Harry Turtledove

by The Best Time Travel Stories of the 20th Century

  There was a little of everything in the lab, much of it incongruous. Rheostats had little skirts on them, like ballet dancers; and vacuously grinning faces of clay. A generator was conspicuously labeled, “Monstro,” and a much smaller one rejoiced in the name of “Bubbles.” Inside a glass retort was a china rabbit, and Gallegher alone knew how it had got there. Just inside the door was a hideous iron dog, originally intended for Victorian lawns or perhaps for hell, and its hollowed ears served as sockets for test tubes.

  “But how do you do it?” Vanning asked.

  Gallegher, his lank form reclining under the liquor organ, siphoned a shot of double martini into his mouth. “Huh?”

  “You heard me. I could get you a swell job if you’d use that screwball brain of yours. Or even learn to put up a front.”

  “Tried it,” Gallegher mumbled. “No use. I can’t work when I concentrate, except at mechanical stuff. I think my subconscious must have a high I.Q.”

  Vanning, a chunky little man with a scarred, swarthy face, kicked his heels against Monstro. Sometimes Gallegher annoyed him. The man never realized his own potentialities, or how much they might mean to Horace Vanning, Commerce Analyst. The “commerce,” of course, was extra-legal, but the complicated trade relationships of the day left loopholes a clever man could slip through. The fact of the matter was, Vanning acted in an advisory capacity to crooks. It paid well. A sound knowledge of jurisprudence was rare in these days; the statutes were in such a tangle that it took years of research before one could even enter a law school. But Vanning had a staff of trained experts, a colossal library of transcripts, decisions, and legal data, and, for a suitable fee, he could have told Dr. Crippen how to get off scot-free.

  The shadier side of his business was handled in strict privacy, without assistants. The matter of the neuro-gun, for example—

  Gallegher had made that remarkable weapon, quite without realizing its function. He had hashed it together one evening, piecing out the job with court plaster when his welder went on the fritz. And he’d given it to Vanning, on request. Vanning didn’t keep it long. But already he had earned thousands of credits by lending the gun to potential murderers. As a result, the police department had a violent headache.

  A man in the know would come to Vanning and say, “I heard you can beat a murder rap. Suppose I wanted to—”

  “Hold on! I can’t condone anything like that.”

  “Huh? But—”

  “Theoretically, I suppose a perfect murder might be possible. Suppose a new sort of gun had been invented, and suppose—just for the sake of an example—it was in a locker at the Newark Stratoship Field.”

  “Huh?”

  “I’m just theorizing. Locker Number Seventy-nine, combination thirty-blue-eight. These little details always help one to visualize a theory, don’t they?”

  “You mean—”

  “Of course if our murderer picked up this imaginary gun and used it, he’d be smart enough to have a postal box ready, addressed to . . . say . . . Locker Forty, Brooklyn Port. He could slip the weapon into the box, seal it, and get rid of the evidence at the nearest mail conveyor. But that’s all theorizing. Sorry I can’t help you. The fee for an interview is three thousand credits. The receptionist will take your check.”

  Later, conviction would be impossible. Ruling 875-M, Illinois Precinct, case of State vs. Dupson, set the precedent. Cause of death must be determined. Element of accident must be considered. As Chief Justice Duckett had ruled during the trial of Sanderson vs. Sanderson, which involved the death of the accused’s mother-in-law—

  Surely the prosecuting attorney, with his staff of toxicological experts, must realize that—

  And in short, your honor, I must respectfully request that the case be dismissed for lack of evidence and proof of casus mortis—

  Gallegher never even found out that his neuro-gun was a dangerous weapon. But Vanning haunted the sloppy laboratory, avidly watching the results of his friend’s scientific doodling. More than once he had acquired handy little devices in just this fashion. The trouble was, Gallegher wouldn’t work!

  He took another sip of martini, shook his head, and unfolded his lanky limbs. Blinking, he ambled over to a cluttered workbench and began toying with lengths of wire.

  “Making something?”

  “Dunno. Just fiddling. That’s the way it goes. I put things together, and sometimes they work. Trouble is, I never know exactly what they’re going to do. Tsk!” Gallegher dropped the wires and returned to his couch. “Hell with it.”

