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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE AKKRA CASE ***
+
+
+
+
+
+ _Miriam de Ford has given a good deal of thought to crime and
+ criminology of other times and spaces (see Editorial). Now she
+ turns her talents to constructing a "true crime" of the future--and
+ its solution. Herewith, then, a criminologist's lecture-report on_:
+
+ THE AKKRA CASE
+
+ By MIRIAM ALLEN de FORD
+
+ Illustrated by ADKINS
+
+ [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
+ Amazing Stories January 1962.
+ Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
+ the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
+
+
+Deliberate murder being so very rare a crime in our society, an
+account of any instance of it must attract the attention not only
+of criminologists but also of the general public. Very many of my
+auditors must remember the Akkra case well, since it occurred only
+last year. This, however, is the first attempt to set forth the bizarre
+circumstances hitherto known only to the authorities and to a few
+specialists.
+
+On February 30 last, the body of a young girl was found under the
+Central Park mobilway in Newyork I. She had been struck on the head
+with some heavy object which had fractured her skull, and her auburn
+hair was matted with congealed blood. Two boys illegally trespassing on
+one of the old dirt roads in the park itself stumbled upon the corpse.
+She was fully dressed, but barefoot, with her socsandals lying beside
+her. An autopsy showed only one unusual thing--she was a virgin, though
+she was fully mature.
+
+Two hundred years ago, say, this would have been a case for the
+homicide branch of the city police. Now, of course, there are no city
+police, all local law enforcement being in the hands of the Federal
+government, with higher supervision and appeal to the Interpol; and
+since there has been no reported murder (except in Africa and China,
+where this crime has not yet been entirely eradicated) for at least 20
+years, Fedpol naturally has no specialists in homicide. Investigation
+therefore was up to the General Branch in Newyork Complex I.
+
+The murderer had stupidly broken off the welded serial number disc from
+her wristlet--stupidly, because of course everybody's fingerprints
+and retinal pattern are on file with Interpol from birth. It was soon
+discovered that the victim was one Madolin Akkra, born in Newyork I
+of mixed Irish, Siamese, and Swedish descent, aged 18 years and seven
+months. Since it is against the law for any minor (under 25) to be
+gainfully employed, and there was no record of any exemption-permit,
+she had necessarily to be a student. She was found to be studying
+spaceship maintenance at Upper Newyork Combined Technicum.
+
+People who deride Fedpol and call it a useless anachronism don't know
+what they are talking about. It is true that in our society criminal
+tendencies are understood to be a disease, amenable to treatment, not
+a free-will demonstration of anti-social proclivities. But it is also
+true that every member of Fedpol, down to the merest rookie policeman,
+is a trained specialist in some field, and that most of its officers
+are graduate psychiatrists. As soon as Madolin Akkra's identity was
+determined, it was easy to find out everything about her.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+The circumstances surrounding her in life were sufficiently odd in
+themselves. Her mother was dead, but she lived with her own father and
+full younger sister in a small (only 20 stories and 80 living-units)
+co-operative apartment house in the old district formerly called
+Westchester, once an "exclusive" settlement but now considerably run
+down, and populated for the most part by low-income families. Few of
+the residents had more than one helicopter per family, and many of them
+had to commute to their jobs or schools by public copter. The building
+where the Akkras lived was shabby, its chrome and plastic well worn,
+and showed the effects of a negligent local upkeep system. The Akkras
+even prepared and ate some of their meals in their own quarters--an
+almost unheard-of anachronism.
+
+The father had served his 20 years of productive labor from 25 to 45,
+and the whole family was therefore supported by public funds of one
+sort or another. When the Fedpol officers commenced their investigation
+by interviewing this man, they found him one of the worst social
+throwbacks discovered in many years--doubtless a prime reason for the
+bizarre misfortune which had overtaken his misguided daughter. To
+begin with, the investigators wanted to know, why had he not reported
+his daughter missing? To this, Pol Akkra made the astonishing reply
+that the girl was old enough to know her own business, and that he had
+never asked any questions as to what she did! Everyone knows it is
+every adult's responsibility to report any deviation by the young more
+serious than the mischievous trespassing by the boys who had found
+Madolin Akkra's body, and who at least had gone to Fedpol at once. The
+officers could get no lead whatever from the girl's father.
+
+To find the murderer, it was of first importance to establish the
+background of this strange case. Access to the park is difficult--has
+been difficult ever since, more than a century ago, the area became a
+hunting-ground for thieves and hoodlums, and was transformed into a
+cultivated forest and garden preserved for aesthetic reasons, and to
+be viewed only from the mobilways above. (The boys who found the body
+are, of course, proof that the sealing-off of the park is not entirely
+effective--but surely only a daring and agile child could insinuate
+himself under the thorn-set hedges surrounding the park, or swing down
+to the tree-tops from the structure above.)
+
+If the victim had been killed elsewhere, how was her body carried to
+the spot where it was found? Both murderer and corpse would have had
+to penetrate unobserved into an almost impenetrable area. Could the
+body have been thrown from above? But if so, how could the remains of
+a full-grown girl have been transported from either a ground car or a
+copter on to the crowded mobilway, brightly lighted all night long?
