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  “Nails,” said Kelland. “And a hammer.”

  He rolled the strip into a ring, punched holes through the overlapping ends with a nail, and used two copper tacks as rivets to secure the improvised joint.

  “Don’t count on this,” he warned.

  Kathie helped him raise the flimsy ring and bring it to the barrier. He swung it in position against the unseen wall. Sweat stood out on his forehead.

  “It resists,” he grunted. “Not much of a ring, really.”

  It sank into place suddenly. He gave a little shout of triumph, which changed almost at once into a cry of pain. As he jerked his hands away, the coiled strip fell inward, the riveted joint red hot. Kathie cried out, but a moment later brought butter to put on his smarting fingers.

  “All the same, we’re on the right track,” muttered Kelland. “The field exists in planes, like walls, floors, and ceilings of a cube. But in that circular framework it acts like an ordinary, alternating-current field. It generates current in the ring. The current heats up that high-resistance joint. We need a better ring.”

  Edding came in. He looked curiously at the twisted metal strip. His forehead was beaded with sweat.

  “What can I do?”

  Kelland shook his head. “We don’t know yet.”

  “My wife has told you how things are with us,” said Edding. “This thing has unsettled her, of course. But if I can get her home—the shock may have helped. We may be able to start afresh.”

  “We understand. But getting out is the problem.”

  “Can you estimate our chances of getting away soon? You see, there are reasons why it must be soon if we are to—” The man took a fresh grip on himself. It was plain that he was under more tension than he had shown up to now.

  “When I found the note she left, I did something I had planned a long time. I took company funds, a large sum I had taken home beforehand. I thought if I offered to go abroad with her, live her kind of life, she might stay with me. But now—”

  “Now you could put it back, and go on here?” asked Kelland.

  Edding nodded. “The auditors are due in the morning. I must have been crazy. But if I could get it back tonight—” He smiled thinly. “There really isn’t much hope of that, is there?”

  “There is, if we can find a ring,” answered Kelland. “A ring of metal, big enough to crawl through. That’s Open Sesame to this trap. But so far all we have is this.”

  He waved the hoop from the coffee urn. As though it conjured an evil jinn, a second wave of compression stronger than the first smote their eardrums.

  From the bedroom Doris screamed.

  Edding was first to reach her. Close behind him, Kelland saw at once that there was nothing physically wrong with her, despite hysterical tears. But he found his way to the windows blocked five feet from them.

  And behind him he heard Kathie’s father cry out. Schmidt had come in too, but now he charged out of the bedroom as if possessed, to run into the next one. This was a small storage room holding canned goods, a few scraps of furniture, some garden tools, sacks of potatoes, and other miscellany. The barrier here also was several feet inside the wall. Schmidt hurled himself on it, sobbing incoherently as his hands tore at nothingness.

  “Take it easy,” said Kelland. “What are you after?”

  At his touch the old man calmed down, trembling. “There—the ring we need.”

  “An old-fashioned tire rim!” shouted Kelland. “Of course.” It was the demountable kind common in the twenties, a hoop of steel without visible joint, virtually a one-piece ring. But now it was plain why Schmidt had clawed at the barrier. The rim was only five feet away—but on the other side.

  “We have to get it,” Kelland told Kathie. “One more compression wave and we may not be able to get into that room at all. But how?”

  “Use this,” said Kathie. “Fish through it with a pole—or a hoe.”

  She held out the coffee urn hoop Kelland had dropped. He took it, tore the bag off, and knelt to poise it against the invisible wall. When he felt it slip in, he nodded, and Kathie’s hands replaced his on the hoop. With both hands, he maneuvered the blade of the hoe through the circle of metal. The sharp corner caught against the corner of a box beyond the barrier, and in working it free, the handle struck the hoop from Kathie’s fingers. With a cry she lunged ineffectually after it.

