His aching muscles forgotten, Lieutenant Rod Caquer started to run back toward the center of town. The streets were deserted. Everyone had gone to the square, of course. They had been told to come.
He was winded after a few blocks, and had to slow down to a rapid walk, but there would be time for him to get there before it was over, even if he missed the start.
Yes, he could get there all right. And then, if his idea worked…
It was almost ten when he passed the building where his own office was situated, and kept on going. He turned in a few doors beyond. The elevator operator was gone, but Caquer ran the elevator up and a minute later he had used his picklock on a door and was in Perry Peters’ laboratory.
Peters was gone, of course, but the goggles were there, the special goggles with the trick windshield-wiper effect that made them usable in radite mining.
Rod Caquer slipped them over his eyes, put the motive-power battery into his pocket, and touched the button on the side. They worked. He could see dimly as the wipers flashed back and forth. But a minute later they stopped.
Of course. Peters had said that the shafts heated and expanded after a minute’s operation. Well, that might not matter. A minute might be long enough, and the metal would have cooled by the time he reached the square.
But he would have to be able to vary the speed. Among the litter of stuff on the workbench, he found a small rheostat and spliced it in one of the wires that ran from the battery to the goggles.
That was the best he could do. No time to try it out. He slid the goggles up onto his forehead and ran out into the hall, took the elevator down to street level. And a moment later he was running toward the public square, two blocks away.
He reached the fringe of the crowd gathered in the square looking up at the two balconies of the Regency building. On the lower one were several people he recognized; Dr. Skidder, Walther Johnson. Even Lieutenant Borgesen was there.
On the higher balcony, Regent Barr Maxon was alone, and was speaking to the crowd below. His sonorous voice rolled out phrases extolling the might of empire. Only a little distance away, in the crowd, Caquer caught sight of the gray hair of Professor Gordon, and Jane Gordon’s golden head beside it. He wondered if they were under the spell, too. Of course they were deluded also or they would not be there. He realized it would be useless to speak to them, to tell them what he was trying to do.
Lieutenant Caquer slid the goggles down over his eyes, blinded momentarily because the wiper arms were in the wrong position. But his fingers found the rheostat, set at zero, and began to move it slowly around the dial toward maximum.
And then, as the wipers began their frantic dance and accelerated, he could see dimly. Through the arc-shaped lenses, he looked around him. On the lower balcony he saw nothing unusual, but on the upper balcony the figure of Regent Maxon suddenly blurred.
There was a man standing there on the upper balcony wearing a strange-looking helmet with wires and atop the helmet was a three-inch wheel of mirrors and prisms.
A wheel that stood still, because of the stroboscopic effect of the mechanized goggles. For an instant, the speed of those wiper arms was synchronized with the spinning of the wheel, so that each successive glimpse of the wheel showed it in the same position, and to Caquer’s eyes the wheel stood still, and he could see it.
Then the goggles jammed.
But he did not need them any more now.
He knew that Barr Maxon, or whoever stood up there on the balcony, was the wearer of the wheel.
Silently, and attracting as little attention as possible, Caquer sprinted around the fringe of the crowd and reached the side door of the Regency building.
There was a guard on duty there.
“Sorry, sir, but no one’s allowed—”
Then he tried to duck, too late. The flat of Police Lieutenant Rod Caquer’s shortsword thudded against his head.
The inside of the building seemed deserted. Caquer ran up the three flights of stairs that would take him to the level of the higher balcony, and down the hall toward the balcony door.
He burst through it, and Regent Maxon turned. Maxon now no longer wore the helmet on his head. Caquer had lost the goggles, but whether he could see it or not, Caquer knew the helmet and the wheel were still in place and working, and that this was his one chance.
Maxon turned and saw Lieutenant Caquer’s face, and his drawn sword.
Then, abruptly, Maxon’s figure vanished. It seemed to Caquer—although he knew that it was not—that the figure before him was that of Jane Gordon. Jane, looking at him pleadingly, and spoke in melting tones.
“Rod, don’t—” she began to say.
But it was not Jane, he knew. A thought, in self-preservation, had been directed at him by the manipulator of the Vargas Wheel.
Caquer raised his sword, and he brought it down hard.
Glass shattered and there was the ring of metal on metal as his sword cut through and split the helmet.
Of course it was not Jane now—just a dead man lying there with blood oozing out of the split in a strange and complicated but utterly shattered helmet. A helmet that could now be seen by everyone there, and by Lieutenant Caquer himself.
Just as everyone, including Caquer himself, could recognize the man who had worn it.
He was a small, wiry man, and there was an unsightly wart on the side of his nose.
Yes, it was Willem Deem. And this time, Rod Caquer knew it was Willem Deem…
“I thought,” Jane Gordon said, “that you were going to leave for Callisto City without saying goodbye to us.”
Rod Caquer threw his hat in the general direction of a hook.
“Oh, that,” he said. “I’m not even sure I’m going to take the promotion to a job as police coordinator there. I have a week to decide, and I’ll be around town at least that long. How you been doing, Icicle?”
“Fine, Rod. Sit down. Father will be home soon, and I know he has a lot of things to ask you. Why, we haven’t seen you since the big mass meeting.”
Funny how dumb a smart man can be, at times.
But then again, he had proposed so often and been refused, that it was not all his fault.
He just looked at her.
“Rod, all the story never came out in the newscasts,” she said. “I know you’ll have to tell it all over again for my father, but while we’re waiting for him, won’t you give me some information?”
Rod grinned.
“Nothing to it, really, Icicle,” he said. “Willem Deem got hold of a Blackdex book, and found out how to make a Vargas Wheel. So he made one, and it gave him ideas.”
“His first idea was to kill Barr Maxon and take over as Regent, setting the helmet so he would appear to be Maxon. He put Maxon’s body in his own shop, and then had a lot of fun with his own murder. He had a warped sense of humor, and got a kick out of chasing us in circles.”
“But just how did he do all the rest?” asked the girl.
“He was there as Brager, and pretended to discover his own body. He gave one description of the method of death, and caused Skidder and me and the clearance men to see the body of Maxon each a different way. No wonder we nearly went nuts.”
“But Brager remembered being there too,” she objected.
“Brager was in the hospital at the time, but Deem saw him afterward and impressed on his mind the memory pattern of having discovered Deems body,” explained Caquer. “So naturally, Brager thought he had been there.”
“Then he killed Maxon’s confidential secretary, because being so close to the Regent, the secretary must have suspected something was wrong even though he couldn’t guess what. That was the second corpse of Willem Deem, who was beginning to enjoy himself in earnest when he pulled that on us.”
“And of course he never sent to Callisto City for a special investigator at all. He just had fun with me, by making me seem to meet one and having the guy turn out to be Willem Deem again. I nearly did go nuts then, I guess.”