  He was, Vanning reflected, an odd duck. Gallegher was essentially amoral, thoroughly out of place in this too-complicated world. He seemed to watch, with a certain wry amusement, from a vantage point of his own, rather disinterested for the most part. And he made things—

  But always and only for his own amusement. Vanning sighed and glanced around the laboratory, his orderly soul shocked by the mess. Automatically he picked up a rumpled smock from the floor, and looked for a hook. Of course there was none. Gallegher, running short of conductive metal, had long since ripped them out and used them in some gadget or other.

  The so-called scientist was creating a zombie, his eyes half-closed. Vanning went over to a metal locker in one corner and opened the door. There were no hooks, but he folded the smock neatly and laid it in the floor of the locker.

  Then he went back to his perch on Monstro.

  “Have a drink?” Gallegher asked.

  Vanning shook his head. “Thanks, no. I’ve got a case coming up tomorrow.”

  “There’s always thiamin. Filthy stuff. I work better when I’ve got pneumatic cushions around my brain.”

  “Well, I don’t.”

  “It is purely a matter of skill,” Gallegher hummed, “to which each may attain if he will. . . . What are you gaping at?”

  “That—locker,” Vanning said, frowning in a baffled way. “What the—” He got up. The metal door hadn’t been securely latched and had swung open. Of the smock Vanning had placed within the metal compartment there was no trace.

  “It’s the paint,” Gallegher explained sleepily. “Or the treatment. I bombarded it with gamma rays. But it isn’t good for anything.”

  Vanning went over and swung a fluorescent into a more convenient position. The locker wasn’t empty, as he had at first imagined. The smock was no longer there, but instead there was a tiny blob of—something, pale-green and roughly spherical.

  “It melts things?” Vanning asked, staring.

  “Uh-uh. Pull it out. You’ll see.”

  Vanning felt hesitant about putting his hand inside the locker. Instead, he found a long pair of test tube clamps and teased the blob out. It was—

  Vanning hastily looked away. His eyes hurt. The green blob was changing in color, shape and size. A crawling, nongeometrical blue of motion rippled over it. Suddenly the clamps were remarkably heavy.

  No wonder. They were gripping the original smock.

  “It does that, you know,” Gallegher said absently. “Must be a reason, too. I put things in the locker and they get small. Take ’em out, and they get big again. I suppose I could sell it to a stage magician.” His voice sounded doubtful.

  Vanning sat down, fingering the smock and staring at the metal locker. It was a cube, approximately 3 X 3 X 5, lined with what seemed to be grayish paint, sprayed on. Outside, it was shiny black.

  “How’d you do it?”

  “Huh? I dunno. Just fiddling around.” Gallegher sipped his zombie. “Maybe it’s a matter of dimensional extension. My treatment may have altered the spatiotemporal relationships inside the locker. I wonder what that means?” he murmured in a vague aside. “Words frighten me sometimes.”

  Vanning was thinking about tesseracts. “You mean it’s bigger inside than it is outside?”

  “A paradox, a paradox, a most delightful paradox. You tell me. I suppose the inside of the locker isn’t in this space-time continuum at all. Here, shove that bench in it. You’ll see.” G
allegher made no move to rise; he waved toward the article of furniture in question.

  “You’re crazy. That bench is bigger than the locker.”

  “So it is. Shove it in a bit at a time. That corner first. Go ahead.”

  Vanning wrestled with the bench. Despite his shortness, he was stockily muscular.

  “Lay the locker on its back. It’ll be easier.”

  “I . . . uh! . . . O.K. Now what?”

  “Edge the bench down into it.”

  Vanning squinted at his companion, shrugged, and tried to obey. Of course the bench wouldn’t go into the locker. One corner did, that was all. Then, naturally, the bench stopped, balancing precariously at an angle.

  “Well?”

  “Wait.”

  The bench moved. It settled slowly downward. As Vanning’s jaw dropped, the bench seemed to crawl into the locker, with the gentle motion of a not-too-heavy object sinking through water. It wasn’t sucked down. It melted down. The portion still outside the locker was unchanged. But that, too, settled, and was gone.

