Science-Fiction Adventures in Dimension, page 8
After the fourth day of the phenomenon of the disappearing passengers, Mr. Steems’s lodgings began to get crowded—with suitcases, packages, storage batteries, saxophones in their cases, groceries of all kinds. One wall of his room was solidly banked with suitcases alone. After the fifth day, the space beneath his bed was filled and a second wall partly obscured. On the sixth day he began really to run out of space.
That day—the sixth—was the day the newspapers broke the story. The headlines were impressive.
52 MISSING IN CITY! MONSTER AT WORK?
And there it was. Up to a given hour, fifty-two citizens of all ages and both sexes had disappeared from the city’s streets, and other disappearances were being reported almost hourly: a list of unfortunates who had seemingly gone out of existence like snuffed candle flames. . . .
Mr. Steems read the list with a jaundiced eye. “I never seen none of ‘em,” he said bitterly to the missing persons’ luggage piled against the walls about him. “I don’t ask nobody their name an’ address when they get in my cab! It ain’t none of my business!” Then Mr. Steems again hurled the crushing, unanswerable question at an imaginary interrogator: “Whadda you want a guy to do? Stop runnin’ his taxi an’ starve to death?”
The newspaper account pointed out that none of the known missing had any reason to disappear. Some had vanished as early as eleven in the morning, and some as late as half-past twelve at night. All had dropped out of sight while on their way from one part of the city to another. Several had last been seen entering a taxicab. Anxious relatives were demanding that the police take drastic action. They demanded the questioning of taxi drivers—
“Yeah!” cried Mr. Steems furiously. “Not only that old bag hadda vanish, so Susie don’t speak to me no more, but now they’re gonna get everybody scared to ride in taxicabs!” He slammed down the paper and went to the corner saloon. He had a beer. He believed that he thought better with a beer. It was a delusion. He brooded. “Whadda they want?” he muttered oratorically, a little later. “It’s them Commies start stories like that! Them newspaper guys, they’re Commies!”
He had another beer, and his rage mounted to the point where he dropped a nickel in the saloon pay phone and furiously called a newspaper.
“Whadda you guys tryin’ to do?” he demanded shrilly. “You wanna drive a honest, self-respectin’ guy outa business ? You go printin’ stuff about people vanishin’ outa taxicabs, and how am I gonna make a livin’? You wanna drive a guy to crime?”
He hung up and went to his cab, muttering embitteredly. Three blocks away he picked up a fat man for a fare. The fat man had an evening paper in his hand. He gave an address. He said in mock fear, “You’re not the Taxi Monster, are you?”
Mr. Steems let in the clutch with a violent jerk. He drove a full hundred yards, hissing like superheated steam awaiting release. Then he spoke in a tone of suppressed frenzy. He expressed his opinion of newspaper reporters in terms that would have curdled sulphuric acid. He worked up to scathing comment on people who made jokes at guys who were only trying to earn an honest living. His voice rose. His bitterness increased. When—it was then nine forty-five p.m.—when he came to a red light and a large truck forced him to halt, he was expressing himself at the top of his lungs. There were stores on either side of the street. Their signs lighted his face clearly.
A squad car came to a halt beside him. Patrolman Cassidy said, “That’s him!” and got out and walked to the side of the cab. Mr. Steems was saying shrilly, “It’s guys like you—guys that because you got some money think you can raise hell with any guy that’s got to make a living—it’s guys like you that ruin this country! Yah, you capitalists—”
“Say,” said Cassidy in Mt. Steems’s ear. “What’s the matter?”
Mr. Steems jumped. Cassidy! Outrage upon outrage! He said furiously, “That guy in the back asked me if I’d killed anybody in my cab yet, on accounta that fancy piece in the paper—”
Patrolman Cassidy looked. Then he said, “That guy in the back? What guy in the back?”
Mr. Steems turned. There was no guy in the back at all. But on the deerskin seat cover was a watch, a monogrammed fountain pen in silver and gold, seventy-five cents in small silver, a hearing aid, three pants buttons, a glittering pile of zipper teeth, and a belt buckle.
Patrolman Cassidy signaled to the squad car. He stepped into the cab himself.
“We’re going to Headquarters,” he said in deadly calm. “I’ve been checking, and Susie’s mother ain’t the only one that was last seen getting into your cab, Mr. Steems! We’re goin’ to Headquarters, and don’t you try nothing funny on the way, you hear?”
Mr. Steems practically strangled on his sense of injustice. He started toward Headquarters. The squad car followed closely.
When at last he could speak, Mr. Steems cried shrilly, “You ain’t got nothing on me!”
And there was no answer from the back of the cab.
~ * ~
Mr. Steems can tell of these things. He can tell of his status after his lodgings had been searched, and—stacked against the wall, hidden under the bed, jammed into the closet—souvenirs turned up of seventy-one out of the seventy-two persons finally missing. The exception was, of course, Patrolman Cassidy, whose shield, service gun, whistle, handcuffs, brass knuckles, and other assorted metallic mementos lay enshrined at Headquarters as a symbol of devotion to duty.
