A Better Mantrap

FROST ANIMALS

The period of weightlessness had been very brief, but its psychological aftermath was profound. Hobart could see and hear the difference in his fellow officers as they moved about the upper deck’s rest room; and within himself he could feel a mixture of emotions – relief, expectation, nostalgia – which were going to make the remaining days of the voyage tedious. There was an irony in that fact, he realized. After weeks of steady deceleration the ship had cut its speed to a level at which the time dilation effect was negligible – but now his impatience to reach home had intervened to slow down subjective time. He was pondering the matter when the tall, angular figure of Harry Stiebel, the day exec, came into the room with a pile of fax sheets curved over his arm.

“Earth is still there, folks,” Stiebel called in a professionally jovial voice. “Still abiding away for all it’s worth. That’s good to know, isn’t it? Hands up everybody who thought the Earth wouldn’t still be there.”

“Why shouldn’t it still be there?” said Os Milburn, the chief systems engineer, who was seated near the door. “Eighteen years without your smart-assing around has probably rejuvenated the place.”

“Have a reorientation kit, lover.” Stiebel threw a fluttering bundle of paper on to Milburn’s lap and began working his way around the room, distributing the sheets with unnecessary vigour and a surprising amount of noise. Hobart watched his progress with affection and respect. Stiebel was completing his fifth trip to the Sirian system, which meant he was more than a hundred years old in Earth chronology, yet he showed no symptoms of dislocation. Thin, square-shouldered, invariably cheerful, he seemed determined to diffuse his normal life span over as many centuries as company regulations and Albert Einstein would allow. It was an ambition of which Hobart stood in awe.

“One for you, Denny,” Stiebel said as he reached Hobart. “See what you’ve been missing.”

“Thanks.” Hobart took the proffered sheaf and began to flick through pages that clung together electrostatically. Switching off the main impulsion torch for two minutes had, as well as giving the crew a warming glimpse of Earth, allowed communication to take place between the ship and the company headquarters in Montana, and the reorientation kits were part of the result. Their contents – fired through in a ten-second information bleep – were intended to familiarize the returning starmen with the major changes that had taken place during their absence. This was Hobart’s first voyage and as he glanced over the section headings on politics, world events, fashion, science, and sport, he tried to come to terms with the knowledge that in the past thirteen months of his own life the world and everybody in it had grown older by eighteen years. I’ve done it, he thought, bemusedly and proudly. I’ve travelled in space, and I’ve travelled in time…

“Before you delve in there and start checking on skirt lengths…” Stiebel paused long enough on his rounds to tap Hobart’s shoulder, “take a walk into George’s office, will you? He wants to see you about some little thing.”

“George wants to see me?” Hobart looked up at Stiebel in open surprise. As the most junior officer in the entire ship’s complement, he had been assigned a number of routine tasks, most of which were connected with monitoring erosion of the hull. There had been little enough actual work for him to do during the two acceleration phases of the voyage, and during retardation – when the ship was shielded against collisions with interstellar material by its own drive torch – there had been virtually no work at all. In any case, at no stage in the journey would Hobart have expected an individual summons from Captain George A. Mercier, commander of the Langer Willow.

“What do you think George wants?” he said to Stiebel. “Did he say anything?”

For a reply, Stiebel stared at him with slightly raised eyebrows then passed on his way, performing a menial administrative duty with gusto and an air of importance, the picture of the corporate space traveller. Hoping the exchange had not been overheard, Hobart stood up and glanced around him. He was a tall man with silver-blond hair and exceptionally clear skin, and he had always found it difficult to do things without being noticed. Several of the ship’s senior technical staff were watching him with amused expressions. There was no personal malice in their attitude, but he knew they were of a breed that firmly believed in the value of making life as irksome and embarrassing as possible for junior officers. Even if it were traditional at this stage of a trip for the captain to give a new man a drink and a clap on the back, nobody would have helped him by divulging the information in advance. Hobart nodded to the onlookers, left the rest room, and made his way along narrow corridors to the compartment Mercier used for office work and rare conferences. He tapped the door and immediately was told to enter.

“Sit down, Hobart,” Mercier said, indicating a chair opposite the desk at which he was seated.

“Thank you, sir.” Hobart lowered himself into the chair, noting as he did so that there was nobody else in attendance and that Mercier’s desk was almost completely clear, as if the captain had come to the room for no reason other than the present interview. Hobart gazed at Mercier, wondering if such a thing could be possible. The captain was a strongly built man of about fifty, with conservative good looks which, had he been an actor, would have typecast him as a judge or an insurance company president. He examined Hobart with frankly puzzled blue eyes and then, unexpectedly and uncharacteristically, gave a deep sigh.

Hobart shifted in his seat. “Sir?”

Mercier seemed to reach a decision. “I contacted you through the day executive, rather than the general address system, because there’s something going on here that I fail to understand, and I want to deal with it as discreetly as possible. Do you remember a junior technical officer called Craven? Wolf Craven?”

“Yes, sir.” Hobart suppressed his uneasiness. The sudden mention of Craven’s name had aroused feelings of guilt, but they were associated with a personal matter, one which could hardly concern his professional life. “I know him quite well.”

“Were you friendly with him?”

“I wouldn’t put it as strongly as that – we just happened to be in the same intake at Langer Centre and went through our pre-ops course at the same time.”

Mercier looked dissatisfied, the overhead light accentuating ridges in his forehead. “Have you ever been to any parties at Colonel Langer’s house?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Was Craven at the same parties?”

“Yes, but…’ Hobart developed a conviction that somehow, against all the odds, the private degradation he had experienced with Wolf Craven on that last night on Earth was leading to unforeseen consequences. “Excuse me, sir – am I entitled to know what this is all about?”

“I never went to any functions at the Langer place,” Mercier said reflectively. “Made a point of staying away from that sort of thing. Even in the old days.”

Hobart was reminded of the fact that, as a veteran starman, Captain Mercier had a memory which reached far back into the previous century. It was an incomplete memory, a thinly dotted line composed of months-long periods on Earth interspersed with decades in the relativistic limbo of the space traveller, but the span was there and it made Mercier different. Although the captain had lived some fifty years of body time, little more than twice as much as Hobart, he had a trick – possibly cultivated – of occasionally appearing to commune with eternity. In spite of his growing sense of alarm, Hobart was constrained to withhold his questions.

“I believe there was a party the night before this voyage began,” Mercier said at length. “And that both you and Craven were present.”

“Yes, but lots of company personnel were there.” Hobart began to wonder if he was making a mistake in going on the defensive before any charge had been made against him, but he pressed on. “We were leaving the next day, and the Langer Rowan – that’s Wolf Craven’s ship – was going out the day after that. It was” – he sought a form of words that might impress the captain – “a fairly significant social occasion.”

“You didn’t speak to Craven at all?”

“Well, I’m bound to have spoken to him at some time, at some stage.” Hobart tried to fend off an intrusive memory of Craven’s dark and cleft-chinned face, the too-red lips lacquered with saliva, the eyes pleading and derisive at the same time. “Sir, I’d like to know what’s going on.”

“So would I, Hobart, so would I.” Mercier paused again, brooding. “We entered the Solar System near the top end of our speed envelope, which is why we had to resume deceleration so soon after the confirmation report. There was only a minute or so, less the allowance for distance lag, for verbal communication – and I could have used that time in more productive ways than talking to the police.”

“The police?” Hobart was both surprised and reassured, knowing there were no criminal activities on his conscience. He made a show of relaxing visibly.

“Yes – the police. This is a serious matter, Hobart.”

“I can’t think why the…”

“They seem to be of the opinion that Wolf Craven was murdered during your fairly significant social occasion.” Mercier paused again, giving Hobart’s own phrase time to rebound on him. “And, from what was said, you appear to be the chief suspect.”

Hobart suddenly became aware that the structure of the ship was alive, that stress patterns and subtle harmonics were coursing through the walls of the room, agitating the air which surrounded him. He could hear it whispering in his ears.

“That’s ridiculous,” he said forcibly, then secondary implications came to his mind. “Is Wolf Craven really dead?”

“I presume the police wouldn’t be talking about murder otherwise.”

“But I know nothing about it.”

“You’d better not,” Mercier said gravely. “You know my way of going by this time, Hobart – if you’re innocent I’ll back you all the way, and you’ll get the same support I’d give to the most senior member of my crew, but if it turns out that you really are involved you’ll find me a bigger enemy than the public prosecutor. The company can’t afford this sort of thing.”

“The company can’t afford it!” A lowering of the captain’s brow told Hobart he was failing to show proper deference, but such considerations no longer seemed important. “Look, I’m entitled to know exactly what was said.”

“I’ve already told you more than I should,” Mercier replied, eyeing Hobart with fresh appraisal, as though suspecting that insolence in a junior officer could point to a capacity for more serious faults.