  Sweating profusely, Kelland tore the blade free and lifted it just as the ring, slithering down, was about to fall off. He raised the blade and the hoop slipped down the handle, back through the barrier. He gave it to Kathie.

  “Hang onto it just in case. But now that the hoe is through, you can handle it as if the field weren’t there.”

  Cautiously he hooked the blade over a sack of potatoes lying atop the tire rim, pulled the sack down, and shoved it out of the way. The rim itself, wedged between the wall and a full case of canned goods, was harder to manage. Nobody spoke as he nudged it out, but there was a gasp of relief when at last it rolled free. Hooking the hoe over its edge, Kelland swiftly dragged it toward him and in through the barrier. Flushed with excitement, Kathie picked it up.

  “You first,” Kelland told her. With the rim upright, he worked it into the field.

  “Please, no.” It was her father who held Kathie back. “We do not know what will happen to a human being who goes through. I will be first.”

  “Hadn’t thought of that,” admitted Kelland. “Okay, you hold the rim while I try it. Then I’ll take over from outside.”

  “Wait.” It was Edding who spoke up, now. “Listen to me, please. If anything goes wrong, the others will need you still. I couldn’t take your place here. But I can go first.”

  In his eyes, Kelland read much he had not said, and a glance at Doris confirmed it. She was looking at her husband as if she had never seen him before.

  “Of course,” said the reporter. “If that’s how you want it.”

  “Thanks,” said Edding. He crouched, and before the others fully realized it, had thrust an arm and his head inside the rim, and crawled through. Forged in the days of large, high-pressure tires, the rim was big enough to make the feat easy. As if a little surprised by his own success, Edding stood and stared back at the others. Then he turned and walked, hands outstretched, to the rear door. Nothing hindered him as he stepped outside.

  A moment later he was back, and Kelland read his expression once more. The reporter turned to Doris. “Your husband is waiting for you.”

  A sob escaped her. She went down in a flutter of fur, heedless of knees or nylons on the concrete floor. Edding took her hand as she came through, and helped her to her feet.

  “Now you, Kathie,” ordered Kelland. The rim was warm in his hands now, but not hot. Whatever energies it bypassed were apparently well within its capacity to handle.

  The girl insisted on sending her father through first. She followed him, and, pausing beside the barrier, held the rim for Kelland to pass through.

  The reporter hesitated. “Can’t help thinking it’s gone—” But when he explored the air outside the rim, he found the barrier still there. Only the steel ring formed an island of space in that sea of invisible substance. Kelland got down and crawled through as the others had. He felt no sensation to it, only a sense of anticlimax as, leaving the rim where it was, he and Kathie joined the others outdoors. In the warm, familiar darkness of a summer evening all that had gone before seemed fantastic and unreal.

  “Thank you. We all owe you a great deal,” said Edding. His wife tugged at him. “Charlie, let’s get out of here before it—before something else happens.”

  “Yes, you’d better go,” Kelland agreed. “The others will ride in my car.”

  But as the Eddings left, he walked back toward the house. Kathie followed and watched him pick up the tire rim, her eyes somber in the moonlight.

  “I can’t believe it! It seems like a nightmare.”

  “Nightmares are only dangerous when they’re real,” returned Kelland. “Maybe we
should find out. Can you drive?” Surprised, she nodded.

  “Here, take my keys. Get in my car and wait.”

  “I needn’t know how to drive for that. What are you going to do.”

  “Take a look inside.” He spoke much more casually than he felt, knowing all at once that nothing on earth, no prospect of danger or imminence of death, could be worse than fleeing the unknown. He must try to learn what more he could.

  She must have understood, for she said no more, but led her father around the house to the car. Kelland entered again by the back door, carrying the tire rim with him. Turning, he found the barrier where it had been last. He fought down the impulse to get out again, and entered the counter room.

  There also things were exactly as before. The white cube floated where he had first seen it. Was it still here, he wondered, to discover what he would do?

