Burton stopped the chair. The scene stopped with him. Burton, not knowing why he was doing so, told the Computer to project the neural-emotional field.
At once, he felt a searing pain as the doctor’s knife rounded the foreskin.
He clamped down on his teeth to keep from screaming, as he had clamped down on his cigar during the actual operation.
At the same time, he felt dizzy and sluggish. The field was enveloping him with his sensations as they had been at that time, and he had been drunk. Not as drunk as he should have been.
“Enough!” he cried. “Remove the NE field.”
Immediately, the pain was gone. Or was it? Was there not the ghost or the shadow of one slowly departing?
Burton was no masochist. He had inflicted pain only so that his desire for Star Spoon, for any woman, would go away. It worked. But not for long.
21
A long time ago, Frigate had said to Burton that it had been impossible on Earth to determine the identity of Jack the Ripper. But since the Ripper must be in the Rivervalley, he could be found there. However, the chances for running across him were extremely slight. Even less were the chances that he, if found, would confess. Also, a man who might admit to the murders might be a liar. Actually, the solution to the enigma was not much more likely here than on Earth.
Frigate had stated that a long time before he and Burton had gotten to the tower. Now they were in a place where the odds for finding the man known as Jack the Ripper were high. Frigate knew who the candidates were, though it was possible that the true Ripper might not be among them, and it was likely that the Computer could locate all of these in its files.
Frigate had not gotten around to his suggested project because he was too busy with other lines of research, including tracing his genealogy. This tower, he said, was a genealogist’s paradise. He did not have to resort to the difficult-to-find and often-lost records: wills, tax and land deeds, probate and orphan court records, censuses, county histories, newspapers, tombstones, military and pension records and all the other elusive traces of people who might or might not be your ancestors. Here you could set the Computer on the track, starting with yourself, and it could work backward through your parents. You could see on a screen what a parent looked like, where he or she was, see their lives through their own eyes and what they looked like through the eyes of others. Sometimes, he had to wait while the Computer used an ancestor’s wathan to search through its files for the matching wathan and then identified the wathan of that person’s parents. Where there was doubt about the paternity of a child, the Computer could compare the genetic makeup of the child and the parent in doubt and establish the relationship. If it proved that a certain child could not be the offspring of a certain adult, then the Computer could examine the genes of those suspected of being the true father. The suspects could be easily identified, since the Computer could review the mother’s past and determine exactly when and with whom she had had intercourse. After which, the physical recordings of the suspect or suspects would be examined for genetic identity.
Burton found this interesting but was not, for the moment, eager to establish his own lineage. He had always been enthralled by stories of murders, mutilations and tortures, and he had read the newspaper accounts of the Whitechapel murders. Once he had decided that he would launch Operation Ripper, as he called it, he asked the Computer for a bibliography of all the books in English regarding the Ripper that its files contained. Whatever Ethical agent or agents had been assigned to obtaining the literature concerning the Ripper had been very thorough. Frigate took a few minutes off from his own work to check them and indicated the ones he thought Burton might find most profitable as starting points.
“I would read first a book by Stephen Knight, Jack the Ripper, the Final Solution, published in 1976. That impressed me as not only the most thoroughly researched and brilliant and convincing in its reasoning—would have made Sherlock Holmes proud—but also the only book that might have the true answers. However, some critics have pointed out flaws in it. Whether it’s wrong or right or only half-right, it’s a good one to use as your springboard to dive from into the incarnadined ocean of the mystery.”