The Time Masters

by Wilson Tucker

  Hoffman glanced up at him with a shy, speculative expression. She rolled the pencil between her fingers.

  “Go on,” Dikty invited, “say it.”

  “I would judge,” she answered slowly, “that Hodgkins visited subject and retained his services. To find the missing wife. I would further judge that Hodgkins intended to shoot his wife—when they again met.”

  “Correct.”

  A roll of heavy thunder followed his agreement.

  “And that he lost his nerve when he discovered the red tape necessary to buy a gun . . .” She paused to frown. “No, not quite that. He didn’t lose his nerve, he merely realized a gun would have to be obtained in another way.”

  “Nearly correct,” Dikty nodded. “He also may have realized that a gun wasn’t necessary at all. He’s a smart chap, remember that. You or I could name a dozen seemingly innocent things to put into her coffee, but then he was no longer in a position to feed her anything. It may be that he searched for some other means of reaching her over a distance.” He went back to searching the dull sky. “I wish I knew what it was he was looking for in the papers.”

  “The personal advertisements—No. he read them quite thoroughly didn’t he?”

  “He did. He was searching for news of some nature.”

  “Something the subject planted in his mind?”

  Dikty made as if to answer and then paused, “Yes,” he said after a moment. “It could be.”

  The telephone rang. He consulted his watch. Hoffman answered the instrument, nodded, and handed it to him.

  “Dikty, here.” A pause. “Yes, he did. Shortly after midnight last night. No, not yet. They are searching.” Another and longer pause. “I am, constantly. Subject has made no move. The occurrence hasn’t yet appeared in the local papers. It will to-night.” Another pause. “Oak Ridge will issue the explanation. Yes, probably. You what . . .?” There was a long period of silence in the office. “I’m making out a detailed report now. It will in your hands in the morning. Hodgkins and our subject made personal contact, rather suddenly. Sought him out, yes. Yes, I think that too. All right.” One final pause. “I will.” And he hung up.

  Hoffman waited expectantly.

  Dikty regarded the cradled phone rather sombrely, moved his eyes to the darkened sky beyond the window for a reflective moment and then swung back to the girl. “The new operative is on the job, but hasn’t yet reported in. Apparently he still doesn’t know what happened last night.” He pointed to the notebook with a stained pipestem.

  “At ten minutes past twelve last night, a neighbour at 2336 North Shasta Drive telephoned the police, reporting that she had heard a noise next door resembling a gunshot. The police arrived at twelve sixteen to find the house dark and locked; after some wasted minutes they gained entrance by forcing the kitchen door. Hodgkins was discovered dead in his wife’s bedroom, stretched across the bed.

  “The man was shot through the head from front to back, the gun being placed in the open mouth and fired. It was a .32-calibre Smith and Wesson and was found on the floor near the body. The weapon was well oiled and of course contained no prints whatsoever. Police immediately made skin tests of deceased’s fingers and found slight traces of oil but none of burned powder.”

  “Dead,” the girl said in a small voice.

  “Very dead,” Dikty agreed. “Through the mouth. We will have to await a criminologist’s report on that, but I’ve heard that sailors and women frequently choose such a method in suicide. Messy. You should have seen the bed.”

  “No, thanks.” Hoffman repressed a shudder. “What does that last mean? Oil and powder stains?”

  “A well-oiled gun will not retain fingerprints, fiction to the contrary. Oil stains on Hodgkins’s fingers indicate he handled the weapon, but the lack of powder stains indicates he did not fire it. Again we’ll have to await an expert’s opinion; it’s out of my field. I believe they have some sort of iodine vapour treatment to develop hidden stains and prints and so forth. Well—here’s the rest of it.

  “Police searched the house and found oil spots on certain items of Hodgkins’s clean clothing in a drawer, leading them at first to believe he had hidden the gun there. In the light of subsequent disclosures mentioned above, they now believe he did not possess a gun and was murdered by the assailant’s weapon. Assailant of course did not know that Hodgkins had twice attempted and failed to purchase a gun earlier that day; therefore the planting of oil spots and leaving the gun on the scene to. suggest suicide were patently false.

