Strange Ports of Call

by August Derleth (ed)

  “Directional—”

  “They’re vestigial in you,” Papenek explained impatiently. “Cats, dogs and birds have a highly developed directional sense which our own ancestors lost far back in the Miocene. In fact, the bodies of all animals contain vestigial homologues of organ’s that were once functional. Certain snakes, for instance, have tiny skeletal legs buried under their skins, so incredibly minute as to present anatomical difficulties to a taxonomist.”

  “If he used any bigger words he’d choke himself,” Junior said. “If you’re talking about snakes you needn’t bother to tell us,” Elsie muttered. “Just show us. Turn your back, Betty Lou. He wants to show us his buried legs.”

  “Directional organs are vestigial in you,” Papenek said, ignoring the interruption. “But we’ve redeveloped them.”

  “Oh,” replied Shevlin, his hands traveling to the bumps at the base of his own skull.

  “Oh, don’t,” Elsie pleaded wildly.

  PLOP.

  Just why Junior should have seen fit to thrust out his leg and trip Papenek right at that moment was a riddle which the child psychologists of the future might have been capable of unraveling. But Shevlin doubted that.

  He doubted it still more when he saw the look of fury on Papenek’s face. The little man’s features were so convulsed with rage that Shevlin feared his temples would burst.

  A scream from Elsie warned him that there was no time to be lost.

  Grabbing his son by the coat collar, Shevlin swung him about and started toward the stairs with him. He had little hope of reaching the top of the stairs before Papenek could regain his feet. It was more an act of appeasement than anything else, and like most such acts it failed utterly to achieve its purpose.

  He saw Papenek’s hand go out, but he wasn’t prepared for the blinding flash of radiance which shot from the tube.

  He himself wasn’t touched. Only Junior was touched.

  For an instant Shevlin’s son was bathed in an unearthly refulgence. Then—Elsie was babbling and clawing at Papenek’s face, and a little wisp of smoke was hovering above a moist spot on the floor that might or might not have been Junior.

  “No, no—don’t,” Papenek shouted, squirming and writhing under Elsie’s merciless assault. “He’ll come back. I just punished him a little. Do you think I’d extinguish a child!”

  “He’ll come back?” Elsie’s voice was a shriek. “He’ll—”

  “Certainly. I just stepped up the beam a bit. Right now his body has the same refractive index as the air about him, but he’ll waver back in about five . . . why, she seems to have fainted!”

  Five minutes later Shevlin stood with his arm about his wife’s sagging shoulders, watching his son wavering back.

  Not all of Junior came back immediately. First his face materialized, pale and startled, and then the back of his head, and then his small body, and finally his feet. His feet took their time in coming back.

  “I just didn’t realize what a shock it would be to you,” Papenek said. “You Atomic Age primitives had abnormally developed parental instincts. When we lose children we certainly don’t lose any sleep over it. We—”

  Something in Shevlin’s stare caused him to break off abruptly.

  Miraculously Junior didn’t seem to be any the worse for his experience. Though the punishment had surpassed a sound spanking in severity there was no tiling to indicate that it had left a lasting impression on his mind.

  As though to prove that it hadn’t he bent over and stuck out his tongue at Papenek tire instant he was himself again.

  The little man seemed to reach a decision then. He moved closer to Shevlin and said, very quietly: “Perhaps you’d better take your children upstairs and put them to bed—or wherever you put them when you want to discuss serious matters in a quiet way.”

  “I’ll take them up,” Elsie said, just as quietly. “Stay here and talk to him, dear. Find out just how long he intends to stay. Before we make any plans we’ve got to find out what our chances are of staying alive in this house.”

  The next fifteen minutes were for Shevlin the most unnerving of all, for the instant Elsie’s footsteps died away the little man asked him the sixty-four-dollar question.

  He’d been afraid all along that Papenek wouldn’t believe he knew no more about time travel than the man in the moon. If he told Papenek the truth—

  He decided to stake everything on Papenek’s capacity for recognizing the truth when he heard it. He avoided looking at the tube as he made his reckless bid for survival. He kept nothing back, even though it meant sacrificing the niggardly respect which Papenek had for the resourceful primitive he’d pretended to be. It was a long moment before Papenek spoke.

