“The fact of the matter is, I had little choice. It was either pretend to be a bank robber myself or spend the weekend at the mercy of those two men. And have them steal all the money inside the vault on Monday morning — approximately forty thousand dollars, not twenty thousand as I told them.”
“Lucky thing you had that Woodsman of yours along. That was probably the clincher.”
“That, and the fact that I wasn’t carrying my wallet. I was in such a hurry this morning that I left it on my dresser at home.”
“How come you happened to have the .22?”
“It has been jamming on me in target practice lately,” I said. “I intended to drop it off at Ben Ogilvie’s gunsmith shop tonight for repairs.”
“How’d you know those two hadn’t cased the bank beforehand?”
“It was a simple deduction. If they had cased the bank, they would have known who I was; they wouldn’t have had to ask.”
Roberts wagged his head again. “You’re something else, Luther. You really are.”
“Mmm,” I said. “Do you think you’ll be able to apprehend them?”
“Oh, we’ll get them, all right. The descriptions you gave us are pretty detailed; Burt’s already sent them out to the county and state people and to the FBI.”
“Fine.” I massaged my temples. “I had better begin making an exact count of how much money they got away with. I’ve called the main branch in the capital and they’re sending an official over as soon as possible. I imagine he’ll be coming with the local FBI agent.”
Roberts rose ponderously. “We’ll leave you to it, then.” He gathered Young and Dawes and prepared to leave. At the door he paused to grin at me. “Yes, sir,” he said, “more damned gall — and more damned luck — than any man in this county.”
I returned to my desk after they were gone and allowed myself a cigar. I felt vastly relieved. Fate, for once, had chosen to smile on me; I had, indeed, been lucky.
But for more reasons than Roberts thought.
I recalled his assurance that the bank robbers would soon be apprehended. Unfortunately — or fortunately, depending on the point of view — I did not believe they would be apprehended at all. Mainly because the description of them I had given Roberts was totally inaccurate.
I had also altered my story in a number of other ways. I had told him the outer vault door had not only been unlocked — which was the truth; despite my lie to the two robbers, I had not set any of the time locks — but that it had been open and the money they’d stolen was from the cash room. I had said the robbers brought the suitcase with them, not that it belonged to me, and that the Woodsman had been in my overcoat pocket when they discovered it. I had omitted mention of the fact that I’d supposedly called their attention to the suitcase in order to carry out my bank-robber ruse.
And I had also lied about the reasons I was not carrying my wallet and why I had the Woodsman with me. In truth, I had left the wallet at home and put the gun into the suitcase because of an impulsive, foolish, and half-formed idea that, later tonight, I would attempt to hold up a business establishment or two somewhere in the next county.
I would almost certainly not have gone through with that scheme, but the point was that I had got myself into a rather desperate situation. The bank examiners were due on Monday for their annual audit — a month earlier than usual in a surprise announcement — and I had not been able to replace all of the $14,425.00 that I had “borrowed” during the past ten months to support my regrettable penchant for betting on losing horses.
I had, however, managed on short notice to raise $8,370.00 by selling my car and my small boat and disposing of certain semi-valuable heirlooms. The very same $8,370.00 that had been in the suitcase, and that I had been about to put back into the cash room when the two robbers arrived.
As things had turned out, I no longer had to worry about replacing the money or about the bank examiners discovering my peccadillo. Of course, I would have to be considerably more prudent in the future where my predilection for the Sport of Kings was concerned. And I would be; I am not one to make the same mistake twice. I may have a lot of gall, as Roberts had phrased it, and I may be something of a rogue, but for all that I’m neither a bad nor an unwise fellow. After all, I had saved most of the bank’s money, hadn’t I?
I relaxed with my cigar. Because I had done my “borrowing” from the vault assets without falsifying bank records, I had nothing to do now except to wait patiently for the official and the FBI agent to arrive from the state capital. And when they did, I would tell them the literal truth.
“The exact total of the theft,” I would say, “is $14,425.00.”
And Then We Went to Venus
Three weeks after the return of Commander Richard Stiles and Major Philip Webber — the two-man crew of Exploration V, the first manned “supership” to land on Venus — and the sudden, unexplained, and total information blackout by both NASA and Washington, a security leak from “an unimpeachable source” blew the lid off the whole thing. If it had not been for that, the news media and the general population might not have gotten the details on the mission for months or years, if they had gotten them at all.
Until the leak, all any of us knew was that Exploration V had made the Venus landing and in it Stiles and Webber had spent some twelve undocumented hours on the surface of the planet (the ship’s entire communication system had malfunctioned shortly after lift-off); that Mission Control had effected Venus lift-off and return; and that re-entry touchdown had been little more than routine. Full news media coverage was encouraged up to that point, of course. We had landed on the moon and we had landed on Mars, and now that government metallurgists had developed a breakthrough alloy able to withstand temperatures in excess of one thousand degrees Fahrenheit, we had landed on Venus--yet another great moment in the history of Mankind. But the official lid dropped and sealed as soon as NASA personnel opened up the capsule. The only other fact we knew for certain was that astronauts Stiles and Webber were alive.
During those three weeks a breathless expectation, and an air of apprehension, gripped the world at large. Why the secrecy, why the silence? I asked those questions myself, in print in my syndicated political column, and feared the answers perhaps more than most. I had long been a professional skeptic, about any number of things including certain “blind-leap” aspects of our re-augmented space program. It seemed to me we did too many things on the basis of insufficient data; our thirst for knowledge sometimes took precedence over other considerations, not the least of which was human safety. NASA was as much an offender in this respect as any other government agency.
The Washington Post broke the story, in a rare banner headline. Within hours it was on every front page of every newspaper in every nation, and on every television and radio station, and on every tongue.
There were two major revelations.
First, both Commander Stiles and Major Webber had returned from the mission suffering from what was termed “severe mental disability.”
And, second, NASA was said to possess a certain amount of evidence that a form of sentient life existed on the planet Venus.
It was, of course, the latter which initiated the most reaction and to which the most lip service was paid. Life on Venus, sentient life on another planet in our solar system; fiction and endless speculation apparently proved fact. It was a startling, exciting, somewhat frightening possibility. What did the life look like? Was it intelligent? If so, could we establish contact? Would it be friendly or unfriendly? What kind of culture could it have on that wet, steaming, vapor-obscured planet? And on and on.