Meeting at Infinity Read Online Free Page B

of trying to kill her. The case was conducted by the vice-sheriff of the Eastern Quarter in person, Kingsley Athlone. There was no evidence except the word of the wife. The courts said accident. Provisional verdict. Athlone appealed. Statute of limitations is relevant, year and a day period. A month later Nevada obtained an injunction against Athlone, claiming persecution and slander. He stopped Athlone from publicizing his identity in places where he lodged. That’s about all.”
    “So in fact he hasn’t killed anyone?” Clostrides said.
    “That’s right.” Dismar Grail waited, his mouth working as though he were repeating what he had said under his breath, double-checking for errors.
    Clostrides shrugged. He had expected something of the sort from the way Athlone behaved. Still, he wasn’t concerned with law-enforcement; he wanted to know about Lyken.
    He said, “Dismar, what was the substance of what Nevada said to Lyken outside The Market about an hour ago?”
    “The words that he said were: ‘Lyken, remember Akkilmar!’ ”
    Clostrides frowned. “What does that mean?”
    “Restricted information,” said Grail smugly.
    Clostrides glanced at the calendar on his desk, and ran down the list of hypnokeys in his mind till he fell on the words appropriate for today’s date. “Ah—‘water is dry.’ ”
    Grail gave a weak smile. He always smiled at the non-senicalhypnokeys. He said, “Akkilmar is the name of a tribe, and a country ruled by that tribe, and its capital city, in the franchise assigned to Ahmed Lyken.”
    “Is it now?” said Clostrides. Automatically, Dismar Grail began to sob, because it was the worst kind of cruelty to him to have the accuracy of his information questioned, even inadvertently. Clostrides’ words were absent-minded; he took them literally, nonetheless.
    Clostrides comforted him with a few exaggerated compliments, and thought the information over. He said at length, “Did Nevada have any trade connections with Lyken?”
    Grail shook his head mutely, his protuberant pale eyes bright with tears.
    That was peculiar, then. Clostrides mulled it over. For Nevada’s shout to have such an effect on Lyken, it must have been significant. If it concerned something in Lyken’s franchise, the chances were a good hundred to one in favor of it being a trade secret. He said, “Water is dry, Dismar. How is it that we know what Akkilmar means?”
    “Uh—preliminary inquiries turned it up before the franchise was assigned to Ahmed Lyken.”
    So within the franchise, it was pretty well known. Had to be. Preliminary scouting of a new franchise was necessarily not very thorough, whatever the public was told. However that might be, Clostrides decided, this would bear investigation.
    He began to give the orders at once.

3
    P OPULAR TRADITION afterwards endowed Tacket with the attributes of a rat—snipy nose, projecting teeth, shifty eyes,sallow complexion probably garnished with pimples. In fact, he was a moderately good-looking man with bushy fair hair and a determined chin—a feature which amateur physiognomists ought to class more often among danger signs.
    But the worst danger sign of all was abstract. Tacket played with number, and with physical analogues of number. He was not a practical man, yet he was clever with his mind and his hands. Up till the time of his great discovery, his main accomplishment had been devising mechanical puzzles.
    The great discovery—that of his celebrated Principle, which changed the world—was the fruit of an examination of
pi.
It fired his mind; his mind was explosive; the explosion came near to destroying everything.
    Pi,
it seemed, was invariant. However, certain deductions from curved-space mathematics indicated conditions under which it would assume values different from the familiar 3.1416. It would remain an irrational number of course. But the physical conditions for altering its value could be described. Tacket’s preoccupation with analogues of