by Anthology
The mess hall, or whatever they called it, was cafeteria style and he got in line with a tray for juice, eggs and coffee. He saw no one he knew, but as he was looking for a table a willowy blonde girl smiled and gestured to the empty place opposite her.
"You're Mr. Cort," she said. "Won't you join me?"
"Thanks," he said, unloading his tray. "How did you know?"
"The mystery man with the handcuff. You'd be hard to miss. I'm Alis—that's A-l-i-s, not A-l-i-c-e—Garet. Are you with the FBI? Or did you escape from jail?"
"How do you do. No, just a bank messenger. What an unusual name. Professor Garet's daughter?"
"The same," she said. "Also the only. A pity, because if there'd been two of us I'd have had a fifty-fifty chance of going to OSU. As it is, I'm duty-bound to represent the second generation at the nut factory."
"Nut factory? You mean Cavalier?" Don struggled to manipulate knife and fork without knocking things off the table with his clinging brief case.
"Here, let me cut your eggs for you," Alis said. "You'd better order them scrambled tomorrow. Yes, Cavalier. Home of the crackpot theory and the latter-day alchemist."
"I'm sure it's not that bad. Thanks. As for tomorrow, I hope to be out of here by then."
"How do you get down from an elephant? Old riddle. You don't; you get down from ducks. How do you plan to get down from Superior?"
"I'll find a way. I'm more interested at the moment in how I got up here."
"You were levitated, like everybody else."
"You make it sound deliberate, Miss Garet, as if somebody hoisted a whole patch of real estate for some fell purpose."
"Scarcely fell, Mr. Cort. As for it being deliberate, that seems to be a matter of opinion. Apparently you haven't seen the papers."
"I didn't know there were any."
"Actually there's only one, the Superior Sentry, a weekly. This is an extra. Ed Clark must have been up all night getting it out." She opened her purse and unfolded a four-page tabloid.
Don blinked at the headline:
Town Gets High
"Ed Clark's something of an eccentric, like everybody else in Superior," Alis said.
Don read the story, which seemed to him a capricious treatment of an apparently grave situation.
Residents having business beyond the outskirts of town today are advised not to. It's a long way down. Where Superior was surrounded by Ohio, as usual, today Superior ends literally at the town line.
A Citizens' Emergency Fence-Building Committee is being formed, but in the meantime all are warned to stay well away from the edge. The law of gravity seems to have been repealed for the town but it is doubtful if the same exemption would apply to a dubious individual bent on investigating….
Don skimmed the rest. "I don't see anything about it being deliberate."
Alis had been creaming and sugaring Don's coffee. She pushed it across to him and said, "It's not on page one. Ed Clark and Mayor Civek don't get along, so you'll find the mayor's statement in a box on page three, bottom."
Don creased the paper the other way, took a sip of coffee, nodded his thanks, and read:
Mayor Claims Secession From Earth
Mayor Hector Civek, in a proclamation issued locally by hand and dropped to the rest of the world in a plastic shatter-proof bottle, said today that Superior has seceded from Earth. His reasons were as vague as his explanation.
The "reasons" include these: (1) Superior has been discriminated against by county, state and federal agencies; (2) Cavalier Institute has been held up to global derision by orthodox (presumably meaning accredited) colleges and universities; and (3) chicle exporters have conspired against the Superior Bubble Gum Company by unreasonably raising prices.
The "explanation" consists of a 63-page treatise on applied magnology by Professor Osbert Garet of Cavalier which the editor (a) does not understand; (b) lacks space to publish; and which (it being atrociously handwritten) he (c) has not the temerity to ask his linotype operator to set.
Don said, "I'm beginning to like this Ed Clark."
"He's a doll," Alis said. "He's about the only one in town who stands up to Father."
"Does your father claim that he levitated Superior off the face of the Earth?"
"Not to me he doesn't. I'm one of those banes of his existence, a skeptic. He gave up trying to magnolize me when I was sixteen. I had a science teacher in high school—not in Superior, incidentally—who gave me all kinds of embarrassing questions to ask Father. I asked them, being a natural-born needler, and Father has disowned me intellectually ever since."
