Once again Sutter drove out across state and down the highway where he had seen the roadside stand. But when he reached the spot there was no sign of the stand. The big oak tree which had shaded it and the rail fence on the adjoining property were there. But no stand. As Sutter stared with perplexed eyes at the spot he saw something he had not noticed before.
At the edge of the highway was a large granite boulder with a bronze plate fastened to its slanting surface. Sutter got out of the car, approached it and read: This property has been preserved as a State Park to commemorate the first successful trial explosion of the Hydrogen Bomb which took place on this site and marked the beginning of an era.
It seemed to Sutter as he stood there that the surrounding silence grew more intense. Then he pa.s.sed through a wide gateway and began to stride across an evenly clipped lawn toward a grove of trees beyond. Halfway he paused and glanced absently at his watch. It was exactly twelve o"clock noon.
And abruptly the scene before him slipped out of plumb. The sky and the lawn seemed to alter positions, to rotate madly as in a vortex. The whirling ceased and the next instant Sutter stood on the sh.o.r.e of a lonely sea with a tawny width of sand stretching out before him and the waves washing up almost at his feet. Then he saw the sh.e.l.ls....
It was the beach of the alien sh.e.l.ls! There they lay, scattered about the sand, hundreds, thousands of them, alien and delicate and lovely, exoskeletons the like of which he had never seen before. Their pastel colors blended with one another to form a horizontal rainbow extending into the measureless distance.
And somehow, as Sutter walked among them, picking his way with care, the years of his life seemed to slip away and he was a small boy at the seash.o.r.e again, entranced with his first sh.e.l.l discovery. He could even hear his mother"s voice calling "Be careful, Martin! Don"t go too far!"
He walked on and on, slowly, uncertainly, until the beach and the sea began to waver like a heat mirage. And suddenly the sh.e.l.ls and the water vanished and he was on the green gra.s.s again with the grove of trees just ahead. He turned, saw a white highway with his car parked on the shoulder.
Dazedly, Sutter walked back to the car....
All next morning he ruminated over his strange experience. Toward noon the pieces of the puzzle began to fit slowly together in his mind. But the partial answer at which he arrived seemed too fantastic for belief. Could it be possible that when he had stopped at the roadside stand he had blundered, in some inexplicable way, into another dimension?
Sutter had a layman"s knowledge of Einsteinian physics, and he knew that experiments in Time were being made every day. Only last week he had read in the paper of an army officer who had reportedly Time-traveled some twenty-two minutes. And a year ago the Belgian scientist, Delgar, claimed to have entered a secondary world which he declared impinged on our own.
a.s.suming all this to be true, then it could be that the Tanganyika television set was a product manufactured in Future Time by a company that, by Sutter"s Time standards, didn"t yet exist.
The following day saw Sutter begin an experiment of which he was rather proud. Travail had said that he had tried to tune in the noon news broadcast yesterday on the TV and had turned the set on from twelve o"clock until five minutes after. At a nearby appliance store Sutter purchased a clock control which would turn his television set on and off at any chosen time. He set the control for two o"clock, then managed to lure Travail out of the house for the afternoon by giving him an invitation he"d received for a lecture on marine life at a local club. Next, he drove again to the H-bomb site and stood waiting in the gra.s.s-like park, watch in hand.
At precisely two o"clock there came that queer staggering of earth and sky. The trees gave way to the stretch of sand; the waves, leaden-colored and cheerless, dotted with white caps rolled up on the lonely sh.o.r.e. As before Sutter felt that same exhilaration, that same reversal to the spirit of his youth. But despite his mental excitement he maintained an awareness of the situation and a remembrance of why he had come here.
When he walked among the sh.e.l.ls this time he carried a large basket with him and he picked up sh.e.l.ls and dropped them into the basket, selecting those that were the most alien.
In due time the basket was filled to overflowing and Sutter stood still, waiting. Once more the surrounding landscape underwent its change. After the whirling had ceased and the initial feeling of vertigo had pa.s.sed Sutter carried the full basket back to the car and began the long drive home.
As he drove he mused over what Travail would say when he saw these sh.e.l.ls. Then on second thought, he decided not to show them to him. Travail was getting on his nerves. He had obviously lied about his interest in sh.e.l.ls. On discussing the subject with him Sutter found he did not know the first thing about them. In fact, he regretted taking him in as a roommate.
