Ann Starnes smiled. "It sounds like hunting for a needle in a haystack when you don't even know whether there's any needle," she said.
"On the contrary," said Unterbaum, "we're fairly certain there is a needle, and a sharp one. What we need to know is what kind of needle it is before someone gets stuck with it. Listen—" He snapped up one of the lids in his desk and spun a wheel of recording tape. "Planes aren't allowed to land in Tolstoia, of course, but every once in a while one comes down there, and occasionally a yacht or fishing-craft gets wrecked on the coast. Now the normal procedure in such a case with a hermit-state is that they hold survivors and notify someone to come and get them. They stopped doing that about eighty years ago."
"What do you mean?" said Heidekopfer. "Stopped notifying or stopped rescuing survivors?"
"It isn't quite certain," said Unterbaum, "but here's the sequence, such as it is. Seventy-eight years ago Bernard Jones and his wife disappeared while on a flight from MacNider to South Bergenland." He indicated the map. "You see, that would carry them close to Tolstoia. Three months later one of the fishing vessels, which are the only form of communication the Tolstoians have, turned up at MacNider. It had a letter from Mrs. Jones. She said her husband had died in a crash landing, and she was staying in Tolstoia with the permission of the authorities."
"Anything wrong about that?" asked Heidekopfer.
"There's nothing wrong with any of this," said Unterbaum, "at least as far as that instance goes. It's other things. Nothing has been heard of Mrs. Jones since. Seventy-six years ago, a musician named Bruno Zaleski went on a yachting trip in the South Ocean with a party of three. They never came back. After the usual interval letters came through from all of them. They said they found Tolstoia a Venusian paradise and were going to stay. Zaleski was heard from again. At the time of the next incident, one year later, his brother received a letter telling how happy he was."
He paused for a moment. "The incident sixty-seven years ago was the beginning of a new series. It concerned a man named Walter Artem, another plane case. Like Jones, he disappeared. One of the Tolstoian fishing-craft brought him back, but he was dead. They had preserved his body carefully. I'll show you the picture."
He touched the stud and the watchers found themselves gazing at a coffin, partly glassed so the occupant was visible to the waist. Rose Lanzerotti gave a little cry and with reason, for the face within was peculiarly horrible; bloated and suffused with blood, the neck swelling out over a clearly visible rope.
"They explained he had hanged himself," Unterbaum continued.