"How old are you, Miss Garet, if I may ask?"
She sat up straight and tucked her sweater tightly into her skirt, emphasizing her good figure. To a male friend Don would have described the figure as outstanding. She had mocking eyes, a pert nose and a mouth of such moist red softness that it seemed perpetually waiting to be kissed. All in all she could have been the queen of a campus much more densely populated with co-eds than Cavalier was.
"You may call me Alis," she said. "And I'm nineteen."
Don grinned. "Going on?"
"Three months past. How old are you, Mr. Cort?"
"Don's the name I've had for twenty-six years. Please use it."
"Gladly. And now, Don, unless you want another cup of coffee, I'll go with you to the end of the world."
"On such short notice?" Don was intrigued. Last night the redhead from the club car had repelled an advance that hadn't been made, and this morning a blonde was apparently making an advance that hadn't been solicited. He wondered where Geneva Jervis was, but only vaguely.
"I'll admit to the double entendre," Alis said. "What I meant—for now—was that we can stroll out to where Superior used to be attached to the rest of Ohio and see how the Earth is getting along without us."
"Delighted. But don't you have any classes?"
"Sure I do. Non-Einsteinian Relativity 1, at nine o'clock. But I'm a demon class-cutter, which is why I'm still a Senior at my advanced age. On to the brink!"
They walked south from the campus and came to the railroad track. The train was standing there with nowhere to go. It had been abandoned except for the conductor, who had dutifully spent the night aboard.
"What's happening?" he asked when he saw them. "Any word from down there?"
"Not that I know of," Don said. He introduced him to Alis Garet. "What are you going to do?"
"What can I do?" the conductor asked.
"You can go over to Cavalier and have breakfast," Alis said. "Nobody's going to steal your old train."
The conductor reckoned as how he might just do that, and did.
"You know," Don said, "I was half-asleep last night but before the train stopped I thought it was running alongside a creek for a while."
"South Creek," Alis said. "That's right. It's just over there."
"Is it still? I mean hasn't it all poured off the edge by now? Was that Superior's water supply?"
Alis shrugged. "All I know is you turn on the faucet and there's water. Let's go look at the creek."
They found it coursing along between the banks.
"Looks just about the same," she said.
"That's funny. Come on; let's follow it to the edge."
The brink, as Alis called it, looked even more awesome by daylight. Everything stopped short. There were the remnants of a cornfield, with the withered stalks cut down, then there was nothing. There was South Creek surging along, then nothing. In the distance a clump of trees, with a few autumn leaves still clinging to their branches, simply ended.
"Where is the water going?" Don asked. "I can't make it out."
"Down, I'd say. Rain for the Earth-people."
"I should think it'd be all dried up by now. I'm going to have a look."
"Don't! You'll fall off!"
"I'll be careful." He walked cautiously toward the edge. Alis followed him, a few feet behind. He stopped a yard from the brink and waited for a spell of dizziness to
pass. The Earth was spread out like a topographer's map, far below. Don took another wary step, then sat down.
"Chicken," said Alis. She laughed uncertainly, then she sat down, too.
"I still can't see where the water goes," Don said. He stretched out on his stomach and began to inch forward. "You stay there."
Finally he had inched to a point where, by stretching out a hand, he could almost reach the edge. He gave another wriggle and the fingers of his right hand closed over the brink. For a moment he lay there, panting, head pressed to the ground.
"How do you feel?" Alis asked.
"Scared. When I get my courage back I'll pick up my head and look."
Alis put a hand out tentatively, then purposefully took hold of his ankle and held it tight. "Just in case a high wind comes along," she said.
"Thanks. It helps. Okay, here we go." He lifted his head. "Damn."
"What?"
"It still isn't clear. Do you have a pocket mirror?"
