We Install (14 page)

Joe Mountain's ears twitched. “I hear him coming back,” he said.

Quickly, Sharon Rock returned the jacket to the chair where it had lain. It wasn't quite in the same position it had been in before, but Petros van Gilder never noticed. When the human suspect walked into his office, all he cared about was selling the two Snarre't a scooter. Even without smell, he radiated disappointment when they declined to buy.

“Maybe you'll come back another time,” he said as Sharon Rock and Joe Mountain made their good-byes.

“Maybe we will.” Sharon Rock wasn't laughing, but she wasn't far from it. She and Joe Mountain left the office. Van Gilder kicked at the floor. A Snarre' wouldn't have shown frustration the same way, but Miss Murple knew it when she saw it.

“You say that isn't proof?” the human detective. “Well, maybe it isn't, not by itself, but it sure smells funny, don't you think?”

So even noseblind Bald Ones used a phrase like that! Miss Murple's fingers spread to show she thought he was right. “It is not proof. It sure does smell funny.”

“All right. What's our next move?”

“You can bring this record with you, right?”

“Oh, sure.”

“Good. I think you'd better show it to my superiors.”

Kling sighed again. “I ought to be going home,” he grumbled, perhaps more to himself than to her. “Well, I'll put it on a laptop. If we can wrap this up, we'd better do it.”

“You think like an investigator, sure enough,” Miss Murple said.

John Paul Kling didn't like night-vision goggles. If you went over to the Furball side of town, though, you needed them—which was putting it mildly. The Snarre't didn't believe in street lights. They didn't believe in a big way. It was as dark as the inside of a cow over there.

The Snarre't didn't think so, and neither did their genetically engineered mounts. Their big eyes (which glowed in the dark like cats') glommed on to every available photon. Human scientists insisted that night-vision goggles grabbed even more, but you couldn't have proved it by Kling.

“Here we are,” the detective said. Kling could read Snarre'l pretty well, even if he didn't speak it worth a damn. The sign in front of the low, sprawling building said PURSUIT AND CAPTURE OF CRIMINALS. The last word literally meant
stinkers
. The Snarre't thought with their noses a lot of the time.

A Furball sat just inside the entrance. His pose bespoke boredom. If he didn't look like every desk sergeant ever born … He stopped looking bored as soon as he saw—and probably smelled—Kling. “What the—?”

“This is my associate on the hoxbomb case,” said the detective with whom Kling was dealing. “He has evidence the ones high in the tree need to smell right away.”

“How can you smell human evidence?” Either the sergeant didn't know Kling was wearing a babelfish or he just didn't care. Kling would have bet on number two. The Snarre's wiggle was the Furball equivalent of a shrug. “Well, go on. You're supposed to know what you're doing.” Even through the babelfish, his tone said it wasn't his problem.

Neither Snarre'i eyes nor night-vision goggles could work with
no
photons. Dimly glowing plates—bioluminescence—set into the walls and ceiling every so often doled out a few. Snarre'i cops bustled along the hallways much like their human equivalents. Some of them stared at Kling. Some just ignored him. He didn't know what that meant. He wasn't real anxious to find out, either.

“Here.” His Snarre'i—colleague?—walked through an open door. “This is my boss.”

John Paul Kling went in, too. By size, the new Furball was a male. “I greet you,” Kling said in Snarre'l.

“Hello,” the male replied in English, then went back to his own language: “What have you got? Hoxbomb business, yes? Yes, of course.” He answered himself. “Why else would a human be here?”

“Yeah, it's hoxbomb business, all right.” Kling opened the laptop, made sure the screen was set to a brightness level Snarre't could stand, and fired it up. He ran through the surveillance video in Petros van Gilder's office, and especially through the part where the two Snarre't handled van Gilder's jacket.

“You sniff out—well, you see—who they are,” his opposite number said to her boss. “But we have to drop on them just the same.” Kling hid a smile. How many times had he heard conversations just like that back at his cop shop? More than he could count—he was sure of that.

“Are you sure we can, with just human evidence?” the boss cop asked.

“Once we interrogate them, we'll get the stench of lying soon enough,” Kling's counterpart said. “Then they're ours.”

“But she's a lifey performer,” the boss cop said. “She can fake those odors.”

