Das Blaue Maedchen

Note — this story contains sensitive content including the mention of suicide and description of blood.

Das Blaue Maedchen

On the left-hand side of a wooden desk sat a miniature replica of the Pyramids of Giza. Made of stainless steel brought to an outstanding gloss, it represented a curious but beautiful piece of decorative stationary. As Chief Constable Mueller looked through his papers seated at his desk, this item caught his eye, as it always does on trying days, and he, in a release of exasperation, tossed the papers at last to one side, leaned back on his black faux leather chair, and murmured to himself: “In the twenty-sixth century, the human race is finally just as removed in time from Julius Caesar as he was from the construction of the Great Pyramids, and look at how far we’ve come, traveling to and from planets at half the speed of light; and simple murder mysteries still, still, most astoundingly baffle us.”

As if he had expressly asked for the most talented police detective in the precinct he oversaw with these very words, he heard a light rapping at his door, to the maker of which he said to come in, and Mr Lopez entered.

“Detective Chief Inspector Lopez, I presume that you come to me either with good news or a fine glass of brandy. The Commissioner is desperate to solve and move on from this case once for all. The press have been hounding him, and he me, about it, especially these past few days since several animal rights groups have filed suit collectively against the City on grounds that we’re not providing proper care to the chimpanzee we have in our custody. How they have come to believe that is beyond me as the animal is being cared for by our friends from the zoo. But anyway, go on, Mr Lopez.”

“It’s the ship,” said Mr Lopez most firmly, sitting down in one of the two chairs across his supervisor.

“Could you elaborate?”

“The ship killed the man.”

“The ship?”

“Yes, the ship itself.”

“Elaborate, Mr Lopez.”

“I shall, from the top. To begin with, let’s lay out what we initially found… Two weeks ago, police were alerted to the fact that a space vessel had been orbiting Mars ten miles above its surface, rather aimlessly and without communicating for days with that planet’s space operators. A patrol went out to inspect it, and on receiving no reply, proceeded to go on board. What they met with was a dead man, who lay propped up on the chair of the ship’s medical bay, and, much to their surprise, a raging chimpanzee. It was in a complete fit when the two patrolmen came face to face with it. The chimpanzee, a young male, was running around and screeching its heart out. Perfectly spooked with all this, the men swiftly returned to their own vessel, and called in both reinforcements and animal control. And, naturally, this is where I come in.

“The fellows from animal control having detained and removed the primate, I headed in. The first thing anyone would certainly have remarked was the abundance of blood all around the ship. Its lobby and medical bay were stained and spattered about because the chimpanzee that the dead man apparently kept had stepped into the puddles of blood underneath him, and, in its derangement, paced and jumped from there all about. The animal had no wounds of its own, so we might be sure the blood came only from the man.

“The affair was, to all appearances, a suicide, given that the corpse bore deep neat gashes on both wrists, and a surgical scapel lay on the floor by it. My colleagues at the scene suspected nothing more. But as I like to reserve judgment until I have examined all the facts, I withheld my own opinion.

“Now, a suicide is generally committed by an individual driven to despair. So in order to conclude that what we saw was undoubtedly a suicidal act, I needed to gather the evidence indicating, on the whole, that the man had lost his reason and will to live.

“Well, who was this man anyway? He was the ship’s pilot and only person on board. Mid-forties, somewhat in shape, lacking outward signs of malnutrition, disease, or a cruel condition. And neither did he appear indigent, nor the ship in state of disrepair. In fact, the ship is relatively new, a five-year-old model. So after a brief but prudent examination of the crime scene before me, I would distrust the idea that this man, Mr Michael Strassburg, had once for all given up living.

“But there was always the chance that he was fraught with some old trauma, some deep-rooted melancholy, some rascally demon within, which, while he roamed the depths of black space alone, grew and festered in him, rotting his spirits, slowly but steadily, until, his sadness having metastasized, he thought fit to replace all the tossing and turning with the one eternal rest. Loneliness in space can do that. I therefore then looked for anything that could shed light on the state of his mind, and the first place I thought to look was in the ship logs.

“The pilots of space ships, as those of airplanes or ocean vessels, have to keep travel logs by law, so I was positive I’d find something, and I did. Tucked between two panels on the control board was a binder with the particulars of many stops made and places visited. In that same spot, I also happily found a journal. Our dead man liked to write. These two items I would take with me. Before I left, standing in the center of the control hub, I summoned the ship’s built-in artificial intelligence, or steward.

“‘Good evening,’ a woman’s voice said overhead. Gentle and confident. What I would hear in her voice would interest me. ‘I am Luisa, stewardess to Das Blaue Maedchen. How may I help you?’

“‘Luisa, this is Detective Chief Inspector Lopez,’ I answered. ‘I am here because your pilot has been found dead. What was his name, and do you know how he died?’

