Isaac Asimov - Mysteries

VIP免费

2024-12-19 0 0 398.28KB 165 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

A devil's dozen of the Masters Mysteries Dr Isaac Asimov is renowned the world over as creator of the

magnificent Foundation trilogy, a galaxy-spanning saga of warfare and political intrigue. He has also

virtually pioneered the mystery story as a distinct branch of science fiction with such novels as The

Naked Sun and The Caves of Steel.

Thirteen ingenious stories of crime, murder, puzzlement and detection in the far reaches of space and

centuries in the future by perhaps the most famous and consistently entertaining science fiction author of

today. This volume is a superb showcase of Asimov's brilliant storytelling talent.

'Any thriller fan with a side interest in sci-fi, or vice versa., will enjoy Asimov's Mysteries,thirteen of the

master's stories, 'all observing the rules of the detective story, but all with the additional fillip of the sci-fi

setting'

ISAAC ASIMOV

MYSTERIES

Introduction

There is a tendency for many people who don't know any better to classify science fiction as just one

more member of the group of specialized literatures that include mysteries, westerns, adventures, sports

stories, love stories, and so on.

This has always seemed odd to those who know science fiction well, for s.f. is a literary response to

scientific change, and that response can run the entire gamut of the human experience. Science fiction, in

other words, includes everything.

How does one differentiate between a science fiction story and an adventure story, for instance, when so

much s.f. is so intensely adventurous as to leave the ordinary stories of the type rather pale ? Surely a trip

to the moon is first of all an adventure of the most thrilling kind, whatever else it is.

I have seen excellent science fiction stories that fall into unusual classifications and bring great enrichment

to what it had touched. Arthur C. Clarke wrote a delightful 'western' —but it took place under the sea,

and it had dolphins in place of cattle. Its name was 'Home on the Range,' however, and it fitted.

Clifford D. Simak wrote 'Rule 18' which is a pure sports story, but one that involved time-travel, so that

the coach of Earth's team could collect all-time greats with whom to win the annual game with Mars.

In 'The Lovers,' Philip Jose Farmer struck a telling variation on ordinary romance by writing a sober and

moving tale of love that crossed the boundary line, not of religion or color, but of species.

Oddly enough, it was the mystery form that seemed most difficult to amalgamate with science fiction.

Surely this is unexpected. One would think that science fiction would blend easily with the mystery.

Science itself is so nearly a mystery and the research scientist so nearly a Sherlock Holmes.

And if we want to reverse things, are there not mysteries that make use of the 'scientific mind' ? R. Austin

Freeman's Dr. Thorndyke is an example of a well known and successful (fictional) scientist-detective.

And yet science fiction writers seemed to be inhibited in the face of the science fiction mystery.

Back in the late 1945, this was finally explained to me. I was told that 'by its very nature' science fiction

would not play fair with the reader. In a science fiction story, the detective could say, 'But as you know,

Watson, ever since 2175, when all Spaniards learned to speak French, Spanish has been a dead

language. How came Juan Lopez, then, to speak those significant words in Spanish!' Or else, he could

have his detective whip out an odd device and say, 'As you know, Watson, my pocket-frannistan is

perfectly capable of detecting the hidden jewel in a trice.'

Such arguments did not impress me. It seemed to me that ordinary mystery writers (non-science-fiction

variety) could be just as unfair to the readers. They could deliberately hide a necessary clue. They could

introduce an additional character from nowhere. They could simply forget about something over which

they had been making a great deal of fuss, and mention it no more. They could do anything. The point

was, though, that they didn't do anything. They stuck to the rule of being fair to the reader. Clues might

be obscured, but not omitted. Essential lines of thought might be thrown out casually, but they were

thrown out. The leader was remorselessly misdirected, misled, and mystified, but he was not cheated.

It seemed, then, a matter to be taken obviously for granted that the same would apply to a science fiction

mystery. You don't spring new devices on the reader and solve the mystery with them. You don't take

advantage of future history to introduce ad hoc phenomena. In fact, you carefully explain all facets of the

future background well in advance so the reader may have a decent chance to see the solution. The

fictional detective can make use only of facts known to the reader in the present or of 'facts' of the

fictional future, which will be carefully explained beforehand. Even some of the real facts of our present

ought to be mentioned if they are to be used—just to make sure the reader is aware of the world now

about him.

