Bill slouched in the witness chair and laced his fingers across his stomach.
“It all started,” he said, “the day the army let that rocket get out of hand on the seventh of May. I’ve got my shop in my cellar. Spend most of my time down there.
“That rocket had an atomic warhead, you know. I guess they’ve busted fifteen generals over that affair so far. It exploded in the hills forty miles from town. The jar upset some of my apparatus and stuff. Put it out of kilter. I was sore.
“I turned around, cussing away to myself, and where my coal bin used to be, there was a room. The arch leading into the room was wide and I could see in. I tell you, it really shook me up to see that room there. I wondered for a minute if the bomb hadn’t given me delusions.
“The room I saw didn’t have any furniture in it. Not like furniture we know. It had some big cubes of dull silvery metal, and some smaller cubes. I couldn’t figure out the lighting.
“Being a curious cuss, I walked right through the arch and looked around. I’m a great one to handle things. The only thing in the room I could pick up was a gadget on top of the biggest cube. It hardly weighed a thing.
“In order to picture it, you’ve got to imagine a child’s hoop made of silvery wire. Then right across the wire imagine the blackest night you’ve ever seen, rolled out into a thin sheet and stretched tight like a drumhead on that wire hoop.
“As I was looking at it I heard some sort of deep vibration and there I was, stumbling around in my coal bin. The room was gone. But I had that darn hoop in my hand. That hoop with the midnight stretched across it.
“I took it back across to my workbench where the light was better. I held it in one hand and poked a finger at that black stuff. My finger went right through. I didn’t feel a thing. With my finger still sticking through it, I looked on the other side.
“It was right there that I named the darn thing. I said, ‘Gawk!’ And that’s what I’ve called it ever since. The Gawk. My finger didn’t come through on the other side. I stuck my whole arm through. No arm. I pulled it back out. Quick. Arm was okay. Somehow it seemed warmed on the other side of the gawk.
“Well, you can imagine what it was like for me, a tinkerer, to get my hands on a thing like that. I forgot all about meals and so on. I had to find out what it was and why. I couldn’t see my own hand on the other side of it. I put it right up in front of my face, reached through from the back and tried to touch my nose. I couldn’t do it. I reached so deep that without the gawk there, my arm would have been halfway through my head...”
“Objection!” Amery Heater said. “All this has nothing to do with the fact...”
“My client,” Justin said, “is giving the incidents leading up to the alleged murder.”
“Overruled,” the judge said.
Maloney said, “Thanks. I decided that my arm had to be someplace when I stuffed it through the gawk. And it wasn’t in this dimension. Maybe not even in this time. But it had to be someplace. That meant that I had to find out what was on the other side of the gawk. I could use touch, sight. Maybe I could climb through. It intrigued me, you might say.
“I started with touch. I put my hand through, held it in front of me and walked. I walked five feet before my hand rammed up against something. I felt it. It seemed to be a smooth wall. There wasn’t such a wall in my cellar.
“There has to be some caution in science. I didn’t stuff my head through. I couldn’t risk it. I had the hunch there might be something unfriendly on the other side of the gawk. I turned the thing around and stuck my hand through from the other side. No wall. There was a terrific pain. I yanked my hand back. A lot of little bloodvessels near the surface had broken. I dropped the gawk and jumped around for a while. Found out I had a bad case of frostbite. The broken bloodvessels indicated that I had stuffed my hand into a vacuum. Frostbite in a fraction of a second indicated nearly absolute zero. It seemed that maybe I had put my hand into space. It made me glad it had been my hand instead of my head.
“I propped the thing up on my bench and shoved lots of things through, holding them a while and bringing them back out. Made a lot of notes on the effect of absolute zero on various materials.
“By that time I was bushed. I went up to bed. Next day I had some coffee and then built myself a little periscope. Shoved it through. Couldn’t see a thing. I switched the gawk, tested with a thermometer, put my hand through. Warm enough. But the periscope didn’t show me a thing. I wondered if maybe something happened to light rays when they went through that blackness. Turns out that I was right.
“By about noon I had found out another thing about it. Every time I turned it around I was able to reach through into a separate and distinct environment. I tested that with the thermometer. One of the environments I tested slammed the mercury right out through the top of the glass and broke the glass and burned my hand. I was glad I hadn’t hit that one the first time. It would have burned my hand off at the wrist.
“I began to keep a journal of each turn of the gawk, and what seemed to be on the other side of it. I rigged up a jig on my work bench and began to grope through the gawk with my fireplace tongs.
“Once I jabbed something that seemed to be soft and alive. Those tongs were snatched right through the gawk. Completely gone. It gave me the shudders, believe me. If it had been my hand instead of the tongs, I wouldn’t be here. I have a hunch that whatever snatched those tongs would have been glad to eat me.
“I rigged up some grappling hooks and went to work. Couldn’t get anything. I put a lead weight on some cord and lowered it through. Had some grease on the end of the weight. When the cord slacked off, I pulled it back up. There was fine yellow sand on the bottom of the weight. And I had lowered it thirty-eight feet before I hit sand.
“On try number two hundred and eight, I brought an object back through the gawk. Justy has it right there in his bag. Show it to the people, Justy.”
Justin looked annoyed at the informal request, but he unstrapped the bag and took out an object. He passed it up to the judge who looked at it with great interest. Then it was passed through the jury. It ended up on the table in front of the bench, tagged as an exhibit.
“You can see, folks, that such an object didn’t come out of our civilization.”
“Objection!” Heater yelled. “The defendant could have made it.”
“Hush up!” the judge said.
“Thanks. As you can see that object is a big crystal. That thing in the crystal is a golden scorpion, about five times life size. The corner is sawed off there because Jim Finch sawed it off. You notice that he sawed off a big enough piece to get a hunk of the scorpion’s leg. Jim told me that leg was solid gold. That whole bug is solid gold. I guess it was an ornament in some other civilization.
“Now that gets me around to Jim Finch. As you all know, Jim retired from the jewelry business about five years ago. Jim was a pretty sharp trader. You know how he parlayed his savings across the board so that he owned a little hunk of just about everything in town. He was always after me to let him in on my next gimmick. I guess those royalty checks made his mouth water. We weren’t what you’d call friends. I passed the time of day with him, but he wasn’t a friendly man.
“Anyway, when I grabbed this bug out of the gawk, I thought of Jim Finch. I wanted to know if such a thing could be made by a jeweler. Jim was home and his eyes popped when he saw it. You know how he kept that little shop in his garage and made presents for people? Well, he cut off a section with a saw. Then he said that he’d never seen anything like it and he didn’t know how on earth it was put together. I told him that it probably wasn’t put together on earth. That teased him a little and he kept after me until I told him the whole story. He didn’t believe it. That made me mad. I took him over into my cellar and showed him a few things. I set the gawk between two boxes so it was parallel to the floor, then dropped my grapples down into it. In about three minutes I caught something and brought it up. It seemed to be squirming.”