Hobart backed away, shaking his head. “You’re sick,” he whispered. “Crazy.”
“Crazy?” Dorcie Langer seemed to savour the word while she kneaded the flesh of her thighs. “Perhaps I am. I could be crazy enough to remember anything I wanted – good or bad. It’s up to you, Denny, my love.”
Hobart turned and fled the room, running with the leaden-footed ponderousness that characterizes nightmares.
Later that night Hobart experienced a real nightmare. He dreamed it was the night of the party again, the location in time and space convincingly established by a shifting montage of images and impressions – large rooms with minimal lighting; a sense of imminence – the dreadful starship waiting; trays of drinks, tables of food; intermingled wisps of music and distant laughter; the choking press of bodies in slithering nakedness… Suddenly Hobart was in a silver room – it was the freezer house – watching in mute terror as the tall figure of Colonel Langer stood over Wolf Craven and methodically destroyed him with an ice pick. Craven was lying on the floor, twitching and flinching under the blows each of which added to and elaborated the pattern of blood-red, dark, centred flowers covering his body from neck to groin. His mouth was open, but the horror of the scene was increased by the fact that he did not scream. Instead, there came from his lips a thin, sad keening, a plaintive note like the beat of insect wings in summer pastures…
Hobart awoke with the sound ringing in his ears and sat up immediately, unwilling to risk falling asleep again and sinking back into the same nightmare. He checked the time, saw that it was almost six in the morning, and decided to get up. While taking a hot shower he pondered over the dream, marvelling at the ways of the subconscious mind. He had a nodding acquaintance with the Faraday theory, which stated that the overt content of dreams – which psychologists had once dismissed as mere ’day residue’ – was more significant than the Freudian and post-Freudian interpretation of symbols and could be treated as genuine attempts at communication between different levels of the mind. But what might his subconscious be trying to say? He had already deduced that Langer had killed Craven, probably in or around the freezer house, so that part was no help to him – and the strange whining sound seemed no more than a grotesque incidental detail. Was the message simply that Craven’s body was hidden in the refrigerated building, where it would be immune from decay?
Hobart considered the idea later while eating breakfast in his room and decided it was of little merit. Investigator Shimming had told him the entire area had been searched by the police, and the freezer house and associated workshop were among the first places anybody would think of checking. He was pouring a third cup of coffee when the infomat buzzed to announce a call and Shimming’s long face appeared on the screen, looking professionally impassive while he waited for two-way communication. Hobart pressed a button to accept the call.
“I was wrong about you, Dennis,” the investigator said without preamble. “I had an idea you’d go up to Silverstream last night, and I expected that you’d be totally ineffective – but I was way off the beam. You really managed to churn things up.”
“Really?” Hobart kept his voice level. “In what way?”
“One of Mrs Langer’s tame lawyers spoke to the commissioner this morning. It appears that she too remembers your having a fist fight with Wolf Craven in her garden on the night he disappeared.”
Hobart shook his head emphatically. “The woman’s insane. You might have warned me about that.”
“Rich people don’t go insane, Dennis – at most they become eccentric. In any case, we now have a second statement corroborating what Colonel Langer told us, and that makes things worse for you.”
“You’re not going to take it seriously, are you?” Hobart was unable to read Shimming’s eyes. “I mean, why did she wait eighteen years before coming out with this?”
“The line they’re taking is that she saw no point in getting involved until you were back on Earth, that nothing could be done until now.”
“Garbage,” Hobart snapped. “Specious garbage, at that.”
“Nevertheless,” Shimming said, dipping his chin, ‘it increases the pressure on me within the department. What did you do up there last night, anyway?”
“It was what I wouldn’t do,” Hobart muttered, and was instantly sorry he had spoken.
“Oh? Gone off her, have you?”
“I was never… Look, we’ve been through all that already.” Hobart sought a way to wrest the conversation on to a new track. “When you were searching for Wolf Craven’s body did you go through the freezer house?”
“Me? I was in my second year in the police academy in 2113.”
“You know what I mean,” Hobart said, refusing to think about timeslip. “Did they check the freezer house?”
“Naturally.” Shimming glanced down at something on his desk. “It’s all here in the report. The investigating officers – with Colonel Langer’s full cooperation, by the way – went all through the workshop and the cold area itself. They looked under the refrigeration machinery housings, behind all movable wall, ceiling, and floor panels, underneath the salt storage unit…”
“What storage unit?”
Shimming inspected his records again. “It seems that those things the colonel brought back from Sirius way, the frost animals, need trays of mineral salts to keep them alive.”
“I know that – but when I was in the freezer house those trays just sat around on the floor.” As a synaesthetic background to his own voice, Hobart heard the curious sound from his nightmare, and memories began to stir.
“So what?” Shimming gave an elaborate shrug. “It wouldn’t have been too tidy that way, so Colonel Langer had a special unit built.”
“Correction! He built it himself.”
“All right – he built it himself. I’m told he liked doing things like that.”
“You don’t understand, Hobart said quickly, above the pounding in his chest. “I was in that freezer house only three days, or it might have been two, before the party – and at that time the trays of salts were still sitting around on the floor.”
Shimming pulled on his chin and looked puzzled. “What do you think you’re getting at?”
“He built it the night of the party. During the party.”
“You haven’t any proof of that. It could have been…”
“I do have proof,” Hobart put in, telling the lie which might not have been a lie had his conscious memory been perfect. “I remember going near the back of the house two or three hours after midnight and hearing somebody outside using a valency saw. You know that weird droning noise they make – you can’t mistake it.”
“It doesn’t matter exactly when the unit was built,” Shimming said through a silent gulp, showing his disapproval of Hobart’s excitement. “The point is that the officers looked at it after Craven disappeared.”
“They didn’t look well enough,” Hobart asserted. “That’s where Craven’s body has to be.”
Shimming turned his gaze towards the ceiling for a few seconds, then gave Hobart a wry smile. “It says in your file that you were born way back in 2091, and that makes me forget you’re just a kid.”
“Kid nothing,” Hobart said angrily. “I’m able to think.”
“Yes, but you think the way a kid does. You think a team of trained police officers could search a room and fail to find an object as large as a human body; you think crimes are solved by a Great Detective sucking on a pipe and making deductions – but that’s not the way it is, sonny. The police success rate is very high these days, but it’s because we get information. There are too many systems for acquiring data, and storing it, and processing it. That’s what gives us the edge.”