Time Travel Omnibus, page 391
But some days later he was back with more. Maybe work was slack, or maybe I was surprised by his playing the same type of phenomena twice running. Anyway, I paid more attention than usual.
“You see. Arms, heads, legs, torsos all over the place. It’s an epidemic,” said Jimmy. “There’s something behind. Something’s happening!” he said, as near as you can vocalise italics.
When I’d read a few I had to admit that this time he had got something where the vein of queerness was pretty constant.
A bus driver had seen the upper half of a body upright in the road before him—but a bit late. When he did stop and climb out, sweating, to examine the mess there was nothing there. A woman hanging out of a window watching the street saw another head below her, doing the same—but this one was projecting out of the solid brickwork. There was a pair of arms which came out of the floor in a butcher’s shop, seemed to grope for something, and then withdrew into the solid cement without trace—unless you count some detriment to the butcher’s trade. There was the man on an erection job who became aware of a strangely dressed figure standing close to him, but in the empty air—after which he had to be helped down and sent home. Another figure was noticed between the rails in the path of a heavy freight train, but had vanished without trace when the train had passed. The dozen or so witnesses agreed that it was wearing some kind of fancy dress, but looked male.
While I skimmed through these and some others Jimmy stood waiting like a bottle of seltzer. I didn’t have to say more than “Huh.”
“You see,” he said. “Something is happening.”
“Supposing it is,” I conceded cautiously. “Then what is it?”
“The manifestation zone is limited,” Jimmy said, impressively. “If you look where I’ve marked the incidents on the city plan you’ll see they’re grouped. Somewhere in that circle is the ‘focus of disturbance’.” This time he managed to vocalise the inverted commas, and waited for me to show that I was struck.
“So?” I said. “Disturbance of just what?”
He dodged that.
“I’ve a pretty good idea of the cause,” he told me, weightily.
I rarely knew Jimmy when he hadn’t, though it might be a different one an hour later.
“I’ll buy it,” I offered.
“Teleportation,” he announced. “That’s what it is. Bound to come sooner or later. Now someone’s on to it.”
“Huh,” I said again.
“But it must be.” He leaned forward earnestly. “How else’d you account for it?”
“If there could be teleportation, or teleportage, or whatever it is, I reckon there’d have to be a transmitter and some sort of reassembly station,” I told him. “You couldn’t expect a person or object to be kind of broadcast and then come together again any old place.”
“But you don’t know that,” he pointed out. “Besides, that’s part of what I was meaning by ‘focus’. It may be focused on that area.”
“If it is,” I said, “he seems to have got his levels and positions all to hell. I wonder just what happens to a guy who gets himself reassembled half in and half out of a brick wall?”
It’s details like that that get Jimmy impatient.
“Obviously,” he said, “it’s early stages. Experimental.”
It struck me as pretty uncomfortable for the subject, early stages or not, but I didn’t press it.
That evening had been the first time I had mentioned it to Sally, and on the whole that was a mistake. After making it clear that she didn’t believe it, she went on to reckon that if it was true it would be just another invention.
“What do you mean, ‘just another invention’ ? Why, it’d be revolutionary,” I told her.
“Should be,” she said, “but not the way we’d use it.”
“Meaning?” I asked.
Sally was in one of her withering moods, I could see. She turned on that voice which she uses for the stupidities of people and the world.
“We’ve got two ways of using inventions,” she said. “One is to kill more people more easily: the other is to help short-sighted business goons to make quick easy money out of suckers. Maybe there are a few exceptions, like X-rays, but look at the line we’ve got with movies and radio. Look at airplanes, too. Can you or I just get a nice cheap little helicopter to keep in the backyard? Can we hell!”
Sal gets like that sometimes.
“Inventions!” she said, with as near a snort as she comes. “What we do with the product of god-given genius is first we ram it down to the lowest common denominator, then multiply by the vulgarest possible fractions. What a century! What a world! When I think of what other centuries are going to say of us it just makes me go hot all over.”
“I shouldn’t worry. You won’t be hearing it,” I said.
The withering eye was on me.
“I should have known. That remark is just about up to twentieth century standards.”
“You’re a funny girl,” I told her. “I mean, the way you think may be crazy, but you do do it. Now most girls’ futures are all cloud-cuckoo beyond next season’s hat or next year’s baby. Outside of that it might snow split atoms for all they care—though down inside ’em they’ve got a feeling nothing’s ever changed or ever will.”
“A lot you know about what most girls think,” said Sally.
“That’s it. How could I?” I said.
She seemed to have set her face so firmly against the whole business that I dropped it for the evening.
A couple of days later Jimmy looked into my room again.
“He’s laid off,” he said.
“Who’s laid off what?”
“This teleporting guy. Not a report later than Tuesday. Maybe he knows somebody’s on to him.”
“Meaning you?” I asked.
“Maybe.”
“Well, are you?”