+She must have gone there alive, either under duress or of her own
+accord.
+
+The first and most natural question, to Fedpol, was: who did have
+access to the park? The answer was, the gardeners. But the gardeners
+were out: they were all robots, even their supervisor. No robot is able
+to harm a human being. Moreover, no robot could have brought the victim
+in from outside if she had been killed elsewhere. The gardeners never
+leave the park, and they would repel any strange robot from elsewhere
+who tried to enter it. And one could hardly imagine a sane human being
+who would go to the park for a rendezvous with a robot!
+
+ * * * * *
+
+It was Madolin's little sister, Margret, who interrupted the futile
+interrogation of the surly and resistant Pol Akkra and provided the
+first clue. She caught the eye of the investigating officer, Inspector
+Dugal Kazazian, and quietly went into the next room, where Kazazian
+followed her after posting his assistant with the father.
+
+"I promised Madolin I would never tell on her," she whispered, "but now
+she's--now it doesn't matter." She had loved her sister; her eyes were
+puffy from weeping. "She--she'd been going to Naturist get-togethers."
+
+Kazazian almost groaned aloud. He might have known--this was the first
+time they had been linked with murder, but it seemed to him that in
+almost every other affair he had investigated for the past few years,
+the subversive Naturists somehow had crept in. And if he had reflected,
+he would have suspected them already, since there seems to be no
+school or college which does not harbor an underground branch of these
+criminal lunatics.
+
+I need hardly explain to my auditors who and what the Naturists
+are. But to keep the record complete, let me say briefly that this
+pernicious worldwide conspiracy, founded 50 years ago by the notorious
+Ali Chaim Pertinuzzi, is engaged in an organized campaign to tear
+down all the marvelous technical achievements of our civilization.
+It pretends to believe that we should eat "natural" foods and wear
+"natural" textiles instead of synthetics, walk instead of ride, teach
+children the obsolete art of reading (reading what?--the antique books
+preserved in museums?), make our own music, painting, and sculpture
+instead of enjoying the exquisite products of perfected machines,
+open up all parks and the few remaining rural preserves to campers,
+hunters and fishers (if any specimens worth hunting can be found
+outside zoos), and what they call "hikers"--in a word, go back to the
+confused, reactionary world of our ancestors. From this hodgepodge
+of "principles" it is a natural transition to political and economic
+subversion. No wonder that the information that Madolin Akkra had been
+corrupted by this vile outfit sent a chill down Inspector Kazazian's
+spine.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+It explained a great deal, however. The Naturists profess to oppose
+our healthy system of sexual experimentation, and Madolin had been a
+virgin. The weird family situation, and her father's attitude both
+toward her and toward the Fedpol, aroused suspicion that he too was
+affiliated with the Naturists, not simply that Madolin had flirted with
+the outer edges of the treasonable organization, as a "fellow-seeker,"
+without her father's knowledge.
+
+Suppose the girl, fundamentally decent and ethically-minded, had
+revolted against the false doctrine and threatened to betray its
+advocates? Then she might have been killed to silence her--and what
+more likely than that, as a piece of brazen defiance, her murdered
+corpse should have been deposited in the only bit of "natural" ground
+still remaining in the Newyork area?
+
+But how, and by whom?
+
+ * * * * *
+
+The first step, of course, was to fling a dragnet around all known or
+suspected Naturists in the district. In a series of flying raids they
+were rounded up; and since there no longer exist those depositories
+for offenders formerly known as prisons, they were kept incommunicado
+in the psychiatric wards of the various hospitals. For good measure,
+Pol Akkra was included. Margret, at 13, was old enough to take care of
+herself.
+
+Next, all Madolin's classmates at the Technicum, the operators of her
+teach-communicators, and members of other classes with whom it was
+learned she had been on familiar terms, were subjected to an intensive
+electronic questioning. (Several of these were themselves discovered
+to be tainted with Naturism, and were interned with the rest.) One of
+the tenets of Naturism is a return to the outworn system of monogamy,
+and the questioning was directed particularly to the possibility that
+Madolin had formed half of one of the notorious Naturist "steady
+couples," who often associate without or before actual mating. But day
+after day the investigators came up with not the slightest usable lead.
+
+Please do not think I am underrating Fedpol. Nothing could have been
+more thorough than the investigation they undertook. But this turned
+out in the end to be a case which by its very nature obfuscated
+the normal methods of criminological science. Fedpol itself has
+acknowledged this, by its formation in recent months of the Affiliated
+Assistance Corps, made up of amateurs who volunteer for the detection
+of what are now called Class X crimes--those so far off the beaten path
+that professionals are helpless before them.
+
+For it was an amateur who solved Madolin Akkra's murder--her own little
+sister. When Margret Akkra reaches the working age of 25 she will be
+offered a paid post as Newyork Area Co-ordinator of the AAC.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+Left alone by her father's internment, Margret began to devote her
+whole time out of school hours to the pursuit of the person or persons
+who had killed her sister. She had told Kazazian all she actually
+knew; but that was only her starting-point. Though she herself, as
+she had told the Inspector, believed that the murder might be traced
+to Madolin's connection with the Naturist (and though she probably at
+least suspected her father to be involved with them also), she did not
+confine herself to that theory, as the Fedpol, with its scientific
+training, was obliged to do.
