Universe 9 - [Anthology] Read online

  Armitage looked interested. “I’ll help you all I can.”

  “Thanks. It’s about that party the night before I left. Colonel Langer walked out in the middle of it and didn’t come back, but he swore that he did. All I need is somebody to...”

  “Hold on,” Armitage protested, smiling. “What party are you talking about? I don’t think I was even there.”

  “You were,” Hobart said, shocked.

  “Sorry—I think you’re wrong, Denny.”

  “But . . .” Hobart searched his memory. “Remember you spent most of the night playing poker with Mexy Gomez.”

  “Did I? Gomez? Was that the character with the blue chin and all the muscles?”

  “Yes. Do you remember now?”

  “I’m trying.” Armitage gazed back at Hobart, his eyes slowly clouding, then he shook his head. “I went to quite a few of the colonel’s parties in the old days, but they’ve all run together in my mind. That was nearly twenty years ago, Denny.”

  “I know,” Hobart said, learning something about time-slip and the nature of loneliness. He spoke to Armitage for another minute, fending off questions about his problems, and ended the call after making an insincere promise to get in touch again. The room seemed abnormally quiet when the screen went dead. He brooded for a moment, then took a pen from his pocket and made a list of twelve other men and women who had been guests at Colonel Langer’s house on the crucial night. Seven of these were operations personnel and a series of enquiries revealed that they were all away on the Procyon run and would not be seen on Earth for another eight years or more. Of the remaining five, residents of Corona Falls, two had died of natural causes, and the others—far from being able to help—were unable even to remember knowing Hobart or having been in his company. After nearly an hour of awkwardness and embarrassment, he turned away from the infomat, went into the bedroom, and lay down.

  It was growing dark outside, the sky turning a peacock blue above the varicolored glitter of the city beyond his balcony, and it came to him that by this time—had his dreams of homecoming materialized properly—he should have been bedding down with a woman. He had an intense yearning for the comfort and companionship of love. Hobart turned restlessly on the bed’s pliant surface for a minute, then lay still, his eyes widening, as the idea which had lain dormant in his mind heaved upward and began to dominate all thought.

  There was one person who had cause to remember the night of the party as clearly as he did, despite the passage of time, and as far as he knew there was nothing to prevent him from contacting Dorcie Langer without further delay.

  * * * *

  Hobart was surprised to find that the big house was in comparative darkness. Subconsciously, having previously been there only when a party was in full swing or when the colonel was organizing a foray, he had it fixed in his mind as a place where such things were the norm, and the terse instruction from Mrs. Langer’s personal secretary had in an obscure way reinforced his preconceptions. As he parked his rented car in the driveway he admitted to himself that more than a year in the confines of the ship had disposed him toward a therapeutic blowout, garnished with excesses of every kind, and the insight was a disturbing one. His current troubles all stemmed from one shameful debauch, yet part of him had been ready to flirt with similar temptations and perhaps still was. The id, he suddenly realized, could be a dangerous encumbrance.

  He slammed the car door and examined the house, wishing he were a smoker so that he could indulge in the ritual of lighting a cigarette. The two-story building, with its stone mullions and complex roof, looked imposingly ancient. In the gardens at the rear he could see the outlines of the freezer house where Nolan Langer had kept his menagerie of frost animals, and he was further surprised to note a bluish glow from the windows, which indicated that the refrigeration system was still functioning. The enigmatic creatures, inhabitants of Sirius VII, were troublesome to support and he would have expected the colonel’s widow—whose interests were more earthly—to have rid herself of the responsibility at the earliest possible moment.

  Hobart walked to the house’s main entrance and ascended the curving steps. A control system, responding to the identity code emitted by his citizenship tag, swung the door open for him and he went through into a dimly lit, spacious hall which seemed not to have altered since his last visit, The same pictures of extraterrestrial scenes— souvenirs of the colonel’s travels—hung on the walls, and the same photon-sculptures glowed in the comers and recesses. He was still getting his bearings when a door on the right opened and a woman he took to be Dorcie Langer’s secretary appeared in a rectangle of pink light and beckoned to him. Hobart had almost reached her before he realized his mistake.

  His talk with Armitage had alerted him to the effects of timeslip and he had steeled himself to find the young Dorcie Langer transformed into a woman in her forties, but other forces had been at work—and the person before him had an apparent age closer to sixty. She was dressed in salmon-colored silks revealing a round-shouldered figure in which the torso had plumped out while the legs had grown thin, giving her an odd sparrow-like aspect. Her face, in the flattering light, was much as he remembered it, except for a waxy, unnatural sheen. Hobart, in spite of his naïveté in such matters, sensed that a cosmetician had all but erased the real face and used it as a canvas upon which to paint the woman who had used to be. His stride faltered.

  “Hello, Denny,” she said in a burry voice. “Don’t stand there gawking, Come in!”

