Dr. Urth took the eyeglasses from Davenport’s outstretched hand. “Thanks.” Then he smiled a transforming smile, one that changed him from blinking owl to beaming Buddha. “But you have had your reward in seeing me make a spectacle of myself.” He polished the lenses with the shirttail, peered at and through them, then put them on. The ears did their part but the button nose did little to support the frame.
He gestured Davenport to a chair. Himself he settled in his armchair-desk with a sigh the seat echoed. He locked his hands over his paunch and looked expectant. The paunch enhanced the look of expectancy.
“This is about the death on Terrarium Nine?”
Davenport nodded. “ ‘Death’ is the working word for it. ‘Death’ is ambiguous enough for something we can’t seem to label satisfactorily. We can’t call it accident, we can’t call it murder, and we’re not ready to call it suicide.”
Dr. Urth shifted himself more comfortable. “Tell me the details.”
“It’s better and easier to show you.” Davenport drew from a capacious pocket a sheaf of holograms. He hopped his chair nearer Dr. Urth and leaned over to show him the holograms one by one, pointing and explaining.
“Here’s a close-up of Terrarium Nine taken from the investigating vehicle on its approach in response to the anomaly alarm. Flammersfeld, the lone experimenter aboard Terrarium Nine, had not transmitted the daily report to Earth headquarters at the scheduled hour, had not punched the All’s-Well signal at the appointed time, and had not responded to worried queries…Here are shots the responding officer took of both docking jacks before she made entry through north dock. You’ll notice a year’s worth of undisturbed space dust coats both jacks. That indicates no one docked since the last resupply-a full year ago…Here’s the death scene, located in the innermost sphere. “
Dr. Urth took this last hologram into his own hands for protracted scrutiny. Then he gave Davenport a quizzical look. “ Aside from telling me that Flammersfeld had just come down to his living quarters from Buck Two, bringing with him a cabbage either for study or for eating, that he stepped out of the lift and fell dead, having somehow taken a poison-tipped dart in his ankle, this hologram does not tell me all I need to know if I’m to help you label his death. What about the autopsy findings? What was the poison?”
Davenport shook his head. “That’s what’s strange. You’d think a biochemist of Flammersfeld’s standing would have brewed it in his lab, in test tubes, without impurities. But this was a weird kind of curare crudely prepared. The investigator found some of the guck in a walnut shell that she discovered in a pile of trash in Buck Two.” He handed Dr. Urth another hologram. “Here’s a shot of that.”
Dr. Urth gave half a nod, half a shake. “I see that, but what are these things?”
Davenport looked where Dr. Urth pointed. “Oh, yeah; them. They seem to be a toy winch and a toy catapult. The engineer we consulted says they’re no great shakes but they work. Maybe Flammersfeld was in his second childhood. “
Dr. Urth grunted doubtingly. He went back to the death-scene hologram. He pointed a stubby finger to a green-black mass. “This is the cabbage?”
Davenport grimaced. “Bad. Pretty well rotted by the time our investigator got there. Stank up the place, she said, so-after taking protection shots-she incinerated it.”
“Bad.”
“Yes, putrid.”
Dr. Urth eyed the TBI inspector censoriously. “I was not speaking of the cabbage, I meant the officer’s action. She should have preserved the evidence no matter how offensive she found it.”
Davenport neither defended nor blamed the officer. Like her, he saw the cabbage not as evidence but as happenstance. “Perhaps.”
“No perhaps about it,” Dr. Urth snapped. His paunch showed momentary agitation, then subsided with his sigh. “Well, it can’t be helped now. But I do wish I could have had a closer look at that cabbage. There’s something queer about it.”
Davenport grinned. “No problem. This is one of the new SOTA holograms. See the bubble-mice sealed in the left and top edges?”
Dr. Urth noticed for the first time two beads of air that almost met at the top left corner of the hologram film. His eyes lit up. “You mean that if I get a stereotaxic fix on the cabbage the cabbage will enlarge?”
“Exactly. By pinching the edge you can move the bubble-mouse along. Coordinate the mice to enlarge and automatically enhance the area you want to observe in greater detail. There’s a limit, of course, but you’ll see quite a lot more than you do now.”
Dr. Urth pinched the mice along till he had the cabbage area blown up by a magnification of five.
