Blind Date (17 page)

“I still intend to leave tomorrow,” Levanter said sternly.

The Chief thought for a moment, then said, “And I've got the means to make sure you don't slip away when my back is turned.” A faint smile crossed his face. “Under county regulations, members of the police force are allowed to moonlight in uniform during off-duty hours and can hold security jobs for private employers. You know, like guards for nightclubs or apartment houses, banks, and so on. As for me” — he pushed out his chest and drew in his belly — “I moonlight by hiring out off-duty police as security guards for all branches of Impton Consolidated. They wear their regular police uniforms and carry their service guns. It gives the
boys a nice extra income and cuts down on the temptation for graft! And so,” he said with a grin, “I hope I can persuade you not to leave Impton.”

“A real guns-for-hire setup,” said Levanter. “Would any one of these guys act if he saw his generous employer doing something wrong? Has anybody in this town or in the state ever complained about conflict of interest?” he asked.

“Would you like to be the first to try?” the Chief asked sarcastically. Then, his voice becoming slightly sharper, he said, “In any case, Greg wants an uncontested divorce from Jolene. She's nothing but a whore. She refused to give him a divorce and thought she could force him into a financial settlement by openly carrying on with out-of-towners every weekend. But her blackmail hasn't worked. Not only that. Because of her filthy behavior she has lost any right she might have had to their daughter.”

“Jolene didn't tell me she and Greg had a child,” Levanter said.

“They have the sweetest little girl in town. There are probably a lot of things Jolene didn't tell you, George. But when she picked you up, even she didn't know she had picked up the one lover who was going to be her undoing.”

Levanter squirmed. “How am I so different from all the others?”

“You're the first real stranger, and an alien too: no business or political connections, no family, no church, no community around here to claim you. You don't even have a decent reason to be in Impton.”

“You've certainly done your homework, Chief. How did you find out all this?”

The Chief shrugged, giving Levanter a disarming smile. “On the telephone,” he said, pleased with himself. “I started with the car rental. You gave some references there. I followed those leads and ended up talking with that ass of a booking agent, the one who gave us all those human miniatures instead of the real kids we were expecting.” He paused, as if deciding whether to tell Levanter the rest. Then he continued, “And just before you and I met, my deputy radioed me that you were about to buy yourself a handgun
but couldn't find one to your liking.” He pointed to the gun riding in his holster. “Customized Magnum Blackhawk. Six-and-a-half-inch barrel. Hundred-and-fifty-yard range! Six seconds to reload,” he boasted. “Last year it sure helped me to win the State Police Combat Championships!”

Levanter glanced at the gun. “Would you use it to prevent me from leaving Impton?” he asked.

“Glad you asked,” the Chief snapped. With one of the keys on his large ring, he unlocked a drawer in the desk. He pulled out the drawer, placing it on top of the desk, right in front of Levanter. In it, Levanter saw a pistol equipped with a silencer, a snub-nosed revolver, a Swiss army knife, a drinking glass, and several empty drug vials.

The Chief moved closer to Levanter, towering over him. “A teacher at the Police Academy who spoke with an accent a bit like yours,” he said, “once explained to us that in this nation people in fifty states are governed by over a million different laws, and they defend themselves against these laws with over a hundred million guns.” Looking attentively at Levanter, he paused. “And so it is only our Constitution and our television that bind us together.” He grinned jovially. “With the exception, of course, of aliens and criminals, who are first bound together by the FBI that fingerprinted them all.”

Like a card player about to make his final bid, he grew serious. “You are an alien, George, a member of that special clan of the fingerprinted. I would like you now to pick up all the objects you see in this drawer, one at a time, and then put them back!” He pushed the drawer closer to Levanter.

Levanter felt assailed by the uncalled-for threat. “What if I refuse?” he asked.

“You know the odds. I'll make sure you pick them up anyway.” The Chief laughed softly, patting his holster again.

