by Anthology
It was Jimmy Lindlen who works, if that isn’t too strong a word for it, in the office next to mine who drew my attention to them in the first place. Jimmy collects facts. His definition of a fact is anything that gets printed in a newspaper—poor fellow. He doesn’t mind a lot what subjects his facts cover as long as they look queer. I suspect that he once heard that the truth is never simple, and deduced from that that everything that’s not simple must be true. I was used to him coming into my room, full of inspiration, and didn’t take much account of it, so when he brought in his first batch of cuttings about Constable Walsh and the rest I didn’t ignite much.
But a few days later he was back with some more. I was, a bit surprised by his playing the same kind of phenomena twice running, so I gave it a little more attention than usual.
“You see. Arms, heads, legs, torsos, all over the place. It’s an epidemic. There’s something behind it.
Something’s happening, ” he said, “as near as one can vocalize italics.”
When I had read a few of them I had to admit that this time he had got hold of something where the vein of queerness was pretty constant.
A bus driver had seen the upper half of a body set up vertically in the road before him—but a bit too late. When he stopped and climbed out, sweating, to examine the mess, there was nothing there. A woman hanging out of a window, watching the street, saw another head below her doing the same, but this one was projecting out of the solid brickwork. Then there was a pair of arms that had risen out of the floor of a butcher’s shop and seemed to grope for something; after a minute or two they had withdrawn into the solid cement without trace—unless one were to count some detriment to the butcher’s trade. There was the man on a building job who had become aware of a strangely dressed figure standing close to him, but supported by empty air—after which he had to be helped down and sent home. Another figure was noticed between the rails in the path of a heavy goods tram, but was found to have vanished without trace when the train had passed.
While I skimmed through these and some others, Jimmy stood waiting, like a soda siphon. I didn’t have to say more than, “Huh!”
“You see,” he said. “Something is happening.”
“Supposing it is,” I conceded cautiously, “then what is it?”
“The manifestation zone is limited,” Jimmy told me impressively, and produced a town plan. “If you look where I’ve marked the incidents you’ll see that they’re grouped. Somewhere in that circle is ‘the focus of disturbance’.” This time he managed to vocalize the inverted commas, and waited for me to register amazement.
“So?” I said. “Disturbance of just what?”
He dodged that one.
“I’ve a pretty good idea now of the cause,” he told me weightily.
That was normal, though it might be a different idea an hour later.
“I’ll buy it,” I offered.
“Teleportation!” he announced. “That’s what it is. Bound to come sooner or later. Now someone’s on to it.”
“H’m,” I said.
“But it must be.” He leaned forward earnestly. “How else’d you account for it?”
“Well, if there could be teleportation, or teleportage, or whatever it is, surely there would have to be a transmitter and some sort of reassembly station,” I pointed out. “You couldn’t expect a person or object to be kind of broadcast and then come together again in any old place.”
“But you don’t know that,” he said. “Besides, that’s part of what I was meaning by ‘focus’. The transmitter is somewhere else, but focused on that area.”
“If it is,” I said, “he seems to have got his levels and positions all to hell. I wonder just what happens to a fellow who gets himself reassembled half in and half out of a brick wall?”
It’s details like that that get Jimmy impatient.
“Obviously its early stages. Experimental,” he said.
It still seemed to me uncomfortable for the subject, early stages or not, but I didn’t press it.
That evening was the first time I mentioned it to Sally, and, on the whole, it was a mistake. After making it quite clear that she didn’t believe it, she went on to say that if it was true it was probably just another invention.
“What do you mean, ‘just another invention’? Why, it’d be revolutionary!” I told her.
“The wrong kind of revolution, the way we’d use it.”
“Meaning?” I asked.
Sally was in one of her withering moods. She turned on her disillusioned voice: “We’ve got two ways of using inventions,” she said. “One is to kill more people more easily: the other is to enable quick turnover spivs to make easy money out of suckers. Maybe there are a few exceptions like X-rays, but not many. Inventions! What we do with the product of genius is first of all ram it down to the lowest common denominator and then multiply it by the vulgarest possible fraction. What a century! What a world! When I think what other centuries are going to say about ours it makes me go hot all over.”
“I shouldn’t worry. You won’t be hearing them,” I said.
The withering eye was on me.
“I should have known. That is a remark well up to the Twentieth Century standard.”
“You’re a funny girl,” I told her. “I mean, the way you think may be crazy, but you do do it, in your own way. Now most girl’s futures are all cloud cuckoo beyond next season’s hat or next year’s baby. Outside of that it might be going to snow split atoms for all they care—they’ve got a comforting feeling deep down that nothing’s ever changed much, or ever will.”
“A lot you know about what most girls think,” said Sally.
“That’s what I was meaning. How could I?” I said.
She seemed to have set her mind so firmly against the whole business that I dropped it for the evening.
A couple of days later Jimmy looked into my room again.
“He’s laid off,” he said.
“Who’s laid off what?”
