Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 37, No. 6, June 1992

Worthsayer by Stanley Schmidt

I knew something was up when I got the call to go at once to Room 333. As the house detective for a hotel where not much happens, I often fill my days making spot checks of rooms that have been vacated and not yet rerented. I have a key that opens everything in the Fritz — except that two weeks ago they changed the lock on 333. I hadn’t seen the inside since. Most peculiar, and a bit insulting.

Manager George Wilcox was waiting by the door, wringing his chubby hands nervously. With him was a guy I didn’t recognize, tall and rangy with curly black hair, wearing an impeccable Brooks Brothers suit and an expression no less distraught than George’s.

“What’s up?” I asked.

“We’re not sure,” said George. “It could be murder, but... oh, you’ll have to see it all for yourself anyway, so we might as well get it over with. I’d like you to meet Mr. Charles Everett Oswald, CEO of Korag, Karfingel, Thatterthwaite, and Phui.”

I blinked as I took Oswald’s hand. “The stockbrokerage?”

“The same,” he said gravely.

“Of course,” said George. “They rented this room for one of their... er... employees. Now let’s go inside. Brace yourself, Rik.”

He opened the door and a blast of desert air hit me full in the face — hot, dry, and heavy with an odor I couldn’t place. I remembered when 333 had looked like all our other rooms, but it sure didn’t now. There were plants all over, vaguely tropical-looking yet somehow wrong. The most conspicuous item of furniture was an overgrown computer workstation, fairly ordinary except that it sported dozens of little screens. There was a desk with nothing on it but what looked like a cereal box with labels in a foreign alphabet, a plastic letter opener, and a wine bottle. And there was a bed with a body on it — a most surprising body.

It’s one of them! I thought incredulously. At a quick glance, it could have passed for human — a wiry, leathery little old man with a froggy face. But look at it for three seconds and you’d see that it was too wiry, too leathery, too froggy.

Everybody knew what the Tsigan looked like. As the first aliens to visit Earth, the papers and newscasts had been full of them for three months. Never in a million years would I have expected to find one murdered in my own hotel.

If, I reminded myself, it was murder. After all, I asked myself, how could a being with the gift of precognition let itself be murdered?

“His name was Azuk,” said Oswald. “I became suspicious when he didn’t report in this morning. I came over, and...” He gestured around the room. “Naturally, I suspect foul play.”

“Maybe,” I said, though I saw no recognizable signs of it. There was no sign of a scuffle, no damage I could recognize to the body. I couldn’t begin to read the expression frozen on the corpse’s face. “Any particular reason?”

“He was in good health yesterday,” said Oswald. “And he made us a lot of money. Maybe somebody didn’t like that. In any case, it seems like too much coincidence to assume this is natural.”

“Maybe,” I repeated. “First we have to determine which it was. I need a coroner’s report, and I doubt that any human doctor is qualified to do one. We’ll have to get one of them in to do it.”

Both Oswald and George went a little white. “You mean a Tsigan?” Oswald said finally.

“That’s right.”

Oswald was silent quite a while. “That’s going to be... awkward.”

“How so?” I asked.

“I’d rather discuss that privately... when we’re finished here.”

I shrugged. “No problem. Let me look around a little first.” I did, taking my time and letting them squirm a bit. I couldn’t find anything on the computer except financial data. The champagne bottle was unopened; I would come back when I was through with Oswald to write down the label info and check it for fingerprints. Likewise the letter opener, which looked like an authentic Woolworth’s. I checked the desk drawers and found them empty. Why a letter opener and nary a letter in sight?

I pointed at the foreign cereal box. “What’s this?”

Oswald gave a nervous giggle. “Tsigan chow. He brought a lot with him. Say, we’re not going to have to call in the city cops, are we?”

“Don’t know yet,” I grunted. “First let’s find out if it’s murder.” And how, I wondered, do our laws apply if it is?

I walked over to take a look at the corpse — and felt a shiver run up my own spine when I noticed the straight-edged object sticking out of the dead alien’s mouth. After a moment’s incredulous hesitation, I slipped on a disposable rubber glove and drew it out just enough to confirm that it was indeed a perfectly ordinary Visa card.

