A Large Anthology of Science Fiction

by Jerry

  Then, the impassive face yielded to pain, contorted and died.

  M arose from the corpse, his body trembling in every nerve. Now, he dared not imagine what punishment his captors would fix upon him.

  There was a small amount of blood on his hands. He stumbled to the lavatory and rinsed his fingers in running water until they were clean.

  He searched his cell. The oppressive walls of the exitless room seemed to be closing in upon him. He had to escape from this sickening chamber of death.

  For the twentieth time, that day, he rushed to the aluminum ladder and climbed. In the room he entered, a repetition of the scene he had just left met his eyes. The interrogator’s body lay stretched across the floor, dead pupils staring emptily. The prisoner retreated to the corner and again mounted the rungs. Room after room greeted him thus, as he climbed. His breath now heaved in great gasps; his muscles were strained to the point of unendurable weakness.

  Then, he felt himself fainting and the rungs of the ladder slipped from his grasp. He was churned in a revolving vortex, falling and spinning toward the center, and then he knew no more.

  Click!

  It was like a key turning in his brain.

  Click! Click! A curtain rising. A hidden world unveiled.

  Identity came to him in a sudden burst of knowledge. He remembered swallowing the lethene pill himself, when the guards of the hidden factory were nearly on him. The sudden flashes of memory he had borne in the past hour now became a veritable explosion.

  He was Dr. John C. Markum, former professor of mathematics at Oregon Institute of Technology, U. S. A. He taught seminar courses in abstract spaces, linear vector spaces, and abstract polynomials. He had been an ordnance captain in the War of 1958. Seven months ago, he had been recalled to the New Pentagon and transferred to Intelligence. Seven weeks ago, he had volunteered for a special mission in Europe.

  Seven eternities ago.

  His cortical control was returning, as his memory cells cleared. He scowled at the dead form before him. Filthy beast, he thought. Execrable sadist.

  AWARENESS of his predicament super-stimulated his adrenals. Trapped in a Moebius cube! The construction of such an object was theoretically possible; yet practically—he shook his head, mournfully. He tried to calculate the number of dimensions a space would require for torsion of a cube into possession of a surface of connectivity.

  The guards would be coming soon, when the officer did not reappear. He calculated his chances with them and dismissed them. Yet, there had to be some method of escape. He studied the walls and ceiling, lowered to his hands and knees and minutely explored the floor; yet, he discovered no sign of a joint or outlet. Electricity evidently flowed through the single blue bulb above and water flowed out of the lavatory faucets, originating somewhere. Perhaps the room collapsed and reassembled itself at 60-cycles per second. A longer collapse would also account for the interrogator’s ability to enter and leave the room.

  Markum put on his shirt, feeling gingerly the wound near his shoulder. In his pockets, he found the pencil, cigarette pack and lighter that had been left him. He unscrewed the lighter, examined it carefully. The enemy still had a great deal to learn about one-sided surfaces. The case was a variant of a Klein bottle and contained in its hidden section several drams of the new jet fuel being manufactured in the Kara sector.

  He scooped up the mathematical notes he had made and studied them. Apparently, his subconscious mind had been aware at the offset of the problem he faced; the symbols appeared to point to a solution. He tried to recall observations that had appeared in papers by Kerejarto and Lefschetz.

  The oppression of the four walls was too overpowering. He had an idea now how Clive’s Englishmen had felt in the Black Hole of Calcutta.

  Markum removed the apron of interrogation tools off the dead man and regarded an object with a burr on its tip, much like a dentist’s drill. He hooked it up to the battery, moved to a wall and commenced to drill. A slight buzzing noise accompanied the incision. Suddenly, resistance gave and the drill pushed through. Markum’s ears caught the sound of plaster falling. He wheeled around and saw on the opposite wall, the drill tip protruding into the room in which he stood.

  The officer had been right. The room opened only on itself on all sides, regardless of the absence of vertical entrance-ways.

