The Chronocide Mission

by Lloyd Biggle, Jr.

  “Thank God!” Egarn exclaimed.

  “If you are still worrying about having to murder him, you can stop. It is Hy, the handyman here, and he is already dead. Now I’ll see what more I can find out.”

  He was about to hang up when Arne gripped his arm again. “Egarn!”

  “I think Arne wants to talk with you,” Brock said. He handed him the telephone. Then he had to show him how to hold it.

  * * *

  Egarn was feeling comfortable and at peace with the world except for the fact that he still felt terribly tired. He was in a spacious motel room, and his guardians treated him royally. The only drawback was the uneasiness he felt in being surrounded by alert men with assault rifles. It reminded him that neither he nor Arne could be safe anywhere.

  The news that a link had finally been discovered between the DuRosche house and a Johnson was an enormous relief to him, but the added realization that the Johnson was already dead, that he had been killed by Roszt and Kaynor, had set his mind reeling. Had the scouts from Slorn fulfilled their quest before they died? What, if anything, was supposed to happen when they did? He needed to think.

  “What is it?” he asked Arne.

  “There is a man here—a rich man who owns this house—”

  “Calvin DuRosche. He is an invalid, isn’t he? He had a stroke, and he has been sick for years. Is that the one you mean?”

  “He isn’t sick at all,” Arne said flatly. “He is a no-namer.”

  23 PROFESSOR MARCUS BROCK (2)

  Jeff and Alida, Brock, and the Kernleys were being served coffee and hot pecan rolls in the dining room by Mrs. Jefferson. The rolls, fresh from the oven, were delicious. It seemed sad indeed that DuRosche, who was paying for all of this, was apparently unable to taste food.

  Arne couldn’t taste food either—or wouldn’t. He refused with a shake of his head, and now he was walking in widening circles about the house and grounds.

  “He looks,” said Alida, who was watching him through the window, “like a general planning a battle. You said he was a general, didn’t you?”

  “Yes—in addition to those other things,” Brock said. Egarn had given him permission to tell his story to a few others whose discretion could be trusted and whose help was needed.

  “He seems young for it,” Alida said, “but he also seems so overwhelmingly serious. Maybe that is the explanation. Do we really have to believe this?”

  “Egarn insisted there was a Johnson connected with this house when everyone said there wasn’t, and he was right. DuRosche’s condition has baffled specialists from around the world, and Egarn immediately knew all about it. Everything that has happened has fit perfectly with what he has told me. Yes, I think we have to believe this. The weapon Arne has in his pocket would stand the Pentagon on its head—if the Pentagon knew about it. Which it must not do. Do you understand? None of us must ever breathe a word of this. Even though we don’t understand how these things are possible—I’m a specialist and a presumed expert, and I can’t begin to understand—a careless remark might give a clue to someone who would find a way to make use of it, and the whole terrible scenario of repeated destructions of Earth and humanity would follow.”

  Jeff said slowly, “And the weapon that will cause the destruction was—or will be—invented right here in Rochester?”

  “Was invented, I think, and here in this house. DuRosche had some connection with it—he received brain damage from that strange lens. We must find out what the connection was. This house has to have the most thorough search possible without tearing it down. We not only will have to look around and under and in everything, but we also will have to look for all those things mystery writers are so fond of—secret panels, and hinged openings in the floor, and false partitions, and whatever. That is where I thought you two could help. Those students who organized themselves to find Janie’s killers—would any of them be available for this?”

  “If I tell them it is important, they will all be available,” Alida said. “Anyone who doesn’t have a class, that is. And some who do.”

  “It is a big house, but we don’t want so many they would get in each other’s way. Perhaps fifteen or twenty?”

  “I’ll telephone,” Alida said.

  “I have another call to make. Let me go first.”

  Brock telephoned his wife and sent her out to his laboratory to search the files. When she returned, she told him, “C. DuRosche is the name on the card. Dated twenty-five years ago. Shall I read your summary?”

  “Please do.”

