The room he had entered was large and in semidarkness except for the brilliant viewing lamp focused over a combination armchair-desk. Rows of book-films covered the walls. A suspension of Galactic charts occupied one comer of the room and a Galactic Lens gleamed softly on a stand in another corner.
‘You are Dr Wendell Urth?’ asked Davenport, in a tone that suggested he found it hard to believe. Davenport was a stocky man with black hair, a thin and prominent nose, and a star-shaped scar on one cheek which marked permanent!:·’ the place where a neuronic whip had once struck him at too close a range.
‘I am,’ said Dr Urth in a thin, tenor voice. ‘And you are Inspector Davenport.’
The Inspector presented his credentials and said, ‘The University recommended you to me as an extraterrologist.’
‘So you said when you called me half an hour ago,’ said Urth agreeably. His features were thick, his nose was a snubby button, and over his somewhat protuberant eyes there were thick glasses.
‘I shall get to the point, Dr Urth. I presume you have visited the Moon . . . ’
Dr Urth, who had brought out a bottle of ruddy liquid and two glasses, just a little the worse for dust, from behind a straggling pile of book-films, said with sudden brusqueness, ‘I have never visited the Moon, Inspector. I never intend to! Space travel is foolishness. I don’t believe in it.’ Then, in softer tones, ·’Sit down, sir, sit down. Have a drink.’
Inspector Davenport did as he was told and said, ‘But you’re an . . . ’
‘Extraterrologist. Yes. I’m interested in other worlds, but it doesn’t mean I have to go there. Good lord, I don’t have to be a time traveler to qualify as a historian, do I?’ He sat down, and a broad smile impressed itself upon his round face once more as he said, ‘Now tell me what’s on your mind.’
‘I have come,’ said the Inspector, frowning, ‘to consult you in a case of murder.’
‘Murder? What have I to do with murder?’
‘This murder, Dr Urth, was on the Moon.’
‘Astonishing.’
‘It’s more than astonishing. It’s unprecedented, Dr Urth. In the fifty years since the Lunar Dominion has been established, ships have blown up and spacesuits have sprung leaks. Men have boiled to death on sunside, frozen on dark-side, and suffocated on both sides. There have even been deaths by falls, which, considering lunar gravity, is quite a trick. But in all that time, not one man has been killed on the Moon as the result of another man’s deliberate act of violence – till now.’
Dr Urth said, ‘How was it done?’
‘A blaster. The authorities were on the scene within the hour through a fortunate set of circumstances. A patrol ship observed a flash of light against the Moon’s surface. You know how far a flash can be seen against the night-side. The pilot notified Luna City and landed. In the process of circling back, he swears that he just mana ed to se by Earth-light what looked like a ship taking off. Upon landmg, he discovereda blasted corpse and footprints.’
‘The flash of light,’ said Dr Urth, ‘you suppose to be the finng blaster.’
‘That’s certain. The corpse was fresh. Interior portions of the body had not yet frozen. The footprints belonged to two people. Careful measurements showed that the depressions fell into two groups of somewhat different diameters, indicating differently sized spaceboots. In the main, they led to craters GC-3 and GC-5, a pair of—’
‘Iam acquainted with the official code for naming lunar craters,’ said Dr Urth pleasantly.
‘Umm. In any case, GC-3 contained footprints that led to a rift in the crater wall, within which scraps of hardened pumice were found. X-ray diffraction patterns showed—’
‘Singing Bells,’ put in the extraterrologist in great excitement. ‘Don’t tell me this murder of yours involves Singing Bells!’
‘What if it does?’ demanded Davenport blankly.
‘I have one. A University expedition uncovered it and presented it to me in return for – Come, Inspector, I must show it to you.’
Dr Urth jumped up and pattered across the room, beckoning the other to follow as he did. Davenport, annoyed, followed.
They entered a second room, larger than the first, dimmer, considerably more cluttered. Davenport stared with astonishment at the heterogeneous mass of material that was jumbled together in no pretense at order.
He made out a small lump of ‘blue glaze’ from Mars, the sort of thing some romantics considered to be an artifact of long-extinct Martians, a small meteorite, a model of an early spaceship, a sealed bottle of nothing scrawlingly labeled ‘Venusian atmosphere.’
Dr Urth said happily, ‘I’ve made a museum of my whole house. It’s one of the advantages of being a bachelor. Of course, I haven’t quite got things organized. Someday, when I have a spare week or so . . . ’
For a moment he looked about, puzzled; then, remembering, he pushed aside a chart showing the evolutionary scheme of development of the marine invertebrates that were the highest life forms on Barnard’s Planet and said, ‘Here it is. It’s flawed, I’m afraid.’
The Bell hung suspended from a slender wire, soldered delicately onto it. That it was flawed was obvious. It had a constriction line running halfway about it that made it seem like two small globes, firmly but imperfectly squashed together. Despite that, it had been lovingly polished to a dull luster, softly gray, velvety smooth, and faintly pock-marked in a way that laboratories, in their futile efforts to prepare synthetic Bells, had found impossible to duplicate.
Dr Urth said, ‘I experimented a good deal before I found a decent stroker. A flawed Bell is temperamental. But bone works. I have one here’ – and he held up something that looked like a short thick spoon made of a gray-white substance – ‘which I had made out of the femur of an ox. Listen.’
With surprising delicacy, his pudgy fingers maneuvered the Bell, feeling for one best spot. He adjusted it, steadying it daintily. Then, letting the Bell swing free, he brought down the thick end of the bone spoon and stroked the Bell softly.
It was as though a million harps h d sounded a mile away. It swelled and faded and returned. It came from no particular direction. It sounded inside the head, incredibly sweet and pathetic and tremulous all at once.
It died away lingeringly and both men were silent for a full minute.
Dr Urth said, ‘Not bad, eh?’ and with a flick of his hand set the Bell to swinging on its wire.
Davenport stirred restlessly. ‘Careful! Don’t break it.’ The fragility of a good Singing Bell was proverbial.
Dr Urth said, ‘Geologists say the Bells are only pressure-hardened pumice, enclosing a vacuum in which small beads of rock rattle freely. That’s what they say. But it’that’s all it is, why can’t we reproduce one? Now a flawless Bell would make this one sound like a child’s harmonica.’
‘Exactly,’ said Davenport, ‘and there aren’t a dozen people on Earth who own a flawless one, and there are a hundred people and institutions who would buy one at any price, no questions asked. A supply of Bells would be worth murder.’
The extraterrologist turned to Davenport and pushed his spectacles back on his inconsequential nose with a stubby forefinger. ‘I haven’t forgotten your murder case. Please go on.’
‘That can be done in a sentence. I know the identity of the murderer.’
They had returned to the chairs in the library and Dr Urth clasped his hands over his ample abdomen. ‘Indeed? Then surely you have no problem, Inspector.’
