A Large Anthology of Science Fiction

by Jerry

  He came back to the table and whispered to Bill, “How about temporary insanity?”

  “I guess it’s o.k. if you like that sort of thing.”

  “No. I mean as a plea!”

  Maloney stared at him. “Justy, old boy, are you nuts? All we have to do is tell the truth.”

  Justin Marks rubbed his mustache with his knuckle and made a small bleating sound that acquired him a black look from the judge.

  Amery Heater built his case up very cleverly and very thoroughly. In fact, the jury had Bill Maloney so definitely electrocuted that they were beginning to give him sad looks—full of pity.

  It took Amery Heater two days to complete his case. When it was done, it was a solid and shining structure, every discrepancy explained, everything pinned down. Motive. Opportunity. Everything.

  On the morning of the third day the court was tense with expectancy. The defense was about to present its case. No one knew what the case was, except, of course, Bill Maloney, Justin Marks, and the unworldly redhead who called herself Rejapachalandakeena. Bill called her Keena. She hadn’t appeared in court.

  Justin Marks stood up and said to the hushed court, “Your Honor. Rather than summarize my defense at this point, I would like to put William Maloney on the stand first and let him tell the story in his own words.”

  The court buzzed. Putting Maloney on the stand would give Amery Heater a chance to cross-examine. Heater would rip Maloney to tiny shreds. The audience licked its collective chops.

  “Your name?”

  “William Maloney, 12 Braydon Road.”

  “And your occupation?”

  “Tinkering. Research, if you want a fancy name.”

  “Where do you get your income?”

  “I’ve got a few gimmicks patented. The royalties come in.”

  “Please tell the court all you know about this crime of which you are accused. Start at the beginning, please.”

  Bill Maloney shoved the blond hair back off his forehead with a square, mechanic’s hand and smiled cheerfully at the jury. Some of them, before they realized it, had smiled back. They felt the smiles on their lips and sobered instantly. It wasn’t good form to smile at a vicious murderer.

  Bill slouched in the witness chair and laced his fingers across his stomach.

  “It all started,” he said, “the day the Army let that rocket get out of hand on the seventh of May. I’ve got my shop in my cellar. Spend most of my time down there.

  “That rocket had an atomic warhead, you know. I guess they’ve busted fifteen generals over that affair so far. It exploded in the hills forty miles from town. The jar upset some of my apparatus and stuff. Put it out of kilter. I was sore.

  “I turned around, cussing away to myself, and where my coal bin used to be, there was a room. The arch leading into the room was wide and I could see in. I tell you, it really shook me up to see that room there. I wondered for a minute if the bomb hadn’t given me delusions.

  “The room I saw didn’t have any furniture in it. Not like furniture we know. It had some big cubes of dull silvery metal, and some smaller cubes. I couldn’t figure out the lighting.

  “Being a curious cuss, I walked right through the arch and looked around. I’m a great one to handle things. The only thing in the room I could pick up was a gadget on top of the biggest cube. It hardly weighed a thing.

  “In order to picture it, you’ve got to imagine a child’s hoop made of silvery wire. Then right across the wire imagine the blackest night you’ve ever seen, rolled out into a thin sheet and stretched tight like a drumhead on that wire hoop.

  “As I was looking at it I heard some sort of deep vibration, and there I was, stumbling around in my coal bin. The room was gone. But I had that darn hoop in my hand. That hoop with the midnight stretched across it.

  “I took it back across to my workbench where the light was better. I held it in one hand and poked a finger at that black stuff. My finger went right through. I didn’t feel a thing. With my finger still sticking through it, I looked on the other side.

  “It was right there that I named the darn thing. I said, ‘Gawk!’ And that’s what I’ve called it ever since. The gawk. My finger didn’t come through on the other side. I stuck my whole arm through. No arm. I pulled it back out. Quick. Arm was O.K. Somehow it seemed warmer on the other side of the gawk.

