“But why did he vanish,” Miss Dodson demanded tearfully, “whenever he saw me?”

  “He did not vanish,” Street replied, “he simply stood up, and, standing, passed into November sixth, as I have already explained. The first time because he heard you call his name, the second because you startled him by dropping glassware, and the third time because, as a gentleman of the old school, he automatically rose when a woman entered the room. He doubtless realized later that he would reappear to you by taking his seat once more, but he was loath to frighten you, and hoped he could think his way out of his predicament; the hint he required for that I believe I have provided: you see, when I stood on my head just now I appeared to Dodson at about the time he suffered his unfortunate accident; the formula I have already quoted, plus the knowledge that Dodson had vanished thirteen days ago, allowed me to calculate that all I need do was to place my own ‘temporal determinant’—the area of my frontal lobes—fourteen centimeters above the floor.”

  “But where is he now?”

  Street shrugged. “I have no way of knowing, really. Obviously, he is not here. He might be at the opera or attending a seminar, but it seems most probable that he is in the apartment below us.” He raised his voice. “Professor! Professor Dodson, are you down there?”

  A moment later I saw a man of less than medium height, with white hair and a straggling yellow mustache, appear at the foot of the escalator. It was Professor Dodson! “What is it?” he asked testily. “Alice, who the hell are these people?”

  “Friends,” she sobbed. “Won’t you please come up? Mr. Street, is it all right if he comes up?”

  “It would be better,” Street said gently, “if you went down to him. He must pack for that trip to the seaside, you know.” While Miss Dodson was running down the escalator he called to the man below, “What project engages you at the moment, Professor?”

  Dodson looked irritated, but replied, “A monograph on the nature of pragmatic time, young man. I had a mysterious—” His mouth was stopped with kisses.

  Beside me St. Louis said softly, “Stay tuned for Ralph the Dancing Moose,” but I was perhaps the only one who heard him.

  · · · ·

  Much later, when we were returning home on the monorail after Street had collected his fee from Wide, I said: “Street, there are several things I still don’t understand about that case. Was that girl Dodson’s daughter—or wasn’t she?”

  The rain drummed against the windows, and Street’s smile was a trifle bitter. “I don’t know why it is, Westing, that our society prefers disguising the love of elderly scientists as parenthood to regularizing it as marriage; but it does, and we must live and work in the world we find.”

  “May I ask one more question, Street?”

  “I suppose so.” My friend slouched wearily in his seat and pushed the deerstalker cap he always affected over his eyes. “Fire away, Westing.”

  “You told him to go down the escalator, but I don’t see how that could help him—he would have ended up, well, goodness knows where.”

  “When,” Street corrected me. “Goodness knows when. Actually I calculated it as July twenty-fourth, more or less.”

  “Well, I don’t see how that could have helped him. And wouldn’t we have seen him going down? I mean, when the top of his head reached the right level—”

  “We could,” Street answered sleepily. “I did. That was why I could speak so confidently. You didn’t because you were all looking at me, and I didn’t call your attention to it because I didn’t want to frighten Miss Dodson.”

  “But I still don’t see how his going down could have straightened out what you call his bend in orientation. He would just be downstairs sometime in July, and as helpless as ever.”

  “Downstairs,” Street said, “but not helpless. He called himself—in his lab upstairs—on the Tri-D-phone and told himself not to do it. Fortunately a man of Dodson’s age is generally wise enough to take his own advice. So you see, the bend was only a rubber bend after all; it was capable of being snapped back, and I snapped it.”

  “Street,” I said a few minutes later, “are you asleep?”

  “Not now I’m not.”

  “Street, is Wide’s real name—I mean, is it really Wide?”

  “I understand he is of Montenegrin manufacture, and it’s actually something unpronounceable; but he’s used Wide for years.”

  “The first time I was in his office—there was some correspondence on his desk, and one of the envelopes was addressed to Wolfe.”

  “That was intended for the author of this story,” Street said sleepily. “Don’t worry, Wide will forward it to him.”

  Westwind

  “…to all of you, my dearly loved fellow countrymen.

  And most particularly—as ever—to my eyes, Westwind.”

  One wall of the steaming, stinking room began to waver, the magic portal that had opened upon a garden of almost inconceivable beauty beginning to mist and change. Fountains of marble waved like grass, and rose trees, whose flowery branches wore strands of pearl and diamond, faded to soft old valentines. The ruler’s chair turned to bronze, then to umber, and the ruler himself, fatherly and cunning, wise and unknowable, underwent a succession of transformations, becoming at first a picture, then a poster, and at last a postage stamp.

  The lame old woman who ran the place turned the wall off and several people protested. “You heard what he said,” she told them. “You know your duty. Why do you have to listen to some simpleton from the Department of Truth say everything over in longer words and spread his spittle on it?”

  The protestors, having registered their postures, were silent. The old woman looked at the clock behind the tiny bar she served.

  “Game in twenty minutes,” she said. “Folks will be coming in then, rain or no rain, wanting drinks. You want some, you better get them now.”

