The Best Mysteries of Isaac Asimov Read online

  “We tried to make sense out of it. We spoke quietly, of course, because we didn’t want to intrude more than we had to, but we kept saying, ‘Where? Where?’ Incoherently enough, and in scraps, she told us enough to make us guess it was San Francisco, which, I need not tell you, is nearly three thousand miles away. There’s only one Golden Gate Bridge after all, and in one spasm, she gasped out, ‘Golden Gate,’ over and over. Afterward it turned out she had never heard of the Golden Gate Bridge and was quite shaky as to San Francisco.

  “When we put it all together, we decided that there was an old apartment house somewhere in San Francisco, possibly within eyeshot of the Bridge, that had gone up in fire. A total of twenty-three people were in it at the time it burst into fire, and of these, five did not escape. The five deaths included that of a child.”

  Halsted said, “And then you checked and found there was a fire in San Francisco and that five people had died, including a child.”

  “That’s right,” said Eldridge. “But here’s what got me. One of the five deaths was that of a woman, Sophronia Latimer. She had gotten out safely and then discovered that her eight-year-old boy had not come out with her. She ran wildly back into the house, screaming for the boy, and never came out again. The boy’s name was Eldridge, so you can see what she was shouting in the minutes before her death.

  “Eldridge is a very uncommon first name, as I need not tell you, and my feeling is that Mary captured that particular event, for all that it was so far away, entirely because she had been sensitized to the name, by way of myself, and because it was surrounded by such agony.”

  Rubin said, “You want an explanation, is that it?”

  “Of course,” said Eldridge. “How did this ignorant girl see a fire in full detail, get all the facts correct—and believe me, we checked it out—at three thousand miles.”

  Rubin said, “What makes the three-thousand-mile distance so impressive? These days it means nothing; it’s one sixtieth of a second at the speed of light. I suggest that she heard the tale of the fire on radio or on television—more likely the latter—and passed it on to you. That’s why she chose that story; because of the name Eldridge. She figured it would have the greatest possible effect on you.”

  “Why?” asked Eldridge. “Why should she put through such a hoax?”

  “Why?” Rubin’s voice faded out momentarily, as though with astonishment, then came back in a shout. “Good God, you’ve been working with these people for years and don’t realize how much they want to hoax you. Don’t you suppose there’s a feeling of power that comes with perpetrating a good hoax; and money, too, don’t forget.”

  Eldridge thought about it, then shook his head. “She doesn’t have the brains to put something like this across. It takes brains to be a faker—a good one, anyway.”

  Trumbull broke in. “Well, now, Voss. There’s no reason to suppose she’s in it on her own. A confederate is possible. She supplies the hysteria, he supplies the brains.”

  “Who might the confederate be?” asked Eldridge softly.

  Trumbull shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  Avalon cleared his throat and said, “I go along with Tom here, and my guess is that the confederate is the manager of the five-and-ten. He had noted her ability to guess at shoplifters, and thought he could put this to use in something more splashy. I’ll bet that’s it. He heard about the fire on television, caught the name Eldridge, and coached her.”

  “How long would it take to coach her?” asked Eldridge. “I keep telling you that she’s not very bright.”

  “The coaching wouldn’t be difficult,” said Rubin quickly. “You say she was incoherent. He would just tell her a few key words: Eldridge, fire, Golden Gate, and so on. She then keeps repeating them in random arrangements and you intelligent parapsychologists fill it in.”

  Eldridge nodded, then said, “That’s interesting, except that there was no time at all to coach the girl. That’s what precognition is all about. We know exactly what time she had her fit and we know exactly what time the fire broke out in San Francisco. It so happens the fire broke out at just about the minute that Mary’s fit died down. It was as though once the fire was actual, it was no longer a matter of precognition, and Mary lost contact. So you see, there could be no coaching. The news didn’t hit the network TV news programs till that evening. That’s when we found out and began our investigation in depth.”

