Collected Short Fiction, page 135
“But what about the crystal? What is it?”
“I don’t know what it is. But I do know that it’s worth every cent I paid for it. I’ve been starving along, struggling with it, hoping to learn the secret of it, before I had to turn it over to some museum or college professor for a song. And I’ve done it!
“That crystal is the greatest thing since Columbus!”
“How?” I pressed him.
“You read those stories about worlds in the Fourth Dimension, worlds in the atom, worlds in the infra-red spectrum, worlds——”
“Read ’em and laugh, mostly. I can admit people on other planets, but as for the Fourth Dimension stuff——”
“I used to be that way. But Stewart, you know that crystal is a connecting link with another world! I’ve never gone through, myself. But I tied my watch on a string, and let it through.”
HE laughed, ruefully. “And something happened to it. I’d been planning to pawn it. It came back all right; but it wasn’t worth pawning any more. Crystal broken, figures faded off the face, case worn and works corroded and ruined. Looked like it had been lying out in the weather a century or so.”
I looked keenly at the man, to see if he were paying for a good dinner with a good lie. A smile of enthusiasm was on his thin face, his blue eyes were very bright. He seemed quite grave and serious, and for the life of me I could not doubt his sincerity.
“Come around to my room, if you like, and I’ll show it to you.”
“I’m coming!”
What he said had appealed indeed to my love of the marvelous and the fantastic.
We had been strolling down the sultry street. Now he quickened our pace, led the way toward the river, where there were many mysterious doors, where there were little fruit stands and dirty street peddlers, where there were signs in Spanish and Chinese, and an alien note to the voice of the crowd.
“Not the best neighborhood in town,” Jimmy Miles observed. “But one cannot be a chooser on three dollars a week.”
He slipped between a swarthy Mexican and a strapping colored woman, and led me into a dingy lobby, a dark and stale-smelling lobby, where a crippled man and a white-haired patriarch were playing a languishing game with dirty cards, and a thin dyspeptic fellow was wearily rattling a newspaper.
He led me quickly across the room, up a narrow steep stairs, and down a long dark hall, that was hot and unpleasant with a faint, sickly odor. He stopped before a blank door, and turned a key in the lock. I followed him.
A mere cell it was, with a narrow bed, a tall scarred bureau with cracked mirror, a broken rocking chair, and a tottering stand. The one little window opened on a hot, black roof, with a blank wall eight feet away. The room was stifling in the sultry midsummer afternoon.
“See!”
Jimmy Miles pointed to the strangest piece of apparatus that I had ever seen. It stood in the corner of the little room, back of the door, filling most of the available floor space.
Set on a low bench, apparently made mostly of packing boxes, was a wonderful, blazing gem. A five-pointed star, nearly three feet across, perfectly formed of scintillant crystal, scarlet, ruby-red, sparkling. It was like a five-pointed star sawed out of an inch-thick sheet of flawless blood-ruby.
Beside the crystal, on the bench, was a little stack of dry cells, a Ford coil, and a small brass switch, connected with wires that ran under the bench. I saw a radio “B” battery, an electron tube and rheostat, and some more wiring that I did not understand.
“There she is,” he said.
“Quite interesting. I hardly see what it’s all about.”
“Well, I found out something interesting about the crystal. It isn’t a natural formation. It’s artificial.”
“Artificial!”
“Made by man—or at least by some intelligent being—without a doubt! There are two little platinum studs on the lower side of it, that I have the coil connected to. And it’s got metal parts inside it. The crystal stuff may just be cast over it to protect it.”
“BUT those Indians, whose ruins are the moctezumas, didn’t know anything about the use of metals, even if they did smelt them a little.”
“No use to argue that. They may have found the thing in the ruins of an older civilization. It’s hard as diamond; it must be nearly indestructible. Just another puzzling relic of a lost civilization, like the Great Pyramid. More than likely the people that made it went inside it—went through it to that other world. You say you write stories. There’s drama for you. A doomed continent sinks into the sea and the scientists toil to make the star to let them into another world.
