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

And suddenly, before his eyes, they changed.

They did not move; there was no movement visible. The inner one, the one toward the hall, had disappeared. The other, which had been pointing straight out through the door, was now displaced by forty-five degrees. It pointed outward still, but to the sky.

He saw. For several seconds he did not understand. And then the first chill wave of comprehension struck at him. He had assumed those minute brilliancies to be reflections of the outer light; he had ignored their immobility. They shone where light was not; they were inside the hemispheres. They were inside the Doorstop, and part of it, part of its armored and mysterious purposes. It was no simple artifact. Alien to him and strange, it was a mechanism, a machine.

The Doorstop stood there against the door. He stared at it. The questions sounded in his skull. What was it? What was it made to do? Where was it from? The questions and the contradictions hammered him—its thick corrosion, as though it were a thing out of past ages before machines were born; the wrongness of its planes and curving surfaces; the two infinitesimal fires shifting fast as thought. He stood there staring at the Doorstop, and felt an answer stirring in his mind, stirring like something vast and dark and cold beneath the summer surface of the sea. Instantly, angrily, he rejected it.

When Eleanor came down the stairs to join him, he told her nothing. They drove to dinner; they returned; finally they went to bed. And all the while, withdrawn into himself, he fought the obstinate irrationalities, trying to bend them to familiar shapes, seeking an answer native to his world.

He found it. It lay there ready-made, compounded for him out of the threat of war, out of repeated rumors, tensions, secrecies—the paper perils of the day and year, co-cooned in headlines which could be torn and burned and thrown away. In these, he told himself, the Doorstop had had its origin. Men had conceived it. Men had employed the magic of their sciences to give it form and plan its functioning. Somewhere, in the not-yet-believable mythology of arming for destruction and defense, it had its place.

He thought of guarded factories, locked laboratories, of dangerous knowledge, spies and counter-spies. The mystery was explained; he was relieved of the necessity for explanation, for doubt, for further thought. The Doorstop was a simple thing, as understandable as friend or enemy, as easily acted on. Whatever knowledge it might yield should either be protected from all eyes or torn from it. He thought of Teddy Froberg, grown up now, an electronics engineer working behind the ramparts of Security. Young Ted would know about the Doorstop; where it belonged; how to dispose of it.

He told himself all this repeatedly; each repetition was a stone to seal the chasm menacing his world, to seal away that other answer still pressing upward to his consciousness. He wrapped himself in certainty. Imagining the military importance of the Doorstop, he let himself enjoy the thrill of touching great affairs. He chuckled at the thought of how surprised young Ted would be. After a time, he slept.

Next morning, after breakfast, he called on Mrs. Hobbs, the antique dealer, and questioned her. Peevishly she assured him that everything in her shop was come by honestly, that he was welcome to go right over and ask that Cory boy, who’d sold it to her.

He went right over; and the Cory boy, snatching a four-bit bribe, told him that he had found the Doorstop down near the railroad tracks, half buried in the ground where there had been a sort of fire.

Afterward he drove into Detroit.

At the Directors’ Table, Dr. Howard Cavaness recalled how the expression on Ted Froberg’s face had changed at the unwrapping of the Doorstop, how he himself had been surprised at that astonishment. He recalled going home and telling Eleanor, too frequently, never to say a word to anyone. He recalled the noncommittal questioners, civilian, military, who had come to them, to Mrs. Hobbs, and to the Cory boy. And he remembered how, during those few days, the shadow of disquiet had attended him, waiting for moments when his guard was down—how it had crept upon him in his sleep, in the cold, drifting dreams where Uncle Matt was dead, and lost, and irretrievable in the immensities of time and space—

Once more, in anger, his mind repelled the thought. Once more it framed his still-life of reality, letting him clutch the safety painted there. He felt his forearms press the hard brown wood. He felt the quickened beating of his heart, and frowned. Words reached him, and he raised his head. He knew the voice. He recognized his name.

“. .. Our gratitude to Dr. Cavaness—”

He looked up to the left, over the bell jar and the Doorstop. Ted Froberg was the speaker now. Tall, seriously intense, he stood behind his chair.

“. . . Who, even though his background isn’t technical, recognized the importance of the instrument. I guess I don’t need to tell you what a lucky thing that was.” He paused. He grinned at Dr. Cavaness. “That’s about all,” he said. “If there are any questions, I’ll try to answer them.”

Then, gathering his courage in his hands, Dr. Cavaness spoke. “Well, how about it, Ted?” he asked. “Now that you’ve got it figured out, what is that gadget? What country is it from?”

He waited. Only the fall of silence answered him. He saw young Froberg’s grin erase itself. He felt the quick, astounded glances gossiping.

“You mean I get three guesses?” He laughed aloud.

And no one echoed him.

There was a whispering round the table; its volume grew; three or four men started to speak at once. Raising his hand, young Froberg quieted them. “Wait,” he said softly, soberly. “I’ve known Dr. Cavaness all my life. I think I understand.”

He sat down on the table’s edge, leaned over toward Dr. Cavaness. “Look, Dr. Howie, let me go over this again. I’ll outline it. We don’t know what this object is, or what it’s for, or even what it’s made of—at least, not accurately. They’ll probably learn more back East, with their facilities. However, we’ve found out what it does. Believe me, that’s enough to hold us for a while.”

He was explaining slowly, patiently; and Dr. Cavaness endured the invading words, trying to listen to them separately, to isolate them from their sentences, to quench their meaning before it reached his mind.

Ted Froberg pointed at the Doorstop; he no longer seemed so very young. “When you first brought it to us, we looked it over pretty carefully. We found those two holes in the dumbbell ends—remember them? Well, they’re T-shaped. Inside, at each end of the cross, there is a knob. They’re cupped and knurled, like push buttons. But they weren’t made for fingers, Dr. Howie. Fingers can’t get at them. They’re for—something else.”

Dr. Cavaness forbade the thought to form. Against it he braced the trembling walls that held his world to its perspectives and accustomed measurements. He wiped the perspiration from his palms.

“We pushed the buttons; nothing happened,” Froberg said. “We rigged a business to push all four at once—and the whole thing opened up, and there was all this stuff. It was beyond us; it made no sense at all. We didn’t dare to disassemble anything for fear of wrecking it. We took some specimens, as small as possible. We tried to run analyses, and some of them succeeded. They were unbelievable; we couldn’t even guess at physical conditions where manufacturing such materials would be possible.”

Dr. Cavaness saw the excitement in his eyes, and shrank from it.

“Our next step followed logically. Those points of light had shifted by themselves. Besides, the socket in the base seemed to contain contact elements. We carried through a series of experiments. We found out that the points of light respond at least to radar frequencies; when you were watching them, they must’ve picked up a reflection from a plane, and followed it. We also found that, when this happens, the hemispheres set up a weird sort of field that propagates at half a light-velocity—and that there’s something else inside that reacts to gravitational and magnetic gradients. Each of these functions modifies the others, and at the output end they’re translated into the damnedest wave-forms we’ve seen yet. The oddest part of all is that there simply is no source of power.”