Deduction from known facts? Echoes of gigabytes in the nervous system? “I’ll need you to talk to some other people, by the way. Within a day or so.”
B’russ’r nodded and smiled. “Of course,” he said. “Master Higsbee, and I should think little Robbin Tress.”
I stared at him. Those names were notions in my head, and nowhere else. I had mentioned neither of them to Ping, or to anyone else. I had seen I would need help with this job, and I’d thought of asking the Master and Robbin. Only thought of it.
Berigot were not, as far as was known, telepathic. It would be the Hell of a secret for them to keep.
“How do you arrive at those names?” I said after several silent seconds.
One more smile. A friendly smile. “A consequence of information upload,” B’russ’r said. “I know of you—an amount about you. I know of many people on Ravenal. I said to myself: other people? The choices seemed predictable. It took me some time.”
His response had been instantaneous. “I am impressed,” I said. I swallowed. Hard. “You will talk to them?”
“Of course,” B’russ’r said, and positively beamed at me. “Who knows what I may learn from actually meeting them?”
God knows I didn’t. I said my farewells—Berigot don’t shake hands, and it is better so, but we hissed politely at each other, and tilted heads in opposite directions—he left, I right.
After that I went to see the police, who were much less unsettling.
CHAPTER FIVE
They were also less informative. They did open a bag or two out of their hoard on the case, but none of the bags contained anything I could think of any way to use. They had a few flakes of dried skin from a bit of floor near the case—people shed, and few beings outside police labs know it—but they’d been too small and too trampled to provide anything much in the way of data. They had the beginnings of a typing on the dried skin, just enough to limit the suspects to fifty-five million. With great good luck and much work, perhaps fifty-three million.
After a while I left, feeling just a bit lost, and thoroughly inferior until I remembered that B’russ’r, certainly, had also had a chance at the police files, and had got no more help from them than I had.
I was heading back to my rooms, to call the Master and get him to call Robbin—unless one is one of three people in the universe, one does not call Robbin. I was on a main boulevard, nicely tree-lined (maple again) and uncrowded. The time was eighteen-seventeen, or sensibly 6:17 P. M. I was not smoking, muttering or whistling, and I was wearing nothing unusual. I did need a haircut, and had for a few days.
The slug hit the sidewalk less than a foot behind me. This time there was no hesitation; I leapt as if cued for the building line and dropped flat there, bruising my nose, one shoulder and both knees. I didn’t know about the bruises until some time later; I was much too busy listening and, as far as my position allowed, looking—though I neither saw nor heard anything helpful.
A few passers-by stopped to help me. I lay still until I had collected a small crowd of hesitant Samaritans (“Don’t move him, you don’t know what’s wrong”), and then allowed them to raise me up, dust me off and help me to a nearby shop. I stayed in the middle of the crowd until well inside the shop, which sold portable walls.
A nice portable wall sounded like a fine idea, but I didn’t really have time, and even if pressed couldn’t carry one everywhere; people would talk. Four or five Samaritans had given the shop-keeper the story of my rescue, very variously, and I sank down on a small chair over by one (permanent) wall and breathed for a little while.
Ten minutes, in fact. It might have been eleven. In either case, I’d given my assassin more room than I had before, because all that Samaritan-collecting had taken time.
Then I stood up, and thanked the wallman, and walked out into the early-evening light. It took me another ten minutes to amble on home, during which time nothing of any interest happened to me.
And, once home, I made completely sure every unbreakable glassex window was shut and locked, told the Totum to take itself and both Robbies to somewhere restful until called for, dressed my small wounds a little, and got to the phone. Voice only, image available for some extra button-pushing and a nice steep charge, but I was not looking my best, and forwent it.
I hadn’t spoken to Master Higsbee in five years, and it was a delight, in a way, to hear that rasp of his again—a sound like an unoiled camshaft with attitude. The phone rang twice (on Ravenal, by the way, it doesn’t ring—for some reason, it blips) and a voice said: “Who?”
It is no damn way to answer the phone, and never will be. “Knave,” I said. “Hello, Master. How are you?”
“Ah, Gerald,” he said. No one else in the entire Galactic collection of vocal races calls me Gerald. I think I dislike it. “A long time. And how should I be? An old blind man, helpless and alone, in a world made for the sighted and the fleet—Gerald, how should I be?”
I sighed a little. The Master would always be the Master, after all. “You’ll be fine,” I said. “You always are.”
A snort from the unoiled camshaft. “By dint of unceasing effort, Gerald, I remain alive and—so far as I may—functioning. In sixty-one months Standard, what have you done?”
I took his word for the time; one could. And I knew what he meant. “Not much, Master,” I said. “I did learn how to lockpick a hologram safe, and I’ve had a few liaisons.”
“Children may result from the liaisons, one cannot be wholly sure,” he said. “Good. The lockpick is too simple for you, Gerald—you must stretch yourself.”
I refrained from saying that I’d stretched myself quite a lot in some of the liaisons. When talking to Master Higsbee, one lets the Master make the jokes.
“I’ll look round for other things,” I said.
He sighed. A cross between a wheeze and a derby-muted trumpet. “Well, enough,” he said. “What have you called to demand of an old man?”
“I’ve got a problem,” I said, and Master Higsbee said at once:
“The Heinlein forgery, of course. What do you need of me?”
There are days when I am not at speed with the entire rest of the universe. This never feels comfortable. “You’ve heard about the theft,” I said.
“I have,” the unoiled camshaft told me. “Gerald, put out the cigarette. The smoke does not of course come through this connection, but the signal of it, your changes in breathing, discomfits me.”
I stubbed out the Inoson Smoking Pleasure T. Why could I not need someone else?
Because, damn it, there wasn’t anyone else. Not like the Master. “I need a full consult,” I said. “Examination of scene, questioning of some people. Everything. And a running consult with me on all aspects—all but one.”
“You will handle one aspect alone, Gerald?” he said. “If so, which one?”
“Not alone,” I said, and he said:
“I will call
