Half-Past Eternity

Chapter Six The Endless Twilight

He stirred and shook his head. He was looking out through the tubing at Howard Dineen. Dineen stood like a man carved of stone, thumb and forefinger on the right-hand dial. Tears seemed to be frozen on his face.

In panic Sam Banth pushed against the front of the iron maiden. He could barely lift his arm. It was as though he were imbedded in sticky oil. His arm seemed to take interminable seconds to reach the tubing. He pushed hard and nothing happened. He leaned his whole weight against it. He could look down and see that it wasn’t latched, that the hinges seemed free. He pushed mightily, panting with the effort. It was enormously difficult to breathe. The air felt like a solid substance. Yet when he tried to breathe the hardest, the air seemed to scorch his lips and nostrils.

He pushed again and saw a tiny gap. No matter how hard he thrust he could not hasten the speed of its opening. Howard stood there, completely motionless. No man could stand like that for so long. Sam wondered if he were dead. There was no question about Linda’s being dead. He could see her on the floor. Her body was shrunken and cracked, swollen lips protruded. Her eyes were sunk back into her head.

Time after time he was forced to stop and rest. He had no idea how many hours passed before the door was opened wide enough for him to squirm through. The room was changeless and eternal. He tried to move toward the door, but it was a prolonged struggle to take each step. He tried harder and saw that both pants legs had split completely down the front. It was then that he realized the constriction of his clothes.

When he pulled at his Clothes the material came apart, with agonizing slowness, in his hands. Hunger and thirst began to torture him. He knew that he had been in that room for the passing of an entire day and a night. He began to grow weak. The shoes were the last. And finally he stood naked; he could move once more. He went to the door with quick steps and found that he couldn’t turn the knob. He gave a fearful look at Howard Dineen. During the past hours the position of his head had changed a bit. Sam went into the small bathroom. The window was open. He eeled through, knowing that public nakedness was preferable to the sure and certain charge of murder should he be captured in the room. He dropped twelve feet to the alley level, falling with a lightness that surprised him, as though something had cushioned his drop through the air.

He trotted cautiously down the alley with a half-made plan to grab someone and strip him of clothing. He came out and peered cautiously at the street. At that moment he realized, for the first time, the complete and utter soundlessness of the city. Pedestrian’s feet were frozen in mid-stride. All traffic was halted. An absurd pigeon hung motionless in the air. Across the street a woman had tripped. She was falling forward, her hands outstretched, a startled look on her face. Sam looked at her narrowly. He could detect no movement.

The fear of pursuit, of being captured and convicted of murder, faded and died in the face of this newer, greater fear. His sensations, except for the breathing difficulty and an odd heat against his body when he moved quickly, seemed normal to him. Yet the world had changed in some grotesque way. Howard Dineen had turned the dial...

Sam Banth was not an emotional man. He forced himself to stand very still despite thirst and hunger and weakness. He would have to weigh his own situation from the point of view of the outside normal world. If he could detect no movement then undoubtedly his own movements would be too fast to be detected by the naked eye.

He puzzled over the problem of the clothes. Evidently it had been inertia. He was capable of moving at a vastly greater speed than the clothes could be moved. Thus they would split and, while clinging, hinder every movement. And that explained why he could not force the door of the iron maiden open except with an agonizing slowness.

He looked back at the falling woman. He narrowed his eyes. Her angle of inclination seemed subtly different. The city was soundless, a vast tomb. The thing was to find something he could measure, some way he could find out just how far he had been speeded up, just how far he was out of phase. A falling woman seemed an inadequate yardstick. He stepped onto the sidewalk. No eye turned toward him. He realized how fortunate he was that it happened to be a warm day. A man was poised a few feet away, frozen in the process of taking a step. Sam walked up to him and hit him in the stomach with all his strength. It was like hitting marble. The painful shock ran up his arm. The inertia of the flesh prevented it from giving under the force of the blow. Yet Sam knew how terrible that blow had been. He went behind the man, bent and wedged his finger between the angle of shoe sole and sidewalk. In several long minutes he sensed that the pressure was increasing. Yes, the man was being driven backward by the force of the blow. It seemed likely that he would eventually end up a dozen feet from the point where he had been struck. Sam went around and looked into the man’s open eyes. There was a subtle change in the expression. He knew that the man was dead where he stood.

Suddenly Sam Banth had a wild sense of power. He turned and touched the bare arm of a girl. It was warm, yet marble-hard. He kissed her lips. They were like sun-wanned stone. He laughed wildly in the silent city and his voice soared shrill in the stone canyon and was gone.