Once all this is accepted, not only does it become obvious that the science fiction mystery is a thoroughly

acceptable literary form, but it also becomes obvious that it is a lot more fun to write and read, since it

often has a background that is fascinating in itself quite apart from the mystery.

But talk is cheap, so I put my typewriter where my mouth was, and in 1953 wrote a science fiction

mystery novel called The Caves of Steel (published, 1954). It was accepted by the critics as a good

science fiction novel and a good mystery and after it appeared I never heard anyone say that science

fiction mysteries were impossible to write. I even wrote a sequel called The Naked Sun (published,

1957) just to show that the first book wasn't an accident.

Between and after these novels, moreover, I also wrote several short stories intended to prove that

science fiction mysteriescould be written in all lengths.

These shorter science fiction mysteries (including some boarderline cases) are included in this volume in

order of publication. Judge for yourself.

The Singing Bell

Louis Peyton never discussed publicly the methods by which he had bested the police of Earth in a dozen

duels of wits and bluff, with the psychoprobe always waiting and always foiled. He would have been

foolish to do so, of course, but in his more complacent moments, he fondled the notion of leaving a

testament to be opened only after his death, one in which his unbroken success could clearly be seen to

be due to ability and not to luck.

In such a testament he would say, 'No false pattern can be created to cover a crime without bearing upon

it some trace of its creator. It is better, then, to seek in events some pattern that already exists and then

adjust your actions to it.'

It was with that principle in mind that Peyton planned the murder of Albert Cornwell.

Cornwell, that small-time retailer of stolen things, first approached Peyton at the latter's usual

table-for-one at Grinnell's. Cornwell's blue suit seemed to have a special shine, his lined face a special

grin, and his faded mustache a special bristle.

'Mr. Peyton,' he said, greeting his future murderer with no fourth-dimensional qualm, 'it is so nice to see

you. I'd almost given up, sir, almost given up.'

Peyton, who disliked being approached over his newspaper and dessert at Grinnell's, said, 'If you have

business with me, Cornwell, you know where you can reach me.' Peyton was past forty and his hair was

past its earlier blackness, but his back was rigid, his bearing youthful, his eyes dark, and his voice could

cut the more sharply for long practice.

'Not for this, Mr. Peyton,' said Cornwell, 'not for this. I know of a cache, sir, a cache of ... you know,

sir.' The forefinger of his right hand moved gently, as though it were a clapper striking invisible substance,

and his left hand momentarily cupped his ear.

Peyton turned a page of the paper, still somewhat damp from its tele-dispenser, folded it flat and said,

'Singing Bells ?'

'Oh, hush, Mr. Peyton,' said Cornwell in whispered agony

Peyton said. 'Come with me.'

They walked through the park. It was another Peyton axiom that to be reasonably secret there was

nothing like a low-voiced discussion out of doors.

Cornwell whispered, 'A cache of Singing Bells; an accumulated cache of Singing Bells. Unpolished, but

such beauties, Mr. Peyton.'

'Have you seen them?'

'No, sir, but I have spoken with one who has. He had proofs enough to convince me. There is enough

there to enable you and me to retire in affluence. In absolute affluence, sir.'

'Who was this other man ?'

A look of cunning lit Cornwell's face like a smoking torch, obscuring more than it showed and lending it a

repulsive oiliness. The man was a lunar grubstaker who had a method for locating the Bells in the crater

sides. I don't knowhis method; he never told me that. But he has gathered dozens, hidden them on the

Moon, and come to Earth to arrange the disposing of them.'

'He died, I suppose?'

'Yes. A most shocking accident, Mr. Peyton. A fall from a height. Very sad. Of course, his activities on

the Moon were quite illegal. The Dominion is very strict about unauthorized Bell-mining. So perhaps it

was a judgment upon him after all... In any case, I have his map.'

Peyton said, a look of calm indifference on his face, 'I don't want any of the details of your little

transaction. What I want to know is why you've come to me.'

