Читать книгу Alienist - Laurence M. Janifer - Страница 15

CHAPTER NINE

I’m not going to tell you about it, not all of it. It would take more time than either of us has to spare, whoever you are and whatever spare time you have lying around. As far as I could get the picture without going over to Harris France’s house and poking around in it for a few hours, Euglane gave it to me, in detail.

I was going to have to go over there, and I knew it, but I wasn’t really fond of the idea. The police would be an occupying army, of course, and though I could probably run a good enough bluff to give me some standing, it would be the Hell of a complicated job to manage. It was just possible I could get some real standing, if I called a few people here and there, and once I had that I could check through the police files for anything they’d managed to turn up at the scene. Not satisfactory—I don’t like trusting anybody’s judgment but my own, having had some experience of what the average range of judgment is likely to be, anywhere in the universe—but it was going to have to do.

Meanwhile, I had to take Euglane’s report on trust. I didn’t like doing that, either, and filed it in my head under Provisional, but I got everything I could. What I’ll give you is a short tour of the high spots.

Many of which were barely spots at all. The couple had had no disagreements to speak of recently, and there were, Euglane assured me, no long-standing items smoldering away anywhere. “There are difficulties, of course,” he said. “Harris sometimes identifies Cornelia—identified Cornelia—with his mother, as many husbands do; and as his mother was not a pleasant woman there was friction. But not serious friction, nothing that seemed to point to real trouble. His major difficulties were outside that relationship. Much more general.”

They had involved, for God’s sake, alien beings. He’d had the idea that alien beings (beings who were both invisible and had, he said, no permanent shape, though they had identities and, in his head at least, voices) were watching him—not to harm him, exactly, nor to help him; they were (Euglane said) grading him daily on his performance in every area of his life. “As if his life were one long school-term, with constant exams and constant supervision,” Euglane said. “What the grading meant—what could result if, at some point, he received a C or an F or an A in some area for a given week or month—he has never been wholly sure; but it is important, he feels, that he do well, that his grades be good ones. He fears greatly some unidentified calamity if they should drop.”

“He must be in great shape just now,” I said.

“He’s very worried,” Euglane said. “Very disturbed—not that they will think he has done this thing—they will of course know, they’re always watching—but that he has done it, and they will disapprove. He is almost as much afraid of their disapproval—of poor grades—as he is forlorn at the loss of Cornelia.”

“It’s a shame we can’t ask them,” I said. “If the damn beings existed, they could fill us in on exactly what the Hell did happen.”

He nodded, and we moved on to other matters.

Harris France, when in one of his naps, slept like the dead. If you’d set off a reasonably large bomb within a few inches of his head (while somehow managing not to shred the head), he might have awakened. He might not, too. During the night, Euglane told me, he slept normally, and wasn’t terribly hard to awaken. But the naps were different.

“They’re escapes for him,” he said. “He needs them, and he has been having them often enough, the last month—perhaps five weeks—so that, to your human ancients, he’d look like a case of narcolepsy. They are not normal sleep—though he dreams in normal sleep, in these naps he is simply, as he expresses it, ‘turned off’; if there are dreams he has no memory of them, and I suspect that perhaps there are none. It might well appear, to someone without sufficient knowledge, that he is a narcolept.”

“But he isn’t?”

“Physically he’s normal,” Euglane said. “Or within normal limits for his age and condition—which is a little above human average. But the sleeping—well, we’ve been working on it. Before this, I thought another few weeks might see the end of it, the replacement of this sleeping by a different, less harmful and demanding, escape. The need for some such escape would be likely to last longer—by a factor of ten or twenty.”

“Sleep doesn’t seem all that demanding,” I said.

“It robs anyone of time,” he said. “Sleep is a good, in anything like normal amounts. It is a great good.”

“Knits up the ravel’d sleave of care,” I said. “Or something.”

He nodded. “Very expressive,” he said.

“I’m quoting an ancient,” I told him. “Shakespeare.”

“Ah,” he said. “Yes. I have read some of the plays and the poems. Not all. A terrible waste, you know.”

“A what?”

“Think of it,” he said. “What a psychiatrist the man would have made, if only he’d had the chance. But he had to settle for plays and poems.”

Well, it was a viewpoint I hadn’t run into before. I nodded and let it pass. “But getting more sleep than usual—”

“The body tries hard to adjust,” he said, “but adjustment’s difficult. Activity is needed, and not really available; there’s a lot of muscular motion during sleep, but of a very limited nature.”

That brought up something. “Maybe not all that limited,” I said. “Did France sleepwalk?”

“Not to his knowledge,” Euglane said, “and since he did not sleep alone—his naps occurred either when he was at work, in which case he would retire to a resting-area, a room that was always occupied by some officer or other lying down for a bit—or at home, where Cornelia would be present—he would have known; someone would have told him.”

“Always?”

“As far as I know,” he said, “and I think I would know; we’ve been working in some detail on this.”

I thought of a small list of ways for a man to sleepwalk without anyone’s knowing about it, including the man himself. But they were all a little tricksy, and I’d look into them later. “It’s about nine o’clock now,” I said. We’d been at it for hours by then. “What time did he wake up to find Cornelia Rasczak?”

“He told me he checked his watch within seconds—professional habit, I suppose,” Euglane said. “It was then—as you say it—four-thirty-seven A. D. Sixteen-thirty-seven, we say here.”

“P. M.,” I said, and he nodded. “What did he do? I mean for the next few minutes. Everything.”

He had, Euglane said, stared for an undetermined time, perhaps a minute. Beyond checking his watch he hadn’t moved. When he did he’d gone to her, seen for certain that she was in fact dead—he hadn’t had any doubt of it, the charred wound over her heart, perhaps an inch and a half in diameter, was a fairly good convincer—and, though he’d dropped to his knees and touched her, mostly around the head and face and hair, he hadn’t moved her body at all.

The wound had made him check his beamer, and he’d gone back to the bedroom and done that, taken it out of its holster and read the counter, checked the charge and put it back.

Then he’d called Euglane and come over. He’d taken a cab, being a little afraid of doing his own driving.

“Nothing else?” I said.

“Nothing, until he started to leave. I wish he had cried, then or when he arrived here. He did not.”

“He was dressed when he woke up?”

“Yes. That was usual for his naps. He didn’t even remove shoes, just lay down.”

“All right,” I said. I sighed. “Tell me: why the Hell does he think he might have done this? Somebody got in—he wouldn’t have heard that—killed her and got out.”

“When he called me, he was only distraught over the death. The violence. The loss,” Euglane said. “When he went to the door to leave, he saw that it was not only locked, but chained from the inside. He took a minute or so then, to check the windows. He’s fully air-conditioned, and the windows were shut and locked; some are sealed shut, and none were open or readily openable. None had been broken.”

“Wonderful,” I said. “We have a classic locked room.”

“If Harris did not himself commit the crime.”

“Just possibly, even if he did,” I said. “If he sleepwalked— he’d have to get rid of the beamer simply. Unchaining the door, say, and chaining it up again, anything like that—would that have been too complex a job for him?”

Euglane thought for a minute, his arms twining. “I’m not sure,” he said.

“So either the beamer is somewhere in the house—or he managed to get it out while sleepwalking—or somebody else got in and out like a ghost. Or, of course,” I added, “like an alien being.”

Euglane nodded. “Just so,” he said.