Chapter One
Despite
the Model 6’s well-documented flaws, the Space Detective preferred the Model 6
Rigelian Hand Zapper to the Model 8. He found it a better balanced blaster
that fit his hand just so. The Model 8 felt barrel-heavy to him. And the way
the 8 molded itself to his hand was very unsatisfying—and a little disturbing.
(More than once I heard him say, “I just don’t know what they were thinking
when they started using those Nevian Octo-ambient grips on the Model 8. When I let
go of the gun, it wouldn’t let go of me. Had to pry it off my fingers.”)
So the Space Detective radiated absolute
confidence as he leveled his Model 6 at Ronnie Roquette, whose recent
activities might better be described as invasion assistance rather than mere
smuggling. But although Ronnie was staring down the cannon-sized blow hole of a
lethal hand blaster, his face began to glow with confidence. Uh oh.
I alerted the Detective:
<<Your helmet must have a breach—short-wave Confidence
radiation is infecting Ronnie. Better shoot fast.>>
The Space Detective
pulled the Zapper’s trigger, and the Model 6 demonstrated one of its flaws:
Instead of firing with a warm and satisfying POM, the charge drum flew to the
right with a PLING, leaving the Detective gripping a gun frame with a barrel
attached. As usual, he was not at a loss for words—at least, one word: “Poot!”
As the drum escaped the frame, its locking
pin had shot forward and struck Ronnie in the face. “Hey! That coulda put out
my eye!”
Radiated by confidence leaking from the
faulty helmet, the smuggler charged, arms extended.
The Detective’s left forearm batted aside
Ronnie’s right arm. He brought up the handgun and wobbled the smuggler by
rapping Ronnie’s collar bone with its barrel. The pistol, even without the
drum, weighed enough to stun the outlaw. The Detective lunged forward, smacked
Ronnie in the face with the front of his helmet and dropped him to the floor.
Even unconscious and battered, Roquette’s features suggested an attitude of
easy accomplishment.
“Gotta get this helmet patched,” the
Detective said.
<<The
Studie is coming around the corner,>> I reported. I
maintained a telepathic link from the office with the Detective. It would be a
misnomer to say I manned the office, as my genetic forebears are Plutonian—I
sat in a container lined with dry ice and kept operations flowing while the
Detective handled the leg work. After all, he had legs.
The Detective dropped Ronnie’s sidearm
into a coat pocket, picked up an egg carton-sized container from the floor with
one hand and with the other slung Ronnie’s inert form over a shoulder. Grit
cracked under his Florsheims as he crossed the vast concrete floor to the open
door. As he stepped out from one of hundreds of warehouses lining this part of
the Great Mohegan River, a car skidded to a stop before him: a modified 1950
Studebaker Commander Starlight Coupe, Milky Way black. The passenger door
opened, and he plopped Ronnie into the seat, closed the door. He got into the
driver’s seat—because I had directed the auto’s robot to the door, no one was
actually already in the seat—and set the carton between him and Ronnie’s
slumped form before putting the Studie in gear and driving off.
Chapter
Two
At
the office—a second-floor walk-up over a tobacconist’s shop that ran numbers
from the back room—the Detective opened the top drawer for one of three filing
cabinets, touched the Containment tab of a file folder.
He moved Ronnie, still on his shoulder, closer to the drawer, and the smuggler
was sucked into the Containment folder like something in a Tex Avery cartoon.
The Detective closed that drawer, opened another and manipulated the Evidence
tab, and the egg carton likewise slurped into the cabinet like a wet noodle.
From a third drawer, the Detective opened
a Workroom folder and stepped in.
As every school boy knows, as New
Angoulême had spread horizontally across the landscape since the arrivals of
Giovanni da Verrazzano and Henry Hudson, the search for more space had
eventually led to the creation of the skyscraper to exploit vertical space. The
technologies the Detective relied on let him use the space between spaces—much
as a tesseract is a four-dimensional cube, the Detective employed science that
allowed him to use rooms within rooms that weren’t even visible from outside.
Some of the spaces within the file cabinets’ folders were larger than the
office within which they sat.
Sitting sealed in a dry ice container all
day gave me the time to think about these things. Luckily, I didn’t get
headaches.
In the Workroom, the Detective found the
fault in the helmet that had allowed Ronnie Roquette to be contaminated during
their little skirmish. He returned to the office proper after retrieving and
donning a fresh helmet from Storage.
Just in time. The office door opened and
revealed Chief Inspector Jonathan Brewster Uncas. His figure briefly fuzzed
around the edges as he stepped over the threshold, and Uncas shook for a moment
as from a chill. The fuzz and chill resulted from the transport process that
moved any visitors from the second floor walk-up to the actual location of the
Detective’s office—using the same tesseract-like science, the office was
Neither Here nor There, but “Nere,” as the Detective described it. Just by
pressing a switch, the New Angouleme office could appear to be empty, and the
office in Hong Kong or Paris would appear to be occupied.
