Terrors (16 page)

“But I only have
one
Harley.”

“In this universe, yes. But suppose there is another universe, identical to this in every way, except that you own a Tucker Torpedo instead. Do you see?”

“There’s only one me.”

“In this universe there is. But there might be a universe exactly like ours, except that you were twins. Or
triplets. Or where you are a woman instead of a man. Or where you died in infancy. Or were never even conceived.”

Behind Carstairs, the water completely covered the windows. They were thick and strong, however. Thoroughly sealed. Through them, Vernon Browne could see hungry-looking creatures baring their fangs. Something big and gray charged straight at Carstairs and collided with the glass.
It bounced off, drifted momentarily as if stunned, then swam away disappointed.

Vernon said, “This sounds like something out of
The Twilight Zone
.”

“The what?”

“
The Twilight Zone
.”

“What’s that?”

“Don’t you remember the old TV show? What’s his name, Rod Sperling, Sterling, something like that. Weird sci-fi stuff.”

“Oh, you mean
Tales of the Dusk
. I used to watch that when I was a kid. That
was a great show, yes. They did deal with ideas a little like this. Ed Sullivan was the host.”

Vern decided not to press the point. “Look, doctor. You’ve been pretty generous with your time. You said you’d give me five minutes and it’s already been a lot longer than that. But I don’t know if we’re getting anywhere.”

Carstairs reached for the bowl on his desk and drew out a lobster snack. He
crunched it between his teeth. “Help yourself if you’d like,” he said.

A huge form swam by behind Carstairs. For a split second it reminded Vernon uncannily of himself. “Professor Carstairs, this theory, this business of other worlds just like ours except for one or two things, like a motorcycle is a car or a man is a woman—is that just your idea?”

“Oh, no! There are papers on it. Bennett at
Minnesota, Klass at Penn State, Jenkins at Norfolk. Several others as well.”

“Well, look, is there a way that somebody could get from one world to another? Like, could I somehow slip into a different universe? One that’s almost exactly like this? And maybe not even know the difference?”

Carstairs grinned, showing rows of triangular teeth. “If the other universe is enough like ours, there will
be another Vernon Browne already in it.” Behind him, the form that reminded Vernon of himself reappeared. It plastered itself to the window like a clinging starfish, waving tentacles in a manner both suggestive and repellent. Suddenly it was torn from its place by a school of tiny, flashing fish. The huge creature struggled, but only briefly. Within seconds it was reduced to a cluster of dead gobbets.
The small fish fought and tore at the chunks
of flesh, devouring them greedily. A pinkish stain slowly dissipated. Simon Carstairs appeared oblivious of the event. “Surely, this other you would take exception to your taking his place, taking over his life.”

“Yeah, I guess so. Vern stood up and moved around the room. The warmth and moisture felt good on his skin. “But suppose that guy moved over
to the
next
world. Are these things all next to each other? Or stacked like pages in the—the
Daily Call-Clarion?
That’s where I work. I’ve been commuting to work over in the city for years.”

“The city?”

“Sure. You know. San Fran—San—uh, give me a minute, I’ll remember it.”

“You mean Yerba Buena?”

“That’s it. Right. Yerba Buena.” What a relief that was!

“You actually commute to Yerba Buena
every day?” Carstairs shook his head. “You actually travel through the swamps and the geysers and the lunar field every day? Amazing! My hat’s off to you for that!”

“What about these different worlds, Professor?” Vernon persisted.

Carstairs cleared his throat. “If these multiple worlds exist, they’re more like multiple realities. In a sense, the points within each of them occupy the same time-space
loci. But in another sense, they do so in different continua. So they are locally mapped onto each other. Superimposed, you see.” He laid one hand on his desktop, palm down, then turned the other palm up and laid it on top of the first, so that thumb covered thumb and fingers covered fingers.

“They are separated in a manner totally ineffable to us.”

“Prof, I don’t even know what you mean by
that. But just suppose one of these guys—one of these
me’s
—started shoving sideways. Shoved his way out of his world and into ours. He could shove the
me
from this world out of his way. Shove him over into the next world. You see? And the next, and the next.”

