COMMUTER

by James White

Author James White makes a break from his ‘Sector General’ stories with this fascinating account of a dying old lady and a young man who apparently had more than a passing interest in her health.

* * * *

The suspect was dishevelled and, if he was contused as well, the Sergeant had left his marks in places where they did not show. Never a very pleasant man at the best of times, Sergeant Greer was completely lacking in charm when he was angry. One of the things which made him very angry was the kind of crime which this suspect had almost certainly been intending to commit, and another was suspects who tried to be smart when they had been caught trying to commit them.

In this instance Inspector Michaelson agreed with his Sergeant.

‘This could be a very serious charge,’ said Michaelson. ‘Why wouldn’t you give the Sergeant your name and address?’

Michaelson kept his tone firm but friendly, suggesting that the other’s lack of cooperation had been due to an understandable dislike of the arresting officer which need not, however, include the Inspector. If the other did not give his name at once he should at least begin to talk—if only to demand details of the charge he was being held on, or to make formal complaint about his rough handling or to ask for a solicitor. But the suspect remained silent.

Irritated, Michaelson said, ‘I take it he speaks English?’

‘Fluently,’ said Greer.

‘I see.’

‘No, sir,’ said the Sergeant, ‘not four-letter fluent. When I was sure he wasn’t armed I eased my hold on him—that was when he became fluent. When he saw that I wasn’t believing any of the stories he was trying on me he said that he wasn’t carrying much money but that I was welcome to it if I let him go and that he had not intended harming the old lady, just watching her. I told him that attempting to bribe a police officer would get him into worse trouble and since then he hasn’t said a word.’

‘He may not have known that you were a policeman when he offered the money,’ said Michaelson coldly, ‘and he stopped doing so as soon as you identified yourself.’

Greer, who was long used to the Inspector’s unorthodox interrogations during which he sometimes gave the impression that he was giving his subordinates a harder time than the suspects, played his part by looking surly.

‘But it isn’t very polite,’ he went on to the suspect, ‘talking about you as if you weren’t there. Sit down, please. Can you tell me your first name, at least?’

The suspect opened his mouth, then closed it again.

‘Your age, then?’

‘Twenty-three.’

Michaelson nodded. ‘I expect your parents will worry if you’re late getting home------’

‘They died, a long time ago.’

‘I see,’ said Michaelson sympathetically. A good defence counsel with that sort of background to enlarge on and with expert psychiatric support could make a judge react sympathetically as well, but his sympathy would be real. He added, ‘Both at once, I suppose. Traffic accident?’

‘No, they died when...’ the suspect began, then stopped as if he had almost said too much.

Knowing that it would be useless to continue asking questions until the other had a chance to relax his guard, Michaelson nodded for Greer to make his report. While the Sergeant went through the preliminaries of setting the time and place, Michaelson studied the suspect more closely. There was something about his appearance which bothered him.

Certainly it was not the suspect’s clothing, which had been neatly casual before Greer had treated their wearer like an opposing half-back. If anything the man was too conservatively dressed for his age and his hair was too short. That was it—his hair was unusually tidy and short. Not skinhead short but neat, combed and parted. Michaelson began to study the suspect’s face, closely.

The play of expression on a face, the lines and contours pulled into it by experience of one kind or another, could tell an awful lot about its owner. But there were occasions, Michaelson knew, when it could tell an awful lot of lies.

If there was any such thing as a criminal face, this certainly was not it. Oh, the man was worried, of course, and hiding something—the bumps of tension along his jaw, the listening look and the sweaty highlights developing on his forehead and around his mouth were clear indications of guilt of some kind. But the overall impression was one of innocence and he looked far too honest and clean-cut to be true.

Michaelson had known high court judges with faces like pickpockets and he himself had steadfastly refused to grow his hair longer or wear coloured shirts. But being old-fashioned and neatly trimmed at his age was normal. In the suspect’s age group it was rare, perhaps abnormal.

‘...He was seen in the shop and several times in the street since the rumour began going around that Mrs. Timmins had come into money,’ Greer was saying. ‘Three times he visited the shop yesterday, buying newspapers on each visit—the same newspaper on two of the occasions. But the old lady hasn’t served in the shop since------’

‘Did she come into money?’ Michaelson preferred facts to rumours, even though a rumour like this was enough to make the vultures gather.

