“Save yourself the trip. Thing’s missing. Me and the sheriff, we went back to the office to get the pickup truck, so’s we could haul it to the compound, but when we got back up to the house it was gone. Plain disappeared!.. Say, how come you city folks want to come all the way out to these parts to see that thing anyway? It’s just an old liquid propane gas tank, if you ask me.”
The deputy’s comments made us all the more curious — not to mention suspicious — so our managing editor drove up anyway. And while he could not locate the cylinder at the compound, or at the ruins, or even in the nearby woods, the trip was amply rewarded. Through certain inducements EQMM managed to borrow (and re-record) the tape of the official statement made to Sheriff Joe Bartheme by Beryl Ward the day she reported Masterson missing. In a quavering voice which frequently broke down (as indicated by ellipses), here’s what she said:
“When Grist didn’t come upstairs for the dinner I left by the door — did that every day for him — I called but he didn’t answer. That got me worried... He kept the basement door locked, so I went round to the side of the house to look in a window — but they were painted black. I’d never noticed that before. I knocked and knocked on the glass; still there was no answer. That really got me upset; I thought he’d had a heart attack or something so I got an axe out of the shed and started hitting the lock on the storm-shelter door. Finally the lock fell apart and I went in... Didn’t see Griswold anywhere. All I found were a bunch of tubes and wires and gadgets, plus some weird charts on the wall... What really amazed me was the big Bible on the stand: It was opened to Genesis.” (Editor’s note: no trace of a Bible was ever found.) “In the back room of the basement I found this... kind of a cylinder, I guess... set up on a log-cutting horse. And it was glowing. So help me!.. Top and bottom were rounded off; looked like a huge vitamin pill, or a miniature rocket ship... I did what I knew would’ve made Griswold very angry, but I couldn’t help myself. Guess I wanted to know once and for all what he was up to — why he stayed up night after night — why his work was more important to him than... than anything else in the world. I started unscrewing the cap... All of a sudden there was a tremendous whoosh and I heard this weird, high-pitched squeaclass="underline" Scared the daylights out of me, but I looked inside and saw... I couldn’t believe it — I found a baby... Just a few months old — a naked baby! It looked up at me as if I were its mother. I was confused, I was frightened... First I wanted to run away, but instincts much deeper took hold of me, I guess. I reached in and pulled the baby out. A fine child, with purplish eyes and silky skin. It didn’t even cry. Just looked at me — poor thing! — and stopped breathing... I wondered where Griswold had gotten the baby, what he was doing with it — all sorts of weird things I wondered until I spotted, off in a black corner... I saw Griswold’s gray trousers and lab smock, his underwear and socks all neatly folded on a bench...”
At this point Miss Ward became silent, and when Sheriff Bartheme asked (more than once) what she did next, she broke down and cried hysterically. Nothing else on the tape was coherent. Later that afternoon Beryl Ward had to be removed from the house in a state police straightjacket, kicking and screaming. That night, the house went up in flames.
In the aftermath of these events — the disappearance of Griswold Masterson, the discovery of the cylinder, the loss of Miss Ward’s grip on reality, the destruction of the house — and as news spread out into the world, scientists and sociologists and theologians hastily began postulating theories. A few of these ideas were incorporated in the summary presented at a recent meeting of the American Board of Science in Washington, D.C.:
“Due to the absence of conclusive data, and the seclusion and secrecy in which Griswold Masterson chose to work throughout his life, and because so much of his research was destroyed, our inquiry, though arduous, has been, in many ways, unsatisfactory. Nevertheless, it is our shared opinion that Mr. Masterson achieved the ability to project himself into the physical form and mental development of his own infancy, and that he used this means to renew his future. That is to say, he opened the door to what he called the “Theoretical Future” not by achieving longevity, but by reducing his age as the framework of life around him progressed at its usual rate. This means that Masterson, who was sixty-three years old at the time of this experiment, by regressing, made available to himself another seventy-two years (based on current life expectancy for a male in this country)... The idea seems to have been to enable himself to observe the future at least seventy years hence, with his records of his first sixty-three years meant to serve as the link between his lifetimes. Of course, this would leave open the possibility of his regressing to infancy again and again — a capability he may not have originally anticipated... Tragically, however, we will probably never know precisely how he accomplished this, for the machine Beryl Ward found has disappeared, and the baby Griswold is dead.”
While the theory of the American Board of Science has the weight of evidence behind it, the editors of this magazine must point out that there is an important consideration that has not yet been addressed: the human element. Beryl Ward had apparently fallen desperately in love with Griswold Masterson. And faced with the prospect of having to watch the man she loved slowly bloom into a youngster — and then into a young man — while she grew shriveled and weak (unaware of the universal implications of his experiments), she may have placed a pillow over the child’s mouth until it wailed and clawed no longer. (Miss Ward is locked behind bars in an institution for the criminally insane.) Thus a basic human emotion may have been responsible for our being separated forever from the full implications of Masterson’s experiments. This, as we see it, is the ultimate irony, the ultimate tragedy of the life and times of Griswold Masterson.
The sheriff’s office is much too close to the real world to bend to the hypotheses of the intellectual community, so they have simply listed Griswold Masterson as a missing person. The child in the cylinder? From the pulpit Rev. Leopold Ossip has rendered the opinion, on more than one occasion, that the infant was the illegitimate offspring of Mr. Masterson and Miss Ward, and that in her madness she murdered her own son. The story she told the sheriff, Ossip proclaimed, was the invention of an unholy “and therefore diseased” mind. While much of Marshville seems to have accepted the reverend’s view, the rest of the world does not agree — judging from the many interpretations which have surfaced on the significance of the child. The most remarkable aspect of the entire affair, however, may be the steel cylinder. While its whereabouts has never been firmly established, a newspaper article (no date was indicated) clipped from the Battleboro Gazette, published in Saskatchewan, Canada, and sent to our offices by an anonymous reader, could well have some bearing on that mystery:
People have begun to gather on a hillside outside Battleboro, Saskatchewan, and each morning there seem to be more of them, speaking in a growing variety of tongues.
All day these people do little more than sit and stare at an object partially imbedded in the earth, which blocks off the mouth of a natural cave — one of a series in the area. The stainless-steel capsule, apparently catching the gleam of the sun, seems to glow as if from its own internal light.
Toward evening, the cave people can be heard chanting. Once the sun is down, they build campfires, and the chanting stops. Lately they have been entering the catacombs of surrounding caves to shelter themselves for the night and, it is said, to pray.