"Sure I will. I always appreciate your tips, Dr. Johns."
His smile was queer. "I haven't got anything—not that you can use," he said. "Certainly not yet. I guess I just figure I'll feel better, talking about it. When can you arrive?"
"I'll come right away," I told him. "Not busy tonight. I'll be there by midnight."
We disconnected. I was just about to leave when Shorty Dirk walked in on me. Shorty was—and still is—connected with the American Newsprint Publishers—a reporter in the Crime Division, specializing in reporting the work of the Bureau of Missing Persons. He and I were good friends, perhaps because we are so different. I'm big and rangy, slow-going and easy-tempered. In college I was a good athlete, but now this radio work was putting quite a bit of soft poundage on me which didn't belong—poundage which, I do assure you, the Crimson Comet business got rid of in a hurry. Like all of us five, I was something like an undernourished greyhound when we got back.
Shorty isn't much over five and a half feet, thin and wiry and alert—a sort of little human dynamo; a freckle-faced fellow with a shock of bristly red hair and a good-natured grin.
"Where you going?" he asked.
I told him. "I'll go with you," he said. He grinned. "I'm only here, Bob, because I haven't got anything better to do."
We took my small flyer from the roof stage and headed north. It was a handsome night, warm and almost cloudless with the upper air so clear that the stars were packed solid on the purple-blue vault of the heavens. Shorty and I didn't theorize, during the brief trip up to the White Mountains, on what Dr. Johns might have to say. Shorty wasn't much interested in astronomy, anyway—to him, as he often said, it was an uninteresting enigma. He mentioned that tonight.
"Good," I said. "Then, how is crime coming? Many people missing lately?"