  “But wait,” said Halsted. “What about the time difference? There’s a three-hour time difference between New York and San Francisco, and a confederate in San Francisco—”

  “A confederate in San Francisco?” said Eldridge, opening his eyes wide, and staring. “Are you imagining a continental conspiracy? Besides, believe me, I know about the time difference also. When I say that the fire started just as Mary finished, I mean allowing for the time difference. Mary’s fit started at just about one-fifteen P.M. Eastern Standard Time, and the fire in San Francisco started at just about ten forty-five A.M. Pacific Standard Time.”

  Drake said, “I have a suggestion.”

  “Go on,” said Eldridge.

  “This is an uneducated and unintelligent girl—you keep saying that over and over—and she’s throwing a fit, an epileptic fit, for all I know.”

  “No,” said Eldridge firmly.

  “All right, a prophetic fit, if you wish. She’s muttering and mumbling and screaming and doing everything in the world but speaking clearly. She makes sound which you interpret, and which you make fit together. If it had occurred to you to hear her say something like ‘atom bomb,’ then the word you interpreted as ‘Eldridge’ would have become ‘Oak Ridge,’ for instance.”

  “And Golden Gate?”

  “You might have heard that as ‘couldn’t get’ and fitted it in somehow.”

  “Not bad,” said Eldridge. “Except that we know that it is hard to understand some of these ecstatics and we are bright enough to make use of modern technology. We routinely tape-record our sessions and we tape-recorded this one. We’ve listened to it over and over and there is no question but that she said ‘Eldridge’ and not ‘Oak Ridge,’ ‘Golden Gate’ and not ‘couldn’t get.’ We’ve had different people listen and there is no disagreement on any of this. Besides, from what we heard, we worked out all the details of the fire before we got the facts. We had to make no modifications afterward. It all fit exactly.”

  There was a long silence at the table.

  Finally Eldridge said, “Well, there it is. Mary foresaw the fire three thousand miles away by a full half-hour and got all the facts correct.”

  Drake said uneasily, “Do you accept it? Do you think it was precognition?”

  “I’m trying not to,” said Eldridge. “But for what reason can I disbelieve it? I don’t want to fool myself into believing it, but what choice have I? At what point am I fooling myself? If it wasn’t precognition, what was it? I had hoped that perhaps one of you gentlemen could tell me.”

  Again a silence.

  Eldridge went on. “I’m left in a position where I must refer to Sherlock Holmes’s great precept: ‘When the impossible has been eliminated, then whatever remains, however improbable, is the truth.’ In this case, if fakery of any kind is impossible, the precognition must be the truth. Don’t you all agree?”

  The silence was thicker than before, until Trumbull cried out, “Damn it all, Henry is grinning. No one’s asked him yet to explain this. Well, Henry?”

  Henry coughed. “I should not have smiled, gentlemen, but I couldn’t help it when Professor Eldridge used that quotation. It seems the final bit of evidence that you gentlemen want to believe.”

  “The hell we do,” said Rubin, frowning.

  “Surely, then, a quotation from President Thomas Jefferson would have sprung to mind.”

  “What quotation?” asked Halsted.

  “I imagine Mr. Rubin knows,” said Henry.

  “I probably do, Henry, but at the moment I can’t think of an appropriate one. Is it in th
e Declaration of Independence?”

  “No, sir,” began Henry, when Trumbull interrupted with a snarl.

  “Let’s not play Twenty Questions, Manny. Go on, Henry, what are you getting at?”

  “Well, sir, to say that when the impossible has been eliminated, whatever remains, however improbable, is the truth, is to make the assumption, usually unjustified, that everything that is to be considered has indeed been considered. Let us suppose we have considered ten factors. Nine are clearly impossible. Is the tenth, however improbable, therefore true? What if there were an eleventh factor, and a twelfth, and a thirteenth…”

  Avalon said severely, “You mean there’s a factor we haven’t considered?”

  “I’m afraid so, sir,” said Henry, nodding. Avalon shook his head. “I can’t think what it can be.”

  “And yet it is an obvious factor, sir; the most obvious one.”

