The mesh cage blurred and she was gone. Her blood was on the floor,
but she was gone into the future I had just come from.
That was when the reaction hit me. I'd escaped starvation and her gun,
but I wasn't a hero and the release of tension flipped my stomach over
and unhinged my knees.
Shaking badly, I stumbled through the big, empty house until I found a
phone.
* * * * *
Lou Pape got there so quickly that I still hadn't gotten over the
tremors, in spite of a bottle of brandy I dug out of a credenza, maybe
because the date on the label, 1763, gave me a new case of the
shivers.
I could see the worry on Lou's face vanish when he assured himself
that I was all right. It came back again, though, when I told him what
had happened. He didn't believe any of it, naturally. I guess I
hadn't really expected him to.
"If I didn't know you, Mark," he said, shaking his big, dark head
unhappily, "I'd send you over to Bellevue for observation. Even
knowing you, maybe that's what I ought to do."
"All right, let's see if there's any proof," I suggested tiredly.
"From what I was told, there ought to be plenty."
We searched the house clear down to the basement, where he stood with
his face slack.
"Christ!" he breathed. "The annex to the Metropolitan Museum!"
The basement ran the length and breadth of the house and was twice as
high as an average room, and the whole glittering place was crammed
with paintings in rich, heavy frames, statuettes, books, manuscripts,
goblets and ewers and jewelry made of gold and huge gems, and
tapestries in brilliant color ... and everything was as bright and
sparkling and new as the day it was made, which was almost true of a
lot of it.
"The dame was loaded and she was an art collector, that's all," Lou
said. "You can't sell me that screwy story of yours. She was a
collector and she knew where to find things."
"She certainly did," I agreed.
"What did you do with her?"
"I told you. I shot her through the arm before she could shoot me and
I sent her into the future."
He took me by the front of the jacket. "You killed her, Mark. You
wanted all this stuff for yourself, so you knocked her off and got rid
of her body somehow."
"Why don't you go back to acting, where you belong, Lou, and leave
sleuthing to people who know how?" I asked, too worn to pull his hands
loose. "Would I kill her and call you up to get right over here?
Wouldn't I have sneaked these things out first? Or more likely I'd
have sneaked them out, hidden them and nobody--including you--would
know I'd ever been here. Come on, use your head."
"That's easy. You lost your nerve."
"I'm not even losing my patience."
* * * * *
He pushed me away savagely. "If you killed her for this stuff or
because of that crazy yarn you gave me, I'm a cop and you're no
friend. You're just a plain killer I happened to have known once, and
I'll make sure you fry."
"You always did have a taste for that kind of dialogue. Go ahead and
wrap me up in an airtight case, have them throw the book at me, send
me up the river, put me in the hot squat. But you'll have to do the
proving, not me."
He headed for the stairs. "I will. And don't try to make a break or
I'll plug you as if I never saw you before."
He put in a call at the phone upstairs. I didn't give a particular
damn who it was he'd called. I was too relieved that I hadn't killed
May Roberts; destroying anything that beautiful, however evil, would
have stayed with me the rest of my life. There was another reason for
my relief--if I'd killed her and left the evidence for Lou to find,
he'd never help me. No, that's not quite so; he'd probably have tried
to get me to plead insanity on the basis of my unbelievable
explanation.
But most of all, I couldn't get rid of the look on her face when I'd
shot her through the arm, the arm that was so wonderful to look at and
that had held a murderous little gun to greet me with.
She was in the future now. She wouldn't be executed by them; they
regarded crime as an illness, and they'd treat her with their
marvelously advanced therapy and she'd become a useful, contented
citizen, living out her existence in an era that had given me more
happiness than I'd ever had.
I sat and tried to stupefy myself with brandy that should long ago
have dried to brick-hardness, while Lou Pape stood at the door with
his hand near his holster and glared at me. He didn't take his eyes
off me until somebody named Prof. Jeremiah Aaronson came in and was
introduced briefly and flatly to me. Then Lou took him upstairs.
It was minutes before I realized what they were going to do. I ran up
after them.
I was just in time to see Aaronson carefully take the housing off the
hooded motors, and leap back suddenly from the fury of lightning
sparks.
* * * * *
The whole machine fused while we watched helplessly--motors, switches,
panel and mesh cage. They flashed blindingly and blew apart and melted
together in a charred and molten pile.
"Rigged," Aaronson said in the tone of a bitter curse. "Set to short
if it was tampered with. I wouldn't be surprised if there were
incendiaries placed at strategic spots. Nothing else could have made a
mess like this."
He finally glanced down at his hand and saw it was scorched. He hissed
with the realization of pain, blew on the burn, shook it in the air to
cool it, and pulled a handkerchief out of his back pocket by reaching
all the way around the rear for it with his left hand.