  Vanning craned forward. A blur of movement hurt his eyes. Inside the locker was—something. It shifted its contours, shrank, and became a spiky sort of scalene pyramid, deep purple in hue.

  It seemed to be less than four inches across at its widest point.

  “I don’t believe it,” Vanning said.

  Gallegher grinned. “As the Duke of Wellington remarked to the subaltern, it was a demned small bottle, sir.”

  “Now wait a minute. How the devil could I put an eight-foot bench inside of a five-foot locker?”

  “Because of Newton,” Gallegher said. “Gravity. Go fill a test tube with water and I’ll show you.”

  “Wait a minute . . . O.K. Now what?”

  “Got it brim-full? Good. You’ll find some sugar cubes in that drawer labeled fuses. Lay a cube on top of the test tube, one corner down so it touches the water.”

  Vanning racked the tube and obeyed. “Well?”

  “What do you see?”

  “Nothing. The sugar’s getting wet. And melting.”

  “So there you are,” Gallegher said expansively. Vanning gave him a brooding look and turned back to the tube. The cube of sugar was slowly dissolving and melting down.

  Presently it was gone.

  “Air and water are different physical conditions. In air a sugar cube can exist as a sugar cube. In water it exists in solution. The corner of it extending into water is subject to aqueous conditions. So it alters physically, though not chemically. Gravity does the rest.”

  “Make it clearer.”

  “The analogy’s clear enough, no? The water represents the particular condition existing inside that locker. The sugar cube represents the workbench. Now! The sugar soaked up the water and gradually dissolved in it, so gravity could pull the cube down into the tube as it melted. See?”

  “I think so. The bench soaked up the . . . the x condition inside the locker, eh? A condition that shrank the bench—”

  “In partis, not in toto. A little at a time. You can shove a human body into a small container of sulphuric acid, bit by bit.”

  “Oh,” Vanning said, regarding the cabinet askance. “Can you get the bench out again?”

  “Do it yourself. Just reach in and pull it out.”

  “Reach in? I don’t want my hand to melt!”

  “It won’t. The action isn’t instantaneous. You saw that yourself. It takes a few minutes for the change to take place. You can reach into the locker without any ill effects, if you don’t leave your hand exposed to the conditions for more than a minute or so. I’ll show you.” Gallegher languidly arose, looked around, and picked up an empty demijohn. He dropped this into the locker.

  The change wasn’t immediate. It occurred slowly, the demijohn altering its shape and size till it was a distorted cube the apparent size of a cube of sugar. Gallegher reached down and brought it up again, placing the cube on the floor.

  It grew. It was a demijohn again.

  “Now the bench. Look out.”

  Gallegher rescued the little pyramid. Presently it became the original workbench.

  “You see? I’ll bet a storage company would like this. You could probably pack all the furniture in Brooklyn in here, but there’d be trouble in getting what you wanted out again. The physical change, you know—”

  “Keep a chart,” Vanning suggested absently. “Draw a picture of how the thing looks inside the locker, and note down what it was.”

  “The legal brain,” Gallegher said. “I want a drink.” He returned to his couch and clutched the siphon in a grip of death.

  “I’ll give you six credits for the thing,” Vanning offered.

  “Sold. It takes up too much room anyway. Wish I could put it inside itself.” The scientist chuckled immoderately. “That’s very funny.”

  “Is it?” Vanning said. “Well, here you are.” He took credit coupons from his wallet. “Where’ll I put the dough?”

  “Stuff it into Monstro. He’s my bank. . . . Thanks.”

  “Yeah. Say, elucidate this sugar business a bit, will you? It isn’t just gravity that affects the cube so it slips into a test tube. Doesn’t the water soak up into the sugar—”

  “You’re right at that. Osmosis. No, I’m wrong. Osmosis has something to do with eggs. Or is that ovulation? Conduction, convection—absorption! Wish I’d studied physics; then I’d know the right words. Just a mad genius, that’s me. I shall take the daughter of the Vine to spouse,” Gallegher finished incoherently and sucked at the siphon.

  “Absorption,” Vanning scowled. “Only not water, being soaked up by the sugar. The . . . the conditions existing inside the locker, being soaked up by your workbench—in that particular case.”

