ed the wires he had attached to his microphone while McIlvaine
was at Bixby's entertaining his other two cronies, but this is fact, not
fiction, and the point of the episode is that Richardson disappeared
from that night on."

"You investigated, of course?" I asked.

Harrigan nodded. "Quite a lot of us investigated. The police might have
done better. There was a gang war on in Chicago just at that time, and
Richardson was nobody with any connections. His nearest relatives
weren't anxious about anything but what they might inherit; to tell the
truth, his cronies at Bixby's were the only people who worried about
him. McIlvaine as much as the rest of them.

"Oh, they gave the old man a hard time, all right. They went through his
house with a fine-toothed comb. They dug up his yard, his cellar, and
generally put him through it, figuring he was a natural to hang a murder
rap on. But there was just nothing to be found, and they couldn't
manufacture evidence when there was nothing to show that McIlvaine ever
knew that Richardson planned to have a little fun with him.

"And no one had seen Richardson there. There was nothing but McIlvaine's
word that he had heard what he said he heard. He needn't have
volunteered that, but he did. After the police had finished with him,
they wrote him off as a harmless nut. But the question of what happened
to Richardson wasn't solved from that day to this."

"People have been known to walk out of their lives," I said. "And never
come back."

"Oh, sometimes they do. Richardson didn't. Besides, if he walked out of
his life here, he did so without more than the clothing he had on. So
much was missing from his effects, nothing more."

"And McIlvaine?"

Harrigan smiled thinly. "He carried on. You couldn't expect him to do
anything less. After all, he had worked most of his life trying to
communicate with the worlds outside, and he had no intention of
resigning his contact, no matter how much Richardson's disappearance
upset him. For a while he believed that Guru had actually disintegrated
Richardson; he offered that explanation, but by that time the dust had
vanished, and he was laughed out of face. So he went back to the machine
and Guru and the little excursions to Bixby's...."

* * * * *

"What's the latest word from that star of yours?" asked Leopold, when
McIlvaine came in.

"They want to rejuvenate me," said McIlvaine, with a certain shy
pleasure.