Beyond the Barriers of Space and Time

by Judith Merril (ed. )

  He opened the hatbox and dumped the snake—which he still could not bear to touch—on the doctor’s desk. Water and blood oozed from its mangled head on to the green blotter. The doctor started back in amazement.

  “I shot that one this morning,” said Simms, almost in apology.

  The doctor picked up a paper cutter and stirred the body. Then, becoming bolder, he prodded it and held it up, limp and resigned, like a cat lifted by the middle.

  “It’s real!” he said indignantly.

  “They’re all real,” answered Simms, going on with the story of the morning’s battle. The doctor listened in reflective silence and then began to ask questions about his patient’s private life: Where did he work? How long had he been there? Was he generally in good health? and so forth. Then, politely asking permission beforehand, he phoned Simms’s office and checked up the story.

  “This isn’t my line,” the doctor finally said, after pondering a long while with his fascinated eyes on the snake. “Better give the psychiatrists a chance at you, I think. Go and see—” and he named a great man. “Wait a moment!” He telephoned the head of the hospital and, having first convinced him that he had not gone mad himself, persuaded him to phone the great man and lay the case before him. Within ten minutes, Simms was assured the great man was deeply interested and would see Simms at half past ten.

  There was something to being a unique case, Simms decided, on his way uptown. The Sunday sections of the newspapers, which he read religiously, had long been full of this Dr. Eisenmark, with particular emphasis on his uncompromising feuds with brother psychiatrists. Under ordinary circumstances, Simms could have become acquainted with international celebrities only through the papers. And yet here he was on his way to a personal interview with the greatest man he would probably ever meet in his life, with an entrée assured, his passport coiled in the hatbox under his arm. He treated himself to the luxury of a cab the whole way.

  Two women, plump and well dressed, got off at the same floor in the hotel and went ahead of him into Dr. Eisenmark’s office. Simms marched intrepidly forward, said: “Mr. Simms—Polyphonic Hospital—half past ten.” Door after door opened before him until he was in the great man’s presence.

  Dr. Eisenmark was ugly. His arms hung apelike from his stooped shoulders and swayed loosely as he paced the floor and inspected his subject. For a moment his gaze rested malevolently on the hatbox and Simms felt a passing pity for the dead snake. He looked square into Simms’s face and Simms’s cheeks and jaws were suffused with the incipient sweat of embarrassment. But when he spoke, his voice was completely reassuring, in spite of a thick German accent, all the more so because it came on the heels of so much silent intimidation.

  His opening remarks were a strange combination of rudeness and brusque courtesy. He suspected Simms and his snake of being an elaborate hoax and said so. On the other hand, he pointed out, there was often much interest to be found in the psychopathic aspects of elaborate hoaxes. He regarded Simms’s keeping the appointment as primary evidence of good faith and was glad to see him. And, if Mr. Simms did not mind, they would proceed at once to business. The first thing would be Mr. Simms’s story, told without reservations and as directly as possible.

  During his narrative, Simms astonished himself with his own pithy eloquence. He told it three times as well as he had at the hospital and ended with a touch of genuine drama, producing the incontrovertible evidence with proud and confident solicitude. There was a gleam of affection in his eye as he displayed the snake, for it was all that stood between him and being accused of bad faith or lunacy.

  Dr. Eisenmark nodded an accompaniment to the story, at first perfunctory, then vigorous, and finally, with narrowed eyes and bared teeth, he began to furnish exclamation points to the narrative with hissing repetitions of “Kolossal!” If Simms had been an actor, he would have been tempted to take a bow.

  “You will take another bath—here—now,” he said. “I shall go with you and see.” He flung open a door and stood aside for Simms to pass through, observing him so narrowly all the while that Simms already felt naked. He badly needed the reassurance of seeing his faithful snake sprawled in the middle of the carpet, a pathetic thread of substance between him and the truth.

