The Rim of Morning

by William Sloane

  His hand came to rest on the control lever. The fingers gripped it until their joints were yellow-white. He moved it perhaps an inch from left toward right and waited. Nothing happened at first and I began to breathe more comfortably. Then I was aware of a low hum, like that which an old-fashioned radio set makes when the tubes are warming. The skin at the base of my neck began to crawl, but I damned myself for a fool. This was all normal enough.

  Julian listened to the hum for a time and then nodded his head and moved the lever again. The hum became deeper, but Julian paid no attention to it beyond a casual glance at the dials in front of him. Once more he moved the lever and this time I was aware that he expected something to happen. He looked up from the panel in front of him and stared down the table. The seven copper figures sat there immovably. I guessed that current was pulsing through them, but nothing was changed in their surrealist outward aspect.

  In what way I first became aware that an alteration was taking place in that room, I find it hard now to say. The noise of the tubes continued, deeper than before, but it was so low a hum that I could not believe it would be audible outside the room. It was definitely not the sound I had heard the night before. I think that the first thing I noticed consciously was the air around me. It was moving, not in any one direction but in eddies and whorls, like water in a saucepan before it comes to a boil. I felt the twists and turns of draft touch my face and then my hands, and finally they were brushing against me from head to foot. Julian, I saw, paid no attention to this phenomenon, at least for a while. Then he turned to me.

  “You feel that?” he asked. “

  Of course; what is it?”

  “Air,” he answered, and then left the panel and went to the nearest window. “We had best open this somewhat,” he remarked and tugged up the sash. Then he fumbled with the steel shutter behind it and swung it open. There must have been a wind on the river. At any rate, I saw his hair move and blow.

  After a while it seemed to me that the air which was eddying in the room had settled to a steady single direction. At any rate, I was aware of a draft against the back of my neck, but no more of the tendrils of motion which had brushed my face. Julian was again at the control panel, his eyes once more fixed on a spot which was apparently somewhere over the middle of the table and above the heads of Hugo, Arthur, and their nightmare companions.

  “What do you see?” His voice was hoarse and low.

  I strained my eyes in the direction of his gaze. “Nothing.” But I heard something, so faint that I could not certainly have identified it if I had not been expecting it. The sound of the night before was in that room with us. In spite of being prepared for it, I was once more, irrationally, afraid.

  “Now watch!” Julian’s voice was shaking. His hand moved the lever over to a point midway between the left and right ends of its slots with a motion so jerky that I knew the thing, whatever it was, that he wanted me to observe was going to happen. There was a sudden stir in the air at my back. I could feel it streaming past me now with renewed speed and the humming roar of the machine deepened. As I stood there, following with my own eyes the direction of Julian’s stare and listening to that unimaginable sound roll through the room around us, I began to understand that the noise did not come from the machine, nor was the hurrying river of air that passed us both being drawn into any part of Julian’s apparatus. Something was happening in the sheer empty space above the center of the table.

  To this day I cannot be sure what the thing was that I saw happen there. It began as a point of blackness which I could see with great distinctness because it was between me and the far wall. “Point of blackness” is not a good description, and yet I hardly know what else to call it. There against the grayish-yellow of the room’s faded wall-paper was a thing, suspended in the air as it seemed to me at first. It was in no way human. It hung there, pulsing faintly and unevenly, but always growing with each expansion slightly more than it shrank with the contractions. When I first noticed it, the thing was the size of a large pea. I have called it black and yet it was actually a colorlessness so intense (to define the thing in terms of its opposite), that it seemed to absorb the very glance with which I looked at it.

  I can remember nothing further of the way that thing appeared to me, or of the emotions I experienced watching it. My memory presents every detail of what followed, but not as a part of my own experience. As I stood there, my eyes fixed on that black focal point, I lost awareness of myself in an emotion so appalling and overwhelming that there is no accurate term for it. Fear it was not, for I was past the point of being afraid. I think perhaps the word “awe” comes closer to it than anything else. . . .

  The blackness over the center of the black table grew. It expanded

  in the air with steadily increasing speed. The seven figures never moved, never looked at it, were deaf to the sound that filled my ears and hammered at the walls of the room till it was wonderful that they did not shatter. As the thing grew, it became more clearly three-dimensional, although that description is in itself meaningless. We know, in actual experience, nothing which is not three-dimensional. Dimension is a fact with three attributes, length, breadth, and thickness, but they are triune and inseparable aspects of material existence. Not so this heart of darkness that beat in and out, to and fro, larger and smaller, over the center of the table. It had no dimension at all. It consumed dimension, negated it, developed like a parasite on the shape and frame of the familiar world.

  Julian was staring at it with the same fixed look. His hand still rested on the control lever, but the knuckles were no longer white with contraction; he was paying no attention to anything but what was in front of us. The wind which was streaming through the window had risen till it shrieked like a gale and his hair blew forward, thin and stringy, toward that center of nothingness in front of us. I saw him lean forward slowly, reluctantly, as if he were being pressed from behind. I saw my own hand, white and shaking, go down against the face of the control panel and stiffen into a brace, though I was not aware of moving it, nor even of the weight of driving air behind me that must have forced me into the action.

