“The place won’t look half so bad when I get those new curtains ironed out and hung up,” Elsie said, and could have bitten her tongue out.
“Thanks,” Shevlin said, dryly. “I was waiting for that. Now, if you don’t mind, I’ll go down in the cellar and mix myself a rum collins.”
“Why pick on the cellar,” Elsie said, miserably. “There’s nothing down there but a lot of rusty machinery which we’ll have to pay someone to rip out and cart away. The renting agent said the last tenant was a professor of—what did he say he was a professor of, Roger?”
“Of physics,” Roger grunted. “Perhaps if I go down in the cellar and surround myself with just the right atmosphere it will work with me.”
Elsie stared at him. “What are you talking about?”
“The homeopathic system of therapeutics,” Shevlin said. “If you have something bad, you dose yourself with more of the same until it either cures or kills you.”
A queer feeling of insecurity took hold of Shevlin when he saw the cellar.
It was damper than he’d ever thought a cellar could be. And chillier.
The machinery was damp, too. It was studded with little blobs of moisture and under the wetness was a rustiness which made Shevlin think of tin cans rusting in the sun, and an ax half-buried in a chopping block in an abandoned woodshed.
Ah, well—a gloomy life and a stagnant one was better than being cooped up in a city apartment with two small kids running around in circles every time the doorbell rang.
The machinery was really quite elaborate. So elaborate, in fact, that if Shevlin had been writing a book about machinery he’d have gone out and hired a ghost writer solely to avoid describing it.
Shevlin took another sip of the rum collins and wished that he were out of the cellar and upstairs in the attic. Of one thing he was certain. It would be sheer insanity for him to remain in the cellar when he could roam all over the house without let or hindrance.
Once as a child Shevlin had almost tangled with a bulldozer and the experience had left an ineffaceable impression on his mind. He had no intention of touching the machinery, or becoming embroiled with it in any way.
Clumsy hands he had. Clumsy hands and a clumsy head, early to rise and early to bed.
He must have stumbled, though it was hard to see how he could have been so unsteady on his feet after just one rum collins.
He had a vague recollection of making a frantic clutch at something huge that glistened. He had a much sharper recollection of feeling that something move beneath his fingers.
The whirring began immediately and didn’t stop. It was faint at first, very faint, but it increased so rapidly in volume that Shevlin had no time to leap back.
For one terrifying instant he seemed to be standing on the brink of a colossal sandstorm, his ears filled with a dull roar that was half a silence. Then there was a flurry of scintillating metal particles, and something seemed to lift him up, and hurl him backwards through a cyclone of motion toward a tumbled waste of emptiness.
When Shevlin struggled to a sitting position the floor was once more firm beneath him, and the machinery had ceased to gyrate. For an instant the walls had seemed to contract in fitful gusts, but now there was nothing to indicate that a convulsion of incalculable magnitude had taken place on the opposite side of the cellar.
He was beginning to think he’d suffered a vertigo attack and imagined the whole thing when he heard his wife’s voice calling to him from the head of the stairs.
“Roger, come up here quick! I can’t see out of the windows! Roger, hurry!”
Shevlin gasped, got swayingly to his feet, and mounted the stairs in five long bounds that carried him well past his wife, who had retreated into the lower hallway, and was staring at him out of eyes that seemed to fill her face.
“What do you mean, you can’t see out?” he demanded.
“It’s like a fine, dazzling mist,” Elsie said, in a stunned voice. “You can see it best from the living room window.”
The living room was filled with little dazzling dust motes that seemed to follow Shevlin as he crossed to the window, pressed his face to the pane and stared out with utter incredulity surging up in him.
“It can’t be an ordinary fog,” Elsie said. “It came up much too—Roger!”
“Yes, what is it?” Shevlin asked.
“The other pane!” Elsie almost screamed. “A little man with a horrible, shrunken face looked right at me!”
Shevlin swung about. “Oh, nonsense,” he said anxiously. “You’re making a mountain out of a fog bank.”
“But I tell you, I saw him! Oh, I did, I did! You didn’t, but I did!”
“All right,” Shevlin said, his mouth tightening. “Shock does strange things to the mind. I most certainly didn’t see him, but I’m going right out now and puncture him before we follow him over the hill to the madhouse.”
He turned as he spoke and went striding toward the front door. Seemingly the door had soaked up a stickiness, for he had to tug and wrench at it, and the knob kept slipping out of his hand.
Bur it came open at last, and Shevlin found himself on the porch staring wildly about him. As far as he could see there wasn’t anyone in sight. But he couldn’t see very far, for the fog was thicker than he’d ever imagined a fog could be. “Oh, my stars!” he muttered, through clenched teeth.
“You’re just not used to our kind of weather,” a wheezy voice said. “Climatic conditions change quite a bit in a half million years.”
Shevlin caught his breath.
Directly in front of him the fog had thinned a little, and—he could see the little man standing there.
The little man wasn’t a dwarf exactly, but he was well below medium height and his cranium bulged so that his face seemed much more shrunken than it actually was. It was sufficiently shrunken, however, to resemble a tissue-paper mask which some besotted reveler had bought as a hand-me-down, daubed with rouge and worn once too often.
