“Do you know what you caused in there?”
“I’m sorry,” she said in a voice so low as to be scarcely audible.
“That doesn’t quite pull it,” he told her bluntly.
Cofort’s mouth tightened. He was entitled to an explanation. All three of them were. “Something was really wrong in there. I don’t know what the danger was or how immediate it was to us, but it was all around us.” Her eyes closed.
“By all I revere, it was there . . .”
Dane spat out Van Rycke’s favorite expletive, but the Engineer-apprentice silenced him with a sharp wave of his hand. Kamil gave the woman a strange look. “If you’d told me that, Doctor,” he said, “I’d have lit my burners and gotten us out a lot sooner with a lot less trouble.”
Rip looked at him in surprise but kept out of the discussion. Whatever had sparked Cofort’s flight, she had not lied about her fear. That was still with her, or some part of it was. She appeared normal at first glance, but the pupils of her eyes were fully dilated, huge and round like those of a cat in mortal terror. Almost despite himself, he felt sorry for her.
He looked about the alley for some distraction to draw his shipmates’ attention away from her for a few moments.
“They actually do take pains to wash the place down occasionally,” he ventured in the end since he could find nothing better to say. “At least, that step nearest us and part of the surface around it have been scrubbed.”
The Medic’s hand flew to her mouth. “Spirit of Space!” she whispered. “Sweet Spirit ruling space!”
The others stared at her as if she had suddenly started a conversation with the Whisperers.
“What’s the matter now?” Thorson demanded testily.
Something definitely was. Rael’s eyes, already too large, looked enormous, and her face had drained completely of color.
“No one washes a step and three feet to one side of it. You do the whole thing, or you don’t start the job at all.”
She was trembling slightly, but she made herself peer even more closely at the place where her eyes were already riveted.
Something white seemed to be jammed into the crack where the single step met the pavement. “Look! They must’ve missed that.” Her back straightened. “We’ll need it if I’m in the right starlane.”
Dane’s eyes narrowed. Despite her terror of a moment before and her distaste for the place, Cofort obviously intended to fetch the little scrap. “Stay put. I’ll get it.” He felt like a damned fool trying to play the hero out of some ridiculous adventure tape, but Rael had been scared and probably still was, even if she was hiding it now. It would not be right to force her to go in there when he had no qualms at all about doing so.
Her fingers closed on his arm with vise-tight urgency.
“Dane, no! We’re not even armed!”
She forced the panic out of her voice. “I’m probably just being Whisperers’ bait, but it’s my idea . . .”
“What’s going on here?”
The four spacers whirled about. Absorbed as they had been, they had failed to notice the nearly silent approach of the flier now parked on the walkway behind them. Two men wearing the black and silver of the Stellar Patrol were standing beside it.
“The Patrol!” Rael exclaimed in patent relief. “Praise whatever gods rule Canuche! I’d rather have you lads take this than the locals. There’s no knowing how they stand with the owners of this place.”
The pair were unimpressed. “Just what are you four doing back here?” the agent who had challenged them, a Sergeant, demanded even more sharply.
“I believe that white object over there’s a pretty damning piece of evidence. We were going to collect it and bring it to you people before it disappeared. It’ll be gone for sure by this time tomorrow, if not a whole lot sooner.”
“Right,” he said unsympathetically. “How about telling us what sort of crime it’s supposed to betray?”
“Murder. Brutal, particularly horrible, multiple murder.”
9
All five men stared at the Medic. “Murder?” There was a new sharpness in the Patrol-Sergeant’s voice.
Rael shook her head. She had herself well in hand now.
With the responsibility that rested on her, she could not afford a show of panic that would weaken and in all probability annihilate her hope of convincing the necessary authorities to take her bizarre and very repugnant theory seriously. “I want to talk to your commander. This could be a big operation with some fairly important people involved.”
The agent nodded. “We’ll play it your way, space hound, but if this is some sort of joke, trust that you won’t be laughing when our old lady gets through with you.”
“Do I look particularly amused, Sergeant?”
“No,” he admitted. “That you do not. — Keil, collect our ‘evidence,’ and let’s light our burners back to headquarters.”
Dane saw Cofort stiffen and felt his own stomach tighten, but the Yeoman was back again in a matter of seconds without mishap. Once more, he felt foolish, and he shot the woman a quick, sharp look. What in space or beyond it was she thinking, and, more to the point, in what kind of stellar mess had she involved them all?
“Hats!” Patrol-Colonel Ursula Cohn’s blue-gray eyes fixed the younger woman in no friendly fashion. “That’s some tale you expect us to believe, Doctor Cofort.”
“I hope I’m wrong, Colonel, for the sake of the unknown number of men and maybe women who I think died in that wretched place,” Rael replied evenly, “but I don’t think I am. The evidence is circumstantial, but it’s there,”
“And you’re the only one who happened to spot it, just picked right up on it, a stranger to Canuche of Halio and her ways?”
“My comrades can attest to the fact that my sense of smell is very acute. I’d been near heavy concentrations of port rats before and knew the odor, but I’d never come across anything so perceptible as that at a distance in the open air. There simply wasn’t a mundane explanation to account for it. If the beasts were present in sufficient number to create a pack nest of the necessary size, they’d be all over the city, to the point that they’d represent a severe and immediate threat to human survival. Commercial starships would certainly be warned off until they could be exterminated. Since none of that was the case, I could only deduce that a vast number of rodents were being purposely kept confined close by under anything but the cleanest conditions. There’re no industries or legitimate laboratories in Happy City as far as I knew to require the creatures, nor could I imagine any experimenting on that scale. I was completely baffled.” Her mouth hardened. “Until Rip mentioned the clean-up.”
“Clean-up?”
“Your agents saw it. Nobody washes a step and a ragged patch beside it.”
“You or I wouldn’t,” the other corrected. “Navy-standard cleanliness is not a characteristic of those alleys.
Mostly, the worst mess is just scraped away to satisfy the basic sanitary code.”
“There would be more than one nasty patch, wouldn’t there, after any normal night? There weren’t any more scrubbed spots and no untouched messes that I saw, or any older residue, either. To judge by that absence and the pattern of frame stains, it looked like that whole section of the alley had been cleaned, really gone over, in odd patches at one time or another over a considerable stretch of time.”
“So you came up with a scenario to explain all the anomalies?”
The tawny-haired spacer nodded. “The motive I don’t know, but I can picture the events all too clearly. Some poor bastard meeting the criteria for a victim is gotten very drunk and maybe drugged to render him, or her, helpless or sick and is pushed or flung out back the moment the police or Patrol have made a swing by the alley. The rats are either waiting or are immediately released. They’ve obviously been accustomed to their work, and they’re great enough in number not to need much time to complete it.
After a few minutes, they’re recalled, maybe fed again as a reward to ensure their speedy return, and the few remaining scraps are swept up. There isn’t even much blood left, and the pavement doesn’t absorb the stain, at least not if it’s mopped up quickly enough.”
“Yeoman Roberts went into the place and returned without trouble,” Cohn pointed out. “Naturally, though I was terrified for him at the time. The things couldn’t be always on the loose. Besides, they have to be well fed to be kept under control and at the necessary concentration. They wouldn’t feel the need to be out foraging in the daylight.”
“It’s a bit odd that none of the neighbors has noticed anything amiss if this has been going on for some time as you suggest, isn’t it?”