+
+Concealed under a false floor in her father's bedroom--mute
+evidence of his Naturist affiliation--she found a cache of printed
+books--heirlooms which should long ago have been presented to a museum
+for consultation by scholars only. They dated back to the 20th century,
+and were of the variety then known as "mystery stories." Margret of
+course could not read them. But she remembered now, with revulsion,
+how, when she and Madolin were small children, their mother had
+sometimes (with windows closed and the videophone turned off) amused
+them by telling them ancient myths and legends that by their very
+nature Margret now realized must have come from these contraband books.
+
+Unlike her father and her sister, and apparently her mother as
+well, Margret Akkra had remained a wholesome product of a civilized
+education. She had nothing but horror and contempt for the subversive
+activities in the midst of which, she knew now, she had grown up. The
+very fact, which became plain to her for the first time, that her
+parents had lived together, without changing partners, until her mother
+had died, was evidence enough of their aberration.
+
+But, stricken to the heart as the poor girl was, she could not cease to
+love those she had always loved, or to be diverted from her resolution
+to solve her sister's murder. Shudder as she might at the memory of
+those subversive books, she yet felt they might inadvertently serve to
+assist her.
+
+It was easy to persuade the school authorities that her shock and
+distress over Madolin's death had slowed up her conscious mind, and
+to get herself assigned to a few sessions with the electronic memory
+stimulator. It took only two or three to bring back in detail the
+suppressed memories, and to enable her to extrapolate from them.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+One feature of these so-called "mysteries" that came back to her struck
+Margret with especial force--the frequent assertion that murderers
+always return to the scene of their crime. She decided that she too
+must plant herself at the spot where her sister's body had been found,
+and lie in wait for the returning killer.
+
+It would be useless to try to obtain official permission, but she was
+only 13, as lean and agile as any other child, and if boys could evade
+the hedges and the robot gardeners, so could she. The audiovids had
+displayed plenty of pictures of the exact scene, and Margret knew where
+to find it. But an inspection of the hedges showed her that it would be
+easier for her to get in from above, at night--a likelier time also for
+her prey.
+
+She located a place where the trees grew almost to the mobilway and
+shaded a section of it between the lamps. Perched on the stand-pave and
+watching for a pause in the stream of gliders-by, she dropped lightly
+into a tree and climbed down to the park beneath. Hiding from the
+gardeners, she made her way to the bushes where the boys had discovered
+Madolin.
+
+For nearly a week, fortified by Sleepnomer pills, Margret spent every
+moment after dark in this hideaway. It was a long, nerve-wracking
+vigil: the close contact with leaves and grass, the sound of the wind
+in the trees, the unaccustomed darkness away from the lights above, the
+frightening approach of wild squirrels and rabbits and even birds, the
+necessity to stay concealed from passing robots, kept her on edge. But
+stubbornly she persisted. And at last she was rewarded.
+
+It was not late--only about 20 o'clock--when she heard a scramble and
+bump not far from her own means of access to the park. It was not the
+first time since her watch began that she had heard other adventurers,
+invariably small and rather scared boys who dared one another to walk
+for a few feet along the dirt paths, then in a panic rushed back
+the way they had come. But this time the steps came directly toward
+her--human footsteps, not the shuffle of a robot.
+
+Hidden behind a bush, Margret saw them approach--two boys of about her
+own age. And then, with a sickening lurch of her heart, she recognized
+them. She had seen them, acclaimed as heroes, on the videoscreen. They
+were the two who had found Madolin. She could hear every word they said.
+
+"Come on," one of them urged in a hoarse whisper. "There's nothing to
+be afraid of."
+
+"Yes, there is," the other objected. "Ever since then, they've got the
+gardeners wired to describe and report anybody they find inside the
+park."
+
+"I don't care. We've _got_ to find it. Give me the beamer."
+
+ * * * * *
+
+Margret crouched behind the thickest part of the shrubbery, her
+infra-red camera at the alert. The tape-attachment was already
+activated.
+
+The second boy still held back. "I told you then," he muttered, "that
+we shouldn't have reported it at all. We should have got out of here
+and never said a word to anyone."
+
+"We couldn't," the first boy said, shocked. "It would have been
+anti-social. Haven't you ever learned anything in school?"
+
+"Well, it's anti-social to kill somebody, too, isn't it?"
+
+Margret pressed the button on the camera. Enlarged enough, even the
+identification discs on the boys' wristlets would show.
+
+"How could we guess there was a human being there, except us? What was
+she doing here, anyway? Come on, Harri, we've got to find that thing.
+It's taken us long enough to get a chance to sneak in here."
+
+"Maybe they've found it already," said Harri fearfully.
+
+"No, they haven't; if they had, they'd have taken us in as soon as they
+dusted the fingerprints."
+
+"All right, it's not anywhere on the path. Put the beamer on the ground
+where it will shine in front of us, and let's get down on our stomachs
+and hunt underneath the bushes."
