VII


There was a frantic scratching of a pass-key in the door to the suite. Flashlight beams licked in the opening. Men rushed in, their lights concentrating on the squirming heap of bodies on the floor. Mannard stood embattled before Laurie, ready to fight all corners.

The men with flashlights rushed past him, threw themselves upon the struggle.

They had Appolonius the Great on his feet, still fighting like a maniac, when the lights flashed back into brightness as silently and unreasonably as they had gone out.

Coghlan stood back, his coat torn, a deep scratch on his face. Lieutenant Ghalil bent down and began to search the floor. After a moment he found what he looked for. He straightened with a crooked Kurdish knife in his hand. He spoke in Turkish to the uniformed police, against whom fat little Appolonius still strug­gled in feverish silence. They marched him out. He still jumped and writhed, like a suitful of fleshy balloons.

Ghalil held out the knife to Coghlan.

“Yours?”

Coghlan was panting. “Yes—I use it as a letter-opener on my desk. How’d it get here?”

“I suspect,” said Ghalil, “that Appolonius picked it up when he visited you today.”

He began to brush off his uniform. He still breathed hard.

Mannard said indignantly, “I don’t get this! Did Appolonius try to kill me? In Heaven’s name why? What would he get out of it?”

Ghalil finished the brushing process. He said with a sigh:

“When M. Duval first brought me that incredible book, I put routine police inquiries through on everyone who might be involved. You, Mr. Mannard. Mr. Coghlan. Of course M. Du­val himself. And even Appolonius the Great. The last informa­tion about him came only today. It appears that in Rome, in Madrid, and in Paris he has been the close friend of three rich men of whom one died in an automobile accident, one apparently of a heart attack, and one seemed to have committed suicide. It is no coincidence, I imagine, that each had given Appolonius a large check for his alleged countrymen only a few days before his death. I think that is the answer, Mr. Mannard.”

“But I’ve given him no money!” protested Mannard blankly. “He did say he’d gotten money, of course, but—” and suddenly he stopped short. “Damnation! A forged check going through the clearing-house! It had to be deposited while I was alive! And I had to be dead before it was cleared, or I’d say it was a forgery! If I was dead, it wouldn’t be questioned—”

“Just so,” said Ghalil. “Unfortunately, the banks have not had time to look through their records. I expect that information to­morrow.”

Laurie put her hand on Coghlan’s arm. Mannard said abruptly:

“You moved fast, Tommy! You and the lieutenant together. How’d you know to jump him when the lights went out?”

“I didn’t know,” admitted Coghlan. “But I saw him looking at that wristwatch of his, with the second-hand sweeping around. He showed me a trick today, at my apartment, that depended on his knowing to a split-second when something was going to happen. I was just thinking that if he’d been expecting the lights to go out last night, he could have been triggered to throw you down-stairs. Then the lights went out here—and I jumped.”

“It was desperation,” Ghalil interposed. “He has tried four separate times to assassinate you, Mr. Mannard.”

“You said something like that—”

“You have been under guard,” admitted Ghalil, “since the moment M. Duval showed me that book with the strange record in it. You had rented an automobile. My men found a newly contrived defect in its muffler, so that deadly carbon-monoxide poured into the back of it. It was remedied. A bomb was mailed to you, and reached you day before yesterday—before I first spoke to Mr. Coghlan. It was—” he smiled apologetically—”in­tercepted. Today he tried to poison you at the Sea of Marmora. That failed by means he did not understand or like. Moreover, he was frightened by the affair of the book. He considered that another conspiracy existed, competing with his. The mystery of it, and the unexplained failure of attempts to assassinate you, drove him almost to madness. When even the bomb failed to blow up my police-car—”

“Suppose,” said Mannard grimly, “just suppose you explain that book hocus-pocus you and Duval are trying to put over!”

“I cannot explain it,” said Ghalil gently. “I do not understand it. But I think Mr. Coghlan proceeds admirably—”

The door to the suite buzzed. Ghalil admitted a waiter carry­ing a huge tray. The waiter said something in Turkish and placed the tray on a table. He went out.

“A man was caught in the basement with a sweep-second wrist­watch,” said Ghalil. “He had turned off the lights and turned them on again. He is badly frightened. He will talk.”

