Croixcodile Keystone Kops?

Talarican · 21 Jan 2001, 00:17 · from urth-v0030.mbox · original

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: "Talarican" <exultnttalarican at mindspring.com>
Subject: (urth) Croixcodile Keystone Kops?
Date: Sun, 21 Jan 2001 00:17:15
Message-ID: <urth-v0030-0251 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/urth/archives/v0030/0251.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

"Who wrote that table of figures in Marsch's copy of _A Field Guide to the
Animals of Sainte Anne_, which officer Constant identified as ballistics
tables for a .35 cal rifle, and cited as evidence 'John V. Marsch' (Victor
Trenchard) came to St. Croix intending to assasinate someone by sniping"
would make a good IAQ if the answer were not so obvious.

The "real" Dr. Marsch, avid hunter that he was, to judge by his journal
entries, calculated and wrote down these figures. (1) See a critter, (2)
look it up in the _Field Guide_ to identify it, (3) consult the ballistics
table in the same cover to see how best to kill it. I have to wonder if this
somehow signals that the real Dr. Marsch was doomed to failure in any case,
since he so blithely destroys what he discovers?

Victor, having learned (strangely enough) sufficiently of anthropology and
academic life, during his sojourn in the back of beyond, to fool every
professor on both planets into accepting him without question upon his
return, never learned to shoot and probably never bothered to learn the
significance of ballistics tables. Thus, 'John V. Marsch' (Victor) told
Constant he was a terrible shot and knew nothing of the figures.

Yet Constant and the other officers no doubt had learned from the journals
that Marsch claimed to be a great shot with a .35 rifle. Did the Croix
secret police think this inconsistency proved their theory that "Marsch" was
an assasin from sisterworld?

Or had the police read the clues in the journals and Victor's prison
writings to figure out he was an impostor, therefore presumably up to no
good in any event?

An interesting clue: in the framing tale of "V.R.T.", the officer assigned
to review the case told his fellow officer that the case was criminal, not
political.

Talarican
(as you can see, what they call my obsession and mania, was in ancient times
a respected academic discipline, which they named 'anthropology'!)

*More Wolfe info & archive of this list at http://www.urth.net/urth/

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net