by Various
Then he had begun his lecture by remarking that they were behind schedule and would have to catch up. He had been speaking less than five minutes when a student by the name of Marvin Green jumped to his feet in great excitement, waving his hand and shouting, "Dr. Grant! Dr. Grant!"
Dr. Grant had stopped his lecture and frowned darkly, then said, "If you will please take your seat--"
"But Dr. Grant!" Marvin Green had interrupted him excitedly. "I've got it! I've got it!"
What had happened then was impossible for the mind to accept. Marvin Green had simply ceased to be.
There had been a stunned silence. And in that silence, it went on. Student after student popping out of existence in what seemed to be a chain reaction.
He wasn't aware when Dr. Grant vanished. All he knew was that when at last he was alone he looked toward the podium and the professor was also gone.
He kept waiting to go himself. When he didn't, he lost the fear that had rooted him to the spot, and rushed to the exit where he at first tried to break down the door and make his escape, then subsided into pounding and shouting for help when he realized his physical strength was insufficient for the job.
Questioning didn't bring out any additional fact, nor alter any statement. There had been no sound to the vanishing, no movement of the person that could be considered significant, no flashes of light, no strange odors. Nothing.
* * * * *
Fred Grant got the flash on his hot rod radio on the way home from high school.
At the end of the report Fred wrote down Mark Smythe's address on a scrap of paper, and drove home to be with his mother. It was three days before he could get away.
On the morning of the third day, his aunt Emily arrived to take charge of things, and he was able to slip away. He drove immediately to Mark Smythe's address. It was one of the better class rooming houses near the campus. The land-lady wasn't going to let him in nor announce him until he explained he was the son of the professor who had vanished. She immediately swung to the other extreme and didn't bother to find out if Mark wanted to see him.
"My father was your teacher," Fred said.
"Oh? Come on in."
There were tennis rackets. On the bookshelves there were tennis books. On a table there was a tennis trophy. Otherwise there was just a bed, a rug, and two or three chairs.
"I don't know what I can tell you more than I've already told the police and the reporters," Mark said apologetically. "I guess it's tough, losing your father...."
"Yeah," Fred agreed. "I wanted to ask you something though. Dad gave a lecture on his new theory a few days ago, didn't he?"
Mark looked at him blankly. Then, "Oh! I guess he did. As a matter of fact I didn't pay much attention to it." He grinned. Then he remembered he should be solemn and stopped grinning. "I--I sort of slipped by it. He made the mistake of telling us ahead of time it was off the course and no questions on it would be in the finals, so I more or less rested up during the period for a tennis match afterwards. Why?"
"Didn't you get any of what he said?" Fred persisted.
"Oh, a little," Mark admitted. "It was about some system of arriving at the basic laws of nature by pure logic, only what you arrived at didn't agree with facts. Some kind of intellectual curiosity." He thought a minute. "Oh," he said, "I see what you want. Didn't he leave any notes on it? It would be too bad if his theory was lost to the world now that--" He left the rest unsaid.
"Maybe you can remember something," Fred coaxed. "Anything. Did he talk about his theory again?"
"Next day he gave a lecture on the necessity of unbelief in modern science. It was pretty good. He overemphasized it, though. Some of the kids thought he was making a religion of unbelief."
"What did they say about his theory?" Fred asked quickly.
"Oh, they were quite impressed. Two of them live--lived here in the rooming house. They were up here that evening tossing it back and forth. I was too tired from the tag match. I let them talk."
"What did they think about it?"
Mark frowned in an effort to recall. "It had to do with this universe being basically illogical, or at least seeming to be, because it didn't agree with your father's theory. They started building up fantasies on it. One I remember was a good one."
"What was that?"
"I think it was Jimmy. He said it would be funny if we were here because we believed this universe was the only real one. Something about inherited memory. Our coming from a long line of people who believed this was the only place, because all our ancestors who didn't believe it shot off into some other universe and had their children there. Utterly crazy. You know."
"Yeah, I know," Fred agreed. "You going to be around in case I want to see you again?"
"God! I hope so!" Mark said. "It makes me nervous."
"You're safe enough," Fred said. "Well--thanks. I'll be seeing you."
* * * * *
He smoothed out the crumpled sheet of paper and glanced at it.
"What do you hope to find, Fred," his mother asked.
"I don't know," he said. "Anything, I--maybe this is something. Look."
Together they read, "Either: the universe is not constructed according to logical necessity, Or: the observable universe is not the universe." There were doodlings along the right margin that meant nothing.
"What does it mean?" Mrs. Grant asked.
"Probably just something connected with his classes," Fred shrugged. He went on searching the waste basket, giving his mother no hint that he had already found what he was searching for.
From the position of the paper in the waste basket he felt reasonably sure it had been recently written. It was probably a voicing of thoughts gained from the disappearance of Horace and John, because up to that time his father had assumed his theory was just an intellectual curiosity.
