One officer turned to a man in a resplendent uniform. “Must have been a false tip, Chief. Nothing going on here — nothing but a little gambling.”
“Wait.” The Chief of Police held up his hand. “Do I, or don’t I, smell freshly baked bread?”
The fat man moved forward, a smile on his smooth face. “Not one crumb of bread in the place, Chief. Take my word for it.” As he spoke his hand went out. Ella thought she saw something pass from one man to the other. She was almost sure that the Chief of Police put his hand in his pocket immediately afterward. He was smiling now. “Guess it was a phony tip at that Carry on, folks! If I wasn’t on duty, I’d join in the blackjack game.”
“He didn’t even look in the kitchen,” whispered Ella.
“He was paid off. Didn’t you notice?”
“How awful!” She rose. “I must go now. Goodbye and — I don’t know how to thank you for the steak.”
“It was a pleasure. I’ll walk with you to the end of the street. This neighborhood isn’t safe for a young woman alone.”
They went down the greasy stairs together, out into the cold windy night. The shadowy figure of the boy on guard had vanished from the doorway. In the moon’s light the street seemed empty — as empty as a lunar landscape.
I hope he’s not going to kiss me, thought Ella, just because he met me in a speakeasy.
She halted with a gasp. She was looking across the street to a car parked at the curb, a black car with white letters on one side — the dread letters A.E.P.
“That car!” Ella’s voice shook. “You know what those letters mean?”
“Advertising Enforcement Police.” His voice had changed. It was no longer the lazy, confidence-inspiring drawl of a man weak enough to indulge himself in bootleg steak. It was now the stem voice of a dedicated moralist. Even his eyes had changed, and he made no effort to hide the deep contempt in them.
“I’m an Inspector of the A.E.P.” In his hand she saw the identity card — signature, photograph, government seal. “I’ve been following you for some time.”
“So that’s why your face was so familiar!”
“Tonight I recorded your conversation with me in the speakeasy. My ring is a microphone.”
“But it has no wire connection!”
“You little fool! As long ago as 1963, they had microphones without wire connections. You’re under arrest.”
“But... you led me on! You’re a member of the secret police—”
“Of course. How else could we ever make an arrest?”
“And the charge?”
“Subversion of the whole economy by failure to perform your duty as a consumer of synthetics willingly, cheerfully, and patriotically. Conviction is certain. With Full Automation and computers on the Bench, a miscarriage of justice has become impossible.”
“And the penalty?”
“A deep-freeze cell for life. We can’t have people like you around. This sort of thing might become contagious.”
“May I call my husband? Please!”
“No.”
Ella screamed as he shoved her into the car. She was still screaming as the A.E.P. car drove away in the moonlight.
John Reese
Hearing Is Believing
An ingenious and amusing adventure of two college seniors, with an old wrinkle on smuggling but an exceedingly new wrinkle on detecting...
“Are we ready?” said Jerry Runkle.
Mort Lisky made a fast examination of his circuits. Ready-lights glowed on both tape recorders. Microphones were in place, amplifiers plugged in, his monitor earphones “hot.” His long sensitive fingers caressed the switches lovingly. “I guess so, but I wish I could test the filter on an incoming call.”
“No time,” said Jerry. “They’re not going to horse around about contacting us. They’ve got a lot of heavy scratch riding on this caper.”
Mort gave him a pained look. “You were in that workshop original about gangsters, weren’t you? Kid, you gotta stop letting freshmen write your lines!”
“Corny or not,” said Jerry, “it’s true. And if you didn’t try to make friends with everybody after two beers, we wouldn’t be in this fix. You’re the genius who picked up those two characters!”
“But you’re the one who loaned Fox your camera, and that’s where we found the jewels,” said Mort. “I still think we ought to call the cops, or the customs agents, or somebody with badges and guns.”
Jerry shivered. “Not yet. Face it, Mort — until we can prove the jewels aren’t ours, we are the smugglers. We did bring them in, don’t forget that!”
“Forget it? How can I?” Mort said hollowly. “All right, maestro, we’ll do it your way. The script gets off to a fast start — I’ll say that for it. But are you sure you know what your third-act curtain’s going to be?”
No answer came from Jerry, who was a serious, blond youth of twenty-one, a senior majoring in theater arts at San Diego State College. Jerry did not yearn to be an actor himself. Once he had, but all that had been discarded with other purposeless yearnings of his callow years. Now Jerry wanted to write, direct, and produce, manipulating players as well as lines, to the greater glory of the modem theater.
Mort Lisky towered over him by six indies, being a swarthy six feet four of bones, chin, nose, and ungentle sarcasm. He too was a senior, but if Jerry felt himself ready for life, Mort knew his education was no more than started. True, he could make a living, and a good one, in any branch of electronics.
But next year Mort would begin postgraduate work at the University of California, one of a picked group of seniors from all over the nation, on something called Interplanetary Communications Project 9-D. Since time immemorial, men have projected their souls to the distant stars, seeking to draw from their constancy some inkling of their own fickle fates. To Mort, the stars talked back.
Jerry and Mort had shared an apartment for three years. They were totally unlike in ambitions, attitudes toward life, and politics — wherefore they were close friends. They had just returned from Mazatlán, Mexico, along with a hundred other San Diego Staters, where they had enjoyed the surf-bathing of Easter Week. They were tanned by the winter sun, exercised to healthy exhaustion, and exceedingly well nourished on the cheap but delicious Mexican beer. They should have felt very fit indeed.
They did not, and all because of a discovery Jerry had made just after crossing the border in the cab that took them from the Tijuana airport to their San Diego apartment. Jerry had decided, at the last minute, to have the cab stop so that he could leave the films of his Mazatlán outing at a photo shop. He remembered having loaned his fine, German-made reflex camera to Mr. Wilfred “Bill” Fox, attorney for that nice American investor, Mr. Barney Cupp. It was hardly likely that Mr. Fox would leave any film in the camera, but if he had, Jerry figured he might as well have that developed too.
So he opened his suitcase which, like all students’ baggage, had been given a once-over-lightly by the U.S. customs guards. There was no film in the camera, but it didn’t feel right to Jerry somehow. He opened its back, and a small cloth bag fell out. Call it a hunch, but at the same time Jerry’s heart fell so many millions of light-years that the most sensitive interplanetary radio could never have made contact with it.
“Ai! Ai! Ai!” said Jerry.
“You sound like a puppy that had its tail rocked on,” said Mort. “What’s wrong? Speak, boy!”
“Look what I found in my c-c-camera,” Jerry gurgled. “It f-f-f-feels like beads inside.”