by Ann
It was a house. It stood in the center of the clearing in an island of sunshine, white, gleaming, and incongruous. All around was the dark loom of the forest under a sunless sky, but somehow sunlight lay on the house, sparkling in its polished windows and making brilliant the colors of massed flowers in carefully tended beds, reflecting from the pristine whiteness of its siding out into the gray, littered clearing with its congeries of derelict buildings.
‘You couldn’t have picked a better time,’ the colonel said. ‘Shining there, cloudy here.’
Gilson was not listening. He had climbed from the car and was staring in fascination. ‘Jesus,’ he said. ‘Like a goddam Victorian postcard.’
Lacy scrollwork foamed over the rambling wooden mansion, running riot at the eaves of the steep roof, climbing elaborately up towers and turrets, embellishing deep oriels and outlining a long, airy veranda. Tall windows showed by their spacing that the rooms were many and large. It seemed to be a new house, or perhaps just newly painted and supremely well-kept. A driveway of fine white gravel led under a high porte-cochère.
‘How about that?’ the colonel said. ‘Look like your grandpa’s house?’
As a matter of fact, it did: like his grandfather’s house enlarged and perfected and seen through a lens of romantic nostalgia, his grandfather’s house groomed and pampered as the old farmhouse never had been. He said, ‘And you got this in exchange for a prefab, did you?’
‘Just like that one,’ the colonel said, pointing to one of the seedy buildings. ‘Of course we could use the prefab.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘Watch,’ the colonel said. He picked up a small rock and tossed it in the direction of the house. The rock rose, topped its arc, and began to fall. Suddenly it was not there.
‘Here,’ Gilson said. ‘Let me try that.’
He threw the rock like a baseball, a high, hard one. It disappeared about fifty feet from the house. As he stared at the point of its disappearance, Gilson became aware that the smooth green of the lawn ended exactly below. Where the grass ended, there began the weeds and rocks that made up the floor of the clearing. The line of separation was absolutely straight, running at an angle across the lawn. Near the driveway it turned ninety degrees, and sliced off lawn, driveway and shrubbery with the same precise straightness.
‘It’s perfectly square,’ Krantz said. ‘About a hundred feet to a side. Probably a cube, actually. We know the top’s about ninety feet in the air. I’d guess there are about ten feet of it underground.’
‘“It”?’ Gilson said. ‘“It”? What’s “it”?’
‘Name it and you can have it,’ Krantz said. ‘A three-dimensional television receiver a hundred feet to a side, maybe. A cubical crystal ball. Who knows?’
‘The rocks we threw. They didn’t hit the house. Where did the rocks go?’
‘Ah. Where, indeed? Answer that and perhaps you answer all.’
Gilson took a deep breath. ‘All right. I’ve seen it. Now tell me about it. From the beginning.’
Krantz was silent for a moment; then, in a dry lecturer’s voice he said, ‘Five days ago, June thirteenth, at eleven thirty a.m., give or take three minutes, Private Ellis Mulvihill, on duty at the gate, heard what he later described as “an explosion that was quiet, like.” He entered the enclosure, locked the gate behind him, and ran up here to the clearing. He was staggered – “shook-up” was his expression – to see, instead of Culvergast’s broken-down prefab, that house, there. I gather that he stood gulping and blinking for a time, trying to come to terms with what his eyes told him. Then he ran over there to the guardhouse and called the colonel. Who called me. We came out here and found that a quarter of an acre of land and a building with a man in it had disappeared and been replaced by this, as neat as a peg in a pegboard.’
‘You think the prefab went where the rocks did,’ Gilson said. It was a statement.
‘Why, we’re not even absolutely sure it’s gone. What we’re seeing can’t actually be where we’re seeing it. It rains on that house when it’s sunny here, and right now you can see the sunlight on it, on a day like this. It’s a window.’
‘A window on what?’
‘Well – that looks like a new house, doesn’t it? When were they building houses like that?’
‘Eighteen seventy or eighty, something like – oh.’
