Death Ray Butterfly, Tom Lichtenberg [most read book in the world .TXT] 📗

sort them all out in my mind, but too many things run together, too many coincidences, too many loose threads. Just when I think I've put some pieces together, it all comes unraveled. I had cases that took years and years to come to some kind of conclusion.

I'd get called in on all sorts of things. I'd wonder why they were bothering with me at all, like the time they brought me in on the Reyn Tundra situation. Here was a job for a scholar, I thought, an archaeologist or an anthropologist at least. They'd found this body, frozen in a block of ice inside a glacier somewhere in Europe. He'd been dead, oh maybe twenty thousand years or so, they said. Said he'd been murdered. Now they wanted me to solve the crime! What could I tell about a frozen stiff that old? Some kind of Neanderthal at that. They flew me over there to see the body in person. I had to think that was the most ridiculous case I'd ever been dragged into.

All these skinny men and women with spectacles and white lab coats were gathered around this ancient body, now encased in a vacuum-sealed clear chamber in some chemical stenchy lab. The dead guy looked pretty pissed. Brutal. What eyes, and eyebrows, and thick long brown hair, and the body all wrapped up in some kind of wolfskin or bearskin or mastodon. What the hell did I know? Nasty looking fellow. So there I am, this fat old cop from the great southwest of the U.S. of A. - I was always kind of heavy, and I was already getting old by that time - anyway, there I am along with my assistant, Kelley, and we are like some kind of fish out of water to say the least. Kelley, smelling like tobacco as always, and me, smelling like burgers most likely, and looking like hell because I hate to fly, absolutely hate it. Makes me sicker than a dog most every time. And the time change wasn't doing me any favors. I was ready to puke already and then one of those scientists flicked some switch somewhere and the chamber started to revolve. The dead guy rolled over like a chicken on a spit and then the scientist who did that, he must have been the main guy, says in some kind of German-English, 'you see, Inspector, why we wanted you', and he pointed at the back of the dead guy's head, and sure enough, there was the entry wound.

Small caliber, close range, unmistakable. The caveman had been murdered with a gun.

The scientists had waited for me to witness the fact first hand, before proceeding with any further extraction of the bullet. I gave them the go ahead. For once, there were no crime lab "detectives" mucking up the scene. These scientists did a clean job of it. They had used some imaging machines and knew precisely where the bullet was - what the bullet was - and had some very fancy medical techniques for getting it out of there. Wasn't long before the thing was on a table in front of me, clean as a whistle.

Of course it would have its own unique markings. Anyone who ever watched a cop show would know about that. What they never tell you is the chances of finding a match were a billion to one, let alone the gun it came out of. This thing could have come out of any yard sale, any gun show, any time from the second half of the twentieth century on. I ventured to say it was American. They agreed. It was why they hadn't brought in Maigret, I suppose. The working theory was, the guy had somehow got himself forward in time at least long enough to get shot, and then was somehow shipped back to his own time as a corpse. Or else somebody went back to his time and did it.

Yeah, I said, why not? If only it was so easy. Turned out there were some further complications.

Nine

Of course it wasn't always homicides. I started out on a regular beat like any other cop, but those were different times. It all seems so innocent now. I can't even remember too much about it; things have gotten all jumbled up and confused since then, which reminds me of another case that caused me a lot of trouble. I'd been in narcotics until that whole situation suddenly disappeared with the legalization of all substances. Man. You spend a lot of time tracking down hoodlums for doing something that the very next day is perfectly all right in the eyes of the law. Some of those that got themselves arrested and locked up were right back out there, back at work but now wearing business attire and doling out firm handshakes!

Some others moved on to trafficking in substances that remained illegal - I guess it was the thrill that got them hooked, or maybe just the independence, being your own boss, living that adrenaline lifestyle. Now it was banned subatomic particles and boy, were those some tricky items to trace. Not just the particles themselves - everyone knows about the quantum effects - but the dealers and their minions too. Just when you thought you'd busted the girl who was carrying, it turned out she was clean, and maybe the loot was on her grandma instead. Hard to know. In the early days we didn't have too many ways of testing so it was easy for them to move the stuff around and get away with it.

There was a lot of panic in high places, top officials publicly worrying about these particles slipping into the mainstream and causing catastrophic anomalies, black holes and such. As if the criminals were going to suck all the air out of the cosmos for fun and profit! They always sold those suckers short. The criminal mind is said to be devious, and there are always rumors of 'masterminds' and geniuses and such, but really these guys are just out to make a buck, get laid and look good. Last thing they want is cataclysmic Armageddons. Even Root Turagu. This guy was said to be the kingpin of the whole nanoptic subworld. Ruled the whole East Coast from an over-sized dollhouse in the backyard of his mother's uncle, an old barber named Clayton Jeffries.