“And of course there is the interesting possibility that it was made by a race of that other world, who wanted a window into our space.”
“How does it work?” I demanded.
He looked around the bare, little room, evidently in search of something, then fumbled in one of the bureau drawers, where there was half a loaf of bread and some grocer’s sacks. He produced an empty sardine tin, which he laid on the scarlet, star-shaped crystal.
“I send the discharge of the coil through it,” he said. “It glows, phosphoresces like the diamond does under kathode rays. But the emanation from it has a queer effect.”
He closed the little switch. The Ford coil buzzed angrily, and purple sparks played about its points. And a soft crimson fire shone from the crystal, it seemed to melt into a rosy fog. Pale weird lights of green and purple and blue played about the edges of the red flame.
Bathed in soft, red fire, the tin can sank through the crystal. Gleaming crimson mist flowed over it—the crystal seemed to have become a mere nebulous scarlet haze. The tin vanished as if it had been dropped into a basin of blood. And quickly though the man still held down the key, the coruscating mist faded, and the star was real again, sharply distinct.
“It isn’t on the other side of the crystal,” Jimmy said. “Not on the bottom, I mean. It has somehow gone through it to another world. It may come back when I break the circuit; that somehow reverses ffhe process. My watch came back—rather the worse for the experience.”
He raised his finger from the key. And the shimmering red mist rose about the scarlet star again, until the crystal itself seemed to dissolve in a fog of dancing red molecules. And the sardine tin popped up through the ruby fog.
BUT it was a sadly altered can, battered and rusty as though it had been lying out of doors for months. “Gone to the bad, like the watch,” he said.
“Mostly, things come back when I break the circuit. That somehow seems to reverse the process. There is an analogy in electricity. When you have a secondary coil wound about a primary, a current is induced, for a moment, when you send a current through the primary coil. When the primary current reaches its full value, the secondary drops to zero. But when you break the primary circuit, the induced current again flows through the secondary circuit, this time in the opposite direction. This phenomenon must be of the same order.”
“But where is it that the can went?”
“Frankly, I don’t know, not positively. But I think it went through the space that mathematicians call the Fourth Dimension, until it entered another plane alongside our world, parallel to it. Let us say that this crystal is just a sort of boundary, or meeting place, between that other world, and this, in the Fourth Dimension.
“When we send the current through the coil, a sort of magnetic effect carries the body through the opening, as it were, into this other space; and when the circuit is broken the magnetic effect is reversed, drawing the body back.”
“I’ve read stories of the Fourth Dimension.”
“So have I—written mostly by men who considered it a sort of weird fairyland, without any conception of the scientific factors involved. But the Fourth Dimensional hypothesis seems to fit all the elements here better than anything else I can think of.”
The man turned toward me suddenly, with fierce determination glowing in his blue eyes. “I’m going through tonight,” he said. “I wish you would operate the switch for me.”
“Going into that! Without knowing!”
“That’s the way to find out. The watch and the can came back. I ought to manage it.”
“Well, I can stand by, of course. But I’d wait——”
“I need a condenser, and another coil and more batteries, to increase the power to man-size capacity. If—
I wonder if—if you could let me have a few dollars——”
“Of course. Whatever you need.”
“The crystal and apparatus will be security.”
“That’s all right. You don’t realize that you’re giving me a real adventure.”
I handed the man a twenty-dollar bill, which he blushingly accepted.
“If you need more——”
“This is ample. And you might come back—say, at eight o’clock. This hole will be cooler then. I’ll try to have everything ready.”
I followed him down the dark hall, and out into the street. “I went to a show, and then tried to read in my room at the hotel. But my mind kept running back to the marvelous crystal that seemed to carry objects to another world—and to the amazing young man who was eager to undertake a voyage of discovery more marvelous than that of Columbus.
