Edge of Time

by Donald A. Wollheim (as David Grinnell)

  Warren's eyes followed the finger to what was indisputably a Speed Graphic, a candid camera of some sort, a large leather shoulder kit of equipment, and a red-leather overnight bag. "My name's Margaret McElroy. I started working for People only last week, and you're my first big job. My uncle, Sam Murray—he's Eastern circulation manager—told me a lot about you, Mr. Alton. You can call me Marge, all my friends do. Mind if I call you Warren? It's so much more friendly and informal."

  "Oh, no!" Warren gasped. "Excuse me a minute." He grabbed across the desk, unhooked the phone and hollered at the switchboard to connect him with Gardner.

  It was a futile call. Gardner, head of the photographic department was adamant. Yes, he knew it was embarrassing to send a girl unescorted with him, but yes, Miss McElroy was quite a good photographer—she's won several contests in amateur and semi-pro status. No, he really didn't have anyone else available. Well, yes; maybe there'd been a little string-pulling from the circulation department, "but you know how it is, Warren."

  Warren slammed the receiver down, glared at the girl. "Well, let's go! My car's in the garage."

  He picked up her overnight bag, while Marge gathered her cameras and equipment. Together they went down, piled her stuff away, and headed for the highways.

  For the first two hours, Warren uttered no word. Marge, who had plunked herself into the front seat next to him, simply watched the scenery, remarking on odd sights.

  By the time they had passed Poughkeepsie, Warren was beginning to relax. They stopped off for coffee and chatted a bit, and by the time they had reached the general area of Coningo County, they were on a working acquaintance.

  It was after five when Warren drove on to Cullenville, and drew up before a motel just outside of town. "Looks like a good place to make our headquarters," he said.

  "Yes," agreed the girl. "Nice. I wonder if they have a swimming pool."

  "I don't know, and besides, we're going to be on the ball. The whole idea is, Miss McElroy, to get this story wrapped up as fast as possible, and then get back to New York. After that, you may head for Coney Island, Rockaway, or wherever you like to swim. But for me, I'll look forward to an air-conditioned apartment, relaxing in a cool tub, with a chilled planter's punch and a good book close at hand."

  She smiled. She had a nice smile, Warren decided rather grudgingly. "Doesn't sound so bad, at that," she admitted. "Maybe magazine writers aren't all as crazy as I've heard they were."

  They got out, walked to the office, rented adjoining cabins, parked their luggage therein. When they met again to go for supper in town, her first words were, "Besides they don't have a pool anyway."

  He nodded. She added, "How about calling me Marge? We gotta get along for the next few days. What do your friends call you?"

  Warren followed the girl into the car. "Mostly just Warren, I guess."

  Next morning Warren banged on her door bright and early. He knocked several times. Finally a yawning voice called for him to desist. "Rise and shine," he called. "Up and about. We've got work to do!"

  "Say," she said finally, poking her head out. "It's only seven o'clock. What's the idea?"

  He smiled at her sweetly. "When you're on an assignment with me, Marge, we start early. So get dressed pronto. Get the show on the road."

  A little later, as they were eating breakfast in the main street of Cullenville, Marge, now trim and awake, asked where they were to start.

  "I think the first person to see is William Bassett," he replied. "It seems to me that he was the first to see something. If there's anything at all fishy about these experiences, it would logically start with him. So we're going out to his farm. That's another reason for an early start. Farmers rise with the sun, you know."

  Bassett's place was back in the foothills. It was a fair-sized farm for the neighborhood, but parts of it were rather rocky and not too productive.

  Inquiring at the rambling farmhouse, they located Bassett in the fields. He turned out to be a heavy-set man in his forties, intelligent with a fairly good education.

  At first Bassett was annoyed. "I've spoken to reporters several times," he said, "and I'm getting a bit tired of it. Most of them don't believe me. Fact is, there isn't anything but my word for it."

