"Well, then, was this here?" And Dr. Smith scraped gently with his fingernail at a spot near the top of the wide side of the thermostat. It was a neat, tiny circle drilled through the metal. The water did not quite reach it.
The chemist's eyes widened. "No, sir, that wasn't there ever before. I'll guarantee that."
"Hmm. Is there one on the other side?"
"Well, I'll be damned. I mean, yes, sir!"
"All right, come round here and sight through the holes...Shut the thermostat off, please. Now stay there." He placed his finger on the hole in the wall. "What do you see?" he called out.
"I see your finger, sir. Is that where the hole is?"
Dr. Smith did not answer. He said, with a calmness he was far from feeling, "Sight through in the other direction... Now what do you see?"
"Nothing now."
"But that's the place where the crucible with the uranium was standing. You're looking at the exact place, aren't you?"
Reluctantly, "I think so, sir."
Dr. Smith said frostily, with a quick glance at the name plate on the still-open door, "Mr. Jennings, this is absolutely top-secret. I don't want you ever to speak about this to anyone. Do you understand?"
"Absolutely, sir!"
"Then let's get out of here. We'll send in the radiation men to check the place, and you and I will spend a siege in the infirmary."
"Radiation burns, you mean?" The chemist paled.
"We'll find out."
But there were no serious signs of radiation burns in either. Blood counts were normal and a study of the hair roots revealed nothing. The nausea that developed was eventually tabbed as psychosomatic and no other symptoms appeared.
Nor, in all the Institute, was anyone found, either then or in the future, to explain why a crucible of crude uranium, well below critical size, and under no direct neutronic bombardment, should suddenly melt and radiate that deadly and significant corona.
The only conclusion was that nuclear physics had queer and dangerous crannies left in it.
Yet Dr. Smith never brought himself to tell all the truth in the report he eventually prepared. He made no mention of the holes in the laboratory, no mention of the fact that the one nearest the spot where the crucible had been was barely visible, the one on the other side of the thermostat was a trace larger, while the one in the wall, three times as far away from that fearful spot, could have had a nail thrust through it.
A beam expanding in a straight line could travel several miles before the Earth's curvature made the surface fall away from it sufficiently to prevent further damage, and then it would be ten feet across. After that, flashing emptily into space, expanding and weakening, a queer strain in the fabric of the cosmos.
He never told anyone of that fancy.
He never told anyone that he called for the morning papers next day, while still in the infirmary, and searched the columns with a definite purpose in mind.
But so many people in a giant metropolis disappear every day. And nobody had gone screaming to the police with vague tales of how, before his eyes, a man (or would it be half a man?) had disappeared. At least no such case was reported.
Dr. Smith forced forgetfulness, eventually.
To Joseph Schwartz it had happened between one step and the next. He had lifted his right foot to clear the Raggedy Ann doll and for a moment he had felt dizzy-as though for the merest trifle of time a whirlwind had lifted him and turned him inside out. When he placed his right foot down again, all the breath went out of him in a gasp and he felt himself slowly crumple and slide down to the grass.
He waited a long time with his eyes closed-and then he opened them.
It was true! He was sitting on grass, where previously he had been walking on concrete.
The houses were gone/ The white houses, each with its lawn, squatting there, row on row, all goner
And it was not a lawn he was sitting on, for the grass was growing rank, untended, and there were trees about, many of them, with more on the horizon.
That was when the worst shock of all came, because the leaves on those trees were ruddy, some of them, and in the curve of his hand he felt the dry brittleness of a dead leaf. He was a city man, but he knew autumn when he saw it.
Autumn! Yet when he had lifted his right foot it had been a June day, with everything a fresh and glistening green.
He looked toward his feet automatically as he thought that and, with a sharp cry, reached toward them...The little cloth doll that he had stepped over, a little breath of reality, a- Well, no! He turned it over in his trembling hands, and it was not whole. Yet it was not mangled; it was sliced. Now wasn't that queer! Sliced lengthwise very neatly, so that the waste-yarn stuffing wasn't stirred a hair. It lay there in interrupted threads, ending flatly.
The glitter on his left shoe caught Schwartz's eye. Still clutching the doll, he forced his foot over his raised knee. The extreme tip of the sole, the part that extended forward past the uppers, was smoothly sliced off. Sliced off as no earthly knife in the hand of an earthly cobbler could have duplicated. The fresh surface gleamed almost liquidly in its unbelievable smoothness.
Schwartz's confusion had reached up from his spinal cord and touched the cerebrum, where it finally froze him with horror.
At last, because even the sound of his own voice was a soothing element in a world otherwise completely mad, he spoke aloud. The voice he heard was low and tense and panting.
He said, "In the first place, I'm not crazy. I feel inside just the way I've always felt...Of course, if maybe I were crazy, I wouldn't know it, or would I? No-" Inside, he felt the hysteria rise and forced it down. "There must be something else possible."