6 Great Short Novels of Science Fiction

by Edited by Groff Conklin

“You see through it,” said Maltby, rather pale, “but there’s a space that the light seems to dodge around. It skips from the front side of the disk to a spot six inches this side of it. There’s that much distance that the light doesn’t have to pass through. Things look six inches nearer. See?”

  He held the right side up and held it over the desk-top. The desk-top did look nearer. He pressed down—and gasped. He was looking at wood-fibres inside the substance of the wood. Then his hand dropped, and he was looking inside the desk, through the top. He was examining the contents of the top desk drawer from a point above the desk’s writing-surface.

  The two of them babbled at each other. For twenty minutes or more they made absurd experiments. The fact remained. You looked into the transparent surface of the disk, and your sight skipped the opaque metal of the other surface and started on from six inches out in mid-air. Nothing in that six-inch space was an impediment to vision. The mirror could be held against a six-inch wall and anything beyond the wall would be visible. It was as if the light received on a small, circular area in mid-air curved through some unknown dimensions and returned to its proper line at the surface of the disk.

  They had agreed on so much when Dick Blair said:

  “What happens if you push something through?”

  He thrust his finger toward himself, staring at its end through the unbelievably ancient instrument. His finger seemed to approach to the observed six inches. Then the impossible happened. He had no sensation, but he saw inside his finger. He saw inside the flesh. He saw the bone. He saw nerve-ends and capillaries-

  He jerked his hand away and stared at Maltby. But Maltby was paler than Dick himself.

  “I was—looking at your finger from the side,” said Maltby with difficulty. “The end of it vanished. And where it vanished, the end of it—looked like quicksilver.”

  They doubted their own sanity, but there could be no doubt of the fact. They pushed a pencil into the impalpable place in-mid-air. The pencil disappeared. Looked at from the side, the spot where it vanished seemed a blob of quicksilver, which moved when the pencil was moved. From the proper side of the device, they saw into the inside of the pencil.

  They pushed a watch, running, into that space. Dick saw its machinery in busy movement—or half its machinery. When it was withdrawn it was unharmed.

  It was Dick who without warning suddenly thrust his whole hand up to the wrist into the enigmatic space. He looked at the bones and cross-section of the muscles and tendons of his wrist, while Maltby at one side saw a changing blob of quicksilver-like reflection the shape of the seemingly cut-off flesh. And then Dick said in a queer voice: “I feel something.”

  He stood rigid for an instant. Then he jerked his hand out. He had something in his fingers.

  It was a living green leaf, freshly plucked from what must have been a tree. It was a perfectly plausible leaf. There were only two things in the least odd about it. One was that it had been plucked from nothingness in an apartment three floors above the street and remote from any vegetation at all. The other was that it wasn’t the leaf of any species of plant known on earth.

  It was Dick Blair who pointed out jerkily that the thing which looked into desks and through desk-tops and into flesh and bone had been used by its long-dead owner to study anatomy and accounted for the five-thousand-year-old description of the circulation of the blood. He could look directly into the inside of a living body. Then Maltby made incoherent noises about dimensions being at right angles to other dimensions and a field of force which made them interchangeable.

  Then Dick said, stridently, that the significance of the crux ansata as a symbol of power over the other world had plainly once possessed a literal sense. There was another world somehow continuous to this one. It had been speculated upon since Plato was in diapers. This leaf had come from it. Which, he continued, might be an unjustified inference from inadequate data, but he was damned if he didn’t believe it, and anyhow he was going to put his hand in that round space again and see what turned up—

  He did. He sweated as he fumbled. He broke off a spray of leaves from an unseen source, and dragged them back. It was the eeriest of sensations to stand in a lighted, well-furnished room with all one’s surroundings completely artificial, and to reach into vacancy in that well lighted room and produce from nothingness a batch of fresh foliage completely unlike any earthly leaves.

  This grab into the unseen brought back something else, too. Coiled about the branch as if feeding on a leaf, there was a tiny living thing. It was perhaps six inches long. It had enormous, inquisitive eyes, and filmy wings. At the impact of the bright lights it blinked wisely and uncoiled itself and launched itself into the air. They both saw it clearly. It hovered delicately, like a hummingbird, and then darted to the window and out.

  It was very small and quite harmless, but it was a serpent, a snake. It had wings. It flew. And winged serpents are not native to Earth.

  The two men were quite literally babbling to each other when the bell rang and Sam Todd stumbled into the room. His face was ashen-white. He looked as if he had been drinking for weeks and had the horrors.

  “Dick,” he said thickly. “I—was looking for you. I had Nancy at the Police Museum. We snatched a bite to eat and I—called a cab for her. Just as it was pulling up I— smelled something queer. Not that—special perfume she used, but—something else. I looked around and—Nancy was vanishing. The top half of her was gone into thin air and there—was a big blob of—quicksilver where her waist was, and it dropped to the ground and—she was gone! Maybe I’m crazy but that’s what happened...”

