Джек Макдевитт - Cryptic - The Best Short Fiction of Jack McDevitt

“Something just occurred to me,” I said. “Victor Randall already has the head wound.”

Her eyes closed momentarily. “You’re suggesting the arsonist didn’t hit Shel in the head after all?”

“That’s what I think.”

She considered that piece of data. “This keeps getting weirder,” she said.

A mirror was mounted on the machine directly in front of the patient’s face. Helen pressed a button and a light went on in the center of the mirror. “They would tell the patient to watch the light,” she said. “That’s how they’re sure they’ve got it lined up.”

“How are we sure?”

“What’s the term? ‘Dead reckoning’?” She punched another button. A motor started, and the cone began to move.

Ten minutes later we took the cassette in back, carefully leaving Victor in place until we were sure we had good pictures. The developer was located in a windowless storage room. Helen removed the film from the cassette and ran it through the machine. When the finished picture came out, she handed it to me without looking at it. “What do you think?”

The entire mouth, uppers and lowers, was clear. “Looks good,” I said.

She held it against the light. “Plenty of fillings on both sides. Let’s see how it compares.”

The records were maintained in manila folders behind the reception desk. Helen found Shel’s, and sat down with it at the desk, where the counter hid her from anyone passing outside.

The folder was filled with records of Shel’s visits. “He goes every three months,” she said. “That’s not bad.” (She also tended to talk about him in the present tense.) The results of his most recent checkup were clipped on the right side. In the middle of the sheet was a panoramic picture, like the one we had just taken, and several smaller photos of individual sections. “I think they call these ‘wings’” she said. “But when they bring a dentist in to identify a body, they do it with these .” She held up the panoramic and compared the two. “They don’t look much alike in detail. And if they ever get around to comparing it with the wings, they’ll notice something’s wrong. But we should have enough to get by.”

She removed Shel’s panoramic, and substituted the one we had just taken. Then she replaced the folder. We wiped off the headrest and checked the floor to be sure we’d spilled no blood. “One more thing,” said Helen. She inserted a fresh cassette into the orthopantomograph. “Okay. We’ve done what we came to do. Let’s clear out.”

“Wait a minute,” I said. “They’re going to know we broke in. We need to do something to make this look like a burglary.” As far as I could see, there wasn’t much worth stealing. Magazines. Cheap landscape prints on the walls. “How about a drill?” I said. “They look expensive.”

She squeezed my arm. “What kind of burglar would steal a drill ?” She went on another tour of the office. Moments later, I heard glass breaking, and she came back with a couple of plastic bottles filled with pills. “Valium,” she said.

Saturday, November 12. 1:15 a.m.

I had the coordinates for Shel’s workshop, so we were able to go right in.

It was located in the basement of the townhouse, a small, cramped, cluttered place that had a Cray computer front and center, banks of displays, and an array of experimental equipment I had never begun to understand. Moments after we arrived, his oil heater came on with a thump.

Helen grumbled that we would have to carry the body up to the second floor. But I had done the best I could. The math had always been Shel’s job, and the only place in the house I could get to was the workshop. So we dragged Victor up two flights of stairs to the master bedroom, dressed him in Shel’s pajamas, turned back the sheets, and laid him in bed. We put his clothes into a plastic bag.

We also had a brick in the bag. Shel kept his car keys in the middle drawer of a desk on the first floor. We had debated just leaving the clothes to burn, but I wanted to leave nothing to chance. Despite what you might think about time travel, what we were doing was forever. We could not come back and undo it, because we were here , and we knew what the sequence of events was, and you couldn’t change that without paying down the road. If we knew anything for sure now, we knew that .

I had left the Porsche at home this time. So we had to borrow Shel’s green Pontiac. It had a vanity plate reading SHEL and a lot of mileage. But he took good care of it. We drove down to the river. At the two-lane bridge that crosses the Narrows, we pulled off and waited until there was no traffic. Then we pulled onto the bridge, went out to the middle, where we presumed the water was deepest, and dropped the bag over the side. We still had Victor’s wallet and ID, which I intended to burn.

We returned Shel’s car to the garage. By now it was about a quarter to two, thirty-eight minutes before a Mrs. Wilma Anderson would call to report a fire at the townhouse. I was a little concerned that we had cut things too close, and that the intruder might already be in the house. But the place was still quiet when I returned the car keys to the desk.

We locked the house, front and back, which was how we had found it, and retired across the street, behind a hedge. We were satisfied with our night’s work, and curious only to see who the criminal was. The neighborhood was tree-lined, well-lighted, quiet. The houses were middle-class, fronted by small yards which were usually fenced. Cars were parked on either side of the street. There was no traffic, and somewhere in the next block we could hear a cat yowling.

Two o’clock arrived.

“Getting late,” Helen said.

Nothing stirred. “He’s going to have to hurry up,” I said.

She looked at me uncomfortably. “What happens if he doesn’t come?”

“He has to come.”

“Why?”

“Because that’s the way it happened. We know that for an absolute fact.”

She looked at her watch. Two-oh-one.

“I just had a thought,” I said.

“Let’s hear it.”

“Maybe you’re right. Maybe there is no firebug. Maybe it happened a different way. After all, we already know where the fractured skull came from.”

She nodded slowly. “Yeah,” she said. “Maybe.”

I left the shelter of the hedge and walked quickly across the street, entered Shel’s driveway, and went back into the garage. There were several gas cans. They were all empty.

I needed the car keys. But I was locked out now. I used a rock to break a window, got in, and retrieved the keys. I threw the empty cans into the trunk of his Pontiac. “Wait here,” I told Helen as I backed out onto the street. “Keep an eye open in case someone does show up.”

“Where are you going?”

“To get some gas.”

There was an all-night station down on River Road, only a few blocks away. It was one of those places where, after eleven o’clock, the cashier locks himself into a glass cage. He was a middle-aged, worn-out guy sitting in a cloud of cigarette smoke. A toothpick rolled relentlessly from one side of his mouth to the other. I filled three cans, paid, and drove back to the townhouse.

It was 2:17 when we began sloshing the gasoline around the basement. We emptied a can on the stairway and another upstairs, taking particular care to drench the master bedroom, where Victor Randall lay. We poured the rest of it on the first floor, and so thoroughly soaked the entry that I was afraid to go near it with a lighted match. But at 2:25 we touched it off.

Helen and I watched for a time from a block away. The flames cast a pale glare in the sky, and sparks floated overhead. We didn’t know much about Victor Randall, but what we did know maybe was enough. He’d been a husband and father. In their photos, his wife and kids had looked happy. And he got a Viking’s funeral.