Richard’s Comments (group member since Mar 02, 2014)

Richard’s comments from the Sci-Fi, fantasy and speculative Indie Authors Review group.

Welcome to the group Khira, Louise, everyone else who has joined recently and everyone who I already know will be joining in the future (among other things, we deal with time travel here!)

A year or two ago this was a busy little group—full of good ideas, lots of fun too—but, to be honest, it’s been pretty quiet for some while. Of course, there’s nothing to stop one or two of the more enterprising newer members in particular from revving it up again and bringing it back to life. Feel free!

* * *

__Professor Bae wasn't really dead of course. Sure, he'd put on a real Oscar-winning performance, desperately windmilling his arms around, then sagging to one side with his tongue sticking out of his mouth and all that - I almost applauded. But something I, Ed and Benj all remembered, but none of the others there knew, is that he has this weird party trick where he can hold his breath for minutes at a time: picture him sitting cross-legged on a bottle-strewn carpet, cheered on by a ring of half-drunken students, with his face turning blue inside a polythene bag - it's a real show-stopper at house-parties I can tell you. (Talented guy our Professor Bae: he can also pull the smallest toe on each foot completely outwards, which is a truly horrible thing to see.)
__Unfortunately, though, Johnson did remember it. "Nice try Prof," he leered, handing me a knife instead, and I wondered if Bae had any other neat tricks up his sleeve which even I didn't know about - like getting-stabbed-by-a-private-eye-and-not-dying for example.
__Meanwhile, the countdown had started up again: less than two minutes until New Hawaii was blown to kingdom come. I was studying the screen intently, something I'd seen there had been nagging at my mind all along. I mean, there just had to be something wrong - the screen itself, or the timer, or the bomb - this just has to be fake, I was thinking, it can't possibly be real...
__Ahhh, home, New Hawaii; for a moment or two my mind lingered back there among its palm trees, sunshine - and noisy overcrowded beaches. That is the one thing wrong with it as a planet: a sort of paradise not so long ago, its very allure has drawn people from all over that region of the Galaxy and the population, as populations do, has already climbed way up into the billions. I remember it the way it was in the old days: you could go for a morning run and have miles of unspoilt beach all to yourself. Well, not any more. These days you can hardly move for sunbathers, souvenir shops, hotdog stands - and traffic. That's the latest craze all along Waikiki: motorised surfboards, an abomination which to any true Hawaiian is an insult to the very spirit of surfing. On a bad day out there it's like being in heavy traffic inland; I thought back to that RV I'd seen just before this whole Red Herring case broke over me - I mean, an RV! On surfboards! During rush hour you even have to queue for a wave, irritably twiddling your thumbs like in a nose-to-tail jam on the highway, and the last time I went out, just the day before I left for Planet X, I even spotted this guy at the wheel of a furniture delivery van (yeah, I know. It was this big!) waiting for the next free space on a breaker, when two sponge-wielding characters moved in on shabby boards of their own and started soaping his windshield with a "Gonna stop us or what?" expression on their faces.
__If it gets any worse, I was thinking, people are going to start heading out to found yet another new colony, another new Hawaii, and the whole process will happen all over again. I can see it now: Even Newer Hawaii they'll call it, an imitation of an imitation of the original old Hawaii back on Earth. But then, doesn't that pretty much sum up the entire history of the human race...
__My mind suddenly snapped back to the present - and I smiled: I had our Red Herring Killer in the bag. "Pineapple!" I shouted this time - fruit-code for grabbing anyone in the vicinity called Johnson and pinning them face-down in the dirt - which Brenda took care of while her Galactopol boys tidied up the rest of the gang. A second later the bomb-countdown reached Zero and the screen briefly glared an eyeball-searing white, then filled with dramatic-looking static. Not bad, I thought, for an amateur, almost convincing. But not quite.
__"And New Hawaii?" said Brenda, eyeing me calmly. "Still there I trust?"
__"Safe as houses. There was no bomb, it was just a piece of film, all of it fake."
__Johnson spat out a mouthful of dirt. "How d'ya guess?"
__"I walked back through it all in my mind: Aloha Stadium, New Honolulu's streets, Waikiki, the big surf rolling in. And then I realised: no surfing RVs, no furniture vans - just surfers with the wind in their hair the way it ought to be. The way it used to be in fact: that footage was shot some time ago, maybe years ago." I looked down at him. "But then, that always was your weakness I remember: details never were your strong suit."

