Sideways In Crime Read online

  “That’s one way of putting it.” I raised a forkful of vegetable curry half way, then lowered it to the plate. “Does progress bring information sharing?”

  “When I get authorization. I follow orders, like the guys down there.”

  I’d been in the Rangers for four years. I’d learned initiative as well as obedience.

  “You’re predicting a suspect will come through here, is that it?”

  “Maybe. So”--Lisa put down her knife and fork--”Ben Franklin, as we discussed earlier. If he hadn’t spoken Deutsch, those things”-- nodding to the resonance booths down below--”wouldn’t exist. By the way, this is me changing the subject.”

  “Uh-huh. So how do you figure that, Lisa? And this is me playing along, for a time.”

  “Well, Herr Doktor Weber. Peter. My subject was the history of

  science--”

  “Ah.”

  “--and I was thinking about Albert Einstein. You know, his first half dozen breakthroughs, from the photoelectric effect and Brownian motion to restricted relativity, were all developments that would eventually have been made by other people. It was astounding that one man came up with all of them, but without Einstein, science as a whole would have discovered the same things.”

  I felt myself smiling, not because this was new to me--it wasn’t-- but because of the animation in Lisa’s voice, the shining of her eyes (remarkably clear, given her age), and the obvious love of history. Perhaps I wasn’t the only one who regretted not taking a different path.

  “But when the Nazis rose to power, and Einstein fled to France, that was when he met up with de Broglie. Between the younger man’s energy and odd ideas, and Einstein’s own genius, they came up with a new framework that could never have arisen otherwise.”

  “If they hadn’t come up with vortex mechanics,” I said, “no one would have.”

  Nearly every scientist with occasional interest in history knew this much.

  “So we agree,” said Lisa. “But here’s my real point. If Amerika hadn’t spoken Deutsch, the Nazis would not have risen to power here as well.”

  “Have you been to Alabama?”

  “But the whole country’s not like that. There would have been places for Jews to flee other than France. Countries farther from the Nazis.”

  “And no psychophysics.” I ate some curry, finding my appetite again. “But without vortex mechanics, you’d have those other old theories. Um...”

  “Wave mechanics and matrix mechanics,” said Lisa. “Same thing, really. What they used to call quantum, which was accurate in its limited way, but implied--”

  “But it gave a special place to human consciousness.” As a psychophysicist, I knew how ridiculous this was. “It was nonsense.”

  “Like placing the Earth at the center of the universe, in pre-Copernican times. I know. But Peter, without vortex mechanics there would have been no alternative but to adopt the quantum formulations.”

  “With no idea how complexities arise from layered vortex patterns,” I said. “No theory of consciousness, of cultural mechanics.”

  “And no Church of the Holy Solar.”

  Perhaps Lisa’s words had carried. I noticed several diners turn around. So I gave them that stare, the one that broadcasts on subliminal levels--a capacity beyond primate anger, to access the reptilian brain we all have, which is fast and cold and can process violent action without emotion. I could recite the vortex flow equations that describe how it works.

  And I could use it to effect, as the civilians blinked and turned back to their food.

  “I hope you’re not blaming psychophysics for Solarian fundamentalism.”

  “Come off it, Peter. You know how misinformation moves through a culture. You can probably write a mathematical description of the--”

  Her PDA buzzed.

  Within minutes, we were down on the concourse, presenting our IDs to the marines’ officer-in-charge. Lisa explained that a suspected killer, almost certainly a Solarian fundamentalist, was likely to pass through the booths.

  “We don’t have his name.” She held up her PDA, currently displaying a complex graph. “Just a predicted travel pattern.”

  “So how can you confirm--?”

  “It’s as likely to be the victim we identify. Herr Leutnant Weber has the authorization and expertise to open a cache.”

  “On the resonance booth? Both the killer and the victim are likely to pass through here?”

  “Exactly.”

