Fers exploded. “You idiot! You half-jetted hypomoronic—”
“Hold it, Brin. Identification’s my job. It’s what I know and what I’m good at. If I get a request to identify a print, I damned well identify it.”
“Even when you know there must be something phony?”
“There isn’t. I know the Port Luna chief. He’s a good man. There isn’t a known method of forging a print that could get by him. This is for real.”
“But we saw Mase here!”
The Captain sighed. “You know, Brin, I’m beginning to wonder . . .”
Brin’s temperament is a mercurial one. Suddenly the public eye snapped his fingers and beamed. “The serological evidence! We’ve got him cold on that coat! And you yourself said blood-typing and sweat-typing are as certain identity evidence now as fingerprints.”
“And you yourself said it was only eighty years since a court threw out serology. Which evidence will it believe now? The new-fangled proof, or the fine old proof that ninety per cent of all identity work is based on?”
Fers slumped again. “It has to be some kind of gimmick of Mase’s. The only other possibility—”
“The only other possibility,” said Captain Wark flatly, “is that the whole foundation of the science of identification is one vast lie.”
The public eye rubbed his red pate and frowned. “And the only way to find out which,” he said softly, “would seem to be at Port Luna . . .”
Port Luna was erected as the first great non-terrestrial city. It was intended as the great pleasure dome of Man, the dream city of everyone from the millionaire to the stenographer saving up for her vacation by skipping lunches.
But rocket travel developed so rapidly that pleasure-planning Man said to himself, “What’s the moon? It’s nice to be under; but what do I get out of being on it? Let’s go to Venus, to Mars—”
And the pleasure dome became the skid road of the system, untended, unrepaired, unheeded. The observatory crew lived under a smaller dome of their own. So did the crews of the space strip. Passengers were rushed from space liners to the Terra Shuttle without even seeing the city of Port Luna. And in the city were the bars and stereos and other needful entertainment for the barracked crews and all the shattered spacemen who drifted back this far but could not quite bring themselves to return to Terra.
It would take a good man, Fers reflected, to be Police Chief in Port Luna.
“The Chief left on the last shuttle,” a uniformed sergeant told him. “You must’ve crossed him. He’s gone to Terra to pick up a hotel sneak thief—and say: Guess who our little old Port Luna sneak thief turned out to be?”
Fers sighed, but not audibly. He registered proper amazement when the sergeant revealed the startling news, registered it so satisfactorily that from then on, as far as the sergeant went, Port Luna was his.
But even the confidential files on the case were no help. The victim was a salesman from Venus, ostensibly traveling in microbooks but suspected—according to a note in the dossier—of peddling Venusian pictures on the side. The amount stolen was approximately what Dolf Mase might charge for five minutes of consultation in his office.
“I’m beginning to get an idea,” Fers said slowly. “I don’t like it, and I can’t get rid of it. Sergeant, I want you to do something for me.”
“Sure. I got a kid who’s crazy about public eyes. He’s gonna get a big blast out of this. What you want I should do?”
“Got some omnidetergent here? Good. Now watch me wash my hands.”
“Huh?”
Very carefully Fers scrubbed, rinsed, and dried his hands. “Now write down that you saw me do that, and put it through the time stamper. Then lock it in your safe.”
“I don’t get it.”
“I’m not too damned sure I do myself. But I’ve got to try. Now which way’s that hotel?”
The Luna Palace was at the corner of Tsiolkovsky and Oberth, only a short walk from the station. Fers was relieved, both because he hated to walk wearing gravity soles and because he loathed these streets of cut whisky and tenth-run stereos, of cheap beds and cheap bedmates.
The Palace was a barely perceptible cut above the other hives of bedding-cells, exactly right both for the Venusian peddler—who wanted to display a touch of swank to his customers—and for the sneak thief—who would find the pickings too slim elsewhere.
The girl behind the desk might have been the mociel for whom Minoan designs were revived. Fers was pleased; it was easier to work among attractive surroundings.
“My name’s Bets,” she stated.
“That’s nice,” said Fers. “Is the manager in?”
“I get off at five o’clock,” Bets announced.
“If that means that he comes on then, maybe I better stick around. Mind if I linger over the desk?”
“Nobody comes in here much,” Bets revealed.
“Good place for a spot of quiet brooding then. Bets, I’ve got me a problem—one they can’t solve by criminalistics. One that maybe disproves crim-inalistics.”
“Not even in the lobby,” Bets further disclosed.
“And I think I’ve got the answer,” Fers went on. “I’m almost sure I’ve got it if I can find out how to prove it. Did you ever read a whodunit, Bets?”
“I get kind of hungry around five,” Bets admitted.
“I like that period—the Twentieth Century, not around five—partly because of Stef Murch, I guess, and partly because I had a great-great-grandfather who was a private eye. I’ve read a lot and they keep saying they couldn’t write a detective story about the ‘future’—meaning, say, now—because everything would be different and how could you be fair?”
“I like steaks,” Bets proclaimed.
“And the answer I’ve got is one you could have figured out even in the Twentieth Century. It’s a problem that couldn’t happen till now, but the answer was in their knowledge. They had a writer named Quinn or