Laurie looked at Coghlan. Then, trembling a little, she began to uncover dishes on the tray.

Mannard roared: “But what the hell’s that book business, and Tommy’s fingerprints, and the stuff on the wall? They’re all part of the same thing!”

“No,” said the Turk. “You make the mistake I did, Mr. Man­nard. You assumed that things which are associated with the same thing are connected with each other. But it is not true. Sometimes they are merely apparently associated—by chance.” Laurie said, “Tommy, I—think we’d better eat something.”

“But do you mean,” demanded Mannard, “that it’s not hocus-pocus? Do you expect me to believe that there’s a gadget that’s got a ghost? D’you mean that Tommy Coghlan is going to put his fingerprints under a memorandum that says I’m going to be killed? That he’s going to write it?”

“No,” admitted Ghalil. “Still, that unbelievable message is the reason I set men to guard you three days ago. It is the reason you are now alive.” He looked hungrily at the uncovered dishes. “I starve,” he confessed. “May I?”

Mannard said, “It’s too crazy! It’d be like a miracle! Confu­sion in time so there’d be all this mix-up to save my life? Non­sense! The laws of nature don’t get suspended—”

Coghlan said thoughtfully, “When you think of it, sir, that field of force isn’t a plane surface. It’s like a tube—the way a bubble can be stretched out. That’s what threw me off. When you think what a magnetic field does to polarized light—”

“Consider me thinking of it,” growled Mannard. “What of it?”

“I can duplicate that field,” said Coghlan thoughtfully. “It’ll take a little puttering around, and I can’t make a tube of it, but I can make a field that will absorb energy—or heat—and yield it as power. I can make a refrigeration gadget that will absorb heat and yield power. It’ll take some research . . .“

“Sure of that?” snapped Mannard.

Coghlan nodded. He was sure. He’d seen something happen. He’d figured out part of how it happened. Now he could do things the original makers of the gadget couldn’t do. It was not an unprecedented event, of course. A spectacle-maker in Hol­land once put two lenses together and made a telescope which magnified things but showed them unhappily upside down. And half a continent away, in Italy, one Galileo Galilei heard a rumor of the feat and sat up all night thinking it out—and next morn­ing made a telescope so much better than the rumored one that all field-glasses are made after his design to this day.

“I’ll back the research,” said Mannard shrewdly. “If you’ll make a contract with me. I’ll play fair. That’s good stuff!”

He looked at his daughter. Her face was blank. Then her eyes brightened. She smiled at her father. He smiled back.

She said, “Tommy—if you can do that—oh, don’t you see? Come in the other room for a moment. I want to talk to you!”

He blinked at her. Then his shoulders straightened. He took a deep breath, muttered four words, and said, “Hah!” He grabbed her arm and led her through the door.

Mannard said satisfiedly: “That’s sense! Refrigeration that yields energy! Power from the tropics! Running factories from the heat of the Gulf Stream!”

“But,” said Ghalil, “does not that sound as improbable as that a gadget should have a ghost?”

“No,” said Mannard firmly. “That’s science! I don’t under­stand it, but it’s science! And Laurie wants to marry him, be­sides. And anyhow, I know the boy! He’ll manage it!”

The telephone rang. It rang again. They heard Coghlan answex it. He called:

“Lieutenant! For you!”

Ghalil answered the telephone. He pointedly did not observe the new, masterful, confident air worn by Coghlan, or the dis­tinctly radiant expression on Laurie’s face. He talked, in Turkish. He hung up.

“I go back to 80 Hosain,” he said briefly. “Something has happened. Poor M. Duval grew hysterical. They had to send for a physician. They do not know what occurred—but there are changes in the room.”

“I’m coming with you!” said Coghlan instantly.

Laurie would not be left behind. Mannard expansively came too. The four of them piled again into the police-car and headed back for the squalid quarter of the city in which the room with the gadget’s ghost was to be found. Laurie sat next to Coghlan, and the atmosphere about them was markedly rosy. Ghalil watched streets and buildings rush toward them, the ways grow narrower and darker and the houses seemed to loom above the racing car. Once he said meditatively:

“That Appolonius thought of everything! It was so desperately necessary to kill you, Mr. Mannard, that he had even an excuse for calling on you to murder you, though he expected a street-bomb to make it unnecessary! It must be time for his forged check to appear at your bank! That letter was a clever excuse, too. It would throw all suspicion upon the engineers of the mys­tery of the ancient book.”