  Only two did: hulking, dirty men who might have been of any dishonest trade. A few people were already discussing the coming game. A few others talked about the address they had just heard—not its content, which could not have meant much to most of them, but the ruler and his garden, exchanging at hundredth hand bits of palace gossip of untold age. The door opened and the storm came in and a young man with it.

  He was tall and thin. He wore a raincoat that had soaked through and an old felt hat covered with a transparent plastic protection whose elastic had forced the hat’s splayed brim into a tight bell around his head. One side of the young man’s face was a blue scar; the old woman asked him what he wanted.

  “You have rooms,” he said.

  “Yes, we do. Very cheap too. You ought to wear something over that.”

  “If it bothers you,” he said, “don’t look at it.”

  “You think I’ve got to rent to you?” She looked around at her customers, lining up support, should the young man with the scar decide to resent her remarks. “All I’ve got to do if you complain is say we’re full. You can walk to the police station then—it’s twenty blocks—and maybe they’ll let you sleep in a cell.”

  “I’d like a room and something to eat. What do you have?”

  “Ham sandwich,” she said. She named a price. “Your room—” She named another.

  “All right,” he said. “I’d like two sandwiches. And coffee.”

  “The room is only half if you share with somebody—if you want me to I can yell out and see if anybody wants to split.”

  “No.”

  She ripped the top from a can of coffee. The handle popped out and the contents began to steam. She gave it to him and said, “I guess they won’t take you in the other places, huh? With that face.”

  He turned away from her, sipping his coffee, looking the room over. The door by which he had just entered (water still streamed from his coat and he could feel it in his shoes, sucking and gurgling with his every movement) opened again and a blind girl came in.

  He saw that she was blind before he saw anything else about her. She wore black glasses, which on that impenetrable, rain-wracked night would have been clue enough, and as she entered she looked (in the second most terrible and truest sense) at Nothing.

  The old woman asked, “Where did you come from?”

  “From the terminal,” the girl said. “I walked.” She carried a white cane, which she swung before her as she sidled toward the sound of the old woman.

  “I need a place to sleep,” the girl said.

  Her voice was clear and sweet and the young man decided that even before the rain had scrubbed her face she hadn’t worn makeup.

  He said, “You don’t want to stay here. I’ll call you a cab.”

  “I want to stay here,” the girl said in her clear voice. “I have to stay somewhere.”

  “I have a communicator,” the young man said. He opened his coat to show it to her—a black box with a speaker, keys, and a tiny screen—then realized that he had made a fool of himself. Someone laughed.

  “They’re not running.”

  The old woman said, “What’s not running?”

  “The cabs. Or the buses. There’s high water in a lot of places all over the city and they’ve been shorting out. I have a communicator too”—the blind girl touched her waist—“and the ruler made a speech just a few minutes ago. I listened to him as I walked and there was a newscast afterward. But I knew anyway because a gentleman tried to call one for me from the terminal, but they wouldn’t come.”

  “You shouldn’t stay here,” the young man said.

  The old woman said, “I got a room if you want it—the only one left.”

  “I want it,” the girl told her.

  “You’ve got it. Wait a minute now—I’ve got to fix this fellow some sandwiches.”

  Someone swore at the old woman and said that the game was about to start.

  “Five minutes yet.” She took a piece of boiled ham from under the counter and put it between two slices of bread, then repeated the process.

  The young man said, “These look eatable. Not fancy, but eatable. Would you like to have one?”

  “I have a little money,” the blind girl said. “I can pay for my own.” And to the old woman: “I would like some coffee.”

  “How about a sandwich?”

  “I’m too tired to eat.”

  · · · ·

  The door was opening almost constantly now as people from the surrounding tenements braved the storm and splashed in to watch the game. The old woman turned the wall on and they crowded near it, watching the pregame warm-up, practicing and perfecting the intentness they would use on the game itself. The scarred young man and the blind girl were edged away and found themselves nearest the door in a room now grown very silent save for the sound from the wall.

  The young man said, “This is really a bad place—you shouldn’t be here.”

  “Then what are you doing here?”

  “I don’t have much money,” he said. “It’s cheap.”

  “You don’t have a job?”

  “I was hurt in an accident. I’m well now, but they wouldn’t keep me on—they say I would frighten the others. I suppose I would.”

  “Isn’t there insurance for that?”

  “I wasn’t there long enough to qualify.”

  “I see,” she said. She raised her coffee carefully, holding it with both hands. He wanted to tell her that it was about to spill—she did not hold it quite straight—but dared not. Just as it was at the point of running over the edge it found her lips.

  “You listened to the ruler,” he said, “while you were walking in the storm. I like that.”

  “Did they listen here?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. I wasn’t here. The wall was off when I came in.”

  “Everyone should,” she said. “He does his best for us.”

  The scarred young man nodded.

