All the Colors of Darkness. Lloyd Biggle jr.
proxies. He’d had faith in the company, and he’d made himself useful, but he was something of a fanatic on the subject of freight. Watkins preferred to develop the passenger service first. The company would show a greater profit on passenger operations, and there were fewer related problems. Passengers accepted the responsibility for transporting themselves to and from the terminals, and they didn’t have to be stored until called for.
“Right now we haven’t fully solved the problem of passenger luggage,” Watkins said. “But we aren’t forgetting the freight potential. Arnold has a special transmitter on the drawing boards, designed to handle freight. My feeling is that the freight operation should be kept entirely separate from our passenger operations. I’m certain that in the long run we can set up freight terminals more easily than we can expand and adapt our passenger terminals to handle freight. We also have inquiries from the postal authorities and from several large corporations about the possibility of leasing transmitters from us. The whole matter should be thoroughly explored. Would you like to head a committee to look into it, Miller?”
Miller nodded. “I agree that it wouldn’t be wise to jump into it without extensive planning. On the other hand—”
The door opened. Watkins turned with a smile, and waved. “Come in, Ted. We were just—what’s the matter?”
Grossman took one look at Arnold’s face, and threw up his hands despairingly. “Here it is. I thought things were going too well.”
Arnold wearily pulled up a chair and sat down to tell them about the missing passenger.
“How is that possible?” Watkins asked.
“It isn’t possible,” Arnold said.
“But it happened.”
“It seems to have happened.”
“Where could a passenger go?” Miller demanded. “Into the ninth dimension, or something?”
“Put it another way,” said Vaughan, a vice president. “How many dimensions are there between transmitter stations? If you engineers really understood how the thing works—”
Arnold interrupted angrily. “We know how the transmitter works. Let’s get that straight right now. We don’t know why it works, but we have the how completely under control. If we didn’t, we wouldn’t be moving passengers today. There is no ‘between’ when you transmit. You are either at your point of departure or at your destination. If something happens before you leave, you don’t go. If something happens after you arrive, you’re already there. Look.” He snatched a blank piece of paper from Grossman, and drew large squares in two diagonal corners. “These are your two transmitter stations.” He brought the corners together, so that the squares were adjacent. “This is what the transmitter does. As long as it is operating properly, the two stations are locked together. If it doesn’t operate properly—” he smoothed out the paper “—the passenger doesn’t go anywhere.”
“But one has gone—somewhere,” Watkins said.
“One seems to have gone somewhere. We have not lost a passenger. We have apparently lost a passenger.”
“The passenger would no doubt find that distinction very consoling,” Vaughan said dryly.
“Good Lord!” Grossman exclaimed. “Another lawsuit!”
Watkins turned to a man at the far end of the table. “Harlow, what are the legal implications of this?”
“There aren’t any,” Harlow said promptly. “The legal aspects are already taken care of. The company’s liability is clearly stated upon each ticket, and is covered by the free insurance given to the passenger. The liability is the insurance company’s headache. You don’t need a lawyer for this. You need a scientist—or the police.”
“If we’d started out with freight,” Miller said, “we wouldn’t have had problems like this.”
“What police?” Grossman wanted to know. “New York or Honolulu? Or any of three thousand places in between?”
“The FBI?” Harlow suggested.
Watkins shook his head. “No. No police. Not if we can help it. We can’t afford bad publicity just when we’re getting started.”
“The publicity will be a lot worse if we don’t handle this properly,” Miller said.
Grossman banged on the table. “Look here. What if the insurance company should decide to cancel our policy? We convinced them there wouldn’t be any claims, and here we are only in the second day, and—bang! If we had to stop giving free insurance because we couldn’t get anyone to underwrite it, that would kill us.”
“We should have started with freight,” Miller said.
“How about a private detective?” Arnold asked. “I know a good one.”
Watkins looked around the table. “What do you think? If there’s no scientific explanation for this, a detective certainly wouldn’t do any harm.”
Four heads nodded. Miller said, “I still think we should call in the police.”
“Not yet,” Watkins said. “Get your detective, Ted.”
Arnold telephoned Darzek’s office, alerted the Paris Terminal of Universal Trans, and was waiting for Darzek when he stepped through to New York. “Come along,” he said. “I have a job for you.”
“Leggo!” Darzek protested. “I don’t want a job. I’ve had a long evening with a very untractable young lady, I’m tired, and I’m late for an appointment.”
“Evening?”
“In Paris it’s evening. Night, now.”
“Oh,” Arnold said. “You can use the phone in my office to cancel your appointment, and then I’ll take you upstairs.”
Black would have been an appropriate color for the room, Darzek thought. The faces were glum except for Arnold’s, which was angry. Watkins seemed calmly rational, but his pallor was deathlike.
Arnold spoke, and then Watkins. Darzek listened and watched the faces around the table. Grossman, the plump treasurer, was working at being heroic in the face of adversity. Miller, after one outburst on the virtues of the freight business, sulked in silence. Harlow, the company’s legal advisor, had lost interest and was looking at Monday’s market reports. The two vice presidents, Vaughan and Cohen, were not listening so much as waiting for an opening to deliver their own gloomy pronouncements.
Arnold was speaking again. “Everything was clear on both ends. She walked through the transmitter here in New York. Plunk, her handbag came sailing through in Honolulu. We haven’t found a trace of her since.”
“Anything in the handbag?” Darzek asked.
“A billfold with identification and fourteen bucks, plus the usual feminine clutter.”
“I’d like to see it.”
“I’ll get it,” Arnold said.
The handbag was produced, and placed on the table. Darzek took one glance at it and started to laugh. The others stared at him, shock and indignation blended in their expressions—exactly, Darzek thought, as if he’d just told an obscene joke in church.
“Now I’ll tell you what happened,” Darzek said. “You’ve been had. First this woman stirred up enough fuss to get herself noticed by a lot of people. She did that so you couldn’t claim afterwards that she’d never been here. Then she walked up to the transmitter, chucked her handbag through, and went back to the gate for another round of arguments. After that she ran out on you. Ducked over into another line, maybe, and left you with a monstrous mystery on your hands.”
The room was silent. Harlow had laid aside his newspaper, and Miller leaned forward and gazed at Darzek, open-mouthed.
“It may be that we were making the