Mr. Partridge hastily recalculated. As a result the next half hour was as packed with action as the final moments of his great plan. He learned about accounts, he ascertained the bookmaker’s address, he hurried to his bank and drew out an impressive five hundred dollars which he could ill spare, and he opened his account and placed a two-hundred-dollar bet which excited nothing but a badly concealed derision.
Then he took a long walk and mused over the problem. He recalled happening on a story once in some magazine which proved that you could not use knowledge from the future of the outcome of races to make your fortune, because by interfering with your bet you would change the odds and alter the future. But he was not plucking from the future; he was going back into the past. The odds he had heard were already affected by what he had done. From his subjective point of view, he learned the result of his actions before he performed them. But in the objective physical temporospatial world, he performed those actions quite normally and correctly before their results.
Mr. Partridge stopped dead on the sidewalk and a strolling couple ran headlong into him. He scarcely noticed the collision. He had had a dreadful thought. The sole acknowledged motive for his murder of Cousin Stanley had been to secure money for his researches. Now he learned that his machine, even in its present imperfect form, could provide him with untold money.
He had never needed to murder at all.
“My dearest Maureen,” Fergus announced at the breakfast table, “I have discovered the world’s first successful time machine.”
His sister showed no signs of being impressed. “Have some more tomato juice,” she suggested. “Want some tabasco in it? I didn’t know that the delusions could survive into the hangover.”
“But, Macushla,” Fergus protested, “you’ve just listened to an announcement that no woman on earth has ever heard before.”
“Fergus O’Breen, Mad Scientist.” Maureen shook her head. “It isn’t a role I’d cast you for. Sorry.”
“If you’d listen before you crack wise, I said ‘discovered.’ Not ‘invented.’ It’s the damnedest thing that’s ever happened to me in business. It hit me in a flash while I was talking to Andy. It’s the perfect and only possible solution to a case. And who will ever believe me? Do you wonder that I went out and saturated myself last night?” Maureen frowned. “You mean this?”
“It’s the McCoy. Listen.” And he briefly outlined the case. “Now what sticks out like a sore thumb is this: Harrison Partridge establishing an alibi. The radio time signal, the talk with the butler— I’ll even lay odds that the murderer himself gave those screams so there’d be no question as to time of death. Then you rub up against the fact that the alibi, like the horrendous dream of the young girl from Peru, is perfectly true.
“But what does an alibi mean? It’s my own nomination for the most misused word in the language. It’s come to mean a disproof, an excuse. But strictly it means nothing but elsewhere. You know the classic gag: ‘I wasn’t there, this isn’t the woman, and, anyway, she gave in.’ Well, of those three redundant excuses, only the first is an alibi, an elsewhere statement. Now Partridge’s claim of being elsewhere is true enough. And even if we could remove him from elsewhere and put him literally on the spot, he could say: ‘I couldn’t have left the room after the murder; the doors were all locked on the inside.’ Sure he couldn’t—not at that time. And his excuse is not an elsewhere, but an elsewhen.”
Maureen refilled his coffee cup and her own. “Hush up a minute and let me think it over.” At last she nodded slowly. “And he’s an eccentric inventor and when the butler saw him he was carrying one of his gadgets.”
“Which he still had when Simon Ash saw him vanish. He committed the murder, locked the doors, went back in time, walked out through them in their unlocked past, and went off to hear the five-o’clock radio bong at Faith Preston’s.”
“But you can’t try to sell the police on that. Not even Andy.”
“I know. Damn it, I know.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to see Mr. Harrison Partridge. And I’m going to ask for an encore.”
“Quite an establishment you’ve got here,” Fergus observed to the plump bald little inventor.
Mr. Partridge smiled courteously. “I amuse myself with my small experiments,” he admitted.
“I’m afraid I’m not much aware of the wonders of modern science. I’m looking forward to the more spectacular marvels, spaceships for instance, or time machines. But that wasn’t what I came to talk about. Miss Preston tells me you’re a friend of hers. I’m sure you’re in sympathy with this attempt of hers to free young Ash.”
“Oh, naturally. Most naturally. Anything that I can do to be of assistance—”
“It’s just the most routine sort of question, but I’m groping for a lead. Now, aside from Ash and the butler, you seem to have been the last person to see Harrison alive. Could you tell me anything about him? How was he?”
“Perfectly normal, so far as I could observe. We talked about a new item which I had unearthed for his bibliography, and he expressed some small dissatisfaction with Ash’s cataloging of late. I believe they had had words on the matter earlier.”
“Bracket says you had one of your inventions with you?”
“Yes, a new, I thought, and highly improved frame for photostating rare books. My cousin, however, pointed out that the same improvements had recently been made by an Austrian emigre manufacturer. I abandoned the idea and reluctantly took apart my model.”
“A shame. But that’s part of the inventor’s life, isn’t it?”
“All too true. Was there anything else you wished to ask me?”
“No. Nothing really.” There was an awkward pause. The smell of whisky was in the air, but Mr. Partridge proffered no hospitality. “Funny the results a murder will
