Beyond the Barriers of Space and Time

by Judith Merril (ed. )

  He stopped.

  “Well, go on, Roger.”

  “Look, did you ever try to pick up something that’s just a step away? You bend and automatically take a step toward it as you reach. It’s completely involuntary. It’s just your body’s over-all co-ordination.”

  “All right. What of it?”

  “I reached for the book and automatically took a step upward. On air, Jane! On empty air!”

  “I’m going to call Jim Sarle, Roger.”

  “I’m not sick, damn it.”

  “I think he ought to talk to you. He’s a friend. It won’t be a doctor’s visit. He’ll just talk to you.”

  “And what good will that do?” Roger’s face turned red with sudden anger.

  “We’ll see. Now sit down, Roger. Please.” She walked to the phone.

  He cut her off, seizing her wrist. “You don’t believe me.”

  “Oh, Roger.”

  “You don’t.”

  “I believe you. Of course, I believe you. I just want—”

  “Yes. You just want Jim Sarle to talk to me. That’s how much you believe me. I’m telling the truth but you want me to talk to a psychiatrist. Look, you don’t have to take my word for anything. I can prove this. I can prove I can float.”

  “I believe you.”

  “Don’t be a fool. I know when I’m being humored. Stand still! Now watch me.”

  He backed away to the middle of the room and without preliminary lifted off the floor. He dangled; with the toes of his shoes six empty inches from the carpet.

  Jane’s eyes and mouth were three round O’s. She whispered, “Come down, Roger. Oh, dear heaven, come down.”

  He drifted down, his feet touching the floor without a sound. “You see?”

  “Oh, my. Oh, my.”

  She stared at him, half-frightened, half-sick.

  On the television set, a chesty female sang mutedly that flying high with some guy in the sky was her idea of nothing at all.

  Roger Toomey stared into the bedroom’s darkness. He whispered, “Jane.”

  “What?”

  “You’re not sleeping?”

  “No.”

  “I can’t sleep, either. I keep holding the headboard to make sure I’m… you know.”

  His hand moved restlessly and touched her face. She flinched, jerking away as though he carried an electric charge.

  She said, “I’m sorry. I’m a little nervous.”

  “That’s all right. I’m getting out of bed anyway.”

  “What are you going to do? You’ve got to sleep.”

  “Well, I can’t, so there’s no sense keeping you awake, too.”

  “Maybe nothing will happen. It doesn’t have to happen every night. It didn’t happen before last night.”

  “How do I know? Maybe I just never went up so high. Maybe I just never woke up and caught myself. Anyway, now it’s different.”

  He was sitting up in bed, his legs bent, his arms clasping his knees, his forehead resting on them. He pushed the sheet to one side and rubbed his cheek against the soft flannel of his pajamas.

  He said, “It’s bound to be different now. My mind’s full of it. Once I’m asleep, once I’m not holding myself down consciously, why, up I’ll go.”

  “I don’t see why. It must be such an effort.”

  “That’s the point. It isn’t.”

  “But you’re fighting gravity, aren’t you?”

  “I know, but there’s still no effort. Look, Jane, if I only could understand it, I wouldn’t mind so much.”

  He dangled his feet out of bed and stood up. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  His wife muttered, “I don’t want to, either.” She started crying, fighting back the sobs and turning them into strangled moans, which sounded much worse.

  Roger said, “I’m sorry, Jane. I’m getting you all wrought up.”

  “No, don’t touch me. Just… just leave me alone.”

  He took a few uncertain steps away from the bed.

  She said, “Where are you going?”

  “To the studio couch. Will you help me?”

  “How?”

  “I want you to tie me down.”

  “Tie you down?”

  “With a couple of ropes. Just loosely, so I can turn if I want to. Do you mind?”

  Her bare feet were already seeking her mules on the floor at her side of the bed. “All right,” she sighed.

