Cold beer has never tasted better. The first one never even touched the sides of my throat and sizzled when it hit my stomach. I sipped the second as I tore the tab on a dinpac of barbecued ribs of porcuswine. As soon as the steam whistled through the venthole I ripped open the lid of the stretched pack and pulled out a rib the length of my arm. Yum!
Showered, dipilated and wrapped around a third beer, I began to feel much better. "On," I told the terminal, then punched into the comnet. My instructions were simple; all newspaper records on the planet for the last fifty years, all references to a criminal named The Bishop, check for redundancies around the same date and don't give me any duplicates. Print.
Before I had picked up my beer again the first sheets were sliding out of the fax. The top sheet was the most recent-and it was ten years old. A not too interesting item from a city on the other side of the planet, Decalogg. The police had picked up an elderly citizen in a low bar who claimed that he was The Bishop. However it had turned out to be a case of senile dementia and the suspect had been ushered back to the retirement home from which he had taken a walk. I picked up the next item.
I tired towards morning and took a nap in die filing cabinet which turned into a bed when ordered to do so. In the gray light of dawn, helped by a large black coffee, I finished placing the last sheet into the pattern that spread across the floor. Rosy sunlight washed across it. I turned off the lights and tapped the stylo against my teeth while I studied the pattern.
Interesting. A criminal who brags about his crimes. Who leaves a little drawing of a bishop behind after scarpering with his loot. A simple design-easy enough to copy. Which I did. I held it out at arm's length and admired it.
The first bishop had been found in the empty till of an automated liquor store sixty-eight years ago. If The Bishop had started his career of crime as a teenager, as I have done, that would put him in his eighties now. A comfortable age to be, since life expectancy has now been pushed up to a century and a half. But what had happened to him to explain the long silence? Over fifteen years had passed since he had left his last calling card, I numbered off the possibilities on my fingers.
"Number one, and a chance always to be considered, is that he has snuffed it. In which case I can do nothing so let us forget about that.
'Two-he could have gone ofiplanet and be pursuing his life of crime among the stars. If so, forget it like number one. I need a lot more golden bucks, and experience, before I try my hand on other worlds.
"Three, he has gone into retirement to spend his illgotten gains-in which case more power to him. Or four, he has changed rackets and stopped leaving his spoor at every job." I sat back smugly and sipped the coffee. If it were three or four I had a chance of finding him. He had certainly had a busy career before the years of silence; I looked at the list with appreciation. Plane theft, car theft, cash theft, bank emptying. And more and more. All of the crimes involving moving bucks from someone else's pockets to his pockets. Or real property that could be sold quickly, with forged identification, for more bucks. And he h"d never been caught, that was the best part of it. Here was the man who could be my mentor, my tutor, my university of crime-who would one day issue a diploma of deviltry that would eventually admit me to the golden acres I so coveted.
But how could I find him if the united police forces of an entire world, over a period of decades, had never been able to lay a finger on him? An interesting question.
So interesting that I could see no easy answer. I decided to let my subconscious work on this problem for a bit, so I pushed some synapses aside and let the whole thing slip down into my cerebellum. The street outside was beginning to fill up with shoppers and I thought that might be a good idea for me as well. All the rations I had here were either frozen or packaged, and after the sludgy prison food I felt the urge for things that crackled and crunched. I opened the makeup cabinet and began to prepare my public persona.
Adults don't realize-or remember-how hard it is to be a teenager. They forget that this is the hallway house of maturity. The untroubled joys of childhood are behind one, the mature satisfactions ofadulthood still ahead. Aside from the rush of blood to the head, as well as other places, when thoughts of the opposite sex intrude, there are real difficulties. The hapless teenager is expected to act like an adult-yet has none of the privileges of that exalted state. For my part I had escaped the tedious tyranny of teendom by skipping over it completely. When tiot lolling about in school or trading lies with my age group, I became an adult. Since I was far more intelligent than most of them-or at least I thought that I was-adults that is, I had only to assume the physical role.
First an application ofcrowsfooter around my eyes and on my forehead. As soon as this colorless liquid was applied wrinkles appeared and the calendar of my age rushed forward a number years. A few wattles under my chin blended in well with the wrinkles, while the final touch was a nasty little moustache. When I pulled on my shapeless under-office clerk jacket, my own mother would not have recognized me if she had passed me in the street. In fact this had happened about a year ago and I had asked her the time and even then no spark of recognition had brought a glint to her bovine eyes. Taking an umbrella from the closet, since there was absolutely no possibility of rain, I stepped from the office and proceeded to the nearest shopping mall.
I must say, my subconscious was really working fast this day, as I shortly found out. Even after all the beers I still had a thirst. That dry stay in the barn had left its mark. Therefore I turned smartly under the platinum arches of Macswineys and marched up to the serving robot that was built into the counter. The plastic head had a permanent grin painted on it and the voice was syrupy and sexy.
"How can I be of service, sir or madam?" They could have spent a few bucks on a sex-recognition program I thought as I scanned the list ofrUM-CHiLLEB YUMMY DMNKS on the wall..
"Let me have a double-cherry oozer with lots of ice." "On the way, sir or madam. That will be three bucks, tf you please." I dropped the coins in the hopper and the serving hatch flipped open and my drink appeared. While I reached for it I had to listen to a robotic sales pitch.
"Macswineys is happy to serve you today. With the drink of your choice I am sure you would like a barbecued porcuswineburger withyummy topsecret sauce garnished with sugarfried spamyams..." The voice faded away from my attention as my subconscious heaved up the answer to my little problem. A really simple and obvious answer that was transparent in its clarity, pristine pure and simple.. ..
"Come on, buster. Order or split, you can't stand there all day." The voice graveled in my ear and I muttered some excuse and shuffled off to the nearest booth and dropped into it. I knew now what had to be done.
Simply stand the problem on its head. Instead of me looking for The Bishop I would have to make him look for me.
I drank my drink until my sinuses hurt, staring unseeingly into space as the pieces of the plan clicked into place. There was absolutely no chance of my finding The Bishop on my own-it would be foolish to even waste my time trying. So what I had to do was commit a crime so outrageous and munificent that it would be on all the news channels right around the planet. It had to be so exotic that not a person alive with the ability to read-or with a single finger left to punch in a news channel-would be unaware of it. The entire world would know what had happened. And they would know as well that The Bishop had done it because I would leave his calling card on the spot.