The Mind Spider and Other Stories (13 page)

“There’s Tlik-Tcha the Martian,” the Young Captain began, ticking them off on his fingers. “A nasty black beetle, that one. Held his breath for twenty minutes and then belched it in my face. Kept printing ‘No Comment’ white-on-black on his chest to whatever I asked him. In Garamond type!”

“Cheer up, Jim. It might have been Rustic Capitals. Next.”

“Hilav the Antarean multibrach. Kept gently waving his tentacles all through the interrogation—I thought he Was trying to hypnotize me! Then it occurred to me he might be talking in code, but the interpreter said no. At the end, he gives a long insulting whistle, like some shameless swish. Whistle didn’t signify anything either, the interpreter said, beyond a polite wish for my serenity.

“Third customer was Fa the Rigelian composite. Took off a limb—real, of course, not artificial—and kept fiddling with it while I shot questions at him. I could hardly keep my mind on what I was saying—expected him to take his head off next! He did that too, just as he started back to his cell.” „

“Telepaths can surely be exasperating,” the Old Lieutenant agreed. “I always had great trouble in keeping in mind what a boring business a vocal interview must be to them —very much as if a man, quite capable of speech, should insist on using a pencil and paper to conduct a conversation with von, with perhaps the further proviso that you print your remarks stylishly. Your fourth suspect, Jim?”

“Hrohrakak the Polarian centipedal. He reared up in a great question-mark bend when I addressed him—looked very much like a giant cobra covered with thick black fur. Kept chattering to himself too, very low—interpreter said he was saying over and over again, ‘Oh, All-father, when will this burden be lifted from me?’ Halfway through, he reaches out a little black limb to Donovan to give him what looks like a pretty pink billiard ball.”

“Oh, naughty, naughty,” the Old Lieutenant observed, shaking his head while he smiled. “So these are your four suspects, Jim? The four rather gaudy racehorses of whom you must back one?”

“They arc. Each of them had opportunity. Each of them has a criminal reputation and might well have been hired to do the murder—either by extremists in the Arcturian war party or by some other alien organization hostile to Earth-such as the League of the Beasts with its pseudo-religious mumbo-jumbo.”

“I don’t agree with you about the League, but don’t forget our own bloody-minded extremists,” the Old Lieutenant reminded him. “There are devils among us too, Jim.”

“True, Sean. But whoever paid for this crime, any one of the four migHt have been his agent. For to complete the problem and tie it up in a Gordian knot a yard thick, each one of my suspects has recently and untraceably received a large sum of money—enough so that, in each case, it might well have paid for murder.”

Leaning forward the Old Lieutenant said, “So? Tell me about that, Jim.”

“Well, you know the saying that the price of a being’s life anywhere in the Galaxy is one thouaand of whatever happens to be the going unit of big money. And, as you know, it’s not too bad a rule of thumb. In this case, the unit is gold martians, which are neither gold nor backed by Mar’s bitter little bureaucracy, but—”

“I know! You’ve only minutes left, Jim. What were the exact amounts?”

“Hlilav the Antarean multibrach had received 1024 gold martians, Hrohrakak the Polarian centipedal 1000 gold martians, Fa the Rigelian composite 1728 gold martians, Tlik-Tcha the Martian coleopteroid 666 gold martians.”

“Ah—” the Old Lieutenant said very softly. “The number of the beast.”

“Come again, Sean?”

“ ‘Here is wisdom,’ ” quoted the Old Lieutenant, still speaking very softly. “ ‘Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man’;
Revelation,
Jim, the last book in the Bible.”

“I know that,” the Young Captain burst out excitedly. “I also know the next words, if only because they’re a favorite with numerology crackpots—of whom I see quite a few at the station. The next words are: ‘and his number is Six hundred threescore and six.’ Almighty, that’s Tlik-Tcha’s— that’s the number of his gold martians! And we’ve always known that the League of Beasts got some of its mumbo-jumbo from Earth, so why not from its Bible? Sean, you clever old devil, I’m going to play your hunch.” The Young Captain sprang up. “I’m going back to the station and have the four of them in and accuse Tlik-Tcha to his face.” The Old Lieutenant lifted a hand. “One moment, Jim,” he said sharply. “You’re to go back to the station, to be sure, and have the four of them in, yes—but you’re to accuse Fa the Rigelian.”