Cornwell said, 'Well, now, there's enough for both of us, Mr. Peyton, and we can both do our bit. For

my part, I know where the cache is located and I can get a spaceship. You 'Yes?'

'You can pilot a spaceship, and you have such excellent contacts for disposing of the Bells. It is a very

fair division of labor, Mr. Peyton. Wouldn't you say so, now?'

Cornwell considered the pattern of his life—the pattern that already existed—and matters seemed to fit.

He said, 'We will leave for the Moon on August the tenth.'

Cornwell stopped walking and said, 'Mr. Peyton! It's only April now.'

Peyton maintained an even gait and Cornwell had to hurry to catch up. 'Do you hear me, Mr. Peyton ?'

Peyton said, 'August the tenth. I will get in touch with you at the proper time, tell you where to bring your

ship. Make no attempt to see me personally till then. Good-bye, Cornwell.'

Cornwell said, 'Fifty-fifty?'

'Quite,' said Peyton. 'Good-bye.'

Peyton continued his walk alone and considered the pattern of his life again. At the age of twenty-seven,

he had bought a tract of land in the Rockies on which some past owner had built a house designed as

refuge against the threatened atomic wars of two centuries back, the ones that had never come to pass

after all. The house remained, however, a monument to a frightened drive for self-sufficiency.

It was of steel and concrete in as isolated a spot as could well be found on Earth, set high above sea level

and protected on nearly all sides by mountain peaks that reached higher still. It had its self-contained

power unit, its water supply fed by mountain streams, its freezers in which ten sides of beef could hang

comfortably, its cellar outfitted like a fortress with an arsenal of weapons designed to stave off hungry,

panicked hordes that never came. It had its air-conditioning unit that could scrub and scrub the air until

anything but radioactivity (alas for human frailty) could be scrubbed out of it.

In that house of survival, Peyton passed the month of August every subsequent year of his perennially

bachelor life. He took out the communicators, the television, the newspaper tele-dispenser. He built a

force-field fence about his property and left a short-distance signal mechanism to the house from the

point where the fence crossed the one trail winding through the mountains.

For one month each year, he could be thoroughly alone. No one saw him, no one could reach him. In

absolute solitude, he could have the only vacation he valued after eleven months of contact with a

humanity for which he could feel only a cold contempt.

Even the police—and Peyton smiled—knew of his rigid regard for August. He had once jumped bail and

risked the psychoprobe rather than forgo his August.

Peyton considered another aphorism for possible inclusion in his testament: There is nothing so conducive

to an appearance of innocence as the triumphant lack of an alibi.

On July 30, as on July 30 of every year, Louis Peyton took the 9.15 a.m. non-grav stratojet at New

York and arrived in Denver at 12.30 p.m. There he lunched and took the 1.45 p.m. semi-grav bus to

Hump's Point, from which Sam Leibman took him by ancient ground-car—full grav! —up the trail to the

boundaries of his property. Sam Leibman gravely accepted the ten-dollar tip that he always received,

touched his hat as he had done on July 30 for fifteen years.

On July 31, as on July 31 of every year, Louis Peyton returned to Hump's Point in his non-grav aeroflitter

and placed an order through the Hump's Point general store for such supplies as he needed for the

coming month. There was nothing unusual about the order. It was virtually the duplicate of previous such

orders.

MacIntyre, manager of the store, checked gravely over the list, put it through to Central Warehouse,

Mountain District, in Denver, and the whole of it came pushing over the mass-transference beam within

the hour. Peyton loaded the supplies onto his aeroflitter with Maclntyre's help, left his usual ten-dollar tip

and returned to his house.

On August 1, at 12.01 a.m., the force field that surrounded his property was set to full power and Peyton

was isolated.

And now the pattern changed. Deliberately he had left himself eight days. In that time he slowly and

meticulously destroyed just enough of his supplies to account for all of August. He used the dusting

chambers which served the house as a garbage-disposal unit. They were of an advanced model capable

of reducing all matter up to and including metals and silicates to an impalpable and undetectable

molecular dust. The excess energy formed in the process was carried away by the mountain stream that

ran through his property. It ran five degrees warmer than normal for a week.