He didn’t seem to be wearing much in the way of clothes. Or perhaps it would have been more correct to say he had been ill-advised in the matter of clothes. From his scrawny chest to just above the knees a thin, one-piece garment—not unlike a sarong—clung loosely to his mummy-thin body, obscuring what it couldn’t conceal and taking a little of the curse off. But his shoulders were completely bare, his elbows stuck out and his legs were visible in their crookedness. He was entirely unshod.
“In another fifty years we’d have mastered time travel ourselves,” the gnomish apparition said. “But now we shall have it right away.”
“Yes, naturally,” Shevlin said, blankly. “You’ll have it—right away.”
“I’m confident we will,” the little man agreed. “You know the secret and will communicate it to us.”
As though unaware that Shevlin had stiffened the little man bowed.
“Perhaps I’d better introduce myself. My name is Papenek, and I’m probably the only man on earth who could cope with a development like this. You see, the house didn’t enter our time sector quite as fast as it left yours, so we had time to step up the beam and get a good look at it.”
“You—”
“When we saw the house coming, Valt—he’s our Chief Monitor—sent for me immediately. ‘You can speak the language of First Atomic Age primitives as fluently as I can,’ Valt told me. ‘Take a tube and go right over there. If necessary, use persuasion.’”
The little man smiled. “Valt provides for every contingency. He wouldn’t be where he is if he didn’t. But I’m sure persuasion won’t be necessary. You want to help us, don’t you.”
Shevlin had no clear recollection of leaping back through the front door and slamming it in the little man’s face. But he must have done so, because he suddenly found himself inside the house with his back to
the door and his stomach crawling with cold terror.
“Roger, what is it?” Elsie said, in a shrill, small voice. “What did you see out there? Why are you staring at me like that?”
Shevlin turned abruptly, and twisted the knob of the door to make sure it wouldn’t open behind his back.
“The little man I didn’t think was there is standing out on the front porch,” he said. “He says the climate has changed a bit because we’re a half million years ahead of the clock.”
“A half million—”
“Apparently the professor wired the house for time travel,” Shevlin said, moistening his dry lips. “Cruel and thoughtless people sometimes leave litters of unwanted puppies in damp cellars for the neighbors and the health department to worry about. I’m simply guessing, of course. But I’ve a hunch the professor just didn’t realize how close to success he was. When that huge clutter of machinery down in the cellar wouldn’t work he must have got disgusted and walked out on it.”
Elsie screamed.
The little man was standing just inside the door, his eyes riveted on Shevlin’s twitching face.
“Wood is an extremely hard substance to make permeable,” he said, as though he were addressing a child. “It has never ceased to amaze me that the First Atomic Age could run its entire course without collapsing such dwellings in their entirety.”
“It…it’s just beginning,” Shevlin muttered, a little wildly.
“You mean the First Atomic Age. Yes, I rather gathered you hadn’t advanced very far into it. Certainly not as far as the Great Holocaust, which wiped out all but a pitiful remnant of the human race.”
“One redeeming feature, though,” he added, as though he’d just thought of it. “The mutations which made our race possible began to occur right after the first atomic bomb was dropped.”
For the first time Shevlin noticed that Papenek was clasping a small glowing tube about five inches in length. It wasn’t elaborate—in fact, a test tube filled with light wouldn’t have looked any different, except that there was nothing inside the tube to account for the light.
“Don’t be alarmed,” Papenek said, with a deprecatory gesture. “The house won’t collapse. I used the beam so sparingly that it didn’t even destroy the wall when I came through. As you can see, all it did was make the wall permeable. I could walk out just as easily as I walked in, but—I’ve certainly no intention of leaving just yet.”
Wide-eyed, Elsie turned sharply. “You hear that? He’s going to visit with us!”
Papenek turned, and started at Shevlin’s wife. “The tyranny of hysteria is the most crippling of all tyrannies because the normal mind has absolutely no defense against it,” he said coldly. “Fortunately we now know how to deal with such aberrations. Women are so highly replaceable that we have no scruples about—”
He was interrupted by sudden clatter on the great central staircase.
Down it came first Shevlin’s only son and heir, Roger J. Shevlin, Jr., pulling after him a toy locomotive and three streamlined pullman cars. The cars bumped and careened perilously on every step and for an instant Shevlin was sure they would come uncoupled. It was curious, but just watching the train descend steadied Shevlin, so that his daughter’s noisy appearance at the top of the stairs armed with his son’s air rifle did not unnerve him too much.
What horribly unnerved him was the expression on Papenek’s face when Petty Lou Shevlin screwed up her face, and aimed the rifle straight down the banisters at the little man from the future.
BBBRRUPP
Though the bb shot hit Papenek in the most delicate part of his anatomy he didn’t budge an inch. Surprisingly he just stood very still, his lips sucked in and a doughy knobbiness sprouting from his face. Then, slowly, his features picked themselves up from where they had landed and regrouped themselves where the doughiness was most pronounced, giving him the aspect of a tormented half-wit.
“Children!” he said, icily.
