Other Days, Other Eyes

Garrod’s attention wandered as he began to accept the fact that his wife could see again. Esther had been blind for almost a year, during which time they had not spent one evening apart and had gone out on perhaps only six occasions. It seemed to Garrod that he had endured eons in the brown dimness of the library, describing the events on endless television shows.

“That’s an interesting voice,” Esther would say. “Does the owner match it?”

At other times she would take the lead and give long visualizations of the owners of voices, then ask him to confirm that she had been right. But, almost invariably, she was wrong—even in cases where Garrod suspected she could have described the person from memory—and greeted his corrections with a taut, wistful smile which told him he was forgiven for blinding her, and being forgiven was even deeper in thrall. Or at other times she would say the most forgiving, most smothering words of all, the ones Garrod dreaded to hear, delivered with a radiant countenance:

“I’m sure the scenery I’m creating for this play is much better than what the viewers have to watch.”

Now, however, Esther could supply her own images, the light for her own eyes, and perhaps he would be able to breathe again.

“We’ll go along and visit Mrs. Garrod now if you like,” Hubert said.

Garrod nodded and followed the surgeon to the private suite. Esther was sitting up in bed in a bright room filled with prisms of sunlight slanting from the windows. She was wearing heavy, side-shielded glasses and, judging by the continuing rapt expression on her face, had not heard them enter the room. Garrod crossed to the bed and, deciding he had better get used to the results of the bizarre surgery, looked into his wife’s face. Flawless blue eyes blinked at him through the lenses of her glasses. The eyes of a stranger. He took an involuntary step backwards, then noticed that the eyes had not responded to his presence.

“I should have told you,” Hubert whispered. “Mrs. Garrod decided against dark glasses. Those are Retardite lenses programmed with another person’s eyes.”

“Where did you get them?”

“They’re available commercially. Girls with pretty eyes can earn extra cash by wearing Retardite lenses all day. Some women who haven’t got eye complaints wear them for cosmetic reasons—by using a fine grating of Retardite you can make spectacles through which a person can see normally, but anybody looking at them sees the programmed eyes. Surely you’ve seen them before?”

“No, I hadn’t—I’ve been out of circulation lately.” Garrod spoke loudly to attract Esther’s attention.

“Alban,” she said immediately, and held out her hands to him. Garrod gripped his wife’s warm dry fingers and kissed her lightly on the lips, and all the while the stranger’s blue eyes gazed tolerantly through Esther’s glasses.

He lowered his gaze. “How do you feel?”

“Wonderful! I can see again, Alban.”

“Is it just like…before?”

“Better than before—I’ve just discovered I was always a little short-sighted. Right now I’m looking out over the ocean at Piedras Blancas Point, I think it is, and I can see for miles. I’d forgotten how many shades of blue and green there are in the sea…” Esther’s voice faded away and her lips parted with pleasure.

Garrod felt the beginnings of hope. “I’m glad, Esther. I’ll send your discs anywhere in the world you want to see. You’ll be able to take in Broadway plays, pleasure trips…”

Esther laughed. “But that would be like being away from you.”

“You won’t really be away. And I’ll always be around.”

“No, darling. I don’t want to waste this gift by spending the rest of my life watching travelogues.” Esther’s fingers closed over his. “I want to do simple personal things. Things that concern us—like going for walks together in our own gardens.”

“That’s a nice idea, honey, but you wouldn’t be able to see the garden.”

“Yes, I would—provided we went for our walk at the same time every day, and always along the same paths.”

A cool breeze seemed to blow over Garrod’s forehead. “That means living in yesterday. You’d be walking in a garden one day but seeing it as it was the day before…”

“Won’t it be wonderful?” Esther raised his hand to her mouth and kissed his knuckles. Her breath was warm on the back of his hand. “You’ll wear a pair of discs for me, won’t you, Alban? I want you to wear them all the time, everywhere you go. That way we’ll always be together.”

Garrod tried to withdraw his hand, but Esther clung to it.

“Tell me you’ll do it, Alban.” Her words were glass rods snapping. “Tell me you’ll share your life with me.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Garrod said. “I’ll do whatever you want.”

He raised his eyes from her frantically clawing hands and looked into her face. The stranger’s blue eyes regarded him with a calm, vacant contentment.

Chapter Nine

The murder of Senator Jerry Wescott took place at 2.33 a.m. on a lonely road several miles north of Bingham, Maine.

His death was timed with precision because the weapon used was a laser cannon so powerful as to vaporize most of the car in which the Senator had been travelling. The murderer had chosen a spot where the road dipped abruptly through a hollow and thus had prevented the flash from being seen by anybody in the surrounding area, but it had been picked up by a Sk-eye II military observation satellite and the information telemetered to an underground tracking station. From there it went to the Pentagon and eventually, but still within the hour, came’into the hands of the civil authorities.

A laser cannon, while effective, is anything but discreet and it was deduced that it had been employed because it was certain to destroy the Retardite telltales on the car and any other pieces of slow glass which might have been in the vehicle. The criminal community had been quick to learn that it was inadvisable to be “seen” by a piece of slow glass even at night, even at a distance, because of the special optical techniques which could be employed for interrogating the glass. And now that Retardite could be played back at will, without having to wait for its nominal delay period to elapse, it was even more imperative to take precautions against it.

In this instance, the laser did effectively destroy all incriminating Retardite on the vehicle. It also charred the Senator’s body far beyond recognition and, had it not failed to incinerate the contents of his fireproof briefcase, the identity of the dead man might not have been ascertained for some days.

As it was, the expanding ripple of information which had begun with a minute surge of photons in an orbiting camera spread outwards through the broadcasting networks and, within a matter of hours, had assumed the proportions of a tidal wave.

No matter how much it might have been predicted, no matter how many times it had occurred in the past, the assassination of a man who in less than a year would probably have been President of the United States was still big news.

Chapter Ten

It was a sunny evening, but they walked in the gardens while Esther admired yesterday’s rain.

“It’s really wonderful, Alban.” She pulled on his arm, forcing him to pause near a clump of deep-hued shrubs. He remembered they had halted at the same place on the previous day, and Esther liked to create an illusion of being normally sighted by matching today’s bodily movements with yesterday’s changing viewpoints.

“I can see the rain falling all round me,” she continued, “but all I can feel is warm sunlight. The sun is my umbrella.”

Garrod was almost certain Esther was trying to be profound or poetic, so he squeezed her hand encouragingly, while making sure his face did not come within range of the two black discs which glinted on her lapel. He had discovered that a look of impatience or anger recorded by Esther’s vicarious eyes, but not passed to her brain until twenty-four hours later, was a bigger strain on the relationship than a spontaneous mutual clash.

“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.

“I’ll try to help,” he said aloud. “Tell me where to meet you.”

When they had finished speaking and the screen had gone dead, he stood for a moment staring into its spurious grey infinities. His first reaction was one of childish elation, but the very intensity of the emotion inspired a sobering query. Why have I allowed Esther to nail me down?

It came to him that the most escape-proof gaol of all was one in which the door was always unlocked—provided the prisoner had not the guts to push it open and walk out. His responsibility for her blindness was hinged on the fact that he had forgotten there was a spare key to his laboratory, but if one adult warns another in clear terms…

“So you’re going to Augusta,” Esther said from behind him.

He turned to face her. “I couldn’t very well refuse.”

“I know, darling. I heard what Mr. Pobjoy said.”

Garrod was surprised at the calmness of his wife’s voice. “You don’t mind?”

“Not as long as you take me with you.”

“That’s out of the question,” he said stiffly. “I’m going to be working and travelling all the…”

“I realize I’d be in the way—if I went in person.” Esther smiled and held out her hand.

“But what other…?” Garrod’s voice trailed away as he saw that Esther was offering him one of the flat cases containing her spare sets of eyes.

He would not be alone, after all.

Chapter Eleven

Garrod’s plan took off early in the morning, twisting and skidding in the clear but turbulent air over Portston, and climbed towards the East.

“Have to fly low this morning,” Lou Nash reminded him over the intercom. “We’re still barred from the commercial lanes.”

“You’ve mentioned that before now, Lou,” Garrod said comfortably, recalling the penalty the air traffic tribunal had meted out for his crazy dash to Macon an eternity ago. “Don’t worry about it.”

“It’s costing you money, this flying low and slow.”

“I said, don’t worry about it.” Garrod smiled, aware that Nash’s concern was not with the economics of the flight, but with the fact that he was prevented from giving the plush-lined projectile its head. He settled back in his chair and watched the miniaturized world drift by below. After a moment he noticed that Esther’s eye discs, in the small plastic holder in his lapel, were below the level of the window. He undipped the device which incorporated a sound recorder and set it on the lower rim of the window, with the watchful black circles facing outwards. Enjoy the view, he thought.

“There’s another one!” Nash’s voice rapped excitedly from the concealed speakers.

“Another what?” Garrod looked downwards at a panorama of tan-coloured hills flecked with scrub and traversed by a single highway. He saw nothing unusual.

“Crop-spraying job at about two thousand feet.”

Garrod’s unpractised eye still had not found anything resembling another aircraft. “But there aren’t any crops out here.”

“That’s what’s funny about it. I’ve seen three of those Joes in the last month, though.”

The plane banked to the right, increasing the downwards view on that side, and suddenly Garrod found a tiny gleaming crucifix far below, moving across their line of flight and trailing a white feather of what appeared to be smoke. As he watched, the feather abruptly vanished.

“He’s just spotted us,” Nash said. “They always quit spraying when they see you.”

