'What if he were color blind?' asked Davenport.
This time Gorham took more time. Finally he said, 'No. Color-blind people don't generally go in for chemistry. Detection of color in chemical reactions is too important. And if anybody in this organization were color blind, he'd have enough trouble with one thing or another so that the rest of us would know about it.'
Davenport nodded. He fingered the scar on his cheek absently, 'All right. If the oxygen cylinder wasn't smeared by ignorance or accident, could it have been done on purpose? Deliberately?'
'I don't understand you.'
'Perhaps the murderer had a logical plan in mind when he smeared the oxygen cylinder, then changed his mind. Are there any conditions where platinum black would be dangerous in the presence of oxygen?
Any conditions at all? You're the chemist, Dr. Gorham.'
There was a puzzled frown on the chemist's face. He shook his head. 'No, none. There can't be. Unless-'
'Unless?'
'Well, this is ridiculous, but if you stuck the oxygen jet into a container of hydrogen gas, platinum black on the gas cylinder could be dangerous. Naturally you'd need a big container to make a satisfactory explosion.'
'Suppose,' said Davenport, 'our murderer had counted on filling the room with hydrogen and then having the oxygen tank turned on.'
Gorham said, with a half-smile, 'But why bother with the hydrogen atmosphere when-' The half-smile vanished completely while a complete pallor took its place. He cried, 'Farley! Edmund Farley!'
'What's that?'
'Farley just returned from six months on Titan,' said Gorham in gathering excitement. Titan has a hydrogen-methane atmosphere. He is the only man here to have had experience in such an atmosphere, and it all makes sense now. On Titan a jet of oxygen will combine with the surrounding hydrogen if heated, or treated with platinum black. A jet of hydrogen won't. The situation is exactly the reverse of what it is here on Earth. It must have been Farley. When he entered Llewes' lab to arrange an explosion, he put the platinum black on the oxygen, out of recent habit. By the time he recalled that the situation was the other way round on Earth, the damage was done.'
Davenport nodded in grim satisfaction. That does it, I think.' His hand reached out to an intercom and he said to the unseen recipient at the other end, 'Send out a man to pick up Dr. Edmund Farley at Central Organic.'
A Loint of Paw
There was no question that Montie Stein had, through clever fraud, stolen better than $100,000. There was also no question that he was apprehended one day after the statute of limitations had expired.
It was his manner of avoiding arrest during that interval that brought on the epoch-making case of the
State of New Yorkvs. Montgomery Harlow Stein, with all its consequences introduced law to the fourth dimension.
For you see after having committed the fraud and possessed himself of the hundred grand plus, Stein had calmly entered a time machine, of which he was in illegal possession, and set the controls for seven years and one day in the future.
Stein's lawyer put it simply. Hiding in time was not fundamentally different from hiding in space. If the forces of law had not uncovered Stein in the seven-year interval that was their hard luck.
The District Attorney pointed out that the statute of limitations was not intended to be a game between the law and the criminal. It was a merciful measure designed to protect a culprit from indefinitely prolonged fear of arrest. For certain crimes, a denned period of apprehension of apprehension-so to speak-was considered punishment enough. But Stein, the D.A. insisted, had not experienced any period of apprehension at all.
Stein's lawyer remained unmoved. The law said nothing about measuring the extent of a culprit's fear and anguish. It simply set a time limit.
The D.A. said that Stein had not lived through the limit.
Defense stated that Stein was seven years older now than at the time of the crime and had therefore lived through the limit.
The D.A. challenged the statement and the defense produced Stein's birth certificate. He was born in 2973. At the time of the crime, 3004, he was thirty-one. Now, in 3011, he was thirty-eight. The D.A. shouted that Stein was not physiologically thirty-eight, but thirty-one.
Defense pointed out freezingly that the law, once the individual was granted to be mentally competent, recognized solely chronological age, which could be obtained only by subtracting the date of birth from the date of now.
The D.A., growing impassioned, swore that if Stein were allowed to go free, half the laws on the books would be useless.
Then change the laws, said Defense, to take time travel into account; but until the laws are changed, let them be enforced as written.
Judge Neville Preston took a week to consider and then handed down his decision. It was a turning point in the history of law. It is almost a pity, then, that some people suspect Judge Preston to have been swayed in his way of thinking by the irresistible impulse to phrase his decision as he did.
For that decision, in full, was:
'A niche in time saves Stein.'
If you expect me to apologize for this, you little know your man. I consider a play on words the noblest form of wit, so there!
This is a James Bond type of story, written before I had ever heard of James Bond. Actually, those who know my writing know that I never introduce naughty motifs into my stories. You can tell that from the other stories in this volume. However, an editor - I won't mention his name-once told me he suspected that I never had love scenes in my stories because I was incapable of writing them. Naturally I repudiated that suggestion with the scorn and contumely it deserved and said with heat that it was merely my natural purity and wholesomeness that kept me from doing so. Since the expression on his lace was one of obvious disbelief, I said, 'I'll show you. I'll write a science-fiction love story, but not for publication.' But it turned out also to be a mystery, and I was so pleased with it I let it be published. Anyway, it shows I can do it if I want to. It's just that I don't want to, ordinarily.
I'm in Marsport without Hilda
It worked itself out, to begin with, like a dream. I didn't have to make any arrangements. I didn't have to touch it. I just watched things work out. Maybe right then's when I should have smelled catastrophe.
It began with my usual month's layoff between assignments. A month on and a month off is the right and proper routine for the Galactic Service. I reached Marsport for the usual three-day layover before the short hop to Earth.
Ordinarily, Hilda, God bless her, as sweet a wife as any man ever had, would be there waiting for me and we'd have a nice sedate time of it-a nice little interlude for the two of us. The only trouble with that is that Marsport is the rowdiest hellhole in the system, and a nice little interlude isn't exactly what fits in. Only, how do I explain that to Hilda, hey?
Well, this time my mother-in-law-God bless her, for a change-got sick just two days before I reached Marsport; and the night before landing, I got a spacegram from Hilda saying she would stay on Earth with her mother and wouldn't meet me this one time.
I grammed back my loving regrets and my feverish anxiety concerning her mother; and when I landed, there I was:
I was in Marsport without Hilda! That was still nothing, you understand. It was the frame of the picture, the bones of the woman. Now there was the matter of the lines and coloring inside the frame; the skin and flesh outside the bones.