* * *

So we got him in the end, laid poor Silas Jacobs to rest in peace, then stayed on as star witnesses in the trial. But this story has a disturbing postscript - a real unsatisfying sting in its tail.
__Grant and Wadas made the formal arrest, since Silas's murder was on their patch, and Johnson was duly found guilty right there on Planet X. Which was fine with just about everybody - including the Red Herring Killer himself. You see, Planet X (as I mentioned somewhere along the way) has this peculiar policy on sentencing: punishments are allocated entirely at random. Any crime can get you any sentence at all: shoplifting, say, or breaking into a car, can land you with anything from a token fine to the death penalty. It's an experimental programme, the idea being to make potential burglers pause, with one leg over the window sill, and think to themselves before slipping into your house, "Do I feel lucky tonight, or not? Is a clapped-out hi-fi and a bunch of crummy brass candlesticks really worth the electric chair?"
__Which is why, of course, Johnson lured us there in the first place with his second murder: to get his revenge certainly, get caught probably, then take his chances. And you know what? Well what can I tell ya, for the first time in his miserable life he did finally get lucky: he got five years. Yep, you heard me right, just five short years for the cold-blooded murder of two innocents. And, as you may have guessed yourself already, this whole case I've been telling you about happened exactly five years ago...
__Brenda just called: he was released right on time this morning. He's out there again, somewhere, right now.

__To understand what happened next, I'm going to have to tell you a bit more about Private Eye School all those years ago. I'd kinda hoped I wouldn't need to, but can see now that the Johnson case - and Johnson himself - just isn't going to make complete sense without it. So it's finally time to come clean: you see, it was me (or I reckon so anyway) yours truly, the one and only Luka Palakiko, who was responsible for creating our Red Herring Killer in the first place.
__The reason I haven't told you much about PI School until now is that there's a bit of a stigma attached to it; not everyone (including me) likes to admit they've been there. PIs who just become PIs - ex-cops a lot of them, going into the business after retiring early from the force - look down on PIs who went to PI college. It's plain snobbery because a lot of its graduates are every bit as good as (many a whole lot better than) the unschooled ones. Sure, the unschooled ones will tell you that they have been to college - the college of hard knocks, the university of real life itself - and, it's true, a PI School can't make you streetwise; but the teaching there is superb, the instructors all ex-gumshoes themselves with hundreds of years experience between them. Also, it's not just about classwork either - in fact, far from it; you spend as much time out there on the streets doing cases as inside with your knees crammed under a desk.
__...which is precisely where Cedric Johnson came unstuck. In the classroom, doing theory, he had no problems; but as soon as he went out into the field to do the practical stuff, he'd start to flounder. Just didn't understand people, is what I reckon (quite some handicap that, for a budding PI, you've got to admit).
__Apart from training to be private dicks, we were typical enough students I guess: four of us - me, Johnson and two other guys - sharing a shabby apartment. We were young, green and without a cent between the four of us most of the time; but we got along just fine and had some real laughs during the first two years. I remember we were so poor we didn't even have a cooker for instance; what I did have though was an unregistered (i.e. completely illegal) blaster, and one time around midnight, hungry after an evening drinking beer the way students all over the Galaxy often are, we stumbled in and I decided to make everybody toast. I put the blaster at its lowest setting, barely above zero, and the beam at its widest spread; then, egged on by the other three, attempted to toast slices of bread. Well I tell you, I toasted the furniture, the wallpaper, the curtains and the carpet, burned holes in my clothes, singed off my own eyebrows, melted a plastic light fitting, blew out one of the windows - then shambled off to bed of course, the way students all over the Galaxy also do, saying, "I'll sort it all out in the morning."
__Where it went bad, though, was during our final year. There was one particular section of the course - 303: Evaluating Clues - which included a sort of murder case: the "murder victim" was a plastic mannikin our instructor laid out for us, complete with lots of clues - there was a feather in its mouth, it had a rubber-duck tattoo on the sole of one foot, smoke particles in its ear...and, yeah, those are kinda familiar aren't they? He also left a trail of clues through the streets leading to the "murderer's hideout", some of them real clues, but most irrelevant non-clues - i.e. red herrings. The trail led through an empty building formerly owned by the Kompleat Kleening Company, there was a park bench by a fountain, a chocolate factory...you get the idea I think.
__Anyway, most of the class passed the test with only a few hints from the instructor along the way, and found the "murderer" (a stuffed toy animal "hiding" in a wood outside of town). A few didn't make it though and ran out of time; I did the best of us, got there quickest and without any help from the instructor at all. In fact, looking back now, that was the day I realised I wasn't just good, but was a natural, had a real eye for it.
__And Johnson? Total humiliation: he simply could not tell the real clues from the red herrings. The instructor had made some of the non-clues easy, glaringly obvious, jokes almost: the "victim" had a red liquid in its throat, there was a red tattoo on its back, a red butterfly in its stomach, red banknotes in its pocket, but these herrings just sailed (or I suppose swam) clean over Johnson's head. The final red herring of all was a plain joke, our instructor's way of saying to us all, "Well, you've followed the trail this far, guys, so have this last one on me!": it was a smoked herring tied to a tree - a kipper in other words, which is what "red herring" originally meant. Everyone else laughed at the joke and carried straight on past, but not Johnson. He spent the rest of the afternoon wandering around the local smoke-house and kipper factory where they process and pack the things, convinced that's where our teddy-bear murderer was hiding. He just didn't get the joke at all, and even back at our desks next day had to have it carefully explained to him, several times over. As the penny finally dropped (face now bright red, ironically enough) his humiliation in front of the rest of the class was, in retrospect, an awful thing to see. Worse was to come though: he showered, he changed all his clothes, but couldn't get rid of that oily-fishy smokehouse smell; even weeks later the rest of the class still got a faint whiff of kippers - his humiliation relived and renewed, over and over again, every time he walked into the room.
__And that, I guess, is where we kinda parted company; I'd discovered my true calling in life, but for him it was only failure and ridicule. Later, he became more solitary and I slowly realised we were no longer friends. None of which, though, really explains what tipped his mind over the edge into obsession - and here's where I make my confession. It was just a joke, a throwaway remark, made as we got back (as usual) from the local bar one evening; hefting my blaster I said to the other three, "So, lads, what's your favourite chef going to prepare for your delight tonight - kippers on toast?" That's all it was, that's all I said, just one of those dumb-ass things you say when you're drunk and twenty years old. I could have bitten off my own tongue as soon as the words were out of my mouth, but it was too late. Without a word, Johnson went to his room. A week later he moved out of the apartment and during what was left of the course the remaining three of us saw very little of him.
__Even then I had no idea of the damage I'd done - until two years later of course, when I heard that Johnson had returned to the School and committed his first murder. To this day I almost feel like it was me who pulled the trigger.
__And now here he is, trying to run the film through a second time - the same murder-hunt, all the same clues, all the same red herrings, but just him and me this time. That, of course, also partly explains why he brought me here: back then, twenty years ago, Planet X was still being laid out - for a while it was the biggest construction project anywhere in the Galaxy - as students we'd all read about it, fantasised about going there when we were rich, when we'd made it big. I'm guessing it, too, must have gradually become part of Johnson's obsession: a sort of Promised Land to him, the one place he knew of where anything - even rewriting your own past - might be possible.

