The shifting waters of the bay scattered sunlight through the otherwise dismal room, the little boats crossed and re-crossed, and silent cars occasionally slid into the service station. An attractive girl in the extremely abbreviated dress of a decade ago walked across a garden in the foreground, and Harpur saw several of the reporters jot some personal angle material in their notebooks.
One of the more inquisitive left his seat and walked round behind the pane of glass to see the view from the other side, but came back looking disappointed. Harpur knew a sheet of metal had been welded into the frame at the back, completely covering the glass. The county had ruled that it would have been an invasion of the senior Bennetts’ privacy to put on public view all their domestic activities during the time the glass was being charged.
As the minutes began to drag out in the choking atmosphere of the room, the reporters grew noticeably restless, and began loudly swapping yarns. Somewhere near the front, one of them began sneezing monotonously and swearing in between. No smoking was permitted near the monitoring equipment which, on behalf of the state, hungrily scanned the glass, so relays of three and four began to drift out into the corridor to light cigarettes. Harpur heard them complaining about the long wait and he smiled. He had been waiting for five years, and it seemed even longer.
Today, June yth, was one of the key days for which he and the rest of the country had been standing by, but it had been impossible to let the press know in advance the exact moment at which they would get their story. The trouble was that Emile Bennett had never been able to remember just what time, on that hot Sunday, he had driven to his parents’ home to collect his sheet of slow glass. During the subsequent trial it had not been possible to pin it down to anything more definite than “about three in the afternoon“.
One of the reporters finally noticed Harpur sitting near the door and came over to him. He was sharply dressed, fair-haired and impossibly young looking.
“Pardon me, sir. Aren’t you Judge Harpur?”
Harpur nodded. The boy’s eyes widened briefly then narrowed as he assessed the older man’s present news value.
“Weren’t you the presiding judge in the…Raddall case?” He had been going to say the Glass Eye case, but immediately changed his mind.
Harpur nodded again. “Yes, that’s correct. But I no longer give interviews to the Press. I’m sorry.”
“That’s all right, sir. I understand.” He went on out to the corridor, walking with quicker, springier steps. Harpur guessed the young man had just decided on his angle for today’s story. He could have written the copy himself:
Today Judge Kenneth Harpur—the man who five years ago presided in the controversial “Glass Eye” case, in which twenty-one-year-old Ewan Raddall was charged with a double slaying—sat on a chair in one of the underground rooms at police headquarters. An old man now, the Iron Judge has nothing at all to say. He only watches, waits, and wonders…
Harpur smiled wryly. He no longer felt any bitterness over the newspaper attacks. The only reason he had stopped speaking to journalists was that he had become very, very bored with that aspect of his life. He had reached the age at which a man discards the unimportant stuff and concentrates on essentials. In another two weeks he would be free to sit in the sun and note exactly how many shades of blue and green there were in the sea, and just how much time elapsed between the appearance of the first evening star and the second. If his physician allowed it, he would have a little good whisky, and if his physician refused it, he would still have the whisky. He would read a few books, and perhaps even write one…
As it turned out, the estimated time given by Bennett at the trial had been pretty accurate.
At eight minutes past three Harpur and the waiting newsmen saw Bennett approach the glass from the far side with a screwdriver in his hand. He was wearing the sheepish look people often have when they get in range of slow glass. He worked at the sides for a moment, then the sky flashed crazily into view, showing the glass had been tilted out of its frame. A moment later the room went dark as the image of a brown, army-type blanket unfolded across the glass, blotting out the laggard light.
The monitors at the back of the room produced several faint clicking noises which were drowned out by the sound of the reporters hurrying to telephones.
Harpur got to his feet and slowly walked out behind the reporters. There was no need to hurry now. Police records showed that the glass would remain blanked out for two days, because that was how long it had lain in the trunk of Bennett’s car before he had got round to installing it in a window frame at the back of his city home. For a further two weeks after that it would show the casual day-to-day events which took place five years before in the children’s public playground at the rear of the Bennett house.
Those events were of no particular interest to anyone; but the records also showed that in the same playground, on the night of June 21, 1968, a twenty-year-old typist, Joan Calderisi, had been raped and murdered. Her boy friend, a twenty-three-year-old auto mechanic named Edward Jerome Hattie, had also been killed, presumably for trying to defend the girl.
Unknown to the murderer, there had been one witness to the double-killing—and now it was getting ready to give its perfect and incontrovertible evidence.
The problem had not been difficult to foresee.
Right from the day slow glass appeared in a few very expensive stores, people had wondered what would happen if a crime were to be committed in its view. What would be the legal position if there were, say, three suspects and it was known that, five or ten years later, a piece of glass would identify the murderer beyond all doubt? Obviously, the law could not risk punishing the wrong person; but, equally obviously, the guilty one could not be allowed to go free all that time.
This was how tabloid feature writers had summed it up, although to Judge Kenneth Harpur there had been no problem at all. When he read the speculations it took him less than five seconds to make up his mind—and he had been impressively unruffled when the test case came his way.
That part had been a coincidence. Erskine County had no more homicides and no more slow glass than any other comparable area. In fact, Harpur had no recollection of ever seeing the stuff until Holt City’s electrical street-lighting was suddenly replaced by alternating panels of eight-hour glass and sixteen-hour glass slung in continuous lines above the thoroughfares.
It had taken some time for a Retardite capable of producing delays measured in years to evolve from the first sheets which held light back by roughly half a second. The user had to be absolutely certain of the time delay he wanted—because there was no way of speeding the process up. Had Retardite been a “glass” in the true sense of the word, it might have been possible to plane a piece down to a different thickness and get the information sooner; but, in reality, it was an extremely opaque materiaclass="underline" opaque in the sense that light never actually got into it.
Radiations with wavelengths in the order of that of light were absorbed on the face of a Retardite panel and their information converted to stress patterns within the material. The piezoluctic effect by which the information worked its way through to the opposite face involved the whole crystalline structure, and anything which disturbed that structure instantaneously randomized the stress patterns.
Infuriating as the discovery was to certain researchers, it had been an important factor in the commercial success of Retardite. People would have been reluctant to install scenedows in their homes, knowing that everything they had done behind them was being stored for other eyes to see years later. So the burgeoning piezoluctics industry had been quick to invent an inexpensive “tickler” by which any piece of slow glass could be cleaned off for reuse, like a cluttered computer programme.