He remembered his hunger. And with it came caution. If hours passed for him at the rate of seconds for the rest of the world, then it would be wise not to be trapped in any closed place. He trotted down the sidewalk to Park Avenue and turned south. In the second block he found a cafeteria with the door wedged open because of the heat of the day. Two men were emerging, fixed in stasis, one grinning back over his shoulder at the other. Just inside a fat woman was reaching for the punch slip. Sam ducked under her extended arm. Thirst was the most pressing need. A girl was filling a water glass from the fountain. The stream of water looked like ice. A few drops that had spattered were perfect spheres hanging in the air.

There were long moments of panic until he found a way that he could drink. It had to be done in precisely one way, and no other. He had to turn so that he was looking straight up and then force his cheek against the still column of water. By exerting a long steady pressure he could move his head through the column. Then, with the end of the broken column directly above his mouth he pushed upward, thrusting the column down to the back of his throat. He bit a length off and it was like biting through a stick of rubbery taffy. He swallowed, gagging at its solidity, but feeling it change in his throat to the fluid he needed so badly. He went to four other fountains and did the same. It seemed to him that an hour passed before his thirst was partially satisfied.

Eating was a simpler problem. At first the method gave him a moment of nausea. There were at least a hundred persons eating. The process was to find forks that were raised halfway to lips. He could fold his mouth over the food and taking what seemed to be a full three minutes in each case, pull it away from the fork. It came reluctantly as though it were frozen to the fork and his action melted it slowly. He found that attempting to chew the food was too prolonged a process, and thus he was forced to find those morsels that he could swallow whole.

It seemed to take hours. When he left he saw that the man who had been smiling over his shoulder had turned his head a full inch. The fat woman had pulled the slip almost free of the machine.

He was enormously weary, his body starved for sleep. Weariness drugged him so that he staggered as he walked. He found an alley, a small dim corner near a barred window. He curled up like a dog and went to sleep.

Sam Banth awakened with a great start. He jumped to his feet, knowing at once where he was, remembering what had happened. He was hungry. He went furtively to the alley mouth and saw the sunlit street still in its frozen state. He trotted hack to the cafeteria.

He stopped suddenly and sobbed aloud. The two men were still emerging. The man in front had turned his head so that he faced straight ahead and he had taken one more step. The fat woman was another step closer to the pile of trays and the slip was free of the machine.

Panting to suck the solid air into his lungs, he walked rapidly back to the street he had first seen. The pigeon had moved a full thirty feet and, feet outstretched, it was frozen in the act of landing on the pavement. The man he had struck had taken two steps backwards. His eyes bulged and his mouth was open and he had lifted his arms.

Sam walked back to the cafeteria. The streams of water that he had bitten off had replaced themselves and the same persons stood filling the water glasses. The forks be had emptied seemed not to have moved and be realized that they had been carried up to the lips and were now on the return journey to the plates.

He spent long hours satisfying thirst and hunger, and then he was face to face with the problem of finding some measuring stick to compare his time with outside time. He walked all the way down to Fortieth Street, seeking some method he could use. No motion was perceptible to his naked eye. He leaned in at the window of a cab and saw that according to the speedometer it was traveling at twenty-four miles an hour. He figured out that, in outside time, it would go thirty-five feet a second. He found that the left rear wheel was resting directly on a small crack in the asphalt. For a moment he thought he had a method of computation and then he realized that he had no certain way of keeping track of his own time. He could go only by “sleep times.” He memorized the license plate of the cab.

After he slept again, this time in the back seat of the empty cab after worming his way in at the open window, he climbed out and paced off the distance that had been traveled. He estimated it at thirty feet. He looked at the speedometer again. The cab was traveling twenty-eight miles an hour now. The variables had defeated him.

But after he ate another idea came to him. He found a penny arcade on Seventh. A young boy had a.22 rifle at his shoulder, the trigger depressed. Sam climbed over the counter and searched down the line of fire until he found the tiny slug, suspended in mid-air. He knew from the loads on the counter that the boy was firing a,22 short. The slug was a dozen feet from the muzzle and he estimated that it was traveling at a thousand feet per second according to outside time.

The most precious thing about it was that he could see the slug move. He could touch it very lightly with his finger and feel it move. He lined it up with an object on the side wall, shut his eyes and counted off a minute — “one thousand one, one thousand two, one thousand three, one thousand four...” He opened his eyes. The little lead pellet had moved what appeared to he a good two feet. He measured it more carefully. Less than two feet. He rechecked, using longer intervals. For a little time it ceased to be such an intensely personal matter and became an abstract problem.