  “Meanwhile, the assigned shadow (or his relief), waiting in a car near by, was of course on duty and reported that no one entered or left the house to the best of his knowledge. He heard the shot but decided against entering for fear the police would discover him there, and because his routine instructions did not cover such emergency action. Oak Ridge has not seen fit to notify the police that the shadow was near by or even to reveal his existence, or the reason he was trailing the deceased, believing that it can add nothing to the case.

  “Police of course are seeking Hodgkins’s widow for information. So am I. I’m attending the funeral tomorrow to see who might turn up. End of report.”

  Outside, the rain began to come down. Dikty glowered at it. Shirley followed his glance to the window and watched the rain for long minutes before asking, “The widow?”

  “Not in my book.”

  “But definitely not suicide?”

  “No.”

  She said, “I wonder . . .?”

  “Police action in a murder case,” Dikty explained, “is first to establish method and motive, I believe. The method was quite plain, quite messy. The motive frequently leads them to the murderer.” He searched through the rain, seeking the outlines of a building down the street.

  “I can read the thoughts on your face,” Shirley told him.

  “Can you, now? Do you also see his name there?”

  “You told me never to mention his name aloud.”

  V.

  Gilbert Nash waited motionless in the rainswept darkness, a tall and lonely figure unseen and unsuspected in the drenched night. His eyes were focused on the house. Most of the neighbouring homes were darkened, their occupants long since retired while only here and there an occasional window continued to spill light. The houses to either side of the Hodgkins domicile were black and silent; the neighbourhood’s brief moment of excitement and scandal was done. No automobiles moved on the rainy street.

  Still Nash waited, his eyes watching for movement and his thoughts turned inward upon Hodgkins and the place he had called home up until twenty-four hours ago. Hodgkins had left home. He had briefly seen the man again that afternoon, seen the remains; the mortician had worked minor miracles on a face which had been troubled, on a skull which only half existed. Hodgkins’s face, ridden with uncertainty and gnawing fear, a face that hadn’t known true peace for many years—until shortly after midnight last night. The bewildered man and his dreams, his many plans for the future, his discoveries—including the one in the library who had soon become his wife.

  There were many things an eulogist might say on behalf of Gregg Hodgkins, but two of his outstanding discoveries had small chance of being mentioned. Physicist Hodgkins had helped to discover the means of pushing the offspring of the Wac Corporal into space—not that battered old pioneer itself—liquid fuel had done that, but those others which had quickly followed the Corporal’s last astonishing flight. Hodgkins deserved at least a small monument for that.

  On its final trip the Corporal hadn’t fallen back to earth, it was still up there, out there, in some dark uncharted place. Space travellers might unexpectedly stumble across it someday, lost and forgotten. And then those three other little ships had quickly followed, the Heinlein I, II and III, each powered with early, inadequate applications of Hodgkins’s discoveries. Unfortunately he did not live to see the flowering of his final atomic seed. The eulogy for that small monument could not mention those facts. All that was still
hidden, buried deep in some agency’s storehouse of confidential matter against the day a slipping politician should need a sensation to aid him in recapturing a public office, or until some state official should need a threat to hurl at an offending nation, or until some zealous military man should need surprise ammunition with which to attack some other branch of the military establishment. Until that far-off day when politicians laboured under the delusion they were statesmen, Hodgkins’s work would go unknown. The small monument must bear a blank face until a political hack gave casual directions to the stonecutter.

  Nash carefully shifted his position, easing back out of the rain. The remaining windows were going dark.

