The Gordon Mamon Casebook Read Online Free PDF Page B

added to the cost, such a physique was probably even more highly favoured.)
    “I don’t see what possible relev—oh, see what you mean, now. Been in here, mostly,” replied Sister McPhaillia. Gordon surmised that she had either been weeping copiously, or was surprisingly maladroit in the application of mascara. “Only time I went out was for dinner, about four hours ago—we’re not supposed to eat before the cryosleep, but I couldn’t bear the thought of three hundred years on a hungry stomach. Like the Parable of the Jaguar Running on Empty.”
    “Dinner? Where?”
    “Ship’s cafeteria. Left, up, then aft about a hundred metres from here, I can show you if you’d like—and then I went to collect Skip—Mr. Gramacek for his cryotreatment.” (Gordon checked his notes. Yes, Gramacek, the ship’s communications officer, was the other name down for interview after McPhaillia.) “He’s been nervous, poor dear, doesn’t want to go under, so we talked it through—I’m medic / counsellor / chaplain, so I approached it from all angles. And then after we’d talked I, um, ministered to him … and then the alarm went off, and we found Rusty bent over the Captain, holding that bandage to her neck. Horrible, horrible thing. Those bandages aren’t designed for such massive blood loss, but Rusty wasn’t to know that, I suppose. A bit like the Parable of the Town Mouse and the Country Computer. Anyway, once I saw there was no help I could offer, I came back here to finish prepping the last four cryobooths.”
    Gordon could see the waiting cryobooths, parked in a neat row against the wall of the clinic like so many tech-heaven caskets. Beside them stood an immense, fog-breathing stainless-steel canister labelled ‘LN2’.
    “Poor Rusty,” McPhaillia added.
    “Why d’you say that?”
    “He was very attracted to the Captain. Look, Mr. Mutton,” (Gordon grimaced), “we’ve been working towards this for the past fifteen years, us four crewmembers I mean, Rusty most of all. Did you know he oversaw this starship’s construction himself? They don’t make antimatter drives any more, so he had to track down old blueprints, and even though it’s obsolete by today’s standards it’s still proscribed tech, so the construction’s been very hush-hush. It’s taken a lot out of him. Plus it’s taken a long time for the Church to raise money for this vessel, and relationships develop over that time. Like me and Skip. Rusty and Captain Kurtz hadn’t gotten quite that far—it had only been fifteen years, no sense in rushing things—but there was definitely some spark between them, you could see it. Like the Parable of the Electric Eel and the Battery Hen, you know? The Captain always wanted to know what he’d been up to, and Rusty always wanted to know where she was—just longed for each other’s company, I guess. And now—” She dabbed at the corner of her eye with a sterilised dressing. “—he’s going to spend the next three hundred years grieving …” McPhaillia blew her nose noisily into a thick wad of surgical cotton, which she placed absently back on the gurney beside her.
    “Yes, but he’ll be in cryosleep all that time,” observed Gordon. “That’ll only seem like a day or so. I shouldn’t imagine he’ll take that long to heal afterwards.”
    “You think that matters, Mr. Marram? Three hundred years is three hundred years.”
     
    * * *
     
    The Gramacek interview, in the latter’s quarters, was a painfully tense affair. Gordon’s handheld had decided, two minutes before interview’s commencement, to provide an update on its analysis of the autopsy results. Frustratingly, there was no information on the nature of the knife used to slash Captain Kurtz’s neck: no detectable residue of any metal, plastic, glass or other feasible knife-blade material, but traces of food particles suggested the incision had been deep enough to sever the gullet as well as the jugular. The handheld also