  “You take your bath warm?” asked Dr. Eisenmark, turning on the faucets with his hairy hands. “Undress!” As Simms took off his coat and vest, the psychiatrist sat himself on a corner of the wash basin and lighted a cigarette. “You see,” he said, “I do not promise to think you a liar if there are no snakes now; but if there should be snakes now, ach, what trouble would we save!”

  “Not snakes,” said Simms, “only one.” His hands were trembling as he slipped his undershirt over his head, and he was shaking from head to foot as he stepped into the warm water.

  “Come,” said the psychiatrist, “I have seen ladies by the dozen giving birth to babies with more calm.”

  Simms sat shivering in the water with his hands round his knees. The psychiatrist came and peered into the tub.

  “So,” he said. “Where is this snake?”

  “They don’t come till I lie down,” Simms mumbled.

  “Lie down!” said the psychiatrist. Simms lay down and then leaped from the tub with a scream, almost knocking the great man down. When he recovered his composure, he was dripping in a corner and watching Dr. Eisenmark’s effort to lay hands on a four-foot green snake which was lashing the surface of the water in vigorous efforts to escape.

  “Wunderschön!” he was hissing to himself. “Ach, mein Schatz, mein Liebling, du lebst!”

  There was a final struggle and the psychiatrist rose out of the tub, soaked to the waist, but clutching his prey in his hands. One fist held it firmly just below the head so that its fangs were useless. His exultant eye spied a wicker hamper for dirty towels; in a panic of panting triumph, he popped the snake within and secured the rattan hasp. Then he came to Simms, threw his ape’s arms round him and kissed him soundly.

  “I am famous now,” he said brokenly, “but I shall be more famous, and you—you will be famous with me. We must talk—I must ask you crazy questions—you must tell me so many things. Come!”

  “But your other patients?” Simms asked, overcome by diffidence.

  “It is good for them to wait,” said the psychiatrist, throwing him a towel. “It stimulates their egos. Schnell!”

  It was late afternoon and the street lamps were lighted when Simms left Dr. Eisenmark and decided he had better walk home even though his knees were still trembling beneath him. He felt as if someone had applied a stomach pump at the base of his brain. His taste in moving pictures and light fiction, his feelings toward his landlord and his opinions on the heavyweight situation had all passed in review. He had told of things he had not thought of for years; particularly in connection with snakes; he had remembered the most unaccountable details of past trivialities; he suspected that he had remembered a great deal which had never happened, but the psychiatrist had seemed to entertain no doubts.

  “What do you think?” he had asked at the end, while Eisenmark stood in the gathering gloom, clasping and unclasping his hands.

  “I think—so much,” the great man said soberly, “but it is not for you to think or to know of thoughts. I must do much also. You must come back tomorrow—at two o’clock. And do not bathe. I shall bathe you here.”

  Safely at home, Simms phoned his office to tell them he was sick and indefinitely in a doctor’s hands. It was not entirely a lie, of course; he found himself pondering with unaccustomed subtlety on the real meaning of the word “sick.” If inconvenient abnormalities all came under that head, he could lay claim to being sick with a vengeance. Anyway he had every right to a bit of private illness on any pretext; what good was a record of ten years’ faithful service if you couldn’t lay off now and again?

  He spent the evening in the public library, reading about snakes, not only anacondas and boa constrictors and cobras, for his was not a romantic curiosit
y, but also about garter snakes and black snakes, beneficent vermin which have been known to be companionable. From the moment he had seen the last arrival struggling in the doctor’s grip, he had lost much of his loathing for the snake family. The man was so triumphant and the reptile so harassed; and the next morning, when he saw the scar left by the bullet in the bottom of the bathtub, he was a trifle ashamed of himself for having attacked his guest in such an unsportsmanlike way. After all, it might have been more his doing than the snake’s that it had been there. Such, at least, was the implication of some of the psychiatrist’s questions.

