So maybe it had been paid, or a big part of it. All at once, all engineered so the payments would span no more than a week, all the sales and options and agreements set up in such a fashion that there would have been nothing to disturb the financial picture, to tip off anyone that there was something going on.
And if it had reached that point, I told myself, then mankind’s position was impossible, or very close to it.
But even after all the conjecture, all the hinted answers, there was still the question: Where had all the money come from?
Certainly not from anything the bowling balls had brought from their alien planet and had sold on Earth. For if they had sold out of it, whatever it might be, to get together the working capital they needed, there would have been some sign of it. Unless, of course, it were something of such fantastic value, something, perhaps, that no one had ever thought of as existing—5omething so valuable that it would appeal to the man who bought certain secret treasures and hugged them close against him, not sharing them, knowing they would decrease in value if he ever dared to share them. Unless it was something like that, it would be impossible to introduce to Earth any trade goods of an alien nature without notice being given them.
“We now communicate,” said the Dog, “with the biologist in his laboratory.”
“That is right,” I told him. “He’ll be wondering where we are.”
“We must warn him,” said the Dog, “to be very careful. I cannot recall if we did or not. Those things in the sack we handed him can be extremely tricky.”
“Never fear,” I reassured the Dog. ’stirling will take due care. He probably more about them now than either of Us.”
“So we make the call,” said Joy, “and then we get some sleep and tomorrow dawns and what do we do then?”
“Damned if I know,” I confessed. “We’ll think of something. We’ll have to think of something. We’ve got to let the people know what is going on. We’ll have to figure out a way to tell them so they will understand and so they will believe.”
We reached the main highway, and down ahead of us was the glow of the all—night service station.
I pulled into it and up in front of a pump.
The man came out.
“Fill her up,” I said. “You got a pay phone in there?”
He gestured with his thumb. “Right over in the corner, next to the cigarette machine.”
I went inside and dialed and fed in the coins when the operator told me to. I heard the buzzing of the signal at the other end.
Someone answered—a gruff, official voice that was not Stirling’s voice.
“Who is this?” I asked. “I was calling Carleton Stirling.”
The voice didn’t tell me. “Who are you?” it asked.
It burned me. Something like that always burns me, but I held my temper and told him who I was.
“Where are you calling from?”
“Now, look—”
“Mr. Graves,” the voice said, “this is the police. We want to talk with you.”
“Police! What’s going on down there?”
“Carleton Stirling’s dead. The janitor found him an hour or so ago.”
I pulled the car up in front of the biology building and got out.
“You better stay here,” I told the Dog. “The janitor doesn’t like you and I would rather not explain a talking dog to the policeman who is waiting up there.”
The Dog sighed gustily, his whiskers blowing out. “I suppose,” he said, “it would be somewhat of a shock. Although the now dead biologist took me very calmly. Somewhat better, I might say, than you did yourself.”
“He had the advantage of me,” I told the Dog. “He had the true scientific outlook.”
And I wondered a second later how I could come even close to joking, for Stirling had been my friend and it might well be that I had brought about his death, although at the moment I had no idea of how he might have died.
I remembered him that morning, sprawled upon the chair in the monitoring room with less than another day of life left to him, and how he’d come awake without rancor or surprise and how he’d talked the crazy kind of talk one knowing him had come to expect of him.
“Wait for us,” I told the Dog. “We shouldn’t be too long.”
Joy and I climbed the steps and I was ready to pound upon the door when I found the door to be unlocked. We climbed the stairs and the door to Stirling’s lab was open.
Two men were perched upon the lab bench, waiting for us. They had been talking, but when they had heard us coming down the hail they had stopped their talking—we had heard them stop their talking—and sat there waiting for us.
One of them was Joe Newman, the kid who had called me about the bowling balls rolling down the road.
“Hi, Parker,” he said, hopping off the bench. “Hi, Joy.”
“Hi, yourself,” said Joy.
“Meet Bill Liggett,” said Joe Newman. He s from homicide.
“Homicide?” I asked.
“Certainly,” said Joe. “They think Someone bumped Stirling off.”
I Swung around to the detective.
He nodded at me. “He was asphyxiated. As if he had been choked. But there wasn’t a mark upon him.”
“You mean—”
“Look, Graves, if someone strangles a man, he leaves marks on his throat. Bruises, discolorations. It takes a lot of pressure to choke a man to death. Usually there is considerable physical damage.”
“And there wasn’t?”
“Not a mark,” said Liggett.
“Then he could have simply strangled. On something that he ate or drank. Or from muscular contraction.”
“The doc says not.”
I shook my head. “It doesn’t make any kind of sense.”
“Maybe it will,” said Liggett, “after the autopsy.”
“It doesn’t seem possible,” I said. “I saw him just this evening.”
“Far as we can tell,” said Liggett, “you were the last man to see him alive. He was alive when you saw him, wasn’t he?”
“Very much alive.”
“What time?”
“Ten-thirty or so. Maybe close to eleven.”
“The janitor said he let you in. You and a dog. He remembers because he told you no dogs were allowed. Says you told him the dog was a specimen. Was be, Graves?”
“Hell, no,” I said. “That was just a gag.”
“Why did you bring the dog up? The janitor told you not to.”
“I wanted to show him to Stirling. We bad talked about him. He was a remarkable dog in many ways. He’d been hanging around my apartment building for days and was a friendly dog.”
“Stirling like dogs?”
“I don’t know. Not especially, I guess.”
“Where is this dog now?”
“Down in the car,” I said.
“Your car blow up tonight?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I heard on the radio it did. They thought that I was in it.”
“But you weren’t.”
“Well, that’s apparent, isn’t it? You guys find out who it was?”
Liggett nodded. “Young punk who’d been pulled in a couple of times before for stealing cars. Just for the rides. Drive them a few blocks, then leave them.”
“Too bad,” I said.
“Yeah, isn’t it,” said Liggett. “You driving a car now?”
“He’s driving my car”, said Joy.
“You’ve been with him all evening, lady?”
“We had dinner,” Joy said. “I’ve been With him ever since.”
Good gal, I thought. Don’t tell this cop a thing. All he’ll do is just muck up the situation.
“You waited down in the car while he and the dog came up?”
Joy nodded.
“Seems,” said Liggett, “there was a ruckus of some sort out in your neighborhood tonight. You know anything about it?”
“Not a thing,” said Joy.
“Don’t mind him,” said Joe. “He asks a lot of questions. He looks suspicious, too. He has to. That’s how he earns a living.”
“It does beat hell,” said Liggett, “how you two could be mixed up in so many things and still come out so clean.”