Murray Leinster Read Online Free

like a phantom on the screen, movable at incredible rates without resistance. Days and nights went by. He flashed through elaborate evolutions with effortless, infinite speed - backward. His speed increased. He could perceive only in flashes. An instant in a car in the open. The car backed with incredible speed. An instant in the courtroom. He was on trial. Flashes of infinitesimal duration before that and before that and before that—
    The confusion and the chaos ended suddenly. He was in the room where Professor Adner Hale lay dead. He, Rodney, had committed the murder in the one fashion no one would possibly associate with him. He had done it with insensate, maniacal violence. It seemed the deed of a brutish and almost mindless fiend. It was inconceivable that one of the best brains in the country should have directed senseless, flailing blows which had continued long after Professor Adner Hale was dead. It was a perfect alibi.
    And this was the instant when he had made his mistake. He surveyed the blood-spattered, violence-smashed room. He saw a chair which was not overturned in the simulated struggle. He regarded it with satisfaction.
    Before, he had toppled it over, without noticing that under it lay the poker with which Professor Hale had been beaten to death. That had been his mistake. It proved that the chair had not been knocked over in Professor Hale’s death struggle. It proved that the effect of mania was the result of calculation. It set the police to work to discover, not a maniac but a coldly functioning brain which had duplicated in every detail but that one the working of a homicidal maniac’s frenzy. That one small flaw had led to the discovery of clue after clue and the condemnation of the country’s greatest physicist to death. But—
    Now he laid the chair gently on its side. The poker was not under it, now. He pulled gently at a chair leg to bring the poker more plainly into view. Now there was nothing but the handiwork of madness.
    He laughed softly. One of the four best brains in the country. He’d been overconfident. That was all. Now this small blunder was corrected. He would go into another time track. The discovery Professor Adner Hale had helped with - on the drudgery only, of course - and which he insisted must be published for all the world to know, would not be published now. With it as his secret, in the time track into which he would now move.
    He felt his return to attained time begin. Time moved swiftly. It was dawn, and he was somewhere else. It was night, and he was in another place. Dawn and midday and night. His body whirled here and there and everywhere, without resistance. There was confusion which was not confusion and chaos which was not chaotic at all. While his body whirled frenziedly through the sequence of events which lay between the significant moment and the instant from which he had traveled back - but now he moved in another time track entirely - his mind was calmly exultant. He was in the midst of crowds, and in solitude. He was in a room which flickered like a kaleidoscope - which was a courtroom. There was an instant when he was in a car being driven somewhere. He passed through months in flashes of infinitely short duration. Then—
    Time steadied. All was normal again. He was in a cell. In a death cell. It was not the cell he had occupied before, but the deathhouse was the same. It was dawn, and a gray light came in the skylight high overhead. He wore prison garb - but not the same garments he had worn before. The stenciled numbers were different. He was in a different time track, but he was in a death cell.
    There were clankings. Footsteps. Three guards and a trusty appeared before his cell. The trusty, twitching, carried a basin of water and safety razor and a pair of shears. He was to shave Rodney’s temples and slit his trouser legs for the convenience of those who would presently - today - take him through that green door and strap him in that horrible squat