Hobart shook his head. “Exactly what did the police say?”

“First they checked that you were still alive and on the ship’s roster, then they requested me to put you in detention until we go into parking orbit.”

“Detention?” The atmospheric whispering in Hobart’s ears grew louder and more malicious. “Are you going to do it?”

“I’m obliged to.” Mercier pressed a call button on his desk. “It will be done discreetly, of course. All I expect of you is that you will remain in your quarters until the parking manoeuvres are completed. I’m not proposing to put a guard on you.”

“Thank you, sir,” Hobart said bitterly. “Will I be hand-cuffed to the shuttle?”

“You’ll no longer be my responsibility at that stage.” The puzzled look returned to Mercier’s eyes as he got to his feet, terminating the interview. “I don’t know what you’ve got yourself involved with, Hobart – but the police are going to the expense of sending up a transit vehicle just to take you off my hands.”

Investigator Charles Shimming was a medium-sized, fit-looking man with a long face and intelligent, worried eyes. During conversation he had a habit of lowering his chin on to his chest, as though suppressing a series of belches, but continuing to speak anyway. This had the effect of making every utterance sound weighty and deliberate, if somewhat disjointed. It also had the effect of irritating Hobart, who wanted his information delivered quickly and clearly.

“There are two ways we can handle this thing,” Shimming said in the privacy of Hobart’s room. “If you are reasonable and cooperative I won’t even have to place you under arrest, and we can walk – or should I say float? – out of here like two friends going off somewhere to have a couple of beers. I think that would be the best way to do it, but if you didn’t want to be reasonable and cooperative I could hit you with a spider, in which case…”

“Hit me with a what?” Hobart scrutinized the policeman’s neat frame, looking for weapons.

“I forgot you’ve been away eighteen years.” Shimming opened his right hand, revealing what looked like a silver golf ball. “This is a spider. If I threw it at you it would explode on contact and wrap you up in metal ribbons – same way some spiders truss up flies. It wouldn’t hurt, but you’d have to be carried off the ship all done up like a Thanksgiving turkey, and it would be bloody undignified. It would be really embarrassing for you.”

“I see. Thanks for bringing me up to date.” Hobart pretended not to notice the threat which had been implicit in the description of the restraint system. “I would have cooperated with you anyway.”

“That’s good.” Shimming made no move to put the silver ball away. “Shall we go?”

“Don’t I get to hear what this is all about?”

“Not now, not in here – it wouldn’t be considerate.”

“Considerate?”

“Yes. The ship has to remain officially sealed until I get you off, and it wouldn’t be fair to all the others if we caused unnecessary delays. They must be pretty anxious to get their feet back on the ground after all this time.”

“Okay.” Unable to shake off a feeling he was being manipulated, Hobart detached his holdall from the spring clip which prevented it from drifting about the room. He glanced around the tiny compartment, scarcely able to believe he would not be spending the night in its familiar confines, and moved out into the corridor. It was a long time since he had walked in zero-gravity conditions with the aid of suction soles, and at first he swayed grotesquely as he made his way towards the transfer port. Shimming laboured along behind him, obviously ill at ease, allowing too much suction to build up under his shoes and having to struggle to lift his feet clear of the deck. His progress was punctuated by popping noises and occasional bursts of subdued swearing.

The pilot was already waiting in the blue-and-grey police transit vehicle, which looked strangely unreal against the background of powdery green that was the Langer Line’s house colour. The vehicle was smaller than the company transits, too, making the cylindrical transfer port seem exceptionally roomy. Aware of the curious stares of the lock technicians in the control chamber, Hobart climbed aboard the shuttle and strapped himself into a deep chair in the midsection passenger compartment. When he looked out through the transparencies at his side he found he was now on a level with the lock crew, all of whom were gazing back at him with undisguised interest. Hobart’s cheeks began to tingle. Suddenly angry, he turned to Shimming, who was hauling himself down into the next seat.

“This is an imposition,” he said. “It’s too much! I ought to have a lawyer here.”

Shimming frowned at the buckle on his seat belt. “You’re not being denied access to a lawyer – but think of the expense of bringing one up here. And the delay.”

“The company should take care of the expense – they’re supposed to look after contract officers. I should have spoken to Colonel Langer.”

Shimming looked up from the buckle, which he seemed to find as tricky as a Chinese puzzle, and an odd expression appeared briefly on his long face. “How in hell do these things go together?”

“Like that.” Hobart slid the metal connectors home across the other man’s stomach. He thought about the reaction his mention of Colonel Langer had produced, and it crossed his mind that he might benefit by showing he had friends in high places.

“Yes,” he said reflectively, striving for maximum effect, “I should have spoken to the colonel. I’ll call him as soon as we touch down.”

“You’ll be wasting your time,” Shimming said. “Colonel Langer died four years ago.”

“But that’s im – ” Hobart broke off in the middle of the word, gagging on his first real taste of what space travellers called timeslip. As far as he was concerned, he had been away on a voyage lasting thirteen months – but during that period a total of eighteen years had elapsed on Earth, and the effect of those years was real. No longer was it an abstract idea in Hobart’s mind, a textbook paradox to be marvelled at and dismissed from his thoughts. His world had run the gamut of eighteen winters, been warmed by eighteen summers, and there had been lots of time for old men to grow older still, and then to die…

“…how you guys do it,” Shimming was saying. “Skipping ten or twenty years at a time would cut the feet out from under me – I’d be lost, if you know what I mean – but you just take it in your stride, calm as you like. Something I really admire, that.”

“How did the colonel die?”

“Some say it was bourbon, some say it was gin.”

“I’m sorry to hear about that,” Hobart said, deciding to pursue his original intent. “He was a good friend.”

Shimming snorted. “Some friend!”

“What do you mean?”

Shimming placed his finger tips together and lowered his chin to his chest a couple of times as a preliminary to speaking. “It would be best for you, Dennis, if you didn’t try to palm off some story about you and old man Langer belonging to the same social set, playing polo together, and that sort of thing. You were one of the bunch of young rams that Mrs Langer used to invite up to the house to keep her amused, and I doubt if the colonel ever did more than say hello and good-bye to you. Am I right?”

“Certainly not,” Hobart snapped, appalled. “Colonel Langer invited me to his place personally, several times, and although we weren’t all that close we had a good…”

“Dennis,” Shimming cut in, smiling apologetically, “it was Langer who started this whole thing off. He was the one who said you killed Craven.”

Hobart was unable to prevent his jaw from sagging as a partial understanding of his predicament seared itself into his mind like a spark tracing a message on chemically treated paper. The colonel must have known what Wolf and I did, he thought in sudden panic. He must have seen us, or been told – and this is his revenge.

He became aware that Investigator Shimming was scanning his face with eyes as intent as those of a gambler watching the wheels of a chance machine shudder to a halt, and it came to him that he needed to protect himself. No doubt Shimming was highly skilled at reading expressions and interpreting instinctive verbal responses – so what was he to say in his own defence?

He composed his features with an effort and retreated into youthful pomposity. “This is too ridiculous for words.”

“That’s unfortunate, because words are the only tools I can use,” Shimming replied. “There’s nothing…” He stopped speaking and glanced around him as the shuttle’s doors sprang together with a pneumatic gasp. There was a diminishing hiss as the transfer dock was bled of air, and a few seconds later the outer door slid open to reveal the blackness of space. Because of the brightness within the dock the stars appeared sparse and dim. The shuttle wallowed slightly as the berthing clamps were released. Manoeuvring jets sounded faintly and the vehicle began to slide out into a boundless ocean of emptiness, forsaking the homely environment of beams, panels and pipe runs for one in which the mind was lost for visual anchors.

Shimming gave a wan smile, and Hobart realized the investigator was highly nervous. He repressed the sympathetic grimace with which he would normally have reassured anyone who was new to space and stared straight ahead, trying to assess the likelihood of his ending up in the death chamber. A chill descended over him as he considered the proposition that his life might terminate on Earth in a few months’ time, in the year 2131, instead of at some vague and postponable date centuries ahead.

The transit vehicle was moving clear of the immense bulk of the Langer Willow now, and the sunlit Earth came into view, looking huge and mysterious as it curved away on all sides, comprising almost half of the visible universe. Powerful jets began to hammer up front, reducing the transit’s orbital speed and putting it into a controlled fall. Hobart watched the milky blue immensities tilt and turn, dismayed at the contrast between actuality and his imagined homecoming at the end of his first voyage. The only crumb of comfort he could find was that Shimming was too overawed and wrapped up in space tyro’s misgivings to continue the interrogation for the present. He had time to get his thoughts in order…

Colonel Langer’s age and failing health had forced him to give up active participation in space flight, but he had liked the company of junior officers who, because of their lowly positions, made an ideal captive audience for his reminiscing. For the most part he had kept himself occupied with his menagerie of frost animals, but there had been days when that pursuit had proved too passive and he had turned to other pastimes. One of them had been going into the strip of rough terrain at the rear of his estate to blast at snakes with antique firearms. Hobart, who had listed shooting as one of his interests, had been brought along mainly as gun-bearer on a number of the mini-expeditions.

