All My Sins Remembered

  Crowell walked around for an hour or so, examining every useless detail. At the other end of the warehouse he came to an open door. Since it’s open, he thought, there can’t be anything worth hiding inside. But he went in to check.

  There was a wide trough along one wall. It proved to be filled with a mixture of sand and sawdust, probably from the native ironwood. The opposite wall was stacked high with plastic bags filled with the same substance. At the end of the room were a sink and a couple of large buckets. A shelf above the sink held several cans the size of half-liter paint cans. Evidently this was the place where they prepared the substance that kept the natives from slipping on the wet mine floors.

  He inspected the sink and it was just a dirty sink. The cans above had been inexpertly lettered ANTISEPTIC. He picked one up and shook it: it was about three-quarters full of some powder. He flashed the light on the bottom and top, and on the top was a faint legend saying BISMUTH NITRATE CRYSTALS C.P. ½ K.G.

  Crowell almost dropped the can in surprise. Evidently the original label had been eradicated, but a trace of it was visible in ultraviolet. He replaced the can and sat back against the sink. This accounted for the natives’ shortened life-span, and for the frantic activity in the mine; bismuth was a powerful stimulant and euphoric for them, as well as a cumulative poison. They must absorb it through their feet as they worked.

  Now who would be responsible? The workers who mixed the bismuth nitrate into the sand-sawdust mixture probably didn’t know what was going on; otherwise why not just leave the cans blank? Were the cans altered before they were shipped in? That seemed likely, since everybody seemed to know about the bismuth theory. Better have a talk with Jonathon Lyndham, new Chief of Imports.

  Outside it was just as dark as it had been when Crowell had first broken into the warehouse. He snapped the padlock and gratefully stripped the thin plastic gloves off his hands.

  There was an almost inaudible click behind Crowell and to his left. The Crowell-mind reacted even before the Otto-mind could think “safety switch,” and Crowell rolled into a ditch on the side of the road. He was blinded as his nightglasses fell off, but looking up he could see a bright red pencil of light fan the road at waist level and flicker out. By then he had slid a miniature air pistol out of its pocket holster. He aimed at where the fading retinal afterimage showed the scarlet dot of a laser muzzle, and squeezed off four silent shots in rapid succession. He heard at least three of them ricochet from the warehouse wall, then the shuffle of a man running away.

  Precious seconds finding the nightglasses, another second to sort out the images and see the man running, nearly a block away. Extreme range for this little popgun; Crowell aimed very high, fired and missed, fired and missed, and on the third try the man stumbled to the ground, but then staggered back to his feet and continued running, holding his arm. He still had the laser pistol in his hand, but didn’t seem disposed to use it. Good thing, Otto thought; if the man were a professional he would have figured out how lightly armed Crowell was—and would have just flattened down at that extreme range and given Crowell a leisurely roasting.

  He studied the rapidly dwindling figure. Nobody he recognized. Neither especially fat nor thin nor tall nor short. Crowell had to admit that he probably wouldn’t know the man the next time he saw him. Unless he had that arm in a sling or cast, which wasn’t unlikely.

  As soon as Crowell stepped into his billet, the radiophone started buzzing. He stood beside it for several seconds; then, with a mental shrug, he picked up the transceiver.

  “Crowell here.”

  “Isaac? Where have you been at this hour? This is Waldo—I’ve been trying to get you since three.”

  “Oh, I woke up and couldn’t get back to sleep… so I took a little walk to tire myself out.”

  “Well, I… look, pardon me for calling so late, but… that sample you gave me—some of the cells in it are still alive!”

  “Still alive? From a two-hundred-year-old mummy?”

  “And undergoing mitosis—you know what mitosis is?”

  “Cells dividing, yeah, chromosomes…”

  “It was just a coincidence—I had the incubator stage on the microscope, that helped; I just put the sample in there rather than go through the rigamarole of changing to a regular stage. There was an interesting cell, a big nerve cell, that had evidently died in the middle of the anaphase—of mitosis, that is… I looked at it for a minute and then went off to get a beer, got sidetracked by some maintenance I had to do on the spectrometer—anyhow, I got back to the microscope a couple of hours later, and that same nerve cell was in a different part of the anaphase! Those cells are growing and dividing, but at a rate that must be several hundred times slower than normal Bruuchian cells.”