  “Well, you can imagine what it was like for me, a tinkerer, to get my hands on a thing like that. I forgot all about meals and so on. I had to find out what it was and why. I couldn’t see my own hand on the other side of it. I put it right up in front of my face, reached through from the back and tried to touch my nose. I couldn’t do it. I reached so deep that without the gawk there, my arm would have been halfway through my head . . .”

  “Objection!” Amery Heater said. “All this has nothing to do with the fact . . .”

  “My client,” Justin said, “is giving the incidents leading up to the alleged murder.”

  “Overruled,” the judge said.

  MALONEY said, “Thanks. I decided that my arm had to be someplace when I stuffed it through the gawk. And it wasn’t in this dimension. Maybe not even in this time. But it had to be someplace. That meant that I had to find out what was on the other side of the gawk. I could use touch, sight. Maybe I could climb through. It intrigued me, you might say.

  “I started with touch. I put my hand through, held it in front of me, and walked. I walked five feet before my hand rammed up against something. I felt it. It seemed to be a smooth wall. There wasn’t such a wall in my cellar.

  “There has to be some caution in science. I didn’t stuff my head through. I couldn’t risk it. I had the hunch there might be something unfriendly on the other side of the gawk. I turned the thing around and stuck my hand through from the other side. No wall. There was a terrific pain. I yanked my hand back. A lot of little bloodvessels near the surface had broken. I dropped the gawk and jumped around for a while. Found out I had a bad case of frostbite. The broken blood vessels indicated that I had stuffed my hand into a vacuum. Frostbite in a fraction of a second indicated nearly absolute zero. It seemed that maybe I had put my hand into space. It made me glad it had been my hand instead of my head.

  “I propped the thing up on my bench and shoved lots of things through, holding them a while and bringing them back out. Made a lot of notes on the effect of absolute zero on various materials.

  “By that time I was bushed. I went up to bed. Next day I had some coffee and then built myself a little periscope. Shoved it through. Couldn’t see a thing. I switched the gawk, tested with a thermometer, put my hand through. Warm enough. But the periscope didn’t show me a thing. I wondered if maybe something happened to light rays when they went through that blackness. Turns out that I was right.

  “By about noon I had found out another thing about it. Every time I turned it around I was able to reach through into a separate and distinct environment. I tested that with the thermometer. One of the environments I tested slammed the mercury right out through the top of the glass and broke the glass and burned my hand. I was glad I hadn’t hit that one the first time. It would have burned my hand off at the wrist.

  “I began to keep a journal of each turn of the gawk and what seemed to be on the other side of it. I rigged up a jig on my workbench and began to grope through the gawk with my fireplace tongs.

  “Once I jabbed something that seemed to be soft and alive. Those tongs were snatched right through the gawk. Completely gone. It gave me the shudders, believe me. If it had been my hand instead of the tongs, I wouldn’t be here. I have a hunch that whatever snatched those tongs would have been glad to eat me.

  “I rigged up some grappling hooks and went to work. Couldn’t get anything. I put a lead weight on some cord and lowered it through. Had some grease on the end of the weight. When the cord slacked off, I pulled it back up. There was fine yellow sand on the bottom of the weight. And I had lowered it thirty-eight feet before I hit sand.

  �
�On try number two hundred and eight, I brought an object back through the gawk. Justy has it right there in his bag. Show it to the people, Justy.”

  Justin looked annoyed at the informal request, but he unstrapped the bag and took out an object. He passed it up to the judge who looked at it with great interest. Then it was passed through the jury. It ended up on the table in front of the bench, tagged as an exhibit.

  “You can see, folks, that such an object didn’t come out of our civilization.”

  “Objection!” Heater yelled. “The defendant could have made it.”

  “Hush up!” the judge said.

  “Thanks. As you can see, that object is a big crystal. That thing in the crystal is a golden scorpion, about five times life size. The corner is sawed off there because Jim Finch sawed it off. You notice that he sawed off a big enough piece to get a hunk of the scorpion’s leg. Jim told me that leg was solid gold. That whole bug is solid gold. I guess it was an ornament in some other civilization.

