Bob Leman - Window.pdf - po ang - Januszek66

Window

by Bob Leman

“We don’t know what the hell’s going on out there,” they told Gilson in Washington. “It may

be pretty big. The nut in charge tried to keep it under wraps, but the army was furnishing

routine security, and the commanding officer tipped us off. A screwball project. Apparently

been funded for years without anyone paying much attention. Extrasensory perception, for

God’s sake. And maybe they’ve found something. The security colonel thinks so, anyway.

Find out about it.”

The Nut-in-Charge was a rumpled professor of psychology named Krantz. He and the

colonel met Gilson at the airport, and they set off directly for the site in an army sedan. The

colonel began talking immediately.

“You’ve got something mighty queer here, Gilson,” he said. “I never saw anything like it,

and neither did anybody else. Krantz here is as mystified as anybody. And it’s his baby.

We’re just security. Not that they’ve needed any, up to now. Not even any need for secrecy,

except to keep the public from laughing its head off. The setup we’ve got here is—”

“Dr. Krantz,” Gilson said, “you’d better give me a complete rundown on the situation here.

So far, I haven’t any information at all.”

Krantz was occupied with the lighting of a cigar. He blew a cloud of foul smoke, and through

it he said, “We’re missing one prefab building, one POBEC computer, some medical

machinery, and one, uh, researcher named Culvergast.”

“Explain ‘missing,’ ” Gilson said.

“Gone. Disappeared. A building and everything in it. Just not there any more. But we do

have something in exchange.”

“And what’s that?”

“I think you’d better wait and see for yourself,” Krantz said. “We’ll be there in a few

minutes.” They were passing through the farther reaches of the metropolitan area, a series of

decayed small towns. The highway wound down the valley beside the river, and the towns

lay stretched along it, none of them more than a block or two wide, their side streets rising

steeply toward the first ridge. In one of these moribund communities they left the highway

and went bouncing up the hillside on a crooked road whose surface changed from

cobblestones to slag after the houses had been left behind. Beyond the crest of the ridge the

road began to drop as steeply as it had risen, and after a quarter of a mile they turned into a

lane whose entrance would have been missed by anyone not watching for it. They were in a

forest now; it was second growth, but the logging had been done so long ago that it might

almost have been a virgin stand, lofty, silent, and somewhat gloomy on this gray day.

“Pretty,” Gilson said. “How does a project like this come to be way out here, anyhow?”

“The place was available,” the colonel said. “Has been since World War Two. They set it up

for some work on proximity fuses. Shut it down in ’48. Was vacant until the professor took it

over.”

“Culvergast is a little bit eccentric,” Krantz said. “He wouldn’t work at the university—too

many people, he said. When I heard this place was available, I put in for it, and got it—along

with the colonel, here. Culvergast has been happy with the setup, but I guess he bothers the

colonel a little.”

“He’s a certifiable loony,” the colonel said, “and his little helpers are worse.”

“Well, what the devil was he doing?” Gilson asked.

Before Krantz could answer, the driver braked at a chain-link gate that stood across the lane.

It was fastened with a loop of heavy logging chain and manned by armed soldiers. One of

them, machine pistol in hand, peered into the car. “Everything O.K., sir?” he said.

“O.K. with waffles, Sergeant,” the colonel said. It was evidently a password. The noncom

unlocked the enormous padlock that secured the chain. “Pretty primitive,” the colonel said as

they bumped through the gateway, “but it’ll do until we get proper stuff in. We’ve got men

with dogs patrolling the fence.” He looked at Gilson. “We’re just about there. Get a load of

this, now.”

It was a house. It stood in the center of the clearing in an island of sunshine, white, gleaming,

and incongruous. All around was the dark loom of the forest under a sunless sky, but

somehow sunlight lay on the house, sparkling in its polished windows and making brilliant

the colors of massed flowers in carefully tended beds, reflecting from the pristine whiteness of

its siding out into the gray, littered clearing with its congeries of derelict buildings.

“You couldn’t have picked a better time,” the colonel said. “Shining there, cloudy here.”

