Judith Merril - The Year's Greatest Science Fiction & Fantasy 2

His mind recalled the moment forty years ago when he and Eleanor had found their first kiss floating on the sweet night air, and shared it, there on the cool brick porch, spontaneously. The stars were close. The friendly stars were winking points of light, as small as glowworms, as near, as intimate. Nightfall created them; at daybreak they dissolved. And there had been no need to think of them, of what they really were. Not then. Then there had been no Doorstop.

His mind touched fear, and anger at the fear. Immediately it flipped the pages of the past, pages of friends and fishing trips, of midnight calls to childbirth, hypochondria, surgery —pages of precious trials and triumphs and routines. That was his life, the busy hours, the days succeeding days, the months, the seasons, the gently moving years, all compassed by his family, his patients, and his town. That was his world, expanding rarely to include a little of Detroit; more rarely still, three weeks in California or in Canada; and sometimes, unavoidably, admitting through its walls the harsh awareness of wars abroad, of strange barbarities in stranger lands —of dark realities that had to stay unreal.

The voices in the unreal present lectured on, the chemist first, the metallurgist next, using the long-linked words of their technologies. Dr. Cavaness’s mind, escaping them, found him the safety of a day when he was twelve, rising excitedly at dawn, mounting his new red bike, whistling his happy dog, riding green-bordered, unpaved roads out to his uncle’s farm. He let himself be drawn into that day: there was the calm white house, the barn, the sunlit hill, and there was Uncle Matt shouting hello at him—and Uncle Matt was going to show him where beavers had built themselves a dam across the creek—and—

The picture vanished. Abruptly, cruelly, he was seventeen, and Uncle Matt was dead. The funeral service in the afternoon, the coffin covered with the flowering earth, the solemn, silent supper afterward—all this was over; he lay awake in bed, sadly and quietly understanding it. Lying there, he thought of how the minister had spoken of eternity. He tried to puzzle out the meaning of the word, tried really hard—and suddenly he seemed to see the endless years, innumerable, incomprehensible, receding to a frozen void that strangled sanity. Fear seized him, and anger at the fear, anger at this rude violation of his world by vastnesses less understandable than death. He called on God to drive the mystery out, extinguish it—but God, appallingly, had grown too great, unthinkably remote, as inconceivable as all the wastes of Time. Desperately, then, young Howard Cavaness had wrestled the idea, thrusting it out beyond the wall again, denying its existence to himself—

The scene receded suddenly, surrendering to another, more vivid, stronger still. It was an autumn night a year ago, cold, crystal-clear; and he and Eleanor were driving home after the show, after a dull main feature and a short or two. One of the shorts had been about astronomy, about the giant telescope at Palomar, how it was built and used, and what it saw. The narrator had spoken of the moon, the sun, the planets near and far, of light that reached the earth in seconds, minutes, hours. He had discussed the nearest stars, a few light-years away; the nearest neighboring galaxies, seen as they were a million years before; the myriad island universes each with its own infinity of suns, stretched to the ends of space, a billion years remote—a thousand million years, each single one of which meant six quadrillion miles. To Dr. Cavaness, the numbers had been words and nothing more. He scarcely thought about them as he drove, leaving the glare of neons far behind, turning into the shadowed, winding road that crossed the hill. Finally they reached the crest. He saw the sky. From end to end, it was alive with light.

Somehow he stopped the car. Just as it had when he was seventeen, the Mystery and its magnitude seized into him. Deep in his soul, his brain, the marrow of his bones, he felt the dreadful distances between the stars.

At the Directors’ Table, Dr. Cavaness forced his eyes to open, his clenching hands under its edge to part. Deliberately he forced himself to look around, to see the general’s face, the long-familiar face of young Ted Froberg, his one-time partner’s son, the listening faces of scientists, engineers, and men from government. Inanely his mind echoed the first comment it had made on his arrival: “Look at the big-shots— pretty fast company for a small-town G.P.!” He tried again to laugh a little at himself for having been impressed, and found no laughter. He made his glance move on—on past the Doorstop—discovering with a curious sense of shock that the mineralogist had resumed his seat, and that farther down a different man, a biophysicist from Princeton, was talking now. Immediately his mind shut out the words; immediately it took him back a week in time, back to his first acquaintance with the Doorstop—when it had been just that and nothing more.

He saw it there again, holding the door ajar as he had seen it then—a twelve-inch dumbbell on a five-inch cone, corroded green as any Roman sword, as any sunken galleon’s gun dredged from the sea. He saw the clouded crystal hemispheres at either end, obscured by dust which could not quite obscure two pinpoint brilliancies. Entering, he halted; put his golf clubs down. He felt the strangeness of its lines and curves. Frowning, he pushed it with his foot, finding it heavier than it ought to be. Annoyance rose in him, at Eleanor, cluttering the house with all these antiques.

“Hello?” he called to her. “Ellie, what is this thing?”

Her voice replied out of the kitchen, “Did you have a good game, dear? I’m glad you’re back for lunch.” Drying her hands, she came into the hall. “What thing? Oh, that. I got it just today from Mrs. Hobbs. It’s...well, it’s a doorstop.” She kissed him. “You don’t mind, do you, dear? I only had to pay four-fifty for it, after all.”

“Ellie, that’s not what I mean. I can see you’re using it for a doorstop. I mean, what is it? What was it meant to be originally?”

She laughed. “Goodness, I don’t know. It looks awfully old. Maybe it’s something off a sailing ship—one of those things they wrapped the ropes around.”

He knelt. He turned it carefully over on its side. “Could be,” he said. “Gosh knows it weighs enough. But if it is, what are those two glass ends for, and these holes reaching up into it right next to them? And what’s that sort of socket in its base?” Uneasily, the feeling of its strangeness grew on him. Somehow it wasn’t right. It didn’t fit.

Shaking his head, he put the Doorstop back against the door. He rose.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

“I don’t know. I just don’t like the thing. It... it’s queer.”

“Oh, don’t be superstitious.” She laughed at him. “Perhaps they got it off a Chinese ship, a junk or something. What difference does it make? Anyhow, now it’s just a doorstop.”

Taking his arm, she led him off to lunch, where there were other matters to discuss.

After that he had said nothing more about it. Three or four times a day, going in or out, he had paused to look at it, experiencing the same sensation of uneasiness. On each occasion he had shrugged, telling himself that it was hers, that if she liked it that was all right with him.

Then, three evenings later, instantaneously, all this had altered. It was a hot, dull evening under a sweltering sky, and he was waiting for her in the hall. The Doorstop stood against the big front door, holding it open to welcome in any unlikely breeze. The tiny focal points of light at the exact center of its now polished hemisphere gleamed in the curdling dusk. The sun’s departure had not diminished them. They shone more brightly than they had before. They shone—