  “’Lens with undulating surfaces. Thinks it is the philosopher’s stone of lenses with all kinds of unlikely potentialities.’ Then you wrote the word ‘crackpot’ with a question mark.”

  “’Unlikely potentialities’ was an understatement, and I was the ‘crackpot.’ Anything happening there?”

  “Not a thing,” his wife said cheerfully. “We are watching an old movie.”

  “One that would interest me?”

  “No. You don’t like Charles Boyer.”

  “He gives me an inferiority complex. I want you to do something right away. Immediately. This instant. Then come back and tell me you have done it. Take that card to the fireplace and burn it. Pulverize the ashes. Make sure nothing is left. And forget what you just read.”

  “If you say so.”

  He waited. Finally she returned. “Done. Burned, ashes pulverized. I don’t remember anything about it. I wouldn’t have anyway. Do you want me to sprinkle the ashes on the geraniums?”

  “It wouldn’t hurt a bit. Enjoy Charles Boyer.”

  Five carloads of students arrived. Arne watched with a disapproving frown as they piled out, laughing and joking, and hurried into the house, but they went to work seriously enough. An hour later, Alida, who was helping Charlie and Shirley in the attic, turned and saw Detective Sergeant Fred Ulling standing on the stairs and eying them perplexedly.

  “Hello, Sergeant,” she said. “Couldn’t you find anyone downstairs?”

  “Someone told me Professor Brock was up here. What is going on?”

  “The Kearneys gave us permission to search the house provided we leave things more or less the way we found them. We are doing our best.”

  “You certainly have plenty of help. What do you expect to find that the police didn’t?”

  “It’s complicated,” Alida said. “I’ll let Professor Brock explain it. Did you know Hy was the mysterious Johnson.”

  “That’s what the professor said on the telephone. He didn’t explain why it mattered. He also didn’t say he was bringing in a wrecking crew to tear the house apart.”

  “Come, now. We haven’t wrecked a thing—yet. I’ll see if I can find him for you.” She said to Shirley and Charlie, “If you two need a hand with anything, shout.”

  She and the detective vanished down the stairway. Charlie applied weight and muscle and shoved a massive old bureau aside. An enormous pile of magazines had been stacked behind it.

  He dusted his hands with satisfaction. “That just about does it up here. There is nowhere else to look unless you want the floorboards ripped up.”

  “We are just getting started,” Shirley told him. “Now we’ve got to go through every one of those magazines, page by page— the secret plans, or the stolen treaty, or the missing will, or the formula for poison gas, or whatever it is could be hidden in one of them. After that, we’ve got to move everything back where it was.”

  “You’re kidding! What does it matter which side of the attic this junk is on?”

  “You are here to supply the muscle. Leave the philosophy to me. Alida said we have to put things back back where we found them.”

  “You mean—all the stuff we just moved from this end to that end we have to move back to this end?”

  “Right. But first we tackle these magazines.”

  Charlie wearily slumped to the floor and picked up a magazine.

  In a room below, Alida and the detective found Brock and Jeff Mardel
l. Brockwas watching while Jeff wielded a yardstick from the top of a ladder.

  “Just what is it you expect to find?” the detective wanted to know.

  “If we knew, it might be a lot easier,” Brock said. “I finally got around to taking a look at DuRosche’s background. Elderly eccentric millionaire. Tinkered with things. Called himself an inventor. Years and years ago, when Mrs. Kernley was his cook, he made a few telescopes. Ground the lenses himself.”

  “You figure that’s important?”

  “Very. In the years before his illness, he suddenly got secretive about what he was doing. People were calling him a crackpot and making fun of him, and he resented that. He also resented the fact that experts he consulted—including myself—were too thick-headed to recognize his ability. So no one knows what he was doing at the time his illness struck. He had an elaborate workshop in the basement, but after he became disabled, a nephew—who has since died—cleaned the place out and took everything. Curse him.”

  “Then you think this funny business concerns something he was working on when he got sick? Someone got wind of it and is trying to steal it?”

  “It seems so.”

  “If the nephew cleaned everything out, why the search for hiding places?”

