This grab into the unseen brought back something else, too. Coiled about the branch as if feeding on a leaf, there was a tiny living thing. It was perhaps six inches long. It had enormous, inquisitive eyes, and filmy wings. At the impact of the bright lights it blinked wisely and uncoiled itself and launched itself into the air. They both saw it clearly. It hovered delicately, like a hummingbird, and then darted to the window and out.
It was very small and quite harmless, but it was a serpent, a snake. It had wings. It flew. And winged serpents are not native to Earth.
The two men were quite literally babbling to each other when the bell rang and Sam Todd stumbled into the room. His face was ashen-white. He looked as if he had been drinking for weeks and had the horrors.
“Dick,” he said thickly. “I—was looking for you. I had Nancy at the Police Museum. We snatched a bite to eat and I—called a cab for her. Just as it was pulling up I— smelled something queer. Not that—special perfume she used, but—something else. I looked around and—Nancy was vanishing. The top half of her was gone into thin air and there—was a big blob of—quicksilver where her waist was, and it dropped to the ground and—she was gone! Maybe I’m crazy but that’s what happened...”
Dick Blair cried out furiously, because he knew as well as Sam that no thing and no person which had vanished in a pool of quicksilver had ever been seen again.
Then Sam lifted his head, twitching.
“Queer smell,” he said thickly. “Like—lush green stuff. I smell it now! My God, I smell it now! This is what I smelled when Nancy vanished...”
And then Dick and Maltby realized that their nostrils, too, were filled with an odor they had been too excited to notice before. Its origin was obvious enough. It came from crux ansata. And it was the smell of a jungle at night—in the heart of New York City.
For three days Maltby worked like a madman, while Dick Blair went practically insane. The worst of it was, of course, that Maltby could promise nothing. He did not dare to chip away any part of what might be called the transparent surface of the instrument from the past. He had to analyze without injuring the object he analyzed, for fear of destroying it altogether. He checked the light it transmitted, and found it circularly polarized. He checked the specific gravity of the entire object to six decimal places, and checked that against the density of a morsel scraped from the end of the handle. The whole instrument was made of bismuth bronze—copper and bismuth together. Normal bronze contains zinc or tin. It became certain that only one substance was involved, and that it was the bismuth-copper alloy. There was no insert of other substance to give the instrument its properties.
In the end, microscopic examination showed that, on the fine line of division where the transparent and opaque parts ran together, there was one irregularity. There was a place where for half a thousandth of an inch the metal was in an inbetween state—not quite the material of the handle, and not quite the enigmatic surface through which one looked around normal space.
That was the clue. Maltby worked on it for twenty-four hours straight, and had a one-inch ring of transparency in a flat slab of quarter-inch copper-bismuth alloy. It was not a duplicate of the entire crux ansata effect, but only of a part. The crux ansata seemed to look into another world and then back again to Earth at a remove of six inches in space. The peephole Maltby made looked only into another world. But that was a lot.
Looking through it, Maltby saw at first only spreading tree branches and thick foliage, speckled with sunshine from an unseen source. He touched a pencil experimentally to the transparent surface and nothing happened. The transparency was not penetrable.
He called Sam Todd on the phone and commanded him to get hold of Dick and bring him there. He worked on
When they burst, into his apartment he wavered on his feet from pure weariness. But he had a second bit of copper-bismuth alloy. This one was quite opaque. But there was a spot where you could push a lead pencil into it, and it vanished and you could pull it out again if it were not allowed to go in all the way. Moreover, if you looked through the peephole into the other world, in the direction of this second opaque spot, in between the illogical foliage you could see the part of the pencil which disappeared from Earth. It enlarged and grew smaller as it was pushed or pulled from Earth, and if it were pushed all the way through it could be seen to go tumbling through the tree branches toward the ground below this jungle.
“I’ve got a beginning,” said Maltby drearily. “I’ve gotten what is probably a sort of cockeyed alignment of cop per crystals with’ bismuth, in a crazy allotropic state. Normally, light-bending seems to call for one arrangement and matter-bending calls for another. Just for simplicity I’m assuming that this—this Other World is occupying the same space as Earth, and that it’s a matter of bending light to get it into that world, and to get it to come out again. It has to bend through an angle we normally can’t conceive of. And I’m guessing that matter more or less bends in the same fashion. That’s not clear, but I’m so tired I don’t think very straight.”
Dick said tensely, “What have you got ready for us?”
“I’ve got a one-inch peephole you can look into the other world with, and a space an inch across that you can push things through into the other world. I know how to make them, now. If I can stay awake, I can make a doorway somebody can go through.”
“Get to work!” commanded Dick. “Nancy’s there! You’ve got to get to work!”
“Agreed,” grunted Maltby, “but I haven’t slept for so long I can’t remember it. You take this peephole and go somewhere high and look around. While I make a door way for you, you’d better be stocking up on information.”
Sam Todd said, “And guns. But I’ll attend to that!”
“Since you may use a taxi,” added Maltby, “you’d better carry only the peephole. If you took the thing that matter can go through, you might be driving down Fifth Avenue in our world and drive through the space a tree occupies in the other. And the tree trunk might try to come through into the cab.”
“How long will it take to make the doorway?” demanded Dick.
“Maybe three hours, maybe four.”
The three of them separated instantly. Dick went raging to The Empire State Building and rode to its top; where he quite insanely held a small slab of copper alloy to his eye, and looked into the Other World.
Below him there was terrain identical with Manhattan Island in form and size and shape. But it was covered with foliage of which not one leaf was recognizable. To the south there were marshes where on Earth he saw tall buildings; and flowing streams, in the Other World, coursed merrily across the paths of streets in this.
At first he saw but one sign of humanity. That was a great villa, apparently of brick, with wide and spacious lawns. But he saw no human figures about it. It was too far away, on the Brooklyn shore. Then, here and there on the twin of Manhattan Island, he saw trails winding apparently at random through the heavy woods. It was a sunny day in the Other World. Everything seemed utterly tranquil and utterly at peace. And Dick, staring with desperate intentness, made notes which identified this trail—meandering from side to side—roughly with Fifth Avenue almost beneath him, and that trail with Twenty-Ninth Street. By sighting with both eyes open, one looking at Earth and the other into the Other World, he identified the position of the one vast villa as roughly south of the Navy Yard.