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6 Great Short Novels of Science Fiction

Page 14

by Edited by Groff Conklin


  Before that, there was the well-attested disappearance of the carriage of a semi-royal princeling in the Tyrol. It went around a curve in the carriage-road, and riding-footmen a hundred yards behind found it utterly gone when they rounded the curve in their turn. Six horses, a coachman and footman, and two of the princeling’s mistresses —one of whom was said to be the most beautiful woman in Europe at the time—vanished in the twinkling of an eye and no trace was ever found of any of them. And still earlier there was that shipload of immigrants to the United States which was sighted only forty miles off Sandy Hook, pressing forward with all sail set on a perfectly fair day, which never reached harbor and from which not one particle of wreckage was ever found.

  When these items are put together, they add up convincingly to mere nonsense. The farther back into history one delves, the less credible the affairs become.

  [What follows has been cast in the form of fiction for obvious reasons. For one thing, it is extremely unlikely to be quoted in any newspaper. For another, it is extremely undesirable that any considerable group of people should take it for fact while any sizable residue of unexplained disappearances occur.—Murray Leinster]

  But Dick Blair dug up a Fifth Dynasty tomb in Egypt and found that exactly one object had been ruined by dampness in a rock-hewn vault in which every other object had remained absolutely dry from the time of its entombment. That object meant the second discovery of the Other World and an explanation—an explanation— for very many mysteries which date back to the time of the Fifth Dynasty, five thousand years ago.

  When he got back to New York, Dick Blair was very busy for a while, but at last, one night, he took a mass of greenish clay to his friend Tom Maltby. Dick was then only partly bleached out from the Egyptian sun, where he had dug out a previously untouched Fifth Dynasty tomb. But civilization already bored him. He was inclined to mourn the humdrumness of life in New York.

  “This,” he told Maltby, “is a hunk of dirt. It’s colored with oxides, and once upon a time it contained something made by a worthy Egyptian at least five thousand years ago. At the Museum we’re pretty good at re-forming objects that have been corroded past recognition, but we have to have at least a sliver of metal to work on. The X-rays say this is absolutely gone.”

  He handed over the X-ray negatives. They showed the distribution of the denser metallic oxides in the lump of clay. Maltby looked at them interestedly.

  With a sliver of the original metal left,” Dick observed, “we run a contact down to it, use it as a cathode, run about a quarter-ampere to it for six months or so, and the oxides break down and the metal goes back to the shape it was originally in. It’s amazing how detailed the things get sometimes. We even find the original decorations. But this one beats us.” [This is literally true, and standard museum practice. Provided that the corroded metal in the clay has not been disturbed, excellent reversals of rusting processes are obtained and artifacts which would have been unrecognizable are regularly restored to a condition suitable for exhibition and study.—Murray Leinster.]

  Maltby nodded.

  “That’s what I want. I said I’d try to work out an improvement on your system. It’s in my line.”

  Maltby was a consulting engineer specializing in the prevention of electrolytic damage by earth-currents. Every public utility has at least one engineer whose specialty is the prevention of damage of this type. Maltby was tops in the field. He’d checked the destruction of a very famous bridge, he had doctored a very modern skyscraper whose foundation-piles were being corroded even in their concrete sheaths, and his process for restoring rusted objects underground was not unlike museum methods for rebuilding prehistoric relics.

  He put down the dried clay and mixed two drinks. Dick Blair settled down comfortably.

  “That hunk of dirt is now officially your property,” he observed, “which is my doing. It may be a copper pot or pan or anything at all. I can’t figure out how it rusted. The place was absolute, stony, dessicated desert without a drop of water for miles. The tomb was bone-dry and nothing else showed any trace of damage by moisture. Where’d the moisture come from?”

  Maltby sipped at his drink. Dick went on:

  “More oddities about that tomb— Its occupant wasn’t a king, but he was fitted out for the afterlife in royal style! There were more imported objects in that tomb than you could shake a stick at. There was stuff from Cyprus, from Phoenicia, from Ethiopia, from Mycenae, and slathers of regular Egyptian stuff. The writings in the tomb are weird. He was a sort of royal physician and miracle-worker, who happened to be cousin to the Pharoah. There was a papyrus on medicine which is going to raise the devil! You simply can’t translate it except as a description of the circulation of the blood— forty-seven hundred years before modern men knew of it. Another scroll is crazier. It describes animals which simply don’t exist. The prize is a description of a small horse with three toes. I may add that the eohippus did not survive until his time. How’d he get such an idea?”

  Maltby shrugged.

  “Fairy tales can’t always be wrong,” he said. “Make enough fantastic statements, and some are bound to be right. You’d have trouble showing me there was modern knowledge fifty centuries ago, papyri or no papyri.”

  Dick Blair grinned. “The old chap in the tomb had modern ideas. I don’t know whether you know it, but there were Pharoahs who never had even civil wars, much less foreign ones. He claimed , he handled that for his cousin. Anybody who even thought evil of the king died mysteriously. And he boasted of the dirt he did to the King of Cyprus of his time. Magic, but modern.”

