6 Great Short Novels of Science Fiction

by Edited by Groff Conklin

  It seemed a matter of no more than seconds. Certainly not more than two minutes elapsed between the time when the cutters were in full flight and the time when the revolted slaves had grown from two dozen men in small boats, freed by Dick, to more than eighty with the oared galley of the master of the villa in their possession. Sixty of them still wept uncontrollably from the tear-gas they’d taken with their masters. But they grinned and howled and clanked their chains in glee, careless of possible retribution.

  The men from the cutter were not blinded. The gas mist was gone before they boarded. But the eyes of some began to smart from traces of the stuff drifting up from the rowers’ space. So Dick got the galley under way again to make a breeze to clear the last of it.

  ~ * ~

  Sam Todd, white-faced, sitting on a bench in East Side Park in the New York City of Earth, put down the little metal peephole through which he had watched the battle in the dawnlight. Behind him, early morning cars whirled past on the double highway. Around him innumerable buildings poured plumes of steam and sooty smoke toward the sky. A puffing tug towed coal barges over the very spot where, in the Other World, Dick Blair and a crew of freed slaves took account of their victory.

  Sam Todd dazedly got up from the park bench. He knew that his message to Dick had not been picked up by Dick. The ready ambuscade told that somebody else had intercepted it, and made a trap for Dick and the naked scoundrels now obeying his orders.

  Then cold chills went up and down Sam Todd’s spine. Not one message, but both must have been intercepted. And his had told Dick how to find the tree which, in the Other World, grew through the space Maltby’s flat occupied on Earth. And the folk who kidnapped slaves would have found it necessary to learn English.

  Sam himself had risen before dawn to see if Dick received his note. Now he knew somebody else had received it. He went white and sick, and suddenly he plunged blindly across the East River Drive without regard to the traffic. Brakes squealed about him but he did not hear them. A car’s bumper nudged his calf, but he did not feel it. Trembling and panting he found a phone booth at the nearest corner, darted inside, and dialed Maltby’s number with fingers that shook uncontrollably. He sweated as the phone buzzed, stopped, buzzed and stopped, in monotonous assurance that it was ringing. Presently Sam hung up and dialed the same number again.

  There was no answer.

  In a taxi on the way to Maltby’s place, his teeth chattered. But he couldn’t bring himself to use the peephole to look into the Other World. Only at the very last instant, when the cab turned into the last block, could he nerve himself to look. Then he had the cab stop short. He got out and put the peephole to his eye.

  He saw the virgin jungle of the Other World. Nothing else. He moved slowly and timorously along the street, the early morning sounds of New York seeming very loud indeed. He looked into the Other World, and then examined his surroundings in this so that he would not run into a blank wall.

  Before the building in which Maltby lived, he stopped again. Shivering, he regarded the corresponding space in the Other World. He saw jungle, which here had little undergrowth and was merely a carpet of rotted leaves. He saw the mottled bole of the great tree he had described to Dick. Then he saw tracks in the dead leaves and wood mold on the ground. Something had come here on narrow, tired wheels like bicycle-wheels. It was gone. It had accomplished what it came for.

  Sam Todd went heavily into the apartment building and into Maltby’s flat. It was quite empty. Maltby was gone. More, all of his experimental apparatus was gone, too. Everything that had been used to make the doorway between worlds was missing.

  Sam knew that there had been many small pools of quicksilver glistening in this place recently. Maltby was now a slave in the Other World. The doorway he’d made for Dick to go through was taken. No more doorways could be made, because Maltby had been the only man who knew how to make them. Dick Blair was beyond help, Nancy—if she still lived—was beyond hoping for, Maltby would shortly be tortured to make him tell everything he knew, and Sam Todd was helpless.

  The telephone rang in Maltby’s apartment. It rang again. Sam swallowed, looking at it.

  Then he turned and went tip-toeing out of the flat. He was now the only man on Earth who knew that the Other World existed. He dared not talk about it, but he had to do something about it. His first impulse was to run away. He’d slept here last night. When Maltby was missed, he’d be asked about it. Naturally. As a man of ample means and a known student of criminology, the questioning would be very polite, of course. But he’d slept here. He’d gone out before dawn. He’d returned—and Maltby was missing. More: when Dick Blair was reported missing, Sam and Maltby had been the last two persons to see him. And Nancy Holt-

  It would strike the police as a series of remarkable coincidences. They would expect him to explain them reasonably. When he couldn’t, they would begin to get suspicious. And if he told the truth— There was nothing that could be more damning, in the eyes of the cops, than for Sam to tell the exact and literal truth. It would look like a very clumsy attempt to feign insanity.

  His metal peephole would be considered a clever fake. It would be cut into to solve the mystery of its construction, and thereby be destroyed. The little door through which pencils and wallets could be thrust into the Other World would be considered also a device of modern prestidigitation. Sam Todd would be jailed until he explained the vanishing of his friends. In the Other World Maltby would be subject to fiendish tortures, and Sam Todd’s name would come out of his babblings. When newspapers were snatched into the Other World, they would presently reveal Sam Todd’s exact whereabouts and that the police accused him of faking insanity. Shortly the newspapers would print the news of his inexplicable escape from a locked cell. Then there would be nobody at all on Earth who knew anything about the Other World, and things would go on as before—theft and blood and agony and murder for thousands of years to come.