Mannard grunted. “What’s happened where we’re going? What sort of changes in the room?” Then he said suspiciously:

“No occult stuff?”

“I doubt it very much,” said Ghalil.

There was another car parked in the narrow lane. The police at the house had gotten a doctor, who was evidently still in the building.

They went up into the room on the second floor. There were three policemen here, with a grave, mustachioed civilian who had the consequential air of the physician in a European—or Asiatic—country. Duval lay on a canvas cot, evidently provided for the police who occupied the building now. He slept heavily. His face was ravaged. His collar was torn open at his throat, as if in a frenzy of agitation when he felt that madness come upon him. His hands were bandaged. The physician explained at length to Ghalil, in Turkish. Ghalil then asked questions of the police. There was a portable electric lantern on the floor, now. It lighted the room acceptably.

Coghlan’s eyes swept about the place. Changes? No change ex­cept the cot. . . No! There had been books here beside Duval, on the floor. Ghalil had said they were histories in which Duval tried to find some reference to the building itself. There were still a few of those books—half a dozen, perhaps, out of three or four times as many. The rest had vanished.

But in their place were other things.

Coghlan was staring at them when Ghalil explained:

“The police heard him making strange sounds. They came in and he was agitated to incoherence. His hands were frost-bitten. He held the magnet against the appearance of silver and thrust books into it, shouting the while. The books he thrust into the silvery film vanished. He does not speak Turkish, but one of them thought he was shouting at the wall in Greek. They subdued him and brought a physician. He was so agitated that the physi­cian gave him an injection to quiet him.”

Coghlan said: “Damn!”

He bent over the objects on the floor. There was an ivory stylus and a clumsy reed pen and an ink-pot—the ink was just beginning to thaw from solid ice—and a sheet of parchment with fresh writing upon it. The writing was the same cursive hand as the memo mentioning “frigid Beyond” and “adepts” and “Appolonius” in the old, old book with Coghlan’s fingerprints. There was a leather belt with a beautifully worked buckle. There was a dagger with an ivory handle. There were three books. All were quite new, but they were not modern printed books: they were manuscript books, written in graceless Middle Greek with no spaces between words or punctuation or paragraphing. In binding and make-up they were exactly like the Alexiad of seven hundred years ago. Only—they were spanking new.

Coghlan picked up one of them. It was the Alexiad. It was an exact duplicate of the one containing his prints, to the minut­est detail of carving in the ivory medallions with which the leather cover was inset. It was the specifically same volume— But it was seven-hundred years younger— And it was bitterly, bitterly cold.

Duval was more than asleep. He was unconscious. In the physi­cian’s opinion he had been so near madness that he had had to be quieted. And he was quieted. Definitely.

Coghlan picked up the alnico magnet. He moved toward the wall and held the magnet near the wet spot. The silvery appear­ance sprang into being. He swept the magnet back and forth. He said:

“The doctor couldn’t rouse Duval, could he? So he could write something for me in Byzantine Greek?”

He added, with a sort of quiet bitterness. “The thing is shrink­ing—naturally!”

It was true. The wet spot was no longer square. It had drawn in upon itself so that it was now an irregular oval, a foot across at its longest, perhaps eight inches at its narrowest.

“Give me something solid,” commanded Coghlan. “A flash­light will do.”

Laurie handed him Lieutenant Ghalil’s flashlight. He turned it on—it burned only feebly—and pressed it close to the silvery surface. He pushed the flashlight into contact. Into the silvery sheen. Its end disappeared. He pushed it through the silver film into what should have been solid plaster and stone. But it went. Then he exclaimed suddenly and jerked his hand away. The flashlight fell through—into the plaster. Coghlan rubbed his free hand vigorously on his trouser-leg. His fingers were numb with cold. The flashlight had been metal, and a good conductor of frigidity.

“I need Duval awake!” said Coghlan angrily. “He’s the only one who can write that Middle Greek—or talk it or understand it! I need him awake!”

The physician shook his head when Ghalil relayed the demand. “He required much sedative to quiet him,” said Ghalil. “He cannot be roused. It would take hours, in any case.”

