by Jeff Sutton
He pondered it. Despite the senator's refusal of a guard, two men had been assigned to his protection. That they had failed was regrettable. But following the explosion, one had recalled seeing a stranger loitering near the senator's car on several occasions. He had quickly identified the man from a photograph in the rogues' gallery.
Before this suspect could be apprehended, he had been shot to death and his body dumped in a vacant lot. To keep him from spilling his guts? Undoubtedly. Since then, a,n exhaustive -investigation into the slain man's background had paid off. Along with a series of convictions for petty and not-so-petty offenses, he was discovered to have worked for an obscure" firm which in turn was a branch of an Androki enterprise.
As in the case of the other murders, the senator's death couldn't even remotely be tied to the financier; nothing whatever was provable. Nothing, Dorrance thought, except that all trails led to John Androki. With more than a dozen murders, he was the only common denominator.
Dorrance reflected coldly on it.
Murdering an everyday citizen was one thing; it was murder but it didn't shake the nation, and it fell within the province of the local police. But the murder of a United States senator was quite something else, especially when it did shake the nation. That fell into the jurisdiction of an* extra-legal judgment.
How strong was his case? He didn't know, but he expected to know quite soon. The manager of the obscure firm for which the bomb killer had worked would sing. It might not be the kind of confession which the Supreme Court would hold admissible, but neither would it be the kind of judgment the law would pass. This time he was judge and jury.
He glanced at his watch. The singing should start at any moment.
That was one problem.
The second was Bertram Kane. He read the last paragraph of Conrad's message again.
Kane caught Monday flight to Chicago to address mathematics convention . . . slipped from agent's view following close of session… present whereabouts unknown… Signed C5A
Eleven days, and Kane still missing—Dorrance sighed uneasily. That was a long time for a rank amateur to elude the kind of net that had been thrown out for him. Where was he? Why was he running? Did he fear reprisal for the knowledge he had gotten from Maxon? No, that wasn't it; Bertram Kane wasn't the running kind. Then what was he up to? Whatever it was, it had something to do with John Androki.
Dorrance felt certain of that.
XIV
Crack!
Bertram Kane felt the rifle butt slam against his shoulder as the shot reverberated throughout the farmlands. Ahead he saw the laborer in the car, in the act of reaching toward the mailbox, slump against the open door; it swung outward and his body pitched forward, falling into the low ditch that ran alongside the road.
Dead! He was dead! Kane knew it! He had killed a man in cold blood! His hands shook violently. He had murdered a man, he had murdered a man… He hadn't realized it would be this bad. He stared indecisively toward the old car; its engine, pounding unevenly in the quiet of the late afternoon, in Kane's mind was a cry of protest. He had to make certain his shot had killed. Forcing himself forward, he plunged across the road.
Staring down into the ditch, he shuddered, feeling a violent nausea. His victim had flopped over on his back as if to die with his face to the sun. The front of his throat, torn away where the bullet had emerged, was a gory mess. There was not the slightest doubt that he was dead.
Caught with another wave of nausea, Kane started to retch, then turned and stumbled back toward the woods. He had to get rid of the rifle, retrieve the rented car, get back to Green Bay, catch a flight to Chicago; he had to— Crack!
A sharp pain stabbed at his back as the sound of a shot split the late afternoon air; it echoed like thunder through the nearby hills. He staggered, caught with a sudden weakness. Androki's men! He had to… Crack!
A stinging force slammed low in the region of his kidney, sending him plunging to his knees. Androki had recognized his vulnerability! The realization came like a blow. He hadn't counted on that. Androki should never have given his family background; that had been his big mistake! He'd assigned killers to protect it; but they were too late, too late. Kane wanted to laugh wildly. The were trying to kill him to save a man who was already dead! Crack!
A sledgehammer blow struck him below the right shoulder blade, driving him face forward into the tall grass. Too late! Too late! No matter what they did, Androki could never destroy the future. Not now. It would go on and on and on; man would know his many dimensions.
Androki! Gasping for breath, Kane had felt a fierce satisfaction, knowing that what he had done was right. Androki wasn't a downthrough; he was a backthrough! That's what Maxon had meant by saying they had been looking in the wrong direction; that's what he had seen that night in the hospital, when he'd followed the psychologist's reasoning.
"Androki!" Kane babbled the name. Androki hadn't been looking into time; he had come from time—from some generation of the future. He'd come back with all the pertinent data to accomplish his ends; he had come to buy the world! But he, Kane, hadn't killed Androki! Not really. Because John Androki had never existed. Now now.
He struggled to roll over. The sky was blue, a soft blue, and in the periphery of his eye he could see the treetops slowly swaying, bending with the breeze. A lovely world.
Footsteps thudded toward him. A figure loomed over him, blotting out the sky. The barrel of a rifle was thrust into his face. He stared upward into the black bore. Margaret! Margaret! Crack!
"So he just vanished into nothingness, eh?" Charles Dorrance eyed the lean figure of the agent whose name for this job had been Philip Conrad. He didn't believe Conrad had been too shaken by the phenomenon. But then it would be difficult to shake Conrad.
"Just like that," Conrad agreed. "I had the back of his head squarely in my sights. He'd just started up the stairs. He was about halfway up when, zip!" He snapped his fingers. "He vanished."
Dorrance asked curiously, "Didn't that startle you?"
"To some extent." Conrad nodded. "I concluded that some kind of secret weapon was involved, but it's not my place to wonder. I only do what I'm assigned to do… and make my reports. Aside from that, I can't help but feel that whatever the gimmick was, John Androki won't be coming back."