“Two thousand feet is too high for crop-spraying, isn’t it? What’s the normal height?”

“Practically on the deck—that’s something else that’s queer.”

“Somebody must be testing spraying equipment, that’s all.”

“But…”

“Lou,” Garrod said severely, “there are too many automatic controls on this airplane—and that means you’re sitting up there all alone with nothing to occupy your mind. Would you please either fly this thing yourself or do a crossword?”

Nash muttered semi-audibly and lapsed into a silence which lasted for the rest of the flight. Garrod, who had curtailed his night’s sleep in preparing for the trip, dozed, drank coffee, and dozed again until the viewphone built into the forward bulkhead chimed for his attention. He accepted the call and found himself looking at the hawkish features of Mansion, his public relations manager.

“Good morning, Alban,” Mansion said in his neutral accent. “Seen any newscasts or papers this morning?”

“No, I hadn’t time.”

“You’re back in the headlines again.”

Garrod sat upright. “In what way?”

“According to all the splash stories I’ve seen you’re on your way to Augusta full of confidence that you can pinpoint Senator Wescott’s murderer by examining the remains of his car.”

“What?”

“There are all kinds of hints that you have a new technique for getting images out of fragmented or fused slow glass.”

“But that’s crazy! I told Pobjoy there was no…” Garrod took a steadying breath. “Charles, did you make any statements about this to the Press last night?”

Manston adjusted his blue spotted cravat and looked pained. “Please!”

“Then it must have been Pobjoy.”

“Do you want me to issue a counter-statement of any kind?”

Garrod shook his head. “No—let it ride. I’ll sort it out with Pobjoy when I see him. Thanks for calling, Charles.”

Garrod terminated the call. He sat back in his chair and tried to drift off to sleep again but a thread of annoyance was wavering in his thoughts, like a bright serpent squirming across the surface of a pool. The past year with Esther had made him very sensitive to some things, and at this moment he had a strong sense of being manipulated, of being used by another person. Pobjoy’s statements to the Press were not merely ill-considered, they were blatantly contrary to the entire gist of the single conversation he had had with Garrod. He had not given the impression of being a man who would act without a well thought out motive, but what had he hoped to gain?

It was a clear brassy noon when Garrod’s aircraft dropped on to the runway at an airport close to Augusta. As it rolled to a halt in the private aircraft arrivals bay Garrod looked through the ports and saw the now-familiar grouping of reporters and cameramen. Some of the latter were holding Retardite panels, but the others—reflecting the struggles that were taking place between branches of the photo-journalists’ union—were carrying conventional photographic equipment. At the last moment Garrod remembered to lift Esther’s discs from the window and clip them to his lapel. When he stepped out of his aircraft the newsmen surged towards the tarmac, but were held back by a strong contingent of uniformed police. The tall, powerful figure of Miller Pobjoy came into view wearing a suit of midnight blue silk.

“Sorry about the crowd,” he said easily, shaking Garrod’s hand. “We’ll get you out of here in no time.” He gave a hand signal, a limousine appeared beside the aircraft, and in a matter of seconds Garrod was inside it and being driven towards the airport gates. “I guess you’re used to the celebrity treatment by this time?”

“I’m not that much of a celebrity,” Garrod replied quickly. “What was the idea of feeding all that bull to the Press last night?”

“Bull, Mr. Garrod?” Pobjoy looked puzzled.

“Yeah—the stuff about my being confident of pinpointing the killer with new Retardite interrogation techniques.”

Pobjoy’s brow was restored to the smoothness and sheen of a new chestnut. “Oh, that! Somebody in our publicity department got a little over-enthusiastic, I guess. You know how it is.”

“As a matter of fact, I don’t. My publicity manager would sack any member of his staff who pulled one like that. Then I would sack him for having allowed it to happen.”

Pobjoy shrugged. “Somebody got carried away, lost his head, that’s all. It’s a big embarrassment to the state that Wescott got himself murdered here—the only reason it happened in Maine was that the Senator came up here regularly for the fishing and hunting—so everybody’s very anxious to show willing.”

Garrod found the black man’s attitude strangely unsatisfactory, but he decided to let the matter slide. On the ride into downtown Augusta he learned that the other members of the expert panel were an FBI man called Gilchrist and a military research chief who had temporarily been detached from the Army for the purpose. The latter turned out to be Colonel John Mannheim, one of the very few men in the military establishment with whom Garrod was on comfortable drinking terms. Mannheim was also—and the thought caused Garrod’s heart to lurch slightly—the immediate boss of the Korean-looking silver-lipped girl who, without raising a finger, had destroyed Garrod’s sanity for a day. He opened his mouth to ask if the colonel had brought any of his secretarial staff with him, then remembered the vision and sound recorder on his lapel. His hand rose instinctively to the smooth plastic.

“That’s an unusual gadget you’ve got there,” Pobjoy smiled. “Is it a camera?” “Sort of. Where are we going now?” “To your hotel.”

“Oh. I thought we’d have gone straight to police headquarters.”

“Have to get you freshened up and fed first.” Pobjoy smiled again. “A man can’t give of his best on an empty stomach, can he?”

Garrod shook his head uncertainly as the feeling of being manipulated returned. “Have you arranged for laboratory and workshop facilities?”

“All laid on, Mr. Garrod. After you meet the other members of the panel and have lunch we’re all driving up to Bingham so you can see the scene of the murder for yourself.”

“What good will that do?”

“It’s hard to say how much good it ever does—but it’s the natural starting point for all homicide investigations.” Pobjoy began scanning the street through which they were passing. “It helps, you know, to get the best possible picture of the actual crime. The relative positions and angles…Here’s the hotel now—what do you say to a drink before lunch?”

Another group of reporters were waiting on the sidewalk outside the hotel, and again they were being held in check by a larger force of police. Pobjoy waved to the newsmen in a friendly manner as he urged Garrod quickly through into the foyer.

“You don’t need to register,” Pobjoy said. “I’ve taken care of all the details and your baggage is right behind us.”

They crossed an area of lush, expensive carpet, rode up three floors in the elevator, and walked a short distance to a large, pale green, sunny room which appeared as though it might have been used for Rotary Club meetings. On this occasion a single table was laid with about twenty places. A bar had been set up in a corner and a number of men who looked like politicians and police executives were standing around in small groups. Garrod at once picked out John Mannheim, looking slightly uncomfortable in a business suit.

Pobjoy fetched Garrod a vodka tonic from the bar and took him around the assembly performing introductions. The only name which stuck with Garrod was that of Horace Gilchrist, the FBI forensic expert, who was a sand-coloured man with cropped, forward-growing hair and the intent expression of someone whose hearing is poor but is determined not to miss a word. Garrod was on his second extra-strong drink and an air of unreality was stealing over him by the time he reached Mannheim.

He drew the colonel aside. “What’s going on here, John? I feel like I’m taking part in a charade.”

“But that’s exactly what it is, Al.”

“What do you mean?”

An amused expression appeared on Mannheim’s ruddy fisherman’s face. “Nothing.”

“You meant something.”

“Al, you know as well as I do that murders aren’t solved at this level…”

“Lunch is served, gentlemen,” Pobjoy called, ringing his glass loudly with a spoon. “Please be seated.”

At the long table Garrod found himself directly opposite John Mannheim, though just too far away for discreet conversation. He kept trying to catch Mannheim’s eye but the colonel was drinking quickly and talking to the men on each side of him. During the meal Garrod answered occasional questions from his own neighbours and did his best to disguise his impatience with the proceedings. He was moodily stirring his coffee when he became aware that a woman had entered the room and was leaning over Mannheim’s shoulder, whispering to him. Garrod glanced up and felt his throat go dry as he recognized her black, black hair and silver-painted lips. It was Jane Wason.

At that instant she raised her eyes and they locked into Garrod’s with a directness which seemed to drain the strength from his body. The businesslike set of the beautiful face appeared to soften momentarily, then she was hurrying away from the table. Garrod stared after her, filled with the elated certainty that he had shaken Jane Wason as she had shaken him.

A full minute had passed before he remembered Esther’s eyes clipped to his lapel, and again his hand rose of its own accord to cover the sentient glassy discs.

In the afternoon Garrod freshened up, changed his clothes and joined the other men—Mannheim, Gilchrist and Pob-joy—who were being driven to Bingham to examine the scene of the crime. There was a sleepy, well-fed atmosphere in the limousine and they spoke very little as it worked its way into the north-bound traffic flow. Garrod kept thinking about Jane Wason, seeing her face shimmering in his vision like a bright after-image, and they had travelled perhaps three miles before he absorbed the fact that they kept passing work crews who were replacing slow glass lighting panels above the road.

“What’s going on?” He tapped Pobjoy’s broad knee and nodded at one of the maintenance trucks.

“Oh, that!” Pobjoy grinned. “We’ve got a really active chapter of the Privacy League here in Augusta. Some nights they go out in their cars with the sunroofs open and shoot up the lighting panels with duck guns.”

“But that would only blank out the glass for a few hours until the light came through again.”

Pobjoy shook his head. “As soon as the material is holed or cracked it’s considered unsafe structurally and has to be replaced. City ordinance.”

“It must be costing the city a fortune.”

“Not only this city—it’s the new national sport, man. And I know I don’t need to tell you that people don’t buy Scenedows much any more.”

“As a matter of fact,” Garrod said guiltily, “I’ve been neglecting the business for the last year, so I’m out of touch with the sales position.”

“I daresay it’ll get in touch with you soon enough. Hotheads in the League throw bricks through Scenedows. The more subtle types blank them out with ticklers and the proud home-owners are left with black windows.”

