Fifteen minutes later, Teddy led the way across the garage floor to the ten-seat bus that was parked in the last stall. The family trailed after him, more willing to evacuate the mansion than St. Cyr had imagined they would be. Only Tina had questioned the wisdom of packing them all in one bus when the killer might be one of their number, and only Tina had not been completely satisfied with his arguments for this course of action. She had said, "Bulls.h.i.+t."

At the bus, St. Cyr stopped them with one word and, remaining slightly separated from them, his own pistol in the chamois shoulder holster under his bandaged arm, said, "Do those of you issued the narcotic-dart pistols still have them?"

Dane, Tina and Jubal said that they did.

St. Cyr turned to Hirschel and said, "What have you got?"

The hunter took a nasty-looking projectile pistol from a holster under his jacket. The weapon had a short snout, a thick trunk where a large number of rounds were stored, a b.u.t.t sculpted to fit Hirschel's hand. "It'll stop a boar, and it'll make confetti of a man."

The statement seemed to make Alicia Alderban ill, though the others did not evidence any reluctance to witness such a thing.

"Anything else?" St. Cyr asked him.

Hirschel smiled slightly and pulled a knife from his waistband. "It's good for close work, hand-to-hand combat. But it's also balanced well enough for throwing."

"Fine," St. Cyr said. "You all came prepared. Now if you'll just hand over the narcotic-dart guns, the projectile pistol and the knife, we can leave."

Jubal's face flushed, and he stepped toward St. Cyr with his blocky fists bunched at his sides again, the same pose he had a.s.sumed the first time the cyberdetective had implied that the murderer might be a member of his family. "What in the h.e.l.l is this, Sc Cyr? Do you want to leave all of us defenseless? You've already told us that-"

"Jubal," St. Cyr said, cutting him short, "I think you're one of the most short-sighted sonsofb.i.t.c.hes I've ever met."

The old man stopped and stared at the detective as if St. Cyr were some new, alien species. He was clearly not accustomed to being spoken to like that, without deference and respect. He had just walked into a brick wall.

"I think you've had money too long," St. Cyr went on. "You've always had life easy, never had to really compete, and now a few important parts of your brain seem to have atrophied."

It felt good, awfully good.

Emotional indulgence.

Until this moment, the cyberdetective had not realized fully how much the household had weighted him down, how depressed he was by the emotional barrenness of this old man. He looked at Tina and realized that her death would be taken as lightly as the others, absorbed by the family-a few tears shed, a few minutes of loss, and then back to the canvas or the typewriter or the guitar, back to the art. Somehow, that was more evil than the killer, more despicable than b.l.o.o.d.y murder.

St. Cyr said, "I told you the killer was here, among us. I haven't the faintest notion, yet, who he is. But I'm not taking any chances that he'll be on that bus, jammed in with the rest of us, with a weapon in his hand. I feel as if I'm on the verge of figuring out this whole d.a.m.ned thing, that it could break any time now. But until it does, until I can positively nail someone with it, we're taking every possible precaution. Now, please, hand over your weapons."

They complied with his demand.

The old man handed his gun over last, reluctantly. He watched as St. Cyr located a large piece of buffing cloth in the car-was.h.i.+ng supplies cabinet and bundled the artillery together. He said, "I hope you'll remember that I'm still your employer, Mr. St. Cyr. I hired you; I pay you; and I can let you go."

"Bulls.h.i.+t," St. Cyr said.

"Fantastic!" Tina chimed in, grinning. "You're actually getting emotional; you actually sound like a human being; Baker."

"Scared," he said. "That's all."

"That's human enough," she said.

He smiled, nodded and said, "Let's get aboard. The sooner we're among other people, the better I'll feel."

The others trooped in ahead of him, providing him an opportunity to ma.s.sage his bandaged shoulder, which had begun to throb painfully. He should have obtained a booster shot of pain-killer from the autodoc before they left, but he hadn't felt that there was time for that.

Teddy was the last in the bus; he swung into his niche beside the seat designed for a human driver. By-pa.s.sing the wheel, he plucked several control leads from beneath the dash and plugged them into his gleaming body trunk.

