Night Freight

"Yes."

"What room did you kill her in?"

"The bedroom?"

"Where in the bedroom?"

"Beside her vanity."

"Who was your first victim?" Rauxton asked.

"Janet Flanders."

"You killed her in the bathroom, is that right?"

"No, no, in the kitchen . . ."

"What was she wearing?"

"A flowered housecoat."

"Why did you strip her body?"

"I didn't. Why would I—"

"Mrs. Gordon was the middle victim, right?" Tobias asked.

"Yes."

"Where did you kill her?"

"The kitchen."

"She was sewing, wasn't she?"

"No, she was ca

There was wetness in Franzen's eyes now. He stopped talking and took his rimless glasses off and wiped at the tears with the back of his left hand. He seemed to be swaying slightly on the chair.

Sheffield, watching him, felt a curious mixture of relief and sadness. The relief was due to the fact that there was no doubt in his mind—nor in the minds of Rauxton and Tobias; he could read their eyes—that Andrew Franzen was the slayer of the three women. They had thrown detail and "trip-up" questions at him, one right after another, and he had had all the right answers; he knew particulars that had also not been given to the news media, that no crank could possibly have known, that only the murderer could have been aware of. The case had turned out to be one of the simple ones, after all, and it was all but wrapped up now; there would be no more "bludgeon slayings," no public hue and cry, no attacks on police inefficiency in the press, no pressure from the commissioners or the mayor. The sadness was the result of twenty-six years of police work, of living with death and crime every day, of looking at a man who seemed to be the essence of normalcy and yet who was a cold-blooded multiple murderer.

Why? Sheffield thought. That was the big question. Why did he do it?

He said, "You want to tell us the reason, Mr. Franzen? Why you killed them?"

The small man moistened his lips. "I was very happy, you see. My life had some meaning, some challenge . . .I was fulfilled—but they were going to destroy everything." He stared at his hands. "One of them had found out the truth—I don't know how—and tracked down the other two. I had come to Janet this morning, and she told me that they were going to expose me, and I just lost my head and picked up the mallet and killed her. Then I went to the others and killed them. I couldn't stop myself; it was as if I were moving in a nightmare."

"What are you trying to say?" Sheffield asked. "What was your relationship with those three women?"

The tears in Andrew Franzen's eyes shone like tiny diamonds in the light from the overhead fluorescents.

"They were my wives," he said.

In the sixties and seventies I perpetrated a fair amount of fantasy and science fiction, much of it with Barry Malzberg and the majority of it eminently forgettable. Of all the s-f with my name on it, I like maybe six stories—four collaborations, including a 10,000-word satire on hack-writing called "Prose Bowl" that some critics consider a minor classic, and two solo efforts. "The Rec Field" is one of the solos, a blend of s-f and psychological suspense whose payoff line gave me a small chill when I wrote it in 1979. It surprised me with another when I reread it recently, hence its inclusion here.

The Rec Field

We'd been on Repair Outpost 217-C for thirty-four months when Renzo got the idea to build a rec field.

One of us should have thought of it long before that. Except for compu-disks, the only recreation we had was cards and chess and backgammon—indoor games that neither of us cared for much. The thing was, we'd both been raised on outdoor sports. Soccer was Renzo's game and baseball was mine; we would talk soccer and baseball for hours, the classic professional contests, the matchups we'd been involved in ourselves when we were kids back home. Fu

But then, I guess maybe we'd both blocked off the idea because of the conditions we were working under. Like 217-C itself. It was an uninhabited dwarf planet located just outside the Company's C-Sector shipping lanes, most of it igneous rock and volcanic ash, with here and there little clusters of trees and patches of bright green grass. Gravity was within 2.3 of Earth's, axis rotation was 21.40 Earth hours, but the atmosphere was low in oxygen; you could breathe it without a life-pac, only not if you were doing anything strenuous and not for more than a couple of hours at a time. And the weather was bad; hot and dank all the time, day and night, with a dense cloud cover always hanging low overhead that made even the daylight a dark gray. We never once saw the planet's sun nor either of its two tiny moons.

Another thing was that we didn't have any equipment—balls, bats, things like that—and no way of getting any sent in. The Company refused to stock the drone supply ship that came from Sector Base every six months with what they called "frivolous material"; the compu-disks were the only concession they made. And we couldn't leave the outpost ourselves, because if we did we would forfeit all of our accumulated wages. We were aware of that when we signed on, of course; it was in the Company contract. They paid enormous salaries, but the catch was that you had to sign on for a full six years and they withheld all your credits until those six years were up.

If any other human beings had come to 217-C we could have asked them to bring us the stuff we needed on a return trip. But in all our thirty-four months the only other man we'd laid eyes on was Dietrich, the Sector Chief, who came in every fifteen months or so on a routine inspection tour. Each of the freighters that were forced to veer in from the lanes for refueling or repairs was a drone, which were cheaper to operate than ma

We got along pretty well from the first, Renzo and me, but even two people with common interests—and we had plenty of them besides sports; that was why we'd been selected to work together as a team—can get on each other's nerves after a while. Particularly in a place like this, where there was no sunlight or moonlight and everything was colorless except for the trees and those beautiful patches of bright green grass. We might even have turned against each other if it hadn't been for the mind-psychs the Company performed on all of its employees. They said the mind-psychs were to keep you from thinking about women and sex and family ties back home, but they were also to keep you from fighting with your partner; they didn't tell you that because they didn't want you worrying about it going in.

As it was, we'd stopped talking to each other for days at a time when Renzo came up with the idea for the rec field. Then all the friction disappeared and we were as close as we'd been in the early months. It was almost like being reborn.

We went to work right away. The first thing we did was to draw up plans and then keep on redrafting them until we had the field laid out exactly the way we wanted it. It would be a hundred and fifty meters long and a hundred meters wide. It would be enclosed on three sides by a curving wooden fence three meters high; the fourth side would be four rows of spectators' seats, even though no spectators would ever sit in them, because we agreed the field should look as authentic as possible. It would be floored in that bright green grass, except for base paths and a pitching mound and home plate area for baseball, and it would have soccer goals and dugout benches and all the other necessary items.