The farewell party at the Langer house had been a rambling, multicentred affair which he had attended for a number of ill-defined reasons. He had been flattered at receiving the invitation from Colonel Langer, and inexperienced enough to entertain hopes that it could bode well for his future in the company; he had been lonely and scared on the eve of the departure for Sirius; and, underlying and colouring all other considerations, had been the possibility of sexual adventure.

The fables about Dorcie Langer had inflamed Hobart’s imagination, filling him with a curious blend of contempt and yearning. He had scarcely dared meet her gaze during his previous visits to the house, and yet he had nourished a conviction – one he would not have voiced – that she had been specially aware of him, that she had singled him out as a prospect. For an unworldly and slightly repressed youngster of twenty-two, those ambiguous glances had been sufficient to trigger off lurid fantasies – none of which had correctly anticipated the event. Even after a lapse of thirteen months, he could remember the exact words with which Wolf Craven had greeted him in an upstairs corridor at the rear of the house.

“I don’t know how you did it, young Denny, but you’ve connected with our good lady – she sent me to get you.”

The peremptory nature of the summons had shaken Hobart, as had the use of Craven as a messenger, but his initial shock had been swamped by the discovery of what Dorcie Langer had in mind for him.

“Come on, Denny,” Craven had pleaded, sinking his fingers into each of Hobart’s biceps. “I’m not going to let you blow this out on me, not after I’ve worked on her for weeks. What does it matter if she wants both of us at once? Don’t be such a kid, for Christ’s sake – it all adds to the fun.”

“Fun,” Hobart heard himself muttering as the shuttle began to sway, to come alive as it dipped into the tenuous upper layers of the Earth’s atmosphere.

Shimming leaned closer. “What was that?”

“Nothing,” Hobart said, shaking his head, wresting his mind away from the recurrent vision of three bodies twined together, straining, sweating, labouring; of the languorous opening and closing of the woman’s mouth; of Craven’s eyes, watchful and derisive. The subsequent events were what he had to think about and try to understand, because in them lay the source of his present danger. Hobart reviewed the rest of the fateful night and found he had nothing to work on, no memories of incidents which through hindsight had acquired new significance. The trouble was that he simply did not have enough information – while appearing to be friendly and communicative Investigator Shimming had, in fact, told him very little.

For the remainder of the brief flight Hobart forced himself to relax into his seat, trying to synthesize the feelings of pleasure and nostalgia he should have experienced on seeing familiar green horizons arise to enfold him.

It was early in the afternoon when the shuttle dropped solidly on to a runway at Langer Field. Instead of rolling the vehicle into one of the company’s operations bays, the pilot swung south and taxied into the section which the city of Corona Falls rented for use as an airport. They came to a halt beside a police car which was parked at a discreet distance from the passenger terminal and the doors swung open even before the turbines had growled into silence. Hobart had time for one glimpse of sharply etched snowy peaks far beyond a line of curved hangar roofs, then he was in the rear seat of the car beside Shimming, and the airport gates were looming ahead. The uniformed driver, without speaking or being spoken to, accelerated towards the city and in a few minutes they were entering the suburbs.

Hobart studied the procession of store fronts and small business premises, backed here and there by dwellings and tree-shaded streets, looking for signs of change. He had only a sketchy knowledge of Corona Falls, acquired during his period of training at the Langer Centre, and to him the lapse of eighteen years had created no striking differences in the place. Even the automobiles seemed very much as he remembered them, the designers having long ago surrendered to the dictates of aerodynamic efficiency. He strove to reorient himself as they neared the city centre, but the car abruptly swerved down a ramp and stopped in an underground parking area. Shimming escorted him from the car to an elevator, through a warren of corridors, and suddenly the two men were alone in a windowless office whose walls were painted the indeterminate green favoured by bureaucrats everywhere. The furniture consisted of a desk and four upright chairs. Hobart felt as though he had been cornered and driven into a pen.

“You’ll have to advise me what to do next,” he said firmly. “How do I contact a lawyer?”

Shimming sat down at the desk. “I told you there’s no need for that, Dennis. You’re not under arrest.”

“It feels like it.”

“I hustled you down here in case there’d be any embarrassment with reporters.”

“Reporters?” Hobart selected a chair and sat down. “I didn’t think there’d be…”

“Local TV, radio, and the Corona Falls Chronicle,” Shimming said. “The Langers have controlling interests in the lot. Old man Langer died about four years ago, but this is still very much his show.”

“But why did he start gunning for me?” Hobart examined his hands as he spoke, knowing the answer to his own question.

“That’s what I want to find out. I’ve just had this case dumped in my lap, long after the whole thing has gone cold, but I’ll sort it out even if I have to read microrecords in bed.” Shimming continued ducking his chin, suppressing belches.

“The Langer Line is the principal employer in this area, and the city couldn’t get on very well without it, but I’m damned if I’m going to be used as an instrument for settling any of the Langers’ personal grievances. Now, if it turned out that Dorcie Langer had given you a grapple or two… and that the colonel had found out… that would incline me to suspect his motives… and it would incline me to backpedal on this investigation.”

“There was nothing like that,” Hobart said heatedly. “I hardly knew either of them.”

Shimming’s lips twitched. “At least we’re getting that much straight. Eh, Dennis?”

Hobart met his gaze squarely. “I demand to know why I’m here. For God’s sake, I don’t even know how Wolf Craven was killed.”

“That’s just the point – neither do I.”

“But the body…”

“We haven’t got a body.”

Hobart shifted in his chair and gave an incredulous laugh. “Then what’s going on? Why did you send a transit vehicle up specially for me?”

“That wasn’t my idea. Somebody upstairs is putting on a bit of a show for the benefit of the Langer board.” Shimming put his elbows on the desk and leaned forward with a look of concern. “Listen, Dennis, think it over carefully before you answer – are you sure there was nothing between you and Mrs Langer?”

Hobart thought about his career ending in a single blaze of sensationalism. “Nothing. Nothing at all.”

“Okay, okay.” Shimming touched a button on the desk. ’I’m going to record the rest of this interview, for your benefit as well as mine. You’ll be given a copy of the tape on request.”

“Suits me.” Hobart crossed his legs, making a show of relaxing. “Perhaps now you’ll tell me why I’m here.”

Shimming nodded. “On the night of May 12, 2113, you – Dennis Hobart – were present at a party in Colonel Nolan Langer’s house on Silverstream Heights. Also present was Wolf B. Craven, a junior engineering officer on a ship of the Langer Lipe. During the course of the party, at approximately midnight, you were seen by a number of witnesses having a heated argument with Craven, following which the two of you withdrew from the rest of the guests. Colonel Langer and other witnesses stated that you returned after approximately one hour, and that you were pale and uncommunicative, as though under mental stress.”

“That’s wrong,” Hobart put in. “That last bit is wrong – I talked to lots of people.”

“None of them remembers it. Anyway, do you admit to having an argument with Craven?”

“Yes, but it was nothing much. He was a bit drunk.”

“What was the argument about?”

“Well, he wanted me to go out to the freezer house at the back and look at Colonel Langer’s collection of frost animals, and I didn’t care for the idea.” Hobart heard the improvisation as though it were coming from a stranger and he felt a pang of unease. Lies, he sensed, should be kept simple and easy to manage.

“Were you afraid of the animals?”

“No – as far as I know they’re harmless. It was just that I had seen them before and wasn’t interested in seeing them again.”

“But you went with Craven anyway?”

“Only part of the way, to humour him. As soon as we got outside in the dark I slipped away from him.”

“What did you do then?”

“I walked in the gardens for about an hour – it was a fine night – then I returned to the house.”

“Was Wolf Craven there?”

“No. Not that I remember.”

“Did you ever see him again?”

“No.” It occurred to Hobart, for the first time, that it was strange that he had not seen Craven during the rest of that night. He had noticed Dorcie Langer more than once – drinking with friends, laughing a lot – but of Craven there had been no sign. Hobart experienced a momentary coldness, small but very real, like a single snowflake dissolving on his skin.

“You’ll be interested to hear that two days after the party Colonel Langer visited the public prosecutor’s office and made a deposition,” Shimming said carefully. “In it he said that he went outside for a short time to check on his frost animals, at about thirty minutes after midnight, and that on his way to the freezer house he overheard you and Craven, still out in the garden, still arguing and apparently having a fist fight.”

That’s wrong,” Hobart countered, shocked. That’s a lie.”

“Why would the colonel have lied?”