On August 9 his aeroflitter carried him to a spot in Wyoming where Albert Cornwell and a spaceship

waited.

The spaceship, itself, was a weak point, of course, since there were men who had sold it, men who had

transported ft and helped prepare it for flight. All those men, however, led only as far as Cornwell, and

Cornwell, Peyton thought— with the trace of a smile on his cold lips—would be a dead end. A very

dead end.

On August 10 the spaceship, with Peyton at the controls and Cornwell—and his map—as passenger, left

the surface of Earth. Its non-grav field was excellent. At full power, the ship's weight was reduced to less

than an ounce. The micro-piles fed energy efficiently and noiselessly, and without flame or sound the ship

rose through the atmosphere, shrank to a point, and was gone.

It was very unlikely that there would be witnesses to the flight, or that in these weak, piping times of

peace there would be a radar watch as in days of yore. In point of fact, there was none.

Two days in space; now two weeks on the Moon. Almost instinctively Peyton had allowed for those two

weeks from the first. He was under no illusions as to the value of homemade maps by non-cartographers.

Useful they might be to the designer himself, who had the help of memory. To a stranger, they could be

nothing more than a cryptogram.

Cornwell showed Peyton the map for the first time only after takeoff. He smiled obsequiously. 'After all,

sir, this was my only trump.'

'Have you checked this against the lunar charts ?'

'I would scarcely know how, Mr. Peyton. I depend upon you.'

Peyton stared at him coldly as he returned the map. The one certain thing upon it was Tycho Crater, the

site of the buried Luna City.

In one respect, at least, astronomy was on their side. Tycho was on the daylight side of the Moon at the

moment. It meant that patrol ships were less likely to be out, they themselves less likely to be observed.

Peyton brought the ship down in a riskily quick non-grav landing within the safe, cold darkness of the

inner shadow of a crater. The sun was past zenith and the shadow would grow no shorter.

Cornwall drew a long face. 'Dear, dear, Mr. Peyton. We can scarcely go prospecting in the lunar day.'

The lunar day doesn't last forever,' said Peyton shortly. There are about a hundred hours of sun left. We

can use that time for acclimating ourselves and for working out the map.'

The answer came quickly, but it was plural. Peyton studied the lunar charts over and over, taking

meticulous measurements, and trying to find the pattern of craters shown on the homemade scrawl that

was the key to— what?

Finally Peyton said. The crater we want could be any one of three: GC-3, GC-5, or MT-10.'

'What do we do, Mr. Peyton?' asked Cornwell anxiously.

'We try them all,' said Peyton, 'beginning with the nearest.'

The terminator passed and they were in the night shadow. After that, they spent increasing periods on the

lunar surface, getting used to the eternal silence and blackness, the harsh points of the stars and the crack

of light that was the Earth peeping over the rim of the crater above. They left hollow, featureless

footprints in the dry dust that did not stir or change. Peyton noted them first when they climbed out of the

crater into the full light of the gibbous Earth. That was on the eighth day after their arrival on the moon.

The lunar cold put a limit to how long they could remain outside their ship at any one time. Each day,

however, they managed for longer. By the eleventh day after arrival they had eliminated GC-5 as the

container of the Singing Bells.

By the fifteenth day, Peyton's cold spirit had grown warm with desperation. It would have to be GC-5.

MT-10 was too far away. They would not have time to reach it and explore it and still allow for a return

to Earth by August 31.

On that same fifteenth day, however, despair was laid to rest forever when they discovered the Bells.

They were not beautiful. They were merely irregular masses of gray rock, as large as a double fist,

vacuum-filled and feather-light in the Moon's gravity. There were two dozen of them and each one, after

proper polishing, could be sold for a hundred thousand dollars at least.

Carefully, in double handfuls, they carried the Bells to the ship, bedded them in excelsior, and returned

for more. Three times they made the trip both ways over ground that would have worn them out on Earth

but which, under the Moon's lilliputian gravity, was scarcely a barrier.

Cornwell passed the last of the Bells up to Peyton, who placed them carefully within the outer lock.

'Keep them clear, Mr. Peyton,' he said, his radioed voice sounding harshly in the other's ear. 'I'm coming

up.'