His father couldn't have asked himself if the observable universe might not be the universe unless something had happened to raise a doubt, or suggest an alternative as a possibility.
Mrs. Grant's interest lessened. She wandered about the room, perhaps reliving memories. It gave Fred a chance to put the piece of paper in his pocket so that when he put everything back in the waste basket his mother would dismiss the whole search.
There was, of course, the file with the entire theory in it. He knew the theory by heart, however, and had no need of that file.
"I think I'll go out for a while, Mom," he said.
"All right, Fred," she said disinterestedly.
Outside he climbed behind the wheel of his hot rod and sat there, making no motion to start the motor. He was thinking.
Mark Smythe had said that he overheard two of his fellow class-men discussing the theory, one of them remarking that, "It would be funny if we were here just because we were descended from a long line of people who believed this was the only place."
Could that be the key?
Take gravitation, for instance. If it were something that some vital part of you had to believe, and that vital part didn't believe, would the entire person go flying off into space?
What about inanimate matter? Did it have to believe too? And what about other forms of life?
Or was everything except human beings just part of the props?
He shook his head. That didn't seem like quite the right track. He took another.
The human mind builds up a picture of the outside universe through its senses. Sometimes its ideas are wrong. Right or wrong, inside everyone's mind is a universe, derived from the outside universe.
What if the outside universe were derived from something? Derived from what? The real, logically necessary universe? That could be. At least it seemed to have some value as a starting point.
He tried to reason from that point. Frustration grew in him. He wished he were older, had his university education behind him. There were so many things he couldn't begin to deal with.
Maybe he could take the entire problem to some of his father's friends. He shook his head
over this thought. From all that had gone on it was too likely that the minute one of them discovered something that would be of help he would disappear before he could tell it!
That raised another point. Why didn't he himself vanish? What was there different about him?
A lot. His father had instilled in him a lot of the things he himself could only aspire to. Unbelief was the major thing. Or perhaps it was the other major thing, remembrance.
His father's voice came into consciousness, saying something he had said so many times it was grooved deeply in memory, even to the inflections of voice. "All psychoses and mental troubles are caused by walled-off unpleasant memories. The child who trains himself to recall all unpleasant things and deliberately associate them with the feeling that they are valuable lessons, but harmless, will grow up in perfect balance."
He smiled. He could let flow through consciousness, dozens of incidents he had taken up with his father.
He was definitely different than others around him. So different he had systematically disguised it by a front of accepted behavior--systematically and consciously, under his father's guidance.
There was a chance those differences made him safe. There was a chance those differences would make it possible for him to find out what caused the others to vanish, without he himself vanishing.
The other train of thought inserted itself into consciousness again. Was belief the key to the disappearances?
* * * * *
Mark Smythe hadn't paid attention when the theory was being explained. The others had undoubtedly lapped it up. The peculiar thing about the theory was that it was so logical and so inevitable that the mind tended to accept it, believe it to be true in spite of the evidence of the senses.
Let us suppose, Fred mused, that deep within the mind there is some matrix of thought that ties the human to this universe. A matrix that could conceivably be altered, and when altered would automatically shift the person to another universe that the altered matrix fitted.
The subconscious usually took time to absorb and react. That was another thing his father had taught him to observe. Learn something, and it takes from days to months for it to become lodged in the subconscious and to rise into operation naturally from there.
John Henderson had taken six weeks to vanish after having learned the theory. It had taken Horace Smith three and a half days, but he had had the added factor of Dr. Henderson's disappearance to trigger reactions. The theoretical physics class had taken three days exactly, and its vanishing had been a sort of group action or chain reaction, with intensely emotional reaction after the first student had vanished before the eyes of the others.
His own father, originator of the theory, had probably fallen into the trap of starting to believe after Horace had vanished, so it became a greater probability that the disappearance was related to knowledge of the theory. Seeing the students vanish had probably set up an emotional state where complete belief was precipitated.
In the whole series the only improbable part was that so many students would react in the same short time. That was partly nullified by the fact that it was a special class, and only high I.Q. students with excellent records were accepted. They would tend to be somewhat identical in reaction times.
He straightened up and stared through the windshield at the dark street. So there it was, the probable mechanism of vanishment. A system was fed into the conscious mind. The conscious mind accepted it. In due time that system was transferred down into the matrix that held the person in this reality or universe. Once there, it made the whole person transfer to a system where the altered matrix fitted. It might not be the system pictured in his father's theory. It might be a compromise system.
Where and when probably had no meaning in relation to the two systems. That was why, when the shift came, the person vanished instantly without any strange manifestations of any kind.
Was it reversible? If so, then some of those who had vanished would reappear eventually.
A sudden, startling thought made Fred sit up straight, his eyes shining with excitement. So far he had been safe mainly because he habitually didn't attach belief to anything. His other facet of difference might be the means of his testing this without real danger of vanishing.