  “That’s incredible!”

  “It’s more than incredible—it’s impossible! I don’t know, Isaac. I’m a generalist, just an overeducated veterinarian. We need a couple of real biologists—and we’ll have them, too, dozens of them, as soon as the word gets out. Suspended animation, that’s what it adds up to. Why, I wouldn’t be surprised if those Bruuchians had a hundred people studying them a year from now.”

  “You’re probably right.” For the first time, Crowell wondered who might be listening in.

  10.

  “Glad you could make it, Isaac.” Dr. Norman’s handshake was unusually firm.

  “Couldn’t pass up a chance to beat you again after all these years, Willy.”

  “Ha—believe I was four wins ahead when you left. Match you for white.” Willy removed the tray with his dishes from the chess table.

  “No, Willy, you go first. Out of consideration for your youth and inexperience.”

  The doctor laughed. “Pawn to King—4 and I’ll fix you a drink.”

  Crowell pulled a chair over to the chessboard and set up the men, making Willy’s first move for him. He looked at the pieces for a second and started his own opening game. “Have you talked to Waldo today?”

  “Oh yes, the mummy thing. Quite fantastic. He was most secretive as to how he came upon a sample, though. I can just see Waldo skulking into one of those huts with his dissecting kit.”

  Dr. Norman set a drink down beside Crowell and took the chair opposite him. “I don’t suppose you had anything to do with it, Isaac?”

  “Well,” Crowell said cautiously, “I’m pretty sure how he got the sample. But, as you say, it’s a deep dark secret right now.”

  “This world is full of secrets.” The doctor made his second move.

  Crowell responded almost instinctively, a stock opening.

  “A Ruy Lopez, Isaac? You’re getting conservative in your old age. Your opening game used to be quite unpredictable.”

  “And you used to be four wins ahead.”

  The game went on for about an hour, with neither man saying much. Isaac was ahead in both position and strength when Dr. Norman looked up and said, “Who are you?”

  “What did you say, Willy?”

  The doctor took a piece of paper out of his pocket, unfolded it, and tossed it into the middle of the board. “If you were Isaac Crowell, you’d be dying or dead, on Gravitol. And don’t tell me you aren’t on it—Pandroxin gives a yellowish cast to the skin. You don’t have it. Besides, your chess style is wrong: good, but all wrong. Isaac never knew how to play position.”

  Crowell finished off his drink, mostly melted ice, and leaned back in the chair. He stuck his right hand in his pocket and aimed the pistol under the table at the doctor’s abdomen. “My name is Otto McGavin. I’m an agent for the Confederación. But please continue to call me Isaac—I’m more Crowell than McGavin in this persona.”

  The doctor nodded. “And you’ve done a very good job. Much more convincing than those other two—that is why you came here, isn’t it, to investigate their disappearance?”

  “Investigate their deaths. Every agent has a monitor implanted in his heart; they stopped broadcasting.”

  “Well, needless to say, your secr
et’s safe with me.”

  “You shouldn’t be burdened with it too much longer. I expect to have things out in the open within a day or two. Down to business, now—” Crowell moved a knight and said, “Mate in three.”

  “Yes, I saw that coming.” Willy smiled. “I was hoping to distract you.”

  “Doctor, I think you missed your calling.” Otto relaxed a little. “I was wondering how to ask you this without arousing suspicion… have you treated any gunshot wounds lately?”

  “What! Why?”

  “Somebody tried to ambush me last night. I shot him.”

  “My God… in the arm, was it?”

  Crowell took out his pistol, opened the magazine, and let one of the small pellets roll onto the chessboard. “A wound in the right arm, this size projectile.”