He frowned. “I got it all figured out. I took the bearings on the map of all the incidents, and the fix came on All Saints Church. I’ve been all over the place, but I didn’t find anything. Still, I reckon I’m close—why else’d he stop?”
I couldn’t tell him that. Nor could anyone else. But that very evening there was a paragraph about an arm and a leg that some woman had watched travel along her kitchen wall. I showed it to Sally.
“Likely it’ll turn out to be some smart line in advertisement,” she said. “Kind of secret ad?” I suggested.
Then, seeing the withering look working up again:
“How about a movie?” I suggested.
It was overcast when we went in to the movie; when we got out it was raining hard. Seeing it was under a mile to her place and all the taxis in town were busy, we decided to walk it. Sally pulled on the hood of her slicker. I took her arm. For a bit we didn’t talk, then:
“Darling,” I said, “I know that I am regarded as an irritating cluck with a low ethical standard. But have you ever seriously thought what an opportunity there is here for reform?”
“Yes,” she said, decisively, and in quite the wrong tone.
“What I mean is,” I told her patiently, “if you happened to be looking for a good work to devote your life to, what could be better than reformation?
The scope is tremendous, now look at——”
“Is this a proposal of some kind?” Sally inquired.
“Some kind! I’d have you know that in spite of all my dubious ethics——Good God!” I broke off.
We were in Tyler Street. A short street, as becomes a minor President, rainswept, and empty now except for ourselves. What stopped me was the sudden appearance of a kind of vehicle further along. I couldn’t make it out very clearly on account of the rain, but I got the impression of a low built truck with several figures in light clothes on it crossing Tyler Street quite swiftly, and vanishing. That wouldn’t have been so bad if there were any street crossing Tyler Street, but there isn’t; it just came out of one side, and went into the other.
“Did you see what I saw?” I said.
“But how on earth——?” she began.
We walked on a few steps to the place where the thing had crossed, and looked at the solid brick wall on one side and the house-fronts on the other. “You must have been mistaken,” said Sally.
“Well, for—I must have been mistaken!”
“But it couldn’t have happened, could it?”
“Now, listen, Honey——”
But at that moment a girl stepped from the solid brick, about ten feet ahead of us. We gawped at her.
I don’t know whether her hair was her own, art and science can do so much together, but the way she wore it, it was like a great golden chrysanthemum a foot and a half across with a red flower set in it a little left of centre. It looked terrible. She was wearing a kind of pink tunic. Maybe it was silk. It wasn’t the kind of thing you expected to see in Tyler Street on a filthy wet night, but in sheer coverage it would have got by in a show most any place. What made it a real shocker was the things that had been achieved by embroidery. I never would have believed that a girl could—oh, well, anyway, there she stood, and there we stood.
When I say “she stood,” she certainly did, but somehow she did it about six inches above ground level. She looked at us both, then she stared at Sally just as hard as Sally was staring at her. It must have been some seconds before any of us moved. The girl opened her mouth as if she were speaking, but no sound came. Then she made a forget-it gesture, turned, and walked back into the wall.
Sally stood quite still. With the rain shining on her slicker she looked like a black statue. When she turned so that I could see her face under the hood there was an expression on it that was new to me. I put my arm round her, and found she was trembling.
“I’m scared, Jerry,” she said.
I was feeling more than a bit rattled myself, but she needed an act.
“No cause for that, Honey. There’s bound to be a simple explanation some place.”
“But it’s more than that, Jerry. Didn’t you see her face? She was exactly like me!”
“She was pretty much like,” I conceded.
“Jerry, she was exactly like.—I-I’m scared.”
“Must have been some trick of the light. Anyway, she’s gone now,” I said.
All the same, Sally was right. That girl was the image of herself. I’ve often wondered about that since . . .
Jimmy came into my room next morning with a copy of the Daniel City News. It carried a brief, facetious leader on the number of local citizens who had been seeing things lately.
“They’re beginning to take notice at last,” he said.
“How’s your own line going?” I asked.
He frowned. “I guess it’s not quite the way I thought. As I see it, it’s still in the experimental stage all right, but the transmitter may not be around here after all. This may be just the area he has it trained on for testing.”
“But why here?”
“How would I know. It’s got to be some place—and the transmitter could be any place.” He paused, looking portentous. “It could be mighty serious. Suppose the Russians had a transmitter, and could project things or people here by teleportation . . .?”
“Why here?” I said again. “I’d have thought Oak Ridge, or maybe Brooklyn Navy Yard—”
“Experimental,” he said, reprovingly.
“Oh,” I said, abashed. I went on to tell him what Sally and I had seen the previous night. “She sort of didn’t look the way I think of Russians,” I added.
Jimmy shook his head. “Might be camouflage. After all, behind that curtain they have to get their idea of the way our girls look from our magazines,” he pointed out.
Which was about as far as we got.
