"Kermit?"
It was Stoddard"s voice.
"Yes," I answered. "What in the h.e.l.l is up? It had better be goo--."
"Hurry," Stoddard said. "Over here, quickly!"
I stumbled across the board s.p.a.cings until I was standing beside Stoddard and peering up at what the beam of his flashlight revealed on the ceiling--a ragged, open hole, which he"d made by tearing several coatings of insulation from the spot.
For a minute, I couldn"t make out anything in that flash beam glare.
Stoddard had hold of my arm, and was saying one word over and over, urgently.
"Look. Look. Look!"
Then my eyes got adjusted to the light change, and I was aware that I was gazing up into the interior of the crazy belfry atop the monstrous house. Gazing up into the interior, while voices, quite loud and clearly distinguishable, were talking in a language which I didn"t recognize immediately. As far as my vision was concerned, I might as well have been looking at a sort of grayish vaporish screen of some sort, that was all I saw.
"Shhhh!" Stoddard hissed now. "Don"t say a word. Just listen to them!"
I held my breath, although it wasn"t necessary. As I said, the voices coming down from that belfry were audible enough to have been a scant ten or twelve feet away. But I held my breath anyway, meanwhile straining my eyes to pierce that gray screen of vapor on which the light was focused.
And then I got it. The voices were talking in German, two of them, both harsh, masculine.
"What in the h.e.l.l," I began. "Is there a short wave set up there or--"
Stoddard cut me off. "Can"t you see it yet?" he hissed.
The voices went on talking, while I strained my eyes even more in an effort to pierce that gray fog covering the rent in the ceiling. And then I saw. Saw at first, as if through a thin gray screen of gauze.
I was looking up into a room of some sort. A big room. An incredibly big room. A room so big that two dozen belfry rooms would have fit into it!
And then it got even clearer. There was a desk at the end of the room. A tremendously ornate desk. A desk behind which was sitting a small, gray uniformed, moustached man.
There was another uniformed person of porcine girth standing beside that desk and pointing to a map on the wall in front of him. He was jabbering excitedly to the little man at the desk, and he wore a uniform that was so plushily gaudy it was almost ridiculous.
The two kept chattering back and forth to each other in German, obviously talking about the map at which the fat, plush-clad one was pointing.
I turned incredulously to Stoddard.
"Wh-wh-what in the h.e.l.l goes?" I demanded.
Stoddard seemed suddenly vastly relieved. "So you see it and hear it, too!" he exclaimed. "Thank G.o.d for that! I thought I"d lost my mind!"
I grabbed hard on his arm. "But listen," I began.
"Listen, nothing," he hissed. "We _both_ can"t be crazy. Those are the voices we kept hearing before. And those two people are the talkers.
Those two German (five words censored) louses. Hitler and Goering!"
There, he"d said it. I hadn"t dared to. It sounded too mad, too wildly, babblingly insane to utter. But now I looked back through that thin gray cheesecloth of fog, back into the room.
The two occupants couldn"t be anyone other than Hitler and Goering. And I was suddenly aware that the map Goering pointed to so frequently was a map of Austria.
"But what," I started again.
Stoddard looked me in the eye. "I can understand a little German," he said. "They"re talking about an invasion of Austria, and if you will look hard at the corner of that map, you"ll see a date marked--1938!"
I did look hard, and of course I saw that date. I turned back to Stoddard.
"We"re both crazy," I said a little wildly, "we"re both stark, raving nuts. Let"s get out of here."
"We are looking back almost five years into the past," Stoddard hissed.
"We are looking back five years into Germany, into a room in which Hitler and Goering are talking over an approaching invasion of a country called Austria. I might have believed I was crazy when I first found this alone, but not now!"
Maybe we were both crazy. Maybe he was wrong. But then and there I believed him, and I knew that somehow, in some wild, impossible fashion, that belfry on Stoddard"s asinine house had become a door leading through s.p.a.ce and time, back five years into Germany, into the same room where Adolf Hitler and Hermann Goering planned the conquest of Austria!
Stoddard was taking something out of his pocket.
"Now that you"re here I can try it," he said. "I didn"t dare do so before, since I felt I couldn"t trust my own mind alone in the thing."
I looked at what he held in his hands. A stone, tied to a long piece of string.
"What"s that for?" I demanded.
"I want to see if that veil, that gray fog door, can be penetrated," he hissed.
Stoddard was swinging the stone on a string in a sharp arc now. And suddenly he released it, sending it sailing through the grayish aperture in the ceiling, straight into the belfry, or rather, the big room.
I saw and heard the stone on the string hit the marble floor of that room. Then, just as sharply, Stoddard jerked it back, yanking it into the attic again.
The result in the room beyond the fog sheet was instantaneous. Goering wheeled from the map on the wall, glaring wildly around the room. A pistol was in his hand.
Hitler had half risen behind that ornate desk, and was searching the vast, otherwise unoccupied room wildly with his eyes.
Of course neither saw anything. Stoddard, breathing excitedly at my side, had pulled the stone back into our section of time and s.p.a.ce. But his eyes were gleaming.
"It can be done," he whispered fiercely. "It can be crossed!"
"But what on--" I started. He cut me off with a wave of his hand, pointing back to the gray screen covering the hole in the ceiling.
Goering had put the pistol back in the holster at his side, and was grinning sheepishly at der Fuehrer, who was resuming his seat behind the desk in confused and angry embarra.s.sment.
The voices picked up again.
"They"re saying how silly, to be startled by a sound," Stoddard hissed in my ear.
Then he grabbed my arm. "But come, we can"t wait any longer. Something has to be done immediately."