“So,” she said quietly. “I had some feeling that they would send you.” She had a thick accent, but her command of the language was absolute.
“Bad pennies always return,” he responded lightly. “You’ve done the preliminary autopsy?”
She shrugged. “As much as can be done. The remains are pretty much of a mess. You want to see them?”
He nodded. “And your conclusion?”
“A wine press could not have done a more complete job,” she told him. “Except, of course, it vas no press, but an encirclement or constriction around the whole of the torso.” She reached down and picked up a blood pressure pad. “More like one of these things the size of a man’s torso that you wrap around and then squeeze until it almost all meets. Or, perhaps, as if crushed to death by two gigantic, powerful hands.”
He nodded soberly. “What the hell have some of you people been experimenting with up here?” He meant the comment in jest, but she took it seriously.
“Look, you may find that someone here did the job, you may find it was all some sort of fancy trick, but there are no monsters here. This is a think tank, as you would say, not a place for mad scientists to build some sort of Frankenstein. Oh, some of these people might well be mad, and some might even set out to design and build such a thing, but there is no place for them to do it here. From here they would get the blueprints; it would be built elsevere, far away from this island.”
He put up a hand. “All right, all right. But they do have both a biological laboratory and a robotics lab here, do they not?”
She nodded. “But the bio lab could not create anything of such size and force, and as for—oh, I see! You are thinking perhaps a machine.”
“It’s a possibility. It might not need to be so tall, it might be designed to make absurd tracks with precision, and it might weigh two or three tons. It also might well be remotely controlled and would not work well in the water.”
She walked over to a cabinet and-opened a door. “Well, it would have to be one very strange machine to make tracks like this and only this.” She took out a huge, heavy plaster cast and laid it on her desk. “One of the first casts from the beach, brought down here at my instruction.”
He gaped at the thing. It was one thing to see the impressions in the sand, another to see what was made from them. It was a huge print, rather rough and malformed, but still clearly representative of the shape that made it. It was monstrous, resembling the sort of feet that must have been on tyrannosaurus Rex or some other bipedal dinosaur of the primeval past. It was certainly unlike anything either he or the doctor or perhaps anyone else had ever seen before.
“So, what do you think now?” she asked him, sounding a little smug. “Tell me the robot that could make that.”
“Oh, if it was a robot, I’ll know it soon enough. I’m running every supplies list for the last three years past a bunch of clerical assistants. You couldn’t hide the physical components needed to build it, and you could hardly smuggle it in in your suitcase.” Still, he thought, there was a way, a fairly easy way, to have done just that. When one has an experimental prototype computer that’s several stories by a couple of square blocks large and always is being fixed, modified, or upgraded, who would even notice a few tons of sheet metal and machinery? Only one man might notice, and he was certainly high on MacDonald’s suspect list.
For the moment, though, he put such things aside, and with the doctor went to view the remains.
“Very little has been noticeably disturbed by the autopsy,” the doctor assured him. “When your subject is already turned almost inside out it is not difficult to do the examination. The experts that are supposed to be coming in later today will do more to it.”
The sight was not a pleasant one. As Andersen had said, the victim had been crushed to death by persons, mechanisms, or creatures unknown. The lower calves and feet remained reasonably intact, and the torso was a mess, but it was the head that was hardest to look at. The eyes had nearly popped out of their sockets, the veins all at the surface, the tongue nearly bitten through—it was a sight that no one who saw would ever forget. Although he’d seen hundreds of corpses, including strangulations and mutilations, in his career, MacDonald felt his breakfast in his throat. Still, he was undeterred and professional about it, forcing it all back for later nightmares. He was quite well aware that this was the case of a lifetime, the sort of thing that, if solved, would make him an international celebrity and almost a worldwide legend among detectives in his own time. This sort of thing fell into the lap of very few detectives, and he knew it.
He was having the time of his life.
He made a slow, methodical examination of the body. “Any sign of foreign material on the surface or in the wounds?”
“Quite a bit, although nothing that I can not account for in other ways. After all, the contents of his clothing were also crushed. Still, I assume that the professionals will send everything through the labs. Nothing remotely resembling lizard scales or metal filings from a killer robot, if that’s what you mean.”
He sighed. “Listen, Doc. Something killed this man here, on the beach, less than twenty-four hours ago. Every single shred of evidence suggests that it was a great prehistoric sort of beast that suddenly appeared in the meadow, chased Sir Robert down the trail to the beach, then caught and killed him there and vanished. Now, either such a beast exists, which means it should be easy to find considering it roams the existing trails in broad daylight, or someone made it seem as if it exists. If the latter is the case, it would mean that damned near every person on this island had to be in on it or else it involved some high level of technology right out of science fiction. And that kind of technology is just what the folks who come and stay here are in the business of dreaming up. Now, you tell me: which of the three theories would you pursue first? Or do you have another?”
“I do not,” she admitted, “unless you mix in black magic of some sort. If you find the method you will find the murderer, that is true. But if it is someone who can do this sort of thing, what defense will you or any of us have if you get close to it?”
“Because,” he said, “anybody smart enough to do it is also smart enough to realize that if I go, an infinite number of replacements will arrive. My main concern is motive. Why do it in such a flashy way, certain to attract a tremendous amount of attention?” He thought a moment. “Magellan is a privately held corporation chartered in the United States. Sir Robert owned about half the existing shares, and as far as I know he never married. I wonder who gets those shares? They’re almost certainly worth billions.”
The doctor shrugged. “His heirs, I presume, whoever they may be, unless he left it all to some home for stray cats. Whoever they are, I wonder if they even know?” She paused a moment. “You will be here for the funeral?”
“Of course, and beyond that, too. Wouldn’t miss it. After all, I’m going to be here for the formal autopsy.” He looked one last time at the remains. “Closed casket ceremony, I bet. The mortician who could make that even halfway presentable wouldn’t be doing cadavers—he’d be painting the Sistine Chapel at the very least.”