He was convinced that Travail"s friendly good-fellowship att.i.tude was just a pose, cloaking a so far mysterious motive. But it could be that Travail knew of the value of Sutter"s sh.e.l.l collection. Yesterday a letter had come from the Federal Arts Museum offering five thousand credits for the lot, and while he had made no mention of the amount, Sutter had been foolish enough to tell Travail there had been an offer.
"Are you going to sell?" Travail had asked.
"Certainly not. They"re worth five times the price they offered."
"Are they really?" said Travail. "That makes my own collection seem worthless by comparison."
Oh, Travail could be clever all right! Why else had he made no comment about the alien sh.e.l.ls they both had seen on the television set, if he did know something of the value of sh.e.l.ls?
Arriving home, Sutter entered by the rear door and carried the basket of sh.e.l.ls to his bedroom. There he took them out and one by one spread them on the table. He drew a goose-necked lamp down close and from the table drawer took out a powerful ato-magnifying gla.s.s. Then he selected one of the larger sh.e.l.ls and began to examine it.
After a while he took a small keyhole saw which he kept for such purposes, and very carefully began to cut the sh.e.l.l into two equal portions. Once again he moved the ato-gla.s.s and began to study one of the sections. But the lamp was not very powerful, and insufficient for the tiny details. Sutter abruptly remembered the four-position lamp in the sitting room. He took the sh.e.l.l and the ato-gla.s.s and went to the front room, hoping that Travail was not there.
To his relief he found the sitting room deserted. The television set stood silent in a corner and as he pa.s.sed it Sutter switched it on, then crossed to the four-position lamp and turned it up full. For a second time he peered through the ato-gla.s.s long and intently.
The bisected sh.e.l.l appeared to be a spinal univalve, resembling the familiar cephalopoda, nautilus, with thin septa dividing the many chambers.
Behind him the Tanganyika TV swelled on, the screen presenting that same scene of the beach of sh.e.l.ls. As it did so Sutter uttered a startled exclamation.
Under the magnifying gla.s.s the chambers in the bisected sh.e.l.l suddenly became more than outgrowths of marine organism. They were rooms! Tessellated ceilings, microscopically mosaic inlaid floors, long sweeping staircases with graceful slender bal.u.s.trades and tall almost Ionic columns....
Heart pounding, Sutter looked again.
He saw that it was actually the light from the television set that was illuminating the interior of the sh.e.l.l, lighting it with a strange radiance that seemed to extend outward from the sh.e.l.l in a steadily widening cone. His hand touched this cone, and it possessed a curious solidity.
He hadn"t been mistaken. There were rooms in that sh.e.l.l! Narrow corridors with arched doorways opened off alcoves and galleries. One vaulted chamber had a kind of dais in the center of it. The entire inner structure was fashioned of pastel-tinted walls which caught the light of the TV and radiated it to every corner in a soft glow of effulgence.
A magnetic lure swept over Sutter. He felt an overwhelming desire to step into that cone of light....
Whether the exoskeleton expanded to admit his entrance or whether his own figure magically dwindled he could not tell, but the next instant he found himself in a fairy palace with all about him a world of silence.
A long broad hallway stretched before him. At the far end a ramp angled upward to a higher level. Sutter walked forward slowly, aware in a vague way that he had entered another plane that was at once a microcosm and a macrocosm. On the second level the way ahead divided. After a moment"s hesitation he chose the left-hand pa.s.sage, pa.s.sing through a keyhole-shaped archway into a broad amphitheater, empty of furnishings, with a kind of terrace or gallery at the far end. Emerging upon that gallery, Sutter saw that he had reached the outer limit of the sh.e.l.l. The edges of the wall before him were cut off, jagged and rough, where his saw had done its work.
He was looking out upon the normal world that was his living room.
He stiffened as the door to the room opened and Lucien Travail entered. He sat down before the center table and carefully, systematically began going through the contents of the table drawer. Startled, Sutter watched from his strange vantage point. Travail had not noticed that the television set was turned on, and the high-backed davenport apparently hid the cone of blue light from his view.
He took a sheet of paper from the drawer, began reading it. With a start Sutter recognized his letter from the Federal Arts Museum.
And as a wave of wrath swept over him, Sutter saw that the beach scene on the television set was slowly fading away. Fear and a realization of his strange position struck him. He turned and ran madly back across the amphitheater, down the ramp and along the long hallway to the point where he had entered the sh.e.l.l. Even as he approached it the cone of blue light dimmed, wavered and was replaced by a wall of partial blackness.
Sutter sent his hands clawing desperately at that wall as it flickered twice and momentarily became translucent again. He forced his body between folds of palpable darkness, slid into the vanishing blue cone. Instantly he found himself in his normal world, standing in the center of the sitting room. Travail looked up, startled.