+
+Grabbing her camera, Margret jumped to her feet and dashed past the
+startled boys. She heard a scream--that would be Harri--and then their
+feet pounding after her. But she had a head start, and her eyes were
+more accustomed to the dark than theirs could be. She reached a tree,
+shinnied up it, jumped from one of its limbs to another on a higher
+tree beneath the mobilway, chinned herself up, and made her way out
+safely.
+
+She went straight to Fedpol headquarters and asked for Inspector
+Kazazian.
+
+The frightened boys were picked up at once. They were brought into
+headquarters, where they had been praised and thanked before, and
+as soon as they saw the pictures and heard the tape-recording they
+confessed everything.
+
+That night, they said, they were being initiated into one of those
+atavistic fraternities which it seems impossible for the young to
+outgrow or the authorities to suppress. As part of their ordeal, they
+had been required to sneak into Central Park and to bring back as
+proof of their success a captured robot gardener. Between them they
+had decided that the only way they could ever get their booty would be
+to disassemble the robot, for though it could not injure them, if they
+took hold of it, its communication-valve would blow and the noise would
+bring others immediately; so they had taken along what seemed to them
+a practical weapon--a glass brick pried out of the back of a locker in
+the school gym. Hurled by a strong and practiced young arm, it could
+de-activate the robot's headpiece.
+
+When, as they waited in the darkness for a gardener to appear, they
+saw a figure moving about in the shrubbery bordering the path, one of
+them--neither would say which one it was--let fly. To their horror,
+instead of the clang of heavy glass against metal, they heard a muffled
+thud as the brick struck flesh and bone. They started to run away. But
+after a few paces they forced themselves to return.
+
+It was a girl, and the blow had knocked her flat. Her head was bleeding
+badly and she was moaning. Terrified, they knelt beside her. She gasped
+once and lay still. One of the boys laid a trembling hand on her
+breast, the other seized her wrist. There was no heart-beat and there
+was no pulse. On an impulse, the boy holding her wrist wrenched away
+her identification disc.
+
+Panic seized them, and they dashed away, utterly forgetting the brick,
+which at their first discovery one of them had had the foresight to
+kick farther into the shrubbery, out of view. Sick and shaking, they
+made their way out of the park and separated. The boy who had the disc
+threw it into the nearest sewer-grating.
+
+The next day, after school, they met again and talked it over. Finally
+they decided they must go to Fedpol and report; but to protect
+themselves they would say only that they had found a dead body.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+Day after day, they kept seeing and hearing about the case on the
+videaud, and pledged each other to silence. Then suddenly one of the
+boys had a horrible thought--they had forgotten that the brick would
+show their fingerprints!... They had come desperately to search for
+it when Margret overheard them. Kazazian's men found it without any
+difficulty; it had been just out of the gardeners' regular track.
+
+In view of the accidental nature of the whole affair, and the boys'
+full confession, they got off easy. They were sentenced to only five
+years' confinement in a psychiatric retraining school.
+
+The suspects against whom nothing could be proved were released and
+kept under surveillance. Pol Akkra, and all the proved Naturists, were
+sentenced to prefrontal lobotomies. Margret Akkra, in return for her
+help in solving the mystery, secured permission to take her father home
+with her. A purged and docile man, he was quite capable of the routine
+duties of housekeeping.
+
+The killing of Madolin Akkra was solved. But one question remained: how
+and why had she been in Central Park at all?
+
+The answer, when it came, was surprising and embarrassingly simple. And
+this is the part that has never been told before.
+
+Pol Akkra, a mere simulacrum of the man he had been, no longer knew
+his living daughter or remembered his dead one. But in the recesses
+of his invaded brain some faint vestiges of the past lingered, and
+occasionally and unexpectedly swam up to his dreamlike consciousness.
+
+One day he said suddenly: "Didn't I once know a girl named Madolin?"
+
+"Yes, father," Margret answered gently, tears in her eyes.
+
+"Funny about her." He laughed his ghastly Zombie chuckle. "I _told_ her
+that was a foolish idea, even if it was good Nat--Nat-something theory."
+
+"What idea was that?"
+
+"I--I've forgotten," he said vaguely. Then he brightened. "Oh, yes, I
+remember. Stand barefoot in fresh soil for an hour in the light of the
+full moon and you'll never catch cold again.
+
+"She was subject to colds, I think." (About the only disease left we
+have as yet no cure for.) He sighed. "I wonder if she ever tried it."