  For the first time the little man seemed visibly shaken, as though the bottom had dropped out of something that had flared with a blinding incandescence for him.

  “I’ve been incredibly blind,” he said. “I should have known that the father of such children would be incapable of inventing a time-traveling house.”

  Shevlin no longer felt angry—only cold. He suddenly realized that he’d put his cards on the table without weighing the advantages which might have accrued from playing them close to the chest. Not that he’d held a trump hand, exactly, but—

  Startlingly Papenek said: “My mind works better on a full stomach. Before we go down in the cellar and have a look at the machinery perhaps we’d better have something to eat. Have you any eggs or fresh meat I could heat up?”

  “Eggs?” Shevlin said, dazedly. “You mean you still eat—”

  Papenek blinked. “Naturally we still eat. What gave you the idea we could live without food?”

  “I…” I took it for granted vitamin concentrates would be the food of the future. Even in our age—”

  “Good earth, no!” Papenek said, impatiently. “It may take me a week—or a month—to learn the correct way of sending the house backwards and forwards in time. If I’m to be your guest I’ve no intention of foregoing the pleasures of the table.”

  Shevlin’s face looked a little abnormal; as though it were reflecting his thoughts in an illicit way and not at all along the lines laid down by nature.

  “You’ll occupy the guest room, I suppose?”

  “Why not?” Papenek said. “Oh, and while I think of it. I hope you have soft feather beds. If there’s anything I detest it’s a coarse hair mattress.”

  Elsie looked down the long table, and pressed her palms to her temples. “He must have had specialized training in eating,” she said.

  Shevlin followed his wife’s stare, wondering how he’d managed to live through the past three days.

  Papenek had tucked a paper napkin under his chin, and was busily engaged in sucking his fifth egg. Having cooked the egg by stepping down the tube to its lowest potential, he seemed to consider it his duty to savor its flavor to the utmost.

  “There isn’t a great deal you can do to help me, Shevlin,” he said, looking up. “But you might at least stop whispering to your wife while I’m eating. It upsets my digestion.”

  Shevlin shut his eyes, ground his teeth together and thought back seventy-two hours.

  Papenek climbing into bed, after first bouncing up and down in the middle of the bed to make sure it would sustain his weight. Papenek drawing up the sheets, demanding a heating pad, and telling Elsie to get out.

  “Your husband will see that I’m made comfortable. If there’s anything I detest it’s a woman standing in the doorway wringing her hands while I’m getting into bed. Get out! GET OUT!”

  Elsie slamming the door, screaming back through the door: “Roger, there’s some chloroform in the medicine cabinet! If you don’t come out smelling of chloroform, you can start looking around for another wife!”

  Papenek down in the cellar, very wide awake, bending over the machinery.

  Hour after hour after hour. His lean and competent little hands working feverishly away in the glow which came from the tube as he stepped it up and dow
n at ten-second intervals. Papenek using both his hands and the beam, turning occasionally to nod at Shevlin, gloating over his progress and making statements which filled Shevlin with steadily mounting dread.

  Papenek saying: “Of course we’ll go back immediately to your age and find the man and destroy him. If the secret leaked out, you First Atomic Age primitives might construct dozens of time machines and destroy our world completely. You almost destroyed your own world, so how can you be trusted with such knowledge?”

  “But when you’ve found him—” Shevlin shuddered. “When you’ve done that you’ll return to your age?”

  “No, I can’t promise you that. It may be necessary for us to police your world for a while. In fact, you may be sure we shan’t allow anything to exist in the past which could possibly injure us here in the future. Even a minor infection should be cleansed at the source. Otherwise it will spread and fester.”

  Papenek was smacking his lips now, and rising from the table. “My work is so exacting I need a great deal of food to ward off fatigue,” he said. “But you certainly don’t need an egg apiece. Next time scramble one and divide it. You want the eggs to last, don’t you?”

