The Universe Maker

POCKET BOOKS, a Simon & Schuster division of GULF & WESTERN CORPORATION

1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, N.Y. 10020

Copyright © 1953 by Ace Books, Inc.

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Pocket Books, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, N.Y. 10020

ISBN: 0-671-83145-3

First Pocket Books printing December, 1979

10 987654321

Trademarks registered in the United States and other countries.

Printed in the U.S.A.

Lieutenant Morton Cargill staggered as he came out of the cocktail bar. He stopped and turned, instinctively seeking support, when he saw a girl emerge from the same bar. She half fell against him.

They clung to each other, maintaining a precarious balance. She seemed to recover first. She mumbled,
" 'Member
, you promised to drive me home."

"Huh?" said Cargill. He was about to add, "Why, I've never seen you before." He didn't say it because it suddenly struck him that he had never before
in
his life been so drunk either. And there was
a vagueness
about the last hour that lent plausibility to her words.

He certainly had intended to find himself a girl before the evening was over. Besides, what did it matter anyway? This was 1953. He was a man who had three days left of his embarkation leave and he couldn't stop to argue about the extent of their acquaintance.

"Where's your car?"

She led the way, weaving, to a Chevrolet coupe. She let him help her unlock the door. Then she collapsed onto the seat beside the steering wheel, her head hanging limply. Cargill climbed behind the wheel and almost slid to the floor.

For a moment he pulled himself out of his own blur. He thought, startled, "I'm not fit to drive a car either. I'd better get a taxi."

The impulse faded. As of right now the pickup was a fact—whatever its history—and he was just drunk enough not to have any qualms. He stepped on the starter.

After the crash, Cargill made the first effort to get out of the car. The door wouldn't open. His attempt to move made him aware of how squeezed in he was. Dazed, he realized that only by a miracle had he escaped death and injury.

He tried to reach the door on the other side of the girl. He received his second big shock. The whole front of the car was staved in.

Even in the half darkness Cargill realized that the blow had been mortal to her. Dismayed, he made a new effort to open his own door. This time it worked. He staggered out and off into the darkness. No one tried to stop him. The street seemed deserted.

In the morning, pale and sober, he read the newspaper report of the accident:

GIRL'S BODY FOUND IN WRECK

Her car smashed beyond repair when it side-swiped a tree, Mrs. Marie Chanette last night bled to death from injuries sustained in the accident. The body was not discovered until early this morning and it is believed the victim might have been saved had she been found sooner and treated.

Mrs. Chanette, who was separated from her husband recently, is survived by a three-year-old baby girl and a brother, said to be living in New York. Funeral arrangements await word from relatives.

There was no mention of a possible escort. A later edition mentioned that she had been seen talking to a soldier. That paragraph was enlarged upon in the evening paper. By the second morning there was talk of murder in the news columns, and further mention of the soldier. Taking alarm, the wretched Cargill returned gloomily to his camp.

He was relieved a week later when his group was sent to Korea. There a year stretched between him and the impulse that had made him scamper off into the darkness, leaving behind a dying woman. Battle experience soon hardened him against the reality of death for other people and slowly the awful sense of guilt faded. When early in 1954 he returned as a captain to Los Angeles, he felt recovered. He had been home several months when a note arrived for him in the morning mail:

Dear Captain Cargill:

I saw you on the street the other day and I noticed your name was still listed in the phone book. I wonder if you would be so kind as to meet me at the Hotel Gifford tonight (Wednesday) at about
8:30
.

Yours in curiosity, Marie Chanette.

Cargill read the note, puzzled, and for just a moment the name meant nothing to him. Then he remembered.
"But,"
he thought, stunned,
"she never knew my name."

It required minutes to shake off the chining sensation that stole along his spine. At first he decided against keeping the appointment, but as evening arrived he knew he couldn't remain away.

"Yours in curiosity!"
What did she mean?

It was 8:15 when he entered the foyer of the magnificent Gifford and took up a position beside a pillar from which he could watch the main entrance.

He waited. At 9:30, he retreated, blushing from his fifth attempt to identify Marie Chanette. He hadn't noticed the man behind the column who was talking to the girl. The girl was smiling sweetly now, the secret smile of a woman who has won the double victory of defending her virtue and simultaneously proving that she is still attractive to other men. Her gaze turned fleetingly, knowingly, and touched Cargill's eyes. Then her attention swung back in a proprietary fashion to the young man. She smiled once more, too sweetly. Then she took her escort's arm and moved off with him through a door above which floated a lighted sign that said alluringly, DREAM ROOM.

The high color faded from Cargill's cheeks as he took up his position once more. But his determination was beginning to wane. Being repulsed by five women was too strenuous for any one evening.

A big man moved up beside him. He said softly, "Captain, how about peddling your wares in some other hotel? Your repeated failure is beginning to embarrass the guests. In other words: Move on, bud, move on. And fast."

Cargill stared with a pale intensity at the house detective's smooth face. He was about to slink off when a young woman's voice said clearly, "Have I kept you waiting long, Captain?"

Cargill swung around in glassy-eyed relief. Then he stopped. His brain roared. He mumbled, "You're Marie Chanette."

She was changed but there was no doubt. It was she. Out of the corner of one eye he saw the house detective move off, baffled. And then there was only the girl, and he was staring at her. "It really is you," he said. "Marie Chanette!"