“I don’t know.” A bizarre idea – in a way more disconcerting than anything that had yet cropped up – began to stir in the lower levels of Hobart’s consciousness. “Why did he wait two days before going to the police with his story?”

“I’m told he was ill – a touch of arthritis in his arms, something like that.” Shimming looked at Hobart with renewed interest, as though trying to tune in on his thought processes. “Does the delay seem significant to you?”

“If he thought somebody had been killed…”

That idea didn’t get kicked around until it was discovered that Craven was missing – and by that time the Langer Willow had already departed, with you on board, and there’s no way to communicate with a ship on drive.”

“Neat,” Hobart said, nodding, wondering if it would be possible to encourage a certain line of reasoning in Shimming’s mind. “Convenient.”

“Not for the police – we don’t like the eighteen-year delays in our enquiries.”

“I didn’t mean convenient for the police. It seems to me that…” Hobart stopped speaking as Shimming held up one hand in a theatrical gesture of warning and at the same time touched the control button of his unseen recorder. There was a moment of near silence dominated by the hum of the air conditioning and a fizzling noise from the light fitment on the ceiling.

“As you can see, I’m speaking off the record, as a friend,” Shimming said. “It’s to give you a piece of advice.”

“Which is… ?”

“Don’t speculate on the record about who might have killed Wolf Craven.”

“What difference does it make when the colonel’s dead?”

“He has an assortment of brothers, cousins, nieces, and nephews. Old Nolan was something of an embarrassment to the family, especially after he quit playing at exploring and settled down at home, but that only makes them more sensitive than ever about anything connected with him.”

“I see.” Hobart considered the notion that Investigator Shimming might actually be his friend. “Does this mean you think I’m innocent?”

“It means I don’t see how you could have disposed of the body in such a short time. You were on foot that night and you didn’t make use of any of the other guests’ cars. And we searched the whole area very thoroughly.”

“Craven just vanished off the face of the Earth?”

Shimming almost smiled. “We considered that as a literal explanation. The Langer Rowan left the day after your ship, and for a long time we hoped there had been a foul-up in its papers. If Craven had got away to Alpha Centaurus on board it without being properly signed on – as has happened in the past—that would have solved everything. But the Rowan got back two years ago and we established that Craven had never reported for duty.”

The oppressive load began to lift from Hobart’s mind. “But you’re not even sure that Craven is dead?”

“I don’t think he ran away to sea, do you?”

“Anything could have happened to him,” Hobart said, gaining confidence. “Why, he could have decided to quit the party and walk back to the Centre. A drunk driver could have zapped him and taken the body into the next state…”

“Clever theory, that. Not plausible – but clever.” Shimming brandished the index finger of his right hand to indicate he was about to start the recorder again. “Just remember what I said about implicating Colonel Langer.”

He pressed the button. “What were you going to say, Dennis? It seems to you that…”

“It seems to me that, even if you had proof that Wolf Craven had been killed, there’s practically no case against me. Some people saw us arguing, which I admit and have explained. Colonel Langer says he heard me having a fight with Craven in the garden, which I deny. And that’s it!”

“But why, out of twenty or so men who were present that night, did Colonel Langer think it was you he heard with Craven?”

“If he saw us arguing earlier he could have jumped to a wrong conclusion.”

“Thank you, Mr Hobart – I have no more questions for you for the present.” Shimming stopped the recorder once more and sat back, eyeing Hobart with moody satisfaction. ’I was scared up there today. Could you tell?”

“Most people are uneasy first time up,” Hobart said, wondering how soon he would be free to leave.

“I wasn’t uneasy – I was scared stiff.” Shimming paused to make a ruminative movement with his chin. “I could be psychologically marked for life, just so that the commissioner can make a political grandstand play. We could have picked you up at Langer Field and got the same useless piece of tape.”

“Useless?” Hobart spoke with a kind of pleasurable indignation. “You can’t call it useless if it clears up an eighteen-year-old case.”

“Who said the case was cleared up?”

“But you practically…”

Shimming shook his head. “Craven was murdered, all right. I don’t know who, how, or why – but I know he got himself snipped.”

“Look, when can I leave here?” Hobart said, his sense of unease returning in full force.

“Any time you like,” Shimming replied, getting to his feet, ‘but don’t leave the city until you get clearance. And don’t forget to let me know where you’re staying.”

“I imagine I’ll be at the junior officers’ hostel at the Centre.”

“You imagine that, do you?” Shimming gave Hobart a wry look. “I’ll see you around, Dennis.”

The Langer Line personnel manager was called Toby Martyn. He was about thirty years old, but had adopted the dress and mannerisms of a middle-aged man, possibly with the intention of showing the staid and nepotic Langer board that he was director material. His eyes, behind gold-rimmed flakes of glass, were blue and unsympathetic as he selected various slips of paper from his desk and dropped them into an envelope bearing Hobart’s name and citizen number.

“As you are no doubt aware,” he said primly, ‘junior officers are assigned very few duties on their first interstellar voyage. Its main purpose is to determine how well they stand up to the psychological stresses of both the journey itself and the associated calendaric displacement.”

There’s no such word as calendaric, you gasbrain, Hobart thought. He was shocked and angry, yet a detached part of his mind had noted a curious fact. With one round trip completed, he had seventeen years of timeslip under his belt and – although it was a paltry score compared to that of a veteran starman – it was already affecting his relationships with Earthbound individuals. Martyn was about seven years his senior in actual body time, and therefore in experience, but Hobart had been born a decade before the other man, and on that account felt himself to be somehow the more complete of the two. He began to get an inkling of how he, as a junior officer, must have seemed to a man like Captain Mercier, and his yearning to bestride the centuries in a like manner suddenly intensified itself.

“I felt fine throughout the trip,” he said. “I feel fine now.”

“That’s not what it says on your psychometric profile,” Martyn replied, sealing the large envelope. Take my advice, Mr Hobart. You’re a young man, with your whole life ahead of you – forget about space flying and take up some other occupation. With your engineering qualifications you should have no trouble getting into –’

“I’m not interested in other work,” Hobart interrupted. “I’m doing the only thing I want to do.”

“Well… perhaps with some other line.”

“Some other line!” Hobart found he was almost shouting, but was past caring about propriety. “That psych report was cooked up to prevent me working anywhere.”

Martyn’s face underwent a subtle change. “Careful what you’re saying, Mr Hobart.”

“I’m saying my assessment was faked. Do you think I don’t know the real reason I’m being booted out?”

Martyn slid the envelope across to the front of his desk. “The references you have here will enable you to obtain another type of position. They contain no mention of the fact that you are suspected of having murdered a fellow officer, and that’s something for which you should be grateful.”

Hobart drove forward and caught Martyn’s wrist. Martyn flinched back, obviously afraid, but at the same time a look of furtive triumph appeared in his eyes, and it was that which enabled Hobart to regain his mental poise. A starship was an emotional pressure cooker, an autoclave in which certain kinds of character defect tended to trigger explosions, and no operator employed people with records of violence. The phrase ‘physically assaulted a company executive’ appearing on his sheet, regardless of the circumstances, would be an ironclad guarantee that he would never again serve on an interstellar vessel. Hobart released Martyn’s wrist, drew his lips into a numb smile, and stood up, searching for words which would make him seem cool and dignified.

“You haven’t heard the last of this,” he said, resorting to a formula he remembered from historical novels. Martyn adjusted his glasses and stared up at him without speaking. Hobart picked up his envelope, left the office, and made his way out of the building to the plaza, where late afternoon sunlight glowed on the alloy statues and islands of shrubbery. It was a perfect spring day, exactly the sort he had visualized for his homecoming, but that fact served only to aggravate the turmoil behind his eyes. He entered a dark-seeming side street and found an even darker bar. The place was empty, engulfed in a musty stillness which preceded the rush of customers at the end of the working day.

Hobart bought a glass of beer, carried it to a table which had a small peach-coloured light, and sat down to examine the contents of his envelope. The pay slip told him he had been credited with close to a hundred thousand dollars, a sum which at first seemed too much. Interstellar travel and its time anomalies had alarmed the world’s bankers in the early years, and they had been quick to reach agreement that interest on any star traveller’s funds should be computed on his body time and not according to Earth calendars. However, starship operators usually factorized crew salaries to compensate for inflation and timeslip, and when Hobart took that into account – along with tax refunds and severance pay – he found he had received no more than his due. He had no immediate money problems, but that was of little comfort when his career had been ruined, deliberately and with malice aforethought, by a man who had escaped into the grave after having…

The colonel murdered Wolf Craven! The thought, which had been swamped by other considerations, struck Hobart with sudden force, aweing him with its strangeness.

On that night, on that fairly significant social occasion, Nolan Langer – probably driven by jealousy or hurt pride – must have killed Craven and disposed of the body. And, being a man who never did things by halves, he had rounded out the act of revenge by shifting the blame on to Hobart, a move which would have increased his satisfaction and diverted the police investigation away from himself.

