Astounding Science Fiction Stories: An Anthology of 350 Scifi Stories Volume 2 (Halcyon Classics)

by Various

  He stood up awkwardly as the girl came across the restaurant toward him. She was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen in Tylerton. Chin-height, honey-blonde hair and a figure that--well, it was all hers. There was no doubt in the world that the dress that clung to her was the only thing she wore. He felt as if he were blushing as she greeted him.

  "Mr. Burckhardt." The voice was like distant tomtoms. "It's wonderful of you to let me see you, after this morning."

  He cleared his throat. "Not at all. Won't you sit down, Miss--"

  "April Horn," she murmured, sitting down--beside him, not where he had pointed on the other side of the table. "Call me April, won't you?"

  She was wearing some kind of perfume, Burckhardt noted with what little of his mind was functioning at all. It didn't seem fair that she should be using perfume as well as everything else. He came to with a start and realized that the waiter was leaving with an order for filets mignon for two.

  "Hey!" he objected.

  "Please, Mr. Burckhardt." Her shoulder was against his, her face was turned to him, her breath was warm, her expression was tender and solicitous. "This is all on the Feckle Corporation. Please let them--it's the least they can do."

  He felt her hand burrowing into his pocket.

  "I put the price of the meal into your pocket," she whispered conspiratorially. "Please do that for me, won't you? I mean I'd appreciate it if you'd pay the waiter--I'm old-fashioned about things like that."

  She smiled meltingly, then became mock-businesslike. "But you must take the money," she insisted. "Why, you're letting Feckle off lightly if you do! You could sue them for every nickel they've got, disturbing your sleep like that."

  * * * * *

  With a dizzy feeling, as though he had just seen someone make a rabbit disappear into a top hat, he said, "Why, it really wasn't so bad, uh, April. A little noisy, maybe, but--"

  "Oh, Mr. Burckhardt!" The blue eyes were wide and admiring. "I knew you'd understand. It's just that--well, it's such a wonderful freezer that some of the outside men get carried away, so to speak. As soon as the main office found out about what happened, they sent representatives around to every house on the block to apologize. Your wife told us where we could phone you--and I'm so very pleased that you were willing to let me have lunch with you, so that I could apologize, too. Because truly, Mr. Burckhardt, it is a fine freezer.

  "I shouldn't tell you this, but--" the blue eyes were shyly lowered--"I'd do almost anything for Feckle Freezers. It's more than a job to me." She looked up. She was enchanting. "I bet you think I'm silly, don't you?"

  Burckhardt coughed. "Well, I--"

  "Oh, you don't want to be unkind!" She shook her head. "No, don't pretend. You think it's silly. But really, Mr. Burckhardt, you wouldn't think so if you knew more about the Feckle. Let me show you this little booklet--"

  Burckhardt got back from lunch a full hour late. It wasn't only the girl who delayed him. There had been a curious interview with a little man named Swanson, whom he barely knew, who had stopped him with desperate urgency on the street--and then left him cold.

  But it didn't matter much. Mr. Barth, for the first time since Burckhardt had worked there, was out for the day--leaving Burckhardt stuck with the quarterly tax returns.

  What did matter, though, was that somehow he had signed a purchase order for a twelve-cubic-foot Feckle Freezer, upright model, self-defrosting, list price $625, with a ten per cent "courtesy" discount--"Because of that horrid affair this morning, Mr. Burckhardt," she had said.

  And he wasn't sure how he could explain it to his wife.

  * * * * *

  He needn't have worried. As he walked in the front door, his wife said almost immediately, "I wonder if we can't afford a new freezer, dear. There was a man here to apologize about that noise and--well, we got to talking and--"

  She had signed a purchase order, too.

  It had been the damnedest day, Burckhardt thought later, on his way up to bed. But the day wasn't done with him yet. At the head of the stairs, the weakened spring in the electric light switch refused to click at all. He snapped it back and forth angrily and, of course, succeeded in jarring the tumbler out of its pins. The wires shorted and every light in the house went out.

  "Damn!" said Guy Burckhardt.

  "Fuse?" His wife shrugged sleepily. "Let it go till the morning, dear."

