Complete Short Fiction, page 223
“Vision of right eye 20/50. Astigmatism of two diopters.” He added: “Do you practice looking at dominoes?”
Slade nodded. Up to a point he had made considerable progress with the muscle imbalance that caused the astigmatism which affected all three of his eyes.
“Left eye next,” said Dr. Mclver. And a little later: “Vision 20/70, astigmatism of 3 diopters.”
“Center eye, vision 3/200, astigmatism of 11 diopters. Now palm.” Palming produced long flashes of 20/20 vision in his right and left eyes, and a bare instant of 5/70 vision in his center eye.
“I think,” said Dr. Mclver, “we shall start by trying for a better illusion of black. What you see may seem black to your imagination, but you’re fooling yourself. Afterwards, we’ll do some whipping and shifting, and bounce a few tennis balls.”
He fumbled in his bag, and came up with a roll of black materials. Slade recognized a black fur piece, black wool, black cotton, a square of black cardboard, black silk, a piece of black metal, a hand-engraved ebony ornament, and a variety of familiar black items including a plastic fountain pen, a bow tie, and a small book with a black cover.”
“Look them over,” Mclver said. “The mind cannot remember any shade of black more than a few seconds. Palm, and switch your imagination from one to the other of these items.”
After half an hour, Slade had improved noticeably the vision of each eye. He could see the large C with his third eye at twenty feet, and the R and B below it were recognizable blurs. But perfect vision was still a long, long way off.
“Again, palm,” said Dr. Mclver. This time he went on talking softly as Slade closed his eyes. “Black is black is black. There is no black but black. Black, pure, unadulterated black is black black.”
It was nonsense with a pattern of reason in it. Slade found himself smiling, as he visualized the black in the various articles that Mclver had placed on his lap. Black, he thought, black, wherefore art thou, black?
As simply as that it came. Black as black as the black of a moonless, starless night, black as printer’s ink, black as all the black that the mind of man ever conceived. The black.
He opened his center eye, and saw the ten line on the twenty-foot chart. He blinked, but it was still there as bright and black as the print itself. Startled, he opened the other two eyes. And still there was no blurring. With 20/10 vision in all three of his eyes he looked around his back yard.
He saw!
At first, the fence and the other residences and the charts and all the shrubbery remained as a part of the scene. It was like looking at two pictures, with one superimposed upon the other, like two images coming through two different sets of eyes. But images of different scenes.
The familiar one—his own back yard, and the hill to the right and the rooftops of his neighbors that made up his horizon—had the effect of blurring the other, stranger scene.
Gradually, however, its outlines pushed through. To his left, where the houses fell away into a large shallow depression, was an enormous expanse of marsh, thick with brilliant growth. To his right, where the hill had always hidden his view, were scores of caves with fires burning at their openings.
The smoke from the fires rose up in curling tongues of black and gray, and intensified the blur that already half hid the Morton and Gladwander mansions, which dominated the hill. They kept fading, fading. And now, Slade saw that the hill with the caves was somewhat higher and steeper than the hill with the houses. There was a wide ledge that ran along in front of the caves. And it was on this ledge that he suddenly noticed something else.
Human beings! They moved around, now bending over pots that hung above the fires, now adding wood to the fires, or disappearing into the caves, and then emerging again. There were not many, and most of them had long hair characteristic of women, or else they were small and childlike. Their primitive clothes—clearly visible even at this distance—made the reality of them unnatural.
Slade sat there. He had a remote impulse to get up, but it was too soon yet for reaction or even understanding. At last memory came that this was happening as a result of improvement in his vision; and the lightning thought followed: What in the name of sanity had happened?
It was too vague as yet, that tugging amazement, and besides there was still the scene of the cave dwellers becoming clearer and clearer to his vision. The houses and his own yard were just shimmering images, like fading mirages, like things dimly seen through an all-enveloping haze.
For the first time Slade realized that his eyes had been straining to hold those two scenes, but that the strain was lessening, as the second one took stronger and stronger hold of his attention.
The paralysis left him. Quite automatically, he stood up.
He noted, with enormous and developing interest, that, where the marsh ended, a rolling meadow began, spotted here and there with bright splashes of gigantic flowering shrubs, and in the distance trees that looked amazingly tall.
Everything was as dear and bright as a summer sun could make it. A warm, glowing wilderness, almost untouched by man, spread before him. It was like a fairy land, and he stared and stared.
At last, with wondering delight, he turned to look at the other horizon—and the girl must have started the same instant around the tree that was there.
She was tall and very straight. She must have been intending to swim in the stream that babbled into the marsh a few yards away because, except for a rather ornamental silvery belt around her waist, she had no clothes on.
She had three eyes, and all three of them appraised Slade with amazement but without a shade of embarrassment. There was something else in her manner that was not so prepossessing, even a little repellent. It was the dominating look of a woman accustomed to think only of herself. He had time to realize that she was older than she looked.
The woman’s eyes were narrowing. She spoke in a violin-toned contralto, meaningless words, but offensively sharp in tone.
