The Long Result by John Brunner Page B

equipment he led us to a point on the outer wall of the block where four square metal pipes, supported at intervals of a yard by F-shaped brackets, ran at waist-height towards the gas-generating plant. Half a dozen men clustered here, scrutinizing the pipes carefully. At first I thought they must be examining the unharmed section, for on the side away from the wall – which of course we could see as we approached – the metal was apparently unmarked. But the policeman asked the workers to stand back for a moment, and gestured for us to look at the side nearer the wall.
    A jagged hole had been torn in the pipe, a good three inches across.
    ‘But this is fantastic!’ Jacky said, stepping back. ‘How was it done?’
    ‘I wish someone would tell us,’ the policeman admitted. ‘Look, the pipes are only inches from the wall yet all the damage is on the inner side. And the wall’s untouched, except for a few splinters of the pipe itself. Any ideas?’
    ‘A – a bomb?’ I hazarded.
    ‘Out of the question,’ said one of the men working on the pipe. He wore a night-vision helmet and carried a black-light projector. ‘A bomb leaves traces – radioactivity or combustion compounds. So far the only substances we’ve found are due to the action of air on the gas in the pipe. Not a bomb.’
    ‘Someone could have cut it with a torch,’ Jacky suggested. Even I could see that didn’t hold water; the metal had been torn outwards from within the pipe.
    The policeman said, ‘The only possibility, I’d have said, is a solid shot weighing about half a pound. But if you can tell me how to fire a bullet at the side of the pipe nearer the wall without damaging the side farther away, I’d be delighted to know. Anyhow, what became of it? There’s nothing scattered round here but the metal from the pipe.’
    ‘Why are the pipes exposed like this?’ Jacky asked.
    A worried middle-aged woman in an airsuit – one of the staff technicians, presumably – answered him. ‘So we can service them while the accommodation’s in use. There are four pipes because the whole system is in duplicate … We switched to the spare pair as soon as we found the hole, but it wasn’t soon enough.’
    ‘Have you an aesthograph with you?’ the policeman demanded of the man in the night-vision helmet.
    ‘Think we need aesthograms on this?’ the man countered, not looking round.
    ‘Never can tell what may come in useful.’ He turned to the woman. ‘Do you keep such things here?’
    ‘Surely – I’ll get you one.’ She hurried off in search of one of the complex devices used in preparing Starhomer tactile-true flat reproductions like the one I’d found on the Tau Cetian file this morning. Rounding the corner of the building, she almost collided with a man looking for us.
    ‘Mr Vincent!’ he called. ‘Dr bin Ishmael wants you to come and have a word with Shvast, please!’
    At sixteen next afternoon, my mind still seemed to be stuck in the small hours of the morning. I was due to take the midnight express to England and spend the week-end with Micky Torres; I wished furiously the clock would spin around and get the day over with.
    We’d fed Shvast the story I’d suggested. I had no idea if it had convinced him, or whether he’d merely let himself accept it. And we couldn’t tell from what he later said to Vroazh and the others. The Starhomers might have saved themselves some trouble by teaching the aliens Anglic instead of learning a native language, but it made it impossible to eavesdrop. Jacky and I had got away at about three, though poor Helga had still been working. Some progress had been made on a transfusion-medium for the Tau Cetians by then, and today’s latest news was that all were expected to survive.
    Indeed, by now they probably felt better than I did. I’d got home in time to catch some sleep, but I hadn’t been able to turn my mind off. I’d lain awake worrying. Then all of today I’d had to face a succession of