The Man From the Diogenes Club Page 17

  Gewell wiped his eyes and kept smiling.

  Richard could really do with a steak-and-kidney pie and chips, washed down with beer. Even a Kit-Kat would have been welcome.

  ‘Have you a guest apartment we could use?’

  Gewell’s smile turned real. ‘Sadly, we’re at maximum optimal zenvol residency. No excess space wastage in the living quarters.’

  ‘No spare beds,’ clarified Zootie.

  ‘Then we’ll have to take the one living space we know to be free.’

  Gewell’s brow furrowed like a rucked-up rug.

  ‘Zhoule’s quarters,’ Richard explained. ‘We’ll set up camp there. Sue-2, you must know the way. Since there are no locks we won’t need keys to get in. Zenvols, it’s been fascinating. I look forward to seeing you tomorrow.’

  Richard and Vanessa stood up, and Sue-2 followed suit.

  Gewell and Jess-F glared. Moana waved bye-bye.

  * * *

  ‘What are you looking for?’ Vanessa asked. ‘Monitoring devices?’

  ‘No,’ said Richard, unsealing another compartment, ‘they’re in the light fittings and the communicator screen, and seem to have been disabled. By Zhoule or his murderer, presumably.’

  There was a constant hum of gadgetry in the walls and from behind white-fronted compartments. The ceiling was composed of translucent panels, above which glowed a steady light.

  The communicator screen was dusty. Beneath the on-off switch, volume and brightness knobs and channel selector was a telephone dial, with the Tomorrow Town alphabet (no Q or X). Richard had tried to call London but a recorded voice over a cartoon smiley face told him that visiphones only worked within the town limits. Use of the telephone line to the outside had to be approved by vote of zenvol visioneers.

  In a compartment, he found a gadget whose purpose was a mystery. It had dials, a trumpet and three black rubber nipples.

  ‘I’m just assuming, Vanessa, that the co-founder of Tomorrow Town might allow himself to sample the forbidden past in ways denied the simple zenvol or despised zenpass.’

  ‘You mean?’

  ‘He might have real food stashed somewhere.’

  Vanessa started opening compartments too.

  It took a full hour to search the five rooms of Zhoule’s bungalow. They discovered a complete run of Town Magazeen, a microfilm publication with all text in fonetik, and a library of 1950s science fiction magazines, lurid covers mostly promising Varno Zhoule stories as back-up to Asimov or Heinlein.

  They found many compartments stuffed with ring-bound notebooks which dated back twenty years. Richard flicked through a couple, noting Zhoule had either been using fonetik since the early 1950s or was such a bad speller that his editors must have been driven to despair. Most of the entries were single sentences, story ideas, possible inventions or prophecies. Tunel under Irish See. Rokit to Sun to harvest heet. Big lift to awbit. Stoopids not allowd to breed. Holes in heds for plugs.

  Vanessa found a display case, full of plaques and awards in the shapes of spirals or robots.

  ‘Is this the murder weapon?’ Vanessa asked, indicating a needle-shaped rocket. ‘Looks too clean.’

  ‘I believe Zhoule was a multiple Hugo-winner. See, this is Best Short Story 1957, for “Vesta Interests”. The blunt instrument was…’

  Vanessa picked up a chunk of ceramic and read the plaque, ‘Best Novelette 1958.’ It was a near-duplicate of the base of the other award. ‘You can see where the rocketship was fixed. It must have broken when the award was lifted in anger.’

  ‘Cold blood, Vanessa. The body and the Hugo were found elsewhere. No blood traces in these quarters. Let’s keep looking for a pork pie.’

  Vanessa opened a floor-level compartment and out crawled a matt-black robot spider the size of an armoured go-kart. The fearsome thing brandished death-implements that, upon closer examination, turned out to be a vacuum cleaner proboscis and limbs tipped with chamois, damp squeegee and a brush.

  ‘Oh, how useful,’ said Vanessa.

  Then the spider squirted hot water at her and crackled. Electrical circuits burned out behind its photo-eyes. The proboscis coughed black soot.

  ‘Or maybe not.’

  ‘“I have seen the future, and it works,”’ quoted Richard. ‘Lincoln Steffens, on the Soviet Union, 1919.’

  ‘“What’s to become of my bit of washing when there’s no washing to do?”’ quoted Vanessa. ‘The old woman in The Man in the White Suit, on technological progress, 1951.’

