by Jerry Sohl
This sent Dr. Costigan into a flurry of examining all the dials, of checking the connections. Finally, he had to turn it all off to check the repairs he had made earlier that night.
Mrs. Basher, breathing more rapidly as she became more angry, her eyes beginning to narrow and fill with deep suspicion as each man tried to explain in his own way, suddenly turned on her heel and walked to the door. She couldn’t get it open because it wouldn’t open unless Dr. Costigan punched the proper button on the control panel. When Devan tried to take advantage of her forced delay and explain it all over again, she slapped him soundly.
“You open that door, do you hear!”
“But why? Don’t you believe us?”
“No. Something’s happened to Glenn and you’re trying to... to... Open that door!”
“What are you going to do?”
“Tell the police. They’ll get the truth out of you!”
Devan grabbed her and shook her. This only made Mrs. Basher’s eyes blaze all the more furiously. She wrested herself from him.
“Don’t you dare touch me!” she said, outraged.
“But you can’t tell the police!”
“Oh, can’t I?”
“But that would spoil everything!”
“Then tell the truth about my husband. Do you think I’m fool enough to fall for this—this fairy tale you’re telling?”
“But it’s the truth!”
Orcutt came up. “He’s right, Mrs. Basher.”
“Open this door!”
Devan shrugged. He looked toward Dr. Costigan who was at the control panel and nodded to him. The red light above the door winked out.
“You can go through the door now, Mrs. Basher,” he said.
“Telling the police will get you nothing,” Orcutt said.
The door shut.
6
If the gloom that had descended upon the six men remaining in the big Needle chamber had been three dimensional, it could not have seemed more real. When Mrs. Basher stepped through the door to get the police, they were all shocked and each man suddenly got busy examining his conscience and, thankfully, found it unsullied.
Still, they were very distressed and Devan found them looking so distraught when he turned from the door that he could not help breaking into a laugh, albeit a rather hysterical laugh.
“What the hell is there to laugh about?” Sam Otto said. “She just wrecked the project.”
“I don’t think so,” Devan said. “I don’t think we need worry too much. What can she prove?”
“But she’ll tell the police what the Needle will do,” Dr. Costigan said. “Then the secret will be out.”
“All that publicity we could use later,” Sam said. “It would ruin us now.”
Devan shook his head. “Which one of us believed in the Needle when he first heard about it? I know I didn’t. Remember how each of you felt? No, I think the police will think she’s insane. She’ll probably insist and after a while, since she’ll tell the same story over and over again the same way, they’ll send somebody out.”
“But that’s really the last thing we want, isn’t it?” Orcutt said. “People nosing around the Needle?”
“It needn’t be fatal. I don’t think any of us saw Basher go through the Needle’s Eye, did we? He just suddenly walked off without telling us, that’s all—if you know what I mean. And though each of us, off the record, did see him disappear in the Eye, we can’t prove it, can we? First of all, the Needle’s not working at the moment. Second, where is his body? You can’t prove anything these days without a body, can you? If we all stand pat, the police will leave quickly, I think.”
Sam Otto smiled. “I see what you mean, Devan. There can’t be a crime without the corpus delicti you always hear about in the murder mysteries. Maybe they’ll put Mrs. Basher in the booby hatch.”
“I don’t know about that. But I do know they’ll investigate. We’ll have to put Basher’s clothes in Dr. Costigan’s workshop and admit nothing except the truth: Glenn Basher has disappeared. Maybe we think he’s vanished in the hole, but we’re not certain, in case your conscience bothers you.”
Tooksberry nodded his head. “That may be very sensible. But it still doesn’t bring Glenn back.”
“If we all go to jail we’ll never get him back.”
“You fellows figure it all out,” Dr. Costigan said. “I’ve got to get the Needle working again. Mr. Basher might even now be looking for the way back.”