Mr. Steems became instantly, nationally, famous as the Taxi Monster, murderer by wholesale. His downfall was ascribed to an untiring patrolman who, spurred on by love of a missing person’s daughter, had gone sleepless and followed clue after clue until finally he unmasked the monster—and had tragically become his final victim, done somehow to death on the way to Police Headquarters while a squad car followed close behind.
Mr. Steems was held without bail on seventy-one charges of murder in the first degree. (It would have been seventy-two, had Mr. Binder’s vanishing been reported.) Mr. Steems’s frenziedly righteous protests went unheeded. He was sunk.
But there is justice for all in these United States, especially if publicity goes along with it. A Mr. Irving Castleman was appointed by the court to defend Mr. Steems. He instantly pointed out that not one dead body had so far been found nor had any of the missing persons been seen dead by anybody. The principle of corpus delicti therefore applied. He requested Mr. Steems’s instant release. The authorities countered with separate charges of larceny for each article found piled up in Mr. Steems’s lodgings. His lawyer submitted that no complaint of theft had been made by any missing person. Those objects might have been gifts to Mr. Steems. There was no proof to the contrary. Mr. Steems should be released. It was not until the cops encouraged a lynching mob to hang around outside the jail that Mr. Steems’s lawyer consented to let him stay in a cell as a suspicious person.
Things boomed. Feature writers, news commentators, and gossip columnists made the most of Mr. Steems. He was compared to Mr. Landru, to Mr. Cripps, to Bluebeard, Gilles de Rais, and other mass murderers. His record topped them all. He was tendered the rewards of such eminence. Huge payments were offered for the story of his life and crimes, and his lawyer hopefully urged him to accept so he could pay his trial expenses. Three psychoanalysts explained his urge to kill as the result of childhood frustration. One psychoanalyst said it had developed because he was not frustrated as a child. Four sociologists declared that not Mr. Steems but society would be on trial when he stood before the bar. The Bell Telephone Company set aside its biggest switchboard for the use of the press when the trial took place.
Susie hit the headlines. Not as Mr. Steems’s fiancée, however, but as the heartbroken sweetheart of his final victim. Three other women, however, claimed to be already married to him, and twenty-nine more wrote and suggested matrimony.
And then the bottom dropped out of everything.
Patrolman Cassidy, who had vanished from Mr. Steems’s cab on the way to Headquarters, came limping into that building in a state of bemused distress. He said he had fallen out of Mr. Steems’s cab and found himself minus shield, gun, handcuffs, pants buttons, and the nails in his shoe, which came apart as he picked himself up. He’d come at once to Headquarters to report. . . .
An hour later a fat man was found lying on the street, out of breath. He insisted that he had kidded a taxicab chauffeur about being The Monster, and the next thing he knew he’d been thrown out on the street. Minus his watch, belt buckle, hearing-aid, pants zipper, shoe nails, and other possessions.
In quick succession other missing persons reappeared on the public streets. All were more or less disheveled. Each had lost all metal carried on his or her person. Each was convinced that he—or she—had not disappeared at all, but had merely gotten into a cab, instantly been thrown out, and immediately had come to report the offense. In four hours, nine missing persons reappeared—persons who had been missing for four to five days. In six hours, fifteen others appeared—having been missing from six days to seven. In twenty-four hours, fifty-eight out of the seventy-one known vanished persons had reappeared and unanimously identified Mr. Steems as associated with their mishap. And the end was not yet.
With keen intelligence, the police observed that those who returned were doing so in the reverse order from that in which they had disappeared. When, therefore, Susie’s mother appeared in outraged fury to report the theft of her shoes, wedding ring, and the steel springs out of her foundation garment by the villainous Mr. Steems—whom Susie would never speak to again—the police knew the end was near.
It was nearer than that. It had come. Mr. Binder found himself lying flat on his back on the public highway. He had, he thought at first, fallen out of a taxicab. Then he realized that he had merely fallen into the soft, ancient deerskin over which he had been gloating a moment before at 5:07 in the afternoon of May 3. Now there was neither taxicab nor deerskin about. Moreover, it had suddenly become the middle of the night, and his watch and small change were gone, and his pants were falling down. . . .
Mr. Binder went home—a matter of two blocks. There were papers piled in his front hall. He discovered that it was May 14. He learned what had been going on. He’d gone out of his house, tumbled into the deerskin which proved compenetrability a practical matter—and now it was eleven days and some hours later.
Mr. Binder brewed a cup of strong tea and thought concentratedly. With the facts before him and his background of technical knowledge, it was not difficult to work out a theory which completely explained all the observed and reported facts. But this had more than merely intellectual interest. There was a legal aspect. Seventy-one people could sue. . . . Mr. Binder shuddered. Then he discovered that his name had not been listed as among the missing. Nobody had reported him gone, because he lived alone. No souvenir of him had been found in Mr. Steems’s lodging, because Mr. Steems had hocked his watch.
Mr. Binder came to a very intelligent conclusion. The thing for him to do was keep his mouth shut.
