The Time Masters

by Wilson Tucker

  “I didn’t put any more on,” she told him desperately. “We weren’t going anywhere. He was driving me home and I was going to bed. I didn’t bother to make up.”

  “I apologise for that,” he said suddenly, softly. “I can imagine how you felt in jail. If the dumb bastards had bothered to compare your lipstick to that smeared on the body, they’d have seen the difference. I apologise, Hoffman. And they’ll sweat for it.”

  She dropped her head to the desk. “Oh, don’t bother.” Cummings perched on the edge of the desk and draped an arm across her shoulder. “Think a bit, now. While the two of you were sitting there talking—Did you hear anything? A noise?”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “Did he?”

  “He might have. He seemed to be listening and looking at the window. I didn’t pay any attention to it at the time. But he might have heard something.”

  “He didn’t investigate it?”

  “No. We didn’t sit there much longer. Just a few minutes more. And then I got ready to leave.”

  “At any time during the evening did he mention going away? Leaving town?”

  “No, it never; came up.”

  “Did you make plans to meet again?”

  Her head moved in a subdued nod. “I was to see him again today. No definite plan, or place. But I told him I’d see him.”

  “He agreed?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you think he’ll still keep that date?”

  “I don’t know. I haven’t had time to think about it. He said—oh!” She jerked upright, startled. “You’ll arrest him! If he comes to see me, you’ll arrest him.”

  “Of course. I can’t think of better bait.”

  “But that isn’t fair!”

  Cummings got up from the desk, stood off to look at her, “Which side are you on?”

  She glared at him for a bewildered moment and suddenly burst into tears.

  “Stop that,” he commanded. “I can’t stand that.”

  She only dropped her head to the desk and continued crying. Cummings hovered over her for an indecisive moment, unable to do anything. Fretfully then, he paced a circle about the room and avoided looking at her. When he could no longer endure the sound of it he stalked into the outer office, pulling shut behind him the connecting door. Out there, the crying was no more than a low muffled noise. He sat down heavily behind the girl’s desk and put his feet up on the edge, to run a nervous hand through his thinning hair. Placing the tips of his index fingers together above the ridge of his nose, Cummings stared past them and contemplated the doorknob.

  What the hell—Dikty dead!

  It wasn’t Nash, damn the man. It wasn’t Nash, despite the many minutes he had been absent from the room where Hoffman waited. It wasn’t Nash, in spite of the fact that the murder occurred on his property while he was only a few feet away. No—it wasn’t Nash. It was a woman. A woman who had first kissed—for some fantastic reason!—and then strangled Dikty to death. Strangled him while he lay in wait outside Nash’s house. A woman. What woman? There was only one woman involved in this grizzly mess. Hodgkins’s widow. A woman who had undoubtedly made herself a widow. First Hodgkins, and then Dikty. But what the hell for? What could she possibly gain? Had it been Hodgkins alone, in the absence of other factors, it might have been an insurance murder. But now Dikty too. What in the devil’s name did Hodgkins and Dikty have in common? That was simple—very simple. The one was an atomic physicist, the other, a watchdog over the same. And a woman without a past had murdered both of them. Why?

  And there was Nash, somehow akin to the woman without a past, without records of any kind.

  But the one seemed to be for, and the other against. What kind of sense did that make when they were so obviously alike? Why should one be on this side while the other took the opposite? Both of them physically alike, both of them without duly recorded and stamped beginnings, and (most likely) both of them in the country illegally.

  He couldn’t just appear in Florida in a given year without some kind of background—yet he did. And she near New York.

  Cummings felt a vague, disturbed notion that he was caught up in something not of his own doing, caught in something he couldn’t comprehend or understand.

  He abruptly left Hoffman’s desk and went to the door, opening it slightly to look in on her. The tears had Ceased.

  “Hoffman . . .?”

  She raised her head. “Yes?”

  “Think hard, now. Did you see any of the signs of a woman out there at the house? Anything at all?”

  The girl turned and stared. “Why, no!”

  “Nothing at all? The bedroom—bathroom? Something that I would have overlooked but you’d have caught?”

  Wide-eyed she returned his gaze and shook her head. “Not a thing. I would have noticed.”

  Cummings sighed with defeat. “All right. It was just an idea. I sort of hoped—”

  “I wouldn’t have stayed a minute if I had seen something there.”

  “Okay, okay, forget it.” He studied her worn face. “You’d better go home and get some sleep; you’re not worth a plugged penny to me the way you are now.”

  “I’m beat,” she confessed. “Really beat. That was horrible!”

  “I can believe it.” His gaze lingered on her face and a trace of sympathy crept into his voice. “Get a cab and go on home. Shoo.” She came around the desk to lay a hesitant hand on his arm. “Mr. Cummings, I’m sorry I failed you. I’ve let you down terribly. I had built such dreams . . . When you told me I could work on the case with you, told me to call Mr. Dikty my cousin if trouble should come—well—I’m afraid I built such foolish dreams. I thought I would set the world on fire; I saw myself in all manner of pseudo-heroic guises. I know better now.”