  “Now that gets me around to Jim Finch. As you all know, Jim retired from the jewelry business about five years ago. Jim was a pretty sharp trader. You know how he parlayed his savings across the board so that he owned a little hunk of just about everything in town. He was always after me to let him in on my next gimmick. I guess those royalty checks made his mouth water. We weren’t what you’d call friends. I passed the time of day with him, but he wasn’t a friendly man.

  “Anyway, when I grabbed this bug out of the gawk, I thought of Jim Finch. I wanted to know if such a thing could be made by a jeweler. Jim was home and his eyes popped when he saw it. You know how he kept that little shop in his garage and made presents for people? Well, he cut off a section with a saw. Then he said that he’d never seen anything like it and he didn’t know how on earth it was put together. I told him that it probably wasn’t put together on earth. That teased him a little, and he kept after me until I told him the whole story. He didn’t believe it. That made me mad. I took him over into my cellar and showed him a few things. I set the gawk between two boxes so it was parallel to the floor, then dropped my grapples down into it. In about three minutes I caught something and brought it up. It seemed to be squirming.”

  MALONEY drew a deep breath. “That made me a shade cautious. I brought it up slow. The head of the thing came out. It was like a small bear—but more like a bear that had been made into a rug. Flat like a leech, and instead of front legs it just seemed to have a million little sucker disks around the flat edge. It screamed so hard, with such a high note, that it hurt my ears. I dropped it back through.

  “When I looked around, old Jim was backed up against the cellar wall, mumbling. Then he got down on his hands and knees and patted the floor under the gawk. He kept right on mumbling. Pretty soon he asked me how that bear-leech and that golden bug could be in the same place. I explained how I had switched the gawk. We played around for a while and then came up with a bunch of stones.

  Jim handled them, and his eyes started to pop out again. He began to shake. He told me that one of the stones was an uncut ruby. You couldn’t prove it by me. It would’ve made you sick to see the way old Jim started to drool. He talked so fast I could hardly understand him. Finally I got the drift. He wanted us to go in business and rig up some big machinery so we could dig through the gawk and come back with all kinds of things. He wanted bushels of rubies and a few tons of gold.

  “I told him I wasn’t interested. He got so mad he jumped up and down. I told him I was going to fool around with the thing for a while and then I was going to turn it over to some scientific foundation so the boys could go at it in the right way.

  “He looked mad enough to kill me. He told me we could have castles and cars and yachts and a million bucks each. I told him that the money was coming in faster than I could spend it already, and all I wanted was to stay in my cellar and tinker.

  “I told him that I guessed the atomic explosion had dislocated something, and the end product belonged to science. I also told him very politely to get the devil home and stop bothering me.

  “He did, but he sure hated to leave. Well, by the morning of the tenth, I had pretty well worn myself out. I was bushed and jittery from no sleep. I had made twenty spins in a row without getting anything, and I had begun to think I had run out of new worlds on the other side of the gawk.

  “Like a darn fool, I yanked it off the jig, took it like a hoop and scaled it across the cellar. It went high, then dropped lightly, spinning.

  “And right there in my cellar was this beautiful redhead. She was dressed in a shiny silver thing. Justy’s got that silver thing in his bag. Show it to the people. You can see that it’s made out of some sort of metal mesh, but it isn’t cold like metal would be. It seems to hold heat and radiate it.”

  The metal garment was duly passed around. Everybody felt of it, exclaimed over it. This was better than a movie. Maloney could see from Amery Heater’s face that the man wanted to claim the metal garment was also made in the Maloney cellar.

  Bill winked at him. Amery Heater flushed a dull red.

  “Well, she stood there, right in the middle of the gawk which was flat against the floor. She had a dazed look on her face. I asked her where she had come from. She gave me a blank look and a stream of her own language. She seemed mad about something. And pretty upset.