‘Yes,’ Krantz said. ‘I think we’re looking at the past.’
‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ Gilson said.
‘I know how you feel. And I may be wrong. But I have to say it looks very much that way. I want you to hear what Reeves says about it. He’s been here from the beginning. A graduate student, assisting here. Reeves!’
A very tall, very thin young man unfolded himself from a crouched position over an odd-looking machine that stood near the line between grass and rubble and ambled over to the three men. Reeves was an enthusiast. ‘Oh, it’s the past, all right,’ he said. ‘Sometime in the eighties. My girl got some books on costume from the library, and the clothes check out for that decade. And the decorations on the horses’ harnesses are a clue, too. I got that from–’
‘Wait a minute,’ Gilson said. ‘Clothes? You mean there are people in there?’
‘Oh, sure,’ Reeves said. ‘A fine little family. Mamma, poppa, little girl, little boy, old granny or auntie. A dog. Good people.’
‘How can you tell that?’
‘I’ve been watching them for five days, you know? They’re having – we’re having – fine weather there – or then, or whatever you’d say. They’re nice to each other, they like each other. Good people. You’ll see.’
‘When?’
‘Well, they’ll be eating dinner now. They usually come out after dinner. In an hour, maybe.’
‘I’ll wait,’ Gilson said. ‘And while we wait, you will please tell me some more.’
Krantz assumed his lecturing voice again. ‘As to the nature of it, nothing. We have a window, which we believe to open into the past. We can see into it, so we know that light passes through; but it passes in only one direction, as evidenced by the fact that the people over there are wholly unaware of us. Nothing else goes through. You saw what happened to the rocks. We’ve shoved poles through the interface there – there’s no resistance at all – but anything that goes through is gone, God knows where. Whatever you put through stays there. Your pole is cut off clean. Fascinating. But wherever it is, it’s not where the house is. That interface isn’t between us and the past; it’s between us and – someplace else. I think our window here is just an incidental side-effect, a – a twisting of time that resulted from whatever tensions exist along that interface.’
Gilson sighed. ‘Krantz,’ he said, ‘what am I going to tell the secretary? You’ve lucked into what may be the biggest thing that ever happened, and you’ve kept it bottled up for five days. We wouldn’t know about it now if it weren’t for the colonel’s report. Five days wasted. Who knows how long this thing will last? The whole goddam scientific establishment ought to be here – should have been from day one. This needs the whole works. At this point the place should be a beehive. And what do I find? You and a graduate student throwing rocks and poking with sticks. And a girlfriend looking up the dates of costumes. It’s damn near criminal.’
Krantz did not look abashed. ‘I thought you’d say that,’ he said. ‘But look at it this way. Like it or not, this thing wasn’t produced by technology or science. It was pure psi. If we can reconstruct Culvergast’s work, we may be able to find out what happened; we may be able to repeat the phenomenon. But I don’t like what’s going to happen after you’ve called in your experimenters, Gilson. They’ll measure and test and conjecture and theorize, and never once will they accept for a moment the real basis of what’s happened. The day they arrive, I’ll be out. And dammit, Gilson, this is mine.’
‘Not any more,’ Gilson said. ‘It’s too big.’
‘It’s not as though we weren’t doing some hard experiments of
our own,’ Krantz said. ‘Reeves, tell him about your batting machine.’
‘Yes, sir,’ Reeves said. ‘You see, Mr. Gilson, what the professor said wasn’t absolutely the whole truth, you know? Sometimes something can get through the window. We saw it on the first day. There was a temperature inversion over in the valley, and the stink from the chemical plant had been accumulating for about a week. It broke up that day, and the wind blew the gunk through the notch and right over here. A really rotten stench. We were watching our people over there, and all of a sudden they began to sniff and wrinkle their noses and make disgusted faces. We figured it had to be the chemical stink. We pushed a pole out right away, but the end just disappeared, as usual. The professor suggested that maybe there was a pulse, or something of the sort, in the interface, that it exists only intermittently. We cobbled up a gadget to test the idea. Come and have a look at it.’