Could he dredge up from the deepest layers of unconscious thought, the threads leading directly to the matrix that held him in his surroundings and learn consciously what it was?
A thought. He reflected on it, then decided before he made any decisions he would explore the other avenue, the one the police had naturally thought of.
Was there some person or persons unknown in back of the disappearances? Some non-human, perhaps? It could fit into the same theory of disappearance. Another universe, beings in that universe. Beings who perhaps didn't want knowledge of their universe to become known on this side of the veil.
If so, why hadn't they snatched him too? Maybe they didn't know he knew about the theory. He'd never talked about it to anyone. But his father had drilled it into him as a supreme example of the reasons why belief in anything was a trap.
He shook his head. It didn't seem likely that the disappearances had been engineered by anyone. They smacked too much of an inner pattern, an inner mechanism.
So he came back to the other theory. What could he try to accomplish by exploring into his deepest substratum of thought? The ideal he could aim for would be conscious transfer into the other system with the assurance before-hand that he could transfer back again. If he could do that, and if he could find those who had vanished, maybe he could teach them how to return.
It was something that might take a long time, he realized. His first objective was to penetrate deeper into his mind than anyone had ever consciously gone before. That alone could take a lifetime. Or it might be accomplished overnight.
How would he begin? Where would he begin? he shrugged. It didn't matter. He would have to systematically extend his ability to be aware in every direction, physical and temporal, until he could be conscious of his individual blood cells if it were possible, and completely and vividly conscious, at will of every second of his past life. If that didn't lead him to his objective, it might at least point the way and increase his ability to reach his goal.
That evening, Fred arrived home to find a stranger seated in the library. There was the usual moment of clumsiness such encounters generate, but Fred's mother returned with a tea tray before self-introductions became necessary. She said, "Mr. Gaard, this is my son, Fred."
The man smiled easily as Mrs. Grant continued, speaking now to Fred. "This is Curt Gaard, Fred. I called on him today and what do you think I discovered. He was a friend--a very old friend--of your father." Mrs. Grant stopped, a certain inward uncertainty showing through.
Fred stood mute, giving voice to none of the questions which sprang up in his mind. Curt Gaard, completely at ease, took up the lead. Even as a feeling of familiarity sprang into Fred's mind, Gaard said, "I knew your father--met him several times--but we weren't as close as your mother's words might imply."
Then Fred knew. He spoke suddenly. "You're a psychiatrist." The pieces fell into place. Fred's father had mentioned this man several times, and the boy knew he was not there by chance--that his mother had contacted the psychiatrist--this particular one because she too had remembered the acquaintanceship. For a moment, Fred was annoyed with his mother. Why on earth had she brought a psychiatrist into this? Then he softened as he realized she felt it to be to her son's best interests.
"Yes, I'm a psychiatrist," Gaard said. Then, as though he could read Fred's mind: "Your mother did send for me, but so far as I'm concerned, it's more than just a professional visit. I knew your father and liked him. I'd like to be your friend."
"You plan to psychoanalyze me?"
"Don't be so grim about it," Curt Gaard smiled. "Just let's make this a social visit. There will be plenty of time for other things later. Perhaps you can drop in at my office."
"Perhaps," Fred said, almost abs
ently. A short time later he excused himself and went to his room.
* * * * *
"Mrs. Grant?" Mr. Browne said, smiling at the woman behind the screen door. "I'm Mr. Browne the publisher."
"Browne?" she said. "Oh yes. My hus--husband has mentioned you."
"Favorably, I hope?" Browne was wondering if Dr. Grant had told her of his decision not to let the book be published.
"Oh yes, very favorably." She frowned. "Which reminds me. He received a check from you for the advance royalties. I'm sure he didn't cash it because there was no deposit at the bank that large. I can't find the check anywhere. He must have had it with him when--"
She had opened the screen door. Browne went in and followed her into the study. He looked around at the walls of books, almost feeling the presence of the man whose retreat this had been.
"That's what I've come here to see you about," Browne said. "You see, he called on me at my office the morning of the day he vanished."
"He did?"
"Yes. I'm going to be quite frank with you. He returned the check to me."
"Why? He said nothing to me about it."
"I rather imagine he didn't have time. I've waited, knowing you wouldn't care to discuss business so soon after--" He waited for her reaction. When she said nothing he continued. "He returned the check and said he didn't want the book published after all. I couldn't quite understand his reasons, but they are no longer valid as I see it."
"What were his reasons? This surprises me very much. Just the day before that he mentioned his book and expressed pleasure that it was being published."
"The reasons he gave were that the book contained some things that were--to use his own words--a trifle crackpottish. He thought they might reflect on him in some way."
"Oh my goodness. He was always doing something like that, Mr. Browne. He leaned over backwards. Scientific integrity was a fetish with him."
