Strange Ports of Call

by August Derleth (ed)

  Shortly after this, an unpublished and profane account of James Grogan Torres, a soldier of fortune, described this angel in greater detail. Torres, who had found that the most profitable insurrections were those under already satisfactory governments, was leading his expedition for gain down on a certain South American city when he saw a solid block of what he thought was white-hot metal leave the city and advance along the road toward him. He concealed himself at once. His army of three hundred, deployed along the hills, stopped their advance and commenced chattering with excitement at this phenomenon.

  There came into view, behind this cube, a white angel with a wand, who pointed at the army from a point not ten feet from Torres, said “Death!” and disappeared. This shining cube then began to plow the men into the earth amid agonized screams. Three besides Torres escaped death or mangling. The hill was very fertile that year.

  Pence never fully understood the working of the camera. Thom could have given a great deal of information if he were asked for it, but Pence was increasingly independent. Even Thorn had no knowledge of the nature of the force which some time-forgotten wizard had harnessed; but it showed a singularity of nature which was referred to in at least three ancient literatures as “god,” and the learned deities of fable, and others, most certainly had traffic with it.

  In its various forms it explained, if it did not excuse, certain well-known miracles. Barring accidents, there was no reason why Pence, a mere archaeologist interested in the origins of Egyptian culture, could not have acquired considerable power, and, in fact, come near making himself a god, if he had any such purpose in mind.

  But he was as much interested in the people who had contrived the camera as he was in using it, and his trained attention was diverted to that end. He dimly guessed at a people long vanished, ingenious beyond belief, but found it difficult to account for their unrecorded passing, and, indeed, for the existence of the camera itself.

  There were more cats than ever. M’Gwallah, the African servant, closed every hole in the old house that might admit a rat, but as fast as Pence got rid of them he would appear, spread his black arms with imperial magnificence, and say apologetically:

  “Cats.”

  There was something in the droning, snoring sound of the camera that attracted them, and that was puzzling. It seemed ridiculous to suppose that the cat family had a generic memory of that sound. The cat once held the distinction of being a venerated beast, but so had other animals.

  Pence took the simplest method of disposing of them. M’Gwallah would throw chicken, freshly roasted, into the cube, and Pence would transport them abroad when the cube was full; load after load.

  The captain of a transatlantic liner was considerably disconcerted when several dozen nondescript cats suddenly appeared in his cabin in mid-ocean, eating chicken. Pence estimated that he had transported more than five thousand of the beasts altogether.

  Nevertheless, they found ways of entering, and removing them was a daily nuisance. When the machine droned they would appear, and the worst of it was, it would occasionally sound when the camera was not in use. It was affected by mild electrical disturbances of the atmosphere.

  One night Pence decided that Thom must be done away with. He approached Thorn’s room with the dark focus and found him asleep. This room was fitted up like a power plant, and the man lay sound asleep on a studio couch in the midst of apparatus. To Pence’s surprise, for he thought the engineer might have appreciated dying in his sleep, Thom said:

  “I have been waiting for you.”

  Pence brightened the focus at once. “You knew I was coming?” he asked.

  “Not at all,” said Thorn, sitting up. “It was a trick. I have trained myself to say that in my sleep, for at least a month. I thought we were getting pretty close to the end. Are you—going to kill me?”

  Pence felt disconcerted and very much ashamed. Hesitating a moment, he turned a head on the god box and stepped into the focus himself. As he did so, both he and Thom were aware again of the mysterious attraction they felt toward the camera. A subtle pull existed between the shining cube they were in and the box.

  “I’m sorry,” Pence said, holding out his hand.

  “That’s quite all right,” said Thorn. “You see, I don’t think your camera will work in this room, and I want to live out my normal span of years, anyhow.”

  “It won’t work? Why not?” Pence’s flesh tingled, as did Thorn’s. There was an unusual tension in the air. Ghostly fires chased over their bodies in phosphorescent ripples, and the hair of their arms and heads bristled.