  It is not strange, then, that he spent his morning in the snake house of the zoo. Here were many of the genera and species he had been reading about, heavily coiled in long glass cases or restlessly exercising themselves in flickering rhythms. Even so he was disappointed; these had nothing of the irreconcilable vigor of his own snakes. They were caged and did not seem to mind very much. Only one large boa, digesting evilly with unblinking eyes, obscenely conscious of the lump back of his head which represented a rabbit swallowed whole, appealed to Simms’s new sensibility. He felt sure that this fifteen feet of gorged malevolence could be irritable and thrash around in his cage.

  At two o’clock Dr. Eisenmark welcomed Simms with a jubilant warmth which made him stare. He also felt inclined to stare at the doctor’s companion, a sharp faced man who was introduced as Dr. Harvey, curator of reptiles in the very zoo which Simms had been visiting. Scalpels and forceps were spread over the desk.

  “You see,” said Dr. Eisenmark, “I have been forced to seek consultation. I know nothing of snakes. But my good friend here who has spent the morning with me, he knows them like his ten fingers. We have been violent with our friend of yesterday—” and he produced a huge cork board on which, pegged down, flayed, and opened up like a half-made necktie, Simms beheld the snake which had been confined in the hamper. Simms felt ill; only yesterday it had been uncompromisingly alive.

  “I do not think my friend will regret the hours he has spent with me,” the psychiatrist went on. “It has been interesting, ach, so interesting. Even to me who knows nothing of snakes. But you must tell him—I do not know the language.”

  The curator of reptiles spoke at some length while Simms stared at the dissected wreck on the board. This snake, it appeared, belonged to no known species or variety. But that was its mildest eccentricity. Its anatomical features were scientifically fantastic: “Its fangs,” said the curator, “are built like dog teeth and its scales attached like fish scales. Then I dissected—and I found, Mr. Simms, that beyond a rudimentary alimentary canal and a vaguely differentiated brain and spinal cord, it has no internal organs at all. No subsidiary nerves—no reproductive system—no muscles—how it managed to move and live I could not imagine, and yet Eisenmark told me it was uncommonly vigorous.” There was a melancholy fear in his eyes as he gazed at the dissected specimen. “I don’t like it—I don’t like it at all,” he said, and reached for his hat.

  Dr. Eisenmark laughed.

  “He does not understand!” he told Simms. “He does not understand any better than you did, even less if possible!” He turned on the curator ferociously. “Do you not see? It is just the kind of snake a man who knew nothing about snakes would imagine.”

  “Don’t go over that again,” said the curator, “I want to forget about it,” and he left without another word, forestalling thanks by his haste, the picture of a man bewildered beyond endurance.

  When the door banged, the psychiatrist burst into roars of laughter.

  “The real man of science!” he said, “shut up in his own specialty and afraid to look out of it. He knows the little snakes, but you must not tell him there is a whole world outside!” Then he reverted to the suppressed excitement of the preceding evening. “Ach!” he went on, “do you know what we have found? I suspect—I guess—and the stupid expert tells me I am right. There—” he indicated the cork board and its horrid display—“there is the death of the old science! Not for nothing have I kept my mind open. Einstein! A trifler with paper and pencil! Newton! Mendel! Darwin! All fools running in a circle: We break through—we—

  “I don’t understand anything,” said Simms drearily. “What have you proved?”

  The psychiatrist panted in disgust and shook a hairy finger in his face.

  “We prove,” he said, “that you—you, an insignificant young man—” Simms winced—“can think matter into existence. And that is not all that you can organize it into moving, living flesh, that you can make life. Himmel, do not stare at me so! Here is the flesh you have made—it was alive—do I not know?”

  “But I didn’t want to make snakes,” said Simms, “I had nothing to do with it. They just came.”

  “My friend,” said the psychiatrist, “if you do not stop being foolish, I shall send you to my colleagues who will try to tell you that your snakes are libidinous symbols and insult your grandmother. They will call your trouble the Laocoön complex and ask you questions for three years until you become self-conscious about the way you get your hair cut. Why do I take time to tell you what you mean to the world? You did not think snakes as you think eggs for breakfast—but yesterday I see you are a man who cannot fall in love, who does his work like a blind horse in a mine, who is alive only because he cannot help breathing—who likes warm water because it is flexible and alive as he is not. Ach, I tell you it was fear and horror you wanted—fear and horror that was alive, more alive than the cinema and little books about murder. And you tell me you did not make these snakes when you have made them without knowing it because it is fear and horror you need! Dummkopf!”

