He paused again, concluded, “There is the final possibility that Dr. McAllen’s action has had the results he was attempting to bring about . . . Ollie, you might speak on that yourself.”
McAllen shrugged. “I’ve already presented my views. Essentially, it’s a question of whether Barney Chard was capable of learning that he could live without competing destructively with other human beings. If he has grasped that, he should also be aware by now that Base Eighteen is presently one of the most interesting spots in the known universe.”
Simms asked: “Do you expect he’ll be grateful for what has occurred?”
“We-e-ll,” McAllen said judiciously, turning a little pale, “that, of course, depends on whether he is still alive and sane. But if he has survived the five years, I do believe that he will not be dissatisfied with what has happened to him. However”—he shrugged again—”let’s get ahead with it. Five years has been a long time to find out whether or not I’ve murdered a man.”
In the momentary silence that followed, he settled himself in the chair Fredericks had vacated, and glanced over at Simms. “You stay seated, Mel,” he said. “You represent Psychology here. Use your chair scanner. The plate’s still showing no indications of clearing, John?”
“No,” said Fredericks. “In another two hours we might have a good picture there. Hardly before.”
McAllen said, “We won’t wait for it. Simms and I can determine through the scanners approximately what has been going on.” He was silent a few seconds; then the blurred red globe in the plate expanded swiftly, filled two thirds of the view space, checked for a moment, then grew once more; finally stopped.
McAllen said irritably, “John, I’m afraid you’ll have to take over. My hands don’t seem steady enough to handle this properly.”
* * *
A minute or two passed. The big plate grew increasingly indistinct, all details lost in a muddy wash of orange-brown shades. Green intruded suddenly; then McAllen muttered “Picking up the cabin now.”
There was a moment of silence, then Fredericks cleared his throat. “So far so good, Oliver. We’re looking into the cabin. Can’t see your man yet—but someone’s living here. Eh, Simms?”
“Obviously,” the psychologist acknowledged. He hesitated. “And at a guess it’s no maniac. The place is in reasonably good order.”
“You say Chard isn’t in the cabin?” Spalding demanded.
Fredericks said, “Not unless he’s deliberately concealing himself. The exit door is open. Hm-m-m. Well, the place isn’t entirely deserted, after all.”
“What do you mean?” asked Spalding.
“Couple of squirrels sitting in the window,” Simms explained.
“In the window? Inside the cabin?”
“Yes,” said Fredericks. “Either they strayed in while he was gone, or he’s keeping them as pets. Now, should we start looking around outside for Chard?”
“No,” Spalding decided. “The Base is too big to attempt to cover at pinpoint focus. If he’s living in the cabin and has simply gone out, he’ll return within a few hours at the most. We’ll wait and see what we can deduce from the way he behaves when he shows up.” He turned to McAllen. “Ollie,” he said, “I think you might allow yourself to relax just a little. This doesn’t seem at all bad!”
McAllen grunted. “I don’t know,” he said. “You’re overlooking one thing.”
“What’s that?”
“I told Chard when to expect us. Unless he’s smashed the clock, he knows we’re due today. If nothing’s wrong—wouldn’t he be waiting in the cabin for us?”
Spalding hesitated. “That is a point. He seems to be hiding out. May have prepared an ambush, for that matter. John—”
“Yes?” Fredericks said.
“Step the tubescope down as fine as it will go, and scan that cabin as if you were vacuuming it. There may be some indication—”
“He’s already doing that,” Simms interrupted.
There was silence again for almost two minutes. Forefinger and thumb of Fredericks’ right hand moved with infinite care on a set of dials on the side of the scanner; otherwise neither he nor Simms stirred.
“Oh-hoo-hoo-haw!” Dr. John Fredericks cried suddenly. “Oh-hoo-hoo-HAW! A message, Ollie! Your Mr. Chard has left you a . . . hoo-hoo . . . message.”
For a moment McAllen couldn’t see clearly through the scanner. Fredericks was still laughing; Simms was saying in a rapid voice, “It’s quite all right, doctor! Quite all right. Your man’s sane, quite sane. In fact you’ve made, one might guess, a one hundred per cent convert to the McAllen approach to life. Can’t you see it?”