He looked long and hard, and at last removed his glasses to wipe tears of strain from his eyes. “Much better, but still lacking. My complaint is not about the resolution but about the object pictured. The cabbage remains blurry thanks to decomposition. I must admit that even had the officer preserved it so that you could put it before me I would be hard put to make out much more. That does not mean that its destruction is not a great loss. It should have been possible to determine its exact composition by autopsy.”
Davenport stared. “ Autopsy? Of a cabbage?”
Dr. Urth nodded curtly. “Autopsy. I choose my words carefully.” His mouth twitched suddenly and he unbent unexpectedly, his voice mock-serious. “I do not see-aitch-oh-you my cabbage twice.” He grew fully serious again. “It’s clear that something got out of hand-the experiment, the experimenter, or both.”
Davenport was still working on the autopsy business. What was Dr. Urth getting at?
Dr. Urth sighed and handed back the death-scene hologram. He gave a slight shiver, then shot Davenport a look as if wondering whether Davenport had noticed.
Davenport kept a poker face.
Dr. Urth breathed an easier sigh. “This calls for mulling over.” He turned a grave face and a twinkling eye on his visitor. “What would you say to a finger of Ganymead?”
“I’d say hello.” Davenport had heard of Ganymead but had never seen it, much less tasted it. He knew it to be extremely rare and extremely expensive and he knew many communities prohibited it. He was not about to ask Dr. Urth how Dr. Urth had come by it. “I’m game.”
He did not feel so game when Dr. Urth drew two containers and two glasses from a liquor drawer of the armchair-desk and one of the containers proved to hold fingers.
Dr. Urth shook two fingers out and stood one, fingernail down, in each glass.
Davenport looked and shuddered.
One corner of Urth’s rosy mouth lifted. “Ganymead is a binary. The fluid part activates the solid part. The ‘fingernail’ is a crystallization. Watch.”
He poured an amber fluid out of the other container into one of the glasses and as it splashed the nail the finger melted. The whole became a clear violet with a bouquet that tickled the senses. Dr. Urth transformed the other finger, handed one of the glasses to Davenport, and lifted the other in a toasting gesture.
Davenport answered with a lift of his own glass, sniffed, then sipped. Tantalizingly delicious, deliciously tantalizing. He saw that it could be dangerous-a taste too easily acquired for something not so easily acquired.
The smooth but strong drink seemed to turn Dr. Urth philosophical. “ Actually, Ganymead comes not from Ganymede but from Callisto. So many things are misnomers. What’s in a name, Davenport? I should have yours-I’m the couch potato, the settee spud, the Murphy-bed murphy. At most, a rambler rose-tethered as I am to the University campus. You’re the one with the gypsy in his soles, the man in the field. Davenport, you’re a misnomer.”
Davenport permitted himself a smile. Davenport’s nose was shaped for wedging into tight spots; a youthful altercation had left a star-shaped scar on his right cheek. Yet a fellow could get his fill of the field, lose his taste for adventure, and-while cherishing his memories of encounters of the close kind-look almost with envy at the cloistered academic who adventured with his mind. Perhaps the Ganymead had turned him philosophical-or prone to babble-too; he was about to express his feelings about life when Dr. Urth saved him.
Dr. Urth had taken a last sip, had raised the glass to his eye to look through its emptiness, and now set it down with regretful finality. “Back to work. To give Flammersfeld’s death its proper name, we must first understand what Terrarium Nine is all about, what Flammersfeld was in the business of.”
He raised a forefinger, though Davenport had given no sign of breaking in.
“I know you think you know, but please bear with me while I tell you what I think I know. Let me state the obvious and posit the known-nothing is so overlooked as the obvious and nothing is so mysterious as the known. “
Davenport sweepingly brought his palm up in sign of turning everything over to Dr. Urth.
Dr. Urth just as graciously gave a nod. “To forestall ecological disruption, Earth has laws against releasing genetically altered plants and animals into the terrestrial environment. Such experiments must take place off-planet. Hence, the Terrariums-at last count, a dozen?-in near-earth orbit. A collateral benefit is zero gravity, which facilitates such techniques as electrophoresis-the rapid continuous-flow fractionating of concentrated solutions of proteins in a high-intensity electric field. “ He cocked an eye at Davenport. “Your turn. What do you think you know about Terrarium Nine and Flammersfeld’s experiments?”