He crouched for the slow high leap against lunar gravity, looked up, and froze in panic. His face, clearly

visible through the hard carved lusilite of his helmet, froze in a last grimace of terror. 'No, Mr. Peyton.

Don't——'

Peyton's fist tightened on the grip of the blaster he held. It fired. There was an unbearable brilliant flash

and Cornwell was a dead fragment of a man, sprawled amid remnants of a spacesuit and flecked with

freezing blood.

Peyton paused to stare somberly at the dead man, but only for a second. Then he transferred the last of

the Bells to their prepared containers, removed his suit, activated first the non-grav field, then the

micropiles, and, potentially a million or two richer than he had been two weeks earlier, set off on the

return trip to Earth.

On August 29 Peyton's ship descended silently, stern bottomward, to the spot in Wyoming from which it

had taken off on August 10. The care with which Peyton had chosen the spot was not wasted. His

aeroflitter was still there, drawn within the protection of an enclosing wrinkle of the rocky, tortuous

countryside.

He moved the Singing Bells once again, in their containers, into the deepest recess of the wrinkle,

covering them, loosely and sparsely, with earth. He returned to the ship once more to set the controls and

make last adjustments. He climbed out again and two minutes later the ship's automatics took over.

Silently hurrying, the ship bounded upward and up, veering to westward somewhat as the Earth rotated

beneath it. Peyton watched, shading his narrow eyes, and at the extreme edge of vision there was a tiny

gleam of light and a dot of cloud against the blue sky.

Peyton's mouth twitched into a smile. He had judged well. With the cadmium safety-rods bent back into

uselessness, the micropiles had plunged past the unit-sustaining safety level and the ship had vanished in

the heat of the nuclear explosion that had followed.

Twenty minutes later, he was back on his property. He was tired and his muscles ached under Earth's

gravity. He slept well.

Twelve hours later, in the earliest dawn, the police came.

* * *

The man who opened the door placed his crossed hands over his paunch and ducked his smiling head

two or three times in greeting. The man who entered, H. Seton Davenport of the Terrestrial Bureau of

Investigation, looked about uncomfortably.

The room he had entered was large and in semidarkness except for the brilliant viewing lamp focused

over a combination armchair-desk. Rows of book-films covered the walls. A suspension of Galactic

charts occupied one corner of the room and a Galactic Lens gleamed softly on a stand in another corner.

'You are Dr. Wendell Urth?' asked Davenport, in a tone that suggested he found it hard to believe.

Davenport was a stocky man with black hair, a thin and prominent nose, and a star-shaped scar on one

cheek which marked permanently the place where a neuronic whip had once struck him at too close a

range.

'I am,' said Dr. Urth in a thin, tenor voice. 'And you are Inspector Davenport.'

The Inspector presented his credentials and said, The University recommended you to me as an

extraterrologist.'

'So you said when you called me half an hour ago,' said Urth agreeably. His features were thick, his nose

was a snubby button, and over his somewhat protuberant eyes there were thick glasses.

'I shall get to the point. Dr. Urth. I presume you have visited the Moon ...'

Dr. Urth, who had brought out a bottle of ruddy liquid and two glasses, just a little the worse for dust,

from behind a straggling pile of book-films, said with sudden brusqueness, 'I have never visited the

Moon, Inspector. I never intend to! Space travel is foolishness. I don't believe in it.' Then, in softer tones,

'Sit down, sir, sit down. Have a drink.'

Inspector Davenport did as he was told and said, 'But you're an...'

'Extraterrologist. Yes. I'm interested in other worlds, but it doesn't mean I have to go there. Good lord, I

don't have to be a time traveler to qualify as a historian, do I?' He sat down, and a broad smile impressed

itself upon his round face once more as he said, 'Now tell me what's on your mind.'

'I have come,' said the Inspector, frowning, 'to consult you in a case of murder.'

'Murder? What have I to do with murder?'

This murder. Dr. Urth, was on the Moon.'

'Astonishing.'

