“Alex,” I said, “you think this is the same guy who did the break-in?”
“I don’t think it’s much of a leap.”
“I wonder if he’s connected with the woman who gave the bogus award to Diane?”
“I suspect so. Maybe not directly, but they’re after the same thing.”
“Which is-?”
“Ah, my sweet, there you have hold of the issue. Let me ask a question. Why did our intruder find it necessary to open the display case, but not the bookcase?”
I watched a taxi rise past the window and swing out toward the east. “I have no idea. Why?”
“Because the glass was in the bookcase. And you can’t hide anything in a glass.”
“You think somebody hid something in one of the artifacts?”
“I don’t think there’s any question about it.”
I was trying to digest it. “Then the thief took the coins and books-”
“-As a diversion.”
“But why not keep them? It’s not as if they weren’t valuable.”
“Maybe he didn’t know that,” he said. “Maybe he doesn’t know anything about collectibles.”
“That can’t be,” I said. “This whole thing is about collectibles.”
“I don’t think it is. This whole thing is about something else entirely, Chase.”
We sat looking at one another. “Alex, if there’d been something in the pockets of the jacket, Maddy’s jacket, do you think we’d have noticed?”
“Oh, yes,” he said. “I always inspect the merchandise. I even examined it for the possibility that something had been sewn into it. In any case, we know they didn’t find what they wanted at the house, or they wouldn’t still be hunting for it.”
My apartment building is a modest place, a privately owned three-story utilitarian structure that’s been there a hundred years. It has four units on each floor and an indoor pool that’s inevitably deserted in the late evening. We came in over the river and drifted down onto the pad. I heard music coming from somewhere, and a peal of laughter. It seemed out of place. We sat in the soft glow of the instrument lights.
“You looked through the Bible?” he said.
“Yes. There was nothing there.”
“You’re sure?”
“Well, I didn’t check every page.”
“Call Soon Lee and ask her to look. Let’s be certain.”
“Okay.”
“And talk to Ida. She has the jumpsuit, right?”
“Yes.”
“Tell her to look in the pockets. And check the lining. Let us know if she finds anything. Anything at all.”
I opened the door and got out. Something flapped in the trees. Alex joined me.
He’d walk me to the door and see that I got safely home. Ever the gentleman. “So who,” I asked him, “had access to the artifacts? Somebody at Survey?”
He pulled his jacket around him. It was cold. “I checked with Windy a day or two after the burglary. She insists they’d been secured since the Trendel Commission, until the vault was opened a few weeks ago and they were inventoried for the auction.
That means, whatever they’re looking for, it had to have been placed during the period of time between the opening of the vault and the attack. Or during the first months of the investigation, in 1365.”
“There’s another possibility,” I said.
He nodded slowly. “I didn’t want to be the first to say it.” Someone on the Polaris might have left something.
Soon Lee called to report there was nothing in the Bible. She said she’d gone through it page by page. There was no insert of any kind, and she could find nothing written on its pages that seemed out of place. Ida assured me there was nothing hidden in the jumpsuit.
The only thing we had in our inventory with a direct connection to any of the Polaris victims was a copy of Pernico Hendrick’s Wilderness of Stars. It had once belonged to Nancy White. I had some time on my hands, so I dug it out and began to page through it. It was a long history, seven hundred-plus pages, of environmental efforts undertaken by various organizations during the sixty years or so preceding publication, which took it back to the beginning of the fourteenth century.
There weren’t many notations. White was more inclined to underline sections that caught her interest and draw question or exclamation marks in the margins. Population is the key to everything, Hendrick had written. Unless we learn to control our own fertility, to stabilize growth, all environmental efforts, all attempts to build stable economies, all efforts at eliminating civil discord, all other courses, are futile. Three exclamation marks. This was the precursor to a long series of citations by the author. Despite advanced technology, people still bred too much. Hardly anybody denied that. The effects were sometimes minimaclass="underline" There might be too much traffic, not enough landing pads. At other times, states collapsed, famines struck, civil wars broke out, and off-world observers found themselves unable to help. It doesn’t matter how big the fleet is, you can’t ship enough food to sustain a billion people. The book detailed efforts to save endangered species across the hundred worlds of the Confederacy, to preserve the various environments, to husband resources, to slow population growth. It described resistance by government and by corporate and religious groups, the indifference of the general public (which, Hendrick maintains, never recognizes a problem until it’s too late). He likened the human race to a cancerous growth, spreading through the Orion Arm, infecting individual worlds.
More exclamation marks.
It was hair-raising stuff, and somewhat overheated. The author never settled for a single adjective where two or three could be levered in.
But the book was well thumbed, and it was obvious that Nancy White was more often than not in agreement. She quibbled now and then on factual information and technical points, but she seemed to accept the conclusion: A lot of people died, or were thrust into poverty, and kept there, for no very good reason other than that the species couldn’t, or wouldn’t, control its urge to procreate.
I showed it to Alex.
“The guy’s an alarmist,” he said. “So is she, apparently.”
I stared at the book, depressed. “Maybe that’s what we need.”
He looked surprised. “I didn’t know you were a Greenie wacko.”
I was on my way home the following day, approaching the junction between the Melony and Narakobo Rivers when Vlad Korinsky called. Vlad owned the Polaris mission plaque. Ultimately, I thought it might prove to be the most valuable of the artifacts that survived the explosion. There was no way to know where it had actually been located in the ship, but if Maddy had adhered to tradition, it would have occupied a prominent position on the bridge. Vlad was a traveler and adventurer.
He’d been to Hokmir and Morikalla and Jamalupe and a number of other archeological sites on- and off-world. His walls were decorated with pictures showing him standing beside the shattered ruins of half a dozen ancient civilizations. He’d had a little too much sun over the years, and the winds of a dozen worlds had etched their lines into his face.
He was shopping. Refurbishing his den. He’d been looking through our catalog.
Was there anything new in the pipeline? “You called at exactly the right moment, Vlad,” I said. “It happens that I can put my hands on a comm link from Aruvia. Four thousand years old, but it’s in excellent condition. It was lost during the Battle of Ephantes.”
We talked it over, and he told me he’d think about it. I knew his tone, though. He was hooked, but he didn’t want to look like an easy sell.
I liked Vlad. We’d been out together a few times, in violation of the general principle that you don’t get involved in personal entanglements with clients. Alex knew about it and looked pained whenever Vlad’s name came up. But he didn’t say anything, relying, I suppose, on my discretion. Or good sense. I hope not on my virtue. “How are you doing, Chase?” he asked.
He sounded worried, and I figured out why he’d really called. “Good,” I said.
“I’m doing fine.”
“Good.” A sprinkle of rain fell across the windscreen. “You have anything yet on the guy who’s trying to steal the artifacts?”