I pushed it back in, hoping George and Oswald hadn’t noticed. That card took a big bite out of my hopes that this was a natural death. It looked too much like the sort of “calling card” that deranged killers often leave to sign their work.

I turned to George. “Looks like you’re going to have to give me a key after all. I’m going to have to come back and go over things carefully. Meanwhile, no one is to touch anything, or even come in here without me.” Then, to Oswald, “Okay, let’s go talk about that autopsy.”

“Why don’t we use my office?” he suggested. “It’s debugged.”

I couldn’t resist grinning. “You mean it only has your bugs. Thanks, but I think we’ll use mine.”

My office used to be a broom closet, but it’s home. I leaned forward across the desk toward Oswald, who was obviously less comfortable in such modest quarters. “So, now, why is it going to be so awkward to get a Tsigan doctor to come look at a dead Tsigan?”

“Maybe I’d better start at the beginning.” He seemed to be avoiding my eyes. “You know how the Tsigant suddenly showed up at the UN last summer and said they’d been watching us for a long time. You know how they said they could see the future, and started proving it by making public predictions and letting us watch them come true.”

Of course I knew, but I listened anyway. That whole business had made me uncomfortable from the start. The accuracy of their predictions could be unnerving, but it could also be very appealing to all those human sheep wanting to be led. And when the Tsigant started hinting that they’d be glad to advise us in all our affairs...

Don’t get off on that now, I scolded myself. Pay attention!

“Naturally,” Oswald was saying, “we at KKT&P watched all that with great interest. We thought it would be a great thing for a stockbrokerage to have somebody with that gift working for us. We thought it was just a daydream, of course. The Tsigant were obviously dealing with humans only through the UN. How could any private company hope to get into the act?

“Then one day Azuk — the one who died — showed up on our doorstep asking us to take him in. Said he wasn’t happy among his own people, and in return for asylum he’d watch the future markets for us and make us rich.

“We thought it over good and hard. It seemed risky, but awfully tempting. Finally we decided we couldn’t pass it up. After all, the stuff we’d been reading in the papers proved they really could see the future, and there wasn’t anything in our laws to forbid it — not yet, anyway. So we hired him, rented a room in your hotel, and had it outfitted to keep him comfortable. The staff was sworn to secrecy, and he never had to enter or leave. What’s one more employee telecommuting, these days?”

“What, indeed? I notice, Mr. Oswald, you keep talking about ‘we.’ Who, precisely, is ‘we’?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Who made these decisions? Who else knew Azuk was here?”

“Uh... nobody, actually. As CEO, I have a discretionary budget and a good deal of autonomy. He came directly to me, and while I quickly decided he could be a great benefit to the company, it seemed equally clear that the fewer people who knew about him, the better. Even the hotel knew only that the company was renting a room and wanted it specially modified and everyone kept out of it.”

“Hm,” said I. “Then I take it you have no idea who might have wanted to kill him, or why?”

“None whatever,” said Oswald, but he looked nervous and evasive. Then he sighed and said, “No, wait. It’s a long shot, but there was somebody in last night, right at quitting time. A rather well-known somebody who came in acting like a lunatic.”

“What did he do?”

“He was ranting and raving and practically demanding that we sell off all our stock in Outward Bound Space Systems.” Oswald laughed nervously. “Perhaps you heard about that on the morning news. We just bought that stock yesterday morning, on Azuk’s advice. It was his first day on the job, you see—”

“Exactly what was his job?”

“We put him in charge of some mutual funds and told him to look at near-future stock reports and tell us what was going to go way up real fast. In his first hour he bought an enormous amount of Outward Bound — made something of a stir because it’s quite unusual for a mutual fund to acquire a controlling interest in one company. But two hours after that, it was announced that a dynamite invention that had been tied up in litigation for years was suddenly free for Outward Bound to develop. By four P.M. their stock had skyrocketed. Needless to say, we were thrilled.”

“Needless to say. And this visitor you had, I take it, was not. Did he have some connection with the invention?”