Reluctantly, Levanter picked up and replaced the articles, one by one. When he finished, the Chief carefully wrapped them in paper, replaced the drawer, and locked it. He looked hard at Levanter. “I
reckon you'll make a perfect witness for Greg,” he said, nodding. “With you and your accent on the stand, that bitch, that used-up piece of trash, won't have a chance in court.”

He opened the door for Levanter. “Right before might,” he said, smiling.

Driving back to the Taft, the Chief turned to look at Levanter. “So many trailer parks around here” — he spoke slowly and distinctly — “there's always some crime being committed by hoods we don't know, felons from out of town.” He went on in a confident tone. “If you leave this town before I tell you to, any one of the gismos you just fingerprinted will be found near the scene of a crime: a nice proof that you committed it during your stay here. Even a fancy lawyer from New York can't help you here. So you see, George, I have stuck you to the cross without nails!”

Evidently pleased with this conclusion, he drove without speaking for a few minutes. Then he turned again to his passenger. “Last year, one of those American Nazi Party lunatics went on trial here for beating up a decent man of the Jewish faith who was attending a convention. Well, the judge and the lawyers reckoned that with a Nazi against a Jew, with all the public knowledge of what the Nazis did to the Jews, they didn't have a prayer of finding an unbiased jury!” He gave a hearty laugh. “I'll tell you, they couldn't have been more wrong! Not one of the twenty or so folks they asked about Nazis and Jews during the Second World War could tell what exactly went wrong between them! The only people in these parts who hate Nazis are the ones who put Nazis and Communists in the same bag. Now you” — he paused — “you went to a Communist university down there, in Moscow. You were a Communist, weren't you?”

“In a Communist country, all the universities are Communist. But I was not,” said Levanter.

The Chief listened absent-mindedly, then continued. “Imagine yourself on trial. Let's say, for murder. A jury here would no more believe what you say about why you came all the way to Impton than they would believe that you were not a Communist, or that you
were ‘fingerprinted' by Impton's Chief of Police!” He chuckled.

Levanter shrugged and took a small mirror from his jacket pocket.

“What are you doing? What's that?” he asked.

“It's a mirror,” said Levanter, displaying it in his hand. “A polished glass backed by silver coating to form images by the reflection of rays of light. Also known as a looking glass.”

“I know what a mirror is!” the Chief cut in.

“But you just asked what it was!”

The Chief was annoyed. “Why do you carry a mirror?”

“To see myself. I can't think of any better way.” As the Chief watched him scornfully, Levanter looked at himself in the mirror and combed his hair.

“I don't like to see you do that to yourself,” said the Chief, grimacing. “Just keep in mind that at Jolene's trial you'll testify as a ladies' man, not a men's.”

They arrived at the hotel, and Levanter stepped out of the car. The Chief gave him a long, searching look.

“Now you behave yourself, George, you hear! You don't, and I'll find you a bride right here,” he shouted as he pulled away from the curb. “Then you'll never leave Impton!”

Bored and restless during his unexpectedly prolonged stay in Impton, Levanter would flip through the local newspaper for interesting items. There was a famous research laboratory just outside of town, and one day, Levanter spotted a reference to the man in charge, a scientist he had met with Jacques Monod a few years before. He decided to take a ride out. The scientist remembered him and was delighted to have the opportunity to show the complex of laboratories to a visitor. When most of his staff had left for the day, he took Levanter on a tour of the research facilities.

Levanter had been educated in the humanities and had little background in science. Even though his host tried to avoid technical terminology, to Levanter his explanations of various instruments and installations sounded like pure science fiction.

“This,” said the scientist, pointing through a window at a giant structure, “contains a linear accelerator. The energy used just to turn it on would dim all the lights of a city as large as Chicago.”

“What would happen if such a mechanism blew up?” asked Levanter.

Mildly amused, the scientist waved his hand. “For a layman, there is, of course, a certain degree of strangeness in all this,” he said, “but I can assure you it's all as safe as a baby's cradle.”

