PART III
The Lady of the Picture
Phil Hurren, often known as "Zip" Hurren, reporter on the Examiner, felt, on the day the managing editor called him into the sanctum, that fortune could smile on him no more brightly. There wasn't anything brighter.
"You stand well with the detective bureau," his boss had said; "and you've followed this safe-disappearing stuff pretty closely. You're relieved of everything else for the time being. Get on that business, and see that the public hears from the Examiner!"
Phil knew better than to say any more, for before he recovered from his surprise, the editor had turned his back, buried himself in his work on the desk, and forgotten that Phil was there. Nor did Phil waste any real time in rejoicing. That is why he was called "Zip." When things happened, whether it was luck or system, Phil was usually there. In sixty seconds more, Phil was in a taxicab, whirling toward police headquarters.
Luck or system, he didn't know, but he struck it again. The big wagon was just starting away from the station door when he arrived, crowded inside with bluecoats and plainclothes-men. The burly, red-faced man with chevrons on his sleeve, sitting beside the driver, saw Phil jump out, and motioned with his hand. Phil leaped up on the back step of the vehicle and hung on for dear life with his fingers through the wire grating as they careened through the streets. The men on the inside grinned at him; a number of them knew him and liked him. Gradually the door was opened and he crowded in. He found Sergeant Johnson and eyed him mutely.
"How the hell do you find these things out, I'd like to know," the sergeant exclaimed. "Are you a mind-reader?"
"I don't really know anything," Phil admitted with that humility which the police like on the part of newspaper men and seldom meet with. "Do you mind?"
"No objection," grunted the sergeant. "Been watching all the old crooks since these safes have been popping. Nothin' much on any of them, except this slippery wop, Tony Costello. No, we haven't caught him at anything. Seems to be keeping close and minding his own business. Working in his laboratory. Ought to make a good living if he turned honest; clever guy, he seems. But he's been too prosperous lately. Lots of machinery delivered to his place; we traced it to the manufacturers and find it cost thousands. Big deposits in his banks. But, no trace of his having sold anything or worked at anything outside his own place. So, we're running over to surprise him and help him get the cobwebs out of his closets."
The raid on Tony Costello's shop and laboratory disclosed nothing whatever. They surrounded the place effectively and surprised Tony genuinely. But a thorough search of every nook and cranny revealed nothing whatever of a suspicious nature. There was merely a tremendous amount of apparatus and machinery that none of the raiding party understood anything about. Tony's person was also thoroughly searched, and the leather-framed photograph of the beautiful unknown girl was found.
"Who's this?" the sergeant demanded. "She don't look like anyone that might belong to your crowd."
"I don't know," Tony replied.
"Whad'ya mean, don't know?" The sergeant gave him a rough shake. "What'ya carryin' it for, then?"
"I had really forgotten that it was in my pocket," Tony replied calmly, at his ease. "I found it in a hotel room one day, and liked the looks of it."
"I know you're lying there," the sergeant said, "though I'm ready to believe that you don't know her. Too high up for you. Well, it looks suspicious and we'll take the picture."
"Boy!" gasped Phil. "What a girl she must be in person! Even the picture would stand out among a thousand. May I have the picture, Sergeant?"
"You can come and get a copy of it to-morrow. We'll have it copied and see if we can trace the subject of it. That might tell us something."
The following morning Phil was at Police Headquarters to pick up further information, and to get a copy of the girl's photograph. Like the police, he could not keep his mind off the idea that there was some association between the crooked engineer and the disappearance of the safes. It seemed to fit too well. The scientific nature of the phenomena, Tony Costello's well known reputation for scientific brilliance, and his recent affluence; what else could it mean? In some way, Tony was getting at these safes. But how? And how prove it? Most exhaustive searches failed to reveal any traces of the safes anywhere. If any fragment of one of them had appeared in New York or San Francisco, the news would have come at once, such was the sensation all over the country that the series of disappearances had caused. Tony's calm insolence during the raid, his attitude of waiting patiently till the police should have had their fun and have it over with so that he might be left at peace again, showed that he must be guilty, for anyone else would have protested and felt deeply injured and insulted. He seemed to be enjoying their discomfiture, and absolutely confident of his own safety.