St. Cyr sat in the last seat in the bus, a position from which he could observe everyone else. He touched his shoulder, pressed down on the bandages and realized that was no good. He was just going to have to be stoical about it.

Up front, Teddy's head swiveled on his body trunk and faced the rear of the bus, an unnecessary gesture, since the robot had no face except for the soft green sight receptors. He said, "Mr. St. Cyr, something has happened to the power cell."

"For the bus?"

"Yes. I am not even recording a trickle charge on the meter."

"Check it out"

The master unit detached itself from the control cables, opened the door and exited the bus. It opened a panel on St. Cyr's side of the vehicle, took one look in the small cavity that housed the compact drive system, closed the panel and came back into the bus. "The power cell is gone, Mr. St. Cyr."

"Gone?" He felt ponderously slow, as if he were reacting to the world at quarter speed, a man moving through syrup.

"Someone removed it."

Wearily, St. Cyr rose and herded them out of the bus again. No one objected, not even Jubal. Apparently some of his own fear had finally filtered down to them.

"We'll go in two groundcars," he told them. "Three of us in each, Teddy driving the first car. We keep the vehicles close together and keep an especially good eye on each other."

Perhaps the other power cells are also gone.

St. Cyr nodded to himself and directed Teddy to look into all the other vehicles. "All empty, Mr. St. Cyr," he reported as he floated back to them. "Someone's removed all the power cells."

St. Cyr looked at the others and smiled grimly. He was feeling feeling grim; the smile was no stage piece. "One of you is certainly a clever b.a.s.t.a.r.d, always a step or two ahead of me." grim; the smile was no stage piece. "One of you is certainly a clever b.a.s.t.a.r.d, always a step or two ahead of me."

"I'm frightened," Alicia said, moving closer to her husband. The old man put an arm around her and squeezed her shoulder. St. Cyr could not help but wonder if that same arm had applied the pressure that broke Salardi's neck...

"What now?" Hirschel asked. He was the only one in high spirits.

"We're two hours or more from help, by car, but we have no cars. The telephones are out. The only thing we can do, until morning, is stay in the same room and keep watch in s.h.i.+fts, never more than three of us asleep at one time."

"Which room?" Hirschel asked.

"The kitchen, I believe. It doesn't have any windows."

Still somewhat angry at St. Cyr's put-down, Jubal said, "No windows? What does that matter?"

"I'm sure the killer is one of us," St. Cyr said. "But I'm still not ruling out other possibilities. Besides looking out for each of you, I don't want to have to guard the windows."

"Very good," Hirschel said, nodding his approval of the tactic.

St. Cyr had drawn his own pistol and was pointing it in their general direction. "Let's go."

Jubal said, "Is the gun really necessary?"

St. Cyr looked hard at the old man and, this time, did not attempt to conceal the pain that worried his shoulder like sharp teeth. Evenly, he repeated: "Let's go."

This time no one questioned his authority. They went up to the second level, where-if they survived-they would spend the remainder of the night.

TWELVE: A Murderer Revealed

A cyberdetective rarely removes his bio-computer sh.e.l.l during an investigation, for he knows that many cases are solved by taking notice of the smallest developments. Often, some mundane action is the trigger that fires the memory and shoots down the veil of confusion s.h.i.+elding the true nature of events. In the case of the Alderban murders, for Baker St. Cyr, understanding was triggered by an ordinary back-scratcher...

When they reached the kitchen, St. Cyr dispatched Teddy to patrol the main corridor on the second level and to keep a special watch on the elevator light-boards in the event that someone had illegally entered the mansion. Next, he carefully marked off limits in the huge kitchen, making it clear that no one was to move out of the large, open center of the floor, and certainly not toward one of the many utilities drawers that might contain a knife or other weapon. This done, the others sitting either on the floor or in the few chairs that were in the room, he perched on the block table to the right of the open area, keeping all of them in sight.

They talked among themselves and occasionally asked him questions. What were they waiting for? He didn't know-perhaps for the killer to make a move of some sort or to give himself away through a bad case of nerves. Preferably, they were just waiting for morning. What would happen in the morning? The delivery boy from Worldwide Communications would copter in with St. Cyr's light-telegram. He would probably be riding a one-man machine, but he could send help when he returned to the port.