__"It was Johnson," said Grant. "Kinda weird the way it happened though."
__I shook my head, "Johnson was with me," and gingerly tapped the end of my bloodied nose as evidence.
__"He was inside the Kompleat Kleening building all the time," said Wadas, "up on the second floor. We waited five minutes, then followed you in there - went up the first staircase and suddenly the joint was full of Johnsons. There musta been a dozen of them, just the freakiest thing you ever saw."
__"But the place was completely empt- " That locked door of course, the one I'd walked straight past: it had been a double-bluff, a "red herring" which wasn't red at all - he'd been waiting behind it all the time with. . .well, with what exactly? A crowd of animatronic lookalikes? And up in the sky a couple of miles away meanwhile, punching me in the face, yet another lookalike? This was more than just an ordinary obsession, the guy must have spent the whole twenty years since our college days planning, preparing, building. . .
__"These didn't look like animatronics though," said Grant. "We reckon he had himself cloned."
__Cloned. Illegal almost everywhere and hideously expensive, but just about possible. So the whole thing - the four stiffs trying to access the crime scene, then the Kompleat Kleening building, the aircar and now these clones - had been a diversion, a way of getting his hands on Brenda.
__But how had he known Brenda would even be along on this case, she'd been out of my life for years until Bigtime brought us back together. He couldn't have known, so if he'd been planning his revenge for the past two decades he must have altered the script at the last moment, seen in Brenda his chance to inflict an extra humiliation.
__I grinned to myself at that - Grant and Wadas were looking at me oddly, but the mere thought of our nut-job tangling with Brenda was ridiculous. Johnson ( if he was even still in one piece by now, which I doubted) had just made his first big mistake.

