Beyond the Barriers of Space and Time

by Judith Merril (ed. )

  “To find another approach which won’t fail? Is that what you want me to say?”

  “It’s what you have said, isn’t it?”

  “So I know it without your telling me.”

  “Do you? You’re ready to quit school, quit your job, quit science. Where’s your consistency, Rog? Do you abandon a problem when your first experiment fails? Do you give up when one theory is shown to be inadequate? The same philosophy of experimental science that holds for inanimate objects should hold for people as well.”

  “All right. What do you suggest I try? Bribery? Threats? Tears?”

  James Sarle stood up. “Do you really want a suggestion?”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Do as Dr. Morton said. Take a vacation and to hell with levitation. It’s a problem for the future. Sleep in bed and float or don’t float; what’s the difference. Ignore levitation, laugh at it or even enjoy it. Do anything but worry about it, because it isn’t your problem. That’s the whole point. It’s not your immediate problem. Spend your time considering how to make scientists study something they don’t want to study. That is the immediate problem and that is exactly what you’ve spent no thinking time on as yet.”

  Sarle walked to the hall closet and got his coat. Roger went with him. Minutes passed in silence.

  Then Roger said without looking up, “Maybe you’re right, Jim.”

  “Maybe I am. Try it and then tell me. Good-bye, Roger.”

  Roger Toomey opened his eyes and blinked at the morning brightness of the bedroom. He called out, “Hey, Jane, where are you?”

  Jane’s voice answered, “In the kitchen. Where do you think?”

  “Come in here, will you?”

  She came in. “The bacon won’t fry itself, you know.”

  “Listen, did I float last night?”

  “I don’t know. I slept.”

  “You’re a help.” He got out of bed and slipped his feet into his mules. “Still, I don’t think I did.”

  “Do you think you’ve forgotten how?” There was sudden hope in her voice.

  “I haven’t forgotten. See!” He slid into the dining room on a cushion of air. “I just have a feeling I haven’t floated. I think it’s three nights now.”

  “Well, that’s good,” said Jane. She was back at the stove. “It’s just that a month’s rest has done you good. If I had called Jim in the beginning—”

  “Oh, please, don’t go through that. A month’s rest, my eye. It’s just that last Sunday I made up my mind what to do. Since then I’ve relaxed. That’s all there is to it.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Every spring Northwestern Tech gives a series of seminars on physical topics. I’ll attend.”

  “You mean, go way out to Seattle.”

  “Of course.”

  “What wall they be discussing?”

  “What’s the difference? I just want to see Linus Deering.”

  “But he’s the one who called you crazy, isn’t he?”

  “He did.” Roger scooped up a forkful of scrambled eggs. “But he’s also the best man of the lot.”

  He reached for the salt and lifted a few inches out of his chair as he did so. He paid no attention.

  He said, “I think maybe I can handle him.”

  The spring seminars at Northwestern Tech had become a nationally known institution since Linus Deering had joined the faculty. He was the perennial chairman and lent the proceedings their distinctive tone. He introduced the speakers, led the questioning periods, summed up at the close of each morning and afternoon session and was the soul of conviviality at the concluding dinner at the end of the week’s work.

  All this Roger Toomey knew by report. He could now observe the actual workings of the man. Professor Deering was rather under the middle height, was dark of complexion and had a luxuriant and quite distinctive mop of wavy brown hair. His wide, thin-lipped mouth when not engaged in active conversation looked perpetually on the point of a sly smile. He spoke quickly and fluently, without notes, and seemed always to deliver his comments from a level of superiority that his listeners automatically accepted.

  At least, so he had been on the first morning of the seminar. It was only during the afternoon session that the listeners began to notice a certain hesitation in his remarks. Even more, there was an uneasiness about him as he sat on the stage during the delivery of the scheduled papers. Occasionally, he glanced furtively toward the rear of the auditorium.

  Roger Toomey, seated in the very last row, observed all this tensely. His temporary glide toward normality that had begun when he first thought there might be a way out was beginning to recede.

  On the Pullman to Seattle, he had not slept. He had had visions of himself lifting upward in time to the wheel-clacking, of moving out quietly past the curtains and into the corridor, of being awakened into endless embarrassment by the hoarse shouting of a porter. So he had fastened the curtains with safety pins and had achieved nothing by that; no feeling of security; no sleep outside of a few exhausting snatches.

  He had napped in his seat during the day, while the mountains slipped past outside, and arrived in Seattle in the evening with a stiff neck, aching bones, and a general sensation of despair.

  He had made his decision to attend the seminar far too late to have been able to obtain a room to himself at the Institute’s dormitories. Sharing a room was, of course, quite out of the question. He registered at a downtown hotel, locked the door, closed and locked all the windows, shoved his bed hard against the wall and the bureau against the open side of the bed; then slept.

  He remembered no dreams, and when he awoke in the morning he was still lying within the manufactured enclosure. He felt relieved.

  When he arrived, in good time, at Physics Hall on the Institute’s campus, he found, as he expected, a large room and a small gathering. The seminar sessions were held, traditionally, over the Easter vacation and students were not in attendance. Some fifty physicists sat in an auditorium designed to hold four hundred, clustering on either side of the central aisle up near the podium.

