“And my fingers wandered idly—”
“WHEN SHE COMES!” Grandpa blatted, always the life of the party. “Used to carry a tune pretty well in my young days. Let’s get together now. Know ‘Frankie and Johnnie’?”
Gallegher repressed an impulse to burst into tears. With a cold glance at Grandpa, he went into the kitchen and opened a bulb of beer. The cool catnip taste refreshed him, but failed to raise his spirits. He couldn’t sing. Not in the manner of Firez, anyhow. Nor would six months of training his larynx work any appreciable change, he knew. The device simply had failed to work. Mental hookup, nuts.
Grandpa’s voice called shrilly.
“Hey! I found something in the back yard!”
“I don’t need three guesses,” Gallegher said moodily, and went to work on the beer.
Three hours later — at 10 P.M. — the police arrived. The reason for the delay was simply explained; the body in the morgue had vanished, but its disappearance hadn’t been detected for some time. Then there had been a thorough search, yielding, of course, not the slightest result. Mahoney appeared, with his cohorts, and Gallegher waved them into the back yard. “You’ll find it out there,” he sighed.
Mahoney glared at him. “More funny business, eh?” he snapped.
“None of my doing.”
The troupe poured out of the lab, leaving a slim, blond man eyeing Gallegher thoughtfully.
“How goes it?” Cantrell inquired.
“Uh — O.K.”
“You got any more of those — gadgets — hidden around here?”
“The heat-ray projectors? No.”
“Then how do you keep killing people that way?” Cantrell asked plaintively. “I don’t get it.”
“He explained it to me,” Grandpa said, “but I didn’t understand what he was talking about. Not then. I do now, of course. It’s simply a matter of variable temporal lines. Planck’s uncertainty principle enters into it, and, Heisenberg, obviously. Laws of thermodynamics show clearly that a universe tends to return to the norm, which is our known rate of entropy, and variations from that norm must necessarily be compensated for by corresponding warps in the temporal-spatial structure of the universal cosmos equation.”
There was silence.
Gallegher went to the wall and drew a glass of water, which he poured slowly over his head. “You understand that, do you?” he asked.
“Sure,” Grandpa said. “Why not? The mental hookup gave me your mathematical talent — which included vocabulary, I suppose.”
“You been holding out on me?”
“Hell, no. It takes awhile for the brain to readjust to the new values. That’s a safety valve, I guess. The sudden influx of a completely novel set of thought-patterns would disrupt the mind completely. It sinks in — three hours or so it takes. It’s been that long or more, hasn’t it?”
“Yeah,” Gallegher said. “Yeah.” He caught sight of the watching Cantrell and managed a smile. “A little joke Grandpa and I have between ourselves. Nothing to it.”
“Hm-m-m,” Cantrell said, his eyes hooded. “That so?”
“Yeah. Sure. That’s all.”
A body was carried in from the back yard and through the laboratory. Cantrell winked, patted his pocket significantly, and drew Gallegher into a corner.
“If I showed anybody that heat-ray of yours, you’d be sunk, Gallegher. Don’t forget that.”
“I’m not. What the devil do you want, anyhow?”
“Oh — I dunno. A weapon like this might come in plenty handy. One never knows. Lots of holdups these days. I feel safer with this thing in my pocket.”
He drew back as Mahoney came in, chewing his lips. The detective was profoundly disturbed.
“That guy in the back yard—”
“Yeah?”
“He looks like you, a bit. Only older.”
“How about the fingerprints, Mahoney?” Cantrell asked.
The detective growled something under his breath. “ You know the answer. Impossible, as usual. Eyeprints check, too. Now listen, Gallegher, I’m going to ask you some questions and I want straight answers. Don’t forget you’re under suspicion of murder.”
“Whom did I murder?” Gallegher asked. “The two guys who vanished from the morgue? There’s no corpus delicti. Under the new Codex, eyewitnesses and photographs aren’t enough to prove murder.”
“You know why that was put into effect,” Mahoney said. “Three-dimensional broadcast images that people thought were real corpses — there was a stink about that five years ago. But those stiffs in your back yard aren’t three-d’s. They’re real.”
“Are?”
“Two were. One is. You’re still on the spot. Well?”
Gallegher said, “I don’t—” He stopped, his throat working. Abruptly, he stood up, eyes closed.
“Drink to me only with thine eyes, and I will pledge with mine,” Gallegher sang, in a blasting tenor that, though untrained, rang true and resonant. “Or leave a kiss within the cup—”
“Hey!” Mahoney snapped, springing up. “Lay off. Hear me?”
“—and I’ll not ask for wine. The thirst that from the soul doth rise—”
“Stop it!” the detective shouted. “We’re not here to listen to you sing!”
Nevertheless, he listened. So did the others. Gallegher, caught in the grip of Senor Firez’s wild talent, sang on and on, his unaccustomed throat gradually relaxing and pouring out the notes like the beak of a nightingale. Gallegher — sang!
They couldn’t stop him. They fled, with threats. They would return later — with a strait jacket.
Grandpa also seemed caught in the throes of some strange affliction. Words poured out of him, strange semantic terms, mathematics translated into word-symbols, ranging from Euclid to Einstein and beyond. Grandpa, it seemed, had certainly acquired Gallegher’s wild talent for math.
It came to an end, as all things, good or bad, inevitably do. Gallegher croaked hoarsely from a dry throat and, after a few feeble gasps, relapsed into silence. He collapsed on the couch, eyeing Grandpa, who was crumpled in a chair, wide-eyed. The three Lybblas had come out of hiding and stood in a row, each with a cookie clasped in furry paws.
“The world is mine,” the fattest one said.
Events marched. Mahoney vised to say he was getting out a special injunction, and that Gallegher would be clapped into jail as soon as the machinery could be swung into action. Tomorrow, that meant.
Gallegher vised an attorney — the best one on the Eastern seaboard. Yes, Persson could quash the injunction, and certainly win the case, or — well, anyhow, Gallegher would have nothing to worry about if he retained the lawyer. The fee was payable partially in advance.
“How much?…Uh!”
“Call me,” Persson said, “when you wish me to take charge. You may mail your check tonight?”
“All right,” Gallegher said, and hurriedly vised Rufus Hellwig. The tycoon, luckily, was in.
Gallegher explained. Hellwig was incredulous. He agreed, however, to be at the laboratory early the next morning for a test. He couldn’t make it before then. Nor could he advance any money till matters had been proved beyond a doubt.
“Make me an excellent concert pianist,” he said, “and I’ll be convinced.”
After that, Gallegher vised the teleview studio, again, and managed to get in touch with Joey Mackenzie, the blond, beautiful pianist who had taken New York by storm recently and had instantly been signed by the tele-company. She said she’d be over in the morning. Gallegher had to talk her into it, but he dropped enough hints to rouse the girl’s interest to fever pitch. She seemed to class science with black magic, and was fascinated by both.