Gods of Riverworld (38 page)

“Then let’s get out,” Frigate said. “The trouble is … what’s to prevent the Snark from closing the suite door?”

“I don’t know,” Burton said. “At least, he can’t drown us.”

They had the e-m converter make chairs for them, and they flew out over the darkened world and under the simulated full moon. Nobody said a word about the bodies on the field. They would not have time to dispose of them; the crows, eagles, and hawks would strip them of their flesh. By the time they returned, if they ever did, they would deal with bones only.

After another nightcap, they went to separate bedrooms in the suite, except for Burton and Star Spoon. She crawled into bed at once, said, “Good night, Dick,” and was asleep. He followed her a few minutes later, and, against his expectation, passed into sleep at once. He awoke four hours later, his lifelong insomnia clutching him like the Old Man of the Sea. The woman was on her side, facing away from him, and snoring softly. He got out of bed, put on a robe, went to the main room and got a big cup of coffee. After that had removed some of his weariness, he set to work at the computer console. Five hours later, he had put into the Computer every injunction and override he could think of to protect all in his suite. He was sure, however, that there were others. He would ask his companions to add to the list.

“I should have done that long long ago,” he told himself.

He decided that he would not wait until his fellow tenants got up for breakfast. As tired as they were, they might sleep until noon. He began scanning the corridors because, at that moment, he could think of nothing else to do. He started from the top of the tower with the hangar, worked the first level and then the second. That was quick because a glance showed that the circular area was empty, and there was no life except animal in the little worlds.

The scan moved into Level 60 and raced up and down the corridors and into the rooms along them. It came to a corridor the inner wall of which formed a side of the
wathan
well. Here, he knew, was where an observer could see the surface of the mass of
wathans.

He cried out, “Stop!”

He stared at the curving transparent wall of the shaft.

The beautiful, bright, many-colored, swelling, shrinking, and whirling entities called
wathans
were gone. The well was empty and dark.

34

Peter Frigate was the first to enter the room. He stopped, and he looked at Burton, at the beamer on the table, and at the half-opened door to the corridor. “What’s going on?”

Li Po came in just as Burton opened his mouth to answer Frigate. Burton said, “Have some coffee first, Pete.”

“How are you, Dick?” the Chinese said.

“I’ve been up most of the night. Working.”

Li Po also glanced at the weapon and the door. He raised his eyebrows but did not comment. Frigate, after pouring out coffee from a pot on the table said, “You look awful. The dark circles around your eyes … you look like a debauched raccoon. What’ve you been doing?”

“I feel more than awful,” Burton said slowly. “I feel … how would you feel if you knew that the end of the world was near? Or perhaps I should say that the world has ended—for all practical purposes.”

Frigate drank the whole cup of very hot coffee without flinching. He said, “The end of the world happens every second.”

Burton did not know what he meant and did not think it worthwhile to find out. In any event, Frigate’s words were just a means for putting off the bad news.

Li Po took a sip of coffee and said, “What do you mean?”

“Perhaps I should wait until everybody’s here. I don’t like to repeat.”

“Sure you don’t,” Frigate said. “Let’s hear it.”

Burton told them that the
wathan
enclosure was empty.

Li Po and Frigate paled but said nothing.

“I checked the body-records then,” Burton said. “I had to force myself to do it because I didn’t want to know what had been done to them, although, of course, I already knew. But it needed doing, and so I did it.”

“And they … they…” Frigate said, choking.

“They had all been erased. All thirty-five billion six hundred and forty-six million plus. No exceptions. All. And no
wathans
have come in since I made the discovery.”

Li Po sat down. “I’ve had too many shocks lately.”

After a long time, Frigate said, “So … when we die, we die for the last time.”

“Quite.”

After another long silence—only a supercatastrophe could have kept Li Po’s mouth shut so long, Burton thought—Frigate poured brandy into a half-full cup of coffee and downed all of the steaming liquid. Li Po looked as if he would like to do the same, half-rose, shook his head, and sank back into the chair. This was the first time Burton had ever seen him reject a drink.