“None that I know of. But I gather he had inside information that led him to anticipate the court decision we took advantage of. Evidently he was planning to do what we did, but we beat him to it. Now he was trying to tell me I’d better sell it to him, at a price well below the new market value, because it was sure to go down even faster than it had gone up. ‘What happened today was a fluke,’ he said, ‘and if you wait till the markets open tomorrow, you’ll take a terrible loss.’ I asked him, ‘Now how do you know that?’ He turned beet red and said, ‘How did you know it was going to shoot up? I can only think of one way. You must have a tame Tsigan.’

“And then he was out of there. Well, that made me plenty nervous because of course we did have Azuk and I was the only one supposed to know. I wasn’t sure if this guy was just spouting words out of anger, but it scared me to think that he might really know.”

“I can imagine. And I suppose even without Azuk, you can predict my next question, Mr. Oswald. Who was this visitor?”

Oswald waited three beats, then said, “Ronald Klaren.”

So Ron Klaren was a suspect. Everyone knew who he was, too: a flamboyant entrepreneur with a habit of playing tight margins and overextending himself to the point where one big deal like this that went the wrong way could ruin him. Yes, he could be very upset. If he seriously suspected that Oswald had been getting tips from a Tsigan soothsayer — or worthsayer — he would not let it drop until he had checked it out and looked Real Hard for a way to exploit it. And with his influence and contacts, he very likely could.

Of course, I could not rule out Oswald himself, either. Even though Azuk was a goose with a proven record of golden eggs, he was not one Oswald could exploit indefinitely. Having made one big killing, Oswald just might have decided that the sooner and more permanently he got rid of this embarrassingly shady contact, the better.

In any case, my first orders of business were to go over that creepy room with a fine-toothed comb, get the lab working on fingerprints and any other tidbits I found there, and take a closer look at that credit card and try to trace it. And, of course, to get a Tsigan medic over here to examine the body ASAP.

Setting those processes in motion took two easy phone calls and one hard one. The hard one, of course, was to get through several layers of security to talk to a leader of the Tsigan delegation. But the expected resistance dissipated dramatically when I said the words “dead Tsigan” — though I had no doubt that everything I said or heard after that was quite thoroughly bugged.

The Tsigan medic arrived just as I was finishing up my scrutiny of the crime scene, having already sent some goodies to the lab. The smell in there was pretty potent by then. I’d never seen a live one in the flesh before. His skin had a kind of iridescence to it that the dead one lacked. His name was Iqaln. It was no surprise that he was accompanied by a couple of UN security guards. No doubt the death of an alien “off campus” during the first negotiations with extraterrestrials made them exceedingly nervous.

Dr. Iqaln bent over the body and made passes over it with some sort of scanner, occasionally muttering something quiet and unintelligible. It went on for quite a while, but I was relieved to see that it apparently wasn’t going to involve any cutting.

Presently I asked him, “Can I ask you questions while you work?”

“Yes.” His English sounded a bit like a trained parrot.

I pointed at the champagne bottle. “Do you know what that is?” Iqaln nodded quite humanly, but silently. “Could Azuk have used it?”

“The bottle, perhaps. The contents, no.”

“The information I need from you is quite simple, doctor. Did Azuk die of natural causes, or was he killed?”

“Could be either,” said Iqaln, finally laying his scanner aside and standing upright to face me. “The facial expression and the human artifact in his mouth do suggest something out of the ordinary. However, there is no evidence of gross trauma or poisoning — though there is some deep central nervous system damage.”

I found that intriguing, but the interview on the whole frustrating. Much of my work consists of watching people and judging their credibility, but I couldn’t read a live alien’s face any better than a dead one’s. “If he was killed,” I asked, “how was that nerve damage caused?”

Despite what I’d just been thinking, it seemed to me that the question bothered him. “Uh,” he said, “under some conditions we Tsigant can... uh... remotely stimulate each other’s nervous systems.”

Great, I thought. Not only precognition, but telekinesis and maybe telepathy, too. Aloud, I said only, “Are you suggesting that Azuk was killed by one of his own kind?”

I was sure that one made him uncomfortable. “Why would you say that?”

