“Should say I did! I know for sure that she didn’t come in on the train or Dave Wattle would’ve seen her. If she’d come by bus, Myrtle Gisco would have known it. Johnny Farness didn’t drive her in from the airport. I figure that any woman who’d live openly with a man like Maloney must have hitchhiked into town. She didn’t come any other way.”
“That’s all, thank you,” Justin Marks said.
Maloney sighed. He couldn’t understand why Justin was looking so worried. Everything was going fine. According to plan. He saw the black looks the jury was giving him, but he wasn’t worried. Why, as soon as they found out what had actually happened, they’d be all for him. Justin Marks seemed to be sweating.
He came back to the table and whispered to Bill, “How about temporary insanity?”
“I guess it’s okay if you like that sort of thing.”
“No. I mean as a plea!”
Maloney stared at him. “Justy, old boy. Are you nuts? All we have to do is tell the truth.”
Justin Marks rubbed his mustache with his knuckle and made a small bleating sound that acquired him a black look from the judge.
Amery Heater built his case up very cleverly and very thoroughly. In fact, the jury had Bill Maloney so definitely electrocuted that they were beginning to give him sad looks — full of pity.
It took Amery Heater two days to complete his case. When it was done, it was a solid and shining structure, every discrepancy explained — everything pinned down. Motive. Opportunity. Everything.
On the morning of the third day, the court was tense with expectancy. The defence was about to present its case. No one know what the case was, except, of course, Bill Maloney, Justin Marks, and the unworldly red-head who called herself Rejapachalandakeena. Bill called her Keena. She hadn’t appeared in court.
Justin Marks stood up and said to the hushed court, “Your Honor. Rather than summarize my defence at this point, I would like to put William Maloney on the stand first and let him tell the story in his own words.”
The court buzzed. Putting Maloney on the stand would give Amery Heater a chance to cross-examine. Heater would rip Maloney to tiny shreds. The audience licked its collective chops.
“Your name?”
“William Maloney, 12 Braydon Road.”
“And your occupation?”
“Tinkering. Research, if you want a fancy name.”
“Where do you get your income?”
“I’ve got a few gimmicks patented. The royalties come in.”
“Please tell the court all you know about this crime of which you are accused. Start at the beginning, please.”
Bill Maloney shoved the blonde hair back off his forehead with a square, mechanic’s hand and smiled cheerfully at the jury. Some of them, before they realized it, had smiled back. They felt the smiles on their lips and sobered instantly. It wasn’t good form to smile at a vicious murderer.
Bill slouched in the witness chair and laced his fingers across his stomach.
“It all started,” he said, “the day the army let that rocket get out of hand on the seventh of May. I’ve got my shop in my cellar. Spend most of my time down there.
“That rocket had an atomic warhead, you know. I guess they’ve busted fifteen generals over that affair so far. It exploded in the hills forty miles from town. The jar upset some of my apparatus and stuff. Put it out of kilter. I was sore.
“I turned around, cussing away to myself, and where my coal bin used to be, there was a room. The arch leading into the room was wide and I could see in. I tell you, it really shook me up to see that room there. I wondered for a minute if the bomb hadn’t given me delusions.
“The room I saw didn’t have any furniture in it. Not like furniture we know. It had some big cubes of dull silvery metal, and some smaller cubes. I couldn’t figure out the lighting.
“Being a curious cuss, I walked right through the arch and looked around. I’m a great one to handle things. The only thing in the room I could pick up was a gadget on top of the biggest cube. It hardly weighed a thing.
“In order to picture it, you’ve got to imagine a child’s hoop made of silvery wire. Then right across the wire imagine the blackest night you’ve ever seen, rolled out into a thin sheet and stretched tight like a drumhead on that wire hoop.
“As I was looking at it I heard some sort of deep vibration and there I was, stumbling around in my coal bin. The room was gone. But I had that darn hoop in my hand. That hoop with the midnight stretched across it.
“I took it back across to my workbench where the light was better. I held it in one hand and poked a finger at that black stuff. My finger went right through. I didn’t feel a thing. With my finger still sticking through it, I looked on the other side.
“It was right there that I named the darn thing. I said, ‘Gawk!’ And that’s what I’ve called it ever since. The Gawk. My finger didn’t come through on the other side. I stuck my whole arm through. No arm. I pulled it back out. Quick. Arm was okay. Somehow it seemed warmed on the other side of the gawk.
“Well, you can imagine what it was like for me, a tinkerer, to get my hands on a thing like that. I forgot all about meals and so on. I had to find out what it was and why. I couldn’t see my own hand on the other side of it. I put it right up in front of my face, reached through from the back and tried to touch my nose. I couldn’t do it. I reached so deep that without the gawk there, my arm would have been halfway through my head...”
“Objection!” Amery Heater said. “All this has nothing to do with the fact...”
“My client,” Justin said, “is giving the incidents leading up to the alleged murder.”
“Overruled,” the judge said.
Maloney said, “Thanks. I decided that my arm had to be someplace when I stuffed it through the gawk. And it wasn’t in this dimension. Maybe not even in this time. But it had to be someplace. That meant that I had to find out what was on the other side of the gawk. I could use touch, sight. Maybe I could climb through. It intrigued me, you might say.
“I started with touch. I put my hand through, held it in front of me and walked. I walked five feet before my hand rammed up against something. I felt it. It seemed to be a smooth wall. There wasn’t such a wall in my cellar.
“There has to be some caution in science. I didn’t stuff my head through. I couldn’t risk it. I had the hunch there might be something unfriendly on the other side of the gawk. I turned the thing around and stuck my hand through from the other side. No wall. There was a terrific pain. I yanked my hand back. A lot of little bloodvessels near the surface had broken. I dropped the gawk and jumped around for a while. Found out I had a bad case of frostbite. The broken bloodvessels indicated that I had stuffed my hand into a vacuum. Frostbite in a fraction of a second indicated nearly absolute zero. It seemed that maybe I had put my hand into space. It made me glad it had been my hand instead of my head.
“I propped the thing up on my bench and shoved lots of things through, holding them a while and bringing them back out. Made a lot of notes on the effect of absolute zero on various materials.
“By that time I was bushed. I went up to bed. Next day I had some coffee and then built myself a little periscope. Shoved it through. Couldn’t see a thing. I switched the gawk, tested with a thermometer, put my hand through. Warm enough. But the periscope didn’t show me a thing. I wondered if maybe something happened to light rays when they went through that blackness. Turns out that I was right.
“By about noon I had found out another thing about it. Every time I turned it around I was able to reach through into a separate and distinct environment. I tested that with the thermometer. One of the environments I tested slammed the mercury right out through the top of the glass and broke the glass and burned my hand. I was glad I hadn’t hit that one the first time. It would have burned my hand off at the wrist.