Barney dropped the letter on the desk, stared down at it, his mouth
open. His face had flushed red. "Why, he's crazy!" he said aloud at
last. "He's crazier than--" He straightened, looked uneasily about the
room again.
Whether a maniac McAllen made a more desirable jailer than a secret
association engaged in keeping dangerous scientific developments under
cover could be considered an open question. The most hopeful thought
was that Dr. McAllen was indulging an unsuspected and nasty sense of
humor.
Unfortunately, there wasn't the slightest reason to believe it.
McAllen was wise to him. The situation was no gag--and neither was it
necessarily what McAllen wanted him to think. Unless his watch had
been reset, he had been knocked out by whatever hit him for roughly
five hours--or seventeen, he amended. But he would have been hungry if
it had been the longer period; and he wasn't.
Five hours then. Five hours wouldn't have given them time to prepare
the "cabin" as it was prepared: for someone's indefinite stay. At a
guess, McAllen had constructed it as a secure personal retreat in the
event of something like a nuclear holocaust. But, in that case, why
vacate it now for Barney Chard?
Too many questions, he thought. Better just keep looking around.
* * * * *
The blank metal face on the grandfather clock swung back to reveal a
group of four dials, each graduated in a different manner, only one of
them immediately familiar. Barney studied the other three for some
seconds, then their meaning suddenly came clear. The big clock had
just finished softly talking away the fourth hour of the first day of
the first month of Year One. There were five figures on the Year Dial.
He stared at it. A five-year period of--something seemed to be the key
to the entire setup.
Barney shook his head. Key it might be, but not one he could read
without additional data. He snapped the cover disk shut on the
unpleasantly suggestive dials, and began to go mentally over McAllen's
letter.
The business that in twenty-four hours--twenty now--the manner of
leaving the cabin would become "apparent" to him--that seemed to
dispose of the possibility of being buried underground here. McAllen
would hardly have provided him with a personal model of the Tube; he
must be speaking of an ordinary door opening on the immediate
environment, equipped with a time lock.
In that case, where was the door?
Barney made a second, far more careful search. Three hours later, he
concluded it. He'd still found no trace of an exit. But the paneling
in any of the rooms might slide aside to reveal one at the indicated
time, or a section of the floor might swing back above a trap door.
There was no point in attempting to press the search any further.
After all, he only had to wait.
On the side, he'd made other discoveries. After opening a number of
crates in the storage room, and checking contents of the freezer, he
could assume that there was in fact more than enough food here to
sustain one man for five years. Assuming the water supply held
out--there was no way of checking on it; the source of the water like
that of the power and the ventilation lay outside the area which was
accessible to him--but if the water could be depended on, he wouldn't
go hungry or thirsty. Even tobacco and liquor were present in
comparably liberal quantities. The liquor he'd seen was all good;
almost at random he had selected a bottle of cognac and brought it and
a glass to the main room with him. The thought of food wasn't
attractive at the moment. But he could use a drink.
He half filled the glass, emptied it with a few swallows, refilled it
and took it over to one of the armchairs. He began to feel more
relaxed almost at once. But the truth was, he acknowledged, settling
back in the chair, that the situation was threatening to unnerve him
completely. Everything he'd seen implied McAllen's letter came close
to stating the facts; what wasn't said became more alarming by a
suggestion of deliberate vagueness. Until that melodramatically
camouflaged door was disclosed--seventeen hours from now--he'd be
better off if he didn't try to ponder the thing out.
And the best way to do that might be to take a solid load on rapidly,
and then sleep away as much of the intervening time as possible.
He wasn't ordinarily a hard drinker, but he'd started on the second
bottle before the cabin began to blur on him. Afterwards, he didn't
remember making it over to the bed.
* * * * *
Barney woke up ravenous and without a trace of hangover. Making a
mental adjustment to his surroundings took no more time than opening
his eyes; he'd been dreaming Dr. McAllen had dropped him into a snake
pit and was sadistically dangling a rope twelve feet above his head,
inviting him to climb out. To find himself still in the softly lit
cabin was--for a few seconds, at any rate--a relief.
The relief faded as he sat up and looked at his watch. Still over an
hour to go before McAllen's idiotic door became "apparent." Barney
swore and headed for the bathroom to freshen up.
There was an electric shaver there, the end of its cord vanishing into
the wall. Barney used it as meticulously as if he were embarking on a
day of normal activities, prepared a breakfast in the kitchen and took
it to the main room. He ate unhurriedly, absorbed in his thoughts, now
and then glancing about the room. After a few minutes he uneasily
pushed back the plate and stood up. If McAllen's twenty-four hours
began with the moment the big clock in the room had been started, the
door should be in evidence by now.