  Maltby raised his eyebrows. Dick went on zestfully:

  “His funeral boasts say that a King of Cyprus had a pretty daughter and the then Pharoah sent a message demanding her for his harem. The King of Cyprus refused. So before his whole court he vanished in a pool of quicksilver. My old gent declares he worked that. The King of Cyprus’ son got ready to fight, but instead he and all his family—including the princess—died in a palace which poured out flames at every window. The next ruler was suitably abject and sent tribute. Nearly the same process happened in Phoenicia, Ethiopia and Mycenae.”

  Maltby looked at the lump of clay. He said mildly, “Such a potent magician must have put a curse on his tomb in case anybody should rob it. Don’t tell me he omitted that!”

  Dick grinned again, and then said in sudden half-seriousness: “Speaking of curses, an odd thing happened in Alexandria while I was there. The very pretty daughter of one of the richest men in town vanished from her bed, with two maid-servants watching her. She vanished in a pool of quicksilver. They screamed like all hell, and all her father did was throw dust on his head and die of a broken heart. That one made the newspapers, but the old sheykhs of Alexandria weren’t surprised. They said it happens occasionally and has since time began. The funny thing is that the quicksilver business—”

  He stopped and looked startled. Maltby said: “That King of Cyprus you mentioned?”

  “Y-Yes,” said Dick blankly. “I never thought of the connection before. Odd, isn’t it?”

  Maltby said deliberately, “I know a chap who is digging into criminology. He’s a queer duck. He has all the money in the world, but he’s working like a beaver to set himself up as a consulting criminologist. And he says that he can’t understand some records he’s found. It seems there are several records of things disappearing in pools of quicksilver right here in New York. It doesn’t make sense, and nobody’s ever believed it. I must tell him about the King of Cyprus.”

  Dick blinked.

  “That’s crazy! In the Middle East quicksilver is considered more or less magical—”

  “Mirages on a motor-road look like quicksilver,” observed Maltby. “I’ve seen a film of gas, formed in an electrolyte, look like it too... Now I’m going to set up my apparatus for your hunk of clay.”

  He got out his gadgets. He had devised this particular set-up to work out his corrosion-reversal process for building
s. It was laboratory-size only, but it would serve for the clay. There was a plastic box with electrodes at its sides. He packed the relic into the box, filling the unoccupied space with more clay. A high-frequency oscillator came into play.

  “There’s no metal in this stuff to serve as a cathode,” he observed, “and it’s just as well. I’m setting up a standing wave in the middle of this clay mass. There’ll be a constant potential difference between the middle and the outer surface. When the clay’s moistened there’ll be a steady flow of plating-out current from every direction toward the center. Presently some particle of metal will establish itself. Maybe several. I may have a dozen centers of potential—they’ll establish themselves wherever the oxide is densest. Then we’ll see what happens. I think the result should be pretty good, but it’ll take time.”

  “At the museum,” said Dick, “we figure on six months.”

  “I estimate two weeks,” said Maltby, drily. “My current-flow depends on the ions present, not on power fed to it. I’m not feeding current in at all. It makes its own.”

  He arranged a moistening solution so that the clay would gradually acquire an even moisture-content. He turned on the oscillator and brushed off his hands.

  “Now we wait. Have another drink?”

  “No-o,” said Dick. “Just what did you mean by that quicksilver business? It’s odd to hear a story like that in New York. I didn’t believe the one in Alexandria, though the local inhabitants did. And it’s absurd to link them with an ancient papyrus with the same yarn in it!”

  “I didn’t mean a thing,” admitted Maltby. “You spoke of a girl vanishing, and quicksilver, and of a forgotten king vanishing, and quicksilver. So I remembered Sam Todd telling me about a safe that was opened only a month ago in a perfume factory, and the flasks of essential oils worth up to hundreds of dollars an ounce vanishing in as many tiny pools of quicksilver. It seemed odd, so I mentioned it. That’s all.”

  “I’d like to talk to this Sam Todd,” said Dick. “I hate to be silly, but that’s too damned queer—”

  ~ * ~

  Dick Blair went about his business, which was partly that of relaxation just now. He’d been through a grueling grind in Egypt, and probably had a few tropical germs in his system which it would be a good idea to get out. He gave a lecture or two, wrote a magazine article, and kept himself available for consultation if needed by the Museum staff. But mostly he rested.

  He met Sam Todd and found him a kindred soul who was, at the moment, almost ready to achieve his great ambition—to become a consulting criminologist with something to offer his clients. His material on quicksilver-pool disappearances and thefts was fascinating. The list went back for over seventy-five years. The tales were so impossible that it was only rarely that they had ever reached print, and that made it the more remarkable that on at least a dozen occasions the same story was told by persons who could not have heard of the others. A famous stallion vanished and when a groom looked in his stall there were four little pools of quicksilver descending to the floor. The horse was gone. There were other quicksilver droplets scattered here and there about the straw bedding on the floor, but they vanished too. No quicksilver was found when the stall was searched afterward. The old Delmonico’s was robbed of priceless wines. The wine bottles disappeared in round and oblong pools of quicksilver, which afterwards vanished too. Only one person saw them. There was the disappearance of an obscure dancer—by no means talented—who had been said to be the prettiest girl on the New York stage that season. Her dresser, and a stage-hand called by the dresser’s shrieks, claimed that they saw quicksilver as the girl vanished. That quicksilver could not be found, either.