“What sort of person do you find in this Privacy League?”

“That’s just it—you couldn’t say that any special group or subdivision supports the League. We pick up college professors, clerks, cab-drivers, school kids…right across the board.”

Garrod leaned back in the deep upholstery and stared thoughtfully into the distance. He was learning things on his excursion into the world that still existed and struggled and changed outside his library windows. Manston had been right when he said the tide of public opinion was turning against Retardite, but it appeared that even he was underestimating the speed and growing power of the reaction.

“Personally, I don’t quite understand the public’s antipathy,” he said. “How do you feel about it?”

“Personally,” Pobjoy replied, “I would say it’s a fairly predictable reaction.”

“But what about the drop in crime figures? And the big jump in successful detections and prosecutions? Don’t the public care about that?”

“They do.” Pobjoy grinned with what could have been malice. “You see, it’s the public who break all the laws.”

“Nobody likes to be spied on,” Gilchrist put in unexpectedly.

Garrod opened his mouth to say something, then he remembered that Esther was watching and listening from his lapel, and that he hated her for it. A silence descended over the four men and remained virtually unbroken while the vehicle made its effortless climb into mountain and lake country.

“If you begin to lose money with slow glass,” Pobjoy said in a jovial voice at one point, “you could try that kind of investment, Al.”

Garrod opened his eyes and looked out. They were passing the entrance to a vacation centre, the curving fence of which bore a freshly-painted sign: “HONEYMOON HEIGHTS—100 idyllic acres guaranteed free from slow glass, spyglass, glass eyes, etc.” He closed his eyes again, and the thought entered his mind that where slow glass was concerned the natural order of things was reversed, the legend giving rise to the event. One of the first folk-stories to spring up after the introduction of Retardite was about a salesman who gave a newly-wed couple a Scenedow at a ridiculously low price, then called back a week later and replaced it with an even better one, free of charge. The classically simple-minded couple in the story, pleased at their good fortune, did not know that Retardite worked in both directions, nor that subsequently they were going over big at stag parties. Childish as the yarn was, it illustrated humanity’s basic fear of being watched at those times when, for sound biological as well as social reasons, they wished to be apart from their fellows and unseen.

The limousine stopped for a time in Bingham, where the three members of the expert panel were introduced to representatives of the county police and then had coffee. It was late in the afternoon when they reached the scene of Wescott’s assassination. A section of the road and nearby hillside had been roped off, but the ruined vehicle had been removed and there was little to see apart from heat scars gouged deeply into the surface.

Garrod’s conviction that the investigation was futile returned to him. He spent the best part of an hour tramping around the site, picking up odd droplets of metal under the watchful gaze of a group of reporters who were not allowed inside the roped enclosure. As he had expected, the entire exercise—including a little lecture from Pobjoy about the probable type and positioning of the laser cannon—was valueless. Garrod expressed his growing impatience with the proceedings by sitting on a low outcropping of rock and gazing into the sky. Far above him, in virtual silence, a small white aircraft of the type used in crop-spraying drifted across the blueness.

On the drive back to Augusta somebody switched on a radio and picked up a news broadcast, two items of which were of particular interest to Garrod. One was to the effect that the state attorney’s office had announced substantial progress towards establishing the identity of Senator Wescott’s killer; the other said that the postal workers’ unions had taken their long-expected industrial action over the installation of Retardite monitors in the sorting centres, and therefore no mail was being handled.

Garrod looked squarely at Pobjoy. “What progress has been made?”

“I didn’t say anything about progress,” Pobjoy protested.

“That eager-beaver publicity man again?”

“I expect so. You know how it is.”

Garrod snorted and was about to criticize the organization of some parts of the attorney’s office again when the personal implications of the newly announced postal strike came home to him. The arrangement he had with Esther was that he would send her a set of eye discs by the stratocourier service each night, which meant they would be in Portston every morning in time for her nurse to slip them under the corneas before breakfast. His anger at the degree of neurosis Esther had displayed in forcing the scheme on him made it all the more important that he make some overt effort towards an alternative arrangement. He took a communicator stick from his pocket, turned the slides to Lou Nash’s code and pressed the call button.

Nash’s voice was heard almost immediately. “Mr. Gar-rod?”

“Lou, there’s a post office strike on, so I’m going to have to use you as a mailman while I’m in Augusta.”

“That’s all right, Mr. Garrod.”

“It means flying to Portston every night and coming back in the mornings.”

“No problem—except for the low and slow injunction. Portston Field won’t stay open any later than midnight, which means I’ll have to get out of Augusta by about 19.00 hours.”

Garrod opened his mouth to insist on the airfield being held open, regardless of expense, but an uncharacteristic mood of slyness came over him. He arranged to meet Nash at six o’clock in the hotel, and sat back in his seat with a pleasurable sense of guilt. An evening on his own, off the hook, in a strange city. Esther would demand to know why he had not worn eye discs for the evening but he could argue that her eyes for that day were absorbing the images of Nash’s flight back to Portston, and there was no way she could cram an extra six hours of seeing into a twenty-four hour day. All he had to do now was decide what he would do with this bonus of time, free time. Garrod considered several possibilities, including the theatre or a straightforward mind-annihilating drink, then realized he was deceiving himself—and if he was going to start cheating his wife it was important that he be honest with himself about it.

What he was going to do that evening was, if circumstances permitted, to do his best to bed down with John Mannheim’s silver-lipped secretary.

Garrod pinned the brooch-like disc-holder on to Lou Nash’s lapel, smiled a farewell into the sentient black beads, and watched the pilot walk away across the hotel lobby. It seemed to him that Nash was walking differently, self-consciously, and he got a sudden insight into how his own marriage must look to an outsider. Nash had passed no comment when he learned what the discs were for, but he had been unable to conceal the mystification in his eyes. Why was it, the unspoken question had been, that a man who was in a position to have a beautiful new woman each week, each day, until all strength and desire were sucked out of him remained subject to Esther? Why indeed? Garrod had never thought much about it, usually considering himself a natural monogamist, but supposing the truth was that Esther—money-wise and value-seeking in all transactions—had been clever enough to buy exactly the sort of man she required?

“There he is!” Mannheim’s voice came from close behind. “Let’s have a drink before dinner.”

Garrod turned with the intention of refusing the invitation, then he saw that Mannheim was accompanied by Jane Wason. She was wearing a black evening dress so fine and sheer that her breasts seemed to have no more covering than a film of glossy paint and there was a soft triangular bulge of hair below the plummy curve of her belly. Prismatic highlights flowed on her body like oil.

“A drink?” Garrod spoke absently, realizing Jane was smiling at him with an oddly uncertain look. “Why not? I hadn’t made any plans for dinner.”

“You don’t make plans for dinner—you just relax and enjoy it. You’ve got to eat with us. Isn’t that right, Jane?”

“We can’t force Mr. Garrod to have dinner with us if he doesn’t want to.”

“But I do!” Garrod gave himself a mental shake and began grabbing the custom-built opportunity. “In fact, I was about to contact you two and ask you to eat with me.”

“The two of us?” Mannheim slid his arm around his secretary’s waist and drew her to him. “I wasn’t even sure you liked me, Al.”

“I’m crazy about you, John.” Garrod smiled at the older man, but as he saw the easy familiarity with which Jane leaned against him he discovered he wished desperately for Mannheim to have a heart attack and collapse on the spot. “How about that drink?”

They went into the dim cave of one of the hotel bars and at Mannheim’s insistence ordered outsize Zombie Christophes. Garrod sipped his drink, not appreciating its burnt candy flavour, and wondered about the relationship between Mannheim and Jane. She was at least twenty years the younger, but she might find his zesty unpretentiousness attractive, and he had had all the time and opportunity in the world to make his mark. And yet, Garrod noticed—or was it his imagination?—that Jane was sitting a little closer to him than Mannheim. The faint light in the bar allowed Garrod’s faulty eye to function practically as well as the other and he was able to see her with what was, for him, a preternatural three-dimensional clarity. She looked impossibly beautiful, like a gilded Hindu goddess. Each time she smiled Garrod’s newfound hatred for Mannheim caused a cold tightness in his stomach. They stayed in the hotel for dinner, during which Garrod tried to steer a course between the overly direct approach he had tried the first time they had spoken and the danger of not challenging Mannheim’s apparent claim. The meal ended too quickly for him.

“I enjoyed that,” Mannheim said, prodding ruefully at his thickening waist. “The least you can do now is take care of the bill.”

Garrod, who had intended paying for the dinner anyway, felt his resentment flare up almost uncontrollably, then he noticed that Mannheim had got to his feet with every appearance of a man about to leave in a hurry. Jane, on the other hand, gave no sign of wanting to move.

“You aren’t leaving?” Garrod fought to mask his joy.

“I’m afraid I am. There’s a stack of paperwork to take care of up in my room.”

“That’s too bad.”

Mannheim shrugged. “The thing worrying me is that I’m starting to like sitting inside my security cloak. A womb with no view. That just has to be a bad sign.”

“You’re giving away your age,” Jane said with a smile. “Freud is completely passé, you know.”

“That puts him level with me.” Mannheim bade her goodnight, gave Garrod a comradely sidewise flick of the head, and made his way out of the restaurant.

Garrod gazed after him with affection. “Too bad he had to leave.”

“That’s the second time you’ve said that.”

“Overdoing it, huh?”

“A little. You’re making me feel like one of the boys.”

“All right,” Garrod said. “I was sitting here wondering how I could arrange for John to receive a fake call to go to Washington. I would have tried it, too, only I wasn’t sure just how things were…”

“With John and me?” Jane gave a low laugh.

