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And in a certain area in a certain direction from that device there were strictly local rain-showers in a space no more than twenty feet across. Sometimes the rain fell there when it wasn’t raining anywhere else. It was exactly as if that small twenty-foot circle were somewhere connected with another weather process—or a time-track—so that it received rain quite independently of the ground about it.
Naturally, nobody noticed it. It was night and everything was rain-wet to begin with, and nobody would have understood, anyhow.
A couple of hundred miles away, however, there were people who would have understood it, if they’d known. There had been much learned discussion of The Mathematics of Multiple Time-Tracks, and as Mr. Grebb bellowed his fury in a tavern around the corner from his boarding house, an eminent mathematician was making an address to a scientific society.
“Professor Muntz has disappeared,” he announced regretfully, “and his disappearance is clearly the result of his excessive shyness. However, the references to experimental evidence in his work have borne fruit. He speaks of interdimensional stresses leading to a tendency of disparate time-streams to coalesce. Then he observes that experimental evidence throws some of his equations into question. A careful study of his equations has disclosed a trivial error in assumption which, when corrected, modifies his equations into accord with the experimental results he mentions.
“There can be no doubt that he has achieved experimental proof of the reality of time-streams, of whole systems of reality, which are parallel to but separate from the reality we know. And what does that mean? It means that if we miss a train in this reality, somewhere there is a cosmos in which we catch it. A thief who has been undetected in the universe we know, has somewhere made some slip which has led to his discovery.”
The learned scientist went on and on with his speech, two hundred miles from where Mr. Grebb bellowed to his tavern companions of the iniquity of Joe Hallix.
Next morning, Mr. Grebb was bleary-eyed and morose. He almost lacked appetite. He ate only twelve pancakes and almost forced himself to mop up the plate. He was uneasy. If sixty or seventy kegs of beer were missing, due to his fine scorn of bookkeeping details, he was in a bad fix. If that bookkeeper guy hunted back for six months or so and found even more missing—well, that would make it right serious. Mr. Grebb was ready to weep with vexation and terror of jail.
But he went out of the front door. Keeping gallantly to established custom even in this time of stress, he stooped for the newspaper his landlady paid for and sadly complained she never received. As he bent over, there was a loud slapping noise. A rolled-up newspaper hit him a resounding whack in the seat of the pants.
He roared, grabbed it, and plunged for the street to avenge the indignity. But there was no paper-boy anywhere about. The paper had materialized in mid-air above a twenty-foot circle which yesterday had received rain independently of neighboring territory.
Mr. Grebb was formidable as he marched at last toward his bus. He was large and coarse and infuriated. He rode on the bus, scowling. A fat woman stood beside his seat. She glared at him because he did not offer his place to a fat lady. He unfolded a newspaper to intercept the glare. A minor headline caught his eye:
AJAX BREWERY VICTIMIZED
Underneath was a news-item. More than four hundred kegs of beer had cleverly been diverted from the regular channels of trade during the past six months. Unscrupulous customers had bought them at cut rates from a dishonest employee.
Irregularities had been suspected, and on the previous day a bookkeeper, checking up, had quite accidentally looked in a drawer containing office-supplies in the delivery director’s desk. He found there, casually hidden, forged delivery slips used to cover past diversions, and other delivery slips made ready for use in future thefts. Confronted with the evidence, Joe Hallix had confessed to a six-months’ career in the racket and had been placed under arrest.
Mr. Grebb stared blankly. The item was infinitely plausible, but it simply was not true. That had not happened yesterday. When he left the brewery the bookkeeper was still frankly suspicious of him.
Then, suddenly, Mr. Grebb’s mouth dropped open. His mental processes were never clear, so he did not reason. But the newspaper story was exactly what he would like to believe, and therefore he was convinced instantly that this was exactly what Joe Hallix had been doing.
* * * *
He became filled with a bellicose triumph. The newspaper slipped from his hands and fell to the floor of the bus, to be trampled on and soiled and so ultimately to go unglanced-at into a trash box. But Mr. Grebb steamed. So that was what Joe Hallix was doing! And he was blaming the missing beer on an innocent truck-driver of utter integrity—on Mr. Grebb himself!
He stalked into the warehouse with magnificent dignity, to find himself confronted by Joe Hallix, by the bookkeeper, and by two other men of ominous aspect.
“Look here, Grebb!” said the bookkeeper sternly. “I worked all night on this thing! There’s four hundred kegs of beer missing in the past six months! Every record is straight but yours? Your delivery slips are a mess! What’ve you been putting over?”
Mr. Grebb breathed heavily.
“Me,” said Mr. Grebb dramatically, “I been thinkin’! Thinkin’ about why my records always get jammed up an’ why Joe Hallix always keeps pickin’ on me an’ ripenin’ me up for a fall guy for him! Any of the other drivers will tell you I’m a right guy, an’ any one of ’em will tell you he’s a crook!”
The bookkeeper interrupted impatiently, but Mr. Grebb bellowed him down.
“Look in his desk!” he roared in righteous wrath. “Look where he keeps his blank forms! You’ll find the whole works right there! Right in this here drawer!”
He thumped with a hairy ham of a hand, breathing in snorts of indignation.
Joe Hallix tried to laugh scornfully. But it wasn’t good. That Mr. Grebb, of all humans, should have hit so instantly and with such uncanny accuracy upon the hiding-place of papers he had to have handy for the working of his racket, and which nobody in the world should ever have thought of looking for, was simply beyond belief. It was too sudden and too startling and too starkly impossible.
Joe Hallix tried to laugh it off, but sweat poured out on his forehead. When the bookkeeper, after one look at his graying face, stooped to pull out the drawer, Joe Hallix got panicky. And the two ominous gentlemen turned their attention to him.
Mr. Grebb returned to his boarding house in a mood of triumphant indignation. He was as near to perfect happiness as he would ever get. Joe Hallix was unmasked and headed for jail, and he, Mr. Grebb, was proven innocent as a babe unborn. Moreover, that half-keg of beer he had managed to get away with, two months before, would never be charged against him.
He was magnificent in his sensations of vindicated purity. He told his landlady about it at supper. But he did not mention the newspaper. He did not understand that, and therefore he ignored it. She listened admiringly.
“I always knew you were smart, Mr. Grebb,” she said with conviction. “That’s why I asked you about that machine down in the basement. Did you ever get time to look at it again, Mr. Grebb?”
“It’s no good,” said Mr. Grebb largely. “It’s just some stuff put together crazy. It don’t work.”
“Too bad,” said the landlady. “And I’ve let it clutter up my cellar all this time.”
“I’ll get it out for you,” said Mr. Grebb, generously. “Give it a couple kicks to get it in two pieces so I can handle it easy, an’ I’ll pile it out on the sidewalk for the garbage man to haul away.”
Which, out of the kindness of his heart, he did. It is still a mystery in high scientific circles just what Professor