by Bob Leman
But at the door of the room his babble abruptly ceased, and with it the wave of emotion. A barrier of a kind that had never existed before had snapped into place. Barley suddenly felt abandoned and alone. "Fido!" he said in panic. "Fido!"
"Yes, Barley," Fido said. "What is the matter?"
He was still there, then. Still there, but drawn into himself, guarding against the communication of emotion, secretive and more separate from Barley than at any time since his coming.
The butler passed him into the room. There were to be twenty or so at dinner, Barley saw. They were not, on the whole, beautiful people. By fifty a face has been shaped by the personality within, and most of these were well past the half-century mark. The bodies were carefully preserved, the results of costly regimens of exercise, massage, and baths containing odd substances; but the faces, above the white ties and bare shoulders, had a common taint of selfishness and irresponsibility, of an irritable, dissipated concentration on the self.
All but one. Barley's heart lurched at the sight of her. She was small, with hair the color of wheat; she bloomed like a flower among the sated faces. She stood smiling at a lizardish roue whose obviously wicked intentions roused Barley to instant indignation. With some rudeness he broke away from the hostess's welcoming words and began a determined advance to the rescue. His eyes met hers. He melted.
There was a sudden thunder in his head. "Barley!" Fido roared. "Barley! Let us leave this room!"
Barley, utterly astonished, came to a halt. He said, "What?"
"Let us leave this room. Quickly, as quickly as possible."
"What for? I want to talk to that woman over there."
A noise almost like static crackled in his mind. "Please, Barley," Fido said. Barley did not remember his having said "please" before, and he was touched. He left the room and the house and stood in the street in the moonlight. "Now, what the hell was that all about?" he asked.
Fido did not reply immediately, but the emotional overflow occurred again, and Barley thought with amazement, "He's going to lie." Fido said, "Barley, my quarry is not here. I see no reason to remain in this place any longer; I think we should move along to a new hunting ground. Paris, perhaps. Or we might take a house in Switzerland. What do you think?"
What Barley thought was that something of the utmost importance had just taken place and that he did not know what it was. It almost certainly had to do with the lovely woman. Fido's explosion had come at the instant her eyes met Barley's. Was it possible that she was—
But then why would Fido have wanted to run out, rather than comer his prey?
"We might go to London for some suits before we move on to Paris," Fido was saying. "While the suits are being made we can spend some time with the wine merchants. Then we will use Paris as a base and tour France, investigating the provincial cuisines and the various vins du pays. And the women."
And after Paris, no doubt Rome, Barley thought. Then the Riviera and the Lido, and all the opulent islands, and anywhere else that the senses could be cosseted. While in some un-graspable dimension a vast entity was crumbling and dissolving; a great mind whose thoughts were the laws that created and sustained a universe was dying, and an ultimate madness was harrying that universe down a long road to death and the end of all things.
*
When Barley was in the sixth grade he had written his name and address on the flyleaf of his geography book, following a form that has passed down from one generation of schoolchildren to the next since the time of the Concord sages, and perhaps before. The address read;
Willis Barley,
2615 Poplar Street,
Groat's Landing, Indiana,
United States of America,
North America, Western Hemisphere,
Earth, Solar System,
Milky Way, Universe,
The Mind of God.
There was comfort in an address like that, a sense of having one's place in a great, solid scheme of things. The final, the all-encompassing location was simple truth. Barley knew that, now. But the comfort was gone. The eternal edifice no longer stood changeless and immutable and as governance for all time. Perfection can become imperfect; it can be wrecked by a tiny flaw, by an infinitesimal defection. Barley knew that, too.
He would not remonstrate with Fido. Fido was an individual now, and he had, it was clear, made his choice. Anyhow, it was another universe that was doomed. It had nothing to do with Earth, Solar System, nothing at all. His life — his life with Fido — would continue to slide smoothly along the rich, soft path they had chosen, and each day would bring its meed of pleasurable sensation. Who could ask for anything more?