The brandy had restored some of the American’s color. He drank more, straight this time, and said, “The Snark has overridden that automatic function … I mean, no bodies will be recorded from now on?”

“Right.”

“But if we can survive until the Gardenworlders get here, we can be recorded again. Otherwise, we, too, will lose our chance for immortality forever.”

“Of course,” Burton said. “But when they get here, our time will be up anyway. If we’re not ready to Go On, our records will be erased. And if we’re not, we’ll be erased.”

He got up and poured himself more coffee, looked at the brandy bottle, and decided against it. “I immediately asked the Computer about that. I was shocked, of course, and I cursed myself, railed against the fates, if you must know, because as soon as we got here from Alice’s, I commanded the Computer to refuse to erase any body-records. I was forestalling that. But I was too late. I did not know that then because the Computer, the idiot, did not tell me that my command was too late. It should have, but the Snark had told it not to display that data unless it was asked for it.”

“We’ve all been just drifting along, doing things too late,” Frigate said in a dull tone. “Sometimes … I wonder if the Snark has had the Computer broadcast some sort of neural suppressant field, something dampening our intelligence?”

“I doubt it. We’ve just been playing with our toys … like children. However”—Burton lifted a napkin and revealed a yellow ball the size of a cranberry—“I’ve been busy while you were sleeping. This is the sphere that records a body. I had the Computer duplicate one for me. It’s empty now, but I wanted to see one. And holding it in my hand enabled me to postulate something … a theory, but the only explanation I could come up with that was reasonable. That is, how could the Snark get into Alice’s world, into Turpin’s and yours … Netley’s … and there arrange for operations that just could not be done from outside those worlds?”

Alice entered a minute later. Burton had to repeat his story and to wait for her to recover enough before he could continue.

“First, though, I don’t think that the Snark did it. I mean I don’t think that there’s an Ethical hiding in the tower. Nur eliminated her, though we cannot, of course, ever be sure. But the murders in the little worlds were done by one of us. By one of the survivors.”

Li Po shot up from his chair, and, quivering, said, “Gull! Or Star Spoon! But why?”

Burton nodded. “Gull may have reverted, but he would have to have gone mad to do that. Star Spoon? She would have to be insane. If either is, he or she has concealed it well. First, let me tell the rest of my theory.”

“First … pardon the interruption,” Frigate said, “we have to consider that it may be neither Gull nor Star Spoon. What if somebody we haven’t even seen is the killer? After all, Williams raised Gull and the others involved in the Ripper killings. And there are the gypsies. We don’t know who raised them, but I suspect Williams did it just as a joke or just to bug us. Or maybe somebody else did. Anyway, what if someone raised a person who was destructively insane, to put it mildly, and that person is our second Snark?”

“I asked the Computer to scan the tower for other people. It reported that it could find none. I asked for a rundown of all those who’d been raised, and the number corresponds exactly with my calculations. Still, the Computer could be reporting only what it’s been told to report.”

Frigate threw his hands up. “Nothing’s certain!”

“It never has been. However, I think that we don’t have to consider a third party or parties.”

He held up the yellow sphere. “Here is how I think he … or she … did it.”

The killer had ordered a number of his body-recordings made in an e-m converter.

“Nobody had inhibited this action until I told the Computer not to allow that, but I was too late. The deed was done.”

The Snark, Snark the Second, as it were, had been given an opportunity to enter the worlds of Turpin, Frigate, and Alice. Perhaps all the worlds and some apartment suites, too.

“There the Snark put the recording-spheres in converters that were out of the way, seldom if ever used. And the Snark also concealed them in other places for easy access and probably carried them around in his clothing.”

The Snark then killed himself in the privacy of an unused apartment. By prearrangement with the Computer, the Snark was resurrected in a converter inside a world.

“The converter in which the Snark died would then disintegrate the body. The Snark did not want anybody finding it, though that possibility was remote.”

