It was three days afterward that the letter came. Syaloch excused himself and kept an illustrious client squatting while he read it. Then he nodded to the other Martian. «You will be interested to know, sir, that the Estimable Diadems have arrived at Phobos and are being returned at this moment.»
The client, a Cabinet Minister from the House of Actives, blinked. «Pardon, Freehatched Syaloch, but what have you to do with that?»
«Oh… I am a friend of the Featherless police chief. He thought I might like to know.»
«Hraa. Were you not on Phobos recently?»
«A minor case.» The detective folded the letter carefully, sprinkled it with salt, and ate it. Martians are fond of paper, especially official Earth stationery with high rag content. «Now, sir, you were saying—?»
The parliamentarian responded absently. He would not dream of violating privacy—no, never—but if he had X-ray vision he would have read:
Dear Syaloch,
You were absolutely right. Your locked room problem is solved. We’ve got the jewels back, everything is in fine shape, and the same boat which brings you this letter will deliver them to the vaults. It’s too bad the public can never know the facts—two planets ought to be grateful to you—but I’ll supply that much thanks all by myself, and insist that any bill you care to send be paid in full. Even if the Assembly had to make a special appropriation, which I’m afraid it will.
I admit your idea of lifting the embargo at once looked pretty wild to me, but it worked. I had our boys out, of course, scouring Phobos with Geigers, but Hollyday found the box before we did. Which saved us a lot of trouble, to be sure. I arrested him as he came back into the settlement, and he had the box among his ore samples. He has confessed, and you were right all along the line.
What was that thing you quoted at me, the saying of that Earthman you admire so much? ‘When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be true.’ Something like that. It certainly applies to this case.
As you decided, the box must have been taken to the ship at Earth Station and left there—no other possibility existed. Carter figured it out in half a minute when he was ordered to take the thing out and put it aboard the Jane. He went inside, all right, but still had the box when he emerged. In that uncertain light nobody saw him put it ‘down’ between four girders right next to the hatch. Or as you remarked, if the jewels are not in the ship, and yet not away from the ship, they must be on the ship. Gravitation would hold them in place. When the Jane blasted off, acceleration pressure slid the box back, but of course the waffle-iron pattern kept it from being lost; it fetched up against the after rib and stayed there. All the way to Mars! But the ship’s gravity held it securely enough even in free fall, since both were on the same orbit.
Hollyday says that Carter told him all about it. Carter couldn’t go to Mars himself without being suspected and watched every minute once the jewels were discovered missing. He needed a confederate. Hollyday went to Phobos and took up prospecting as a cover for the search he’d later be making for the jewels.
«As you showed me, when the ship was within a thousand miles of this dock, Phobos gravity would be stronger than her own. Every spacejack knows that the robot ships don’t start decelerating till they’re quite close; that they are then almost straight above the surface; and that the side with the radio mast and manhatch—the side on which Carter had placed the box—is rotated around to face the station. The centrifugal force of rotation threw the box away from the ship, and was in a direction toward Phobos rather than away from it. Carter knew that this rotation is slow and easy, so the force wasn’t enough to accelerate the box to escape velocity and lose it in space. It would have to fall down toward the satellite. Phobos Station being on the side opposite Mars, there was no danger that the loot would keep going till it hit the planet.
«So the crown jewels tumbled onto Phobos, just as you deduced. Of course Carter had given the box a quick radioactive spray as he laid it in place, and Hollyday used that to track it down among all those rocks and crevices. In point of fact, its path curved clear around this moon, so it landed about five miles from the station.
Steinmann has been after me to know why you quizzed him about his hobby. You forgot to tell me that, but I figured it out for myself and told him. He or Hollyday had to be involved, since nobody else knew about the cargo, and the guilty person had to have some excuse to go out and look for the box. Chess playing doesn’t furnish that kind of alibi. Am I right? At least, my deduction proves I’ve been studying the same canon you go by. Incidentally, Steinmann asks if you’d care to take him on the next time he has planet leave.
Hollyday knows where Carter is hiding, and we’ve radioed the information back to Earth. Trouble is, we can’t prosecute either of them without admitting the facts. Oh, well, there are such things as blacklists.
Will have to close this now to make the boat. I’ll be seeing you soon—not professionally, I hope!
Admiring regards,
Inspector Gregg
But as it happened, the Cabinet minister did not possess X-ray eyes. He dismissed unprofitable speculation and outlined his problem. Somebody, somewhere in Sabaeus, was farniking the krats, and there was an alarming zaksnautry among the hyukus. It sounded to Syaloch like an interesting case.
THEN DEATH WILL COME
PROPHECY
Ambassadors are rarely, if ever, met by the head of the nation to which they come. They go to him. But this case was an exception to every established precedent, and the President of the United States, Philip Brackney, felt no loss in dignity as he came to the spaceship.
It was, he thought, really a lovely machine, with all the beauty of perfect functionalism—and something more than that, a touch of the haunting indefinable splendor of a clipper ship or a Greek temple. The five-hundred-foot pylon towered over the green Iowan plain, a blinding metallic dazzle in the sunlight, a spearhead poised at infinity. Its gleaming height dwarfed the buildings on the farm on which it had descended.
As the presidential car and its attendants swept up the dirt road—it was in extremely poor condition after the thousands of sightseers who had used it in the past month—the chief of Brackney’s secret service guards said nervously: «For the last time, sir, are you sure this is wise?»