"Hullo. Where did you come from?" he said finally.
Sutter said, "What are you doing in my drawer?"
"I was looking for my tobacco pouch," Travail replied easily. "I"m sure I left it here on the table last night. I thought the maid might have put it in the drawer."
In his bedroom Sutter wrapped each of the alien sh.e.l.ls in a sheet of newspaper and restored them to the basket. He placed the basket on the top shelf of the closet, concealing it with a couple of old hats.
He didn"t sleep well that night. His mind reviewed over and over his strange experience. Toward morning he fell into a deep sleep and dreamed a wild dream of walking down a broad highway, flanked on one side by an endless line of television sets and on the other by man-high hills of alien sh.e.l.ls.
He had his breakfast at the little coffee shop around the corner. But halfway back to his apartment he suddenly thought of Travail alone in the house with his sh.e.l.ls. He broke into a run and he was panting for breath when he reached his door.
The basket of sh.e.l.ls was still on the shelf, but the newspaper wrappings were loosened, and the bisected sh.e.l.l was entirely free of covering. And he had not left them that way last evening.
Had atomic transmigration attempted to draw the sh.e.l.ls back into the Time sphere to which they really belonged? Sutter was a logical man, and even as this thought came his mind rejected it. It must be Travail. He had taken a sample sh.e.l.l from the basket and even now perhaps was d.i.c.kering with the officials of the Federal Arts Museum on a price.
Sutter picked up the bisected sh.e.l.l and went into the sitting room. He carefully placed the sh.e.l.l upon the table so that the light from the television set would fall directly upon it. Then he sat down to wait.
As he waited he mentally viewed the material prospects of his discovery.
If the Federal Arts Museum had offered five thousand credits for his old collection, they would surely double their price on these rarities. He saw himself the recipient of a fat check, his name and picture in the papers, television interviews, lecture a.s.signments, world fame ...
And to think that Travail had the brazen nerve to believe he could cash in on his good fortune!
"d.a.m.ned bearded coot!" Sutter mumbled to himself. "He must take me for an utter fool!"
Footsteps sounded and his bearded roommate entered the room. Was it fancy or did Sutter see in those grey eyes a gleam of mingled avarice and satisfaction?
"Have a cigar?" said Travail casually.
Sutter shook his head. "You know I don"t smoke." He crossed the room, adjusted the controls of the television set and watched the familiar beach scene come into sharper focus. As the sound of the washing waves boomed from the speaker, the cone of bluish light took form before the bisected sh.e.l.l. Sutter moved the sh.e.l.l slightly so that it lay at directly right angles to the panel of the TV set. Travail, drawing on his cigar, watched him curiously.
"What are you doing?" he asked at length.
"Little experiment. Stand over here and I"ll show you. Here, in front of this cone of light."
Travail took the place indicated. His face was emotionless as he looked beyond the light into the bisected sh.e.l.l.
"Now walk forward," commanded Sutter.
"I"ll do nothing of the sort," said Travail, starting to back away. "What are you up to anyway?"
Sutter had no plan in mind beyond an overwhelming desire to put a bad fright into his roommate in payment for what he considered a monstrous act of duplicity. It would serve Travail right if, once he entered the secondary plane of the sh.e.l.l, he would be forced to stay there a while. A good scare would cause him to leave, maybe.
Sutter moved up behind the bearded man and gave him a violent shove forward. "In you go!" he cried hysterically.
Travail pitched head foremost. But, spinning, he clutched at Sutter"s arm, gripping it with the desperation of a drowning man. Half inside, half outside the cone of blue light he seemed propelled into the depths of the bisected sh.e.l.l by an irresistible force. In vain did Sutter fight to release the hold upon his arm. His squirming legs fastened themselves about the legs of a heavy Windsor chair, kicked frantically.
The chair spun from between his feet and lurched heavily across the room where it fell hard upon the television set, shattering the glowing screen into a thousand fragments. Simultaneously, Sutter slid forward into the bisected sh.e.l.l as the cone of light vanished after him....
Mrs. Conworth, the landlady, reported the disappearance of her two roomers on August first, a week after she last saw them. First, however, to the disgust of the police, she cleaned their apartment, giving to the trash man all valueless and inconsequential articles, including a box of old sea sh.e.l.ls which she found in the closet. It was a curious fact that neither Sutter nor Travail possessed relatives or friends to make inquiry as to their whereabouts and thus without incentive the official search died into nothing.
