profession,” said Sheppard, cheerful now that Gregory’s embarrassment had provided him with a degree of honorable satisfaction. “In any event, I didn’t come over to reprimand you but to offer you some help. Let’s get back on the subject. How did it go at Sciss’s?”
Emotionally uplifted by this unexpected reprieve, Gregory described his visit to Sciss with great gusto, not omitting even those points which put him in a bad light. Around the middle of the story, when he came to the part about how he and Sciss burst into laughter after a tense silence, Gregory heard a muffled sound from behind the wall. He bristled internally.
Mr. Fenshawe was beginning the nightly acoustical mystery.
Gregory began to speak faster and with more glibness. He became flushed with excitement. Sooner or later the Chief Inspector was going to notice the noises, whatever they were, and then he’d be mixed up in this weird business too. Barely able to think coherently or to imagine what might happen next, Gregory listened as the sounds increased in volume, reacting to Mr. Fenshawe’s wall with the same obstinacy he would have exhibited in response to the pain caused by the extraction of a tooth. A series of rattling noises was followed by several soft, moist slaps. Raising his voice, Gregory talked faster and still faster with a kind of strained eloquence, hoping the Chief Inspector would be too distracted to notice the noises. And for this same reason, undoubtedly, he didn’t stop talking when he reached the end of the story. Instead, overwhelmed by the desire to drown out Mr. Fenshawe, he undertook something which in other circumstances he would have kept to himself: an elaborate analysis of Sciss’s “statistical hypothesis.”
“I don’t know where he got the cancer story,” Gregory said, “but I’m sure there really is an enclave with a low death rate. Of course we ought to make a large-scale comparative study of all Europe to find out if there are any other enclaves like the one in Norfolk. If there are, it would knock the bottom out of his theory. I didn’t discuss any of this with him, but he’s right about one thing: if his theory is valid, this really isn’t a job for us. The idea of the police checking out a scientific hypothesis is too funny for words. Still, so far as the theory’s long-range consequences are concerned, Sciss was very clever. Instead of trying to confuse me with fantastic possibilities, he made it into a joke. But there aren’t any alternatives. I’ve been giving this theory a lot of thought. This is what I’ve come up with. I’ll give you the more conservative variant first. The assumption is that we’re facing some kind of peculiar mutation that causes cancer; an unknown virus of some kind, let’s say. The reasoning goes this way: cancer manifests itself in an organism as chaos; the organism itself, representing order as it is found in the life processes of a living body, is the antithesis of chaos. Under certain conditions, this chaos factor — that is, cancer, or, more accurately, the cancer virus — is mutated, but it remains alive, vegetating in whatever medium is its host. When the victim stops being sick, the virus goes on living in his corpse. Ultimately, it undergoes such a complete transformation that it develops entirely new powers; it changes from a factor that causes chaos to one that tries to create a new kind of order — a kind of posthumous order. In other words, for a specific period of time it fights against the chaos represented by death and the decomposition of the body that follows death. To do this, the new factor tries to restore the life process in an organism whose body is already dead. When a dead body begins moving around, it’s a sign that this process is going on. The moving corpses, in other words, are produced by a weird symbiotic relationship between the living — that is, the mutated virus — and the dead — the corpse itself. Since human reason isn’t capable of understanding everything, it’s irrelevant whether or not this explanation makes sense. It is important, however, that the order factor is able to initiate highly sophisticated, well-coordinated movements: an ordinary virus wouldn’t be able to make a corpse get up, find some clothing for it, and then sneak it away so skillfully that we can’t find it again.”
Gregory paused, seemingly awaiting Sheppard’s reaction; in reality the wall had distracted him with a gentle, repetitive pattering — it sounded as if a light rain was falling on Mr. Fenshawe’s side.