"I have a compact." She took it out of her bag with her free hand and tossed it to him. It rolled and Don had to grab to keep it from going over the edge. Alis gave a little shriek. Don was momentarily unnerved and had to put his head back on the ground. "Sorry," she said.
Don opened the compact and carefully transferred it to his right hand. He held it out beyond the edge and peered into it, focusing it on the end of the creek. "Now I've got it. The water isn't going off the edge!"
"It isn't? Then where is it going?"
"Down, of course, but it's as if it's going into a well, or a vertical tunnel, just short of the edge."
"Why? How?"
"I can't see too well, but that's my impression. Hold on now. I'm coming back." He inched away from the edge, then got up and brushed himself off. He returned her compact. "I guess you know where we go next."
"The other end of the creek?"
"Exactly."
South Creek did not bisect Superior, as Don thought it might, but flowed in an arc through a southern segment of it. They had about two miles to go, past South Creek Bridge—which used to lead to Ladenburg, Alis said—past Raleigh Country Club (a long drive would really put the ball out of play, Don thought) and on to the edge again.
But as they approached what they were forced to consider the source of the creek, they found a wire fence at the spot. "This is new," Alis said.
The fence, which had a sign on it, warning—electrified, was semicircular, with each end at the edge and tarpaulins strung behind it so they could see the mouth of the creek. The water flowed from under the tarp and fence.
"Look how it comes in spurts," Alis said.
"As if it's being pumped."
Smaller print on the sign said: Protecting mouth of South Creek, one of two sources of water for Superior. Electrical charge in fence is sufficient to kill. It was signed: Vincent Grande, Chief of Police, Hector Civek, Mayor.
"What's the other source, besides the faucet in your bathroom?" Don asked.
"North Lake, maybe," Alis said. "People fish there but nobody's allowed to swim."
"Is the lake entirely within the town limits?"
"I don't know."
"If it were on the edge, and if I took a rowboat out on it, I wonder what would happen?"
"I know one thing—I wouldn't be there holding your ankle while you found out."
She took his arm as they gazed past the electrified fence at the Earth below and to the west.
"It's impressive, isn't it?" she said. "I wonder if that's Indiana way over there?"
He patted her hand absent-mindedly. "I wonder if it's west at all. I mean, how do we know Superior is maintaining the same position up here as it used to down there?"
"We could tell by the sun, silly."
"Of course," he said, grinning at his stupidity. "And I guess we're not high enough to see very far. If we were we'd be able to see the Great Lakes—or Lake Erie, anyway."
They were musing about the geography when a plane came out of a cloudbank and, a second later, veered sharply. They could make out UAL on the underside of a wing. As it turned they imagined they could see faces peering out of the windows. They waved and thought they saw one or two people wave back. Then the plane climbed toward the east and was gone.
"Well," Don said as they turned to go back to Cavalier, "now we know that they know. Maybe we'll begin to get some answers. Or, if not answers, then transportation."
"Transportation?" Alis squeezed the arm she was holding. "Why? Don't you like it here?"
"If you mean don't I like you, the answer is yes, of course I do. But if I don't get out of this handcuff soon so I can take a bath and get into clean clothes, you're not going to like me."
"You're still quite acceptable, if a bit whiskery." She stopped, still holding his arm, and he turned so they were face to face. "So kiss me," she said, "before you deteriorate."
They were in the midst of an extremely pleasant kiss when the brief case at the end of Don's handcuff began to talk to him.
III
Much of the rest of the world was inclined to regard the elevation of Superior, Ohio, as a Fortean phenomenon in the same category as flying saucers and sea monsters.
The press had a field day. Most of the headlines were whimsical:
Town Takes Off
Superior Lives Up To Name
A Rising Community
The city council of Superior, Wisconsin, passed a resolution urging its Ohio namesake to come back down. The Superiors in Nebraska, Wyoming, Arizona and West Virginia, glad to have the publicity, added their voices to the plea.
The Pennsylvania Railroad filed a suit demanding that the state of Ohio return forthwith one train and five miles of right-of-way.
The price of bubble gum went up from one cent to three for a nickel.