  “I’ve had the idea,” Thom explained, “that whatever force is imprisoned in that box is only related to electricity as we know it. That’s obvious. But a common house current sets the camera working. I repeat, I am just an old fool, but I have a few ideas. Do you see all this apparatus? Well, this bed is in the middle of a field of resistance that ought to prove very troublesome for your god-box. I have a supply of current here large enough to create a sizable lightning bolt, and the more force you used the more current it would meet. The camera mechanism would weld.

  “By the by, haven’t you found any way of keeping those monsters of yours outdoors?”

  It was true; the cats appeared in ever-increasing numbers. Pence watched the animals filing through the open door of his room, which they could see beyond the camera from Thorns laboratory. The beasts slunk around the camera stand as though they were in search of prey.

  Momentarily the two men heard the rumble of M’Gwallah’s bass, and the great black appeared in the doorway. He glowered at the cats, which now numbered more than a dozen, and began to stalk them. One of the animals leaped up on the table, glared into the crystal, and leisurely assumed a position on top of the royal Egyptian heads.

  “M’Gwallah!” Pence shouted.

  The surprised black looked up.

  “For the love of God, Pence!” Thorn said. “Don’t move!” Thorn was sitting where he looked into the camera’s eye, and he could see something Pence could not. It was the first time either man had looked into the lens from the cube. The crystal, curiously, seemed to be increasing in size, and behind it was not the mere jumble of wheels there should have been.

  The cat had leaped off the camera meanwhile, which was what Thorn had hoped to prevent. It was too late now. For the cat had disturbed the position of the heads.

  “Pence! Pence!” whispered Thorn. “Come down here and look!”

  The sound of the camera increased to a great booming drone. The camera, on its stand, approached the cube of light which was its focus, met the cube with a shivering sound of metal, and vanished. They could still see M’Gwallah off in the shadows, a cat screaming under each arm—great fighting cats that were raking his glistening black hide with their steel claws.

  The cube of light was so charged with cross currents of force that their flesh stung. Pence and Thorn looked around the room, amazed. Graham Thorn gasped with realization, then screamed: “God help us! Pence! We are inside the camera!”

  Their surroundings changed. They were on a sandy beach, and saw to the left a mighty building fronted by countless steps in terraces. It was of red stone, and of unrecognizable architecture. They saw a scintillating blue sea, and at perhaps a thousand yards’ distance a towering, brightly painted galley at anchor. Red-skinned men and women, clad in a kind of shimmering, easily draping cotton when they were clad at all, stood about them, and eyed them incuriously, smiling. Large cats, or beasts of that family, wandered about freely and seemed to be held in high esteem.

  “Egypt?” whispered Thorn.

  Pence shook his head. “Don’t you see?” he said. “There are two suns in that sky. That’s a western ocean.”

  Meanwhile a small boat was nearing shore, in which stood erect a Negro holding a plate covered with a red cloth. On it was a golden box having the general appearance of the camera Pence had found at the locksmith’s. And behind them, behind Pence and Thorn, a black shadow had been m
oving up across that plane of the cube of focus. It was the shutter.

  Pence stood up, terribly afraid and glaring sightlessly. The camera was nowhere to be seen.

  “M’Gwallah!” he screamed.

  He could still see the Negro. The red people frowned at him and uttered blurred, musical words of protest in their own language. “M’Gwallah! M’Gwallah!” He made twisting motions with his hands, as though he were turning the royal Egyptian heads.

  The African giant, totally dumfounded, stood there like a black shadow. The cats shrieked and fought against his fixed arms, unheeded. He muttered anxious sounds, shifted his bare feet uncertainly.

  The small boat they had seen touched shore, and the Negro carrying the box stepped pompously on the sand. Pence pointed violently at the spot where his camera should have been and made gestures as though he were pushing the camera over. M’Gwallah still did not understand. Pence hurled himself forward, and his body met the shining wall of the cube with a thud.

  M’Gwallah strode forward and seemed to be busy with some invisible object. His mighty back arched and cracked as he strove to move a ton or more of metal, the camera they could no longer see. Suddenly he sprawled into the cube of light himself. The black shadow crossed the cube behind them with a crash like cataclysm.