* * *

To understand that grin, there are one or two things you need to know about the Girl From Galactopol.
__Brenda Francine Cassiopeia Murchison. To look at she always reminds me of the dames in those 1950s cigarette commercials, or the cheerful-housewife-hoovering-carpet ads they used to plaster across roadside billboards in those days: pretty as a picture in tight sweater and slacks, wide smile with two rows of perfect white teeth. She throws herself into everything with total uninhibited enthusiasm; and, a born giggler, collapses into helpless laughter at the slightest excuse. We were staying in a cheap hotel one time, when a mouse ran across the carpet; most of the women I've ever known would have been straight up on a chair screaming their heads off, but not Brenda - she just found it completely hilarious, named the mouse "Mickey" as I remember and left a cheese sandwich out for it.
__But in the field, out on a case, I've got to know the other Brenda too - she's good, even by Galactopol's standards, and they only recruit the very best of the best; when the heat's really on, that infectious giggle disappears and you're left with the calmest, coolest, head in the business. Her ability with sidearms is legendary - I mean, I'm a six-out-of-six crack shot myself, but she's better: ordinary hand guns, gravity guns, lasers, handheld particle-beam weapons (up to and including the infamous Higgs). Another time, on a practice range, she spotted a large bird that had got itself caught on a wire fence, and shot the wire away with a single blip of laser light - one-handed, and without a telescopic sight, from more than two hundred yards. Afterwards, watching the bird flap away, she didn't say a word, just did that thing gunslingers do in old movies: blew imaginary smoke from the end of the barrel, twirled the gun round her finger once and then down into its holster. That's Brenda.
__Oh yeah, and I nearly forgot to mention that she's also a black belt at "invisible hand" (and the less you know about that, probably, the better). For a moment there I almost caught myself feeling sorry for our Red Herring Killer.
__"We have a fair idea where he's taken her though," Wadas was saying, "and you, we figure, are the clue."
__"Place up at the north end of the island - gotta be," Grant indicated my, er, costume. "A factory, Snow Goddess Ice Creams- "
__"And, don't tell me, they make a brand called Chocolate Moustache?"
__"A milkshake, famous all over this part of the Galaxy. Just the best."
__"Well, don't worry," I said, "I doubt we're exactly going to find Brenda tied to the railroad tracks or anything."
__Barely skimming the treetops, we spotted several more obvious red herrings on our way out there - a gate into a field left open, wheel tracks in mud matching the ones we'd seen earlier that day - but then, all these red herring "clues" were starting to look obvious by now; after a while, I was finding, you get your eye in even with this sort of stuff. So I left the detective work to the detectives, while I just sat in the back seat and thought some more about Brenda: I reckoned there was actually a fair chance we'd find her tied to some sort of railway line - as well as cowboy films, she's also a fan of those early, flickering, black-and-white silent ones and, I hadn't any doubt at all, would absolutely love being the girl tied to the rails. I could see her hamming it up outrageously: wrists and ankles in chains she could have slipped out of in five seconds flat, screaming silently and mouthing, "Help! Help!" at the imaginary camera.
__"Well this is it," said Wadas, as Grant put us down in full view of the main entrance; no point in creeping about, we'd already decided, since Johnson knew full well we were coming. The idea this time was for me to go straight in through the front, while Wadas headed for a loading bay round the back and Grant busted her way in from the roof. Although Snow Goddess was huge - a sprawling complex of mostly windowless blocks linked by catwalks and a forest of stainless-steel pipes - I figured Johnson would lead me through the maze.
__The main doors led into their front office where the receptionist (remarkably slim, I remember thinking, for someone who works in an ice cream factory) was sitting at her desk, and as I walked across the carpet I suddenly wondered what in the world I was supposed to say to her. "Had any murderers in today?" maybe? I looked around: there was no way he could have brought Brenda through here in any case. . . was there?
__And that was when I noticed the fish. Behind the receptionist's head, partly set into the wall, was a giant fishtank and I stood, dumbfounded, watching what was swimming about in it. They couldn't be; I mean, they were red, sure, but you couldn't keep a school of those in an aquarium, could you? And even if you could, how had he got his hands on these, how had Johnson organised all this? You don't get red herrings in real life, so had he taken some of the ordinary kind and dyed them red? Or were these more, but tiny, animatronics? Or had he even, bearing in mind the depth of this nut's obsession, been breeding red ones - which would have taken years and years - just for this one joke, for this single moment? As I stared in at them all swimming about, with them staring back at me out of the side of the tank, I couldn't help thinking to myself: this guy should have been a stage-set or window-display designer, what a terrible waste of talent.
__The wide-eyed receptionist, meanwhile, was already phoning Building Security - and catching a glimpse of myself reflected in the tank, I remembered that I was still painted bright blue from head to toe and wearing a dress. The place was full of cameras, of course, recording this sight for posterity - and also, if this next bit of the story went very badly wrong, for the TV news in every home right across the Galaxy.
__Without a word, I pushed my way through a side door and found myself in a corridor.