  Burckhardt shook his head. "You go back to bed. I'll be right along."

  It wasn't so much that he cared about fixing the fuse, but he was too restless for sleep. He disconnected the bad switch with a screwdriver, stumbled down into the black kitchen, found the flashlight and climbed gingerly down the cellar stairs. He located a spare fuse, pushed an empty trunk over to the fuse box to stand on and twisted out the old fuse.

  When the new one was in, he heard the starting click and steady drone of the refrigerator in the kitchen overhead.

  He headed back to the steps, and stopped.

  Where the old trunk had been, the cellar floor gleamed oddly bright. He inspected it in the flashlight beam. It was metal!

  "Son of a gun," said Guy Burckhardt. He shook his head unbelievingly. He peered closer, rubbed the edges of the metallic patch with his thumb and acquired an annoying cut--the edges were sharp.

  The stained cement floor of the cellar was a thin shell. He found a hammer and cracked it off in a dozen spots--everywhere was metal.

  The whole cellar was a copper box. Even the cement-brick walls were false fronts over a metal sheath!

  * * * * *

  Baffled, he attacked one of the foundation beams. That, at least, was real wood. The glass in the cellar windows was real glass.

  He sucked his bleeding thumb and tried the base of the cellar stairs. Real wood. He chipped at the bricks under the oil burner. Real bricks. The retaining walls, the floor--they were faked.

  It was as though someone had shored up the house with a frame of metal and then laboriously concealed the evidence.

  The biggest surprise was the upside-down boat hull that blocked the rear half of the cellar, relic of a brief home workshop period that Burckhardt had gone through a couple of years before. From above, it looked perfectly normal. Inside, though, where there should have been thwarts and seats and lockers, there was a mere tangle of braces, rough and unfinished.

  "But I built that!" Burckhardt exclaimed, forgetting his thumb. He leaned against the hull dizzily, trying to think this thing through. For reasons beyond his comprehension, someone had taken his boat and his cellar away, maybe his whole house, and replaced them with a clever mock-up of the real thing.

  "That's crazy," he said to the empty cellar. He stared around in the light of the flash. He whispered, "What in the name of Heaven would anybody do that for?"

  Reason refused an answer; there wasn't any reasonable answer. For long minutes, Burckhardt contemplated the uncertain picture of his own sanity.

  He peered under the boat again, hoping to reassure himself that it was a mistake, just his imagination. But the sloppy, unfinished bracing was unchanged. He crawled under for a better look, feeling the rough wood incredulously. Utterly impossible!

  He switched off the flashlight and started to wriggle out. But he didn't make it. In the moment between the command to his legs to move and the crawling out, he felt a sudden draining weariness flooding through him.

  Consciousness went--not easily, but as though it were being taken away, and Guy Burckhardt was asleep.

  III

  On the morning of June 16th, Guy Burckhardt woke up in a cramped position huddled under the hull of the boat in his basement--and raced upstairs to find it was June 15th.

  The first thing he had done was to make a frantic, hasty inspection of the boat hull, the faked cellar floor, the imitation stone. They were all as he had remembered them--all completely unbelievable.

  The kitchen was its placid, unexciting self. The electric clock was purring soberly around the dial. Almost six o'clock, it said. His wife would be wak
ing at any moment.

  Burckhardt flung open the front door and stared out into the quiet street. The morning paper was tossed carelessly against the steps--and as he retrieved it, he noticed that this was the 15th day of June.

  But that was impossible. Yesterday was the 15th of June. It was not a date one would forget--it was quarterly tax-return day.

  He went back into the hall and picked up the telephone; he dialed for Weather Information, and got a well-modulated chant: "--and cooler, some showers. Barometric pressure thirty point zero four, rising ... United States Weather Bureau forecast for June 15th. Warm and sunny, with high around--"

  He hung the phone up. June 15th.

  "Holy heaven!" Burckhardt said prayerfully. Things were very odd indeed. He heard the ring of his wife's alarm and bounded up the stairs.

  Mary Burckhardt was sitting upright in bed with the terrified, uncomprehending stare of someone just waking out of a nightmare.