Her name came hard off his tongue, as if the words were pebbles that interfered with his speech. He began to realize how changed she was, how different.

The girl he had picked up the year before had been well dressed but not like this. Now she wore a "hot pink" sari with a fur coat of indeterminable animal lightly held over her shoulders. It was the most glittering coat Cargill had seen since his return to America.

Her clothes ceased to matter. "But you're dead," he wanted to say. "I read the account of your burial."

He didn't say that. Instead he listened as the girl murmured, "Let's go into the bar. We can talk about ... old times... over a drink."

Without pausing Cargill poured down the first drink. Looking questioningly at the girl, he noted that she was watching him with a faint indulgent smile.

"I wondered," she said, "what it would be like to come back and have a drink with a murderer. It's really not very funny, is it?"

Cargill began to gather his defenses. There was something here he didn't understand, a purpose deeper than appeared on the surface. He had seen suppressed hostility too often not to be able to recognize it instantly. This woman was out to hurt him and he had better watch himself. "I don't know what you mean," he said sharply. His voice had a faint snarl in it. "I'm not sure that I even know you."

The woman did not answer immediately. She opened her purse and took out two large photographs. Without a word she tossed them across the table.

For several seconds Cargill focused his unsteady gaze on the prints. Finally his eyes and his mind coordinated. With a gasp he snatched the pictures up.

Each one showed a man in an officer's uniform in the act of climbing out of a badly wrecked car. The detail of the scenes almost stopped Cargill's breath. One of the prints showed the girl pinned by the door on her side. Her face was twisted and blood was streaming down over her eyes. The second print held a full face of the officer, taken on an upward slant from an almost impossible position behind the girl. Both photographs showed the officer's face, and both showed him squeezing out of the partly open door on the driver's side. In each case the face was
his own
.

Cargill let the prints drop from limp fingers. He stared at the girl with narrowed eyes. "What do you want?" he asked harshly. Then more violently, "Where did you get those pictures?"

The last question galvanized him into action. He snatched the prints as if defending them from her, as if they were the only evidence against him. With tensed fingers he began to rip them into tiny pieces.

"You can keep those," said the girl calmly. "I have the negatives."

Cargill shifted his feet and he must have looked up, for a waiter darted forward and he heard himself ordering drinks. And then the whiskey was back and he was pouring it down his burning throat. He began to think more sanely. If she were alive after
all this
tune, no charge could be brought against him.

He saw that she was fumbling in her purse. She drew forth a glittering cigarette and, putting it in her mouth, took a deep puff,
then
exhaled a thin cloud of smoke. Without seeming to notice his gaze fastened on the "cigarette," she delved once again into her purse. She withdrew what appeared to be a slightly over-sized calling card. She tossed it across the table at him.

"You will be wondering," she said, "what this is all about. There, that explains to some extent. Suppose you look at it."

Cargill scarcely heard.

"That cigarette," he said. "You didn't light it."

"Cigarette?" She looked puzzled; then she seemed to understand. She reached once more into her purse and came out with a second cigarette similar to the one she was smoking. She held it out to him.

"It works automatically," she said, "every time you draw on it. Very simple but I'd forgotten they won't be available for a hundred years yet. They are very soothing."

He needed it. The cigarette seemed to be made of some kind of plastic, but the flavor was of pure mild tobacco. Cargill inhaled deeply three times. Then, his nerves steadier, he forgot the uniqueness of the cigarette and picked up the document she had thrown on the table. A luminous print stared up at him:

THE INTER-TIME SOCIETY FOR PSYCHOLOGICAL ADJUSTMENTS

RECOMMENDS READJUSTMENT THERAPEUTICS

FOR CAPTAIN MORTON CARGILL

JUNE 5, 1954

CRIME: MURDER

THERAPY: TO BE MURDERED

Cargill felt a sinking sensation and became conscious of darkness gathering over his mind. He was aware of a boogie-woogie record starting to play nearby. Dazed, he shook himself. Through a growing mist he looked at the girl. "This is silly," he muttered. "You're kidding me."

She shook her head. "It isn't me. Once I went to them it was out of my control. And as for you, the moment you picked up that card you were—"

Her voice retreated into a remote distance. There was night.

The blackness ended, but his vision remained blurred. After he had blinked hard for several seconds the obstruction cleared away. Automatically, he looked around him.

At first, he did not clearly realize that he was no longer in the DREAM ROOM. Although this setting was entirely different, for a moment his mind made a desperate effort to see a similarity. He tried to think of the cocktail bar as having been stripped of its furniture.

The illusion collapsed. He saw that he was sitting in a chair at one end of a tastefully furnished living room. To his left was an open door through which he could see the edge of a bed. The wall directly across from him was a mirror.

Once more he had to make an adjustment. For as he looked into the "mirror" he saw that there was a girl sitting in what would have been the mirror-image of his own chair. It was the girl who had resembled Marie Chanette.

Cargill started to his feet. In two minutes, in a frenzy of uneasy amazement, he explored the room. The door he had seen when his vision first cleared led to a bedroom with attached bathroom. The bathroom had an outside door but it was locked. He realized that the living room wall was not a mirror at all but a window.

Beyond it was a virtual duplicate of the apartment he was in. There were the same living room and the same door leading to another room—Cargill could not see if it were a bedroom, but he presumed that it was. On one wall of the living room was a clock which said: "May 6, 6:22 P.M." It had obviously stopped working a month ago.