+
+
+ THE END
+
+
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE AKKRA CASE ***
\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/72197-h/72197-h.htm b/72197-h/72197-h.htm new file mode 100644 index 0000000..409658d --- /dev/null +++ b/72197-h/72197-h.htm @@ -0,0 +1,546 @@ +<!DOCTYPE html>
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+ The Akkra Case | Project Gutenberg
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+<body>
+<div style='text-align:center'>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE AKKRA CASE ***</div>
+
+<div class="titlepage">
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+<p><i>Miriam de Ford has given a good deal of thought to crime and
+criminology of other times and spaces (see Editorial). Now she turns
+her talents to constructing a "true crime" of the future—and its
+solution. Herewith, then, a criminologist's lecture-report on</i>:</p></div>
+
+<h1>THE AKKRA CASE</h1>
+
+<p class="ph1">By MIRIAM ALLEN de FORD</p>
+
+<p>Illustrated by ADKINS</p>
+
+<p>[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from<br>
+Amazing Stories January 1962.<br>
+Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that<br>
+the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]</p>
+
+</div>
+
+<hr class="chap">
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp91" id="illus" style="max-width: 38.3125em;">
+ <img class="w100" src="images/illus.jpg" alt="">
+</figure>
+
+<hr class="chap">
+
+<p>Deliberate murder being so very rare a crime in our society, an
+account of any instance of it must attract the attention not only
+of criminologists but also of the general public. Very many of my
+auditors must remember the Akkra case well, since it occurred only
+last year. This, however, is the first attempt to set forth the bizarre
+circumstances hitherto known only to the authorities and to a few
+specialists.</p>
+
+<p>On February 30 last, the body of a young girl was found under the
+Central Park mobilway in Newyork I. She had been struck on the head
+with some heavy object which had fractured her skull, and her auburn
+hair was matted with congealed blood. Two boys illegally trespassing on
+one of the old dirt roads in the park itself stumbled upon the corpse.
+She was fully dressed, but barefoot, with her socsandals lying beside
+her. An autopsy showed only one unusual thing—she was a virgin, though
+she was fully mature.</p>
+
+<p>Two hundred years ago, say, this would have been a case for the
+homicide branch of the city police. Now, of course, there are no city
+police, all local law enforcement being in the hands of the Federal
+government, with higher supervision and appeal to the Interpol; and
+since there has been no reported murder (except in Africa and China,
+where this crime has not yet been entirely eradicated) for at least 20
+years, Fedpol naturally has no specialists in homicide. Investigation
+therefore was up to the General Branch in Newyork Complex I.</p>
+
+<p>The murderer had stupidly broken off the welded serial number disc from
+her wristlet—stupidly, because of course everybody's fingerprints
+and retinal pattern are on file with Interpol from birth. It was soon
+discovered that the victim was one Madolin Akkra, born in Newyork I
+of mixed Irish, Siamese, and Swedish descent, aged 18 years and seven
+months. Since it is against the law for any minor (under 25) to be
+gainfully employed, and there was no record of any exemption-permit,
+she had necessarily to be a student. She was found to be studying
+spaceship maintenance at Upper Newyork Combined Technicum.</p>
+
+<p>People who deride Fedpol and call it a useless anachronism don't know
+what they are talking about. It is true that in our society criminal
+tendencies are understood to be a disease, amenable to treatment, not
+a free-will demonstration of anti-social proclivities. But it is also
+true that every member of Fedpol, down to the merest rookie policeman,
+is a trained specialist in some field, and that most of its officers
+are graduate psychiatrists. As soon as Madolin Akkra's identity was
+determined, it was easy to find out everything about her.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>The circumstances surrounding her in life were sufficiently odd in
+themselves. Her mother was dead, but she lived with her own father and
+full younger sister in a small (only 20 stories and 80 living-units)
+co-operative apartment house in the old district formerly called
+Westchester, once an "exclusive" settlement but now considerably run
+down, and populated for the most part by low-income families. Few of
+the residents had more than one helicopter per family, and many of them
+had to commute to their jobs or schools by public copter. The building
+where the Akkras lived was shabby, its chrome and plastic well worn,
+and showed the effects of a negligent local upkeep system. The Akkras
+even prepared and ate some of their meals in their own quarters—an
+almost unheard-of anachronism.</p>
+
+<p>The father had served his 20 years of productive labor from 25 to 45,
+and the whole family was therefore supported by public funds of one
+sort or another. When the Fedpol officers commenced their investigation
+by interviewing this man, they found him one of the worst social
+throwbacks discovered in many years—doubtless a prime reason for the
+bizarre misfortune which had overtaken his misguided daughter. To
+begin with, the investigators wanted to know, why had he not reported
+his daughter missing? To this, Pol Akkra made the astonishing reply
+that the girl was old enough to know her own business, and that he had
+never asked any questions as to what she did! Everyone knows it is
+every adult's responsibility to report any deviation by the young more
+serious than the mischievous trespassing by the boys who had found
+Madolin Akkra's body, and who at least had gone to Fedpol at once. The
+officers could get no lead whatever from the girl's father.</p>
+
+<p>To find the murderer, it was of first importance to establish the
+background of this strange case. Access to the park is difficult—has
+been difficult ever since, more than a century ago, the area became a
+hunting-ground for thieves and hoodlums, and was transformed into a
+cultivated forest and garden preserved for aesthetic reasons, and to
+be viewed only from the mobilways above. (The boys who found the body
+are, of course, proof that the sealing-off of the park is not entirely
+effective—but surely only a daring and agile child could insinuate
+himself under the thorn-set hedges surrounding the park, or swing down
+to the tree-tops from the structure above.)</p>
+
+<p>If the victim had been killed elsewhere, how was her body carried to
+the spot where it was found? Both murderer and corpse would have had
+to penetrate unobserved into an almost impenetrable area. Could the
+body have been thrown from above? But if so, how could the remains of
+a full-grown girl have been transported from either a ground car or a
+copter on to the crowded mobilway, brightly lighted all night long?