Gilson was not listening. He had climbed from the car and was staring in fascination. “Jesus,”

he said. “Like a goddamn Victorian postcard.”

Lacy scrollwork foamed over the rambling wooden mansion, running riot at the eaves of the

steep roof, climbing elaborately up towers and turrets, embellishing deep oriels and outlining

a long, airy veranda. Tall windows showed by their spacing that the rooms were many and

large. It seemed to be a new house, or perhaps just newly painted and supremely well-kept. A

driveway of fine white gravel led under a high porte-cochère.

“How about that?” the colonel said. “Look like your grandpa’s house?”

As a matter of fact, it did: like his grandfather’s house enlarged and perfected and seen

through a lens of romantic nostalgia, his grandfather’s house groomed and pampered as the

old farmhouse never had been. He said, “And you got this in exchange for a prefab, did

you?”

“Just like that one,” the colonel said, pointing to one of the seedy buildings. “Of course we

could use the prefab.”

“What does that mean?”

“Watch,” the colonel said. He picked up a small rock and tossed it in the direction of the

house. The rock rose, topped its arc, and began to fall. Suddenly it was not there.

“Here,” Gilson said. “Let me try that.”

He threw the rock like a baseball, a high, hard one. It disappeared about fifty feet from the

house. As he stared at the point of its disappearance, Gilson became aware that the smooth

green of the lawn ended exactly below. Where the grass ended, there began the weeds and

rocks that made up the floor of the clearing. The line of separation was absolutely straight,

running at an angle across the lawn. Near the driveway it turned ninety degrees, and sliced

off lawn, driveway and shrubbery with the same precise straightness.

“It’s perfectly square,” Krantz said. “About a hundred feet to a side. Probably a cube,

actually. We know the top’s about ninety feet in the air. I’d guess there are about ten feet of it

underground.”

“It?” Gilson said. “ ‘It’? What’s ‘it’?”

“Name it and you can have it,” Krantz said. “A three-dimensional television receiver a

hundred feet to a side, maybe. A cubical crystal ball. Who knows?”

“The rocks we threw. They didn’t hit the house. Where did the rocks go?”

“Ah. Where, indeed? Answer that and perhaps you answer all.”

Gilson took a deep breath. “All right. I’ve seen it. Now tell me about it. From the beginning.”

Krantz was silent for a moment; then, in a dry lecturer’s voice he said, “Five days ago, June

thirteenth, at eleven thirty a.m., give or take three minutes, Private Ellis Mulvihill, on duty at

the gate, heard what he later described as ‘an explosion that was quiet, like.’ He entered the

enclosure, locked the gate behind him, and ran up here to the clearing. He was

staggered—‘shook-up’ was his expression—to see, instead of Culvergast’s broken-down

prefab, that house, there. I gather that he stood gulping and blinking for a time, trying to

come to terms with what his eyes told him. Then he ran over there to the guardhouse and

called the colonel. Who called me. We came out here and found that a quarter of an acre of

land and a building with a man in it had disappeared and been replaced by this, as neat as a

peg in a pegboard.”

“You think the prefab went where the rocks did,” Gilson said. It was a statement.

“Why, we’re not even absolutely sure it’s gone. What we’re seeing can’t actually be where

we’re seeing it. It rains on that house when it’s sunny here, and right now you can see the

sunlight on it, on a day like this. It’s a window.”

“A window on what?”

“Well—that looks like a new house, doesn’t it? When were they building houses like that?”

“Eighteen seventy or eighty, something like—oh.”

“Yes,” Krantz said. “I think we’re looking at the past.”

“Oh, for God’s sake,” Gilson said.

“I know how you feel. And I may be wrong. But I have to say it looks very much that way. I

want you to hear what Reeves says about it. He’s been here from the beginning. A graduate

student, assisting here. Reeves!”

A very tall, very thin young man unfolded himself from a crouched position over an

odd-looking machine that stood near the line between grass and rubble and ambled over to

the three men. Reeves was an enthusiast. “Oh, it’s the past, all right,” he said. “Sometime in

the eighties. My girl got some books on costume from the library, and the clothes check out

for that decade. And the decorations on the horses’ harnesses are a clue, too. I got that

from—”

“Wait a minute,” Gilson said. “ Clothes? You mean there are people in there?”

