Hide and seek by Paul Preuss Page B

the motions, but she knew what she would learn. For one thing, Nutting’s rounds were as regular as clockwork, against all accepted security practice–Nutting had fallen into laziness and a lifetime’s habit, and her movements about the neighborhood had no doubt been timed by the killer in advance.
    It was easy to sympathize with the old woman. Compared to a night on Mars, Antarctica is Tahiti, and normal people stayed inside if they could. Sparta could understand why the patroller–old enough to feel the cold in her bones even through her heated suit–would delay leaving the warmth of the office, would put off sealing her pressure suit to walk the cold, sandy streets of the town until the last minute. The killer had probably been waiting in one of the pressurized tubes that connected with the Town Hall until she passed.
    Three minutes after the patroller passed the lighted building, alarms went off in the patrol office–hardly a hundred meters from the scene of the crime. The first alarm sounded when the Martian plaque was moved. Most of the other alarms–sniffers, movement detectors, pressure detectors in the floor, and so forth–were already disarmed in deference to Morland’s work, but additional alarms went off when the outer door of the airlock at the main entrance of the building was opened before the inner door had closed, permitting a temporary pressure drop inside.
So the robber had been wearing a pressure suit too; he or she had fled the scene not through the warm corridors but through the freezing streets.
     
“Let’s look at the airlock.”
     
“Not much to see, Inspector.” Polanyi manipulated the holo controls and carried them spastically to the big bronze-rimmed doors of the main airlock–and then through the doors to the outside.
    In the sand outside the airlock there were only smooth windblown rills and a few vague depressions, nothing suggesting a clear footprint. A few meters away, the entire scene faded into a black void at the edge of the holo.
“Seems there was a wind blowing.”
     
“A light breeze by local standards.”
    Sparta peered at the holographically frozen ridges in the fine sand. Her visual capacities far exceeded the resolution of the holo recorder, so her eyes were almost useless here–as were her nose and tongue, with their capabilities for chemical analysis. The crime was two weeks past. Perhaps if she had been on the real scene, in real time . . . “You’re right, Lieutenant. Not much to see.”
    “This is pretty much the extent of our reconstruction. We figured the killer went outside because the way back through the corridors was blocked by the patrollers responding to the first alarm. Or maybe there was an accomplice outside.”
“Maybe,” said Sparta. Without evidence, she did not make hypotheses.
    “The local patrollers did a good job,” said Polanyi, loyal to the locals he had to live with. “They responded in minutes. What you’ve seen is what they found. No murder weapon. No witnesses. No unusual prints or other physical evidence.”
“Thanks, you can turn it off.”
     
He did so. Instantly they were standing in the bright and busy center of Town Hall. * * *
     
Ten minutes later, they were back in Polanyi’s cramped and overlit office. “Now shall I run down for you the likely ones? The three with opportunity?”
     
“Please.” Let him do his job; she would draw her conclusions later.
    She already knew the Martian plaque had been taken that particular night, and not, for example, the night before or the night after, because the robbery had been timed to coincide with the destruction of the Culture X records on Venus and elsewhere throughout the inhabited solar system. Simultaneously the prophetae had unleashed their secret death squads in a mass attack–attempting to murder everyone who might remember the texts well enough to reconstruct them. A dozen scholars had died on Earth. Here on Mars, Dewdney Morland was the intended victim, Dare Chin