He said, aloud, with satisfaction, “Close enough. One second outside time equals ten hours subjective time.” He carried it further. “Let me see. Five of my minutes equal one hundred twentieth of a second for Them. Conversely, thirty-six hundred seconds in an hour, eighty-six thousand, four hundred seconds in a twenty-four hour day, multiplied by ten to give the number of subjective hours — divided by twenty-four is thirty-six thousand days, or—”

He fell to his knees as the full import struck him. He beat his thighs with his fists. He shouted at the deathly stillness of the city and at the frozen people. He ran through the streets then, cursing them and the motionless sun and the unseeing, unknowing faces.

Those were the early years. The sunlit years, the years when his beard grew full and tangled and his belly was gaunt and his legs knotted and stringy from trotting through the city.

As he grew more adept at eating it took up less of his time, and he estimated that he cut it down to half his waking hours. He learned craft. If he saw someone in the act of pushing a door open, a heavy door, he knew that before the door swung shut again he could spend long hours inside the building. It became a dangerous game.

Once he barely slid through in time and he was afraid, because if ten objective seconds passed before the door was opened again, it would be one hundred hours for him. Thus he learned caution.

He got a childlike pleasure from the department stores.

He roamed all over the city. In the city were many women. He saw the fresh young faces, the skirts sculptured and frozen by the breeze, the legs striding. He found them in the dressing rooms of the department stores, on the rubbing tables, in the beauty salons, and their flesh was to him like the stone of a garden bench in the sun. He found one girl warm-eyed, smiling into the face of her beloved, and he returned to that girl many times to put his face in the line of her vision and imagine that she smiled at him rather than at the stone man behind him. But he tired of that.

Several years later, it seemed, he found himself in a neighborhood that looked vaguely familiar. A shattered man lay on the sidewalk, crumpled in death and the blood around him was like a dark red mirror. Tt took a long time to remember. He seemed to remember having struck that man a long time ago, and yet he did not know why. People stood around the fallen man. with horror fixed on their faces.

Once he heard a deep sustained sound. It took four “sleep times” before he found it. It was a subway train. A woman had fallen on the tracks in front of it. Frozen sparks fanned out from the steel wheels and it was from those wheels that the sound came. He listened to it with pleasure for a long time. He went back many days until the sound died away.

He discovered that If he went to enough bars he could find hard brown streams of liquor that could be bitten off. On those day he went singing through the streets, smiling and nodding at the thousands of statues.

For many years he slept in one of the department stores, one that had a door blocked open. The bed he found was like stone but he discovered that after what seemed like an hour or two of sleep he sank into it, into a hollow that made sleep more comfortable. Once, when he was very tired, he slept in that bed for a very long time.

He awakened and sat up to see a woman who had been looking toward the bed when he had climbed in. Her expression had changed to one of incredulous surprise. He knew that if he had slept for ten subjective hours, she would have had a whole second to see him there. It would look to her as though he had appeared by magic. This pleased him. He ate and returned to the bed. He lay very still and watched her. Over the long hours her face slowly turned brick red. Then he tired of the game.

But it gave rise to other experiments. He found a fire escape and climbed it one day to find a woman sunbathing on the flat roof. He lay beside her and went to sleep, directly within her line of vision. When he awakened, her mouth was wide in a scream he could not hear. He did not know how many days passed before he thought of her again. He went up and found her, eyes bulging, towels left behind, frozen in the act of running toward the small penthouse.

The dark years came. The sun faded slowly over a period of many sleeps and he saw the cloud that crept across it. It was during those years that he ceased his wandering. He went only as far as was necessary to find food that could be obtained without the danger of being trapped. He slept, when he was weary, on a pile of rags in a protected corner of an alley. He talked a great deal to himself. He measured the time of sleep by the people who walked by the alley mouth. One step, a step and a half, sometimes two steps.

The world slowly darkened. Each time he awoke more lights would be on. For weeks they came on, for months.

He was constantly cold and yet he had discovered that many of the doors, once open, were closing, and he dared not sleep inside.

Once he awoke in the darkness and he remembered that he had dreamed. He had dreamed of a girl and people who moved as he moved, and a shining network of tubes and a place a long way off. He had to go to that place. He was feeble and he walked slowly. But he knew he would reach it.

The district man was Lieutenant Mareno. He folded his hands on top of the desk with exaggerated patience. “Dineen,” he said, “if it takes a year, you’re going to give me a story I can get through my thick head. Now try it again.”