  “Of course.” Hobart entered the room behind her and closed the door. “Hello, Mrs. Langer.”

  “Mrs. Langer he says! You don’t need to be formal with me, Denny.” She threw him a brilliant smile as she went toward a liquor cabinet. “What are you drinking?”

  “Ah ... anything.”

  “Good for you. Still game for anything, eh?” She splashed two glasses of clear liquid from a decanter, came back and handed one to him. She looked closely into his face as their fingers touched, and her smile vanished. “Just as a matter of interest—what age are you?”

  “Twenty-three,” Hobart replied, too nonplused to avoid a direct answer which carried a whiff of danger.

  “My God,” Dorcie said, walking around him as though inspecting a statue. “My God! It isn’t fair—you’re still just a kid. How can you still be just a kid?”

  Hobart strove to be diplomatic. “Age isn’t important.”

  “Not important!” Dorcie drained her glass, wetting the side of her chin in the process. “Not important, he says. Of course it isn’t important for somebody who doesn’t change in eighteen years.”

  “For me it’s only been one year,” Hobart said soothingly. “The time dilation effect—”

  “Don’t give me any of that scientific crap,” she shouted, chilling Hobart with the abrupt contortion of her face into a mask of fury. “Time is time, for God’s sake! It’s the same everywhere. Nobody will ever convince me...” She stopped speaking, glanced around like someone who had just heard a stealthy footfall, and her smile returned in full force. “Let’s have another drink.”

  Hobart held up his still brimming glass. “I suppose you can guess why I came to see you.”

  “I can guess, all right—you young spacers are all the same,” Dorcie said coquettishly, appalling Hobart even further. She refilled her glass and sat down on a low-backed couch. “Don’t stand around, Denny—we’re old friends, aren’t we?”

  “Yes, indeed.” Hobart sat down near her and sipped his drink, which proved to be a cloying almond-flavored liqueur. “Look, Dorcie, you don’t believe I killed Wolf Craven, do you?”

  “You? That’s hardly your style.”

  “Have you any idea why Colonel Langer told the Police I did it?”

  “I know exactly why.” Dorcie gave a sharp laugh. “Don’t you know? It’s because he was a bastard. Through and through. He tried to keep me shut up as if I was a goddamn Sister of Mercy or something—but it didn’t work.”

 
; “That’s not what I’m getting at.”

  “Funny thing is, he was able to do it better after he was dead. I’m not allowed to give up the house, you know. I’m tied to this mausoleum and that damned ice box out in back, otherwise I lose three fourths of my lousy income.”

  Hobart shook his head impatiently. “Do you remember the party the night before I left?”

  “Do I?” Dorcie rolled her eyes, put a hand on his knee, and leaned closer. “Are you trying to get me going?”

  “In his deposition to the police,” Hobart said steadily, repressing the urge to shrink away, “the colonel said he rejoined the party soon after midnight, but you must remember that he didn’t. Nobody saw him for the rest of the—”

  “I don’t want to talk about that old goat,” Dorcie cut in, setting her glass aside. “All right, Denny—let’s go upstairs.”

  Hobart’s mouth went dry. “Upstairs?”

  “Don’t act so innocent.” She slid her hand along his thigh. “You’ve been stripping me with your eyes ever since you came in here.”

  Hobart disengaged by jumping to his feet. “You’re the only one who can help me. Think back, please. Can you remember exactly what the colonel did that night?”

  Dorcie made as if to come after him, then a slow smile appeared on her face and she settled back on the couch, spreading her legs a little. “I probably could remember— given the right sort of encouragement.”

  “He was missing for the rest of the night, wasn’t he?”

  “Down on your knees,” she commanded, eyes bleak and threatening. “Down on your knees, boy.”

  Hobart backed away, shaking his head. “You’re sick,” he whispered. “Crazy.”

  “Crazy?” Dorcie Langer seemed to savor the word while she kneaded the flesh of her thighs. “Perhaps I am. I could be crazy enough to remember anything I wanted—good or bad. It’s up to you, Denny, my love.”

  Hobart turned and fled the room, running with the leaden-footed ponderousness that characterizes nightmares.

  Later that night Hobart experienced a real nightmare. He dreamed it was the night of the party again, the location in time and space convincingly established by a shifting montage of images and impressions—large rooms with minimal lighting; a sense of imminence—the dreadful starship waiting; trays of drinks, tables of food; intermingled wisps of music and distant laughter; the choking press of bodies in slithering nakedness. . . . Suddenly Hobart was in a silver room—it was the freezer house— watching in mute terror as the tall figure of Colonel Langer stood over Wolf Craven and methodically destroyed him with an ice pick. Craven was lying on the floor, twitching and flinching under the blows, each of which added to and elaborated the pattern of blood-red, dark-centered flowers covering his body from neck to groin. His mouth was open, but the horror of the scene was increased by the fact that he did not scream. Instead, there came from his lips a thin, sad keening, a plaintive note like the beat of insect wings in summer pastures....

