strode rapidly toward the terminal. Maybe it was too late. Maybe his ship had already landed and the damage had been done.

Again he passed a knot of people gathered about a frenzied speaker. Almost everyone must be under the influence by this time. But why had he been spared? Why was not he, too, under the evil influence?

True, he must have been on the street on the way to the police station at the time Skidder had been on the air, but that didn’t explain everything. All of these people could have seen and heard that visicast. Some of them must have been asleep already at that hour.

Also he, Rod Caquer, had been affected, the night before, the night of the whispers. He must have been under the influence of the wheel at the time he investigated the murder — the murders.

Why, then, was he free now? Was he the only one, or were there others who had escaped, who were sane and their normal selves?

If not, if he was the only one, why was he free?

Or was he free?

Could it be that what he was doing right now was under direction, was part of some plan?

But no use to think that way, and go mad. He would have to carry on the best he could, and hope that things, with him, were what they seemed to be.

Then he broke into a run, for ahead was the open area of the terminal, and a small space-ship, silver in the dawn, was settling down to land. A small official speedster — it must be the special investigator. He ran around the check-in building, through the gate in the wire fence, and toward the ship, which was already down. The door opening.

A small, wiry man stepped out and closed the door behind him. He saw Caquer and smiled.

“You’re Caquer?” he asked, pleasantly. “Coordinator’s office sent me to investigate a case you fellows are troubled with. My name—”

Lieutenant Rod Caquer was staring with horrified fascination at the little man’s well-known features, the all-too-familiar wart on the side of the little man’s nose, listening for the announcement he knew this man was going to make—

“—is Willem Deem. Shall we go to your office?”

7. Wheels Within the Wheel

Such a thing as too much can happen to any man!

Lieutenant Rod Caquer, Lieutenant of Police of Sector Three, Callisto, had experienced more than his share. How can you investigate the murder of a man who has been killed twice? How should a policeman act when the victim shows up, alive and happy, to help you solve the case?

Not even when you know he is not there really–or if he is, he is not what your eyes tell you he is and is not saying what your ears hear.

There is a point beyond which the human mind can no longer function sanely with proper sense as when they reach and pass that point, different people react in different ways.

Rod Caquer’s reaction was a sudden blind, red anger. Directed, for lack of a better object, at the special investigator — if he was the special investigator and not a hypnotic phantasm which wasn’t there at all.

Rod Caquer’s fist lashed out, and it met a chin. Which proved nothing except that if the little man who’d just stepped out of the speedster was an illusion, he was an illusion of touch as well as of sight. Rod’s fist exploded on his chin like a rocket-blast, and the little man swayed and fell forward. Still smiling, because he had not had time to change the expression on his face.

He fell face down, and then rolled over, his eyes closed but smiling gently up at the brightening sky.

Shakily, Caquer bent down and put his hand against the front of the man’s tunic. There was a thump of a beating heart, all right. For a moment, Caquer had feared he might have killed him with that blow.

And Caquer closed his eyes, deliberately, and felt the man’s face with his hand — and it still felt like the face of Willem Deem looked, and the wart was there to the touch as well as to the sense of sight.

Two men had run out of the check-in building and were coming across the field toward him. Rod caught the expression on their faces and then thought of the little speedster only a few paces from him. He had to get out of Sector Three City, to tell somebody what was happening before it was too late.

If only they’d been lying about the outgoing power beam being shut off. He leaped across the body of the man he had struck and into the door of the speedster, jerked at the controls. But the ship did not respond, and — no, they hadn’t been lying about the power beam.

No use staying here for a fight that could not possibly decide anything. He went out of the door of the speedster, on the other side, away from the men coming toward him, and ran for the fence.

It was electrically charged, that fence. Not enough to kill a man, but plenty to hold him stuck to it until men with rubber gloves cut the wire and took him off. But if the power beam was off, probably the current in the fence was off, too.

