The parting answer floated back over a slamming door, ‘Do you think I’m crazy? . . . ’
Marmie rubbed his hands ecstatically when he was sure Hoskins was gone.
‘Brains, that’s what it was,’ he said, and probed one finger as deeply into his temple as it would go. ‘This sale I enjoyed. This sale, Professor, is worth all the rest I’ve ever made. All the rest of them together.’ He collapsed joyfully on the nearest chair.
Torgesson lifted little Rollo to his shoulder. He said mildly, ‘But, Marmaduke, what would you have done if little Rollo had typed your version instead?’
A look of grievance passed momentarily over Marmie’s face. ‘Well, damn it,’ he said, ‘that’s what I thought it was going to do.’
The Singing Bell
Louis Peyton never discussed publicly the methods by which he had bested the police of Earth in a dozen duels of wits and bluff, with the psychoprobe always waiting and always foiled. He would have been foolish to do so, of course, but in his more complacent moments, he fondled the notion of leaving a testament to be opened only after his death, one in which his unbroken success could clearly be seen to be due to ability and not to luck.
In such a testament he would say, ‘No false pattern can be created to cover a crime without bearing upon it some trace of its creator. It is better, then, to seek in events some pattern that already exists and then adjust your actions to it.’
It was with that principle in mind that Peyton planned the murder of Albert Cornwell.
Cornwell, that small-time retailer of stolen things, first approached Peyton at the latter’s usual table-for-one at Grinnell’s. Cornwell’s blue suit seemed to have a special shine, his lined face a special grin, and his faded mustache a special bristle.
‘Mr Peyton,’ he said, greeting his future murderer with no fourth-dimensional qualm, ‘it is so nice to see you. I’d almost given up, sir, almost given up.’
Peyton, who disliked being approached over his newspaper and dessert at Grinnell’s, said, ‘If you have business with me, Cornwell, you know where you can reach me.’ Peyton was past forty and his hair was past its earlier blackness, but his back was rigid, his bearing youthful, his eyes dark, and his voice could cut the more sharply for long practice.
‘Not for this, Mr Peyton,’ said Cornwell, ‘not for this. I know of a cache, sir, a cache of . . . you know, sir.’ The forefinger of his right hand moved gently, as though it were a clapper striking invisible substance, and his left hand momentarily cupped his ear.
Peyton turned a page of the paper, still somewhat damp from its tele- d1spenser, folded it flat and said, ‘Singing Bells?’
‘Oh, hush, Mr Peyton,’ said Cornwell in whispered agony.
Peyton said, ‘Come with me.’
They walked through the park. It was another Peyton axiom that to be reasonably secret there was nothing like a low-voiced discussion out of doors.
Cornwell whispered, ‘A cache of Singing Bells; an accumulated cache of Singing Bells. Unpolished, but such beauties, Mr Peyton.’
‘Have you seen them?’
‘No, sir, but I have poken with one who has. He had proofs enough to convmce me. There 1s enough there to enable you and me to retire in affluence. In absolute affluence, sir.’
‘Who was this other man?’
A look of cunning lit Cornwell’s face like a smoking torch, obscuring more than 1t showed and lending it a repulsive oiliness. ‘The man was a lunar grubstaker who had a method for locating the Bells in the crater sides. I don’t know his method; he never told me that. But he has gathered dozens, hidden them on the Moon, and come to Earth to arrange the disposing of them.’
‘He died, I suppose?’
‘Yes. A most shocking accident, Mr Peyton. A fall from a height. Very sad. Of course, his activities on the Moon were quite illegal. The Domi ion is very strict about unauthorized Bell-mining. So perhaps it was a Judgment upon him after all . . . In any case, I have his map.’
Peyton said, a look of calm indifference on his face, ‘I don’t want any of the details of your little transaction. What I want to know is why you’ve come to me.’
Cornwell said, ‘Well, now, there’s enough for both of us, Mr Peyton, and we can both do our bit. For my part, I know where the cache is located and I can get a spaceship. You . . .’
‘Yes?’
‘You can pilot a spaceship, and you have such excellent contacts for disposing of the Bells. It is a very fair division of labor, Mr Peyton. Wouldn’t you say so, now?’
Peyton considered the pattern of his life – the pattern that already existed – and matters seemed to fit.
He said, ‘We will leave for the Moon on August the tenth.’
Cornwell stopped walking and said, ‘Mr Peyton! It’s only April now.’
Peyton maintained an even gait and Cornwell had to hurry to catch up. ‘Do you hear me, Mr Peyton?’
Peyton said, ‘August the tenth. I will get in touch with you at the proper time, tell you where to bring your ship. Make no attempt to see me personally till then. Good-bye, Cornwell.’
Cornwell said, ‘Fifty-fifty?’
‘Quite,’ said Peyton. ‘Good-bye.’
Peyton continued his walk alone and considered the pattern of his life again. At the age of twenty-seven, he had bought a tract of land in the Rockies on which some past owner had built a house designed as refuge against the threatened atomic wars of two centuries back, the ones that had never come to pass after all. The house remained, however, a monument to a frightened drive for self-sufficiency.
It was of steel and concrete in as isolated a spot as could well be found on Earth, set high above sea level and protected on nearly all sides by mountain peaks that reached higher still. It had its self-contained power unit, its water supply fed by mountain streams, its freezers in which ten sides of beef could hang comfortably, its cellar outfitted like a fortress with an arsenal of weapons designed to stave off hungry, panicked hordes that never came. It had its air-conditioning unit that could scrub and scrub the air until anything but radioactivity (alas for human frailty) could be scrubbed out of it.
In that house of survival, Peyton passed the month of August every subsequent year of his perennially bachelor life. He took out the communicators, the television, the newspaper tele-dispenser. He built a force-field fence about his property and left a short-distance signal mechanism to the house from the point where the fence crossed the one trail winding through the mountains.
For one month each year, he could be thoroughly alone. No one saw him, no one could reach him. In absolute solitude, he could have the only vacation he valued after eleven months of contact with a humanity for which he could feel only a cold contempt.
Even the police – and Peyton smiled – knew of his rigid regard for August. He had once jumped bail and risked the psychoprobe rather than forgo his August.