The Young Captain almost sat down again, involuntarily. “But that doesn’t make sense, Sean,” he protested. “Fa’s number is 1728. That doesn’t fit your clue. It’s not the number of the beast.”

“Beasts have all sorts of numbers, Jim,” the Old Lieutenant said. “The one you want is 1728.”

“But your reason, Sean? Give me your reason.”

“No. There’s no time and you mightn't believe me if I did. You asked for my advice and I’ve given it to you. Accuse Fa the Rigelian.”

“But-”

“That’s all, Jim.”

Minutes later, the Young Captain was still feeling the slow burn of his exasperation, though he was back at the station and the moment of decision weighed sickeningly upon him. What a fool he’d been, he told himself savagely,

to waste his time on such an old dodderer! The nerve of the man, giving out with advice—orders, practically!—that he refused to justify, behaving with the whimsicality, the stubbornness—yes, the insolence!—that only the retired man can afford.

He scanned the four alien faces confronting him across the station desk—Tlik-Tcha’s like a section of ebon bowling ball down to the three deeply recessed perceptors, Hrohrakak’s a large black floormop faintly quivering, Fa’s pale and humanoid, but oversize, like an emperor’s death mask, Hlilav’s a cluster of serially blinking eyes and greenish jowls. He wished he could toss them all in a bag and reach in—wearing an armor-plated glove—and pick one.

The room stank of disinfectants and unwashed alienity— the familiar reek of the oldtime police station greatly diversified. The Young Captain felt the sweat trickling down his flushed forehead. He opened wide the louver behind him and the hum of the satellite’s central concourse poured in. It didn’t help the atmosphere, but for a moment he felt less constricted.

Then he scnnncd the four faces once more and the deadline desperation was back upon him.
Pick a number,
he thought,
any number from one to two thousand. Grab a face. Trust to luck. Seans a stubborn old fool, but the boys always said he had the damnedest luck . . .

His finger stabbed out. “In the nexus of these assembled minds,” he said loudly, “I publish the truth I share with yours, Fa—”

That was all he had time to get out. At his first movement, the Rigelian sprang up, whipped off his head and hurled it straight toward the center of the open louver.

But if the Young Captain had been unready for thought, he was more than keyed up for action. He snagged the head as it shot past, though he fell off his chair in doing it. The teeth snapped once, futilely. Then a tiny voice from the head spoke the words he’d been praying for: “Let the truth that our minds share be published forth. But first, please, take me back to my breath source . . .”

Next day, the Old Lieutenant and the Young Captain talked it all over.

“So you didn’t nab Fa’s accomplices in the concourse?” the Old Lieutenant asked.

“No, Sean, they got clean away—as they very likely would have, with Fa’s head, if they’d managed to lay their hands on it. Fa wouldn’t rat on them.”

“But otherwise our fancy-boy killer confessed in full? Told the whole story, named his employers, and provided the necessary evidence to nail them and himself once and for all?”

“He did indeed. When one of those telepath characters does talk, it’s a positive pleasure to hear him. He makes it artistic, like an oration from Shakespeare. But now, sir, I want to ask the question you said you didn’t have time to answer yesterday—though I’ll admit I’m asking it with a little different meaning than when I asked it first. You gave me a big shock then and I’ll admit that I’d never have gone along and followed your advice blind the way I did, except that I had nothing else to go on, and I
was
impressed with that Bible quotation you had so pat—until you told me it didn’t mean what it seemed to!

“But I
did
follow your advice, and it got me out of one of the worst jams I’ve ever been in—with a pat on the back from Earthside.to boot! So now let me ask you, Sean, in the name of all that’s holy, how did you know so surely which one of the four it was?”

“I didn’t know, Jim. It’s more accurate to say I guessed.” “You old four-flusher! Do you mean to say you just played a lucky hunch?”

“Not quite, Jim. It was a guess, all right, but an educated guess. It all lay in the numbers, of course, the numbers of gold martians, the numbers of our four beasts. Tlick-Tcha’s 666 did strongly indicate that he was in the employ of the League of the Beasts, for I understand they are great ones on symbolic actions and like to ring in the number 666 whenever they can. But that gets us just nowhere—the League, though highly critical of most Earthmen, has never shown itself desirous of fomenting interstellar war.

“IJrohrakak’s 1000 would indicate that he was receiving money from some organization of Earthmen, or from some alien source that happens also to use the decimal system.
Anyone
operating around Sol would be apt to use the decimal system. Hrohrakak’s 1000 points in no one direction.

