uninhabited until twenty years ago, when jumpShift Inc. had revolutionized transportation.
The shrill of the alarm stopped.
In the sudden silence a policeman walked briskly from around the side of the house. 'Lieutenant!' he called. 'It's not burglary. It's murder. There's a dead man on the living room rug.'
'All right,' said Donaho. He called Homicide.
Captain Hennessey flicked in with the hot summer air of Fresno around him. It puffed out when he opened the door, and he felt the dry chill of the mountains. His ears popped. He stepped out of the belly of the copter, looking for the nearest man. 'Donaho! What's happening?'
Dopaho nodded at the uniformed man, whose name was Fisher. Fisher said, 'It's around in back. Picture window shattered. Man inside, dead, with two holes in his back. That's as far as we've got. Want to come look, sir?'
'In a minute. What was wrong with the displacement booth? Never mind, I see it.'
It was obvious even from here. The displacement booth was a standard model, a glass cylinder rounded at the top, with a dial system set in the side. Its curved door was blocked open by a chunk of granite.
'So that's why you needed the copter,' said Hennessey, 'Hmm.' He hadn't expected that.
It was an old trick. Any burglar knew enough to block the displacement booth door before trying to rob a house. If he set off an alarm the police couldn't flick in, and he could generally run next door and use the displacement booth there. But here...
'I wonder how he got out?' said Hennessey. 'He couldn't set the rock and then use the booth. Maybe he couldn't use the booth anyway. Some alarms lock the transmitter on the booth, so people can still flick in but nobody can flick out.'
Donaho shifted impatiently. This was a murder investigation, and he had not yet so much as seen the body. Hennessey looked down a rocky, wooded slope, darkening with dusk. 'Hikers would call this leg-breaker country,' he said. 'But that's how he did it. There's no other way he could get out. When the booth wouldn't send him anywhere, he blocked the door open and set out for. . . hmm.'
The nearest house was half a mile away. It was bigger than Anderson's house, with a pool and a stretch of lawn and a swing and a slide, all clearly visible in miniature from this vantage point.
'To there, I think. He'd rather go down than up. He'd have to circle that stretch of chaparral...'
'Captain, do you really think so? I wouldn't try walking through that.'
'You'd stay here and wait for the fuzz? It's not that bad. You'd make two miles an hour without a backpack. Hell, he might even have planned it this way. I hope he left footprints.
We'll want to know if he wore hiking boots.' Hennessey scowled. 'Not that it'll do us any good. He could have reached the nearest house a good hour ago.'
'That doesn't mean he could use the booth. Someone might have seen him.'
'Hmm. Right. Or...he might have broken an ankle anyway, mightn't he? Donaho, get that copter up and start searching the area. We'll have someone in Fresno question the neighbors. With the alarm blaring like that, they might have been more than usually alert.'
Lieutenant Donaho had not greatly enjoyed his first helicopter flight, which had ended twenty minutes ago. Now he; was in the air again, and, the slender wings were beating round and round over his head, and the ground was an uncomfortable distance below.
'You don't like this much,' the pilot said perceptively. He was a stocky man of about forty.
'Not much,' Donaho agreed. It would have been nice if he could close his eyes, but he had to keep watching the scenery. There were trees a man could hide in, and a brook a man might have drunk from. He watched for movement; he watched for footprints. The scenery was both too close and too far down, and it wobbled dizzyingly.
'You're too young,' said the pilot. 'You young ones don't know anything about speed.'
Donaho was amused. 'I can go anywhere in the world at the speed of light.'
'Hell, that isn't speed. Ever been on a motorcycle?'
'No!'
'I was using a chopper when they started putting up the JumpShift booths all over the place. Man, it was wonderful. It was like all the cars just evaporated! It took years, but it, didn't seem that way. They left all those wonderful freeways for just us. You know what the most dangerous thing was about riding a chopper? It was cars.'
'Yah.'
'Same with flying. I don't own a plane. God knows I haven't got the money, but I've got a friend who does. It's a lot more fun now that we've got the airfields to ourselves. No more big planes. No more problem refueling either. We used to worry about running out of gas.'
'Uh huh.' A thought struck Donaho. 'What do you know about off-the-road vehicles?'
'Not that much. They're still made. I can't think of one small enough to fit into a displacement booth, if that's what you're thinking.'
'I was. Hennessey thinks the killer might have set off the alarm deliberately. If he did, he might have brought an off-the-road vehicle along. Are you sure he couldn't get one into a booth?'
'No, I'm not.' The pilot looked down, considering. 'It's too damn steep far a ground-effect vehicle. He'd leave tire tracks.'
'What would they look like?'
'Oh, God. You mean it, don't you? Look for two parallel lines, say three to six feet apart. Most tires are corrugated and you'd see that too.'
There was nothing like that in sight.
'Then, I know guys who might try to take a chopper across this. Might break their stupid necks, too. That'd leave a trail like a caterpillar track, but corrugated.'
'I can't believe anyone would walk across this. It looked like half a mile of bad stairs back there. And how would he get through those bushes?'
'Crawl. Not that I'd try it myself. But they don't want me for the gas chamber.' The pilot laughed. 'Can you see the poor bastard, standing in the booth, dialing and dialing-'
Lucas Anderson had been a big man. He had left a big corpse sprawled across a sapphire-blue rug, his arms stretched way out, big hands clutching. Anderson's arms had been dragging a dead weight. One of the holes in his back was high up, just over the spine.
And men moved about him, doing things that would not help him and probably would not catch his killer.
Someone had come here expressly to kill Lucas Anderson. He would have some connection with him, in business or friendship or enmity. He might have left traces of himself, and if he had, these men would find him.
But the alibi machine might have put him anywhere by now. With a valid passport he could be in Algiers or Moscow.
Anderson's bookshelf of his own works showed some science fiction titles. His killer could have been a spaceman-and then he could be in Mars orbit by now, or moving toward Jupiter at lightspeed as a kind of superneutrino.
Yet they were learning things about him.
The cleaning machines had come on as soon as the alarm had been switched off. An alert policeman had got to them before they could do anything about the mess.
There was no glass on the body.
There was no glass under the body either.
'Now, that's not particularly odd,' the man in the white coat said to Hennessey. 'I mean, the pattern of explosion might have done that. But it means we can't say one way or another.'
'He could have been dead when the shot was fired.'
'Sure, or the other way around. No glass on him could mean he came running in when he heard all the noise. Just a minute,' the man in the white coat said quickly, and he stooped far down to examine Anderson's big shoes with a magnifying glass. 'I was wrong. No glass here.'
'Hmm. Anderson must have let him in. Then he shot out the window to fox us, and set off the alarm. That wasn't too bright.' In a population of three hundred million Americans you could usually find a dozen suspects for any given murder victim. An intelligent killer would simply risk it.