“Well—he had his arm around you, and…”

“How beautifully Victorian!” Her face became serious. “You’ve absolutely no technique with girls, have you, Al?”

“I’ve never needed one.”

“Because you’re rich and good looking they just fall into your lap.”

“I didn’t mean that,” he said a little desperately. “It’s just…”

“I know what you mean, and I’m flattered.” Jane put her hand on his, the contact sending a thrill along his arm. “You are married, aren’t you?”

“I…am.” Garrod broke through a mental barrier. “For the time being, that is.”

She looked directly into his eyes for a long moment, then her jaw dropped. “One of your pupils is shaped like a…”

“A keyhole,” he said. “I do know about it. I had an operation on that eye when I was a kid.”

“But you don’t need to wear dark glass just for that. It looks a bit unusual, but you would hardly notice it.”

Garrod smiled as he realized the goddess had her own set of human frailties. “I don’t wear tinted glasses for cosmetic reasons. The eye admits twice as much light as it should, and when I’m outside in bright daylight it hurts.”

“Oh. I’m sorry.”

“It’s nothing. What would you like to do now?”

“Could we go for a drive? I hate being cooped up in cities too long.”

Garrod nodded. He signed the bill and, while Jane was away fetching her wrap, arranged for a rental car to be brought to the hotel entrance. Ten minutes later they were heading towards the southern outskirts of the city, and in a further thirty were in the country.

“You seem to know where you’re going,” Jane said.

“I don’t. All I know is this is the opposite direction to the way I went this morning.”

“I see.” He was aware of Jane looking at him. “You aren’t happy with this so-called investigation, are you?”

“No.”

“I thought not—you’re too honest.”

“Honest? What do you mean, Jane?”

There was a protracted silence. “Nothing.”

“I think you meant something. Pobjoy’s been acting strangely and earlier today John said something about a charade. What is it, Jane?”

“I told you—nothing.”

Garrod swung off the highway on to a sideroad, braked sharply and cut the engine. “I want to know, Jane,” he said. “You’ve either said too much or too little.”

She looked away from him. “You’ll probably be able to go back home tomorrow.”

“Why?’

“The only reason Miller Pobjoy asked you to come here was so that he could use your name.”

“Sorry—I don’t get it.”

“The police know who killed Senator Wescott. They’ve known it from the start.”

“If that’s true they would have picked the killer up.”

“It is true.” Jane turned to him, her face an undine-mask in the green light of the instrument panel. “I don’t know how they know, but they do.”

“It still doesn’t make sense! Why did they send for me if…?”

“It’s all a cover-up, Al. Don’t you see it yet? They know, but they don’t want anybody to know how they know.”

Garrod shook his head. “Too much.”

“John told me you got pretty uptight with Mr. Pobjoy over the stories his department released to the Press,” Jane said insistently. “Why do you think they did that? Most people now believe you’ve developed a new kind of interrogation technique for slow glass. Even if you deny it the rumours will still be going the rounds.”

“So?”

“So when they arrest the killer they won’t need to make public how they knew his identity!” Jane lunged for the car’s ignition key and now her voice was angry. “Why am I bothering?”

Garrod caught her arm. She resisted for a second, then they were kissing, drinking from each other’s mouths, breathing each other’s breath. Garrod tried, without much success, to think on two levels. If Jane’s theory was correct—and as Mannheim’s secretary she would have access to top secret files—it would explain several things which had been bothering him, important things…but she felt and tasted just the way he had imagined she would, and her breast firmed naturally into his hand, pressing outwards through the fingers.

When they finally separated he said, “Do you remember the afternoon I saw you in Macon?”

She nodded.

“I flew from Washington just for that purpose, just hoping I would see you…”

“I know, Al,” she murmured. “I kept telling myself I was conceited, and it was impossible, but I knew.”

They kissed again. When he touched the satin-smooth skin of her knees they parted for an instant then closed hard, gripping his fingers.

“Let’s go back to the hotel,” she said.

On the drive back into town, despite a pounding sexuality such as he had never known, the mental habits of years kept sending his mind back to the riddle of Miller Pobjoy and his motives. And in her bedroom, by the time they had gone through the ritual of undressing each other, yet more thoughts were intruding, of Esther, of the watchful black beads that were her eyes, of his wife saying, “You’re a cold fish, Alban.”

And, when they coupled on the cool sheets, he felt the destructive tensions grow within him. The delay between the first moment in the car and this one had been too great.

“Relax,” Jane whispered in the darkness. “Love me.”

“I am relaxed,” he said with a growing sense of panic. “I do love you.”

And at that moment Jane, in her wisdom, saved him. One of her fingertips traced a line down his spine and as it reached the small of his back a diamond-bright plume of ecstasy geysered through his body, triggering a staccato, explosive climax which she shared and which annihilated all his repressions, all his fears.

They can drop the Bomb now, he thought. It doesn’t matter any more.

A moment later, simultaneously, they both began to laugh, silently at first then with a childish helplessness. And in the hours which followed Garrod’s renaissance was completed.

Chapter Twelve

Next morning Garrod called his home, although he knew that—because of the time difference—Esther would still be asleep. He left her a short recorded message:

“Esther, I can no longer agree to wearing eye discs for you. When the set which reaches you this morning is expended, you will simply have to make some other arrangements—about everything. I’m sorry, but that’s the way it is.”

Turning away from the viewplate he felt a powerful sense of relief that he had finally taken positive action. It was only when he was eating breakfast alone in his room that he began to wonder about the timing of his call. The positive way to look at it was that he had phoned immediately he awoke because he had an unshakable resolve to break free and would tolerate no delay. But within his personality was another Garrod who, judging by past performance, would deliberately have chosen to place the call at a time when he would not be forced to confront Esther directly. The notion disturbed him. He took a shower with a vague hope of driving it away, and emerged feeling refreshed. There was an unaccustomed warmth inside him, a feeling of easiness, which seemed to nestle in his pelvis and radiate along his limbs.

I’ve gone sane, he thought. It took a hell of a long time, but I finally experienced the madness which brings sanity.

Unexpectedly, Jane had insisted that they separate and spend the last hours of the night in their own rooms. Now he felt a deep sense of wrongness that she had not been with him during breakfast and in the shower. He decided to call her as soon as he had finished dressing, but within a few seconds his own viewphone chimed. He strode to it eagerly and activated

the screen.

The caller was Miller Pobjoy, his face as smooth and glossy

as a newly-hatched chestnut. “Morning, Al. I hope you got a good night’s sleep.”

“An excellent night, thanks.” Garrod refrained from mentioning sleep.

“Good! I want to tell you our programme for the day…”

“First let me tell you mine,” Garrod cut in. “In a few minutes I’m going to call my public relations manager and instruct him to issue a statement to all media that the investigation you’re conducting here is a pure sham, that you’ve no evidence from Wescott’s car, and that I’m resigning from…”

“Hold on, man! This channel may not be secure.”

“I hope it isn’t. A good news leak is usually more effective than straight announcements.”

“Don’t take any action till I see you,” Pobjoy said, frowning. “I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”

“Make it fifteen.” Garrod broke the connection, lit a cigarette and smoked it slowly as he analysed his situation. He had two reasons for wanting to remain in Augusta. The first and most important was that Jane was likely to be here for some time yet; the second was that he had become involved in a mystery and hated to walk away from it. If he could bully Pobjoy into letting him in on the real investigation he could satisfy his curiosity, stay with Jane, and at the same time have a perfect excuse to give to Esth…Garrod gnawed his lower lip. He did not need to explain or justify anything to Esther. Ever again, Never, ever again.

“Now, Mr. Garrod,” Pobjoy said, lowering his bulk into an armchair. “What is all this?”

Garrod noted the other man’s return to the formal mode of address, and he smiled. “I’m tired of playing games, that’s all.”

“I don’t get it. What sort of games?”

“The sort in which you use my name and reputation to make the public think there’s useful evidence in the ashes of Wescott’s car—when all the time you and I both know there isn’t any.”

Pobjoy looked up at him over steepled fingers. “You can’t prove that.”

“I’m a trusting sort of person,” Garrod said patiently. “It’s easy to bluff me—once. I don’t need to prove what I say. All I have to do is put you in the position of needing to prove what you say. And that’s what I’m about to do.” “Who’s been talking to you?”

“You underestimate me, Pobjoy. Politicians are known to tell damn stupid lies when they get into tight corners, but they’re accepted only by a public which is ignorant of the facts. I’m not a member of the public, in this instance, and I had a front row seat during your whole pantomime.

“Now tell me—who killed Senator Wescott?”

Pobjoy chuckled. “What makes you think I know?”

Garrod was tempted to mention Jane Wason—after all, he was in a position to recompense her for the loss of a job in multiples of a lifetime’s salary—but he decided to carry it through alone. “I think you know because you tried bloody hard to make it appear that I, who couldn’t possibly help, was able to provide the answer. You identified the killer—but the method you used is packed with too much political dynamite for it to be made public.”

“This is just so stupid, man. Can you even suggest such a method?” Pobjoy spoke in a scathing, relaxed manner, but there were barely perceptible inflexions in his second sentence which spurred Garrod on. A chilly intuition stirred far back in his consciousness. He turned away and busied himself with another cigarette, both to hide his face from Pobjoy and to give himself time to think.

“Yeah,” he said, mind still racing. “I can suggest a method.” “Such as?”

“A highly illegal use of Retardite.” “That’s just a vague generality, Mr. Garrod—not a

method.”

