Robert Silverberg: Harwood's Vortex

The vortex bubbled up out of nowhere, hung shimmering in the air in front of me, glistened and gleamed brightly. There was a whirlpool of twisting currents in the air, and I wavered dizzily for a second or two while the Invaders poured through the newly-created gulf.

Then someone had me by the hand, someone was pulling me away. Leading me inside the house, behind a screen, safe from danger.

I didn’t understand what had happened. I was numb with shock, half-blinded by the brightness. I felt Laura near me, and that was all I cared to think about.

After a couple of minutes, I opened my eyes. “What was that?” I asked weakly. “What happened?”

Two minutes before, I had been approaching the Harwood house, impatient to see Laura, untroubled by the world around me. And suddenly—

“It was Daddy’s experiment,” Laura half-sobbed. “It—it worked!”

“The old crackpot,” I said. “The dimensional gulf—at last? I wouldn’t believe it, if I hadn’t nearly fallen into it!”

She nodded. “I saw you staggering around out there. I got out from just in time to—to—”

I held her tight against me, while she unloaded some of her anxiety. She sobbed for a minute or two, not trying to say anything. I looked uneasily out the window. Yes, it was still going on.

Right in front of Abel Harwood’s house, the vortex was open—and coming up through it were what we later knew as the invaders. Globes of light, radiant and intangible, floating up out of nowhere and ringing themselves in the air like so many loathsome jellyfish.

“Why doesn’t he close it?” I asked. “Those things are still coming through! Laura, where’s your father?”

“I’m right here,” said a cold, business-like voice from behind me. I turned and saw Abel Harwood’s husky frame in the door. “What do you want of me?” Harwood asked.

“Do you see what’s going on out there?”

He nodded. “So?”

“Those things out there—what are they? What are you letting into the world, Harwood?”

“It’s an experiment, young man.” He crossed his arms over his dressing-gown. “Would you mind leaving my house, now?”

“Daddy!”

“You keep out of this, Laura.” He turned to me. “I’ve asked you to leave my house. I don’t want you meddling in my experiments any more.”

I repressed an urge to aim a kick at his well-stuffed belly. Abel Harwood was a crackpot, a crazy amateur scientist who had been riding this other-dimension kick for years. Now, he’d let loose Lord knew what upon the world—the things were still funnelling through the gateway—and he was determined to see it continue.

“Harwood, you’re playing with something too big for you! You’re foolish and blind, and you—”

“You’re a trespasser,” he interrupted. “I’ve ordered you out of my home twice, already. Will you go now—or do I have to get my gun?”

“I’ll go,” I said. I broke loose from Laura and, with an uneasy look at the gateway outside, headed for the door.

“Wait, Dad—you can’t make him go outside in that! ”

“Quiet, Laura.”

She started to say something else, but I put my hand on her arm. “Never mind, Laura.”

I opened the front door and stepped outside.

It was hellish out there. The things had formed a circle around the vortex in the air and hung there, humming and crackling. The air was dry and strange smelling.

I paused on the porch of the Harwood house for just a moment, tucked my head under my arm and ran—ran as fast as my legs would go. I charged through the garden, carefully averting the vortex that had opened right in front of me, circled the nest of things buzzing in the air, and dashed down the street.

One of the creatures followed me a short distance, hovering a foot or two above my head. I watched it uneasily, dodged and ducked as it took swipes at me. It caught me once, a grazing blow on the side of my scalp. I smelled burned hair, and felt as if I’d stuck my head up an electric socket. It drove low for another swipe.

And just then it began to rain.

The heavens opened and the water came pouring down and the sky was bright with lightning. And the globes went up to meet it. The one that had been tormenting me forgot me in an instant and went to join its fellows.

I stood there and watched them. They rose in a straight line—there must have been a hundred of them by now—climbing upwards, toward the black clouds overhead. The sky was split by a giant bolt of lightning, and I saw all hundred of them limned grotesquely against it, enlarged and given color by the lightning, drinking it. Then I started running again.

I kept on running until I was home, in my two-room flat near the University. I dove in, locked and bolted the door, threw off my soaking clothing. I grabbed for the phone and dialed the Harwood number.

“Hello?”

It was Laura’s voice. I sighed in relief. It could have been old Abel, after all.

“Laura? This is Chuck.”

Her voice dropped. “Daddy’s right here. I can’t talk very much.”

“Tell me—what the devil has he done? You should have seen those things drinking up the lightning!”

“I did,” she said. “I know what you mean.”

“Is the gateway still open?”

“Yes. They’re still coming through. Chuck, I—I don’t know what’s going to happen. I— no, Daddy!”

There was a sound of a little scuffle, and then the phone went dead. I stared at the silent receiver for a second, then let it thunk back on the cradle. I sat down on the edge of my bed and stared at my soggy socks for a long while.

Abel Harwood fit the classic description of a crackpot perfectly. My status as an authentic scientist—if only an underpaid engineer—gave me every right to make that statement.

I had been doing some experimental force-field work, and when I met Laura she told me her father would be interested in talking to me about my work. So I had dinner at their home one night, and started talking about my project—and then old Harwood started talking about his.

It was some hodge-podge. Dimensional tubes, and force vortices, and subspace converters. A network of gadgetry in the basement that had taken twenty years and as many thousand dollars to build. A fantastic theory of bordering dimensions and alien races. I listened as long as I could, then made the mistake of expressing my honest opinion.

Harwood looked at me a long time after I finished. Then he said, “Just like all the others. Very well, Mr. Matthews. Kindly don’t pay us a second visit.”

“If that’s the way you want it,” I told him. “But I still think it’s cockeyed!”

And a month later, I still did. Only now there was this vortex in the street, spewing forth alien entities that drank radiation. Crackpot or not, Harwood had turned something on that might take some doing to turn off.

Outside, the storm was continuing. I snapped on my radio, listened to the crackling of static that was the only sound ft produced. Were Harwood’s pets blanketing the radio frequencies, I wondered, as I twiddled the dials? Were they drinking them too?

I’d know soon enough, I thought.

That was just the beginning, that night when the Invaders came storming out of Harwood’s vortex. The next few days told of terror and panic, of retreat and the swift crumbling of civilization.

The Invaders, they were called. Thousands of them, wandering around New York and the metropolitan area, devouring electricity, attacking people, bringing a reign of terror to the city.