Flight of the Maita Supercollection 3: Solving Galactic Problems Collector's Edition (101 page)

"All Inktans
look alike!" Tab replied.

"Oh, crap! They
do not!" TR replied.

"They do if
you're not an Inktan!" Tab pointed out happily. "I just want to
know if they were all in it. Tell Kit to bring anything that
doesn't seem to belong in that ship. Maybe in kitchen utensils or
spare parts of some sort that are in an area where the passengers
could have gotten to them. It has to be! It's them or ... nah! He
couldn't have beaten the probe."

"You don't make
any damned sense, as usual!" TR snapped, but Tab could tell by the
tone of excitement it saw what he had seen.

* *

Kit went
through all bins and drawers and closets, checked under in and
around the seats, checked the restrooms and baggage areas. He
collected a few things that seemed out of place for one reason or
another and picked up some parts that showed signs of having been
used from a bin. No used parts on a spaceship! Period!

He looked at
the box of junk and shrugged as T6 sent he was to be most careful
and was to bring any little thing back aboard, then they were
headed for Narjn. Tab had figured it out. It had something to do
with Zuni. T6 input all the information TR sent about the theft
ring.

"Then why
Narjn?" Kit asked.

"Apparently Tab
has tied those Bentans to it," T6 answered. "They're the only ones
who went there."

"They were
booked on that flight thirty or forty days ago!" Kit protested.
"They were sitting in the general area the knife came from, but
that's not enough. Someone could have walked along the aisle and
fired the thing.

He sat on a
bench to think, nodded and went through the rest of the ship, then
went to T6.

"Head for
Zuni," he said.

"Zuni?" T6
asked.

"Zuni," he
repeated.

*

Tab came into
the commercial field and sat close to the big liner. Narjn is a
bright tropical world with lush foliage, colorful – if raucous –
birds and myriad flowers of many descriptions. It was an
artificial, planoformed world. It was delightful.

It had not too
long ago been a huge rock in exactly the right place where the
Mords used the systems Maita had used when it moved them from a
world whose sun was prepared to nova. They are a strange people of
an unclassifiable type who use subtle colors as well as sounds to
communicate.

The Bentans
were staying at a luxury hotel by a lake in the mountains. Tab
called a floater and was getting aboard when TR told him to stop.
Kit was doing something and would be a little late. Tab was to
wait.

"Why?" Tab
asked.

"Because you're
going in there knowing full well you're right, but you don't have
anything a judge would accept," TR replied. "You don't know if it's
all of them or one of them. You don't have one single fact to
question them about that can tie them to the murder with any
credence. You're acting like Z!"

"I can find out
who's part of it damned fast!" Tab returned. "What's wrong with
acting like Z?"

"Even he admits
he, as he says, goes off half cocked," TR said. "He usually makes
up for it in luck which, as he also says, you ain't got much of the
better variety of."

Tab grinned and
went to the pilot's dome to wait. Kit was right, of course. He had
jumped ahead of reality. He didn't have enough.

"Why is Kit
going to be late?" he asked.

"He's going to
Zuni," TR replied. "The Bentans live there. The trouble was there
that started all of this. The police records are there. The answers
are probably there. This was very premeditated. It took time to
make that knife and Kit thinks he's found how it was done. They
booked that flight long ago, knowing the schedule the Inktans
followed. If you go in there and let the guilty party say the wrong
thing he gets away with claiming he recognized him on the flight
and lost control. He gets a minor sentence relative to his
crime."

"I agree.
You're right," Tab said. "I'm going to study this. Call me when Kit
arrives and we'll go after them together. I'll be interested to
know how it was done."

"So will I!" TR
retorted. "So would T Six! Kit wants to get dramatic, I think. He
read all those stupid murder mysteries Z has at his place and wants
to try some of the methods to see if they work."

Tab grinned at
that. He liked to show off a bit himself! How very unrobotic!