“Well enough to fool you or me, maybe. I'll be damned if I believe she can fool a sniffer for long.” The other Furball seemed very sure of herself.

“Hmm.” The boss cop thought it over. “Yeah, I guess you're right.” He didn't sound thrilled about it. A human lieutenant would have decided the same thing, and would have sounded the same way, too. High-profile cases always meant trouble. The boss cop swung his big eyes toward John Paul Kling. “Want to come along for the bust? Maybe you'll intimidate them.”

“Sure. Why not?” Kling found himself grinning. Not many of his fellow bulls would have a story like this one. That was almost as good a reason to go with the Furballs as the chance to close the case. He wondered if the aliens would see—or smell—things the same way. He thought they would. Plainly, they were cops, too.

The human-made scooter wasn't in the garage at Sharon Rock and Joe Mountain's apartment house. Miss Murple muttered under her breath. That meant the suspects were out doing whatever important people did.

Miss Murple had started muttering when she discovered that reporters were at the apartment house ahead of her and her comrades and Kling. Somehow, the newsies always sniffed out stories. Somebody back at the station was probably counting her sweetener right now.

“What are you doing here?” one of the reporters called. “Sharon and Joe are at Famous Janus' party.”

“
Whose
party?” Sam Spud asked. Famous Janus wasn't famous to him. As far as Miss Murple could tell, Famous Janus was famous for being famous, not for anything he'd actually done. To a lot of Snarre't, that didn't seem to matter. Miss Murple wondered whether humans were so foolish. She doubted it. Maybe not being driven by odors had occasional advantages. Famous Janus
smelled
as if he ought to be important, so people naturally thought she was.

“Do you know where Famous Janus lives?” Miss Murple asked the reporters.

They laughed at her. She'd known they would. But they told her where, too, and then they set out to beat her over there. Sam Spud turned to the Baldy. “Can your gadget go faster than drofs and caitnops?” he asked.

“And how many can it carry?” Miss Murple added.

“It will take both of you, if you want to ride with me,” Kling said. “I don't know whether it will go faster than your animals or not. Shall we find out?”

“Yes!” Miss Murple and Sam Spud said together.

“Hop on behind me, then,” the human told them. “You'll have to let me know when to turn. This isn't my part of town, remember.”

“We'll do it,” Miss Murple promised. “Just hurry.”

“Right,” Kling said. “Grab the handholds. Are you ready? … We're going, then.”

Go they did. Maybe scooters were faster than caitnops. They were certainly smoother. The sheet of clear stuff in front of the human kept the wind from buffeting the riders the way it would have on a caitnop at full gallop. The remaining breeze was almost enough to sweep away the stench of metal and plastic that clung to human-built machinery. Miss Murple could see why Sharon Rock and Joe Mountain might want a scooter. What she couldn't see was why they'd hoxbombed the male who sold it to them.

Had the Baldy somehow offended them? If he had, then the human suspect was working with them and not their dupe. Did they do it because Cravath
was
a human and they thought they could get away with it? Was it a thrill crime? Maybe answers would come out one of these days. In the meantime …

“Go right!” she shouted. Kling swung the scooter into a tight turn. It raced past a reporter on a tired old drof. The female looked and no doubt smelled unhappy. Miss Murple yelled for another turn. The human made that one in the nick of time, too. He started passing caitnops, even though they were running flat out. If you wanted to get somewhere in a hurry, a scooter could do the trick.

“Stop!” Sam Spud said. The human did, so abruptly that Miss Murple was squeezed against his back for a moment. It wasn't pleasant. Like most of his kind, he wore chemicals to mask his odors. They made contact with him less pleasant than his natural aromas would have, even if those were sharply alien. Humans didn't just ignore their noses. They seemed to go out of their way to torment them.

A large, muscular bouncer advanced on the scooter. “Who are you people?” she demanded. “And what are you doing with a Baldy?”

“Don't get personal, Furball,” Kling snapped. Humans could be speciesist, too.

“We are investigators,” Miss Murple said. “We are seeking two people said to be at Famous Janus' party. You will be sorry if you interfere.”

