by Fritz Leiber
Eddie did not even smile. “B-Jane, if a crackpot invented a weapon as complex as that it might not be—a laughing matter.”
“Oh, shut up!”
Betty-Jane was trembling in spite of herself. The gun was complex, all right. The barrel flared, and was so dazzling it blinded her. In fact, it hurt her brain when she concentrated on it, so that for an instant she had the illusion that her skull was being crushed by a nutcracker with invisible prongs.
But the heavy stock was the really complex part of the gun—a gleaming conglomeration of notched disks, wheels, knobs, and dangling strips of metal so intricately welded together they seemed to blend with a glimmering conglomeration of valves, tubes, wheels and dangling strips of metal. Welded together into a compact unit which seemed almost to blend with a gleaming—Betty-Jane tore her gaze from the stock, and tried to smile.
“Eddie, I didn’t mean to snap at you like that. But I wasn’t seriously trying to laugh my way out of anything. I don’t know where the gun came from any more than you do. How could I know?”
The panic in Eddie’s eyes was growing. He hadn’t dared tell her the gun seemed to be pointing in the wrong direction. Not that the barrel was actually twisting back up over the stock. It wasn’t as pronounced as that—wasn’t in fact anything but a kind of impression he got when he stared at the gun steadily.
It had not been in Betty-Jane’s mind to take any chances with so strange, so unfathomable a weapon. But suddenly she had raised it to her shoulder and was sighting it along the road. Suddenly, too, her fingers were moving furtively, almost feverishly over the stock, as though in the depths of her mind were Pandora-like stirrings.
It was on the tip of Eddie’s tongue to warn her not to be such a fool, that the gun was not to be trusted. But abruptly, before he could shout a warning, she seemed to sense his agitation. She nodded guiltily, and started to lower the weapon. Her eyes dilated in sudden horror—
The two island universes which had collided inside Eddie’s head took their time in going their separate ways in silence. They left a trail of blazing super-novae, and dizzily spinning giant and dwarf stars, hot, cold, red, blue, and yellow—all in the plane of a super-ecliptic superimposed on the lobes of Eddie’s bruised brain, and the little pools of white-hot lava which studded his spinal column.
Then—Eddie’s torment became medieval and almost droll. There was no transition period. Suddenly the suns were gone, and very conventional little demons with forked red tails were racing around and around inside his skull.
“Oh, nonsense!” someone yelled out lustily, and the demons were gone.
A long row of very beautiful mint juleps next appeared on the rim of Eddie’s consciousness. The rest of his mind was a desert, and across its sands a parched manikin that could only have been himself dragged itself with heaving shoulders. The manikin never seemed to make any progress. But the juleps grew more beautiful—more and more beautiful until the manikin burst into convulsive sobs, and the juleps turned into tall, pale women on the rim of Eddie’s mind.
A huge book opened slowly, and a bony finger wrote on a blank page: Sorry, Eddie, but we’ve got to close up. Here’s your check, Eddie—here’s your cane and your homburg. Hey, Eddie, wake up!!
Eddie sat up. The first thing he noticed was his torn-off shirt, which was twisted around his legs. Then he noticed with mounting consternation that his torso was sooty and his trousers ripped. There was deep grass on both sides of him, long, luxurious jungle grass, and he was sitting on something mound-like that felt uncomfortably like an ant hill.
Unmistakably there was a rustling beneath him, accompanied by little stabs of pain lancing up through the posterior ligaments of his knees which were beginning to dissolve in blobs of light.
The rustling grew vague suddenly, and almost he saw the book again.
“Eddie, Eddie…hey, we’re closing up!”
In a jungle, he thought drowsily, you had to expect ants. Tropical jungle—ants. Long grass—very primitive life—must take it easy. White man—quinine—‘sportant to relax—
Huh?
Eddie’s faculties were suddenly alert—as sharp as the purple-edged blades of lush jungle grass which had grown up about him.