  As he looked at Simms’s pale face, a glint of humor crept into his voice: “But I shall take care of you,” he went on, obviously striving to collect himself. “You come to me not like a guinea pig for experiment but as a patient to be cured. You will make me a snake in the presence of eminent witnesses and then I shall cure you. Then, if you are wise, you will go murder a nice girl and run away and enlist in the Frenchman Foreign Legion and try to live a little.”

  Simms gaped at him and hung his head.

  “So,” said the psychiatrist, in a kindlier voice, “I am not polite. But it is my business to speak strongly. You will come back tomorrow and we will talk about the witnesses and the demonstration.”

  Incapable of saying a word, Simms gulped and went out. Out of his new scientific significance he had got nothing but an uncomfortably bloated feeling. Now that he was out of Dr. Eisenmark’s hearing, he repeated to himself again and again that he had not wanted snakes, they just came; and, nuisance that they had been, it was all nothing compared to the scale of the troubles they had brought upon him. He shrank pitifully from the prospect of taking such a momentous bath in the presence of bearded, pretentious witnesses. He should have said nothing to anyone and disposed of his snakes unaided, or even let them stay. It might have been hasty to decide that they were hostile; it seemed inconceivable that they should be, now that he had seen yesterday’s specimen in such pathetic dishabille.

  When he got home, he went straight to the bathroom and stared at the scar in the bottom of the bathtub. He recalled the agonized care with which he had aimed the revolver and the cataclysmic reverberations of the explosion when he fired. Trying to kill the snake would be the last thing he would consider doing in his new frame of mind. Perhaps it was because the psychiatrist had put the notion in his head, but there was now something attractive and satisfying about that convulsive wriggling which made every fiber tingle throughout the brute’s whole length. With as casual an air as he could manage, he turned on the hot water and began to undress.

  The bath was quite cold when the cleaning woman found him on the bathroom floor the next morning. He had got as far as the medicine cabinet before he lost consciousness, and a tiny bottle of a popular disinfectant proved that he had not lost his man-in-the-street faith in first aid. The curator had been right; the fangs of Simms’s snakes were poisonous.
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  The green snake which the woman found in the tub was still swimming gallantly with its head raised above the water. Its remarkable powers of endurance can be attributed only to the fact that Simms had inclined to believe that snakes could not be drowned.

  In little more than a year’s time since the appearance of their much admired “What Thin Partitions” the team of Clifton and Apostolides has become firmly established among the top ranks of idea innovators in science fiction—or psience fiction, rather, since much of their work has been in this area.

  Apostolides is “something classified in engineering at an aircraft plant.” Clifton, a former personnel director and industrial engineer, began his career of introducing startling new concepts more than thirty years ago: “Qualified for a country teacher’s job in Arkansas when I was thirteen,” he writes. “Investigation into subversive teacher activities is not something new. I lost my job for insisting that the world was round.”

  A new novel, They’d Rather Be Right, carrying on the life history of “Crazy Joey,” is currently appearing serially in Astounding Science Fiction.

  Crazy Joey by Mark Clifton and Alex Apostolides

  Joey pulled the covers up over his head, trying to shut out the whispers which filled the room. But even with the pillow over his head, their shrill buzz entered up through the roof of his mouth, tasting acrid and bitter, spinning around in his brain. Fingers in his ears simply made the words emerge from a sensation of cutting little lights into words.

  “It worries me, Madge, more and more, the way that boy carries on. I was hoping he’d outgrow it, but he don’t.”

  His father’s voice was deep and petulant, sounding from the pillow on his side of the bed there in the other room. “Hanging back, all the time. Not playing with the other kids, staying out of school, claiming the teachers don’t like him. It ain’t natural, Madge. I don’t like it.”