Next day, however, he went over to see his friend Mr. McFadden.
“Now, what d’you know!” said Mr. McFadden. “I had it you were a victim of that there Taxi Monster. Where were you, anyway?”
“I’d like to be sure,” said Mr. Binder. “Listen, George!”
He told Mr. McFadden exactly what had happened. He had found, said Mr. Binder, the secret of compenetration. The atoms of solid things, even steel, are very small and relatively far apart, so that the solidest of objects has actually as much empty space in it as a dust cloud; neutrons and cosmic rays go through without trouble. Ordinarily two solid objects can no more penetrate each other than two dust clouds can penetrate each other. The dust clouds are held together by the air on which the dust particles float. Solid objects are held together by the electric and magnetic fields the individual atoms possess. But if the electric fields of atoms can be stopped from hindering, there is plenty of room for one seemingly solid object to penetrate another, and therefore for two or more things to be in the same place at the same time.
“And that,” said Mr. Binder, “is what I did. I couldn’t take away all the hindering of the atoms, George. I could just cut it down. But I fixed up a deerskin that used to be a throw on the parlor settee, and I could push anything but metal right through it without making a hole. Metal wouldn’t go through. It stayed behind. I had the deerskin sort of magnetized, George, and the effect wouldn’t last forever, but I started over here with it to show you that I could make things compenetrate.”
“Does that tell me where you’ve been—if I believe it?”
“Well,” said Mr. Binder, considering, “I don’t know that it does. You see, George, I missed out on one thing. Normally those atom fields hold each atom in its place up and down, and side to side, and fore and aft—if you get what I mean. When something—an atom—tries to push between them, they push right back. But when I hindered them from that, they still pushed. Only they pushed at right angles to up and down and side to side and fore and aft. At right angles to all of the other directions they ought to push in.”
“At right angles to all other directions?” said Mr. McFadden skeptically. “How could that be? ‘Twould be a fourth dimension!”
“It was,” said Mr. Binder modestly. “And the fourth dimension’s time flow, George. So when I fell through the deerskin and all those atoms pushed on the atoms that are me, they pushed me off into the fourth dimension. They pushed me into the middle of week after next. This is the middle of week after next to me, George. By relativity.”
Mr. McFadden stared. Then, carefully, he filled his pipe. He lighted it and puffed without words. Mr. McFadden was a skeptical man.
Mr. Binder said meditatively, “Ah, well! Those atoms that get their fields all tricked up won’t stay that way. Every day they threw people who fell through the deerskin just a little shorter distance. From the middle of the week after next, where they threw me, they’ve slowed down and slowed down. By what the papers say, I figure the last missing people only got thrown into the day after tomorrow. And maybe by this time the atoms in the deerskin are back to normal and won’t allow any compenetration.”
“Is that so?” said Mr. McFadden with fine scorn.
“I’m afraid so,” said Mr. Binder regretfully. “Compenetration can be done, George, but it just isn’t practical. I’m going to try replication.”
“And what, may I ask, is replication?”
“Ah!” said Mr. Binder enthusiastically. “That’s the philosophical notion that it could be possible for the same thing to be in several places at the same time! That has possibilities, George!”
It can be reported that Mr. Thaddeus Binder is now at work on the problem of replication, which—he will explain—is a philosophico-scientific prospect of great interest. He is a very nice, pink-cheeked, little man, Mr. Binder, but maybe somebody ought to stop him. He does not realize his talents. Replication, now . . .
Mr. Steems could be applied to for an opinion. After all, he has had experience with Mr. Binder’s experiments. If the matter of the Taxi Monster and the middle of the week after next is mentioned in his vicinity, he will begin to speak rapidly and with emotion. His speech will grow impassioned, his tone will grow hoarse and shrill at the same time, and presently he will foam at the mouth. But on the other hand, Susie Blepp and Patrolman Cassidy feel quite otherwise.
It’s pretty hard to decide.
>
~ * ~
Lester del Rey
AND IT COMES OUT HERE
Time travel is bound to result in a wide variety of paradoxes, such as a grandfather meeting a grandson when the grandson is older than the grandfather, or things even more unlikely, as you will see. Ordinarily such paradoxes occur during time travel in the past, not the future, but this story is so curiously constructed that it deals with both “past” and “future” at the same time, difficult though it may sound. And here the paradox itself is made to serve as the basis of a first-class plot. Of course, it never does unwind; the paradox remains paradoxical forever; but the story does not suffer because of that!
~ * ~
No, you're wrong. I'm not your father's ghost, even if I do look a bit like him. But it's a longish story, and you might as well let me in. You will, you know, so why quibble about it? At least, you always have…or do…or will. I don't know, words get all mixed up. We don't have the right attitude toward tense for a situation like this.
Anyhow, you'll let me in. I did.
Thanks. You think you're crazy, of course, but you'll find out you aren't. It's just that things are a bit confused. And don't look at the machine out there too long—until you get used to it, you'll find it's hard on the eyes, trying to follow where the vanes go. You'll get used to it, of course, but it will take about thirty years.