  “If they were filled with cyanide, I’d want them to last,” Elsie mumbled under her breath. “I’d even settle for roach poison.”

  “The little man who came for dinner,” Shevlin whispered, “is eating us out of house and home. Perhaps we could sprinkle arsenic on the wall paper.”

  “Be careful, Shevlin,” Papenek warned. “I shouldn’t care to really step up the beam, but—I must warn you! Remarks like that disturb me because I know you mean them.”

  Shevlin’s features darkened. “All right,” he said, loudly. “I’ll consider myself warned. Now what?”

  “Back to work,” Papenek said. “Success is almost within my grasp now, Shevlin. It might even come this morning.”

  He turned abruptly and went hobbling from the room.

  Elsie waited until she heard him descending the cellar stairs before she took her husband’s cold hands in her feverish ones and said, anxiously: “Roger, if it should come this morning, are we prepared for it?”

  “About as prepared as the dodo was when the early Dutch navigators peppered his hide with a blunderbuss and blasted his nest right out from under him,” Shevlin said.

  He stood up as he spoke, pulling his hands free and shoving his chair back.

  “That all-purpose tube he’s toting doesn’t merely alter electronic orbits. It controls atomic chain reactions in a way we’ve never dreamed they could be controlled. You might say it makes monkeys out of atoms.”

  Elsie nodded. “They’ll overrun our age, Roger. They’ll regulate, remold everything and everyone. They’ll give us lessons in cooking, eating, mating and—dying. They’ll complain, they’ll be petulant. They’ll be capricious and fretful. Sour little spinsters armed with glowing darning needles they are, male and female. I haven’t seen the females, but—”

  “We’ve seen Papenek. He’s been our guest.”

  “Yes, we’ve seen Papenek.”

  A moment later Shevlin was descending the cellar stairs. He moved cautiously, because he hoped to surprise Papenek in one of his unguarded moments and perhaps learn just how close to success he really was. Shevlin knew that not too much reliance could be placed on Papenek’s words, but Papenek’s expression would be a dead give-away if he could be surprised in the very act of making a connection bright with promise.

  It wouldn’t have to be the final connection. It could be the one before the last or the one before that. What it boiled down to was that if Papenek was about to succeed the mounting tension would show up in his features.

  Shevlin was halfway down the stairs when he saw Papenek kneeling in shadows a little to the left of the beam cast by the tube, which was lying on a circular metal stand about twenty feet from the base of the stairs.

  Shevlin’s breath caught in his throat. It was the first time Papenek had ever turned his back on the tube or allowed it to stray so far from his person.

  It was Shevlin’s chance, and he knew it.

  According to present ideas of motion a moving body can’t be in two places at the same time. But almost Shevlin seemed to be crossing the cellar floor while his feet were still clattering on the stairs.

  Probably it was simply a case of unbelievably speeded up reflexes. At any rate, he had the tube and was clasping it firmly when Papenek turned.

  For perhaps five seconds Papenek’s expression remained completely blank. Then, slowly, his mouth tightened and a purplish flush suffused his features.

  “Put it down,” he said.

  Shevlin shook his head. “No. Remember what you said about an infection? It should be cleansed, you said, at the source.”

  For an instant Shevlin had feared that the tube might be completely smooth, precluding any attempt to step up its energies. But that fear, he now perceived, had been ill-grounded. The part he was clasping was slightly flattened, and he could detect beneath his thumb a double row of tiny protuberances, like musical stops on a child’s toy flute.

  “I’m afraid you don’t realize just what the potential of that tube is,” Papenek warned. “It could destroy the earth.”

  Shevlin was suddenly aware that his knees were shaking. He’d suddenly remembered that the ancients had believed that a flute could go completely bad, piping shrill mysterious music that could bring down the keystone of matter itself, could topple the very universe into an abyss.

  Perhaps it was just thinking about that guess which further unnerved Shevlin, causing him to tighten his clasp on the tube. Or perhaps he’d been exerting too much pressure from the first. At any rate, there was a dull flare, and—total darkness came sweeping across the cellar like a moving wall, obliterating everything in its path.