“Oh, sure,” Reeves said. “A fine little family. Mamma, poppa, little girl, little boy, old granny

or auntie. A dog. Good people.”

“How can you tell that?”

“I’ve been watching them for five days, you know? They’re having— were having—fine

weather there—or then, or whatever you’d say. They’re nice to each other, they like each

other. Good people. You’ll see.”

“When?”

“Well, they’ll be eating dinner now. They usually come out after dinner. In an hour, maybe.”

“I’ll wait,” Gilson said. “And while we wait, you will please tell me some more.”

Krantz assumed his lecturing voice again. “As to the nature of it, nothing. We have a

window, which we believe to open into the past. We can see into it, so we know that light

passes through; but it passes in only one direction, as evidenced by the fact that the people

over there are wholly unaware of us. Nothing else goes through. You saw what happened to

the rocks. We’ve shoved poles through the interface there—there’s no resistance at all—but

anything that goes through is gone, God knows where. Whatever you put through stays

there. Your pole is cut off clean. Fascinating. But wherever it is, it’s not where the house is.

That interface isn’t between us and the past; it’s between us and—someplace else. I think our

window here is just an incidental side-effect, a—a twisting of time that resulted from whatever

tensions exist along that interface.”

Gilson sighed. “Krantz,” he said, “what am I going to tell the secretary? You’ve lucked into

what may be the biggest thing that ever happened, and you’ve kept it bottled up for five

days. We wouldn’t know about it now if it weren’t for the colonel’s report. Five days wasted.

Who knows how long this thing will last? The whole goddamn scientific establishment ought

to be here—should have been from day one. This needs the whole works. At this point the

place should be a beehive. And what do I find? You and a graduate student throwing rocks

and poking with sticks. And a girlfriend looking up the dates of costumes. It’s damn near

criminal.”

Krantz did not look abashed. “I thought you’d say that,” he said. “But look at it this way.

Like it or not, this thing wasn’t produced by technology or science. It was pure psi. If we can

reconstruct Culvergast’s work, we may be able to find out what happened; we may be able to

repeat the phenomenon. But I don’t like what’s going to happen after you’ve called in your

experimenters, Gilson. They’ll measure and test and conjecture and theorize, and never once

will they accept for a moment the real basis of what’s happened. The day they arrive, I’ll be

out. And damnit, Gilson, this is mine .”

“Not any more,” Gilson said. “It’s too big.”

“It’s not as though we weren’t doing some hard experiments of our own,” Krantz said.

“Reeves, tell him about your batting machine.”

“Yes, sir ,” Reeves said. “You see, Mr. Gilson, what the professor said wasn’t absolutely the

whole truth, you know? Sometimes something can get through the window. We saw it on the

first day. There was a temperature inversion over in the valley, and the stink from the

chemical plant had been accumulating for about a week. It broke up that day, and the wind

blew the gunk through the notch and right over here. A really rotten stench. We were

watching our people over there, and all of a sudden they began to sniff and wrinkle their

noses and make disgusted faces. We figured it had to be the chemical stink. We pushed a pole

out right away, but the end just disappeared, as usual. The professor suggested that maybe

there was a pulse, or something of the sort, in the interface, that it exists only intermittently.

We cobbled up a gadget to test the idea. Come and have a look at it.”

It was a horizontal flywheel with a paddle attached to its rim, like an extended cleat. As the

wheel spun, the paddle swept around a table. There was a hopper hanging above, and at

intervals something dropped from the hopper onto the table, where it was immediately

banged by the paddle and sent flying. Gilson peered into the hopper and raised an

interrogatory eyebrow. “Ice cubes,” Reeves said. “Colored orange for visibility. That thing

shoots an ice cube at the interface once a second. Somebody is always on duty with a

stopwatch. We’ve established that every fifteen hours and twenty minutes the thing is open

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