  Hodgkins the husband had discovered another thing—or, more accurately, had rediscovered a lost property although he did not recognize it as such. With his wife’s unwitting and possibly unwilling assistance, he had revived a lost art almost as old as humanity. While the Rhine and allied experimenters continued their investigations into mental telepathy over a distance or through barriers with varying haphazard results, Hodgkins almost stumbled over the proper application and unknowingly revived it for a minute in time. Not being a Methuselah nor an unorthodox archeologist, he couldn’t know that his new-found system of thought transference was practised as long ago as the Akkad Dynasty—some seven thousand years before his birth. He had no knowledge that the “mental telepathy” occurring between himself and his wife was a part of the lives of the ancient Sumerians, had become lost the first time in that same long ago age, had reappeared briefly during the Third Dynasty of Ur, only to vanish again. Present-day scholars knew there were many things the Subaerians began that still survived in the world today; people avoided black cats, not knowing a superstition more than five thousand years old was responsible. Present-day scholars of the conservative school had nothing but derisive laughter for the notion that the ancients sometimes practiced “mental telepathy” but the unhappy scientist had found himself living a revival of that old Akkad-Sumerian art.

  There would be no monument to that, either. Hodgkins hadn’t lived long enough to properly exploit his discovery. If he would be allowed to exploit it.

  Nash left his protected position and advanced on the house.

  The police had boarded up the broken window in the kitchen door with a thin sheet of plywood, had locked the door again and taken the key with them. Nash moved softly across the tiny porch and put his weight to the door. It was solid and unyielding. He placed his hands against one corner of the plywood and pressed in, gently easing the nails free of their grip. When a small space had been opened he reached through and turned the knob from the inside. The door opened to him. He stepped silently into the dark kitchen and closed the door behind him, pushing the plywood back into place. The house smelled of stale cigars, of musty unclean odours.

  Nash waited there for a long moment, probing the blackened silence of the dead house, imagining that he could almost feel the past presence of the scientist. Hodgkins’s personality still clung to the darkened interior, clashing somehow with the stale smoke of the recent intruders.

  There was nothing to suggest a similar presence for the wife. Her subtle, feminine aura had departed with her some three weeks before, had swept through the door with her and away like a live, obedient thing. There was not now a wisp to indicate she had ever been there. Nash wondered about her briefly, wondered if she had ever really lived in the house despite the number of years she stayed there? Or had she been akin to the overnight traveller who does not live but exists in his hotel room?

  He wondered too if she had known the eerie, haunting shock he’d felt, when he shook hands with her husband? Had that shock struck her suddenly as it had hit him, or had it grown with a quiet intensity over a period of months, causing her to become slowly aware of impending events? That one final handclasp had told him quite clearly why Carolyn Hodgkins deserted her husband. She was about to become a widow. And for some reason she did not care to be at home when the state of widowhood arrived.

  Nash moved out of the kitchen to explore the house, shielding the flashlight beam with his hand.

  First a bathroom and then a bedroom met his inquiring eye—Hodgkins’s bedroom, as he determined after a few minutes examination. The man’s clothing still hung in the closet, carelessly rumpled, A few books on the bedside table, a run-down alarm clock, a layer of dust. The dresser drawers had been left hanging open after the visit of the police, and Nash abandoned any hope of finding the clothing containing the oil spots. He peered into the top drawer to discover a few handkerchiefs, a couple of pairs of socks, a neatly folded woollen scarf, a used but unbroken shoestring and a chewed pencil. To judge by the marks in the dust, a large picture had been removed from the dresser top—Carolyn’s picture, undoubtedly, taken along by the police to aid them in their search for the woman.

  Traces of white powder clung to every surface; the police never bothered to clean up their finger-printing paraphernalia behind them. Nash slipped his hands into his pockets and gave the room a last glance.

  He walked through the adjoining bath into another room, quite evidently her bedroom. The bed had been shoved back out of the way, perhaps to clear a space so that the police photographer might completely cover the interior. The mattress was bare, the bedclothing gone—to the police station, the laundry or the incinerator. Nash paused beside the bed to examine the mattress and the dull bloodstain, to judge how the body had sprawled across it. He failed to draw a clear-cut, logical image. Hodgkins would probably have been standing beside the bed if he was murdered; lying on it if he killed himself. The bloodstain gave no hint.

  Nash retreated to the bathroom and glanced again at the bed in Hodgkins’s room. It was clean, dusty, unmussed. The man had been sleeping in his wife’s bed during the three weeks following her departure. A curiously inverted form of revenge, or wishful thinking? Following a sudden thought, he bent down to investigate the catch on her bedroom door. The key still stood in the lock on her side of the panel. Keep out—no trespassing. Unless of course Hodgkins arrived home from work with new knowledge, new developments. Come in—welcome.