“I’d like to ask them,” said Coghlan bitterly, “what they did to a mirror that would make its surface produce a ghost of itself. It must have been something utterly silly!”

He paced up and down, clenching and unclenching his hands. “To make a gadget Duval called a ‘magic mirror’ “—his tone was sarcastic—”they might try diamond-dust or donkey-dung or a whale’s eyelashes. And one of them might work! Somebody did get this gadget, by accident we can’t hope to repeat!”

“Why not?”

“We can’t think, any more, like lunatics or barbarians or Byzantine alchemists!” snapped Coghlan. “We just can’t! It’s like a telephone! Useless by itself. You have to have two telephones in two places at the same time. We can see that. To use a thing like this, you have to have two instruments in the same place at different times! With telephones you need a connection of wire, joining them. With this gadget you need a connection of place, joining the times!”

“A singularly convincing fantasy,” said Ghalil, his eyes admir­ing. “And just as you can detect the wire between two telephone instruments—”

“—You can detect the place where gadgets are connected in different times! The connection is cold. It condenses moisture. Heat goes into it and disappears. And I know,” said Coghlan defiantly, “that I am talking nonsense! But I also know how to make a connection which will create cold, though I haven’t the ghost—hah, damn it!—of an idea how to make the instruments it could connect! And making the connection is as far from mak­ing the gadgets as drawing a copper wire is from making a tele­phone exchange! All I know is that an alnico magnet will act as one instrument, so that the connection can exist!”

Mannard growled: “What the hell is all this? Stick to facts! What happened to Duval?”

“Tomorrow,” said Coghlan in angry calm, “he’s going to tell us that he heard faint voices through the silvery film when he played with the magnet. He’s going to say the voices were talking in Byzantine Greek. He’s going to say he tried to rap on the silver stuff—it looked solid—to attract their attention. And whatever he rapped with went through! He’ll say he heard them exclaim, and that he got excited and told them who he was—maybe he’ll ask them if they were working with Appolonius, because Appo­lonius was mentioned on the flyleaf of that book—and offer to swap them books and information about modern times for what they could tell and give him! He’ll swear he jammed books through—mostly history-books in modern Greek and French— and they shoved things back. His frost-bitten hands are the evi­dence for that! When something comes out of that film or goes into it, it gets cold! The ‘frigid Beyond’! He’ll tell us that the ghost of the gadget began to get smaller as he swapped—the coating or whatever produced the effect would wear terrifically with use!—and he got frantic to learn all he could, and then your policemen came in and grabbed him, and then he went more fran­tic because he partly believed and partly didn’t and couldn’t make them understand. Then the doctor came and everything’s messed up!”

“You believe that?” demanded Mannard.

“I know damned well,” raged Coghlan, “he wouldn’t have asked them what they did to the mirror to make it work! And the usable surface is getting smaller every minute, and I can’t slip a written note through telling them to run-down the process because Duval’s the only one here who could ask a simple ques­tion for the crazy answer they’d give!”

He almost wrung his hands. Laurie picked up the huge, five-inch-thick book that had startled him before. Mannard stood four-square, doggedly unbelieving. Ghalil looked at nothing, with bright eyes, as if savoring a thought which explained much that had puzzled him.

“I’ll never believe it,” said Mannard doggedly. “Never in a million years! Even if it could happen, why should it here and now? What’s the purpose—the real purpose in the nature of things? To keep me from getting killed? That’s all it’s done! I’m not that important, for natural laws to be suspended and the one thing that could never happen again to happen just to keep Ap­polonius from murdering me!”

Then Ghalil nodded his head. He looked approvingly at Man­nard.

“An honest man!” he said. “I can answer it, Mr. Mannard. Duval had his history-books here. Some were modern Greek and some were French. And if the preposterous is true, and Mr. Coghlan has described the fact, then the man who made this— this ‘gadget’ back in the thirteenth century was an alchemist and a scholar who believed implicitly in magic. When Duval offered to trade books, would he not agree without question because of his belief in magic? He would have no doubts! What Duval sent him would seem to him magic. It would seem prophecy—in flimsy magic form, less durable than sheepskin—but magic none­theless. He could even fumble at the meaning of the Greek. It would be peculiar—but magic. He could read it as 'perhaps' a modern English-speaking person can read Chaucer. Not clearly, and fumblingly, but grasping the meaning dimly. And this an­cient alchemist would believe what he read! It would seem to him pure prophecy. And he would be right!"

