Adventures in Time and Space

by Raymond J Healy

  With an effort he carried and placed it against the first step. It lacked three feet of reaching the top, but he had arranged for that. Grasping the remaining shorter hairpin, he climbed his ladder to the top, pushed the hairpin over the edge of the step above, and followed up after. Then, using the hook on the shorter hairpin, he pulled the ladder up after him.

  He had climbed the first step.

  In fifteen minutes he was in the open vestibule, dragging his hook and ladder after him in the long trip to mid-hall where the stairway to the upper floors was.

  Allison was never to forget the weary time he had climbing that new set of steps. Already tired to exhaustion, he had for eighteen more times to go through with the back-breaking routine of climbing eight inches upward‌—‌pushing his hook up and over, before, and with it pulling his heavy ladder up, after. Daylight came on apace, and through the dirty window, halfway up, revealed him as a tiny purposeful doll in a long white dress. When the last step had been surmounted, Allison sat right down where he was for a moment of rest.

  He needed it. His labors since leaving the space ship had been titanic, his emotions had taken their own heavy toll‌—‌and his metabolic rate was much higher in toy size than when normal.

  He got up refreshed, but already a little stiff. It occurred to him that he might be able to make enough noise on Peyton’s door to rouse him from sleep; so, rather anxious, dragging his hook and ladder after him, he started down the long stretch of wooden planking to the rear, where his friend’s room opened off the left.

  He arrived and knocked; then, suspecting that he had made pitifully little noise, he turned his back to the door and kicked hard with the heel of his shoe. There was no answer. As he had feared, he was unable to make himself heard.

  The crack under the door, however, was almost an inch‌—‌a foot‌—‌in depth, and, with considerable relief, he found he was able to squeeze in under it. There was much more light on the other side. There was enough for him to see at once that the couch which served his friend for a bed was covered with its usual daytime cover and was unoccupied.

  This was a major misfortune. He had never considered the possibility that his friend might not be there.

  He dropped his hook and ladder on the floor and looked around. Two windows, one in the back wall and one, partly opened, on the left, showed up a dirty and disordered room. Along the right wall was the unoccupied couch; in front of the remaining one a sink and a four-foot cupboard on whose top rested a gas plate; and between the windows stood a chair and flimsy card table which Peyton used as a desk. These made up most of the furnishings of the room.

  Allison walked over to the cupboard, the door of which stood slightly ajar. He was weak for food and hoped desperately that something loose might be lying around that he could eat. He was unable to pull the door open any farther, so he stepped right through the narrow opening above the one-foot board that formed its base.

  There was nothing there. Only a row of canned goods‌—‌baked beans and salmon, in six-foot tins. How he hated the sight of tins! He disappeared around the side of one and rummaged in the back‌—‌and when he came into view again he held five, large stale crumbs in his left hand and was eating heartily from a six-inch piece of cheese in his right.

  He had found a baited mousetrap. And food had never tasted so good.

  Munching his cheese and gnawing with his side teeth one of the rock-hard crumbs he had found, he went over and sat down against one leg of the couch. His position was still precarious; chiefly in the matter of food. He had no air-car. What was he to do?

  As he ate and considered, Allison was suddenly aware of movement off under the far end of the couch to his right. Startled, he looked, and in the dimness he saw two unblinking eyes of yellow fire. It was Peyton’s cat. He had utterly forgotten that Peyton had a cat.

  The hair rose on the back of his neck, and with one push he was on his feet. The cat at his movement bellied forward a few yards, a nerve-taut orange tiger, tail lashing. It was stalking him.

  And he was fair prey. Only shoulder-high to the cat would he stand; he’d be but one fiftieth its weight. Lighter than a mouse.

  He tried frantically to remember the cat’s name, but for the life of him he couldn’t. It bellied a little closer. Desperately he called out soothing cat talk; but words that at other times might have caused it to purr, now had absolutely no effect. It was preposterous! That cat had been his friend; he had petted it a score of times; and now in his helpless size it no longer knew him and was preparing to take his life. For all of his human brains, he, weaponless, would not fare even so well as a mouse.

  With a thrill he remembered that he was not weaponless. Out came Jones’ hypodermic, and in a second was fitted into his palm. It was a poor-enough weapon against the lightning speed of a cat’s claw, but it would have to do.

  He advanced boldly against the cat. He would not have had time to reach the cupboard, and he had always found it safest, when possible, to attack.

  In this, brains showed. The cat, surprised, backed; circled; crouched again. He followed it up. Noiselessly it backed toward the door; crouched; circled from there. Allison could then have backed out through the crack under the door; but that would have got him nothing; and moreover a strange new elation had come to him‌—‌the lust to conquer. He felt, with that weapon, that he could win. Forward to the cat, then, he went; back and to the side it retreated, crouching every time it stopped. It clearly was disconcerted by his unexpected advance.

  At the wall under the card table it stood its ground, and Allison felt that that would be the place to see the end. He advanced to within its own length of it; stood ready, right arm out. The cat opened its mouth in a noiseless hiss, and he was drenched with the creature’s breath.