  Still carrying the rim to insure his escape if the barrier should shrink further, he approached the thing closely. Was this the origin of the barrier? Or was it not only that but much more—a shield of force concealing a living thing, alert and observant behind that opaque, shimmering envelope?

  Was the cube, then, a barrier within the barrier, a more concentrated field of the same nature as the larger one?

  Had he stopped to think, Kelland might have hesitated. But on a sudden rash impulse, he swung the tire rim up, turned it flat with both hands, and dropped it squarely over the cube. For a moment of unbearable suspense, it seemed to him that time itself stood still while only his own heart pounded on.

  Instead of falling, the rim floated an inch above the top of the cube. Immediately it became red hot. Kelland stepped back, and the rim dropped another inch, while the smell of heated metal tainted the air. The white glare of the cube dimmed, as if its energies were being diverted. In seconds the tire rim glowed red, and the cube was shot with swirling darkness. Then as Kelland retreated, the cube moved.

  It rose, or struggled to rise, as if against a weight too heavy for it. The tire rim rose with it, perfectly balanced as on a cushion of forces, a fiery white circle glistening with drops of molten metal. But the cube now moved as with the last shuddering energy of exhaustion, as though whatever forces had been locked in it were spent, drained by the magic circle Kelland had cast over it.

  With a last flicker of pale light, the cube collapsed into darkness. The rim crashed to the floor. Something else fell also, something that lay inside the glowing ring, its pyre a circle of flames springing up from the floor.

  Hastily Kelland drew a pail of water and poured it against the rim. Steam hissed up in a great cloud as the flames died. When the floor was thoroughly soaked and the white vapor dispersed, he saw clearly for the first time the thing inside the rim.

  What its shape might once have been could now only be guessed. Scarcely a foot long, the tiny body was crushed in upon itself as if by a giant fist. Thin blue bones had broken through a translucent outer skin. What might have been limbs were misshapen and shriveled in death. But Kelland could tell it was not heat that had killed it, but something else. Something for which that fragile frame had never been fashioned. Something that would forever prevent its kind from usurping man’s birthright.

  It might explore the Earth as man explores the ocean’s depths. But compete with mankind for its place in the sun, it never could.

  “Air pressure!” murmured Kelland. “The cube was its diving bell. When that went, it was crushed.”

  No barrier hindered him as he walked out to the waiting car.

  The Large Ant

  by HOWARD FAST

  THERE have been all kinds of notions and guesses as to how it would end. One held that sooner or later there would be too many people; another that we would do each other in, and the atom bomb made that a very good likelihood. All sorts of notions, except the simple fact that we were what we were. We could find a way to feed any number of people and perhaps even a way to avoid wiping each other out with the bomb; those things we are very good at, but we have never been any good at changing ourselves or the way we behave.

  I know. I am not a bad man or a cruel man; quite to the contrary, I am an ordinary, humane person, and I love my wife and my children and I get along with my neighbors. I am like a great many other men, and I do the things they would do and just as thoughtlessly. There it is in a nutshell.

  I am also a writer, and I told Lieberman, the curator, and Fitzgerald, the government man, that I would like to write down the story. They shrugged their shoulders. “Go ahead,” they said, “because it won’t make one bit of difference.”

  “You don’t think it would alarm people?”

  “How can it alarm anyone when nobody will believe it?”

  “If I could have a photograph or two.”

  “Oh, no,” they said then. No photographs.”

  “What kind of sense does that make?” I asked them “You are willing to let me write the story—why not the photographs so that people could believe me?”

  “They still won’t believe you. They will just say you faked the photographs, but no one will believe you. It will make for more confusion, and if we have a chance of getting out of this, confusion won’t help.”

  “What will help?”

  They weren’t ready to say that, because they didn’t know. So here is what happened to me, in a very straightforward and ordinary manner.