+She must have gone there alive, either under duress or of her own
+accord.</p>
+
+<p>The first and most natural question, to Fedpol, was: who did have
+access to the park? The answer was, the gardeners. But the gardeners
+were out: they were all robots, even their supervisor. No robot is able
+to harm a human being. Moreover, no robot could have brought the victim
+in from outside if she had been killed elsewhere. The gardeners never
+leave the park, and they would repel any strange robot from elsewhere
+who tried to enter it. And one could hardly imagine a sane human being
+who would go to the park for a rendezvous with a robot!</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>It was Madolin's little sister, Margret, who interrupted the futile
+interrogation of the surly and resistant Pol Akkra and provided the
+first clue. She caught the eye of the investigating officer, Inspector
+Dugal Kazazian, and quietly went into the next room, where Kazazian
+followed her after posting his assistant with the father.</p>
+
+<p>"I promised Madolin I would never tell on her," she whispered, "but now
+she's—now it doesn't matter." She had loved her sister; her eyes were
+puffy from weeping. "She—she'd been going to Naturist get-togethers."</p>
+
+<p>Kazazian almost groaned aloud. He might have known—this was the first
+time they had been linked with murder, but it seemed to him that in
+almost every other affair he had investigated for the past few years,
+the subversive Naturists somehow had crept in. And if he had reflected,
+he would have suspected them already, since there seems to be no
+school or college which does not harbor an underground branch of these
+criminal lunatics.</p>
+
+<p>I need hardly explain to my auditors who and what the Naturists
+are. But to keep the record complete, let me say briefly that this
+pernicious worldwide conspiracy, founded 50 years ago by the notorious
+Ali Chaim Pertinuzzi, is engaged in an organized campaign to tear
+down all the marvelous technical achievements of our civilization.
+It pretends to believe that we should eat "natural" foods and wear
+"natural" textiles instead of synthetics, walk instead of ride, teach
+children the obsolete art of reading (reading what?—the antique books
+preserved in museums?), make our own music, painting, and sculpture
+instead of enjoying the exquisite products of perfected machines,
+open up all parks and the few remaining rural preserves to campers,
+hunters and fishers (if any specimens worth hunting can be found
+outside zoos), and what they call "hikers"—in a word, go back to the
+confused, reactionary world of our ancestors. From this hodgepodge
+of "principles" it is a natural transition to political and economic
+subversion. No wonder that the information that Madolin Akkra had been
+corrupted by this vile outfit sent a chill down Inspector Kazazian's
+spine.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>It explained a great deal, however. The Naturists profess to oppose
+our healthy system of sexual experimentation, and Madolin had been a
+virgin. The weird family situation, and her father's attitude both
+toward her and toward the Fedpol, aroused suspicion that he too was
+affiliated with the Naturists, not simply that Madolin had flirted with
+the outer edges of the treasonable organization, as a "fellow-seeker,"
+without her father's knowledge.</p>
+
+<p>Suppose the girl, fundamentally decent and ethically-minded, had
+revolted against the false doctrine and threatened to betray its
+advocates? Then she might have been killed to silence her—and what
+more likely than that, as a piece of brazen defiance, her murdered
+corpse should have been deposited in the only bit of "natural" ground
+still remaining in the Newyork area?</p>
+
+<p>But how, and by whom?</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>The first step, of course, was to fling a dragnet around all known or
+suspected Naturists in the district. In a series of flying raids they
+were rounded up; and since there no longer exist those depositories
+for offenders formerly known as prisons, they were kept incommunicado
+in the psychiatric wards of the various hospitals. For good measure,
+Pol Akkra was included. Margret, at 13, was old enough to take care of
+herself.</p>
+
+<p>Next, all Madolin's classmates at the Technicum, the operators of her
+teach-communicators, and members of other classes with whom it was
+learned she had been on familiar terms, were subjected to an intensive
+electronic questioning. (Several of these were themselves discovered
+to be tainted with Naturism, and were interned with the rest.) One of
+the tenets of Naturism is a return to the outworn system of monogamy,
+and the questioning was directed particularly to the possibility that
+Madolin had formed half of one of the notorious Naturist "steady
+couples," who often associate without or before actual mating. But day
+after day the investigators came up with not the slightest usable lead.</p>
+
+<p>Please do not think I am underrating Fedpol. Nothing could have been
+more thorough than the investigation they undertook. But this turned
+out in the end to be a case which by its very nature obfuscated
+the normal methods of criminological science. Fedpol itself has
+acknowledged this, by its formation in recent months of the Affiliated
+Assistance Corps, made up of amateurs who volunteer for the detection
+of what are now called Class X crimes—those so far off the beaten path
+that professionals are helpless before them.</p>
+
+<p>For it was an amateur who solved Madolin Akkra's murder—her own little
+sister. When Margret Akkra reaches the working age of 25 she will be
+offered a paid post as Newyork Area Co-ordinator of the AAC.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>Left alone by her father's internment, Margret began to devote her
+whole time out of school hours to the pursuit of the person or persons