  “People won’t cooperate,” she said. “Don’t cooperate. Look at the crime problem—everyone complains about it, but it is the people themselves who commit the crimes. He tries to clean the air, the water, all for us—”

  “But they burn in the open whenever they think they won’t be caught,” the young man finished for her, “and throw filth in the rivers. The bosses live in luxury because of him, but they cheat on the standards whenever they can. He should destroy them.”

  “He loves them,” the girl said simply. “He loves everyone. When we say that, it sounds like we’re saying he loves no one, but that’s not true. He loves everyone.”

  “Yes,” the scarred young man said after a moment, “but he loves Westwind the best. Loving everyone does not exclude loving someone more than others. Tonight he called Westwind ‘my eyes.’”

  “Westwind observes for him,” the girl said softly, “and reports. Do you think Westwind is someone very important?”

  “He is important,” the young man said, “because the ruler listens to him—and after all, it’s next to impossible for anyone else to get an audience. But I think you mean ‘does he look important to us?’ I don’t think so—he’s probably some very obscure person you’ve never heard of.”

  “I think you’re right,” she said.

  He was finishing his second sandwich and he nodded, then realized that she could not see him. She was pretty, he decided, in a slender way, not too tall, wore no rings. Her nails were unpainted, which made her hands look, to him, like a schoolgirl’s. He remembered watching the girls playing volleyball when he had been in school—how he had ached for them. He said, “You should have stayed in the terminal tonight. I don’t think this is a safe place for you.”

  “Do the rooms lock?”

  “I don’t know. I haven’t seen them.”

  “If they don’t I’ll put a chair under the knob or something. Move the furniture. At the terminal I tried to sleep on a bench—I didn’t want to walk here through all that rain, believe me. But every time I fell asleep I could feel someone’s hand on me—once I grabbed him, but he pulled away. I’m not very strong.”

  “Wasn’t anyone else there?”

  “Some men, but they were trying to sleep too—of course it was one of them, and perhaps they were all doing it together. One of them told the others that if they didn’t let me alone he’d kill someone—that was when I left. I was afraid he wasn’t doing it—that somebody would be killed or at least that there would be a fight. He was the one who called about the cab for me. He said he’d pay.”

  “I don’t think it was him, then.”

  “I don’t either.” The girl was silent for a moment, then said, “I wouldn’t have minded it so much if I hadn’t been so tired.”

  “I understand.”

  “Would you find the lady and ask her to show me to my room?”

  “Maybe we could meet in the morning for breakfast.”

  The blind girl smiled, the first time the scarred young man had seen her smile. “That would be nice,” she said.

  He went behind the bar and touched the old woman’s arm. “I hate to interrupt the game,” he said, “but the young lady would like to go to her room.”

  “I don’t care about the game,” the old woman said. “I just watch it because everybody else does. I’ll get Obie to take care of things.”

  “She’s coming,” the scarred young man said to the blind girl. “I’ll go up with you. I’m ready to turn in myself.”

  The woman was already motioning for them and they followed her up a narrow staircase filled with foul odors. “They pee in here,” she said. “There’s toilets down at the end of the hall, but they don’t bother to use them.”

  “How terrible,” the girl said.

  “Yes, it is. But that way they’re getting away with something—they’re putting one over on me because they know if I was to catch them I’d throw them out. I try and catch them, but at the same time I feel sorry for them—it’s pretty bad when the only wins you have left are the games on the wall and cheating an old woman by dirtying her steps.” She paused at the top of the stairs for breath. “You two are going to be just side-by-side—you don’t mind that?”

  The girl said, “No,” and the scarred young man shook his head.

  “I didn’t think you would and they’re the last I’ve got anyway.”

  The scarred young man was looking down the narrow corridor. It was lined with doors, most of them shut.

  “I’ll put you closest to the bathroom,” the old woman was saying to the girl. “There’s a hook on the bathroom door, so don’t you worry. But if you stay in there too long somebody’ll start pounding.”

  “I’ll be all right,” the girl said.

  “Sure you will. Here’s your room.”

  The rooms had been parts of much larger rooms once. Now they were subdivided with green-painted partitions of some stuff like heavy cardboard. The old woman went into the girl’s place and turned on the light. “Bed’s here; dresser’s there,” she said. “Washstand in the corner, but you have to bring your water from the bathroom. No bugs—we fumigate twice a year. Clean sheets.”

  The girl was feeling the edge of the door. Her fingers found a chain lock and she smiled.

  “There’s a dead bolt too,” the scarred young man said.

  The old woman said, “Your room’s next door. Come on.”

  · · · ·

  His room was much like the girl’s, save that the cardboard partition (it had been liberally scratched with obscene words and pictures) was on the left instead of the right. He found that he was acutely aware of her moving behind it, the tap of her stick as she established the positions of the bed, the dresser, the washstand. He locked his door and took off his soaked coat and hung it on a hook, then took off his shoes and stockings. He disliked the thought of walking on the gritty floor in his wet feet, but there was no alternative except the soggy shoes. With his legs folded under him he sat on the bed, then unhooked the communicator from his belt and pushed 555-333-4477, the ruler’s number.

  “This is Westwind,” the scarred young man whispered.