Nale was close enough to see what happened. He saw the pennies taken
from what seemed to be seven or eight in the boy's palm. When the two
were taken away there seemed to be a slight blur--and there was only a
solitary penny left.
He didn't wait. The paper boy and the customer were still patiently
arguing as he climbed into his car and drove away. He drove slowly with
his foot close to the brakes.
Although his eyes were warily watching each car on the street, his mind
was busy. _He was trying to figure out who had been shot._
"It might even have been me!" he thought. And there was no way of
knowing.
He drove the car another block. There was doubt growing in his mind. On
a sudden impulse he pulled the car over to the curb and stopped the
motor. Getting out, he started walking rapidly. There would be three
miles of walking before he reached observation, but it would be safer to
walk.
A block further he stopped abruptly in surprise. The spaceport
observation hospital was just in front of him.
"I should have guessed," he muttered as he pushed through the heavy
doors. "The speedometer, of course. Naturally it would go first."
* * * * *
Martha Ryan saw the door close on Dr. Hargrave, then started reading
again. She finished the page and turned it over. The first few words of
the opposite side of the sheet showed the continuity to be difficult.
Thinking she might have turned two sheets by mistake, she turned back
one. It was still wrong. She sighed exasperatedly. She distinctly
remembered that she had been on page twenty-five, so the next page
should be twenty-six. Since it hadn't been, she would have to look for
twenty-six.
She looked through the book, page by page, and it wasn't there. Getting
over her exasperation she made a game of it. Finally she developed to
the stage where she would open the book at random, note the number of
the page, close the book, and then try to find that page she had just
seen.
It was a very peculiar book. She found that, (a) she could find any page
number she wasn't looking for, and (b) any page number she looked for
was not in the book, even though it had been a moment before.
Resting thoughtfully for several minutes on this achievement of
deduction she decided to try another experiment. She counted the number
of sheets of paper in the book and wrote the number down. It was one
hundred twenty-four.
Then she counted them again. There were one hundred eighty-six. She
counted them five more times, making seven times she had counted them.
She got nine different numbers of sheets in the book. She decided she
couldn't get nine different numbers after counting only seven times, and
counted the numbers. There were five. She closed her eyes and counted to
ten rapidly, then counted them again. There were fourteen.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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