‘If she did, it came too late to do much good,’ said Greer, who obviously was feeling so strongly about it that he had forgotten to answer the question. Michaelson understood why.

Mrs. Timmins had been forced by age and ill-health to sell her shop and live in the flat above sixteen years earlier, and she had been virtually bedridden for the past five years. By rights she should have given up trying to work long before then, but she had never been quite right in the head—a condition which, Michaelson had heard, dated from the time her husband had deserted her during the second year of their marriage. And she was old, she had been old even when Michaelson had been a kid at school.

He remembered hanging around the bright window of her shop with some of his classmates, all of them flat broke and their pocket money not due for three days. It would have been very easy to create a diversion or for a few of them to keep her talking while the others loaded up with apples or chocolate or her teeth-destroying peppermint rock, but in those days boys did not often think along those lines.

Instead they had smeared the display window with their dirty faces and even dirtier hands, wearing expressions of distress and projecting hunger for all they were worth. She had been a very soft touch and had nearly always asked them in for a handout, saying that they could pay by doing odd jobs or by tidying up.

But the shop, like the old lady herself, was always clean and tidy so that they were never overworked. She had talked to them about their lessons or the running of the shop or her long-absent husband as if they were members of her non-existent family. When they came away they had laughed and tapped their heads at some of the things she had said, but with less and less frequency. She had become a very pleasant and important part of their young lives.

Michaelson had been much older when he overheard his parents discussing the old lady. His mother had wondered why she had not married after the statutory seven years had passed since her husband’s desertion and he could be presumed dead in law—-she had been a beautiful girl—and his father had replied that her husband must have been a good con man to make her remain faithful to his memory like that.

It had been about that time that Michaelson had decided that the old lady was too good and kind and trusting for people to be allowed to take advantage of her. Later he realised that there were a lot of kindly, vulnerable people needing the same kind of protection, but by then he had already decided what he would do with his life.

She must be nearly ninety, Michaelson thought. When he had visited her three years ago she had looked frighteningly old and shrunken, and he had been kept too busy to visit her since then. She had mistaken him for one of the other boys, but she had called him ‘son’ the way she always had done and had talked about the importance of education if he wanted to get on, the necessity of cleaning his teeth after eating her candy and, inevitably, about her husband.

Michaelson sighed and checked his headlong gallop down memory lane. He repeated, ‘Did she come into money?’

‘Sorry, sir,’ said Greer, ‘we won’t know until we’ve had time to ask more questions, but she had a big screen colour TV delivered three weeks ago, her doctor and nurse visit her every day instead of every week or so and she has a cleaning lady coming three days a week. The man downstairs —the one who bought the shop from her—says that she did not tell him anything but that all these things began happening at once.’

‘The point is,’ said Michaelson, ‘that everyone in the district thinks she has money and some of them may not want her to keep it.’ He opened the big envelope containing the suspect’s personal possessions and tipped them on to his desk.

There were two soiled handkerchiefs, a bunch of keys and a leather wallet. The usual junk which accumulates in pockets was absent and the wallet was unusually thin. It contained a more than adequate number of banknotes and two small photographs in transparent pockets.

They were a little more than an-inch square—too small for the windows—and showed the suspect and a girl of about the same age. The focus was soft and they had been cropped to show only the features.

‘Girlfriend?’ Michaelson asked.

‘Wife,’ said the suspect.

The girl’s face showed character, all of it good, and she was beautiful. He had no doubt about that because she was wearing little if any make-up and her face had a freshly-scrubbed look that was almost nun-like. Perhaps she, too, had strict parents.

But he was forgetting that the suspect had no parents. He did have a beautiful young wife, though, so why was he playing Peeping Tom with an old lady if he had not intended committing a crime of some kind ? And why had he removed all identification from his clothing and wallet? In short, was the suspect sick, or bent ?

For a few seconds Michaelson tried to think like an expert witness for the defence. It was possible that the loss of this man’s parents at an early age had caused serious psychological damage or, despite his prepossessing appearance, outright psychosis. The relatives or friends responsible for bringing him up might have been too strict—his tidy, well-barbered look and conservative dress were symptoms of repression. Perhaps his wife had been chosen by the people who had made him what he now was. Perhaps his condition was aggravated by the fact that his wife was not the angel she appeared to be.

