Universe 9 - [Anthology] Read online

  “Kid nothing,” Hobart said angrily. “I’m able to think.”

  “Yes, but you think the way a kid does. You think a team of trained police officers, could search a room and fail to find an object as large as a human body; you think crimes are solved by a Great Detective sucking on a pipe and making deductions—but that’s not the way it is, sonny. The police success rate is very high these days, but it’s because we get information. There are too many systems for acquiring data, and storing it, and processing it. That’s what gives us the edge.”

  “What about the information I’ve just given you?” Hobart demanded. “Aren’t you even going to ... ?” He broke off as someone knocked heavily on the door leading out to the corridor.

  “That’ll be my men,” Shimming said. “The way the situation has developed, I have to bring you in. I’m sorry about this.”

  “I’m sorry, too.” Hobart allowed his shoulders to droop as the pounding on the door grew more insistent. “I’ll let them in.” He left the infomat, walked straight out to the balcony and—praying the flower beds were no further down than he remembered—vaulted over the railing.

  It was growing dark when Hobart left the cover of the timber plantation and approached Silverstream Heights from the west, picking his way through the swathe of gullies and sheared ground that helped protect the big houses against intruders.

  His main concern throughout the day had been that of keeping well away from store entrance scanners and any other devices which could read the signals from his citizenship tag. He might have thrown the tag away altogether, but many commercial security systems could sense the nearness of a human body and when it was not accompanied by appropriately coded radiation they tended to react loudly. Less embarrassing, but more dangerous from his point of view, was the type that remained silent and sent a microwave call to the nearest police station. Hobart’s strategy had been to leave the city on foot and go into hiding at the first good opportunity, and although his day-long wait in the sanctuary of the trees had been uncomfortable and boring he had successfully retained his freedom.

  He followed a track up to the fence which marked the western edge of the Langer estate and, his progress now hampered by darkness, located the gate the colonel had installed to facilitate his snake hunts. Its rails were covered with spirals of barbed wire and, predictably, it was locked. Hobart took off his tunic, wrapped it around the top bar and managed to climb over without incurring any injury. He began to retrieve the garment and then, recalling that he might need to make a rapid exit, changed his mind and knotted the jacket in place by the sleeves. An ivory-colored moon, horizontally striped with cloud, was lifting clear of the distant hills, but its luminance was weak and Hobart had to move cautiously as he went toward the house. After five minutes the exterior lamps came into view, interfering with his night vision and creating the illusion that he was nearing the edge of a black and dangerous pit. He continued to feel his way forward and it was with a considerable sense of gratitude that he reached the smooth turf of the gardens and was able to pick out the sloping roof of the freezer house and workshop. A blue glow from the square high-set windows told him the environment necessary for the survival of the frost animals was still being maintained.

  Hobart felt strangely uneasy and uncertain as he approached the freezer house door. The notion of taking direct action to solve a murder mystery had seemed both logical and attractive during the day, but the reality—involving illegal night entry and, for all he knew, a risk of getting himself shot—was a different matter. He looked up at the dark bulk of the house, wondering if Dorcie Langer was in it at that very moment, and he was gripped by a desire to complete his mission as quickly as possible and slip away before his situation deteriorated in some unforeseen manner. Moving with self-conscious stealth, he opened the door, stepped inside, and stood for a moment in the small, square lobby. On his left was the insulated door of the refrigerated area, with its single viewing aperture; on the right was the workshop, with a cone of yellow light illuminating one of the workbenches. Did that mean he had been unlucky and that a maintenance engineer was actually on the premises?

  He cleared his throat loudly and strode into the workshop, his mind working on a passable cover story, and found it deserted. Aware of the need for haste, he gathered up several types of screwdrivers and a hammer and carried them out to the lobby. He slid back the bolt on the insulated door and went through it into the menagerie itself. The door closed behind him with a pneumatic sigh. For a brief moment, while his clothing retained a protective layer of air, he had the impression the temperature in the room was quite moderate—then the coldness closed with him, grappling and clawing like an invisible enemy. Pain flared in his nostrils and throat.

  Hobart looked around, breathing in shallow gasps, and saw one of the captive animals on the wall at his side. It resembled a beautifully symmetrical array of frost ferns, almost a meter in diameter. As he watched, its crystalline patterns began to alter—a seething of diamonds—and the flower shape grew smaller. In the space of a few seconds the creature had vanished altogether. Hobart turned nervously and saw that the alien had re-formed on the wall behind him. At the edge of his vision he saw others blossoming or shrinking on every flat surface, like glassy lichens.

  Reminding himself that the frost creatures had never been known to settle on a human, he went further into the room, past the refrigerator housing, and immediately saw the fabricated unit of which Shimming had spoken. Basically, it was a squat pyramid fringed with silver laminate-covered shelves on which sat trays of the mineral salts commonly found in the deserts of Sirius VII. The structure was screwed to the floor, and Hobart’s pulse quickened as he noted that the central pyramid was large enough to contain two or three bodies if required. Wishing he had retained his tunic to help ward off the cold, he began lifting the wide trays from the shelves and placing them on the floor. It seemed to him as he did so that the migratory activity of the frost animals increased slightly, but he dismissed the idea. Xenologists had been studying the creatures for some years and still had not managed to classify them or produce any behavioral responses, so it would have been fanciful for him to suppose they were reacting to his presence.