“All right, I’ll be a little less vague.” Garrod sat down facing Pobjoy and stared into his eyes, filled with a new certainty. “Slow glass has already been used in satellites, but

the ordinary man-in-the-street—even your average member of the Privacy League—doesn’t mind that, because the recorded information is beamed down by television and nobody believes we’ll ever have a TV system which could show up details as small as individual human beings. At orbital heights the loss of picture quality makes that impossible.”

“Go on,” Pobjoy said cautiously.

“But the resolution of slow glass is so good that in the right circumstances and atmospheric conditions and with the right optical equipment, turbulence compensators, et cetera, you could follow the movements of people and cars—provided you bring the glass down out of orbit for direct interrogation in a lab. And to do that all you need is a transfer system, small robot spacecraft, torpedoes really, which the mother satellite could fire down to prearranged pick-up areas.”

“Nice idea—but have you thought of the expense?”

“Astronomical, but justifiable in certain circumstances—such as major political assassinations.”

Pobjoy lowered his face into his hands, sat quietly for a moment, then spoke through his fingers. “Does that idea horrify you?”

“It constitutes the most massive invasion of privacy anybody’s ever heard of.”

“When we were driving up to Bingham yesterday you said something about the huge drop in crime figures compensating for the citizens’ loss of some rights.”

“I know—but this new idea carries it to the point where a man couldn’t be sure of being alone even on a mountain top or in the middle of Death Valley.”

“Do you think the Government of the United States would spend millions of dollars just to watch a family having a picnic?”

Garrod shook his head. “You’re admitting I’m right?”

“No!” Pobjoy jumped to his feet and walked to the window. He stared out into the verticalities of the city then added in a quieter voice, “If…If such a thing were true—how could I admit it?”

“But if it were true, it would put you in the curious position

of knowing Wescott’s killer yet having to prove your case or appear to prove it by some other means.”

“We’ve already gone over that ground, Mr. Garrod, but that’s roughly the situation we would be in. What I need to know is—are’ you still determined to spread your theory

around?”

“As you point out—it’s only a theory.”

“But one which could do a lot of…” Pobjoy chose his word with obvious care, “…mischief.”

Garrod stood up and followed the other man to the window. “I could be persuaded not to. As the inventor of slow glass I feel sort of responsible—also I hate walking away from an unsolved problem.”

“You mean you’ll stay on as a member of the advisory

panel?”

“Not on your life,” Garrod said cheerfully. “I want to work on the real investigation. If you know your man we ought to be able to find some way to pin this thing on him.”

Ten minutes later Garrod was in Jane Wason’s room, in her bed. After yet another merging of bodies had ratified his new contact with life, he—although bound to secrecy—let her know that all her suspicions about Pobjoy’s handling of the investigation had been correct.

“I thought so,” she said. “John never said anything to me about it, but I know he’s been trying to figure out their secret

method.”

“You mean he doesn’t know?” Garrod was unable to resist boasting. “He mustn’t have used the right approach to Fobjoy.”

“I’ve been working with John long enough to know he uses the right approach to everything.” She raised herself on one arm and looked down at Garrod. “If he wasn’t able to

find out…”

Garrod laughed as he saw the speculative look in Jane’s eyes and the beginning of a frown disturbing the fine line of her eyebrows. “Forget it,” he said easily as he pulled the already-familiar torso across his own.

Chapter Thirteen

It was obvious right from the start that Captain Peter Remmert disapproved of Garrod’s intrusion. (He was a moody, changeable man; sometimes laconic and at others voluble in an incongruously bookish manner. Once during coffee he said to Garrod, “The rich amateur who solves murders as a hobby is no longer a credible figure, even in cheap fiction, thanks to the levelling out of the distribution of wealth. His heyday was the first half of the century when the anomaly of his position wasn’t appreciated by a poor to whom the rich were incomprehensible beings who might very well turn detective just to pass the time.”) But Remmert co-operated fully on what must have been, from his point of view, a tiresome and frustrating case. At the outset, all he knew was that he and a small selected team had been sworn to secrecy, given a name and address in Augusta, and told to do all they could to link the suspect with the assassination of Senator Wescott.

The suspect’s name was Ben Sala. He was aged forty-one, of Italian extraction, and he ran a small wholesale business specializing mainly in detergents and disinfectants. He lived, with his wife, in a smallish house in a middle-class district on the city’s west side. They had no children and the upper part of the house was sublet to a fifty-year-old bachelor, Matthew H. McCullough, who drove for the local transit system.

As a matter of routine, Remmert did some checking into Sala’s Italian ancestry and family, looking for a connection with the Mafia, but drew a blank. As he had been instructed not to make a direct approach to Sala about the assassination, the investigation seemed about to end almost before it had

begun—until another death occurred.

On the morning after Senator Wescott’s death among the exploding metallic vapours of his car, Sala’s lodger—McCullough—died of a heart attack while climbing up into his bus.

The coincidence did not come to the attention of Remmert’s team for several hours, and when it did they regarded it as little more than a ready-made excuse to pay a direct visit to Sala’s home—at first. At that stage the results of certain interrogations of Traffic Department slow glass monitors became available. And they gave Remmert an unpleasant and unwanted surprise. He had been instructed to prove that Sal a had carried out the assassination, and the monitors collaborated to the extent that they showed Sala’s battered delivery truck leaving his home, heading north towards Bingham some hours before the killing, and returning by the same route some hours after it. There was a drawback, however.

The trapped images showed clearly that the truck had been driven by Matthew McCullough—the man who had died a natural death a few hours later.

And he had been alone.

“It meant we were able to go into the Sala house and work properly,” Remmert said. “The idea was that we were supposed to be checking up on McCullough, but all the time we were getting what we could on Sala.”

“And what did you get?” Garrod kept staring at the projection screen on which was a still hologram of the front of Sala’s house.

“Nothing, of course. McCullough was the guilty party.”

“Wasn’t it a little too convenient the way he dropped dead the next morning?”

Remmert snorted. “If that’s convenient, I hope I remain inconvenienced till I’m a hundred.”

“You know what I mean, Peter. If Sala was the killer, didn’t everything drop into place a little too nicely when a man he could pin the blame on was silenced the very next morning?”

“Sala isn’t pinning the blame on McCullough—I am. Anyway I don’t follow that line of reasoning. Supposing Sala had done it—would he want his tenant to attract the attention of the police by dropping dead? Besides, no matter what Pobjoy says, Sala didn’t do it. We’ve got all kinds of evidence which backs up his statement.”

“Let’s run over the evidence.”

Remmert sighed audibly but put the holoprojector on fast rewind. They had requisitioned a Scenedow from a house which was almost directly opposite Sala’s place and had made a holofilm covering the suspect’s life during the previous year. The information from the Scenedow was also stored in Retardite recorders but—because slow glass had the disadvantage of not being able to go into reverse—conventional holofilm was used for the practical work of examining evidence.

On the screen there appeared an image of the Sala house as it had been a year ago when the Scenedow had been installed. It was an ordinary two-storey frame building with a bay window downstairs supporting a small verandah on the upper level. The front garden was neatly kept and there was a garage attached to the main structure with its front flush with the building line. The windows in the top half of the garage door provided the only view of the interior.

Remmert began skipping through the reel, pausing here and there to show scenes of Sala and McCullough entering and leaving the place. Sala was a smallish thickset man with black curling hair in the centre of which his scalp could be seen glistening like polished leather. McCullough was taller and slightly stooped. He had steel-coloured hair brushed back from a long doleful face, and appeared to keep very much to his own part of the house.

“McCullough doesn’t look like a high-powered political assassin to me,” Garrod commented. “Sala does.”

“That’s about the sum total of your case against him,” Remmert said, freezing on an image of Sala working in his garden, shirt straining across a protuberant stomach. “He’s got the pycnic build.”

“The what?”

“The pycnic build—that’s the name psychiatrists have given to that shortish plumpish thick-shouldered build which occurs so often among psychotic killers. But lots of harmless people are put together in exactly the same way.”

Other images followed—diamond-clear fragments of ice snatched from the river of time—of Sala and his dark-haired wife, arguing, eating, dozing, reading, sometimes engaging in unsubtle loveplay, while all the time McCullough’s lonely and humourless face brooded at the upper windows. Sala went to and from his place of business at regular hours in a white current-model pickup truck. Fall advanced quickly into winter and the snows came, then Sala was seen using a dented five-years-old utility truck instead of the newer model.

Garrod held up his hand for the film to stop. “Was Sala’s business not going so well?”

“It’s doing all right—he seems to be a shrewd business man at his own level.”

“Did you ask him why he began using that old truck?”

“As a matter of fact, I did,” Remmert replied. “In old-style detective work it’s the sort of thing which wouldn’t crop up, but in a Retardite run-through it becomes glaringly noticeable.”

“What did he say?”

“He’d been planning to keep the newer truck for only another six or eights months anyway, then somebody made him a good offer for it. Sala said he just couldn’t turn it down.”

“Did you ask him how much he got?”

“No. I didn’t care.”

Garrod jotted a note down in his pad, and motioned for the holofilm to continue. The snows receded, sifted out of existence by the greens and blossom-colours of spring and summer. Fall was approaching again when a length of blue tarpaulin appeared on the roof of the garage. It was large enough to stretch over the entire roof and an edge hung down at the front, covering the windows of the door.

“What’s the idea of that?” Garrod raised his hand again.

“His garage roof began to leak.”

“Did it look bad? I didn’t notice.”

Remmert moved back in time a little and the roof was seen with disturbed felt tiles in several places. A few days earlier and they all appeared normal.