__"We already interviewed them," said Wadas. "Nobody saw a thing."
__"And," added Grant, "none of them needs the money badly enough to help a double-murderer. From the lack of bloodstains we know Jacobs was killed off-site and brought here already dead - and you'd think Johnson woulda needed help with that - but every one of them, including the robots, have got cast-iron alibis."
__"The security cams?"
__"Zip there too. In fact, we can't figure out how he placed the body here and arranged all his fake clues around it - the footage shows nothing at all."
__"Not even on thermal," Wadas shrugged, "so he didn't even use cloaking. It's spooky."
__"Well someone must have helped him," said Brenda. "There's the animatronics too - that's skilled work."
__I nodded, but Wadas was right: it was odd, like there was something obvious here we weren't seeing. Anyway, my instinct - and what I actually remembered of Johnson himself - was telling me that he'd definitely be working alone.
__Something else had just struck me. "I reckon there must be two different kinds of clue here. Think about it: he wants to keep me on this case, obviously, so all these red herrings may be fine as revenge but in among them he'd have to leave some helpful clues as well, designed to keep me on his trail despite the red herrings."
__"And there's all the random stuff," Brenda reminded me, "like the dropped napkin that time. So that's three kinds."
__"In fact," I added, "better make that four. Johnson's no genius, he'll make mistakes along the way as well. So here's what we've got: there are deliberate red herrings left by Johnson; there are helpful clues also left by Johnson to keep me on his tail; there are random things which look like clues but are nothing to do with Johnson at all; and then there are mistakes Johnson makes - genuine clues."
__There was silence for a bit after that. This case was already becoming the most confusing in the entire history of crime.

***

Kompleat Kleaning (and I do wish companies would stop doing that) was in a two-storey firetrap on the outskirts of town which had "insurance scam" written all over it. My instinct had been doing the talking again: that cleaning crew, it was telling me this time, is one of the helpful clues Johnson arranged to keep me after him - that's where he wants me to go next.
__As we pulled up outside, we took turns at reeling off all the possible red herrings we could see just from where we were sitting even before we got out of the car:
__"Tire tracks from some kind of six-wheeler," said Wadas.
__"Bush with broken twigs," said Grant.
__"Pizza box," said Brenda, shooting her arm in the air again. "This is fun!"
__"Broken window!"
__"Missing drain cover!"
__"Pigeon!" I shouted as one flew directly over the building.
__"Pigeon?" Brenda was looking at me with a What? expression. "You think maybe the guy trains birds now?"
__"Carrier pigeon," I deadpanned. "His way of saying, 'Getting the message yet, Luka?' "
__I was getting his message though and, sitting there, suddenly realized one more thing. "I'm going in there alone."
__"No way, cops in first," Grant turned around in the driver's seat to look me in the eye. "You saw what he did to Silas Jacobs - this joint could be booby-trapped or anything."
__"No it won't," I looked out at the flight of wooden steps leading up to the main doorway. " I'm the one person in the whole Galaxy he doesn't want dead - if I did somehow get killed on this case, I'd probably become even more popular and famous than I am already." I opened the car door. "You three keep your heads down - particularly you," I gave Brenda's arm a squeeze, "I reckon he'd just love to take a pot-shot at you. Me though, I could walk in there blindfolded and he wouldn't touch a hair on my head."
__They didn't like it of course, but could see I was right. So in I went.
__The building was deserted, as I'd been expecting: "Kompleat Kleaning" didn't exist - had never existed - and those four goons who'd showed up weren't really trying to access the crime scene at all; they were robots most likely, bribed or reprogrammed, and the whole charade just a way of leading me here. I drew my blaster...then put it away again, reminding myself that firepower was the one thing I wasn't going to need.
__I went from room to room, which was eerie in the way all deserted buildings are, but Johnson wasn't in any of them. That was also as I'd been expecting; our killer was where he intended to stay all the way along: one step ahead of yours truly, all the way along to...well, to where exactly? That was the one thing I hadn't figured out yet, what kind of Big Finish, what kind of ritual humiliation, our double-murderer had in mind for me: something as public as possible, that's all I knew, something with the whole Galaxy watching.
__More classic red herrings: a single fingerprint on a dusty banister, a locked door (I carried on straight past, didn't even try to force it), a dripping tap in a washroom, the same broken windowpane but seen from the inside this time... There'll be something here though, I was thinking, to take me on to the next stage of the game. As I opened door after door and peered into each musty room, I also realized why he'd brought me here: to separate me from the other three of course; it was just me, working alone, he wanted on his tail. That had been clever.
__I made it all the way up to the top floor, out on to the roof...and found myself looking at an empty aircar: the driver's door was open, the keys hanging invitingly in the dash - no instructions, nothing to tell me where I was supposed to fly this thing. But I didn't even break step; just got in, took her up and sped away out over the bustling city.
__It got a lot more exciting after that. Before I'd even crossed the last few blocks and then trees and open fields beyond, another car slotted in up ahead of me keeping a steady half-mile distance.