It wasn’t more than an hour later that Detective Sergeant Walter Peavine and Detective Timothy Griffin arrived to begin their investigation. The sergeant, a large man with a thick neck, a burr haircut and protruding brown eyes, got to the point at once and seemed peeved that no one would say the missing man was missing through the courtesy, or discourtesy, of Costigan’s Needle. Detective Griffin devoted his time to a studied tour of the building.
The detective sergeant tried a number of ways of extracting information from them all and failed, always coming back with another method not quite as courteous and gentlemanly as the previous one until Orcutt could stand it no longer.
“Sergeant, let me ask you a question,” Orcutt said, hands behind his back, balancing on the balls of his feet and glaring at the policeman as if he had been insulted. “Tell me frankly, would you believe it if I told you Glenn Basher walked into that opening and disappeared?”
Detective Sergeant Peavine inspected the Needle with a respectful eye. “Of course not. You think I’m crazy?”
“Then why are you asking us if he did?”
The plain-clothes man was fascinated by the beauty, line and symmetry of the Needle. He could hardly tear his eyes away from it.
“All right,” the sergeant said. “I admit it’s crazy, but we have to check on these things, you know. Mrs. Basher came into the precinct station and raised hell, telling us you tried to hand her a story about her husband walking into a hole and disappearing.”
“How is Mrs. Basher, Sergeant?” Devan asked. “Is she resting well? She was pretty upset when she was here.”
“She was feeling pretty good when we left. She was fit to be tied when she came in, though. Don’t think I’ve ever seen a woman as angry.” He coughed. “But to get back to the business of her husband... Some one of you called her and told her to come down. Isn’t that right?”
“That’s right, Sergeant,” Holcombe said. “It so happens that Glenn Basher did duck out right in the middle of an experiment and we... well”—he smiled embarrassedly—“we wondered if he went on home.”
“Here one minute,” Sam said, snapping his fingers, “and gone the next. We were hoping she could give us a clue. Very mysterious.”
“Classic puzzle, isn’t it?” the sergeant said drily. “All the doors and windows locked, ventilators closed, and so on. Yet someone disappears.”
“That’s right, Inspector,” Tooksberry said.
Sergeant Peavine looked at Tooksberry. “It’s sergeant.”
“Of course. Sorry.”
Cleated shoes beat a tattoo as the other detective came across the floor. “I’ve looked through everything, Sergeant. Found nothing except a few locked rooms.”
“We’ll get to those, Tim. Stick around.” The sergeant deftly spun a chair around and sat facing the back of it. He looked at the six of them and then looked at the Needle. “What are you fellows doing here at this time of the morning, anyway?”
“I told you, Sergeant,” Orcutt said, rubbing the stubble on his chin. “Force field experiments.”
“My kid would like to see that.” The sergeant pointed to the Needle.
“Bring him down.”
“He’s nuts about space travel. Could tell you the size and distance of every planet.” He turned to Orcutt. “How much do you weigh?”
“One hundred and eighty-five pounds. Why?”
“On the planet Mars,” the sergeant said, “you’d weigh only two-fifths that much. Randolph, that’s my boy, could figure it out for you. A
two hundred pound man would weigh only eighty pounds. That will give you an idea of some of the conditions on Mars. Amazing, isn’t it?”
“This isn’t a space ship, Sergeant.”
“Think how easy it would be to hit a home run on Mars! Wouldn’t the boys in the outfield be really out! Think of the size of the baseball park!”
“I say, Sergeant. You’re on the wrong track. This isn’t a space ship.”
“It isn’t?” The detective was disappointed. “Sure looks like one. What is it?”
“Well, as near as we can figure out,” Orcutt said, passing a quick glance Devan’s way, “it’s a problem.”
“I suppose that’s a wisecrack.”
“No. I mean it has handed us a problem in hyperspace and its relationship to the space around us.”
“At the moment,” Devan put in, “we’re worried about the transferability of living cellular structures from here to there and back again. Particularly the return.”