Ordinarily, I should have suspected chicanery, and a plot to separate me from some money. But I had not the slightest doubt of Jimmy Miles’ sincerity.
My imagination, following his suggestion, persisted in building up rather a fantastic story out of it. I pictured a mighty civilization grown up on the earth, and suddenly faced with a cataclysmic doom—a submergence of continents, or an age of ice, or collision with a comet—the struggle to build the crystal, the escape, through it to a new world in the Fourth Dimension—and the crystal, by some freak of fate, the sole memento of that vanished race upon the earth—though what an empire they might have in the new world!
IMPATIENTLY I awaited the appointed hour; and when it came I hurried down to the shabby little hotel, so wrought up that I hardly noticed the bright windows and the gay, half-alien throngs that ordinarily I studied so intently. I found my way up to Jimmy’s room, and knocked on the door.
When he let me in I saw that he had new apparatus attached to the crystal, to bring a more powerful and more accurately regulated current through it. I found that he had not eaten, so I insisted that we go down and get supper before the trial. He came rather reluctantly, but ate heartily enough.
By nine o’clock we were back in the little room. Jimmy gave me detailed instructions for operating the rheostat and switches—I was to hold the key down for exactly one minute. He handed me a long legal envelope. I opened it, and found this document:
To Whom it May Concern:
This is to certify that I, James R. Miles, do this night of June 3, 1930, enter upon a most perilous adventure, in full knowledge of the peril to my own life and person thereby incurred. Mr. Stewart, or no other person, is to be held responsible in the event of my injury or complete disappearance.
(Signed) James R. Miles
Below was the signature and seal of a notary public who had acknowledged the document.
“In case something happens,” he said, “you might find that useful. Not likely to be any inquiries, though. I haven’t a relation in the world.”
With these words, he stepped lightly upon the flat, polished surface of the scarlet crystal star, and stood waiting, slender, erect, eager, his blue eyes burning intensely.
“Shoot!” he said.
Suddenly I felt a lump in my throat. For no very good reason, I felt tears springing into my eyes. I tried to say something, but at the moment I could not speak. I realized there would be no dissuading the young man from his adventure.
With an eye on the second hand of my watch, I pressed the little button that completed the circuit. The coils buzzed, wasp-like. A soft red mist rose about the crystal—it seemed oddly as if the gleaming thing vanished, ceased to exist in our space at all, leaving a sort of door that was screened with the dancing rosy mist. And Jimmy Miles fell through the scarlet star. Quickly, as if some strong magnetic attraction were drawing him, he dropped into the three-foot blur of crimson fog. He waved his hand briefly, as I pressed the button. And he opened his lips, to breathe a sound that might have been “Good-by” if he had stayed to finish it.
It was over in a split second. The red mists had faded, and the gleaming star had recovered its appearance of brilliantly polished ruby.
I SAT on the broken chair, in the stuffy little room.
My watch was on my knee, and I held the key down with a finger. The coil was buzzing merrily, with purple fire flashing from its contact points. My eye traveled restlessly between the crawling second-hand of the watch and the rude apparatus that had sent a man on an amazing voyage of exploration. I moved a little, sat straighter, in my tense nervous strain. In my pocket I heard the rattle of the document which was to absolve me from prosecution for murder, if Jimmy did not come back.
It was all beginning to seem very wild and fantastic, when the end of the minute came. And I felt an icy chill of fear. What if that vaguely guessed-at reversed magnetic power of the crystal failed to function? What if it failed to draw Jimmy Miles back into our world?
I was near crying out with the strain when the end of the minute came. I raised the key. The hum of the coil ceased abruptly. And the glistening surface of the scarlet star seemed to melt into a dancing mist of ruby particles.
And an amazing apparition plunged up through that bloody fog.
