As I lay immobilized by the metal ropes against her bulkhead, Snake Lady stroked my chest with her fingers and murmured sweet nothings of seduction.

I closed my eyes and counted to three. I reminded myself what a bad idea it was to get involved with suspected murderers. Her touches became harder to ignore. I reminded myself I hadn't cracked the case, and needed to make a profit. Her fee was only going to go up. This focused my mind.

"That was all I'm up for right now, lady. Free my hands and I'll pay."

She pouted, and pressed a button. The ropes around my arms released. I pulled out two hundos and handed them over. She delicately put them down the middle of her elegant black dress.

She returned to the bed and resumed the enticing pose she had held as I entered. She pressed a button and the ropes released me.

"A pleasure doing business, flatfoot. Come back if you want some business doing pleasure."

As I walked out I saw her out of the corner of my eye checking the clock and noting me down in her book of business. It became a bit easier not to turn back, knowing I was already immortalized as another entry in her long list of paying customers.

I paced towards my office, thinking. All of the prime suspects had alibis, alibis that put them far away from the scene at the time of death. How could any of them have taken him out? How could anyone at all have? Something Snake Lady had said tugged at my mind, just out of reach.

I took a swig from my flask and set my mind back. I glimpsed a memory of a brief thought about a class from long ago, Stellar Sailing 101, blown out of my mind like a leaf in a hurricane when she'd lain on the bed, her body alluring. I turned and headed to the foresail deck, hoping to jog my memories.

No one challenged me. From here I saw the grandeur of the foresail mast, extending far into the distance, the plane of the foresail nearly parallel to my vision. Magnificent. The sailors on deck look bored, just killing time until next sail angle change.

The angle list was posted on the wall, paper and handwritten angles, a table of times and angle trios. The papers went back days and days and days, and extended into the future with planned changes. Sail changes were checked off if they occurred. The charts on the wall were planned all the way to planetfall.

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Angles...

A question from my Stellar Sailing 101 exam came to me. It went something like this:

"A slow-moving solid sphere approaches the stellar sail with an angle of 60 degrees relative to the ship. The sail is held at an angle of 45 degrees relative to the ship. At what angle does the sphere bounce?"

It was one of those questions where if you flunked it, you flunked the class, not just the test. If you said it bounced like a light beam, to 30 degrees, you clearly hadn't been paying enough attention. Actually, the surface of the ball would be totally converted to energy as it touched the sail, and since this energy would hit it directly at its center of gravity, and its previous kinetic energy was negligible compared to the total conversion energy, it would be propelled at 45 degrees back the way it came at stellar speeds.

I looked at the sail angle table. I found the angles at the hullscraper's time of death. I opened my casebook to Sliderule's math. The angles at the top were the same.

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The dame stood in my office with her arms crossed. I paced back and forth.

"As near as I can figure, your boy won a monster poker hand three nights ago, cleaning out a few of the regulars. He cheated it in conjunction with Sliderule Stallone, who dealt him the winning hand from a stacked deck and dealt himself the Aces, then teamed on the bets to get everyone's money in the pot.

"Once the night was over, he would've had an agreement to split the cash with Sliderule some time after. But instead he took the whole stack of cash and traded it for your sapphire to one of the miners and had it set in the ring. Next day, nervous he'd have it beaten out of him, he passed you the sapphire then went to take extra shifts on the hull till planetfall, confident no one could touch him out there and planning to run away with you and the loot the moment we reached orbit."

She uncrossed her arms and leaned against the wall, misty eyed. "He really did love me..." she murmured, "...he really was going to run away with me." She bit her lip and steadied herself.

"He didn't count on Sliderule's math skills. Sliderule calculated the exact angles to bounce a ball at his head off the sail during one of his shifts, depending on his position on the hull. Sliderule took a brief break from last night's poker game, poked out a nearby airlock, and measured the angle of your boy's reflection with an astrolabe. He then interpolated his angles and launched one of his metal balls to bounce off the sail at just the right angle, probably using his ball tube and electrical repulsion to launch it, and an astrolabe to aim precisely. He came back to the game with one fewer ball, no one the wiser, and your boy's head blown off by a metal ball moving at stellar speeds."

At this her eyes hardened and filled with anger. "That will be all," she said, then counted out twenty hundos and slammed them on my desk. She turned and walked out, not looking back.

I hadn't given her enough to convict a man at a tribunal, not even close. But that probably wasn't her plan. Anyway, she'd paid me out, and it was now her business, not mine. I put it out of my mind.

Afterwards, she must've pulled the sort of strings only a beautiful officer-caste girl could. Because even before planetfall, I never saw or heard of Sliderule Stallone again.

END OF CASE