“Very sorry,” Kling put in, drawing his hand weapon. The noise it made when it went off might kill a Snarre' even if the pellet it hurled missed. Bald Ones more readily survived such shocks. They were a coarse-grained race.

The bouncer recognized the weapon for what it was. She retreated in a hurry. Miss Murple and Sam Spud uncurled their ears as the human stowed the vicious thing once more.

“What's going on?” someone shouted as a caitnop panted up. “Have they dropped on Sharon and Joe yet?”

“Sharon and Joe!” the bouncer exclaimed.

“Don't warn them,” Miss Murple said.
Her
weapon launched a casing full of paralyzing spores. It took a couple of heartbeats to kill, but no longer than that. The bouncer didn't warn anybody.

Miss Murple, Sam Spud, and the human rushed up the stairs and into Famous Janus' flat. Several different illegalities were going on there.
Another time
, Miss Murple thought. The music was almost as loud as Kling's weapon would have been. Joe Mountain was licking the ear of a female not a quarter as attractive as the one he had. Sharon Rock was dancing with a weedy little male; if they'd danced any closer, they would have been mating.

“I arrest you,” Sam Spud told Joe Mountain. “Go quietly, or else.” Joe looked astonished. He smelled that way, too. He hadn't even noticed the investigators coming in.

Miss Murple, then, had the pleasure of seizing Sharon Rock. The lifey performer looked and smelled amazed, too. “You'll never pin this on us,” she said.

“That's what you think,” Miss Murple said. “We have plenty of human evidence to convict you. Come along quietly, or you'll stay quiet for good.”

“Human evidence,” Sharon Rock said scornfully. “What's human evidence worth?”

“Your neck,” Miss Murple answered. “Nobody takes kindly to hoxbombing. You won't get away with it, even if you passed the stuff on to a Bald One.”

“We didn't do anything.” Sharon rather spoiled that by adding, “You haven't met our solicitors and barristers yet, either.”

“Quietly, I told you,” Miss Murple said. And Sharon Rock, who was used to taking direction from the finest lifey visualizers on Lacanth C, took it from a no-account investigator, too.

Once Miss Murple and Sam Spud and Kling brought their prisoners out onto the lawn in front of the apartment house … things got no easier. By then, the reporters had got there. The brains they carried recorded the images of the captured stars and sent them into the neural net. All the jaded sensation-seekers would be stinking up their flats in excitement.

How much trouble
would
Sharon and Joe's attorneys be able to kick up? Once the sniffers decided they smelled guilty, not much. It didn't matter how famous you were, not if you smelled like someone who'd done it. If the sniffers
didn't
think Sharon and Joe had done it, Miss Murple knew what her career was worth, and Sam Spud's with it.

Attorneys being what they were, the Snarre't might even go after the human investigator. Could they get him? Miss Murple didn't know, but she had her doubts. If he was wrong about Sharon and Joe, he'd made an honest mistake. The Bald Ones wouldn't be upset about it, not when he was dealing with Snarre't.

Miss Murple's big boss wouldn't care whether her mistake was honest or not. Who would have imagined that humans might have better sense than her own folk?

“You helped us. You truly did,” Sam Spud told Kling. He sounded startled. Miss Murple couldn't blame him. She also had trouble believing a human could be worth anything. But this one had pulled his weight. He really had.

“Yeah, well, you guys did all right, too,” he replied. Maybe it was the imagination of the worm in Miss Murple's brain, but he also seemed surprised. She wondered why. Didn't he know the Snarre't had a strong sense of justice? And if he didn't, how ignorant
were
humans, anyhow?

“Looks like you're off the hook,” John Paul Kling told Petros van Gilder as he set the scooter seller free. “You were just a sucker for the Furballs.”

“I said so,” van Gilder replied with as much dignity as he could muster. “I don't have anything against Jack and Beverly. I feel bad things turned out the way they did.” He shook his head. “I don't feel bad. I feel awful. That poor kid.”

“Yeah.” Kling didn't like thinking about the Cravaths' baby. He wished he'd never set eyes on it. By all accounts, it was healthy and showed every sign of being smart even if it was a monster. The Snarre't still thought humans were crazy for not getting rid of it. They had a point, too. Could any kid be smart enough to make up for what the hoxbomb had done to this one's flesh? It wasn't easy to believe.