  Jeff spoke from the top of the ladder. “I’ve been wondering about that myself. Why would he bother to hid things in a false ceiling, or under the floor, or behind fake partitions? If it was something he was using regularly, he would want it where he could get at it. If he wanted a really secure hiding place, he could have rented a safe-deposit box.”

  “With eccentric millionaires, you never know,” Brock said. “I talked to his attorney. He guarantees there was nothing in his safe except deeds, stock certificates, bonds, financial records, things of that kind. He doesn’t think DuRosche had a safe-deposit box. No rental notice has ever arrived for one. Also, no important papers are missing. So we have to search.”

  “And how did Hy—whatever his last name was—get connected with this thing?” the detective demanded.

  “That part is easy,” Brock said. “He found what we are looking for.”

  Ulling shook his head. “You academic types have your own special brand of logic. If Hy found it, then it is no longer hidden. So why are you looking for it?”

  “Because it isn’t around anywhere. Therefore Hy hid it again—or left it hidden.”

  “If that kind of mental loop-the-loop appeals to you, I suppose you might as well look. If you have nothing better to do, that is. Unfortunately, I do, but Colonel Lobert telephoned someone at headquarters, and that someone spoke to someone else, who spoke to my boss, and I’m assigned to keep an eye on you. As long as I’m here, I might as well look, too. The sooner we finish looking, the sooner all of us can do something else.”

  From the first floor came an enormous clatter. Alida and the detective ran. When they reached the bottom of the stairs, the plump Mrs. Jefferson was just ahead of them, moving with surprising speed. In the kitchen, one of the students sat dejectedly on the floor surrounded by pans of every description.

  Mrs. Jefferson shook her finger at him and said angrily, “There are no hiding places in my kitchen!”

  By evening, the students were convinced there were no hiding places anywhere. They had examined the floor boards throughout the house except where carpets had been in place for years. They had eliminated any possibility of false ceilings, false partitions, secret rooms, hidden staircases, or even wall cavities. One carload at a time they were giving up and leaving.

  Alida, descending the cellar stairs, found Jeff standing on a chair and scrutinizing with intense interest a bulge in a furnace pipe. “Have we sunken to that?” she asked.

  “I’m afraid it’s the only thing left,” Jeff said, “except for a suspicion I’ve been nourishing about that old oil tank at the other end of the cellar. It easily could contain blueprints, or drawings, or notes of experiments, or even some of those strange lenses. Unfortunately, it is at least a third full of oil. I’m wondering if I should try to drain it.”

  “Better not,” Brock said from the other side of the furnace. “I already asked about it. The oil furnace was installed after DuRosche had his stroke. When they changed to natural gas, they kept the tank just in case they decided to switch back.”

  “Scratch one oil tank. How are things going upstairs?”

  “The same as down here,” Alida said. “Our detective decided we weren’t worth keeping an eye on. His superiors agreed, so he left. Most of the students had to leave for classes. The ones still here are persisting but with noticeably less enthusiasm. They want to know if they should start over again. I’m afraid it’s a washout.”

  “Too bad,” Jeff said. “It seemed like such a good idea—especially with Hy being the mysterious Johnson.”

  “The only thing the search established beyond a doubt is that Mrs. Kernley is an excellent housekeeper,” Alida said. “By the way, she insists that anything connected with Hy will be hidden down here. He sometimes ranged through the rest of the house doing chores, but this is where he spent his leisure— which seems to have taken up quite a lot of his time. No one knows what he did with it except that sometimes he tinkered. Mrs. Kernley thinks he slept a lot.”

  “She’s wrong,” Jeff said. “About there being anything hidden down here, I mean. We have searched everything but the cellar walls. I thought of tapping on them, but those stones wouldn’t sound hollow even if they were. Was Hy a tinkerer?”

  “He fixed things, if that’s what you mean. When he first came here, years ago, he would roam the alleys and pick up junk and repair it.”

  “And sell it?”

  “He wasn’t much concerned with money. He would give it away if someone wanted it.

