The Thinking Machine Collected Stories Part 131

"Then we saw Mr. Knight. He a.s.sured me, and I believed him, that he had never had any other love affair, therefore no woman would have had a motive in killing Miss Oliver because of him. He was positive, too, that Miss Oliver had never had any other love affair, yet I saw the possibility of some connecting link between her and the n.o.bleman. It was perfectly possible, indeed probable, that he would not know of it. At the moment I was convinced that there had been such an affair.

"Mr. Knight also told me that he bought his stiletto cane in Rome; and he paid a price that would seem to guarantee that it would be a perfect one, with the same wood in the handle and lower part, and that he and Miss Oliver had never had any sort of a quarrel."

There was a little pause and The Thinking Machine shifted his position slightly.

"Here I had a motive-jealousy of one man who was thrown over for another; the method of death, through the lattice; a clue to the murderer in the stiletto, and the name of the man. It seemed conclusive but I had overlooked a figure one. I saw that when Mr. Oliver a.s.sured me that Miss Eleanor Oliver did not know the n.o.bleman whose name I wrote for him; that she could not have known him. The entire structure tumbled. I was nonplussed and a little rude, I fear, in my surprise. Then I had to reconsider the matter from the beginning. The most important of all the connecting links was missing, yet the logic was right. It is always right.

"There are times when imagination has to bridge gaps caused by the absence of demonstrable facts. I considered the matter carefully, then saw where I had dropped the figure one. I 'phoned to Mr. Hatch to know if Miss Oliver had a sister. She had. The newspapers to which Mr. Hatch referred me told me the rest of it. It was Eleanor Oliver's sister who had the affair with the n.o.bleman. That cleared it. There is the name of the murderer."

He laid down a card on which was scribbled this name and address: "Count Leo Tortino, Hotel Teutonic." Hatch and the detective read it simultaneously, then looked at The Thinking Machine inquiringly.

"But I don't see it yet," expostulated the detective. "This man Knight--"

"Briefly it is this," declared the other impatiently. "The newspapers carried a story of Florence Oliver's love affair with Count Tortino at the time she was travelling in Europe with her mother. According to what I read she jilted him and returned to this country where her engagement to another man was rumoured. That was several months ago. Now it doesn't follow that because the Count knew Florence Oliver that he knew or even knew of Eleanor Oliver.

"Suppose he came here maddened by disappointment and seeking revenge, suppose further he reached the theatre, as he did, while the anvil chorus was on, the party started into the wrong box and the usher mentioned casually that the Olivers were in there. We presume he knew Mrs. Oliver by sight, and saw her. He might reasonably have surmised, perhaps he was told, that the other woman was Miss Oliver-and Miss Oliver meant to him the woman who had jilted him. The lattice work offered a way, the din of the music covered the act-and that's all. It doesn't really appear-it isn't necessary to know-how he carried the stiletto about him, or why."

The detective was gnawing his moustache. He was silent for several minutes trying to see the tragedy in this new light.

"But the threats Knight made?" he inquired finally.

"Has he explained them?"

"Oh, he said something about the girl being ill and wanting to go home, and he urged her not to. He told her, he says, that she mustn't go, because he would have to do something desperate. Silly explanation I call it."

"But I dare say it's perfectly correct," commented The Thinking Machine. "Men of your profession, Mr. Mallory, never believe the simple things. If you would take the word of an accused man at face value occasionally you would have less trouble." There was a pause, then: "I promised Mr. Knight that he would be free by midnight. It is now ten. Suppose you run down to the Teutonic and see Count Tortino. He will hardly deny anything."

Detective Mallory and Hatch found the Count in his room. He was lying face down across a bed with a bullet hole in his temple. A note of explanation confessed the singular error which had led to the murder of Eleanor Oliver.

It was three minutes of midnight when Sylvester Knight walked out of his cell a heartbroken man, but free.

FIVE MILLIONS BY WIRELESS.

Within the great room, dim, shadowy, mysterious as the laboratory of some alchemist of old, and foul with the pungent odors of strange chemical messes, there blazed a single light, a powerful electrical contrivance fitted with reflector, and so shaded that its concentrated rays beat down fiercely upon a table littered with scientific apparatus; and bending over the table was a man, an odd, almost pathetic little figure, slight to childishness, small of stature, attenuated. His hair was a straw-colored thatch thrown back impatiently from a domelike brow, increasing in effect the abnormal size of his head. His eyes were narrow slits of pale blue, squinting petulantly through thick spectacles; his wizened, clean-shaven face was white with the pallor of the student; his mouth was a straight, bloodless line. His hands, busy now at some microscopic labor, were slender and almost transparent under the blinding glare from above; his fingers long, sensitive, delicate.

