“We shall,” said Caquer. “Thanks a lot, Perry. If you don’t mind, I’ll use your phone to get that search started right away. If there are any Blackdex books there, we’ll take care of them all right.”
When he got his secretary on the screen, she looked both frightened and relieved at seeing him.
“Mr. Caquer,” she said, “I’ve been trying to reach you. Something awful’s happened. Another death.”
“Murder again?” gasped Caquer.
“Nobody knows what it was,” said the secretary. “A dozen people saw him jump out of a window only twenty feet up. And in this gravity that couldn’t have killed him, but he was dead when they got there. And four of them that saw him knew him. It was—”
“Well, for Earth’s sake, who?”
“I don’t—Lieutenant Caquer, they said, all four of them, that it was Willem Deem!”
With a nightmarish feeling of unreality Lieutenant Rod Caquer peered down over the shoulder of the Medico-in-Chief at the body that already lay on the stretcher of the utility men, who stood by impatiently.
“You better hurry, Doc,” one of them said. “He won’t last much longer and it takes us five minutes to get there.”
Dr. Skidder nodded impatiently without looking up, and went on with his examination. “Not a mark, Rod,” he said. “Not a sign of poison. Not a sign of anything. He’s just dead.”
“The fall couldn’t have caused it?”
“There isn’t even a bruise from the fall. Only verdict I can give is heart failure. Okay, boys, you can take it away.”
“You through too, Lieutenant?”
“I’m through,” said Caquer. “Go ahead. Skidder, which of them was Willem Deem?”
The medico’s eyes followed the white-sheeted burden of the utility men as they carried it toward the truck, and he shrugged helplessly.
“Lieutenant, I guess that’s your pigeon,” he said. “All I can do is certify the cause of death.”
“It just doesn’t make sense,” Caquer wailed. “Sector Three City isn’t so big that he could have had a double living here without people knowing about it. But one of them had to be a double. Off the record, which looked to you like the original?”
Dr. Skidder shook his head grimly.
“Willem Deem had a peculiarly shaped wart on his nose,” he said. “So did both of his corpses, Rod. And neither one was artificial, or make-up. I’ll stake my professional reputation on that. But come on back to the office with me, and I’ll tell you which one of them is the real Willem Deem.”
“Huh? How?”
“His thumbprint’s on file at the tax department, like everybody’s is. And it’s part of routine to fingerprint a corpse on Callisto, because it has to be destroyed so quickly.”
“You have thumbprints of both corpses?” inquired Caquer.
“Of course. Took them before you reached the scene, both times. I have the one for Willem—I mean the other corpse—back in my office. Tell you what—you pick up the print on file at the tax office and meet me there.”
Caquer sighed with relief as he agreed. At least one point would be cleared up—which corpse was which.
And in that comparatively blissful state of mind he remained until half an hour later when he and Dr. Skidder compared the three prints—the one Rod Caquer had secured from the tax office, and one from each of the corpses. They were identical, all three of them.
“Um,” said Caquer. “You’re sure you didn’t get mixed up on those prints, Dr. Skidder?”
“How could I? I took only one copy from each body, Rod. If I had shuffled them just now while we were looking at them, the results would be the same. All three prints are alike.”
“But they can’t be.”
Skidder shrugged.
“I think we should lay this before the Regent, direct,” he said. “I’ll call him and arrange an audience. Okay?”
Half an hour later, he was giving the whole story to Regent Barr Maxon, with Dr. Skidder corroborating the main points. The expression on Regent Maxon’s face made Lieutenant Rod Caquer glad, very glad, that he had that corroboration.
“You agree,” Maxon asked, “that this should be taken up with the Sector Coordinator, and that a special investigator should be sent here to take over?” A bit reluctantly, Caquer nodded. “I hate to admit that I’m incompetent, Regent, or that I seem to be,” Caquer said. “But this isn’t an ordinary crime. Whatever goes on it’s way over my head. And there may be something even more sinister than murder behind it.”
“You’re right, Lieutenant. I’ll see that a qualified man leaves headquarters today and he’ll get in touch with you.”
“Regent,” Caquer asked, “has any machine or process ever been invented that will—uh—duplicate a human body, with or without the mind being carried over?”
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 Regent Maxon’s office, Caquer went to Deems 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 the 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.