  Roger took his seat in the last row, where he would not be seen by casual passers-by looking through the high, small windows of the auditorium door, and where the others in the audience would have had to twist through nearly a hundred eighty degrees to see him.

  Except, of course, for the speaker on the platform—and for Professor Deering.

  Roger did not hear much of the actual proceedings. He concentrated entirely on waiting for those moments when Deering was alone on the platform; when only Deering could see him.

  As Deering grew obviously more disturbed, Roger grew bolder. During the final summing up of the afternoon, he did his best.

  Professor Deering stopped altogether in the middle of a poorly constructed and entirely meaningless sentence. His audience, which had been shifting in their seats for some time stopped also and looked wonderingly at him.

  Deering raised his hand and said, gaspingly, “You! You there!”

  Roger Toomey had been sitting with an air of complete relaxation—in the very center of the aisle. The only chair beneath him was composed of two and a half feet of empty air. His legs were stretched out before him on the armrest of an equally airy chair.

  When Deering pointed, Roger slid rapidly sidewise. By the time fifty heads turned, he was sitting quietly in a very prosaic wooden seat.

  Roger looked this way and that, then stared at Deering s pointing finger and rose.

  “Are you speaking to me. Professor Deering?” he asked, with only the slightest tremble in his voice to indicate the savage battle he was fighting within himself to keep that voice cool and wondering.

  “What are you doing?” demanded Deering, his morning’s tension exploding.

  Some of the audience were standing in order to see better. An unexpected commotion is as dearly loved by a gathering of research physicists as by a crowd at a baseball game.

  “I’m not doing anything,” said
Roger. “I don’t understand you.”

  “Get out! Leave this hall!”

  Deering was beside himself with a mixture of emotions, or perhaps he would not have said that. At any rate, Roger sighed and took his opportunity prayerfully.

  He said, loudly and distinctly, forcing himself to be heard over the gathering clamor, “I am Professor Roger Toomey of Carson College. I am a member of the American Physical Association. I have applied for permission to attend these sessions, have been accepted, and have paid my registration fee. I am sitting here as is my right and will continue to do so.”

  Deering could only say blindly, “Get out!”

  “I will not,” said Roger. He was actually trembling with a synthetic and self-imposed anger. “For what reason must I get out? What have I done?”

  Deering put a shaking hand through his hair. He was quite unable to answer.

  Roger followed up his advantage. “If you attempt to evict me from these sessions without just cause, I shall certainly sue the Institute.”

  Deering said, hurriedly, “I call the first day’s session of the Spring Seminars of Recent Advances in the Physical Sciences to a close. Our next session will be in this hall tomorrow at nine in—”

  Roger left as he was speaking and hurried away.

  There was a knock at Roger’s hotel-room door that night. It startled him, froze him in his chair.

  “Who is it?” he cried.

  The answering voice was soft and hurried. “May I see you?”

  It was Deering’s voice. Roger’s hotel as well as his room number were, of course, recorded with the seminar secretary. Roger had hoped, but scarcely expected, that the day’s events would have so speedy a consequence.

  He opened the door, said stiffly, “Good evening, Professor Deering.”

  Deering stepped in and looked about. He wore a very light topcoat that he made no gesture to remove. He held his hat in his hand and did not offer to put it down.

  He said, “Professor Roger Toomey of Carson College. Right?” He said it with a certain emphasis, as though the name had significance.

  “Yes. Sit down, Professor.”

  Deering remained standing. “Now what is it? What are you after?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I’m sure you do. You aren’t arranging this ridiculous foolery for nothing. Are you trying to make me seem foolish or is it that you expect to hoodwink me into some crooked scheme? I want you to know it won’t work. And don’t try to use force now. I have friends who know exactly where I am at this moment. I’ll advise you to tell the truth and then get out of town.”

  “Professor Deering! This is my room. If you are here to bully me, I’ll ask you to leave. If you don’t go, I’ll have you put out.”

  “Do you intend to continue this… this persecution?”

  “I have not been persecuting you. I don’t know you, sir.”

  “Aren’t you the Roger Toomey who wrote me a letter concerning a case of levitation he wanted me to investigate?”

  Roger stared at the man. “What letter is this?”

  “Do you deny it?”

  “Of course I do. What are you talking about? Have you got the letter?”

  Professor Deering’s lips compressed. “Never mind that. Do you deny you were suspending yourself on wires at this afternoon’s sessions?”

  “On wires? I don’t follow you at all.”

  “You were levitating!”

  “Would you please leave, Professor Deering? I don’t think you’re well.”

  The physicist raised his voice. “Do you deny you were levitating?”

  “I think you’re mad. Do you mean to say I made magician’s arrangements in your auditorium? I was never in it before today and when I arrived you were already present. Did you find wires or anything of the sort after I left?”

  “I don’t know how you did it and I don’t care. Do you deny you were levitating?”

  “Why, of course I do.”

  “I saw you. Why are you lying?”

