“And when, about nine months ago, I heard your side of what had been happening in Chicago, I began to suspect that Chappel had come here to do his work. Are you beginning to get the picture?”
“Faintly.”
“Well, don’t faint yet. Not until you figure how an expert psychiatrist can help crooks beat the detector. Or have you?”
“Well—”
“That’s it. The most elementary form of hypnotic treatment, something any qualified psychiatrist could do fifty years ago. Chappel’s clients—of course they don’t know who or what he is; he’s a mysterious underworld figure who helps them beat the rap—pay him well and tell him what crimes they may be questioned about by the police if they’re picked up. He tells them to include every crime they’ve ever committed and any racket they’ve ever been in, so the police won’t catch them up on any old counts. Then he—”
“Wait a minute,” Rand interrupted. “How does he get them to trust him that far?”
Joad gestured impatiently. “Simple. They aren’t confessing a single crime, even to him. He just wants a list that includes everything they’ve done. They can add some ringers and he doesn’t know which is which. So it doesn’t matter.”
“Then he puts them under light waking-hypnosis and tells them they are not criminals and never have been and they have never done any of the things on the list he reads back to them. That’s all there is to it.”
“So when you put them under the detector and ask them if they’ve done this or that, they say they haven’t and they believe it. That’s why your detector gauges don’t register. That’s why Joe Zatelli didn’t jump when he saw Martin Blue walk in. He didn’t know Blue was dead—except that he’d read it in the papers.”
Rand leaned forward. “Where is Ernst Chappel?”
“You don’t want him, Dyer.”
“Don’t want him? He’s the most dangerous man alive today!”
“To whom?”
“To whom? Are you crazy?”
“I’m not crazy. He’s the most dangerous man alive today—to the underworld. Look, Dyer, any time a criminal gets jittery about a possible pinch, he sends for Ernie or goes to Ernie. And Ernie washes him whiter than snow and in the process tells him he’s not a criminal.”
“And so, at least nine times out of ten, he quits being a criminal. Within ten or twenty years Chicago isn’t going to have an underworld. There won’t be any organized crimes by professional criminals. You’ll always have the amateur with you, but he’s a comparatively minor detail. How about some more café royale?”
Dyer Rand walked to the kitchenette and got it. He was wide awake by now, but he walked like a man in a dream.
When he came back, Joad said, “And now that I’m in with Ernie on it, Dyer, we’ll stretch it to every city in the world big enough to have an underworld worth mentioning. We can train picked recruits; I’ve got my eye on two of your men and may take them away from you soon. But I’ll have to check them first. We’re going to pick our apostles—about a dozen of them—very carefully. They’ll be the right men for the job.”
“But, Joad, look at all the crimes that are going to go unpunished!” Rand protested.
Bela Joad drank the rest of his coffee and stood up. He said, “And which is more important—to punish criminals or to end crime? And, if you want to look at it moralistically, should a man be punished for a crime when he doesn’t even remember committing it, when he is no longer a criminal?”
Dyer Rand sighed. “You win, I guess. I’ll keep my promise. I suppose—I’ll never see you again?”
“Probably not, Dyer. And I’ll anticipate what you’re going to say next. Yes, I’ll have a farewell drink with you. A straight one, without the coffee.” Dyer Rand brought the glasses. He said, “Shall we drink to Ernie Chappel?”
Bela Joad smiled. He said, “Let’s include him in the toast, Dyer. But let’s drink to all men who work to put themselves out of work. Doctors work toward the day when the race will be so healthy it won’t need doctors; lawyers work toward the day when litigation will no longer be necessary. And policemen, detectives, and criminologists work toward the day when they will no longer be needed because there will be no more crime.”
Dyer Rand nodded very soberly and lifted his glass. They drank.
And the Gods Laughed
You know how it is when you’re with a work crew on one of the asteroids. You’re there, stuck for the month you signed up for, with four other guys and nothing to do but talk. Space on the little tugs that you go in and return in, and live in while you’re there, is at such a premium that there isn’t room for a book or a magazine nor equipment for games. And you’re out of radio range except for the usual once-a-terrestrial-day, system-wide newscasts.
So talking is the only indoor sport you can go in for. Talking and listening. You’ve plenty of time for both because a work-day, in space-suits, is only four hours and that with four fifteen-minute back-to-the-ship rests.
Anyway, what I’m trying to say is that talk is cheap on one of those work crews. With most of the day to do nothing else, you listen to some real whoppers, stories that would make the old-time Liars Club back on Earth seem like Sunday-school meetings. And if your mind runs that way, you’ve got plenty of time to think up some yourself.
Charlie Dean was on our crew, and Charlie could tell some dillies. He’d been on Mars back in the old days when there was still trouble with the bolies, and when living on Mars was a lot like living on Earth back in the days of Indian fighting. The bolies thought and fought a lot like Amerinds, even though they were quadrupeds that looked like alligators on stilts—if you can picture an alligator on stilts—and used blow-guns instead of bows and arrows. Or was it crossbows that the Amerinds used against the colonists?
Anyway, Charlie’s just finished a whopper that was really too good for the first tryout of the trip. We’d just landed, you see, and were resting up from doing nothing en route, and usually the yarns start off easy and believable and don’t work up to real depth-of-space lying until along about the fourth week when everybody’s bored stiff.
“So we took this head bolie,” Charlie was ending up, “and you know what kind of flappy little ears they’ve got, and we put a couple of zircon-studded earrings in its ears and let it go, and back it went to the others, and then darned if—” Well, I won’t go on with Charlie’s yarn, because it hasn’t got anything to do with his story except that it brought earrings into the conversation.
Blake shook his head gloomily and then turned to me. He said, “Hank, what went on on Ganymede? You were on that ship that went out there a few months ago, weren’t you—the first one that got through? I’ve never read or heard much about that trip.”
“Me either,” Charlie said. “Except that the Ganymedeans turned out to be humanoid beings about four feet tall and didn’t wear a thing except earrings. Kind of immodest, wasn’t it?”
I grinned. “You wouldn’t have thought so if you’d seen the Ganymedeans. With them, it didn’t matter. Anyway, they didn’t wear earrings.”
“You’re crazy,” Charlie said. “Sure, I know you were on that expedition and I wasn’t, but you’re still crazy, because I had a quick look at some of the pictures they brought back. The natives wore earrings.”
“No,” I said. “Earrings wore them.”
Blake sighed deeply. “I knew it, I knew it,” he said. “There was something wrong with this trip from the start. Charlie pops off the first day with a yarn that should have been worked up to gradually. And now you say—Or is there something wrong with my sense of earring?”