__Rojas lifted a bin-liner on to one of the empty tables and pulled out a bundle of clothes. I stared down at them in stunned silence for a few moments - I'd recognised them immediately.
__Brenda was looking from the clothes to me and back again. "What?"
__"These are mine." I lifted a worn leather jacket, turned it first one way then the other. "Or at least, they're imitations - almost identical to what I was wearing myself twenty years ago."
__"Johnson's making fun of you?"
__"That's what this case is all about - the lookalike body, the impossible clues: he wants to make me look like an idiot."
__Det. Grant gingerly lifted a pair of voluminous bright yellow flared trousers and held them out at arm's length. "Well, he's making a pretty good job of it," she was measuring the flared bottoms with an expert eye, "these have gotta be twelve inches at lea-"
__"They were all the rage back then," I said quickly, "everybody was wearing them. Everybody."
__"You should have seen him on the dance floor," said Brenda, picking a huge medallion from the pile and swinging it round and round on its chain.
__I eyed Rojas who was struggling to keep a straight face himself. "Anything in the pockets?"
__"A bunch of keys, one with a numbered plastic tag attached..." I could see the number on it: 2216 "...and some money - not local, it's all in Centauran dollars. No weapons."
__"You mean actual, old-style, cash?"
__"Sure, notes and coins. There are a few places where they do still use it." Rojas passed across a manila envelope and, as I tipped the contents out on to a tabletop, everybody crowded in for a closer look.
__"Spondulicks," said Grant, her eyes bugging out.
__"Dough," whimpered Wadas, mopping his brow.
__"Lolly," whispered Brenda, visibly moved.
__"Loot," I heard myself croak. I mean, seeing the stuff in old films is one thing, but none of us had ever had the chance to handle real live moolah in the flesh.
__"So," said Wadas at last with an appreciative sigh, reluctantly handing back the notes, "anything you've seen so far mean anything to you?"
__"Just one," I said. "That plastic tag - 2216 was the year Johnson was failed out of school."
__"So maybe this is the key to the whole case," suggested Brenda, picking it up, "if that's the way this nut's mind works."
__"Or just another red herring. It looks like a locker key, or for a safety deposit box."
__"That's what we thought too," said Grant, "but we've checked the spaceport, all the monorail terminals, every bank vault right around the planet - and come up empty."
__Brenda was looking thoughtful though. "Then there's the butterfly in the stomach - is he saying, 'Getting a bit nervous Luka?' "
__"The lenses too. Telling me my eyes need testing."
__"Ah, those," said Rojas. "I forgot to tell you about those - here, put them in."
__I recoiled. I mean, I'm not squeamish by nature, but they'd been taken out of a dead guy's eyes.
__"They're interactive," said Wadas, "retinal-pattern recognition." He took one himself and held it up to the light. "None of us see a thing, but I've a feeling you might."
__I'd already guessed as much myself. "But how would Johnson get hold of my retinal ID?" Swallowing my reluctance though, I put them in, blinked once...and found the Red Herring Killer himself standing directly between me and Rojas.
__For a second or two nothing happened, as if he was studying me, waiting for me to react, then he bowed suddenly and grinned. "Welcome to Planet X, Luka. I won't try to shake hands for obvious reasons - good to see you again though, so to speak, after all these years." I examined the familiar face, now two decades older than I remembered it: thinner and with an odd expression, but nothing in the hazel eyes that said "murderer" or "madman" - just the ordinary face of the ordinary student I once knew.
__"Him?" asked Brenda.
__I nodded - was this live, or a recording? Either way, there was something strange about his manner, the way he paused for a fraction too long between sentences, or maybe-
__"...and of course..." He was already speaking again, it was obviously a recording. "...being the smartest PI in the entire Universe, you'll have guessed exactly why you're here..."
__To set the record straight, I thought to myself, or straight in his eyes at least. To show the School they failed the wrong man.
__"To play a little game, Luka, like we did when we were students, sitting up all night with a few beers playing board games. Except this time..."
__Except this time he wins every point, every round.
__He was telling me nothing I hadn't figured out myself already, so I reeled off another shoal of red herrings for the others: "There's a pink carnation in his left lapel, the bottom button is missing from his jacket, he's wearing contact lenses of his own, untinted, and in his right hand he's holding a bell - brass, old-school...some kind of handbell."
__"He's saying, 'Anything here ring a bell?" said Brenda immediately, shooting her hand in the air like a schoolkid at a desk. "I'm starting to get the hang of this stuff."
__"...so beat me if you can, Luka Palakiko. But if..."
__I'd heard enough, took the lenses out and handed them back to Rojas, then glanced down at my double again and shuddered: if I ever fall off a boat into a sea full of mako sharks, I reckon this was pretty much how I'll look afterwards. "Where was Jacobs found?"
__"A place called The Lagoon," said Grant, "ten minutes away."
__That didn't help my mood either; don't ask me why, but words ending in "-oon" always give me the creeps: bassoon, buffoon, loon...
__"Pantaloon?" suggested Grant, hoisting the yellow twelve-inchers high; I hadn't realised I'd been thinking out loud.
__"Macaroon," added Brenda with a giggle. Is there anything, I wondered, anything at all, which this woman doesn't find just hilarious?

