Concept YUS (Cross-World Murder Cases Book 1) Read online

  “I do,” he responded tersely. “I do!” Then he knit his ginger eyebrows in stony silence.

  We entered the so-called study, which I would have taken for a kitchen. Larsen invited me to take a seat and left me alone. The room shared the same scarcity as the rest of the research field. Furnishings included only a long table half covered by a computer, two monitors, and a printer; a chair, bookshelf, refrigerator, and sink; and of course, a safe. But one thing was obvious at a glance: these were the premises of a military man. Not a speck of dust, all papers arranged in tight, orderly rows, and the windows shining as if they had just been washed for inspection.

  Larsen returned with a second chair and sat facing me. “All right, Simon, will you explain to me why on earth you needed to meet with those two?”

  “I didn’t have a particular reason.”

  “Oh, right!” He almost snarled. “You simply missed them. And what about that ramble through the defractor complex?”

  “Obviously, Vernie has already reported to you—”

  “But not in detail. He only noticed that Yusian, the strange one, entering the biostation ahead of you, looking even stranger than usual.”

  “That’s true, but his appearance had nothing to do with the complex. He only got in there by chance.”

  “Why are you so sure?”

  “Because when I caught up with him, he simply tried to find the nearest hiding place.”

  “Caught up with him? You weren’t chasing him, were you?”

  “Well—yes. When he rushed toward the defractor, I thought he might intend to harm it.”

  “Then all of a sudden you were convinced that he wouldn’t?”

  “Yes. He was behaving more like a lunatic than a saboteur.”

  This time my judgment obviously appealed to Larsen. “It’s possible.” He nodded. “With all its wandering around and that weak, crippled body. But if the creature is crazy, why do they let him stay here?”

  “Why not? We also plan to do the same with our nut cases, don’t we?”

  “Damn it! Whatever we decide, it will just be another wild guess. From the first day they came to Earth, we’ve done nothing else. We turned into fortune-tellers. Incompetent ones at that. What about the normal Yusian? How did he behave?”

  “Followed the other one from a distance. He said it was dangerous to stop him and that he was from another world.”

  “Aha!”

  “Listen to me, Larsen. Take advantage of this incident to contact them yourself.”

  “And tell them to keep a closer watch on their resident lunatic, right?”

  “He really could cause problems. You must prevent that.”

  Larsen bent over and buried his fingers in his hair. He closed his eyes and stayed that way for a long time. “It’s late,” he finally said. “Too late.”

  “For what?” I asked him.

  “For everything.” Again he was slow in answering, obviously fabricating a specific response. “For anything besides just waiting for what comes next. Our relations with the Yusians are so—fragile. The smallest mistake or even tactlessness on our part could tip the scales against the colonization.”

  “I doubt it. They also seem to want it to happen.”

  “Who knows what they want?” Larsen asked, waving off my remark. “Can any human ever understand them?”

  “It might be possible. But not by hiding in his hollow.”

  He stood up suddenly, walked over to the sink, and tightened the faucet with all his strength. When the monotonous dripping finally stopped, I realized that I had been half listening to that intrusive sound the whole time.

  “We need to hide, Simon. Otherwise, all we show them is our ignorance of anything and everything on this world. You tell me, in a situation like this, how we can expect to make any intellectual contact, even the most basic?”

  “Intellectual, certainly not. But human—”

  “Human? With them?”

  “Well, yes,” I answered. “We are human, aren’t we?”

  Larsen quickly came back to the table, resting his hands on it. “Isn’t it our most human quality to seek knowledge, to domesticate the strange, and to overcome the unknown? Regardless of what we might say, Simon, the Yusians are our rivals. Rivals! And if we want to achieve a real, equal dialogue with them in the future, we need first to uncover the secrets behind their achievements.”

  “What secrets, Larsen? You know perfectly well that, from the very beginning, the Yusians have been more than willing to familiarize us with everything they have and all that they’ve achieved. To give us their inventions, to explain them—”

  “Obviously you’re not in the least aware that our best scientists have been incapable of understanding those inventions, despite their generous ‘explanations.’ And what have we gained from it all? An end to scientific progress! Our scientists don’t bother to do research or invent anything anymore, Simon. They know that whatever they might achieve will be humiliatingly insignificant compared to what the Yusians have had for thousands of years. There is no point.”

  “A while ago you said you had obtained some results,” I reminded him.

  “That’s right!” Again Larsen sat down on the flimsy chair. “That’s why the colonization is vital for us. Only then could we begin to overcome our total stagnation. With this colony to keep the Yusians away from Earth, we could bring our knowledge to their level—or at least somewhere near.”

  “Why don’t we look for another, more dignified, way? Why do we need to subject ourselves to their experiments so submissively? Just the euphoria itself should tell us what will happen when the colonists come.”

  “Obviously the whole universe obeys the same laws that apply on Earth.” Larsen stretched out his hands palms up, as if in supplication. “The stronger always sets the rules. Or destroys the weaker.”

  “I think we’re inclined to overestimate the range of such laws,” I said. “Also, I’ll never agree that we are weaker just because their knowledge is currently at a higher level than ours.”