+who had killed her sister. She had told Kazazian all she actually
+knew; but that was only her starting-point. Though she herself, as
+she had told the Inspector, believed that the murder might be traced
+to Madolin's connection with the Naturist (and though she probably at
+least suspected her father to be involved with them also), she did not
+confine herself to that theory, as the Fedpol, with its scientific
+training, was obliged to do.</p>
+
+<p>Concealed under a false floor in her father's bedroom—mute
+evidence of his Naturist affiliation—she found a cache of printed
+books—heirlooms which should long ago have been presented to a museum
+for consultation by scholars only. They dated back to the 20th century,
+and were of the variety then known as "mystery stories." Margret of
+course could not read them. But she remembered now, with revulsion,
+how, when she and Madolin were small children, their mother had
+sometimes (with windows closed and the videophone turned off) amused
+them by telling them ancient myths and legends that by their very
+nature Margret now realized must have come from these contraband books.</p>
+
+<p>Unlike her father and her sister, and apparently her mother as
+well, Margret Akkra had remained a wholesome product of a civilized
+education. She had nothing but horror and contempt for the subversive
+activities in the midst of which, she knew now, she had grown up. The
+very fact, which became plain to her for the first time, that her
+parents had lived together, without changing partners, until her mother
+had died, was evidence enough of their aberration.</p>
+
+<p>But, stricken to the heart as the poor girl was, she could not cease to
+love those she had always loved, or to be diverted from her resolution
+to solve her sister's murder. Shudder as she might at the memory of
+those subversive books, she yet felt they might inadvertently serve to
+assist her.</p>
+
+<p>It was easy to persuade the school authorities that her shock and
+distress over Madolin's death had slowed up her conscious mind, and
+to get herself assigned to a few sessions with the electronic memory
+stimulator. It took only two or three to bring back in detail the
+suppressed memories, and to enable her to extrapolate from them.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>One feature of these so-called "mysteries" that came back to her struck
+Margret with especial force—the frequent assertion that murderers
+always return to the scene of their crime. She decided that she too
+must plant herself at the spot where her sister's body had been found,
+and lie in wait for the returning killer.</p>
+
+<p>It would be useless to try to obtain official permission, but she was
+only 13, as lean and agile as any other child, and if boys could evade
+the hedges and the robot gardeners, so could she. The audiovids had
+displayed plenty of pictures of the exact scene, and Margret knew where
+to find it. But an inspection of the hedges showed her that it would be
+easier for her to get in from above, at night—a likelier time also for
+her prey.</p>
+
+<p>She located a place where the trees grew almost to the mobilway and
+shaded a section of it between the lamps. Perched on the stand-pave and
+watching for a pause in the stream of gliders-by, she dropped lightly
+into a tree and climbed down to the park beneath. Hiding from the
+gardeners, she made her way to the bushes where the boys had discovered
+Madolin.</p>
+
+<p>For nearly a week, fortified by Sleepnomer pills, Margret spent every
+moment after dark in this hideaway. It was a long, nerve-wracking
+vigil: the close contact with leaves and grass, the sound of the wind
+in the trees, the unaccustomed darkness away from the lights above, the
+frightening approach of wild squirrels and rabbits and even birds, the
+necessity to stay concealed from passing robots, kept her on edge. But
+stubbornly she persisted. And at last she was rewarded.</p>
+
+<p>It was not late—only about 20 o'clock—when she heard a scramble and
+bump not far from her own means of access to the park. It was not the
+first time since her watch began that she had heard other adventurers,
+invariably small and rather scared boys who dared one another to walk
+for a few feet along the dirt paths, then in a panic rushed back
+the way they had come. But this time the steps came directly toward
+her—human footsteps, not the shuffle of a robot.</p>
+
+<p>Hidden behind a bush, Margret saw them approach—two boys of about her
+own age. And then, with a sickening lurch of her heart, she recognized
+them. She had seen them, acclaimed as heroes, on the videoscreen. They
+were the two who had found Madolin. She could hear every word they said.</p>
+
+<p>"Come on," one of them urged in a hoarse whisper. "There's nothing to
+be afraid of."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, there is," the other objected. "Ever since then, they've got the
+gardeners wired to describe and report anybody they find inside the
+park."</p>
+
+<p>"I don't care. We've <i>got</i> to find it. Give me the beamer."</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>Margret crouched behind the thickest part of the shrubbery, her
+infra-red camera at the alert. The tape-attachment was already
+activated.</p>
+
+<p>The second boy still held back. "I told you then," he muttered, "that
+we shouldn't have reported it at all. We should have got out of here
+and never said a word to anyone."</p>
+
+<p>"We couldn't," the first boy said, shocked. "It would have been
+anti-social. Haven't you ever learned anything in school?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, it's anti-social to kill somebody, too, isn't it?"</p>
+
+<p>Margret pressed the button on the camera. Enlarged enough, even the
+identification discs on the boys' wristlets would show.</p>
+
+<p>"How could we guess there was a human being there, except us? What was
+she doing here, anyway? Come on, Harri, we've got to find that thing.