  The prisoner returned to the table, commenced to apply new mathematics to his calculations. Sweat poured from his brow. He paused briefly, went through a brief series of Intelligence Section-drilled exercises for heart-beat stimulations. His pulse accelerated, as his mind shifted into high gear. Time was urgent.

  Finally, his equations were completed; but he looked at them with dread. There existed dire possibilities in following the course prescribed, many even predicating the probability of losing oneself in extra-dimensional spaces outside the known universe. But topologically, there was no other action to be taken. The equations told only what should be done—not what would be the result!

  Markum was now desperate. He gnawed wood off the pencil until its point again was sharp. Then consulting his symbols, he drew a curved line across the floor of the room, along the wall and by dint of much stretching from the ladder across the room’s ceiling and down the opposite wall.

  The task was only half done. Again examining the assortment of torture tools, Markum picked out one with a rotary blade that presupposed great slicing effect. Connecting it with the battery he drilled along the path of the line he had drawn, slicing the ceiling and walls. Then before continuing to follow the line’s path on the floor, he drew a square about three feet from the line.

  This completed, he proceeded to slice through the remainder of the line with the tool. When only one foot remained, he unhooked a slat from the cot and tied the handle of the cutting tool to it. Then standing in the protected square, he held the cutting tool above the last portion of drawn line to be sliced—being careful that no part of his body projected past the square.

  THE two sections of the room commenced to separate as the floor was split. A rocking effect, like a mild earthquake, set in. Markum felt new dizziness. Where the walls had drawn apart, there now penetrated an eyewrenching darkness, yet the air in the room showed no tendency to leak away.

  The bouncing motion increased. Then as Markum watched, the darkness between the separating sections of the room lightened and he made out star clusters. With chilled recognition, he knew he was looking into deep space far from any comfortable planet. The stars wavered, vanished. Now, a giant blazing sun swung into view, tongues of flame soaring into yellow prominences. Then, a view of a landscape populated by curious globes and parallelopipeds.

  The giant sun reappeared, followed by a glimpse of an endless red desert above which three ringed satellites raced through a starless sky.

  Scene upon scene crowded in upon Markum’s consciousness as the rift between the room’s two sections widened. His brain reeled at the almost infinite number of vistas that pressed in and crowded each other for his attention.

  How, how out of all of them to select the right one?

  Then, finally, the rocking motion ceased and the other half of the room vanished.

  Markum knew he had to make his choice now or never. Stooping, he applied the second drill to the lines of the square on which he stood. Having no slicing edge, the operation took longer; Markum, therefore, had to pause twice to calm his nerves, now over-exhilarated by the effect of the cortical exercises.

  Then suddenly, the square was completely excised and it fell away from the floor of the room, Markum’s body borne with it as though he stood in iron shoes that clung to a magnetized section of plate iron.

  Again, as when he had climbed the ladder rungs in the Moebius room, he found himself floating in a spinning vortex. Blood poured into his skull and a red mist, similar to that experienced by pilots in rocket dives, rendered him unconscious. . . .

  The next thing of which John C. Markum, Ph.D., was aware—and he could not have gu
essed how much time had elapsed since his faint—was his effort to open his eyelids. He struggled and struggled to pry the skin flaps apart; but for what seemed an eternity, the muscles about his eyes refused to obey the intense command of his will.

  He knew why—quite well. His too-human brain feared what he might see.

  But finally, the will triumphed.

  He gazed up at a spacious white ceiling from which glowed two even banks of luminescent lights. Cool air fanned his cheeks. Bent over him was a kindly white face of a woman in starched nurse’s uniform.

  “Where am I?” Markum asked, weakly.

  The woman did not answer. She turned away and addressed another person present: “He’s conscious, now.

  Would you like to talk to him, sir?”

  “Indeed I would—been through quite an ordeal, apparently.”

  MARKUM moved his head around.

