The Chronocide Mission

18. THE STUDENTS; PROFESSOR MARCUS BROCK

Mount Hope Avenue, with its swarming north-south traffic, formed the eastern boundary of Mount Hope Cemetery. Across from the cemetery were venerable sidestreets of large, old-fashioned houses packed closely together—a tranquil neighborhood despite the volume of traffic flowing past. The streets were lined with tall shade trees; the houses, many with their original wood-railed porches, were carefully maintained. Flowers garnished the tidy yards with splashes of color. Here an old neighborhood grocery store had been converted into a residence; a short distance away the wheel had turned completely, and a residence had been converted into a business. Other houses were remodeled into two family dwellings or apartments. The few small, modern apartment building stood out starkly, bearing no resemblance to the houses that had formerly occupied those plots.

Enterprising developers had further crowded the neighborhood by inserting courts of row houses down the middle of the longer blocks, thus diminishing the backyards of the original buildings. One of these, Mount Hope Court, consisted of narrow, elongated rows of apartments. They were occupied entirely by students, some married, some sharing an apartment for the term.

A party was in progress in one of those apartments. Revelers crowded living room and bedrooms, drapping themselves over furniture or sprawling on the floor, talking, singing, or just listening while digging into a variety of chips and dips or inbibing drinks of varying potency. From the kitchen came tantilizing odors that promised more solid fare to follow.

The doorbell rang, and Alida Brylon hurried to answer it. She was tall, with long, unadorned, dark hair and very little makeup—the rare type who could be attractive with no concession to stylishness. Normally she was poised and completely at ease in any social situation, but on this evening her rush to the door reflected a growing nervousness.

She said, “Hi, Shirley. Hi, Charlie. Come in and join the zoo.”

“Sorry we’re late,” Charlie said. He was a small, dark-complexioned youth who had the air of one who went through life apologizing. “My car—”

Shirley, a hefty blond, cut him off with a vicious nudge. “She knows about your car. Everyone knows about your car.”

From the living room, a voice called, “Is it Janie?”

Alida called back, “It’s Shirley and Charlie.”

“Where’s Janie?” Charlie asked.

“She went to see her aunt, but she should have been here an hour ago. I’m worried about her.”

Shirley grabbed her hand and held it up to the light. A ring with a large diamond sparkled. “Hey—you got it!” she exclaimed. “How did Jeff manage that on an intern’s salary?”

“How does any man get engaged?” Charlie asked sourly. “By mortgaging his future.”

Shirley’s nudge almost knocked him down. “Is Jeff here?”

Alida nodded happily. “He found someone to cover for him.”

Shirley and Charlie inserted themselves into the packed living room—a contortionistic manipulation that required experience and skill. Alida returned to the kitchen.

A guitar twanged. “Let’s count the stars!” someone called.

“We can’t until Janie gets here.”

“Ruth can do it.”

“Ruth and Bob, then. Ready?”

The guitar twanged again. Ruth and Bob began the duet between an ardent suitor and a young lady who preferred counting stars to love. At intervals the other students commented in chorus, “No, she can’t love anyone … until her work is done … she is counting all the stars in the sky.”

The song concluded with laughter and applause, followed by a lull during which everyone reached for food. In the kitchen, the telephone rang. A moment later, Alida appeared in the living room doorway. Her face was white; she obviously was in shock.

Ruth’s voice came. “What is it? What’s happened?”

Alida said dully, “She’s dead.”

“Who’s dead?” one of the men called.

“Janie’s dead.”

Jeff Mardell, Alida’s fiance, hurried to her side and put an arm around her. She kept repeating, “Janie’s dead. Janie’s dead,” and trying to make herself believe it; and the stunned students, many of whom had got to their feet, were staring at her in equal disbelief.

They buried Janie in Mount Hope Cemetery, a place she had dearly loved. She had jogged there each morning before she went to class, and she knew every monument. Her friends desperately wanted to give her an elaborate funerary sculpture like those she had so much admired—an enormous angel with spread wings, or perhaps Janie herself, jogging perpetually through Mount Hope in her running shoes, but all of them were struggling for financial survival.