  At the same instant, the walls of the Manhattan residence of an archaeologist named Paul Pence collapsed inward as the result of a vertical explosion of unknown nature. This man Pence could not be found, nor could his friend Graham Thorn who disappeared at the same time, and who had been well liked in local scientific circles. Another phenomenon occurred at about this time also, no one having heard the explosion.

  Quite a number of persons, considering the average New Yorker as a rather unobservant individual, saw the rocket go off. This rocket was of a singular shape, being that of a box kite, or cube of about twelve feet in dimensions. It was reported by several loose-witted persons, too, that thought this rocket was blinding in its brilliance, there still could be seen in it the figures of three men, one of them a Negro. A statement wholly untenable, since authorities had no knowledge of any persons working on passenger rockets at this time, and particularly not of this shape.

  Nevertheless, the cube had a meteoric course, brilliant, instant, and free; and if any astronomer were observing it, he would have said it was pursuing a mathematically direct line for a point a fraction of a degree off the north star Vega. Toward that certain planet, in fact, which the imaginative tribe of astronomers count as one able to support life as on earth.

  Fritz Leiber, Jr. (1910- ) is the son of the famed Shakespearean actor of the same name. He spent two seasons acting in his father’s Shakespearean company, under the name of Francis Lathrop. He lives and works in Chicago, where he is an associate editor of Science Digest. He has contributed to Astounding Science-Fiction, Unknown, Weird Tales, and other magazines in the genre. His first collection, Night’s Black Agents, was published in 1947 by Arkham House, where two novels, Conjure Wife and Gather, Darkness! are scheduled for early publication.

  MR. BAUER AND THE ATOMS

  Fritz Leiber, Jr.

  DR. JACOBSON BEAMED AT HIM THROUGH the thick glasses. “I’m happy to tell you there is no sign whatever of cancer.”

  Mr. Bauer nodded thoughtfully. “Then I won’t need any of those radium treatments?”

  “Absolutely not.” Dr. Jacobson removed his glasses, wiped them with a bit of rice paper, then mopped his forehead with a handkerchief. Mr. Bauer lingered.

  He looked at the X-ray machine bolted down by the window. It still looked as solid and mysterious as when he had first glimpsed a corner of it from Myna’s bedroom. He hadn’t gotten any farther.

  Dr. Jacobson replaced his glasses.

  “It’s funny, you know, but I’ve been thinking . . .” Mr. Bauer plunged.

  “Yes?”

  “I guess all this atomic stuff got me started, but I’ve been thinking about all the energy that’s in the atoms of my body. When you start to figure it out on paper—well, two hundred million electron volts, they say, from just splitting one atom, and that’s only a tiny part of it.” He grinned. “Enough energy in my body, I guess, to blow up, maybe the world.”

  Dr. Jacobson nodded. “Almost. But all safely locked up.”

  Mr. Bauer nodded. “They’re finding out how to unlock it.”

  Dr. Jacobson smiled. “Only in the case of two rare radioactive elements.”

  Mr. Bauer agreed, then gathered all his courage. “I’ve been wondering about that too,” he said. “Whether a person could somehow make himself . . . I mean, become . . . radioactive?” Dr. Jacobson chuckled in the friendliest way. “See that box at your elbow?” He reached out and turned something on it. The box ticked. Mr. Bauer jerked.

  “That’s a Geiger-Müller counter,” Dr. Jacobson explained. “Notice how the ticks come every second or so? Each tick indicates a high-frequency wave. If you were radioactive, it would tick a lot oftener.”

  Mr. Bauer laughed. “Interesting.” He got up. “Well, thanks about the cancer.”

  Dr. Jacobson watched him fumble for his Panama hat and duck out. So that was it. He’d sensed all along something peculiar about Bauer. He’d even felt it while looking over the X-ray and lab reports—something intangibly wrong. Though he hadn’t thought until now of paranoia, or, for that matter, any other mental ailment, beyond the almost normal cancer-fear of a man in his fifties.