“This teleporting fellow. Not a report later than Tuesday. Maybe he knows somebody’s on to him.”
“Meaning you?” I asked.
“Maybe.”
“Well, are you?”
He frowned. “I’ve started. I took the bearings on the map of all the incidents, and the fix came on All Saints’ Church. I had a look all over the place, but I didn’t find anything. Still, I must be close—why else’d he stop?”
I couldn’t tell him that. Nor could anyone else. But that very evening there was a paragraph about an arm and a leg that some woman had watched travel along her kitchen wall. I showed it to Sally.
“I expect it will turn out to be some new kind of advertisement,” she said.
“A kind of secret advertising?” I suggested. Then, seeing the withering look working up again: “How about going to a picture?” I suggested.
It was overcast when we went in; when we came out it was raining hard. Seeing that there was less than a mile to her place, and all the taxis in the town were apparently busy, we decided to walk it. Sally pulled on the hood of her mackintosh, put her arm through mine and we set out through the rain. For a bit we didn’t talk, then:
“Darling,” I said, “I know that I can be regarded as a frivolous person with low ethical standards, but has it ever occurred to you what a field there is there for reform?”
“Yes,” she said, decisively, but not in the right tone.
“What I mean is,” I told her patiently, “if you happened to be looking for a good work to devote your life to, what could be better than a reclamation job on such a character. The scope is tremendous, just—”
“Is this a proposal of some kind?” Sally inquired.
“Somekind! I’d have you know—Good God!” I broke off.
We were in Tyler Street. A short street, rainswept now, and empty, except for ourselves. What stopped me was the sudden appearance of some kind of vehicle, farther along. I couldn’t make it out very clearly on account of t
he rain, but I had the impression of a small, lowbuilt lorry with several figures in light clothes on it driving across Tyler Street quite quickly, and vanishing. That wouldn’t have been so bad if there were any street crossing Tyler Street, but there isn’t; it had just come out of one side and gone into the other.
“Did you see what I saw?” I asked.
“But how on earth—?” she began.
We walked a little farther until we came to the place where the thing had crossed, and looked at the solid brick wall on one side and the housefronts on the other.
“You must have been mistaken,” said Sally.
“Well, for—I must have been mistaken!”
“But it just couldn’t have happened, could it?”
“Now, listen, darling—” I began.
But at that moment a girl stepped out from the solid brick about ten feet ahead of us. We stopped, and gaped at her.
I don’t know whether her hair would be her own, art and science together can do so much for a girl, but the way she was wearing it, it was like a great golden chrysanthemum a good foot and a half across, and with a red flower set in it a little left of center. It looked sort of top-heavy. She was wearing some kind of brief pink tunic, silk perhaps, and more appropriate to one of those elderly gentleman floorshows than Tyler Street on a filthy wet night. What made it a real shocker was the things that had been achieved by embroidery. I never would have believed that any girl could—oh well, anyway, there she stood, and there we stood . . .
When I say ‘she stood’, she certainly did, but somehow she did it about six inches above ground level.
She looked at us both, then she stared back at Sally just as hard as Sally was staring at her. It must have been some seconds before any of us moved. The girl opened her mouth as if she were speaking, but no sound came. Then she shook her head, made a forget it gesture and turned and walked back into the wall.
Sally didn’t move. With the rain shining on her mackintosh she looked like a black statue. When she turned so that I could see her face under the hood it had an expression I had never seen there before. I put my arm round her, and found that she was trembling.
“I’m scared, Jerry,” she said.
“No need for that, Sal. There’s bound to be a simple explanation of some kind,” I said, falsely.
“But it’s more than that, Jerry. Didn’t .you see her face? She was exactly like me!”
“She was pretty much like—” I conceded.
“Jerry, she was exactly like—I’m—I’m scared.”
“Must have been some trick of the light. Anyway, she’s gone now,” I said.
All the same, Sally was right. That girl was the image of herself. I’ve wondered about that quite a bit since . . .
Jimmy brought a copy of the morning paper into my room next day. It carried a brief, facetious leader on the number of local citizens who had been seeing things lately.
“They’re beginning to take notice, at last,” he proclaimed.
“How’s your own line going?” I asked.
He frowned. “I’m afraid it can’t be quite the way I thought. I reckon it is still in the experimental stage, all right, but the transmitter may not be in these parts at all. It could be that this is just the area he has trained it on for tests.”
“But why here?”
“How would I know? It has to be somewhere—and the transmitter itself could be anywhere.” He paused, struck by a portentous thought. “It might be really serious. Suppose the Russians had a transmitter which could project people—or bombs—here by teleportation . . . ?”
“Why here?” I said again. “I should have thought that Harwell or a Royal Arsenal—”
“Experimental, so far,” he reminded me.
“Oh,” I said, abashed. I went on to tell him what Sally and I had seen the previous night. “She sort of didn’t look much like the way I think of Russians,” I added.