Carstairs took another lobster snack. “You’re sure? No? Well, Mr. Vernon, I suppose if we carry that notion to its logical conclusion,
we will find an infinite series of
you’s
rotating among an infinite number of universes. Each time you get shoved—and shove—you will find yourself in a universe farther from the one where you began. Farther and farther. And stranger and stranger. Stranger and stranger and stranger.”

“And is there an end to this? An end and a beginning? Do you fall off the edge eventually? Or does it go in a circle?
If I keep on shoving,
world after world,
me
after
me
, will I wind up back where I started?”

“That’s a very interesting question. I suppose the universes of reality might be circular in nature. I’m afraid, though, that even if they are, you’ll never get home. No. The worlds are getting stranger as you get farther from your point of origin. Sooner or later you will find yourself in a world where
you cannot survive. Once you reach such a world—well, I wish I could offer you some hope, sir or madam, but I’m afraid that there is none. No hope for your survival. No hope at all.”

“No hope at all? But why me? Why me?” Bronenstein sobbed, on the edge of hysteria and despair.

“
Scientists talk about what, Mr. Steinbacher, and about how, but not about why. Never about why. That is a philosopher’s
question, Mrs. Klemper. Or a clergything’s. Not a scientist’s. And now, I have to meet a class, and so I will have to ask you to leave
.”

Carstairs showed his visitor out of the physics tank, and the visitor swam slowly, puzzlement still visible in uncertainly wavering antennae and dismally pulsating pigment spots, slowly toward home. As the traveler swam past the Venusian enclave, purple-tentacled
aliens sang in the complex, amazingly beautiful harmonies for which they were famous over all the worlds, and giant feathery fern-eels visiting Earth from the civilized moons of Neptune danced merrily to the tune.

We are told that humans—or creatures that could reasonably be defined as humans—have walked the earth for 2,000,000 years at the least, and perhaps for as long as 5,000,000 years. And yet civilization, in any form that we would recognize and acknowledge, has existed for a mere 10,000 to 15,000 years. We are thus asked to believe that Gug and her mate Ug led a primitive
existence, hunting and gathering or perhaps scratching a few crude holes in the ground and dropping seeds into them each spring, and made little more progress than that for a minimum of 1,985,000 years. Following this there sprang into being virtually simultaneously the miracles of Angkor Wat, Babylon, Thebes, Kukulcan, Yucatan, and Cuzco
.

We are also told that life has existed on the earth for
at least 2,000,000,000 years, and perhaps as long as 6,000,000,000. Uncounted millions of species have evolved and disappeared. Whole orders of life have emerged and departed. Creatures as tiny as a virus and so huge as to dwarf the mammoth or the whale, creatures of infinite variety and endless complexity, have lived and died on this world. And yet we are told that of all these species, only one,
our own, and at that, only in a relative flicker of an eyelash, has developed true consciousness and intelligence
.

What nonsense! What arrogance! What blind, ignorant balderdash!

—from the preface to
Paleontology and Paleoanthropology: the Failure and the Fraud
, by Lindsey and Plum, Canyon Press, San Carlos, California, 1981

When a traveler in north central Massachusetts takes the wrong fork
at the junction of the Aylesbury Pike just beyond Dean’s Corners he may feel that he has fallen through a crack in time and emerged into an earlier era in New England. The countryside is marked by rolling hills and meadows, spotted here and there with stands of woodland that, at first glance, appear lush and healthy, but that, upon closer examination, seem to emit an almost palpable miasma of
wrongness
. The grasses are oddly yellow. The tree trunks seem to be writhing in pain, while their leaves appear oddly
fat
and to give off an unpleasantly oily exudation.

If one arrives in what has become known as Dunwich Country at night, the sense of temporal alienation is especially strong. The few advertising billboards that were erected along the Pike in earlier decades have fallen into wrack
and ruin, but no one has bothered either to rehabilitate or to remove them. The few tatters of once-colorful posters that remain attached to their frameworks, flapping in every errant gust of wind, remind the traveler of products long removed from the market: Graham-Paige automobiles, Atwater-Kent super-heterodyne radio sets, Junius Brutus Cigars.