She had not been a pretty girl, but she was a wholly beautiful person. She had no enemies, and all of her friends loved her. There was a crowd of students present in the cemetery when her coffin was lowered, along with Janie’s aunt and uncle, Mr. and Mrs. Kernley—who were devastated by grief—and the DuRosche maid, Mrs. Calding. There were no dry faces. A young minister said a final prayer and stepped back. Ed Cranston, the slender, bald guitar player from Alida’s party, twanged a few notes, and the students sang a farewell song that Ed had written.

Alida broke away suddenly. Jeff overtook her and put his arm around her, and the two of them walked off together. They followed a curving, descending road, and the fading conclusion of Ed’s song drifted after them.

From its founding in the 1838, Mount Hope Cemetery was considered a park for the living as well as a necropolis for the dead. It offered a lovely, rolling landscape, unusual geological features, and views of the Genesee River Valley, and families found it a delightful setting for picnics and outings. Janie and the students who were fond of jogging there were anticipated by residents of nineteenth century Rochester who thought it an attractive place for a stroll or a carriage ride.

The road Alida and Jeff were following dropped into a delightful dell. Against one of the steep hills surrounding it stood the Gothic chapel, which dated from the time of the Civil War. The smokestack of its crematorium looked excessively tall and charmingly ornate. Neither had been used for many years. The windows of the handsome old building were boarded up, and there was a padlock on the door. Nearby was an unused fountain. To the east, past the Moorish gazebo, was the original entrance gate to the cemetery with its elaborate Romanesque gate house.

The dell offered a picturesque history of fashions in dying. Heavy slabs of stone framed entrances to crypts that had been cut into the hillsides. There were free-standing mausoleums that looked like clumsy sheds except for their ornate stone construction. There were ranks of unadorned grave markers. Elaborate monuments were topped with handsome sculptures whose angels cried petrified tears, whose children were perpetually endowed with sweet innocence, or whose soldiers would never know defeat. Tall pillars and obelesques caught the eye and symbollically pointed the way to heaven. Rows of tombstones looked down from the surrounding hills. All of these memorials were designed to withstand the ravages of time, but some of them had aged badly—the erect slabs were tilted, the more substantial markers had taken on odd alignments, and here and there one had begun to crumble.

It had been a beautiful setting, lovingly fashioned with great care and expense to memorialize the dead. Now it was more than merely beautiful because the patina of age had enhanced each weathered structure and monument and because most of those who mourned these dead were dead themselves, survived only by the grief they left here frozen in stone.

Alida and Jeff seated themselves on the steep slope opposite the chapel and crematorium. Traffic noises from Mount Hope Avenue were muted; the place seemed utterly peaceful.

Alida sat looking straight ahead. “It is such a quiet place for Janie.”

“Wherever she is, she will quickly liven things up,” Jeff said.

Alida continued to stare straight ahead. “Jeff—why?”

Jeff shook his head. “What is there to say? It was a freak accident. She fell; probably that stone had been there for a hundred years without causing any trouble, and she just happened to hit it the worst way possible.”

Alida turned on him indignantly. “It was no accident. She was knocked down.” She looked at her hand. “Janie never saw my ring. I don’t want to be happy. I can’t be happy and not know why.” She turned to him. “Jeff—I’ve got to know why. The police aren’t doing a thing.”

Jeff Mardell, a stocky, good-looking man with a tumbling locke of hair his woman patients were going to love, got to his feet and helped her up. He felt Alida’s unhappiness intensely, and he hadn’t been able to think of a thing that could be done. It pained him to be made aware of this limitation on his powers of healing so early in his career. “If you’ve got to know why, then we’ve got to find out why,” he said.

He kissed her. Then the two of them walked slowly back toward Jeff’s car, arms around each other.

They drove to DuRosche Court and followed the mansion’s curving drive. “This is quite a shack,” Jeff said. “Who is Calvin DuRosche?”

“He comes from an old Rochester family. His ancestors were rich socialites long before Mr. Eastman thought of Kodaks.”

“It’s hard to imagine something like this being a private home. How would one family manage to fill it? It looks more like a public building.”

“At the time it was built, they probably had loads of servants. Now there are just a few people looking after Mr. DuRosche, but once a year they hire someone to clean and air the parts of the house that aren’t used. They hire someone to help with the grounds, too, whenever things get out of hand. Janie’s aunt is the housekeeper, and her uncle acts as caretaker. They’ve been here for years. Before Mr. DuRosche had his stroke, Mrs. Kernley was his cook.”