Hobart sipped his beer, reluctantly impressed. He could remember the colonel on the night of the party – tall, iron grey, limping, militarily correct – welcoming his guests, and… and… Hobart frowned as he realized he had no other recollections of the colonel on that night. Langer had absented himself at quite an early stage, which tied in with the theory that he was getting rid of cumbersome evidence, but there was an inconsistency somewhere. His memories of the party itself were all compatible, now that he understood what had been going on beneath the surface, so the discordant note must have originated during his talk with Investigator Shimming. Hobart stared into the peachy orb of the table lamp, unable to pin down the vagrant idea which was tantalizing him, then he recalled Shimming’s promise that he could have a record of the interview. He pushed his beer glass away, crammed the envelope into an inner pocket of his tunic, and left the bar.

The street outside was more crowded now as the city’s stores and offices began to close down for the day. Hobart walked one block south to the Lewis Hotel and checked into an expensive second-floor suite with a balcony overlooking colourful tulip beds. As soon as he was alone he went to the living room’s infomat and put a call through to police headquarters, praying that Shimming would still be on duty. He relaxed somewhat as the investigator’s long, serious face appeared on the screen.

“I’m glad I caught you,” he said.

Shimming nodded. “No panic. I’m usually patched into the system – even in bed.”

“Oh! I’m staying at the Lewis, by the way.”

“Thanks for letting me know, Dennis.” Shimming lowered his chin, conducting one of his silent battles against internal pressures, but his eyes remained fixed on Hobart’s. ’You decided against the Langer Centre?”

Hobart gave a rueful grimace. “How did you know they were going to dump me?”

“It wasn’t hard to figure out.”

“Well, I’m not leaving it like that. I’d like the tape you promised me earlier.”

“You want it now?”

“Yes.” Hobart checked to make sure there was a cassette of lateral-imprinting tape in the console’s bulk information receiver and pressed the intake button. On the screen he saw Shimming looking down at his own terminal as he fired through an information bleep in which the entire interview was compressed into a signal lasting a fraction of a second. A green light appeared above the bulk receiver.

“Got it,” Hobart said. “Thanks.”

“This sort of thing never works,” Shimming commented. “Not in real life, anyway. Amateur investigators never turn up anything the police didn’t know about all along.”

“Is that a fact?” Hobart suppressed an impulse to issue some kind of enigmatic challenge. “You don’t mind if I go over the tape a few times, do you?”

“Be my guest,” Shimming said, fading himself out. Hobart took the cassette out of the receiver and dropped it into a playback slot, all at once convinced that Shimming was right, that he was only play-acting. The idea which had seemed so close to the surface of his mind in the bar had retreated to deep tiers of consciousness populated only by unremembered dreams. Voices suddenly pervaded the room, his own the strangest of the two, and he began pacing the floor to work off his tensions. In that mood he had no expectation of success and consequently he was surprised to find his attention instantly caught by a single fragment.

“… the two of you withdrew from the rest of the guests. Colonel Langer and other witnesses stated that you returned after approximately one…”

And the point was that Langer had not been around when Hobart returned to the party. Hobart was certain of his ground because, with Dorcie Langer’s perfume still in his nostrils, he had been supercharged with guilt, abnormally keyed up for the first encounter with the colonel. It had never occurred.

The fact was not very important in itself, but it could be used to prove to Shimming that Colonel Langer had lied when making his deposition – and if one part of his testimony was shown to be fake the remainder could perhaps be written off. Hobart strode to the infomat, but paused before making a call. As the matter stood, it was a case of his word against the sworn statement of a member of the city’s most influential family – and he had an idea Shimming was likely to be unimpressed. After a few moments of thought, Hobart asked the machine for a communications code and put a call through to Joe Armitage, a dentist who did much of the contract work for the training centre. He had become friendly with Hobart when they found themselves attending the same concerts, and as youngsters with like interests they had seen each other at least once a week throughout Hobart’s pre-ops course. The screen came to life almost immediately, showing a square-faced, ruddy-complexioned man in his forties against a background of antique books. Hobart stared at him in silence, filled with a curious timidity. I have travelled in space, and I have travelled in time…

This is Joe Armitage,” the stranger said. “My daughter isn’t at home right now, if that’s what…”

Hobart shook his head. “Joe! This is Denny. Denny Hobart.”

Armitage frowned, his eyes taking in details of Hobart’s tunic and service emblems. “I’m afraid I… Wait a minute – you went off on the Oak, didn’t you?”

“The Langer Willow.”

“That’s right! I heard a ship had just come in, but I wasn’t sure which one it was. I’m in private practice these days and I don’t have much to do with the Langer organization.”

“Neither do I,” Hobart said. “I was wondering…”

“I’m sorry I didn’t recognize you,” Armitage cut in. “I knew so many of the Langer boys in my old hell-raising days, and… It’s a funny thing, but when people look the same as they did eighteen or twenty years ago you can’t recognize them. I have no trouble with acquaintances who’ve been on Earth all along and who have changed. It’s as if the old brain keeps a model of them and updates it year by year, putting in the sags and bags and wrinkles and so forth, so that when I see them I know who they are, even if they don’t look much like they used to. Know what I mean?”

“I think so.” Hobart felt a pang of sadness at having been classed as an acquaintance rather than a friend, but he put it out of his mind. “Listen, Joe, I’m sorry about springing this on you, but I’m in a bit of trouble with the police and I need somebody to back up my statement to them.”

Armitage looked interested. “I’ll help you all I can.”

“Thanks. It’s about that party the night before I left. Colonel Langer walked out in the middle of it and didn’t come back, but he swore that he did. All I need is somebody to…’

“Hold on,” Armitage protested, smiling. “What party are you talking about? I don’t think I was even there.”

“You were,” Hobart said, shocked.

“Sorry – I think you’re wrong, Denny.”

“But…” Hobart searched his memory. “Remember you spent most of the night playing poker with Mexy Gomez.”

“Did I? Gomez? Was that the character with the blue chin and all the muscles?”

“Yes. Do you remember now?”

“I’m trying.” Armitage gazed back at Hobart, his eyes slowly clouding, then he shook his head. “I went to quite a few of the colonel’s parties in the old days, but they’ve all run together in my mind. That was nearly twenty years ago, Denny.”

“I know,” Hobart said, learning something about timeslip and the nature of loneliness. He spoke to Armitage for another minute, fending off questions about his problems, and ended the call after making an insincere promise to get in touch again. The room seemed abnormally quiet when the screen went dead. He brooded for a moment, then took a pen from his pocket and made a list of twelve other men and women who had been guests at Colonel Langer’s house on the crucial night. Seven of those were operations personnel and a series of enquiries revealed that they were all away on the Procyon run and would not be seen on Earth for another eight years or more. Of the remaining five, residents of Corona Falls, two had died of natural causes, and the others – far from being able to help – were unable even to remember knowing Hobart or having been in his company. After nearly an hour of awkwardness and embarrassment, he turned away from the infomat, went into the bedroom, and lay down.

It was growing dark outside, the sky turning a peacock blue above the varicoloured glitter off the city beyond his balcony, and it came to him that by this time – had his dreams of homecoming materialized properly – he should have been bedding down with a woman. He had an intense yearning for the comfort and companionship of love. Hobart turned restlessly on the bed’s pliant surface for a minute, then lay still, his eyes widening, as the idea which had lain dormant in his mind heaved upward and began to dominate all thought.

There was one person who had cause to remember the night of the party as clearly as he did, despite the passage of time, and as far as he knew there was nothing to prevent him from contacting Dorcie Langer without further delay.

Hobart was surprised to find that the big house was in comparative darkness. Subconsciously, having previously been there only when a party was in full swing or when the colonel was organizing a foray, he had it fixed in his mind as a place where such things were the norm, and the terse instruction from Mrs Langer’s personal secretary had in an obscure way reinforced his preconceptions. As he parked his rented car in the driveway he admitted to himself that more than a year in the confines of the ship had disposed him towards a therapeutic blowout, garnished with excesses of every kind, and the insight was a disturbing one. His current troubles all stemmed from one shameful debauch, yet part of him had been ready to flirt with similar temptations and perhaps still was. The id, he suddenly realized, could be a dangerous encumbrance.

He slammed the car door and examined the house, wishing he were a smoker so that he could indulge in the ritual of lighting a cigarette. The two-storey building, with its stone mullions and complex roof, looked imposingly ancient. In the gardens at the rear he could see the outlines of the freezer house where Nolan Langer had kept his menagerie of frost animals, and he was further surprised to note a bluish glow from the windows, which indicated that the refrigeration system was still functioning. The enigmatic creatures, inhabitants of Sirius VII, were troublesome to support and he would have expected the colonel’s widow – whose interests were more earthly – to have rid herself of the responsibility at the earliest possible moment.