Memory didn’t rush back exactly. It descended upon him like a pendulum swinging down toward him through a pea-soup fog. There was startlement at first, and a lightening of the mist, and then it swung very low with a blazing swish.
An explosion. It had begun with an explosion. Light on her face as she turned, the weapon jerking in her hand. He’d screamed hoarsely and tried to duck. The roar had deafened him and then—
Not too clear. His knees had buckled and there had been—a glimmering? He’d been hurled back into a glimmering? He thought he had because he remembered a sensation of floundering in a sea of light that had become suddenly opaque. He remembered nothing else.
He rose swayingly the instant he realized the gray wall inside his head was hindering his explorations. He could see at once that he was alone in the jungle. No, it…it wasn’t a jungle. It was a sort of clearing in reverse. Right where he stood the grass was waist-high and thick, but there were blue distances in all directions where the grass grew sparsely, and—
The road was gone. It shocked him that he could miss the road more than his wife until he remembered that the missing road had included his wife.
A strange look came in Eddie’s face—a look not often seen outside of monastic cells and the battle-scarred waste places of the earth. Almost savagely he told himself that now when there was a…a wrongness like the beat of vulture wings all about him he’d he less than a man if he didn’t slough off the glowing chrysalis he’d worn on the other track. He’d have to become inwardly lean again, a hard, tough fighter who could take anything in his stride. With no holds barred, with only himself to worry about—
“Eddie, grab hold of me—hold on to me, and don’t let me think!”
Betty-Jane was in his arms before Eddie’s mind could adjust to the chill urgency of spinning the leanness out into a cloak to cover her shuddering approach.
“Eddie, we’re not… I’m not… I could never stand it, Eddie! Dribbling in a straitjacket, being fed through a tube—”
“Tube?” Eddie said, dazedly. Then, as comprehension dawned, “Of course you’re not. That’s right—just keep digging your thumbs in deep. My tonsils are too large anyway.”
“Eddie, it was pure nitric acid torment. Am I hurting you, Eddie. I’m honestly not trying to choke you, or anything. I just had to make sure you’re real and I’m not—”
Eddie forced a smile.
“B-Jane, darling, if you were you wouldn’t be talking about it. Folks who have it are catatonically depressed. They’re not interested in themselves, or their environment. You’re interested, I take it?”
“Oh, Eddie, and how!”
“Sure, then, and it’s talking it over calmly we should be doing, like the civilized, top-drawer people we are. B-Jane, where’s that gun?”
She gestured toward an ingrown clump of jungle grass at the edge of the clearing that had bunched itself up into a dry oasis without consulting the scenery it had managed to displace.
“Right over there, Eddie.”
“All right. We’ll get around to it. Just a couple of questions first. You say I was blown through a glimmering into here. What made the glimmering?”
“The gun, Eddie. It blew a hole right through the…the old stand. A shining oval in the air. But, if you stand a little ways back, you can hardly see it, Eddie. Inside you flounder. I started to walk and ended up on my hands and knees. I thought I’d never get through.”
Eddie frowned, and shut his eyes an instant. His furred brow, and twitching facial muscles gave him an aspect of watching little sparkling triangulations canceling themselves out in the darkness b
ehind his eyelids.
“Nuts!”
“Eddie?”
“Solving anything as insane as this by ear is…hold on, maybe I’ve got something. Maybe I have at that. If…if that gun had merely blown a hole in the air, we’d still be at the old stand. But if it had blown a hole in the warp-and-woof stuff of the physical universe—”
“Eddie!”
“Where would we be then?”
“Outside the universe,” Jane whispered, feeling like a child who has watched her schoolbooks burst into flames, and must say the right thing before the classroom explodes in her face.
“Well, yes, that’s one possibility. But if we were in some unimaginable dimension outside—say in a kind of blister-gall on De Sitter’s skin of the orange turned inside out universe, everything would be illogical, mixed up. It isn’t at all.”