  "Oh!" she gasped, as her husband came in the room. "Darling, I just had the most terrible dream! It was like an explosion and--"

  "Again?" Burckhardt asked, not very sympathetically. "Mary, something's funny! I knew there was something wrong all day yesterday and--"

  He went on to tell her about the copper box that was the cellar, and the odd mock-up someone had made of his boat. Mary looked astonished, then alarmed, then placatory and uneasy.

  She said, "Dear, are you sure? Because I was cleaning that old trunk out just last week and I didn't notice anything."

  "Positive!" said Guy Burckhardt. "I dragged it over to the wall to step on it to put a new fuse in after we blew the lights out and--"

  "After we what?" Mary was looking more than merely alarmed.

  "After we blew the lights out. You know, when the switch at the head of the stairs stuck. I went down to the cellar and--"

  Mary sat up in bed. "Guy, the switch didn't stick. I turned out the lights myself last night."

  Burckhardt glared at his wife. "Now I know you didn't! Come here and take a look!"

  He stalked out to the landing and dramatically pointed to the bad switch, the one that he had unscrewed and left hanging the night before....

  Only it wasn't. It was as it had always been. Unbelieving, Burckhardt pressed it and the lights sprang up in both halls.

  * * * * *

  Mary, looking pale and worried, left him to go down to the kitchen and start breakfast. Burckhardt stood staring at the switch for a long time. His mental processes were gone beyond the point of disbelief and shock; they simply were not functioning.

  He shaved and dressed and ate his breakfast in a state of numb introspection. Mary didn't disturb him; she was apprehensive and soothing. She kissed him good-by as he hurried out to the bus without another word.

  Miss Mitkin, at the reception desk, greeted him with a yawn. "Morning," she said drowsily. "Mr. Barth won't be in today."

  Burckhardt started to say something, but checked himself. She would not know that Barth hadn't been in yesterday, either, because she was tearing a June 14th pad off her calendar to make way for the "new" June 15th sheet.

  He staggered to his own desk and stared unseeingly at the morning's mail. It had not even been opened yet, but he knew that the Factory Distributors envelope contained an order for twenty thousand feet of the new acoustic tile, and the one from Finebeck & Sons was a complaint.

  After a long while, he forced himself to open them. They were.

  By lunchtime, driven by a desperate sense of urgency, Burckhardt made Miss Mitkin take her lunch hour first--the June-fifteenth-that-was-yesterday, he had gone first. She went, looking vaguely worried about his strained insistence, but it made no difference to Burckhardt's mood.

  The phone rang and Burckhardt picked it up abstractedly. "Contro Chemicals Downtown, Burckhardt speaking."

  The voice said, "This is Swanson," and stopped.

  Burckhardt waited expectantly, but that was all. He said, "Hello?"

  Again the pause. Then Swanson asked in sad resignation, "Still nothing, eh?"

  "Nothing what? Swanson, is there something you want? You came up to me yesterday and went through this routine. You--"

  The voice crackled: "Burckhardt! Oh, my good heavens, you remember! Stay right there--I'll be down in half an hour!"

  "What's this all about?"

  "Never mind," the little man said exultantly. "Tell you about it when I see you. Don't say any more over the phone--somebody may be listening. Just wait there. Say, hold on a minute. Will you be alone in the office?"

  "Well, no. Miss Mitkin will probably--"

  "Hell. Look, Burckhardt, where do you eat lunch? Is it good and noisy?"

  "Why, I suppose so. The Crystal Cafe. It's just about a block--"

  "I know where it is. Meet you in half an hour!" And the receiver clicked.

  * * * * *

  The Crystal Cafe was no longer painted red, but the temperature was still up. And they had added piped-in music interspersed with commercials. The advertisements were for Frosty-Flip, Marlin Cigarettes--"They're sanitized," the announcer purred--and something called Choco-Bite candy bars that Burckhardt couldn't remember ever having heard of before. But he heard more about them quickly enough.

  While he was waiting for Swanson to show up, a girl in the cellophane skirt of a nightclub cigarette vendor came through the restaurant with a tray of tiny scarlet-wrapped candies.

  "Choco-Bites are tangy," she was murmuring as she came close to his table. "Choco-Bites are tangier than tangy!"

