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The Singing Bell

Louis Peyton never discussed publicly the methods by which he had bested the police of Earth in a dozen duels of wits and bluff, with the psychoprobe alaiting and always foiled He would have been foolish to do so, of course, but in hisa testament to be opened only after his death, one in which his unbroken success could clearly be seen to be due to ability and not to luck

In such a testament he would say, 'No false pattern can be created to cover a cri upon it some trace of its creator It is better, then, to seek in events some pattern that already exists and then adjust your actions to it'

It ith that principle in mind that Peyton planned the murder of Albert Cornwell

Cornwell, that ss, first approached Peyton at the latter's usual table-for-one at Grinnell's Cornwell's blue suit seerin, and his faded mustache a special bristle

'Mr Peyton,' he said, greeting his future murderer with no fourth-diiven up, sir, aliven up'

Peyton, who disliked being approached over his newspaper and dessert at Grinnell's, said, 'If you have business with me, Cornwell, you knohere you can reach me' Peyton was past forty and his hair was past its earlier blackness, but his back was rigid, his bearing youthful, his eyes dark, and his voice could cut thepractice

'Not for this, Mr Peyton,' said Cornwell, 'not for this I know of a cache, sir, a cache of you know, sir' The forefinger of his right handinvisible substance, and his left hand momentarily cupped his ear

Peyton turned a page of the paper, still somewhat da Bells?'

'Oh, hush, Mr Peyton,' said Cornwell in whispered agony Peyton said 'Come with me'

They walked through the park It was another Peyton axio like a low-voiced discussion out of doors

Cornhispered, 'A cache of Singing Bells; an accu Bells Unpolished, but such beauties, Mr Peyton'

'Have you seen them?'

'No, sir, but I have spoken with one who has He had proofs enough to convince h there to enable you and me to retire in affluence In absolute affluence, sir'

'Who was this other man?'

A look of cunning lit Cornwell's face like a s it a repulsive oiliness Thethe Bells in the crater sides I don't knowhis athered dozens, hidden the of them'

'He died, I suppose?'

'Yes A ht Very sad Of course, his activities on the Moon were quite illegal The Do So perhaps it was a judgment upon him after all In any case, I have his map'

Peyton said, a look of calm indifference on his face, 'I don't want any of the details of your little transaction What I want to knohy you've come to me'

Cornwell said, 'Well, now, there's enough for both of us, Mr Peyton, and we can both do our bit For et a spaceship You 'Yes?'

'You can pilot a spaceship, and you have such excellent contacts for disposing of the Bells It is a very fair division of labor, Mr Peyton Wouldn't you say so, now?'

Cornwell considered the pattern of his life-the pattern that already existed-and matters seemed to fit

He said, 'We will leave for the Moon on August the tenth'

Cornwell stopped walking and said, 'Mr Peyton! It's only April now'

Peyton ait and Cornwell had to hurry to catch up 'Do you hear et in touch with you at the proper ti your ship Make no attempt to see me personally till then Good-bye, Cornwell' Cornwell said, 'Fifty-fifty?'

'Quite,' said Peyton 'Good-bye'

Peyton continued his walk alone and considered the pattern of his life again At the age of twenty-seven, he had bought a tract of land in the Rockies on which soainst the threatened atomic wars of two centuries back, the ones that had never come to pass after all The house rehtened drive for self-sufficiency

It was of steel and concrete in as isolated a spot as could well be found on Earth, set high above sea level and protected on nearly all sides by her still It had its self-contained power unit, its water supply fed by mountain strea comfortably, its cellar outfitted like a fortress with an arsenal of weapons designed to stave off hungry, panicked hordes that never ca unit that could scrub and scrub the air until anything but radioactivity (alas for human frailty) could be scrubbed out of it

In that house of survival, Peyton passed the ust every subsequent year of his perennially bachelor life He took out the communicators, the television, the newspaper tele-dispenser He built a force-field fence about his property and left a short-distance signal mechanism to the house fro through the mountains

For one hly alone No one saw him, no one could reach him In absolute solitude, he could have the only vacation he valued after eleven months of contact with a humanity for which he could feel only a cold contempt

Even the police-and Peyton sust He had once juust

Peyton considered another aphoris so conducive to an appearance of innocence as the triumphant lack of an alibi

