[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Startling Stories, March 1948.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
This was England, two hundred years before bomb craters had become afixed feature of the English landscape, and while the coffee housestill had precedence over the pub. The fire roared, and the smoke fromlong clay church-warden pipes made a blue haze through which cheerfulconversation struggled.
The door swung back, and the host stood in the opening, fat handson hips, surveying the scene contentedly. Someone, invisible in thefog, drank a slurred uproarious toast, and a glass slammed into thefireplace, where the brandy-coated fragments made a myriad of smallblue flames.
"Split me if that goes not in the reckoning!" the innkeeper bellowed.A ragged chorus of derision answered him. The inn cat shot down thestairs behind him, and its shadow glided briefly over the room as itpassed the fire. It was an impossibly large, dark shadow, and for amoment it blacked out several of the booths in the rear of the chamber;the close, motionless air seemed to take on a chill. Then it was gone,and the cat, apparently annoyed by the noise, vanished into the depthsof a heavy chair.
The host forgot about it. He was accustomed to its sedentary tastes.It often got sat on in the after-theater hilarity. He rolledgood-naturedly across the room as someone pounded on a table for him.
But the cat, this time, had not merely burrowed into the cushions. Itwas gone. In the chair, in a curiously transparent condition which madehim nearly invisible in the uncertain light, sat a dazed, tired figurein a Twentieth-Century Tux....
The radio was playing a melancholy opus called "Is You Is or Is YouAin't, My Baby," as the cab turned the corner. "Here you are, sir,"croaked the driver in his three A.M. voice.
The sleepy-eyed passenger's own voice was a little unreliable. "Howmuch?"
The fare was paid and the cabby wearily watched his erstwhile customergo up the snow-covered walk between the hedges. He put the car in gear.Then he gaped and let the clutch up. The engine died with a reproachfulgasp.
The late rider had staggered suddenly sidewise toward the bushes—hadhe been that drunk? Of course, he had only tripped and fallen out ofsight; the cabby's fleeting notion that he had melted into the airwas an illusion, brought on by the unchristian lateness of the hour.Nevertheless the tracks in the snow did stop rather unaccountably. Thecabby swore, started his engine, and drove away, as cautiously as hehad ever driven in his life.
Behind him, from the high tree in the yard, a cat released a lonelyululation on the cold, still night.
The stage was set....
There is order in all confusions; but Dr. Hugh Tracy, astronomer,knew nothing of the two events recorded above when his adventurebegan, so he could make no attempt at integrating them. Indeed, he wasin confusion enough without dragging in any stray cats. One minutehe had been charging at the door of Jeremy Wright's apartment, anautomatic in his hand and blind rage in his heart. As his shoulder hadsplintered the panel, the world had revolved once around him, like ascene-changing stunt in the movies.
The scene had changed, all right. He was not standing in JeremyWright's apartment at all, but in a low-roofed, dirt-floored room builtof crudely shaped logs, furnished only with two antique chairs and arickety table from which two startled men were arising. The two weredressed in leathern jerkins of a type fashionable in the early 1700's.
"I—I beg your pardon," he vol