The door opened, and an elderly woman appeared with a tray.

"Some coffee and rolls, sir," she explained. "Really you ought to have something, sir."

"Put them down." The little man didn't lift his eyes from his work; he spoke curtly.

"And if you should ask me, sir," the woman continued, "I'd say you ought to stop whatever you're a-doing of, and take some rest, sir."

"Tut, tut, Martha!" the little man objected. "I've only just begun."

"You've been a-standing right there, sir," Martha denied, in righteous indignation, "ever since Sunday afternoon at four o'clock."

"What time is it now?"

"It's ten o'clock Tuesday morning, sir."

"Dear me, dear me!"

"You haven't slept a wink, sir," Martha complained, "and you haven't eat enough--"

"Martha, you annoy me," the little man interrupted peevishly. "Run along and attend to your duties."

"But, sir, you can't keep a-going like--"

"Very well, then," and there was a childish tone of resignation in the master's voice. "It's Tuesday, you say? Tell me when it's noon Wednesday."

Martha went out with a helpless shrug of her shoulders, leaving him alone.

Hours pa.s.sed. The coffee, untasted, grew cold. Motionless, the little man continued at his labors with tense eagerness in his narrow eyes, oblivious alike of the things about him, and of exhausted nature. The will beneath the straw-colored thatch knew not weariness.

And this was "The Thinking Machine"-Professor Augustus S. F. X. Van Dusen, Ph. D., F. R. S., M. D., LL. D., et cetera, et cetera-logician, a.n.a.lyst, worker of miracles in the exact sciences, intellectual wizard of his time; this the master mind, exalted by the c.u.mulative genius of generations gone before, which had isolated itself on a pinnacle of achievement through sheer force of applied reason. Once he had been the controversial center of his profession, riding down pet theories and tentative surmises and cherished opinions, and setting up instead precise facts, a few rescued from the chaos he had himself created, more of his own uncovering. Now he was the court of last appeal in the sciences.

The Thinking Machine! No one of the honorary degrees thrust upon him w.i.l.l.y-nilly by the universities of the world described him half so accurately as did this t.i.tle-a chance paradox applied by a newspaper man. Seemingly tireless, calm, unemotional-unless one counted as an emotion the constant note of irritation in his voice-terse of speech, crabbed of manner, and possessed of an uncanny faculty of separating all things into their primal units, he lived in a circ.u.mscribed sphere which he had stripped of all illusion. The mental precision which distinguished his laboratory work characterized all else he did. If any man ever reduced human frailties, human virtues, and human motives to mathematics that man was The Thinking Machine.

It has been my pleasure to set down at another time and place some results of The Thinking Machine's investigations along lines disa.s.sociated with abstruse problems of his profession, these being chiefly instances in which he had turned the light of cold logic upon perplexing criminal mysteries with well-nigh mathematical precision.

Also, it has been my pleasure to relate at length some of those curious adventures which led to The Thinking Machine's incongruous friendship for Hutchinson Hatch.

Hatch was a newspaper reporter, a young man of vitality and enthusiasm and keen wordliness; he was a breath of the outside to this odd little man, who never read papers, who rarely came into contact with things as they are, who had not even the small vices which bring individuals together. It had been Hatch who first applied the t.i.tle of The Thinking Machine to the eminent scientist, and the phrase had stuck.

Perhaps not the least interesting of the adventures of these two together was that which culminated in the bestowal upon The Thinking Machine of the Order of the Iron Eagle, second cla.s.s, by Emperor Gustavus, of Germania-Austria. It so happened in that case that the fate of an empire and the future of its royal house lay for a time in The Thinking Machine's slender hands. Failure on his part certainly would have changed the history of Europe, and probably the map. This problem was purely intellectual, and came to his attention at a time when physical vitality was at its lowest, after forty-eight hours' unceasing work in his laboratory.

The door opened, and Martha entered.

"Martha," the eminent scientist stormed, "if you've brought me more coffee I shall discharge you!"

"It isn't coffee, sir," she replied. "It's a--"

"And don't tell me it's already twelve o'clock Wednesday."

"It's a card, sir. Two gentlemen who--"

"Can't see them."

Not for an instant had the squinting eyes been raised from the work which engrossed The Thinking Machine. Martha laid the card on the table; he glanced at it impatiently. Herr Von Hartzfeldt!

"He says, sir, it's a matter of the utmost importance," Martha explained.

"Ask him who he is and what he wants."

The unexpectedness of the answer Martha brought back straightened The Thinking Machine where he stood.