  When he had disposed of the trays he lifted the heavy shelves off the brackets, stood them against a wall, and began taking up the screws which secured the pyramid to the floor. By this time he was shivering so violently that he had to use both hands to guide the screwdriver into the slots, and he realized he could remain in the subzero environment for only a few more minutes. He removed the last screw with trembling hands, slid the screwdriver under the base of the pyramid, and tilted the structure onto its side.

  The interior was completely empty.

  Unable to accept the evidence of his eyes, Hobart sank to his knees and tapped the laminated boards, looking for dimensional or angular discrepancies which would have betrayed a hidden compartment. Cracks of light glimmering between the boards told him the quest was hopeless—even a master magician would have found it impossible to conceal a rabbit within the simple structure. Hobart, sick with disappointment, sank back onto his heels and pressed a hand to his jaw to dampen its vibrations. He looked around the featureless wall of the room, heedless now of the transient flat rosettes of the frost animals, and cursed himself for the senseless egotism that had led him to go against a professional like Shimming. The best thing he could do now was to put things back as he had found them, in the hope his trespass would remain undetected, then go back into the city and give himself up to the police.

  He got to his feet and was trying for a good grip on the toppled pyramid when there was a sharp metallic sound from the direction of the door.

  Hobart froze in the act of lifting, certain he was about to be apprehended. He remained in the same attitude for a few seconds—then a more disquieting idea entered his mind.

  Letting the pyramid fall, he ran to the door—seeing a pale face flicker and vanish in the dark rectangle of the view
ing aperture—and tugged on the handle. As his premonition had told him it would, the metal-sheathed door refused to move.

  “Dorcie!” he shouted. “It’s Denny. Don’t do this. Let me out!”

  There was total, black-velvet silence.

  He turned away from the door and cast about wildly, his breath pluming in the gelid air. The hammer he had taken from the workshop was lying on the floor. He picked it up in stiffened hands, went to the nearest window, and struck it with all his force. The head of the hammer rebounded from the toughened glass without marking it in any way. Hobart tried again and this time the hammer spun from his grasp and fell behind him He dropped to his knees and was going after the tool that represented his hope of salvation when a silent voice— perhaps that of his superego, perhaps of the wise, worldly, and dispassionate Denny Hobart he had always hoped to become—spoke to him, commanding his attention. He listened for a moment and rose to his feet, smiling apologetically with one hand on his forehead, then gathered up the screwdrivers and went to the true source of his peril—the flanged and louvered mass of the refrigeration plant.

  The main side panel was held in place by six spring-loaded screws requiring only a half-turn each. Using his two-handed technique, Hobart was able to remove the screws in a matter of seconds and to lift the sheet of metal out of his way, exposing the machinery itself. The type and its operating principle were unfamiliar to him, but he had no difficulty in identifying a thermostat which had a slide control on a scale running from — 40° to + 30° Centigrade, which meant the system could double up as a heater. Grunting with relief, he reached for the control, then jerked his hand back as the entire thermostat housing became enveloped in a thick coating of frost. The white crystalline layer continued to thicken and exhibit patterns, diamond petals furling out on diamond petals with bewildering rapidity, until quite suddenly the thermostat was locked inside a shell of ice.

  Hobart gaped at it, dumbfounded, then raised his head to look around the room. Most of the elaborate, jeweled rosettes of the frost animals had disappeared from the walls and ceiling. He looked back at the refrigeration machinery and saw that no part of it had been affected by the encrustation except the control he had been about to operate. Hugging himself to ease the growing pain in his chest, Hobart rocked backward and forward as he tried to make sense of what was happening. The only conclusion he could reach was that somehow, by some process he could not even begin to understand, the alien beings had divined his intention. Switching off the refrigeration would save his life, but as a consequence the frost animals would be destroyed—the temperature in the room had never been allowed to rise above —20° Centigrade in the decades of its existence—and it appeared they had taken preventative action.

  Questions began to clamor in his mind. Had he, Denny Hobart, accidentally made the first intellectual contact with an extraterrestrial race? Had no xenological researcher thought of testing for motivation by threatening a frost animal with death? Or, unknown to him, had progress been made in that field during his eighteen years of absence in space?

  The stabbing sensation in his lungs grew worse and he realized that, at this stage, questions and answers were without relevance. His very life was at stake—and there were more ways than one of stopping a machine. He turned to reach for the fallen hammer and in that moment became aware of another phenomenon, one of silent but flurried movement. The shelves he had removed from the storage unit were still leaning against the nearest wall, and all over their sloping surfaces a number of frost animals were forming, fading away to nothingness and re-forming in a kind of regimented dance, creating fantastic, shifting, geometrical designs.