“Think,” I said. “If he was killed, it was evidently done by a method which the Tsigant can do, but humans can’t. So I ask you: did any Tsigan have a motive to do it?”

“Uh... I know of none... but I am not qualified or permitted to discuss any aspect of the case except the medical. I have done that. If you wish to ask more questions of Tsigant, you will have to speak to my superiors.”

“Okay,” I said. “Just one more question. How long has he been dead?”

The doc seemed relieved to be back on his own turf. “Since early this morning — approximately six A.M.”

I was in no hurry to talk to Iqaln’s higher-ups. The more I learned about the Tsigant, the more uncomfortable they made me. But I’d keep it in mind as something I might have to do later.

Meanwhile, I had other things to do. With the Tsigant’s permission, George and I moved the body (minus credit card) to another room and stored it on ice. I was the tiniest bit queasy about having not yet said anything to the city police, but a lot of the legalities of this case had no clear precedents and I was following the terms of my license to the letter.

The crime scene didn’t feel quite so spooky with Azuk out of there, and felt a lot better with the “air conditioning” turned off. With some relief, I made a couple of phone calls to follow up my lab and credit card investigations. I’d found no clear traces of human presence except some fingerprints on the champagne bottle. Thanks to a youthful indiscretion involving a fraternity project to relocate a phone booth, Ron Klaren’s prints were on file, and they did match.

So Klaren had gone to see Azuk, though the lab said he hadn’t touched the bottle since several hours before Azuk’s death. He could have stayed after putting the bottle down, with care to avoid touching anything else — but why? And how could a human cause the kind of damage Dr. Iqaln had reported?

Getting nowhere with that, I called the credit card company. I’d already known that the card was eight months expired; what was more surprising was that the company had no record of either its number or the name to which it was issued.

What good was an expired credit card in a nonexistent name that matched no account on the company’s books?

Another dead end, or so it seemed at the moment. And it was getting late.

I made one more visit to the scene of the crime, stopping on the way to pick up my “clues” from the lab so I could put them back where I’d found them. I was hoping vaguely for inspiration, but all I saw was a too-familiar pattern of mocking nonsense. The only thing that had changed was that the bed was now empty, still rumpled and unmade, with “J. Abraham Washton’s” Visa card resting forlornly on the pillow.

I was tired, and glumly convinced that I would have to try to talk to other Tsigant — tomorrow. There was just one more thing I wanted to try tonight.

Ron Klaren didn’t want to see me, but his blockers couldn’t argue with my private police credentials. I found him in a plush den decorated with antiques and trophy heads of animals, several of them recently extinct. Up close, at ten P.M., he didn’t look quite as cosmetically perfect as the public is used to seeing him, but he still looked quite suave and commanding with his boyish face, sleek silver hair, and gold brocade smoking jacket.

He offered me a sherry, but I declined. “I appreciate it, Mr. Klaren, but I don’t think either of us wants this to take any longer than it must. I’ll come right to the point: there’s been a death, possibly a murder, and your fingerprints were found on a bottle left in the deceased’s room last night. Can you explain what you were doing there?”

He set the sherry bottle aside with a sigh, but kept his own drink, lowered himself into a recliner, and took a sip before answering. “I give lots of people gifts, often in bottles. Maybe you’d better tell me who this unfortunate was.”

“I think you know, Mr. Klaren. Or are many of your business associates Tsigant?”

He put down his glass, steepled his fingers, and frowned almost imperceptibly. “Okay, I guess there’s no point in beating around the bush. You’re saying that KKT&P’s Tsigan fortuneteller was killed?”

“Possibly; even that’s not certain, but it looks very likely. And you’re a leading suspect, since we know you went to see him shortly before he died. We also know about your earlier conversation with Charles Oswald.”

Klaren smiled sardonically. “Yes. Hardly a cooperative chap. Okay, I suppose Oswald told you I was unhappy because they made a killing — no pun intended — I’d counted on making myself. I tried to talk him into undoing the damage, but he wouldn’t budge. He became nasty, actually. The more I thought about it, the less likely it seemed that they could have been sure enough to sink that much of a mutual fund into one company unless they were getting help from somebody who could literally see the future. I don’t know anybody who can do that except the Tsigant. Oswald didn’t respond to my accusation, but I became convinced it had to be that.