  Warren Alton, however, had probably a good deal more skill than the small-town reporters who had seen him before. He easily won the farmer's confidence and drew him out. Marge turned out to be quite helpful. It seemed that Bassett was not at all averse to having his picture appear in the big slick pages of People.

  He posed for her on the seat of his tractor. He led the two of them to the same spot where he had seen his jungle

  appear, and the two beasts come out. He described them a-gain, and answered questions.

  Warren was taking it all down carefully. He looked into the brief case he had brought with him and extracted a small book. Opening it, he showed some pages in it to Bassett. The book was about dinosaurs and other animals of prehistoric times, with drawings of several kinds of these monster lizards.

  Bassett took the book and studied it. "Well, now, I'd say that the creatures I saw were certainly like these but I don't see any pictures that were exactly like them. Now these fellows . . ." and he described them again.

  His description tallied with his original news account. He had not taken advantage of the time passage to embroider the yarn. That, thought Warren, was to his credit.

  Warren wandered around the scene for a while, looking over the ground, examining the underbrush. "You won't find no footprints, mister," said Bassett. "There weren't any."

  Warren merely nodded, went on looking anyway. Finally they went back to the house, leaving Bassett working again in the fields. In the house, Warren talked briefly with the farmer's wife, then the two took their leave.

  "So did you find out anything, Warry?" said Marge as they headed back to town. "Maybe he was drunk, huh?"

  "No, no," said Warren, shaking his head. "First, let's keep it plain Warren. And I'm pretty sure that Bassett was on the level. That was why I went back to the house. But it's the home of a sober, church-going man, to judge from his wife. I was looking for some kind of weeds around his back fields when he thought I was hunting footprints. But I saw nothing suspicious."

  Back in Cullenville the quest went on. Warren and Marge visited the local policeman, had a chat with him, looked in on the hay-and-feed store and talked about Bassett, took some photos of the main street.

  Next they looked up one of the two boys who had seen the strange city. He was at school, but his mother was very friendly. Her son, she said, was honest, was not in the habit of making up tall tales. She couldn't account for the thing he said he saw, but insisted that he must have been honest about it. She invited them to wait for the boy to return home for lunch—to join in the meal.

  They took the invitation. Afterwards, as they returned to their car, Marge said, "I can't figure it. How could he have seen a whole city where it wasn't? And such a funny city, too."

  Warren was thoughtful. "It seems to me that these people are sincere. The primitive city the boys described sounds a little like some sort of African native villages I've seen. Now I wonder if it's possible for a mirage to appear halfway a-round the world?

  "You see, if we could figure out that, for some reason, this locality attracted mirages of some sort, then the other details could simply be mistaken. There are African tribes who make huts of a beehive shape. Of course they wouldn't be golden and all the other details the boys saw, but maybe in the light, and maybe in the hurry, the rest of the stuff got into the story.

  "Same thing with Bassett's jungle. If we could imagine an African veldt scene suddenly reflected by a mirage onto his farm, he could mistake say a giraffe or a pair of elephants for something more like dinosaurs."

  "Yeah, but how could a mirage go so far, and how come it's only around here they see 'em?" said Marge.

  "Ah," said Warren, "there's the rub, as Hamlet would say. The six-dollar-and-forty-cent
question."

  They spent the afternoon on an active roundup of other persons noted in the various stories. They spoke to many people who had seen the volcano that time, and their stories checked with remarkable consistency. They snooped around in an effort to locate some signs of moonshining or dope, but no signs could be found. As far as rural communities went, Coningo County was remarkably clean.

  It was a lovely locality. The fields were green and rolling, the houses fairly well kept and the roads wooded. The central and eastern section of the county was heavily mountainous, with the rolling, darkly wooded and often steep mountains of the type found in the general belt of the Appalachians and Green Mountains.

  They spent the next day in the same way. Again driving around the lovely mountains, looking in on isolated farms, talking to people in small crossroads hamlets. The visions all these people had seen were varied, yet marked by the fact that the viewers were insistent on their integrity. They turned up a number of accounts that had never made their way into the papers. And they turned up some corroborative evidence.