  The officer looked confused, which was a good sign: he understood that the Intention Scan should rule out someone traveling in order to kill. My instinct had been to shut down the booths, but it would take an hour to decouple them, and Lisa had pointed out the real result: the killer would shift to compensate, and take down his victim elsewhere.

  “Goddam Solarians,” muttered the officer, heading back toward his men.

  It was vortex mechanics that had predicted the layers upon layers of complexity that swirled inside our Sun, and every star. And it was vortex-based psychophysics that had revealed what those patterns meant: a form of self-aware cognition that lay so far beyond human thought that it was nonsense to describe it with the same word.

  Call the Sun god-like if you want, but to assume it cares about our worship is like expecting a bacterium to adore a human being, and the human to be pleased. Why can’t people get that?

  “We think,” Lisa said to me now, “that the bastard uses something like your eavesdropping tech, passing through the booth, leaving a perturbation behind him.”

  “That’s not easily done.”

  “I know.”

  Because in the Eavesdropping Suite, we have guys with big brains--I’m not talking about me--and a massive hardware budget, in order to set up resonances that are subtle enough to listen in without destroying the link they’re overhearing. That’s the trick. And if this killer was able to perturb a booth’s resonance while leaving its vortex link intact, he knew more than I did.

  “Your job is to track the bastard,” said Lisa. “But I’ve a question I need to ask. It’s important.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Would you travel through a booth to catch him?”

  I stared at her.

  “You eat steak,” I said. “Have you ever been inside a slaughterhouse?”

  “What relevance does that have?”

  “I’m a vegetarian.” As I spoke, I was aware of the booths’ presence beyond the marines. “So I’ll let you work that out.”

  “That’s an interesting attitude”--Lisa’s accent became very crisp, very Hochdeutsch--”for a policeman to have. Especially one responsible for convicting killers.”

  “Live with the paradox. That’s what I do.”

  But perhaps Lisa had seen deeper than I had, for when we walked through the ring of marines, what I saw jolted me, even though I knew what to expect.

  “Fuck,” I muttered.

  Each of the twelve booths, as we could see when we entered the oval configuration, was fronted by thick armored glass. The remaining three walls of each booth were of pale stone, matching the concourse floor. But inside the booths--

  “Morton. My God.”

  The booths alternated: six empty, six occupied, for inside every second booth was a manacled naked man. And the booth in front of me contained someone I’d last seen struggling in the courtroom, yelling when the judge pronounced sentence, thrashing while the guards maneuvered him away.

  “Who is he?”

  “His name,” I told Lisa, “is Elwyn Morton. Child molester. Killer.”

  Morton was staring at us through the glass. Not screaming, just watching.

  “And you caught him? So this is justice.”

  “Call it what you like,” I said, “but I do not want to watch.”

  “Stand easy, Peter. There are civilians here.”

  “What--? Oh, shit.”

  A well-dressed businessman, escorted by two travel assistants wearing white coats, was passing thro
ugh the ring of marines. One assistant placed a silver cap on the businessman’s head, while her colleague checked a monitor screen set next to a booth.

  “All clear,” she said. “Have a fine journey, sir.”

  The businessman gave a small, emotionless nod.

  Heartless bastard.

  But even from here I could see the resonance interpretation on the screen. According to the parameters of the Intention Scan, the businessman was a well-intentioned traveler, with a justifiably urgent reason for using resonance.

  “Wait a minute.” I focused on the businessman, who was beginning to undress. “If the killer travels through, then he passes the Intention Scan.”

  “Exactly. See how consistent that is?”

  I rubbed dry saliva from the corner of my mouth. My stomach felt sour, though I’d eaten little of my curry. But Lisa was right: anyone who could perturb a booth’s resonance could also subvert the Intention Scan. This took things to another level.

  I breathed consciously, a time-honored way of telling the unconscious to relax. You don’t need flow equations to understand it works.

  Exhale.