“That’s right, Sergeant,” Sam Otto said.
“Yeah, yeah.” The sergeant pulled a cigarette from a pack, stuck it in his mouth. “Who’s the old duck over there with the wires?”
“That’s Dr. Winfield Costigan,” Orcutt said. “He invented the Needle.”
This was getting nowhere, Devan decided. He looked at his watch. Seven o’clock. In another hour people would start reporting for work. What then?
“I don’t get it,” the sergeant said. “You build something and don’t even know what it does or how it works.”
“Would you like to meet the inventor?” Devan asked.
The sergeant nodded, two jets of smoke emanating from his nostrils, a hint of awe in his eyes as he followed Devan closely. Detective Griffin kept with them.
“This is Sergeant Peavine of the detective bureau,” Devan said.
The physicist grunted, twirled a knob, watched a dial.
“That’s Dr. Costigan.”
“Having trouble?” the sergeant asked.
Dr. Costigan looked up. “Yes.” He walked from the control box to the opening in the hull of the Needle, withdrew a cable of wires, inspected a wiring diagram on a stool at his side.
“Won’t it work?”
“Not now.”
“What does it do when it works?”
“Haven’t quite decided yet. It’s never worked that good yet.” The doctor squinted at the diagram. “Would you mind handing me that chart for a moment, please?”
The sergeant picked up the diagram, handed it to the doctor.
“How will you know when it works, then?”
“That’s it!” The doctor let the chart fall to the floor. “Hold this.” He handed the sergeant a trouble light. The sergeant held it aloft, got on his tiptoes to see what the doctor was doing. “Ah!” Dr. Costigan sighed. “That’s more like it! Correct resistance now in that circuit. Sure a funny thing what a few ohms more or less will do to unbalance a circuit.” He moved past the sergeant, leaving him with the light. The detective finally turned it off and put it on the stool.
The sergeant then moved and tried to see the top of the Needle from the floor, a feat that Devan could have told him was impossible. While the sergeant craned his neck, Devan glanced at the doctor, then looked casually around to see Detective Griffin walking toward them from around the Needle.
“Sure is a big thing,” the sergeant said. “Just like pictures in Randolph’s books.”
“Listen to this,” Griffin said, rapping his knuckles against the side of the Needle. The sound was a hollow one. Detective Griffin came nearer, tapping as he came. He looked at the archway. “What’s this?”
Griffin stooped to examine the fillings a little more closely.
Dr. Costigan yelled “Hey!”
Everybody looked at Dr. Costigan, then, seeing the horror on his face, turned back to look at the plain-clothes man.
Griffin, startled by the voice and the doctor’s expression, had taken a step backward and met with no resistance because the step took him into the Eye of the Needle.
While everyone watched, the detective’s rearmost foot met nothing. His face filled with astonishment and the yell he started as he fell backward was cut off when his head disappeared.
The hands that reached for support met only empty air and the clutching fingers and arms themselves vanished from the sleeves as they entered the Eye area. His suit crumpled to the concrete floor, empty. The movement of the shoes into the Eye sent them part way through and they stopped in a grotesque position, toes pointing at each other, shoelaces still tied, socks draped over the sides.
It seemed as if the seconds were minutes. They were long moments of agony. Devan sensed that the nerves of them all tightened as if the invisible web in which they were all caught had suddenly become energized and was drawing taut....
“Tim,” came the whisper from his side. Sergeant Peavine, his face a pasty white, the fingers of the hands at his sides flexing spasmodically, stared stupefied.
“Timmy!” The sergeant became a man of action suddenly. He moved toward the Needle’s Eye. “TIMOTHY!”
Devan expected the sergeant to disappear when he went into the Eye but he did not. The doctor had shut off the machine.
They all rushed close now and saw the sergeant on the floor inside the archway, his hands patting the missing detective’s clothes as if he expected some part of the man to be still within it.