Of course his real name was not Root Turagu. It was something like Billy Pride, or Rick Rock, something like that. He went with Turagu because it sounded tribal. Man had tattoos up and down, around and about, pretty much everywhere he had skin, and they were all especially tribal looking too. Kept his war councils on the lawn back there. One time I went and looked him up, just to see for myself. I'd been hearing his name being whispered here and there so I figured I would take the bull by the horns, so to speak, find out if it really was all bull and no horns like I thought.

Turagu was sitting there on a lawn chair, eating a grilled cheese sandwich and drinking an orange soda. One of the tattoos on his right forearm was running Xvfd and he had some kind of jigsaw puzzle application running on it. Every now and then he'd glance down and tap on a piece with his left hand index finger to direct an alteration in the pattern. He seemed pretty engrossed in the project. He didn't notice me for awhile, or at least I thought so, but eventually he looked up and briefly nodded towards a chair (his own was surrounded by several other, equally ratty looking faded plastic pieces of furniture).

“Go ahead, Inspector”, he said, take a seat. “Can I offer you a sandwich?”

I declined his offer of food but did sit down.

“You got some questions”, he continued, “but I don't got no answers. You see me. Here I am. This is it.”

“People say you're some kind of big shot”, I remarked, and he laughed.

“I built my rep with care”, he grinned. “It pays to have some word.”

“So what is it?”, I asked. “You get some kind of tribute delivered?”

“Every Friday night”, he smiled. “Eight o'clock sharp. You should come around and see. Home worship delivery. Don't it beat all?”

“I don't get it”, I said. “What's in it for them?”

“Some of them want to follow”, he muttered, checking his forearm with a look of disapproval. “Frickin' loombot, do what I say, dammit!”

He tapped away furiously on his arm and I had to ask him what he was doing.

“Mongrel config”, he replied, as if that was supposed to mean something to me.

“I'm shaping the shapes”, he continued. “I'll dish 'em out when they're ready.”

“Shapes for what?”

“The shapes, man”, he said, staring at me as if I was crazy. “Everything's got to have a shape. Where do you think they come from? Out the sky?”

I had to admit I didn't know. I always thought that things simply formed themselves as they were destined to be, according to their genetic blueprints. Maybe this guy thought he was God.

“Nanoptics?“, I guessed.

“I don't deal with that”, he spat. “Leave that for the crooners and the spoilers who think they know but they don't know. It's the shapes, man. It's all of that.”

I didn't get much more out of him from that interview. The more we talked, the less sense it made. It was pretty clear that I was going to have to get some more education on these matters. I had to turn to some kind of expert, which meant I had to find one.

Ten

Turned out the big number one expert I was looking for was the one and only Arab "Cricket" Jones. I'd already been curious about him because of Jimmy Kruzel's nonstop whining about his gambling luck, but I had no idea who he really was. I didn't know he was actually even famous. He was some kind of physicist-novelist-pop-culture-pundit-hero, had published all sorts of books and given all kinds of speeches, and was even renowned for naming his son Enrico Fermi Planck Einstein Newton K. Jones.

He lived in a top floor penthouse apartment in Fulsom Towers downtown. I met him there, flanked by his supermodel wife and aforementioned infant son. Jones was an ordinary looking sort; not too tall, not too light, sporting a crewcut and thick tortoise-shell rimmed glasses. He was very polite, ushered me in, offered me a brandy, sat me down in a thickly carpeted library with a picture window overlooking the harbor. He sat himself behind an obsidian slab of a desk, and with his head propped up by his elbows, seemed to be studying me carefully. I was inspecting him as well. He seemed inordinately confident, like someone who had everything all figured out, and yet was not so above it all to be bored or condescending. The look in his eyes was one of genuine interest and curiosity.

“I've heard of you, of course”, he said. “Certain acquaintances of mine have even threatened me with your name.”

“Kruzel?”, i offered, and he nodded.

“Among others”, he agreed. “Some you may have already heard of, others of whom you most certainly will.”

“I'm not here for you”, I reassured him.

“You have questions”, he suggested.

“Nanoptics?”

“Nothing to worry about”, he said dismissively, leaning back and waving his hands in the air.

“Child's play”, he continued. “It's like people selling oregano for weed. Only the ignorant would pay and it's completely harmless to boot. There