“If he saw us arguing earlier he could have jumped to a wrong conclusion.”
“Thank you, Mr Hobart – I have no more questions for you for the present.” Shimming stopped the recorder once more and sat back, eyeing Hobart with moody satisfaction. ’I was scared up there today. Could you tell?”
“Most people are uneasy first time up,” Hobart said, wondering how soon he would be free to leave.
“I wasn’t uneasy – I was scared stiff.” Shimming paused to make a ruminative movement with his chin. “I could be psychologically marked for life, just so that the commissioner can make a political grandstand play. We could have picked you up at Langer Field and got the same useless piece of tape.”
“Useless?” Hobart spoke with a kind of pleasurable indignation. “You can’t call it useless if it clears up an eighteen-year-old case.”
“Who said the case was cleared up?”
“But you practically…”
Shimming shook his head. “Craven was murdered, all right. I don’t know who, how, or why – but I know he got himself snipped.”
“Look, when can I leave here?” Hobart said, his sense of unease returning in full force.
“Any time you like,” Shimming replied, getting to his feet, ‘but don’t leave the city until you get clearance. And don’t forget to let me know where you’re staying.”
“I imagine I’ll be at the junior officers’ hostel at the Centre.”
“You imagine that, do you?” Shimming gave Hobart a wry look. “I’ll see you around, Dennis.”
The Langer Line personnel manager was called Toby Martyn. He was about thirty years old, but had adopted the dress and mannerisms of a middle-aged man, possibly with the intention of showing the staid and nepotic Langer board that he was director material. His eyes, behind gold-rimmed flakes of glass, were blue and unsympathetic as he selected various slips of paper from his desk and dropped them into an envelope bearing Hobart’s name and citizen number.
“As you are no doubt aware,” he said primly, ‘junior officers are assigned very few duties on their first interstellar voyage. Its main purpose is to determine how well they stand up to the psychological stresses of both the journey itself and the associated calendaric displacement.”
There’s no such word as calendaric, you gasbrain, Hobart thought. He was shocked and angry, yet a detached part of his mind had noted a curious fact. With one round trip completed, he had seventeen years of timeslip under his belt and – although it was a paltry score compared to that of a veteran starman – it was already affecting his relationships with Earthbound individuals. Martyn was about seven years his senior in actual body time, and therefore in experience, but Hobart had been born a decade before the other man, and on that account felt himself to be somehow the more complete of the two. He began to get an inkling of how he, as a junior officer, must have seemed to a man like Captain Mercier, and his yearning to bestride the centuries in a like manner suddenly intensified itself.
“I felt fine throughout the trip,” he said. “I feel fine now.”
“That’s not what it says on your psychometric profile,” Martyn replied, sealing the large envelope. Take my advice, Mr Hobart. You’re a young man, with your whole life ahead of you – forget about space flying and take up some other occupation. With your engineering qualifications you should have no trouble getting into –’
“I’m not interested in other work,” Hobart interrupted. “I’m doing the only thing I want to do.”
“Well… perhaps with some other line.”
“Some other line!” Hobart found he was almost shouting, but was past caring about propriety. “That psych report was cooked up to prevent me working anywhere.”
Martyn’s face underwent a subtle change. “Careful what you’re saying, Mr Hobart.”
“I’m saying my assessment was faked. Do you think I don’t know the real reason I’m being booted out?”
Martyn slid the envelope across to the front of his desk. “The references you have here will enable you to obtain another type of position. They contain no mention of the fact that you are suspected of having murdered a fellow officer, and that’s something for which you should be grateful.”
Hobart drove forward and caught Martyn’s wrist. Martyn flinched back, obviously afraid, but at the same time a look of furtive triumph appeared in his eyes, and it was that which enabled Hobart to regain his mental poise. A starship was an emotional pressure cooker, an autoclave in which certain kinds of character defect tended to trigger explosions, and no operator employed people with records of violence. The phrase ‘physically assaulted a company executive’ appearing on his sheet, regardless of the circumstances, would be an ironclad guarantee that he would never again serve on an interstellar vessel. Hobart released Martyn’s wrist, drew his lips into a numb smile, and stood up, searching for words which would make him seem cool and dignified.
“You haven’t heard the last of this,” he said, resorting to a formula he remembered from historical novels. Martyn adjusted his glasses and stared up at him without speaking. Hobart picked up his envelope, left the office, and made his way out of the building to the plaza, where late afternoon sunlight glowed on the alloy statues and islands of shrubbery. It was a perfect spring day, exactly the sort he had visualized for his homecoming, but that fact served only to aggravate the turmoil behind his eyes. He entered a dark-seeming side street and found an even darker bar. The place was empty, engulfed in a musty stillness which preceded the rush of customers at the end of the working day.
Hobart bought a glass of beer, carried it to a table which had a small peach-coloured light, and sat down to examine the contents of his envelope. The pay slip told him he had been credited with close to a hundred thousand dollars, a sum which at first seemed too much. Interstellar travel and its time anomalies had alarmed the world’s bankers in the early years, and they had been quick to reach agreement that interest on any star traveller’s funds should be computed on his body time and not according to Earth calendars. However, starship operators usually factorized crew salaries to compensate for inflation and timeslip, and when Hobart took that into account – along with tax refunds and severance pay – he found he had received no more than his due. He had no immediate money problems, but that was of little comfort when his career had been ruined, deliberately and with malice aforethought, by a man who had escaped into the grave after having…
The colonel murdered Wolf Craven! The thought, which had been swamped by other considerations, struck Hobart with sudden force, aweing him with its strangeness.
On that night, on that fairly significant social occasion, Nolan Langer – probably driven by jealousy or hurt pride – must have killed Craven and disposed of the body. And, being a man who never did things by halves, he had rounded out the act of revenge by shifting the blame on to Hobart, a move which would have increased his satisfaction and diverted the police investigation away from himself.
Hobart sipped his beer, reluctantly impressed. He could remember the colonel on the night of the party – tall, iron grey, limping, militarily correct – welcoming his guests, and… and… Hobart frowned as he realized he had no other recollections of the colonel on that night. Langer had absented himself at quite an early stage, which tied in with the theory that he was getting rid of cumbersome evidence, but there was an inconsistency somewhere. His memories of the party itself were all compatible, now that he understood what had been going on beneath the surface, so the discordant note must have originated during his talk with Investigator Shimming. Hobart stared into the peachy orb of the table lamp, unable to pin down the vagrant idea which was tantalizing him, then he recalled Shimming’s promise that he could have a record of the interview. He pushed his beer glass away, crammed the envelope into an inner pocket of his tunic, and left the bar.