The Jimmy Miles, who had vanished through the crystal one minute before, had been clad in conventional civilized clothing, if a bit shabby. Now a half-naked savage stood on the glistening surface of the crystal. He had a good deal of beard, and unkempt hair fell to his naked bronzed shoulders. There was a livid scar across his great bare breast. His only garment was a tawny skin, dressed with the hair on, crudely fastened about his middle. In one mighty hand he grasped a coil of rawhide rope.
And this amazing stranger raised a bronzed arm, cried out in astonishment evidently as great as my own. Then he grinned at me in astounded recognition, and I realized that he was indeed Jimmy Miles, but changed immensely. Instead of a slight boy, or little more, he was now a powerful man, tremendously muscled—and extremely unkempt.
It seemed as if he had aged years in a single minute of our time.
“Still here, Stewart?”
He spoke hesitantly, in a voice rusty, it seemed, from disuse.
“Yes. Yes, of course. But what has happened to you.”
“Of course? And still in this same little room? And you don’t look—why you look as I might have left you yesterday!”
“Yesterday? I held the key down just one minute—
“One minute! Man you’re foolish! It’s years! I’ve been roaming a strange world for years. A moment ago I was stalking a wild horse with Harr Garr, without a thought in the world of the old life. And to be snatched up like this!
“You don’t believe it? Look at this hair, this beard! Look at these!” He touched the great scar on his chest, a livid white spot on his forehead. Evidently wounds, long-healed. “Does a man collect such things in a minute? You’re crazy!”
“No. No. But a strange world, you say?”
“YES. I can tell you about it. Plenty of time. But this! Still 1930? I had figured it ought to be ‘35, at least. How in the Sam Hill——”
“I have it!” I interjected. “The watch and the tin can! They showed the effects of months of time. Time passes faster in that other world T
The giant bowed his shaggy head, considered.
“Yes, it could be. Relativity and so on. And it must really be in the Fourth Dimension. The crystal is just a door between two worlds. The magnetic attraction draws one way when the current is turned on, and jerks the object back with the reversed field when the circuit is broken.”
“Logical enough, as such things go.”
“I’d given up all hope of coming back. I was making the best of things there. The Lord knows I had thrills enough!”
“Tell me!” I demanded.
“Give me time!” The naked, bronzed giant stepped down from the little crystal, flexing mighty limbs.
“You need some clothing.”
“Presently. Before I go out, of course. But I’m pretty well used to going as I am.” He looked down at the spotted, tawny hide about him. “Skin of a leopard I killed myself,” he commented.
“Shoot! Spill it!” I demanded.
He stepped over to the bed, a splendid bronzed giant, and deliberately seated himself upon a none-too-clean sheet, fixing his brilliant eyes upon me.
“To begin with,” he said, “it seems to me that it is about five years since I saw you last. I was not able to measure time very exactly, however, for on the planet where I found myself, seasonal changes were not perceptible. And the sky was uniformly cloudy, so that only occasionally was I able to see sun or stars. I did get enough glimpse of the sky there, however, to assure myself that, by day and by night, it looks somewhat as the sky of earth, though the sun seems rather larger and bluer, and the constellations of the stars are strange.
“That world, too, seems much younger than the earth—say, about like what the earth probably was when man first appeared upon it. There was no winter while I was there, no frost, and the climate was uniformly warm and wet. It is a world of luxuriant jungle.
“But I suppose I should begin with the sensations of the change. When I stood upon the crystal, and you depressed the switch, I felt as if I were floating on immense waves of power. Then the room grew black, about me, and vanished. I reeled, had a dizzy feeling of falling. That is all.
“Then I was standing in that new world.
“Literally new, I suppose. I found myself in a rank, luxuriant jungle. Above me towered a larger tree than I have ever seen on earth. It must have been nearly a thousand feet high; sometimes its top was actually hidden in the low gray clouds. For it was always cloudy in that world, and warm rain drizzled almost endlessly down upon the rank, fern-like undergrowth that rose in the gray light.