  Cumming lifted her drooping chin and smiled at her dulled eyes, haggard face. “A night in jail can kill the dreams in anyone. It’s rough. Let the words wait until you’ve slept, slept around the clock. We can discuss these things tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow,” she repeated wanly. “He said that.”

  “He said what?”

  “That I could cook dinner for him again tomorrow. He didn’t mean today, but tomorrow. Any tomorrow. He said I would have a thousand of them.”

  “What did he mean by that?”

  “I don’t know, really. He just said it.”

  XIII.

  Nash perched on the hillside, surveying the lights of the sleeping city spread out beneath him. By turning his head slightly he could see the dark outline of the road snaking out from the city, could see the smaller cluster of madly bobbing lights that were the police about his house. The police were down there now, with the strangled body of Dikty, with the near-hysterical girl. But back in the other direction the street lights of the city claimed his attention. He crouched in the underbrush on the side of the hill, studying the city and its lights.

  Carolyn was in there—somewhere.

  She was secreted there, safely hidden away from the prying eyes of the police, from Cummings, from himself. And that rankled. Secreted from him, the only one of all the billions of people in the world who actually knew her, hail known her a long, long time. She had been hidden away—somewhere—since that day many weeks ago when she first deserted and then murdered her husband—the last in line of many such husbands. Hidden so well that none had ever found her. The police, then Cummings and Dikty, then he himself had followed every suggestive trail, had searched out the hotels, the rental units, the red estate agencies, the very utility offices that must supply her with those things she wanted and needed: water, electricity, gas. But she had not been found.

  There was no evidence that she had slipped out of town and, until tonight, none that she had stayed. No house, apartment or room could be located that might have been rented her, no automobile had been sold her, the family bank account had remained untouched. Knowing Carolyn, he knew those last items meant nothing in themselves—the woman who now called herself Carolyn Ho
dgkins had had ample time to accumulate and hide material wealth in any part of the world. Carolyn Hodgkins could have existed without beauty parlours these past few weeks, without entertainment, without small luxuries, without clothes, without this or that to which she had become accustomed in her lifetime. But she could not exist without food and water and it was highly unlikely that she had existed without electricity and possibly gas. Still, there appeared no record or evidence that those things had been furnished her. Any reasonable man examining the known facts would finally conclude the woman was no longer on the scene.

  But she still was, as the second death proved.

  She had killed again with a swift and sure purpose—not an idle killing because the man happened to be standing there watching the house. She had kissed him to suck his mind of information, and then she had killed him. Carolyn had remained on the scene all these past weeks while the search continued. It was she who had been following him as he followed the plodding Dikty, she whose eyes had bored into the back of his skull with malevolent intensity. She had been following Dikty—and Nash had fallen into line between. Then Dikty must have been close to her, dangerously close.

  Nash hugged the overgrown hillside, squinting into the darkness. Dikty had discovered her hiding place. And paid with his life.

  She who was currently known as Carolyn Hodgkins was imaginative, brilliant in her field—and cruel. Like those few other survivors she had come plummeting down from the wrecked vessel so many centuries ago, down into a tangled jungle of a land peopled with aborigines. That much he knew about Carolyn, although he had not seen her for ten thousand years—not since before the wreck. He remembered the woman as one of the navigation crew; possibly he had encountered her almost daily on shipboard, eaten in the same room or at the same table with no marked attention to her. He knew her well enough, but like himself she had been but one among a crew of nearly three hundred. He knew she was keen on navigation; given a ship and the power, she was quite capable of charting a route to any point in creation. The stars had changed in their courses in ten thousand years, but not enough to prevent Carolyn from finding her way home again. He remembered Carolyn, remembered her from the voyage of ten thousand years ago—and he had since heard more.

  It was difficult not to be talked about.

  Old Raul had first told him something of her. Raul, who had fallen into the fertile, half-barbaric country surrounding the Nile and in pure self-preservation set himself up in the priesthood. Raul had once crossed the Mediterranean in his declining days seeking a substance of truth to the Gilgamesh legends, and had told him a little about a third survivor. A third who lived far to the south, deep in the southern regions of the African continent; for more than a hundred years the continual rumours and stories drifted north on the lips of slaves, in the campfire tales of traders and thieves roaming the land. A woman, a beautiful white woman in the jungle fastness, a fiery, golden goddess who had fallen from the slues and had been enthroned by the aborigine warriors. She was brilliant, she was imaginative, she was cruel. She gave lands and crops and wealth and wives to those who served her; gave sudden death to those who did not. She introduced the rites and rituals of human sacrifice, taught the art of bow-making, of honing better spears and blades, taught a rudimentary knowledge of the heavens which rapidly degenerated into a mystical religion. The white goddess seemed to live forever.

  They could not guess which of the ship’s crew she might be, old Raul and he, but by analyzing her conduct they narrowed the probable suspects to a handful. And later, much, much later when the means of transportation were available, he had gone searching for her only to find the goddess and the warrior race so much vanished dust.

