“Twenty-four hours after the crime. But—”
“But nothing. Come on over here, right now. You can make out those old forms in the morning.”
She smiled at him, and Caquer weakened. He was not getting anywhere anyway, was he?
“All right, Jane,” he said. “But I’m going by patrol quarters on the way. Had some men canvassing the block the crime was committed in, and I want their report.”
But the report, which he found waiting for him, was not illuminating. The canvass had been thorough, but it had failed to elicit any information of value. No one had been seen to leave or enter the Deem shop prior to Brager’s arrival, and none of Deem’s neighbors knew of any enemies he might have. No one had heard a shot.
Rod Caquer grunted and stuffed the reports into his pocket, and wondered, as he walked to the Gordon home, where the investigation went from there. How did a detective go about solving such a crime?
True, when he was a college kid back on Earth a few years ago, he had read detectives usually trapped someone by discovering a discrepancy in his statements. Generally in a rather dramatic manner, too.
There was Wilder Williams, the greatest of all the fictional detectives, who could look at a man and deduce his whole life history from the cut of his clothes and the shape of his hands. But Wilder Williams had never run across a victim who had been killed in as many ways as there were witnesses.
He spent a pleasant — but futile — evening with Jane Gordon, again asked her to marry him, and again was refused. But he was used to that. She was a bit cooler this evening than usual, probably because she resented his unwillingness to talk about Willem Deem.
And home, to bed.
Out the window of his apartment, after the light was out, he could see the monstrous ball of Jupiter hanging low in the sky, the green-black midnight sky. He lay in bed and stared at it until it seemed that he could still see it after he had closed his eyes.
Willem Deem, deceased. What was he going to do about Willem Deem? Around and around, until at last one orderly thought emerged from chaos.
Tomorrow morning he would talk to the Medico. Without mentioning the sword wound in the head, he would ask Skidder about the bullet hole Brager claimed to have seen over the heart. If Skidder still said the blaster burn was the only wound, he would summon Brager and let him argue with the Medico.
And then— Well, he would worry about what to do then when he got there. He would never get to sleep this way.
He thought about Jane, and went to sleep.
After a while, he dreamed. Or was it a dream? If so, then he dreamed that he was lying there in bed, almost but not quite awake, and that there were whispers coming from all corners of the room. Whispers out of the darkness.
For big Jupiter had moved on across the sky now. The window was a dim, scarcely-discernible outline, and the rest of the room in utter darkness.
Whispers!
“—kill them.”
“You hate them, you hate them, you hate them.”
“—kill, kill, kill.”
“Sector Two gets all the gravy and Sector Three does all the work. They exploit our corla plantations. They are evil. Kill them, take over.”
“You hate them, you hate them, you hate them.”
“Sector Two is made up of weaklings and usurers. They have the taint of Martian blood. Spill it, spill Martian blood. Sector Three should rule Callisto. Three the mystic number. We are destined to rule Callisto.”
“You hate them, you hate them.”
“—kill, kill, kill.”
“Martian blood of usurious villians. You hate them, you hate them, you hate them.”
Whispers.
“Now — now — now.”
“Kill them, kill them.”
“A hundred ninety miles across the flat planes. Get there in an hour in monocars. Surprise attack. Now. Now. Now.”
And Rod Caquer was getting out of bed, fumbling hastily and blindly into his clothing without turning on the light because this was a dream and dreams were in darkness.
His sword was in the scabbard at his belt and he took it out and felt the edge and the edge was sharp and ready to spill the blood of the enemy he was going to kill.
Now it was going to swing in arcs of red death, his unblooded sword — the anachronistic sword that was his badge of office, of authority. He had never drawn the sword in anger, a stubby symbol of a sword, scarce eighteen inches long; enough, though, enough to reach the heart — four inches to the heart.
The whispers continued.
“You hate them, you hate them, you hate them.”
“Spill the evil blood; kill, spill, kill, spill.”
“Now, now, now, now.”
Unsheathed sword in clenched fist, he was stealing silently out of the door, down the stairway, past the other apartment doors.
And some of the doors were opening, too. He was not alone, there in the darkness. Other figures moved beside him in the dark.
He stole out of the door and into the night-cooled darkness of the street, the darkness of the street that should have been brightly lighted. That was another proof that this was a dream. Those street-lights were never off, after dark. From dusk till dawn, they were never off.
But Jupiter over there on the horizon gave enough light to see by. Like a round dragon in the heavens, and the red spot like an evil, malignant eye.
Whispers breathed in the night, whispers from all around him.
“Kill — kill — kill—”
“You hate them, you hate them, you hate them.”
The whispers did not come from the shadowy figures about him. They pressed forward silently, as he did.
Whispers came from the night itself, whispers that now began to change tone.
“Wait, not tonight, not tonight, not tonight,” they said.
“Go back, go back, go back.”
“Back to your homes, back to your beds, back to your sleep.”
And the figures about him were standing there, fully as irresolute as he had now become. And then, almost simultaneously, they began to obey the whispers. They turned back, and returned the way they had come, and as silently…
Rod Caquer awoke with a mild headache and a hangover 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 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.