Mr. Steems practically strangled on his sense of injustice. He started toward Headquarters. The squad car followed closely.
When at last he could speak, Mr. Steems cried shrilly, “You ain’t got nothing on me!”
And there was no answer from the back of the cab.
Mr. Steems can tell of these things. He can tell of his status after his lodgings had been searched, and—stacked against the wall, hidden under the bed, jammed into the closet—souvenirs turned up of seventy-one out of the seventy-two persons finally missing. The exception was, of course, Patrolman Cassidy, whose shield, service gun, whistle, handcuffs, brass knuckles, and other assorted metallic mementos lay enshrined at Headquarters as a symbol of devotion to duty.
Mr. Steems became instantly, nationally, famous as the Taxi Monster, murderer by wholesale. His downfall was ascribed to an untiring patrolman who, spurred on by love of a missing person’s daughter, had gone sleepless and followed clue after clue until finally he unmasked the monster—and had tragically become his final victim, done somehow to death on the way to Police Headquarters while a squad car followed close behind.
Mr. Steems was held without bail on seventy-one charges of murder in the first degree. (It would have been seventy-two, had Mr. Binder’s vanishing been reported.) Mr. Steems’s frenziedly righteous protests went unheeded. He was sunk.
But there is justice for all in these United States, especially if publicity goes along with it. A Mr. Irving Castleman was appointed by the court to defend Mr. Steems. He instantly pointed out that not one dead body had so far been found nor had any of the missing persons been seen dead by anybody. The principle of corpus delicti therefore applied. He requested Mr. Steems’s instant release. The authorities countered with separate charges of larceny for each article found piled up in Mr. Steems’s lodgings. His lawyer submitted that no complaint of theft had been made by any missing person. Those objects might have been gifts to Mr. Steems. There was no proof to the contrary. Mr. Steems should be released. It was not until the cops encouraged a lynching mob to hang around outside the jail that Mr. Steems’s lawyer consented to let him stay in a cell as a suspicious person.
Things boomed. Feature writers, news commentators, and gossip columnists made the most of Mr. Steems. He was compared to Mr. Landru, to Mr. Cripps, to Bluebeard, Gilles de Rais, and other mass murderers. His record topped them all. He was tendered the rewards of such eminence. Huge payments were offered for the story of his life and crimes, and his lawyer hopefully urged him to accept so he could pay his trial expenses. Three psychoanalysts explained his urge to kill as the result of childhood frustration. One psychoanalyst said it had developed because he was not frustrated as a child. Four sociologists declared that not Mr. Steems but society would be on trial when he stood before the bar. The Bell Telephone Company set aside its biggest switchboard for the use of the press when the trial took place.
Susie hit the headlines. Not as Mr. Steems’s fiancée, however, but as the heartbroken sweetheart of his final victim. Three other women, however, claimed to be already married to him, and twenty-nine more wrote and suggested matrimony.
And then the bottom dropped out of everything.
Patrolman Cassidy, who had vanished from Mr. Steems’s cab on the way to Headquarters, came limping into that building in a state of bemused distress. He said he had fallen out of Mr. Steems’s cab and found himself minus shield, gun, handcuffs, pants buttons, and the nails in his shoe, which came apart as he picked himself up. He’d come at once to Headquarters to report. . . .
An hour later a fat man was found lying on the street, out of breath. He insisted that he had kidded a taxicab chauffeur about being The Monster, and the next thing he knew he’d been thrown out on the street. Minus his watch, belt buckle, hearing-aid, pants zipper, shoe nails, and other possessions.
In quick succession other missing persons reappeared on the public streets. All were more or less disheveled. Each had lost all metal carried on his or her person. Each was convinced that he—or she—had not disappeared at all, but had merely gotten into a cab, instantly been thrown out, and immediately had come to report the offense. In four hours, nine missing persons reappeared—persons who had been missing for four to five days. In six hours, fifteen others appeared—having been missing from six days to seven. In twenty-four hours, fifty-eight out of the seventy-one known vanished persons had reappeared and unanimously identified Mr. Steems as associated with their mishap. And the end was not yet.
With keen intelligence, the police observed that those who returned were doing so in the reverse order from that in which they had disappeared. When, therefore, Susie’s mother appeared in outraged fury to report the theft of her shoes, wedding ring, and the steel springs out of her foundation garment by the villainous Mr. Steems—whom Susie would never speak to again—the police knew the end was near.
It was nearer than that. It had come. Mr. Binder found himself lying flat on his back on the public highway. He had, he thought at first, fallen out of a taxicab. Then he realized that he had merely fallen into the soft, ancient deerskin over which he had been gloating a moment before at 5:07 in the afternoon of May 3. Now there was neither taxicab nor deerskin about. Moreover, it had suddenly become the middle of the night, and his watch and small change were gone, and his pants were falling down. . . .
Mr. Binder went home—a matter of two blocks. There were papers piled in his front hall. He discovered that it was May 14. He learned what had been going on. He’d gone out of his house, tumbled into the deerskin which proved compenetrability a practical matter—and now it was eleven days and some hours later.
Mr. Binder brewed a cup of strong tea and thought concentratedly. With the facts before him and his background of technical knowledge, it was not difficult to work out a theory which completely explained all the observed and reported facts. But this had more than merely intellectual interest. There was a legal aspect. Seventy-one people could sue. . . . Mr. Binder shuddered. Then he discovered that his name had not been listed as among the missing. Nobody had reported him gone, because he lived alone. No souvenir of him had been found in Mr. Steems’s lodging, because Mr. Steems had hocked his watch.
Mr. Binder came to a very intelligent conclusion. The thing for him to do was keep his mouth shut.
Next day, however, he went over to see his friend Mr. McFadden.
“Now, what d’you know!” said Mr. McFadden. “I had it you were a victim of that there Taxi Monster. Where were you, anyway?”
“I’d like to be sure,” said Mr. Binder. “Listen, George!”
He told Mr. McFadden exactly what had happened. He had found, said Mr. Binder, the secret of compenetration. The atoms of solid things, even steel, are very small and relatively far apart, so that the solidest of objects has actually as much empty space in it as a dust cloud; neutrons and cosmic rays go through without trouble. Ordinarily two solid objects can no more penetrate each other than two dust clouds can penetrate each other. The dust clouds are held together by the air on which the dust particles float. Solid objects are held together by the electric and magnetic fields the individual atoms possess. But if the electric fields of atoms can be stopped from hindering, there is plenty of room for one seemingly solid object to penetrate another, and therefore for two or more things to be in the same place at the same time.
“And that,” said Mr. Binder, “is what I did. I couldn’t take away all the hindering of the atoms, George. I could just cut it down. But I fixed up a deerskin that used to be a throw on the parlor settee, and I could push anything but metal right through it without making a hole. Metal wouldn’t go through. It stayed behind. I had the deerskin sort of magnetized, George, and the effect wouldn’t last forever, but I started over here with it to show you that I could make things compenetrate.”