In his profession Michaelson was continually being reminded that devils were fallen angels and that few of them had had time for plastic surgery on the way down.

This suspect did not look bent nor, so far as Michaelson could see, was he sick, either—but he had to be one or the other. The absence of spoken or documentary identification indicated careful pre-planning. Perhaps he considered the reward worth the risk of a period under psychiatric care should he be caught.

‘What,’ said Michaelson again, ‘is your name?’

The suspect shook his head.

Michaelson said, ‘You must realise that we will learn your name sooner or later—much sooner than you expect, believe me—and that your behaviour increases our suspicions and reduces any chance of sympathetic treatment when we do discover------’

‘I can’t tell you anything,’ the suspect broke in, beginning to sound desperate. ‘I wasn’t going to hurt the old lady. There is no crime that I’m guilty of and so you won’t be able to prove that I committed one and eventually, even though I won’t give my name, you’ll have to let me go.’

Michaelson nodded. A tricky one...

He was thinking of old Mrs. Timmins, bedridden, frail and with a bone structure as fragile as a bird’s and her only hold on life an innocent obsession about the blackguard who had deserted her. He thought of her being beaten into disclosing the hiding place of her money or being rolled on to the floor while the suspect tore the mattress apart. He thought of the livid, permanent bruising and the broken bones too old ever to knit and of the months or years of pain which resulted from a simple robbery with violence when the victim was senile. Michaelson had worked on too many cases just like that.

‘Your property will be returned to you,’ he said finally, ‘if I ever let you out.’

While the suspect was being returned to his cell Michaelson prodded the bunch of keys with his forefinger. There were no car keys and the five in the bunch, presumably the door, room and garden shed keys, were old in design indicating a dwelling in the older part of the city and the remaining two, which were duplicates, were new and distinctive with a long serial number etched into them. Greer was practically breathing down his neck as he wrote the number on his pad.

‘I’ve seen that type of key before, too,’ said the Sergeant. “There are five or six new office blocks using them. We were notified because the locks are supposed to be thief-proof, but obviously the keys aren’t. Or do you think they are his own?’

When Michaelson did not reply he went on, ‘Those buildings maintain a round-the-clock security guard. I can ring them with the serial number right now, and if their key registers are up to date, find out the office and the occupier’s name. He may know something about the suspect, and I can call at his office first thing in the morning.’

‘I’ll call at his office,’ said Michaelson, ‘as soon as you come off the phone.’

‘Aren’t you a bit senior to be personally investigating a...’

Michaelson nodded, and said, ‘This one bothers me.’

Half an hour later he was reading the tasteful cream lettering on the grained door of office 47 in the Dunbar Building while the patrolman on night duty, an ex-policeman called Nesbitt, stood watchfully behind him. The company occupying the office was SMITH PHILATELIC SUPPLIES and the Smith in question, Michaelson had discovered on the way up, answered fully to the description of the suspect.

‘I intend having a look around,’ said Michaelson, ‘and I shall not remove any of Mr. Smith’s property unless a more detailed examination becomes necessary, by which time I shall have a warrant. In the meantime I would appreciate it if you would accompany me while I look around, and, of course, give me as much information as you can about Smith. Last time I saw him he could not even give me his name.’

He was not actually lying to Nesbitt, but he had managed to give the other a very strong reason for believing that the suspect was an amnesia victim.

The suspect—Michaelson could not believe that his name was really Smith—occupied a small suite of offices. The outer office contained two desks, a few chairs and even fewer filing cabinets. Dominating the inner office was a large desk covered by a thick asbestos board on which lay an electric toaster, kettle and frying pan. The desk lamp was angled to point at the head of the camp bed which was neatly made up behind the desk. Most of the built-in shelving contained non-perishable groceries, also neatly stacked, while a refrigerator in one corner took care of the perishable kind. The desk’s telephone table had been removed to another corner where it supported a colour TV. A washroom opened off the smaller office where shirts and socks were dripping dry into a bath.

‘It isn’t usual,’ said Nesbitt in answer to Michaelson’s unspoken question, ‘but so long as there is no fire hazard, and Smith is very careful that way, there is nothing in the rules which actually forbids it. Besides, at the prices we charge for these offices we can’t afford to be too strict.’

