by Philip Wylie
Carpenter had read Baxter’s papers. They had followed many similar channels of investigation. He wrote to Baxter at considerable length, received a lengthy reply that was at once acute and capricious, and they carried on for some time an intermittent correspondence. Finally Carpenter had invited Baxter to assist him in his work—naming a handsome salary which did not interest the younger man at all, and hinting at the direction of his experiments, which attracted him a great deal.
A month before Daryl arrived, Baxter had set an approximate day for his appearance at Carpenter’s laboratory and had agreed to spend a short period there, extending it if he found the work congenial. Subsequently he had regretted the promise. A friend of his was embarking for the Mountains of the Moon to take some live gorillas. Another friend had solved the difficulty that beset the animals that had been discharged into space in rockets and begged him to go back to the smoke-blackened plateau in Arizona. And Baxter had been more than normally set upon by the yearning, aching, unconquerable emotion of boredom which had risen in him periodically and made life almost unbearable while it endured.
Inertia rather than a sense of duty carried him to Sinkak. He descended from the train and stared at the desultory town. All the gaudy and parasitical activities which in the summer drew its life-blood from tourists and pleasure-seekers were now wrapped in a half-concealing winter mantle. The scene before him was ugly and uncomfortable. He had met Carpenter once and had been excited by the man, his ideas, his attitude—but Carpenter alone day after day seemed unattractive to him. Grewsome, he would have said.
He telephoned Carptenter to send for him and went back to the platform. It is possible that he might have fled while there was time if Daryl had not driven up to the station. It did not occur to him that she was to be his chauffeur. He watched her turn the long car in the drive, stop it smartly—the wheels sliding a few inches on the blue stone—and descend. She wore a blue coat with a grey fur collar. Her hat was black. Cold air had brought the color back to her cheeks.
She also looked at him with some surprise. Carpenter’s description had not been adequate. He was impeccably dressed. He wore spats, carried a cane. His gloves were shining pigskin. Her first thought was that the man she saw could not be Baxter—he was far too distinguished in appearance to be connected in any way with laboratories, far too young and alert to be a bio-chemist. But there was no other person in evidence, so she spoke to him.
“Are you Mr. Baxter?”
“Yes.” His voice was at once courteous and surprised.
“I’m William Carpenter’s niece. My uncle sent me for you.”
“Good for your uncle!”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Ignore it. Give it your utmost inattention. An unwarranted advance. I’ll rally the satchels. The Red Cap is a badge of service unknown in Sinkak.” He went into the station and returned presently with two leather suit cases. He lifted them into the back of the car and sat in front with her. “Didn’t know the entourage had so glittering a satellite. Pay no heed to my rude tongue. Have no control over it. My mother used to mention it to me at mealtime. Nice town you have here.”
Daryl turned her eyes squarely upon him and said without smiling, “Yes, isn’t it terrible?”
“A thousand pardons. A million.” Then he saw that she was laughing. He said, “Ah. Caught again. Up, guard. You’re not a native, presumably.”
“No. Tree City, North Dakota.”
“And how long have you blossomed in this lucky land?”
“Five days, and thank you very much.”
“I ramble. Possibly I err. Five days. Plenty—but now you can have me. We’ll roast chestnuts together over the glowing coals. Picnic in the vernal woods—in a couple of months. Slide down yonder roller coaster—ye gods—it’s grim looking when the paint is scaled off. Tree City. Personally—I was born in New York. A place at the mouth of the Hudson. Pure accident those things. Now, I know a fellow who was born in Guatemala. Couldn’t do a thing about it. Parents happened to be there at the time—”
Daryl had turned from the concrete road and now she slowed down the car. She had been half listening to his continuous and easy flow of words. She interrupted him abruptly.
“Mr. Baxter, it’s about two miles to the house and I’ll drive slowly. I don’t know you from Adam. You look sensible. You sound capable of sense—”
“Three university degrees—two medals for—”
“Never mind. I’d like to be serious.”
“Profoundly attentive and willing.”
“Five days ago I came here to work for my uncle. That is—I began to work for him when I arrived. Taking care of things in his laboratory. Have you ever seen him?”
“Once.”
“Well?”
“You mean—what do I think of him? Unusual fellow. Big brain. Apt to do something unusual. I didn’t like him. I didn’t dislike him.”
“That’s no help. Did you think he was sane?”
Baxter’s dark eyes traveled rapidly toward her and away. “Sane? He was sane when I saw him. Has he begun to cut paper dolls?”
“Stop that! I tell you, I’m in a desperate position. I’ve got to trust somebody. You—or the police. Will you help me or will you go on being nutty?”
The man’s expression changed quickly. His whole being became different. “I’m unfortunately that sort of person. The more excited I become, the dizzier. It’s a defense, I presume. But I believe I have the right to say that you can trust me fundamentally as far as you can any one. If there is anything I can do for you, or to help you, God knows, I’d like to do it. What’s the matter?”
She smiled fugitively. “That’s an immense improvement. For the last four days I’ve worked in the laboratory with my uncle. I had no idea of what he was doing.” She stopped and stared at him with tremendous concentration. Then she sighed. “Will you promise not to tell him what I tell you now? Promise to act as if you did not know? Because if you give me away—he’ll kill me, I think.”
