She had climbed down, dressed in a terricloth robe, from the terrace outside her bedroom window. She could see the robe on the dock, glinting white in the sun.
It was so much more pleasant to swim without a suit.
Her soaked hair plastered her forehead. She pushed it aside, rolled over and began her long, effortless crawl out into the big lake. The waves were a bit higher way out and sometimes when she rolled her face up to breathe, one would slap her in the face.
Suddenly she felt the churn of nausea. The hangover was worse than she thought. But messy to be sick out in the water like this.
She floated for a time as the feeling got worse. When the paroxysms started, she doubled over, unable to catch her breath, unable to straighten out. She coughed under water and it made a strange bubbling by her ears. Then, stupidly, she had to breathe and she strangled on the water she was sucking into her lungs.
She had no idea where the surface was, and she was climbing up an endless green ladder with arms as limp as wet doth and then there was a softness of music in her ears and it was so much easier and more delicious just to lie back and relax and sleep and…
It was Baedlik who first penetrated the barrier of the speed of light. The feat was not performed, as one might suppose, in the depths of space but in his laboratory in London. By bombarding the atoms of Baedlium with neutrons, he so increased the mass and attraction of the nuclei that the outer rings of electrons, moving at forty thousand miles per hour, were drawn in toward the nuclei, their speed proportionately increasing.
This decreased the dead space within the atom, resulting in an incredibly heavy material. When the speed of the outer rings passed the speed of light, the samples of Baedlium, to all intents and purposes, naturally ceased to exist at Baedlik’s focal point.
This, for over seventy years, was called Baedlik’s Enigma, until the lateral movement in time was explained by Glish, who also set forward the first set of formulae designed to predict and control this lateral movement.
Chapter II
The Watching Boxes
Howard Loomis did not have, in his background or experience, any comparable sensation. One moment every fibre of his body was tensed in vain effort to withstand the smash which would tear soul from body.
And, without transition, he lay on a gentle slope, still curled in a seated position, and the air that was cold was warm the night that was dark was suddenly a new day.
He sat up, still dressed in gray conservative suit, snap-brim hat, buttoned topcoat. His trembling hands rested against the grass. Or was it grass? It was not a proper green, having a bluish cast mixed with it.
Seventy feet away a fairytale forest cast a heavy shadow — mammoth trunks, roots like broken fingers, crowns as high as redwoods, reaching up toward a sky that was too blue. It was a purple blue. The disk of the sun was wide and in its yellow-glare was a tinge of blood.
Breathing hard, he scrambled to his feet, turning, looking around him, seeing nothing but the expanse of grass, a ragged outcropping of rock that glinted silver, the side of a hill that restricted his horizon.
There was no sign of car, bridge or tracks. And, after the first few seconds, he did not look for any. This was alien, this world. The air was thin, as on a high mountain and to have seen in this place his car or any fragment of the world he knew would have been as grotesque an anachronism as his own presence.
He listened and heard the distant sound of birds. The air was sweet with the scent of sun-warmed grasses.
Howard Loomis dropped to his knees.
His hat rolled away, unheeded. He ran thin fingers through his thinning hair and thought about delirium, Valhalla and death.
He took off his topcoat and threw it aside. He fingered the fabric of his familiar suit, hoping to gain from the touch of the smooth weave a surer grasp on reality. He looked at his sleeve, saw the place where the weaver had fixed the cigarette burn in Baltimore.
He spun to his feet as she coughed.
She was a tall girl in a wine evening dress. Her blue eyes were wide with fear and she stood, her hands at her throat. She looked at something in the air in front of her which did not exist.
“Rick!” she gasped.
Howard Loomis began to laugh. He couldn’t control it. He fell onto his hands and knees and laughed until the tears dripped ridiculously from the end of his sharp nose.
“Too… too much,” he gasped. “Now bring on the — the golden harps.”
“Who are you calling a harp?” the girl snapped.
The sound of her angry voice snapped him out of it. He stared at her in silence. “Where is this place? Who are you?”
“Those are my lines, mister.”
“I car’t tell you where we are, but I’m Howard Loomis. I sell Briskies. I skidded off a railroad bridge but I don’t remember hitting the bottom. I ended up right here.”
“You don’t belong here?” she asked.
“Do I look it? In this decorator’s nightmare am I part of the decor?”
“No,” she said. “You’re the Junior Chamber of Commerce type. You and blue trees don’t mix. I’m Mary Callahan. I was starting my strip when a hoppie named Rick walked up and shot me right between the eyes. At least that was where he was aiming. I saw him pull the trigger but I didn’t feel it hit.”
She reached an unsteady hand up and touched her smooth forehead between her eyebrows with her fingertips.
He took out his cigarettes. She came over and sat down beside him. They smoked in silence.
“Oh, great!” Mary Callahan said.
“Meaning that it’s tougher on you than on the common people? Let’s take a hike around this glamour pasture and see where we are?”
“In these?” she asked, holding out a slim foot encased in a silver sandal with a four inch heel. “You walk. I’ll wait.”
He shrugged. When he was forty feet from her, walking toward the hill, she said, “Hey! Howie! Don’t look now but there’s something floating over you.”
He looked up quickly and his mouth sagged open. It was a little metal box about the size of a cigar box. A fat lense protruded from the bottom of it. It had no visible means of support. Howard stepped quickly to one side. So did the box.
In sudden anger he picked up a rock and threw it at the box.
The rock sailed up, passed through the space where the box had been and continued on.
He turned and looked with exasperation at Mary Callahan. He cocked his head on one side, said, “Hmmm. You have one too.”
Fear of the unknown drove them together. Mary Callahan, in her high heels, topped him by two inches, yet she clung to his arm as she stared upward. The two boxes were twenty feet over their heads, drifting quietly side by side.
“They… they’re watching us!” said Mary Callahan.
And he knew that she was right. The lenses were cool observant eyes.
“This I’m not going to like,” she said grimly. “In spite of my profession I’m a girl who rather likes her privacy. I don’t want to be watched, even by floating cameras.”
She waited while he went down the slope, struggled up the steep hill. Tough brush aided him as did the outcroppings or rock. At last he gained the summit. He looked out over wild country. There were more forests, a wide river in the distance and several semiflat expanses which he judged to be covered by grass at least ten feet high. He saw no sign of human habitation.
He turned and looked back. The wine dress was brilliant against the blue-green grass. He saw her wave up at him. He started down the hill. She met him at the foot of the hill.