Lou looked helplessly at the heap of cooling slag. "Can you make any
sense of it, Prof?" he asked.
"Can you?" Aaronson retorted. "Melt down a microtome or any other
piece of machinery you're unfamiliar with, and see if you can identify
it when it looks like this."
He went out, wrapping his hand in the handkerchief.
Lou kicked glumly at a piece of twisted tubing. "Aaronson is a top
physicist, Mark. I was hoping he'd make enough out of the machine
to--ah, hell, I wanted to believe you! I couldn't. I still can't. Now
we'll have to dig through the house to find her body."
"You won't find it or the secret of the machine," I answered
miserably. "I told you they said the secret would be lost. This is
how. Now I'll never be able to visit the future again. I'll never see
them or May Roberts. They'll straighten her out, get rid of her hate
and vindictiveness, and it won't do me a damned bit of good because
the machine is gone and she's generations ahead of me."
He turned to me puzzledly. "You're not afraid to have us dig for her
body, Mark?"
"Tear the place apart if you want."
"We'll have to," he said. "I'm calling Homicide."
"Call in the Marines. Call in anybody you like."
"You'll have to stay in my custody until we're through."
I shrugged. "As long as you leave me alone while you're doing your
digging, I don't give a hang if I'm under arrest for suspicion of
murder. I've got to do some straightening out. I wish the people in
the future could take on the job--they could do it faster and better
than I can--but some nice, peaceful quiet would help."
* * * * *
He didn't touch me or say a word to me as we waited for the squad to
arrive. I sat in the chair and shut out first him and then the men
with their sounding hammers and crowbars and all the rest.
She'd been ruthless and callous, and she'd murdered old people with no
more pity than a wolf among a herd of helpless sheep.
But Blundell and Carr had told me that she was as much a victim as the
oldsters who'd died of starvation with the riches she'd given them
still untouched, on deposit in the banks or stuffed into hiding places
or pinned to their shabby clothes. She needed treatment for the
illness her father had inflicted on her. But even he, they'd said, had
been suffering from a severe emotional disturbance and proper care
could have made a great and honored scientist out of him.
They'd told me the truth and made me hate her, and they'd told me
their viewpoint and made that hatred impossible.
I was here, in the present, without her. The machine was gone.
Yearning over something I couldn't change would destroy me. I had no
right to destroy myself. Nobody did, they'd told me, and nobody who
reconciles himself to the fact that some situations just are
impossible to work out ever could.
I'd realized that when the squad packed up and left and Lou Pape came
over to where I was sitting.
"You knew we wouldn't find her," he said.
"That's what I kept telling you."
"Where is she?"
"In Port Said, exotic hellhole of the world, where she's dancing in
veils for the depraved--"
"Cut out the kidding! Where is she?"
"What's the difference, Lou? She's not here, is she?"
"That doesn't mean she can't be somewhere else, dead."
"She's not dead. You don't have to believe me about anything else,
just that."
He hauled me out of the chair and stared hard at my face. "You aren't
lying," he said. "I know you well enough to know you're not."
"All right, then."
"But you're a damned fool to think a dish like that would have any
part of you. I don't mean you're nothing a woman would go for, but
she's more fang than female. You'd have to be richer and
better-looking than her, for one thing--"
"Not after my friends get through with her. She'll know a good man
when she sees one and I'd be what she wants." I slid my hand over my
naked scalp. "With a head of hair, I'd look my real age, which happens
to be a year younger than you, if you remember. She'd go for me--they
checked our emotional quotients and we'd be a natural together. The
only thing was that I was bald. They could have grown hair on my head,
which would have taken care of that, and then we'd have gotten
together like gin and tonic."
* * * * *
Lou arched his black eyebrows at me. "They really could grow hair on
you?"
"Sure. Now you want to know why I didn't let them." I glanced out the
window at the smoky city. "That's why. They couldn't tell me if I'd
ever get back to the future. I wasn't taking any chances. As long as
there was a possibility that I'd be stranded in my own time, I wasn't
going to lose my livelihood. Which reminds me, you have anything else
to do here?"
"There'll be a guard stationed around the house and all her holdings
and art will be taken over until she comes back--"
"She won't."
"--or is declared legally dead."
"And me?" I broke in.
"We can't hold you without proof of murder."
"Good enough. Then let's get out of here."
"I have to go back on duty," he objected.
"Not any more. I've got over $15,000 in cash and deposits--enough to
finance you and me."
"Enough to kill her for."
"Enough to finance you and me," I repeated doggedly. "I told you I had
the money before she sent me into the future--"
"All right, all right," he interrupted. "Let's not go into that again.
We couldn't find a body, so you're free. Now what's this about
financing the two of us?"