“As bad as that?”
“It might be. But I’m telling you for your own good. Now. About an hour ago, while I was dusting, I found a stone in a closet. I picked it up. There was something on it I could not see—”
“Some poison?”
“Oh, no. Something I could feel and not see. Don’t try to explain. He did. My uncle. He found me with the stone. At first he was furious. Then he told me—what I intend to tell you. I’ve got to tell some one. The stuff on the stone was a fungus and he had made it invisible. Understand? He had made it grow thick there—but you couldn’t see it. Just feel it.”
She glanced at him and found him staring through the car window. “Don’t get bored so quickly. This isn’t any woman’s silliness.”
He turned toward her and she saw that, while his face was impassive, there was a light in his eyes that betokened vehement emotion. “I’m not bored. Not a bit. Well then?”
“Well—after that—he told me all about his life. It must have been pretty terrible. People don’t like him, you know. And he told me what he was trying to do—what he has been trying to do for a long time.”
“Which was?” Baxter asked quietly.
“You won’t believe me. It was—to make himself—his body—invisible like the fungus.”
“Good God!”
Daryl bit her lip. “Then he made me promise not to tell any one. But I’m positive he is insane. So I had to tell.”
“Of course,” Baxter said absently. “Tell me—you said you saw the fungus.”
“No. Felt it.”
“I mean—felt it. You’re sure it wasn’t—artificial?”
“How could I be sure what it was? He said it was some sort of fungus that grew on stones in the dark. He said it was growing and—healthy. He said that he had made it invisible. He was very agitated.”
“I imagine.” Baxter took a cigarette case from his pocket and lit a cigarette with a silver briquet. “I believe he’s done it.”
“Done what?”
“Nothing. I was thinking of our correspondence. That business of making himself invisible—not strange. Plenty of writers have done stories on the idea. There are myths about it—the Cloak of Invisibility—did I mention that I had a happy childhood? I beg your pardon. Again—seriously. The idea of becoming invisible is as old an idea as any we have. Always cropping up in archaeology—anthropology. I’ve thought about it. So have you. To be able to slip around and see what is going on everywhere without being seen ourselves. A pleasant thought.”
“You mean that you believe what he told me?”
Baxter nodded slowly and exhaled smoke. “I believe it.”
She shook her head. “I don’t. He was so wild, so excited when he told me—and his reasons for doing it seemed to be so garbled—”
The man at her side smiled. “Carpenter is pathological, no doubt. Should have been fed gland extracts when he was young. Too long ago. And he may be psychopathic. Most of us are. I am. I think you may not be. Nature doesn’t try to make men perfect—it tries to make them adequate. When it misses we have deformity and insanity. Carpenter is barely not a miss. Everything about him has been exaggerated—even his mind and its emotions. I keep going back to that fungus. Amazing.”
“It was unpleasant.”
“Was it? I wondered about that.”
Her thoughts returned to their original topic. “That leaves me pretty much upset. I thought he was insane. If he isn’t—it’s worse than before.”
Baxter chuckled. “I’m really rather cruel to you. I’ve acted as if our friend and your uncle had actually vanished into thin air and was menacing us both with unseen hands. What I meant was this: he wrote about his experiments with the optics of protoplasm and hinted how far they could be carried. I wrote back a dozen reasons that contradicted his theories. But I was interested. And it seems I was partly wrong. He has really made an invisible fungus. From a standpoint of pure experimental science that is quite exciting.
“It means that, in order to accomplish so much, Carpenter has gone a good deal deeper into cell structure than most men. Any men. The things he discovered en route, as it were, are what intrigue me. His accomplishment in itself is merely a freak. An oddity.”
“Then you believe he won’t go on with it?”
“Not that. He struck me as a singularly perseverant devil. But beyond his fungus—he’ll not get far.”
“Why?”
Baxter lit a second cigarette from the first. “It’s complicated. To be invisible a thing must have no color, must be transparent, and must not refract or reflect light. Pretty nearly every known substance has all those properties. Plate glass is nearly invisible, but the light shimmers from it and you can always tell at a glance when there is a pane in a window and when there is not, when a window is open and when it is closed. See what I mean?”
“Of course.”
“Now. Consider Carpenter’s fungus. It is a kind that grows in the dark. Hence it has no color to speak of. Being a fungus, it is a very simple plant from the point of structure—so that what would affect one cell would affect the whole thing. In other words, that fungus was the easiest thing to make invisible that Carpenter could find—with the possible exception of things like bacteria and paramecia. Even there, he would be fooling with chromatin of a high complexity.
“He makes the fungus vanish from human view. Excellent, I say. A splendid analytical and synthetic job. But when he goes to work on himself—he has to cope with three trillion cells, of hundreds of types. A magician can make a half dollar disappear. But he couldn’t do away with the Woolworth Building and the Leviathan with the help of a wand and a top hat. Unless—”
“Unless what?”
“Well—there are one or two ways he might do it at that. But not by chemistry. Physics.”