  Roger Toomey sat in the small cubbyhole that passed for his office and stared at the pile of examination papers before him. At the moment, he didn’t see how he was going to mark them.

  He had given five lectures on electricity and magnetism since the first night he had floated. He had gotten through them somehow, though not swimmingly. The students asked ridiculous questions so probably he wasn’t making himself as clear as he once did.

  Today he had saved himself a lecture by giving a surprise examination. He didn’t bother making one up; just handed out copies of one given several years earlier.

  Now he had the answer papers and would have to mark them. Why? Did it matter what they said? Or anyone? Was it so important to know the laws of physics? If it came to that, what were the laws? Were there any, really? Or was it all just a mass of confusion out of which nothing orderly could ever be extracted? Was the universe, for all its appearance, merely the original chaos, still waiting for the Spirit to move upon the face of its deep?

  Insomnia wasn’t helping him, either. Even strapped in upon the couch, he slept only fitfully, and then always with dreams.

  There was a knock at the door.

  Roger cried angrily, “Who’s there?”

  A pause, and then the uncertain answer. “It’s Miss Harroway, Dr. Toomey. I have the letters you dictated.”

  “Well, come in, come in. Don’t just stand there.”

  The department secretary opened the door a minimum distance and squeezed her lean and unprepossessing body into his office. She had a sheaf of papers in her hand. To each was clipped a yellow carbon and a stamped, addressed envelope.

  Roger was anxious to get rid of her. That was his mistake. He stretched forward to reach the letters as she approached and felt himself leave the chair.

  He moved two feet forward, still in sitting position, before he could bring himself down hard, losing his balance and tumbling in the process. It was too late.

  It was entirely too late. Miss Harroway dropped the letters in a fluttering handful. She screamed and turned, hitting the door with her shoulder, caroming out into the hall and dashing down the corridor in a clatter of high heels.

  Roger rose, rubbing an aching hip. “Damn,” he said forcefully.

  But he couldn’t help seeing her point. He pictured the sight as she must have seen it; a full-grown man, lifting smoothly out of his chair and gliding toward her in a maintained squat.

  He picked up the letters and closed his office door. It was quite late in the day; the corridors would be empty; she would probably be quite incoherent. Still—He waited anxiously for the crowd to gather.

  Nothing happened. Perhaps she was lying somewhere in a dead faint. Roger felt it a point of honor to seek her out and do what he could for her, but he told his conscience to go to the devil. Until he found out exactly what was wrong with him, exactly what this wild nightmare of his was all about, he must do nothing to reveal it.

  Nothing, that is, more than he had done already.

  He leafed through the letters; one to every major theoretical physicist in the country. Home talent was insufficient for this sort of thing.

  He wondered if Miss Harroway grasped the contents of the letters. He hoped not. He had couched them deliberately in technical language; more so, perhaps, than was quite necessary. Partly, that was to be discreet; partly, to impress the addressees with the fact that he, Toomey, was a legitimate and capable scientist.

  One by one, he put the letters in the appropriate envelopes. The best brains in the country, he thought. Could they help?


  He didn’t know.

  The library was quiet. Roger Toomey closed the Journal of Theoretical Physics, placed it on end and stared at its backstrap somberly. The Journal of Theoretical Physics! What did any of the contributors to that learned bit of balderdash understand anyway? The thought tore at him. Until so recently they had been the greatest men in the world to him.

  And still he was doing his best to live up to their code and philosophy. With Jane’s increasingly reluctant help, he had made measurements. He had tried to weigh the phenomenon in the balance, extract its relationships, evaluate its quantities. He had tried, in short, to defeat it in the only way he knew how—by making of it just another expression of the eternal modes of behavior that all the Universe must follow.

  (Must follow. The best minds said so.)

  Only there was nothing to measure. There was absolutely no sensation of effort to his levitation. Indoors—he dared not test himself outdoors, of course—he could reach the ceiling as easily as he could rise an inch, except that it took more time. Given enough time, he felt, he could continue rising indefinitely; go to the Moon, if necessary.