  The businessman, now naked, looked fleshy and soft, nothing like a terrorist. He walked toward an empty booth. The naked men chained in the booths on either side watched him without moving. Resigned or horrified, I could not tell which.

  And I did not want to watch this.

  Inhale.

  Exhale.

  An assistant opened the booth, and the nude man stepped inside. Then--it was excruciating, the care they took--the assistant closed the booth, while her colleague pressed the--

  Breathe.

  --button, and red meat exploded against the glass, spattering the booth. Gobbets of flesh smacked, stuck to the glass, then began to slide down through viscous layers of blood.

  “Oh, very nice,” said the first assistant, checking the screen.

  “He got through okay?” asked the other.

  “All the way to San Francisco, safe and sound.”

  “Good. Initiating clean-up.”

  Inside the booth, nozzles began to spray water and detergent, and rotating brushes started to clean away the unstructured flesh that only moments earlier had been a living, conscious, sentient human being.

  But the businessman had taken exactly zero time to reach San Francisco.

  Call it progress.

  After I checked the cache, mostly to reassure myself that I could operate the system, I told Lisa that everything appeared to check out fine. As I spoke, the vortex flux within the cache swirled, went non-linear, and spun away. The cache was now clear, and unreadable.

  “So we wait for the next one.” Lisa held up her PDA, pointing at the graph on the screen. “We’re only tracking probabilities here.”

  “Wonderful.”

  “You’re doing fine, Peter.”

  It wasn’t any kind of praise I needed.

  It was another half hour before a small violet light began to wink above one of the occupied booths. Not the one containing Morton. I wondered how they chose.

  The assistants, in their laundered white coats, were coming back.

  “Incoming,” one of them said to me.

  In one of the booths, the naked, manacled prisoner turned toward the rear, his shoulders bobbing. The armored glass and thick glass walls kept the sound inside.

  But the prisoner whose booth was flashing, expecting someone to arrive--

  “I can’t watch.” My voice.

  --knew he was next. One of the assistants had put on glasses, and the flashing light reflected in her lenses like a violet strobe. The man shook his head, lips drawn back as he fought against his chains, as though he could rip them free from the concrete--impossible--then he threw his head back and howled, so loud I could almost hear a distant attenuated sound, a ghost’s agony, before he--

  “I can,” said Lisa.

  --just swirled, red and pink and gray, a tornado of color and movement--

  “Oh, sweet God.”

  --and then a narrow-bodied Afrikan American woman was standing there.

  “Here you are.” One of the attendants held up a fluffy robe, as the glass door clicked open. “Welcome to Neu München, ma’am.”

  “Thank you.” The arrival stepped into the robe. “Thank you very much.”

  She glanced at me. I tried not to remember the flash of chocolate-brown nipple, of firm breast.

  “Peter.” Lisa touched my shoulder.

  “Sorry. Yes.”

  I went to the booth, trying not to look at the gobbets of flesh inside. A faint pink mist, a pastel vapor, billowed from the still-open booth, like steam from a shower.

  The prisoner had weighed perhaps forty pounds more than the woman whose flesh he’d reconstituted. That was forty pounds of waste organic matter, left over from the transport process, untargeted by the resonance effect.

  While I opened the brass hatch set into the outside of the booth, one of the attendants closed the door and set the cleaning cycle going. Detergents washed, while I tried to concentrate on pattern traces in the resonator’s cache.

  “No perturbations remaining.” I ran through the phase space displays once more, and then the information was gone, dissipated into random flux. “An ordinary resonance.”

  Ordinary, except to the man whose sentence had just been carried out.

  “All right.” Lisa checked her PDA, and put it away. “We were playing the odds, but if we go home without a crime happening, I’ll be happy for it.”

  “But you--”

  “What?”

  “Never mind,” I said.

  Lisa nodded toward the booth, where the cleaning cycle continued. “You mean, I’ll have had a wasted journey? A wasted resonance journey?”

