Dick arrived at Maltby’s flat, “Dammit, I tried to get Nancy to come along, but Sam had some photographs he wants made in the Police Museum. She’s busy listing the subjects for the photographer. Bludgeons and sashweights and ice-picks and other objects used by various murderers to express their lethal impulses. Damn!”
“That clay mess,” said Maltby mildly, “seems to have yielded a crux ansata. Interesting?”
“Rather early for such things,” said Dick restlessly. “And that mummy shouldn’t have had one in his tomb. He wasn’t a king.”
“I can’t make out,” said Maltby, “a disk that the X-rays show in the clay. It appeared quite suddenly at the very end of the process, and it’s quite opaque to X-rays. Even copper lets a little hard radiation go through. Any ideas?”
Dick shook his head, still thinking of Nancy. When Maltby dumped the clay out of the plastic box, though, his interest rose. He spurned a proffered knife and briskly cut a wooden spatula to carve the clay with. He looked at the X-ray negatives and placed the clay block just so. Then he made curiously surgeon-like incisions and laid the clay back cleanly. In only seconds he lifted out the golden-copper crux exactly as shown by the X-rays, and regarded it with astonishment.
“It’s perfect,” he said blankly, “—and there’s glass!”
The four-inch disk had seemed a solid mass of metal. Now the center was plainly transparent. They could see through it. Dick put it to one side and probed for the other disk, supposedly six inches from it, which should still be buried in the clay.
It wasn’t there.
He searched for minutes, until the clay lump was dissected into portions in which the imaged second disk could not be hidden.
“Queer,” said Dick. “We’ll use the X-ray again later. I want to look over this thing. Extraordinarily early for good glass! Really clear glass didn’t turn up until late in Roman times. Maybe it’s crystal.”
He picked it up impatiently. He cleaned the transparent surface from the front. He reached behind to clean the back, and his face went bewildered. He could feel the back of the mirror. It was metal. But he couldn’t see his fingers. He saw through them. Beyond them.
“Now, what the devil—”
He held up the thing and looked through it. He could see Maltby and the other side of the room. He took a book and slid it past the back of the supposed glass. It did not impede the view at all. He still saw Maltby and the other side of the room. The book seemed to be perfectly transparent as it passed before the window-like center of the disk. Then Maltby made an astounded exclamation.
“Here! Look at this!” he said sharply.
He took the crux ansata from Dick. He turned it over. He laid it on his desk glass side down. There was an extraordinary optical phenomenom. An infinitely thin layer of the desk’s surface seemed to be lifted up six inches above the desk. Beneath it could be seen the copper back of the disk. There was empty space above it, and then a film of desk-top. Which, of course, simply could not be.
“You see through it,” said Maltby, rather pale, “but there’s a space that the light seems to dodge around. It skips from the front side of the disk to a spot six inches this side of it. There’s that much distance that the light doesn’t have to pass through. Things look six inches nearer. See?”
He held the right side up and held it over the desk-top. The desk-top did look nearer. He pressed down—and gasped. He was looking at wood-fibres inside the substance of the wood. Then his hand dropped, and he was looking inside the desk, through the top. He was examining the contents of the top desk drawer from a point above the desk’s writing-surface.
The two of them babbled at each other. For twenty minutes or more they made absurd experiments. The fact remained. You looked into the transparent surface of the disk, and your sight skipped the opaque metal of the other surface and started on from six inches out in mid-air. Nothing in that six-inch space was an impediment to vision. The mirror could be held against a six-inch wall and anything beyond the wall would be visible. It was as if the light received on a small, circular area in mid-air curved through some unknown dimensions and returned to its proper line at the surface of the disk.
They had agreed on so much when Dick Blair said:
“What happens if you push something through?”
He thrust his finger toward himself, staring at its end through the unbelievably ancient instrument. His finger seemed to approach to the observed six inches. Then the impossible happened. He had no sensation, but he saw inside his finger. He saw inside the flesh. He saw the bone. He saw nerve-ends and capillaries-
He jerked his hand away and stared at Maltby. But Maltby was paler than Dick himself.
“I was—looking at your finger from the side,” said Maltby with difficulty. “The end of it vanished. And where it vanished, the end of it—looked like quicksilver.”
They doubted their own sanity, but there could be no doubt of the fact. They pushed a pencil into the impalpable place in-mid-air. The pencil disappeared. Looked at from the side, the spot where it vanished seemed a blob of quicksilver, which moved when the pencil was moved. From the proper side of the device, they saw into the inside of the pencil.
They pushed a watch, running, into that space. Dick saw its machinery in busy movement—or half its machinery. When it was withdrawn it was unharmed.
It was Dick who without warning suddenly thrust his whole hand up to the wrist into the enigmatic space. He looked at the bones and cross-section of the muscles and tendons of his wrist, while Maltby at one side saw a changing blob of quicksilver-like reflection the shape of the seemingly cut-off flesh. And then Dick said in a queer voice: “I feel something.”
He stood rigid for an instant. Then he jerked his hand out. He had something in his fingers.
It was a living green leaf, freshly plucked from what must have been a tree. It was a perfectly plausible leaf. There were only two things in the least odd about it. One was that it had been plucked from nothingness in an apartment three floors above the street and remote from any vegetation at all. The other was that it wasn’t the leaf of any species of plant known on earth.
It was Dick Blair who pointed out jerkily that the thing which looked into desks and through desk-tops and into flesh and bone had been used by its long-dead owner to study anatomy and accounted for the five-thousand-year-old description of the circulation of the blood. He could look directly into the inside of a living body. Then Maltby made incoherent noises about dimensions being at right angles to other dimensions and a field of force which made them interchangeable.
Then Dick said, stridently, that the significance of the crux ansata as a symbol of power over the other world had plainly once possessed a literal sense. There was another world somehow continuous to this one. It had been speculated upon since Plato was in diapers. This leaf had come from it. Which, he continued, might be an unjustified inference from inadequate data, but he was damned if he didn’t believe it, and anyhow he was going to put his hand in that round space again and see what turned up—
He did. He sweated as he fumbled. He broke off a spray of leaves from an unseen source, and dragged them back. It was the eeriest of sensations to stand in a lighted, well-furnished room with all one’s surroundings completely artificial, and to reach into vacancy in that well lighted room and produce from nothingness a batch of fresh foliage completely unlike any earthly leaves.