  Frank Bauer hesitated at the corridor leading to Myna’s apartment, then went on. His heart hammered enragedly. There he’d gone chicken again, when he knew very well that if he could ever bring himself to state his fear coldly and completely—that crazy fear that a man’s thoughts could do to the atoms of his body what the scientists had managed to do with uranium 235 and that other element—why, he’d be rid of the fear in a minute.

  But a man just didn’t go around admitting childish things like that. A human bomb exploded by thought! It was too much like his wife Grace and her mysticism.

  Going crazy wouldn’t be so bad, he thought, if only it weren’t so humiliating.

  Frank Bauer lived in a world where everything had been exploded. He scented confidence games, hoaxes, faddish self-deception, and especially (for it was his province) advertising-copy exaggerations behind every faintly unusual event and every intimation of the unknown. He had the American’s nose for leg-pulling, the German’s contempt of the non-factual. Mention of such topics as telepathy, hypnotism, or the occult—and his wife managed to mention them fairly often—sent him into a scoffing rage. The way he looked at it, a real man had three legitimate interests—business, bars, and blondes. Everything else was for cranks, artists, and women.

  But now an explosion had occurred which made all other explosions, even of the greatest fakeries, seem like a snap of the fingers.

  By the time he reached the street, he thought he was beginning to feel a bit better. After all, he had told the doctor practically everything, and the doctor had disposed of his fears with that little box. That was that.

  He swabbed his neck and thought about a drink, but decided to go back to the office. Criminal to lose a minute these days, when everybody was fighting tooth and nail to get the jump. He’d be wanting money pretty soon, the bigger the better. All the things that Grace would be nagging for now, and something special for Myna—and then there was a chance he and Myna could get away together for a vacation, when he’d got those campaigns lined out.

  The office was cool and dusky and pleasantly suggestive of a non-atomic solidity. Every bit of stalwart ugliness, every worn spot in the dark varnish, made him feel better. He even managed to get off a joke to ease Miss Minter’s boredom. Then he went inside.

  An hour later he rushed out. This time he had no joke for Miss Minter. As she looked after him, there was something in her expression that had been in Dr. Jacobson’s.

  It hadn’t been so bad at first when he’d got out paper and black pencil. After all, any advertising copy had to
make Atomic Age its keynote these days. But when you sat there, and thought and thought, and whatever you thought, you always found afterwards that you’d written:

  INSIDE YOU . . . TRILLIONS OF VOLTS!

  You wouldn’t think, to look at them, that there was much resemblance between John Jones and the atom bomb.

  Unlocked!

  THE WORLD IN YOUR HANDS!

  JUST A THOUGHT—

  Frank Bauer looked around at the grimy street, the windows dusty or dazzlingly golden where the low sun struck, the people wilted a little by the baking pavement—and he saw walls turned to gray powder, their steel skeletons vaporized; the people became fumes, or, if they were far enough away, merely great single blisters. But they’d have to be very far away.

  He was going crazy—and it was horribly humiliating. He hurried into the bar.

  After his second bourbon and water he began to think about the scientists. They should have suppressed the thing, like that one fellow wanted to. They shouldn’t ever have told people. So long as people didn’t know, maybe it would have been all right . . . but once you’d been told.

  Thought was the most powerful force in the world. It had discovered the atom bomb. And yet nobody knew what thought was, how it worked inside your nerves, what it couldn’t manage.

  And you couldn’t stop thinking. Whatever your thoughts decided to do, you couldn’t stop them.

  It was insanity, of course.

  It had better be insanity!

  The man beside him said, “I saw a lot of those Jap suicide flyers. Crazy as loons. Human bombs.”

  Human bombs! Firecrackers. He put down his drink.

  As he hurried through the thinning crowd, retracing the course he had taken early in the afternoon, he wondered why there should be so much deadly force locked up in such innocent-seeming, inert things. The whole universe was a booby trap. There must be a reason. Who had planned it that way, with the planets far enough apart so they wouldn’t hurt each other when they popped?