“Now as to Hlilav’s 1024—that number is the tenth power of two. As far as I know, no natural species of being uses the binary system. However, it is the rule with robots. The indications are that Hlilav is working for the Interstellar Brotherhood of Free Business Machines or some like organization, and, as we both know, the robots are not ones to pound the war drums or touch off the war fuses, for they are always the chief sufferers.

“That leaves Fa’s 1728. Jim, the first thing you told me about the Arcturians was that they were hexadactylic bipeds. Six fingers on one hand means 12 on two—and almost a mortal certainty that the beings so equipped by nature will be using the duodecimal system, in many ways the most convenient of all. In the duodecimal system, ‘one thousand’ is not 10 times 10 times 10, but 12 times 12 times 12—which comes out as 1728 exactly in our decimal system.

"As you said, ‘one thousand’ of the going unit is the price of a being’s life. Someone paid ‘one thousand’ gold martians by an Arcturian would have 1728 in his pocket according to our count.

“The size of Fa’s purse seemed to me an odds-on indication that he was in the pay of the Arcturians war party. Incidentally, he must have felt very smart getting that extra 728—a more principled beast-criminal would have scorned to profit from a mere difference in numerical systems."

The Young Captain took some time before he answered. He smiled incredulously more than once, and once he shook his head.

Finally he said, “And you asked me to go ahead, Sean, and make my accusation, with no more indication than that?”

“It worked for you, didn’t it?” the Old Lieutenant countered briskly. “And as soon as Fa started to confess, you must have known I was right beyond any possibility of doubt. Telepaths are always truth-tellers.”

The Young Captain shot him a very strange look.

“It couldn’t be, Sean—?” he said softly. “It couldn’t be that you’re a telepath yourself? That that’s the alien thought system you’ve been studying with your Martian witch doctor?”

“If it were,” the Old Lieutenant replied, “I’d tell—” He stopped. He twinkled. “Or would I?”

Hour and minute hand of the odd little gray clock stood almost at midnight, Horn Time, and now the second hand, driven by the same tiny, invariable radioactive pulses, was hurrying to overtake them. Morton Horn took note. He switched off his book, puffed a brown cigarette alight, and slumped back gratefully against the saddle-shaped force-field which combined the sensations of swansdown and laced rawhide.

When all three hands stood together, he flicked the switch of a small black cubical box in his smock pocket. A look of expectancy came into his pleasant, swarthy face, as if he were about to receive a caller, although the door had not spoken.

With the flicking of the switch a curtain of brainwave static surrounding his mind vanished. Unnoticed while present, because it was a meaningless thought-tone—a kind of mental gray—the vanishing static left behind a great inward silence and emptiness. To Morton it was as if his mind were crouched on a mountainpeak in infinity.

“Hello, Mort. Are we first?”

A stranger in the room could not have heard those words, yet to Mort they were the cheeriest and friendliest greeting imaginable—words clear as crystal without any of the air-noise or bone-noise that blurs ordinary speech, and they sounded like chocolate tastes.

“Guess so, Sis,” his every thought responded, “unless the others have started a shaded contact at their end.”

His mind swiftly absorbed a vision of his sister Grayl’s studio upstairs, just as it appeared to her. A comer of the work table, littered with air-brushes and cans of dye and acid. The easel, with one half-completed film for the multilevel picture she was spraying, now clouded by cigarette smoke. In the foreground, the shimmery gray curve of her skirt and the slim, competent beauty of her hands, so close —especially when she raised the cigarette to puff it—that they seemed his own. The feathery touch of her clothes on her skin. The sharp cool tingly tone of her muscles. In the background, only floor and cloudy sky, for the glastic walls of her studio did not refract.

The vision seemed a ghostly thing at first, a shadowy projection against the solid walls of his own study. But as the contact between their minds deepened, it grew more real. For a moment the two visual images swung apart and stood side by side, equally real, as if he were trying to focus one with each eye. Then for another moment his room became the ghost room and Grayl’s the real one—as if he had become Grayl. He raised the cigarette in her hand to her lips and inhaled the pleasant fumes, milder than those of his own
rompe-pecho.
Then he savored the two at once and enjoyed the mental blending of her Virginia cigarette with his own Mexican “chestbreaker."