  She came to his attention again almost in his own land, his own yard, when the ritualistic dances of bulls and youths appeared in the Aegean islands. He knew the original source of those rites, knew the faraway world among the stars where such dances were a common thing. It was an easy realisation to know that only a survivor from the ship could have introduced an otherworldly custom into the Aegean lands. But he could not find her. He discovered long afterward that she was the lion-goddess personified on Cretan coins and rings, but the discovery came too late to assist him in his search.

  And oddly enough, a brazen caricature of her existed on one of those illustrations brought back from Egypt by Napoleon’s free-wheeling artist. A caricature copied from some other unknown source, but: roughly recognizable. In time, he knew the identity of the white African goddess, the introducer of human sacrifice and cattle rites,, but not once in all the ten thousand years had he managed to meet up with her. He was very close to her at Peenemunde, but once again she had slipped away. He was closer now, closer than he had been at: any time since the ship met its death in space. He knew she was in the United States when he landed on the shore, knew what her destination would be once the destination itself had come into existence.

  And so he had drifted into Oak Ridge and settled down to await her appearance. And then one day a bewildered physicist had come to him for consultation. And Carolyn was pegged.

  She was not content to stay here, to spend her remaining though shortened years on a paradise planet. She yearned mightily to return home, to her native world where she might yet outwit death in a reversion to the natural waters of her kind. Carolyn was younger than he, Nash reflected. Younger, less mature, more impulsive and certainly more hopeful. As well as more deadly. She had quickly enough shed the civilized conduct of her own world when adapting herself to this new one. Old Raul, Raul of the fabulous age and equally fabulous memory had said that no one of their race deliberately brought death to another. No one until Carolyn found herself a despotic goddess, that was. Their struggling race was far too dependent upon life.

  But Carolyn murdered her latest husband—and was pegged. And then she killed the one man who had found out her hiding place. Why bad she first kissed him? To discover if he held any knowledge not yet known to her, to discover if he knew the date and the place that one important ship would be hurled into the sky. Dikty might have known that, considering his occupation, his organization. Or he might have known nothing at all about it. Still, she could not afford to pass up the opportunity; and so she had kissed and killed.

  Dikty, of all men, had found her hiding place.

  You’re down there, Carolyn, down there somewhere in the maze of lighted streets or surrounding patches of darkness. But where, damn you, where?

  Nash turned his head again, turned back to the black ribbon of road that wound out of the city and past his house. The tiny lights were still there, running crazily back and forth, in and out of the house and across the yard, running from the massed automobiles to the glob of light which illuminated the front steps and the strangled body.

  Hoffman was due for some rough handling. He hoped she had the quick wit to telephone Cummings; he hadn’t thought to tell her that before he left, hadn’t thought to have her call her supervisor before she phoned the police. And he had left in a hurry before anyone could arrive, so there was no returning to give safe advice. She would have to take her chances, and perhaps Cummings could get to her before too long. He felt proud of the girl—quite proud. It was fatuously pleasing to discover some of his own character traits recurring in her, and he wondered briefly how long it might be before she guessed the truth?

  When she had surprised him with that hot, rapturous kiss in his library, it had proved so startling not to perceive the end of her life.

  But Carolyn had foreseen her husband’s end, whether or not at that time she knew she would be responsible for his death. In the years of their marriage and the steady meeting of connubial love she had known everything of her husband; had known his past before they had met, had known his present even though he attempted to leave his work at the laboratory, and had finally known his future—a short, surprising future that ended not too far away. In such close, personal meeting nothing is hidden from the one mind prying into another, nothing can remain
secreted away in the mental nooks of the past, the open surface channels of the present or the unformed and grey vista of the future. The past is there, for searching; the present is there, for reading; and the future is there for possible interpretation. Carolyn had finally looked into her husband’s mind and found that its future path came to an abrupt halt bare weeks away. She must have attempted to search forward in his subconsciousness, to search for what was to come—and discovered only blankness, a blankness that meant the mind would shortly cease to exist. Hodgkins was going to die. Carolyn hastily deserted him.

  But three weeks later she returned to murder him—why? To seal his lips? Knowing him as she did, she realised he might talk about her, about them, but not dangerously or wildly, for Hodgkins would be greatly concerned with his own sanity and would take pains to reveal no damaging facts which might lay himself open to suspicion, to self-injury. So at first she had not worried about the possibility of his talking, arid had left him to wait out the weeks until his death—even perhaps wondering all the while how that death could come about. Hodgkins had then done the one thing which upset her calculations; he had called on Nash. If she had been keeping an eye on her husband at all, she would have known of the visit and guessed at its conclusions. It was then likely that she had returned to their home that evening and perhaps realised for the first time that she was the instrument of death.

  Hodgkins, being Hodgkins, would have blurted out all the details of the interview with the private investigator when his wife confronted him. And quite possibly have remarked the strange similarity between his wife and Nash. If Carolyn had not previously known Nash was in Knoxville, that would have been a startling shock. In an instant, she would have grasped all that his presence meant. Exit, Gregg Hodgkins. Nash would get no more information from him!

  But it was such a useless death.