Maxon seemed puzzled by the question.
“You think Deem might have been playing around with something that bit him. No, to my knowledge a discovery like that has never been approached. Nobody has ever duplicated, except by constructive imitation, even an inanimate object. You haven’t heard of such a thing, have you, Skidder?”
“No,” said the Medical Examiner. “I don’t think even your friend Perry Peters could do that, Rod.”
From the Regent Maxon’s office, Caquer went to Deem’s shop. Brager was in charge there, and Brager helped him search the place thoroughly. It was a long and laborious task, because each book and reel had to be examined minutely.
The printers of illicit books, Caquer knew, were clever at disguising their product. Usually, forbidden books bore the cover and title page, often even the opening chapters, of some popular work of fiction, and the projection reels were similarly disguised.
Jupiter-lighted darkness was falling outside when they finished, but Rod Caquer knew they had done a thorough job. There wasn’t an indexed book anywhere in the shop, and every reel had been run off on a projector.
Other men, at Rod Caquer’s orders, had been searching Deem’s apartment with equal thoroughness. He phoned there, and got a report, completely negative.
“Not so much as a Venusian pamphlet,” said the man in charge at the apartment, with what Caquer thought was a touch of regret in his voice.
“Did you come across a lathe, a small one for delicate work?” Rod asked.
“Um — no, we didn’t see anything like that. One room’s turned into a workshop, but there’s no lathe in it. Is it important?”
Caquer grunted noncommittally. What was one more mystery, and a minor one at that, to a case like this?
“Well, Lieutenant,” Brager said, when the screen had gone blank, “what do we do now?”
Caquer sighed.
“You can go off duty, Brager,” he said. “But first arrange to leave men on guard here and at the apartment. I’ll stay until whoever you send comes to relieve me.”
When Brager had left, Caquer sank wearily into the nearest chair. He felt terrible, physically, and his mind just did not seem to be working. He let his eyes run again around the orderly shelves of the shop and their orderliness oppressed him.
If there was only a clue of some sort. Wilder Williams had never had a case like this in which the only leads were two identical corpses, one of which had been killed five different ways and the other did not have a mark or sign of violence. What a mess, and where did he go from here?
Well, he still had the list of people he was going to interview, and there was time to see at least one of them this evening.
Should he look up Perry Peters again, and see what, if anything, the lanky inventor could make of the disappearance of the lathe? Perhaps he might be able to suggest what had happened to it. But then again, what could a lathe have to do with a mess like this? One cannot turn out a duplicate corpse on a lathe.
Or should he look up Professor Gordon? He decided to do just that.
He called the Gordon apartment on the visiphone, and Jane appeared in the screen.
“How’s your father, Jane?” asked Caquer. “Will he be able to talk to me for a while this evening?”
“Oh, yes,” said the girl. “He’s feeling much better, and thinks he’ll go back to his classes tomorrow. But get here early if you’re coming. Rod, you look terrible; what’s the matter with you?”
“Nothing, except I feel goofy. But I’m all right, I guess.”
“You have a gaunt, starved look. When did you eat last?”
Caquer’s eyes widened. “Earth! I forgot all about eating. I slept late and didn’t even have breakfast!”
Jane Gordon laughed.
“You dope! Well, hurry around, and I’ll have something ready for you when you get here.”
“But—”
“But nothing. How soon can you start?”
A minute after he had clicked off the visiphone, Lieutenant Caquer went to answer a knock on the shuttered door of the shop.
He opened it. “Oh, hullo, Reese,” he said. “Did Brager send you?”
The policeman nodded.
“He said I was to stay here in case. In case what?”
“Routine guard duty, that’s all,” explained Caquer. “Say, I’ve been stuck here all afternoon. Anything going on?”
“A little excitement. We been pulling in soap-box orators off and on all day. Screwballs. There’s an epidemic of them.”
“The devil you say! What are they hipped about?”
“Sector Two, for some reason I can’t make out. They’re trying to incite people to get mad at Sector Two and do something about it. The arguments they use are plain nutty.”
Something stirred uneasily in Rod Caquer’s memory — but he could not quite remember what it was. Sector Two? Who’d been telling him things about Sector Two recently — usury, unfairness, tainted blood, something silly. Although of course a lot of the people over there did have Martian blood in them…
“How many of the orators were arrested?” he asked.
“We got seven. Two more slipped away from us, but we’ll pick them up if they start spouting that kind of stuff again.”
Lieutenant Caquer walked slowly, thoughtfully, to the Gordon apartment, trying his level best to remember where, recently, he heard anti-Sector Two propaganda. There must be something back of the simultaneous appearance of nine soap-box radicals, all preaching the same doctrine.
A sub-rosa political organization? But none such had existed for almost a century now. Under a perfectly democratic government, component part of a stable system-wide organization of planets, there was no need for such activity. Of course an occasional crackpot was dissatisfied, but a group in that state of mind struck him as fantastic.
It sounded as crazy as the Willem Deem case. That did not make sense either. Things happened meaninglessly, as in a dream. Dream? What was he trying to remember about a dream? Hadn’t he had an odd sort of dream last night — what was it?
But, as dreams usually do, it eluded his conscious mind.
Anyway, tomorrow he would question — or help question — those radicals who were under arrest. Put men on the job of tracing them back, and undoubtedly a common background somewhere, a tieup, would be found.
It could not be accidental that they should all pop up on the same day. It was screwy, just as screwy as the two inexplicable corpses of a book-and-reel shop proprietor. Maybe because the cases were both screwy, his mind tended to couple the two sets of events. But taken together, they were no more digestible than taken separately. They made even less sense.
Confound it, why hadn’t he taken that post on Ganymede when it was offered to him? Ganymede was a nice orderly moon. Persons there did not get murdered twice on consecutive days. But Jane Gordon did not live on Ganymede; she lived right here in Sector Three and he was on his way to see her.
And everything was wonderful except that he felt so tired he could not think straight, and Jane Gordon insisted on looking on him as a brother instead of a suitor, and he was probably going to lose his job. He would be the laughing-stock of Callisto if the special investigator from headquarters found some simple explanation of things that he had overlooked….
5. Nine-Man Morris
Jane Gordon, looking more beautiful than he had ever seen her, met him at the door. She was smiling, but the smile changed to a look of concern as he stepped into the light.
“Rod!” she exclaimed. “You do look ill, really ill. What have you been doing to yourself besides forgetting to eat?”
Rod Caquer managed a grin.
“Chasing vicious circles up blind alleys, Icicle. May I use your visiphone?”