“That happened a bit suddenly, didn’t it?”

“Beginning of September—there were a couple of freak storms. Sala is going to build a new garage so it wasn’t worth his while to have a proper repair job done on the roof.”

“Everything still clicking into place.”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t know. Look at the sloppy way the tarpaulin hangs down over the front of the garage, but Sala is very fussy about everything else.”

“It probably keeps the rain out better that way.” Remmert was beginning to sound impatient as Garrod made another note. “What could you make out of that?”

“Perhaps nothing—but when you’ve lived with slow glass as long as I have it changes your way of looking at things.” Garrod suddenly realized he was sounding pompous. “I’m sorry, Peter—is there anything of special interest between then and the night of the murder?”

“/ don’t think so, but maybe you…”

“Let’s move up to the big night,” Garrod said.

It was dark when the garage door swung open and then slid inwards with a movement which reminded Garrod of flaps being retracted on an airliner’s wing. The truck nosed its way out towards the street, the door closing automatically behind it, and the image on the screen grew brighter as light intensifiers came into play. Remmert froze the action and the driver was clearly revealed as McCullough. He was wearing a hat which shaded his eyes, but there was no mistaking the long sad countenance.

“Traffic monitors recorded him right to the northern limits of the city,” Remmert said. “Now watch the garage—the tarpaulin’s been folded back a little and you can see in.”

He speeded up the time flow, then dropped back to normal when the digital indicator in a corner of the picture showed that half an hour had passed. The dark rectangles which

were the garage windows flooded with white radiance and a man was seen within. He was stubby and black-haired—unmistakably Ben Sala.

While Sala was moving about the garage doing odd cleaning and tidying jobs, Remmert touched a button which triggered a recording of the suspect’s statement:

“Well, roundabout seven that evenin’ Matt came downstairs. He wasn’t lookin’ too good—sorta grey, you know—and he was rubbin’ his left arm like there was a pain in it. Matt told me the transit company had asked him to do a few hours’ overtime that night. Most of the time he went everywhere by bus ’cause he was allowed to ride everywhere free, but this time he asked me for the lend of the truck. He said it was ’cause he was tired and didn’t feel up to walkin’ up to the bus stop on the main road.

“I told him okay he could have the truck, so he went off in it about eleven. After he’d gone I did some work in the garage for about an hour, then I went to bed. I heard Matt bringin’ the truck back some time in the middle of the night, but I didn’t look to see what time it was. Next mornin’ he went out to work like he always does, and that was the last time I saw him alive.”

Remmert switched off the recording. “What do you think of that?”

“What do you think of it?”

“It was just a statement— I’ve taken thousands of them.”

Garrod kept his eyes on the screen, where Sala’s image could still be seen occasionally as he moved around the garage. “Sala doesn’t talk like a professional communicator, and yet…”

“And yet?”

“He packed a tremendous amount of information into a short statement—all of it relevant, well-ordered, logical. Out of those thousands of statements you’ve taken, Peter, how many were there in which not one word was wasted?”

“The weight of damning evidence is piling up against Sala,” Remmert said tartly. “He looks like he could be an assassin, and he talks sensibly. You know we interview lots of people

in here who don’t use academic English, yet can make you see a thing better than a university don can. Have you never noticed that in interrogation scenes in crime movies the tough slum kids always get the best lines? The screenwriter’s talent must be liberated by the knowledge that for a while—in this character—he can kick the subjunctive out the window.”

Garrod thought for a moment. “I’ve got an idea.”

Remmert was not listening. “One night last year I had a kid in here for questioning on a manslaughter charge, and I asked him why he had done it. Do you know what he said? He said, ’All that the public ever reads in the papers about young people is that they keep going around doing welfare work and voluntary service—I wanted to let them see that some of us are real bastards.’ Now, that’s better than anything I’ve heard in the movies.”

“Listen,” Garrod said. “I’m seeing this holofilm for the first time, isn’t that right?”

“Right.”

“Would it improve my credibility if I made a prediction about something we’re going to see later in the film?”

“It might. Depends.”

“All right.” Garrod pointed at the screen. “Note that the tarpaulin on the garage roof has been folded back so that we can see inside through the door windows. My prediction is that after we’ve seen McCullough driving the truck back into the garage, the edge of that tarp will somehow fall down again and cover the windows.”

“What if it does? We’ve seen McCullough driving away and leaving Sala behind…” Remmert stopped speaking as the truck appeared on the screen, moved down the drive. The coded frequency in its headlight beam caused the garage door to swing up and the vehicle disappeared into the now-darkened interior. As the door was swinging down behind it, a loose strand from the tarpaulin seemed to snag part of the locking mechanism and the covering twitched downwards over the windows.

“That was pretty good,” Remmert conceded.

“I thought so, too.”

“But you can’t make predictions like that without a theory to base them on. What have you got up your sleeve?”

“I’m going to tell you, but first I need one extra piece of information,” Garrod said. “Just to confirm it in my own mind.”

“What do you want to know?”

“Can you find out how much Sala actually got paid for the truck he sold?”

“Huh?.Come through to my office—I haven’t got a computer terminal here.” Remmert gave Garrod a frankly puzzled look as they walked to his office, but he refrained from asking any more questions. At his desk he tapped briefly on the keys of the terminal which was linked to the big police computer at the other side of the city. The machine chimed a second later and Remmert tore off a strip of photoprinter tape.

He glanced at it and became even more puzzled. “It says here he got fifteen hundred dollars for it from a dealer out along the line.”

“I don’t know about you,” Garrod said, the old triumphal pounding now filling his chest, “but if that truck had been mine I’d have had no difficulty in turning down that kind of an offer.”

“It’s hellish low, I must admit—which means Sala was drifting a bit in that part of his statement anyway. I can’t understand why a sharp businessman like him would practically give away a good truck and buy a beat-up utility model.”

“If you ask me, it was like this.” Garrod began to explain his theory.

When the word came to Ben Sala that it was time to move against Senator Wescott, he was dismayed. He had been hoping that the call would never come, somehow, but now that it had he had no choice but to act—the alternative would have been death, perhaps by a bomb planted in his next consignment of detergent. In any case, the plan had been so carefully worked out that there was practically no risk of detection.

The first step was to get hold of a G.M. Burro, an ultra-cheap delivery truck which had been tried out then discontinued by the manufacturers four years earlier. Its big feature, as far as Sala was concerned, was that all its transparencies were of flat glass and the windshield could be pivoted to admit air. Sala, however, was not concerned with letting air in—but with seeing out.

He sold his own truck and bought a Burro. The latter was quite difficult to obtain and he had to accept a model in poor condition, but it was adequate for his needs. He took the Burro home, began using it for his daily transportation, and set other phases of the plan into action. The first night on which there was a high wind he went into the garage by the kitchen entrance and, working in complete darkness, loosened several roof tiles from the under side. A couple of days later he covered the roof with what appeared to be a randomly chosen piece of tarpaulin from his warehouse, but which had actually been carefully designed for its task. With the interior of his garage now hidden from the gaze of the Scenedow across the street, he was able to go ahead with assembly of the laser cannon which had been mailed to him piece by piece in small packages.

He also began work on one of the most delicate parts of the operation.

Thanks to the simplistic design of the Burro it was easy to remove the windshield and replace them with panels of Retardite. But getting Matt McCullough to sit in the driving seat for the best part of an hour was more difficult, even though he had been selected as a tenant because of his dullness. Sala solved the problem by telling McCullough the Burro had developed a fault in the steering linkage and that he was going to repair it himself. McCullough, who would only have been broodingat one of his windows anyway, agreed to sit in the truck and turn the wheel each time Sala called out to him. He even wore his old hat in case it would be draughty in the garage.

There was a crucial moment when McCullough got in and closed the door, but he failed to notice he was seeing the garage not as it actually was that night—and Sola was careful to stay underneath the vehicle the whole time. The truck’s front wheels were in pools of thick oil which enabled them to be turned easily, and Sola—who had carefully timed the drive along a simple, crossing-free route out of the city—was able to get McCullough to twist the steering wheel according to the prearranged programme.

With the slow glass panels suitably charged with images of McCullough, Sola slowed their emission rate down to almost zero and put them away for future use. On another night, working under cover of the tarpaulin, he removed the windows from his garage door, replaced them with Retardite panels and spent an hour pottering about doing small jobs. These panels, too, he removed, slowed down almost to a standstill and put into storage for when they would be required. He was now ready to commit the foolproof murder.

On the evening he received the coded message to proceed he began by slipping Matt McCullough a strong sedative which would keep him away from the windows of the duplex at a time when he was supposed to be out driving. Sala then made certain the garage doors were covered from the outside, and put the assembled laser cannon into the truck. He clipped the Retardite panels into the garage door and into the frames of the Burro, increased their emissions to normal rate, and drove out of town towards Bingham.

It was at this stage that the unique design of the Burro played a vital role, because in a normal vehicle Sala would have had no vision of the road as it was that night. He tilted the windshield back until there was a hairline crack between the glass and the frame, through which he could see forward. The sharply restricted view made the trip fairly difficult, and there was an unexpected hazard in that the sound of the engine and the sense of movement contrasted with the static view of the interior of his own garage in a way which produced disorientation and nausea.

Out in the country, however, beyond the view of slow glass monitors he was able to tilt the windshield back a little further and drive in comparative comfort. He also slowed the Retardite emissions down almost to zero, preserving the stored images of McCullough for the journey back through the city. The telltales on any car he met on the way would yield images of a motionless McCullough at the wheel, but this would be acceptable for highway conditions in which virtually no control movements were required of the driver. In any case, all these precautions were unlikely to be necessary because the murder would not be traced to the point where Sala would be involved. It was simply part of the plan that an entire back-up line of defence was included.