Michaelson nodded and began taking a closer look around. The towels looked new—not brand new, but not very old, either—and the shaver and other bits and pieces had also been bought recently. A closer examination of the inner office showed that the suspect was very clean and tidy in his habits. There were books here and there, not enough to be called a library but they all looked as though they had been read several times—cheap editions or paperbacks on pretty heavy, non-fiction subjects for the most part. The exception was a small pile of science-fiction paperbacks. He noted Asimov’s The End of Eternity, Heinlein’s Door Into Summer, Shaw’s The Two-Timers and Tucker’s Year of the Quiet Sun...

The suspect’s taste in S-F was good if somewhat restricted, Michaelson decided as he returned to the outer office.

‘Has Mr. Smith spoken to you?’ Michaelson asked as he lifted the dust cover off what he thought was a typewriter, but what turned out to be a small record player.

‘Often,’ Nesbitt replied, then explained, ‘he isn’t very organised about his paperwork and when I suggested that he get himself a secretary, he asked me what exactly would be involved. I told him about medical and unemployment insurance payments and income tax deductions and so on, he seemed to lose interest.’

There were sheets of printed music and blank manuscript pages scattered over the top of the desk, which apparently had not been disturbed for some time. On the manuscript pages the same few bars of a melody had been written over and over again. The desk drawers were filled with more manuscript blanks and dozens of records which, like the sheet music on top of the desk, were mainly ballads. A few were familiar—pleasant enough tunes, but too derivative for Michaelson to really approve of them. There were no musical instruments in the room.

The other desk, which seemed to be in current use, was scattered with philatelic magazines and reference books. The drawers contained magnifiers and large sheets of unused stamps in plastic folders with a few singles, also in transparent envelopes, which were even older. Michaelson had never been a stamp collector.

‘Are these valuable?’

‘They aren’t rare,’ replied Nesbitt, in tones which said that he had been and probably still was. ‘But in quantities like that, in mint condition, they are worth a considerable sum of money. If I’d known about them I would have advised him to keep them in a fire-proof safe.’

‘He takes your advice?’

‘He listens to it.’

Michaelson smiled. ‘How well do you know him?’

‘I call in most nights during my rounds,’ said Nesbitt. ‘Being alone he doesn’t have to work normal hours, and if he is awake or working late he leaves the door open so I can come in for a cup of coffee, or to watch the wrestling if it coincides with my break.’

‘So his hobbies are drinking coffee and watching the wrestling,’ said Michaelson drily.

‘No, sir. He switches channels for me. I usually find him watching current affairs programmes. He is a very serious-minded young man,’

‘Worried about something, do you think?’

‘He hasn’t looked very happy recently, but from what I’ve heard he doesn’t have any financial worries.’

‘Any idea where he stayed before coming here?’

‘At a hotel a few blocks away, the Worcester. Some of his mail is still being forwarded from it.’

‘Why did he move?’

‘I think it was red tape again,’ said Nesbitt. ‘He had been living there for nearly two years—well, not exactly, he used a room to carry on his business and sometimes he lived in it if it was too late to go home in the evening. The hotel did not mind at first—it is a small place with an easygoing manager. But apparently it contravened regulations for a guest to carry on a business on a permanent basis from his room. Rather than try to sort it out he moved here.’

‘He confided in you a lot?’

‘Not at first. But one night he came in drunk, really sick drunk. I think it must have been the first time he had tried alcohol and he had tried everything in sight. While I was helping him to bed he told me that he had a problem, but not what it was, and that he had to talk to somebody here. After that we talked for a few minutes, sometimes longer, every night—but never about his problem. I got the impression that it was a very personal thing.’

‘Yes,’ said Michaelson. ‘Did he go out much at night?’

‘Recently, yes,’ said Nesbitt. ‘I expect he got himself a girlfriend. A good thing, too—he had been very worried about something for the past three weeks. He had told me that his problem was worse than ever and that now there would never be a solution to it. But earlier this week he started going out every night for three or four hours and sometimes staying away all day, so probably there was a solution to it after all.’

‘Yes,’ said Michaelson.

He was thinking about Mrs. Timmins and the solution which she represented to the suspect’s very personal problem and he could not trust himself to say anything else.