“So I started checking. Yes, I know it’s not easy for ordinary mortals to get close to our alien visitors, but I hardly think it immodest if I point out that I’m not an ordinary mortal. I have contacts, Mr. Parvenza. I use them. I found out about this runaway alien who was working for Oswald, and I found out where he was, and I went to see him.”

“What time was that?”

“Oh, I’d say elevenish. And I assure you that this Azuk character was just as stubborn as his boss — and just as much alive when I left him an hour or so later.”

“You say he was stubborn. What were you hoping to get from him?”

“Why, what I couldn’t get from Oswald, of course. A second chance to get what I’d been aiming at for so long. If I couldn’t persuade Oswald to unload that stock, maybe I could get his tame Tsigan to tell him things that would scare him into it.”

“You wanted Azuk to lie about the future,” I said. “And you hoped to bribe him to do that with a bottle of champagne?”

“Oh, of course not! I didn’t know what it would take; I didn’t even know if he could metabolize the stuff. But I did figure it would make a good host gift to break the ice. If he knew enough about our culture to make hundreds of millions per hour in the stock market, surely he’d know enough to recognize a good will gift.” He laughed shortly. “Turns out he took it, even though he couldn’t drink alcohol — seems he collects alien bottles. But he wouldn’t consider doing what I asked.”

I got no more out of Klaren, and left dissatisfied. His story seemed consistent with everything else I had, little as that was, and I still didn’t see how he could have done the physical deed — or how a precognitive victim could have let him. But his motive was so obvious I couldn’t get him out of my mind.

Early the next morning, after too little sleep, I again called the UN and arranged to talk to one Diilang, who I gathered was the leader of the Tsigan delegation to Earth. An hour later I was doing so — not face to face, but across a CCTV link from another room somewhere in the UN building. “I assume you already know about the death of one of your delegates in the hotel where I work,” I said. “I’m investigating because we’re afraid someone may have killed him.”

“You mean Azuk,” said Diilang, who looked to me much like Iqaln but had more rumble in his squawk-talk. “Why do you suspect this thing?”

“Well, for one thing, he had a counterfeit human credit card stuck in his mouth, which seemed most unusual.” Was that a flicker of reaction on Diilang’s face? “Also, your medical expert, Iqaln, examined the body and said that Azuk’s facial expression suggested that something unusual had happened in his last moments. He also said he found no physical damage — except some internal and potentially lethal damage to his nervous system. A kind of damage which, as I understand Iqaln, no human could cause, but a Tsigan could.”

He certainly showed a reaction that time. Too bad I couldn’t read it. He almost hissed, “Surely you don’t think we—”

“Oh, not as a matter of official policy,” I assured him, as casually as if I actually believed it. “But how did you and his other compatriots feel about Azuk?”

A pause so long it just had to mean something. Then, with what sure sounded like sullenness, “That’s of concern to us alone.”

“Maybe so,” I said, “but the suspicion of murder casts doubt on the whole human-Tsigan relationship. You’ve spent a couple of months here building up our trust in you, dazzling us with your ability to foretell the future, holding out the promise of a mutually beneficial arrangement between our species. If our people suddenly get the impression that some of you disagree with others so much that they run off and hide, and then you kill to silence them... It’s not going to help, sir.”

Again a long silence. “I repeat, sir, that the details of Azuk’s relationship with his fellows are no concern of yours. I can tell you, however, that he was a malcontent, and he did disappear.” Pause. “What bothered us most about his association with the human financial firm was the impropriety of his independently offering special aid to a particular human group while the rest of us were trying to work for the benefit of your species as a whole.”

Yeah, I thought with heavy irony. I said, “So it might have been convenient for you to be rid of him.”

“Perhaps,” said Diilang. “But we would hardly need to kill him. It would be quite sufficient to send him lies about the future that would discredit him with his human employer.”

