Fredric Brown - The Second Fredric Brown Megapack

Rod Caquer awoke with a mild headache and a hung over feeling. The sun, tiny but brilliant, was already well up in the sky.

His clock showed him that he was a bit later than usual, but he took time to lie there for a few minutes, just the same, remembering that screwy dream he’d had. Dreams were like that; you had to think about them right away when you woke up, before you were really fully awake, or you forgot them completely.

A silly sort of dream, it had been. A mad, purposeless dream. A touch of atavism, perhaps? A throwback to the days when peoples had been at each other’s throats half the time, back to the days of wars and hatreds and struggle for supremacy.

This was before the Solar Council, meeting first on one inhabited planet and then another, had brought order by arbitration, and then union. And now war was a thing of the past. The inhabitable portion of the solar system—Earth, Venus, Mars, and two of the moons of Jupiter—were all under one government.

But back in the old bloody days, people must have felt as he had felt in that atavistic dream. Back in the days when Earth, united by the discovery of space travel, had subjugated Mars—the only other planet already inhabited by an intelligent race—and then had spread colonies wherever Man could get a foothold.

Certain of those colonies had wanted independence and, next, supremacy. The bloody centuries, those times were called now.

Getting out of bed to dress, he saw something that puzzled and dismayed him. His clothing was not neatly folded over the back of the chair beside the bed as he had left it. Instead, it was strewn about the floor as though he had undressed hastily and carelessly in the dark.

“Earth!” he thought. “Did I sleep-walk last night? Did I actually get out of bed and go out into the street when I dreamed that I did? When those whispers told me to?”

“No,” he then told himself, “I’ve never walked in my sleep before, and I didn’t then. I must simply have been careless when I undressed last night. I was thinking about the Deem case. I don’t actually remember hanging my clothes on that chair.”

So he donned his uniform quickly and hurried down to the office. In the light of morning it was easy to fill out those forms. In the “Cause of Death” blank he wrote, “Medical Examiner reports that shock from a blaster wound caused death.”

That let him out from under; he had not said that was the cause of death; merely that the medico said it was.

He rang for a messenger and gave him the reports with instructions to rush them to the mail ship that would be leaving shortly. Then he called Barr Maxon.

“Reporting on the Deems matter, Regent,” he said. “Sorry, but we just haven’t got anywhere on it yet. Nobody was seen leaving the shop. All the neighbors have been questioned. Today I’m going to talk to all his friends.”

Regent Maxon shook his head.

“Use all jets, Lieutenant,” he said. “The case must be cracked. A murder, in this day and age, is bad enough. But an unsolved one is unthinkable. It would encourage further crime.”

Lieutenant Caquer nodded gloomily. He had thought of that, too. There were the social implications of murder to be worried about—and there was his job as well. A Lieutenant of Police who let anyone get away with murder in his district was through for life.

After the Regent’s image had clicked off the visiphone screen, Caquer took the list of Deems friends from the drawer of his desk and began to study it, mainly with an eye to deciding the sequence of his calls.

He penciled a figure “1” opposite the name of Perry Peters, for two reasons. Peters’ place was only a few doors away, for one thing, and for another he knew Perry better than anyone on the list, except possibly Professor Jan Gordon. And he would make that call last, because later there would be a better chance of finding the ailing professor awake—and a better chance of finding his daughter Jane at home.

Perry Peters was glad to see Caquer, and guessed immediately the purpose of the call.

“Hello, Shylock.”

“Huh?” said Rod.

“Shylock—the great detective. Confronted with a mystery for the first time in his career as a policeman. Or have you solved it, Rod?”

“You mean Sherlock, you dope—Sherlock Holmes. No I haven’t solved it, if you want to know. Look, Perry, tell me all you know about Deem. You knew him pretty well, didn’t you?”

Perry Peters rubbed his chin reflectively and sat down on the work bench. He was so tall and lanky that he could sit down on it instead of having to jump up.

“Willem was a funny little runt,” he said. “Most people didn’t like him because he was sarcastic, and he had crazy notions on politics. Me, I’m not sure whether he wasn’t half right half the time, and anyway he played a swell game of chess.”

“Was that his only hobby?”

“No. He liked to make things, gadgets mostly. Some of them were good, too, although he did it for fun and never tried to patent or capitalize anything.”

“You mean inventions, Perry? Your own line?”

“Well, not so much inventions as gadgets, Rod. Little things, most of them, and he was better on fine workmanship than on original ideas. And, as I said, it was just a hobby with him.”

“Ever help you with any of your own inventions?” asked Caquer.

“Sure, occasionally. Again, not so much on the idea end of it as by helping me make difficult parts.” Perry Peters waved his hand in a gesture that included the shop around them. “My tools here are all for rough work, comparatively. Nothing under thousandths. But Willem has—had a little lathe that’s a honey. Cuts anything, and accurate to a fifty-thousandth.”

“What enemies did he have, Perry?”

“None that I know of. Honestly, Rod. Lot of people disliked him, but just an ordinary mild kind of dislike. You know what I mean, the kind of dislike that makes ’em trade at another book-and-reel shop, but not the kind that makes them want to kill anybody.”

“And who, as far as you know, might benefit by his death?”

“Um—nobody, to speak of,” said Peters, thoughtfully. “I think his heir is a nephew on Venus. I met him once, and he was a likable guy. But the estate won’t be anything to get excited about. A few thousand credits is all I’d guess it to be.”

“Here’s a list of his friends, Perry.” Caquer handed Peters a paper. “Look it over, will you, and see if you can make any additions to it. Or any suggestions.” The lanky inventor studied the list, and then passed it back.

“That includes them all, I guess,” he told Caquer. “Couple on there I didn’t know he knew well enough to rate listing. And you have his best customers down, too; the ones that bought heavily from him.”

Lieutenant Caquer put the list back in his pocket.

“What are you working on now?” he asked Peters.

“Something I’m stuck on, I’m afraid,” the inventor said. “I needed Deems help —or at least the use of his lathe, to go ahead with this.” He picked up from the bench a pair of the most peculiar-looking goggles Rod Caquer had ever seen. The lenses were shaped like arcs of circles instead of full circles, and they fastened in a band of resilient plastic obviously designed to fit close to the face above and below the lenses. At the top center, where it would be against the forehead of the goggles’ wearer, was a small cylindrical box an inch and a half in diameter.

“What on Earth are they for?” Caquer asked.

“For use in radite mines. The emanations from that stuff, while it’s in the raw state, destroy immediately any transparent substance yet made or discovered. Even quartz. And it isn’t good on naked eyes either. The miners have to work blindfolded, as it were, and by their sense of touch.”