The lieutenant had the hook-and-ladder driven to a distant police station, where in due course Vinelli, the lawyer, arrived with his foot in a cast, and I was bailed out. The cops showed me surprising consideration; it turned out they were furious at the irresponsible riding they had been getting from Bill Bart. A scientific big-shot that McGill knew, named Joe Stein, convinced them I was in no way to blame, and the case was dropped. Professor Stein gave a wonderfully incomprehensible but tranquilizing statement to the press, and Molly and I went to Oyster Bay. "In two weeks, everybody'll have forgotten all about it," the lieutenant told us. "You may even be a hero. I don't know." Before we left, we went with McGill to the lab and saw the diamond. It sat on a bench, gleaming brilliant, smooth-faceted and without a flaw. It was at least two feet across, about the same as the chunk of "glass" on Fifty-first Street. "The cops never recognized what it was," McGill said, "it being so big." "Who would?" Molly asked. "McGill, I've got an idea--" "All I had to do," McGill said, ignoring her, "was to put the graphite on some cinder blocks and the fragment on the graphite. Then I turned a bunsen flame on it and it caught fire with a terrifically bright flame--very small--I guess you saw it." I nodded. "It didn't give off any heat," he went on. "Adiabatic process. And it got its necessary pressure from the random motions together of the graphite particles. Some random motions! When that was used up, it started on the cinder blocks and then the CO_{2} in the air. That's what caused the suction: the blinds were blown straight in. You probably missed that." I shook my head. "Anyway, this thing--" "McGill," Molly interrupted, "I've got an _idea_!" "--this thing has got to be dumped out at sea." "Oh," Molly said, looking crest-fallen. "I was just going to say why don't we break a piece off and sell it in Amsterdam?" "Good God, no! That would only start it up all over again!" "Just a _little_ piece, McGill?" "NO!" With Stein's help, McGill convinced the police that the thing had to be dumped, and we dropped it off a police launch beyond Sandy Hook, to their bored perplexity. They would have been still more puzzled if they had known what it was. McGill came down to Oyster Bay for the weekend and we played a game of gin rummy--a truly memorable game, because the cards behaved and I even lost a little. He congratulated me in a pre-occupied way, which annoyed me. "I should think you'd be gladder than that," I told him. "I am," he said. "But there's something else--" "What's that?" asked Molly, worried. "The schools of fish are traveling head to tail. I'm wondering if that's just the beginning of another mess." We went back to playing gin rummy, but our minds weren't on what we were doing. They haven't been since. Just yesterday, an ocean liner chased its berthing tugboats away and went sightseeing up the Hudson River.