  Dick Blair cried out furiously, because he knew as well as Sam that no thing and no person which had vanished in a pool of quicksilver had ever been seen again.

  Then Sam lifted his head, twitching.

  “Queer smell,” he said thickly. “Like—lush green stuff. I smell it now! My God, I smell it now! This is what I smelled when Nancy vanished...”

  And then Dick and Maltby realized that their nostrils, too, were filled with an odor they had been too excited to notice before. Its origin was obvious enough. It came from crux ansata. And it was the smell of a jungle at night—in the heart of New York City.

  ~ * ~

  For three days Maltby worked like a madman, while Dick Blair went practically insane. The worst of it was, of course, that Maltby could promise nothing. He did not dare to chip away any part of what might be called the transparent surface of the instrument from the past. He had to analyze without injuring the object he analyzed, for fear of destroying it altogether. He checked the light it transmitted, and found it circularly polarized. He checked the specific gravity of the entire object to six decimal places, and checked that against the density of a morsel scraped from the end of the handle. The whole instrument was made of bismuth bronze—copper and bismuth together. Normal bronze contains zinc or tin. It became certain that only one substance was involved, and that it was the bismuth-copper alloy. There was no insert of other substance to give the instrument its properties.

  In the end, microscopic examination showed that, on the fine line of division where the transparent and opaque parts ran together, there was one irregularity. There was a place where for half a thousandth of an inch the metal was in an inbetween state—not quite the material of the handle, and not quite the enigmatic surface through which one looked around normal space.

  That was the clue. Maltby worked on it for twenty-four hours straight, and had a one-inch ring of transparency in a flat slab of quarter-inch copper-bismuth alloy. It was not a duplicate of the entire crux ansata effect, but only of a part. The crux ansata seemed to look into another world and then back again to Earth at a remove of six inches in space. The peephole Maltby made looked only into another world. But that was a lot.

  Looking through it, Maltby saw at first only spreading tree branches and thick foliage, speckled with sunshine from an unseen source. He touched a pencil experimentally to the transparent surface an
d nothing happened. The transparency was not penetrable.

  He called Sam Todd on the phone and commanded him to get hold of Dick and bring him there. He worked on

  When they burst, into his apartment he wavered on his feet from pure weariness. But he had a second bit of copper-bismuth alloy. This one was quite opaque. But there was a spot where you could push a lead pencil into it, and it vanished and you could pull it out again if it were not allowed to go in all the way. Moreover, if you looked through the peephole into the other world, in the direction of this second opaque spot, in between the illogical foliage you could see the part of the pencil which disappeared from Earth. It enlarged and grew smaller as it was pushed or pulled from Earth, and if it were pushed all the way through it could be seen to go tumbling through the tree branches toward the ground below this jungle.

  “I’ve got a beginning,” said Maltby drearily. “I’ve gotten what is probably a sort of cockeyed alignment of cop per crystals with’ bismuth, in a crazy allotropic state. Normally, light-bending seems to call for one arrangement and matter-bending calls for another. Just for simplicity I’m assuming that this—this Other World is occupying the same space as Earth, and that it’s a matter of bending light to get it into that world, and to get it to come out again. It has to bend through an angle we normally can’t conceive of. And I’m guessing that matter more or less bends in the same fashion. That’s not clear, but I’m so tired I don’t think very straight.”

  Dick said tensely, “What have you got ready for us?”

  “I’ve got a one-inch peephole you can look into the other world with, and a space an inch across that you can push things through into the other world. I know how to make them, now. If I can stay awake, I can make a doorway somebody can go through.”

  “Get to work!” commanded Dick. “Nancy’s there! You’ve got to get to work!”

  “Agreed,” grunted Maltby, “but I haven’t slept for so long I can’t remember it. You take this peephole and go somewhere high and look around. While I make a door way for you, you’d better be stocking up on information.”

  Sam Todd said, “And guns. But I’ll attend to that!”

  “Since you may use a taxi,” added Maltby, “you’d better carry only the peephole. If you took the thing that matter can go through, you might be driving down Fifth Avenue in our world and drive through the space a tree occupies in the other. And the tree trunk might try to come through into the cab.”

  “How long will it take to make the doorway?” demanded Dick.

  “Maybe three hours, maybe four.”

  The three of them separated instantly. Dick went raging to The Empire State Building and rode to its top; where he quite insanely held a small slab of copper alloy to his eye, and looked into the Other World.

  Below him there was terrain identical with Manhattan Island in form and size and shape. But it was covered with foliage of which not one leaf was recognizable. To the south there were marshes where on Earth he saw tall buildings; and flowing streams, in the Other World, coursed merrily across the paths of streets in this.

  At first he saw but one sign of humanity. That was a great villa, apparently of brick, with wide and spacious lawns. But he saw no human figures about it. It was too far away, on the Brooklyn shore. Then, here and there on the twin of Manhattan Island, he saw trails winding apparently at random through the heavy woods. It was a sunny day in the Other World. Everything seemed utterly tranquil and utterly at peace. And Dick, staring with desperate intentness, made notes which identified this trail—meandering from side to side—roughly with Fifth Avenue almost beneath him, and that trail with Twenty-Ninth Street. By sighting with both eyes open, one looking at Earth and the other into the Other World, he identified the position of the one vast villa as roughly south of the Navy Yard.

