He was to be astonished by the answers, and was to learn that the homicide was well out of his jurisdiction.
Al stood for a moment at the bag board by the glowing red light that had been sparked into life by a departing vital force giving, as its last act, the warning that Kit 674101 was in homicidal hands. With a sigh, Al pulled the plug and the light went out.
'Yah, 'jeered the woman. 'You'd fool around with my neck, but you wouldn't risk your own with that thing!'
Angie smiled with serene confidence a smile that was to shock hardened morgue attendants. She set the Cutaneous Series knife to three centimeters before drawing it across her neck. Smiling, knowing the blade would cut only the dead horny tissue of the epidermis and the live tissue of the dermis, mysteriously push aside all major and minor blood vessels and muscular tissue— Smiling, the knife plunging in and its microtomesharp metal shearing through major and minor blood vessels and muscular tissue and pharynx, Angie~ cut her throat.
In the few minutes it took the police, summoned by the shrieking Mrs.
Coleman, to arrive, the instruments had become crusted with rust, and the flasks which had held vascular glue and clumps of pink, rubbery alveoli and spare gray cells and coils of receptor nerves held only black slime, and from them when opened gushed the foul gases of decomposition.
WHAT SORGHUM SAYS
UP IN THE FOOTHILLS of the Cumberlands they have something new in the way of folk-lore. If you're lucky and haven't got the professorial gleam in your eye, the tale is unfolded something like this: Sorghum Hackett lived by himself up by Sowbelly Crag, not because he was afraid for his still but because when he was a young man some girl blighted his life by running off to Nashville with a railroad man. Ever since that he's been bitter against most people.
So this spring morning, when the scientific man came climbing up to his house he got out his squirrel-gun and asked him like the mountain people do: 'Will you make tracks or your peace with God?'
'Shut up!' said the scientific man, not even looking at him. Then he went pacing off the ground and writing down figures in a book. At last he turned to Sorghum.
'How much do you want for your property?' he asked. 'I suppose it's yours.'
'Anyone in his right mind wouldn't be eager to dispute it,' said Sorghum dryly. 'But it ain't for sale.'
'Don't be stubborn,' said the scientific man. 'I haven't any time to waste on benighted peasants.'
Sorghum dropped his gun in real admiration for the bravery of the man, whoever he was. He held out a hand saying: 'I'm Sorghum Hackett, and I've killed men for less than what you said.'
The man shook his hand absentmindedly. 'I'm Wayne Baily, and I've got to have the use of your land for about a month.'
Hackett nearly fell in love with the man; he didn't know there was anyone who could stand up to him that way, and he liked it. 'I'm willing,' he said at last. 'But I won't take your money—it ain't clean.'
So Baily just laughed and then went down to the village and came back up with a Nord truck loaded to the gills with junk. 'Hackett,' he said,
'first thing we do is run this penstock down from that springhead.'
And by the next morning they had forty yards of big piping down from Chittling Spring, and the water gushing out of the end of the pipe would have irrigated a whole farm. Baily rigged up a metal globe that he bolted to the pipes' end; a globe with a small-gage turbine wheel in it, and he hooked that up to a little dynamo that stayed on the truck.
When a week was up there was precious little room in Sorghum's house for him and Baily, because it was cluttered up with the junk from town—insides of radios, big coils of wire, aerials, rods stuck into the ground so deep that they were cold from underground water they touched—everything crazy you could think of, and all lit up every now and then whenever Baily turned on his dynamo in the truck.
Finally Baily said to Sorghum: 'It's been a pleasure knowing you, Hackett. Now there's only one stipulation I'm putting on you, and that is to knock all my machinery into pieces as soon as I'm gone.'
'Gone?' asked Sorghum, because Baily didn't say it as though he was going down to town for another storage battery.
'Yes—for good, Hackett,' said Baily, puttering with the wires and finally turning a switch. The things lit up and glowed even brighter than ever before.
'Goodbye, Hackett,' said Baily. Then he grabbed at his chest and his face twisted. 'Heart!' he gasped faintly, and even fainter he cut loose with a string of curses that made Sorghum blush.
Baily hit the floor, and Sorghum listened for his breath, but there wasn't any.
He scratched his head, wondering how he'd explain things to the coroner, and reached automatically for his jug to help him think.
But one of the things he didn't think of was that his jug had been moved outside to make room for what the late Mr. Baily had called a condenser. Sorghum got a shock that sent him crashing back on his heels into some of the deep-driven rods. The last thing he knew the lights were still sparkling and glowing, but he never could tell what hit him.
THERE WAS a dizzying splash and Sorghum found himself floundering in water up to his knees. He looked around and wasn't in any place he knew, because he didn't know any places that were all marble and tile.
Overhead a hot sun was beating down on him.
'Well!' said someone. And right there Sorghum knew that something was wrong, because though what he heard was 'Well!' the sound he heard wasn't anything like that—more like 'Ahoo!'
He looked up and saw a man facing him, dressed in sandals and a shirt that fell to his knees. And the man said, still talking so that Sorghum could understand him but not making a single sound in English, 'It's a blundering assassin that falls into his victim's fishpond. Tiberius chooses unwisely.'
'Are you calling me a bushwhacker, mister?' demanded Sorghum, who never killed except fairly.
The man, who had been grinning proudly, looked surprised then. Not frightened, surprised. 'I don't know what language you speak, assassin,' he said, 'but it's a damnably strange one that confounds and is clear at the same time.' He looked closer at Sorghum. 'And you don't seem altogether real. Are you always as ghostly when you're sent on the Caesar's errands?'
Sorghum looked at himself and saw that the man wasn't lying. His own flesh seemed to have got a funny trick of being half here and half there, like a column of smoke that's always ready to break. 'I reckon you're right, mister,' said Sorghum, cracking one of his icy smiles. 'I seem to be in a predicament. But I ain't what you take me for. I'm Sorghum Hackett of Tennessee.'
'Never heard of the town,' said the man. 'I'm Asinius Gallo. Need I explain that this is Rome?'
Now Sorghum had heard that foreigners were peculiar, but he didn't expect anything as peculiar as this, and he said so.
'Foreigners!' yelled the man. 'I don't know what barbarous land you're from, stranger, but bear in mind that when you're in the City you're the foreigner until and unless naturalized. Though,' he added, calmer,
'what with that avaricious slut the Lady Livia raising the prices on the roll week after week, soon a Julio- Claudian himself won't be able to stay in his place.'
'I don't get your talk, Mr. Gallo,' said Sorghum. 'I'm here by accident, and I'd like mightily to get back to Tennessee. How can I earn some passage money? I reckon it's overseas.'
'Work, eh?' asked Asinius Gallo. 'What can you do?'
Sorghum considered. 'I can do a little carpentering,' he said. 'And I can make the best white mule in the Cumberlands.'
'Carpentry's out of the question,' said Asinius Gallo. 'The Joiners' Guild has it tight as a drum. But I don't know of any guild covering the manufacture of white mules—doubt that it can be done.'
'Do ye?' asked Sorghum, grinning again. 'Just give me some corn, some copper and a few days and I'll show
