rattling the door as he bellowed into his telephone. I pulled the curtains to darken one corner of the room, and fed the film into a projection machine.

I ran the film ten times without coming up with anything new. I couldn't make out the number on the door. I also couldn't decide whether the assailant was a chance prowler or someone known to the victim. I stopped the camera, and made a sketch of the room from what I could make out in the way of furnishings.

The Captain came barging out of his office, took a quick look at my sketch, and nodded approval. "We'll find the apartment," he said. "Then our troubles will really start."

I couldn't see that, and I told him so. I figured our troubles would be nearly over if we found the apartment.

"You think it's possible to prevent this crime," he said. "I don't. Even if we find the apartment and identify the man and woman, the crime is still going to happen."

"Why?" I said.

"Look at it this way. If we prevent the crime, it's not going to happen. Right?"

"Right."

"And if it's not going to happen, Cronus wouldn't show it to us. All you see on that screen is what will happen. As far as Cronus is concerned, it already has happened. Preventing it is like trying to change the past."

"We can try," I said.

"Yes, we can try. The regular force will help us on this one. A team of detectives is waiting outside. Tell them what you want done."

I wanted an apartment living room with a corner location and a door scanner. It wasn't as bad as it sounded—the scanner was a new gadget at that time. Not many apartment buildings would have it. There was always the chance, of course, that an individual had had one installed on his own, but that was a worry I could postpone.

I put in a hectic day of trudging through apartment buildings and squabbling with superintendents, but we found it the next morning, in a stubby little seven-story building on South Central. It was one of those apartment buildings that went up way back in 1990, when the city decided it couldn't afford the luxury of open spaces and opened part of old Central Park to apartment buildings. This one was a midget among the other buildings in that 

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