Another tour of the place revealed nothing and left him nervous enough
to start biting his nails. He moved about the room, looking over
things he'd already investigated. A music cabinet--he'd thought it was
a radio at first, but it was only an elaborate hi-fi record player;
two enclosed racks of records went with it--mainly classical stuff
apparently. And a narrow built-in closet with three polished fishing
rods and related gear, which would have allowed for speculation on the
nature of the cabin's surroundings, except that McAllen might feel
compelled to have a sampling of his toys around him wherever he was.
Barney closed the closet door morosely, stood regarding the two
crowded bookcases next to it. Plenty of books--reflecting the McAllen
taste again. Technical tomes. Great Literature. Dickens, Melville, the
Life of Gandhi.
Barney grunted, and was turning away when another title caught his
eye. He glanced back at it, hauled out the book:
"Fresh Water Game Fish; Tested Methods of Their Pursuit." The author:
O. B. McAllen.
[Illustration]
Barney was opening the book when the cabin's door also opened.
* * * * *
Bright light--daylight--filled the room with so sudden a gush that
Barney's breath caught in his throat. The book seemed to leap out of
his hands. With the same glance he saw then the low, wide picture
window which abruptly had appeared in the opposite wall, occupying
almost half its space--and, in the other wall on the far left, a big
door which was still swinging slowly open into the room. Daylight
poured in through window and door. And beyond them--
For seconds he stared at the scene outside, barely aware of what he
was looking at, while his mind raced on. He had searched every inch of
the walls. And those thick wooden panels hadn't simply slid aside; the
surfaces of doorframe and window were flush with the adjoining wall
sections. So the McAllen Tube was involved in these changes in the
room--and he might have guessed, Barney thought, that McAllen would
have found more than one manner of putting the space-twisting
properties of his device to use. And then finally he realized what he
was seeing through the window and beyond the door. He walked slowly up
to the window, still breathing unevenly.
The scene was unfamiliar but not at all extraordinary. The cabin
appeared to be part way up one side of a heavily forested, rather
narrow valley. It couldn't be more than half a mile to the valley's
far slope which rose very steeply, almost like a great cresting green
wave, filling the entire window. Coming closer Barney saw the skyline
above it, hazy, summery, brilliantly luminous. This cabin of McAllen's
might be in one of the wilder sections of the Canadian Rockies.
Or--and this was a considerably less happy thought--it probably could
have been set up just as well in some area like the Himalayas.
But a more immediate question was whether the cabin actually _was_ in
the valley or only appearing to be there. The use of the Tube made it
possible that this room and its seeming surroundings were very far
apart in fact. And just what would happen to him then if he decided to
step outside?
There were scattered sounds beyond the open door: bird chirpings and
whistles, and the continuous burring calls of what Barney decided
would be a wild pigeon. Then a swirl of wind stirred the nearer
branches. He could feel the wash of the breeze in the room.
It looked and sounded--and felt--all right.
Barney scowled undecidedly, clearing his throat, then discovered that
a third item had appeared in the room along with the door and the
window. In the wall just this side of the door at shoulder-height was
a small ivory plate with two black switches on it. Presumably the
controls for door and window....
Barney went over, gingerly touched the one on the right, watching the
window; then flicked up the switch. Instantly, the window had
vanished, the wood paneling again covered the wall. Barney turned the
switch down. The window was back.
The door refused to disappear until he pushed it shut. Then it obeyed
its switch with the same promptness.
He went back across the room, returned with one of McAllen's fishing
poles, and edged its tip tentatively out through the door. He wouldn't
have been surprised if the tip had disintegrated in that instant. But
nothing at all occurred. He dug about with the pole in the loose earth
beyond the doorsill, then drew it back. The breeze was flowing freely
past him; a few grains of soil blew over the sill and into the room.
The door seemed to be concealing no grisly tricks and looked to be
safe enough.
Barney stepped out on the sill, moved on a few hesitant steps, stood
looking about. He had a better view of the valley here--and the better
view told him immediately that he was not in the Canadian Rockies. At
least, Canada, to his knowledge, had no desert. And, on the left, this
valley came to an end perhaps a little more than a mile away from the
cabin, its wooded slopes flowing steeply down to a landscape which was
dull rust-red--flat sand stretches alternating with worn rock
escarpments, until the desert's rim rose toward and touched the hazy
white sky. Not so very different from--
Barney's eyes widened suddenly. Could he be in the Sierras--perhaps
not more than three or four hours' drive from Los Angeles?