Philip Farmer - The Maker of Universes

Wolff was beginning to wonder about him. He had been so evasive that Wolff suspected Kickaha had another identity about which he did not intend to talk.

“I know what you’re thinking, but don’t you believe it,” Kickaha said. “I’m a trickster, but I’m leveling with you. By the way, did you know how I came by my name among the Bear People? In their language, a kickaha is a mythological character, a semidivine trickster. Something like the Old Man Coyote of the Plains of Nanabozho of the Ojibway or Wakdjunkaga of the Winnebago. Some day I’ll tell you how I earned that name and how I became a councilor of the Hrowakas. But I’ve more important things to tell you now.”

In 1941, at the age of twenty-three Paul Finnegan had volunteered for the U.S. Cavalry because he loved horses. A short time later, he found himself driving a tank. He was with the Eighth Army and so eventually crossed the Rhine. One day, after having helped take a small town, he discovered an extraordinary object in the ruins of the local museum. It was a crescent of silvery metal, so hard that hammer blows did not dent it nor an acetylene torch melt it.

“I asked some of the citizens about it. All they knew was that it had been in the museum a long time. A professor of chemistry, after making some tests on it, had tried to interest the University of Munich in it but had failed.

“I took it home with me after the war, along with other souvenirs. Then I went back to the University of Indiana. My father had left me enough money to see me through for a few years, so I had a nice little apartment, a sports car, and so on.

“A friend of mine was a newspaper reporter. I told him about the crescent and its peculiar properties and unknown composition. He wrote a story about it which was printed in Bloomington, and the story was picked up by a syndicate. It didn’t create much interest among scientists—in fact, they wanted nothing to do with it.

“Three days later, a man calling himself Mr. Vannax appeared at my apartment. I thought he was Dutch because of his name and his foreign accent. He wanted to see the crescent. I obliged. He got very excited, although he tried to to appear calm. He said he’d like to buy it from me. I asked how much he’d pay, and he said he’d give ten thousand dollars, but no more.

“ ‘Sure you can go higher,’ I said,” Kickaha continued. “ ‘Because if you don’t, you’ll get nowhere.’

“ ‘Twenty thousand?’ Vannax said.

“ ‘Let’s pump it up a bit,’ I said.

“ ‘Thirty thousand?’ ”

Finnegan decided to plunge. He asked Vannax if he would pay $100,000. Vannax became even redder in the face and swelled up “like a hoppy toad,” as Finnegan-Kickaha said. But he replied that he would have the sum in twenty-four hours.

“Then I knew I really had something,” Kickaha said to Wolff. “The question was, what? Also, why did this Vannax character so desperately want it? And what kind of a nut was he? No one with good sense, no normal human being, would rise so fast to the bait. He’d be cagier.”

“What did Vannax look like?” Wolff asked.

“Oh, he was a big guy, a well-preserved sixty-five. He had an eagle beak and eagle eyes. He was dressed in expensive conservative clothes. He had a powerful personality, but he was trying to restrain it, to be real nice. And having a hell of a time doing it. He seemed to be a man who wasn’t used to being balked in any thing.”

“ ‘Make it $300,000, and it’s yours’ I said. I never dreamed he’d say yes. I thought he’d get mad and take off. Because I wasn’t going to sell the crescent, not if he offered me a million.”

Vannax, although furious, said that he would pay $300,000 but Finnegan would have to give him an additional twenty-four hours.

“ ‘You have to tell me why you want the crescent and what good it is first,’ I said.

“ ‘Nothing doing!’ he shouted. It is enough for you to rob me, you pig of a merchant, you, you earth . .. worm!’

“ ‘Get out before I throw you out. Or before I call the police,’ I said.”

Vannax began shouting in a foreign tongue. Finnegan went into his bedroom and came out with a .45 automatic. Vannax did not know it was not loaded. He left, although he was cursing and talking to himself all the way to his 1940 Rolls-Royce.

That night Finnegan had trouble getting to sleep. It was after 2:00 A.M. before he succeeded, and even then he kept waking up. During one of his rousings he heard a noise in the front room. Quietly, he rolled out of bed and took the .45, now loaded, from under his pillow. On the way to the bedroom door he picked up his flashlight from the bureau.

Its beam caught Vannax stooping over in the middle of the living room. The silvery crescent was in his hand.

“Then I saw the second crescent on the floor. Vannax had brought another with him. I’d caught him in the act of placing the two together to form a complete circle. I didn’t know why he was doing it, but I found out a moment later.

“I told him to put his hands up. He did so, but he lifted his foot to step into the circle. I told him not to move even a trifle, or I’d shoot. He put one foot inside the circle, anyway. So I fired. I shot over his head, and the slug went into a corner of the room. I just wanted to scare him, figuring if he got shaken up enough he might start talking. He was scared all right; he jumped back.

“I walked across the room while he backed up toward the door. He was babbling like a maniac, threatening me in one breath and offering me half a million in the next. I thought I’d back him up against the door and jam the .45 in his belly. He’d really talk then, spill his guts out about the crescent.

“But as I followed him across the room I stepped into the circle formed by the two crescents. He saw what I was doing and screamed at me not to. Too late then. He and the apartment disappeared, and I found myself still in the circle—only it wasn’t quite the same—and in this world. In the palace of the Lord, on top of the world.”

Kickaha said he might have gone into shock then. But he had avidly read fantasy and science-fiction since the fourth grade of grammar school. The idea of parallel universes and devices for transition between them was familiar. He had been conditioned to accept such concepts. In fact, he half-believed in them. Thus he was flexible-minded enough to bend without breaking and then bounce back. Although frightened, he was at the same time excited and curious.

“I figured out why Vannax hadn’t followed me through the gate. The two crescents, placed together, formed a ‘circuit’. But they weren’t activated until a living being stepped within whatever sort of ‘field’ they radiated. Then one semicircle remained behind on Earth while the other was gated through to this universe, where it latched onto a semicircle waiting for it. In other words, it takes three crescents to make a circuit. One in the world to which you’re going, and two in the one you’re leaving. You step in; one crescent transfers over to the single one in the next universe, leaving only one crescent in the world you just left.

“Vannax must have come to Earth by means of these crescents. And he would not, could not, do so unless there had been a crescent already on Earth. Somehow, maybe we’ll never know, he lost one of them on Earth. Maybe it was stolen by someone who didn’t know its true value. Anyway, he must’ve been searching for it, and when that news story went out about the one I had found in Germany, he knew what it was. After talking to me, he concluded I might not sell it. So he got into my apartment with the crescent he did have. He was just about to complete the circle and pass on over when I stopped him.