“Well? What’s the matter? Isn’t that fine?”
“Matter? Look, Maureen Macushla. I killed Partridge. I didn’t mean to, and maybe you could call it justifiable; but I did. I killed him at one o’clock yesterday afternoon. Andy and I saw him at two; he was then eating a ham sandwich and drinking whisky. The stomach analysis proves that he died half an hour after that meal, when I was with Andy starting out on a bender of bewilderment. So you see?”
“You mean he went back afterward to kill his uncle and then you . . . you saw him after you’d killed him only before he went back to be killed? Oh, how awful.”
“Not just that, my sweeting. This is the humor of it: The time alibi, the elsewhen that gave the perfect cover up for Partridge’s murder—it gives exactly the same ideal alibi to his own murderer.”
Maureen started to speak and stopped. “Oh!” she gasped.
“What?”
“The time machine. It must still be there—somewhere—mustn’t it? Shouldn’t you—
Fergus laughed, and not at comedy. “That’s the payoff of perfection on this opus. I gather Partridge and his sister didn’t love each other too dearly. You know what her first reaction was to the news of his death? After one official tear and one official sob, she went and smashed the hell out of his workshop.”
The Pink Caterpillar
“And their medicine men can do time travel, too,” Norm Harker said. “At least, that’s the firm belief everywhere on the island: a tualala can go forward in time and bring you back any single item you specify, for a price. We used to spend the night watches speculating on what would be the one best thing to order.”
Norman hadn’t told us the name of the island. The stripe and a half on his sleeve lent him discretion, and Tokyo hadn’t learned yet what secret installations the Navy had been busy with on that minute portion of the South Pacific. He couldn’t talk about the installations, of course; but the island had provided him with plenty of other matters to keep us entertained, sitting up there in the Top of the Mark.
“What would you order, Tony,” he asked, “with a carte blanche like that on the future?”
“How far future?”
“They say a tualala goes to one hundred years from date: no more, no less.”
“Money wouldn’t work,” I mused. “Jewels maybe. Or a gadget—any gadget— and you could invent it as of now and make a fortune. But then it might depend on principles not yet worked out . . . Or the Gone with the Wind of the twenty-first century—but publish it now and it might lay an egg. Can you imagine today’s best sellers trying to compete with Dickens? No . . . it’s a tricky question. What did you try?”
“We finally settled on Hitler’s tombstone. Think of the admission tickets we could sell to see that!”
“And—?”
“And nothing. We couldn’t pay the tualala!s price. For each article fetched through time he wanted one virgin from the neighboring island. We felt the staff somehow might not understand if we went collecting them. There’s always a catch to magic,” Norman concluded lightly.
Fergus said “Uh-huh” and nodded gravely. He hadn’t been saying much all evening—just sitting there and looking out over the panorama of the bay by night, a glistening joy now that the dimout was over, and listening. I still don’t know the sort of work he’s been doing, but it’s changing him, toning him down.
But even a toned-down Irishman can stand only so much silence, and there was obviously a story on his lips. Norm asked, “You’ve been running into magic too?”
“Not lately.” He held his glass up to the light and watched his drink. “Damned if I know why writers call a highball an amber liquid,” he observed. “Start a cliche and it sticks . . . Like about detectives being hardheaded realists. Didn’t you ever stop to think that there’s hardly another profession outside the clergy that’s so apt to run up against the things beyond realism? Why do you call in a detective? Because something screwy’s going on and you need an explanation. And if there isn’t an explanation . . .
“This was back a ways. Back when I didn’t have anything worse to deal with than murderers and, once, a werewolf. But he was a hell of a swell guy. The murderers I used to think were pretty thorough low-lifes, but now . . . Anyway, this was back then. I was down in Mexico putting the finishing touches on that wacky business of the Aztec Calendar when I heard from Dan Rafetti. I think you know him, Tony; he’s an investigator for Southwest National Life Insurance, and he’s thrown some business my way now and then, like the Solid Key case.
“This one sounded interesting. Nothing spectacular, you understand, and probably no money to speak of. But the kind of crazy unexplained little detail that stirs up the O’Breen curiosity. Very simple: Southwest gets a claim from a beneficiary. One of their customers died down in Mexico and his sister wants the cash. They send to the Mexican authorities for a report on his death and it was heart failure and that’s that. Only the policy is made out to Mr. Frank Miller and the Mexican report refers to him as Dr. F. Miller. They ask the sister and she’s certain he hasn’t any right to such a title. So I happen to be right near Tlichotl, where he died, and would I please kind of nose around and see was there anything phony, like maybe an imposture. Photographs and fingerprints, from a Civil Service application he once made, enclosed.”
“Nice businesslike beginning,” Norman said.
Fergus nodded. “That’s the way it started: all very routine, yours-of-the-27th-ult. Prosaic, like. And Tlichotl was prosaic enough too. Maybe to a tourist it’d be picturesque,
