Captain Marks had his office in a cubbyhole off the main room. It was quite a comedown from the quarters he'd occupied upstairs as captain of detectives. He'd held onto that job past his retirement age and, when they were about to throw him out on his ear, D. F. C. came along and he jumped at it. The Captain was not the retiring type.
His door was open, and he waved me in. "Sit down, Forsdon," he said. "Welcome to the Department of Future Crime."
I sat down, and he looked me over. A lean, hard face, closely cropped white hair, and steely grey eyes that looked through a man, rather than at him. Small—five feet seven, a hundred and forty pounds. You looked at him and wondered how he'd ever gotten on the force in the first place, until you saw his eyes. I'd never felt comfortable in his presence.
"Do you know what we have here, Forsdon?" he said.
"Not exactly."
"I don't either—exactly. The brass upstairs thinks it's an expensive toy. It is. But they've given us a trial budget to see if it works, and now it's up to us."
I nodded, and waited for him to go on. He packed his pipe, lit it, and then leaned back and let the smoke go out.
"We have an invention," he said, "which I don't pretend to understand. You saw the thing?"
"Yes," I said. It wasn't easy to overlook.
"Walker calls it Cronus—for the Greek God of Time. It gives us random glances around the city on what looks like a large TV screen—random glances into the future!" He paused for dramatic effect, and I probably disappointed him. I already knew that much. "The picture is hazy," he went on, "and sometimes we have a hell of a time figuring out the location of whatever it is we're looking at. We also have trouble pinpointing the time of an event. But we can't deny the potential. We've been in operation for three weeks, and already we've seen half a dozen holdups days before they happened."