***

The Lagoon was

__Wadas was watching me closely. "You know who did this?"
__"The Red Herring Killer," said Brenda. "I always did have the feeling we hadn't seen the last of that creep."
__I nodded. "A real nut-job."
__The Red Herring Killer, a face from both our pasts. "It was a news reporter on Waynesworld who christened him that," I explained. "Everywhere he went he left irrelevant clues, like the ones in classic crime novels: a discarded driving glove, or a coffee cup with traces of lipstick on the rim, or a button which could only have come from a twenty-first-century space cadet's tunic, or a footprint in mud showing the brand name and shoe size. And I'm not talking just one or two clues either, he scattered them about like confetti."
__"Sounds pretty smart to me," said Grant, "covering your tracks with...well, tracks."
__"Sure was, it made it a nightmare trying to follow him - we spent most of our time figuring out which were the genuine clues and which the red herrings."
__"And it got worse as we went along," added Brenda. "After you've been looking for him for months on end, you start to 'see' clues where there aren't any, real or fake. Some guy in some random hamburger joint drops a napkin on the floor, say; five minutes later you walk past it yourself: 'He was here!' you're shouting, 'We just missed him again!' We nearly went nuts ourselves."
__There was silence for a second or two as Planet X's finest began to see just what they were up against. Meanwhile, I cast my own mind back to another time, another world. "His real name's Johnson, Cedric Johnson, and it all started twenty years ago when he was failed out of Private Eye School on Waynesworld..."
__It was Wadas's turn to snort. "There's a Private Eye School? What do they teach - how to lurk in doorways wearing a raincoat?"
__"...and on his final report card it said: 'Too easily led astray by red herrings.' A year later he goes back there and ices the guy who wrote the report."
__"That crime scene must have been a dilly."
__"The local cops had never seen anything like it, irrelevant 'clues' everywhere you looked: theatre-ticket stubs, three stopped grandfather clocks, more tyre tracks across the croquet lawn than you'd know what to do with and at least fifteen different plausible murder weapons. It looked like a gigantic version of Cluedo."
__"So they called in Galactopol," said Brenda. Which is, of course, how I met her in the first place - still a rookie detective back then on her very first case.
__"And you?" asked Grant. "Where do you fit into all this?"
__I squirmed a bit, face reddening. “They called me in to help as well. I knew him...I'd been in his class."
__"You?" smirked Wadas. "The famous Luka Pala-"
__"It's a perfectly respectable institution," I said testily. "Fully accredited."
__Happily Dr Rojas came to my rescue at that moment, clearing his throat to draw our attention back to what was left of Silas Jacobs. And what he showed us next shut all of us up.