"Just as well," Dorrance observed noncommittally. He gazed at the agent. "Androki's man talked."
"The one who ordered the senator's car bombed?"
Dorrance nodded. "Not enough to convict Androki in a court of law—the fellow didn't know that much—but enough to be convincing. The senator died at Androki's orders; I say that as a statement of fact. Who would have been next? The President? But on that trip alone he'd gone too far beyond the law. A few billion dollars can't buy total immunity."
"I figured something like that when the code word came through."
Dorrance asked casually, "Did you know that Dr. Kane was killed?"
"Kane?" Conrad was startled.
"It happened about the time your man was vanishing.'*
"How?" The agent leaned forward in his chair.
"He murdered a laborer outside of Green Bay—near a small village named Cooperstown, to be exact."
"Kane… murdered a man?" Conrad asked disbelievingly.
Dorrance inclined his head. "Someone witnessed the act, probably a hunter. They say those woods are filled with deer. At any rate, he shot Kane, perhaps trying to prevent the murder." He smiled slightly. "Apparently he got frightened at what he did and fled the scene."
"I won't buy that," Conrad declared.
"The hunter bit? Of course not. Not when Kane was shot four times, the last one at point-blank range squarely between the eyes."
"I can't figure it." Conrad's brow knitted into a puzzled frown. "Kane went to Chicago to attend a convention. He certainly appeared normal at that time. So why would he do a thing like that? And if so, why a laborer? And why in such a God-forsaken place? Did he crack up?"
"H
e didn't crack up," Dorrance answered calmly.
"Well, I guess it's none of my business."
"Not officially," Dorrance agreed. His eyes weighted the agent. "The man he murdered was named George Androki."
"George Androki?" Again the agent was startled. "A relative?"
"Yes, I believe you could say so."
"I can't follow that one."
"He did it to rid the world of John Androki."
"All Greek." Conrad gestured helplessly.
"It is unless you see it as Kane must have seen it."
"Through a distorted lens?"
"Not a bit." Dorrance shook his head. "If George Androki had lived, he would have had a son or sons; and that son or sons would have had sons. And finally there would have been John Androki, probably a brilliant scientist or mathematician. Twisted but brilliant."
"You're saying that John Androki came from the. future, is that it?" The agent stared at him.
"As Kane and Maxon saw it, yes." Dorrance nodded assent. "In their view, it appeared very much as if Androki had come from the future armed with the knowledge and the specific data to take over the world, at least from the standpoint of the dollar. That, as you know, is the prime basis of power."
"Then the man Kane killed was… ?"
"Androki's ancestor. I said that."
"Fantastic!" Conrad murmured.
"With his death, of course, there could be no descendants, hence no Androki to come back." Dorrance folded his hands musingly. "As I see it, again from Kane's probable viewpoint, the- three unidentified men who were murdered were agents sent back from the future to stop Androki. You'll recall that Wygant identified himself as an agent. That answers the question of why they had no records. They were trying to stop Androki before he could change the future…"
"Change the future?" Conrad interrupted. "By murdering the mathematician or mathematicians who someday would unlock the key to multidimensional space and time," Dorrance explained. "Unfortunately, there were a number of key possibilities."
"Spread around the world," Conrad observed. Dorrance stroked his jaw. "If he had succeeded, then the world of the future would have been deprived of the knowledge of how to pass through the time barrier, if I can put it that way. Lacking that knowledge, they couldn't have sent back agents in the attempt to stop Androki."
"Whoa!" Conrad exclaimed. He hunched forward in his chair. "If he had succeeded in depriving them of the knowledge, how could he have come back?"
"He came back first, then tried to change the future."
"You're saying… ?"
"They had the knowledge when he came back; that's how he got back," Dorrance explained. "But once he got back, he was living in the present. 'This reality' is the expression Maxon and Kane used several times on the tape. But being in this reality, the future did not yet exist; hence, he was in a position to change it."
"Saw it off ahead of him, is that what you're saying?"
"Or behind him. It's according to which direction you're looking. From the present, of course, the future lies ahead. If Androki had gone farther back in history, he could have changed today. Again I'm citing some of the reasoning that came from the tapes."
"It's too deep for me," Conrad declared.
"And for me."
"As far as I'm concerned, it's all a figment of Kane's imagination."
"Of course. Kane's and Maxon's." Dorrance lifted his head. "We certainly couldn't commit a thing like that to the records."
"We certainly couldn't," Conrad answered steadily.
After the agent had gone, Dorrance remained gazing at the wall. Although he had reconstructed the theory from the tapes and evidence, the pieces fitted quite nicely, even though the end product was quite unbelievable. Could a man, by coming back, alter a future that actually had been? Or did his altering it make that future a never-was? There were simply too many paradoxes.
And yet the pieces fitted. They fitted at every point along the line. Take any one of the murders, apply the theory, and that was it. How else could one explain John Androki's abrupt disappearance coincidental with the murder of… his ancestor?
But one thing he knew: he couldn't put that in the books.
Through the window of his office on the campus of Tokyo University, Saburo Tanaki watched the laurel trees sway gently in the breeze. Short, thin, graying, he stared out through thick spectacles that gave his myopic eyes a luminous appearance. His thoughts were sad.
Bertram Kane, the great American mathematician, was dead. So were Cantrup, Freyhoff, Vosin, Bernardi. Only he was left. Now it was up to him.
What is destiny but a plan of the gods? He considered the question wonderingly. Yet men create their own destiny. Aside from that, there was a certain inevitability about life that defied the power of any single man to change. But a single man could hasten that inevitability.
Rising, he walked slowly through the long corridor,'pondering the formidable task that lay ahead of him.