"Listen, nothing," he hissed. "We _both_ can't be crazy. Those are the
voices we kept hearing before. And those two people are the talkers.
Those two German (five words censored) louses. Hitler and Goering!"
There, he'd said it. I hadn't dared to. It sounded too mad, too wildly,
babblingly insane to utter. But now I looked back through that thin gray
cheesecloth of fog, back into the room.
The two occupants couldn't be anyone other than Hitler and Goering. And
I was suddenly aware that the map Goering pointed to so frequently was a
map of Austria.
"But what," I started again.
Stoddard looked me in the eye. "I can understand a little German," he
said. "They're talking about an invasion of Austria, and if you will
look hard at the corner of that map, you'll see a date marked--1938!"
I did look hard, and of course I saw that date. I turned back to
Stoddard.
"We're both crazy," I said a little wildly, "we're both stark, raving
nuts. Let's get out of here."
"We are looking back almost five years into the past," Stoddard hissed.
"We are looking back five years into Germany, into a room in which
Hitler and Goering are talking over an approaching invasion of a country
called Austria. I might have believed I was crazy when I first found
this alone, but not now!"
Maybe we were both crazy. Maybe he was wrong. But then and there I
believed him, and I knew that somehow, in some wild, impossible fashion,
that belfry on Stoddard's asinine house had become a door leading
through space and time, back five years into Germany, into the same room
where Adolf Hitler and Hermann Goering planned the conquest of Austria!
Stoddard was taking something out of his pocket.
"Now that you're here I can try it," he said. "I didn't dare do so
before, since I felt I couldn't trust my own mind alone in the thing."
I looked at what he held in his hands. A stone, tied to a long piece of
string.
"What's that for?" I demanded.
"I want to see if that veil, that gray fog door, can be penetrated," he
hissed.
* * * * *
Stoddard was swinging the stone on a string in a sharp arc now. And
suddenly he released it, sending it sailing through the grayish aperture
in the ceiling, straight into the belfry, or rather, the big room.
I saw and heard the stone on the string hit the marble floor of that
room. Then, just as sharply, Stoddard jerked it back, yanking it into
the attic again.
The result in the room beyond the fog sheet was instantaneous. Goering
wheeled from the map on the wall, glaring wildly around the room. A
pistol was in his hand.
Hitler had half risen behind that ornate desk, and was searching the
vast, otherwise unoccupied room wildly with his eyes.
Of course neither saw anything. Stoddard, breathing excitedly at my
side, had pulled the stone back into our section of time and space. But
his eyes were gleaming.
"It can be done," he whispered fiercely. "It can be crossed!"
"But what on--" I started. He cut me off with a wave of his hand,
pointing back to the gray screen covering the hole in the ceiling.
Goering had put the pistol back in the holster at his side, and was
grinning sheepishly at der Fuehrer, who was resuming his seat behind the
desk in confused and angry embarrassment.
The voices picked up again.
"They're saying how silly, to be startled by a sound," Stoddard hissed
in my ear.
Then he grabbed my arm. "But come, we can't wait any longer. Something
has to be done immediately."
He was pulling me away from the rent in the ceiling, away from the door
that had joined our time and space to the time and space of a world and
scene five years ago.
As we emerged from the attic and started blinkingly down the steps,
Stoddard almost ran ahead of me.
"We must hurry," he said again and again.
"To where?" I demanded bewilderedly. "Hadn't we better do something
about th--"
"Exactly," Stoddard panted. "We're really going to do something about
that phenomenon in the belfry. We're going to the first place in two
where we can buy two rifles, quick!"
"Rifles?" I gasped, still not getting it.
"For that little moustached swine up there," Stoddard said, pointing
toward the attic. "If a stone can cross that gray barrier, so can
bullets. We are both going to draw bead on Adolf Hitler in the year of
1938, and thus avert this hell he's spread since then. With two of us
firing, we can't miss."
And then, of course, I got it. It was incredible, impossible. But that
gray screen covering the rent in the attic ceiling upstairs wasn't
impossible. I'd seen it. Neither was the room behind it, the room where
the belfry was supposed to be, but where Adolf Hitler's inner sanctum
was instead. I'd seen that, too. So was it impossible that we'd be able
to eliminate the chief cause of the world's trouble by shooting
accurately back across time and space?
At that moment I didn't think so!
Our mad clattering dash down the attic steps, and then down to the first
floor brought Mrs. Stoddard up from the basement. She looked
frightenedly from her husband to me, then back to him again.
"What's wrong?" she quavered.
"Nothing," Stoddard said, pushing her gently but quickly aside as we
dashed for the door.
"But, George!" Mrs. Stoddard shrilled behind us. We heard her footsteps
hurrying toward the door, even as we were out of it.
"My car," I yelled. "It's right in front. I know the closest place where
we can get the guns!"
