boucher book oct28.pdf - Index of

394 Anthony Boucher
“Nothing.” Captain Wark answered his unspoken query. “You’ve got your evidence;
you have to prosecute. But Brin’s spacegram hinted—”
“The public eye,” Dolf Mase stated, “is a vastly overrated character. The romantic
appeal of the unconventional—”
At this point the nascent lecture was interrupted by the entrance of a public eye
and a Lunar sneak-thief.
And in another five minutes there occurred one of the historical moments in
the annals of criminalistics: the comparison of two identical prints made by two
different men.
Wark and the Chief were still poring over the prints, vainly striving to find the
faintest classifiable difference, when Fers addressed the lawyer.
“War’s over,” he said. “And I think it’s unconditional surrender for Mase. You
try to bring up this Lunar ‘alibi’ in court and we’ll have Smit shuttled down here
and produced as a prosecution exhibit. Unless you force us to that, we’ll just forget
the whole thing; no use announcing this identity-problem until we’ve adjusted our
systems to it. But either way we’ve got you cold.”
“I still,” said Dolf Mase smugly, “reserve my defense.”
Hours later, Fers Brin was delivering his opinion over a beer.
“Only this time,” Fers said, “we know it’s a bluff. This fingerprint gimmick was
a gift from his own strange gods—he never could have counted on it. All he has left
now is some kind of legalistic fireworks and much damned good it’ll do him.”
“You’ve done a good job, Brin,” Captain Wark said glumly. “We’ve got Mase
nailed down—only …”
“Only you can’t really rejoice because you’ve lost faith in the science of identification?
Brighten up, Captain. It’s OK. Look: it’s all because we forgot one little thing.
Fingerprint identification worked so beautifully for so many centuries in so many
million cases that we came to believe in it as a certainty. We took it as an axiom:
There are no identical fingerprints. And we missed the whole point. There never
was any such certainty. There were only infinitely long odds.”
Captain Wark sat up slowly and a light began to gleam in his eyes.
But the Chief said, “Odds?”
“Galton,” Fers went on, “is the guy who started it all on a serious criminalistic
level. Sir Francis Galton, English anthropologist. It’s all in your office; I looked it up
again while you were disposing of our print-twins. Quite a character, this Galton;
practically founded meteorology and eugenics too. And he figured that the odds
on any two fingerprints coinciding on all the points we used in classification was
one in sixty-four billion. For his time this was fine; it was just about the same, for
practical police work, as saying one in infinity. But what’s the population of the
system now?”
“The whole system?” The Chief’s eyes were boggling. “Damned near—seventy
billion! ”
“So by now,” the Captain exclaimed, “it just about had to happen sooner or
later!”
“Exactly,” said Fers. “From now on a single print is not identification. It’s strong
presumptive evidence, but that’s all. And it’ll usually be enough. Just remember