Hobart walked to the house’s main entrance and ascended the curving steps. A control system, responding to the identity code emitted by his citizenship tag, swung the door open for him and he went through into a dimly lit, spacious hall which seemed not to have altered since his last visit. The same pictures of extraterrestrial scenes – souvenirs of the colonel’s travels – hung on the walls, and the same photon-sculptures glowed in the corners and recesses. He was still getting his bearings when a door on the right opened and a woman he took to be Dorcie Langer’s secretary appeared in a rectangle of pink light and beckoned to him. Hobart had almost reached her before he realized his mistake.

His talk with Armitage had alerted him to the effects of timeslip and he had steeled himself to find the young Dorcie Langer transformed into a woman in her forties, but other forces had been at work – and the person before him had an apparent age closer to sixty. She was dressed in salmon-coloured silks revealing a round-shouldered figure in which the torso had plumped out while the legs had grown thin, giving her an odd sparrow-like aspect. Her face, in the flattering light, was much as he remembered it, except for a waxy, unnatural sheen. Hobart, in spite of his naivety in such matters, sensed that a cosmetician had all but erased the real face and used it as a canvas upon which to paint the woman who had used to be. His stride faltered.

“Hello, Denny,” she said in a burry voice. “Don’t stand there gawking. Come in!”

“Of course.” Hobart entered the room behind her and closed the door. “Hello, Mrs Langer.”

“Mrs Langer he says! You don’t need to be formal with me, Denny.” She threw him a brilliant smile as she went towards a liquor cabinet. “What are you drinking?”

“Ah… anything.”

“Good for you. Still game for anything, eh?” She splashed two glasses of clear liquid from a decanter, came back and handed one to him. She looked closely into his face as their fingers touched, and her smile vanished. “Just as a matter of interest – what age are you?”

“Twenty-three,” Hobart replied, too nonplussed to avoid a direct answer which carried a whiff of danger.

“My God,” Dorcie said, walking around him as though inspecting a statue. “My God! It isn’t fair – you’re still just a kid. How can you still be just a kid?”

Hobart strove to be diplomatic. “Age isn’t important.”

“Not important!” Dorcie drained her glass, wetting the side of her chin in the process. “Not important, he says. Of course it isn’t important for somebody who doesn’t change in eighteen years.”

“For me it’s only been one year,” Hobart said soothingly. “The time dilation effect – ”

“Don’t give me any of that scientific crap,” she shouted, chilling Hobart with the abrupt contortion of her face into a mask of fury. “Time is time, for God’s sake! It’s the same everywhere. Nobody will ever convince me…” She stopped speaking, glanced around like someone who had just heard a stealthy footfall, and her smile returned in full force. “Let’s have another drink.”

Hobart held up his still brimming glass. “I suppose you can guess why I came to see you.”

“I can guess, all right – you young spacers are all the same,” Dorcie said coquettishly, appalling Hobart even further. She refilled her glass and sat down on a low-backed couch. “Don’t stand around, Denny – we’re old friends, aren’t we?”

“Yes, indeed.” Hobart sat down near her and sipped his drink, which proved to be a cloying almond-flavoured liqueur. “Look, Dorcie, you don’t believe I killed Wolf Craven, do you?”

“You? That’s hardly your style.”

“Have you any idea why Colonel Langer told the police I did it?”

“I know exactly why.” Dorcie gave a sharp laugh. “Don’t you know? It’s because he was a bastard. Through and through. He tried to keep me shut up as if I was a goddamn Sister of Mercy or something – but it didn’t work.”

“That’s not what I’m getting at.”

“Funny thing is, he was able to do it better after he was dead. I’m not allowed to give up the house, you know. I’m tied to this mausoleum and that damned ice box out in back, otherwise I lose three fourths of my lousy income.”

Hobart shook his head impatiently. “Do you remember the party the night before I left?”

“Do I?” Dorcie rolled her eyes, put a hand on his knee, and leaned closer. “Are you trying to get me going?”

“In his deposition to the police,” Hobart said steadily, repressing the urge to shrink away, ‘the colonel said he rejoined the party soon after midnight, but you must remember that he didn’t. Nobody saw him for the rest of the –’

“I don’t want to talk about that old goat,” Dorcie cut in, setting her glass aside. “All right, Denny – let’s go upstairs.”

Hobart’s mouth went dry. “Upstairs?”

“Don’t act so innocent.” She slid her hand along his thigh. “You’ve been stripping me with your eyes ever since you came in here.”

Hobart disengaged by jumping to his feet. “You’re the only one who can help me. Think back, please. Can you remember exactly what the colonel did that night?”

Dorcie made as if to come after him, then a slow smile appeared on her face and she settled back on the couch, spreading her legs a little. “I probably could remember – given the right sort of encouragement.”

“He was missing for the rest of the night, wasn’t he?”

“Down on your knees,” she commanded, eyes bleak and threatening. “Down on your knees, boy.”

Hobart backed away, shaking his head. “You’re sick,” he whispered. “Crazy.”

“Crazy?” Dorcie Langer seemed to savour the word while she kneaded the flesh of her thighs. “Perhaps I am. I could be crazy enough to remember anything I wanted – good or bad. It’s up to you, Denny, my love.”

Hobart turned and fled the room, running with the leaden-footed ponderousness that characterizes nightmares.

Later that night Hobart experienced a real nightmare. He dreamed it was the night of the party again, the location in time and space convincingly established by a shifting montage of images and impressions – large rooms with minimal lighting; a sense of imminence – the dreadful starship waiting; trays of drinks, tables of food; intermingled wisps of music and distant laughter; the choking press of bodies in slithering nakedness… Suddenly Hobart was in a silver room – it was the freezer house – watching in mute terror as the tall figure of Colonel Langer stood over Wolf Craven and methodically destroyed him with an ice pick. Craven was lying on the floor, twitching and flinching under the blows each of which added to and elaborated the pattern of blood-red, dark, centred flowers covering his body from neck to groin. His mouth was open, but the horror of the scene was increased by the fact that he did not scream. Instead, there came from his lips a thin, sad keening, a plaintive note like the beat of insect wings in summer pastures…

Hobart awoke with the sound ringing in his ears and sat up immediately, unwilling to risk falling asleep again and sinking back into the same nightmare. He checked the time, saw that it was almost six in the morning, and decided to get up. While taking a hot shower he pondered over the dream, marvelling at the ways of the subconscious mind. He had a nodding acquaintance with the Faraday theory, which stated that the overt content of dreams – which psychologists had once dismissed as mere ’day residue’ – was more significant than the Freudian and post-Freudian interpretation of symbols and could be treated as genuine attempts at communication between different levels of the mind. But what might his subconscious be trying to say? He had already deduced that Langer had killed Craven, probably in or around the freezer house, so that part was no help to him – and the strange whining sound seemed no more than a grotesque incidental detail. Was the message simply that Craven’s body was hidden in the refrigerated building, where it would be immune from decay?

Hobart considered the idea later while eating breakfast in his room and decided it was of little merit. Investigator Shimming had told him the entire area had been searched by the police, and the freezer house and associated workshop were among the first places anybody would think of checking. He was pouring a third cup of coffee when the infomat buzzed to announce a call and Shimming’s long face appeared on the screen, looking professionally impassive while he waited for two-way communication. Hobart pressed a button to accept the call.

“I was wrong about you, Dennis,” the investigator said without preamble. “I had an idea you’d go up to Silverstream last night, and I expected that you’d be totally ineffective – but I was way off the beam. You really managed to churn things up.”

“Really?” Hobart kept his voice level. “In what way?”

“One of Mrs Langer’s tame lawyers spoke to the commissioner this morning. It appears that she too remembers your having a fist fight with Wolf Craven in her garden on the night he disappeared.”

Hobart shook his head emphatically. “The woman’s insane. You might have warned me about that.”

“Rich people don’t go insane, Dennis – at most they become eccentric. In any case, we now have a second statement corroborating what Colonel Langer told us, and that makes things worse for you.”

“You’re not going to take it seriously, are you?” Hobart was unable to read Shimming’s eyes. “I mean, why did she wait eighteen years before coming out with this?”

“The line they’re taking is that she saw no point in getting involved until you were back on Earth, that nothing could be done until now.”

“Garbage,” Hobart snapped. “Specious garbage, at that.”

“Nevertheless,” Shimming said, dipping his chin, ‘it increases the pressure on me within the department. What did you do up there last night, anyway?”

“It was what I wouldn’t do,” Hobart muttered, and was instantly sorry he had spoken.

“Oh? Gone off her, have you?”

“I was never… Look, we’ve been through all that already.” Hobart sought a way to wrest the conversation on to a new track. “When you were searching for Wolf Craven’s body did you go through the freezer house?”

“Me? I was in my second year in the police academy in 2113.”