  The edges of the blackness were not precise. They wavered and changed like the outer rim of a whirlpool and, as the thing got bigger, I noticed that it had a sort of penumbra, a rim of shadow through which I could make out the shapes of wall and floor and ceiling behind it.

  Let me say at once that there was nothing about this presence which suggested life, either present or past, to me. It was no more alive than a tornado or a maelstrom. It was simply an existence of forces so enormous that I could not grasp what they meant, or what was actually taking place. But I did see the inexorable spread of that thing, saw it numbly until it bulked as large as the table and the room grew dim because it was between us and the light on the ceiling. In its larger diameter it must have been several feet through at that moment. Dust, bits of stuff, the papers on Julian’s desk were being snatched up by the wind and carried into that blackness in front of us. None of them came out again. I am sure that the very air which rushed into that chasm is gone forever. . . .

  How long it took the thing to grow until it was almost at the edge of the lectern I could not say. Several minutes, certainly. Some blind instinct of self-preservation moved in me then, though it was nothing conscious. But somehow I managed to get my left hand over Julian’s and grip the handle of the control. With every ounce of power I had, I slammed it back to the starting point.

  Instantly, so sudden was the release of the pressure from behind, we both staggered backward, away from the table. The black gulf into which we had been staring vanished as though it were a light which had been turned off. The room sprang full into the glow of the lamp. Simultaneously, the air, meeting at the heart of the space where the thing had been, roared tumultuously in our ears.

  And then the room was still, silent, unchanged.

  We looked at each other without words. Both of us were panting; I felt spent, as if I had
run for miles, and there was a thin ringing in my ears. Julian groped his way to the desk chair and sat down, trembling. He buried his face in his hands and did not look up for a long time. I stood staring down at him vacantly, my mind empty of anything except wonder that I was still alive and an incredulous surprise that nothing had altered. The thing had left no trace behind it.

  He looked up at me after a time and licked his lips. “You see,” he said.

  “Yes.”

  After a second long silence he said, slowly, “I told you that I would show you the other world. Well?”

  With some difficulty I remembered back to our talk in his room before this demonstration had begun. “Oh, yes. But Julian . . .” I could not think how to go on in any rational terms.

  “What?”

  “This . . . thing . . . you just showed me, that cannot be the other

  world you meant. That black thing was no world. It was opposite to any world at all.”

  He shook his head. “You’re wrong about that, Richard. It is her world . . . Helen’s . . . I know that. But I have not found the right door. Surely you see that this is at least the right track?”

  I did not answer that question. Instead I demanded, “Why did all the air rush into that thing?”

  He looked away and his voice was very low when he replied, “I don’t know.”

  And yet, it seemed to me that perhaps he did, that the same theory that was formulating itself in my own mind must have been in his, and long before now. But believing as he did that he had discovered the formula for the one thing he wanted, he would never believe that he had actually found something else. He would even reject the single hypothesis that could explain what we had just seen. In that moment of insight I felt pity for him and yet, I was more afraid of him than anything else.

  “What am I to do?” he asked me, his face still averted. “I tell you, Dick, I do not see where I have gone astray on this thing. I’ve checked and rechecked my figures. I’ve tried one set of adjustments after another. You heard me doing that last night . . . and still it is always the same. Sometimes it happens more quickly than others.” He put his hand on a black notebook in front of him. “All the data are here. All my work, for six years. It must be right . . .”

  “Let’s get out of here,” I told him. “I can’t think in this place. I want to talk to you, Julian. But not now.”

  He stood up stiffly and walked down the room. I followed him. The table gleamed as before. The seven figures along its edges sat there on their nonexistent chairs, their faceless heads turned toward its center, their copper fingers still in contact. I wondered then how Julian could have named them. Still, Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos were named, and if men had found words for those three fatal sisters, it was permissible, I suppose, to christen the things around the table.

  Julian unlocked the door without a word and we went through it.

  He was silent as we crossed the hall. In his room again I made him lie down. “We won’t talk just yet,” I told him. “Stretch out a while and rest. I want to think. This afternoon is time enough.”

  He looked up at me heavily. “Perhaps. All right.” “I take back everything, Julian. I thought you . . .” “I know,” he said wearily. “Thank you, Richard. I feel easier now that you have seen that black . . . node. We must work together on it, find out why it isn’t what we want, and discover what we can about it.”

  The thought of creating that thing even once again made me deadly afraid. “I’ll talk to you later about that, Julian. Promise me you’ll rest a while now. And promise that you won’t go back into that room again alone. It isn’t safe. If I hadn’t moved that lever for you . . .”

  “Yes,” he said again, “I know.” He brushed his hand across his eyes. “Thank you for that.”

  “One more thing, Julian,” I said. “I want you to give me the key to that room.”

  “Why?” He was instantly alert.