They entered another lab. “This is an ultra-centrifuge rotor,” he said. “The rotor is balanced on a flexible wire. If the wire should snap, the rotor would spin off like a projectile — with enough force to go through a thick wall of concrete.”

Again Levanter asked, “What are the chances of such an accident?”

The scientist dismissed his fears. “Practically zero,” he said.

Levanter was shown a number of scientific achievements: tanks that stored liquid nitrogen at minus one hundred and ninety degrees; an electron microscope through which one could view the atoms in a speck of gold; rows of rooms with walls covered with absolute virus filters; an instrument capable of slicing matter into sections thinner than wavelengths of visible light; and many other scientific marvels the uses of which he did not understand.

Then he took Levanter to his own microbiology laboratory, where he handed him a white lab coat to put on. They went through two sets of heavy doors, separated by an empty vestibule, and entered a large room.

“This is the core of our research on immunology and cell culture,” he said. He switched on the lights. Every side of the room was filled with stacked cages full of mice.

As Levanter looked around, he saw a mouse run across the floor to hide under a stack of cages. The scientist did not see the animal.

“The temperature of this room is automatically monitored,” he said. “To prevent even the slightest indirect contact between mice in various test groups, the air, spread in linear sheets, is replaced in the room one hundred and sixty times an hour. That's why” — he
smiled — “you can't smell mice in here. Yet there are two thousand of them, in more than a hundred cages.”

Levanter shook his head in amazement.

The scientist went on. “We inject each group of mice with a particular serum,” he explained. “The crucial element is keeping the mice in every cage totally separate from all the others. That's why the air doesn't mix in here; why it flows vertically, in sheets.”

“Could a mouse escape from a cage?” Levanter asked casually.

The scientist smiled. “These cages are specially designed to make it impossible,” he said. “As you see” — he drew Levanter over to the cages — “the cage grillwork is so narrow that not even the smallest mouse could possibly squeeze through.”

“But couldn't a mouse escape when it is being put in or taken out of its cage for inoculations?” asked Levanter.

“Not a chance! The mice are handled one at a time by a member of our staff trained especially for the task.” He seemed to be amused by Levanter's skepticism.

Levanter bent down as if to tie his shoelace. Under the stack of cages he could see the small white mouse, its nostrils twitching, its whiskers quivering. He straightened up. “Assuming the impossible,” Levanter persisted, “what would happen if, let's say, one mouse managed to escape and to move about the room unnoticed for a while?”

“Assuming the impossible,” the scientist said, humoring his visitor, “the mouse would probably sniff and touch other mice through the grillwork, thereby contaminating all of them. Since our research is based on collecting tissues from mice in strictly separated test groups, this would render the entire project invalid. That's why it's unthinkable.” Clearly considering the matter closed, he reached for the light switch, ready to leave the room.

Levanter stopped him gently. “What if I told you,” he said slowly, “that when we entered this room I actually saw a mouse running across the floor?”

The scientist looked at him. “I'd know that you were suffering from a momentary illusion.”

“And if I insist I saw a mouse?”

“That you are a victim of hallucination!”

“If I swear I saw it?”

“That you are paranoid!” He laughed.

“How certain are you that at this very moment a mouse is not loose in this room?” Levanter persisted.

The scientist turned to Levanter as if to open a formal debate. “Absolutely certain. I know how this lab is run. This stage of our research has been specifically devised to avoid such slip-ups. Only the most reliable and responsible scientists handle the mice, and their research — in immunology, cell culture, and fractionation, for example — depends on what originates here, on accurately injecting the mice in one test group with serum, and on careful control against mishap. We are meticulous and vigilant in this lab.” He scrutinized Levanter's face. “Are you convinced now?”

Levanter was not about to give up. “Still and all, what is the probability of finding an escaped mouse in this room now?” he asked with a grin.

“It's zero,” said the scientist. “After all, a mouse is not an atom,” he added. “Here, where we're accustomed to dealing with the tiniest particles of matter, a mouse would loom larger than an elephant.”