“A cancer virus is within the realm of probability,” Gregory continued, “but since the improbable can’t be explained in terms of the probable, we may have to find an improbable explanation for this case. That’s why Sciss mentioned flying saucers, although he tried to be casual about it. He wanted me to know that we may have to look for the answer in outer space. The second variant involves cosmic forces. We’re faced with something along the lines of a ‘first contact’ between Earth and a race of people from the stars. It goes this way: there are beings of some kind out there, intelligent but functioning in a manner completely beyond our comprehension. They want to study human beings at close range, so they send some kind of — information-gathering instruments, let’s call them — to Earth, using a method of transportation that we can’t understand yet. Maybe the saucers deliver them. The information-collectors are microscopic — invisible for all practical purposes. Once on Earth they ignore living organisms and are directed — programmed would be a better word — only to the dead. Why? First, so they won’t hurt anyone — this proves that the star people are humane. Second, ask yourself this. How does a mechanic learn about a machine? He starts it up and watches it in operation. The information-collectors do exactly the same thing. They start up some human corpses, getting everything they want to know in the process. If this variant is correct, there are several good reasons why we can’t understand the phenomenon. First of all, the information-collector seems to act rationally; therefore, it isn’t a device or tool in our sense of the word. It’s probably more comparable to a hunting dog: in other words, some kind of trained bacteria. Second, there’s the problem of the connection between the information-collector and cancer. If I was forced to figure out a theoretical basis for linking the second variant with the cancer phenomenon, I’d do it this way: there are just as many cancer viruses in the low-mortality enclave as anywhere else. So if most people in the enclave don’t get cancer, it’s because they’re immune to it. Therefore, human immunity to cancer is inversely proportional to immunity to the something from outer space. This theory explains everything, and we don’t have to abandon our statistics…”
Gregory paused. His room, like Mr. Fenshawe’s next door, was silent. During this whole presentation Sheppard had listened quietly, occasionally looking as if Gregory’s fervor surprised him more than his ideas.
“Obviously you don’t believe any of this…” the Chief Inspector commented.
“Not a bit,” Gregory answered in a weak voice. He suddenly felt indifferent to everything. He didn’t care whether or not the other side of the wall was quiet. All he wanted, just as when he left Sciss’s place, was to be alone. The Chief Inspector continued:
“You’ve done so much research that you hardly sound like a policeman anymore. Well, I suppose it’s a good idea to master the enemy’s language… Sciss would probably consider you a good pupil. You still suspect him, don’t you? What do you think his motive is?”
“It’s not that I suspect him,” Gregory answered. “If I did I’d make a formal accusation. Actually, I’m more on the defensive, and my position is quite hopeless. I feel like a cornered rat. I only want to defend myself against the allegedly miraculous character of this case. After all, sir, to develop this kind of theory to its full extent, you have to include everything. Let’s say, for example, that there are periodic interventions of factor X separated by long time intervals; that the last drop in cancer mortality took place about two thousand years ago — not in England but in the Near East; that there was a series of alleged resurrections then also — you know, Lazarus, and… the other one… If we take this story seriously even for one moment, the ground opens up beneath our feet, our whole civilization turns into jelly, people can appear and disappear, everything is possible, and the police should just take off their uniforms, disperse, and disappear… and not just the police. We must have a culprit. If this series has really stopped, then it will soon be nothing but past history and we won’t have anything to show for it but a couple of plaster casts, a few contradictory stories told by some not too bright mortuary workers and gravediggers — and what kind of investigation can we conduct with that? Finally, the rest of our investigation will probably concentrate on getting the bodies back. You’re absolutely right: my trick didn’t accomplish anything, the phone call didn’t surprise Sciss at all, and yet, wait a minute—”
Gregory leaped from his chair, his eyes blazing.
“Sciss told me something concrete after the phone call. He said he expects the corpses to be recovered, and he claims he can use his formula to figure out exactly where they will reappear, that is, when their energy of movement, as he calls it, will be used up… Now it’s up to us to do everything possible to make sure that the reappearances take place in front of witnesses, at least once.”
“Just a minute,” interrupted Sheppard, who had been trying for some time to get Gregory’s attention. The detective, almost running around the room in excitement, seemed for a few moments to have forgotten that the Chief Inspector was there.
“You’ve set up an either-or proposition: Sciss — or the factor. Now you’ve practically eliminated the factor, leaving us with nothing but some kind of crude fraud, a gruesome little game being played out in the mortuaries. But what if neither alternative is valid? What if the perpetrator isn’t Sciss or the factor? Or what if the perpetrator invented the factor, then injected it into the corpses as an experiment?”
