Читать книгу The Counterfeit Heinlein - Laurence M. Janifer - Страница 7

CHAPTER FOUR

The robbery had taken place, as all good robberies should, at dark of night. The thief or thieves (and there was a general consensus that there’d been a small crew) had somehow a) managed to get across the grounds of the building, not easy because the place was sub-electronically guarded—a pulsating field (a look every twentieth of a second) from three feet below ground to six feet above—and b) managed to get through into the room where the manuscript had been on display, and remove it. The thing had still been on display—the forgery wasn’t quite public knowledge, though not hard to find out about, and the forged manuscript was to have been removed and stored under Curiosae two days later.

Getting into the room had been quite a trick. The windows were locked from the inside (real and very old-fashioned window-locks, late-Twentieth in style but newly made of real metals). There was a Berigot perch nearby, but what difference it made nobody could see, since, if you somehow managed to get to it and onto it from the ground, you were still looking at the locked windows. Nothing had been broken. There were no fingerprints, no meaningful residual heat-spots, on the windows themselves. There were residual heat-spots on the inner sills, and on the floor leading to the case—as good as footprints, and showing two or just possibly three human people, the small crew already mentioned—and the case itself had been wiped clean of everything including heat by an alcohol mixture. The locks on the case showed signs of tampering.

I asked B’russ’r: “Now, why would you expect someone to have noticed?”

“Even late at night,” he said, “there are Berigot in flight. We enjoy to fly, and require the exercise. There were none on this side of the building—we will have to see about arranging our exercise flights with more care.”

“Not your fault,” I said. B’russ’r nodded.

“I know that, Knave,” he said. “It is not fault I consider. But someone should have noticed.” He did what Berigot think of as a disapproving motion; both small arms twitched forward under the webbing. “There must have been noise, even if faint. The alarm should have gone off.”

“Apparently not,” I said. “These three, or however many, slipped through the alarm like ghosts. Through the window, too. Not a trace anywhere.”

“And the case showed signs of tampering,” he said. He swallowed twice. The cigarette was gone. Mine had long been ash and a small red remainder, in the glassex ashtray. “No trace at the window. Definite traces at the case. Does this dichotomy suggest anything to you?

I shrugged. “Insanity, possibly. Little else.”

“Nor to me,” he said. “But it must mean something. It is too odd to be meaningless.”

I thought about lighting a second cigarette, out of sheer frustration, and decided I didn’t want to see B’russ’r consume another one. “You have good instincts,” I said.

He smiled again. “They are not instincts,” he said. “They are consequences of information upload.”

“Whatever you say,” I told him, wondering idly what such a thing meant. Deduction from known facts? Echoes of gigabytes in the nervous system? “I’ll need you to talk to some other people, by the way. Within a day or so.”

B’russ’r nodded and smiled. “Of course,” he said. “Master Higsbee, and I should think little Robbin Tress.”

I stared at him. Those names were notions in my head, and nowhere else. I had mentioned neither of them to Ping, or to anyone else. I had seen I would need help with this job, and I’d thought of asking the Master and Robbin. Only thought of it.

Berigot were not, as far as was known, telepathic. It would be the Hell of a secret for them to keep.

“How do you arrive at those names?” I said after several silent seconds.

One more smile. A friendly smile. “A consequence of information upload,” B’russ’r said. “I know of you—an amount about you. I know of many people on Ravenal. I said to myself: other people? The choices seemed predictable. It took me some time.”

His response had been instantaneous. “I am impressed,” I said. I swallowed. Hard. “You will talk to them?”

“Of course,” B’russ’r said, and positively beamed at me. “Who knows what I may learn from actually meeting them?”

God knows I didn’t. I said my farewells—Berigot don’t shake hands, and it is better so, but we hissed politely at each other, and tilted heads in opposite directions—he left, I right.

After that I went to see the police, who were much less unsettling.