  I closed the hatch. The newly arrived Afrikan American woman was gone, escorted to the shower room by the assistants. Other staff would already have laid out a full wardrobe for the woman to choose from. All part of the very expensive service that is resonator travel.

  “Oh, God,” I said. “Another one.”

  “Get ready.”

  Again, a violet light flashed. Again, it wasn’t Morton in the receiving booth. I supposed they worked through the men in chronological sequence, except when body mass was insufficient to receive the incomer. Did the staff wait until all six men had been reconstituted as incoming travelers before replacing them with six new prisoners? Or did they wait for a certain time of day, when they brought in just the right number of prisoners, like refills for the vacant booths? And if a really heavy person was due to come in, would they chain two prisoners into a single booth?

  I didn’t want to ask.

  Then it happened, as before.

  This time, when the maelstrom of red gore had ceased swirling, it was a pale, doughy young man in his early twenties who stood there. His dirty-blond hair was untidy. He stepped over the mass of misshapen metal that had been the prisoner’s manacles.

  “Thank you,” he told his attendants, as they wrapped a robe around him.

  Unlike the previous arrival, he looked back into the booth. There was less excess mass this time. Still, some remains lay like scattered mincemeat on the floor.

  “Bloody hell,” muttered Lisa in English. “It’s getting busy.”

  Another violet light was flashing.

  “What’s that?” said an attendant.

  The other looked puzzled.

  “We’re not supposed to have another incoming for--”

  Inside the booth, the waiting prisoner exploded into gouts of meat.

  “Jesus Christ,” said Lisa. “Open this, now.”

  An arrival?

  No.

  Because whatever had arrived wasn’t what you’d expect to--

  “Peter.”

  “Sorry.”

  I helped her pull the booth open. It was partly reconstituted, the body of the incomer: a torn-apart corpse with two faces on the deformed skull. One face was that of the original prisoner, distorted
into a final scream. The other surely was the features of the failed arrival, also dead.

  This was the traveler.

  And this was the murder, the kind of murder that Lisa had been talking about. I wanted to throw up, but I was supposed to be able to think logically in a crisis, to integrate the cortex when amygdala-led vortices of neural flow were not enough, when the neural cliques that represented my reaction of horror were simply not useful. There’s psychophysical jargon but we call it getting a grip, and that’s what I did now, finally.

  The scheduled traveler.

  And the attendants had been expecting only one traveler at this time, so if that was the dead person, then who--?

  I ripped the Luger from under my jacket as I spun around. But the doughy-skinned young man had already leaped inside a vacant booth. The attendants looked shocked as the booth began its transmission cycle.

  “Fire!” said Lisa.

  “I . . .“

  But red flesh exploded, and my opportunity was gone.

  “Shit. Shit.”

  Reholstering the gun, I ran to the booth, popped the brass hatch, then worked the tracing tools fast, before the cache could clear.

  “He’s in Berlin.” I looked at Lisa. “Phone Berlin Tiergarten, quick. Because if he goes on to Beijing or Mumbai, we’ve lost the bastard.”

  “I know.”

  Lisa didn’t move.

  “Then why are you--?”

  I stopped.

  “Lisa. What’s that in your hand?”

  “It’s fast acting.” The small device was of polished metal. It might have been a lipstick holder. “I’m so sorry.”

  “That’s not--”

  The world snapped out of being.

  And back into focus, except that I was naked, inside a booth the size of a large shower cubicle. Outside, through the glass, I could see Lisa, standing with a marine to either side of her. One of them sketched a salute.

  “No!” I yelled. “I don’t want to--”

  Shit.

  “--do this.”

  There was a pavilion outside the booth, with glimpses of night-covered parkland beyond. I was in the Tiergarten terminal.

  Lisa. No.

  Little blood or meat stained the floor. I guess the prisoner hadn’t been much heavier than me.