Universe 9 - [Anthology] Read online

  “Why would the colonel have lied?”

  “I don’t know.” A bizarre idea—in a way more disconcerting than anything that had yet cropped up—began to stir in the lower levels of Hobart’s consciousness. “Why did he wait two days before going to the police with his story?”

  “I’m told he was ill—a touch of arthritis in his arms, something like that.” Shimming looked at Hobart with renewed interest, as though trying to tune in on his thought processes. “Does the delay seem significant to you?”

  “If he thought somebody had been killed...”

  “That idea didn’t get kicked around until it was discovered that Craven was missing—and by that time the Longer Willow had already departed, with you on board, and there’s no way to communicate with a ship on drive.”

  “Neat,” Hobart said, nodding, wondering if it would be possible to encourage a certain line of reasoning in Shimming’s mind. “Convenient.”

  “Not for the police—we don’t like eighteen-year delays in our enquiries.”

  “I didn’t mean convenient for the police. It seems to me that. . .” Hobart stopped speaking as Shimming held up one hand in a theatrical gesture of warning and at the same time touched the control button of his unseen recorder. There was a moment of near silence dominated by the hum of the air conditioning and a fizzling noise from the light fitment on the ceiling.

  “As you can see, I’m speaking off the record, as a friend,” Shimming said. “It’s to give you a piece of advice.”

  “Which is ... ?”

  “Don’t speculate on the record about who might have killed Wolf Craven.”

  “What difference does it make when the colonel’s dead?”

  “He has an assortment of brothers, cousins, nieces, and nephews. Old Nolan was something of an embarrassment to the family, especially after he quit playing at exploring and settled down at home, but that only makes them more sensitive than ever about anything connected with him.”

  “I see.” Hobart considered the notion that Investigator Shimming might actually be his friend. “Does this mean you think I’m innocent?”

  “It means I don’t see how you could have disposed of the body in such a short time. You were on foot that night and you didn’t make use of any of the other guests’ cars. And we searched the whole area very thoroughly.”

  “Craven just vanished off the face of the Earth?”

  Shimming almost smiled. “We considered that as a literal explanation. The Langer Rowan left the day after your ship, and for a long time we hoped there had been a foul-up in its papers. If Craven had got away to Alpha Centaurus on board it without being properly signed on—as has happened in the past—that would have solved everything. But the Rowan got back two years ago and we established that Craven had never reported for duty.”

  The oppressive load began to lift from Hobart’s mind. “But you’re not even sure that Craven is dead?”

  “I don’t think he ran away to sea, do you?”

  “Anything could have happened to him,” Hobart said, gaining confidence. “Why, he could have decided to quit the party and walk back to the Center. A drunk driver could have zapped him and taken the body into the next state . ..”

  “Clever theory, that. Not plausible—but clever.” Shimming brandished the index finger of his right hand to indicate he was about to start the recorder again. “Just remember what I said about implicating Colonel Langer.” He pressed the button. “What were you going to say, Dennis? It seems to you that...”

  “It seems to me that, even if you had proof that Wolf Craven had been killed, there’s practically no case against me. Some people saw us arguing, which I admit and have explained. Colonel Langer says he heard me having a fight with Craven in the garden, which I deny. And that’s it!”

  “But why, out of twenty or so men who were present that night, did Colonel Langer think it was you he heard with Craven?”

  “If he saw us arguing earlier he could have jumped to a wrong conclusion.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Hobart—I have no more questions for you for the present.” Shimming stopped the recorder once more and sat back, eying Hobart with moody satisfaction. “I was scared up there today. Could you tell?”

  “Most people are uneasy first time up,” Hobart said, wondering how soon he would be free to leave.

  “I wasn’t uneasy—I was scared stiff.” Shimming paused to make a ruminative movement with his chin. “I could be psychologically marked for life, just so that the commissioner can make a political grandstand play. We could have picked you up at Langer Field and got the same useless piece of tape.”

  “Useless?” Hobart spoke with a kind of pleasurable indignation. “You can’t call it useless if it clears up an eighteen-year-old case.”

  “Who said the case was cleared up?”

  “But you practically ...”

  Shimming shook his head. “Craven was murdered, all right. I don’t know who, how, or why—but I know he got himself snipped.”

  “Look, when can I leave here?” Hobart said, his sense of unease returning in full force.

  “Any time you like,” Shimming replied, getting to his feet, “but don’t leave the city until you get clearance. And don’t forget to let me know where you’re staying.”

  “I imagine I’ll be at the junior officers’ hostel at the Center.”

  “You imagine that, do you?” Shimming gave Hobart a wry look. “I’ll see you around, Dennis.”

  * * * *

  The Langer Line personnel manager was called Toby Martyn. He was about thirty years old, but had adopted the dress and mannerisms of a middle-aged man, possibly with the intention of showing the staid and nepotic Langer board that he was director material. His eyes, behind gold-rimmed flakes of glass, were blue and unsympathetic as he selected various slips of paper from his desk and dropped them into an envelope bearing Hobart’s name and citizen number.

