The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction - August 1980

by Various

  "These are the facts," Hertz continued. "At 8:45 last night Dr. Dunklepopulos entered Hellwood Hall — the Physics building — and informed the security man from Military Intelligence that he was going to work in his lab. Pursuant to normal security procedure, the MI operatives sealed the laboratory entrance after the doctor went in. An armed guard was present at all times after Dr. Dunklepopulos entered. There are no other entrances or exits to the lab. All heating and ventilation ducts were under tamper-proof security alarms," Hertz stopped, took a long pull on his cigar; the end glowed cherry red, and he looked into the eyes of each of his listeners.

  "At three o'clock this morning a security man entered the lab to ask whether Dr. Dunklepopulos would like something to eat. He found the doctor lying in a pool of his own blood in the cleared space before his apparatus. His throat was torn open and bore the marks of attack by some sort of large animal. There was no animal in the lab. There is no possibility that any man, let alone some savage beast, could have entered Hellwood Hall without detection. And — and — Dr. Dunklepopulos had recently let it be known that he was working on a technique that would eliminate the stray pet problem and save these Reunited States of America.

  "It is up to us, ladies and gentlemen, to find out what happened to Victor Dunklepopulos last night — and more importantly — you all know how much more importantly — to discover just what it was he had found that he thought would preserve our Stars and Stripes. Forever!"

  When they got to the university, the team spread out through the laboratory and Hellwood Hall, an aggressively modern building in the old 1980s style. Hertz conferred with the police medical examiner, the FBI agents, and the PECOS investigators already on the scene. Then he called Jim over.

  "They tell me there's another physicist here who may know something about Dunklepopulos's experiment. His name's Benjamin Epstein, and they're holding him in Dunklepopulos's office here for questioning. I want you to be there."

  The office occupied a glassed-in corner of the lab. Looking out through the windows, Jim could watch Doris and the others examining the site of the murder. He nodded to her, but he didn't think she saw him.

  Benjamin Epstein wore the traditional baggy woolens of a Highland's Jew and spoke with a soft burr. The fact that he was not a native American had already put him on several lists of potential subversives. His family, he admitted readily, had moved to the new Jewish homeland the British had set up in Scotland in '67 when the Arabs had evicted the Israelis from Palestine. He had grown up on a kibbutz near Balmoral, in the shadow of big Ben MacDhui, and had migrated to the USA after the abortive Scots-Israeli war of 2002. His specialty was low-temperature physics.

  Hertz was his competent self. "All right, Professor Epstein, cooperate and we can make this short and sweet. How well did you know Victor Dunklepopulos?"

  "I hae known him since I came to the university. Professionally. We waerna the best of friends, I can tell you." The little man threw them a dark, uncertain look. "I haedna anythin' against him, you unnerstand; we ware jest not friends, is all."

  Hertz shot Jim a significant glance. He proceeded calmly. "Just so. Why was it that you were not friends? Be frank, now."

  The swarthy Highlander began to look nervous. "You dinna unnerstand the way the profession works, gentlemen. I am in my speciality; he is in his." He spread his hands about a foot apart in front of him. "The twa disciplines waer not sae related as you maught imagine, and the twain dinna meet sae often. Donklepoopuloos was working in field manipulation — I am in low temperatures." He hesitated as if he were calculating just how much he could say, then added. "Besides, he was a goy." He muttered something about "schmucks" under his breath.

  "What do you know about the experiments he was conducting?" Jim snapped suddenly.

  The man's reply was guarded. "Victor haed tauld me he was making use of sooperconductors. He was a saecretive man, gentlemen. I gathered — and this is jest an empression, mind you — that he was attemptin' something in the way of manipulation of gravitational fields."

  Hertz's eyes lit up. "Antigravity, huh? This could be it!" He walked over behind Epstein's chair and rested a friendly hand on the physicist's shoulder. Ike's entire manner had changed, relaxed — but Jim could see the steel-trap mind waiting to spring beneath cool gray eyes.