In Parliament a Labour member rose to ask the Home Secretary for assurances that all British cities were firmly fastened down.
An Ohio waterworks put in a bid for the sixteen square miles of hole that Superior had left behind, explaining that it would make a fine reservoir.
A company that leased out big advertising signs in Times Square offered Superior a quarter of a million dollars for exclusive rights to advertising space on its bottom, or Earthward, side. It sent the offer by air mail, leaving delivery up to the post office.
In Washington, Senator Bobby Thebold ascertained that his red-haired secretary, Jen Jervis, had been aboard the train levitated with Superior and registered a series of complaints by telephone, starting with the Interstate Commerce Commission and the railroad brotherhoods. He asked the FBI to investigate the possibility of kidnaping and muttered about the likelihood of it all being a Communist plot.
A little-known congressman from Ohio started a rumor that raising of Superior was an experiment connected with the United States earth satellite program. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration issued a quick denial.
Two men talked earnestly in an efficient-looking room at the end of one of the more intricate mazes in the Pentagon Building. Neither wore a uniform but the younger man called the other sir, or chief, or general.
"We've established definitely that Sergeant Cort was on that train, have we?" the general asked.
"Yes, sir. No doubt about it."
"And he has the item with him?"
"He must have. The only keys are here and at the other end. He couldn't open the handcuff or the brief case."
"The only known keys, that is."
"Oh? How's that, General?"
"The sergeant can open the brief case and use the item if we tell him how."
"You think it's time to use it? I thought we were saving it."
"That was before Superior defected. Now we can use it to more advantage than any theoretical use it might be put to in the foreseeable future."
"We could evacuate Cort. Take him off in a helicopter or drop him a parachute and let him jump."
"No. Having him there is a piece of luck. No one knows who he is. We'll assign
him there for the duration and have him report regularly. Let's go to the message center."
Senator Bobby Thebold was an imposing six feet two, a muscular 195, a youthful-looking 43. He wore his steel-gray hair cut short and his skin was tan the year round. He was a bachelor. He had been a fighter pilot in World War II and his conversation was peppered with Air Force slang, much of it out of date. Thebold was good newspaper copy and one segment of the press, admiring his fighting ways, had dubbed him Bobby the Bold. The Senator did not mind a bit.
At the moment Senator Thebold was pacing the carpet in the ample working space he'd fought to acquire in the Senate Office Building. He was momentarily at a loss. His inquiries about Jen Jervis had elicited no satisfaction from the ICC, the FBI, or the CIA. He was in an alphabetical train of thought and went on to consider the CAA, the CAB and the CAP. He snapped his fingers at CAP. He had it.
The Civil Air Patrol itself he considered a la-de-da outfit of gentleman flyers, skittering around in light planes, admittedly doing some good, but by and large nothing to excite a former P-38 pilot who'd won a chestful of ribbons for action in the Southwest Pacific.
Ah, but the PP. There was an organization! Bobby Thebold had been one of the founders of the Private Pilots, a hard-flying outfit that zoomed into the wild blue yonder on week ends and holidays, engines aroar, propellers aglint, white silk scarves aflap. PP's members were wealthy industrialists, stunt flyers, sportsmen—the elite of the air.
PP was a paramilitary organization with the rank of its officers patterned after the Royal Air Force. Thus Bobby Thebold, by virtue of his war record, his charter membership and his national eminence, was Wing Commander Thebold, DFC.
Wing Commander Thebold swung into action. He barked into the intercom: "Miss Riley! Get the airport. Have them rev up Charger. Tell them I'll be there for oh-nine-fifty-eight take-off. Ten-hundred will do. And get my car."
Charger was Bobby the Bold's war surplus P-38 Lightning, a sleek, twin-boomed two engine fighter plane restored to its gleaming, paintless aluminum. Actually it was an unarmed photo-reconnaissance version of the famous war horse of the Pacific, a fact the wing commander preferred to ignore. In compensation, he belted on a .45 whenever he climbed into the cockpit.