  He could carry weights while levitating. The process became slower, but there was no increase in effort.

  The day before he had come on Jane without warning, a stop watch in one hand.

  “How much do you weigh?” he asked.

  “One hundred ten,” she replied. She gazed at him uncertainly.

  He seized her waist with one arm. She tried to push him away but he paid no attention. Together, they moved upward at a creeping pace. She clung to him, white and rigid with terror.

  “Twenty-two minutes thirteen seconds,” he said, when his head nudged the ceiling.

  When they came down again, Jane tore away and hurried out of the room.

  Some days before he had passed a drug-store scale, standing shabbily on a street corner. The street was empty, so he stepped on and put in his penny. Even though he suspected something of the sort, it was a shock to find himself weighing thirty pounds.

  He began carrying handfuls of pennies and weighing himself under all conditions. He was heavier on days on which there was a brisk wind, as though he required weight to keep from blowing away.

  Adjustment was automatic. Whatever it was that levitated him maintained a balance between comfort and safety. But he could enforce conscious control upon his levitation just as he could upon his respiration. He could stand on a scale and force the pointer up to almost his full weight and down, of course, to nothing.

  He bought a scale two days before and tried to measure the rate at which he could change weight. That didn’t help. The rate, whatever it was, was faster than the pointer could swing. All he did was collect data on moduli of compressibility and moments of inertia.

  Well—what did it all amount to anyway?

  He stood up and trudged out of the library, shoulders drooping. He touched tables and chairs as he walked to the side of the room and then kept his hand unobtrusively on the wall. He had to do that, he felt. Contact with matter kept him continually informed as to his status with respect to the ground. If his hand lost touch with a table or slid upward against the wall—that was it.

  The corridor had the usual sprinkling of students. He ignored them. In these last days, they had gradually learned to stop greeting him. Roger imagined that some had come to think of him as queer and most were probably growing to dislike him.

  He passed by the elevator. He never took it any more; going down, particularly. When the elevator made its initial drop, he found it impossible not to lift into the air for just a moment. No matter how he lay in wait for the moment, he hopped and people would turn to look at him.

  He reached for the railing at the head of the stairs and just before his hand touched it, one of his feet kicked the other. It was the most ungainly stumble that could be imagined. Three weeks earlier, Roger would have sprawled down the stairs.

  This time his autonomic system took over and, leaning forward, spread-eagled, fingers wide, legs half-buckled, he sailed down the flight glider-like. He might have been on wires.

  He was too dazed to right himself, too paralyzed with horror to do anything. Within two feet of the window at the bottom of the flight, he came to an automatic halt and hovered.

  There were two students on the flight he had come down, both now pressed against the wall, three more at the head of the stairs, two on the flight below, and one on the landing with him, so close they could almost touch one another.

  It was very silent. They all looked at him.

  Roger straightened himself, dropped to the ground and ran down the stairs, pushing one student roughly out of his way.

  Conversation swirled up into exclamation behind him.

  “Dr. Morton wants to see me?” Roger turned in his chair, holding one of its arms firmly.

  The new department secretary nodded. “Yes, Dr. Toomey.”

  She left quickly. In the short time since Miss Harroway had resigned, she had learned that Dr. Toomey had something “wrong” with him. The students avoided him. In his lecture room today, the back seats had been full of whispering students. The front seats had been empty.

  Roger looked into the small wall mirror near the door. He adjusted his jacket and brushed some lint off but that operation did little to improve his appearance. His complexion had grown sallow. He had lost at least ten pounds since all this had started, though, of course, he had no way of really knowing his exact weight loss. He was generally unhealthy-looking, as though his digestion perpetually disagreed with him and won every argument.

  He had no apprehensions about this interview with the chairman of the department. He had reached a pronounced cynicism concerning the levitation incidents. Apparently, witnesses didn’t talk. Miss Harroway hadn’t. There was no sign that the students on the staircase had.