Mrs. Conworth rather regretted the loss of her bachelor roomers and, as she said to her neighbor across the street, she kept one memento of them--a thing that looked like a sh.e.l.l but wasn"t a sh.e.l.l. She thought it must be one of them optical illusion things.
"When you look at it in a certain way," said Mrs. Conworth, "it seems as if there are two tiny men inside it, fighting to get out."
Contents
SIGHT GAG.
By Laurence Mark Janifer
Intelligence is a great help in the evolution-by-survival--but intelligence without muscle is even less useful than muscle without brains. But it"s so easy to forget that muscle--plain physical force--is important, too!
Downstairs, the hotel register told Fredericks that Mr. John P. Jones was occupying Room 1014. But Fredericks didn"t believe the register. He knew better than that. Wherever his man was, he wasn"t in Room 1014. And whoever he was, his real name certainly wasn"t John P. Jones. "P for Paul," Fredericks muttered to himself. "Oh, the helpful superman, the man who knows better, the man who does better."
Fredericks had first known of him as FBI Operative 71-054P, under the name of William K. Brady. "And what does the K stand for?" Fredericks muttered, remembering. "Killer?" Brady wouldn"t be the man"s real name, either. FBI Operatives had as many names as they had jobs, that much was elementary. Particularly operatives like Jones-Brady-X. "Special talents," Fredericks muttered. "Psi powers," he said, making it sound like a curse. "Superman."
Upstairs, in Room 1212, the superman sat in a comfortable chair and tried to relax. He wasn"t a trained telepath but he could read surface thoughts if there were enough force behind them, and he could read the red thoughts of the man downstairs. They worried him more than he wanted to admit, and for a second he considered sending out a call for help. But that idea died before it had been truly born.
Donegan had told him he could handle the situation. Without weapons, forbidden to run, faced by a man who wanted only his death, he could handle the situation.
Sure he could, he thought bitterly.
Of course, if he asked for reinforcements he would undoubtedly get them. The FBI didn"t want one of its Psi Operatives killed; there weren"t enough to go round as it was. But calling for help, when Donegan had specifically told him he wouldn"t need it, would mean being sent back a grade automatically. A man of his rank and experience, Donegan had implied, could handle the job solo. If he couldn"t--why, then, he didn"t deserve the rank. It was all very simple.
Unfortunately, he was still fresh out of good ideas.
The notion of killing Fredericks--using his telekinetic powers to collapse the hotel room on the man, or some such, even if he wasn"t allowed to bear arms--had occurred to him in a desperate second, and Donegan had turned it down very flatly. "Look," the Psi Section chief had told him, "you got the guy"s brother and sent him up for trial. The jury found him guilty of murder, first degree, no recommendation for mercy. The judge turned him over to the chair, and he fries next week."
"So let Fredericks take it out on the judge and jury," he"d said. "Why do I have to be the sitting duck?"
"Because ... well, from Fredericks" point of view, without you his brother might never have been caught. It"s logic--of a sort."
"Logic, h.e.l.l," he said. "The guy was guilty. I had to send him up. That"s my job."
"And so is this," Donegan said. "That"s our side of it. Fredericks has friends--his brother"s friends. Petty criminals, would-be criminals, unbalanced types. You know that. You"ve read the record."
"Read it?" he said. "I dug up half of it."
Donegan nodded. "Sure," he said. "And we"re going to have six more cases like Fredericks" brother--murder, robbery, G.o.d knows what else--unless we can choke them off somehow."
"Crime prevention," he said. "And I"m in the middle."
"That"s the way the job is," Donegan said. "We"re not superman. We"ve got limits, just like everybody else. Our talents have limits."
He nodded. "So?"
"So," Donegan said, "we"ve got to convince Fredericks" friends--the unbalanced fringe--that we are supermen, that we have no limits, that no matter what they try against us they"re bound to fail."
"Nice trick," he said sourly.
"Very nice," Donegan said. "And what"s more, it works. n.o.body except an out-and-out psychotic commits a crime when he hasn"t got a hope of success. And these people aren"t psychotics; most criminals aren"t. Show them they can"t get away with a thing--show them we"re infallible, all-knowing, all-powerful supermen--and they"ll be scared off trying anything."
"But killing Fredericks would do that just as well--" he began.
Donegan shook his head. "Now, hold on," he said. "You"re getting all worked up about this. It"s your first time with this stakeout business, that"s all. But you can"t kill him. You can"t kill except when really necessary. You know that."
"All right. But if he"s going to kill me--"