  They found several people who had seen winged dragons of the same type as those spotted from the airliner. In fact it would seem that they were the same dragons, for two of the persons remembered an airplane passing overhead at the same time.

  They found a number who had seen beasts of various odd kinds, and one who claimed he saw a number of queer lights in the sky at the dark of night.

  By the morning of the third day, they had accumulated quite a bit of material, many photographs of people and places. "But not a darn picture of a monster or a flying whatsit," frowned Marge over breakfast.

  They were eating at a little roadside place near their motel. Warren had been shuffling through his notes as they ate, trying to determine his next point of attack. He nodded, thumbing through his notebook. "I didn't think we'd be that lucky, and we weren't. Can't conjure up a vision just to order."

  Marge nodded. "Yeah, but I was ready for it." She tapped a little candid camera she had slung around her neck. "This little .35 milli was ready to click on sight. Never took a shot with it, though. I only need ten seconds, that's all."

  Warren put his notebook aside, took out their road map again. "I have an idea," he said, looking at the map. "Come on back to my cabin. I think I can figure this out."

  They returned to his cabin, where he spread the map out on the writing desk. "Get a pencil," he directed the girl, "and place an X on every location I call out."

  She bent over the map. He sat on the bed and went through his notes, calling out the various towns and places where they had been. When he was done, she had about thirty such marks on the map.

  He looked over it. There was one thing apparent immediately. "They're all in the same general neighborhood," said Marge, anticipating his observation.

  "Yes, and that's significant if we can only find out why," said the reporter. "Note that the farthest points can't be more than about forty miles apart, with the rest clustered in be-ween. The whole area in which these visions have been occurring can be inclosed in a circle—" here he penciled it in around the area "—not more than forty miles in diameter."

  "That's right. So maybe we ought to concentrate on the other places in the circle we haven't heard from, and maybe turn up some new stories."

  Warren nodded. "That isn't a bad idea, and I think we would get some new ones, too. But that wasn't what I had in mind. What I want to find out is just where the center of this—disturbance—is."

  He got out a ruler and started to draw lines connecting the farthest opposing points. When he was done the map was criss-crossed with lines. But at once they could see that they did indeed have a central radiant.

  The lines kept crossing each other at almost the same spot.

  They both bent over the map. "Seems to be a hamlet near there. Let's see. . . . Bloomfield Corners. That, we could call the Vision center.' Can't be much more than a whistle stop," remarked Warren.

  "We passed near there yesterday," said Marge. "That was up in the mountains."

  "And that's where we're heading for today," said Warren. "It's the center of the area where these things take place. They must have seen things there—and maybe we can get at the origin of this thing, if it has one. Pack your stuff. Bloom-field Corners is our new headquarters."

  "I guess if we hang around there long enough, we ought to see something ourselves," said Marge. "That's okay with me, even if we pitch a tent in the grass—I wanna get a shot of one of those monsters—111 bet it would make the cover."

  "Hope so," Warren laughed. They packed and piled into the Dodge and set off again.

  In about half an hour they were driving along the winding back country road when they came to a dilapidated crossroads store and a paint-peeling old farmhouse. A weather-beaten sign across the front of the store said "Bloomfield Corners" and an old gas pump indicated that this was it. Just beyond the two old structures the road narrowed and headed off steeply into the mountains, which at this point towered abruptly upward in a steep slope of pines and rocks.

  They pulled the car up, got out, and entered the general store.

  CHAPTER THREE

  IT WAS DARKISH inside the store and for a moment or two they had to adjust their eyes. There was a counter running along one side, behind which were shelves piled high with cans of groceries. On the other side, other shelves and barrels held assortments of goods of all types, candy, overalls, etc. In one corner, there was a grated window, a series of mail boxes, and the sign of a U. S. Post Office.