It was a horizontal flywheel with a paddle attached to its rim, like an extended cleat. As the wheel spun, the paddle swept around a table. There was a hopper hanging above, and at intervals something dropped from the hopper onto the table, where it was immediately banged by the paddle and sent flying. Gilson peered into the hopper and raised an interrogatory eyebrow. ‘Ice cubes,’ Reeves said. ‘Colored orange for visibility. That thing shoots an ice cube at the interface once a second. Somebody is always on duty with a stopwatch. We’ve established that every fifteen hours and twenty minutes the thing is open for five seconds. Five ice cubes go through and drop on the lawn in there. The rest of the time they just vanish at the interface.’
‘Ice cubes. Why ice cubes?’
‘They melt and disappear. We can’t be littering up the past with artifacts from our day. God knows what the effect might be. Then, too, they’re cheap, and we’re shooting a lot of them.’
‘Science,’ Gilson said heavily. ‘I can’t wait to hear what they’re going to say in Washington.’
‘Sneer all you like,’ Krantz said. ‘The house is there, the interface is there. We’ve by God turned up some kind of time travel. And Culvergast the screwball did it, not a physicist or an engineer.’
‘Now that you bring it up,’ Gilson said, ‘just what was your man Culvergast up to?’
‘Good question. What he was doing was – well, not to put too fine a point upon it, he was trying to discover spells.’
‘Spells?’
‘The kind you cast. Magic words. Don’t look disgusted yet. It makes sense, in a way. We were funded to look into telekinesis – the manipulation of matter by the mind. It’s obvious that telekinesis, if it could be applied with precision, would be a marvelous weapon. Culvergast’s hypothesis was that there are in fact people who perform feats of telekinesis, and although they never seem to know or be able to explain how they do it, they nevertheless perform a specific mental action that enables them to tap some source of energy that apparently exists all around us, and to some degree to focus and direct that energy. Culvergast proposed to discover the common factor in their mental processes.
‘He ran a lot of putative telekinesists through here, and he reported that he had found a pattern, a sort of mnemonic device functioning at the very bottom of, or below, the verbal level. In one of his people he found it as a set of musical notes, in several as gibberish or various sorts, and in one, he said, as mathematics at the primary arithmetic level. He was feeding all this into the computer, trying to eliminate simple noise and the personal idiosyncrasies of the subjects, trying to lay bare the actual, effective essence. He then proposed to organize this essence into words; words that would so shape the mental currents of a speaker of standard American English that they would channel and manipulate the telekinetic power at the will of the speaker. Magic words, you might say. Spells.
‘He was evidently further along than I suspected. I think he must have arrived at some words, tried them out, and made an attempt at telekinesis – some small thing, like causing an ashtray to rise off his desk and float in the air, perhaps. And it worked, but what he got wasn’t a dainty little ashtray-lifting force; he had opened the gate wide, and some kind of terrible power came through. It’s pure conjecture, of course, but it must have been something like that to have had an effect like this.’
Gilson had listened in silence. He said, ‘I won’t say you’re crazy, because I can see that house and I’m watching what’s happening to those ice cubes. How it happened isn’t my problem, anyhow. My problem is what I’ll recommend to the secretary that we do with it now that we’ve got it. One thing’s sure, Krantz: this isn’t going to be your private playpen much longer.’
There was a yelp of pure pain from Reeves. ‘They can’t do that,’ he said. ‘This is ours, it’s the professor’s. Look at it, look at that house. Do you want a bunch of damn engineers messing around with that?’