"I wish we had seen the Goyas, Barley," Fido was saying, "but there will be another time for that. We will be back again, never fear. These people know we belong among them. We have much to look forward to, Barley, as we explore all the ingenious pleasures that have been developed by your race in its short, eventful history. But all in due course. Our immediate need is to put this island behind us. Let us repair to the house and instruct the servant to pack and otherwise make ready for our departure. We will drink a bottle of Taittinger while he does so, and take a bit of the Beluga, since we have missed dinner. We have, of course, ample time. The boat leaves at sunup, I believe."
At sunup. Into Barley's mind came a picture of the humid morning and the red sun rising out of the sea. He would be looking at it very carefully, tomorrow. And not just tomorrow, he supposed, but for the rest of his life. He could tell himself that the odds against it were almost infinitely large, but nevertheless he knew now that it could — just could — happen, and he saw that he would henceforth, for all of his days, be watching for a beginning: for time to run backward, for light to become as viscous as oil, for the sun to become a cold ball of iron.
Window
(The Magazine of Fantasy & S.F., May 1980)
“We don’t know what the hell’s going on out there,” they told Gilson in Washington. “It may be pretty big. The nut in charge tried to keep it under wraps, but the army was furnishing routine security, and the commanding officer tipped us off. A screwball project. Apparently been funded for years without anyone paying much attention. Extrasensory perception, for God’s sake. And maybe they’ve found something. The security colonel thinks so, anyway.
Find out about it.”
The Nut-in-Charge was a rumpled professor of psychology named Krantz. He and the colonel met Gilson at the airport, and they set off directly for the site in an army sedan. The colonel began talking immediately.
“You’ve got something mighty queer here, Gilson,” he said. “I never saw anything like it, and neither did anybody else. Krantz here is as mystified as anybody. And it’s his baby.
We’re just security. Not that they’ve needed any, up to now. Not even any need for secrecy, except to keep the public from laughing its head off. The setup we’ve got here is—”
“Dr. Krantz,” Gilson said, “you’d better give me a complete rundown on the situation here.
So far, I haven’t any information at all.”
Krantz was occupied with the lighting of a cigar. He blew a cloud of foul smoke, and through it he said, “We’re missing one prefab building, one POBEC computer, some medical machinery, and one, uh, researcher named Culvergast.”
“Explain ‘missing,’” Gilson said.
“Gone. Disappeared. A building and everything in it. Just not there any more. But we do have something in exchange.”
“And what’s that?”
“I think you’d better wait and see for yourself,” Krantz said. “We’ll be there in a few minutes.” They were passing through the farther reaches of the metropolitan area, a series of decayed small towns. The highway wound down the valley beside the river, and the towns lay stretched along it, none of them more than a block or two wide, their side streets rising steeply toward the first ridge. In one of these moribund communities they left the highway and went bouncing up the hillside on a crooked r
oad whose surface changed from cobblestones to slag after the houses had been left behind. Beyond the crest of the ridge the road began to drop as steeply as it had risen, and after a quarter of a mile they turned into a lane whose entrance would have been missed by anyone not watching for it. They were in a forest now; it was second growth, but the logging had been done so long ago that it might almost have been a virgin stand, lofty, silent, and somewhat gloomy on this gray day.
“Pretty,” Gilson said. “How does a project like this come to be way out here, anyhow?”
“The place was available,” the colonel said. “Has been since World War Two. They set it up for some work on proximity fuses. Shut it down in ’48. Was vacant until the professor took it over.”
“Culvergast is a little bit eccentric,” Krantz said. “He wouldn’t work at the university—too many people, he said. When I heard this place was available, I put in for it, and got it—along with the colonel, here. Culvergast has been happy with the setup, but I guess he bothers the colonel a little.”
“He’s a certifiable loony,” the colonel said, “and his little helpers are worse.”
“Well, what the devil was he doing?” Gilson asked.
Before Krantz could answer, the driver braked at a chain-link gate that stood across the lane.
It was fastened with a loop of heavy logging chain and manned by armed soldiers. One of them, machine pistol in hand, peered into the car. “Everything O.K., sir?” he said.