Once inside Alice’s world, Snark II did what had to be done. The androids were verbally programmed when they were out of sight of Alice and Maglenna or perhaps they were programmed before Maglenna showed. Since the Snark had to be furtive about the process, it undoubtedly took weeks to complete it.

The flooding of the two worlds, though, was ordered from the outside.

“The Ethicals thought that they were one hundred per cent safe when they were in their private worlds. Of course, they were not nearly as security-conscious as we since they believed the tower to be an impregnable fortress. They knew that one of them was a traitor, but they still could not conceive that he would actually personally endanger them.

“But an ingenious person could flood the little worlds by ordering the liquid supply to pour into it until it was completely filled or its inhabitants had been drowned.”

“That may be true,” Alice said, “but how could the Snark shut the doors to the worlds? And how could he see what was going on in the worlds when the flooding began? The Computer had commands to open the door only to authorized codewords, and it would not transmit pictures or any communications except as ordered by the tenants. No one could override those.”

“But they could be bypassed by various means. The Snark made cameras in the worlds he had gotten into via the recording-spheres, flew the cameras to the ceilings, probably at night, and attached them there. You see, the Computer had orders not to transmit wave frequencies through the circuits of the walls except through certain channels, but the Computer interpreted those orders literally. It did have orders to transmit the frequencies through the wall circuits to the converters and the computer auxiliary and communication devices. It did not distinguish between those computers installed and authorized by the Ethicals and any installed later. It would assume that the additions were authorized.”

“But the doors?” Alice said.

“The Snark sealed the exterior of the door with a substance that hardened and so resisted the operating mechanisms of the doors, which open outward.”

That meant that the Snark had sealed the doors while Alice’s party was going on. The Snark had killed himself or herself, had been resurrected in an apartment, and then had flown in a chair to the central area and applied the substance to the exit doors of two of the worlds. Then the Snark had ordered the liquid supply to convert to bourbon and gin and started the deluging. After which, the Snark had committed suicide, been resurrected in an apartment, and returned to Alice’s place as a guest. There the Snark had waited until the androids had started their predetermined attack. During the battle, the Snark had made sure that he was not harmed by the androids. His or her plans had not been completely successfully, but the Snark was not dismayed. There would be other opportunities.

Li Po said, “Ah! Only those at the party could be suspects! So … Gull or Star Spoon!”

“Not necessarily,” Frigate said. “The Snark could be someone else, if that someone had had an opportunity to get into the worlds. It would have to be one of those raised, someone we know or ought to know. It could be many people. After all, we haven’t seen all the bodies in Turpin’s or Netley’s … my … world. We should find out if anyone is missing from there.”

“First, we put Gull and Star Spoon through the grinder,” Burton said.

If one of them was so infernally clever, he thought, wouldn’t he or she have anticipated that one of the others might be Sherlock Holmes enough to narrow the suspects to two?

If that was so, the Snark would know that his or her identity would soon be revealed.

Li Po, as if he had been reading Burton’s thoughts said, “That accounts for the beamer on the table? You’ll be ready for the Snark?”

“Yes. If one of them walks through the doorway with a weapon in hand, I won’t be caught surprised.”

“It seems to me,” Alice said, “that they … one of them … could kill himself … or herself … and be resurrected elsewhere. What’s to keep the Snark from coming through there?” She pointed at the open door to the corridor.

“Ah, that,” Burton said. “Well, you see, I copied the killer’s modus operandi. Very early this morning, I sealed Gull’s and Star Spoon’s doors.”

Burton did not have to tell them what would happen. The guilty one would be unable to get out, and it would not be long before he or she knew why. The only escape was the route the Snark had often taken. Commit suicide and be resurrected elsewhere.

“What if the Snark pretends innocence and asks us to let him out?” Frigate said.

“We won’t let either out. Sooner or later, the Snark will leave.”

The immediate excitement had lifted them from the shock of finding out that the
wathan
s were gone and the records erased. They were not concentrating on the numbing realization that they would be dead forever the next time they died. Or that those still alive in The Valley would not be raised again after they had died. Or that all that they had suffered to get here had been in vain.