On July 30, as on July 30 of every year, Louis Peyton took the 915 arav stratojet at New York and arrived in Denver at 1230 prav bus to Huround-car-full grav! -up the trail to the boundaries of his property Saravely accepted the ten-dollar tip that he always received, touched his hat as he had done on July 30 for fifteen years

On July 31, as on July 31 of every year, Louis Peyton returned to Hurav aeroflitter and placed an order through the Hueneral store for such supplies as he needed for the co unusual about the order It was virtually the duplicate of previous such orders

MacIntyre, ravely over the list, put it through to Central Warehouse, Mountain District, in Denver, and the whole of it ca over the mass-transference beam within the hour Peyton loaded the supplies onto his aeroflitter with Maclntyre's help, left his usual ten-dollar tip and returned to his house

On August 1, at 1201 am, the force field that surrounded his property was set to full power and Peyton was isolated

And now the pattern changed Deliberately he had left hiht days In that tih of his supplies to account for all of August He used the dusting chae-disposal unit They were of an advancedmetals and silicates to an iy formed in the process was carried away by the rees warmer than normal for a week

On August 9 his aeroflitter carried hi where Albert Cornwell and a spaceship waited

The spaceship, itself, was a weak point, of course, since there were men who had sold it, ht All those men, however, led only as far as Cornwell, and Cornwell, Peyton thought- with the trace of a smile on his cold lips-would be a dead end A very dead end

On August 10 the spaceship, with Peyton at the controls and Cornwell-and his rav field was excellent At full power, the ship's weight was reduced to less than an ounce The y efficiently and noiselessly, and without flah the atone

It was very unlikely that there would be witnesses to the flight, or that in these weak, piping times of peace there would be a radar watch as in days of yore In point of fact, there was none

Two days in space; noeeks on the Moon Almost instinctively Peyton had allowed for those teeks from the first He was under no illusions as to the value of hoht be to the designer hier, they could be nothing ram

Cornwell showed Peyton the map for the first time only after takeoff He smiled obsequiously 'After all, sir, this was my only trump'

'Have you checked this against the lunar charts?'

'I would scarcely kno, Mr Peyton I depend upon you'

Peyton stared at hi upon it was Tycho Crater, the site of the buried Luna City

In one respect, at least, astronoht side of the Moon at the moment It meant that patrol ships were less likely to be out, they themselves less likely to be observed

Peyton brought the ship down in a riskily quick non-grav landing within the safe, cold darkness of the inner shadow of a crater The sun was past zenith and the shadoould grow no shorter

Cornwall drew a long face 'Dear, dear, Mr Peyton We can scarcely go prospecting in the lunar day' The lunar day doesn't last forever,' said Peyton shortly There are about a hundred hours of sun left We can use that ti out the map'

The answer came quickly, but it was plural Peyton studied the lunar charts over and over, takingto find the pattern of craters shown on the homemade scrawl that was the key to- what?

Finally Peyton said The crater ant could be any one of three: GC-3, GC-5, or MT-10'

'What do we do, Mr Peyton?' asked Cornwell anxiously

'We try the with the nearest'

The terht shadow After that, they spent increasing periods on the lunar surface, getting used to the eternal silence and blackness, the harsh points of the stars and the crack of light that was the Earth peeping over the rim of the crater above They left hollow, featureless footprints in the dry dust that did not stir or change Peyton noted theht of the gibbous Earth That was on the eighth day after their arrival on the moon

The lunar cold put a li they could remain outside their ship at any one tier By the eleventh day after arrival they had eli Bells

By the fifteenth day, Peyton's cold spirit had groith desperation It would have to be GC-5 MT-10 was too far away They would not have time to reach it and explore it and still allow for a return to Earth by August 31

On that same fifteenth day, however, despair was laid to rest forever when they discovered the Bells They were not beautiful They were e as a double fist, vacuuravity There were two dozen of the, could be sold for a hundred thousand dollars at least

Carefully, in double handfuls, they carried the Bells to the ship, bedded them in excelsior, and returned for round that would have worn theravity, was scarcely a barrier

Cornwell passed the last of the Bells up to Peyton, who placed them carefully within the outer lock

'Keep the harshly in the other's ear 'I' up'

He crouched for the slow high leap against lunar gravity, looked up, and froze in panic His face, clearly visible through the hard carved lusilite of his helrimace of terror 'No, Mr Peyton Don't-'

