“We’ve all been just drifting along, doing things too late,” Frigate said in a dull tone. “Sometimes … I wonder if the Snark has had the Computer broadcast some sort of neural suppressant field, something dampening our intelligence?”
“I doubt it. We’ve just been playing with our toys … like children. However”—Burton lifted a napkin and revealed a yellow ball the size of a cranberry—”I’ve been busy while you were sleeping. This is the sphere that records a body. I had the Computer duplicate one for me. It’s empty now, but I wanted to see one. And holding it in my hand enabled me to postulate something … a theory, but the only explanation I could come up with that was reasonable. That is, how could the Snark get into Alice’s world, into Turpin’s and yours … Netley’s … and there arrange for operations that just could not be done from outside those worlds?”
Alice entered a minute later. Burton had to repeat his story and to wait for her to recover enough before he could continue.
“First, though, I don’t think that the Snark did it. I mean I don’t think that there’s an Ethical hiding in the tower. Nur eliminated her, though we cannot, of course; ever be sure. But the murders in the little worlds were done by one of us. By one of the survivors.”
Li Po shot up from his chair, and, quivering, said, “Gull! Or Star Spoon! But why?”
Burton nodded. “Gull may have reverted, but he would have to have gone mad to do that. Star Spoon? She would have to be insane. If either is, he or she has concealed it well. First, let me tell the rest of my theory.”
“First… pardon the interruption,” Frigate said, “we have to consider that it may be neither Gull nor Star Spoon. What if somebody we haven’t even seen is the killer? After all, Williams raised Gull and the others involved in the Ripper killings. And there are the gypsies. We don’t know who raised them, but I suspect Williams did it just as a joke or just to bug us. Or maybe somebody else did. Anyway, what if someone raised a person who was destructively insane, to put it mildly, and that person is our second Snark?”
“I asked the Computer to scan the tower for other people. It reported that it could find none. I asked for a rundown of all those who’d been raised, and the number corresponds exactly with my calculations. Still, the Computer could be reporting only what it’s been told to report.”
Frigate threw his hands up. “Nothing’s certain!”
“It never has been. However, I think that we don’t have to consider a third party or parties.”
He held up the yellow sphere. “Here is how I think he … or she … did it.”
The killer had ordered a number of his body-recordings made in an e-m converter.
“Nobody had inhibited this action until I told the Computer not to allow that, but I was too late. The deed was done.”
The Snark, Snark the Second, as it were, had been given an opportunity to enter the worlds of Turpin, Frigate and Alice. Perhaps all the worlds and some apartment suites, too.
“There the Snark put the recording-spheres in converters that were out of the way, seldom if ever used. And the Snark also concealed them in other places for easy access and probably carried them around in his clothing.”
The Snark then killed himself in the privacy of an unused apartment. By prearrangement with the Computer, the Snark was resurrected in a converter inside a world.
“The converter in which the Snark died would then disintegrate the body. The Snark did not want anybody finding it, though that possibility was remote.”
Once inside Alice’s world, Snark II did what had to be done. The androids were verbally programmed when they were out of sight of Alice and Maglenna or perhaps they were programmed before Maglenna showed. Since the Snark had to be furtive about the process, it undoubtedly took weeks to complete it.
The flooding of the two worlds, though, was ordered from the outside.
“The Ethicals thought that they were one hundred per cent safe when they were in their private worlds. Of course, they were not nearly as security-conscious as we since they believed the tower to be an impregnable fortress. They knew that one of them was a traitor, but they still could not conceive that he would actually personally endanger them.