His quick look around was gradually developing into a full-scale search, but so far the night security man had made no objections. He believed that he was helping the suspect and it was obvious that he was so convinced of ‘Smith’s’ honesty that the thought that he might be harming the other man had never entered his head. The fact that he was an ex-policeman and Michaelson an Inspector would also have something to do with it.

Michaelson wrestled briefly with his conscience, but the process was little more than a token bout.

Looking disinterested, he began sliding open the desk drawers one by one. ‘Apart from his recent absences, did he have any other hobbies or outside interests ?’

‘He was keen on local history,’ said Nesbitt. ‘He kept a scrapbook of old newspaper clippings, on the shelf behind you.’

Michaelson picked up the scrapbook and went through it quickly but thoroughly. There were a few old street maps, plans of urban road systems and developments long since completed and clippings going back over half a century. He was not surprised to find several mentions of the city’s moment of stark drama some sixty years earlier when the physics building at the university had blown up, taking the physics professor—a stuffy but very brilliant old gentleman tipped for a Nobel Prize—and a mercifully small number of post-graduate assistants with it. He read the Chancellor’s statement that, so far as he knew, no explosives had been kept in the building, descriptions of the peculiarly sharp detonation and the theories, based on evidence of fusing in parts of the debris, which ranged from an old-fashioned thunderbolt from on high to a meteor strike or the premature invention of a nuclear device...

‘No other hobbies?’

‘Not that I know of,’ said Nesbitt, then added, ‘At one time I thought he might be taking up radio as a hobby—he had read some technical articles and wanted to to know if I could tell him anything about a standing wave. He gets suddenly curious about lots of things.’

Michaelson had a vague idea of what a standing wave might be, having listened to the engineers talking shop during a course he had taken on TV traffic monitoring systems, but he did not see how it could help his current investigation. He opened another drawer.

And hit the jackpot.

It contained a large desk diary, a day book recording income and expenditure and an address book. As he leafed through them the look of disinterest on his face required an increasingly greater effort to maintain.

There were appointment notes and memos reminding the suspect that he needed stamps for various retail outlets. There was not, so far as Michaelson could see, a corresponding supplier for the stamps. Other notes, none of which were recent, comprised current song titles with remarks like ‘Piano arrangement not too difficult’ or ‘Very simple melody’ or ‘Good, but complicated orchestration needed—I can’t memorise it.’ The final entry, dated three weeks earlier, said ‘Found another possibility, will investigate the old lady tomorrow.’

The last entry in the address book, which otherwise contained only business contacts, was that of Mrs. Timmins. It had been written so heavily that her name and address had been embossed on four of the underlying pages.

An emotional type, thought Michaelson coldly as he began going through the cash book.

The entries were meticulously neat and, possibly because he had forgotten which book he was using, interspersed with reminders. Like the desk diary it showed ample evidence of income from the sale of stamps, but no indication of where he got them. His expenditure seemed to be confined to rent, food, clothing and sheet music. One of the latter items was for a song with ‘Memories’ in the title and he had added, leaning very heavily on his ballpoint, ‘Memories don’t sell as easily as stamps, but they are all I can take.’ The last four entries, all dated within the past few weeks, showed the expenditure of considerable sums of money to an undisclosed company or person, with a bracketed notation which said, ‘In used notes by registered post.’ Michaelson noted the amounts.

‘Can I telephone?’ asked the Inspector.

‘He has a night line,’ said Nesbitt.

The night receptionist at the Worcester remembered Smith and, because he was not very busy, did not mind talking about him. Smith had stayed there for nearly a year, conducting a stamp business from nine to five—he lived somewhere else. He kept a very smart if conservative wardrobe in his office room—for impressing customers, he had said—but travelled to and from work in an old, shapeless suit. No, he had not acted in any way suspiciously or oddly, except that sometimes he arrived in the morning without a raincoat when it was pouring wet, and vice versa. But then the weather could change so suddenly. In this morning’s forecast they had promised sunny periods...’

During the next pause for breath Michaelson thanked the receptionist and hung up.

A man who avoids red tape and who sells stamps without buying them and buys sheet music and copies it over and over again, apparently to memorise it. Stamps were a peculiar commodity in that they could not be stolen in bulk without the fact showing up—especially when they were over half a century old. And where could freshly plagiarised music be sold. Any country or broadcasting company who bought it would signal the fact to the whole world and if they were pirates they would hardly pay for the music in the first place.