+It's taken us long enough to get a chance to sneak in here."</p>
+
+<p>"Maybe they've found it already," said Harri fearfully.</p>
+
+<p>"No, they haven't; if they had, they'd have taken us in as soon as they
+dusted the fingerprints."</p>
+
+<p>"All right, it's not anywhere on the path. Put the beamer on the ground
+where it will shine in front of us, and let's get down on our stomachs
+and hunt underneath the bushes."</p>
+
+<p>Grabbing her camera, Margret jumped to her feet and dashed past the
+startled boys. She heard a scream—that would be Harri—and then their
+feet pounding after her. But she had a head start, and her eyes were
+more accustomed to the dark than theirs could be. She reached a tree,
+shinnied up it, jumped from one of its limbs to another on a higher
+tree beneath the mobilway, chinned herself up, and made her way out
+safely.</p>
+
+<p>She went straight to Fedpol headquarters and asked for Inspector
+Kazazian.</p>
+
+<p>The frightened boys were picked up at once. They were brought into
+headquarters, where they had been praised and thanked before, and
+as soon as they saw the pictures and heard the tape-recording they
+confessed everything.</p>
+
+<p>That night, they said, they were being initiated into one of those
+atavistic fraternities which it seems impossible for the young to
+outgrow or the authorities to suppress. As part of their ordeal, they
+had been required to sneak into Central Park and to bring back as
+proof of their success a captured robot gardener. Between them they
+had decided that the only way they could ever get their booty would be
+to disassemble the robot, for though it could not injure them, if they
+took hold of it, its communication-valve would blow and the noise would
+bring others immediately; so they had taken along what seemed to them
+a practical weapon—a glass brick pried out of the back of a locker in
+the school gym. Hurled by a strong and practiced young arm, it could
+de-activate the robot's headpiece.</p>
+
+<p>When, as they waited in the darkness for a gardener to appear, they
+saw a figure moving about in the shrubbery bordering the path, one of
+them—neither would say which one it was—let fly. To their horror,
+instead of the clang of heavy glass against metal, they heard a muffled
+thud as the brick struck flesh and bone. They started to run away. But
+after a few paces they forced themselves to return.</p>
+
+<p>It was a girl, and the blow had knocked her flat. Her head was bleeding
+badly and she was moaning. Terrified, they knelt beside her. She gasped
+once and lay still. One of the boys laid a trembling hand on her
+breast, the other seized her wrist. There was no heart-beat and there
+was no pulse. On an impulse, the boy holding her wrist wrenched away
+her identification disc.</p>
+
+<p>Panic seized them, and they dashed away, utterly forgetting the brick,
+which at their first discovery one of them had had the foresight to
+kick farther into the shrubbery, out of view. Sick and shaking, they
+made their way out of the park and separated. The boy who had the disc
+threw it into the nearest sewer-grating.</p>
+
+<p>The next day, after school, they met again and talked it over. Finally
+they decided they must go to Fedpol and report; but to protect
+themselves they would say only that they had found a dead body.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>Day after day, they kept seeing and hearing about the case on the
+videaud, and pledged each other to silence. Then suddenly one of the
+boys had a horrible thought—they had forgotten that the brick would
+show their fingerprints!... They had come desperately to search for
+it when Margret overheard them. Kazazian's men found it without any
+difficulty; it had been just out of the gardeners' regular track.</p>
+
+<p>In view of the accidental nature of the whole affair, and the boys'
+full confession, they got off easy. They were sentenced to only five
+years' confinement in a psychiatric retraining school.</p>
+
+<p>The suspects against whom nothing could be proved were released and
+kept under surveillance. Pol Akkra, and all the proved Naturists, were
+sentenced to prefrontal lobotomies. Margret Akkra, in return for her
+help in solving the mystery, secured permission to take her father home
+with her. A purged and docile man, he was quite capable of the routine
+duties of housekeeping.</p>
+
+<p>The killing of Madolin Akkra was solved. But one question remained: how
+and why had she been in Central Park at all?</p>
+
+<p>The answer, when it came, was surprising and embarrassingly simple. And
+this is the part that has never been told before.</p>
+
+<p>Pol Akkra, a mere simulacrum of the man he had been, no longer knew
+his living daughter or remembered his dead one. But in the recesses
+of his invaded brain some faint vestiges of the past lingered, and
+occasionally and unexpectedly swam up to his dreamlike consciousness.</p>
+
+<p>One day he said suddenly: "Didn't I once know a girl named Madolin?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, father," Margret answered gently, tears in her eyes.</p>
+
+<p>"Funny about her." He laughed his ghastly Zombie chuckle. "I <i>told</i> her
+that was a foolish idea, even if it was good Nat—Nat-something theory."</p>
+
+<p>"What idea was that?"</p>
+
+<p>"I—I've forgotten," he said vaguely. Then he brightened. "Oh, yes, I
+remember. Stand barefoot in fresh soil for an hour in the light of the
+full moon and you'll never catch cold again.</p>
+
+<p>"She was subject to colds, I think." (About the only disease left we
+have as yet no cure for.) He sighed. "I wonder if she ever tried it."</p>
+
+
+<p class="ph2">THE END</p>
+
+<div style='text-align:center'>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE AKKRA CASE ***</div>
+</body>
+</html>
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