“I’ve got your brain wavelength,” Slim was saying. I started mopping up with my handkerchief while I hung the coat up to dry. “Now, all I have to do is—come here, Doc!”
I put the sandwiches on the bench in front of him, but for once Slim didn’t even reach. He looked at me and his deep-set eyes were burning. “We are going to be the greatest private investigators in history,” he said. “In fact, we’ll make history. Doc, we’ll be the most important men in America.”
I should have been more enthusiastic, but things were going so badly—“I don’t care,” I told him, “about being a great man, if I can just quit ducking the landlord. I want to walk in under his nose and not be scared of him. If you want to fill my cup to overflowing, just let me use that thing long enough to get something on him.”
Slim was already turning dials. Tubes were lighting up. The set was humming. Pretty soon he pointed to a screen, and I damn near lost my breath. There on a screen about twelve by eighteen inches, big enough so there wasn’t any mistake, I saw myself on the night of July Fourth, just as I bought one ticket for the roller coaster.
I guess my eyes stuck out a foot, for Slim was looking at me with that kind of sad smile. “Roller coasters,” he said gently. “Got enough, Doc?”
I gulped. “Plenty. Cut it off, please.” In the screen I saw the blonde just behind me, and I didn’t want Slim to see her put her arms around me when the roller coaster went over the dip.
Slim smiled and snapped a bunch of switches. The lights in the tubes went out. “Think what this will mean in criminal prosecutions, to be able to follow a man in the past. Present-day testimony will be archaic. The courts won’t have to take anybody’s word for anything; they can follow a man and watch him in the past.”
“Judge Monday wouldn’t admit that kind of evidence,” I pointed out.
“Naturally not. It will take twenty-five years to get this kind of evidence admitted in court. In the meantime, we’ll have to go easy. But we can make millions, just by bluffing. When we know that a man was playing poker in Jones’s basement until six o’clock Sunday morning, then we can bluff and put it over. Just so we don’t tangle with a real tough guy the first time. For instance—sh! Somebody’s at the door.”
Slim ran to the door while I ran for my pants. I ducked back into the other room and got them on. I heard the voice. It was a man’s voice, and I had heard it before—just recently. I peeked out. Yes, it was Tom Ellingbery. I stayed quiet.
“A potbellied little guy just served divorce papers on me,” he said harshly. “I got off the train and came here. A friend of mine sent me; I want your services.”
“Yes,” said Slim.
“Here’s a hundred-dollar bill,” Tom Ellingbery said. “Start shadowing my wife; get something on her. I’ll give you five thousand to get something—ten if it’s necessary,” he said with a slight leer.
Slim gravely picked up the C note. “We don’t do business that way,” he said; “but if your wife has been misbehaving we’ll find it out.”
Ellingbery was a big man with a sharp go-getter look about him. He stared hard at Slim and Slim stared back. Ellingbery’s expression didn’t show anything; then he left.
Slim locked the door after Ellingbery, and I took off my pants and set up the ironing-board on the desk. Slim went back to adjust the dials on his machine.
“This gadget is a sort of super-sensitive radar,” he said as it warmed up. “I can tune it to your brainwaves and pick you up anywhere within forty miles or three months.”
A purple indicator began to wink. “It proves I’ve got brains, anyway,” I pointed out.
“Yes, your waves come in at a frequency of approximately 1,832,956,000. That’s as close as I can tune it so far, but that’s plenty close enough. There are other characteristics, such as power and damping and height of crest and so on, that make it selective enough to pick out any one person in the United States if it could reach that far.”
“And then you can see everything I do?”
“No, I can see only what you see with your own eyes.”
Then I must have been staring at the blonde. I held my breath when I asked, “Can you tell what I’m thinking?”
“No.”
I breathed again.
“I can translate what you say into language, though. Something happens when I throw two hundred and twenty volts into this bank of tubes. As near as I can figure, it creates a ‘time-warp’—which doesn’t mean much of anything objectively. I don’t know how it works; I couldn’t even duplicate it. I suppose some high-powered electronics engineer could figure it out, but I don’t want anybody but you and me even to know about it. What I’m interested in is what we can do with it.”
“What I’m interested in,” I said, “is how much money we can make with it.”
Slim looked at me with his great burning eyes while the steam rose from under the iron on my pants.
“You’re about to find out.” The ground-glass screen slowly lighted. A new bank of tubes began to sparkle and then settled down into a greenish glow. Slim turned dials, and there was the figure of a woman on the screen.
“That,” said Slim, “is Mrs. Tom Ellingbery.”
Well, of course I couldn’t see her face. She was playing bridge, apparently. Her hands looked nice. The woman at her left said, “I hear you’ve filed suit against your husband.”
Mrs. Ellingbery reached for a king, but her fingers were nervous. She played a six instead and lost the trick. “Yes,” she said quietly, “I have.” Her voice was sad.
I waited a minute. Then, “How did you know how to tune in on
