“The best steaks are at the Jet,” Bets explained.
“Challenge,” Fers mused. “What brought Dolf Mase’s left middle finger to the Luna Palace? And how am I going to prove it?”
“Only lately,” Bets annotated, “there’s too many crooks hanging around the Jet so I go to the Spacemen’s Grotto.”
Fers leaned over the desk and bussed her warmly. “Bless you, Bets,” he said. “I knew our conversations were bound to meet eventually! And if this works, you get the biggest steak on the whole damned moon!”
The sergeant looked with some dubiety at the public eye, who held on to a chair to steady himself with his right hand while keeping his left hand carefully in the air.
“I don’t think,” Fers observed, “that I could pass a sobriety test. Call of duty. Got me into a little drinking more along the standards of a private eye. But I’ve got some jobs for you. Got an ultraviolet light, first of all?”
The baffled sergeant followed instructions. Perplexedly he assembled the dossier on the sneak-thief, the time-marked slip from the safe, the ultra-violet lamp.
He flashed the lamp, at Fers’ behest, on the public eye’s left palm, and stareci at the fine set of hitherto invisible fingerprints.
“Notice the middle one,” said Fers. “Now look at the sneak-thief’s.”
After a full minute of grunting study, the sergeant looked up. He might have been staring at a Venusian swamp-doctor in the flesh.
“And remember,” Fers went on, “that my hands were scrubbed with omnidetergent three hours ago. I shook hands with that man and got his prints on this invisible fluorescent film some time in the last three hours. Therefore he’s on Luna. Therefore he isn’t Dolf Mase, whom your Chief is probably still interviewing on lerra.
“Then—then there’s two guys with the same print!” The sergeant lookeci as if his world were collapsing around him.
“It makes sense,” said Fers. “It’s crazy but it makes sense. And don’t worry— you’re still in business. And I wonder whether another drink would save my life or kill me?”
Doggedly the sergeant had fought his way through his bewilderment to the immediate problem. “Where is he? If he’s here, I gotta arrest him.”
“How right you are. He’s at the Jet and his name’s Wil Smit.”
“That son-of-a-spacesuit! We been trying to pin something on him for years!”
“I thought so. It had to be somebody you’d never actually arrested and printed, or you’d have had him on file and not needed to send out a fax-floater. So when I learned that the Jet was in favor with the criminal set this season, I wandered around there—if you can call it wandering in these damned gravity-soles. I threw around the names of some criminals I know on Terra—little enough to be in his league but big enough to be familiar names out here. I said I needed a guy for a hotel job only it had to be somebody with a clean record. It was around the seventh drink that I met Wil Smit. When we shook on the deal I got all drunk and obstinate and, by God, if I was left-handed, he was going to shake left-handed too.”
“But you ain’t left-handed. Or are you?” added the sergeant, to whom nothing was certain any longer in a system in which the same print belonged to two different guys.
“Right-handed as a lark,” said Fers airily, and then paused to contemplate his statement. He shook his head and went on, “You go get Smit. Suspicion of theft. Book him, print him, and then you’ll have him cold. About that time I’ll be back and we’ll take the next shuttle. Meantime, I’ve got a date with a couple of steaks at the Spacemen’s Grotto.”
An urgent spacegram had persuaded the Port Luna Chief to stay on Terra with his presumptive prisoner until the public eye arrived.
“Of course,” that prisoner was remarking once again, “I shall refuse to disclose the reason for my presence on Luna, the name under which I traveled thither, or the motive for my invasion of the picture-peddler’s room. I shall merely plead guilty and serve my sentence on Luna, while you, my dear Captain Wark, continue to prosecute here on Earth the search for the abominable murderer of my beloved brother.”
The Lunar Chief gave his old friend a yes-but-what-can-I-do? look.
“Nothing.” Captain Wark answered his unspoken query. “You’ve got your evidence; you have to prosecute. But Brin’s spacegram hinted—”
“The public eye,” Dolf Mase stated, “is a vastly overrated character. The romantic appeal of the unconventional—”
At this point the nascent lecture was interrupted by the entrance of a public eye and a Lunar sneak-thief.
And in another five minutes there occurred one of the historical moments in the annals of criminalistics: the comparison of two identical prints made by two different men.
Wark and the Chief were still poring over the prints, vainly striving to find the faintest classifiable difference, when Fers addressed the lawyer.
“War’s over,” he said. “And I think it’s unconditional surrender for Mase. You try to bring up this Lunar ‘alibi’ in court and we’ll have Smit shuttled down here and produced as a prosecution exhibit. Unless you force us to that, we’ll just forget the whole thing; no use announcing this identity-problem until we’ve adjusted our systems to it. But either way we’ve got you cold.”
“I still,” said Dolf Mase smugly, “reserve my defense.”
Hours later, Fers Brin was delivering his opinion over a beer.
“Only this time,” Fers said, “we know it’s a bluff. This fingerprint gimmick was a gift from his own strange gods—he never could have counted on it. All he has left now is some kind of legalistic fireworks and much damned good it’ll do him.”
“You’ve done a good job, Brin,” Captain Wark said glumly. “We’ve got Mase nailed down—only . . .”
“Only you can’t really rejoice because you’ve lost faith in the science of identification? Brighten up, Captain. It’s OK. Look: it’s all