  Sam went to his hotel and up to his suite. He began to pack for hiding, and for combat. He had been studying weapons as a part of his work. He took what weapons he had ammunition for, and all their ammunition. And he took what money he could find. There wasn’t enough. He was in the act of debating whether or not to cash a check at the hotel desk when his telephone rang.

  He jumped. It rang again.

  He swallowed, with some difficulty. His mind was in the Other World. He felt hunted. He tried not to think of Maltby, but Maltby would have to scream out every secret thought he knew when the Other Worldlings began to work on him. He knew Sam’s address and how to call him by phone.

  The phone rang a third time.

  Sam went quickly out of the door, sweating. He carried two bags. He left the telephone ringing.

  Minutes later, he was at his bank. He cashed a large check. He cursed himself for knowing that he looked very pale. He cursed himself still more for being unable to devise a plan to save Maltby or even Dick.

  He tried to close his mind and not think of such things. He went to Penn Station and paid off his taxi, then went by subway to Grand Central and left that with the passengers of an incoming train, apparently one of them. He took another taxi to a medium-priced hotel and registered as from out of town, asking for a room as high from the street as possible. Doggedly and bitterly, he meant to do what he could to fight the Other World. Within hours—days at most—the police would be hunting him. From the Other World he would be hunted, too. He had just two weapons—a one-inch peephole through which he could look into the Other World, and a one-inch space on a copper plate through which he could thrust things into the other cosmos. He had nothing else.

  With the peephole he would learn the ways of the Other World. Slowly, carefully, he could find where doorways were placed and how they were made sometimes to be open and sometimes shut. In time he would be able to drop written word to some slave, guiding him to such a doorway and instructing him in its use. He might be able to drop small sharpened steel rods to serve as daggers. He should
be able to pour down inflammable stuff and start incendiary fires to cover a break by such a slave. If once an interworld doorway fell into his hands, he would manage to get it underground where in the Other World it could not be found, or else to some upper floor of a skyscraper. And then he would act as the situation required. With one full-sized doorway opening into the other cosmos and freed slaves to tell what went on there, he could not fail to cause conviction and armed exploration.

  From his eighth-floor room in the hotel he looked exhaustively out over jungle and placid waters. He saw only those, and once the reflection of sunlight from the villa’s roof. There was nothing to be learned from aloft. So Sam took a deep breath and equipped himself with arms so that he would be inconspicuously a walking arsenal. It was wryly humorous to think that if the police found him his weapons would be proof of criminality, and if a between-worlds door closed on him the weapons would be useless. But he carried them just the same. He went down to the street to begin his search.

  Then an idea struck him. He could give himself more time before the police hunted actively for him. He stepped into a phone booth and dialed his original hotel.

  “Desk?” he said briskly. “Todd speaking. I have suite 406, you know. I’ve been suddenly called out of town. Cleveland and possibly Chicago afterward. Hold my mail for a forwarding address, won’t you? I’ll wire it.”

  The desk-clerk said hurriedly: “Yes, sir. But Mr. Todd! Your secretary has called three times in the past hour. She says it is desperately important for you to call her at once, sir. Extremely urgent.”

  Sam’s hair stood upon his head. Nancy Holt was his secretary. Four days ago she’d vanished in a pool of quicksilver. And nobody who vanished like that ever came back. Nobody! It would be a trap—

  “Very well,” said Sam Todd, his throat tightening. “I’ll call her. Did she leave a number?”

  “No sir.”

  “Thanks,” said Sam.

  He hung up, his lips twisted. Then the oddity of it hit him. Nancy hadn’t left a phone number. She didn’t need to, of course. He knew the number of her phone. But anybody impersonating Nancy, or Nancy under duress, would have left a number. Anybody who forced Nancy to call would think it suspicious if she didn’t leave a number Sam could call. So—incredibly enough—it was possible that it was straight. Or it was possible that some compulsion more terrible than he could guess at would have enslaved Nancy’s mind as well as her body.

  It was a decision of importance vastly greater than merely his own safety. Sam felt that the wrong decision might mean slavery and degradation and shame and horror for generations yet unborn. He had to play it out.

  He called her number from the other side of town, with a taxi waiting to carry him away the instant he dashed out of the booth. He heard the crisp buzzings that meant her phone was ringing. Then her voice. It was unquestionably Nancy’s voice, strained and tense.

  “Hello?”

  “Nancy!” he said hoarsely. “This is Sam Todd.”

  He heard her give a cry of pure relief.

  “Sam! I’ve been going crazy, trying to reach Dick, and I couldn’t—the Museum doesn’t know where he is—and—”

  “He went after you,” said Sam flatly.

