Beyond the Vanishing Point | Page 3

and Babs and the
housekeeper went to bed. He had written a note to Alan; it was found
on his desk in a corner of the laboratory next morning, addressed in

care of the family lawyer to be given Alan in the event of his death. It
said very little. Described a tiny fragment of gold quartz rock the size
of a walnut which would be found under the giant microscope in the
laboratory; and told Alan to give it to the American Scientific Society
to be guarded and watched very carefully.
This note was found, but Dr. Kent had vanished! There had been a
midnight marauder. The laboratory was on the lower floor of the house.
Through one of its open windows, so the police said, an intruder had
entered. There was evidence of a struggle, but it must have been short,
because neither Babs, Alan, the housekeeper, nor any of the neighbors
had heard anything. And the fragment of golden quartz was gone!
The police investigation came to nothing. Polter was found in New
York. He withstood the police questions. There was nothing except
suspicion upon which he could be held, and he was finally released.
Immediately thereafter, he disappeared.
Neither Alan, Babs nor I saw Polter again. Dr. Kent had never been
heard from to this day, four years later when I flew to join the twins in
Quebec. And now Alan told me that Polter was up there! We had never
ceased to believe that Dr. Kent was alive, and that Polter was the
midnight marauder. As we grew older, we began to search for Polter. It
seemed to us, that if we could once get our hands on him, we could
drag from him the truth which the police had failed to get.
The call of a traffic director in mid-Vermont brought me back from
these memories. My buzzer was clanging; a peremptory halting signal
day-beam came darting up at me from below. It caught me and clung. I
shouted down at it.
"What's the matter?" I gave my name and number and all the details in
one breath. Above everything I had no wish to be halted now. "What's
the matter? I haven't done anything wrong."
"The hell you haven't," the director roared. "Come down to three
thousand. That lane's barred."

I dove obediently and his beam followed me. "Once more, like that,
young fellow--" But he went busy with somebody else and I didn't hear
the end of his threat.
I crossed into Maine in mid-afternoon. It was already twilight. The sky
was solid lead and the landscape all up through here was gray-white
with snow in the gathering darkness. I passed the City of Jackman,
crossing full over it to take no chances of annoying the border officials;
and a few miles further, I dropped to the glaring lights of International
Inspection Field. The formalities were soon finished. I was ready to
take-off when Alan rushed at me.
"George! I thought I could connect here." He gripped me. He was
wild-eyed, incoherent. He waved his taxiplane away. "I'm going with
you, George. I'm almost out of my mind. I can't--I don't know what's
happened to her. She's gone, now--"
"Who's gone? Babs?"
"Yes." He pushed me into my plane and climbed in after me. "Don't
talk. Get us up! I'll tell you then. I shouldn't have left."
When we were up in the air, I swung on him. "What are you talking
about? Babs gone?"
I could feel myself shuddering with a nameless horror.
"I don't know what I'm talking about, George. I'm about crazy. The
Quebec police think I am, anyway. I've been raising hell with them for
an hour. Babs is gone! I can't find her. I don't know where she is."
He finally calmed down enough to tell me what happened. Shortly after
his radiophone to me in New York, he had missed Babs. They had had
lunch in the huge hotel and then walked on the Dufferin Terrace--the
famous promenade outside looking down over the Lower City, the
great sweep of the St. Lawrence River and the gray-white distant
Laurentian mountains.

"I was to meet her inside. I went in ahead of her. But she didn't come. I
went back to the Terrace but she was gone. She wasn't in our rooms.
Nor the library, the lobby--anywhere."
But it was afternoon, in the public place of a civilized city. In the
daylight of the Dufferin Terrace, beside the long ice toboggan slide,
under the gaze of skaters on the ice-rink and several hundred holiday
merrymakers, a young girl could hardly be murdered, or kidnapped,
without attracting attention! The Quebec police thought the young
American unduly excited about his sister, who was missing only an
hour. They would do what they could,