THE OTHER WORLD
Murray Leinster
DICK BLAIR dug up a Fifth Dynasty tomb in Lower Egypt and found that one object, and one only, had been spoiled by dampness in a climate which preserved all the other objects in the tomb to perfection. Almost simultaneously, in New York, a plumber carrying a kit of tools turned into a doorway on Eighth Avenue and was never seen again, living or dead. Shortly after, a half-ton of dried figs vanished inexplicably from a locked warehouse in Smyrna, and—in New York—a covered barge complete with a load of bricks and building materials evaporated into thin air while a night watchman gazed goggle-eyed. His account of the event was not believed.
There were other pertinent events even before these. One year in New York’s history of the number of missing persons who had no reason to vanish went up to four times normal. Most missing persons have their reasons for disappearing, but there are always a few who seem neither to have been murdered or to have absconded. This year the number of such cases was unprecedented, and there was no explanation for it at all.
There was the time seventy-five years before when the four prettiest members of a theatrical chorus went upstairs to doff their winter wraps in the home of a rich man who was giving a party, and never came down again. Then there was that indubitable were-wolf which was killed in Avino province in Italy, in the 1850’s. It was classed only tentatively as wolf because it had some oddities of conformation, but it had intelligence at least equal to that of the peasants on whom it had preyed for two weeks before its destruction. It had killed and partly or wholly devoured twenty-two human beings in two weeks. The scientists of the time were very much annoyed when enraged peasants stormed the place where it was held for examination and burned the carcass to ashes.
Before that, there was the well-attested disappearance of the carriage of a semi-royal princeling in the Tyrol. It went around a curve in the carriage-road, and riding-footmen a hundred yards behind found it utterly gone when they rounded the curve in their turn. Six horses, a coachman and footman, and two of the princeling’s mistresses —one of whom was said to be the most beautiful woman in Europe at the time—vanished in the twinkling of an eye and no trace was ever found of any of them. And still earlier there was that shipload of immigrants to the United States which was sighted only forty miles off Sandy Hook, pressing forward with all sail set on a perfectly fair day, which never reached harbor and from which not one particle of wreckage was ever found.
When these items are put together, they add up convincingly to mere nonsense. The farther back into history one delves, the less credible the affairs become.
[What follows has been cast in the form of fiction for obvious reasons. For one thing, it is extremely unlikely to be quoted in any newspaper. For another, it is extremely undesirable that any considerable group of people should take it for fact while any sizable residue of unexplained disappearances occur.—Murray Leinster]
But Dick Blair dug up a Fifth Dynasty tomb in Egypt and found that exactly one object had been ruined by dampness in a rock-hewn vault in which every other object had remained absolutely dry from the time of its entombment. That object meant the second discovery of the Other World and an explanation—an explanation— for very many mysteries which date back to the time of the Fifth Dynasty, five thousand years ago.
When he got back to New York, Dick Blair was very busy for a while, but at last, one night, he took a mass of greenish clay to his friend Tom Maltby. Dick was then only partly bleached out from the Egyptian sun, where he had dug out a previously untouched Fifth Dynasty tomb. But civilization already bored him. He was inclined to mourn the humdrumness of life in New York.
“This,” he told Maltby, “is a hunk of dirt. It’s colored with oxides, and once upon a time it contained something made by a worthy Egyptian at least five thousand years ago. At the Museum we’re pretty good at re-forming objects that have been corroded past recognition, but we have to have at least a sliver of metal to work on. The X-rays say this is absolutely gone.”
He handed over the X-ray negatives. They showed the distribution of the denser metallic oxides in the lump of clay. Maltby looked at them interestedly.
With a sliver of the original metal left,” Dick observed, “we run a contact down to it, use it as a cathode, run about a quarter-ampere to it for six months or so, and the oxides break down and the metal goes back to the shape it was originally in. It’s amazing how detailed the things get sometimes. We even find the original decorations. But this one beats us.” [This is literally true, and standard museum practice. Provided that the corroded metal in the clay has not been disturbed, excellent reversals of rusting processes are obtained and artifacts which would have been unrecognizable are regularly restored to a condition suitable for exhibition and study.—Murray Leinster.]
Maltby nodded.
“That’s what I want. I said I’d try to work out an improvement on your system. It’s in my line.”
Maltby was a consulting engineer specializing in the prevention of electrolytic damage by earth-currents. Every public utility has at least one engineer whose specialty is the prevention of damage of this type. Maltby was tops in the field. He’d checked the destruction of a very famous bridge, he had doctored a very modern skyscraper whose foundation-piles were being corroded even in their concrete sheaths, and his process for restoring rusted objects underground was not unlike museum methods for rebuilding prehistoric relics.
He put down the dried clay and mixed two drinks. Dick Blair settled down comfortably.
“That hunk of dirt is now officially your property,” he observed, “which is my doing. It may be a copper pot or pan or anything at all. I can’t figure out how it rusted. The place was absolute, stony, dessicated desert without a drop of water for miles. The tomb was bone-dry and nothing else showed any trace of damage by moisture. Where’d the moisture come from?”
Maltby sipped at his drink. Dick went on:
“More oddities about that tomb— Its occupant wasn’t a king, but he was fitted out for the afterlife in royal style! There were more imported objects in that tomb than you could shake a stick at. There was stuff from Cyprus, from Phoenicia, from Ethiopia, from Mycenae, and slathers of regular Egyptian stuff. The writings in the tomb are weird. He was a sort of royal physician and miracle-worker, who happened to be cousin to the Pharoah. There was a papyrus on medicine which is going to raise the devil! You simply can’t translate it except as a description of the circulation of the blood— forty-seven hundred years before modern men knew of it. Another scroll is crazier. It describes animals which simply don’t exist. The prize is a description of a small horse with three toes. I may add that the eohippus did not survive until his time. How’d he get such an idea?”
Maltby shrugged.
“Fairy tales can’t always be wrong,” he said. “Make enough fantastic statements, and some are bound to be right. You’d have trouble showing me there was modern knowledge fifty centuries ago, papyri or no papyri.”
Dick Blair grinned. “The old chap in the tomb had modern ideas. I don’t know whether you know it, but there were Pharoahs who never had even civil wars, much less foreign ones. He claimed , he handled that for his cousin. Anybody who even thought evil of the king died mysteriously. And he boasted of the dirt he did to the King of Cyprus of his time. Magic, but modern.”
Maltby raised his eyebrows. Dick went on zestfully:
“His funeral boasts say that a King of Cyprus had a pretty daughter and the then Pharoah sent a message demanding her for his harem. The King of Cyprus refused. So before his whole court he vanished in a pool of quicksilver. My old gent declares he worked that. The King of Cyprus’ son got ready to fight, but instead he and all his family—including the princess—died in a palace which poured out flames at every window. The next ruler was suitably abject and sent tribute. Nearly the same process happened in Phoenicia, Ethiopia and Mycenae.”