At the site chosen for the assassination Sala set up his cannon. A short time later a close-range personal radio message told him the Senator’s car was near—and when it reached the bottom of the hollow he burned it and the driver into a heap of glowing, crackling slag.

On the trip back, he stopped several miles along the road and buried the cannon. He drove the rest of the way without incident and got back into his gara>ge well before dawn. The hanging strand device he had carefully but unobtrusively rigged up drew the tarpaulin down over the windows as the garage doors closed behind him. Sala took the Retardite panels out of the door and truck and replaced them with ordinary glass. He then used a tickler on the slow glass to disturb its crystalline structure, blanking out the mute evidence for ever. As a further precaution he broke the panels into small fragments and fed them into the furnace in the basement.

Only the final step in the plan remained. He went upstairs to McCullough’s bedroom, took off the other man’s hat and hung it in its usual place on the back of the door. He then took out a phial of specially prepared thrombogenic poison which had been sent to him by the organization. McCullough was still in a drugged sleep and he did not waken up while Sala was rubbing the traceless poison into the skin of his left arm. The position of the site on which Sala had chosen to apply the poison meant that McCullough would die of a massive embolism approximately four hours later.

Well satisfied with his night’s work, Sala had a glass of milk and a sandwich before joining his wife in bed.

“When you concoct a theory,” Remmert said slowly, “you really do it in a big way.”

Garrod shrugged. “I used to be in the theory-concocting business. Actually this is a good one in that it explains all the observed facts, but it falls down on one major respect.” “Too complicated. Occam’s Razor.”

“No—in these days all murder plans have to be complicated. It’s just that I can’t think of any way to demonstrate its truth. I’ll bet you’ll find fresh scratches on the window frames in the truck and on the garage door—but that proves nothing.”

“We might pick up traces of Retardite in the furnace.” “Possibly. But there’s no law against incinerating slow glass, is there?”

“Isn’t there?” Remmert bumped his forehead with the heel of his hand as if trying to jar his memory into action. Visual sarcasm. “Would you like to drive out to the Sala place? Have a look at the real thing?”

“Okay.” Accompanied by another detective called Agnew they drove out to the west side of the city. The morning sky was now well advanced, with clouds fleeing across the blue ceramic of the sky, changing the quality of the light which reflected from the neat houses. The car climbed into a hilly suburb and stopped outside a white-painted house. Garrod experienced a peculiar thrill as he recognized the Sala place, his eyes picking out all the familiar details of the structure, garden and garage.

“It looks quiet,” he said. “Is anybody likely to be at home?”

“I don’t think so. We allow Sala to attend his business but we have keys and he told us to go in anytime. He’s co-operating like hell.”

“In his position he has to do all he can to help you pin the blame on McCullough.”

“I guess you’ll be more interested in the garage than anywhere else,”

They walked down the short drive and Remmert used a key to open the garage door manually. The interior smelled of paint, gasoline and dust. Watched by the two officers, Garrod walked round the garage self-consciously lifting odd objects, empty cans and old magazines, and setting them down again. He had a conviction he was making a fool of himself, but was reluctant to leave the garage.

“I don’t see any oil patches on the floor,” Remmert said. “How did he turn the wheels?”

“With these.” Garrod’s memory came to his aid. He pointed at two glossy magazines which had tyre marks on the covers and heavily creased pages inside. “It’s an old DIY trick—you run the front wheels on to slick magazines and they turn easily.”

“It doesn’t prove anything, does it?”

“It does to me,” Garrod said stubbornly.

Remmert lit a cigarette and Agnew a pipe, and the two detectives wandered out into the nervously buffeting air. They stood smoking for a good ten minutes, conversing in low voices, then began glancing at their watches to indicate they were ready for lunch. Garrod felt the same way—he had arranged to eat with Jane—yet he had a feeling that if he did not make a breakthrough on this visit, when he was seeing the interior of the garage with that special clarity which is present only when something is viewed for the first time, he would never get anywhere.

Agnew tapped out his pipe with a gentle clicking sound and went to sit in the car. Remmert sat down on the low garden wall and appeared to take an intense interest in cloud formations. Wishing the others would go away and leave him, Garrod took a final walk around the garage and saw a fragment of glass close to the wall which adjoined the house. He knelt and picked it up, but the simpkst test—moving a finger behind it—showed that it was ordinary glass.

Remmert stopped inspecting the sky. “Get anything?”

“No.” Garrod shook his head dispiritedly. “Let’s go.”

“You bet.” Remmert pulled the overhead door part way down, darkening the garage.

Garrod’s face was close to the unpainted inner wall and as he moved, in the very instant of straightening up, he saw a faint circular image appear on the dry boards. There was a dim silhouette of a rooftop, a ghostly tree waving its branches—and they were upside down. Spinning on his heels, he faced the outer wall of the garage and saw a bright, white star shining there, about five feet above the floor. There was a small hole in the woodwork. He approached it and put his eye to the tiny aperture. A jet of cold air from outside played on his eye like a hose, producing tears, but he saw through to the sunlit world of ascending hillside and houses nestling in baskets of shrubbery. He went to the door, stooped below its lower edge and beckoned to Remmert.

“There’s a small hole in this wall,” he said. “It’s angled downwards slightly, so you don’t notice it when you’re walking about.”

“What difference…?” Remmert stooped and looked through the hole. “I don’t know—do you think it’s big enough to be of any use?”

“Of course!” If Sala really had been moving around in here an outside observer would see the chink of light blinking on and off—but if he wasn’t here, only programmed into the slow glass in the windows, the light will have remained constant.

“How many houses can you see through there?”

“Ah…twelve for sure. Some of them are pretty far away though.”

“It doesn’t matter. If one of those houses has a Scenedow facing this way you can wind up the case this afternoon.” Garrod kicked the fragment of glass he had discovered out into the shifting sunlight—he was certain a slow glass witness would be found.

Remmert stared at him for a moment, then punched his shoulder. “I’ve got binoculars in the car.”

“Go and get them,” Garrod said. “I’ll make a location sketch of the houses we’re interested in.”

He took out his notepad and looked through the hole again, but decided the sketch was unnecessary. The hill had been plunged into cloud-shadow, and even with the naked eye he could see that one of the houses had a window which glittered green with transposed sunlight, like a rectangular emerald.

Chapter Fourteen

The news that Ben Sala had been arrested for the murder of Senator Wescott was broadcast in the late afternoon. Garrod was alone in his olive-and-gold suite, waiting for Jane to finish her day’s secretarial work with John Mannheim. For almost an hour he had been standing at a window looking at the street twenty storeys below, and he had not been able to rid himself of the sense of apprehension which heaved coldly in his stomach.

Arriving back at the hotel after lunch, he had received a message from Esther, one he had been expecting. It said: I am arriving in Augusta this evening and will be at your hotel by 79.00. Wait for me. Love, Esther.

Since sending his own message he had been hoping to hear from his wife, wanting to get the final confrontation tucked into the past where it ought to be—but now, suddenly, he was afraid. His wife’s final sentence—Love, Esther—read in context, meant there was not going to be a clean break, that she still regarded him as her property. It was all going to be drawn-out, bloody and abrasive.

Analysing his own feelings, he realized he was afraid of his own moral softness, the almost pathological inability to hurt other people, even when it was necessary, even when all parties would benefit from a swift, decisive stroke. He could think of dozens of examples, but in the introspective mood his mind sprang to the very earliest, back when he he was a boy of ten running with a small gang in Barlow, Oregon.

The young Alban Garrod had never fitted in very well and he was desperately anxious to win the approval of the gang leader, a plump but physically powerful boy called Rick. His chance came when he was walking home from school with an unlikeable lad named Trevor, who was high on the gang’s “execution list“. Trevor incautiously made a disparaging remark about Rick, and—in spite of feelings of self-revulsion—Alban reported the incident to Rick. Rick accepted the news gratefully and conceived a plan. The gang was to surround Trevor in an alley and Rick would utter a formal accusation. If Trevor admitted his guilt he would be worked over to teach him a lesson, and if he denied it he was calling both Rick and Alban liars, which would earn him an equally severe punishment. Everything went well until the crucial moment.

After the ritual ripping open of his fly, which was always done to put an enemy at a psychological disadvantage, Trevor was backed against a wall, with his lapels gathered in Rick’s fist. He frantically denied ever having uttered the fateful words. In accordance with his own obscure code, Rick was not yet entitled to deal a blow. He looked at Alban for confirmation.

“He said it, didn’t he?”

Alban stared at Trevor, a boy he despised, and quailed when he saw the terror and pleading in his eyes. Feeling sick inside, he said, “No. I didn’t hear him saying anything about you.”

Rick released his hold on his prisoner and allowed him to scurry away to safety, then he turned to Alban with a look of bafflement which changed to contempt and anger. He advanced with heavy fists swinging. The ten-year-old Alban accepted his beating with something approaching relief—all that mattered was that he had not had to crush another human being.

With Garrod’s personal history, and without Jane actually there to steady him, there was a possibility—a very faint one, but a possibility nonetheless—that if Esther came at him the right way he would agree to go back home with her and become a dutiful husband again. The thought brought a tingle of cool perspiration to his face. He leaned his head against the glass of the window and stared down at the minute coloured rectangles which were automobiles and the even smaller specks which were people in the street below. Seen from almost directly overhead the pedestrians had no identity—it was barely possible to separate men from women—and he found it difficult to accept that each of the creeping dots regarded itself as the centre of the universe. Garrod’s depression grew more intense.