  Wondering why he was squandering the short time left to him, Hobart rose painfully to his feet and approached the shelves. The activity of the beautiful enigmatic beings reached a frenzied climax, dazzling his eyes.

  I can learn from you, he thought, numbly, as though his brain cells were turning to ice. The same lesson that old man Langer learned. Rigid bodies make rigid minds make rigid thinking ...

  He watched his hands reach out like servomechanisms, the blue-knuckled fingers crooking in preparation, and in that moment the frost animals vanished from the shelf he was about to touch. Hobart dug his nails under the top edge of the plank’s silvery laminate and slowly peeled it downward, revealing the core material, which appeared to be a red semitransparent plastic, variegated here and there by whitish spots and areas of blue and black and brown.

  Thunderous seconds passed before his mind came to grips with the mosaic of lines and charnel-house colors, imposing a pattern on them, letting him know he was looking at a longitudinal section cut through a human body. He turned away, retching, and went back to the refrigeration plant

  “I’m sorry,” he said aloud. “You’ve given me what I wanted, but I’m not going to die. Not in this century. Not in the next...”

  He knelt at the machine, grasped a slim feed pipe, and tugged on it with what remained of his strength. The pipe began to bend, but in that instant his breath was cut off. He fell sideways to the floor in the grip of a searing coldness unlike anything he could have imagined as the frost animals attacked, suffocating him beneath a mask of sparkling ice.

  * * * *

  Investigator Shimming paused for a moment, nuzzling his chin down onto his chest. He remained in that attitude for a short time—perhaps coping with gastric explosions, perhaps ordering his thoughts—then activated the recorder in his desk.

  “It is now obvious,” he said, settling back in his chair, “that having unlawfully killed Wolf Craven, Colonel Langer placed the body of the deceased in an oblong box, filled the box up with water and put it in the refrigerated room he used as an extraterrestrial menagerie. Forensic reports will reveal whether or not he added any chemicals to the water to accelerate the freezing process. As soon as the contents of the box had frozen solid he took a cutting implement—almost certainly a valency saw, which is quick in operation and generates no heat—and sliced the resultant block into longitudinal planks about three centimeters in thickness. An engineering consultant from the University of Montana has already confirmed that ordinary ice has quite good structural properties below a certain temperature, and in this case we are talking about ice which was reinforced with bone and strips of clothing.

  “Colonel Langer then covered the planks with metallic laminate, to disguise their nature, and used them to build the shelf unit I referred to earlier in this report. Evidence suggests that this work was begun on the night of 12 May 2113, while the party was still in progress, and was completed late the following day—by which time Dennis Hobart had already departed on the Langer Willow. Having disposed of Craven’s body in a manner he was confident would escape detection, Colonel Langer went to the office of the public prosecutor and made a deposition in which he attached the blame for Craven’s death to Hobart.

  “I have not been able to establish any motive for his desire to incriminate Hobart, and am of the opinion that Hobart was chosen fortuitously, simply because he had been seen arguing with the deceased. That concludes my interim report on this case.”

  Shimming switched off the recorder, surveyed the drab green walls of his office, then allowed his gaze to settle on Hobart, who was sitting opposite him. “As you’ll have gathered, I’m letting you off the hook,” he said. “You know, I don’t think I’ve ever met anybody so lucky.”

  “Lucky!” Pain caused Hobart’s face to twist spasmodically beneath the surgical dressings and he fell silent, wishing he had not reacted so violently.

  “That’s what I said. You’re alive when you ought to be dead, and you’re getting your job back. The Langers didn’t have to reinstate you.”

  “Didn’t they? Can you think of a better way to remove an embarrassment?”

  “Perhaps not.” Shimming took a roll of white tablets from a drawer and began to suck one, rolling it about his mouth as though tasting a rare wine. “All the same, Dorcie Langer could have blackballed you.”
/>   “She ought to be put away for trying to kill me.”

  “We have no proof of that, Dennis. She says she locked the door on an intruder, which is what any normal woman might have done in the same circumstances.”

  “Normal?” Hobart winced and gingerly pressed both palms to his cheeks. “The frost animals are more normal than she is.”

  “Could be. Have you thought about how we must appear to them? Perhaps we’re the real frost animals.”

  Hobart nodded, waiting for the pain in his face to subside. The creatures from Sinus VII no longer seemed quite so enigmatic since it had been established that they were life-oriented, reacting as positively as they could against any form of killing. It was due to that facet of their nature that he was still alive—because eighteen years earlier they had attacked Nolan Langer. Nobody would ever know the precise details of what had happened that night, but it seemed that Langer had lured Craven into the freezer house to kill him, and that the frost animals had attacked their owner during the crime. The colonel had not been forestalled—he was good at killing—but he had been obliged to seek medical treatment for frostbite.

  And it had been Shimming’s belated discovery of this fact, hidden in a computerized medical report, which had set him wondering about the veracity of the long-dead colonel’s deposition. It chastened Hobart to realize he had been allowed to get away from his hotel, and that he had actually been under long-range surveillance right up to the moment he entered the freezer house, even though the final outcome had been in his favor.