  “As you are no doubt aware,” he said primly, “junior officers are assigned very few duties on their first interstellar voyage. Its main purpose is to determine how well they stand up to the psychological stresses of both the journey itself and the associated calendaric displacement.”

  There’s no such word as calendaric, you gasbrain, Hobart thought. He was shocked and angry, yet a detached part of his mind had noted a curious fact. With one round trip completed, he had seventeen years of timeslip under his belt and—although it was a paltry score compared to that of a veteran starman—it was already affecting his relationships with Earth-bound individuals. Martyn was about seven years his senior in actual body time, and therefore in experience, but Hobart had been born a decade, before the other man, and on that account felt himself to be somehow the more complete of the two. He began to get an inkling of how he, as a junior officer, must have seemed to a man like Captain Mercier, and his yearning to bestride the centuries in a like manner suddenly intensified itself.

  “I felt fine throughout the trip,” he said. “I feel fine now.”

  “That’s not what it says on your psychometric profile,” Martyn replied, sealing die large envelope. “Take my advice, Mr. Hobart. You’re a young man, with your whole life ahead of you—forget about space flying and take up some other occupation. With your engineering qualifications you should have no trouble getting into—”

  “I’m not interested in other work,” Hobart interrupted. “I’m doing the only thing I want to do.”

  “Well... perhaps with some other line.”

  “Some other line!” Hobart found he was almost shouting, but was past caring about propriety. “That psych report was cooked up to prevent me working anywhere.”

  Martyn’s face underwent a subtle change. “Careful what you’re saying, Mr. Hobart.”

  “I’m saying my assessment was faked. Do you think I don’t know the real reason I’m being booted out?”

  Martyn slid the envelope across to the front of his desk. “The references you have here will enable you to obtain another
type of position. They contain no mention of the fact that you are suspected of having murdered a fellow officer, and that’s something for which you should be grateful.”

  Hobart drove forward and caught Martyn’s wrist. Martyn flinched back, obviously afraid, but at the same time a look of furtive triumph appeared in his eyes, and it was that which enabled Hobart to regain his mental poise. A starship was an emotional pressure cooker, an autoclave in which certain kinds of character defect tended to trigger explosions, and no operator employed people with records of violence. The phrase “physically assaulted a company executive” appearing on his sheet, regardless of the circumstances, would be an ironclad guarantee that he would never again serve on an interstellar vessel. Hobart released Martyn’s wrist, drew his lips into a numb smile, and stood up, searching for words which would make him seem cool and dignified.

  “You haven’t heard the last of this,” he said, resorting to a formula he remembered from historical novels. Martyn adjusted his glasses and stared up at him without speaking. Hobart picked up his envelope, left the office, and made his way out of the building to the plaza, where late afternoon sunlight glowed on the alloy statues and islands of shrubbery. It was a perfect spring day, exactly the sort he had visualized for his homecoming, but that fact served only to aggravate the turmoil behind his eyes. He entered a dark-seeming side street and found an even darker bar. The place was empty, engulfed in a musty stillness which preceded the rush of customers at the end of the working day.

  Hobart bought a glass of beer, carried it to a table which had a small peach-colored light, and sat down to examine the contents of his envelope. The pay slip told him he had been credited with close to a hundred thousand dollars, a sum which at first seemed too much. Interstellar travel and its time anomalies had alarmed the world’s bankers in the early years, and they had been quick to reach agreement that interest on any star traveler’s funds should be computed on his body time and not according to Earth calendars. However, starship operators usually factorized crew salaries to compensate for inflation and timeslip, and when Hobart took that into account— along with tax refunds and severance pay—he found he had received no more than his due. He had no immediate money problems, but that was of little comfort when his career had been ruined, deliberately and with malice aforethought, by a man who had escaped into the grave after having ...

  The colonel murdered Wolf Craven! The thought, which had been swamped by other considerations, struck Hobart with sudden force, awing him with its strangeness. On that night, on that fairly significant social occasion, Nolan Langer—probably driven by jealousy or hurt pride—must have killed Craven and disposed of the body. And, being a man who never did things by halves, he had rounded out the act of revenge by shifting the blame onto Hobart, a move which would have increased his satisfaction and diverted the police investigation away from himself.

  Hobart sipped his beer, reluctantly impressed. He could remember the colonel on the night of the party—tall, iron gray, limping, militarily correct—welcoming his guests, and . . . and . . . Hobart frowned as he realized he had no other recollections of the colonel on that night. Langer had absented himself at quite an early stage, which tied in with the theory that he was getting rid of cumbersome evidence, but there was an inconsistency somewhere. His memories of the party itself were all compatible, now that he understood what had been going on beneath the surface, so the discordant note must have originated during his talk with Investigator Shimming. Hobart stared into the peachy orb of the table lamp, unable to pin down the vagrant idea which was tantalizing him, then he recalled Shimming’s promise that he could have a record of the interview. He pushed his beer glass away, crammed the envelope into an inner pocket of his tunic, and left the bar.