“Perhaps,” I echoed. “But suppose whoever killed Azuk was acting on his own rather than for your government. Might he, for instance, have had a coconspirator? Someone who planned to desert with him, changed his mind, and then wanted to cover his complicity?”

“I tell you again, that’s our concern, not yours.”

“Of course. My apologies for an inappropriate question. But perhaps you could tell me this. Iqaln said one Tsigan could damage another’s nervous system by remote control. Exactly how is that done?”

“That’s hardly the sort of information we’d wish to share with humans,” Diilang said stiffly. “But I do find it interesting that you’re the second human who’s asked us that question in the last day.”

I found that interesting, too. “Who was the first?”

“He called himself Ronald Klaren. Now, if you’ll excuse me—”

“Certainly. If you’ll answer just one more question—”

“I’ve lost patience with you,” said Diilang. “No more questions today.”

He reached forward. My screen went blank and my speaker silent.

So Klaren had also been to see Diilang. That strengthened his standing as a suspect. The very fact that he had gotten through to the alien leader proved that he had unusual connections — which was hardly surprising.

Perhaps, after giving up on both Oswald and Azuk, Klaren had been trying to feel out a weakness — to learn a way to kill a precognitive alien.

Or maybe it wasn’t a simple murder. If Klaren had learned that only Tsigant could do that nerve trick, and if he too suspected there was a coconspirator, he might have tried to find and hire that individual to do the actual deed...

It seemed like more of a lead than I’d found so far, but it still didn’t take me very far. I switched off my monitor to get some quiet, leaned back in my chair, and closed my eyes. I tried to empty my conscious mind, to make it receptive to anything my subconscious might choose to dump into it. Words started flitting across from ear to ear. At first most of them had to do with the case, and then I started free-associating, which sometimes helped. Empty desk... precognitive corpse... letter opener... let ’er rip... ripped a seam... things are seldom what they...

My eyes snapped open and I sat bolt upright. The few things I’d found at the scene seemed utterly irrelevant to it — if they were really what they seemed.

But what if they weren’t?

I stood up and charged out into the nippy fall drizzle to grab a taxi. Twenty minutes later I’d gathered all the “clues” from Room 333 at the Fritz and lugged them back to the lab. “Analyze these as thoroughly but nondestructively as you can,” I told the dropoff clerk. “And fast. I have to know if they’re really what they look like.”

She looked skeptically at the expired credit card, the cheap letter opener, and the expensive bottle, and shrugged. “Whatever you say, Mr. Parvenza.”

The lab called back within the hour. It was Anitra, a very good tech whose friendship and confidence I’d cultivated over the years, and she sounded baffled. “The champagne appears to be just what the label says,” she said. “Good stuff — if you need any help drinking it when this is all over, let me know. But that other stuff... I’ve never seen anything like it. The credit card and letter opener are both full of hidden structure that looks vaguely like microchips. We did the credit card first, so that didn’t surprise us too much. Most credit cards are smart these days. But when we looked closer, none of it looked quite right. And the letter opener has it, too. Who ever heard of a Woolworth letter opener full of exotic microcircuits?”

“I thought you might find something like that,” I grinned. “Any idea what the circuits do?”

“None whatever,” she said. “We’re not even sure they’re really circuits. Do you have any ideas?”

“I might. Maybe we can talk about them later over that champagne. Right now I’ve got work to do. Thanks ever so much, Anitra.”

I hung up before she could press me for details. Truth was, my idea was still pretty vague. But I really did have the feeling things were starting to fall into place.

I suddenly remembered something Diilang had said during our interview that hadn’t fully registered at the time, and my heart and brain sped up even more. I grabbed the phone and called him back. It didn’t take quite as much bullying this time.

Somewhat to my surprise, I got him to talk to me on the regular phone, which saved me a trip to the UN. The only disadvantage was that he was a good deal harder to understand without visual cues. (I suppose he thought the same about me.) “When Ronald Klaren visited you,” I began, “and asked how your remote control works, did he ask anything else?”

“I don’t understand,” said Diilang — stiffly, I thought.

“I need to know,” I told him. “One thing we can’t understand about this case is how someone with precognition could let himself be killed. Why wouldn’t he foresee it and take measures to prevent it?”

