The interviewer, Fers observed regretfully, should have had better sense than to succumb to this year’s Minoan fashions, especially for broadcast. But maybe it was just as well; he could keep his mind on her conversation.
“Now first of all, Mr. Brin, before you tell us some of your fascinating cases— and you don’t know how thrilled I am at this chance to hear all about them—I’m sure our watchers would like to hear something about this unusual job of yours. Just what is a public eye?”
Fers began the speech he knew by heart. “We aren’t so uncommon; there must be a hundred of us here on Terra alone. But we don’t usually come into the official reports; somehow lawyers and judges are apt to think we’re kind of—well, unconventional. So we dig up the leads, and the regular boys take over from there.”
“Has this system been in use long?”
“About a hundred years or so. It got started in sort of a funny way. You probably know that the whole science of crime detection goes back only a few centuries— roughly to about the middle of the Nineteenth. By around another century, say in Nineteen Fifty, they knew scientifically just about all the basic principles we work on; but the social and political setup was too chaotic for good results. Even within what was then the United States, a lot of localities were what you might call criminalistically illiterate; and it wasn’t until the United Nations got the courage and the sense to turn itself into the World Federation that criminalistics began to get anywhere as the scientific defense-weapon of society. After the foundation of the W.F.B.I., man began to be safe, or nearly so, from the atavistic wolves—which, incidentally, are something I don’t think we’ll ever get rid of unless we start mutating.”
“Oh, Mr. Brin, you are a cynic. But how did the public eyes start? You said it was funny.”
“It was. It all came out of the freak chance that the head of W.F.B.I. a hundred years ago—he was the legendary Stef Murch—had started out in life as a teacher of Twentieth Century literature. He wrote his thesis on what they used to call whodunits—stories about murder and detectives—and if you’ve ever read any of that damned entertaining period stuff, you know that it was full of something called private eyes—which maybe stood for private investigator and maybe came from an agency that called itself The Eye. These characters were even wilder than the Mad Scientists and Martians that other writers then used to dream up; they could outdrink six rocketmen on Terra-leave and outlove an asteroid hermit hitting Venusberg. They were nothing like the real private detective of the period—oh yes, there were such people, but they made their living finding men who’d run out on their debts, or proving marital infidelity.”
“I’d like to ask you to explain some of those words, Mr. Brin, but I’m sure our watchers want to get on with the story of your life as a public eye.”
“Sorry; but it’s a period you’ve got to use its own words for. Anyway, Stef Murch saw that detectives like these private eyes, even if they never existed, could be a perfect adjunct to official scientific criminalists and solid trained policemen. We don’t wear uniforms, we don’t keep office hours, we don’t always even make reports or work on definite assignments. Our job’s the extras, the screwball twists, the— Look: If you wanted an exact statement of a formula you’d have it written by a Mark, wouldn’t you? But suppose you wanted a limerick? We take the cases that have the limericktype switch to them. We do what we please when and where we please. We play our hunches; and God knows it’s scientific heresy to say so, but if you don’t get hunches you won’t last long at the—”
Suddenly, Brin’s image had vanished mysteriously from the screen.
“Mr. Brin! Where are you? Mr. Brin, we’re still on the air!”
“Sorry,” said Fers Brin off-camera. “Tell your watchers they’ve had a rare privilege. They’ve just seen a public eye get a hunch and he’s acting on it right now!”
His hunch was, Fers realized later, like most hunches: a rational piecing together of known facts by the unconscious mind. In this instance the facts were that Professor Mase was a just and humane man, and that his life-long affection for his brother—quite possibly wilful self-delusion—could not vanish overnight. Conclusion: he would give the lawyer one last chance before turning evidence over to Captain Wark, and there was only one way Dolf Mase would react in selfprotection.
Resultant hunch: Murder.
The helicab made it from the casting station to the Professor’s quiet Connecticut retreat in record time; but the hunch had come too late. It might even have been too late the moment when the screen had gone dark during the earlier conversation with the Professor. For, as the prosecution was to reconstruct the case, Dolf Mase had already remembered where there was evidence of his one slip and was on his way.
It wasn’t usual for a public eye to find a body; the eyes were generally called into the case later. It wasn’t usual for any man to find the body of a man whom he had liked and respected—and whom he might possibly, with a faster-functioning hunch, have kept alive.
Professor Lu Mase had been killed very simply. His skull had been crushed by a Fifth Dynasty Martian statuette; and long after the bone splinters had driven life from the brain tissue, the killer had continued to strike, pounding with vicious persistence at what