'It's more than astonishing. It's unprecedented, Dr. Urth. In the fifty years since the Lunar Dominion has

been established, ships have blown up and spacesuits have sprung leaks. Men have boiled to death on

sun-side, frozen on dark-side, and suffocated on both sides. There have been deaths by falls, which,

considering lunar gravity, is quite a trick. But in all that time, not one man has been killed on the Moon as

the result of another man's deliberate act of violence—till now.'

Dr. Urth said, 'How was it done?'

'A blaster. The authorities were on the scene within the hour through a fortunate set of circumstances. A

patrol ship observed a flash of light against the Moon's surface. You know how far a flash can be seen

against the night-side. The pilot notified Luna City and landed. In the process of circling back, he swears

that he just managed to see by Earth-light what looked like a ship taking off. Upon landing, he discovered

a blasted corpse and footprints.'

The flash of light,' said Dr. Urth, 'you suppose to be the firing blaster.'

That's certain. The corpse was fresh. Interior portions of the body had not yet frozen. The footprints

belonged to two people. Careful measurements showed that the depressions fell into two groups of

somewhat different diameters, indicating differently sized spaceboots. In the main, they led to craters

GC-3 and GC-5, a pair of——'

'1 am acquainted with the official code for naming lunar craters,' said Dr. Urth pleasantly.

'Umm. In any case, GC-3 contained footprints that led to a rift in the crater wall, within which scraps of

hardened pumice were found. X-ray diffraction patterns showed——'

'Singing Bells,' put in the extraterrologist in great excitement. 'Don't tell me this murder of yours involves

Singing 'Bells!'

'What if it does ?' demanded Davenport blankly.

'I have one. A University expedition uncovered it and presented it to me in return for——Come,

Inspector, I must show it to you.'

Dr. Urth jumped up and pattered across the room, beckoning the other to follow as he did. Davenport,

annoyed, followed.

They entered a second room, larger than the first, dimmer, considerably more cluttered. Davenport

stared with astonishment at the heterogeneous mass of material that was jumbled together in no pretense

at order.

He made out a small lump of 'blue glaze' from Mars, the sort of thing some romantics considered to be an

artifact of long-extinct Martians, a small meteorite, a model of an early spaceship, a sealed bottle of

nothing scrawlingly labeled 'Venusian atmosphere.'

Dr. Urth said happily, 'I've made a museum of my whole house. It's one of the advantages of being a

bachelor. Of course, I haven't quite got things organized. Someday, when I have a spare week or so ...'

For a moment he looked about, puzzled; then, remembering, he pushed aside a chart showing the

evolutionary scheme of development of the marine invertebrates that were the highest life forms on

Barnard's Planet and said, 'Here it is. It's flawed, I'm afraid.'

The Bell hung suspended from a slender wire, soldered delicately onto it. That it was flawed was

obvious. It had a constriction line running halfway about it that made it seem like two small globes, firmly

but imperfectly squashed together. Despite that, it had been lovingly polished to a dull luster, softly gray,

velvety smooth, and faintly pock-marked in a way that laboratories, in their futile efforts to prepare

synthetic Bells, had found impossible to duplicate.

Dr. Urth said, 'I experimented a good deal before I found a decent stroker. A flawed Bell is

temperamental. But bone works. I have one here'—and he held up something that looked like a short

thick spoon made of a gray-white substance—'which I had made out of the femur of an ox. Listen.'

With surprising delicacy, his pudgy fingers maneuvered the Bell, feeling for one best spot. He adjusted it,

steadying it daintily. Then, letting the Bell swing free, he brought down the thick end of the bone spoon

and stroked the Bell softly.

It was as though a million harps had sounded a mile away. It swelled and faded and returned. It came

from no particular direction. It sounded inside the head, incredibly sweet and pathetic and tremulous all at

once.

It died away lingeringly and both men were silent for a full minute.

Dr. Urth said, 'Not bad, eh?' and with a flick of his hand set the Bell to swinging on its wire.

Davenport stirred restlessly. 'Careful! Don't break it.' The fragility of a good Singing Bell was proverbial.

Dr. Urth said, 'Geologists say the Bells are only pressure-hardened pumice, enclosing a vacuum in which

small beads of rock rattle freely. That's what they say. But if that's all it is, why can't we reproduce one?

Now a flawless Bell would make this one sound like a child's harmonica.'