Whoever crossed the threshold remained
unaware that he had been transported from one reality to another. It was one of
those little secrets we kept that made our work tricky.
“Always cold in here,” Uncas muttered.
His name was pulled from Mohegan history,
but he actually belonged to the Pequot tribe; still, both were Algonquian, and
Uncas wore on the lapel of his topcoat the traditional black feather pin of the
Algonquian nation. The police department ranks were filled with Mohawks and
Irish, and the newspapers occasionally ran a story about dissent in the
precincts caused by Uncas—or one of the other officers from a competing
tribe—rubbing someone in uniform the wrong way.
He didn’t doff the non-standard-issue
black beret. “Where have you been tonight?” he asked.
The Detective moved casually, sat in the
captain’s chair behind his desk. His helmet was opaque, therefore it would do
no good to smile, so he tried to put a smile in the sound of his voice. “Why
should I have been anywhere but here?”
Uncas remained all business. “The hood of
your car was still warm.”
Note to self: expect a reprimand and a
request for a better heat sink for the Studie’s engine.
Experience proved that putting Uncas at
ease helped keep relations less difficult. The Detective gestured to a
visitor’s chair with a gloved hand: “Go ahead, have a seat. I bet you need a
break from chasing down all those JDs.”
Crimes committed by teenagers had been
fodder for bold headlines in the newspapers recently. Juvenile crime was
nothing new, but its nature had gotten more violent lately—beatings, shootings,
rapes, small-scale riots—and the spike in this sort of activity had both
shocked and frightened a large part of the population.
The chief inspector ignored the effort to
make things warm and friendly. He remained standing. He kept that stiff,
professional posture that alternately drew praise for his unyielding focus to
the particulars of his job—or scorn for his lack of reasonable human empathy
when dealing with citizens or members of the competing news outlets. He might
well have served as a model for Dragnet’s
ubercop, Detective Joe Vrijdag.
“Where were you three weeks ago, May 28
through June 6?” Uncas asked.
“Working a case,” the Detective said.
“Where?”
“Out of town.”
“Four weeks before that?” Uncas asked.
“Another case.”
“Where?”
“Out of town.”
“For whom?” the inspector pressed.
“That’s a confidential matter between me
and my client,” the Detective responded. “I’m sure you can understand that,
Inspector.”
Uncas said nothing, but stared without
blinking at the Detective. It was the sort of look that would prompt those
irritated news writers to include the words “stoic Indian” in their blocks of
copy.
Finally he spoke: “You disappear for days
at a time, supposedly on a case. Business must be good,” and he almost smiled,
“but no clients ever appear at your door. You could meet them at other
locations, of course, but there is no evidence of that, either.”
The Detective didn’t respond. He seemed
content to let his uninvited guest air his thoughts to see where they would
carry him.
Uncas raised a hand, touched one finger to
his chin. “You show up at interesting places—crime scenes where you seem to
have no business, you just happen to be in the neighborhood, or you are
exercising your professional interest.
“And I have not even mentioned this gaudy
outfit. Do you ever take off that ghastly mask?”
The Detective shook his head, silent.
“I pegged it for an interesting business
gimmick when you first came to my notice,” Uncas continued, and he put both
hands in the pockets of his coat. “Masked wrestlers were gaining fans in the
rings, so it made sense you might draw attention to likely clients with a mask
of your own. And Space Detective
probably has a nice ring for those souls who get a tingle from those low-budget
UFO movies. Your paperwork is all clean and on file, but how you got approval
without using an actual, legal name, I have yet to determine.”
“Space
Detective is my legal name,” the boss answered.
Uncas gave him another one of those
time-stopped stares.
Now he placed his hands on the back of the
visitor’s chair and leaned forward. The light from the desk lamp blazed on the
enameled lapel pin. “Your existence puzzles and bothers me. I do not like
puzzles in my city. Puzzles mean problems in my world.” He turned to leave,
then stopped at the door. “For the past three years, you have struck me as a
problem I just have not unpuzzled yet.” Then he exited, fuzzing around the
edges as he left, and shut the door behind him.
“Hm.” The Detective remained silent in his
chair awhile. Then: “I’d expect someone who considers absolute zero a balmy day
to know something about cooling car engines.”
Ah, the expected zinger.
<<I’ll
get on it.>>
“Hm. What do you
suppose all that was about?”
<<What
do you mean?>>
“That uncharacteristic, un-Uncas-like
unburdening?”
I thought about it. <<Does he think we’re criminals?>>
“He might think I’m a criminal. He doesn’t know about
you.”
True. I considered.
I started to be distracted by thoughts of the Studie’s heat sink. So I asked,
<<What do you think?>>
The Detective
tapped his fingers on the desktop in some sort of rhythm he’d heard on the
radio. He answered, “I think I need a gunsmith.”