* * *

Kit and Tab
took the floater and four local police out to the small cabin the
Bentans were sharing to face them. Kit introduced himself and Tab,
then the police and told them blankly what they were there for. The
Bentans were almost sneering at them as they immediately invited
them inside. They seemed very sure of themselves.

"I'm Boost," a
male said. "This is Nicht, my wife, Lahs and Sarn, my brothers.
Come on in and entertain us with your theories!"

Kit grinned and
took his box from the floater and they went to sit around a
comfortable room. Kit went into the center of the room, bowed
slightly to the Bentans and began: "I hope you'll be entertained as
much as I was," he said. "When we were called into this I was sure
there was some simple thing that tied it together – and I was
right. It was simply a matter of mistaken identity. The Inktan you
killed wasn't the Inktan who brought about the investigation that
brought about your father's execution and your own incarceration in
a rehab center for one year. Carzo was retired from the sales
force. Kile had nothing whatever to do with any of that."

Nicht looked
scared. Tab was sure the males knew by now Kile wasn't the one they
planned to kill, but this was probably the first she knew about
it.

"You will all
be executed for murdering the wrong person," Tab continued. "It was
sort of ingenious in method. If you spent half the time and effort
in designing and building something useful you wouldn't spend
nearly so much of your sordid lives in these sorts of untenable
situations."

"Well," Boost
said with a smirk, "There's one little problem with that. If we did
have anything to do with killing some stranger on a spaceship in
plain view of thirty people you'd have to find the one who actually
did it before you could talk about executions. You have a body and
the fact our father was executed because of something that was done
by a member of the Inktan race. You have the weapon.

"There's no way
you can show any of us stuck that knife in him. No one from our
party went anywhere near him."

Tab smiled
pleasantly at him (As pleasantly as a mouthful of sharp teeth could
smile in any case) and took several items from his box.

"You delivered
the knife from your seat," he said. "This is a package conveyor.
Two of them. They're used in all mail rooms. They're basically
small plastic wheels on plastic rails. The only thing that caught
my attention about them was that they were in the food preparation
parts bin – which are all of metal because of the extreme heat used
to sterilize them. In themselves they are nothing.

"Now, these are
standard solenoid coils. They're all over the place on a spaceship.
These were also found in the wrong place. They've had the
protective coating scraped here and here, exactly where the
conveyor roller rails would touch! How odd!

"Used coils are
dropped into the elementizers. One doesn't place them in the parts
bins. Not on a spaceship.

"Now! We place
the rails together like so and run them through our coils. We
attach the orange lead from all the coils to one side of this wire
and we wind the wire from each of the other sides along here
underneath and hook it to this, which we stick up along the rail so
anything between the two sets of rollers rubs along them.

"Ah! Now we
hook a wire to the end of our little piece of flat soft iron stock
like so. I didn't bother to sharpen it like you did.

"See how easy
it was to figure?"

"So what?" Sarn
snapped. "You've got some coils and rollers and a piece of iron.
Big deal!"

Tab smiled at
him and pointed the end of the thing directly at his stomach, then
said, "We put these little springs here to hold the rollers tightly
against the iron bar, like so. Then we take a standard power pack
of any sort whatever and attach the wire from the orange to this
lead and we touch this wire hanging on the iron to the green lead
and..."

Sarn screamed
and dropped to the floor.

"As I was
saying, I touch this end to the green and, if there were any
current whatever in the power pack, the iron would fly out to go
right through Sarn's gut. It would be traveling at too much
velocity for him to duck. That he knew exactly what would happen
was obvious.

"The angle of
the shot shows it could have come only from your seats. You have
motive, opportunity – what else do we need? We have you."

"Even if you do
you can't prove which one!" Nicht cried as Boost shouted, "Shut up,
you fool!"

"So? We don't
have to know which one," Tab argued. "You had come together over a
period of time to plan this thing, which means it's a conspiracy,
which means we can prosecute any one of you. That one will be
placed on the probe and the rest of you are just as surely
caught.

