'Sorry, you must be looking for someone else.'
"'What're you doing here?' Leopold asked then.
"'Why, I inherited what my uncle left,' said the young fellow.
"And, sure enough, when Leopold talked to me and persuaded me to go around with him to McIlvaine's lawyer, we found that the old fellow had made a will and left everything to his nephew, a namesake.
The stipulations were clear enough; among them was the express wish that if anything happened to him, the elder Thaddeus McIlvaine, of no matter what nature, but particularly something allowing a reasonable doubt of his death, the nephew was still to be permitted to take immediate possession of the property and effects."
"Of course, you called on the nephew," I said.
Harrigan nodded.
"Sure.
That was the indicated course, in any event.
It was routine for both the press and the police.
There was nothing suspicious about his story; it was straightforward enough, except for one or two little details.
He never did give us any precise address; he just mentioned Detroit once.
I called up a friend on one of the papers there and put him up to looking up Thaddeus McIlvaine; the only young man of that name he could find appeared to be the same man as the present inhabitant's uncle, though the description fit pretty well."
"There was a resemblance, then?"
"Oh, sure.
One could have imagined that old Thaddeus McIlvaine had looked somewhat like his nephew when he himself was a young man.
But don't let the old man's rigmarole about rejuvenation make too deep an impression on you.
The first thing the young fellow did was to get rid of that machine of his uncle's.
Can you imagine his uncle having done something like that?"
I shook my head, but I could not help thinking what an ironic thing it would have been if there had been something to McIlvaine's story, and in the process to which he had been subjected from out of space he had not been rejuvenated so much as just sent back in time, in which case he would have no memory of the machine nor of the use to which it had been put.
It would have been as ironic for the inhabitants of McIlvaine's star, too; they would doubtless have looked forward to keeping this contact with Earth open and failed to realize that McIlvaine's construction differed appreciably from theirs.
"He virtually junked it.
Said he had no idea what it could be used for, and didn't know how to operate it."
"And the telescope?"
"Oh, he kept that.
He said he had some interest in astronomy and meant to develop that if time permitted."
"So much ran in the family, then."
"Yes.
More than that. Old McIlvaine had a trick of seeming shy and self-conscious.
So did this nephew of his.
Wherever he came from, his origins must have been backward.
I suspect that he was ashamed of them, and if I had to guess, I'd put him in the Kentucky hill-country or the Ozarks.
Modern concepts seemed to be pretty well too much for him, and his thinking would have been considerably more natural at the turn of the century.
"I had to see him several times.
The police chivvied him a little, but not much; he was so obviously innocent of everything that there was nothing for them in him.
And the search for the old man didn't last long; no one had seen him after that last night at Bixby's, and, since everyone had already long since concluded that he was mentally a little off center, it was easy to conclude that he had wandered away somewhere, probably an amnesiac.
That he might have anticipated that is indicated in the hasty preparation of his will, which came out of the blue, said Barnevall, who drew it up for him.
"I felt sorry for him."
"For whom?"
"The nephew.
He seemed so lost, you know—like a man who wanted to remember something, but couldn't.
I noticed that several times when I tried to talk to him; I had the feeling each time that there was something he wanted desperately to say, it hovered always on the rim of his awareness, but somehow there was no bridge to it, no clue to put it into words.
He tried so hard for something he couldn't put his finger on."
"What became of him?"
"Oh, he's still around.
I think he found a job somewhere.
As a matter of fact, I saw him just the other evening.
He had apparently just come from work and he was standing in front of Bixby's with his face pressed to the window looking in.
I came up nearby and watched him.
Leopold and Alexander were sitting inside—a couple of lonely old men looking out.