A long time later the car stopped. "Get out," said a voice, and Baum shambled up the front steps of an old brownstone house. They hustled him up a flight of stairs and into a room bare except for a large full-length mirror screwed to one wall.
One of the blue-suited men stepped up to the mirror and rapped sharply against the glass with a ring on one of his fingers, thus—
AND immediately the reflections in the mirror dissolved into mist so that they looked more like images on a television screen out of focus than true reflections.
"Come on," said one of the men and Baum walked with them through the mist.
He stepped into another room, quite different from the one he had left. Instead of a bare inclosure in a creaky old private house this looked like the reception-room of some public institution or industrial concern. On the linoleum-covered floor stood a plain desk and behind the desk sat a young man dressed (as Baum noted with a slight stir of surprise) much as he himself was, in a red outfit resembling a ballet-suit.
One of the men escorting Baum said something that sounded like, "The Dimai Jich!"
Whereupon the man at the desk called, "Pass five!"
There was a clank and a big gate of thick metal bars, like that into the safe-deposit vault of a bank, swung open. Baum had a glimpse of the man who swung it—another fellow in a union-suit, but this time, with a pistol of sorts dangling in a holster from his belt. He might have been another guest at the Engineers' Hallowe'en party who by some strange coincidence had decided to dress up in a costume of the same sort as that Baum wore.
The gate clanged shut behind them. They walked down the hall of a building which, judging by its looks, must be devoted to some technical enterprise—a hospital or laboratory building, perhaps.
PRESENTLY Baum's captors turned into a room that looked like a doctor's office. A man in black with a little white goatee on his chin sat behind a desk. Behind him a window opened onto landscaped grounds.
Through this window Baum caught a glimpse of something that stirred his interest despite the flaccid state of his volition. Beyond the hedges and lawns stood a tall iron fence and beyond the fence something vast and slaty-gray moved. It was an animal somewhat on the order of a sauropod dinosaur—a brontosaurus or diplodocus—and it was eating the long grass that grew beyond the fence.
"Here he is," said one of the escort.
The man at the desk looked at Baum, then opened his desk drawer and took out a sheet of paper with half-tone cuts and printing on it.
"Nonsense," said he of the beard. "He's no more like Dimai than I am. "You've made a mistake."
Baum's bound mind wondered vaguely at the fact that these people spoke common General American English. It would have been less surprising had they spoken Russian or Martian—assuming such a language as Martian existed.
"But looks at his clothes!" said one of the men in the blue serge suits.
"Let's see your clothes, son," said the beard.
Baum obediently shucked his overcoat.
"Hm," said Whiskers. "This does seem to call for an explanation. Prisoner, how come you're wearing Antichthonese costume? Have you changed clothes with Dimai?"
"I didn't know it was Ant—well, that it was the kind of costume you say it is. I rented it for a fancy-dress party."
Goatee chuckled. "See? Now you'll have to start over. It's not likely you'll find him in his original suit when he's been gone as many hours as this. As for you, son, I reckon we owe you an apology."
A light flashed in Baum's face again and he heard the beard's voice saying sharply, "Wake up!"
Life seemed to flow back into him, and Baum realized that he had regained his will. "Now," he said belligerently, "maybe you'll explain ..."
The man in black held up his hand. "Later. First I'll have to know a bit about you. McMichael, you stay here. The rest of you go about your business. Now, my young friend, suppose you tell us who you are?"
The biggest of the four men in the double-breasted suits settled himself into a chair while the others filed out.
"Why should I tell you?" said Baum in tones of cold defiance. "Who are you?"
The other man smiled. "We seem to be at an impasse. If you'll tell me who you think we are, maybe we can clear things up."
"Aren't you working for Uncle Larry?"
"Uncle Larry?" said the other, plainly puzzled.
"Yes. Lavrenti Beria."
"Oh, you mean the Commies?" The man in black opened his mouth and laughed loud and long. "No," he said when he got himself under control. "We aren't. In fact we're after Dimai because he is. Now will you tell us about yourself?"
"Well," said Baum, somewhat mollified, more puzzled than ever and still suspicious, "my name's Marius Baum, I'm a native-born American and I have a technical editorial job with the U. S. Government." He gave a few more details of his background, avoiding any mention of the confidential nature of his work.
He concluded, "Where am I then? In another dimension?"
His interlocutor winced. "You're a smart lad but don't use 'dimension' in that pseudo-scientific sense! Call it another continuum."
"All right, another continuum. On a planet that occupies the same space as ours, only in this other plane—"
"Not 'plane'—that's occultism. Continuum."
"All right, continuum, that goes around its sun at the same speed as ours."
"You're mostly right, except there's no exact correspondence between Antichthon and Earth. Antichthon is actually somewhat smaller than the Earth and takes a longer time to go round a larger star at a longer radius.
"I can't explain it to you now but it's like those formulae for the location of an electron—they only tell you where it's most likely to be. So the connections between Earth and Antichthon are valid even though they don't coincide literally. Actually Antichthon is in the same continuum as Earth but at the other end, where the universe curves back on itself.
"However, you pose a problem for us. You can't stay here, not having been invited through the usual channels, and we can't send you back knowing about us. Don't look scared—we're not going to bump you off. Antichthon adheres to a strict standard of justice. But ...
"All I can think of is to destroy the memory of your visit to us. We don't much like to do that, since a man's memory is his most private possession. However ..."
"If you're on the level," said Baum, "You could trust me not to give you away."
THE white eyebrows rose. "We can find out about that." He threw a switch on the teletalk system and said, "Send Guzman in to me." He turned back to Baum. "He'll examine you."
"Who's he? Psychologist?"
The man in black nodded.
"Mean I've got to lie on a sofa for a month telling him about every lustful thought I ever had?"
"No, nothing like that. You'll see. My name's Harris, by the way. I'm an administrator."
"Pleased to know you. I suppose you've got some Utopia here and don't want a lot of nogoodniks from Earth swarming in and spoiling it?"
Harris smiled. "Wait till Guzman—ah, here he is.
Baum met a small dark man who took him into another office and kept him working on tests much like aptitude tests for a couple of hours.
Then Guzman brought Baum back to Harris's office, saying, "Reliability index ninety seven point eight, one of the highest I ever tested. It indicates in fact that he's one of those fanatically punctual and truthful people who make themselves unpopular with their more easy-going friends by too much exactness."
Harris said, "Such being the case, I think we can trust you."
"Can't I visit your world? I'd like a look at that live dinosaur at least."
"Sorry. Rules, you know. You see, as you guessed, we're trying to run a kind of democratic scientific Utopia. And it's hard enough, even with specially picked immigrants, because brains and character aren't simple Mendelian hereditary qualities, though heredity does influence them. So different characters do crop up."