There was another car parked in the narrow lane. The police at the house had gotten a doctor, who was evidently still in the building.
They went up into the room on the second floor. There were three policemen here, with a grave, mustachioed civilian who had the consequential air of the physician in a European—or Asiatic—country. Duval lay on a canvas cot, evidently provided for the police who occupied the building now. He slept heavily. His face was ravaged. His collar was torn open at his throat, as if in a frenzy of agitation when he felt that madness come upon him. His hands were bandaged. The physician explained at length to Ghalil, in Turkish. Ghalil then asked questions of the police. There was a portable electric lantern on the floor, now. It lighted the room acceptably.
Coghlan’s eyes swept about the place. Changes? No change except the cot. . . No! There had been books here beside Duval, on the floor. Ghalil had said they were histories in which Duval tried to find some reference to the building itself. There were still a few of those books—half a dozen, perhaps, out of three or four times as many. The rest had vanished.
But in their place were other things.
Coghlan was staring at them when Ghalil explained:
“The police heard him making strange sounds. They came in and he was agitated to incoherence. His hands were frost-bitten. He held the magnet against the appearance of silver and thrust books into it, shouting the while. The books he thrust into the silvery film vanished. He does not speak Turkish, but one of them thought he was shouting at the wall in Greek. They subdued him and brought a physician. He was so agitated that the physician gave him an injection to quiet him.”
Coghlan said: “Damn!”
He bent over the objects on the floor. There was an ivory stylus and a clumsy reed pen and an ink-pot—the ink was just beginning to thaw from solid ice—and a sheet of parchment with fresh writing upon it. The writing was the same cursive hand as the memo mentioning “frigid Beyond” and “adepts” and “Appolonius” in the old, old book with Coghlan’s fingerprints. There was a leather belt with a beautifully worked buckle. There was a dagger with an ivory handle. There were three books. All were quite new, but they were not modern printed books: they were manuscript books, written in graceless Middle Greek with no spaces between words or punctuation or paragraphing. In binding and make-up they were exactly like the Alexiad of seven hundred years ago. Only—they were spanking new.
Coghlan picked up one of them. It was the Alexiad. It was an exact duplicate of the one containing his prints, to the minutest detail of carving in the ivory medallions with which the leather cover was inset. It was the specifically same volume— But it was seven-hundred years younger— And it was bitterly, bitterly cold.
Duval was more than asleep. He was unconscious. In the physician’s opinion he had been so near madness that he had had to be quieted. And he was quieted. Definitely.
Coghlan picked up the alnico magnet. He moved toward the wall and held the magnet near the wet spot. The silvery appearance sprang into being. He swept the magnet back and forth. He said:
“The doctor couldn’t rouse Duval, could he? So he could write something for me in Byzantine Greek?”
He added, with a sort of quiet bitterness. “The thing is shrinking—naturally!”
It was true. The wet spot was no longer square. It had drawn in upon itself so that it was now an irregular oval, a foot across at its longest, perhaps eight inches at its narrowest.
“Give me something solid,” commanded Coghlan. “A flashlight will do.”
Laurie handed him Lieutenant Ghalil’s flashlight. He turned it on—it burned only feebly—and pressed it close to the silvery surface. He pushed the flashlight into contact. Into the silvery sheen. Its end disappeared. He pushed it through the silver film into what should have been solid plaster and stone. But it went. Then he exclaimed suddenly and jerked his hand away. The flashlight fell through—into the plaster. Coghlan rubbed his free hand vigorously on his trouser-leg. His fingers were numb with cold. The flashlight had been metal, and a good conductor of frigidity.
“I need Duval awake!” said Coghlan angrily. “He’s the only one who can write that Middle Greek—or talk it or understand it! I need him awake!”
The physician shook his head when Ghalil relayed the demand. “He required much sedative to quiet him,” said Ghalil. “He cannot be roused. It would take hours, in any case.”
“I’d like to ask them,” said Coghlan bitterly, “what they did to a mirror that would make its surface produce a ghost of itself. It must have been something utterly silly!”
He paced up and down, clenching and unclenching his hands. “To make a gadget Duval called a ‘magic mirror’ “—his tone was sarcastic—”they might try diamond-dust or donkey-dung or a whale’s eyelashes. And one of them might work! Somebody did get this gadget, by accident we can’t hope to repeat!”
“Why not?”
“We can’t think, any more, like lunatics or barbarians or Byzantine alchemists!” snapped Coghlan. “We just can’t! It’s like a telephone! Useless by itself. You have to have two telephones in two places at the same time. We can see that. To use a thing like this, you have to have two instruments in the same place at different times! With telephones you need a connection of wire, joining them. With this gadget you need a connection of place, joining the times!”
“A singularly convincing fantasy,” said Ghalil, his eyes admiring. “And just as you can detect the wire between two telephone instruments—”
“—You can detect the place where gadgets are connected in different times! The connection is cold. It condenses moisture. Heat goes into it and disappears. And I know,” said Coghlan defiantly, “that I am talking nonsense! But I also know how to make a connection which will create cold, though I haven’t the ghost—hah, damn it!—of an idea how to make the instruments it could connect! And making the connection is as far from making the gadgets as drawing a copper wire is from making a telephone exchange! All I know is that an alnico magnet will act as one instrument, so that the connection can exist!”
Mannard growled: “What the hell is all this? Stick to facts! What happened to Duval?”
“Tomorrow,” said Coghlan in angry calm, “he’s going to tell us that he heard faint voices through the silvery film when he played with the magnet. He’s going to say the voices were talking in Byzantine Greek. He’s going to say he tried to rap on the silver stuff—it looked solid—to attract their attention. And whatever he rapped with went through! He’ll say he heard them exclaim, and that he got excited and told them who he was—maybe he’ll ask them if they were working with Appolonius, because Appolonius was mentioned on the flyleaf of that book—and offer to swap them books and information about modern times for what they could tell and give him! He’ll swear he jammed books through—mostly history-books in modern Greek and French— and they shoved things back. His frost-bitten hands are the evidence for that! When something comes out of that film or goes into it, it gets cold! The ‘frigid Beyond’! He’ll tell us that the ghost of the gadget began to get smaller as he swapped—the coating or whatever produced the effect would wear terrifically with use!—and he got frantic to learn all he could, and then your policemen came in and grabbed him, and then he went more frantic because he partly believed and partly didn’t and couldn’t make them understand. Then the doctor came and everything’s messed up!”
“You believe that?” demanded Mannard.
“I know damned well,” raged Coghlan, “he wouldn’t have asked them what they did to the mirror to make it work! And the usable surface is getting smaller every minute, and I can’t slip a written note through telling them to run-down the process because Duval’s the only one here who could ask a simple question for the crazy answer they’d give!”