It was too high to jump, so he took the chance. And the current was off. He scrambled over it safely and his pursuers stopped and went back to take care of the fallen man beside the speedster.

Caquer slowed down to a walk, but he kept on going. He didn’t know where, but he had somehow to keep moving. After a while he found that his steps were taking him toward the edge of town, on the northern side, toward Callisto City.

But that was silly. He couldn’t possibly walk to Callisto City and get there in less than three days. Even if he could walk across the intervening roadless desert at all. Besides, three days would be too late.

He was in a small park near the north border when the significance, and the futility, of his direction came to him. And he found, at the same time, that his muscles were sore and tired, that he had a raging headache, that he could not keep on going unless he had a worthwhile and possible goal.

He sank down on a park bench, and for a while his head was sunk in his hands. No answer came.

After a while he looked up and saw something that fascinated him. A child’s pinwheel on a stick, stuck in the grass of the park, spinning in the wind. Now fast, now slow, as the breeze varied.

It was going in circles, like his mind was. How could a man’s mind go other than in circles when he could not tell what was reality and what was illusion? Going in circles, like a Vargas wheel.

Circles.

But there ought to be some way. A man with a Vargas Wheel was not completely invincible, else how had the council finally succeeded in destroying the few that had been made? True, possessors of the wheels would have cancelled each other out to some extent, but there must have been a last wheel, in someone’s hands. Owned by someone who wanted to control the destiny of the solar system.

But they had stopped the wheel.

It could be stopped, then. But how? How, when one could not see it? Rather, when the sight of it put a man so completely under its control that he no longer, after the first glimpse, knew that it was there because, on sight, it had captured his mind.

He must stop the wheel. That was the only answer. But how?

That pinwheel there could be the Vargas Wheel, for all he could tell, set to create the illusion that it was a child’s toy. Or its possessor, wearing the helmet, might be standing on the path in front of him at this moment, watching him. The possessor of the wheel might be invisible because Caquer’s mind was told not to see.

But if the man was there, he’d be really there, and should Rod slash out with his sword, the menace would be ended, wouldn’t it? Of course.

But how to find a wheel that one could not see? That one could not see because—

And then, still staring at the pinwheel, Caquer saw a chance, something that might work, a slender chance!

He looked quickly at his wrist watch and saw that it was half past nine, which was one half hour before the demonstration in the square. And the wheel and its owner would be there, surely.

His aching muscles forgotten, Lieutenant Rod Caquer started to run back toward the center of town. The streets were deserted. Everyone had gone to the square, of course. They had been told to come.

He was winded after a few blocks, and had to slow down to a rapid walk, but there would be time for him to get there before it was over, even if he missed the start.

Yes, he could get there all right. And then, if his idea worked….

It was almost ten when he passed the building where his own office was situated, and kept on going. He turned in a few doors beyond. The elevator operator was gone, but Caquer ran the elevator up and a minute later he had his picklock on a door and was in Perry Peters’ laboratory.

Peters was gone, of course, but the goggles were there, the special goggles with the trick windshield-wiper effect that made them usable in radite mining.

Rod Caquer slipped them over his eyes, put the motive-power battery into his pocket, and touched the button on the side. They worked. He could see dimly as the wipers flashed back and forth. But a minute later they stopped.

Of course. Peters had said that the shafts heated and expanded after a minute’s operation. Well, that might not matter. A minute might be long enough, and the metal would have cooled by the time he reached the square.

But he would have to be able to vary the speed. Among the litter of stuff on the workbench, he found a small rheostat and spliced it in one of the wires that ran from the battery to the goggles.

That was the best he could do. No time to try it out. He slid the goggles up onto his forehead and ran out into the hall, took the elevator down to street level. And a moment later he was running toward the public square, two blocks away.

He reached the fringe of the crowd gathered in the square looking up at the two balconies of the Regency building. On the lower one were several people he recognized; Dr. Skidder, Walter Johnson. Even Lieutenant Borgesen was there.

