"You know, Claude," he said, "I am not feeling so good neither. Maybe I should not be eating on top of dose candies ..."
The orderly removed the tray. Godwin, glancing at Kaalund, felt a shock of alarm. The man's ruddy round face had taken on a mottled hue, and sweat glistened on his forehead.
"I got a fordoemme belly-ache," muttered the sufferer. "I must telephone for my relief to come qvick so I can .... Ow!" The big man grunted and doubled over. "Hey, Claude, push de button! Somebody is poisoning me!"
With a bellow of pain the detective rolled out of his chair to the floor.
Chapter 4
THEY TOOK the moaning Kaalund away, and presently an-other detective came in and picked up the hand-grip on the other end of Godwin's handcuff. This was a smaller man, black-haired and flat-faced, who introduced himself as Niels Kirdlavik.
"Is that an Eskimo name?" said Godwin.
"Yes."
"Are you Sven's regular relief on this job?"
"Yes."
"What's gonna happen next?"
"Do not know."
"Do they know what's wrong with Sven yet?"
"Do not know."
The man was not a sprightly conversationalist. Presently, another detective and a couple of uniformed cops came in and poked around the room. They gathered up the remains of the gumdrops and retrieved the empty bags that had contained the first two lots from the waste-basket. The detective asked Godwin a lot of questions that brought out the stories of the three bags of gumdrops, though Godwin refrained from telling about the message capsules.
Godwin finally asked, "Was he poisoned? How is he now?"
"He vas. Ve think it vas meant for you, whom it vould have killed qvick, but he is so big it vill not hurt him much. He vill be back to vork in a couple days."
"Who's trying to poison me?"
"That is vat ve are trying to find out. It might have been your last visitor, or any of the people who prepared and brought the lunch."
Godwin did not know of any motive for Thomsen's trying to murder him—though never having met the man he was in no position to judge. The name of Werner von Wittelsbach had entered his mind at once. The man did have a motive, even though a screwy one. But while Godwin hesitated to tell about this, the detective bustled out.
The afternoon was dull. In answer to his loud protests the hospital personnel finally dug a battered book in English out of their library: The Theory & Practice of Chicken Fanning, by John II. Pappakostas, N. Y.: McGraw-Hill, 2097, 347 pp., $49.50.
Claude Godwin groaned and covered his eyes with his free hand.
Next morning he was awakened by a tug on his wrist and Kirdlavik's voice: "Hey, Mr. Godvin, vake up! The doctors is examine you to see if you can go out!"
Examination showed that the effect of the drug that had kept him unconscious during his transportation to Greenland had wholly worn off. Kirdlavik unlocked his handcuff long enough for him to dress.
"Where am I going?" he asked.
"To the palace; they got a room there for you."
"Yesterday, Gram" said I could visit the lab where Bruun's got his parachron. Why couldn't I stop there on my way?"
"I vill see." Kirdlavik spoke Danish into the telephone, then said: "You may." While the policeman had been telephoning, Godwin slipped the seeming chocolate-bar into his pants pocket.
When Godwin had finished dressing and had eaten his breakfast, still anther detective arrived to take the place of Kirdlavik, who was yawning from his all-night vigil. Otto Malling, a tall thin knobby man with faded blue eyes and a handlebar mustache proved more communicative than the dourly silent Kirdlavik and started off with a lecture on the beauties of Greenland in general and the Junianehaab region in particular: "... and you must take a ride out to the Oster-Bygt where is the ruins of the houses Eric the Red and his people made when they came here in 982..."
GODWIN was not overly impressed by Julianehaab, where the bicycles outnumbered the automobiles, though it did have a quaint, old-fashioned air with its field-stone houses with small windows and steeply gabled roofs. The taxi purred up a winding street towards an academic-looking group of buildings.
"The University of Greenland," said Malling. "The laboratory is this building separate from the rest. You understand, I suppose, that the parachron is a secret yet; you must not talk about it to anybody except those like Doctor Bruun who know already."
"If it's so important, wouldn't the news leak out?"
Malling shrugged. "Plenty of rumors is floating about, but so long as nobody knows exactly, no harm is doing."
Malling showed his identification to the uniformed cop at the front door of the laboratory building. Inside, they waited in a small front office, where Malling exchanged chaff in Danish with a girl secretary. Presently two men entered: Karl Bruun and an older man with a white goatee introduced as Viggo Bruun. Both Bruuns had their sleeves rolled up and were dirty from tinkering; they wiped their hands on pieces of waste and shook hands.
Godwin said, "The gumdrops were superb."
"Good," said the elder Bruun. "You wish to see the parachron, do you not?"
He led the way through featureless concrete halls to an automatic elevator where another policeman stood guard. On the second floor of the building he led them from the elevator to a. large room at whose door stood still another gendarme.
"Why all the cops?" asked Godwin. "Even if this machine works—I mean, in spite of the fact that it works, I don't see why the secrecy."
Bruun said, "It is Anker Gram's doing; he has all sorts of profound political plans connected with the parachron. Besides, he thinks some criminal might destroy the machine lest it be used to view his crimes in the past. This machine should eliminate crime and clear up a lot of mysteries like the Aarestrup fraud."
The elder Bruun led them into a laboratory room littered with the usual clutter of wires, tubing, electric cables, glassware, stands, clamps, meters, old copies of technical magazines, and ash-trays made of discarded scientific apparatus. In the middle of the room, on a massive bench, stood the parachron, a thing somewhat like a television set without its cabinet, but much larger. Besides the viewing screen facing the door, the machine bore on top a gadget with a parabolic reflector, something like a small radar antenna.
Viggo Bruun continued, "We think that is all foolishness. This is science; we should' take it around the world to solve the great historical problems, and not waste time in political maneuvers and tracking down petty pickpockets. "
"If you had to track them down," said Otto Malling, "you would not take such a yolly attitude about them."
"Perhaps not, my friend," said Bruun. "But if this works that way a lot of you fellows will be out of jobs, because a crew with a parachron can visit the scene of every crime and get all the evidence to convict right there."
"If the lawyers don't have the machine outlawed, because it makes it too hard for their clients to make an honest living by robbery," said Malling.
BRUUN turned back to Godwin. "Some day, maybe, we can take the parachron down between Latitudes Thirty and Forty North and really find out something about history; meanwhile Anker Gram says no, and he is the boss."
"You mean," said Godwin, "you gotta lug the machine around to the places where the things actually happened? You can't just sit here in Greenland and twiddle knobs and see the Battle of Waterloo?"
"That is right; you cannot. Actually, the magneto-gravitic matrix precesses about three degrees to the West per century, so the impressions of the Battle of Waterloo would be—let me see—" (he glanced at a wall map) "—about where the southwest tip of England is now." Bruun sighed, a far-away look in his eyes. "If I can only live long enough to get it down to the latitude of Alexandria and photograph the lost books in the Library ..."