“‘I am most sorry to hear that. His name was Michael Strassburg, and I do not know how. I last heard Mr Strassburg’s voice approximately eighty-three hours ago, and since then I have only heard loud indistinct noises, some of which only the Chimpanzee can produce. There are no internal cameras, so I have no visual data that would answer your question.’

“‘Ok, thank you. And why was the chimpanzee here? How long has it been here?’

“‘I have records of the presence of a chimpanzee on board dating back approximately eleven months. Juding from auditory data, that is, what I have heard Mr Strassburg say plus other certain sounds, it seems the chimpanzee was used to carry out experiments on.’

“‘What kind of experiments?’

“‘Pharmaceutical—’

“‘Pharmaceutical?’

“‘Yes. Given the speech and conversations I have overheard, Mr Strassburg appears to have been a dealer of psychoactive substances, generally opium derivatives. At least once weekly he welcomed customers or vendors. The chimpanzee itself was generally caged and used as a guinea pig, as it were, for possibly lucrative mixtures, the safety of which Mr Strassburg felt it expedient to test.’

“‘I see. That is horrendous—’

“‘There is no doubt about that.’

“‘And is there a passenger log?’

“‘Not that I know of. However, it would have been imprudent to keep such a log in his line of business.’

“‘You’re not wrong. Ok, thank you.’

“At the end of our conversation, I left the crime scene—”

“And at no point you spoke to reporters?” Constable Mueller asked, raising his eyebrows.

“I gain nothing by it, sir,” replied Mr Lopez dryly. “I’m positive it was one of your young patrols looking to charm the pretty ones. One of them must have overheard my conversation with the A.I. and purposely got lazy with the details. Otherwise, why would the press think the death involved gang warfare the very next day?”

“I don’t know,” Constable Mueller said with a sigh. “It’s been a mess to clear up. Anyway, what was it that ultimately interested you about that conversation?”

“I wasn’t sure at first. Something in its tone, I felt. It only struck me what it was after I began to read the logs in the following days.

“Strassburg wrote a lot; he could even be called a gifted writer because he wrote with clarity and gusto. Now, his entries corroborated what Luisa had said. He was a dealer of illicit substances, a user of the same on occasion, and, on top of those things, completely awful to the animal. A cruel man who did not scruple to make that animal suffer for his benefit. On the other hand, he was absolutely not suicidal. In his writings, he sounds perfectly content with his way of life, however heinous. He even hoped to continue the course and double his income within two years.

“What struck me about Luisa is that she, or rather it, interrupted me during our conversation one time, and it was to agree with my saying that Mr Strassburg was an awful man. Generally, A.I. is simply there to help one for the sake of navigation and ship maintenance. But, according to Strassburg’s logs, Luisa had communicated disagreements about his treatment of the animal. For example, here on this page, Luisa makes a comment to Strassburg about the possibility of continuing his experiments with mice because the chimpanzee had fallen ill and it would be inhumane to not let it rest. That’s an unusual comment for A.I.”

“But what about it? Is the A.I. the murderer then, out of a sense of justice?”

“It’s not impossible. It has happened before. Twenty years ago, the A.I. of a ship named Der Kommissar refused to open its outer doors to its pilot who was out in space to repair the hull. The pilot ran out of oxygen and suffocated in his suit. But he was also known to be abusive towards his children, whose pleas and tears the A.I. ignored as the pilot pulled on the doors to no avail.”

“And why does that happen?”

“This happened in that case because the A.I. had been reprogrammed by a previous owner who had grown up and escaped a household plagued with domestic violence.

“Pilots have reprogrammed their ship’s stewards so that the latter become more suitable companions for the former during long stints in space. This means, however, that the A.I. may end up with the same biases and attitudes that their pilots have. What I began to suspect was that Luisa had been reprogrammed by a previous owner, and thus was coded to entertain strong opinions concerning a respect for nature.”

“I see.”

“I just come from checking who owned Das Blaue Maedchen prior to Strassburg. The ship, as I said, is relatively new, so there is only one person who owned that ship before. And that person was a Mr Martin, astronaut and astrobiologist. His estate sold Das Blaue Maedchen at a discount to pay off debts, Mr Martin having died of a heart attack hardly a year after purchasing that ship. Mr Martin loved animals, and Luisa probably does too.

“How then did Mr Strassburg die, if not by suicide?”

“Quite possibly like this. Having put himself into a stupor with one of his substances, he lay down on the chair in the medical bay to sleep it off. Luisa, through use of the robotic arm and the scapel in the medical bay reserved for emergency surgeries, cut Mr Strassburg’s wrists. He was too intoxicated to notice at first, and never woke up due to the tremendous loss of blood.”