  He gestured with his arm. The cat’s front quarters lifted from the floor, and, ears flat, made a lightning swipe at his hand. It touched; the cat fell slowly to its side; and like that it was over.

  Allison brought up his forearm‌—‌numb, from the violence with which it had been hit back. His hand was slit deeply in two places, and dark blood was dripping copiously from the openings. But it had been better to take the cat’s claws there than over his body. And it would have been his body if he had not forced the creature to make a swipe that was half defensive.

  He lost no time in tying up the cat with a piece of cord found under the sink; and then, staggering with fatigue, trembling all over with the reaction to the encounter, he was setting himself to think of a way to climb to the basin and get water out of the spigot, when to his overpowering joy he found a saucer of it nearly full, that had been left on the floor for the cat.

  He drank, as deeply as he dared, then washed and tended his wounds. Then, on the cat’s own cushion under the couch, he lay down and slept.

  The sun showed midafternoon through the western window when he awoke. Terribly stiff, aching all over, he got up, saw that the cat still lay unconscious, sat a while in thought and then set to work.

  He did many curious things, all under the terrific handicap usual to the predicament of his size. He routed out a cardboard box that dental powder had come in; removed the corrugated paper inside; opened both ends of the box so that it could be pressed flat, and pushed box and paper under the hall door. He found some medical cotton and pushed that under; also a long unsharpened pencil. He did the same with a long piece of string, to which at one end he had tied several paper clips. He took a piece of manuscript paper from the table; wrote some large words on it; found some stamps and a razor blade‌—‌and pushed them under. Then he squeezed under himself and returned after nearly an hour.

  But then the sun had gone down, and he was exhausted again. He ate a little more of the mouse’s cheese, drank some more water from the cat’s saucer, and then lay down once more on the cushion and went to sleep.

  It was pitch dark when Allison awoke. He got up at once, released the still-unconscious cat, drank all the water he could hold, and pushe
d out under the door. He could not be sure, but after reconnoitering the second-floor hall he came to the conclusion that it was after midnight, and time for what he had in mind, so he returned to the hall door and dragged to the stairhead what he had secreted there. It was the tooth-powder box, now wrapped up, and within, visible through one end, the corrugated pasteboard, cotton, razor blade, string with the clips, and the long unsharpened pencil.

  The coast seemed clear; he pushed the box containing all this through the rungs of the banister to the main-floor landing below, then followed down himself by way of the steps‌—‌sitting, turning over the edge, letting himself down by his arms and then dropping‌—‌all these eighteen times until he was at the, bottom.

  There, he retrieved his box, filled it as before, and dragged it to the vestibule, where he cautiously surveyed the street. It was dark and obviously very late. Nothing stirred except the occasional trucks and taxis far down the corner of First Avenue. Assured, he pushed the box and its contents off onto the broad top step, lowered himself there, then pushed it off the side to the pavement and again followed down.

  Fifteen minutes later, dragging his box laboriously behind him, he arrived at a letter box precisely halfway in the block toward Second Avenue; and that was his destination.

  He proceeded to work with unhesitating efficiency. First he took the pencil out of the box and laid it on the ground. Then he removed the string and tied its free end to the base of the letter box. After four tries he succeeded in casting the clip-tied end over the top of the letter box; and when its weight had carried the string down on the other side climbed that string to the top.

  He sat there a moment‌—‌a bloody, bearded, six-inch gnome, still in his dirty white dress‌—‌and after he was rested rose, tied the string by its middle to the letter-drop door, and slid down one string to the ground.

  And now had his string tied at one end of the base of the letter box, a slack length leading from there up to the letter-drop knob, and the long loose clip end hanging free.

  He tied the tooth-powder box to this clip end.

  Next, he stuck the pencil, head high, in a loop he made in the string attached, at both ends, and began, in the fashion of one tightening a tourniquet, to twist. He twisted it many scores of times, and when he had finished, the letter-drop door was held open.

  He rested a little, then, once more climbed hand over hand to the top of the letter box. There, he rested again, then pulled up the tooth-powder box to position in the open mouth of the letter drop. And, that done, he got down in the mouth alongside his box, and took out the razor blade and cut both strings.

  The letter-drop door closed, and he and the little box fell down into the inside of the letter box.

  Fifteen minutes later he himself was in the little tooth-powder box, and it was closed, the outer paper gathered at the end and tied.

  He had mailed himself. How else was he to get to Doctor Heiler?

  There was no telling when Peyton would return; probably not for some time, from the window he had left open for the cat to get in and out by way of the fire escape. If Allison had waited, he might have starved, for he was none too sure that he would have been able to open one of those cans of beans, helpless and without tools as he was.

  It was better, anyway, that Peyton did not know. That would leave only Heiler.

  Snug in his cotton-padded box, Allison tried to sleep. Once more he was dog-tired. The acts that were casual nothings to normal people had required titanic energies on his part. He was lame all over, and his right arm, now that it was no longer being used, was beginning to ache intolerably.

  He thought back over the amazing events of the last twenty-four hours‌—‌Jones’ agent, whom he had left lying unconscious back on Forty-ninth Street‌—‌the heart-bursting discovery that he had been reduced to a pitiful toy‌—‌his colossal labors in getting to Doctor Heiler. He had performed feats that once he would have called impossible; but now the worst was over. His friend would take him in; would guard his secret; and would help him prepare a way to kill without possible failure that traitor Jones when he should call on him once more.