There was a long silence. Then Diilang said, “Please stop bothering me,” and hung up.

I didn’t bother trying to call him back. The very fact that he cut me off without answering strengthened my conviction that the question was very important.

And I had a half-baked idea why it was important. The Tsigan doctor had said they could kill by remote control, and the Tsigan leader hadn’t denied it. He had also mentioned (in what I now suspected was a slip of his alien tongue) that they could send — or at least fake — a message from the future.

Suppose that was the only way they could get information from the future!

All us humans, myself included, had been making a big assumption ever since the Tsigant showed up. They said they had precognition, and they proved it by making lots of predictions. They were never wrong — but what about all the things they didn’t predict that happened anyway? We just assumed that the entire future was an open book to them; nobody thought to ask how their precognition worked or what its limitations were. Which made their offer to tell us everything we should do from here on out all too tempting to a lot of people.

Which was, I suspected, exactly what the Tsigant wanted. If you had the run of the galaxy, and you came upon a sometimes-warlike race that was about to burst forth into your domain, wouldn’t you like a way to control that race’s future development?

What if their “omniscience” was really just a straightforward application of an impressive, but limited, technology? What if all they knew about the future was what their future selves told them via some sort of “time telephone”? What if it was difficult or expensive to send those messages, so they couldn’t send very many?

They could create the impression of knowing far more than they did, just by showing off a few laboriously arranged demonstrations. And maybe those messages themselves could be dangerous — especially if they interfaced directly with the recipient’s nervous system.

Sound familiar?

So far all my evidence had said that Azuk was dead, but nobody had been in his apartment at the right time to do the damage. Well, maybe the explanation was very simple: they hadn’t.

Maybe the murderer didn’t even have a motive — yet.

Maybe, crazy as it sounded, he could still be stopped...

A day and a half hiding out in Room 333 was beginning to get on my nerves. It might not even be the right place, I thought, and I had only a vague idea when the time would be. I had so little to go on. It could be any time, any place. But that was too big a field to stake out, and I did have reasons to suspect this time and place. If my telephone theory was right, there ought to be a receiver and a transmitter. Since Azuk was spending all his time in this room, he had to be collecting his “future” data and sending it to his “past” self right here. So where were the transmitter and receiver?

I sure hadn’t found anything that looked like I’d expect them to. So they had to be disguised as something else. That made sense; Azuk would be just as eager as his compatriots to be thought of as having a mysterious gift for seeing the future rather than a black box that could do a few tricks. So I’d had the letter opener and Visa card checked out, and the lab report suggested I’d struck paydirt. One of them, evidently, was the transmitter and the other the receiver.

Who ever said a time machine had to be big?

Which was which? Well, if my hunch was right, he’d sent stock data back to something which fed it directly into his nervous system. Maybe not directly; maybe he had some sort of implant in the roof of his mouth that Iqaln had chosen not to tell me about. Feed the wrong kind of signal to that something and it might make his nervous system do things it shouldn’t — maybe even fry the neurons themselves. The receiver must be the one that he had in his mouth when he died, because that was how the lethal signal from the future — from now — got into his nervous system.

So the Visa card was the receiver. It was not just a “calling card”; it was the business end of the weapon. Whoever came up with the scheme had an admirable eye for detail. A smart credit card would normally have things in it that looked sort of like the timephone’s works, and an expired card would be less likely to invite close examination.

I hoped, though I didn’t know, that the transmitter and receiver would be a matched pair so it would be difficult or impossible to send a killer signal to Azuk’s receiver without using his own transmitter. So I guessed they would most likely come here to do it — and since there’d be no advantage in waiting, they’d do it soon.

So I’d put everything (except Azuk) back where I’d found it, and settled in to wait. And after a day and a half, I was beginning to wonder if I was on a completely wrong track.

Even on stakeout, one has to go to the bathroom. When I was coming back, it finally happened. I heard the outer door opening, ducked behind a smelly alien plant, and froze, pistol ready, heart pounding.