  ‘You suspect the diabolical Big Thinks sent this cleaning robot to murder Varno Zhoule? A Frankensteinian rebellion against the Master-Creator?’

  ‘If BeeTee is so clever, I doubt it’d use this arachnoid doodad as an assassin. The thing can’t even beat as it sweeps as it cleans, let alone carry out a devilish murder plan. Besides, to use the blunt instrument, it would have to climb a wall and I reckon this can’t even manage stairs.’

  Richard poked the carapace of the machine, which wriggled and lost a couple of limbs.

  ‘Are you still hungry?’

  ‘Famished.’

  ‘Yet we’ve had enough nourishment to keep body and spirit together for the ten long kronons that remain until breakfast time.’

  ‘I’ll ask medico Mal-K if he sees many cases of rickets and scurvy in futopia.’

  ‘You do that.’

  Richard tried to feel sorry for the spider, but it was just a gadget. It was impossible to invest it with a personality.

  Vanessa was thinking.

  ‘Wasn’t the idea that Tomorrow Town would pour forth twenty-first-century solutions to our drab old 1970s problems?’

  Richard answered her. ‘That’s what Mr Wilson thought he was signing up for.’

  ‘So why aren’t Mrs Mopp Spiders on sale in the Charing Cross Road?’

  ‘It doesn’t seem to work all that well.’

  ‘Lot of that about, Mm Richard. A monorail that would lose a race with Stephenson’s Rocket. Technomeritocratic droit de seigneur. Concentrated foods astronauts wouldn’t eat. Robots less functional than the wind-up ones Fred’s nephew Paulie uses to conquer the playground. And I’ve seen the odd hovercraft up on blocks with “Owt of Awder” signs. Not to mention Buster the Basher, living incarnation of a society out of joint.’

  ‘Good points all,’ he said. ‘And I’ll answer them as soon as I solve another mystery.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘What are we supposed to sleep on?’

  Around the rooms were large soft white cubes which distantly resembled furniture but could as easily be tofu chunks for the giants who would evolve by the turn of the millennium. By collecting enough cubes into a windowless room where the lighting panels were more subdued, Richard and Vanessa were able to put together a bed-shape. However, when Richard took an experimental lie-down on the jigsaw-puzzle affair, an odd cube squirted out of place and fell through the gap. The floor was covered with a warm fleshy plastic substance that was peculiarly unpleasant to the touch.

  None of the many compartment-cupboards in the bungalow contained anything resembling twentieth-century pillows or bedding. Heating elements in the floor turned up as the evening wore on, adjusting the internal temperature of the room to the point where their all-over condoms were extremely uncomfortable. Escaping from the Tomorrow Town costumes was much harder than getting into them.

  It occurred to Richard and Vanessa at the same time that these spacesuits would make going to the lavatory awkward, though they reasoned an all-pill diet would minimise the wasteful toilet breaks required in the past. Eventually, with some cooperation, they got free and placed the suits on hangers in a glass-fronted cupboard which, when closed, filled with coloured steam. ‘Dekontaminashun Kompleet,’ flashed a sign as the cabinet cracked open and spilled liquid residue. The floor was discoloured where this had happened before.

  Having more or less puzzled out how the bedroom worked, they set about tackling the bathroom, which seemed to be equipped with a denta
l torture chamber and a wide variety of exotic marital aids. By the time they were done playing with it all, incidentally washing and cleaning their teeth, it was past ten midnight and the lights turned off automatically.

  ‘Nighty-night,’ said Richard.

  ‘Don’t let the robot bugs bite,’ said Vanessa.

  * * *

  He woke up, alert. She woke with him.

  ‘What’s the matter? A noise?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘No noise.’

  ‘Ah.’

  The Tomorrow Town hum, gadgets in the walls, was silenced. The bungalow was technologically dead. He reached out and touched the floor. It was cooling.

  Silently, they got off the bed.

  The room was dark, but they knew where the door – a sliding screen – was and took up positions either side of it.

  The door had opened by touching a pad. Now the power was off, they were shut in (a flaw in the no-locks policy), though Richard heard a winding creak as the door lurched open an inch. There was some sort of clockwork back-up system.

  A gloved hand reached into the room. It held an implement consisting of a plastic handle, two long thin metal rods, and a battery pack. A blue arc buzzed between the rods, suggesting lethal charge.

