called Ping to check on me. They’re a deeply suspicious bunch, and they should be; five years ago, Ravenal (just about five and a third, Standard), according to report, some nut decided to get dangerous, and tried shooting at Berigot. He made a nice, if somewhat ragged, hole in each of three Berigot—in each case puncturing some part of the strong webbing with which a Beri sailplanes; only natural, as it’s the biggest target in flight, and all three were hit while off the ground.
Police built up a fair picture of the nut, who had been using an unfashionable, but very damaging, slug gun, and their final working theory was, believe it or not, that he’d been a sports maniac, and had decided the Berigot were fair game, like ducks or some such. They’d never managed to snare him, despite some helpful data (by Berigot, of course, who notice things), and since that little series of incidents Berigot Services has been just a hair paranoid.
The Berigot themselves take things more calmly; their feeling seems to be that nuts happen, the way earthquakes and economic depressions happen, and one has to get on with life.
So when I knocked on the door of the Frontier Worlds History room, B’russ’r B’dige simply unlocked the field and poked his head out to see who’d come along.
“Gerald Knave,” I said.
“My goodness,” he said. His voice was clear, with a slight echo, and a little high even for Berigot, who tend to the tenor ranges. “I know of you, Knave. Have you come to add to my knowledge? Come in, please come right in.”
“I’ve come to borrow from it,” I said. “I’m here about the Heinlein manuscript.”
B’russ’r smiled. Berigot have rather pinched, open smiles, and they look more pleasant than my description does. “Ah, Heinlein,” he said. “‘What are the facts? Again and again and again—what are the facts? You pilot always into an unknown future; facts are your single clue.’ Our attitude exactly, Knave.”
He stepped aside and I went in, and he closed the field firmly behind me.
“Now, then,” he said. “A phrase, by the way, whose oddity has always appealed to me—now, then—well, what do you want to know?”
I found a chair and sat down. B’russ’r remained standing, of course, his legs locked; a Beri can’t sit and doesn’t want to. I took out a cigarette (Inoson Smoking Pleasure Tubes, Guaranteed Harmless—no Earth tobaccos—but most people do seem to call them cigarettes) and offered him one. He nodded and took one and stuck it through his head-bubble (I’d had no idea it passed Inoson Smoking Pleasure Tubes as well as sight and sound) into his mouth. “I have never understood why humans burn these things,” he said, and began to chew, slowly. “I don’t think I have ever seen cigarettes dyed red before, Knave.”
I explained that I had them made, lit mine while B’russ’r found a handsome ashtray—map of the Ravenal Scholarte pressed between glassex panels, in gold—and explained matters to him. He grew very grave, munching away at his cigarette.
“Someone should have been on duty,” he said. “Someone should have taken notice.”
“Notice of what?” I said. B’russ’r shook his head.
“Of the actual theft,” he said. “The process itself—it must have taken appreciable time, after all.”
“Now that’s what I want to know,” I said. “How was it managed? What do you know?”
“Know? Very little,” he said. He was still chewing thoughtfully. Apparently Berigot don’t spit. “We have some deductions, and the police have told us of a very few—ah—clues.”
I asked for a consecutive story first, and then got down to details and went back and forth. I made notes as we went along, and B’russ’r watched me do that with a curious resignation. When I asked him why, he said: “We use a better method: upload data directly to the nervous system, as non-sensory input, for classification and filing. Automatic, but humans somehow won’t take to it.”
“I wonder why not?” I said, not even wanting to think about shoving megabytes of strange data into my nervous system.
“I think it must be the loading system,” he said. “It is bulky, but we found room by shrinking parts of our reproductive systems. I’m sure humans could do that.”
“Well,” I said, smiling with some effort, “maybe they will. Some day.” A dedicated race, the Berigot.
CHAPTER FOUR
The robbery had taken place, as all good robberies should, at dark of night. The thief or thieves (and there was a general consensus that there’d been a small crew) had somehow a) managed to get across the grounds of the building, not easy because the place was sub-electronically guarded—a pulsating field (a look every twentieth of a second) from three feet below ground to six feet above—and b) managed to get through into the room where the manuscript had been on display, and remove it. The thing had still been on display—the forgery wasn’t quite public knowledge, though not hard to find out about, and the forged manuscript was to have been removed and stored under Curiosae two days later.
Getting into the room had been quite a trick. The windows were locked from the inside (real and very old-fashioned window-locks, late-Twentieth in style but newly made of real metals). There was a Berigot perch nearby, but what difference it made nobody could see, since, if you somehow managed to get to it and onto it from the ground, you were still looking at the locked windows. Nothing had been broken. There were no fingerprints, no meaningful residual heat-spots, on the windows themselves. There were residual heat-spots on the inner sills, and on the floor leading to the case—as good as footprints, and showing two or just possibly three human people, the small crew already mentioned—and the case itself had been wiped clean of everything including heat by an alcohol mixture. The locks on the case showed signs of tampering.
I asked B’russ’r: “Now, why would you expect someone to have noticed?”
“Even late at night,” he said, “there are Berigot in flight. We enjoy to fly, and require the exercise. There were none on this side of the building—we will have to see about arranging our exercise flights with more care.”
“Not your fault,” I said. B’russ’r nodded.
“I know that, Knave,” he said. “It is not fault I consider. But someone should have noticed.” He did what Berigot think of as a disapproving motion; both small arms twitched forward under the webbing. “There must have been noise, even if faint. The alarm should have gone off.”
“Apparently not,” I said. “These three, or however many, slipped through the alarm like ghosts. Through the window, too. Not a trace anywhere.”
“And the case showed signs of tampering,” he said. He swallowed twice. The cigarette was gone. Mine had long been ash and a small red remainder, in the glassex ashtray. “No trace at the window. Definite traces at the case. Does this dichotomy suggest anything to you?
I shrugged. “Insanity, possibly. Little else.”
“Nor to me,” he said. “But it must mean something. It is too odd to be meaningless.”
I thought about lighting a second cigarette, out of sheer frustration, and decided I didn’t want to see B’russ’r consume another one. “You have good instincts,” I said.
He smiled