Gilson could understand how Reeves felt. The house was drenched now with the light of a red sunset; it seemed to glow from within with a deep, rosy blush. But, Gilson reflected, the sunset wasn’t really necessary; sentiment and the universal, unacknowledged yearning for a simple, cleaner time would lend rosiness enough. He was quite aware that the surge of longing and nostalgia he felt was nostalgia for something he had never actually experienced, that the way of life the house epitomized for him was in fact his own creation, built from patches of novels and films; nonetheless he found himself hungry for that life, yearning for that time. It was a gentle and secure time, he thought, a time when the pace was unhurried and the air was clean; a time when there was grace and style, when young men in striped blazers and boater hats might pay decorous court to young ladies in long white dresses, whiling away the long drowsy afternoons of summer in peaceable conversations on shady porches. There would be jolly bicycle tours over shade-dappled roads that twisted among the hills to arrive at cool glens where swift little streams ran; there would be long sweet buggy rides behind somnolent patient horses under a great white moon, lover whispering urgently to lover while nightbirds sang. There would be excursions down the broad clean river, boats gentle on the current, floating toward the sound from across the water of a brass band playing at the landing.
Yes, thought Gilson, and there would probably be an old geezer with a trunkful of adjectives around somewhere, carrying on about how much better things had been a hundred years before. If he didn’t watch himself he’d he helping Krantz and Reeves try to keep things hidden. Young Reeves – oddly, for someone his age – seemed to be hopelessly mired in this bogus nostalgia. His description of the family in the house had been simple doting. Oh, it was definitely time that the cold-eyed boys were called in. High time.
‘They ought to be coming out any minute, now,’ Reeves was saying. ‘Wait till you see Martha.’
‘Martha,’ Gilson said.
‘The little girl. She’s a doll.’
Gilson looked at him. Reeves reddened and said, ‘Well, I sort of gave them names. The children. Martha and Pete. And the dog’s Alfie. They kind of look like those names, you know?’ Gilson did not answer, and Reeves reddened further. ‘Well, you can see for yourself. Here they come.’
A fine little family, as Reeves had said. After watching them for half an hour, Gilson was ready to concede that they were indeed most engaging, as perfect in their way as their house. They were just what it took to complete the picture, to make an authentic Victorian genre painting. Mama and Papa were good-looking and still in love, the children were healthy and merry and content with their world. Or so it seemed to him as he watched them in the darkening evening, imagining the comfortable, affectionate conversation of the parents as they sat on the porch swing, almost hearing the squeals of the children and the barking of the dog as they raced about the lawn. It was almost dark now; a mellow light of oil lamps glowed in the windows, and fireflies winked over the lawn. There was an arc of fire as the father tossed his cigar butt over the railing and rose to his feet. Then there followed a pretty little pantomime, as he called for the children, who duly protested, were duly permitted a
few more minutes, and then were firmly commanded. They moved reluctantly to the porch and were shooed inside, and the dog, having delayed to give a shrub a final wetting, came scrambling up to join them. The children and the dog entered the house, then the mother and father. The door closed, and there was only the soft light from the windows.
Reeves exhaled a long breath. ‘Isn’t that something,’ he said. ‘That’s the way to live, you know? If a person could just say to hell with all this crap we live in today and go back there and live like that…And Martha, you saw Martha. An angel, right? Man, what I’d give to–’
Gilson interrupted him: ‘When does the next batch of ice cubes go through?’
‘– be able to – Uh, yeah. Let’s see. The last penetration was at 3:15, just before you got here. Next one will be at 6:35 in the morning, if the pattern holds. And it has, so far.’
‘I want to see that. But right now I’ve got to do some telephoning. Colonel!’
Gilson did not sleep that night, nor, apparently, did Krantz and Reeves. When he arrived at the clearing at five a.m. they were still there, unshaven and red-eyed, drinking coffee from thermos bottles. It was cloudy again, and the clearing was in total darkness except for a pale light from beyond the interface, where a sunny day was on the verge of breaking.
‘Anything new?’ Gilson asked.
‘I think that’s my question,’ Krantz said. ‘What’s going to happen?’ ‘Just about what you expected, I’m afraid. I think that by evening this place is going to be a real hive. And by tomorrow night you’ll be lucky if you can find a place to stand. I imagine Bannon’s been on the phone since I called him at midnight, rounding up the scientists. And they’ll round up the technicians. Who’ll bring their machines. And the army’s going to beef up the security. How about some of that coffee?’