  Vanessa took the wrist, careful not to touch the rods, and gave a good yank. The killing-prod, or whatever it was, was dropped and discharged against the floor, leaving a blackened patch and a nasty smell.

  Surprised, the intruder stumbled against the door.

  As far as Richard could make out in the minimal light, the figure wore the usual Tomorrow Town suit. An addition was an opaque black egg-shaped helmet with a silver strip around the eyes which he took to be a one-way mirror. A faint red radiance suggested some sort of infra-red see-in-the-dark device.

  Vanessa, who had put on a floral bikini as sleepwear, kicked the egghead in the chest, which clanged. She hopped back.

  ‘It’s armoured,’ she said.

  ‘All who defy Buster must die,’ rasped a speaker in the helmet.

  Vanessa kicked again, at the shins, cutting the egghead down.

  ‘All who defy Buster must die,’ squeaked the speaker, sped-up. ‘All who de– de– de– de—’

  The recorded message was stuck.

  The egghead clambered upright.

  ‘Is there a person in there?’ Vanessa asked.

  ‘One way to find out,’ said Richard.

  He hammered the egghead with a bed-cube, but it was too soft to dent the helmet. The intruder lunged and caught him in a plastic-and-metal grasp.

  ‘Get him off me,’ Richard said, kicking. Unarmoured, he was at a disadvantage.

  Vanessa nipped into the en-suite bathroom and came back with a gadget on a length of metal hose. They had decided it was probably a water-pick for those hard-to-clean crannies. She stabbed the end of the device at the egghead’s neck, puncturing the plastic seal just below the chin-rim of the helmet, and turned the nozzle on. The tappet-key snapped off in her fingers and a high-pressure stream that could have drilled through cheddar cheese spurted into the suit.

  Gallons of water inflated the egghead’s garment. The suit self-sealed around the puncture and expanded, arms and legs forced out in an X. Richard felt the water-pressure swelling his captor’s chest and arms. He wriggled and got free.

  ‘All who defy Buster…’

  Circuits burned out, and leaks sprouted at all the seams. Even through the silver strip, Richard made out the water rising.

  There was a commotion in the next room.

  Lights came on. The hum was back.

  It occurred to Richard that he had opted to sleep in the buff and might not be in a decorous state to receive visitors. Then again, in the future taboos against social nudity were likely to evaporate.

  Georgie Gewell, Moana and Jess-F, who had another of the zapper-prod devices, stood just inside the doorway.

  There was a long pause. This was not what anyone had expected.

  ‘Buster has escaped,’ said Gewell. ‘We thought you might be in danger. He’s beyond all reason.’

  ‘If he was a danger to us, he isn’t any longer,’ said Vanessa.

  ‘If this is him,’ Richard said. ‘He was invoking the name.’

  The egghead was on the floor, spouting torrents, super-inflated like the Michelin Man after a three-day egg-eating contest.

  Vanessa kicked the helmet. It obligingly repeated ‘All who defy Buster must die.’

  The egghead waved hands like fat starfish, thumbing towards the helmet, which was sturdier than the rest of the suit and not leaking.

  ‘Anybody know how to get this thing off?’ asked Richard.

  The egghead writhed and was still.

  ‘Might be a bit on the late side.’

  Gewell and Jess-F looked at each other. Moana took action and pushed into the room. She knelt and worked a few buttons around the chinrim of the helmet. The egghead cracked along a hitherto-unsuspected crooked seam and came apart in a gush of water.

  ‘That’s not Buster,’ said Vanessa. ‘It’s Mal-K, the medico.’

  ‘And he’s drowned,’ concluded Richard.

  * * *

  ‘A useful rule of thumb in open-and-shut cases,’ announced Richard, ‘is that when someone tries to murder any investigating officers, the case isn’t as open-and-shut as it might at first have seemed.’

  He had put on a quilted double-breasted floor-length jade-green dressing gown with a Blakeian red dragon picked out on the chest in sequins.

  ‘When the would-be murderer is one of the major proponents of the open-and-shut theory,’ he continued, ‘it’s a dead cert that an injustice is in the process of being perpetrated. Ergo, the errant Buster is innocent and someone else murdered Mm Zhoule with a Hugo award.’

  ‘Perhaps there was a misunderstanding,’ said Gewell.

  Richard and Vanessa looked at him.

