The bookshelf loomed over him. He cried out and flung up an arm. The case came crashing down on him. The top shelf drove into his skull. Black waves dashed over him, a sharp blade of pain drove into his head. Books showered over him. He rolled on his side with a groan. He tried to crawl out from underneath. He shoved the books aside weakly and they fell open. He felt the page edges slicing into his fingers like razor blades.

  The pain cleared his head. He sat up and hurled the books aside. He kicked the bookcase back against the wall. The back fell off it and it crashed down.

  He rose up, the room spinning before his eyes. He stag-

  gered into the wall, tried to hold on. The wall shifted under his hands it seemed. He couldn’t hold on. He slipped to his knees, pushed up again.

  “Bandage myself,” he muttered hoarsely.

  The words filled his brain. He staggered up through the quivering dining room, into the bathroom.

  He stopped. No! Get out of the house! He knew it was not his will that brought him in there.

  He tried to turn but he slipped on the tiles and cracked his elbow against the edge of the bath tub. A shooting pain barbed into his upper arm. The arm went numb. He sprawled on the floor, writhing in pain. The walls clouded; they welled around him like blank shroud.

  He sat up, breath tearing at his throat. He pushed himself up with a gasp. His arm shot out, he pulled open the cabinet door. It flew open against his cheek, tearing a jagged rip in the soft flesh.

  His head snapped back. The crack in the ceiling looked like a wide idiot smile on a blank, white face. He lowered his head, whimpering in fright. He tried to back away.

  His hand reached out. For iodine, for gauze!—his mind cried.

  His hand came out with the razor.

  It flopped in his hand like a new caught fish. His other hand reached in. For iodine, for gauze!—shrieked his mind.

  His hand came out with dental floss. It flooded out of the tube like an endless white worm. It coiled around his throat and shoulders. It choked him.

  The long shiny blade slipped from its sheath.

  He could not stop his hand. It drew the razor heavily across his chest. It slit open the shirt. It sliced a valley through his flesh. Blood spurted out.

  He tried to hurl away the razor. It stuck to his hand. It slashed at him, at his arms and hands and legs and body.

  At his throat.

  A scream of utter horror flooded from his lips. He ran from the bathroom, staggering wildly into the hvingroom.

  “Sally!” he screamed, “Sally, Sally, Sally …”

  The razor touched his throat. The room went black. Pain. Life ebbing away into the night. Silence over all the world.

  The next day Dr. Morton came. He called the police. And later the coroner wrote in his report:

  Died of self-inflicted wounds.

  XXXXX—

  F ---

  GROUND cars shrieked to a halt. Muffled curses assailed windshields. Pedestrians jumped back, eyes widened, mouths spread into incredulous O’s.

  A great metal sphere had appeared out of thin air right in the middle of the intersection.

  “What? What?” bumbled a traffic controller, leaving the fastness of his concrete island.

  “Good heavens!” cried a secretary, gaping from her third story window. “What can this be?”

  “Popped outta nowhere!” ejaculated an old man. “Outta nowhere, I’ll be bound.”

  Gasps. Everyone leaned forward with pounding hearts.

  The sphere’s circular door was being pushed open.

  Out jumped a man. He looked around interestedly. He stared at the people. The people stared at him.

  “What’s the meaning?” ranted the traffic controller, pulling out his report book. “Looking for trouble, eh?”

  The man smiled. People close by heard him say, “My name is Professor Robert Wade. I’ve come from the year 1954.”

  “Likely, likely,” grumbled the officer. “First of all get this contraption out of here.”

  “But that’s impossible,” said the man. “Right now anyway.”

  The officer stuck out his lower lip.

  “Impossible, eh?” he challenged and stepped over to the metal globe. He pushed it. It didn’t budge. He kicked it. He howled, “Ow!”

  “Please,” said the stranger. “It won’t do any good.”

  Angrily, the officer pushed aside the door. He peered into the interior.

  He backed away, a gasp of horror tom from paled lips.

  “What? What?” he cried in fabulous disbelief.

  “What’s the matter?” asked the professor.