On the higher balcony, Regent Barr Maxon was alone, and was speaking to the crowd below. His sonorous voice rolled out phrases extolling the might of empire. Only a little distance away, in the crowd, Caquer caught sight of the gray hair of Professor Gordon, and Jane Gordon’s golden head beside it. He wondered if they were under the spell, too. Of course they were deluded also or they would not be there. He realized it would be useless to speak to them, then, and tell them what he was trying to do.

Lieutenant Caquer slid the goggles down over his eyes, blinded momentarily because the wiper arms were in the wrong position. But his fingers found the rheostat, set at zero, and began to move it slowly around the dial toward maximum.

And then, as the wipers began their frantic dance and accelerated, he could see dimly. Through the arc-shaped lenses, he looked around him. On the lower balcony he saw nothing unusual, but on the upper balcony the figure of Regent Maxon suddenly blurred.

There was a man standing there on the upper balcony wearing a strange-looking helmet with wires and atop the helmet was a three-inch wheel of mirrors and prisms.

A wheel that stood still, because of the stroboscopic effect of the mechanized goggles. For an instant, the speed of those wiper arms was synchronized with the spinning of the wheel, so that each successive glimpse of the wheel showed it in the same position, and to Caquer’s eyes the wheel stood still, and he could see it.

Then the goggles jammed.

But he did not need them any more now.

He knew that Barr Maxon, or whoever stood up there on the balcony, was the wearer of the wheel.

Silently, and attracting as little attention as possible, Caquer sprinted around the fringe of the crowd and reached the side door of the Regency building.

There was a guard on duty there.

“Sorry, sir, but no one’s allowed—”

Then he tried to duck, too late. The flat of Police Lieutenant Rod Caquer’s short sword thudded against his head.

The inside of the building seemed deserted. Caquer ran up the three flights of stairs that would take him to the level of the higher balcony, and down the hall toward the balcony door.

He burst through it, and Regent Maxon turned. Maxon now, no longer wore the helmet on his head. Caquer had lost the goggles, but whether he could see it or not, Caquer knew the helmet and the wheel were still in place and working, and that this was his one chance.

Maxon turned and saw Lieutenant Caquer’s face, and his drawn sword.

Then abruptly, Maxon’s figure vanished. It seemed to Caquer — although he knew that it was not — that the figure before him was that of Jane Gordon. Jane, looking at him pleadingly, and spoke in melting tones.

“Rod, don’t—” she began to say.

But it was not Jane, he knew. A thought, in self-preservation, had been directed at him by the manipulator of the Vargas Wheel.

Caquer raised his sword, and he brought it down hard.

Glass shattered and there was the ring of metal on metal, as his sword cut through and split the helmet.

Of course it was not Jane now — just a dead man lying there with blood oozing out of the split in a strange and complicated, but utterly shattered, helmet. A helmet that could now be seen by everyone there, and by Lieutenant Caquer himself.

Just as everyone, including Caquer himself, could recognize the man who had worn it.

He was a small, wiry man, and there was an unsightly wart on the side of his nose.

Yes, it was Willem Deem. And this time, Rod Caquer knew, it was Willem Deem….

“I thought,” Jane Gordon said, “that you were going to leave for Callisto City without saying goodbye to us.”

Rod Caquer threw his hat in the general direction of a hook.

“Oh, that,” he said. “I’m not even sure I’m going to take the promotion to a job as police coordinator there. I have a week to decide, and I’ll be around town at least that long. How you been doing, Icicle?”

“Fine, Rod. Sit down. Father will be home soon, and I know he has a lot of things to ask you. Why we haven’t seen you since the big mass meeting.”

Funny how dumb a smart man can be, at times.

But then again, he had proposed so often and been refused, that it was not all his fault.

He just looked at her.

“Rod, all the story never came out in the newscasts,” she said. “I know you’ll have to tell it all over again for my father, but while we’re waiting for him, won’t you give me some information?”