  The only common factor in all the tales was the absence of a sequel. Not one of the vanished things, whether persons or goods, had ever been found again. No corpus delicti. No underworld boastings. Nothing.

  All of this brought Dick’s curiosity to the point where it became almost an obsession. Then he met Nancy Holt. Sam Todd had employed her to do research for him; she would be part of his staff when he opened his office. He thought a great deal of her brains, but the only personal fact he had noted about her was that she used a strictly personal perfume, which she said was made from a recipe of her grandmother’s.

  But Dick Blair saw her as the one girl on earth whom he could not possibly let anybody else marry. He fell hard the first time he saw her. By the third time he was sunk so completely that she knew it too. And then he had an occupation which was at once relaxing and absorbing. He got busy trying to make her fall in love with him.

  Meanwhile, the electrolytic reconstruction of the object in the plastic box went on. After four days, X-rays showed half a dozen small bits of solid metal in the clay. In six they had joined, three of them to form the beginning of a round flat disk, and the others still separated at odd angles to it. In eight days they were all joined. There was an irregular disk some four inches in diameter. It had a rod projecting from one side, and there were two branches from the rod. In ten days the object was recognizable. It was a ceremonial mirror with a cruciform handle, a crux ansata, part of an Egyptian Pharoah’s royal regalia through all the years down to Alexander the Great. Its significance was that the Pharoah was monarch not only of this world, but of the Other World beyond.

  The outlines of the one in the clay were still rough. It was still being re-formed by the current the standing-waves induced. Two days later the X-rays showed an odd, disk-shaped shadow that Maltby could not understand. On the fourteenth day he had still made no sense of it at all, but the X-rays indicated that all metal in the clay had been returned to its original shape. The object was as completely restored as Maltby’s apparatus could make it. He called Dick on the phone to come and uncover it, with the precautions an archaeologist would take.

  Dick arrived at Maltby’s flat, “Dammit, I tried to get Nancy to come along, but Sam had some photographs he wants made in the Police Museum. She’s busy listing the subjects for the photographer. Bludgeons and sashweights and ice-picks and other objects used by various murderers to express their lethal impulses. Damn!”

  “That clay mess,” said Maltby mildly, “seems to have yielded a crux ansata. Interesting?”

  “Rather early for such things,” said Dick restlessly. “And that mummy shouldn’t have had one in his tomb. He wasn’t a king.”

  “I can’t make out,” said Maltby, “a disk that the X-rays show in the clay. It appeared quite suddenly at the very end of the process, and it’s quite opaque to X-rays. Even copper lets a little hard radiation go through. Any ideas?”

  Dick shook his head, still thinking of Nancy. When Maltby dumped the clay out of the plastic box, though, his interest rose. He spurned a proffered knife and briskly cut a wooden spatula to carve the clay with. He looked at the X-ray negatives and placed the clay block just so. Then he made curiously surgeon-like incisions and laid the clay back cleanly. In only seconds he lifted out the golden-copper crux exactly as shown by the X-rays, and regarded it with astonishment.

  “It’s perfect,” he said blankly, “—and there’s glass!”

  The four-inch disk had seemed a solid mass of metal. Now the center was plainly transparent. They could see through it. Dick put it to one side and probed for the other disk, supposedly six inches from it, which should still be buried in the clay.

  It wasn’t there.

  He searched for minutes, until the clay lump was dissected into portions in which the imaged second disk could not be hidden.

  “Queer,” said Dick. “We’ll use the X-ray again later. I want to look over this thing. Extraordinarily early for good glass! Really clear glass didn’t turn up until late in Roman times. Maybe it’s crystal.”

  He picked it up impatiently. He cleaned the transparent surface from the front. He reached behind to clean the back, and his face went bewildered. He could feel the back of the mirror. It was metal. But he couldn’t see his fingers. He saw through them. Beyond them.

  “Now, what
the devil—”

  He held up the thing and looked through it. He could see Maltby and the other side of the room. He took a book and slid it past the back of the supposed glass. It did not impede the view at all. He still saw Maltby and the other side of the room. The book seemed to be perfectly transparent as it passed before the window-like center of the disk. Then Maltby made an astounded exclamation.

  “Here! Look at this!” he said sharply.

  He took the crux ansata from Dick. He turned it over. He laid it on his desk glass side down. There was an extraordinary optical phenomenom. An infinitely thin layer of the desk’s surface seemed to be lifted up six inches above the desk. Beneath it could be seen the copper back of the disk. There was empty space above it, and then a film of desk-top. Which, of course, simply could not be.

 

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