  “You saw me levitate? Professor Deering, will you tell me how that’s possible? I suppose your knowledge of gravitational forces is enough to tell you that true levitation is a meaningless concept except in outer space. Are you playing some sort of joke on me?”

  “Good heavens,” said Deering in a shrill voice, “why won’t you tell the truth?”

  “I am. Do you suppose that by stretching out my hand and making a mystic pass… so… I can go sailing off into air?” And Roger did so, his head brushing the ceiling.

  Deering’s head jerked upward, “Ah! There… there—”

  Roger returned to earth, smiling. “You can’t be serious.”

  “You did it again. You just did it.”

  “Did what, sir?”

  “You levitated. You just levitated. You can’t deny it.”

  Roger’s eyes grew serious. “I think you’re sick, sir.”

  “I know what I saw.”

  “Perhaps you need a rest. Overwork—”

  “It was not a hallucination.”

  “Would you care for a drink?” Roger walked to his suitcase while Deering followed his footsteps with bulging eyes. The toes of his shoes touched air two inches from the ground and went no lower.

  Deering sank into the chair Roger had vacated.

  “Yes, please,” he said, weakly.

  Roger gave him the whiskey bottle, watched the other drink, then gag a bit. “How do you feel now?”

  “Look here,” said Deering, “have you discovered a way of neutralizing gravity?”

  Roger stared. “Get hold of yourself. Professor. If I had antigravity, I wouldn’t use it to play games on you. I’d be in Washington. I’d be a military secret. I’d be—Well, I wouldn’t be here! Surely all this is obvious to you.”

  Deering jumped to his feet. “Do you intend sitting in on the remaining sessions?”

  “Of course.”

  Deering nodded, jerked his hat down upon his head and hurried out.

  For the next three days. Professor Deering did not preside over the seminar sessions. No reason for his absence was given. Roger Toomey, caught between hope and apprehension, sat in the body of the audience and tried to remain inconspicuous. In this, he was not entirely successful. Deering’s public attack had made him notorious while his own strong defense had given him a kind of David versus Goliath popularity.

  Roger returned to his hotel room Thursday night after an unsatisfactory dinner and remained standing in the doorway, one foot over the threshold. Professor Deering was gazing at him from within. And another man, a gray fedora shoved well back on his forehead, was seated on Roger’s bed.

  It was the stranger who spoke. “Come inside, Toomey.”

  Roger did so. “What’s going on?”

  The stranger opened his wallet and presented a cellophane window to Roger. He said, “I’m Cannon of the F.B.I.”

  Roger said, “You have influence with the government, I take it. Professor Deering.”

  “A little,” said Deering.

  Roger said, “Well, am I under arrest? What’s my crime?”

  “Take it easy,” said Cannon. “We’ve been collecting some data on you, Toomey. Is this your signature?”

  He held a letter out far enough for Roger to see, but not to snatch. It was the letter Roger had written to Deering which the latter had sent on to Morton.

  “Yes,” said Roger.

  “How about this one?” The federal agent had a sheaf of letters.

  Roger realized that he must have collected every one he had sent out, minus those that had been torn up. “They’re all mine,” he said, wearily.

  Deering snorted.

  Cannon said, “Professor Deering tells us that you can float.”

  “Float? What the devil do you mean, float?”

  “Float in the air,” said Cannon, stolidly.

  “Do you believe anything as crazy as that?”

  “I’m not here to believe or not to believe,
Dr. Toomey,” said Cannon. “I’m an agent of the Government of the United States and I’ve got an assignment to carry out. I’d co-operate if I were you.”

  “How can I co-operate in something like this? If I came to you and told you that Professor Deering could float in air, you’d have me flat on a psychiatrist’s couch in no time.”

  Cannon said, “Professor Deering has been examined by a psychiatrist at his own request. However, the government has been in the habit of listening very seriously to Professor Deering for a number of years now. Besides, I might as well tell you that we have independent evidence.”

  “Such as?”

  “A group of students at your college have seen you float. Also, a woman who was once secretary to the head of your department. We have statements from all of them.”

  Roger said, “What kind of statements? Sensible ones that you would be willing to put into the record and show to my congressman?”

  Professor Deering interrupted anxiously, “Dr. Toomey, what do you gain by denying the fact that you can levitate? Your own dean admits that you’ve done something of the sort. He has told me that he will inform you officially that your appointment will be terminated at the end of the academic year. He wouldn’t do that for nothing.”

  “That doesn’t matter,” said Roger.

  “But why won’t you admit I saw you levitate?”

  “Why should I?”

  Cannon said, “I’d like to point out. Dr. Toomey, that if you have any device for counteracting gravity, it would be of great importance to your government.”

  “Really? I suppose you have investigated my background for possible disloyalty.”

  “The investigation,” said the agent, “is proceeding.”

  “All right,” said Roger, “let’s take a hypothetical case. Suppose I admitted I could levitate. Suppose I didn’t know how I did it. Suppose I had nothing to give the government but my body and an insoluble problem.”

  “How can you know it’s insoluble?” asked Deering, eagerly.

  “I once asked you to study such a phenomenon,” pointed out Roger, mildly. “You refused.”