  "That's all I think we need to ask you, Professor," Hertz said. The Semitic Scot rose and walked to the door. Hertz nailed him just as he reached for the doorknob. "Just one more thing, Epstein ... we know about your record. Don't think you're putting anything over on us. I can smell a parlor petkeeper a mile away!"

  Epstein turned to face them. His lip quivered.

  "Yeah, Epstein, we know about that sheepdog in your basement. And the gerbils! We've known a long time all about your dirty little habits, ever since you made that mistake with the Shetland pony. And now it's going to catch up with you." He nodded to one of the FBI agents. "Take him in, Stewart. We'll find out the truth down in the PECOS Visitors' Lounge."

  "Not that!" the fiery low-temperature man shouted as the agents grabbed his arms. "You dinna unnerstand! I haed nothing to do wi' this!" Jim could still see him shouting and hear his muffled voice after the door closed.

  "We'll scrape the pile out of this carpet in short order, Tapwater," Ike said. "I'm going along to be in on the grilling. I want you and one of the others to stay here and make sure nothing is touched. I'll let you know when Epstein cracks."

  He strode aggressively out of the office.

  Jim chose Doris Blackwell as his assistant. He chased the other agents and hangers-on out of the lab and told them to keep an eye on the area and to enter only in the event of an emergency. Then he and Doris went to work, testing and retesting for paw-prints, noting in the fieldbook the precise size and shape of everything in the room. As they worked they made small talk, and Jim pondered the facts of the case.

  Antigravity. If that was what Dunklepopulos was onto, you could see why he was an important man. Important enough to be killed. Antigravity could possibly be the answer to the pet problem, either through the forcible projection of strays into space (which would call for some kind of amazing selectivity) or through human colonization of new worlds. But what about Epstein? Was he in the employ of a foreign power? The Red Dogmasters? And more puzzling still — it suddenly hit him, shockingly, that Hertz had neglected to consider this — how the hell had he committed the crime anyway? When he hadn't been in the building at the time but instead, according to surveillance, had been with Andrea Dorian, Dean of Women. Jim had examined the wounds on Dunklepopulos's neck himself, before they took him to the morgue, and had decided that, if they were caused by a large cat or dog, it had to be an animal with an oral configuration drastically different from any he had encountered in the past. And how had Epstein, presuming he had such a ravenous beast, snuck it into the lab? How had he gotten it out? The questions, once admitted, multiplied like hamsters.

  "I think I'm done here," Doris said. She was bending over a lab bench toward him, brushing away some fingerprint dust, and her unbuttoned tunic revealed her firm, milk-white breasts.

  "What-say we take a break, Doris. There's not much left to do."

  "Okay."

  They sat down on the cot that the unfortunate Dunklepopulos had kept there for nights when he was working late. They talked for a while, and then, what with one thing and another — a little boredom, a little loneliness, a little close physical proximity — Jim found himself holding her tightly while she fumbled with the buttons at the front of his uniform. The guards outside would not be coming in...she seemed extremely willing, even for a nurse...

  ...football, he thought... basketball, dribbling down-court and around a pick into the clear put up a shot! ... cold weather, snow, piling up outside, so cold you could hardly move...yes, don't move...cars, speeding along until you came to the tollgate...tolls, money vending machine, put your coin in the...candy bar wrapper, scraps of drafting paper at the Academy when you used a T-square
and number-four drawing pencil for straight, straight lines, oh, straight...oh, oh...how straight the lines...were.

  After a while he somewhat returned to himself. She lay very warm beside him, half in and half out of the uniform. Jim gazed absently across the chilly lab toward the professor's mysterious apparatus. That was where he'd been killed. From this angle the tall, slender network of electronic components around a long elliptical aluminum ring, wired with heavy cables to a bank of switches, transformers, circuit boards — looked a little like a door. An elliptical doorway of electronic spaghetti. As Jim watched, slowly the area inside the ring began to become misty. In his groggy state he at first registered nothing more than curiosity. The opaqueness grew, a kind of yellow dullness, reflecting nothing, until after a minute or so the area inside the aluminum ring looked like it was covered by a flat, mustard-colored sheet of paper, and you could not see the wall behind it.