Ghalil's expression was triumphant.

"Consider! He would have not only past history but future history in his hands! He would use the information! His prophe­cies would be right! Perhaps he could even grasp a little of the French! And what happens when superstitious men find that a soothsayer is invariably right? They guide themselves by him! He would grow rich! He would grow powerful! His sons would be noblemen, and they would inherit his secret knowledge of the future! Always they would know what was next to come in the history of Byzantium and—perhaps even elsewhere! And men, knowing their correctness, would be guided by them! They would make the prophecies come to pass! Perhaps Nostradamus com­piled his rhymes after spelling through a crumbling book of paper —they had no paper in Byzantium or later in Europe itself ­and startlingly foretold the facts narrated in a book our friend Duval sent back to ancient Istanbul!"

Then Ghalil sat down on the foot of the cot, almost calmly.

"Knowledge of the future, in a superstitious age, would make the future. This event, Mr. Mannard, did not come about to save your life, but to direct the history of the world through the Dark Ages to the coming of today. And that is surely significant enough to justify what has happened!"

Mannard shook his head.

"You're saying now," he said flatly, "that if Tommy doesn't write down what you showed me, all this won't happen because Duval won't find the writing. If he doesn't find the writing, the books won't go back to the past. All history will be different. Mygreat-grandfather and yours, maybe, *ill never be born and we won't be here. No! That's nonsense!"

Coghlan looked at the book in Laurie's hand. He took it from her. "This is exactly like Duval's book," he said.

"It is the same book," said Ghalil, with confidence. "And I think you know what you will do."

"I'm not sure," said Coghlan. He frowned. "I don't know." Laurie said urgently:

"If it isn't nonsense, Tommy, then—I could not be at all, and you could not be at all . . . we'd never meet each other, and you wouldn't have that research to do—and—and—"

There was silence. Coghlan looked around on the floor. He picked up the reed pen. He said, unnecessarily:

"I still don't believe this."

But he dipped the pen in the thawing ink of the ink-pot. Laurie steadied the book for him to write. He wrote:

See Thomas Coghlan, 750 Fatima, Istanbul.

He looked at her and hesitated. Then he said:

"There was something I'd say to myself . . . written down here, it was what made me believe in it enough to trail along." He wrote:

Professor, president, so what?

Ghalil said mildly: "I am sure you remember this address." "Yes," said Coghlan seriously. He wrote:

Gadget at 80 Hosain, second floor, back room.

Mannard said grimly: "It's still nonsense!" Coghlan wrote:

Make sure of Mannard. To be killed.

"That's a slight exaggeration," he observed slowly, but it's nec­essary, to make us act as we did."

He was smudging ink on his fingers when Ghalil said politely:

“May I help? The professional touch—”

Coghlan let him smear the smudgy black ink on his fingertips. Ghalil painstakingly rolled the four finger-prints, the thumb-print below. He said calmly:

“This is unique—to make a fingerprint record I will see again when it is seven centuries old! Now what?”

Coghlan picked up the magnet. It was much brighter than a steel one. It had the shine of aluminum, but it was heavy. He presented it to the dwindling wet spot on the wall. The wet place turned silvery. Coghlan thrust the book at the shining surface. It touched. It went into the silver. It vanished. Coghlan took the magnet away. The wet place looked, somehow, as if it were about to dry permanently. Duval breathed stertorously on the canvas cot.

“And now,” said Ghalil blandly, “we do not need to believe it any more. We do not believe it, do we?”

“Of course not!” growled Mannard. “It’s all nonsense!”

Ghalil grinned. He brushed off his fingers.

“Undoubtedly,” he said sedately, “M. Duval contrived it all. He will never admit it. He will always insist that one of us con­trived it. We will all suspect each other, for always. There will be no record anywhere except a very discreet report in the ar­chives of the Istanbul Police Department, which will assign the mystification either to M. Duval or to Appolonius the Great— after he has gone to prison, at least. It is a singular mystery, is it not?”

He laughed.

A week later, Laurie triumphantly pointed out to Coghlan that it was demonstrably all nonsense. The cut on his thumb had healed quite neatly, leaving no scar at all.


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