"I have a question," said Ann Starnes. "Why did they go to all the trouble of preserving him just the way he died? It sounds as though they were afraid somebody might get suspicious."
"That's what I thought," said Unterbaum. "But there's an explanation. The records show that the Tolstoians, even while they were in Russia, showed a peculiar reverence for their dead when they were important people. It's a hold-over from their twentieth century leader Lenin. They preserve bodies this way so they're visible. The explanation that came with Artem's body was that the Tolstoians didn't know how important he was, but thought he might be big enough to deserve preservative treatment."
"Polite of them," murmured Lanzerotti.
"Very," said Unterbaum. "Almost too polite. Because it was repeated—since Artem there have been six cases of castaways on Tolstoia committing suicide and being delivered at MacNider in preserved form."
"All hangings?" asked Heidekopfer.
"No. One stabbing, three shootings, two overdoses of soporifics. There are autopsy records on those, and they're legitimate."
"Seems a high proportion of suicides among the castaways," said Heidekopfer. "Can anything be made of that?"
"Nobody seemed to think so," said Unterbaum. "Seven suicides out of a given group over a period of eighty years isn't much, after all. The thing that stirred up our office was the discovery that in the past eighty years not one castaway has come back alive. They've either been crated out as suicides or sent through letters saying they have decided to become citizens of Tolstoia."
He paused a moment to let that sink in. "A number of these cases are rather special. There was Carmenilla Baio, forty-four years ago. She was a video dancer on a flight from MacNider to South Bergenland. Sent out the usual letter saying she had decided her future lay in Tolstoia, and followed it with another one a couple of years later. That's ordinary enough, but the case made the news, and when we went through the records, we found that when she disappeared she had been married only three months and was passionately devoted to her husband. Her second letter was written in a kind of code, and asked him to fake an accident and join her there."
"Did he?" asked Ann Starnes.