  An old man came out from a room somewhere in the rear and greeted them. "Is there anything I can do for you?"

  Warren looked to him, went to meet him. "Perhaps you can help us. We're doing a little research for the magazine People."

  The old man nodded. "Oh," he said, "you must be that reporter and the girl that folks been telling me about. Looking into those yarns about the critters and things, eh?"

  "That's right," said Warren, "and I wonder if you know anyone around here who has anything to contribute to the stories."

  "Wal," said the old storekeeper, "you've come to the right place. I've seen some humdingers in the past few weeks, yes-sirree!" He blinked as one of Marge's flash bulbs popped.

  It took a little while before he got to talking. He had drawn up an old chair, while Warren sat on an apple crate and Marge perched herself on top of the counter and started examining a copy of a recent movie magazine from the rack nearby.

  The old man, it seems, had indeed witnessed a number of things—as had, according to him, his wife and one of the neighbors down the road. There was, he said, "a stampede of crazy critters down the road in the dead of night-only they was all lit up like the sun was shining just on them. My wife said they was ghost cattle, but me, I just watched them from the window. They was four-legged all right, and they had horns, but they weren't no cattle I ever seen. They had slight humps, and bushy tails, and were sort of lean, low-slung and gaunt. They were running mad like they was something chasing them, but we never saw what. Must have been hundreds of them come along in only a half a minute, and then—bam!—they all just blanked out."

  "No footprints on the road? Did they make any noises?" asked Warren quickly.

  The old man shook his head. "Nope. Looked at the road next day; no sign of anything. And didn't hear nary a sound. Figure maybe they was ghost things. . . ."

  Warren waited patiently while the old man ruminated. Then the storekeeper remembered seeing, "a range of mountains over where they shouldn't be, with trees and landslides and all. And once I saw a lake right across the road, with the Smithson's house just vanished and the blue water shining there. Neither sight lasted more than a few blinks, but they sure looked real."

  Warren noted all these stories. He had guessed right, he thought, in figuring that this spot was near the intensity center of the visions. But he remembered that while Bloom-field Corners was near, it was still just a hairbreadth away from the exact center of his map.
The exact center was apparently somewhere up the mountain that rose behind the store.

  "Anybody live up this mountain?" he asked the storekeeper.

  The old man nodded. "Used to be a couple summer lodges up on old Thunderhook, but mostly the folks have just left them go. One of 'em's being used, though. Bunch of fellers working on something. University men, I guess."

  Warren sat up sharply. "University men? How can you tell?"

  "Why, that's easy," said the storekeeper. "I'm the postmaster here, and I see they get letters addressed to Doctor So-and-So from some big colleges."

  "Do you suppose we can go up and pay these gentlemen a visit?" Warren asked.

  The old man shook his head. "I doubt if they'd like it.

  They don't seem to exactly care for visitors—least-ways they rarely get them. Road up Thunderhook is marked private these days. Seems they bought up all the places along the old road."

  "Where's the old road start? I'd like to go up and see for myself."

  The storekeeper got up, went to the door. He pointed up the road. "Go up about two hundred feet, and you'll see a narrow old dirt road branch off to your right. That'll take you up the mountain along the Old Hook Road, which runs right up Thunderhook. It's not paved, but I guess it's passable. Drive careful, there's some sharp spots and turns."

  Marge put down her magazine and got to her feet. "We going up?"

  Warren nodded. "Let's try." The two piled into the car. Warren started the engine; the car began to roll.

  As he drew away from the general store, another car came down the road from the direction of Cullenville. It was a black-painted station wagon, and it drew up sharply in front of the Bloomfield Corners store. Warren slowed his car, looking for the turn-off up the mountain and at the same time keeping an eye on his rear mirror where he could see the other car.

  He saw a man leap from the driver's seat of the car and hurry into the store. He got a brief impression of a hard-faced man, big and muscular, wearing a short Navy-style pea jacket. He turned to concentrate on the road.