“Watch closely now,” Gallegher’s voice said from last night. “I’ll explain as I proceed. Oh-oh. Wait a minute. I’m going to patent this later, so I don’t want any spies. I can trust you two not to talk, but that recorder’s still turned on to audio. Tomorrow, if I played it back, I’d be saying to myself, ‘Gallegher, you talk too much. There’s only one way to keep a secret safe. ’ Off it goes! ”
Someone screamed. The shriek was cut off midway. The projector stopped humming. There was utter silence.
The door opened to admit Murdoch Mackenzie. He was rubbing his hands.
“I came right down,” he said briskly. “So you’ve solved our problem, eh, Mr. Gallegher? Perhaps we can do business then. After all, there’s no real evidence that you killed Jonas — and I’ll be willing to drop the charges, if you’ve got what Adrenals, Incorporated wants.”
“Pass me those handcuffs, Fred,” Johnson requested.
Gallegher protested, “You can’t do this to me!”
“A fallacious theorem,” Joe said, “which, I note, is now being disproved by the empirical method. How illogical all you ugly people are.”
The social trend always lags behind the technological one. And while technology tended, in these days, toward simplification, the social pattern was immensely complicated, since it was partly an outgrowth of historical precedent and partly a result of the scientific advance of the era. Take jurisprudence. Cockburn and Blackwood and a score of others had established certain general and specific rules — say, regarding patents — but those rules could be made thoroughly impractical by a single gadget. The Integrators could solve problems no human brain could manage, so, as a governor, it was necessary to build various controls into those semimechanical colloids. Moreover, an electronic duplicator could infringe not only on patents but on property rights, and attorneys prepared voluminous briefs on such questions as whether “rarity rights” are real property, whether a gadget made on a duplicator is a “representation” or a copy, and whether mass;duplication of chinchillas is unfair competition to a chinchilla breeder who depended on old-fashioned biological principals. All of which added up to the fact that the world, slightly punchdrunk with technology, was trying desperately to walk a straight line. Eventually the confusion would settle down.
It hadn’t settled down yet.
So legal machinery was a construction far more complicated than an Integrator. Precedent warred with abstract theory as lawyer warred with lawyer. It was all perfectly clear to the technicians, but they were much too impractical to be consulted, they were apt to remark wickedly, “So my gadget unstabilizes property rights? Well — why have property rights, then?”
And you can’t do that!
Not to a world that had found security, of a sort, for thousands of years in rigid precedents of social intercourse. The ancient dyke of formal culture was beginning to leak in innumerable spots, and, had you noticed, you might have seen hundreds of thousands of frantic, small figures rushing from danger-spot to danger-spot, valorously plugging the leaks with their fingers, arms, or heads. Some day it would be discovered that there was no encroaching ocean beyond that dyke, but that day hadn’t yet come.
In a way, that was lucky for Gallegher. Public officials were chary about sticking their necks out. A simple suit for false arrest might lead to fantastic ramifications and big trouble. The hardheaded Murdoch Mackenzie took advantage of this situation to vise his own personal attorney and toss a monkey wrench in the legal wheels. The attorney spoke to Johnson.
There was no corpse. The audio-sonic recording was not sufficient. Moreover, there were vital questions involving habeas corpus and search warrants. Johnson called Headquarters Jurisprudence and the argument raged over the heads of Gallegher and the imperturbable Mackenzie. It ended with Johnson leaving, with his crew — and the incriminating record — and threatening to return as soon as a judge would issue the appropriate writs and papers. Meanwhile, he said, there would be officers on guard outside the house. With a malignant glare for Mackenzie, he stamped out.
“And now to business,” said Mackenzie, rubbing his hands. “Between ourselves”—he leaned forward confidentially—“I’m just as glad to get rid of that partner of mine. Whether or no you killed him, I hope he stays vanished. Now I can run the business my way, for a change.”
“It’s all right about that,” Gallegher said, “but what about me? I’ll be in custody again as soon as Johnson can wangle it.”
“But not convicted,” Mackenzie pointed out. “A clever lawyer can fix you up. There was a similar case in which the defendant got off with a defense of non esse—his attorney went into metaphysics and proved that the murdered man had never existed. Quite specious, but so far the murderer’s gone free.”
Gallegher said, “I’ve searched the house, and Johnson’s men did, too. There’s simply no trace of Jonas Harding or my grandfather. And I’ll tell you frankly, Mr. Mackenzie, I haven’t the slightest idea what happened to them.”
Mackenzie gestured airily. “We must be methodical. You mentioned you had solved a certain problem for Adrenals, Incorporated. Now, I’ll admit, that interested me.”
Silently Gallegher pointed to the blueeyed dynamo. Mackenzie studied the object thoughtfully.
“Well?” he said.
“That’s it. The perfect quarry.” Mackenzie walked over to the thing, rapped its hide, and looked deeply into the mild azure eyes. “How fast can it run?” he asked shrewdly.
Gallegher said: “It doesn’t have to run. You see, it’s invulnerable.”
“Ha. Hum. Perhaps if you’d explain a wee bit more—”
But Mackenzie did not seem pleased with the explanation. “No,” he said, “I don’t see it. There would be no thrill to hunting a critter like that. You forget our customers demand excitement — adrenal stimulation.”
“They’ll get it. Anger has the same effect as rage—” Gallegher went into detail.
But Mackenzie shook his head. “Both fear and anger give you excess energy you’ve got to use up. You can’t, against passive quarry. You’ll just cause neuroses. We try to get rid of neuroses, not create them.”
Gallegher, growing desperate, suddenly remembered the little brown beast and began to discuss that. Once Mackenzie interrupted with a demand to see the creature, Gallagher slid around that one fast.
“Ha,” Mackenzie said finally. “It is canny. How can you hunt something that’s invisible?”
“Oh — ultraviolet. Scent-analyzers. It’s a test for ingenuity—”
“Our customers are not ingenious. They don’t want to be. They want a change and vacation from routine, hard work — or easy work, as the case may be — they want a rest. They don’t want to beat their brains working out methods to catch a thing that moves faster than a pixy, nor do they want to chase a critter that’s out of sight before it even gets there. You are a vurra clever man, Mr. Gallegher, but it begins to look as though Jonas’s insurance is my best bet after all.”
“Now wait—”
Mackenzie pursed his lips. “I’ll admit the beasties may—I say may — have some possibilities. But what good is quarry that can’t be caught? Perhaps if you’d work out a way to capture these other-worldly animals of yours, we might do business. At present, I willna buy a pig in a poke.”
“I’ll find a way,” Gallegher promised wildly. “But I can’t do it in jail.”