  Carolyn was a bitch.

  He moved around the bedroom, looking for traces of the departed woman, peering at the dust along the window sills and under the bed. Hodgkins had been no tidy housekeeper. The vanity drawers were empty of everything but a fine layer of dust and a few overlooked hairpins. He picked up one of those, held it close to the beam of the tiny flashlight he carried. It imparted nothing but he dropped it into his pocket. There was a small empty bottle that had contained nail polish but now it was covered by the white powder. Nash did not touch it. The room contained nothing more of Carolyn Hodgkins, but he remained there in the darkness, for many minutes searching for an impression, for an indefinable something that might suggest she had once dwelt there. Still nothing.

  For a third time he stepped into the bathroom and flashed his light around, peering into the medicine cabinet above the sink, sighting along the small window sill over the tub. He sighed his disappointment and at last walked through the other rooms of the house, rooms that had no real interest to him. They were comfortable by modern standards, well-to-do as fitted their late owner’s station in life. No more. No touch of Carolyn Hodgkins.

  Nash seated himself in one of the overstuffed chairs beside a cold fireplace, laced his fingers together beneath his chin and contemplated the empty darkness. The steady fall of rain was the only sound.

  He thought he understood Hodgkins’s wanting to sleep in his wife’s bed after she had gone; the man was very human, no cold-blooded scientific monster manufacturing death in underground retreats, no sinister Hollywood ogre. And he partially understood Hodgkins’s love for his wife—only partially. He still couldn’t decide to his own satisfaction if that love affair had been genuine or had been carefully planted in the man. It must certainly be hell to be human and not know your own mind—not know beyond all reasonable doubt. Not know if an emotion was your ow
n, or a clever counterfeit implanted in you. But whatever it had been, it was real enough to the husband. He had fallen hopelessly in love with the woman that long ago night in a public library, and had continued to love her hopelessly until the hour and minute of his death.

  Why had he wanted a gun?

  To kill Carolyn? Quite possible. Men desperately in love sometimes did that when the objects of their affections deliberately held themselves aloof. To kill himself? Again, quite possible. Men desperately in love also sometimes resorted to that when frustrated. And Carolyn Hodgkins had known she was about to become a widow. She had discovered that startling and disastrous fact on one of those erotic nights when her husband was permitted to share her bedroom. Rude, shattering discovery! Almost obscene, considering the time and place. Like inviting a coming corpse to share your bed. But why had he wanted a gun? To kill someone else? Hardly possible. Who else would be a likely candidate in Hodgkins’s small circle of friends and business acquaintances? He had begun his search for a gun the same morning he had instigated a search for his wife. Quick thought: had the physicist intended to kill him? For what possible reason? Because he and the missing wife had eyes of similar colour? Suspicions aroused?

  Consider that.

  The drumming rain beat against the side of the house.

  Hodgkins hadn’t been deranged—the doctor and the plant psychiatrist would have known that. But the man had been bathed in misery and despair; he may have intended killing any one of the three of them—or more than one. Wife, investigator, himself, which? Still, there always remained the possibility he hadn’t intended to shoot anyone, except in self-defence. He may have sought the gun for protection—against something unknown. Was there still a third party forming a triangle to the Hodgkins marriage?

  Carolyn Hodgkins had known what was about to happen and had deserted the husband before she could become entangled in it. And he himself had discovered the approaching death when he shook hands with Hodgkins in the office. A man’s future, like his present, like his past, is written on his mind and waiting to be read or lived. Hodgkins had no future. His wife had discovered that and vanished. She had known for some months that her husband was nearing the end of his life; she had been making preparations to leave him long weeks before she actually did, and those preparations were readily apparent to the man, forcing a crisis upon him. Even he, a stranger, had foreseen the shortness of Hodgkins’s future, the near-by blank ending of the conscious mind during that brief handclasp as the scientist left the office.