I knew Dr. Essen. I’d interviewed her twice, right after Hiroshima, about the work she’d done with Meitner and Frisch in establishing the nuclear liquid-drop concept of atomic fission. I wanted very much to ask her what she was doing here but I didn’t. I knew I’d get more out of her if I let it come her way.
“Mr. De Kalb asked me to meet you, Mr. Cortland,” she said in her pleasant soft voice. “Hello, it’s nice to see you again. You’ve been having quite a time in Rio, haven’t you?”
“Old stuff now,” I said. “This looks promising, if you’re in on it. What’s up, anyhow?”
She gave me that shy smile again. She had a tired gentle face, gray curls cut very short, gray eyes like two flashes of light off a steel beam when she let you meet her direct gaze. Mostly she was too shy. But when you caught that rare quick glance of her it was almost frightening. You realized then the hard dazzling mind behind the eyes.
“I’ll let Mr. De Kalb tell you all about that,” she said. “It isn’t my secret. But you’re involved more than you know. In fact—” She paused, not looking at me, but giving the corner of the carpet a gentle scowl. “In fact, I’d like to show you something. We’ve got a little time to spare, and I want your reaction to—to something. Come with me and we’ll see.”
I followed her out into the hall, down a flight of steps and then into a big room, comfortably furnished. A study, I thought. But the bookshelves were empty now and everything was lightly filmed with dust.
“The fireplace, Mr. Cortland,” Dr. Essen said, pointing.
It was an ordinary fireplace, gray stone in the pine-paneled wall, with a gray stone hearth. But there seemed to be a stain at one spot on the hearth, close to the wall. I stepped closer. Then I knelt to look.
The speed of a chain of thoughts comes as close as anything I know to annihilating time itself. The images that flashed through my mind seemed to come all at once.
I saw the stain. I thought—transmutation. There was no overt reason but I thought it. And then before I could take it in clearly with my conscious mind, in the chambers of the unconscious I was standing again at the alley mouth in Rio at three in the morning, seeing a dark thing leap forward at me with its two hands outstretched.
I heard the thin humming in my ears, felt the burning of its touch. I remembered the sunburst of violent energy deep inside me that had heralded murder whenever it came. And I knew that all these were one—all these and the stain upon the hearth. The knowledge came unbidden, without reason.
But it was sure.
I didn’t question it. But I looked very closely at the stone. That stain was an irregular area where the stone seemed changed into another substance. I didn’t know what the substance was. It looked wholly unfamiliar. The gray of the hearth stopped abruptly, along an irregular pattern, and gave place to a substance that seemed translucent, shot through with veins and striae that were lighter, like the veins in marble.
The pine panels beside the fireplace were partly stained like the stone and a little area of the carpet that came up to the edge of the hearth. Wood, stone and cloth alike had turned into this—this marble stain. The veins in it were like tangled hair, curling together, embedded like some strange neural structure in half transparent flesh.
I looked up.
“Don’t touch it,” Dr. Essen said quickly.
I didn’t mean to. I didn’t need to. I knew what it would feel like. I knew that though it was perfectly motionless it would burn my hand with friction if I touched it. Dr. Essen knew too. I saw that in her face.
I stood up. “What is it?” I asked, my voice sounding oddly thin.
“The nekron,” she told me, almost absently. She was searching my face and the keenness of her gaze was al– most painful to meet. “That’s Mr. De Kalb’s word for it. As good a word as any. It’s—a new type of matter. Mr. Cortland—you have seen something like this before?” Her rare, direct look was like the sharpness of a knife going through me, cold and deep.
“Maybe,” I said. “No, never, really. But—”
“All right, I understand,” she nodded. “I wanted to verify something. I’ve verified it. Thank you.” She turned away toward the door. “We’d better get back. No, please—no questions yet. I can’t possibly explain until after you’ve seen the Record.”
“The Record? What—”
“It’s something that was dug up in Crete. It’s—peculiar. But thoroughly convincing. You’ll see it soon. Shall we go back?”
She locked the door behind us.
Certainly De Kalb didn’t look his forty-seven years any more than a Greek statue does. He looked like a young man, big and well proportioned. His sleek hair lay flat and short upon his head, and his face was handsome in the vacant way the Belvedere’s is.
There was no latent expression upon it and you felt that no emotions had ever drawn lines about the mouth or between the brows. Either he had never felt any or his control was such that he could suppress all feeling. There was the same placidity you see in the face of Buddha.
There was something odd about his eyes—I couldn’t make out their color. They seemed to be filmed as though with a cat’s third eyelid. Light blue, I thought, or gray, and curiously dull.
He gave me a strong handshake and collapsed into an overstaffed chair, hoisted his feet to a hassock. Grunting, he blinked at me with his dull stare. There was a curious clumsiness to his motions, and when he spoke, a curious ponderous quality in his diction. He seemed to feel something like indulgent contempt for the rest of the world. It was all right, I suppose. Nobody had better reason. The man was a genius.
“Glad you’re here, Mr. Cortland,” he said hoarsely. “I need you. Not for your intelligence which is slight. Not for your physical abilities, obviously sapped by years of wasteful and juvenile dissipation. But I have an excellent reason to think we may work well together.”
“I was sent to get an interview for Spread,” I told him.
“You were not.” De Kalb raised a forefinger. “You err through ignorance, sir. Robert Allister, the publisher of Spread is a friend of mine. He has money. He has agreed to do the world and me a service. You are under contract to him, so you do as he says. He says you will work with me. Is that clear?”
“Lucid,” I told him. “Except I don’t work that way. The contract says I’m to handle news assignments. I read the fine print too. There was no mention of peonage.”
“This is a news assignment. I shall give you an interview. But first, the Record. I see no point in futile discussion. Dr. Essen, will you be kind enough—” He nodded toward a cupboard.
She got out a parcel wrapped in cloth, handed it to De Kalb. He held it on his knee, unopened, tapped his fingers on its top. It was about the size and shape of a portable typewriter case.
“I have showed the contents of this,” he said, “only to Dr. Essen. And—”
“I am convinced,” Dr. Essen said dryly. “Oh yes, Ira. I am convinced I”
“Now I show it to you,” De Kalb said and held out the package. “Put it on the table—so. Now draw up a chair. Remove the wrappings. Excellent. And now—”
They were both leaning forward, watching me expectantly. I glanced from them to the battered box, then back again. It was a tarnished blue-white rectangle, battered, smudged with dirt, perfecly plain.
“It is of no known metal,” De Kalb said. “Some alloy, I think. It was found fifteen years ago in an excavation in Crete and sent to me unopened. Not intentionally. Nobody has ever been able to open it until recently. It is, as you may have guessed, a puzzle box. It took me fourteen years to learn the trick that would unlock it. It is also apparently indestructible. I shall now perform the trick for you.”