"I feel more than awful," Burton said slowly. "I feel ... how would you feel if you knew that the end of the world was near? Or perhaps I should say that the world has ended—for all practical purposes."
Frigate drank the whole cup of very hot coffee without flinching. He said, "The end of the world happens every second."
Burton did not know what he meant and did not think it worthwhile to find out. In any event, Frigate's words were just a means for putting off the bad news.
Li Po took a sip of coffee and said, "What do you mean?"
"Perhaps I should wait until everybody's here. I don't like to repeat."
"Sure you don't," Frigate said. "Let's hear it."
Burton told them that the wathan enclosure was empty.
Li Po and Frigate paled but said nothing.
"I checked the body-records then," Burton said. "I had to force myself to do it because I didn't want to know what had been done to them, although, of course, I already knew. But it needed doing, and so I did it."
"And they ... they ..." Frigate said, choking.
"They had all been erased. All thirty-five billion six hundred and forty-six million plus. No exceptions. All. And no wathans have come in since I made the discovery."
Li Po sat down. "I've had too many shocks lately."
After a long while, Frigate said, "So ... when we die, we die for the last time."
"Quite."
After another long silence—only a supercatastrophe could have kept Li Po's mouth shut so long, Burton thought—Frigate poured brandy into a half-full cup of coffee and downed all of the steaming liquid. Li Po looked as if he would like to do the same, half-rose, shook his head, and sank back into the chair. This was the first time Burton had ever seen him reject a drink.
The brandy had restored some of the American's color. He drank more, straight this time, and said, "The Snark has overridden that automatic function ... I mean, no bodies will be recorded from now on?"
"Right."
"But if we can survive until the Gardenworlders get here, we can be recorded again. Otherwise, we, too, will lose our chance for immortality forever."
"Of course," Burton said. "But when they get here, our time will be up anyway. If we're not ready to Go On, our records will be erased. And if we're not, we'll be erased."
He got up and poured himself more coffee, looked at the brandy bottle, and decided against it. "I immediately asked the Computer about that. I was shocked, of course, and I cursed myself, railed against the fates, if you must know, because as soon as we got here from Alice's, I commanded the Computer to refuse to erase any body-records. I was forestalling that. But I was too late. I did not know that then because the Computer, the idiot, did not tell me that my command was too late. It should have, but the Snark had told it not to display that data unless it was asked for it."
"We've all been just drifting along, doing things too late," Frigate said in a dull tone. "Sometimes ... I wonder if the Snark has had the Computer broadcast some sort of neural suppressant field, something dampening our intelligence?"
"I doubt it. We've just been playing with our toys ... like children. However"—Burton lifted a napkin and revealed a yellow ball the size of a cranberry—"I've been busy while you were sleeping. This is the sphere that records a body. I had the Computer duplicate one for me. It's empty now, but I wanted to see one. And holding it in my hand enabled me to postulate something ... a theory, but the only explanation I could come up with that was reasonable. That is, how could the Snark get into Alice's world, into Turpin's and yours ... Netley's ... and there arrange for operations that just could not be done from outside those worlds?"
Alice entered a minute later. Burton had to repeat his story and to wait for her to recover enough before he could continue.
"First, though, I don't think that the Snark did it. I mean I don't think that there's an Ethical hiding in the tower. Nur eliminated her, though we cannot, of course; ever be sure. But the murders in the little worlds were done by one of us. By one of the survivors."
Li Po shot up from his chair, and, quivering, said, "Gull! Or Star Spoon! But why?"
Burton nodded. "Gull may have reverted, but he would have to have gone mad to do that. Star Spoon? She would have to be insane. If either is, he or she has concealed it well. First, let me tell the rest of my theory."
"First... pardon the interruption," Frigate said, "we have to consider that it may be neither Gull nor Star Spoon. What if somebody we haven't even seen is the killer? After all, Williams raised Gull and the others involved in the Ripper killings. And there are the gypsies. We don't know who raised them, but I suspect Williams did it just as a joke or just to bug us. Or maybe somebody else did. Anyway, what if someone raised a person who was destructively insane, to put it mildly, and that person is our second Snark?"
"I asked the Computer to scan the tower for other people. It reported that it could find none. I asked for a rundown of all those who'd been raised, and the number corresponds exactly with my calculations. Still, the Computer could be reporting only what it's been told to report."
Frigate threw his hands up. "Nothing's certain!"
"It never has been. However, I think that we don't have to consider a third party or parties."
He held up the yellow sphere. "Here is how I think he ... or she ... did it."
The killer had ordered a number of his body-recordings made in an e-m converter.
"Nobody had inhibited this action until I told the Computer not to allow that, but I was too late. The deed was done."
The Snark, Snark the Second, as it were, had been given an opportunity to enter the worlds of Turpin, Frigate and Alice. Perhaps all the worlds and some apartment suites, too.
"There the Snark put the recording-spheres in converters that were out of the way, seldom if ever used. And the Snark also concealed them in other places for easy access and probably carried them around in his clothing."
The Snark then killed himself in the privacy of an unused apartment. By prearrangement with the Computer, the Snark was resurrected in a converter inside a world.
"The converter in which the Snark died would then disintegrate the body. The Snark did not want anybody finding it, though that possibility was remote."
Once inside Alice's world, Snark II did what had to be done. The androids were verbally programmed when they were out of sight of Alice and Maglenna or perhaps they were programmed before Maglenna showed. Since the Snark had to be furtive about the process, it undoubtedly took weeks to complete it.
The flooding of the two worlds, though, was ordered from the outside.
"The Ethicals thought that they were one hundred per cent safe when they were in their private worlds. Of course, they were not nearly as security-conscious as we since they believed the tower to be an impregnable fortress. They knew that one of them was a traitor, but they still could not conceive that he would actually personally endanger them.
"But an ingenious person could flood the little worlds by ordering the liquid supply to pour into it until it was completely filled or its inhabitants had been drowned."
"That may be true," Alice said, "but how could the Snark shut the doors to the worlds? And how could he see what was going on in the worlds when the flooding began? The Computer had commands to open the door only to authorized codewords, and it would not transmit pictures or any communications except as ordered by the tenants. No one could override those."