  “Immeasurably higher.”

  “Even so, everything depends on the psyche, not just on achievements.”

  But Larsen wasn’t even listening anymore. The resistance of his one-track mind was simply stunning! “As I already told you, I’ve been working here for seven months,” he began, “and I’ll continue my work as long as I live. As our research center expands, we’ll provide better working conditions, like those on Earth. Now I’m alone, but when Fowler was with me, everything went more smoothly. Imagine what it would be like if I had a team of highly skilled assistants!”

  I lost patience. “As a base commander you must take a broader view of the situation, Larsen. For instance, you should want to know why the Yusians are going out of their way to prepare this whole planet for us. What their intentions are toward the future colonists and what they expect to gain in return—or take by force from them. Yes, those are the really important questions! You’re really hiding in this pathetic research field, presuming you can fix the situation simply by analyzing their machines. By cutting and dismembering them with your primitive instruments!”

  We glared at each other, ready to turn our heated debate into a fistfight. Strangely enough, only now did I feel a spark of empathy fly between us. Both of us were in similar positions, like two poker players holding losing hands.

  “My nerves aren’t what they used to be,” Larsen murmured. “And you…you, Simon, are causing more tension among us.”

  “What else can I do?” I asked. “I didn’t come all this way to sing you lullabies.”

  He just shook his head, took out his phone, and pressed a button.

  In a minute, something appeared just outside. Huge, reddish, and squirming, it looked like a living piece of raw meat, cut from some giant. It blocked the entire window; we could see only its shivering, sinewy flesh—until it slowly passed by. It staggered to the construction area, and only then could I see the tires of a truck under it. Behind
it, like a retinue accompanying the disgusting load, clattered a few two-meter-high rudimentary metal objects for whom even the term “protorobots” would have been considered a compliment. Of course they were human, not essiko, creations.

  “I see,” I turned to Larsen. “I got your hint.”

  “Yes, I…must…have to continue with my work.”

  “But I need to continue with mine as well, Larsen. That’s why I want you to tell me something: Do you think it’s possible that, on the day they died, Fowler and Stein were not going to the defractor but to the Yusian base instead?”

  “I don’t know.” He lowered his eyelids, either because he was tired or to avoid my gaze. “I don’t think so.”

  “Does your answer mean you do think it’s possible? At our first meeting, you were convinced by, or wanted me to believe so, that absurd version of a murder-suicide. You didn’t even mention the Yusians as potential perpetrators.”

  “They are totally indifferent to us as individuals, Simon. Their interest is just general, like archeologists studying another civilization or entomologists observing an anthill. From above, without resting their gaze on particular insects. Do you know how strictly they maintain their policy of noninterference in our affairs?”

  “So,” I began, “you probably think that all the rumors about their excesses—”

  “Are created by our own imaginations,” concluded Larsen. “Mostly horror stories, skillfully incited and disseminated by Zung. That man’s preparing the way for his own apotheosis. After the immense chaos that has gripped Earth since the Yusians arrived, gaining us thirty years of isolation will elevate him to the level of Savior of Humankind—and that’s what he’ll really be.”

  “Nonsense,” I interjected but not very convincingly. “At the moment, he’s more a Judas than a Jesus, betraying all those wretched creatures he’s planning to dump here on Eyrena—where we can’t even discuss the Yusians’ so-called noninterference in everything here: the euphoria, the predatory plants—”

  “And the four settlements,” Larsen added in a gloomy, ominous monotone. His words hung between us, a fitting end to our fruitless conversation.

  Chapter 24

  The next morning I decided to skip going to the dining room again. I felt a strong aversion to the prospect of sitting at the same table with people eating their food like automatons, without looking at each other or saying a word. Yes, there was something repulsive in their awkward breakfasts together that had become demonstrations of stern will power and the indomitable human spirit or something like that. “The more obvious something is, the more you should be inclined to doubt it,” my boss always says.

  I had a bite of the food I found in the refrigerator and then leaned on the windowsill of my wide-open window to wait for the rise of Ridon. I didn’t see the sun rise because it was hidden behind the forest, but the first rays made my skin tingle. The leafless five-trunk trees sensed it too, extending their crowns like open hands begging for light and warmth. Then their branches started swaying, and the forest started crying its thick white tears that exploded in the intensely clear air, turning into millions of floating silver crystals of light.

  I stepped back from the window, closed it, pulled the curtains, but still the silent presence I had felt that morning during my forest walk filled me again with its enchanting friendliness, stimulating even my simplest senses to exultation. I knew it wasn’t real but embraced it anyway. This invisible, indefinable, incomparable presence offered me the whole universe! Filled with it, I was a titan! Its life force seethed in my blood, muscles, eyes, lips, thoughts, and so on, Afterward, I would fall asleep exhausted.

  Exhausted! I warned myself. I left the apartment—left the lodge. Ran to the parking lot and climbed into Stein’s shuttle. Last night I had equipped myself with a transformer. Now I inserted it into the smooth grayish substance, pressed the corresponding button, and said only one word, “Up!”