* * * * *
Stoddard and I piled into the car like a pair of high school kids when
the last bell rings. Then I was gunning the motor, while out of the
corner of my eye I could see Stoddard's wife running down the front
steps shouting shrilly after us.
We jumped from the curb like a plane from a catapult, doing fifty by my
quick shift to second gear. Then we were tearing the quiet streets of
Mayfair's second subdivision apart with the noise of a blasting horn and
a snarling motor.
It was ten minutes later when I screeched to a stop in front of the
sports and gun store I'd remembered existed in Mayfair's first
subdivision. The clerk was amazed at the wild speed with which we raced
in, grabbed the guns, threw the money on the counter, and dashed out.
We must have looked like something out of a gangster movie as we raced
back to Stoddard's place.
I was doing the driving, and Stoddard had clambered in beside me, both
rifles, and several cartridge packages in his hands. He was rocking back
and forth in mad impatience, as if by rocking he could increase our
speed. The expression on his face was positively bloodthirsty.
And then we heard the sirens behind us. Shrill, coming up like comet
wails in spite of our own speed.
"Oh, God!" Stoddard groaned. "Police!"
I squinted up into my rear vision mirror. We were less than two blocks
from the Stoddard house, now, and the thought of being overhauled by
police at the juncture was sickening, unbearable even to contemplate.
And then I saw the reason for the sirens. Saw them in the rear vision
mirror. Two fire engines, one a hook and ladder outfit, the other a hose
truck!
"It's all right," I yelped. "It's only two fire trucks!"
"Thank God!" Stoddard gasped.
We were a block from his place now, with only one corner left to turn
before we'd see the mad architectural monstrosity he called him home;
before we'd see the crazy belfry which held the salvation of the world
in its screwballish, queer-angled lines.
And then the fire trucks and the sirens were nearer and louder, less
than a block behind us. At that instant we turned the corner and came
into full view of the Stoddard place.
It was a mass of flames, utterly, roaringly ablaze!
[Illustration: It was tragedy! The house was in flames; the rats would
escape....]
I almost drove us off the street and into a tree. And by the time I'd
gotten a grip on myself, we were just a few houses away from the blazing
inferno of Stoddard's crazy quilt dwelling.
I stopped by the curb, and clambered out of the car onto knees which
would scarcely support me. My stomach was turning over and over in an
apparently endless series of nauseating somersaults.
Stoddard, white-faced, frozen, stood there beside me, clutching the guns
and the cartridge boxes foolishly in his hands.
Then someone was running up to us. Running and crying sobbingly,
breathlessly. It was Stoddard's wife.
The fire trucks screeched to a stop before the blazing building at that
instant, and her first words were drowned in the noise they made.
"... just drying out some clothes, George," she sobbed. "Just drying
them out and turned on the furnace to help dry them. You left like that,
and I got frightened. I ran to a neighbor's. The explosion and fire
started not five minutes later."
Sickly, I thought of the naphtha Stoddard had piled near his boiler. I
didn't say anything, though, for I knew he was thinking of it also.
He dropped the guns and cartridge boxes, and in a tight, strained voice,
while putting his arms comfortingly around his wife, said: "That's all
right, Laura. It wasn't your fault. We'll have another house like this.
So help me God, _just like this_!"
* * * * *
It has been six months now since Stoddard's architectural eyesight
burned to the ground. He started rebuilding immediately after that. I
turned over all the drafts my company made from his first crude "plans,"
and he handed them to the supervisor of the construction company he
bought out. You see, he took every dime he owned, sold out his insurance
business, and has gone into the building game in dead earnest.
He explained it to me this way.
"I couldn't go on having house after house built and torn down on the
same spot, Kermit. It would break me in no time. This way, with my own
company to construct the house every time, I'll save about half each
time."
"Then you're going to build precisely the same house?" I demanded.
His jaw went hard, and he peered from behind his spectacles with the
intense glare of a fanatic. For once he didn't look like Mr.
Suburbanite.
"You know damned well I am," he said. "And until it is _precisely_ the
same as the first, I'll keep tearing 'em down and putting 'em up again.
I don't care if I have to build a thousand to do it, right on this
spot!"
Of course I knew what he meant by precisely the same. And I wondered
what on earth the odds were he was bucking. Through chance and a mad
combination of angles, that time and space door had appeared the first
time. But it might have been hanging on the tiniest atom of a fractional
difference.
Stoddard has already finished his second house, and although it _looks_
exactly like the monstrosity I first built for him, it can't be
_precisely_ like it. For he didn't get the gray shrouded door when he
poked a hole in the attic ceiling and looked up into the second crazy
belfry. All he saw was the belfry.
Tomorrow he starts tearing down to build another, and pretty soon people
are going to be certain he's crazy.
As a matter of fact, they'll soon be pretty sure I'm loony also. For of
course I can't help going over there now and then to sort of lend a
hand....