  Then he saw movement on the trail a thousand feet below his eyrie. In the Other World a horse-drawn vehicle plodded slowly between giant tree trunks in the space otherwise occupied by Altman’s. There were two human figures in the vehicle, and at first he thought them naked, before he saw loin-cloths about their middles. Behind the vehicle trotted a four-legged creature far too large to be a dog. But the equipage turned beneath over hanging branches and he lost sight of it.

  He went uptown to Radio City. Again from a vast height he surveyed endless forests. From here, though, he saw plowed fields which before had been invisible. More, in the middle of a virgin wilderness, he saw the sunlight glinting on acres upon acres of glass. It looked extraordinarily as if hothouses sufficient to supply a small town with foodstuffs were in existence. And he thought, but he was not sure, that he saw horses pulling plows. There were two of them. If men guided them, they were too far away to be seen with the naked eye.

  It seemed all peace and serenity there. But Dick, staring from a great height, knew such hatred and horror as made him tremble. This Other World lay beside the earth that men knew, in that greater cosmos men have not yet begun to visualize. And Dick had an idea of the perverted significance that had been given it. Eons since, other men had found a way to pass between the worlds. Men had moved to the Other World, with the power to return to Earth where and when they wished. And man is the most predatory of animals; his favorite prey is other men.

  That first discovery had unquestionably taken place far back in the dim dawn of history, when all of civilization lay in Egypt. A scientist or a magician of that time had doubtless made the first crossing between the worlds. Perhaps he told his king and was duly slaughtered for reward, after the king had made the discovery his own. At first, perhaps, the Other World had seemed to the king merely a possible refuge from rebellious nobles or an unruly people. A fugitive king, driven from his throne by his own tyranny, could retire to the Other World and be in safety from all his enemies. He could take his women and his slaves and build a palace in which to live in perfect security. Perhaps some king did do this, fleeing from successful civil war. But in exile he would crave revenge. And what could be more obvious than to make a doorway back to Earth which would open into the bedroom of his former palace, where his successor on the throne lay asleep behind guarded doors?

  Then Dick remembered a scrap of history almost lost in the mists of time. He himself had first translated an ancient papyrus which told of such a thing. There had been such a king who had gone into the after world and bided his time, and had come again to rule Egypt in terror and blood when all his enemies died in a single night.

  That was unquestionably it. The later kings of the Fifth Dynasty had ruled more ruthlessly than any other kings of Egypt. Magic slew their enemies. Disasters overwhelmed their foes. There was no treasure they could not lay hands upon, nor any human being they could not seize or slaughter. All Earth was at their mercy, when they could walk at will into the most secret, most guarded, most hidden retreat of the normal Earth.

  They would be the masters, then, those men of the Other World. They would not need to fight battle for loot, when loot could be taken without hindrance. They need not capture cities for slaves, when slaves could be stolen in absolute safety from any place where men lived.

  Dick could only guess at the development of so purely parasitic a society. The robbery of gold would soon cease to have meaning. Gold would have no more value than a clod of earth, when it could be taken as easily. Jewels would have no more value than so much glass. But fine fabrics and soft carpets, and luxuries of food and drink, and horses and strong men for slaves and pretty girls for playthings—those things would have value. And there would be no great nation of the parasitic Other World. It would be absurd for them to rob each other with the Earth to loot, so they would not need to combine in defense against each other. Their society would be anarchic. They would set up villas, as time went on, wherever Earth cities promised easy supplies of luxuries and slaves. The master of one villa would owe no allegience to any other. Yet how would they keep the loyalty of their guards, because guards against the slaves they must have?

  There Dick’s ima
gination failed him, but such faint imaginings as he could contrive were enough to make him half-mad when he got back to Maltby’s place.

  Sam Todd came in. He had brought guns. He began to divide with Dick, but Dick said grimly:

  “No division, Sam. I’m going through the doorway alone as soon as Maltby has it done. You’ve got to stay behind. I may need some help I can’t anticipate. I need somebody cruising about—watching through the peephole we already have—ready to give me help if it’s needed. And if both of us go through, who’s going to tell the authorities about this business and bring help along?”

  Sam laughed without amusement.

  “Tell the authorities?” he asked sardonically. “How long would they listen before they’d usher me into a padded cell? Oh, it could be done in time, but I’d need to spend weeks convincing them that I wasn’t crazy and the peephole wasn’t a trick, and then they’d refer to higher authority and they’d need to be convinced, and then they’d decide that the democratic procedure was to send an observer or an ambassador through— We’ll get Nancy back and then talk about such things!”

  “But you’ll stay behind to help me when I need it!” snapped Dick. “You know damned well you can do that better than Maltby! And you’ve more reason to do it as well as more money to spend if it’s needed. You stay behind! Look here!”