“No,” gasped McAllen. He had a vague impression of the top of the desk in the main room of the cabin, of something white—a white card—taped to it, of blurred printing on the card. “Nothing’s getting that boy unduly excited any more.” Simms’ voice went on beside him. “Not even the prospect of seeing visitors from Earth for the first time in five years. But he’s letting you know it’s perfectly all right to make yourself at home in his cabin until he gets back. Here, let me—”
He reached past McAllen, adjusted the scanner. The printing on the card swam suddenly into focus before McAllen’s eyes.
The message was terse, self-explanatory, to the point:
GONE FISHING,
Regards, B. Chard
The Beacon to Elsewhere
It didn’t happen twice a year that Gustavus Robert Fry, Chief Commissioner of the Interstellar Police Authority, allotted more than an hour in his working day to any one appointment. However, nobody in the outer offices was surprised to learn that the chief expected to remain in conference until noon today, and was not to be disturbed before then. The visitor who had been ushered in to him—without benefit of appointment—was Howard Camhorn, the Overgovernment’s Co-ordinator of Research. It was a meeting of political mastodons. Portentous events would be on the agenda.
Seated at the desk in his private office, Gus Fry, massive, strong-jawed, cold-eyed—looking precisely like the powerhouse, political and otherwise, which he was—did not feel entirely at ease. Howard Camhorn, sprawled in a chair half across the room from the Chief Commissioner, might have passed for a middle-aged, moderately successful artist. He was lanky, sandy-haired, with a lazy smile, lazier gestures. But he was, by several degrees, the bigger VIP of the two.
Camhorn said, “There’s no question at all, of course, that the space transport your boys picked up is the one we’re interested in. But is it absolutely certain that our YM-400 is no longer on board?”
Fry shrugged. “It’s certain that it isn’t in the compartment where it was stored for the trip—and the locks to that compartment have been forced. It’s possible that whoever removed the two YM cases has concealed them in some other part of the ship. That would be easy to do, but . . .”
Camhorn shook his head. “No,” he said. “Nobody would benefit from that. I’m afraid we’ll have to resign ourselves to the fact that the stuff has been taken.”
Fry said, “It looks like it. The police search will go on until your own investigators get there, but there’s no reason to believe anything will be found.”
“The ship’s course had been reset so that it was headed into unoccupied space?”
“Yes,” said Fry. “It was only by a very improbable coincidence that an IPA boat happened to spot it. The transport’s new course wouldn’t have brought it anywhere near a traffic lane, inhabited planet, or normal patrol route. Three weeks later, when its fuel was exhausted, the planted explosives would have blown it up without a chance that the wreckage would ever be detected.”
“How about the cargo? Have you heard about that? Was it otherwise intact?”
“As far as we can tell. The shippers will check everything in detail when the freighter gets back to port. But it’s a good guess that the Overgovernment’s YM-400 is the only item missing.”
Camhorn nodded. “A group which was planning to pick it up wouldn’t be very interested in ordinary loot. That seems to make it conclusive.” He wrinkled his nose reflectively. “Modus operandi?” he asked.
“Two possibilities,” Fry said. “They had themselves loaded aboard with the cargo, or they intercepted the transport en route and entered it in flight.”
“Which do you like?”
“The first. In fact, the other is hardly a possibility. Even the IPA couldn’t get aboard a modern automatic freighter between ports without setting off an explosion of alarms in every flight control station on its course. No such alarm was recorded. And there is no indication of a forcible entry.”
“So our thieves had themselves loaded on,” said Camhorn. “Now, Gus, I’ve always been under the impression that the check system which keeps stowaways out of the automatic transports was foolproof.”
The IPA Chief shrugged. “It’s been foolproof so far. But not because it was impossible to circumvent. It’s simply that circumventing the check system would add up to so enormously expensive a proposition that the total cash value of a transport and its cargo wouldn’t be worth the trouble. These people definitely were not considering expenses.”