__Planet X is a holiday planet - well, in a sense. This is the twenty-third century and anything's now possible, we can go anyplace we want, do pretty much anything we like; our robots and androids wash the dishes and take out the trash, while for most of its citizens the Galaxy has become a kind of paradise. Which is fine, except that the problem with paradise is that it gets pretty tedious after a while - heavens are bland. In a paradise, hells are what people want - so much so that, where there are none we even try to create them ourselves (my own pre-Bigtime drinking days are proof of that).
__So where better than a place like Planet X to get away from it all? A fortnight's vacation in Hell recharges the batteries and soul alike, makes it possible to get through another undemanding year in Heaven.
__"We have every kind here you could think up I reckon." While Grant was doing the driving, Wadas was doing the filling-in. "I mean, some clients do prefer a traditional hell alright - demons armed with tridents, lakes of fire, plenty of screaming in the background - but we cater for everybody. A lot go for the B-movie theme: creeping about in cemeteries with ghouls and vampires."
__"Anything you won't do?"
__"Actual torture, we draw the line at that."
__"I like the sound of the Budget Package Holiday," said Brenda, glancing up from the files. "That looks like fun."
__"One of our most popular. You arrive to find your hotel still only half-built, with concrete-mixers and tipper trucks everywhere; the balcony looks out on to a flyover and the nearest beach is ten miles away. On the second day you get mugged, on the third diarrhoea..."
__"Love it!" She actually clapped her hands in delight. "And pubic hair in the shower?"
__"Comes as standard."
__There is virtual reality of course - and, sure, you can be in Hell at the press of a button using that - but it's never quite fulfilled the promise it showed early on. While you're in it it is brilliant, convincing, totally real, but afterwards something else creeps in: way down at the bottom of your mind somewhere, at some reptile- or fish-brain level, you weren't fooled at all, you knew all along that none of it was really happening and the memory you're left with is tinged with that falseness; it's like getting back home from a vacation and finding that all your holiday snaps now look like they were faked.
__Which is why, even in this twenty-third century of ours, we still have these theme-park planets, real bricks-and-mortar fantasies.
__"Morgue," announced Grant from the front, expertly slewing the aircar down on to a rooftop.

__Catching the next wave I headed in, wondering what sort of info could be too sensitive for an ordinary phone line. Were the tax people finally on to me? Or maybe the gun department (my blaster was unregistered, a felony on New Hawaii). More likely though it was just another reporter looking for an interview; since returning from Bigtime, the story of my exploits there had gone right around the planet - I'd done TV shows, opened supermarkets and seen my own ugly mug plastered across half the billboards from here to New Maui. Which meant, of course, that every small-time crook and philandering spouse this side of the Crab Nebula now recognised me on sight - not exactly the most brilliant career move for a supposedly undercover private eye. Brenda, as usual, just thought the whole situation hilarious and asked whether I'd ever considered cosmetic surgery.
__My board slid smoothly out on to the white sand. All the same, what I really needed was a new case. Since stepping off the ship from Bigtime I'd been resting up - seeing plenty of Brenda and lazing on the beach - but to tell you the truth, after only a couple of months of that my feet were already getting pretty itchy. What I could do with is a new challenge, I was thinking: an incredibly rich heiress, say, a trillionaire's daughter gone missing on a paradise planet...the distraught parents...the huge fee...
__"Aka'aka called," said Brenda, shattering this pleasant train of thought the moment I walked in: Aliioa Aka'aka is New Hawaii's Chief of Police. "The cops on Planet X have found a body."
__"A body?" That threw me - I'm a PI, I usually track down living ones not dead ones. "So what does a body have to do with me?"
__She eyed me levelly, expression unreadable. Then: "Luka...it is you."


***

Hey, and I'm still two meals short. Fi-i-ish!

Fish!

Fish!

Fish!

Fish!

Never figured out how to use a can opener more like. That's nothing to be ashamed of though - there are support groups you can join and everything.

It's a game, a lot like Pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey. You have to be pretty bored to play it though.

You mean you've never found moustache-hair in a can of tuna? Puts you right off.

Maybe, although I've heard someone stole all the police dogs as well. What we really need is a space-going private eye on the case. . .oh yeah, I wonder what ever happened to him. . .

Kept from us - probably by the same people who are sitting on the everlasting lightbulb and instant spray-from-the-can soundproofing for rooms.

Hákon wrote: "Now if one could also harness the energy in their bark."

I've been doing a few back-of-the-envelope calculations and reckon that the amount of energy released (in Joules) by a single average bark is exactly enough to open a back door, wait for a minute while a dog goes out into the garden and relieves itself, then close the door again when it's come back in. All we lack is the technology.