Even tuning the radio to stations in Boston,
Providence or Worcester does little good, for the particular conformation of the terrain, or perhaps the presence of deposits of as yet undetected ores beneath the ground or of unexplained atmospheric conditions, makes it impossible to receive more than an unpleasant melange of sound, interspersed with indecipherable whisperings and gurglings.

Rounding the base of Sentinel Hill on the outskirts
of Dunwich, the site of the infamous “horror” of 1928, the traveler beholds an incongruous sight: a modern laboratory and office building of mirrored glass construction. Activity in the building proceeds uninterrupted, day and night. A wire-mesh fence surrounds the facility, and a single rolling gateway is guarded at all times by stern-faced young men and women. These individuals are clad in dark
uniforms of unfamiliar cut and tint, identifiable neither as military nor police in nature. Each uniform jacket carries a shoulder patch and each uniform cap a metal device, but the spiraling helix into which these insignia are formed is also unique to the Dunwich facility. This ensign, it may be noted, is laminated as well on the stock of the dull-black, frightening sidearm which each uniformed
guard carries.

A small wooden plaque is mounted beside the rolling gate, in sparse letters identifying the facility as the property of the Dunwich Research Project. No newspaper files or directories of government organizations make mention of the Dunwich Research Project, and neither the directory issued by the Dunwich Telephone Company, nor that company’s Directory Assistance operators are able
to furnish a number by means of which the facility may be contacted.

However, careful study of federal appropriations documents of past years may reveal “black” items in the budgets of major agencies which, a selected few Washington insiders are willing to concede, may indeed have been directed through back channels to the Project. Further study of federal records will show that these covert
appropriations for the Dunwich Research Project began in 1929.

The initial appropriation was extremely small, but in later years the funding for the Dunwich Research Project increased despite crisis, Depression, or war. The names of every President from Herbert Hoover to the present time will be found attached to these “black” items.

It was to this region that young Cordelia Whateley, a graduate
student of anthropology at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, drove her conservative gray four-door sedan in the late spring of the year. Her examinations over for the semester, she had determined to spend the next several months researching her master’s dissertation on the events of 1928. It was Miss Whateley’s belief that an encounter with one or more alien beings had provided the basis
for those horrific happenings. Because she was herself a member of a distant (and undecayed) branch of the Whateley family, she had been inculcated from infancy with a revulsion for her (decayed) kith and kin. This she wished to resolve once and for all: to prove that her distant cousin Wilbur Whateley had been not so much a menace to be feared and loathed as he was a sport of nature deserving of
the sympathy and aid which he failed to receive from those around him.

Miss Whateley brought her automobile to a stop outside the rolling gate of the Dunwich Research Project. The guard on duty, a young man with a square jaw and muscular build, approached her and courteously asked her business at the Project. She showed him a letter from her faculty adviser at McGill, addressed to the Director
of the Dunwich Institute, and a response, on Institute letterhead, welcoming her inquiry and authorizing all concerned to offer the bearer every possible courtesy and assistance.

The merest suggestion of a smile played around the lips of the guard as he handed the documents back to Miss Whateley. “You’ll want the Dunwich Institute, miss,” the guard explained. “This is the Dunwich Research Project.
The Institute is in Dunwich Town. On South Water Street. Dr. Armitage is the Director. That’s his signature on the bottom of your letter. You want the Institute, miss. The Research Project is off limits.”

He gestured courteously, suggesting but not exactly duplicating, a military salute. Then, with a series of clear and vigorous hand gestures (he was wearing white gloves) he directed Miss Whateley
to depart and return to town.

Cordelia Whateley complied, swinging her automobile around and pointing its nose back toward Dunwich proper. As she circled Sentinel Hill she could not help noticing that an array of radar dishes dotted the top of the hill. To her, they looked like a recrudescence of white, puffy toadstools.