“You know what I mean,” Hobart said, refusing to think about timeslip. “Did they check the freezer house?”

“Naturally.” Shimming glanced down at something on his desk. “It’s all here in the report. The investigating officers – with Colonel Langer’s full cooperation, by the way – went all through the workshop and the cold area itself. They looked under the refrigeration machinery housings, behind all movable wall, ceiling, and floor panels, underneath the salt storage unit…”

“What storage unit?”

Shimming inspected his records again. “It seems that those things the colonel brought back from Sirius way, the frost animals, need trays of mineral salts to keep them alive.”

“I know that – but when I was in the freezer house those trays just sat around on the floor.” As a synaesthetic background to his own voice, Hobart heard the curious sound from his nightmare, and memories began to stir.

“So what?” Shimming gave an elaborate shrug. “It wouldn’t have been too tidy that way, so Colonel Langer had a special unit built.”

“Correction! He built it himself.”

“All right – he built it himself. I’m told he liked doing things like that.”

“You don’t understand, Hobart said quickly, above the pounding in his chest. “I was in that freezer house only three days, or it might have been two, before the party – and at that time the trays of salts were still sitting around on the floor.”

Shimming pulled on his chin and looked puzzled. “What do you think you’re getting at?”

“He built it the night of the party. During the party.”

“You haven’t any proof of that. It could have been…”

“I do have proof,” Hobart put in, telling the lie which might not have been a lie had his conscious memory been perfect. “I remember going near the back of the house two or three hours after midnight and hearing somebody outside using a valency saw. You know that weird droning noise they make – you can’t mistake it.”

“It doesn’t matter exactly when the unit was built,” Shimming said through a silent gulp, showing his disapproval of Hobart’s excitement. “The point is that the officers looked at it after Craven disappeared.”

“They didn’t look well enough,” Hobart asserted. “That’s where Craven’s body has to be.”

Shimming turned his gaze towards the ceiling for a few seconds, then gave Hobart a wry smile. “It says in your file that you were born way back in 2091, and that makes me forget you’re just a kid.”

“Kid nothing,” Hobart said angrily. “I’m able to think.”

“Yes, but you think the way a kid does. You think a team of trained police officers could search a room and fail to find an object as large as a human body; you think crimes are solved by a Great Detective sucking on a pipe and making deductions – but that’s not the way it is, sonny. The police success rate is very high these days, but it’s because we get information. There are too many systems for acquiring data, and storing it, and processing it. That’s what gives us the edge.”

“What about the information I’ve just given you?” Hobart demanded. “Aren’t you even going to… ?” He broke off as someone knocked heavily on the door leading out to the corridor.

“That’ll be my men,” Shimming said. “The way the situation has developed, I have to bring you in. I’m sorry about this.”

“I’m sorry, too.” Hobart allowed his shoulders to droop as the pounding on the door grew more insistent. “I’ll let them in.” He left the infomat, walked straight out to the balcony and – praying the flower beds were no further down than he remembered – vaulted over the railing.

It was growing dark when Hobart left the cover of the timber plantation and approached Silverstream Heights from the west, picking his way through the swathe of gullies and sheared ground that helped protect the big houses against intruders.

His main concern throughout the day had been that of keeping well away from store entrance scanners and any other devices which could read the signals from his citizenship tag. He might have thrown the tag away altogether, but many commercial security systems could sense the nearness of a human body and when it was not accompanied by appropriately coded radiation they tended to react loudly. Less embarrassing, but more dangerous from his point of view, was the type that remained silent and sent a microwave call to the nearest police station. Hobart’s strategy had been to leave the city on foot and go into hiding at the first good opportunity, and although his day-long wait in the sanctuary of the trees had been uncomfortable and boring he had successfully retained his freedom.

He followed a track up to the fence which marked the western edge of the Langer estate and, his progress now hampered by darkness, located the gate the colonel had installed to facilitate his snake hunts. Its rails were covered with spirals of barbed wire and, predictably, it was locked. Hobart took off his tunic, wrapped it around the top bar and managed to climb over without incurring any injury. He began to retrieve the garment and then, recalling that he might need to make a rapid exit, changed his mind and knotted the jacket in place by the sleeves. An ivory-coloured moon, horizontally striped with cloud, was lifting clear of the distant hills, but its luminance was weak and Hobart had to move cautiously as he went towards the house. After five minutes the exterior lamps came into view, interfering with his night vision and creating the illusion that he was nearing the edge of a black and dangerous pit. He continued to feel his way forward and it was with a considerable sense of gratitude that he reached the smooth turf of the gardens and was able to pick out the sloping roof of the freezer house and workshop. A blue glow from the square high-set windows told him the environment necessary for the survival of the frost animals was still being maintained.

Hobart felt strangely uneasy and uncertain as he approached the freezer house door. The notion of taking direct action to solve a murder mystery had seemed both logical and attractive during the day, but the reality-involving illegal night entry and, for all he knew, a risk of getting himself shot – was a different matter. He looked up at the dark bulk of the house, wondering if Dorcie Langer was in it at that very moment, and he was gripped by a desire to complete his mission as quickly as possible and slip away before his situation deteriorated in some unforeseen manner. Moving with self-conscious stealth, he opened the door, stepped inside, and stood for a moment in the small, square lobby. On his left was the insulated door of the refrigerated area, with its single viewing aperture; on the right was the workshop, with a cone of yellow light illuminating one of the workbenches. Did that mean he had been unlucky and that a maintenance engineer was actually on the premises?

He cleared his throat loudly and strode into the workshop, his mind working on a passable cover story, and found it deserted. Aware of the need for haste, he gathered up several types of screwdrivers and a hammer and carried them out to the lobby. He slid back the bolt on the insulated door and went through it into the menagerie itself. The door closed behind him with a pneumatic sigh. For a brief moment, while his clothing retained a protective layer of air, he had the impression the temperature in the room was quite moderate – then the coldness closed with him, grappling and clawing like an invisible enemy. Pain flared in his nostrils and throat.

Hobart looked around, breathing in shallow gasps, and saw one of the captive animals on the wall at his side. It resembled a beautifully symmetrical array of frost ferns, almost a metre in diameter. As he watched, its crystalline patterns began to alter – a seething of diamonds – and the flower shape grew smaller. In the space of a few seconds the creature had vanished altogether. Hobart turned nervously and saw that the alien had reformed on the wall behind him. At the edge of his vision he saw others blossoming or shrinking on every flat surface, like glassy lichens.

Reminding himself that the frost creatures had never been known to settle on a human, he went further into the room, past the refrigerator housing, and immediately saw the fabricated unit of which Shimming had spoken. Basically, it was a squat pyramid fringed with silver laminate-covered shelves on which sat trays of the mineral salts commonly found in the deserts of Sirius VII. The structure was screwed to the floor, and Hobart’s pulse quickened as he noted that the central pyramid was large enough to contain two or three bodies if required. Wishing he had retained his tunic to help ward off the cold, he began lifting the wide trays from the shelves and placing them on the floor. It seemed to him as he did so that the migratory activity of the frost animals increased slightly, but he dismissed the idea. Xenologists had been studying the creatures for some years and still had not managed to classify them or produce any behavioural responses, so it would have been fanciful for him to suppose they were reacting to his presence.

When he had disposed of the trays he lifted the heavy shelves off their brackets, stood them against a wall, and began taking up the screws which secured the pyramid to the floor. By this time he was shivering so violently that he had to use both hands to guide the screwdriver into the slots, and he realized he could remain in sub-zero environment for only a few more minutes. He removed the last screw with trembling hands, slid the screwdriver under the base of the pyramid, and tilted the structure on to its side.

The interior was completely empty.

Unable to accept the evidence of his eyes, Hobart sank to his knees and tapped the laminated boards, looking for dimensional or angular discrepancies which would have betrayed a hidden compartment. Cracks of light glimmering between the boards told him the quest was hopeless – even a master magician would have found it impossible to conceal a rabbit within the simple structure. Hobart, sick with disappointment, sank back on to his heels and pressed a hand to his jaw to dampen its vibrations. He looked around the featureless walls of the room, heedless now of the transient flat rosettes of the frost animals, and cursed himself for the senseless egotism that had led him to go against a professional like Shimming. The best thing he could do now was to put things back as he had found them, in the hope his trespass would remain undetected, then go back into the city and give himself up to the police.

He got to his feet and was trying for a good grip on the toppled pyramid when there was a sharp metallic sound from the direction of the door.

Hobart froze in the act of lifting, certain he was about to be apprehended. He remained in the same attitude for a few seconds – then a more disquieting idea entered his mind.

Letting the pyramid fall, he ran to the door – seeing a pale face flicker and vanish in the dark rectangle of the viewing aperture – and tugged on the handle. As his premonition had told him it would, the metal-sheathed door refused to move.