They walked up the steps to the stoop—there was a wheelchair ramp at one side—and Alida rang the bell. Mrs. Calding, the maid, was a friendly, motherly type, and she greeted them with a warm smile.

“Hello, Mrs. Calding,” Alida said. “This is Jeff Mardell, my fiance.”

“I saw you at the funeral,” Mrs. Calding said. “What a terrible thing. Come in, come in.”

She led them along a hallway and into a Victorian parlor that was tastefully furnished with antiques of a type people had been eager to throw out fifty years before—to their descendants’ grief. An exquisite old roll-top desk stood in one corner. It served Mrs. Kernley as an office where she kept her household accounts and records.

Jeff and Alida seated themselves on a sofa that looked as though it might have been a prop for one of Mr. Eastman’s first photographs. Mrs. Calding took a nearby chair. Alida asked, “Is Mrs. Kernley here?”

“The doctor gave her a sedative and put her to bed, the poor dear. This has been almost more than she could take.”

“Is it true those men asked Janie about someone named Johnson?”

“That’s what Mr. Fairchild thought. He lives in the neighborhood, and he was walking his dog. But he was across the street, and there are traffic noises from East Avenue, and he is elderly—he couldn’t have heard very well. This town has got Johnsons on the brain after all those newspaper stories. He may have imagined it.”

“I know there is no Johnson living here, but I wondered if someone’s relatives could have been named Johnson or something like that.”

“Believe me, honey, the police already thought of that. They’ve got Johnsons on the brain, too. On account of all the burglaries, you know. But no one here has any connection with a Johnson. The police checked. They not only checked us—they checked the whole neighborhood!”

“Of course. They would have. We thought we were being clever.” Alida stood up dejectedly. “I suppose we should leave detecting to the detectives. Sorry to bother you, Mrs. Calding.”

“That’s all right, honey. You stop by any time. We are always happy to see you, and I’m sure Mrs. Kernley will want to talk with you when she is feeling better.”

As they started back down the hallway, a door opened. Mrs. Halmer, the nurse, immaculate in her white dress, looked out, nodded at Alida, and said, “Mrs. Calding—could you give me a hand for a moment?”

Calvin DuRosche sat in a invalid’s chair by the window. It was a tidy room, an immaculately clean room, with everything essential to a sick man’s comfort. DuRosche was elderly, gaunt, bald-headed. He sat staring straight ahead. Mrs. Halmer lifted him easily, and Mrs. Calding rearranged his pillows. Jeff watched with professional interest.

“He has had every kind of specialist,” Mrs. Halmer said. “None of them helped him. He can’t talk, he can’t walk, he can’t do a thing for himself. All he does is exist. They say he was such an active, intelligent, man. It is a terrible thing when a person lives too long.”

Alida turned away, holding back her tears. “There is a worse thing—dying too soon.”

They moved down the hall to the doorway with Mrs. Calding following them. On the stoop, Alida said, “Apologies again for bothering you. I guess it was a pretty silly idea.”

“The police didn’t think it was silly. But I wish they would forget about Johnsons and look for those murderers.”

As Jeff and Alida turned away, Mrs. Calding looked down into the shrubbery. “Hy Hyatt!” she exclaimed angrily. “What are you doing there?”

The handyman was crouched behind the clump of bushes that stood beside the entrance. He had a short length of thick pipe in one hand and a butcher knife in the other. He was a runty, ragamuffin type, dressed in cast-off clothing. He wore a white dress shirt, much in need of laundering, open at the throat; faded and patched golfing pants; and running shoes. He didn’t seem to be wearing socks. His long hair was a shaggy brown mat, and any public health officer would have declared him a disaster area.

He flashed a crafty smile, showing decayed stumps of teeth. “I’m guardin’ the house, Mrs. Calding. Them murderers is back. I saw ‘em drive past.”

“Nonsense!” Mrs. Calding exclaimed. “You don’t even know what they looked like. You put those things away before you hurt yourself!”

“Now don’t you worry, Mrs. Calding. I been to school, you know. I can take care of this. There won’t be no murderers breaking in while I’m here.”