  “Now what I should have done was pick up that gawk and lift it back up over her head. That would have put her back in her own world. But she stepped out of it, and like a darn fool I stood and held it and spun it, nervous like. In spinning it, I spun her own world off into some mathematical equation I couldn’t figure.

  “It was by the worst or the best kind of luck, depending on how you look at it, that I made a ringer on her when I tossed the gawk across the cellar. Her make-up startled me a little. No lipstick. Tiny crimson beads on the end of each eyelash. Tiny emerald-green triangles painted on each tooth in some sort of enamel. Nicely centered. Her hairdo wasn’t any wackier than some you see every day.

  “Well, she saw the gawk in my hands and she wasn’t dumb at all. She came at me, her lips trembling, her eyes pleading, and tried to step into it. I shook my head, hard, and pushed her back and set it back in the jig. I shoved a steel rod through, holding it in asbestos mittens. The heat beyond the blackness turned the whole rod cherry red in seconds. I shoved it on through the rest of the way, then showed her the darkened mitten. She was quick. She got the most horrified look on her face.

  “Then she ran upstairs, thinking it was some sort of joke, I guess. I noticed that she slammed right into the door, as though she expected it to open for her. By the time I got to her, she had figured out the knob. She went down the walk toward the gate.

  “That’s when nosy Anita must have seen her. I shouted and she turned around and the tears were running right down her face. I made soothing noises, and she let me lead her back into the house. I’ve never seen a prettier girl or one stacked any . . . I mean her skin is translucent, sort of. Her eyes are enormous. And her hair is a shade of red that you never see.

  “She had no place to go and she was my responsibility. I certainly didn’t feel like turning her over to the welfare people. I fixed her up a place to sleep in my spare room and I had to show her everything. How to turn on a faucet. How to turn the lights off and on.

  “She didn’t do anything except cry for four days. I gave her food that she didn’t eat. She was a mess. Worried me sick. I didn’t have any idea how to find her world again. No idea at all. Of course, I could have popped her into any old world, but it didn’t seem right.

  “On the fourth day I came up out of the cellar and found her sitting in a chair looking at a copy of See magazine. She seemed very much interested in the pictures of the women. She looked up at me and smiled. That was the day I went into town and came back with a mess of clothes for her. I had to show her how a zipper worked and how to button a button.”

  HE LOOKED as if that might have been fun.

  “Aft
er she got all dressed up, she smiled some more, and that evening she ate well. I kept pointing to things and saying the right name for them.

  “I tell you, once she heard the name for something, she didn’t forget it. It stayed right with her. Nouns were easy. The other words were tough. About ten that night I finally caught her name. It was Rejapachalandakeena. She seemed to like to have me call her Keena. The first sentence she said was, ‘Where is Keena?’

  “That is one tough question. Where is here and now? Where is this world, anyway? On what side of what dimension? In which end of space? On what twisted convolution of the time stream? What good is it to say, ‘This is the world’ ? It just happens to be our world. Now I know that there are plenty of others.

  “Writing came tougher for her than the sounds of the words. She showed me her writing. She took a piece of paper, held the pencil pointing straight up, and put the paper on top of the rug. Then she worked that pencil like a pneumatic hammer, starting at the top right corner and going down the page. I couldn’t figure it until she read it over and made a correction by sticking in one extra hole in the paper. I saw then that the pattern of holes was very precise—like notes on a sheet of music.

  “She went through the grade school readers like a flash. I was buying her some arithmetic books one day, and when I got back she said, ‘Man here while Billy gone.’ She was calling me Billy. ‘Keena hide,’ she said.

  “Well, the only thing missing was the gawk, and with it Keena’s chance to make a return to her own people. I thought immediately of Jim Finch. I ran over and pounded on his door. He undid the chain so he could talk to me through a five-inch crack, but I couldn’t get in. I asked him if he had stolen the little item. He told me that I’d better run to the police and tell them exactly what it was that I had lost, and then I could tell the police exactly how I got it. I could tell by the look of naked triumph in his eyes that he had it. And there wasn’t a thing I could do about it.