Howard said angrily, “You could understand it if you’d just concede one point, lieutenant. I smashed the apparatus because I hated it, because it had killed Linda. Or rather Sam Banth killed her. But when the thing was working it made time go very quickly for the person inside it. Sam Banth was using it to decrease the reaction time of athletes, professional athletes. You’ve heard of Wally Christopher, I imagine.”

“Who hasn’t? Four eighty-three batting average.”

“He couldn’t hit until we treated him. We used a different method on him but it amounts to the same thing. Banth collects fifty percent of his gross. You grab him and he’ll help prove what I’m trying to say. Now try to understand. From something Linda said I think Banth got her to sign over her stock in Champions, Incorporated, to him. He took us to that room to kill us by putting us in that apparatus and making time go very quickly for us. When we were dead he was going to leave with the apparatus, I’m sure. The police would find two people dead of thirst and starvation.”

“I want to know how.”

“Look, lieutenant. What if you were locked in this office for ten days?”

“I’d die, naturally.”

“Then suppose I could fix you so that while you were living ten days, the rest of the world was living two or three minutes. It would only take you two or three minutes to die, wouldn’t it?”

Mareno scratched his gray head. “I don’t quite figure it.”

“Then, dammit, how come Miss Tomlinson is dead of what your own medical examiner calls dehydration? And how come we both can prove she was in perfect health at nine o’clock this morning, twelve hours ago? Answer it some other way, lieutenant. I wouldn’t be wearing this bandage if I hadn’t been slugged by Banth, would I?”

“Look, Dineen. My job is to turn enough over to the prosecuting attorney so he can make a case. What the hell!”

“Banth killed her.”

“Look. Could you rig up some kind of gadget and come into court, provided we catch Banth, and prove maybe with an animal how it works? The S.P.C.A. will crucify us, but I don’t see any other way.”

“I could do that.”

“Okay. Now what happened to Banth? What did he do after you slugged him and took Miss Tomlinson’s body out of that machinery?”

Howard looked away for a moment. He said easily, “I hit Banth and he fell. I took Miss Tomlinson’s body out. I was examining her and then I found that she was dead. I looked around the room and I saw that Banth had escaped from me.”

“I don’t see where the hell he went,” Mareno said. “He’s an easy guy to spot. We’ll pick him up sooner or later. What a hell of a day this has been for the department!”

“How so?”

“A guy is killed thirty feet from the place where the Tomlinson girl was killed. Nobody knows what killed him. Something hit him and broke him almost into two pieces. The whole town goes crazy all at once. We get calls that a cafeteria is serving disappearing food. Can you tie that?”

Howard Dineen wore an odd expression. “It sounds strange.”

“And that ain’t half of it, brother. Hysterical women phoning in about seeing ghosts in the daytime. They call in from all over the city and always it’s the same ghost, an old nekkid guy with a bushy beard that appears suddenly and then disappears just as they yell We combed a department store for him where three people seen him. No dice. Two bars or maybe it was three phone in that somebody is stealing liquor. Sergeant Rausch, a friend of mine covers one case. The bartender shows him. lie pours liquor into a shot glass. He pours out half the bottle before He can fill the glass. Rausch is quitting the force. Then we got maybe fifty, sixty cases of people all banged up, nobody knowing what hits ‘em. Busted arms, shoulders, legs, heads, backs. Two dead already and maybe two more going to be. A hell of a day. The witnesses say these people were walking along and all of a sudden they take a big dive onto the sidewalk or out onto the street,”

The phone rang. Mareno picked it up. He listened, replied in monosyllables and then hung up. He wiped one big hand slowly down his face.

“I quit,” he said weakly. “I resign.”

“What now?”

“They got a call to go back to that same address. Where you were. There is an old naked guy there with a white bushy beard and hair halfway to his waist. He was on the steps and nobody knows how he got there. The ambulance boys say he died of old age and pneumonia. It isn’t the ghost those women saw because they said the naked guy had a dark beard. I was sworn in by Valentine and he never told me there’d be days like this.”

Howard stood up. “Would it be all right if I left now?”

“It will suit me fine. Don’t plan on moving away or joining the army, though.” Mareno looked up suddenly. “Say, would you know anything about that old guy — no, that’s a silly question. We’ll be in touch with you. When we locate Banth you’ll have some work to do for us.

Howard Dineen walked out into the night city. The cool breeze that had come with the fading day chilled the perspiration on his forehead and upper lip. Around him was the sound of traffic, fragments of sentences, subterranean roar of the trains.

Above him the timeless stars moved in infinite orbits.