“Do you think Johnny Barefoot knows where she is?”

“I doubt it.”

Pondering, Harvey said, “I’ll bet she tries to call him. I’ll bet he either knows or will know, soon. If we only could manage to put a snoop-circuit on his phone… get his calls routed through here.”

“But the phones,” St. Cyr said wearily. “All it is now—just the gibberish. The interference from Louis.” He wondered what became of Archimedean Enterprises if Kathy was declared unable to manage her affairs, if she was forcibly committed. Very complicated, depending on whether Earth law or—

Harvey was saying, “We can’t find her and we can’t find the body. And meanwhile the Convention’s on, and they’ll nominate that wretched Gam, that creature of Louis’s. And next we know, he’ll be President.” He eyed St. Cyr with antagonism. “So far you haven’t done me much good, Claude.”

“We’ll try all the hospitals. But there’s tens of thousands of them. And if it isn’t in this area it could be anywhere.” He felt helpless. Around and around we go, he thought, and we get nowhere.

Well, we can keep monitoring the TV, he decided. That’s some help.

“I’m going to the Convention,” Harvey announced. “I’ll see you later. If you should come up with something—which I doubt—you can get in touch with me there.” He strode to the door, and a moment later St. Cyr found himself alone.

Doggone it, St. Cyr said to himself. What’ll I do now? Maybe I ought to go to the Convention, too. But there was one more mortuary he wanted to check; his men had been there, but he also wanted to give it a try personally. It was just the sort that Louis would have liked, run by an unctuous individual named, revoltingly, Herbert Schoenheit von Vogelsang, which meant, in German, Herbert Beauty of the Bird’s Song—a fitting name for a man who ran the Beloved Brethren Mortuary in downtown Los Angeles, with branches in Chicago and New York and Cleveland.

When he reached the mortuary, Claude St. Cyr demanded to see Schoenheit von Vogelsang personally. The place was doing a rush business; Resurrection Day was just around the corner and the petite bourgeoisie, who flocked in great numbers to just such ceremonies, were lined up waiting to retrieve their half-lifer relatives.

“Yes sir,” Schoenheit von Vogelsang said, when at last he appeared at the counter in the mortuary’s business office. “You asked to speak to me.”

St. Cyr laid his business card down on the counter; the card still described him as legal consultant for Archimedean Enterprises. “I am Claude St. Cyr,” he declared. “You may have heard of me.”

Glancing at the card, Schoenheit von Vogelsang blanched and mumbled, “I give you my word, Mr. St. Cyr, we’re trying, we’re really trying. We’ve spent out of our own funds over a thousand dollars in trying to make contact with him; we’ve had high-gain equipment flown in from Japan where it was developed and made. And still no results.” Tremulously, he backed away from the counter. “You can come and see for yourself. Frankly, I believe someone’s doing it on purpose; a complete failure like this can’t occur naturally, if you see what I mean.”

St. Cyr said, “Let me see him.”

“Certainly.” The mortuary owner, pale and agitated, led the way through the building into the chill bin, until, at last, St. Cyr saw ahead the casket which had lain in state, the casket of Louis Sarapis. “Are you planning any sort of litigation?” the mortuary owner asked fearfully. “I assure you, we—”

“I’m here,” St. Cyr stated, “merely to take the body. Have your men load it onto a truck for me.”

“Yes, Mr. St. Cyr,” Herb Schoenheit von Vogelsang said in meek obedience; he waved two mortuary employees over and began giving them instructions. “Do you have a truck with you, Mr. St. Cyr?” he asked.

“You may provide it,” St. Cyr said, in a forbidding voice.

Shortly, the body in its casket was loaded onto a mortuary truck, and the driver turned to St. Cyr for instructions.

St. Cyr gave him Phil Harvey’s address.

“And the litigation,” Herb Schoenheit von Vogelsang was murmuring, as St. Cyr boarded the truck to sit beside the driver. “You don’t infer malpractice on our part, do you, Mr. St. Cyr? Because if you do—”

“The affair is closed as far as we’re concerned,” St. Cyr said to him laconically, and signaled the driver to drive off.

As soon as they left the mortuary, St. Cyr began to laugh.

“What strikes you so funny?” the mortuary driver asked.

“Nothing,” St. Cyr said, still chuckling.

When the body in its casket, still deep in its original quick-pack, had been left off at Harvey’s home and the driver had departed, St. Cyr picked up the telephone and dialed. But he found himself unable to get through to the Convention Hall. All he heard, for his trouble, was the weird distant drumming, the monotonous litany of Louis Sarapis—he hung up, disgusted but at the same time grimly determined.

We’ve had enough of that, St. Cyr said to himself. / won’t wait for Harvey’s approval; I don’t need it.

Searching the living room he found, in a desk drawer, a heat gun. Pointing it at the casket of Louis Sarapis he pressed the trigger.

The envelope of quick-pack steamed up, the casket itself fizzed as the plastic melted. Within, the body blackened, shriveled, charred away at last into a baked, coal-like clinker, small and nondescript.

Satisfied, St. Cyr returned the heat gun to the desk drawer.

Once more he picked up the phone and dialed.

In his ear the monotonous voice intoned, “…no one but Gam can do it; Gam’s the man what am—good slogan for you, Johnny. Gam’s the man what am; remember that. I’ll do the talking. Give me the mike and I’ll tell them; Gam’s the man what am. Gam’s—”

Claude St. Cyr slammed down the phone, turned to the blackened deposit that had been Louis Sarapis; he gaped mutely at what he could not comprehend. The voice, when St. Cyr turned on the television set, emanated from that, too, just as it had been doing; nothing had changed.

The voice of Louis Sarapis was not originating in the body. Because the body was gone. There simply was no connection between them.

Seating himself in a chair, Claude St. Cyr got out his cigarettes and shakily lit up, trying to understand what this meant. It seemed almost as if he had it, almost had the explanation.

But not quite.

V

By monorail—he had left his ‘copter at the Beloved Brethren Mortuary—Claude St. Cyr numbly made his way to Convention Hall. The place, of course, was packed; the noise was terrible. But he managed to obtain the services of a robot page; over the public address system, Phil Harvey’s presence was requested in one of the side rooms used as meeting places by delegations wishing to caucus in secret.

Harvey appeared, disheveled from shoving through the dense pack of spectators and delegates. “What is it, Claude?” he asked, and then he saw his attorney’s face. “You better tell me,” he said quietly.

St. Cyr blurted, “The voice we hear. It isn’t Louis! It’s someone else trying to sound like Louis!”

“How do you know?”

He told him.

Nodding, Harvey said, “And it definitely was Louis’s body you destroyed; there was no deceit there at the mortuary—you’re positive of that.”

“I’m not positive,” St. Cyr said. “But I think it was; I believe it now and I believed it at the time.” It was too late to find out now, in any case, not enough remained of the body for such an analysis to be successfully made.

“But who could it be, then?” Harvey said. “My God, it’s coming to us from beyond the solar system—could it be nonterrestrials of some kind? Some sort of echo or mockery, a non-living reaction unfamiliar to us? An inert process without intent?”