"Henry Kuttner - Private Eye" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kuttner Henry)

“As tricky a case as I’ve ever seen,” the sociologist remarked. “If we
can make a homicide charge stick on Sam Clay, I’ll be a little surprised.”

The tracer engineer twirled a dial and watched the figures on the
screen repeat their actions. One—Sam Clay—snatched the letter cutter
from a desk and plunged it into the other man’s heart. The victim fell down
dead. Clay started back in apparent horror. Then he dropped to his knees
beside the twitching body and said wildly that he didn’t mean it. The body
drummed its heels upon the rug and was still.

“That last touch was nice,” the engineer said.

“Well, I’ve got to make the preliminary survey,” the sociolo-gist
sighed, settling in his dictachair and placing his fingers on the keyboard. “I
doubt if I’ll find any evidence. However, the analysis can come later.
Where’s Clay now?”

“His mouthpiece put in a habeas mens.”

“I didn’t think we’d be able to hold him. But it was worth trying.
Imagine, just one shot of scop and he’d have told the truth. Ah, well. We’ll
do it the hard way, as usual. Start the tracer, will you? It won’t make sense
till we run it chronologically, but one must start somewhere. Good old
Blackstone,” the sociolo-gist said, as, on the screen, Clay stood up,
watching the corpse revive and arise, and then pulled the miraculously
clean paper cutter out of its heart, all in reverse.

“Good old Blackstone,” he repeated. “On the other hand, sometimes
I wish I’d lived in Jeffreys’ time. In those days, homicide was homicide.”

****

Telepathy never came to much. Perhaps the developing faculty went
underground in response to a familiar natural law after the new science
appeared omniscience. It wasn’t really that, of course. It was a device for
looking into the past. And it was limited to a fifty-year span; no chance of
seeing the arrows at Agincourt or the homunculi of Bacon. It was sensitive
enough to pick up the “fingerprints” of light and sound waves imprinted on
matter, descramble and screen them, and reproduce the image of what had
happened. After all, a man’s shadow can be photo-graphed on concrete, if
he’s unlucky enough to be caught in an atomic blast. Which is something.
The shadow’s about all here is left.

However, opening the past like a book didn’t solve all problems. It
took generations for the maze of complexities to iron itself out, though
finally a tentative check-and-balance was reached. The right to kill has been
sturdily defended by mankind since Cain rose up against Abel. A good
many idealists quoted, “The voice of thy brother’s blood crieth unto me
from the ground,” but that didn’t stop the lobbyists and the pressure groups.
Magna Carta was quoted in reply. The right to privacy was defended