  I took off above the base. I was all white from the little crystals, my face and hands hardening under their sparkling mask. I threw myself onto the transparent floor, vaguely surprised that I felt no instinctive fear at swinging in space so high above the ground. “Just like a Yusian,” I murmured to myself with awful joy. “I’m just like a Yusian!”

  The crystals melted, and I started to regain my normal mental state as the shuttle reached an altitude of about two thousand meters. I ordered it to circle the area. I wanted to see what the Yusian base looked like, but huge clouds from the north soon spread under me like a shaggy lead-gray blanket. I reached for the transformer, disappointed.

  “Above the biosector,” I said, touching the same button. “Low.”

  The clouds grew even thicker. The shuttle fell for some time into their dark embrace, and then without a transition, the biosector appeared below me like a precise model instantaneously created.

  I couldn’t land the shuttle very close to Reder’s “creative studio,” so I climbed out and started walking through the bizarre ferns, standing like fossils despite the breeze. No plant on Earth could be so motionless and yet so intensely expressive as these ferns that seemed to have frozen in fear of the coming storm.

  I looked up. Not even the slightest light could be seen through the clouds. In fact, the whole sky had become inky black, but a pulsating yellow-purple radiance seemed to be streaming up from the ground, coloring everything around. I walked faster, overtaken by anxious imaginings.

  When I reached Reder’s residence, identical to the one Stein had occupied, I pressed the door handle. It was locked. I rang the bell, waited about a minute, and then looked for an open window. Not finding one, I forced the door open by slamming it two or three times with my shoulder. I went in, the flexor ready in my hand. I didn’t know for sure that Reder was out; he could be hiding somewhere in the house. I didn’t bother to check—just locked the door of his study behind me.

  I pulled the blinds down, turned the lights on, and hurried to the safe. Using the flexor, I cut out a wide rectangle from its front panel. At the bottom was the huge bag Reder had been carrying the day I arrived when Elia had chosen a route that would intersect his. I took it out, surprised at how light it was. Then I checked all the drawers and compartments in the safe but found only a plastic bottle filled with small yellow pills—Sizoral, no doubt, at least two hundred. I put the bottle in my pocket and turned my attention to the bag. Although the zipper jammed, I finally managed to open it. And immediately jumped back.

  A crushed human head rose out of the bag! Followed by its shoulders and body! They inflated in front of me. Up to the knees in the blue bag stood a deformed replica of Odesta Gomez, slightly swaying. I pulled myself together. This was just another Yusian replica. Just. I hauled it to the corner of the room, next to the door, and set the blue bag beside it.

  Then I booted up Reder’s computer. I already had plenty of experience finding hidden or “protected” files, so if there were any in his system, I was pretty sure I’d find them. Now I understood why Reder had a restricted data bank on the server: in his own computer, he kept only notes about performed or pending experiments, remarks about the life cycles of certain plants, their mutations, and so on. Interesting information in itself but hardly top secret. Still the thought that I was on a wild-goose chase wasn’t enough to stop me. I had decided to make the most of Reder’s absence.

  Finally I found a hidden file, when I was no longer expecting one. After I managed to open it, what I found there staggered me. This was the file—dated March 26, the day of the murders—that Stein had created, at exactly 8:02 a.m., giving Reder the code for his restricted data bank and permission to open and announce it “without delay.”

  But that data bank had been completely deleted from the server.

  Soon I discovered another important and puzzling piece of information, contradicting the first one. Using Reder’s computer again at 8:09 a.m., Stein sent an urgent request to the server for a double-protected microdisk containing all the information in his d
ata bank. This request was missing on the server. But who deleted the request from the server? If Reder, why would he save these exposing facts on his own computer?

  I called him on the mobile phone.

  “Where are you?” I asked.

  “In the nursery,” he answered sharply.

  “I’m in your study,” I told him. “I’m waiting for you here, but there’s no need to hurry.”

  But I was sure he would hurry. In fact, no more than five minutes later, I heard the brakes of his jeep outside. I opened the hidden file and went to unlock the door.

  Reder was already at the door. The expression on his face was relatively calm, but a twitch at the corner of his lips gave him away. He walked by me and sat at the desk. He looked at the screen for a moment, then the open safe, then Odesta’s replica, and finally to one side.

  “This is too much, Inspector. Yes, this is altogether too much.”

  “What happened to Stein’s research information?”

  “Too much again.”

  “I asked you a concrete question!”

  “Is that so? But what information are you talking about?”

  “About the information in his restricted data bank.”

  He suddenly smiled broadly, baring his big teeth. “OK then, I’ll answer you. I moved them to my data bank without leaving copies.”

  “Why is this information not on the server?”

  “There is a simple explanation: because the transfer from one restricted data bank to another is also secret.”

  “And who deleted Stein’s request for the microdisk from the server?”

  “Another simple explanation, Simon. The same person who took care of cleaning Stein’s computer.”

  “And the same who then searched Stein’s dead body, looking for the microdisk with the information among his personal belongings.”

  “Congratulations!” Reder showed me his big teeth again. “So far, so good. But if you think that I’m the only one who knew about the microdisk, you are very wrong.”