“O.K. with waffles, Sergeant,” the colonel said. It was evidently a password. The noncom unlocked the enormous padlock that secured the chain. “Pretty primitive,” the colonel said as they bumped through the gateway, “but it’ll do until we get proper stuff in. We’ve got men with dogs patrolling the fence.” He looked at Gilson. “We’re just about there. Get a load of this, now.”
It was a house. It stood in the center of the clearing in an island of sunshine, white, gleaming, and incongruous. All around was the dark loom of the forest under a sunless sky, but somehow sunlight lay on the house, sparkling in its polished windows and making brilliant the colors of massed flowers in carefully tended beds, reflecting from the pristine whiteness of its siding out into the gray, littered clearing with its congeries of derelict buildings.
“You couldn’t have picked a better time,” the colonel said. “Shining there, cloudy here.” Gilson was not listening. He had climbed from the car and was staring in fascination. “Jesus,” he said. “Like a goddamn Victorian postcard.”
Lacy scrollwork foamed over the rambling wooden mansion, running riot at the eaves of the steep roof, climbing elaborately up towers and turrets, embellishing deep oriels and outlining a long, airy veranda. Tall windows showed by their spacing that the rooms were many and large. It seemed to be a new house, or perhaps just newly painted and supremely well-kept. A driveway of fine white gravel led under a high porte-cochère.
“How about that?” the colonel said. “Look like your grandpa’s house?” As a matter of fact, it did: like his grandfather’s house enlarged and perfected and seen through a lens of romantic nostalgia, his grandfather’s house groomed and pampered as the old farmhouse never had been. He said, “And you got this in exchange for a prefab, did you?”
“Just like that one,” the colonel said, pointing to one of the seedy buildings. “Of course we could use the prefab.”
“What does that mean?”
“Watch,” the colonel said. He picked up a small rock and tossed it in the direction of the house. The rock rose, topped its arc, and began to fall. Suddenly it was not there.
“Here,” Gilson said. “Let me try that.”
He threw the rock like a baseball, a high, hard one. It disappeared about fifty feet from the house. As he stared at the point of its disappearance, Gilson became aware that the smooth green of the lawn ended exactly below. Where the grass ended, there began the weeds and rocks that made up the floor of the clearing. The line of separation was absolutely straight, running at an angle across the lawn. Near the driveway it turned ninety degrees, and sliced off lawn, driveway and shrubbery with the same precise straightness.
“It’s perfectly square,” Krantz said. “About a hundred feet to a side. Probably a cube, actually. We know the top’s about ninety feet in the air. I’d guess there are about ten feet of it underground.”
“It?” Gilson said. “ ‘It’? What’s ‘it’?”
“Name it and you can have it,” Krantz said. “A three-dimensional television receiver a hundred feet to a side, maybe. A cubical crystal ball. Who knows?”
“The rocks we threw. They didn’t hit the house. Where did the rocks go?”
“Ah. Where, indeed? Answer that and perhaps you answer all.” Gilson took a deep breath. “All right. I’ve seen it. Now tell me about it. From the beginning.” Krantz was silent for a moment; then, in a dry lecturer’s voice he said, “Five days ago, June thirteenth, at eleven thirty a.m., give or take three minutes, Private Ellis Mulvihill, on duty at the gate, heard what he later described as ‘an explosion that was quiet, like.’ He entered the enclosure, locked the gate behind him, and ran up here to the clearing. He was staggered—‘shook-up’ was his expression—to see, instead of Culvergast’s broken-down prefab, that house, there. I gather that he stood gulping and blinking for a time, trying to come to terms with what his eyes told him. Then he ran over there to the guardhouse and called the colonel. Who called me. We came out here and found that a quarter of an acre of land and a building with a man in it had disappeared and been replaced by this, as neat as a peg in a pegboard.”
“You think the prefab went where the rocks did,” Gilson said. It was a statement.
“Why, we’re not even absolutely sure it’s gone. What we’re seeing can’t actually be where we’re seeing it. It rains on that house when it’s sunny here, and right now you can see the sunlight on it, on a day like this. It’s a window.”