  “What is it, then?” demanded Halsted, clearly annoyed. “Get to the point!”

  “To begin with,” said Henry, “it is clear that to explain the ability of the young lady to foretell, as described, the details of a fire three thousand miles away except by precognition is impossible. But suppose precognition is also to be considered impossible. In that case—”

  Rubin got to his feet, straggly beard bristling, eyes magnified through thick-lensed glasses, staring. “Of course! The fire was set. The woman could have been coached for weeks. The accomplice goes to San Francisco and they coordinate. She predicts something she knows is going to happen. He causes something he knows she will predict.”

  Henry said, “Are you suggesting, sir, that a confederate would deliberately plan to kill five victims, including an eight-year-old boy?”

  “Don’t start trusting in the virtue of mankind, Henry,” said Rubin. “You’re the one who is sensitive to wrongdoing.”

  “The minor wrongdoings, sir, the kind most people overlook. I find it difficult to believe that anyone, in order to establish a fancied case of precognition, would deliberately arrange a horrible multi-murder. Besides, to arrange a fire in which eighteen of twenty-three people escape and five specific people die requires a bit of precognition in itself.”

  Rubin turned stubborn. “I can see ways in which five people can be trapped; like forcing a card in conjuring—”

  “Gentlemen!” said Eldridge peremptorily, and all turned to look at him. “I have not told you the cause of the fire.”

  He went on, after looking about the table to make sure he had the attention of all, “It was a stroke of lightning. I don’t see how a stroke of lightning could be arranged at a specific time.” He spread out his hands helplessly. “I tell you. I’ve been struggling with this for weeks. I don’t want to accept precognition, but…I suppose this spoils your theory, Henry?”

  “On the contrary, Professor Eldridge, it confirms it and makes it certain. Ever since you began to tell us this tale of Mary and the fire, your every word has made it more and more certain that fakery is impossible and that precognition has taken place. If, however, precognition is impossible, then it follows of necessity, Professor, that you have been lying.”

  Not a Black Widower but exclaimed at that, with Avalon’s shocked “Henry!” loudest of all.

  But Eldridge was leaning back in his chair, chuckling. “Of course I was lying. From beginning to end. I wanted to see if all you so-called rationalists would be so eager to accept parapsychological phenomena that you would overlook the obvious rather than spoil your own thrill. When did you catch me out, Henry?”

  “It was a possibility from the start, sir, which grew stronger each time you eliminated a solution by inventing more information. I was certain when you mentioned the lightning. That was dramatic enough to have been brought in at the beginning. To be mentioned only at the very end made it clear that you created it on the spot to block the final hope.”

  “But why was it a possibility from the start, Henry?” demanded Eldridge. “Do I look like a liar? Can you detect liars the way I had Mary detect shoplifters?”

  “Because this is always a possibility and something to be kept in mind and watched for. That is where the remark by President Jefferson comes in.”

  “What was that?”

  “In 1807, Professor Benjamin Silliman of Yale reported seeing the fall of a meteorite at a time when the existence of meteorites was not accepted by scientists. Thomas Jefferson, a rationalist of enormous talent and intelligence, on hearing the report, said, ‘I would sooner believe that a Yankee professor would lie than that a stone would fall from heaven.’”

  “Yes,” said Avalon at once, “but Jefferson was wrong. Silliman did not lie and stones did fall from heaven.”

  “Quite so, Mr. Avalon,” said Henry, unruffled. “That is why the quotation is remembered. But considering the great number of times that impossibilities have been reported, and the small number of times they have been proven possible after all, I felt the odds were with me.”

  2

  The Pointing Finger

  In each of my Black Widowers, I try to bring up some different subject concerning which each of my members can wax erudite and eloquent about. The plays of Shakespeare are an obvious example and I feel at home with them, for at about the time I had begun my Black Widower series I had also written a two-volume discussion of those plays. The books were entitled Asimov’s Guide to Shakespeare.

  Frankly, I have as much fun involving myself in such discussions as in working up the conclusion. Of course, I keep thinking with a shiver: What happens when I run out of subjects for competing erudition?