She began to fade. The trees, the great marsh, the hill, partly visible to his left now, faded perceptibly. A house showed through her body, and, all around, the earth as he had known it for years took swift form.
Suddenly, there was the yard, and himself standing beside his chair. There was Dr. Mclver, his back to Slade, peering around the corner of the house. The eye specialist turned, and his face lighted as he saw Slade.
“Where did you go?” he asked. “I turn my back, and you’re off without a word.”
Slade made no immediate reply. The pain in his eyes was like a fire.
It burned and burned.
BEFORE THE CORONER’S JURY
STATEMENT OF DR. McIVER
I had personal contact with Michael Slade over a period of about two and a half months. For an hour a day I assisted him with his eye training. It was a slow process, as, after apparently recovering the first day, he had an unusually sharp retrogression.
When I asked him about any particular effects he had observed during his brief spell of good vision he hesitated a long time, and then shook his head.
At the end of ten weeks his third eye had a normal vision of only 10/400. He decided then that he was going to take a holiday on his farm at Canonville, in the hope that his childhood surroundings would relax his mind, and so effect a cure.
I understand he later returned to his home, but I did not see him again until I was called to identify his smashed body in the morgue.
II.
The first day on the farm! It was distinctly cooler. A September breeze was blowing over the pasture, when Slade settled down with his eye charts. He glanced at the sun, already low in the west, for he had arrived late. And he sighed. The day was almost gone.
It had to be today. That feeling was strong in him. This afternoon he was still convinced that it would be easy to recall the relaxed days of his childhood on the farm. By tomorrow, if he failed today, the tension of doubt would have set in.
Then, too, there had been the anxious feeling way in the back of his mind about the cave dwellers. He was just a little reluctant to appear within a stone’s throw of a primitive tribe. Here, on this prairie, it was different. It was very unlikely that any inhabitants of that obviously sparsely settled world would be anywhere in the vicinity.
What the mind wants to see, Slade thought, it will see if it is there to see. He was creating conditions where his mind would again want to see.
He palmed, and then looked at the chart with his center eye. He could see the big C at twenty feet; the R and B below it were a blur, and the T F P a blotch of gray. As an improvement it was practically worthless.
He palmed again. The eyeball, according to the eye training theorists, was a round organ, which elongated for near vision, and flattened for distance vision. Some of the practitioners were willing to concede the possibility that the ciliary muscles did, in addition, change to some extent the shape of the lens.
But whatever the explanation behind the reality that the system worked, if the muscles pulled disproportionately, vision was poor. The fact that those muscles were controlled by the imagination, a difficult part of the mind to train, made the problem all the more intricate for people who had long worn glasses or had eye trouble.
The solution, Slade thought, is in me. I have got rid of all the astigmatism in my right or left eye, yet my center eye persists in being astigmatic, sometimes to the point of blindness.
It was of the mind, his trouble. His eye had proved that it was able to function normally.
About an hour before sundown, his brain was still refusing to work with the third eye.
Perhaps, Slade thought, if I went to the various spots, of which I have particularly vivid childhood memories, I’d be able to recapture the mood and—
First, the creek beside which he had hidden so often in the brush, and watched the cars go by to their remote and wonderful destinations.
The grass had grown deep where he had once worn it down with his small body. He knelt, and the scent was a tang in his nostrils. He pressed his face to the cool, green softness of it, and he lay quiet, conscious of his weariness and of the sustained effort he had made during the past months.
Am I a fool? he wondered. Did I turn my wife against me, break off with my friends, all in order to follow a will-o’-the-wisp?
And had he really seen that other world, or was that some fantastic illusion which his mind had experienced during a profound organic readjustment?
His mood of depression intensified. The sun went down, and twilight was yielding to darkness when he finally started back along the bank of the creek towards the farmhouse.
In the darkness he couldn’t find the path, and so he struck across the pasture, stumbling once in a while through thicker patches of grass. He could see the light of the end window of the farmhouse, but it seemed farther away than he remembered. The first alarm came with that realization, but it wasn’t until five minutes later that a far more telling fear struck into him. The fence! He should have come to the fence long ago.
The light seemed to be only a few hundred feet from where he stopped short.
Slade sank slowly down onto the grass. He swallowed hard, and then he thought: This is ridiculous. I’m imagining things.
But there was an empty sensation in the pit of his stomach, as he strove to penetrate the intense darkness all around him. There was no moon, and clouds must have been heavy overhead, for not a single star showed. The light in the near distance glowed with a hazy but bright steadiness. It failed, however, to illuminate the building from which it came.
Slade blinked at it with a gathering fascination, his tenseness draining before the consciousness that it would probably be easy to get back to Earth. After all, he had thought himself here. He should be able to get back without too much trouble.
He climbed to his feet, and began to walk forward. As the light drew nearer, it seemed to him that it was coming from inside a doorway. Vaguely, he could make out that the doorway was inset under a curving sweep of metal, that bulged far out. The metal gleamed dully, and then merged with the general blackness without leaving a hint of the shape of the whole structure.