  “Like a sponge or a blotter.”

  “The bench?”

  “Me,” Gallegher said succinctly, and relapsed into a happy silence, broken by occasional gurgles as he poured liquor down his scarified gullet. Vanning sighed and turned to the locker. He carefully closed and latched the door before lifting the metal cabinet in his muscular arms.

  “Going? G’night. Fare thee well, fare thee well—”

  “Night.”

  “Fare—thee—well!” Gallegher ended, in a melancholy outburst of tunefulness, as he turned over preparatory to going to sleep.

  Vanning sighed again and let himself out into the coolness of the night. Stars blazed in the sky, except toward the south, where the aurora of Lower Manhattan dimmed them. The glowing white towers of skyscrapers rose in a jagged pattern. A sky-ad announced the virtues of Vambulin It Peps You Up.

  His speeder was at the curb. Vanning edged the locker into the trunk compartment and drove toward the Hudson Floatway, the quickest route downtown. He was thinking about Poe.

  The Purloined Letter, which had been hidden in plain sight, but refolded and readdressed, so that its superficial appearance was changed. Holy Hecate! What a perfect safe the locker would make! No thief could crack it, for the obvious reason that it wouldn’t be locked. No thief would want to clean it out. Vanning could fill the locker with credit coupons and instantly they’d become unrecognizable. It was the ideal cache.

  How the devil did it work?

  There was little use in asking Gallegher. He played by ear. A primrose by the river’s rim a simple primrose was to him—not Primula vulgaris. Syllogisms were unknown to him. He reached the conclusion without the aid of either major or minor premises.

  Vanning pondered. Two objects cannot occupy the same space at the same time. Ergo, there was a different sort of space in the locker—

  But Vanning was jumping at conclusions. There was another answer—the right one. He hadn’t guessed it yet.

  Instead, he tooled the speeder downtown to the office building where he maintained a floor, and brought the locker upstairs in the freight lift. He didn’t put it in his private office; that would have been too obvious. He placed the metal cabinet in one of the storerooms, sliding a file cabinet in front
of it for partial concealment. It wouldn’t do to have the clerks using this particular locker.

  Vanning stepped back and considered. Perhaps—

  A bell rang softly. Preoccupied, Vanning didn’t hear it at first. When he did, he went back to his own office and pressed the acknowledgment button on the Winchell. The gray, harsh, bearded face of Counsel Hatton appeared, filling the screen.

  “Hello,” Vanning said.

  Hatton nodded. “I’ve been trying to reach you at your home. Thought I’d try the office—”

  “I didn’t expect you to call now. The trial’s tomorrow. It’s a bit late for discussion, isn’t it?”

  “Dugan & Sons wanted me to speak to you. I advised against it.”

  “Oh?”

  Hatton’s thick gray brows drew together. “I’m prosecuting, you know. There’s plenty of evidence against MacIlson.”

  “So you say. But speculation’s a difficult charge to prove.”

  “Did you get an injunction against scop?”

  “Naturally,” Vanning said. “You’re not using truth serum on my client!”

  “That’ll prejudice the jury.”

  “Not on medical grounds. Scop affects MacIlson harmfully. I’ve got a covering prognosis.”

  “Harmfully is right!” Hatton’s voice was sharp. “Your client embezzled those bonds, and I can prove it.”

  “Twenty-five thousand in credits, it comes to, eh? That’s a lot for Dugan & Sons to lose. What about that hypothetical case I posed? Suppose twenty thousand were recovered—”

  “Is this a private beam? No recordings?”

  “Naturally. Here’s the cut-off.” Vanning held up a metal-tipped cord. “This is strictly sub rosa.”

  “Good,” Counsel Hatton said. “Then I can call you a lousy shyster.”

  “Tch!”

  “Your gag’s too old. It’s moth-eaten. MacIlson swiped five grand in bonds, negotiable into credits. The auditors start checking up. MacIlson comes to you. You tell him to take twenty grand more, and offer to return that twenty if Dugan & Sons refuse to prosecute. MacIlson splits with you on the five thousand, and on the plat standard, that ain’t hay.”