The whole thing had ended within thirty seconds; for about half as long, everybody waited, poised in a sort of action-vacuum, for something else to happen. Dalla had dropped the shoulder-bag with which she had clubbed the prisoner’s needler out of his hand, and caught up the fallen weapon. When she saw that the man was down and motionless, she laid it aside and began picking up the glittering or silken trifles that had spilled from the burst bag. Vall retrieved his own weapon, glanced over it, and holstered it. Sothran Barth, the lieutenant in charge of the landing stage, was bawling orders, and men were coming out of the ready-room and piling into vehicles to pursue the aircar which had brought the assassins.
“Barth!” Vall called. “Have you a hypodermic and a sleep-drug ampoule? Well, give this boy a shot; he’s only impact-stunned. Be careful of him; he’s important.” He glanced around the landing-stage. “Fact is, he’s all we have to show for this business.”
Then he stooped to help Dalla gather her things, picking up a few of them—a lighter, a tiny crystal perfume flask, miraculously unbroken, a face-powder box which had sprung open and spilled half its contents. He handed them to her, while Sothran Barth bent over the prisoner and gave him an injection, then went to the body of the other pseudo-policeman, forcing open his mouth. In his cheek, still unbroken, was a second capsule, which he added to the first. Tortha Karf was watching him.
“Same gang that killed that Carera slaver on Esaron Sector?” he asked. “Of course, exactly the same general procedure. Let’s have a look at the other one.”
The man in Proletarian dress must have had his capsule between his molars when he had been killed; it was broken, and there was a brownish discoloration and chemical odor in his mouth.
“Second time we’ve had a witness killed off under our noses,” Tortha Karf said. “We’re going to have to smarten up in a hurry.”
“Here’s one of us who doesn’t have to, much,” Vall said, nodding toward Dalla. “She knocked a needler out of one man’s hand, and we took him alive. The Force owes her a new shoulder-bag: she spoiled that one using it for a club.”
“Best shoulder-bag we can find you, Dalla,” Tortha Karf promised. “You’re promoted, herewith, to Special Chief’s Assistant’s Special Assistant—You know, this Organization murder-section is good; they could kill anybody. It won’t be long before they assign a squad to us. Blast it, I don’t want to have to go around bodyguarded like a Fourth Level dictator, but—”
A detective came out of the control room and approached.
“Screen call for you, sir,” he told Tortha Karf. “One of the news services wants a comment on a story they’ve just picked up that we’ve illegally arrested Councilman Salgath and are holding him incommunicado and searching his apartment.”
“That’s the Organization,” Vall said. “They don’t know how their boys made out; they’re hoping we’ll tell them.”
“No comment,” Tortha Karf said. “Call the girl on my switchboard and tell her to answer any other news-service calls. We have nothing to say at this time, but there will be a public statement at … at 2330,” he decided after a glance at his watch. “That’ll give us time to agree on a publicity line to adopt. Lieutenant Sothran! Take charge up here. Get all these bodies out of sight somewhere, including those of Councilman Salgath and Detective Malthor. Don’t let anybody talk about this; put a blackout on the whole story. Vall, you and Dalla and … oh, you, over there; take the prisoner down to my office. Sothran, any reports from any of the cars that were chasing that fake police car?”
Verkan Vall and Dalla were sitting behind Tortha Karf’s desk; Vall was issuing orders over the intercom and talking to the detectives who had remained at Salgath Trod’s apartment by visiscreen; Dalla was sorting over the things she had spilled when her bag had burst. They both looked up as Tortha Karf came in and joined them.
“The prisoner’s still under the drug,” the Chief said. “He’ll be out for a couple of hours; the psych-techs want to let him come out of it naturally and sleep naturally for a while before they give him a hypno. He’s not a ServSec Prole; uncircumcised, never had any syntho-enzyme shots or immunizations, and none of the longevity operations or grafts. Same thing for the two stiffs. And no identity records on any of the three.”
“The men at Salgath’s apartment say that his housekeeper and his two servants checked out through the house conveyer for ServSec One-Six-Five, at about 1830,” Vall said. “There’s a Prole entertainment center on that timeline. I suppose Salgath gave them the evening off before he called you.”
Tortha Karf nodded. “I suppose you ordered them picked up. The news services are going wild about this. I had to make a preliminary statement, to the effect that Salgath Trod was not arrested, came to Headquarters of his own volition, and is under no restraint whatever.”
“Except, of course, a slight case of rigor mortis,” Dalla added. “Did you mention that, Chief?”
“No, I didn’t.” Tortha Karf looked as though he had quinine in his mouth. “Vall, how in blazes are we going to handle this?”
“We ought to keep Salgath’s death hushed up, as long as we can,” Vall said. “The Organization doesn’t know positively what happened here; that’s why they’re handing out tips to the news services. Let’s try to make them believe he’s still alive and talking.”
“How can we do it?”
“There ought to be somebody on the Force close enough to Salgath Trod’s anthropometric specifications that our cosmeticians could work him over into a passable impersonation. Our story is that Salgath is on PolTerm, undergoing narco-hypnosis. We will produce an audiovisual of him as soon as he is out of narco-hyp. That will give us time to fix up an impersonator; We’ll need a lot of sound-recordings of