  The street outside was more crowded now as the city’s stores and offices began to close down for the day. Hobart walked one block south to the Lewis Hotel and checked into an expensive second-floor suite with a balcony overlooking colorful tulip beds. As soon as he was alone he went to the living room’s infomat, and put a call through to police headquarters, praying that Shimming would still be on duty. He relaxed somewhat as the investigator’s long, serious face appeared on the screen.

  “I’m glad I caught you,” he said.

  Shimming nodded. “No panic. I’m usually patched into the system—even in bed.”

  “Oh! I’m staying at the Lewis, by the way.”

  “Thanks for letting me know, Dennis.’’ Shimming lowered his chin, conducting one of his silent battles against internal pressures, but his eyes remained fixed on Hobart’s. “You decided against the Langer Center?”

  Hobart gave a rueful grimace. “How did you know they were going to dump me?”

  “It wasn’t hard to figure out.”

  “Well, I’m not leaving it like that. I’d like the tape you promised me earlier.”

  “You want it now?”

  “Yes.” Hobart checked to make sure there was a cassette of lateral-imprinting tape in the console’s bulk information receiver and pressed the intake button. On the screen he saw Shimming looking down at his own terminal as he fired through an information bleep in which the entire interview was compressed into a signal lasting a fraction of a second. A green light appeared above the bulk receiver.

  “Got it,” Hobart said. “Thanks.”

  “This sort of thing never works,” Shimming commented. “Not in real life, anyway. Amateur investigators never turn up anything the police didn’t know about all along.”

  “Is that a fact?” Hobart suppressed an impulse to issue some kind of enigmatic challenge. “You don’t mind if I go over the tape a few times, do you?”

  “Be my guest,” Shimming said, fading himself out. Hobart took the cassette out of the receiver and dropped it into a playback slot, all at once convinced that Shimming was right, that he was only play-acting. The idea which had seemed so close to the surface of his mind in the bar had retreated to deep tiers of consciousness populated only by unremembered dreams. Voices suddenly pervaded the room, his own the strangest of the two, and he began pacing the floor to work off his tensions. In that mood he had no expectation of success and consequently he was surprised to find his attention instantly caught by a single fragment

  “. . . the two of you withdrew from the rest of the guests. Colonel Langer and other witnesses stated that you returned after approximately one...”

  And the point was that Langer had not been around when Hobart returned to the party. Hobart was certain of his ground because, with Dorcie Langer’s perfume still in his nostrils, he had been supercharged with guilt, abnormally keyed up for the first encounter with the colonel. It had never occurred.

  The fact was not very important in itself, but it could be used to prove to Shimming that Colonel Langer had lied when making his deposition—and if one part of his testimony was shown to be fake the remainder could perhaps be written off. Hobart strode to the infomat, but paused before making a call. As the matter stood, it was a case of his word against the sworn statement of a member of the city’s most influential family—and he had an idea Shimming was likely to be unimpressed. After a few moments of thought, Hobart asked the machine for a communications code and put a call through to Joe Armitage, a dentist who did much of the contract work for the training center. He had become friendly with Hobart when they found themselves attending the same concerts, and as youngsters with like interests they had seen each other at least once a week throughout Hobart’s pre-ops course. The screen came to life almost immediately, showing a square-faced, ruddy-complexioned man in his forties against a background of antique books. Hobart stared at him in silence, filled with a curious timidity. I have traveled in space, and I have traveled in time....

  “This is Joe Armitage,” the stranger said. “My daughter isn’t at home right now, if that’s what. . .”

  Hobart shook his head. “Joe! This is Denny. Denny Hobart.”

  Armitage frowned, his eyes taking in details
of Hobart’s tunic and service emblems. “I’m afraid I . . . Wait a minute—you went off on the Oak, didn’t you?”

  “The Langer Willow.”

  “That’s right! I heard a ship had just come in, but I wasn’t sure which one it was. I’m in private practice these days and I don’t have much to do with the Langer organization.”

  “Neither do I,” Hobart said. “I was wondering...”

  “I’m sorry I didn’t recognize you,” Armitage cut in. “I knew so many of the Langer boys in my old hell-raising days, and . . . It’s a funny thing, but when people look the same as they did eighteen or twenty years ago you can’t recognize them. I have no trouble with acquaintances who’ve been on Earth all along and who have changed. It’s as if the old brain keeps a model of them and updates it year by year, putting in the sags and bags and wrinkles and so forth, so that when I see them I know who they are, even if they don’t look much like they used to. Know what I mean?”

  “I think so.” Hobart felt a pang of sadness at having been classed as an acquaintance rather than a friend, but he put it out of his mind. “Listen, Joe, I’m sorry about springing this on you, but I’m in a bit of trouble with the police and I need somebody to back up my statement to them.”