"Officers, you
can now arrest them."

Kit put his
stuff back in the box as the police led the four Bentans out. They
went back to their ships and were soon back on Perfect (Hah!)
3.

"You know, I
think they still think they'll get away with it," Tab said as they
sat together in the pilot's dome on TR. "It's surprising how a
person with the mental ability to do this can't see how it's
hopeless to fight a judge machine. It was basically Boost's idea.
He talked Nicht into it and his brothers naturally followed him. He
was always the smart one in the family."

"Nicht will get
off pretty lightly," T6 said over the speaker system. "She was, as
you say, talked into it by her husband. It was really coercion. The
three men are going to be executed. You can't beat the
machines."

"It seems such
a pity a mind that could dream that up is so totally crooked," Tab
noted. "If he'd invented something productive the crime bit would
be very small takings in contrast."

"The whole
family was oriented toward crime," TR said. "That's the way it
goes! I fail to ever have any sympathy with the type. It sometimes
seems to be a whole crooked universe."

"I think we
could use a vacation on New Zule," Tab suggested. "Those people
always could restore my faith in things. So long as there's one
race like that it's worth it!"

No one, machine
or organic, could deny that!

Ninth Case

"This is
interesting," T6 said to Kit.

Kit is a robot
detective for the Maitan Empire, and T6 is his spaceship while
being a part of him. While they are individuals they are also a
single being. They are independently intelligent as well as
collectively intelligent with the added abilities of the other pair
in the T-K Detective Agency, Tab and TRD-60. They're robots, too,
of course.

"What's
interesting?" Kit asked.

"A case that's
just coming in," T6 replied. "TR's handling it. You can listen
in."

The whole thing
was then placed on the internal communications system. That way TR,
Tab, T6 and Kit could all take part and hear everything. As it was
coming in on fastcom it was received in digital writing,
anyhow.

~T-K Det. Ag.
TRD60 Perfect 3:

~There have
been a series of burglaries.

~Expensive
equipment.

~No clues. No
ideas. Need help.

~Going
bankrupt. Insurance refusals.

~Top security
agency not avail. No place to turn. No money for your fees, but
will make payment agreement.

~Znof Znuw.
Erlicjh 4 code RT231-16E4~

TR replied.

~Znof Znuw
Erlicjh 4 RT231-16E4:

~Will arrive
midday Septate 16.

~TRD60 Perfect
3~

"It seems we
have a case," Tab said. "Shall we take both ships?"

"Why not?" T6
asked. "We can always come home if this is one of those boggy
things where only you're needed."

"Maybe you can
stay and we'll come home," TR shot back.

"No way!" Kit
replied quickly. "YOU took the job!"

"We leave
tomorrow at what time here, TR?" Tab asked.

"Oh, seven,
seven ten should do it," TR replied. "You'll really love this one!
The Ejahds are one of those unclassifiable lifeforms. They use a
different system of logic than we do. This will be total confusion
for everyone! It's possible you'll walk right in there and see
what's happening, but you'll play hell making them see it!"

They discussed
the Ejahds and their strange way of thinking, but no one really
knew anything useful. It was mostly a matter of empire records,
which weren't clear. No one really understood the people.

"Thing says
their logic is as good as ours, but one must be inside of it to
understand it," Tab complained. "Of course where Thing's concerned
we can't hope to compete. It can understand any system of logic
through its empathic talent."

There was
nothing else to do so they waited, then headed for Erlicjh in the
morning.

They arrived at
the planet where they were instructed to land on the company field
where Znof Znuw rushed out to meet them. It was a sort of tubular
being with six legs and two sets of arms. It was covered in an
orange-red fur, almost like velvet.

"I'm sure you
will want to see where the things were stolen so you can solve the
case quickly," Znof greeted them. "When it is solved we will tell
you all we know and will also give you the information about what
was stolen and when and all of that."

Kit looked over
to Tab and shrugged.