The Complete Roderick by John Sladek Page B

ectoplasm of blue smoke. ‘Can’t say I remember that, no, hmm, hmm, hmm …’ After a moment he added, ‘But even if you did, so what? One swallow doesn’t make a flock.’
    ‘But –’
    ‘Kindly let me finish? Okay, what I think we have here is a political situation, Bud. No sooner do I tell you the committee will probably veto my proposal, than you want to back another horse. Maybe all you ever really cared about was your pendulum, eh?’
    ‘No, but –’
    ‘It’s okay, Bud. Really. I’m not hurt. Some people are capable of loyalty, some aren’t, I realize that. I don’t know, maybe you’reafter my
job
in your own crazy way, I can accept that too. Just a humble scientist myself, I leave the politics to you slick guys with all the answers.’
    Unanswered phones were ringing all over the place. A patrolman sat on his desk, trying to juggle two receivers and take down a message that would probably be just another flying saucer sighting. The dispatcher peered over her glass partition (a frosted look over frosted glass, he would write) letting the chief know she was peeved about missing her coffee break. The telex was ringing its bell and rattling out a yard of paper. The fat prisoner threw him a sulky look from the cage (‘… as if,’ he would write, ‘as if he thought someone else had crapped his drawers’).
    Chief Dobbin went into his office and closed the door against all of them. But even here he had Sergeant Collar balancing an armload of reports and shouting into a phone:
    ‘Don’t ask me, that’s all. Just don’t ask me!’ The receiver banged down. ‘Been like this all fucking day, chief. Two more men down with flu, the coroner’s screaming for his paperwork on this suicide, not to mention –’
    ‘Shut up, Collar, and get outa my office. I need five minutes to get squared away here.’ Getting squared away meant sitting down with a clean legal pad and a handful of sharpened pencils, to work on his book. Dobbin wrote slowly and carefully, his tongue protruding at the corner of his mouth:
‘Don’t touch me,’ she said. ‘Don’t you ever touch me again. Why was I ever dumb enough to marry a cop?’
    Suddenly I felt big and awkward and very, very tired. ‘Look, I know it’s our anniversary, but this Delmore diamond case is ready to crack wide open –’
    ‘And then there’ll be some other case,’ she said, her mouth set hard. ‘Maybe when you give all you’ve got to your work, there’s just nothing left for me.’
    She was near the window when it happened. Suddenly the glass blossomed into a spider-web pattern, with a hole in the middle the size of a .303 slug. There was a matching hole in Laura’s lovely throat. Even before she hit the floor, she was very, very –
    ‘What is it
now,
Collar? Can’t you handle it?’
    ‘Security problem, chief. With our visiting potentate. He’s visiting all the wrong places. In fact we can’t locate him.’
    ‘Terrific. Have Angie get him on the radio, and –’
    ‘No can do. He’s got the wrong car, too. I’m trying to get a VSU fix on him now, but nothing. Zilch. Maggie’s drawers.’
    ‘Probably left the damn campus.’ He flicked on his own video surveillance unit and ran through the scenes quickly, then slowly. ‘There, is that his car? Black Mercedes limo, gold grille? Okay, he’s at the Ag Sci complex, horse barns. Can we detail a coupla men to escort?’
    Collar made a face. ‘Nope. Simons is off sick, and Fielder has to guard this gold dinnerware at the Faculty Club, so that leaves –’
    ‘Okay, okay. Try to catch up on a little paperwork around here and what happens? All hell breaks loose, people get sick, people want coffee breaks – and now we got this guy, a king of some place, just walking around loose like anybody else!’
    ‘You want to question the prisoner now, chief? He’s kinda weird and –’
    ‘Who is he, anyhow?’
    ‘A John Doe. No ID at all. Our special Ripper Patrol picked him up last night. He