  The officer’s face was grim and shocked. His teeth chattered. He was unnerved.

  “If you’d …” began the man.

  “Silence, filthy dog!” the officer roared. The professor stepped back in alarm, his face a twist of surprise.

  The officer reached into the interior of the sphere and plucked out objects.

  Pandemonium.

  Women averted their faces with shrieks of revulsion. Strong men gasped and stared in frank paralysis. Little children glanced about furtively. Maidens swooned.

  The officer hid the objects beneath his coat quickly. He held the lump of them with one trembling hand. Then he clapped violently on the professor’s shoulder.

  “Vermin!” he raved. “Pig!”

  “Hang him, hang him!” chanted a group of outraged ladies, beating time on the sidewalk with their canes.

  “The shame of it,” muttered a churchman, flushing a fast Vermillion.

  The professor was dragged down the street. He tugged and complained. The shouting of the crowd drowned him out. They struck at him with umbrellas, canes, crutches and rolled-up magazines.

  “Villain!” they accused, waving vindictive fingers. “Unblushing libertine!”

  “Disgusting!”

  But in alleys, in vein bars, in pool rooms, behind leering faces everywhere, squirmed wild fancies. Word got around. Chuckles, deeply and formidably obscene, quivered through the city streets.

  They took the professor to jail.

  Two men of the control police were stationed by the metal globe. They kept away all curious passersby. They kept looking inside with glittering eyes.

  “Right in there!” said one of the officers again and again, licking his lips excitedly. “Wow!”

  High Commissioner Castlemould was looking at licentious postcards when the televiewer buzzed.

  His scrawny shoulders twitched violently, his false teeth clicked together in shock. Quickly, he scooped up the pile of cards and threw them in his desk drawer.

  Casting one more inhaling glance at the illustrations, he slammed the drawer shut, forced a mask of official dignity over his bony face and threw the control switch.

  On the telecom screen appeared Captain Ranker of the control police, fat neck edges oozing over his tight collar.

  “Commissioner,” crooned the captain, his features dripping obeisance. “Sorry to disturb you during your hour of meditation.”

  “Well, well, what is it?” Castlemould asked sharply, beating an impatient palm on the glossy surface of the desk.

  “We have a prisoner,” said the captain. “Claims to be a time traveler from 1954.”

  The captain looked around guiltily.

  “What are you looking for?” crackled the Commissioner.

  Captain Ranker held up a mollifying hand. Then, reaching under the desk, he picked up the three objects and set them on his blotter where Castlemould could see.

  Castlemould’s eyes made an effort to pop from their sockets. His Adam’s apple took a nose dive.

  “Aaaah!” he croaked. “Where did you get those?”

  “The prisoner had them with him,” said Ranker uneasily.

  The old Commissioner drank in the sight of the objects. Neither of the men spoke for gaping. Castlemould felt a sensuous dizziness creep over him. He snorted through pinched nostrils.

  “Hold on!” he gasped, in a high cracking voice, “I’ll be right down.”

  He threw off the switch, thought a second, threw it on again. Captain Ranker jerked his hand back from the desk.

  “You better not touch those things,” warned Castlemould, eyes slitted. “Don’t touch ’em. Understand?”

  Captain Ranker swallowed his heart.

  “Yes, sir,” he mumbled, a deep blush splashing up his fleshy neck.

  Castlemould sneered, threw off the switch again. Then he jumped up from his desk with a lusty cackle.

  “Haah haah!” he cried. “Haah haah!”

  He hobbled across the floor, rubbing his lean hands to-gather. He scuffed the thick rug delightedly with his thin black shoes.

  “Haah haah! Aha haah haah haah!”

  He called for his private car.

  Footsteps. The burly guard unlocked the door, slid it open.

  “Get up, you,” he snarled, lips a curleycue of contempt.

  Professor Wade got up and, glaring at his jailer, walked past the doorway into the hall.

  “Turn right,” ordered the guard.

  Wade turned right. They started down the hall.

  “I should have stayed home,” Wade muttered.

