The Probability Broach by L. Neil Smith Read Free Book Online

something, ha ha. But we don’t want it said we failed to cooperate, do we?” He looked at his watch again.
    “We most certainly don’t,” I chimed. “How about his lab—or is that from watching too many Frankenstein movies? Maybe he was one of those mathematicians who work it out with a—”
    “No, Dr. Meiss did have facilities. I suppose you may examine them.” He peeked again at his watch. “I can scarcely see any objection to that!”
     
    BEALLS LED ME through his outer office, stopping to tell his secretary where he’d be if anybody wanted to know. Anybody important. She looked at me as if to ask whether I knew what I was getting into, but when her boss removed his glasses once again, I winked and patted my coat lightly where the hammer of the forty-one wears out the lining.
    I’ve been accused of lots of things, but never of stupidity. In a business lucky to solve one out of twenty, I get my man about half the time, and, unlike fictional detectives, I’ve never been clubbed from behind or slipped a Mickey Finn. Not yet, anyway. The one time I got burned, some puke was shooting through a tiny window in a fire door, and my miserable .38 couldn’t punch through. I bought the .41 Magnum the day I got out of the hospital.
    Bealls was still watching his watch. With a ninety-minute stall, the busy phone, and his utter delight at getting me into another part of the building, I wasn’t exactly without suspicions. I was the good guy, and couldn’t shoot first, that being the Code of the West or something, but whenever Bealls’s visitors showed up, they weren’t gonna get a chance with that machine gun—not if Smith & Wesson, Inc. had anything to say.
    Vaughn Meiss’s office was a cinder-block cubicle in a nest of cinder-block cubicles along a cinder-block hall, all painted a depressingly familiar government gang-green. Bookcases teetered to the ceiling on all four walls, and a desk heaped with books and papers was crammed into the middle somehow. On the ceiling, over crumbing acoustic tile, he’d taped a Propertarian poster: IRS—IT REALLY STEALS! A small blackboard was covered with much erased squiggles like those in Bealls’s magazines, plus, for a nice human touch, the word “Shit!”
    Bealls ushered me in like a hotel bellboy, turned the keys over, then excused himself—which was honest, people like him need a lot of excusing—to hustle off for “another appointment.” I peeked around the corner and watched him scurry away, staring at his watch.
    I mugged around, wondering if I’d recognize a clue written in Meiss’s academic Sanskrit if it jumped off the board and started chewing on my tie. A quick once-over of the bookcases: fairly predictable—lots of math and physics, a couple of shelves of Propertarian stuff, a little science fiction. No secret panels, mysterious codes, or hollowed-out volumes.
    One strange datum: the desk was piled with histories covering the Revolution and two or three subsequent decades. Bookmarks—campus parking tickets going back to 1983—indicated special interest in Alexander Hamilton, the Federalist Party, and, by golly, Albert Gallatin.
    Another curious thing: in an absolutely jam-packed office, one drawer of the desk, the second on the right, was conspicuously empty, or almost so—a half-empty box of Norma .357 Magnum ammunition, 158-grain hollowpoints; a felt-tip pen bearing the odd inscription LAPORTE PARATRONICS, LTD., LAPORTE, N.A.C., TELECOM GRAY 4-3122; a single pistol cartridge in an unfamiliar caliber marked D & A Auto .476; and—another coin! This one was about the size of a quarter:

    ONE HALF METRIC OUNCE
SILVER 999 FINE
THE LAPORTE INDUSTRIAL BANK, LTD.
     

    The other side was even weirder, a ferocious-looking elder in a Karl Marx beard:

    LYSANDER SPOONER
A.L. 32-110 ARCHITECT OF LIBERTY
     

    These dubious clues in my pocket, I resolved to stop by the city of Laporte after I finished here. If it was the Laporte in Colorado, something definitely