“I’ll see to you later,” Mrs. Calding promised.

She followed Alida and Jeff down to the car. Alida apologized again for trying to wish the name Johnson on her.

“The only mystery about a name in this house belongs to Hy,” Mrs. Calding said. “He won’t tell anyone what his first name is. The ‘Hy,’ comes from his last name, Hyatt.”

Hy had come out from behind his shrubbery. He grinned at them again. He held the pipe and knife in a way that boded no good for any intruding murderer. As they drove back down the drive, Mrs. Calding waved her hand at them. Hy stood beside her waving his butcher knife.

At the foot of the drive, Mr. Kernley, a short, fat man with graying hair and a small mustache that seemed incongruously black, stepped out and flagged them. He greeted Alida warmly; she introduced him to Jeff.

“I was looking around that place where Janie was killed,” he said. “She fell back into the hedge and landed on a rock, you know. The police searched there, of course, but it was dark, and I don’t think they worked very hard at it. Probably they didn’t expect to find anything. Those two men never stepped off the sidewalk. Janie lost her balance and staggered backward into the hedge before she fell.”

“She was pushed!” Alida said bitterly.

“Well—Mr. Fairchild thought she was, but he also said she seemed to be struggling with one of the men as though they were both pulling on something. I found this.”

He opened a handkerchief and showed them a fragment of what looked like a black tube. “I thought it was metal,” he said. “But it isn’t—it’s thin wood. See the splinters where it broke? There is something odd set in the end of it. I think one of the men had this in his hand, and Janie caught hold of it, and both of them pulled on it. When it broke, she lost her balance and stumbled backward. She must have fallen pretty hard, so I suppose she could have been pushed at the same time.”

“It looks like a piece of a pocket telescope,” Jeff mused. “Or maybe a microscope—one made for kids. Except that those things wouldn’t have a wood tube.” Holding it by the handkerchief, he scrutinized it perplexedly. “If that’s a lens in the end of it, it certainly is strange-looking.”

“It may have nothing to do with Janie,” Mr. Kernley said. “Someone could have tossed this into the hedge to get rid of it. I pick up all kinds of junk there. Do you think I ought to take it to the police station?”

“The police certainly will want to see it. I know a sergeant who is working on the case. I can take it to him now. It should be checked for fingerprints and then analyzed scientifically. Maybe someone will know what it is.”

“That’s nice of you,” Mr. Kernley said. “I was worried about making a fool of myself, but if you really think it is important—”

“It is. The police will thank you. Even if they don’t, Alida and I thank you. You have given us a chance to do one small thing about Janie’s death.” He folded the handkerchief around the odd object and handed it to Alida to hold.

“Such a lovely girl with all her life ahead of her,” Mr. Kernley said. He shook his head sadly. “So unnecessary. You’ll see that the police get that?”

“In about fifteen minutes,” Jeff promised. They waved and drove off.

There was a meeting that night in one of the row apartments. It was an exact duplicate of the apartment Alida had occupied with Janie, but its furnishings and decor were distinctly masculine, and the place had the unmistakable air of occupancy by indifferent males rather than tidy females.

Most of those present had been at the party. Bob, one of the vocalists, interrupted a babble of talk by shouting for silence. He had a wrestler’s build; in fact, he was one, and his voice boomed. “Hold it! Alida and Jeff have asked us to help them.”

“Where are they?” Charlie asked.

“Alida is working and Jeff had an errand. Now listen. They are trying to find Janie’s murderers. This is our problem, too. Janie was one of us. Are we going to let those thugs get away with it?”

Charlie said, “Well, if the police can’t catch them, how do you expect us—ouch!”

Shirley elbowed him a second time and said, “Shut up!”

“The police don’t seem to be pushing this,” Bob said. “In their book, it wasn’t murder, it was manslaughter—there is no indication that the men wanted to hurt Janie. They certainly didn’t know that rock was there, and they might even be able to plead self-defense. The guy was trying to pull away from her, and she had hold of him—or 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 absorbs light, which is impossible. The light must go somewhere, but it doesn’t. On the other hand, this monstrosity emits light from nowhere. In a dark box with no possible light source, it manages to focus a measurable amount of light.”

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 that is impossible. The police said this was found near the scene of a violent death. Was anything else found there?”

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.