Jimmy shook his head. “Might be camouflage. After all, behind that curtain they have to get their idea of the way our girls look mostly from magazines and picture papers,” he pointed out.
The next day, after about seventy-five per cent of its readers had written in to tell about the funny things they had been seeing, the News dropped the facetious angle. In two days more, the thing had become factional, dividing sharply into what you might call the Classical and Modern camps. In the latter, schismatic groups argued the claims of teleportage against three-dimensional projection, or some theory of spontaneous molecular assembly: in the former, opinions could be sorted as beliefs in a ghostly invasion, a suddenly acquired visibility of habitually wandering spirits, or the imminence of Judgment Day. In the heat of debate it was rapidly becoming difficult to tell who had seen how much of what, and who was enthusiastically bent on improving his case at some expense of fact.
On Saturday Sally and I met for lunch. Afterwards, we started off in the car for a little place in the hills which seemed to me an ideal spot for a proposal. But at the main crossing in a High Street the man in front jumped on his brakes. So did I, and the man behind me. The one behind him didn’t quite. There was an interesting crunch of metal going on on the other side of the crossing, too. I stood up to see what it was all about, and then pulled Sally up beside me.
“Here we go again,” I said. “Look!”
Slap in the middle of the crossing was—well, you could scarcely call it a vehicle—it was more like a flat trolley or platform, about a foot off the ground. And when I say off the ground, I mean just that. No wheels, or legs. It kind of hung there, from nothing. Standing on it, dressed in colored things like long shirts or smocks, were half a dozen men looking interestedly around them. Along the edge of the platform was lettered: PAWLEY’S PEEPHOLES . One of the men was pointing out All Saints’ Church to another; the rest were paying more attention to the cars and the people. The policeman on duty was hanging a goggling face over the edge of his traffic control box. Then he pulled himself together. He shouted, he blew his whistle, then he shouted again. The men on the platform took no notice at all. The policeman got out of his box and went across the road looking like a volcano that had seen a nice place to erupt.
“Hey!” he shouted to them.
It didn’t worry them, but when he got within a yard or two of them they noticed him, and they nudged one another, and grinned. The policeman’s face was purplish, he spoke to them luridly, but they just went on watching him with amused interest. He reached a truncheon out of his back pocket, and went closer. He grabbed at a fellow in a yellow shirt—and his arm went right through him.
The policeman stepped back. You could see his nostrils sort of spread, the way a horse’s do. Then he took a firmer hold of his truncheon and made a fine circular sweep at the lot of them. They kept on grinning back at him as the stick went through them.
I take off my hat to that policeman. He didn’t run. He stared at them for a moment with a very queer expression on his face, then he turned and walked deliberately back to his box; just as deliberately he signaled the north-south traffic across. The man ahead of me was ready for it. He drove right at, and through, the platform. It began to move, but I’d have nicked it myself, had it been nickable. Sally, looking back, said that it slid away on a curve and disappeared through the front of the Penny Savings Bank.
When we got to the spot I’d had in mind the weather had come over bad to make the place look dreary and unpropitious, so we drove about a bit, and then back to a nice quiet roadside restaurant just outside Westwich. I was getting the conversation round to the mood where I wanted it when who should come across to our table but Jimmy.
“Fancy meeting you two!” he said. “Did you hear what happened at the Crossing this afternoon, Jerry?”
“We were there,” I told him.
“You know, Jerry, this is something bigger than we thought—a whole lot bigger. That platform thing.
These people are away ahead of us technically. Do you know what I reckon they are?”
&nb
sp; “Martians?” I suggested.
He stared at me, taken aback. ‘Now, how on earth did you guess that?’ he said, amazedly.
“I sort of saw it had to come,” I admitted. “But,” I added, “I do have a kind of feeling that Martians wouldn’t be labeled ‘Pawley’s Peepholes’.”
“Oh, were they? Nobody told me that,” said Jimmy.
He went away sadly, but even by breaking in at all he had wrecked the mood I’d been building up.
On Monday morning our typist, Anna, arrived even more scattered than commonly.
“The most terrible thing happened to me,” she told us as soon as she was inside the door. “Oh dear.
And did I blush all over!”
“Allover?” inquired Jimmy interestedly.
She scorned him.
“There I was in my bath, and when I happened to look up there was a man in a green shirt, standing watching me. Of course, I screamed, at once.”
“Of course,” agreed Jimmy. “Very proper. And what happened then, or shouldn’t we—”
“He just stood there,” said Anna. “Then he sniggered, and walked away through the wall. Was I mortified!”
“Very mortifying thing, a snigger,” Jimmy agreed.
Anna explained that it was not entirely the snigger that had mortified her. “What I mean is,” she said, “things like that oughtn’t to be allowed. If a man is going to be able to walk through a girl’s bathroom wall, where is he going to stop?”
Which seemed a pretty fair question.
The boss arrived just then. I followed him into his room. He wasn’t looking happy.
“What the hell’s going on in this damned town, Jerry?” he demanded. “Wife comes home yesterday.