To make any sense at all of this puzzle he would have to look at all the pieces very carefully and move them around to see how or if they fitted. Michaelson considered the suspect’s manner, appearance, everything he had found out about him and his oddly-run business. Potentially they were all important pieces and he had to try fitting all of them together before he could risk discarding any as belonging to some other puzzle.

‘Would you like some coffee?’ said the night patrolman. He said it three times before Michaelson heard him.

‘No, thanks,’ he said absently. The pieces, all of them, were beginning to fit together. ‘I would like to make another call before I leave.’

Doctor Weston had a large local practice. He also had the information on Mrs. Timmins which Michaelson needed and eventually, and with great difficulty, it was coaxed out of him. The details of her physical condition were given much more easily.

‘... And I gave that silly old woman until the middle of last week,’ said the Doctor, in the tone of voice he used when he felt very strongly about a patient but did not want people to think that he was soft-hearted. ‘When I saw her earlier this evening I told the nurse to stay with her—she won’t last the night. In her condition I don’t know why she bothers to hang on.’

I do, said Michaelson, but he spoke under his breath.

‘One more call, honest,’ he said to Nesbitt. He had to arrange with Greer to bring the suspect to Mrs. Timmins’ flat, where he would meet them as soon as possible.

They met twenty minutes later in her lounge. The nurse had gone into the adjoining bedroom to prepare her patient to receive visitors, leaving the suspect, Greer and Michaelson alone. The suspect looked as frightened as Michaelson had ever seen a man look, and the Sergeant’s expression reflected controlled puzzlement.

He could very well be making the worst mistake of his long and fairly successful career, Michaelson thought, but if all the evidence pointed to an impossible conclusion then the impossible wasn’t.

‘This man has been rather naughty, Sergeant,’ he said. ‘His reticence about giving his name was ill-advised, but understandable in the circumstances. I have evidence that he is in fact the old lady’s benefactor—he sent the money which she is supposed to have inherited. He hasn’t admitted it yet, but I would say that it was conscience money and that he is the son or grandson of the old lady’s husband who deserted her and probably married again and who wants the payoff to be anonymous so as to avoid a possible bigamy charge and questions of the legitimacy or otherwise of his children.’

Greer nodded, then said, ‘I’ll return to the station, sir.’ He gave the suspect a pained look, the sort which he reserved for nice but ill-advised people who played games with the overworked constabulary, and left. Professionally the Sergeant was completely disinterested in nice people.

If anything the suspect looked even more frightened.

‘That isn’t the true story,’ Michaelson told him, ‘but it will do for the Sergeant. Let’s go in—she’s dying and there isn’t much time.’

‘No!’ He looked as if he might run if he did not faint first.

‘You tried hard enough to see her and now is your chance,’ Michaelson began angrily. Controlling himself he went on, ‘I have known this old lady for a very long time. She was and is a ... a very nice person.’

‘I know that!’

Michaelson nodded and went on, ‘When I was a kid she was so good, so stupidly good and generous, that I wanted to do something for her—we all did. But her problem was not susceptible to solution by ten-year-old boys. Now ... well, I want you to inconvenience yourself just a little by going in to see her. If you don’t,’ he added quietly, ‘I’ll break every bone in your body.’

‘You don’t understand,’ said the suspect dully, but he began moving towards the bedroom door.

‘Maybe I do,’ said Michaelson. ‘You have two very nice businesses going—buying stamps at face value there and selling them here at a profit of several thousand per cent. You even speculated in a few rare items, which became ever rarer and more valuable. The music business in the other direction—no wonder so many of today’s songs sound as if they’d been plagiarised—did not pay so well and you decided to stay where the money was...’

The nurse opened the bedroom door, motioned them inside and then moved into the lounge.

‘You know,’ said the suspect, looking more relieved than frightened. ‘But I didn’t desert her. There was an accident and I couldn’t get back.’

‘Tell me about it,’ said Michaelson.