Next day, after about seventy-five per cent, of its readers had written in to tell about the funny things they’d been seeing, the News dropped the facetious angle. In two days more the thing had become factional, dividing sharply into what you might call the Modem, and the Classical camps. In the former, schismatic groups argued the claims of teleportage against three dimensional projection or some theory of spontaneous molecular assembly: in the latter, opinions could be sorted to beliefs in a ghostly invasion, a suddenly acquired visibility of habitual wandering spirits, or the imminence of Judgement Day. In the heat of debate it was becoming difficult to know who had seen how much of what, and who was enthusiastically bent on improving his case at some expense of fact.
On Saturday Sally and I met for lunch. Afterwards we took the car en route for a little place up in the hills which seemed to me an ideal spot for a proposal. But at the crossing of Jefferson and Main the man in front of me jumped on his brakes. So did I, and the guy behind me. The one behind him didn’t quite. There was an interesting crunch of metal going on the other side of the crossing, too. I stood up to see what it was all about, and then pulled Sally up beside me.
“Here we go again,” I said. “Look!”
Slap in the middle of the intersection was a—well, you could scarcely call it a vehicle—it was more like a flat trolley or platform, about a foot off the ground. And when I say off the ground, I mean just that. No wheels. It kind of hung there from nothing. Standing on it, dressed in coloured things like long shirts or smocks were half a dozen men looking around them. Along the edge of the platform was lettered: PAWLEY’S PEEPHOLES. One of the men was pointing out All Saints Church to another; the rest were paying more attention to the cars and the people. The cop on duty was hanging a goggling face out of his little traffic-control house. He bawled, he blew his whistle, then he bawled some more. The men on the platform took no notice. He got out of his box and came across the road like he was a volcano that had seen a nice place to erupt.
“Hey!” he bellowed.
It didn’t worry them. When he got a yard or two away they noticed him, nudged one another, and grinned. The cop’s face went purplish; his language was a pretty line in fission. But they just watched him with amused interest. He drew his stick, and went closer. He grabbed at a fellow in a yellow shirt—and his arm went right through him.
The cop stepped back. You could see his nostrils kind of spread, the way a horse’s do. He got a hold on his stick and made a fine circular swipe at the lot of them. They grinned back at him as the stick went through them.
I’ll hand it to that cop. He didn’t run. He stared at them a moment, then he turned and walked deliberately back to his box; just as deliberately he signalled the north-south traffic across. The guy ahead of me was ready for it, he drove right at, and through, the platform. It began to move, but I’d just have nicked it myself had it been nickable. Sally, looking back, said it slid away on a curve and disappeared through the front of the First National Bank.
When we got to the spot I’d had in mind the weather had come over bad; it looked dreary and unpropitious, so we drove around and then back to a nice quiet roadside restaurant just out of town. I was getting the conversation round to the mood where I wanted it when who should come over to our table but Jimmy.
“Fancy meeting you two,” he said. “Did you hear what went off at the Crossing this afternoon, Jerry?”
“We were there,” I told him.
“You know, Jerry, this is something bigger than we thought—a whole lot bigger. That platform thing. These people are technically way ahead of us. Do you know what I reckon they are?”
“Martians?” I suggested.
He stared at me. “Gee! Now how did you guess that?” he said, amazedly.
“I sort of saw it had to come,” I admitted. “But,” I added, “I kind of feel Martians wouldn’t be labelled ‘Pawley’s Peepholes’.”
“Oh, were they? Nobody told me that,” said Jimmy, and went away sadly.
But he’d wrecked the mood.
On Monday Anna, our stenographer, arrived in the office more scatterated than commonly.
“The most terrible thing just happened to me. Oh my, did I blush all over!”
“All over?” inquired Jimmy, with interest.
She scorned him.
“I was in my tub this morning, and when I looked up there was a man in a green shirt standing watching me. Naturally, I screamed at once.”
“Naturally,” agreed Jimmy. “And what happened then, or shouldn’t——?”
“He just stood there,” Anna said, firmly. “Then he sniggered at me, and walked away through the wall! Was I mortified!”
In this particular case I wasn’t certain of the answer, but Jimmy said:
“Very mortifying thing, a snigger—and at you, too——”
“That’s not what I—what I mean is, things like that oughtn’t to be allowed,” Anna said. “If a man’s going to be able to walk through a girl’s bathroom walls, where’s he going to stop?”
Which seemed a pretty fair question.
The boss arrived just then. I followed him into his room. He wasn’t looking happy.
“What the hell’s going on in this damned town, Jerry?” he demanded. “I’d like to know,” I told him.
“Wife comes home yesterday. Finds two incredible girls in the sitting-room. Thinks it’s me. First bust-up in twenty years. Girls vanish,” he said, succinctly.
“Sure,” I said, sympathetically.
That evening when I went to see Sally I found her sitting on the steps of the house in the drizzle.
“What on earth——?” I began.