  “Because I don’t trust you. I think you’re planning to go right back there when I leave this room.”

  “I’ll rest. I promise.” “Give me the key and I’ll believe you. I promise not to go in myself or to let anyone else in. But to tell you the truth, Julian, I’m afraid of that thing of yours. Unless I know that you won’t be going back in there, I won’t be able to think clearly about this whole problem.”

  “You’ll return it when I ask?” “Yes,” I said. I could not persuade myself that I intended to keep my word, but Julian must have decided to trust me. His secret had become, I think, too much even for him to carry alone. He took the key out of his pocket and handed it to me. “Here.”

  I dropped it into my own pocket with a sense of triumph which I did not want to analyze too closely. Then I pulled a blanket up over him. “Get some rest now, for God’s sake,” I told him. “I’ll call you in time for lunch. I may even lie down myself. I feel a bit rocky somehow.”

  “It’s a relief to know that you understand about it now,” he said. “I think I can rest to advantage. But we must have another talk this afternoon. There is something else I think I had best tell you.”

  “Sure,” I answered and left him lying there. His eyes were closed, even before I got to the door. He looked old and weak.

  I went down the stairs heavily and quickly. I wanted time to think, to arrange the chaos of impressions in my mind into some coherence. The cold air outside felt good on my face. I walked up and down in the grass in front of the house and tried to reason things out. The more I thought about the apparatus of Julian’s, the more sure I was that it was beyond my understanding. But other things began to fall into a sort of pattern. After a time I went to look for Anne.

  28.

  I FOUND her in the barn, washing the car with a sort of desperate concentration. I knew what was wrong, of course, but there had been no way I could warn her about the sound. When it began she must have come out here to get away from it and, in desperation, begun to clean the automobile.

  “It’s all over,” I said.

  She straightened suddenly and looked at me with panic in her eyes. Then she caught her breath and smiled. “Dick!”

  “All quiet along the Kennebec,” I told her. “I’ve seen Julian’s invention.”

  She said quietly, “You look as if you’d seen a ghost.” “No ghosts,” I said. “But something. A nice little something.” “As bad as that?”

  I sat down on the running board. “Worse.” “

  I suppose you don’t want to tell me?”

  “I can’t,” I said. “I promised him.”

  She nodded. “All right. But what I don’t know won’t hurt me and it’s a relief to be sure that he hasn’t succeeded.”

  “Yes . . .well, maybe I’m wrong in thinking I know what he’s actually accomplished. But I don’t think so and I think he knows it, too. Only he won’t admit it to himself. And it’s got to be stopped. If that thing ever got out of control . . .” I thought of that for a moment and then pulled myself together. There was something else I had to do before I could be sure that the peril in Julian’s apparatus was ended forever. “I have to talk to Mrs. Walters.”

  Anne stared at me as if I were suddenly demented. “All right. She’s in the kitchen, I think.”

  “Don’t come with me,” I said. “This isn’t going to be nice.”

  I left her sitting on the running board; once I turned and looked back. She was still there. I saw her give a sort of mock salute with her hand and then reach for the chamois with which she’d been doing the car. It felt good to see her, just to know that she was there. Because what I had to do now was a thing which I could contemplate only with loathing.

  On a sudden impulse I did not go in the kitchen door, but went round to the front and wrenched open the door into the hall. Then I went upstairs to my room and took the bottle of whiskey out of my bag. I poured about four stiff fingers of it down my throat and then sat down to think.

  I would have to act quickly if I was to prevent Julian from going on with that th
ing of his. And yet, there was a pang of regret in my mind at the thought of what I had to do. For he had accomplished something that no man before him had ever achieved. He had gone out to the very edge of the physical world, and beyond it. In some way which I did not begin to understand, that black thing I had seen was an aperture. What it opened into, or upon, was no concern of mine; I did not want even to speculate about that. There was nothing on which to go. But my theory about its nature was the only possible one—of that I was sure.

  I took another small and careful drink. The evidence for my conclusion was purely circumstantial. But that was plenty. The rush of air into the center of the thing, as if it were being drawn into a complete vacuum; the fact that neither the air nor the things it had carried with it returned; the very appearance of the blackness, like an extra-dimensional whirlpool; and, above everything else, the cold conviction that the thing which Julian Blair’s potential created was beyond all the bounds of our universe. It seemed to me that something in my mind recognized it.

  That was absurd, of course. And yet, how had Julian created this thing? By magnifying the radiations, the waves given off by the human brain and nervous system. Something like that, according to his own account. I snatched my thoughts back from the gulf toward which they were headed. If man were not altogether a physical being, if he possessed in himself a contact with an existence neither spatial nor of time, and if that contact were to be artificially produced, even by sheer imitation of the sort to which Julian had openly confessed, then . . . then what would be created would be no bridge, but a mechanical, arbitrary rent in the warp and woof of the fabric of the physical universe. A lesion, indeed, through which everything known streamed into the unknown. A hole in the dike. No, that wasn’t quite accurate. A leak in the helmet of the diver would be closer.