“A window on what?”
“Well—that looks like a new house, doesn’t it? When were they building houses like that?”
“Eighteen seventy or eighty, something like—oh.”
“Yes,” Krantz said. “I think we’re looking at the past.”
“Oh, for God’s sake,” Gilson said.
“I know how you feel. And I may be wrong. But I have to say it looks very much that way. I want you to hear what Reeves says about it. He’s been here from the beginning. A graduate student, assisting here. Reeves!”
A very tall, very thin young man unfolded himself from a crouched position over an odd-looking machine that stood near the line between grass and rubble and ambled over to the three men. Reeves was an enthusiast. “Oh, it’s the past, all right,” he said. “Sometime in the eighties. My girl got some books on costume from the library, and the clothes check out for that decade. And the decorations on the horses’ harnesses are a clue, too. I got that from—”
“Wait a minute,” Gilson said. “Clothes? You mean there are people in there?”
“Oh, sure,” Reeves said. “A fine little family. Mamma, poppa, little girl, little boy, old granny or auntie. A dog. Good people.”
“How can you tell that?”
“I’ve been watching them for five days, you know? They’re having— were having—fine weather there—or then, or whatever you’d say. They’re nice to each other, they like each other. Good people. You’ll see.”
“When?”
“Well, they’ll be eating dinner now. They usually come out after dinner. In an hour, maybe.”
“I’ll wait,” Gilson said. “And while we wait, you will please tell me some more.” Krantz assumed his lecturing voice again. “As to the nature of it, nothing. We have a window, which we believe to open into the past. We can see into it, so we know that light passes through; but it passes in only one direction, as evidenced by the fact that the people over there are wholly unaware of us. Nothing else goes through. You saw what happened to the rocks. We’ve shoved poles through the interface there—t
here’s no resistance at all—but anything that goes through is gone, God knows where. Whatever you put through stays there. Your pole is cut off clean. Fascinating. But wherever it is, it’s not where the house is.
That interface isn’t between us and the past; it’s between us and—someplace else. I think our window here is just an incidental side-effect, a—a twisting of time that resulted from whatever tensions exist along that interface.”
Gilson sighed. “Krantz,” he said, “what am I going to tell the secretary? You’ve lucked into what may be the biggest thing that ever happened, and you’ve kept it bottled up for five days. We wouldn’t know about it now if it weren’t for the colonel’s report. Five days wasted.
Who knows how long this thing will last? The whole goddamn scientific establishment ought to be here—should have been from day one. This needs the whole works. At this point the place should be a beehive. And what do I find? You and a graduate student throwing rocks and poking with sticks. And a girlfriend looking up the dates of costumes. It’s damn near criminal.”
Krantz did not look abashed. “I thought you’d say that,” he said. “But look at it this way. Like it or not, this thing wasn’t produced by technology or science. It was pure psi. If we can reconstruct Culvergast’s work, we may be able to find out what happened; we may be able to repeat the phenomenon. But I don’t like what’s going to happen after you’ve called in your experimenters, Gilson. They’ll measure and test and conjecture and theorize, and never once will they accept for a moment the real basis of what’s happened. The day they arrive, I’ll be out. And damnit, Gilson, this is mine.”
“Not any more,” Gilson said. “It’s too big.”
“It’s not as though we weren’t doing some hard experiments of our own,” Krantz said.
“Reeves, tell him about your batting machine.”
“Yes, sir,” Reeves said. “You see, Mr. Gilson, what the professor said wasn’t absolutely the whole truth, you know? Sometimes something can get through the window. We saw it on the first day. There was a temperature inversion over in the valley, and the stink from the chemical plant had been accumulating for about a week. It broke up that day, and the wind blew the gunk through the notch and right over here. A really rotten stench. We were watching our people over there, and all of a sudden they began to sniff and wrinkle their noses and make disgusted faces. We figured it had to be the chemical stink. We pushed a pole out right away, but the end just disappeared, as usual. The professor suggested that maybe there was a pulse, or something of the sort, in the interface, that it exists only intermittently.