Rod grinned.

“Nothing to it, really, Icicle,” he said. “Willem Deem got hold of a Blackdex book, and found out how to make a Vargas Wheel. So he made one, and it gave him ideas.

“His first idea was to kill Barr Maxon and take over as Regent, setting the helmet so he would appear to be Maxon. He put Maxon’s body in his own shop, and then had a lot of fun with his own murder. He had a warped sense of humor, and got a kick out of chasing us in circles.”

“But just how did he do all the rest?” asked the girl.

“He was there as Brager, and pretended to discover his own body. He gave one description of the method of death, and caused Skidder and me and the clearance men to see the body of Maxon each in a different way. No wonder we nearly went nuts.”

“But Brager remembered being there too,” she objected.

“Brager was in the hospital at the time, but Deem saw him afterward and impressed on his mind the memory pattern of having discovered Deem’s body,” explained Caquer. “So naturally, Brager thought he had been there.”

“Then he killed Maxon’s confidential secretary, because being so close to the Regent, the secretary must have suspected something was wrong even though she couldn’t guess what. That was the second corpse of Willim Deem, who was beginning to enjoy himself in earnest when he pulled that on us.

“And of course he never sent to Callisto City for a special investigator at all. He just had fun with me, by making me seem to meet one and having the guy turn out to be Willem Deem again. I nearly did go nuts then, I guess.”

“But why, Rod, weren’t you as deeply in as the others — I mean on the business of conquering Callisto and all of that?” she inquired. “You were free of that part of the hypnosis.”

Caquer shrugged.

“Maybe it was because I missed Skidder’s talk on the televis,” he suggested. “Of course it wasn’t Skidder at all, it was Deem in another guise and wearing the helmet. And maybe he deliberately left me out, because he was having a psychopatic kind of fun out of my trying to investigate the murders of two Willem Deems. It’s hard to figure. Perhaps I was slightly cracked from the strain, and it might have been that for that reason I was partially resistant to the group hypnosis.”

“You think he really intended to try to rule all of Callisto, Rod?” asked the girl.

“We’ll never know, for sure, just how far he wanted, or expected to go later. At first, he was just experimenting with the powers of hypnosis, through the wheel. That first night, he sent people out of their houses into the streets, and then sent them back and made them forget it. Just a test, undoubtedly.”

Caquer paused and frowned thoughtfully.

“He was undoubtedly psychopathic, though, and we don’t dare even guess what all his plans were,” he continued. “You understand how the goggles worked to neutralize the wheel, don’t you, Icicle?”

“I think so. That was brilliant, Rod. It’s like when you take a moving picture of a turning wheel, isn’t it? If the camera synchronizes with the turning of the wheel, so that each successive picture shows it after a complete revolution, then it looks like it’s standing still when you show the movie.”

Caquer nodded.

“That’s it on the head,” he said. “Just luck I had access to those goggles, though. For just a second I could see a man wearing a helmet up there on the balcony — but that was all I had to know.”

“But Rod, when you rushed out on the balcony, you didn’t have the goggles on any more. Couldn’t he have stopped you, by hypnosis?”

“Well, he didn’t. I guess there wasn’t time for him to take over control of me. He did flash an illusion at me. It wasn’t either Barr Maxon or Willem Deem I saw standing there at the last minute. It was you, Jane.”

“I?”

“Yep, you. I guess he knew I’m in love with you, and that’s the first thing that flashed into his mind; that I wouldn’t dare use the sword if I thought it was you standing there. But I knew it wasn’t you, in spite of the evidence of my eyes, so I swung it.”

He shuddered slightly, remembering the will power he had needed to bring that sword down.

“The worst of it was that I saw you standing there like I’ve always wanted to see you — with your arms out toward me, and looking at me like you loved me.”

“Like this, Rod?”

And he was not too dumb to get the idea, that time.