Judith Merril - The Year's Greatest Science Fiction & Fantasy 4

Horowitz: Ihave, as a matter of fact. Given that you had a job to do, namely to cut out and leave us with our cyanide bomb at the start of the trip—

Flannel: (aroused) I tol’ you and tol’ you that wasn’t a job. I didn’t know about the damn cyanide.

Horowitz: Suppose you had known about it. Would you have come? If you hadn’t come, would you have tipped us off about it? And here’s the question I thought of: if the first bomb had failed—which it did—and there had been no second bomb to tell you that you were a member of the Exit Club, would you have tried to do the job on the way home?

Flannel: I was thinkin’ about it, about what to do.

Horowitz: And what did you decide?

Flannel: Nothin’. You found the bomb in the boat so I just stopped thinkin’.

Iris: (suddenly) Why did that really make a difference?

Flannel: All the diff’nce in the world. Heri Gonza tol’ me to get in the lifeboat before fourteen an’ a half hours and come back and tell him how things went. Now if there was just your bomb, could be that Heri Gonza wanted you knocked off. There was an accident and it din’t knock you off, and here I am working for him and wonderin’ if I shoon’t take up where the bomb left off.

Iris: Then we found the second bomb, and you changed your mind. Why?

Flannel: (exasperated) Whata ya all, simple or somepin? Heri Gonza, he tol’ me to come back and tell him how it went. If he tells me that an’ then plants a bomb on me, how could I get back to tell him? A man’s a fool to tell a guy to do somethin’ an’ then fix it so he can’t. He’s no fool, Heri Gonza I mean, an’ you know it. Well then: if he din’t plant my bomb, he din’t plant your bomb, because anyone can see they was planted by the same guy. An’ if he din’t plant your bomb, he don’t want you knocked off, so I stopped thinkin’ about it. Is that simple enough for ya?

Iris: Idon’t know that it’s simple, but it sure is beautiful.

Horowitz: Well, one of us is satisfied of Heri Gonza’s good intentions. Though I still don’t see what sense it made to go to all the trouble of putting you aboard just to have you get off and go back right at the start.

Flannel: Me neither. But do I have to understand everything he tells me to do? I done lots of things for him I didn’t know what they was about. You too, Kearsarge.

Kearsarge: That’s right. I drive this can from here to there, and from there to yonder, and I don’t notice anything else, but if I notice it I forget it, but if I don’t forget it I don’t talk about it. That’s the way he likes it and we get along fine.

Iris: (forcefully) I think Heri Gonza wanted us all killed.

Horowitz: What’s that—intuition? And . . . shouldn’t that read “wants”?

Iris: “Wants,” yes. He wants us all killed. No, it’s not intuition. It formulates. Almost. There’s a piece missing.

Flannel: Ah, y’r out of y’r mind.

Kearsarge: Doubled.

Horowitz: (good-naturedly) Shut up, both of you. Go on with that, Iris. Maybe by you it formulates, but by me it intuits. Go on.

Iris: Well, let’s use as a working hypothesis that Heri Gonza wants us dead—us four; He wants more than that: he wants us to disappear from the cosmos—no bodies, no graves, no nothing.

Kearsarge: But why?

Horowitz: Just you listen. We start with the murders and finish with the why. You’ll see.

Iris: Well then, the ship will do the removal. The cyanide —both cyanides—do the actual killing, and it hits so fast that the ship keeps blasting, out and out until the fuel is gone, and forever after that. We three are on it; Flannel crashes in a small craft and if anybody wonders about it, they don’t wonder much. Is there any insignia on that boat, by the way, Kearsarge?

Kearsarge: Always.

Iris:Go look, will you? Thanks. Now, what about the traces we leave behind us? Well, we took off illegally so notified no one and filed no clearances. You, George, were already in hiding from Heri Gonza’s persecutions; Kearsarge here is so frequently away on indeterminate trips of varying lengths that he would soon be forgotten; Flannel here— no offense, Flannel—I don’t think anyone would notice that you’re gone for good. As for me, Heri Gonza himself had me plant a story about going off secretly for some solitary research for a year or so. What’s the matter, Kearsarge?

Kearsarge:I wouldn’ta believed it. No insignia. Filed off and sanded smooth and painted. Numbers off the thrust block. Trade-name off the dash, even. I... I wouldn’ta believed it.

Horowitz: Now you’d better listen to the lady.

Iris:No insignia. So even poor Flannel’s little smashup is thoroughly covered. Speaking of Flannel, I say again that it was stretching credibility to put him aboard that way— unless you assume that he was put aboard like the rest of us, to be done away with. I certainly came under false pretenses: Heri Gonza not only told me he needed an astro-gator for the trip, which he didn’t, but had me bone up on the subject.

Now we can take a quick look at motive. George Horowitz here is the most obvious. He has for a long time been a thorn in the flesh of that comedian. Not only has he concluded that Heri Gonza doesn’t really want to find a cure for iapetitis—he says so very loudly and as often as he can. In addition, George is always on the very verge of whipping the disease, something that frightens Heri Gonza so much that he’s actually hoarding patients so George can’t get to them. Also, he doesn’t like George.

Why kill Flannel? Is he tired of you, Flannel? Did you boggle something he asked you to do?

Flannel: He don’t have to kill me, Miss Iris. He could fire me any time. I’d feel real bad, but I wouldn’t bother him none. He knows that.

Iris: Then you must know too much. You must know something about him so dangerous he won’t feel safe until you’re dead.

Flannel: So help me, lady, there ain’t a single thing like that I know about him. Not one. Not that I know of.

Horowitz: There’s the key, Iris. He doesn’t know he knows it.

Kearsarge: Then that’s me too, because if there’s a single thing I know that he’d have to kill me for then I don’t know what it is.

Iris:You said “key.” Lock and key. A combination of things. Like if you put what Flannel knows with what Kearsarge knows, they will be dangerous to Heri Gonza.

Flannel and Kearsarge gape at each other blankly and simultaneously shrug.

Horowitz: I can give you one example of a piece of knowledge we all have that would be dangerous to him. We now know that the disease virus does not originate on Iapetus. Which means that poor Swope was not responsible for bringing it to earth, and, further, the conclusion that the little Tresak girl—the first case—caught it from the wreckage of the space ship, was unwarranted.

Flannel: I brung that picture of that little girl standing in the wreck, I brung it to Heri Gonza. He liked it.

Iris: What made you do that?

Flannel: I done it all the time. He told me to.