When they had been in the kitchen more than an hour, everyone was quiet, wrestling with his own fears and working out his own suspicions. By morning, St. Cyr thought, they would all be just as cynical as he was. Even Jubal would no longer find it impossible to accept the notion that the killer was one of them. Already he was looking oddly at Hirschel.

Tina, who had been sitting on the floor with her pretty legs tucked under her, rose and stretched, walked slowly toward St. Cyr. She stood to his side so that she would not interfere with his view of the family. She said, "How's the shoulder?"

"I'll live."

"You should have had another dose of morphine by now."

He used his good hand to scratch his back and said, "I'm getting used to the pain, but I'll soon be nuts if it doesn't stop itching."

"Want a back-scratcher?" she asked.

"You have one?"

"In that drawer over there," she said. "It's full of odds and ends."

"Knives?"

She did not smile. "No knives."

"Get it for me, would you?"

She crossed the room, opened the drawer and rummaged through it while everyone else in the room watched her closely. She turned a moment later and came back with a stainless steel back-scratcher. It was formed like a human hand, with five blunt fingers.

"Turn around and I'll get it for you."

He smiled and took the tool out of her hand. "I'll do it myself."

"Of course," she said, "I forgot. I might try to beat you with it, knock you out or something like that."

"Something like that," he agreed.

She was angry, but she did not go away. She folded her arms under her full b.r.e.a.s.t.s, making them fuller, and leaned against the edge of the table. Even now, during this penultimate moment, he could not help but want her.

Re-direct your attention.

St. Cyr reached over his shoulder with the silvery tool and began clawing at his back below the bandages. He s.h.i.+vered as relief flooded over the affected area. And that abruptly, he knew who the killer was.

Impossible suspect.

He held the back-scratcher up before his face and looked at the tiny hand with the hooked fingers. He had no doubt at all that he was right, though it would be necessary to do a little breaking and entering to find the evidence he needed.

There will be no evidence. You suspect the wrong person.

No.

Let me feed you the data that cancels out your newest supposition. And, without his permission, it did just that, ran tapes that refuted the possibility of his suspicions in the minutest of detail.

Still, St. Cyr thought, hesitating now...

You are wrong.

He put the back-scratcher down. I guess I am, he thought.

He could not possibly be a killer.

For a few minutes the detective sat on the edge of the table, completely detached from everything except his new theory. The bio-computer had effectively disproved the possibility that he was still toying with, and yet...

Impossible.

Despite the wealth of data that the other half of the symbiote had fed him to the contrary, St. Cyr slowly became certain, once again, that he was right and the bio-computer was wrong. He was elated, felt light as air, energetic as he only was when he knew that he was on top of a solution.

To progress on feeling alone is illogical.

He stood and said, "I'm leaving the room for a few minutes."

"To go where?" Jubal asked.

"I want to look around a bit, collect a few pieces of evidence thai I'm fairly sure I'm going to find." He looked at each of them, slowly, one-by-one, giving the bio-computer a chance to supply him with some suspect different than the one that he was now so certain of. Jubal... Alicia, looking more frightened than anyone else... Dane staring with disbelief, still clinging to the batch of superst.i.tions he thought was the only answer to the affair... Hirschel, watchful but not unsettled, almost smiling... Tina standing beside him, so innocent and attractive... But the bio-computer could not produce any viable alternative. St. Cyr told them: "I believe I know who killed the others."

Jubal was on his feet an instant later. "Good G.o.d, man, tell us who it was!"

"Not yet. I want to be sure of everything before I make any accusations. Give me twenty minutes or half an hour to look around."

"You don't mean that you're leaving us here alone, without any weapons?" Jubal asked, incredulous.

"That's best."

The old man was in a cantankerous mood again. Sitting there with nothing to do but brood for almost an hour, something he had probably never done before, he had put himself quite on edge. "I won't permit-"

"You haven't any choice," the cyberdetective said. He quickly crossed the room, opened the door, stepped into the corridor, and let the door shut behind him before anyone else could object-including the bio-computer, which had almost gotten to him once before.

"Mr. St, Cyr?" Teddy asked, looming suddenly out of the dark hall. His sight receptors glowed like cat's eyes. "Is something wrong?"