  However, it hasn’t happened yet, and I present this story as a successful example (in my opinion) of this sort of thing.

  It was a rather quiet Black Widowers banquet until Rubin and Trumbull had their nose-to-nose confrontation.

  Mario Gonzalo had been first to arrive, subdued and with the shadow of trouble upon him.

  Henry was still setting up the table when Gonzalo arrived. He stopped and asked, “How are you, sir?” in quiet and unobtrusive concern.

  Gonzalo shrugged. “All right, I guess. Sorry I missed the last meeting, but I finally decided to go to the police and I wasn’t up to much for a while. I don’t know if they can do anything, but it’s up to them now. I almost wish you hadn’t told me.”

  “Perhaps I ought not to have done so.”

  Gonzalo shrugged. “Listen, Henry,” he said. “I called each of the guys and told him the story.”

  “Was that necessary, sir?”

  “I had to. I’d feel constrained if I didn’t. Besides, I didn’t want them to think you had failed.”

  “Not an important consideration, sir.”

  The others came one by one, and each greeted Gonzalo with a hearty welcome that ostentatiously ignored a murdered sister, and each then subsided into a kind of uneasy quiet.

  Avalon, who was hosting the occasion, seemed, as always, to add the dignity of that office to his natural solemnity. He sipped at his first drink and introduced his guest, a young man with a pleasant face, thinning black hair, and an amazingly thick mustache which seemed to be waiting only for the necessary change in fashion to be waxed at the end.

  “This is Simon Levy,” said Avalon. “A science writer and a splendid fellow.”

  Emmanuel Rubin promptly said, “Didn’t you write a book on the laser, Light in Step?”

  “Yes,” said Levy with the energetic delight of an author greeting unexpected recognition. “Have you read it?”

  Rubin, who was carrying, as he always did, the self-conscious soul of a six-footer in his five-foot-four body, looked solemnly at the other through his thick glasses and said, “I did, and found it quite good.”

  Levy’s smile weakened, as though he considered a judgment of “quite good” no good at all.

  Avalon said, “Roger Halsted won’t be with us today. He’s out of town on something or other. Sends his regrets and says to say hello to Mario if he shows up.”

  Trumbull said with his
mouth down-curved in a sneer, “We’re spared a limerick.”

  “I missed last month’s,” said Gonzalo. “Was it any good?”

  “You wouldn’t have understood it, Mario,” said Avalon gravely. “That good, eh?”

  And then things quieted down to a near whisper until somehow the Act of Union came up. Afterward, neither Rubin nor Trumbull could remember exactly how.

  Trumbull said, in what was considerably more than an ordinary speaking voice, “The Act of Union forming the United Kingdom of England, Wales, and Scotland was made law at the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713.”

  “No, it wasn’t,” said Rubin, his straw-colored and straggly beard wagging indignantly. “The Act was passed in 1707.”

  “Are you trying to tell me, you dumb jackass, that the Treaty of Utrecht was signed in 1707?”

  “No, I’m not,” shouted Rubin, his surprisingly loud voice reaching a bellow. “The Treaty of Utrecht was signed in 1713. You guessed that part right, though God only knows how.”

  “If the Treaty was signed in 1713, then that settles the Act of Union.”

  “No, it doesn’t, because the Treaty had nothing to do with the Act of Union, which was 1707.”

  “Damn you, five dollars says you don’t know the Act of Union from a union suit.”

  “Here’s my five dollars. Where’s yours? Or can you spare a week’s pay at that two-bit job you’ve got?”

  They were standing up now, leaning toward each other over James Drake, who philosophically added a fresh dollop of sour cream and chives to the last of his baked potato, and finished it.

  Drake said, “No use shouting back and forth, my fellow jackasses. Look it up.”

  “Henry!” roared Trumbull.

  There was the smallest of delays and then Henry was at hand with the third edition of the Columbia Encyclopedia.

  “Host’s privilege,” said Avalon. “I’ll check, as an impartial observer.”