Peyton's fist tightened on the grip of the blaster he held It fired There was an unbearable brilliant flash and Cornas a dead fragment of a man, sprawled a blood

Peyton paused to stare somberly at the dead man, but only for a second Then he transferred the last of the Bells to their prepared containers, rerav field, then the micropiles, and, potentially a million or two richer than he had been teeks earlier, set off on the return trip to Earth

On August 29 Peyton's ship descended silently, stern botto froust 10 The care hich Peyton had chosen the spot was not wasted His aeroflitter was still there, draithin the protection of an enclosing wrinkle of the rocky, tortuous countryside

He ain, in their containers, into the deepest recess of the wrinkle, covering them, loosely and sparsely, with earth He returned to the ship once more to set the controls and ain and two minutes later the ship's automatics took over

Silently hurrying, the ship bounded upward and up, veering to ard somewhat as the Earth rotated beneath it Peyton watched, shading his narrow eyes, and at the extreht and a dot of cloud against the blue sky

Peyton's ed well With the cadmium safety-rods bent back into uselessness, thesafety level and the ship had vanished in the heat of the nuclear explosion that had followed

Twenty minutes later, he was back on his property He was tired and his ravity He slept well

Twelve hours later, in the earliest dawn, the police came

The man who opened the door placed his crossed hands over his paunch and ducked his s The man who entered, H Seton Davenport of the Terrestrial Bureau of Investigation, looked about uncomfortably

The rooe and in se lamp focused over a combination armchair-desk Rows of book-films covered the walls A suspension of Galactic charts occupied one corner of the rooleamed softly on a stand in another corner

'You are Dr Wendell Urth?' asked Davenport, in a tone that suggested he found it hard to believe Davenport was a stocky man with black hair, a thin and prominent nose, and a star-shaped scar on one cheek which marked permanently the place where a neuronic whip had once struck hie

'I am,' said Dr Urth in a thin, tenor voice 'And you are Inspector Davenport'

The Inspector presented his credentials and said, The University recoist'

'So you said when you called reeably His features were thick, his nose was a snubby button, and over his solasses

'I shall get to the point Dr Urth I presume you have visited the Moon'

Dr Urth, who had brought out a bottle of ruddy liquid and two glasses, just a little the worse for dust, fro pile of book-films, said with sudden brusqueness, 'I have never visited the Moon, Inspector I never intend to! Space travel is foolishness I don't believe in it' Then, in softer tones, 'Sit down, sir, sit down Have a drink'

Inspector Davenport did as he was told and said, 'But you're an'

'Extraterrologist Yes I'o there Good lord, I don't have to be a time traveler to qualify as a historian, do I?' He sat down, and a broad smile impressed itself upon his round face once more as he said, 'Now tell me what's on your mind'

'I have co, 'to consult you in a case of murder'

'Murder? What have I to do with murder?' This murder Dr Urth, was on the Moon'

'Astonishing'

'It'sIt's unprecedented, Dr Urth In the fifty years since the Lunar Dominion has been established, ships have blown up and spacesuits have sprung leaks Men have boiled to death on sun-side, frozen on dark-side, and suffocated on both sides There have been deaths by falls, which, considering lunar gravity, is quite a trick But in all that time, not one man has been killed on the Moon as the result of another man's deliberate act of violence-till now' Dr Urth said, 'Hoas it done?'

'A blaster The authorities were on the scene within the hour through a fortunate set of circuainst the Moon's surface You kno far a flash can be seen against the night-side The pilot notified Luna City and landed In the process of circling back, he swears that he justoff Upon landing, he discovered a blasted corpse and footprints'

The flash of light,' said Dr Urth, 'you suppose to be the firing blaster'

That's certain The corpse was fresh Interior portions of the body had not yet frozen The footprints belonged to two people Careful roups of so differently sized spaceboots In the main, they led to craters GC-3 and GC-5, a pair of-'

'1 a lunar craters,' said Dr Urth pleasantly

'Umm In any case, GC-3 contained footprints that led to a rift in the crater wall, within which scraps of hardened pumice were found X-ray diffraction patterns showed-'

'Singing Bells,' put in the extraterrologist in great excitement 'Don't tell me this murder of yours involves

Singing 'Bells!'

'What if it does?' demanded Davenport blankly

'I have one A University expedition uncovered it and presented it to me in return for-Come, Inspector, I must show it to you'