“What’s the other possibility?”
“Time is a dimension, B-Jane. Time is a dimension, but—what would pure time be like? We just don’t know because we could no more live in time than we could live in length without thickness. We live in a world of four dimensions, and time is only one of them. But suppose that gun did something to time?
“Suppose it blew a hole in space-time—the space-time continuum of the physicists—and made a fluid bridge of time between two widely separated space-time frames. Inside the rent you’d have pure time, a kind of stasis in the continuum. Outside—”
“Outside?”
“Two widely separated ages.”
Betty-Jane made a little whimpering sound deep in her throat.
“You mean you think we may be—in the future?”
“Or in the past,” Eddie said. “I’m just guessing, understand. I’ve just knifed down at random and cut myself a slice of something that may turn out to be nuttier than a fruit cake.”
“But, who, Eddie—”
“Who?”
“Who could have invented a weapon like that—”
Eddie was about to reply when he saw in the distance a moving something which made him catch his breath and forestalled a still deeper plunge into the dubious maelstrom of assumptions his thoughts had set in motion.
For a full minute the object remained very distant, a scarcely visible red dust mote advancing steadily over the short grass expanse which fringed the long grass, for several miles in a circular direction.
There was no reason why so small an object should have chilled Eddie to the core of his being, and filled him with a terrifying sense of urgency. Yet chill him it did, so that his teeth were chattering when it ceased to be a dust mate, and came loping toward them.
Betty-Jane screamed when she saw it, and suddenly it was as large as a lion, and growing larger. It moved almost effortlessly, the muscles rippling along its untiring flanks, and through every aspect of its approach there was as much of stealth as of speed, there was no sacrifice of speed, and it moved with the rapidity of a thunderbolt.
Eddie never knew how he reached the clump of tall withergrass where Betty-Jane had left the gun. Neither did Betty-Jane, despite the sobbing cry of relief which welled up from her throat when she met him there.
Eddie snatched up the gun, then remembered he didn’t know how to fire it. Frantically he plucked and tore at the stock, but it wouldn’t, it wouldn’t, IT WOULDN’T—
Betty-Jane snatched it from him just as the long grass shook, and the cyclopean cat burst through upon them.
She fired from the shoulder, at almost point-blank range.
There was a blinding flash of light, an explosion which ripped at her flesh. The explosion was Krakatoan, and for an instant Betty-Jane was sure that an active volcano had erupted in her face.
The glimmering seemed to precede the explosion by the barest instant, but that, she knew, was an illusion, caused by the fact that sound and light do not travel at the same speeds when convulsing. What she did not know was whether she had blown a hole in the physical universe, or just a hole in the cat.
All she could see was the cyclopean beast etched against the glimmer, its rust-red tusks drooling saliva, its unsheathed claws outspread.
For an instant it hovered directly above her, as though frozen in the act of descending. Then the gaping scarlet hole in its chest became a gushing Niagara, and it went sailing back through the glimmering out of sight.
Before he’d begin his gags Eddie would get up, pace the floor, drink three cups of black coffee, light a cigarette, take six short puffs, crush out the cigarette, examine his haggard face in a shaving mirror, pace the floor, grimace, brush the erasings out of his typewriter, sit down, and—
Then he’d type out the gag, very swiftly with one finger.
It was curious, but Eddie went through the same agony now. He knew the disappearing cat wasn’t a gag. It was real, and it was—ghastly. But it wrenched him in the same way, the torturing despair of not being sure, and then the moment of creative frenzy when power flowed into him, and he knew he had something.
He got his arms around his wife just in time. She’d dropped the weapon, and was beginning to sag when he caught her.
“You really hit the keys that time,” he whispered hoarsely.
She was sobbing and clinging to him like a…a—Stunned, he waited, realizing that the shock and horror had jarred a gag loose far down, and it was coming up despite all his efforts to repress it.