"There's got to be some way of getting him," Phil mused; and he mused almost absent-mindedly, for he was gazing at the photograph of the girl. For many minutes he looked at it, and then put it silently into his pocket.
Five o'clock in the evening of that same day came the news of another safe disappearance. Phil got his tip over the phone, and in fifteen minutes was at the scene. It was too much like the others to go into detail about; a six-foot portable safe had suddenly disappeared right in front of the eyes of the office staff of The Epicure, a huge restaurant and cafeteria that fed five thousand people three times a day. In its place stood a ragged, rusty old Ford coupe body. He went away from there, shaking his head.
Then suddenly in the midst of his dinner, he jumped up, and ran. An idea had leaped into his head.
"Right after one of these things pops is the time to take a peek at Tony," he said to himself, and immediately he was on the way.
But how to get his peep was not so easy a problem. When he alighted from his cab a block away from Tony's building, he was hesitant about approaching it. Tony knew him, and might see him first. Phil circled the brick building, keeping under cover or far enough away; all around it was a belt of thirty feet of lawn between the building and the sidewalk. Ought he have called the police and given them his idea? Or should he wait till darkness and see what he could do alone?
Then suddenly he saw her. Across the street, standing in the shelter of a delivery truck in front of an apartment, she was observing Tony's building intently. The aristocratic chin, the brightness of the eyes, the waves of her hair, and the general sunny expression! It could not be anyone else. Post haste he ran across the street.
"Pardon me!" he cried excitedly, lifting his hat and then digging hastily into his inner pocket. "I'm sure you must be the – "
"Well, the nerve!" the young woman said icily, and pointing her chin at the opposite horizon she walked haughtily away.
By that time Phil had dug out his picture and was running after her.
"Please," he said, "just a moment!" And he held the picture out in front of her face.
"Now, where in the world – ?" She looked at him in puzzled and indignant inquiry, and then burst out laughing.
"It is you, isn't it?" Phil asked. "What are you laughing at?"
"Oh, you looked so abject. I'm sure your intentions must be good. Now tell me where you got my picture."
"Let us walk this way," suggested Phil, leading away from Tony's building.
And, as they walked, he told her the story. When he got through she stood and looked at him a long time in silence.
"You look square to me," she said. "You're working on my side already. Will you help me."
"I'll do anything – anything – " Phil said, and couldn't think of any other way of expressing his willingness, for the wonderful eyes bore radiantly upon him.
"First I must tell you my story," she began. "But before I can do so, you must promise me that it is to remain an absolute secret. You're a newspaper man – "
Phil gave his promise readily.
"My father is Professor Bloomsbury at the University of Chicago. He has been experimenting in mathematical physics, and I have been assisting him. He has succeeded in proving experimentally the concept of tensors. A tensor is a mathematical expression for the fact that space is smooth and flat, in three dimensions, only at an infinite distance from matter; in the neighborhood of a particle of matter, there is a pucker or a wrinkle in space. My father has found that by suddenly removing a portion of matter from out of space, the pucker flattens out. If the matter is heavy enough and its removal sudden enough, there is a violent disturbance of space. By planning all the steps carefully my father has succeeded in swinging a section of space on a pivot through an angle of 180 degrees, and causing two portions of space to change places through hyperspace, or as you might express it popularly, through the fourth dimension."
Phil held his hands to his head.
"It is not difficult," she went on smiling. "Loan me your pocket knife and a piece of paper from your notebook. If I cut out a rectangular piece of paper from this sheet and mount it on a pivot or shaft at A B, I can rotate it through 180 degrees, just like a child's teeter-totter, so that X will be where Y originally was. That is in two dimensions. Now, simply add one dimension all the way round and you will have what daddy is doing with space. He does it by shoving fifty or a hundred pounds of lead right out of space; the sudden flattening out of the tensors causes a section of space to flop around, and two portions of space change places. The first time he tried it, his desk disappeared, and we've never seen it again. We've thought it was somewhere out in hyperspace; but this terrible story of yours about disappearing safes, and the fact that you have this picture, means that someone has got the desk."