  With a last touch at his tie, he left his office.

  Dr. Philip Morton’s office was not too far down the hall, which was a gratifying fact to Roger. More and more, he was cultivating the habit of walking with systematic slowness. He picked up one foot and put it before him, watching. Then he picked up the other and put it before him, still watching. He moved along in a confirmed stoop, gazing at his feet.

  Dr. Morton frowned as Roger walked in. He had little eyes, wore a poorly trimmed grizzled mustache and an untidy suit. He had a moderate reputation in the scientific world and a decided penchant for leaving teaching duties to the members of his staff.

  He said, “Say, Toomey, I got the strangest letter from Linus Deering. Did you write to him on”—he consulted a paper on his desk—“the twenty-second of last month? Is this your signature?”

  Roger looked and nodded. Anxiously, he tried to read Deering’s letter upside down. This was unexpected. Of the letters he had sent out the day of the Miss Harroway incident, only four had so far been answered.

  Three of them had consisted of cold one-paragraph replies that read, more or less: “This is to acknowledge receipt of your letter of the twenty-second. I do not believe I can help you in the matter you discuss.” A fourth, from Ballantine of Northwestern Tech, had bumblingly suggested an institute for psychic research. Roger couldn’t tell whether he was trying to be helpful or insulting.

  Deering of Princeton made five. He had had high hopes of Deering.

  Dr. Morton cleared his throat loudly and adjusted a pair of glasses. “I want to read you what he says. Sit down, Toomey, sit down. He says: ‘Dear Phil—’ ”

  Dr. Morton looked up briefly with a slightly fatuous smile. “Linus and I met at Federation meetings last year. We had a few drinks together. Very nice fellow.”

  He adjusted his glasses again and returned to the letter: “ ‘Dear Phil: Is there a Dr. Roger Toomey in your department? I received a very queer letter from him the other day. I didn’t quite know what to make of it. At first, I thought I’d just let it go as another crank letter. Then I thought that since the letter carried your department head
ing, you ought to know of it. It’s just possible someone may be using your staff as part of a confidence game. I’m enclosing Dr. Toomey’s letter for your inspection. I hope to be visiting your part of the country—’

  “Well, the rest of it is personal.” Dr. Morton folded the letter, took off his glasses, put them in a leather container and put that in his breast pocket. He twined his fingers together and leaned forward.

  “Now,” he said, “I don’t have to read you your own letter. Was it a joke? A hoax?”

  “Dr. Morton,” said Roger, heavily, “I was serious. I don’t see anything wrong with my letter. I sent it to quite a few physicists. It speaks for itself. I’ve made observations on a case of… of levitation and I wanted information about possible theoretical explanations for such a phenomenon.”

  “Levitation! Really!”

  “It’s a legitimate case. Dr. Morton.”

  “You’ve observed it yourself?”

  “Of course.”

  “No hidden wires? No mirrors? Look here, Toomey, you’re no expert on these frauds.”

  “This was a thoroughly scientific series of observations. There is no possibility of fraud.”

  “You might have consulted me, Toomey, before sending out these letters.”

  “Perhaps I should have. Dr. Morton, but, frankly, I thought you might be—unsympathetic.”

  “Well, thank you. I should hope so. And on department stationery. I’m really surprised, Toomey. Look here, Toomey, your life is your own. If you wish to believe in levitation, go ahead, but strictly on your own time. For the sake of the department and the college, it should be obvious that this sort of thing should not be injected into your scholastic affairs.

  “In point of fact, you’ve lost some weight recently, haven’t you, Toomey? Yes, you don’t look well at all. I’d see a doctor, if I were you. A nerve specialist, perhaps.”

  Roger said, bitterly, “A psychiatrist might be better, you think?”

  “Well, that’s entirely your business. In any case, a little rest—”

  The telephone had rung and the secretary had taken the call. She caught Dr. Morton’s eye and he picked up his extension.