The suspect had been working at nights in the university, augmenting his wages as a shop assistant by sweeping and tidying the labs—he had been saving hard to get married. Professor Morrison, one of the most important people at the university, had offered him a lot of money to take part in an experiment which he had said was perfectly safe but which must be kept secret. Professor Morrison had not explained what he was doing in detail, saying that it was too complicated, but from overheard conversations between the Professor and his assistants and from his own recent reading, fictional as well as technical, he had a vague idea of how if not why the system worked.

The field of stress which he had entered could be considered as a standing wave in time with an amplitude of exactly sixty-three years and that material objects currently in existence could go forward into the future and come back again to the present, but an object which existed in the future could not be brought back. Once the field had been set up it would remain in existence for ever, he had heard the Professor say, unless some outside agency or carelessness—such as materialising people or lab animals in a non-empty space—caused it to break down.

Professor Morrison had intended to publish his results but he had first to develop a shorter-range field—as things were he could not prove that his subject had travelled forward in time if he could not bring something back from the future. He had to send someone forward who would materialise in the Professor’s own life-time, and Morrison was pushing eighty. As well, his reputation was such that he could not risk being accused of scientific trickery.

The Professor’s budget did not allow him to go on paying his guinea-pig, so he had devised the idea of memorising songs of the future and selling them in the past. Memories, after all, were non-material...

‘... I thought of the stamp idea myself,’ the suspect continued. ‘I was married by then and my wife knew what I was doing. We thought eventually of coming to the future here, where I was making much more money, and I would commute to the past for stamps or anything else I needed. It was like going to work in the morning on a train, except that I commuted through time.

‘I had told her not to worry if I didn’t come home for a few evenings—if I wasn’t home for tea then I had sprained my ankle or something and would be along the next evening, or the next. The time I spent in the future exactly equalled the time I was absent from the past, you see, and I didn’t want her to be waiting up for me and worrying.

‘I should have realised that the overgrown hollow I always arrived in was an old crater,’ he concluded, ‘but it was so big and shallow. All I knew was that the Professor was working on a new, short-duration field which would make his time-travel demonstrable to all, and that one evening I went back to the hollow and couldn’t get home. And life here is so complicated, so much more documentation which I don’t fully understand------’

‘I could help you understand it,’ said Michaelson quietly. He had been gradually moving the suspect closer to the bed. He added, ‘But you will have to do something for me.’

‘Even before I traced the old newspaper references,’ the other went on, ‘I knew that I was marooned here. I had a large enough stock of stamps to be able to make enough money to set up a legitimate philatelic business if I could only sort out the red tape. But I wanted to find my wife if she was still alive. We didn’t make much money on the songs I had memorised and most of it went on buying stamps, anyway. She must have moved to this place before our house was levelled to make room for the new development, but the new owner changed the name and made it difficult to trace...’

‘But you found her,’ Michaelson broke in softly, ‘and she’ll be glad to see you after all this time.’

‘No,’ said the other, beginning to back away, ‘I can’t.’

Michaelson gripped him very firmly by the arm and said, ‘You are going to need help and advice and I’m willing to give it, but if you don’t go to that old lady I will make you wish that you’d never been born. With your ridiculous story and lack of documentation I could easily get you in trouble—a charge of espionage, perhaps, or committal to a psychiatric------’

‘She’s so old!’ he burst out in a tortured whisper. ‘Letting her see me still young would ... would ... it wouldn’t be fair to her!’

That’s a risk we both must take,’ said Michaelson more gently. ‘But I talked to her doctor. She is pretty far gone, far enough gone perhaps and senile enough to be living in the past, and you are exactly as she remembers you ...’

Michaelson moved towards the bed taking the other with him. On the bedside table there was a framed wedding picture showing them together. The faces were identical to those in the cropped photographs in the suspect’s wallet except that this picture was old and yellowed and had not had the old-fashioned suit and dress and bouquet trimmed away to make period identification difficult. The terribly wrinkled and shrunken and caved-in face on the pillow close by bore no resemblance to the picture at all except for the eyes. They were the same as in the photograph and the same as Michaelson remembered them as a boy.

He stared intently at the suspect’s face, looking for the slightest sign of revulsion in the other’s expression as he bent over the bed, but could not find it.

As the nurse closed the bedroom door behind him she said, ‘He’s holding her in his arms, sir. Is the young man a relative?’

Michaelson rubbed his eyes and said, ‘Only by marriage.’