“Thanks,” Caquer said. He clicked off the screen and went out into the dawn, outside. There was a chance, then. The special investigator might be able to help.
But he, Rod Caquer, would have to intercept him, tell him the story and its implications before he could fall with the others, under the influence of the Vargas Wheel. Caquer strode rapidly toward the terminal. Maybe his ship had already landed and the damage had been done.
Again he passed a knot of people gathered about a frenzied speaker. Almost everyone must be under the influence by this time. But why had he been spared? Why was not he, too, under the evil influence?
True, he must have been on the street on the way to the police station at the time Skidder had been on the air, but that didn’t explain everything. All of these people could not have seen and heard that visicast. Some of them must have been asleep already at that hour.
Also he, Rod Caquer, had been affected, the night before, the night of the whispers. He must have been under the influence of the wheel at the time he investigated the murder—the murders.
Why, then, was he free now? Was he the only one, or were there others who had escaped, who were sane and their normal selves?
If not, if he was the only one, why was he free?
Or was he free?
Could it be that what he was doing right now was under direction, was part of some plan?
But no use to think that way, and go mad. He would have to carry on the best he could, and hope that things, with him, were what they seemed to be.
Then he broke into a run, for ahead was the open area of the terminal, and a small space-ship, silver in the dawn, was settling down to land. A small official speedster—it must be the special investigator. He ran around the check-in building, through the gate in the wire fence, and toward the ship, which was already down. The door opened.
A small, wiry man stepped out and closed the door behind him. He saw Caquer and smiled.
“You’re Caquer?” he asked, pleasantly. “Coordinator’s office sent me to investigate a case you fellows are troubled with. My name—”
Lieutenant Rod Caquer was staring with horrified fascination at the little man’s well-known features, the all-too-familiar wart on the side of the little man’s nose, listening for the announcement he knew this man was going to make—
“—is Willem Deem. Shall we go to your office?”
Too much can happen to any man.
Lieutenant Rod Caquer, Lieutenant of Police of Sector Three, Callisto, had experienced more than his share. How can you investigate the murder of a man who has been killed twice? How should a policeman act when the victim shows up, alive and happy, to help you solve the case?
Not even when you know he is not there really—or if he is, he is not what your eyes tell you he is and is not saying what your ears hear.
There is a point beyond which the human mind can no longer function sanely, and when they reach and pass that point, different people react in different ways.
Rod Caquer’s reaction was a sudden, blind, red anger. Directed, for lack of a better object, at the special investigator—if he was the special investigator and not a hypnotic phantasm which wasn’t there at all.
Rod Caquer’s fist lashed out, and it met a chin. Which proved nothing except that if the little man who’d just stepped out of the speedster was an illusion, he was an illusion of touch as well as of sight. Rod’s fist exploded on his chin like a rocket-blast, and the little man swayed and fell forward. Still smiling, because he had not had time to change the expression on his face.
He fell face down, and then rolled over, his eyes closed but smiling gently up at the brightening sky.
Shakily, Caquer bent down and put his hand against the front of the man’s tunic. There was the thump of a beating heart, all right. For a moment, Caquer had feared he might have killed with that blow.
And Caquer closed his eyes, deliberately, and felt the man’s face with his hand—and it still felt like the face of Willem Deem looked, and the wart was there to the touch as well as to the sense of sight.
Two men had run out of the check-in building and were coming across the field toward him. Rod caught the expression on their faces and then thought of the little speedster only a few paces from him. He had to get out of Sector Three City, to tell somebody what was happening before it was too late.
If only they’d been lying about the outgoing power beam being shut off. He leaped across the body of the man he had struck and into the door of the speedster, jerked at the controls. But the ship did not respond, and—no, they hadn’t been lying about the power beam.
No use staying here for a fight that could not possibly decide anything. He went out the door of the speedster, on the other side, away from the men coming toward him, and ran for the fence.
It was electrically charged, that fence. Not enough to kill a man, but plenty to hold him stuck to it until men with rubber gloves cut the wire and took him off. But if the power beam was off, probably the current in the fence was off, too.
It was too high to jump, so he took the chance. And the current was off. He scrambled over it safely and his pursuers stopped and went back to take care of the fallen man beside the speedster.
Caquer slowed down to a walk, but he kept on going. He didn’t know where, but he had somehow to keep moving. After a while he found that his steps were taking him toward the edge of town, on the northern side, toward Callisto City.
He was in a small park near the north border when the significance, and the futility, of his direction came to him. And he found, at the same time, that his muscles were sore and tired, that he had a raging headache, that he could not keep on going unless he had a worthwhile and possible goal.
He sank down on a park bench and for a while held his head in his hands. No answer came.
After a while he looked up and saw something that fascinated him. A child’s pinwheel on a stick, stuck in the grass of the park, spinning in the wind. Now fast, now slow, as the breeze varied.
It was going in circles, like his mind was. How could a man’s mind go other than in circles when he could not tell what was reality and what was illusion? Going in circles, like a Vargas Wheel.
Circles.
But there ought to be some way. A man with a Vargas Wheel was not completely invincible, else how had the council finally succeeded in destroying the few that had been made? True, possessors of the wheels would have cancelled each other out to some extent, but there must have been a last wheel, in someone’s hands. Owned by someone who wanted to control the destiny of the solar system.
But they had stopped the wheel.
It could be stopped, then. But how? How, when one could not see it? Rather, when the sight of it put a man so completely under its control that he no longer, after the first glimpse, knew that it was there. Because, on sight, it had captured his mind.
He must stop the wheel. That was the only answer. But how?
That pinwheel there could be the Vargas Wheel, for all he could tell, set to create the illusion that it was a child’s toy. Or its possessor, wearing the helmet, might be standing on the path in front of him at this moment, watching him. The possessor of the wheel might be invisible because Caquer’s mind was told not to see.
But if the man was there, he’d be really there, and should Rod slash out with his sword, the menace would be ended, wouldn’t it? Of course.
But how to find a wheel that one could not see? That one could not see because—
And then, still staring at the pinwheel, Caquer saw a chance, something that might work, a slender chance!
He looked quickly at his wrist watch and saw that it was half past nine, which was one half-hour before the demonstration in the square. And the wheel and its owner would be there, surely.