  The voice had been familiar; now the appearance confirmed his suspicion of the speaker’s identity. His chief at the New Pentagon, General Harper, was at his bedside. The general said: “Congratulations, Markum. I don’t know how you managed to get through the lines and back to America, but it was a wonderful job, however you did it. We got your fuel sample analyzed; imagine we’ll be synthesizing it ourselves in a month. Now, if your strength’s up to it, let’s have your story.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Markum. “Just one thing, General. Mind telling me where I was found?”

  The general smiled: “About two blocks from the Library of Congress. Clad in gray denim and sandals. And moaning about some fellow named Moebius.”

  “A great mathematician,” Markum explained. “Founded the science of topology.”

  The bedfast man then elucidated in detail his experience behind the lines of the Pan-Eurasian Combine, culminating with his escape from the endless room.

  “We ‘highbrows’ of higher math like to think every problem can be solved, if its component elements are set up properly. Sometimes we have to invent imaginary numbers or situations as tools to manipulate the factors in a problem, however. Now, you take this room I’ve just described. As soon as I’d calculated the equations for its construction, I realized it could be collapsed by the incision of a re-entrant section. You know how a Moebius sheet may be bilateralized by such a section, thus affecting its connectivity.

  “I performed the same operation on the Moebius cube. Result: instead of null connectivity, we developed infinite connectivity and a high number of boundaries. Once that was accomplished, all I had to do was jump off the square whenever I located a boundary contiguous to non-Combine soil. If I’d had a calculating machine with me, I believe I could have stepped right into the Pentagon.”

  The general stroked his chin: “From what you learned, do you suppose our technicians could make a similar cube?” Markum laughed: “We can do better. We can build one the size of a fort, slice it with re-entrant sections at any point—and thus, step out into any part of the globe we choose.”

  “Hmm,” said the general.

  “I beg your pardon, sir.”

  “Hmm. I was just thinking. Won’t their leader be surprised when a battalion of our troops march out of thin air into his bedroom?”

  1953

  TIME ENOUGH AT LAST

  Lynn Venable

  The atomic bomb meant, to most people, the end. To Henry Bemis it meant something far different—a thing to appreciate and enjoy.

  FOR A LONG time, Henry Bemis had had an ambition. To read a book. Not just the title or the preface, or a page somewhere in the middle. He wanted to read the whole thing, all the way through from beginning to end. A simple ambition perhaps, but in the cluttered life of Henry Bemis, an impossibility.

  Henry had no time of his own. There was his wife, Agnes who owned that part of it that his employer, Mr. Carsville, did not buy. Henry was allowed enough to get to and from work—that in itself being quite a concession on Agnes’ part.

  Also, nature had conspired against Henry by handing him with a pair of hopelessly myopic eyes. Poor Henry literally couldn’t see his hand in front of his face. For a while, when he was very young, his parents had thought him an idiot. When they realized it was his eyes, they got glasses for him. He was never quite able to catch up. There was never enough time. It looked as though Henry’s ambition would never be realized. Then something happened which changed all that.

  Henry was down in the vault of the Eastside Bank & Trust when it happened. He had stolen a few moments from the duties of his teller’s cage to try to read a few pages of the magazine he had bought that morning. He’d made an excuse to Mr. Carsville about needing bills in large denominations for a certain customer, and then, safe inside the dim recesses of the vault he had pulled from inside his coat the pocket size magazine.

  He had just started a picture article cheerfully entitled “The New Weapons and What They’ll Do To YOU”, when all the noise in the world crashed in upon his eardrums. It seemed to be inside of him and outside of him all at once. Then the concrete floor was rising up at him and the ceiling came slanting down toward him, and for a fleeting second Henry thought of a story he had started to read once called “The Pit and The Pendulum”. Pie regretted in that insane moment that he had never had time to finish that story to see how it came out. Then all was darkness and quiet and unconsciousness.