“Dorcie!” he shouted. “It’s Denny. Don’t do this. Let me out!” There was total, black-velvet silence.

He turned away from the door and cast about wildly, his breath pluming in the gelid air. The hammer he had taken from the workshop was lying on the floor. He picked it up in stiffened hands, went to the nearest window, and struck it with all his force. The head of the hammer rebounded from the toughened glass without marking it in any way. Hobart tried again and this time the hammer spun from his grasp and fell behind him. He dropped to his knees and was going after the tool that represented his hope of salvation when a silent voice – perhaps that of his superego, perhaps of the wise, worldly, and dispassionate Denny Hobart he had always hoped to become – spoke to him, commanding his attention. He listened for a moment and rose to his feet, smiling apologetically with one hand on his forehead, then gathered up the screwdrivers and went to the true source of his peril – the flanged and louvred mass of the refrigeration plant.

The main side panel was held in place by six spring-loaded screws requiring only a half-turn each. Using his two-handed technique, Hobart was able to remove the screws in a matter of seconds and to lift the sheet of metal out of his way, exposing the machinery itself. The type and its operating principle were unfamiliar to him, but he had no difficulty in identifying a thermostat which had a slide control on a scale running from –40° to +30°. Centigrade, which meant the system could double up as a heater. Grunting with relief, he reached for the control, then jerked his hand back as the entire thermostat housing became enveloped in a thick coating of frost. The white crystalline layer continued to thicken and exhibit patterns, diamond petals furling out on diamond petals with bewildering rapidity, until quite suddenly the thermostat was locked inside a shell of ice.

Hobart gaped at it, dumbfounded, then raised his head to look around the room. Most of the elaborate, jewelled rosettes of the frost animals had disappeared from the walls and ceiling. He looked back at the refrigeration machinery and saw that no part of it had been affected by the encrustation except the control he had been about to operate. Hugging himself to ease the growing pain in his chest, Hobart rocked backward and forward as he tried to make sense of what was happening. The only conclusion he could reach was that somehow, by some process he could not even begin to understand, the alien beings had divined his intention. Switching off the refrigeration would save his life, but as a consequence the frost animals would be destroyed – the temperature in the room had never been allowed to rise above –20°. Centigrade in the decades of its existence – and it appeared they had taken preventive action.

Questions began to clamour in his mind. Had he, Denny Hobart, accidentally made the first intellectual contact with an extraterrestrial race? Had no xenologist researcher thought of testing for motivation by threatening a frost animal with death? Or, unknown to him, had progress been made in that field during his eighteen years of absence in space?

The stabbing sensation in his lungs grew worse and he realized that, at this stage, questions and answers were without relevance. His very life was at stake – and there were more ways than one of stopping a machine. He turned to reach for the fallen hammer and in that moment became aware of another phenomenon, one of silent but flurried movement. The shelves he had removed from the storage unit were still leaning against the nearest wall, and all over their sloping surfaces a number of frost animals were forming, fading away to nothingness and reforming in a kind of regimented dance, creating fantastic, shifting, geometrical designs.

Wondering why he was squandering the short time left to him, Hobart rose painfully to his feet and approached the shelves. The activity of the beautiful enigmatic beings reached a frenzied climax, dazzling his eyes.

I can learn from you, he thought, numbly, as though his brain cells were turning to ice. The same lesson that old man Langer learned. Rigid bodies make rigid minds make rigid thinking…

He watched his hands reach out like servomechanisms, the blue-knuckled fingers crooking in preparation, and in that moment the frost animals vanished from the shelf he was about to touch. Hobart dug his nails under the top edge of the plank’s silvery laminate and slowly peeled it downward, revealing the core material, which appeared to be a red semitransparent plastic, variegated here and there by whitish spots and areas of blue and black and brown.

Thunderous seconds passed before his mind came to grips with the mosaic of lines and charnel-house colours, imposing a pattern on them, letting him know he was looking at a longitudinal section cut through a human body. He turned away, retching, and went back to the refrigeration plant.

“I’m sorry,” he said aloud. “You’ve given me what I wanted, but I’m not going to die. Not in this century. Not in the next…”

He knelt at the machine, grasped a slim feed pipe, and tugged on it with what remained of his strength. The pipe began to bend, but in that instant his breath was cut off. He fell sideways to the floor in the grip of a searing coldness unlike anything he could have imagined as the frost animals attacked, suffocating him beneath a mask of sparkling ice.

Investigator Shimming paused for a moment, nuzzling his chin down on to his chest. He remained in that attitude for a short time – perhaps coping with gastric explosions, perhaps ordering his thoughts – then activated the recorder in his desk.

“It is now obvious,” he said, settling back in his chair, “that having unlawfully killed Wolf Craven, Colonel Langer placed the body of the deceased in an oblong box, filled the box up with water and put it in the refrigerated room he used as an extraterrestrial menagerie. Forensic reports will reveal whether or not he added any chemicals to the water to accelerate the freezing process. As soon as the contents of the box had frozen solid he took a cutting implement – almost certainly a valency saw, which is quick in operation and generates no heat – and sliced the resultant block into longitudinal planks about three centimetres in thickness. An engineering consultant from the University of Montana has already confirmed that ordinary ice has quite good structural properties below a certain temperature, and in this case we are talking about ice which was reinforced with bone and strips of clothing.

“Colonel Langer then covered the planks with metallic laminate, to disguise their nature, and used them to build the shelf unit I referred to earlier in this report. Evidence suggests that this work was begun on the night of 12 May, 2113, while the party was still in progress, and was completed late the following day – by which time Dennis Hobart had already departed on the Langer Willow. Having disposed of Craven’s body in a manner he was confident would escape detection, Colonel Langer went to the office of the public prosecutor and made a deposition in which he attached the blame for Craven’s death to Hobart.

“I have not been able to establish any motive for his desire to incriminate Hobart, and am of the opinion that Hobart was chosen fortuitously, simply because he had been seen arguing with the deceased. That concludes my interim report on this case.”

Shimming switched off the recorder, surveyed the drab green walls of his office, then allowed his gaze to settle on Hobart, who was sitting opposite him. “As you’ll have gathered, I’m letting you off the hook,” he said. “You know, I don’t think I’ve ever met anybody so lucky.”

“Lucky!” Pain caused Hobart’s face to twist spasmodically beneath the surgical dressings and he fell silent, wishing he had not reacted so violently.

“That’s what I said. You’re alive when you ought to be dead, and you’re getting your job back. The Langers didn’t have to reinstate you.”

“Didn’t they? Can you think of a better way to remove an embarrassment?”

“Perhaps not.” Shimming took a roll of white tablets from a drawer and began to suck one, rolling it about his mouth as though tasting a rare wine. “All the same, Dorcie Langer could have blackballed you.”

“She ought to be put away for trying to kill me.”

“We have no proof of that, Dennis. She says she locked the door on an intruder, which is what any normal woman might have done in the same circumstances.”

“Normal?” Hobart winced and gingerly pressed both palms to his cheeks. “The frost animals are more normal than she is.”

“Could be. Have you thought about how we must appear to them? Perhaps we’re the real frost animals.”

Hobart nodded, waiting for the pain in his face to subside. The creatures from Sirius VII no longer seemed quite so enigmatic since it had been established that they were life-oriented, reacting as positively as they could against any form of killing. It was due to that facet of their nature that he was still alive – because eighteen years earlier they had attacked Nolan Langer. Nobody would ever know the precise details of what had happened that night, but it seemed that Langer had lured Craven into the freezer house to kill him, and that the frost animals had attacked their owner during the crime. The colonel had not been forestalled – he was good at killing – but he had been obliged to seek medical treatment for frostbite.

And it had been Shimming’s belated discovery of this fact, hidden in a computerized medical report, which had set him wondering about the veracity of the long-dead colonel’s deposition. It chastened Hobart to realize he had been allowed to get away from his hotel, and that he had actually been under long-range surveillance right up to the moment he entered the freezer house, even though the final outcome had been in his favour.

“I ought to thank you,” he said, getting to his feet. “If it hadn’t been for you…”

“Forget it.” Shimming extended his hand. “I’ve had the pleasure of putting a couple of department politicians in their places. Come back and see me any time.”

“Thanks.” Hobart shook hands and paused awkwardly. “I’d like to come back, but they’ve assigned me to the Langer Maple – on the Sigma Draconis run – which means…”

“A three-or four-year round trip for you, but forty years for me on Earth. I’ll most likely be dead when you get back.”

“I wasn’t going to put it like that.”

“Don’t worry about it.” Shimming laughed, almost brutally, and for an instant his eyes resembled those of Dorcie Langer – suspicious, resentful, hostile. “If I’m not worried about it, why should you be?” Hobart nodded, his sense of alienation complete, then turned and left the office, already wondering how he was going to get through the month that lay ahead before he could rejoin his own kind and take flight among the stars.