“I think we should go in now,” he said. “Dinner is almost ready.”
“In a moment. We walked to the pool yesterday so that I could see the rain falling on it.”
“All right.” Garrod walked with his wife to the edge of the long pool. She stood at its turquoise-tiled rim for a minute, and once leaned over above their reflections. Looking downwards at the water’s smooth surface, Garrod was able to see the same stranger’s enormous blue eyes behind Esther’s glasses. Close to them, due to the foreshortening of her reflection, were the two night-black specks which were her real windows on the world, but which would not yield these images until the same time the following day. His own reflection shivered and shrank beside hers, anonymous dark pits for eyes, like a detail from an oil painting magnified to a size which revealed all its imperfections. That’s the real me down there, the fugue-like thought came. And I’m the real reflection. He breathed deeply, but the air seemed not to reach his lungs. His heart swelled like a pillow, filling his chest with its frustrated fluffy poundings, strangling him.
“We’re walking now,” Esther commanded. “Come along.”
They moved off towards the ivy-coloured house for the evening meal. As usual, Esther had a sea-food salad—she preferred a repetitious diet to eating varied foods whose tastes were not in accordance with yesterday’s images. Garrod ate lightly from his own servings, then stood up. Esther un-clipped the discs from her lapel and handed them to him. He took the plastic mount from her and went through to his laboratory at the rear of the house to prepare the evening’s television viewing.
In a corner of the laboratory he had set up one of the old-style large-screen television sets, a sound recorder and an automatic control which switched channels according to Esther’s pre-selected viewing requirements. Facing the set was a stand on which he placed his wife’s eye discs to absorb that evening’s shows. Also on the stand was what looked like an ordinary pair of glasses but which had two discs of twenty-four hour slow glass in place of conventional lenses. These were his.
Garrod replaced the glasses with a similar pair, switched on the television set, the sound recorder and the control unit. He took a tape cassette and his charged glasses into the library, where Esther was already waiting in her wing-back chair. When he put the glasses on he found himself watching a newscast which had gone out exactly twenty-four hours earlier. He plugged the cassette into a playback machine, worked for a moment to synchronize the recorded sound, and sat down beside his wife. Another evening at home had begun.
Normally Garrod was able to take in day-old newscasts with complete indifference, but with that morning’s announcement of Senator Wescott’s assassination fresh in his mind the experience was nerve-racking. Yesterday was as distant and lost and futile as the Punic Wars. And yesterday was the place where his wife was making him live. He sat with clenched hands and thought of the one and only time, a month earlier, when he had tried to break free. Esther had snatched the Retardite discs out of her own eyes, screaming with pain, and endured blindness for days afterwards, refusing to see again until he promised to restore their previous degree of “togetherness“. Again the sense of asphyxiation came on him and he fought it with deep, controlled breathing.
Perhaps an hour had passed when McGill, the major domo, quietly entered the library and told Garrod there was a priority call from Augusta, Maine.
Garrod glanced at his wife’s impassive face. “You know I don’t accept business calls while at home. Get Mr. Fuente to deal with it.”
“Mr. Fuente has already been on another channel, Mr. Garrod. He said it was he who gave this caller your private number and that it’s imperative for you to take the call personally.” McGill was whispering out of deference to Esther, but there was a stubborn expression on his jowled face.
“In that case…” Garrod got to his feet, pleased at the unexpected break in the stultifying routine, set his glasses down and went to the ground-floor room he used as an office. In the viewphone he saw an expensively-dressed, powerfully-built man who had fierce eyes and a spectacular streak of white in his hair.
“Mr. Garrod,” the caller said. “I am Miller J. Pobjoy, chief executive of the State of Maine police commission.”
Garrod had a feeling he had heard the name already that day, but was unable to place it. “What can I do for you?”
“A great deal, I think. My department is investigating the murder of Senator Wescott, and I’m asking for your assistance.”
“In a murder investigation! I don’t see how I can help.”
Pobjoy smiled, showing very white, slightly uneven teeth. “Come now, Mr. Garrod—next to Sherlock Holmes you’re the most famous amateur detective I can think of.”
“Strictly an amateur, Mr. Pobjoy. The business about my father-in-law was meant to be a private matter.”
“I appreciate that—I should explain that I was only joking about the gumshoeing. The reason I’ve called is…I presume this is a secure channel?”
Garrod nodded. “It is. I have a type 183 security cloak here too, if you want.”
“Not necessary. We’ve recovered the remains of the Retardite telltales from the Senator’s car and we’re appointing a panel of experts whose job it will be to see if they contain any information about the killer or killers.”
“Remains?” Garrod felt his interest quicken. “What sort of remains? I understood from the radio broadcasts that the whole vehicle was puddled.”
“Well, that’s just the point—we aren’t too sure just what we’ve got. We have some chunks of drippy-looking metal here, and we think one of them might have a Retardite telltale inside it. The best technical advice we’ve got so far is that it would be risky to slice into the metal in case the stresses damaged the glass.”
“It won’t make any difference,” Garrod said emphatically. “If the telltale has been in contact with white-hot metal all its interior stress patterns will have been relieved. The information is gone.”
“We don’t know how hot the metal was, or even if it was truly molten at the time these chunks were formed. There were explosive forces at work on it.”
“I still say the information’s gone.”
“But can you, as a scientist—a scientist who hasn’t even seen what we’ve got—make a positive statement to that effect?” Pobjoy leaned forward, intent.
“Of course not.”
“Then will you agree to look at the material?”
Garrod sighed. “All right—have it sent to my Portston laboratories.”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Garrod, but you would have to come here. This is being handled within the state of Maine.”
“I’m sorry, too. I don’t see how I could spend that much time and…”
“There’s a lot at stake, Mr. Garrod. Assassins have robbed this country of too much already.”
Garrod thought of Jerry Wescott’s burning commitment to social reform, his Darrow-like hatred of the kind of injustice which is born of inequality of opportunity. Anger at the Senator’s premature death had been an undercurrent in his thoughts all day, but suddenly it was overlaid by an entirely new consideration. He thought: I would have to go without Esther.