  Dr. Norman rolled the pellet between his thumb and forefinger. “Yes, it was this small. The very devil to get out, too. And the wound was in the right arm.” He took a deep breath. “Early this morning, Ambassador Fitz-Jones and Superintendent Kindle woke me up to take a pellet out of Kindle’s arm. They said they had been up drinking and decided to try some target practice in the ambassador’s back yard. Fitz-Jones had accidentally shot Kindle; he was most apologetic. They both reeked of wine, but acted quite sober. Kindle was in some pain; it looked as if they had tried to get the pellet out themselves. But it was too deep.”

  “Kindle—I’ve never met him.”

  “It seems you did meet him, last night. It’s hard to believe. He seems such a meek fellow.”

  “You might as well know the whole story. If anything happens to me, try to get word to Confederacion authorities.

  “Some group of persons, including but not necessarily limited to the ambassador and the superintendent, is systematically poisoning the Bruuchians who work in the mines. The only motivation I can see is that it makes them work harder; increases profits.

  “Say, Kindle owns a large part of the Company, doesn’t he? I wonder whether Fitz-Jones also has an interest.”

  “I don’t know,” Dr. Norman said. “He claims to be independently wealthy. I can see that he might well be investing in the Company, though. Profits have quadrupled in the past few years. Why, I’ve been thinking of investing, myself, as a retirement income.”

  “Maybe you better not. Profits will be going down pretty soon.”

  “I suppose. Well, it is a horrible thing, even though I don’t much care for the little boogers myself. What can I do to help?”

  “I’ve got to use subspace radio. The only two on the planet are the superintendent’s and the ambassador’s. If you can get one of them here for an hour or so, I’ll be able to call in the arrest and get authority to confine them.”

  “That’ll be easy enough. Fitz-Jones and I have to fill out an accident report and take it to the Company clerk for witnessing. I told him to come by at around three this afternoon; it’ll take more than an hour.”

  “You couldn’t get Kindle to come up too, could you?”

  “Afraid not. I’ve already confined him to quarters—wouldn’t do to erode my authority in these matters by telling him to come over for a chat… but you’re in no danger from him. I had to make a deep incision in his right triceps; he’s going to be either doped up or in considerable pain for at least a week.”

  “Can’t say that I have too much sympathy for him. Well, then, I’ll pay a visit to the ambassadorial residence at about three o’clock. Here, take this.” Crowell handed the pistol to Dr. Norman. “I’m afraid I’ve set you up as a secondary target.”

  Dr. Norman turned the little weapon over on his palm. “Won’t you be needing this thing more than I?”

  “No, I’m going to pick up some heavier artillery. Kindle had a laser pistol last night; if he’d known what he was doing, he could have fried me with no trouble.”

  “Well, I’ll certainly keep it. But I’ve never fired a gun in my life.”

  “Well, be careful; that pistol doesn’t have a safety. Just aim it in the right general direction and start pulling the trigger—it has over a hundred shots left in the magazine.”

  The doctor dropped it into the capacious front pocket of his lab coat. “I hope you get them safely incarcerated before I have to use it.”

  “They should be in the Company jail before dark tonight.”

  11.

  From his billet window Crowell could see the ambassador roll away toward the dispensary. He unplugged the laser pistol and checked the charge on it—more than half full, two minutes of continuous operation, which would be about enough to take on a platoon of infantrymen. He held both the pistol and his burglar’s kit in his right hand, and draped a light jacket over them.

  He set out walking down the street away from the ambassador’s house, then circled around and came up behind the place. There were no buildings to obscure Fitz-Jones’s view of the desert, which rolled in from the horizon to within a few meters of a large picture window.

  Crowell took a crayon from his kit and inscribed a large black circle on the window. The black turned to chalky white and the circle of plastic fell out. With considerable effort he pulled himself up to the hole and through. He swallowed a Gravitol—only one more in his pillbox—and reflected on how good it would be to get his real body back again.

  He checked three rooms before he found the radio, in the study. There was a cover over the sending plate and he cursed aloud when he saw that it had a thumbprint lock on it. It would take hours to open it.

