"Two to three days."
I sat down wearily, and stared at Cronus. The screen was blank. "How did you manage to invent that thing?" I said.
"I didn't really invent it. I just—discovered it. I was tinkering with a TV set, and I changed some circuits and added a lot of gadgets, just for the hell of it. The pictures I got were darned poor, but they didn't seem to be coming from any known station—or combination of stations, since they kept changing. That was interesting, so I kept working on it. Then one day the screen showed me a big aircar smashup. There were about ten units involved, and I told myself, 'Boy, these Class D pictures are really overdoing it.' About a week later I opened my morning paper, and there was the same smashup on page one. It took a long time to get anybody interested."
He stopped suddenly as the Captain came charging out of his office.
"Brooklyn," he called. "Gregory was living in a rooming house in Brooklyn. He left three weeks ago."
A lead with a dead end. No one knew where he'd gone. It proved that he was somewhere in the vicinity of New York City, but I don't think any of us ever doubted that.
"One thing is interesting," the Captain said. "He's using his own name. No reason why he shouldn't, of course. He's not a criminal—but he is a potential criminal, and he doesn't know that."
I saw, suddenly, that we had a double problem. We had to protect Stella from Gregory, but we also had to protect Gregory from himself. If we could find him.
"There's not much we can do," I said, "but keep on looking."