  In an instant, curiosity became alarm — became terror.

  A black, hairy leg, then an arm, then an entire semihuman body stepped through the ovoid. An ape! Jim struggled to sit up. Doris stirred and lifted her head to see what was going on. Yet it wasn't exactly an ape, Jim saw in the split second before the attack came — something of the musculature, the gait was wrong. And this moment of calm observation departed as quickly as the money in a charge account when the beast saw them and, with an insane glare, a low growl of mindless brutality, charged them!

  Jim was halfway to his feet, tugging up on his trousers, when the ape in its mad rush hit him full in the chest and sent him reeling back into Doris on the cot, to strike his head on the wall behind them. Stunned, he tried to roll to the side, but the beast had already torn an inch-deep gash in his shoulder with his claws, and was snarling at his throat through razor fangs. To her credit, Doris did not scream. Jim couldn't tell what she was doing; he was busy trying to keep the beast from tearing him to pieces — one good swipe at his neck with either the claws or the fangs, and his carotid would be severed, his life flown away!

  He felt the beast's hot and stinking breath in his face, saw the furious black mask inches from his nose. His one advantage was weight — apparently the thing weighed only 140 or 150 pounds. The blood from his shoulder made grasping slimy and unfirm. Just when he thought it was all over — only seconds after it had begun — he felt his foot strike some solid object. In desperation he pushed out with all his remaining strength. Both of them flipped off the cot onto the floor; pulling forward suddenly on the ape's arms and muzzle instead of pushing away, he threw the thing into a somersault. The beast landed on its shoulders and its back slammed into a laboratory bench. It was only momentarily dazed, but in that moment Doris, still half naked, hit it in the midriff with a chair. Jim struggled to his feet while the ape was still down, took the chair from Doris, and jammed it legs-first into the creature's face. One of the legs caught it in an eyesocket. The beast gave one convulsive shudder, and was still.

  Two security men at last ran into the room. "Oh, Jim!" Doris gasped, falling into his arms.

  "All in a day's work," Tapwater replied.

  Doris had just finished bandaging Jim's arm and shoulder when Ike Hertz arrived. Sitting in Dunklepopulos's glassed-in office, they watched a couple of FBI men poke at the corpse of an ape with a chair through its eye. Finally Hertz broke the silence.

  "So what's the story, Jim? Epstein might just as well have been a hula hoop, for all we got out of him."

  Jim leaned forward in the chair and looked up at Ike. "Well, we know what killed Dunklepopulos — an ape. And we know how it got in and out without being detected. And now, I guess, we know what the professor was working on, too."

  "Quit the guessing games, Jim. I want the straight poop."

  "Okay," Jim grinned. "The key is Dunklepopulos's experiment. It wasn't gravity control he was working on — though, for all I know, that might have something to do with it. It was dimensional control. That machine there..." Jim gestured with his good arm at the apparatus visible through the glass, "...is a device to puncture the fabric of our universe, to put us in contact with another, parallel world. It's a dimensional doorway."

  "How can you be sure?" Doris asked.

  "What's the alternative?" Jim got up, strode over to the glass, and turned to them. "When you've eliminated the dumb answers, whatever remains, however unlikely, must be un-dumb."

  "Smart thinking, Jimbo." Hertz lit a cigar.

  "Dunklepopulos must have been trying out his device here last night," Jim continued, "when he accidentally transported one of these wild creatures, from what must be a very primitive world, to our own. The ape promptly tore the good doctor to shreds, then blundered back into its own world. And none of us the wiser."

  Doris whistled lowly. "And that's how we'll solve the pet problem! Ship them all off to this other world!"

  Jim flashed her a smile. "Right. And I'll just bet if we do a little investigating, we'll find that Dunklepopulos had developed a way to make the process species-specific, so we can project the pests without accidentally sending people."