He went into his bedroom, lay on top of the bedcovers and tried to doze, but sleep was impossible. After twenty restless minutes he broke one of his strictest rules by activatine the bedside viewphone and calline his Portston headquarters to check on how things were going. He spoke to Mrs. Werner first and got a rundown on the important developments of the past few days, then he talked to several divisional and deoartment heads, including Manston who wanted euidance on how to handle Garrod’s connection with the current news break. Another was Schickert, in a near-panic over the fact that a Governmental purchasing: agency was nlacing new priority orders for Retardite particles so quickly that even if the new Liquid Light Paints plant had been in ooeration it would have been impossible to keep up. Garrod soothed him down and spent an hour in conference with other senior management.

By the time he had finished there was less than an hour to go till Esther’s arrival and he was in no mood for sleeping-He went to the bathroom and, scorning the idea of blacking; it out, took a shower with all the lights on. His short association with lane Wason, he realized, was what had made him careless of vicarious watchers. Conscious of and uplifted by the beauty of her own body, she simply refused to hide under cover of darkness at any time, including the hours with him. The thought of her brought with it a mingled pang of desire and regret. Life with Jane would have been so…

Garrod panicked as he understood that already, before a word had been spoken, he was anticipating a victory for Esther.

I choose Jane, he told himself, stepping out of the shower cubicle. I choose life.

But later when his doorbell sounded he felt himself begin to die. He opened it slowly and saw Esther standing there accompanied by her personal nurse. She was carefully dressed, with a minimum of make-up, and was wearing ordinary black glasses of the type used by people who have disfigured eyes.

“Alban?” she said in a pleasant voice. She’s going to be brave, he thought sadly. Blind—hence the dark glasses—but brave.

“Come in, Esther.” He included the nurse in his gesture, but she had obviously been primed by his wife and moved backwards into the corridor, her coral-pink antiseptic face showing her disapproval of him.

“Thank you, Alban.” Esther held out her hand, but he took her elbow instead and led her to a chair.

He sat down opposite. “Did you have a good trip?”

She nodded. “You were right all along, Alban. I can get around in spite of my handicap. I’ve just flown thousands of miles to be with you.”

“I’m…” The significance of Esther’s final words was not lost on Garrod. ’That’s wonderful, for you.”

She in turn picked up his final words. “Aren’t you glad to see me?”

“Of course I’m glad to see you out and about again.”

“That isn’t what I asked you.”

“Isn’t it?”

“No.” Esther was sitting very erect, hands neatly folded in her lap. “When did you begin to hate me, Alban?”

“For God’s sake! Why should I hate you?”

“That’s what I’m asking myself. I must have done something very…”

“Esther,” he said firmly. “I don’t hate you.” He looked at her precision-cast features, saw the faint lines of stress there, and his heart sank.

“You just don’t love me, is that right?”

This is it, he thought. This is the exact second on which your whole future depends. He opened his mouth to give the answer she had invited, but his mind was engulfed in a cryogenic chill. He stood up, went to the window and looked into the street below. The anonymous specks which thought of themselves as people were still swarming down there. How the hell, he asked himself, could an observer in a satellite, looking straight down, tell one man from another?

“Answer me, Alban.”

Garrod swallowed, wishing he could escape, but unrelated pictures were flickering behind his eyes. A small crop-spraying aircraft drifting across the sky, shining like a silver crucifix. Schickert in a panic because his plant could not keep up with orders for Retardite dust. The dark countryside, glowing…

Esther’s groping hands touched his back. She had risen from the chair without his noticing. “You’ve given me all the answer I need,” she said.

“Have I?”

“Yes.” Esther took a deep, quivering breath. “Where is she now?”

“Who?”

Esther laughed. “Who? Your new bedmate, that’s who. That… hooker who wears the silver make-up.”

Garrod was appalled. It seemed to him that Esther had used a frightening power to look into his mind. “What makes you think…?”

“Do you think I’m a fool, Alban? Did you forget you were wearing my eye discs at the luncheon on the day you got here? Do you think I didn’t see the way John Mannheim’s girl looked at you?”

“I don’t remember her looking at me in any special way,” Garrod fenced.

“I’m blind,” Esther said bitterly, “but I’m not as blind as you pretend to be.”

Garrod stared at her and again his thoughts ricocheted away. Miller Pobjoy didn’t mention satellites. I was the one who thought up the satellite story, and all he did was let me go along with it! I’ve known this all along, and it’s been chewing me up, but I couldn’t face…

The door swung open and Jane Wason walked in. “I’ve just finished, Al, and…Oh!”

“It’s all right, Jane,” Garrod said. “Come in and meet my wife. Esther, this is Jane Wason. She does secretarial work for…John Mannheim.”

Esther smiled sweetly, but deliberately facing in the wrong direction to emphasise her blindness. “Yes, do come in, Jane. We’ve just been talking about you.”

“I think it would be better if I didn’t intrude.”

Esther’s voice hardened. “I think it would be better if you stayed. We’re trying to decide exactly who is the real intruder around here.”

Jane advanced into the room, her large eyes fixed on Garrod’s face, waiting for him to speak. He felt utterly incapable of dealing with the situation.

“Speak up, Alban. Let’s make it clean and sharp and final,” his wife said.

Garrod looked down into Esther’s face. Her age and tiredness were showing up in contrast to Jane’s lush youthfulness. She had just crossed a continent, blind, to face him. Of the three people in the room she was the only one at a crippling disadvantage, yet she was dominating the group. She was strong. She was brave, but sightless and helpless, waiting with her face turned up to his. All he had to do was take the verbal axe firmly in both hands—and swing on her…

He closed his eyes for a moment, and when he opened them Jane was leaving the room. Garrod ran to her. “Jane,” he said desperately, “give me a chance to think.”

She shook her head. “Colonel Mannheim’s finished in Augusta now. I just came by to tell you I’ll be flying down to Macon with him on the late plane.”

He caught her wrist but she twisted free with unexpected strength. “Leave me alone, Al.”

“I can work this thing out.”

“Yes, Al. You can—just the way you worked it out about the…” The end of her sentence was lost in the slamming of the door, but Garrod did not need to hear it. He knew the last word had been, “satellites“.

His legs were rubbery as he turned back into the room and sat down. Esther found her way to him and rested her hands on his shoulders. “My poor dear Alban,” she whispered.

Garrod lowered his face into cupped hands. There are no satellites, he thought. No torpedoes carrying Retardite eyes down out of orbit. They don’t need them. Not when they’re dusting the whole world with slow glass!

A preternatural calm seemed to descend over his brain as he considered the mechanics of the proposition. The resolution of Retardite’s crystalline structure was so fine that a usable image could be obtained from a particle a few microns in diameter. Yet each speck would be invisible to the naked eye under normal conditions. They were using it in hundreds of tons—Retardite dust of mixed delays, swirling down over the entire continent from crop-sprayer aircraft. Such aircraft generally used electrically charged ejector nozzles, giving the particles an electromagnetic potential which caused it to be attracted on to the crops rather than drift straight on to the ground. Only in this case, the slow glass micro-eyes were being released from high up so that they would cling to everything—trees, buildings, telegraph poles, flowers, mountain slopes, birds, flying insects. It would be in people’s clothing, in their food, in the water they drank.

From now on, came the silent scream inside his head, anybody, any agency, with the right equipment can find out anything about ANYBODY! This planet is one huge, unblinking eye watching everything that moves on its surface. We’re all encased in glass, asphyxiating, like bugs dropped into an entomologist’s killing bottle.

The seconds crept, and he was conscious only of the sound of blood pulsing in his veins. And I…And I did it!

When Garrod stood up he lifted the incomprehensible weight of the planet with him. And he discovered, with infinite gratitude, that he could support it.

“Esther,” he said peacefully, “you asked me an important question a while ago.”

“Yes?” Her voice was wary, as though she could already sense a change in him.

“The answer is—no. I don’t love you, Esther, and I realize now that I never did.”

“Don’t be stupid,” she said, with a frightened harshness in her voice.

“I’m sorry, Esther. You asked me, and I told you how it is. I must go and find Jane now. I’ll send in your nurse.” He walked out of the room without hurrying, without needing to hurry, and went to Jane’s room on the floor below. The outer door was open and he could see she had begun to pack. She was bending over one of her cases in an unintentionally voluptuous pose which produced a slow and powerful hammering in his chest.

“You lied to me,” he said in mock severity. “You said you were taking the late plane.”

Jane turned to face him with transparent ribbons of tears on her cheeks. “Please let me get away from you, Al.”

Garrod said, “No. Not ever again.”

“Al, have you…?”

“Yes. I’ve ended one thing that should never have started, and I want your help while I do the same thing with something else.”

Jane was with him when he went to a newspaper office and told his story, and she was with him during the hard months which followed when a panic-stricken Government was forced by the people to create new legislation banning the production of slow glass. She was with him during the even harder years when it was realized that other countries were continuing with Retardite production, eventually adulterating the oceans with it, and the air itself—even up to the stratosphere. In later decades, men were to come to accept the universal presence of Retardite eyes, and they learned to live without subterfuge or shame as they had done in a distant past when it was known that the eyes of God could see everywhere.

Jane was with him through all that, and one of the ways in which he knew he loved her was that, no matter how hard he tried, he could not visualize her beautiful face ever growing older. To him she was ageless, eternal—like a lovely image enshrined forever in a prism of slow glass.