  It was good that Heiler lived just down the hall from him. He would have perfect protection, and yet be close to his own laboratory.

  Sleep came gradually, and when it did it was filled with the face of Jones, and a lovely girl, his own size, whom he would never see again, and two men who looked remarkably like himself‌—‌and always, ever returning, doll faces, rows of them, each one identical with himself, and each one somehow himself.

  He was rudely awakened by the shock of his plunge into the postman’s bag, and knew, then, it must be morning.

  There was no sleep after that. He rode; was jolted; rested; was jolted, rode, and rested some more; and then was off in a carrier’s bag on the way to his own house. He could hear nothing, but could tell when he was being carried up the steps and given to the maid. She would now be carrying him up to his old friend Heiler.

  A pause, and he came to rest.

  Another pause, but Allison couldn’t wait. He pushed aside the string and paper at the top end of the box and looked out. He was on the desk in his own laboratory. Fearfully he continued out and looked around.

  His high-backed swivel chair pivoted; a colossus was seated there. And the high-looming features of the colossus were those of the man called Jones.

  VIII

  For a moment Allison crouched there, petrified.

  Then the great features above spread up in a smile, and that released him, and in instant wild panic he was scrambling back over the surface of the desk looking for a way to get down. Jones’ hand came swooping through the air, but before it could close over him he had made one wild jump out beyond the edge of the table to the cord leading up to the reading lamp, had closed his arms about it and was sliding down its rough, wavy length.

  He was skinned, and bleeding when he reached the floor, but at once he was away and looking for a place‌—‌any place‌—‌to escape into. Nothing near by offered. The desk was placed forty yards out from the wall, and far to one side, in the corner, stood a high, heavy specimen cabinet. If he could make that!

  The’ colossal feet under the desk were moving; Jones’ head and arm appeared into view above them. Allison seized his chance and ran with all his might over the hundred-yard open space to the cabinet. After him charged Jones; but he reached it safely and retired far under its base. Its height was such that he just had room to stand erect.

  He got out his hypodermic. He was cornered; but let Jones’ fingers come near enough and he was as good as dead!

  Heart beating like a frightened mouse, Allison waited. What would his enemy do? Get the broom and sweep him out? Then bat him to death as one would a cockroach?

  He watched the man’s feet. They lifted out of sight, lowered, slowly, one at a time; receded: he was returning to the desk. A pause, then the feet returned. Knees appeared, and hands; the man’s head showed. He was wearing over his head and mouth an apparatus not unlike that of a telephone operator. Then Allison heard words, the first since he had left the other’s civilization, weeks‌—‌it seemed years ‌—‌before. The word-sounds were extremely attenuated; he could not recognize them as belonging to Jones.

  “Come out, Allison,” they said. “I won’t hurt you.”

  “Come and get me!” the ethnologist challenged, hoping fervently that he would reach in and try.

  “All right; but throw out the hypodermic first,” came the long-drawn-out reply.

  “Like hell I will!” exclaimed Allison passionately. Jones knew! He was prepared! Despair seized him. He was lost.

  He waited to see what would happen next. Jones wasted no more words, but returned to the desk and occupied himself there in a manner Allison could not see. Then he returned, and knelt down again.

  “All right, 372, if you will,” he said.

  What did these cryptic words mean?

  Allison waited, tense, far back und
er the cabinet. Jones’ cupped hands lowered near the front edge; one was removed; and off the other stepped a tiny man, his own size. He wore a soft-green robe and sandals; was clean and freshly shaven; and in figure, face, and bearing he was another himself!

  He stepped under the front edge of the cabinet and looked around. Allison, amazed and frightened, cowered farther back. Jones’ face appeared at the floor, watching.

  “I say, Allison, how are you?” exclaimed the double, seeing the other and starting heartily over to him.

  “Who are you?” Allison asked fearfully, backing still more. The fellow had his own voice!

  “372.” The other laughed. “You’re 793‌—‌though I know you aren’t aware of it. But heavens, man‌—‌how you look!”

  Allison looked the wreck he was. His dresslike costume was torn and filthy; his arm was burned; his hands were skinned, swollen, raw, and bleeding; and on his face was a tangled, matted three-inch yellow beard.

  “Who are you?” Allison repeated, crouching, devouring him with bloodshot eyes, ready at a flash to run or strike, like a man cornered by his own ghost.

  “Come on out, old fellow, and I’ll explain,” said the double kindly. He made as if to grasp Allison’s upper arm.

  “If you touch me, you die!” growled the ethnologist intensely, avoiding his hand.

  Jones’ voice floated in. “Watch out! He has a hypodermic!”

  “Oh!” said the double and held himself with more caution. “Allison,” he said seriously to the other, “you’ve been a damn fool. We’re not here to hurt you. Come on out and‌—‌”

  “Go away!” Allison interrupted, crouching lower, a wild light in his eyes. “Go away! Go away!” he replied shrilly, utter desperation in his voice.