  "Unless," Hertz added, "they're racially undesirable. This sounds real good — I think we can get a program going in short order, now that there's a way out...but I guess that means we'll have to let this Epstein fellow go. Seems a pity."

  Doris's eyes lit up. "Book him on the petkeeper charges. Get the right judge and he won't see daylight for forty years."

  "You got it, kiddo!" Hertz chortled. "I think you're both due for promotions." The tip of his cigar once more glowed cherry red.

  Jim rested his back against the cool glass, minding his own gentle thoughts. Doris was going to be good for him. And, he realized happily, if Betty grew to be too much of a problem, — Dunklepopulos's invention could eliminate more than one kind of meddlesome bitch.

  But one question still gnawed at the roots of his contentment. If Dunklepopulos had accidentally brought through the beast that had killed him, then how, when the machine wasn't even operating, had the second ape come to attack them in the lab? Could it be that there was a parallel civilization on the other side, in a parallel state of development? People who could open their own dimensional portal? To solve social problems that were likewise parallel to our own?

  It was a sobering thought, but not one suitable to the joyous occasion. So with some relief Jim turned to thoughts of Doris and the days to come. He looked at Hertz's gruff smile; he saw Doris's seductive one. And had he not had his back to the window, he would also have seen coming through the portal the first three of the great plague of pestiferous apes that have entirely usurped the surface of our poor earth.

  QUESTIONS FOR THOUGHT AND DISCUSSION:

  Why is there a starship in the title when there is none in the story?

  What does Winkler think he is trying to warn us against?

  Make a list of the predictions in this story that have come true. Which of those that have not do you think will eventually? Do you have a dog?

  If you met Benjamin Epstein in the street, would you shake his hand? Think again.

  Why do you think Winkler placed the PECOS Academy in Terre Haute? Where is Terre Haute?

  In science fiction, we often find nurses who are "easy." Why do you think this is so?

  Films

  BAIRD SEARLES

  THE RETURN OF THE WHAT?

  After so many years of often having to search for something to review, the sudden spate of s/f and fantasy films means that I am sometimes lately flooded with material to write about. I am still enough aware of former deprivation to be tempted to squirrel away a movie or two for possible lean months upcoming, but what the hell! Let's blow it all and talk about three movies this time.

  They're all losers, alas; one is a brave (not-so-new) try, one is just plain insipid, and one is a thoroughgoing disaster from every point of view.

  The good-try-there award goes to the three hour (with commercials) film adaptation of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. Again, as with The Lathe of Heav
en and The Martian Chronicles, we have the transferral to screen of a respectable, literate book. But unlike those two, and even with uneven acting, uninspired direction, and a pretty dull production, the major problems here lie directly with the novel.

  Frankly, I've always despised Brave New World. When I read it many years ago, it seemed to me the perfect example of the mainstream author rather condescendingly using the stuff of science fiction to manufacture an allegory for our times. This describes some of the best works in the field, of course (Stapledon, Wells, et al.), but it's usually badly done. In short, Brave New World is the kind of book assigned to science fiction courses by teachers who know nothing about science fiction.

  In the movie, all of this preachiness came across, as well as an extraordinarily dated premise.

  Huxley's major cautionary point was the use of genetic engineering and assembly line, "test tube" births. This results in a perverted future society of physical and intellectual castes wherein anyone with the moral sensibilities of our time is persecuted as anti-social. Unfortunately, for "our time," read the 1930s. Already we have moved toward certain aspects of the brave, new world; Huxley's attitudes toward sex and death for instance (monogamy and pietism), seem downright unhealthy in the '70s, and even in smaller matters, the philosophy is hopelessly outdated, as in the condemnation of the "feelies" of the future. Huxley was obviously equating them with the movies; the attitude reflected was that of the '30s intellectual toward cinema, as a hopelessly crude entertainment involving neither art nor technique.

  All of this showed up faithfully on the screen; I'm surprised no one noticed it on the way to production, but I guess they figured that futuristic settings and body-stocking costumes would disguise the fact that it should have been decorated with art deco and dressed in '30s prints.