  Then out of the darkness came a voice, filled with utter hate.

  “You’ve inverted the beam, Shevlin. Steady pressure, evenly applied, will do that. I can’t see in the dark, but my directional organs will enable me to find you.”

  There was a sudden, metallic clatter.

  “W-what are you doing?” Shevlin asked.

  “Looking for a sharp, cutting instrument,” Papenek replied, with startling candor. “With all these tools you’d think . . . ah, this will do very nicely. Before I kill you, Shevlin, there’s something you may as well know.

  “I can send the house back now, to your age or any age. You know that straining blade unit at the base of the central shaft—the one I was reassembling yesterday? Well, you just swing the blade completely around the neutral pole of the magnetic wave arrester and groove it into the third notch from the top. The third notch will carry the house completely back to your age.”

  Shevlin felt a sudden prickling at the base of his scalp. Under the guise of talking to him Papenek had moved very close to him in the darkness. He could hear the little man’s harsh breathing, the shuffling scrape of his unshod feet.

  Shevlin clenched his jaw. He’d often wondered just how much self-control he’d have if someone in a position to kill him was a murderer by choice or necessity. Now he knew.

  He didn’t have any self-control. But there were forms of fear which could paralyze—

  “I’ve got him, Pop! I’VE GOT HIM!”

  The voice tore out of the darkness, exuberant, lusty, springy with confidence. It swelled into a mouthing of syllables that ran together as syllables are prone to do in the mouth of a nine-year-old almost beside himself with the joy of battle.

  “I tripped him up, Pop! Pop, quick—turn on the lights!” Mentally Shevlin poured himself a stiff one, swallowed it and went staggering blindly around the cellar in search of a dangling light bulb that continually seemed to elude his grasp.

  He was still making frantic clutches at the air when the entire cellar blazed with light.

  For an instant Shevlin thought that he’d collided with the bulb and jarred it on. Then he saw that by some distortion of pressure he’d energiz
ed the tube again, causing it to brim with more than its wonted share of light.

  Papenek, armed with a very long and wicked-looking drill, was trying to get up. But Junior was sitting on Papenek’s chest, swinging his legs and digging his thumbs into the little man’s eye sockets, so remorselessly as almost to justify what Papenek had said about the savagery of children.

  “You murderous little savage,” Papenek shrieked. “Let me up, you hear? You primitive little—”

  “Enough of that!” Shevlin said, clasping the tube very firmly and aiming it at Papenek’s bulging brow. “One more word out of you and I’ll step up the beam so high you’ll be just a little wisp of smoke drifting off into limbo. Perhaps less than that.”

  Papenek quieted down.

  “That’s better,” Shevlin said.

  Very deliberately he unfastened his wrist watch and handed it to his son.

  “What goes, Pop?”

  Shevlin looked at his son. “Junior, just how long have you been down here?” he asked.

  “Since before breakfast, Pop,” Junior said. “I’ve been spying on him ever since he started dismantling that straining blade unit yesterday afternoon. I was hiding in the coal bin, so I didn’t miss a thing. Y’know, Pop, there’s a make-or-break ignition factor involved that’s only partly magnetomotive. A regular manual pinion shift movement it is, Pop.”

  “Hm-m-m,” Shevlin said. “Are you sure you can handle it, Junior? You didn’t seem like a prodigy to me when you tripped him three days ago for no reason at all. Not a prodigy born a year after the New Mexico experiment, at any rate.”

  “Ah, that was just a gag, Pop. Betty Lou dared me. Besides, I wanted him to think that all I had inside my head was an elaborate arrangement of knocking tubes.”

  Shevlin nodded at Papenek. “Remarkable boy in some respects. I. Q. of 270. It disturbs my wife more than it does me. Maturity will bring emotional balance, and we’ll need a few young mutant geniuses to handle the difficult tasks ahead. He can see in the dark too. Dark sight is common enough in Eskimos, but before 1945 extremely rare in Caucasoids. It’s more effective than directional organs, don’t you think?”