  WHEN HENRY came to, he knew that something was desperately wrong with the Eastside Bank & Trust. The heavy steel door of the vault was buckled and twisted and the floor tilted up at a dizzy angle, while the ceiling dipped crazily toward it. Henry gingerly got to his feet, moving arms and legs experimentally. Assured that nothing was broken, he tenderly raised a hand to his eyes. His precious glasses were intact, thank God! He would never have been able to find his way out of the shattered vault without them.

  Pie made a mental note to write Dr. Torrance to have a spare pair made and mailed to him. Blasted nuisance not having his prescription on file locally, but Henry trusted no-one but Dr. Torrance to grind those thick lenses into his own complicated prescription. Henry removed the heavy glasses from his face. Instantly the room dissolved into a neutral blur. Henry saw a pink splash that he knew was his hand, and a white blob come up to meet the pink as he withdrew his pocket handkerchief and carefully dusted the lenses. As he replaced the glasses, they slipped down on the bridge of his nose a little. He had been meaning to have them tightened for some time.

  He suddenly realized, without the realization actually entering his conscious thoughts, that something momentous had happened, something worse than the boiler blowing up, something worse than a gas main exploding, something worse than anything that had ever happened before. He felt that way because it was so quiet. There was no whine of sirens, no shouting, no running, just an ominous and all-pervading silence.

  HENRY walked across the slanting floor. Slipping and stumbling on the uneven surface, he made his way to the elevator. The car lay crumpled at the foot of the shaft like a discarded accordion. There was something inside of it that Henry could not look at, something that had once been a person, or perhaps several people, it was impossible to tell now.

  Feeling sick, Henry staggered toward the stairway. The steps were still there, but so jumbled and piled back upon one another that it was more like climbing the side of a mountain than mounting a stairway. It was quiet in the huge chamber that had been the lobby of the bank. It looked strangely cheerful with the sunlight shining through the girders where the ceiling had fallen. The dappled sunlight glinted across the silent lobby, and everywhere there were huddled lumps of unpleasantness that made Henry sick as he tried not to look at them.

  “Mr. Carsville,” he called. It was very quiet. Something had to be done, of course. This was terrible, right in the middle of a Monday, too. Mr. Carsville would know what to do. He called again, more loudly, and his voice cracked hoarsely, “Mr. Carrrrsville!” And then he saw an arm and shoulder extending out from under a huge fallen block of marble ceiling. In the buttonhole was the white
carnation Mr. Carsville had worn to work that morning, and on the third finger of that hand was a massive signet ring, also belonging to Mr. Carsville. Numbly, Henry realized that the rest of Mr. Carsville was under that block of marble.

  Henry felt a pang of real sorrow. Mr. Carsville was gone, and so was the rest of the staff—Mr. Wilkinson and Mr. Emory and Mr. Prithard, and the same with Pete and Ralph and Jenkins and Hunter and Pat the guard and Willie the doorman. There was no one to say what was to be done about the Eastside Bank & Trust except Henry Bemis, and Henry wasn’t worried about the bank, there was something he wanted to do.

  He climbed carefully over piles of fallen masonry. Once he stepped down into something that crunched and squashed beneath his feet and he set his teeth on edge to keep from retching. The street was not much different from the inside, bright sunlight and so much concrete to crawl over, but the unpleasantness was much, much worse. Everywhere there were strange, motionless lumps that Henry could not look at.

  Suddenly, he remembered Agnes. He should be trying to get to Agnes, shouldn’t he? He remembered a poster he had seen that said, “In event of emergency do not use the telephone, your loved ones are as safe as you.” He wondered about Agnes. He looked at the smashed automobiles, some with their four wheels pointing skyward like the stiffened legs of dead animals. He couldn’t get to Agnes now anyway, if she was safe, then, she was safe, otherwise . . . of course, Henry knew Agnes wasn’t safe. He had a feeling that there wasn’t anyone safe for a long, long way, maybe not in the whole state or the whole country, or the whole world. No, that was a thought Henry didn’t want to think, he forced it from his mind and turned his thoughts back to Agnes.