“O.K., O.K.!” Vanning growled. “Hop to it. I want that suitcase back.”
“What interests me is that little bug you squashed. In fact, that’s the only reason I’m tackling your problem. Life in the fourth-dimension—” Gallegher trailed off, murmuring. His face faded from the screen. After a while Vanning broke the connection.
He reexamined the locker, finding nothing new. Yet the suedette suitcase had vanished from it, into thin air. Oh, hell.
Brooding over his sorrow, Vanning shrugged into a topcoat and dined ravenously at the Manhattan Roof. He felt very sorry for himself.
The next day he felt even sorrier. A call to Gallegher had given the blank signal, so Vanning had to mark time. About noon MacIlson dropped in. His nerves were shot.
“You took your time in springing me,” he started immediately. “Well, what now? Have you got a drink anywhere around?”
“You don’t need a drink,” Vanning grunted. “You’ve got a skinful already, by the look of you. Run down to Florida and wait till this blows over.”
“I’m sick of waiting. I’m going to South America. I want some credits.”
“Wait’ll I arrange to cash the bonds.”
“I’ll take the bond. A fair half, as we agreed.”
Vanning’s eyes narrowed. “And walk out into the hands of the police. Sure.” MacIlson looked uncomfortable. “I’ll admit. I made a boner. But this time — no, I’ll play smart now.”
“ You’ll wait, you mean.”
“There’s a friend of mine on the roof parking lot in a helicopter. I’ll go up and slip him the bonds and then I’ll just walk out. The police won’t find anything on me.”
“I said no.” Vanning repeated. “It’s too dangerous.”
“It’s dangerous as things are. If they locate the bonds—”
“They won’t.”
“ Where’d you hide ’em?”
“That’s my business.”
Macllson glowered nervously. “Maybe. But they’re in this building. You couldn’t have finagled ’em out yesterday before the cops came. No use playing your luck too far. Did they use X-rays?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, I heard Counsel Hatton’s got a batch of experts going over the blueprints on this building. He’ll find your safe. I’m getting out of here before he does.” Vanning patted the air. “You’re hysterical. I’ve taken care of you, haven’t I? Even though you almost screwed the whole thing up.”
“Sure,” MacIlson said, pulling his lip. “But I—” He chewed a finger nail. “Oh, damn! I’m sitting on the edge of a volcano with termites under me. They can’t extradite me from South America — where I’m going anyway.”
“You’re going to wait.” Vanning said firmly. “That’s your best chance.”
There was suddenly a gun in MacIlson’s hand. “You’re going to give me half the bonds. Right now. I don’t trust you a little bit. You figure you can stall me along — hell, get those bonds!”
“No,” Vanning said.
“I’m not kidding.”
“I know you aren’t. I can’t get the bonds.”
“Eh? Why not?”
“Ever heard of a time lock?” Vanning asked, his eyes watchful. “You’re right, I put the suitcase in a concealed safe. But I can’t open that safe until a certain number of hours have passed.”
“Mm-m.” MacIlson pondered. “When—”
“Tomorrow.”
“All right. You’ll have the bonds for me then?”
“If you want them. But you’d better change your mind. It’d be safer.”
For answer MacIlson grinned over his shoulder as he went out. Vanning sat motionless for a long time. He was, frankly, scared.
The trouble was, MacIlson was a manic-depressive type. He’d kill. Right now, he was cracking under the strain, and imagining himself a desperate fugitive. Well — precautions would be advisable.
Vanning called Gallegher again, but got no answer. He left a message on the recorder and thoughtfully looked into the locker again. It was empty, depressingly so.
That evening Gallegher let Vanning into his laboratory. The scientist looked both tired and drunk. He waved comprehensively toward a table, covered with scraps of paper.
“What a headache you gave me! If I’d known the principles behind the gadget, I’d have been afraid to tackle it. Sit down. Have a drink. Got the fifty credits?”
Silently Vanning handed over the coupons. Gallegher shoved them into Monstro.
“Fine. Now—” He settled himself on the couch. “Now we start. The fifty-credit question.”
“Can I get the suitcase back?”
“No,” Gallegher said flatly. “At least, I don’t know how it can be worked. It’s in another spatial temporal sector.”
“Just what does that mean?”
“It means the locker works something like a telescope, only the thing isn’t merely visual. The locker’s a window, I figure. You can reach through it as well as look through it. It’s an opening into Now plus x.” Vanning scowled. “So far you haven’t said anything.”
“So far all I’ve got is theory, and that’s all I’m likely to get. Look, I was wrong originally. The things that went into the locker didn’t appear in another space because there would have been a spatial constant. I mean, they wouldn’t have gotten smaller. Size is size. Moving a one-inch cube from here to Mars wouldn’t make it any larger or smaller.”
“What about a different density in the surrounding medium? Wouldn’t that crush an object?”
“Sure, and it’d stay squashed. It wouldn’t return to its former size and shape when it was taken out of the locker again. X plus y never equal xy. But x times y—”
“So?”
“That’s a pun,” Gallegher broke off to explain. “The things we put in the locker went into time. Their time-rate remained constant, but not the spatial relationships. Two things can’t occupy the same place at the same time. Ergo, your suitcase went into a different time. Now plus x. And what x represents I don’t know, though I suspect a few million years.”
Vanning looked dazed. “The suitcase is a million years in the future.”
“Dunno how far, but — I’d say plenty. I haven’t enough factors to finish the equation. I reasoned by induction, mostly, and the results are screwy as hell. Einstein would have loved it. My theorem shows that the universe is expanding and contracting at the same time.”
“What’s that got to do—”
“Motion is relative,” Gallegher continued inexorably.
“That’s a basic principle. Well, the universe is expanding, spreading out like a gas, but it’s component parts are shrinking at the same time. The parts don’t actually grow, you know — not the suns and atoms. They just run away from the central point. Galloping off in all directions…where was I? Oh. Actually, the universe, taken as a unit, is shrinking.”
“So it’s shrinking. Where’s my suitcase?”
“I told you. In the future. Deductive reasoning showed that. It’s beautifully simple and logical. And it’s quite impossible of proof, too. A hundred, a thousand, a million years ago the Earth — the universe — was larger than it is now. Only we won’t notice it because the universe will be proportionately smaller.”
Gallegher went on dreamily. “We put a workbench into the locker, so it emerged sometime in the future. The locker’s an open window into a different time, as I told you. Well, the bench was affected by the conditions of that period. It shrank, after we gave it a few seconds to soak up the entropy or something. Do I mean entropy? Allah knows, Oh, well.”