He picked up the coat and then the shoes, then let them fall and picked up the other clothing. A pink and white object rolled out from the clothes and the plain-clothes man picked it up and stared at it.
“I’ll be damned,” he said. “Griffin’s upper plate!”
7
The scheme to keep the function of the Needle a secret exploded with force. Detective Sergeant Peavine started the chain reaction, with Devan, Orcutt, Sam Otto, Holcombe, Tooksberry and Dr. Costigan the next step in the reaction: they gave information about the Needle to uniformed men who told newsmen who told the public who wanted to know more and told the newsmen and the newsmen came back and went now directly to the men who had seen the two men disappear and asked more questions.
It was a nightmare. Things had passed so suddenly out of the hands of the tight little research group that it hardly seemed real. They were all haggard, worn, unshaven and hungry but the police department had ordered that they were not to leave the building. There were reporters and photographers and radiomen and policemen everywhere and as each new one came in, he paused for a few moments to look at the Needle, then came up to the group around the six research men.
“Is this really on the level, Mac?”
“Costigan’s Needle? What’s it for?”
“You say he disappeared in there?”
“Can you or do you know anyone who can explain this?”
“Would you mind starting at the beginning again?”
New faces every minute demanding to know, new pencils poised to write on new pads, in new notebooks, people shoving their faces forward, some with badges, others without, people quiet and retiring, merely observing and reporting and smiling and frowning.
And then the pictures. Pictures inside and outside the Eye. Official and unofficial photos. Newspaper and police. Photographs of them separately and together, some candid shots using only the light of the big room itself, others with every manner of flash bulb, photoflash unit, special bulbs for color, every kind and type of exposure sometimes using the police and sometimes not, with and without the clothing of Detective Griffin and Glenn Basher.
“One more, please.”
“Hold it right there. That’s right. Now just one more.”
“A little to the left. There.”
“Just one more, please. Hold it.”
Devan felt faint with hunger. He had run out of everything, cigarettes, stamina and patience, and his eyelids felt as if someone were sitting on them. He knew the others felt as he did, knew they were as disgusted as he was with the answers they got from the police when
they asked them for a chance to have breakfast sent in.
“You’ll get breakfast as soon as we’re through with this preliminary part of the investigation,” they were told by Lieutenant Harold Johnson, a large, blond, heavy-set man who filled out his uniform the way a police officer should.
It was Betty Peredge who helped out. She came to work at nine, wouldn’t be stopped by the police guard at the research room door and demanded to know what they were doing to her boss. She refused to answer questions and, by plunge and feint, finally made her way over to the besieged six men.
Not knowing who or what she was, the ring of men broke to let her in.
“What are they doing to you?” she asked, coming through to them. “I’ve been listening on the radio.” Then she saw Dr. Costigan. “Oh, Doctor! You look all in! Can’t I do something for you?”
“Just bring me a gallon of coffee, a double order of ham and eggs and a bed, Mrs. Peredge,” he said. “That’s all I need.”
Betty turned angrily to the policemen. “What’s the matter with you officers? Can’t you see these men need a rest? They’ve been awake all night. How would you feel if someone kept hounding you with questions if you were dead on your feet?”
The officers moved back a little, leaving Lieutenant Johnson an island to face her. He walked to her. “Lady,” he said. “I don’t know who you are, but you haven’t any business here.”
There were a few chuckles at this. Betty’s dark blue eyes flashed. “I have every right in the world here. I happen to be Dr. Costigan’s assistant. I don’t know who you are.”
“I’m Lieutenant Johnson, in charge of this detail. I’m asking you like a gentleman to leave these men alone.”
“If you were a gentleman you’d have seen to it that they had something to eat.”
“The department will take care of it. All in good time.”
“They’re mighty slow getting around to it, I’d say. What kind of a police department does Chicago have? It ought to be obvious these men haven’t had a bit of anything to eat since their dinner last night, that they haven’t had a minute’s sleep, that they haven’t had a chance to shave.”