She was clinging to him like a terrified little wood nymph in a wry Scotch nightmare.
“Eddie,” she whispered chokily. “It was the past I blew a hole in. That was…that was—”
“I know what it was,” Eddie soothed. “It was a saber-toothed tiger. They were big, weren’t they?”
“Big—”
Betty-Jane’s eyes were deep pools of liquid horror. “How…how…how can you…take it so calmly?”
“I’m not taking it calmly, B-Jane. But there’s something in me—Did it have stripes? No, no, I guess it didn’t. Asphalt pit saber-tooths are all petrified flesh and eroded bones, so it could have surprised us more than it did. Now we know. It was dun colored, with red tusks and whiskers.”
Betty-Jane was staring past him at the glimmering. It wasn’t the only glimmering. Behind Eddie pulsed the first pale oval she’d blown in time. No, Eddie had said space-time. Inside the oval was time, was time—a bridge. It was time inside the oval—time to stop gnawing at her fingernails and trying to swallow her mouth, time to stop pretending she wasn’t already quite mad.
Eddie was shaking her. “B-Jane, listen to me. If you crawled through into here, we can crawl back. But it had better be now! Those rents you blew through the back of the looking glass may fill in without consulting us. Where’s that other—”
“Right behind you, Eddie.”
Betty-Jane was getting her color back. She had wanted out desperately, but now that the first oval was in plain view behind her husband’s right shoulder her eyes were shining and she was staring at the glimmering she’d blown in an opposite direction.
“Well, shall we get started?”
“You mean we—follow the tiger?”
“No!” Eddie almost screamed. “Are you out of your mind? I didn’t like the old stand much once, but I do now. I’ve changed my mind in the last twenty seconds. It was—is much healthier for people like us than an age which includes the scenery inside a cat’s stomach.”
“Eddie how long ago were saber-toothed tigers?”
“Huh?”
“Please, Eddie, I want to know.” Eddie stared at her. “Well, the Machaerodus, the typical genus of a group of long-tusked extinct cats commonly known as saber-tooths prowled through most of the Oligocene, the Miocene, and the Pliocene.”
“In basic English, Eddie.”
“Well, we are perhaps a half million years back. Or twenty million, depending
on whether that tiger was a Nimravus machaerodus, or a Hoplophoneus machaerodus, and what Tertiary system age-scale you’d like for breakfast. There’s a terrific disagreement among the experts as to how old you’d be if you traveled through any one age just by aging. For instance, Sir Arthur Keith and Elliot Smith disagree—in a small way, of course—about how long ago was the Pliocene. Smith thinks the Pleistocene began a million years ago—Keith a quarter million. Of course they’re not geologists, and—”
“I like Mr. Keith’s estimate best, Eddie.”
“A saber-tooth might find Smith just as appetizing.”
Eddie had found that Betty-Jane could sometimes be placated by facetiousness. Even when it was forced and sounded hollow, it could sometimes produce an astonishing change in her. She’d stand back, and laugh at herself, and stop making appalling suggestions.
Sometimes a tiny grain of drollery served up with a straight face could do that for her. It couldn’t now.
He knew what was coming before she spoke.
“Eddie, if we followed the tiger, how far back in time would we be?”
“Too far.” Eddie scarcely recognized his own voice. It was hoarse with strain, and the effort it cost him to speak at all.
“Eddie, we could still go back to the old stand. The two ovals are only a few yards apart, and the one you like best will be here when we get back. You just now said there was something in you—it’s in me too, Eddie. A desire to look beyond and all the way through—until we’re too old to drag ourselves about.”
“When you can know more, when you’re able to, you’ve just got to! Eddie, we’re going to follow the tiger.”
* * * *
Eddie never knew how he allowed himself to be persuaded. One minute he was standing with his feet firmly planted on the good late Pliocene earth; the next he was floundering through a bog of fluid time inside a glimmering.