  She laughed without amusement, almost hysterically.

  “He couldn’t. He couldn’t, Sam! He’s going to think I’m crazy—”

  “Another world,” said Sam. “Manhattan Island with no buildings on it. Slaves. Animals like dogs or wolves that have as much sense as men. Jungle all around. Right?”

  “Sam!” she gasped. “How did you know?”

  “Dick’s gone there,” he repeated. “The people who live there just kidnapped Maltby. How’d you get back?”

  He kept listening for a false note in her voice. There weren’t any false notes. Either this was the first escape in five thousand years, or it was Nancy made into a traitor to Earth and all her kind.

  “Sam!” she panted. “They have ways like doors from that world to this. They set traps for people to drop into!. I—I got back through one of those traps. It was—like the one I fell into when I was on the street with you. If—you hurry we can get the trap and—”

  Sam said flatly, “Where is the trap? In terms of this world, Nancy. Where were you when you got back?”

  “A little alley between two old houses—” She told him, almost incoherently, the exact location. “Why?”

  “I’ll be seeing you,” he said. “Right away. That’s what you want, isn’t it?”

  “Y-Yes. I brought back a slave with me. A man who was a slave there. Where are you, Sam?”

  “I’m on the way,” said Sam grimly. “I’ll be right over,”

  He hung up. He went out and got into the cab. He stopped it two blocks from where she said she’d come back to earth. There was again an office building handy. Sam bribed an elevator operator and was admitted to a men’s room normally accessible only to tenants of the building. In privacy, there, he peered through his peephole. He looked directly into the Other World from a height above the jungle trees. At first he saw nothing, but there was a small gap among the branches through which he glimpsed squared, fresh lumber. It was a crude and clumsy cage, of hand-hewn timbers mortised together so that anything inside could not possibly get out. He stared at it, and saw a movement nearby. There were beasts around it. The wolf-like beasts he’d seen at the villa and engaged in the galley fight of that morning. There were several beasts. At one time he saw three, one lying peacefully on the ground, and one sitting up thoughtfully licking at its paw, and another pacing restlessly up and down.

  He went very pale indeed. He went down to the street again and rode the six blocks to Nancy’s home. He approached it cautiously, several times using the peephole in his handkerchief as if he had a speck of dust in his eye.

  The part of the Other World corresponding to Nancy’s apartment-house was empty of beasts or cages or beings of the Other World. The space corresponding to her apartment itself was empty of anything but tree branches. But there were Other World beasts waiting where she said she’d returned to Earth. And she’d brought back a man.

  It was Sam’s duty to be suspicious, but he felt rather sick. He liked Nancy. He’d been naive before, when he went to Brooklyn, and he’d almost been picked up. There were just two possibilities here. It might be quite straight, and a break of incredible importance, or—Nancy had been in the Other World for four days, and she might have been the victim of contrivances or concoctions developed during five thousand years of pure villainy, and she might have become enslaved in the most literal possible sense.

  Sam took a deep breath. He hoped desperately that everything was all right. But he held his pistols fast as he went into the apartment-house. He was unhappily ready to kill Nancy as an act of kindness, if it should be necessary.

  ~ * ~

  There was sunshine streaming in a window. There was dust on a polished table on which the sunbeams smote. There was a man with shaggy, uncombed hair and beard seated at the table, clad in a quilted dressing gown which obviously belonged to Nancy. He was eating ferociously with his fingers. Nancy was nowhere in sight. The man looked up. Sam backed against a wall and said: “Well?”

  His fingers were very ready to pull the triggers. The man stared at Sam. He swallowed convulsively and spoke. “You Sam Todd?”

  “Yes,” said Sam. “I am. Who’re you?”

  “Name’s Kelly,” said the long-haired man huskily. “I been a slave—yonder. She got me back here. She’s—washin’, I guess. She said she felt filthy.”

  Nancy’s voice called, “Sam?”

  “Here!” said Sam. It didn’t seem like a trap.

  “Just a minute!” she called. “Get Kelly to tell you!”

  “Right. Go ahead,” said Sam to the man. But he kept his back against the wall.

  “I was a slave,” said the man in the dressing, gown. “I— here!” He stood up and slipped off the garment. He wore a loin-cloth underneath, and nothing els
e. There were horrible, criss-cross, purplish marks upon his back, laid over and over each other. “They’re floggin’s,” he said briefly. “The overseer said I was hard to break an’ the ruhks’d get me sure. But they didn’t. I was choppin’ wood when this ruhk come up an’ told my guard a master wanted me. So I went with the ruhk.”

  “What’s a ruhk?” asked Sam warily. The man drew the dressing gown about his shoulders and sat down again.

  “A creature of the devil!” said Kelly in a hard voice. “Critters that look like police dogs, only twice their size. They got sense like men. They can talk to each other an’ we slaves hadda learn to understan’ their orders.”

  Sam waited. He felt very lonely. It had seemed to him that he was the only man left with the purpose of fighting the Other World. He wanted to believe this man, but he did not quite dare. Not yet.