  Every summer, sometime in August, four good friends of mine and I go for a week’s fishing on the St. Regis chain of lakes in the Adirondacks. We rent the same shack each summer; we drift around in canoes, and sometimes we catch a few bass. The fishing isn’t very good, but we play cards well together, and we cook out and generally relax. This summer past, I had some things to do that couldn’t be put off. I arrived three days late, and the weather was so warm and even and beguiling that I decided to stay on by myself for a day or two after the others left. There was a small flat lawn in front of the shack, and I made up my mind to spend at least three or four hours at short putts. That was how I happened to have the putting iron next to my bed.

  The first day I was alone, I opened a can of beans and a can of beer for ray supper. Then I lay down in my bed with Life on the Mississippi, a pack of cigarettes, and an eight ounce chocolate bar. There was nothing I had to do, no telephone, no demands and no newspapers. At that moment, I was about as contented as any man can be in these nervous times.

  It was still light outside, and enough light came in through the window above my head for me to read by. I was just reaching for a fresh cigarette, when I looked up and saw it on the foot of my bed. The edge of my hand was touching the golf club, and with a single motion I swept the club over and down, struck it a savage and accurate blow, and killed it. That was what I referred to before. Whatever kind of a man I am, I react as a man does. I think that any man, black, white or yellow, in China, Africa or Russia, would have done the same thing.

  First I found that I was sweating all over, and then I knew I was going to be sick. I went outside to vomit, recalling that this hadn’t happened to me since 1943, on my way to Europe on a tub of a Liberty Ship. Then I felt better and was able to go back into the shack and look at it. It was quite dead, but I had already made up my mind that I was not going to sleep alone in this shack.

  I couldn’t bear to touch it with my bare hands. With a piece of brown paper, I picked it up and dropped it into my fishing creel. That, I put into the trunk case of my car, along with what luggage I carried. Then I closed the door of the shack, got into my car and drove back to New York. I stopped once along the road, just before I reached the Thruway, to nap in the car for a little over an hour. It was almost dawn when I reached the city, and I had shaved, had a hot bath and changed my clothes before my wife awoke.

  During breakfast, I explained that I was never much of a hand at the solitary business, and since she knew that, and since driving alone all night was by no means an extraordinary procedure for me, she didn’t press me with any questions. I had two eggs, coffee and
a cigarette. Then I went into my study, lit another cigarette, and contemplated my fishing creel, which sat upon my desk.

  My wife looked in, saw the creel, remarked that it had too ripe a smell, and asked me to remove it to the basement.

  “I’m going to dress,” she said. The kids were still at camp. “I have a date with Ann for lunch—I had no idea you were coming back. Shall I break it?”

  “No, please don’t. I can find things to do that have to be done.”

  Then I sat and smoked some more, and finally I called the Museum, and asked who the curator of insects was. They told me his name was Bertram Lieberman, and I asked to talk to him. He had a pleasant voice. I told him that my name was Morgan, and that I was a writer, and he politely indicated that he had seen my name and read something that I had written. That is normal procedure when a writer introduces himself to a thoughtful person.

  I asked Lieberman if I could see him, and he said that he had a busy morning ahead of him. Could it be tomorrow?

  “I am afraid it has to be now,” I said firmly.

  “Oh? Some information you require.”

  “No. I have a specimen for you.”

  “Oh?” The “oh” was a cultivated, neutral interval. It asked and answered and said nothing. You have to develop that particular “oh.”

  “Yes. I think you will be interested.”

  “An insect?” he asked mildly.

  “I think so.”

  “Oh? Large?”

  “Quite large,” I told him.

  “Eleven o’clock? Can you be here then? On the main floor, to the right, as you enter.”

  “I’ll be there,” I said.

  “One thing—dead?”

  “Yes, it’s dead.”

  “Oh?” again. “I’ll be happy to see you at eleven o’clock, Mr. Morgan.”

  My wife was dressed now. She opened the door to my study and said firmly, “Do get rid of that fishing creel. It smells.”

  “Yes, darling. I’ll get rid of it.”

  “I should think you’d want to take a nap after driving all night.”