  ‘How so?’ Richard asked.

  Wheels worked behind Gewell’s eyes, which were amber now.

  ‘Mm Mal-K might have heard of Buster’s escape and come here to protect you from him. In the dark and confusion, you mistook his attempted rescue as an attack.’

  ‘And tragedy followed,’ completed Jess-F.

  Moana weighed invisible balls and looked noncommittal.

  It was sixty-eight past six o’kronon. The body had been removed and they were in Zhoule’s front room. Since all the cubes were in the bedroom and wet through, everyone had to sit on the body-temperature floor. Vanessa perched decorously, see-through peignoir over her bikini, on the dead robot spider. Richard stood, as if lecturing.

  ‘Mm Jor-G, you were an editor once,’ he said. ‘If a story were submitted in which a hero wanted to protect innocent parties from a rampaging killer, would you have allowed the author to have the hero get into a disguise, turn off all the lights and creep into the bedroom with a lethal weapon?’

  ‘Um, I might. I edited science fiction magazines. Science fiction is about ideas. No matter what those New Wavers say. In sf, characters might do anything.’

  ‘What about “All who defy Buster must die”?’ said Vanessa.

  ‘A warning?’ Gewell ventured, feebly.

  ‘Oh, give up,’ said Jess-F. ‘Mal-K was a bad ’un. It’s been obvious for desiyears. All those speeches about “expanding the remit of the social experiment” and “assuming pole position in the larger technomeritocracy”. He was in a position to doctor his own records, to cover up instability. He was also the one who matched Buster’s fingerprints to the murder weapon. Mm and Ms, congratulations, you’ve caught the killer.’

  ‘Open-and-shut-and-open-and-shut?’ suggested Richard.

  Moana gave the thumbs-up.

  ‘I’m going to need help to convince myself of this,’ said Richard. ‘I’ve decided to call on mighty deductive brainpower to get to the bottom of the mystery.’

  ‘More yesterday men?’ said Jess-F, appalled.

  ‘Interesting term. You’ve been careful not to u
se it before now. Is that what you call us? No, I don’t intend to summon any more plods from the outside.’

  Gewell couldn’t suppress his surge of relief.

  ‘I’ve decided to apply the techniques of tomorrow to these crimes of the future. Jess-F, I’ll need your help. Let’s take this puzzle to Big Thinks, and see how your mighty computer does.’

  Shutters came down behind Jess-F’s eyes.

  ‘Computer time is precious,’ said Gewell.

  ‘So is human life,’ answered Richard.

  * * *

  The inside of the building, the insides of Big Thinks, was the messiest area Richard had seen in Tomorrow Town. Banks of metal cabinets fronted with reels of tape were connected by a spaghetti tangle of wires that wound throughout the building like coloured plastic ivy. Some cabinets had their fronts off, showing masses of circuit-boards, valves and transistors. Surprisingly, the workings of the master brain seemed held together with a great deal of sellotape, string and Blu-tack. Richard recognised some components well in advance of any on the market, and others that might date back to Marconi or Babbage.

  ‘We’ve been making adjustments,’ said Jess-F.

  She shifted a cardboard box full of plastic shapes from a swivel chair and let him sit at a desk piled with wired-together television sets. To one side was a paper-towel dispenser which coughed out a steady roll of graph-paper with lines squiggled on it.

  He didn’t know which knobs to twiddle.

  ‘Ms Jess-F, could you show me how a typical dispute arbitration is made? Say, the triangle of Zhoule, Buster and Sue-2.’

  ‘That documentation might be hard to find.’

  ‘In this futopia of efficiency? I doubt it.’

  Jess-F nodded to Moana, who scurried off to root through large bins full of scrunched and torn paper.

  Vanessa was with Gewell and Zootie, taking a tour of the hydroponics zone, which was where the body of Varno Zhoule had been found. The official story was that Buster (now, Mal-K) had gone to Zhoule’s bungalow to kill him but found him not at home. He had taken the Hugo from its display case and searched out the victim-to-be, found him contemplating the green gunk that was made into his favourite pills, and did the deed then and there. It didn’t take a computer to decide it was more likely that Zhoule had been killed where the weapon was handy for an annoyed impulse-assassin to reach for, then hovercrafted along with the murder weapon to a public place so some uninvolved zenvol clot could find him. But why ferry the body all that way, with the added risk of being caught?