“Physics?”
“He could—conceivably—bend the light rays around an object and collect them on the other side in the same order so that you could see everything behind the object and not see it. But that, clever as it might be, could only be done in one spot at a time. You couldn’t pick up a fungus that had vanished in that manner and carry it around the room—it would get out of—focus.”
Daryl nodded. “I see.” She had driven the car at a snail’s pace. Now, however, they had reached the edge of Carpenter’s property. She had gone to the station with the fixed purpose of leaving Carpenter at the earliest possible moment. Now, returning with Baxter, she knew that she would remain—indefinitely. She rounded the corner under the trees.
“If my uncle had told me about his work so calmly—I wouldn’t have been foolish just now.”
He emerged from his meditation. “Foolish? My dear child, that was not in the least bit foolish. My words were a prescription for the nerves. I have no doubt your uncle entertains some notions that, to the layman, are quite devastating.”
“Anyway—thanks.” She spoke almost shyly. “I’m glad you’re here.”
“I’ll wear the words in my memory as commoner men would a gardenia in their lapels.”
She laughed briefly. “Here we are.”
Baxter looked at the house. “Seems to be something wrong with it. I know! Not a window.”
“That’s where the laboratory is.”
“Still—one doesn’t work in the dark—or does one?”
“You’ll see.”
Carpenter was standing in the kitchen. When she saw him, Daryl felt guilty of the time she had consumed in bringing his assistant to the house. His inscrutable eye rested on her for an instant. He held out his hand to Baxter.
“Hello. Glad to have you.” Then, to Daryl, “Puncture?”
Baxter intervened. “I’m afraid I held her up for a while at the station. I had a last-minute telephone call to make.”
Carpenter relaxed somewhat. “Lunch is nearly ready. I’ll take your bags.”
When they sat down at the table Baxter made an immediate effort toward a light and amenable conversation. He tried praising Carpenter’s choice of a location for his laboratory. He prognosticated an early spring, indicating buds that were already swelling in the yard. He told an anecdote of his last experiment which had been performed with protozoa and which Daryl did not comprehend. His host and employer, gorging himself with loose, reaching motions, did not appear to be aware that he was talking. Carpenter completed his meal first, as he invariably did, and waited for them. When they rose he said, “We won’t need you this afternoon, Daryl.”
It was the first time he had addressed her by any name. She was so surprised by it that she did not answer. Carpenter beckoned to Baxter and they went toward the laboratory.
The great door opened, they stepped beyond it. Baxter stood on the threshold of the chamber and whistled. His head turned slowly and he examined each unit of the room’s contents with a far different reaction from Daryl’s.
“Good Lord, Carpenter, you have a magnificent layout here.”
“It’s adequate.”
“Adequate? If a world catastrophe destroyed every place but this, science could still jog along without missing a beat.”
“Possibly. I’ll show you around. I planned it—for the work I had in mind.”
For four hours they went over the details of the laboratory, their brows concentrated, their words long and technical. In all that time they had not touched upon the work in progress. There had been no evidence of it. Carpenter had merely given a complete exposition of his resources. When they finished, he drew out the same stools on which he and Daryl had sat in the morning. Baxter perched himself gracefully on the top of one of them.
“Mind if I smoke?”
“No.”
The briquet’s tiny flame sprang into being. A vaporous train of smoke moved indolently through the maze of machines and implements. The indecision, the boredom, everything that had been Baxter in the forenoon was gone. He had the same ease, the same glib carelessness, but his eyes were alert and his hands were too steady to be controlled b
y utter casualness. He had committed the laboratory to memory. He had weighed the fact and the inferences of what he knew about the fungus. He was acutely conscious of the girl who was in the house; slow tides of remembering her had marked the entire afternoon. He dusted his cigarette with his little finger, the ash splashing soundlessly on the floor.
“I’ve said all I can think of, Carpenter. The place is almost incredible. I know a dozen men who would break down and weep to see it.”
“So.” Carpenter pressed against his stiff hair, his hand covering most of his scalp. “You will recall our correspondence?”
“Vividly.”
“I mentioned certain deductions I had made concerning protein sensitivity to other proteins and to inorganic compounds.”
“Relative to optical properties?”
“Relative to a variety of properties. Optical among them. Why do you mention that?”
Baxter realized that he had endangered Daryl’s confession. “Because, you will recall, they interested me particularly. I discussed them at some length.”
“And with a flippancy that does injustice to your knowledge.”
“My attitude toward life, Carpenter, is scarcely circumscribed by the academic or the pedagogical.”
“Which is unfortunate.” The slight hostility left his voice. “Unfortunate. Personally, I am not a clown. Although I have been told that clowning should have been my choice of profession. The fact is, Baxter, that I’ve gone a long way since I last wrote to you.” He dropped his immense feet to the floor, crossed the room, unlocked the closet and produced the stone Daryl had found. “Look at this.”
Baxter took it. The flabby flesh of the growth on the stone which could be touched but not perceived by the eye, which seemed merely to separate his fingers from the stone by a wall of thin air, caused Baxter to drop it as Daryl had. On his part, the accident was mere acting.