  Nothing for it but to wait until Fitz-Jones returned, and force him to open it. Crowell had an uncharacteristically macabre thought as he felt the weight of the vibroknife in his pocket. He only needed the man’s thumb.

  After wandering around Fitz-Jones’s study for half an hour, learning nothing, Crowell remembered the Chateau de Rothschild. Might as well enjoy the wait. Crowell walked over the thick carpet to the kitchen. He found a glass, stuck the laser in his belt, and tapped the cask of wine.

  “Don’t do anything foolish, Isaac.”

  Otto turned slowly. Mark II Westinghouse antique laser safety off right-hand range three meters set on full dispersion no chance “Why Jonathon. Fancy meeting you here.” Hand shaking but full dispersion can’t miss hasn’t fired yet probably won’t thinkthinkthink…

  “I’m surprised at you, Isaac. Such language I heard you use. But you aren’t really Isaac, are you? Any more than those other two were geologists. You’ll be joining your friends tonight, Isaac. You can talk over old times out in the dustpit.”

  “Shut up!” Another man came into view, his right arm stiff in a tractor cast. “Give me that gun.” He took it in his left hand. Otto noted that he was trembling even more than the other, but it was pain, and probably anger, rather than nervousness. “Now go disarm him.”

  Kill him use body as shield would work one gee Otto-body but Crowell-body too slow too big… Jonathon plucked the gun from his belt and hopped back. “You aren’t as dangerous as Stuart said you would be.”

  “He’s dangerous, all right. But we’ve pulled his fangs. Go on back to your office, Lyndham. Fitz and I’ll finish this job; you’re the only one without any good reason for being here.”

  Jonathon went out the front door. “Well, Mr. McGavin—I suppose you find this rather embarrassing, to be held at bay by a ‘meek fellow’ like me.

  “Yes, we heard your whole conversation this morning—Dr. Norman’s radiophone really doesn’t work too well, and neither does Dr. Struckheimer’s; they broadcast all the time, straight into a recorder in my office.” He motioned with the gun. “Come sit in the living room, Mr. McGavin. By all means bring your wine. I d love to join you, but my good hand is full—that should make it even easier to kill you when the time comes.”

  Crowell sat in the old-fashioned chair and wondered when the time would come. “You can’t actually think you can keep getting away with this.”

  “It’s a big dustpit, the biggest. I’m afraid Doctors Norman and Struckheimer will be foll
owing you into it, too. We can’t afford to have dozens of specialists prying around.”

  Crowell shook his head. “If I don’t report, you’re going to have to contend with more than a handful of scientists. A battle cruiser will land in your port and put the whole Goddamn planet under arrest.”

  “Strange they didn’t do it when the first two agents disappeared. That’s a pretty clumsy bluff, McGavin.”

  “Those two good men were agents, Mr. Kindle, but just agents. I’m a prime operator, one of twelve such. You can ask Fitz-Jones what that means when he gets back.”

  “You may not be alive when he gets back. He didn’t want to kill you here, because that would entail dragging your body over nearly a kilometer of desert. But it occurs to me that we could make more than one trip.”

  “A grisly alternative. Do you actually think you could cut up a man as if he were a side of beef? Very messy.”

  “I’m desperate…”

  “Whatever are you two talking about?” Fitz-Jones came in through the hall entrance. “I saw Jonathon on the way here. I thought he was supposed to wait with you until I got back.”

  “I was afraid he’d do something stupid, so I told him to go on. Never did feel I could trust the man very much.”

  “You may be right. But I didn’t want to leave you alone with this expert murderer.”

  “Hasn’t murdered me yet. Fitz, he says he’s a prime operator—does that mean anything to you?”

  Fitz-Jones’s eyebrows went up a fraction and he looked at Crowell. “That can’t possibly be true. This planet’s too small to rate a prime operator.”

  “We always send a prime when an agent gets killed,” Crowell said. “No matter how unimportant the case is otherwise.”

  “Possibly,” Fitz-Jones mused, “and if so, I am indeed honored.” He gave a little mocking bow. “But the most expert bridge player would lose if he couldn’t pick up his cards. That’s the position you’re in, sir.”