  “Silence, lewd dog!”

  “Oh, shut up!” said Wade. “You must all be crazy around here. You find a little …”

  “Silence!” roared the guard, looking around hurriedly. He shuddered. “Don’t even say that word in my clean jail.”

  Wade threw up imploring eyes.

  “This is too much,” he announced, “anyway you look at it.”

  He was ushered into a room which spread out behind the door reading: “Captain Ranker—Chief of Control Police.

  The chief got up hastily as Wade came in. On the desk were the three objects discreetly hidden by a white cloth.

  A wizened old man in funereal garb looked at Wade, a shrewd deductive look on his face.

  Two hands waved simultaneously at a chair.

  “Sit down,” said the chief.

  “Sit down,” said the Commissioner.

  The chief apologized. The Commissioner sneered.

  “Sit down,” Castlemould repeated.

  “Would you like me to sit down?” Wade asked.

  Apoplectic scarlet spattered over Captain Ranker’s already mottled features.

  “Sit down!” he gargled. “When Commissioner Castlemould says to sit down, he means to sit down!”

  Professor Wade sat down.

  Both men circled him like calculating buzzards anticipating the first swoop. The professor looked at Chief Ranker.

  “Maybe you’ll tell me . .

  “Silence!” snapped Ranker.

  Wade slapped an irate hand on the chair arm. “I will not be silent! I’m sick and tired of this asinine prattle you people are talking. You look in my time chamber and find these idiotic things and . .

  He jerked the cloth from its shielding drape. The two men jumped back and gasped as though Wade had torn the clothes from the backs of their grandmothers.

  Wade got up, throwing the cloth on the desk.

  “For God’s sake, what’s the matter!” he growled. “It’s food. Food. A little food!”

  The men wilted under the repeated impact of the word as though they stood in blasts of purgatorial wind.

  “Shut your filthy mouth,” said the captain in a choked, wheezy voice. “We refuse to listen to your obscenities.” “Obscenities!” cried Professor Wade, his eyes and mouth expanding in disbelief. “Am I hearing right?”

  He held up one of the objects.

  “This is a box of crackers!” he said incredulously. “Are you telling me that’s obscene?”

  Captain Ranker closed his eyes, all atremble. The old Commissioner regained his senses and, pursing his greyish lips, watched the professer with cunning little eyes.

  Wade threw down the box. The old man blanched. Wade grabbed the other two objects.

  “A can of processed meat!” he exclaimed furiously. “A flask of coffee. What in the hell is obscene about meat and coffee?”

  Dead silence filled the room when the tirade had ended.

  They all stared at one another. Ranker shivered bone-lessly, his face suffused with hopeless fluster. The old man’s gaze bounced back and forth between Wade’s indignant face and the objects that were back on the desk. Cogitations strained his brain centers.

  At length Castlemould nodded and coughed meaningfully.

  “Captain,” he said, “I want to be alone with this scoundrel. I’ll get to the bottom of this outrage.”

  The captain looked at his superior and nodded his grotesque skull. He hurried from the room wordlessly. They heard him. stumbling down the hall, breathing steam whistles.

  “Now,” said the Commissioner, dwindling into the immensity of Ranker’s chair. “Just tell me what your name is.” His voice cajoled. It was half joking.

  He picked up the cloth between sedate thumb and forefinger and dropped it over the offending articles with the decorum of a minister throwing his robe over the naked shoulders of a strip teaser.

  Wade sank down in the other chair with a sigh.

  “I give up,” he said, “I come from the year 1954 in my time chamber. I bring along a little … food … in case of a slight emergency. Then you all tell me that I’m an obscene dog. I’m afraid I don’t understand a bit of it.”

  Castlemould folded his hands over his sunken chest and nodded slowly.

  “Mmm-hmmm. Well, young man, I happen to believe you,” he said. “It’s possible. I’ll admit that. Historians tell of such a period when, ahem … physical sustenance was taken orally.”

  “I’m glad someone believes,” Wade said. “But I wish you’d tell me about this food situation.”

  The Commissioner flinched slightly at the word. Wade looked puzzled again.

