Dawson chuckled. “We get plenty of those.” Barbro recalled his fondness for gabbing. He tugged the beard which he affected, as if he were an outwayer instead of a townsman. “No harm in them as a rule. They only have a lot of voltage to discharge, after weeks or months in the backlands.”
“I’ve gathered that that environment—foreign in a million major and minor ways to the one that created man—I’ve gathered that it does do odd things to the personality.” Sherrinford tamped his pipe. “Of course, you know my practice has been confined to urban and suburban areas. Isolated garths seldom need private investigators. Now that situation appears to have changed. I called to ask you for advice.”
“Glad to help,” Dawson said. “I’ve not forgotten what you did for us in the the Tahoe murder case.” Cautiously: “Better explain your problem first.”
Sherrinford struck fire. The smoke that followed cut through the green Odors—even here, a paved pair of kilometers from the nearest woods—that drifted past traffic rumble through a crepuscular window. “This is more a scientific mission than a search for an absconding debtor or an industrial spy,” he drawled. “I’m looking into two possibilities: that an organization, criminal or religious or whatever, has long been active and steals infants; or that the Outlings of folklore are real.”
“Huh?” On Dawson’s face Barbro read as much dismay as surprise. “You can’t be serious!”
“Can’t I?” Sherrinford smiled. “Several generations’ worth of reports shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand. Especially not when they become more frequent and consistent in the course of time, not less. Nor can we ignore the documented loss of babies and small children, amounting by now to over a hundred, and never a trace found afterward. Nor the finds which demonstrate that an intelligent species once inhabited Arctica and may still haunt the interior.”
Dawson leaned forward as if to climb out of the screen. “Who engaged you?” he demanded. “That Cullen woman? We were sorry for her, naturally, but she wasn’t making sense, and when she got downright abusive—”
“Didn’t her companions, reputable scientists, confirm her story?”
“No story to confirm. Look, they had the place ringed with detectors and alarms, and they kept mastiffs. Standard procedure in country where a hungry sauroid or whatever might happen by Nothing could’ve entered unbeknownst.”
“On the ground. How about a flyer landing in the middle of camp?”
“A man in a copter rig would’ve roused everybody.”
“A winged being might be quieter.”
“A living flyer that could lift a three-year-old boy? Doesn’t exist.”
“Isn’t in the scientific literature, you mean, Constable. Remember Graymantle; remember how little we know about Roland, a planet, an entire world. Such birds do exist on Beowulf—and on Rustum, I’ve read. I made a calculation from the local ratio of air density to gravity, and, yes, it’s marginally possible here too. The child could have been carried off for a short distance before wing muscles were exhausted and the creature must descend.”
Dawson snorted. “First it landed and walked into the tent where mother and boy were asleep. Then it walked away, toting him, after it couldn’t fly further. Does that sound like a bird of prey? And the victim didn’t cry out, the dogs didn’t bark!”
“As a matter of fact,” Sherrinford said, “those inconsistencies are the most interesting and convincing features of the whole account. You’re right, it’s hard to see how a human kidnapper could get in undetected, and an eagle type of creature wouldn’t operate in that fashion. But none of this applies to a winged intelligent being. The boy could have been drugged. Certainly the dogs showed signs of having been.”
“The dogs showed signs of having overslept. Nothing had disturbed them. The kid wandering by wouldn’t do so. We don’t need to assume one damn thing except, first, that he got restless and, second, that the alarms were a bit sloppily rigged-seeing as how no danger was expected from inside camp-and let him pass out. And, third, I hate to speak this way, but we must assume the poor tyke starved or was killed.”
Dawson paused before adding: “If we had more staff, we could have given the affair more time. And would have, of course. We did make an aerial sweep, which risked the lives of the pilots, using instruments which would’ve sported the kid anywhere in a fifty-kilometer radius, unless he was dead. You know how sensitive thermal analyzers are. We drew a complete blank. We have more important jobs than to hunt for the scattered pieces of a corpse.”
He finished brusquely. “If Mrs. Cullen’s hired you, my advice is you find an excuse to quit. Better for her, too. She’s got to come to terms with reality.”
Barbro checked a shout by biting her tongue.
“Oh, this is merely the latest disappearance of the series,” Sherrinford said. She didn’t understand how he could maintain his easy tone when Jimmy was lost. “More thoroughly recorded than any before, thus more suggestive. Usually an outwayer family has given a tearful but undetailed account of their child who vanished and must have been stolen by the Old Folk. Sometimes, years later, they’d tell about glimpses of what they swore must have been the grown child, not really human any longer, flitting past in murk or peering through, a window or working mischief upon them. As you say, neither the authorities nor the scientists have had personnel or resources to mount a proper investigation. But as I say, the matter appears to be worth investigating. Maybe a private party like myself can contribute.”
“Listen, most of us constables grew up in the outway. We don’t just ride patrol and answer emergency calls; we go back there for holidays and reunions. If any gang of… of human sacrificers was around, we’d know.”
“I realize that. I also realize that the people you came from have a widespread and deep-seated belief in nonhuman beings with supernatural powers. Many actually go through rites and make offerings to propitiate them.”
“I know what you’re leading up to,” Dawson fleered. “I’ve heard it before, from a hundred sensationalists. The aborigines are the Outlings. I thought better of you. Surely you’ve visited a museum or three, surely you’ve read literature from planets which do have natives—or damn and blast, haven’t you ever applied that logic of yours?”
He wagged a finger. “Think,” he said. “What have we in fact discovered? A few pieces of worked stone; a few megaliths that might be artificial; scratchings on rock that seem to show plants and animals, though not the way any human culture would ever have shown them; traces of fires and broken bones; other fragments of bone that seem as if they might’ve belonged to thinking creatures, as if they might’ve been inside fingers or around big brains. If so, however, the owners looked nothing like men. Or angels, for that matter. Nothing! The most anthropoid reconstruction I’ve seen shows a kind of two-legged crocagator.
“Wait, let me finish. The stories about the Outlings—oh, I’ve heard them too, plenty of them. I believed them when I was a kid—the stories tell how there’re different kinds, some winged, some not, some half human, some completely human except maybe for being too handsome—It’s fairyland from ancient Earth all over again. Isn’t it? I got interested once and dug into the Heritage Library microfiles, and be damned if I didn’t find almost the identical yarns, told by peasants centuries before spaceflight.
“None of it squares with the scanty relics we have, if they are relics, or with the fact that no area the size of Arctica could spawn a dozen different intelligent species, or… hellfire, man, with the way your common sense tells you aborigines would behave when humans arrived!”