of something he had in his hand.”
“Whatever the charge is, we want him caught,” Shirley said.
“Right. Ed—are you still driving that cab part time?”
“What do you mean, part time?” Ed demanded mournfully. “I’m doing eight to ten hours a night!”
“If we furnish descriptions of the thugs, can you put all the cab drivers in the Rochester area on the lookout for them?”
“Sure,” Ed said. “That part is easy. It’s recognizing them from a description that’s difficult.”
“We can but try,” Bob said. “A cousin of mine is a truck driver. He will ask all the truckers in this part of the state to help. Can anyone think of anything else?”
“My uncle is a postal supervisor,” one of the girls said. “He can put the mail persons onto it.”
Connie, a petite, dazzlingly attractive brunette, asked, “What about waiters and waitresses? Thugs have to eat, don’t they.”
“Great idea,” Bob said. “Waiters, Waitresses, bell hops, bar tenders, newspaper boys—we need all of them. We also will need a line to the ham and citizens’ band radio operators. Let’s get working on it. We are calling it Operation J, for Janie. Someone will be at this phone twenty-four hours a day from now on.”
Jeff’s errand was an appointment with a former teacher of his. Professor Marcus Brock, a retired specialist in optics, lived in a magnificently wooded setting east of Rochester in the town of Penfield. His private laboratory, a long, low stone building, was separated from his home by an ornamental garden.
The crushed tube lay on his work bench. The odd object Jeff had thought might or might not be a lens was mounted in a testing clamp.
“The police told me you recommended me,” Brock said with a grin. He was a tall, slender, gray-haired man with a neatly-trimmed beard, and he spoke with a marked English accent. “I suppose you meant it as a compliment, but you are going to be as disappointed as the police were. This thing is impossible. It doesn’t exist. It can’t exist.”
Jeff grinned back at him. “That’s interesting. When I held it in my hand, I could have sworn it was real.”
“I didn’t say it was unreal,” the professor said testily. “I merely said it didn’t exist. Look!”
He aimed a beam of light at the object. “It neither reflects nor refracts light. It
He placed the object in a dark box and closed the lid. The needle on the attached meter swung wildly.
“There is no light source,” he said. “There can be no light source. Hence there can be no light. Nevertheless, this thing emits light. And that’s impossible. I have tested it with infrared, ultraviolet, and gamma rays, and it is opaque to all of them, which also is impossible. Ionization is present—it fogs film—but the pulses are irregular, and
Jeff shook his head.
“That’s a great pity. I was hoping for another piece of this material for analysis. I would love to know what this thing is made of, but there is no way that could be determined without destroying it.”
“Would the results justify destroying it?”
“A chemist would think so. Chemists believe everything can and ought to be analyzed. But what if it is made of devitrified glass? Or what if these peculiar properties are due to trace ingredients in amounts too small to be measured or even identified? I would rather have the lens to experiment with.”
“Is it really a lens?” Jeff asked.
“It is hard to say what the function of an opaque piece of glass might be, but I think it is. In that mounting, what else could it be?”
“That was my thought, but the shape of the thing—”
“Ah—the shape. That is impossible, too. But you have reminded me of something.”
He tilted back in his chair and meditated, his eyes on the ceiling. “The shape,” he said finally. “It has a series of concentric undulations, and someone did come to me with a plan for a lens with some such configuration. That was years ago, and I can’t remember who it was or what he thought the undulations would accomplish. But the shape was something like this. I remember that distinctly.”
“Was it by chance someone named Johnson?”
The professor straightened with a jerk. “Let’s check.”
Filing cabinets stood in the corner of the room. The professor went to one containing five by eight cards and opened a drawer. “If this individual’s ideas struck me as interesting or unusual—and they probably did, since I remember them—I will have notes about him. Unfortunately, there are thirty-five years of records here.”
He thumbed through a section of the cards, thumbed again, and shook his head regretfully. “No,” he said, pushing the drawer shut. “If I kept a card on that person, his name wasn’t Johnson. I’ll run those tests again, and I’ll give the chemists a piece of the broken case to analyse. One never knows, there may be something unusual about the wood. Anyway, I’m grateful for the recommendation. An impossible lens doesn’t happen to an optics expert more than once in a lifetime.”
They walked back to Jeff’s car together. Behind them on the work bench, the lens, the broken case, and an assortment of tools that chanced to be nearby, suddenly disappeared.
19. GEVIS
Roszt and Kaynor fled, leaving the girl lying crumpled in the hedge. Egarn leaped to his feet and gazed after them in horror. Arne, deeply puzzled as to what could have happened, leaned forward and stared. Inskel matter- of-factly started to adjust the len to follow the fleeing men, but Egarn snapped, “Leave it.” For more than an hour they watched the drama unfolding at DuRosche Court—the people gathering in consternation about the girl, ambulance and medics, her body taken away, the shock and grief displayed by those at the DuRosche mansion.
“What were Kaynor and the girl struggling over?” Arne asked finally. “It looked like—”
“It was his weapon,” Inskel said flatly.
“But why would he be carrying it in his hand? Surely there was no danger threatening. It wasn’t to be used unless all else failed.”
“Everything went too easily for them at first,” Egarn said soberly. “Now the police are searching for them, and people are talking about them, and newspapers are printing stories about them, and they were getting jittery. Even so, Kaynor had no reason to carry his weapon in his hand. Something must have frightened him.” He turned to Inskel. “Where did they go?”
Inskel first focused on their motel room, where Val was comfortably stretched out on the bed. Roszt and Kaynor weren’t there. The dog raised his head hopefully whenever he heard footsteps in the hallway.
Inskel searched the entire neighborhood around the DuRosche mansion, but there was no sign of them.
“They will have to come back eventually, if only to feed and exercise the dog,” Egarn said. “I will leave a message for them. They must get out of Rochester. This isn’t like a breaking and entering where nothing is stolen. This is a disaster. They must leave at once and go back to Buffalo.”
Egarn wrote a stern order. Gevis, who delighted in his expertise with the small machine, deftly landed it on the motel room’s table. Then they checked the various hiding places Roszt and Kaynor had established for emergencies. There was no sign of them anywhere. The despairing Egarn finally slept; Inskel continued the futile search. At intervals they focused on the motel room again. It was mid-morning the next dae when they suddenly found the room empty. Roszt and Kaynor had returned for the dog. They also had taken the message but without