The door opened slowly and a Tsigan, one I hadn’t seen before, slunk into the room. He too was holding something that I suspected was a weapon. Did he know I was here, or did he think Azuk was in the bathroom and might come out too soon? If he was trying to kill him, he must not know he was already dead.

One thing bothered me: if he thought Azuk was alive and on the premises, why not just shoot him here and now? Why bother with what I thought he was going to do — what he must be going to do, since Azuk’s death proved the deed accomplished?

And what would happen if I stopped him?

I tried not to think about that. I’d read enough science fiction to give up on making sense of temporal paradoxes, and this was no time to get sidetracked into thinking about them again.

My suspect looked around, seemed to relax a little, and stepped to the computer. He didn’t sit down, but he did pick up the letter opener — the thing I’d guessed was the transmitter — and slipped it deftly into what looked like one of the ventilation slots on the computer. He looked around once more, then laid his “gun” down and poised his hands over the keyboard.

“Stop!” I yelled, charging out of my hiding place. “You’re under arrest!” I had no idea whether such an arrest would hold up in court, but there was no time to think about that, either.

The Tsigan turned his head but didn’t move his hands from the keyboard. He started to type...

I had to do something fast. I was willing to try arresting an alien, but shooting him seemed too risky. In the split second of my hesitation, he took one hand from the keyboard — but kept typing, hunt-and-peck, with the other — and reached for his weapon. My reflexes realized I was within reach of the champagne bottle; I grabbed it and in one swift movement cracked it over his head. Bubbly pressure released explosively, showering everything in sight with champagne and shards of glass.

He staggered back, apparently not seriously hurt, but bleeding, just as I was, from several small cuts. His blood was a bright Christmassy green that made a nice contrast to my red.

“You idiot!” he squawked. “You’ve probably killed him!”

Only then did I see the champagne dripping from the computer — and letter opener — and remember the sparks it had triggered when it hit, which had not registered consciously until now. With a precipitously sinking feeling, I realized what he must mean.

And at that instant the outer door opened again to admit my old friends from UN Security, with sidearms drawn.

“I’m afraid,” one of them said, “you’re both going to have to come with us.”

It’s quite a blow to a detective’s ego to find out that he did it. There was a big meeting after that, with both UN and Tsigan leaders, in which they admitted that I was right about how their precognition worked, including the roles of the letter opener and credit card. I’d picked that up from Diilang’s remark about messages; unfortunately, I hadn’t picked up on the part about “we wouldn’t have to kill him.”

A lot of secrets came out now because the human leaders had suddenly developed a healthy fear of the pig in that poke. The Tsigan I’d tried to stop from sending a destructive message back to kill Azuk in the past wasn’t doing any such thing. He was my counterpart: the detective they’d turned loose to track down Azuk when he disappeared. He’d been working pretty much on his own and hadn’t checked in with headquarters as often as he should have. He didn’t know about either Klaren’s or my visit to Diilang, or that Azuk was already dead. But he did see the same news that had driven Klaren into a frenzy and used that to figure out where Azuk was and what he was doing. He had independently reached the same conclusion that Diilang had let slip to me, that Azuk could be rendered harmless to Tsigan goals by sending him phony messages that would make him the laughingstock of KKT&P. That’s what he was trying to do when I clobbered him.

But the shower of champagne had shorted out all manner of things in the computer and time transmitter, and that’s what zapped poor Azuk. So I was, however unwittingly, the killer — or at least the weapon. Since the lethal impulse was sent back through time, what looked like a “whodunit” had really been a “who-will-do-it.”

I feel terrible about my role in it, but both the UN and the Tsigant are letting me off. Everybody’s willing to accept what happened as an accident, and the Tsigant have had to back off quite a bit in their pressure to take over our affairs. Now that we know they don’t really know as much about the future as they wanted us to believe, their “guidance” is a lot easier to resist. The UN has ordered them off Earth, on pain of destruction of their fleet (yes, we could do it), and we’re back to trying to make it on our own, without soothsayers. Or worthsayers.

But we’ve got a new incentive to do it really well. We know they’re out there, and while they’re not everything we thought they were, they’re not to be trifled with.

And someday, I suspect, they’ll be back.