  Burckhardt, intent on watching for the strange little man who had phoned him, paid little attention. But as she scattered a handful of the confections over the table next to his, smiling at the occupants, he caught a glimpse of her and turned to stare.

  "Why, Miss Horn!" he said.

  The girl dropped her tray of candies.

  Burckhardt rose, concerned over the girl. "Is something wrong?"

  But she fled.

  The manager of the restaurant was staring suspiciously at Burckhardt, who sank back in his seat and tried to look inconspicuous. He hadn't insulted the girl! Maybe she was just a very strictly reared young lady, he thought--in spite of the long bare legs under the cellophane skirt--and when he addressed her, she thought he was a masher.

  Ridiculous idea. Burckhardt scowled uneasily and picked up his menu.

  "Burckhardt!" It was a shrill whisper.

  Burckhardt looked up over the top of his menu, startled. In the seat across from him, the little man named Swanson was sitting, tensely poised.

  "Burckhardt!" the little man whispered again. "Let's get out of here! They're on to you now. If you want to stay alive, come on!"

  There was no arguing with the man. Burckhardt gave the hovering manager a sick, apologetic smile and followed Swanson out. The little man seemed to know where he was going. In the street, he clutched Burckhardt by the elbow and hurried him off down the block.

  "Did you see her?" he demanded. "That Horn woman, in the phone booth? She'll have them here in five minutes, believe me, so hurry it up!"

  * * * * *

  Although the street was full of people and cars, nobody was paying any attention to Burckhardt and Swanson. The air had a nip in it--more like October than June, Burckhardt thought, in spite of the weather bureau. And he felt like a fool, following this mad little man down the street, running away from some "them" toward--toward what? The little man might be crazy, but he was afraid. And the fear was infectious.

  "In here!" panted the little man.

  It was another restaurant--more of a bar, really, and a sort of second-rate place that Burckhardt had never patronized.

  "Right straight through," Swanson whispered; and Burckhardt, like a biddable boy, side-stepped through the mass of tables to the far end of the restaurant.

  It was "L"-shaped, with a front on two streets at right angles to each other. They came out on the side street, Swanson staring coldly back at the question-looking cashier, and crossed to the o
pposite sidewalk.

  They were under the marquee of a movie theater. Swanson's expression began to relax.

  "Lost them!" he crowed softly. "We're almost there."

  He stepped up to the window and bought two tickets. Burckhardt trailed him in to the theater. It was a weekday matinee and the place was almost empty. From the screen came sounds of gunfire and horse's hoofs. A solitary usher, leaning against a bright brass rail, looked briefly at them and went back to staring boredly at the picture as Swanson led Burckhardt down a flight of carpeted marble steps.

  They were in the lounge and it was empty. There was a door for men and one for ladies; and there was a third door, marked "MANAGER" in gold letters. Swanson listened at the door, and gently opened it and peered inside.

  "Okay," he said, gesturing.

  Burckhardt followed him through an empty office, to another door--a closet, probably, because it was unmarked.

  But it was no closet. Swanson opened it warily, looked inside, then motioned Burckhardt to follow.

  It was a tunnel, metal-walled, brightly lit. Empty, it stretched vacantly away in both directions from them.

  Burckhardt looked wondering around. One thing he knew and knew full well:

  No such tunnel belonged under Tylerton.

  * * * * *

  There was a room off the tunnel with chairs and a desk and what looked like television screens. Swanson slumped in a chair, panting.

  "We're all right for a while here," he wheezed. "They don't come here much any more. If they do, we'll hear them and we can hide."

  "Who?" demanded Burckhardt.

  The little man said, "Martians!" His voice cracked on the word and the life seemed to go out of him. In morose tones, he went on: "Well, I think they're Martians. Although you could be right, you know; I've had plenty of time to think it over these last few weeks, after they got you, and it's possible they're Russians after all. Still--"

  "Start from the beginning. Who got me when?"

  Swanson sighed. "So we have to go through the whole thing again. All right. It was about two months ago that you banged on my door, late at night. You were all beat up--scared silly. You begged me to help you--"

  "I did?"