  Hobart awoke with the sound ringing in his ears and sat up immediately, unwilling to risk falling asleep again and sinking back into the same nightmare. He checked the time, saw that it was almost six in the morning, and decided to get up. While taking a hot shower he pondered over the dream, marveling at the ways of the subconscious mind. He had a nodding acquaintance with the Faraday theory, which stated that the overt content of dreams—which psychologists had once dismissed as mere “day residue”—was more significant than the Freudian and post-Freudian interpretation of symbols and could be treated as genuine attempts at communication between different levels of the mind. But what might his subconscious be trying to say? He had already deduced that Langer had killed Craven, probably in or around the freezer house, so that part was no help to him—and the strange whining sound seemed no more than a grotesque incidental detail. Was the message simply that Craven’s body was hidden in the refrigerated building, where it would be immune from decay?

  Hobart considered the idea later while eating breakfast in his room and decided it was of little merit. Investigator Shimming had told him the entire area had been searched by the police, and the freezer house and associated workshop were among the first places anybody would think of checking. He was pouring a third cup of coffee when the infomat buzzed to announce a call and Shimming’s long face appeared on the screen, looking professionally impassive while he waited for two-way communication. Hobart pressed a button to accept the call.

  “I was wrong about you, Dennis,” the investigator said without preamble. “I had an idea you’d go up to Silverstream last night, and I expected that you’d be totally ineffective—but I was way off the beam. You really managed to churn things up.”

  “Really?” Hobart kept his voice level. “In what way?”

  “One of Mrs. Langer’s tame lawyers spoke to the commissioner this morning. It appears that she too remembers your having a fist fight with Wolf Craven in her garden on the night he disappeared.”

  Hobart shook his head emphatically. ‘The woman’s insane. You might have warned me about that.”

  “Rich people don’t go insane, Dennis—at most they become eccentric. In any case, we now have a second statement corroborating what Colonel Langer told us, and that makes things worse for you.”

  “You’re not going to take it seriously, are you?” Hobart was unable to read Shimming’s eyes. “I mean, why did she wait eighteen years before coming out with this?”

  “The line they’re taking is that she saw no point in getting involved until you were back on Earth, that nothing could be done until now.”

  “Garbage,” Hobart snapped. “Specious garbage at that.”

  “Nevertheless,” Shimming said, dipping his chin, “it increases the pressure on me within the department. What did you do up there last night, anyway?”

  “It was what I wouldn’t do,” Hobart muttered, and was instantly sorry he had spoken.

  “Oh? Gone off her, have you?”

  “I was never . . . Look, we’ve been through all that already.” Hobart sought a way to wrest the conversation onto a new track. “When you were searching for Wolf Craven’s body did you go through the freezer house?”

  “Me? I was in my second year in the police academy in 2113.”

  “You know what I mean,” Hobart said, refusing to think about timeslip. “Did they check the freezer house?”

  “Naturally.” Shimming glanced down at something on his desk. “It’s all here in the report. The investigating officers—with Colonel Langer’s full co-operation, by the way—went all through the workshop and the cold area itself. They looked under the refrigeration machinery housings, behind all movable wall, ceiling, and floor panels, underneath the salt storage unit...”

  “What storage unit?”

  Shimming inspected his records again. “It seems that those things the colonel brought back from Sirius way, the frost animals, need trays of mineral salts to keep them alive.”

  “I know that—but when I was in the freezer house those trays just sat around on the floor.” As a synaesthetic background to his own voice, Hobart heard the curious sound from his nightmare, and memories began to stir.

  “So what?” Shimming gave an elaborate shrug. “It wouldn’t have been too tidy that way, so Colonel Langer had a special unit built.”

  “Correction! He built it himself.”

  “All right—he built it himself. I’m told he liked doing things like that.”

  “You don’t understand,” Hobart said quickly, above the pounding in his chest. “I was in that freezer house only three days, or it might have been two, before the party—and at that time the trays of salts were still sitting around the floor.”

  Shimming pulled in his chin and looked puzzled. “What do you think you’re getting at?”

  “He built it the night of the party. During the party.”

  “You haven’t any proof of that. It could have been...”

  “I do have proof,” Hobart put in, telling the lie w
hich might not have been a lie had his conscious memory been perfect. “I remember going near the back of the house two or three hours after midnight and hearing somebody outside using a valency saw. You know that weird droning noise they make—you can’t mistake it.”

  “It doesn’t matter exactly when the unit was built,” Shimming said through a silent gulp, showing his disapproval of Hobart’s excitement. “The point is that the officers looked at it after Craven disappeared.”

  “They didn’t look well enough,” Hobart asserted. “That’s where Craven’s body has to be.”

  Shimming turned his gaze toward the ceiling for a few seconds, then gave Hobart a wry smile. “It says in your file that you were born way back in 2091, and that makes me forget you’re just a kid.”