“They know better.”
“Fine. I don’t know what the applications will be for this gadget of yours, but there’ll be plenty of them.”
“Weapons,” McFarlane hazarded gloomily.
“I don’t think so. Too cumbersome, and the range would be pretty short with atmospheric absorption. But there’s flash photography. Signalling in space. I’ll bet if you hauled a five-year panel all the way out to Uranus on a probe and triggered it the flash would be detectable on Earth.”
McFarlane opened the door of his office. “Let’s have a drink to celebrate—I’ve been saving a bottle for this occasion.”
“I don’t know, Theo.”
“Come on, Al. Besides I’ve got a new line for you. How’s this?” He pointed ahead with a fierce frown on his face, and shouted, “Stop fiddling with that belt, Van Alien!”
“Not bad. Not very good, but not bad either.” Garrod smiled at his research chief who had been a friend since college days. They had a running joke which involved a fantasy in which all the great scientists who had given their names to discoveries were children in a classroom together. Even at a tender age each was concerned in some way with the field of research in which he would triumph in later life, but the harassed teacher had no way of knowing this, and kept trying to force them to pay attention. So far in the fantasy sequence he had shouted, “What have you got in that bottle, Klein?” to an incipient topologist; “Stop that fidgeting, Brown,” to the future discoverer of molecular agitation; and “Make up your mind, Heisenberg,” to the child who would one day formulate the Uncertainty Principle. Garrod had almost stopped trying because it was difficult to find a new line with the required degree of universality, but McFarlane was still working away and producing a new line every week.
Garrod hesitated at the door. “It’s a little early to celebrate. We still have to figure out why we got a runaway reaction and what to do about it.”
“Now that we’ve got this far, the rest is only ,a matter of time,” McFarlane said emphatically. “I’ll guarantee you that within three months you’ll be able to take a piece of slow glass and view any scene in it at will—just like a home movie. Think what that’s going to mean.”
“Yeah, for people like the police.” Garrod thought about his nameless judge. “And the Government.”
McFarlane shrugged. “Spying, you mean? Glass eyes? Invasion of privacy? The only people who have to worry about that are the crooks.” He took a bottle of whisky from a cupboard and poured two generous measures into gold-rimmed tumblers. “I’ll tell you one thing, though—I wouldn’t like to be any guy who’s up to things he doesn’t want his wife to know about.”
“Neither would I,” Garrod said. In the bottom of his glass, where the interplay of reflection and refraction created a miniature universe, he saw a girl with black hair and silver lips.
When he arrived home an hour later he expected to find the house in darkness, but lights were on in several rooms and he saw Esther standing at the open front door of the house. She was wearing a belted tweed coat and had a scarf tied over her hair. Garrod got out of the Mercedes and, with a premonition of trouble, went up the steps. The wall lights showed that Esther’s face was pale and streaked with tears.
Was this he wondered, a delayed reaction to his request for a divorce? Yet, she had seemed so cool…
“Alban,” she said quickly, before he could speak “I tried to get you at the plant but the patrol man said I had just missed you.
“Is there something wrong?”
“Will you drive me to see Dad?”
“Is he ill?”
“No. The police have arrested him.”
Garrod almost burst out laughing. “But that would be lèse majesté! What’s he supposed to have done?”
Esther covered her mouth with trembling hands as she spoke. “They’re saying he killed a man.”
Chapter Six
“The evidence is all there,” Lieutenant Mayrick said, with an easy helpfulness which suggested he was so certain of his ground that he could see no danger in being frank. He was a thick-shouldered young man with prematurely greying hair and a scarred, competent face.
“What evidence? So far nobody has offered me any evidence.” Garrod tried to sound as alert and competent as the lieutenant, but it had been an incredibly long day and the whisky he had drunk with McFarlane had died in him.
Mayrick’s gaze was level. “I know who you are, Mr. Garrod, and I know how much money you have. But I also know that I’m not required to tell you.”
“Forgive me, lieutenant—I’m very tired and all I want to do is go home and get to bed, but I know my wife won’t let me sleep unless I can put her mind at ease about this thing. Now, what happened?”
“I don’t know if this will help you put Mrs. Garrod’s mind at ease.” Mayrick lit a cigarette and threw the pack on to his desk.
“One of our patrol cars was going east on Ridge Avenue just before one o’clock and the officers in it found Mr. Livingstone’s car sitting with one wheel up on the sidewalk. He was slumped over the steering wheel, drugged to the eyeballs. At the other side of the street they found a dead man who has since been identified as one William Kolkman. The reason he was dead was that he had been struck by an automobile moving at considerable speed. The front left-hand fender of Mr. Livingstone’s car was dented in a manner exactly consistent with Kolkman’s injuries, and we have already matched paint samples taken from his clothes with the paint on the car.
“How does all that sound to you?” Mayrick leaned back and puffed contentedly on his cigarette.
“It sounds like you’ve already convicted my father-in-law.”
“That’s your own reaction—all I did was summarize the evidence.”
“I still can’t take it in,” Garrod said slowly. “There’s this business about drugs. Boyd Livingstone was born back in the Thirties, so he likes liquor—to him it isn’t a drug—but he has a built-in antipathy to anything that comes out of a pillbox.”
“We’ve given him a medical check-up, Mr. Garrod, and he’s loaded with MSR.” Mayrick opened a blue folder and placed some large photographs in front of Garrod. “Do these make it any more believable?”
The pictures, all with certified time-recording dials in the corners, showed Livingstone lying over the steering wheel of his car, close-ups of the dented fender, a shabbily-dressed dead man crumpled in an appallingly large pool of blood, and general views of the accident scene under flood-lighting.
“What are these?” Garrod pointed to dark objects like broken rock scattered on the concrete of the street.
“Bits of caked mud dislodged from inside the wheel arch by the impact.” Mayrick smiled briefly. “That’s something your realistic movie-makers forget about when they’re staging accident scenes.”
“I see.” Garrod got to his feet. “Thanks for telling me all this, lieutenant. I’ll just have to try making my wife face up to this thing.”
“That’s all right, Mr. Garrod.”
They shook hands and Garrod left the small, coldly-lit office. He walked along the corridor and found Esther and Grant Morgan, the Livingstones’ lawyer, in an ante-room near the police building’s main entrance. Esther’s brown eyes locked on his, pleading with him to say what she wanted him to say.