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After dinner, they returned to the porch, Hartley pere smoking a cigar and carrying out several law books. He only glanced at these occasionally; for the most part, he sat and blew smoke rings, and watched them float away. Some thrice-guilty felon was about to be triumphantly acquitted by a weeping jury; Allan could recognize a courtroom masterpiece in the process of incubation.

* * * * *

It was several hours later that the crunch of feet on the walk caused father and son to look up simultaneously. The approaching visitor was a tall man in a rumpled black suit; he had knobby wrists and big, awkward hands; black hair flecked with gray, and a harsh, bigoted face. Allan remembered him. Frank Gutchall. Lived on Campbell Street; a religious fanatic, and some sort of lay preacher. Maybe he needed legal advice; Allan could vaguely remember some incident–

“Ah, good afternoon, Mr. Gutchall. Lovely day, isn’t it?” Blake Hartley said.

Gutchall cleared his throat. “Mr. Hartley, I wonder if you could lend me a gun and some bullets,” he began, embarrassedly. “My little dog’s been hurt, and it’s suffering something terrible. I want a gun, to put the poor thing out of its pain.”

“Why, yes; of course. How would a 20-gauge shotgun do?” Blake Hartley asked. “You wouldn’t want anything heavy.”

Gutchall fidgeted. “Why, er, I was hoping you’d let me have a little gun.” He held his hands about six inches apart. “A pistol, that I could put in my pocket. It wouldn’t look right, to carry a hunting gun on the Lord’s day; people wouldn’t understand that it was for a work of mercy.”

The lawyer nodded. In view of Gutchall’s religious beliefs, the objection made sense.

“Well, I have a Colt .38-special,” he said, “but you know, I belong to this Auxiliary Police outfit. If I were called out for duty, this evening, I’d need it. How soon could you bring it back?”

Something clicked in Allan Hartley’s mind. He remembered, now, what that incident had been. He knew, too, what he had to do.

“Dad, aren’t there some cartridges left for the Luger?” he asked.

Blake Hartley snapped his fingers. “By George, yes! I have a German automatic I can let you have, but I wish you’d bring it back as soon as possible. I’ll get it for you.”

Before he could rise, Allan was on his feet.

“Sit still, Dad; I’ll get it. I know where the cartridges are.” With that, he darted into the house and upstairs.

The Luger hung on the wall over his father’s bed. Getting it down, he dismounted it, working with rapid precision. He used the blade of his pocketknife to unlock the endpiece of the breechblock, slipping out the firing pin and buttoning it into his shirt pocket. Then he reassembled the harmless pistol, and filled the clip with 9-millimeter cartridges from the bureau drawer.

There was an extension telephone beside the bed. Finding Gutchall’s address in the directory, he lifted the telephone, and stretched his handkerchief over the mouthpiece. Then he dialed Police Headquarters.

“Yes. I think I see what you mean. That was Dunne’s idea, wasn’t it?”

“No. Dunne postulated an infinite series of time dimensions, the entire extent of each being the bare present moment of the next. What I’m postulating is the perpetual coexistence of every moment of time in this dimension, just as every graduation on a yardstick exists equally with every other graduation, but each at a different point in space.”

“Well, as far as duration and sequence go, that’s all right,” the father agreed. “But how about the ‘Passage of Time’?”

“Well, time does appear to pass. So does the landscape you see from a moving car window. I’ll suggest that both are illusions of the same kind. We imagine time to be dynamic, because we’ve never viewed it from a fixed point, but if it is totally present, then it must be static, and in that case, we’re moving through time.”