“Y-you still have them, d-don’t you?” Shevlin asked, a coldness encircling his scalp.
“Oh, yes, we still have them,” Papenek said.
“I…I suppose you treat them differently than we do, though. Give them haywire toys to play with that turn them into pitiful little adult lunatics before they’re six.”
Being an imaginative man Shevlin had often tried to imagine what the children of the far distant future would be like. Despite his terror, despite the fact that Betty Lou was now tripping down the stairs in the wake of his son he couldn’t repress a certain curiosity as to the young of the species which his own descendants had sired.
“No, we don’t,” Papenek said, a malevolent resentment in his stare. “The human infant has a long learning period. We…we don’t try to telescope it. All we do is utilize it to teach a child the rudiments of civilized behavior. What amazes me is that you haven’t utilized it at all. Your children are far more primitive than young orangutans or chimpanzees.”
“Are they?” Shevlin said, and something in his tone made Papenek tighten his hold on the tube and take another swift step backward.
“I didn’t mean to seem patronizing,” Papenek said. “You First Atomic Age primitives must have had a quite astonishing grasp of scientific imponderables in some respects. Perhaps I should say ‘hit-or-miss techniques.’ In a crude way you’ve outdistanced us. Possibly a barbaric, not to say, savage childhood has given you a certain mental resilience which—”
He was not permitted to finish. Betty Lou had dropped the air rifle, seized her brother by the arm, and was dragging him toward Papenek as though she wanted something confirmed which she didn’t dare refer to in the presence of her parents.
“I tell you he has!” she shrieked. “He has, he has, he has!”
“Aw, he’s just a dwarf,” Junior protested. “Let him alone and he’ll sing ‘happy birthday to you’ from the Western Union.”
It all seemed like a dream, but Shevlin knew it wasn’t. The bright and shining faces of his brats were far too real and earnest.
And now Betty Lou was coming right out with it, accusing Papenek of having little knobby outgrowths at the base of his skull. Like horns they were, jutting out a good inch and a half on both sides of his neck.
Shevlin hadn’t noticed them before. But now Papenek was fingering the growths, causing Elsie to squirm in horror.
“Directional organs,” Papenek said, almost belligerently. “I’m not surprised those little savages should be upset by them.”
“Directional—”
“They’re vestigial in you,” Papenek explained impatiently. “Cats, dogs and birds have a highly developed directional sense which our own ancestors lost far back in the Miocene. In fact, the bodies of all animals contain vestigial homologues of organs that were once functional. Certain snakes, for instance, have tiny skeletal legs buried under their skins, so incredibly minute as to present anatomical difficulties to a taxonomist.”
“If he used any bigger words he’d choke himself,” Junior said.
“If you’re talking about snakes you needn’t bother to tell us,” Elsie muttered. “Just show us. Turn your back, Betty Lou. He wants to show us his buried legs.”
“Directional organs are vestigial in you,” Papenek said, ignoring the interruption. “But we’ve redeveloped them.”
“Oh,” replied Shevlin, his hands traveling to the bumps at the base of his own skull.
“Oh, don’t,” Elsie pleaded wildly.
PLOP
Just why Junior should have seen fit to thrust out his leg and trip Papenek right at that moment was a riddle which the child psychologists of the future might have been capable of unraveling. But Shevlin doubted that.
He doubted it still more when he saw the look of fury on Papenek’s face. The little man’s features were so convulsed with rage that
Shevlin feared his temples would burst.
A scream from Elsie warned him that there was no time to be lost.
Grabbing his son by the coat collar, Shevlin swung him about and started toward the stairs with him. He had little hope of reaching the top of the stairs before Papenek could regain his feet. It was more an act of appeasement than anything else, and like most such acts it failed utterly to achieve its purpose.
He saw Papenek’s hand go out, but he wasn’t prepared for the blinding flash of radiance which shot from the tube.
He himself wasn’t touched. Only Junior was touched.
For an instant Shevlin’s son was bathed in an unearthly refulgence. Then—Elsie was babbling and clawing at Papenek’s face, and a little wisp of smoke was hovering above a moist spot on the floor that might or might not have been Junior.
“No, no—don’t,” Papenek shouted, squirming and writhing under Elsie’s merciless assault. “He’ll come back. I just punished him a little. Do you think I’d extinguish a child!”
“He’ll come back?” Elsie’s voice was a shriek. “He’ll—”
“Certainly. I just stepped up the beam a bit. Right now his body has the same refractive index as the air about him, but he’ll waver back in about five…why, she seems to have fainted!”
Five minutes later Shevlin stood with his arm about his wife’s sagging shoulders, watching his son wavering back.
Not all of Junior came back immediately. First his face materialized, pale and startled, and then the back of his head, and then his small body, and finally his feet. His feet took their time in coming back.
“I just didn’t realize what a shock it would be to you,” Papenek said. “You Atomic Age primitives had abnormally developed parental instincts. When we lose children we certainly don’t lose any sleep over it. We—”
Something in Shevlin’s stare caused him to break off abruptly.
The Frank Belknap Long Science Fiction MEGAPACK®: 20 Classic Science Fiction Tales Page 20