  “Is it possible,” he said, “that the word … food . . . has become obscene?”

  At the repeated sound of the word something seemed to click in Castlemould’s brain. He reached over and drew back the cloth with glittering eyes. He seemed to drink in the sight of the flask, the box, the tin. His tongue flicked over dried lips. Wade stared. A feeling close to disgust rose in him.

  The old man ran a shaking hand over the box of crackers as though it were a chorus girl’s leg. His lungs grappled with the air.

  “Food.” He breathed the word in bated salacity.

  Then, quickly, he drew the cloth back over the articles, apparently surfeited with the maddening sight. His bright old eyes flicked up into Professor Wade’s. He drew in a tenuous breath.

  “F— well,” he said. t

  Wade leaned back in his chair, beginning to feel an embarrassed heat sluicing through his body. He shook his head and grimaced at the thought of it all.

  “Fantastic,” he muttered.

  He lowered his head to avoid the old man’s gaze. Then, looking up, he saw Castlemould peeking under the cloth again with all the tremor of an adolescent at his first burlesque show.

  “Commissioner.”

  The ratty old man jerked in the chair, his lips drawing back with a startled hiss. He struggled for composition.

  “Yes, yes,” he said, gulping.

  Wade stood up. He pulled off the cloth and stretched it out on the desk. Then he piled the objects in the center of it and drew up the comers. He suspended the bundle at his side.

  “I don’t wish to corrupt your society,” he said. “Suppose I get the facts I want about your era and then leave and take my … take this with me.”

  Fear sprang into the lined features. “No!” Castlemould cried.

  Wade looked suspicious. The Commissioner bit off his mental tongue.

  “I mean,” he glowed, “no point in going back so soon. After all …” He flourished his skinny arms in an unfamiliar gesture. “You are my guest. Come, we’ll go to my house and have some …”

  He cleared his throat violently. He got up and hurried around the desk. He patted Wade’s shoulders, his lips wrenched into the smile of a hospitable jackal.

  “You can get all the facts you need in my library,” he said.

  Wade didn’t say anything. The old man looked around guiltily.

  “But you … uh, better not leave the bundle here,” he said. “Better take it with you.”

  He chuckled confidentially. Wade looked more .suspicious. Castlemould stiffened the backs of his words. “Hate to say it,” he said, “but you can’t trust inferiors. Might cause terrible upset in the department. That, I mean.”

  He glanced with affected carelessness toward the bundle. His narrow throat suffered an honest contraction.

  “Never know what might happen,” he continued. “Some people are unprincipled, you know.”

  He said it as though the horrendous thought had just made its unwanted appearance in his pristine mind.

  He started for the door to avoid argument. He turned, fingers clawed around the knob. “You wait here,” he said, “I’ll get your release.”

  “But . .

  “Not at all, not at all,” said Castlemould, springing out into the hallway.

  Professor Wade shook his head. Then he reached into his coat pocket and drew out a bar of chocolate.

  “Better keep this well hidden,” he said to himself, “or it’s the firing squad for me.”

  As they entered the hallway of his house, Castlemould said, “Here, let me take the package. We’ll put it in my desk.”

  “I don’t think so,” Wade said, keeping back laughter at the Commissioner’s eager face. “It might be too much of a … temptation.”

  “Who, for me?” cried Castlemould. “Haah, that’s funny.” He kept holding onto the professor’s bundle, his lips molded into a pouting circle.

  “Tell you what,” he bargained furiously. “We’ll go in my study and I’ll guard your bundle while you take notes from my books. How’s that, haah? Haah?”

  Wade trailed the hobbling old man into the high-ceil-inged study. It still didn’t make sense to him. Food. He tested the sound of it in his mind. Just a harmless word. But, like anything else, it could have any meaning people assigned to it.

  He noted how Castlemould’s vein-popping hand’ caressed the bundle, noted the acquisitive, shifty-eyed look that swallowed up his dour old face. He wondered if he could leave the … He smiled to himself at the hesitation in his mind. It was getting him too.