Slade hesitated about a hundred feet from the entrance. He was even more fascinated than he had been, but his desire to investigate was dwindling. Not now, in this dark night of a strange plane of existence. Wait till morning. And yet he had the uneasy conviction that before dawn the tensions would have reasserted in his mind.
One knock at the door, he thought, one look inside. And then off into the darkness. The door was metal, and so solid that his knuckles made only the vaguest sound. He had some silver coins in his pocket, and they tinged with a sharp sound as he used them. Instantly, he stepped back, and waited.
The silence grew tremendous, like a pall pushing at him. Dark and silent night in a primitive land inhabited by cavemen and—
And what? This was no caveman’s residence. Was it possible he had come to a plane of Earth entirely separate from that of the nude girl he had seen?
He retreated into the shadows away from the light. He stumbled, barking his shins. On one knee, he felt the object over which he had nearly fallen. Metal. That brought a thrill of real interest. Cautiously, he pressed the button of his flashlight, but it wouldn’t light. Slade cursed under his breath, and tugged at the metal thing in the ground. That was the trouble. It was in the ground. And held hard.
It seemed to be a wheel attached to a boxing of some kind. He was still fumbling over it, tugging tentatively, when it began to rain. That sent him to the nearest brush for cover. But the rain grew heavier, until finally the bush poured water on him. Slade accepted his fate, and headed back for the doorway. He tried the latch, and pushed. The door opened immediately.
The interior was brightly lighted, a long, high, wide corridor of dully shining metal. About a hundred feet away, the massive hallway ended in a cross corridor. There were three doorways on each side of the corridor.
He tried the doors one after another. The first one opened into a long, narrow room that was all shiny blue mirror. At least, it looked like a mirror. Then he grew aware that stars were shining in its depth.
Slade closed the door hastily. It wasn’t that he felt fear. But his mind had hesitated, unable to interpret what it was seeing. Its hold on this world was far too precarious for him to subject it to incomprehensible strangeness.
He moved across the hall to the first door on his left. It opened onto a long, narrow room half filled with case on case of goods. Some of them were open, their contents spilled out on the floor. Instruments glittered up at him, a quantity array of miscellaneous gadgets of all sizes. Some of the boxes were haphazardly pulled aside, as if a searcher had been looking for some specific item.
Slade closed that door too, puzzled but without any threatening strain this time. A storeroom was a recognizable thing, and his mind accepted it without there being any necessity for him to identify what was in the boxes.
The two middle doors revealed identical interiors. Massive machines that towered three quarters of the way to the ceiling. In spite of their size Slade recognized them for what they were. For more than a year American papers and magazines had shown pictures of the atomic engine developed at the University of Chicago for rocket ships. The design was slightly different, but the general tenor was unmistakable.
Slade closed each door in turn, hastily. And stood in the hallway, dissatisfied with his situation. A spaceship settled on a lonely moor in an alien plane of existence, brilliantly lighted inside, and a solitary light outside like a beacon in the night beckoning to wanderers like himself, offering surcease from the darkness—was that the reality?
Slade doubted it, and a grisly feeling came that he had willed himself into a nightmare, and that any instant he would wake up, perspiring, in his bed.
But the instants passed, and there was no waking. Gradually, his mind accepted the silence, the brief panic faded, and he tried the fifth door.
It opened into darkness. Slade stepped back hastily. His eyes grew accustomed to the shadows, and so after scant seconds he saw the shape. It was pressed against the darkest wall, and it watched him alertly from three eyes that gleamed brightly in the vaguely reflected light. One swift look Slade had, and then his mind refused the vision.
Instantly, the ship, the light, vanished. He fell about three feet to a grassy embankment. Half a mile away was a yellow glowing light. It turned out to be his own farmhouse.
He was back on Earth.
Slade remained on the farm, undecided. The vision of all three of his eyes had deteriorated this time, and besides he was a badly shaken man. It couldn’t have been the same woman, he told himself. Standing there in the shadows of a corridor of an old, seemingly deserted spaceship, the same young woman—watching him.
And yet, the resemblance to the nude cave girl had been so apparent to his brain that he had instantly been under an abnormal strain. His mind proved that it recognized her by the speed with which it rejected the logic of her presence.
The question was, should he continue his exercises? For a whole month he walked the reaches of the farm, unable to make up his mind. And the main reason for his indecision was his realization that his return to the two-eyed world had not been absolutely necessary.
Normal vision was a product of many balancing factors, not only mental but physical. Muscles weakened by glasses or by disuse lacked the endurance to resist the shudderingly swift impulses of the mind. Properly strengthened, they would withstand far greater shocks than he had experienced.
A demonic woman, he thought, standing in the shadows of a shadow ship in a shadow land. He was no longer sure he wanted to commit himself to that other plane of existence—to a woman who was aware of him, and who was trying to lure him.
After a month, the first snowfall whitened the foothills. Still undecided, Slade returned to the city.
STATEMENT OF PROFESSOR GRAY
My name is Ernest Gray, and I am a professor of languages. Some time ago—I cannot remember the exact date—I received a visit from Michael Slade. It seems that he had been away on his farm, and that, on returning to his city home, he learned that, in his absence, a three-eyed woman had visited his home.