  “Then where is it? That sort of person usually converts his environment into a junk yard.”

  “Mrs. Kernley wouldn’t have tolerated that.”

  Jeff picked up a hammer and tapped on the nearest wall. “See? Even if it were hollow, it wouldn’t sound any different. I suppose I could look for loose stones.”

  He went on tapping and prying at the stones. Alida and Brock stood watching him. He worked as far as the old wardrobe, and then he resumed on the other side.

  “You aren’t being consistent,” Alida said. “That wardrobe is the only thing down here that could be hiding something. It’s right up against the wall.”

  Jeff grabbed the wardrobe, tried to shove it, tried to lift a corner. “It seems to be cemented down,” he said.

  “Let’s try moving it the other way,” Brock said. “I’ll push and you pull.”

  He put his shoulder to the other side of the wardrobe. Jeff pulled. It swung aside with ridiculous ease, dumping Jeff to the floor. It was hinged, and it served as a door to an opening in the basement wall. Beyond it, in the shadows, was a small room. At the back stood a workbench and equipment.

  There were papers on the bench; at one side there was a bracket with an odd-looking circular object. There were similar objects scattered on the bench.

  “Finally, the Honsun Len!” Brock breathed.

  The wardrobe had a spring that closed it automatically. Jeff set a chair against it to hold it open. Brock stepped into the hidden room.

  “It’s the old well for an outside stairway,” he announced. “DuRosche must have poured a cement roof and sodded over it so he could have a secret workshop. These are technical drawings.”

  He pulled the chain on a dangling light bulb and bent over the drawings. “This is it,” he said. There was a queer flutter of excitement in his voice. “We have got it. The important thing now is not to let anyone touch anything until we are very sure what we are going to do with it.”

  He continued to scrutinize the drawings. “DuRosche’s name has been trimmed from one of these but not from the others. And here is a sheet of paper where someone has practiced lettering the name ‘H. H. Johnson’ in the same style as the lettering on the drawings. Meaning ‘Hyacinth Hyatt John
son,’ I suppose. I do believe Hy was about to steal DuRosche’s invention. And look—here are Hy’s personal papers, including a diploma from the Mellia Technical Institute certifying that one H. H. Johnson accomplished this and that. I’ve never heard of it. Has anyone seen Arne?”

  “He is still wandering around outside,” Jeff said. “I think he is worrying about what might happen here after dark.”

  Professor Brock nodded. “The house is highly vulnerable, you know. As for this workshop, we simply must not let anyone else near it. Looking into this odd lens can be dangerous. That’s what DuRosche did. The lens releases bursts of energy, probably at random moments, and he had the bad luck to catch the full blast of one. Probably he was at work down here. He staggered backward and collapsed on the basement floor. The wardrobe swung shut, and no one except him knew the secret workroom existed. And the doctors, who had never seen such an affliction, thought he’d had a stroke. Maybe he did, in a way. He might have suffered broken blood vessels.

  “And then, long afterward, Hy discovered the workroom. He was an educated man ruined by drink. He was getting ready to claim he had invented the lens himself and patent it. Johnson lens—Honsun Len. Of course.”

  “Why don’t we just release the wardrobe and put a guard on it?” Jeff suggested.

  “There is no way we can guard it,” Brock said. He was thinking about the lens that had been snatched from his own laboratory. Perhaps they were watching—and getting ready to suck up the drawings and lenses at any moment.

  He dashed into the next room and came back with a small bookcase. He moved the lenses to the center of the bench and placed the bookcase on top of them and the drawings, open-side down.

  “I need something heavy,” he said.

  “I saw a few bags of ready-mix cement beside the rear entrance.”

  “The very thing.”

  They brought them, one at a time, and stacked them atop the bookcase. From Egarn’s description, Brock didn’t think the small machine had sufficient power to deal with the weight. Even the large machine, the one that accidentally snatched Egarn out of the past and then sent him back again, would have difficulty handling that much mass, and Egarn had said it wasn’t all that accurate anyway. The setup was as safe as he could make it.