'Exactly,' said Davenport, 'and there aren't a dozen people on Earth who own a flawless one, and there

are a hundred people and institutions who would buy one at any price, no questions asked. A supply of

Bells would be worth murder.'

The extraterrologist turned to Davenport and pushed his spectacles back on his inconsequential nose with

a stubby forefinger. 'I haven't forgotten your murder case. Please go on.'

That can be done in a sentence. I know the identity of the murderer.'

They had returned to the chairs in the library and Dr. Urth clasped his hands over his ample abdomen.

'Indeed? Then surely you have no problem. Inspector.'

'Knowing and proving are not the same, Dr. Urth. Unfortunately he has no alibi.'

'You mean, unfortunately he has, don't you?'

'I mean what I say. If he had an alibi, I could crack it somehow, because it would be a false one. If there

were witnesses who claimed they had seen him on Earth at the time of the murder, their stories could be

broken down. If he had documentary proof, it could be exposed as a forgery.-, or some sort of trickery.

Unfortunately he has none of it.'

'What does he have ?'

Carefully Inspector Davenport described the Peyton estate in Colorado. He concluded, 'He has spent

every August there in the strictest isolation. Even the T.B.I, would have to testify to that. Any jury would

have to presume that he was on his estate this August as well, unless we could present definite proof that

he was on the Moon.'

'What makes you think he was on the Moon ? Perhaps he is innocent.'

'No!' Davenport was almost violent. 'For fifteen years I've been trying to collect sufficient evidence

against him and I've never succeeded. But I can smell a Peyton crime now. I tell you that no one but

Peyton, no one on Earth, would have the impudence or, for that matter, the practical business contacts to

attempt disposal of smuggled Singing Bells. He is known to be an expert space pilot. He is known to

have had contact with the murdered man, though admittedly not for some months. Unfortunately none of

that is proof.'

Dr. Urth said, 'Wouldn't it be simple to use the psycho-probe, now that its use has been legalized?'

Davenport scowled, and the scar on his cheek turned livid. 'Have you read the Konski-Hiakawa law. Dr.

Urth?'

'No.'

'I think no one has. The right to mental privacy, the government says, is fundamental. All right, but what

follows? The man who is pyschoprobed and proves innocent of the crime for which he was

psychoprobed is entitled to as much compensation as he can persuade the courts to give him. In a recent

case a bank cashier was awarded twenty-five thousand dollars for having been psychoprobed on

inaccurate suspicion of theft. It seems that the circumstantial evidence which seemed to point to theft

actually pointed to a small spot of adultery. His claim that he lost his job, was threatened by the husband

in question and put in bodily fear, and finally was held up to ridicule and contumely because a news-strip

man had learned the results of the probe held good in court.'

'I can see the man's point.'

'So can we all. That's the trouble. One more item to remember: Any man who has been psychoprobed

once for any reason can never be psychoprobed again for any reason. No one man, the law says, shall

be placed in mental jeopardy twice in his lifetime.'

'Inconvenient.'

'Exactly. In the two years since the psychoprobe has been legitimized, I couldn't count the number of

crooks and chiselers who've tried to get themselves psychoprobed for purse-snatching so that they could

play the rackets safely afterward. So you see the Department will not allow Peyton to be psychoprobed

until they have firm evidence of his guilt. Not legal evidence, maybe, but evidence that is strong enough to

convince my boss. The worst of it, Dr. Urth, is that if we come into court without a psychoprobe record,

we can't win. In a case as serious as murder, not to have used the psychoprobe is proof enough to the

dumbest juror that the prosecution isn't sure of its ground.'

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

摘要：

Adevil'sdozenoftheMastersMysteriesDrIsaacAsimovisrenownedtheworldoverascreatorofthemagnificentFoundationtrilogy,agalaxy-spanningsagaofwarfareandpoliticalintrigue.HehasalsovirtuallypioneeredthemysterystoryasadistinctbranchofsciencefictionwithsuchnovelsasTheNakedSunandTheCavesofSteel.Thirteeningenious...

展开>> 收起<<

Isaac Asimov - Mysteries.pdf

共165页,预览33页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

Isaac Asimov - Mysteries

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: