August Derleth

“ YOU CAN'T ALWAYS ESCAPE EVILS BY RUNNING AWAY FROM THEM...BUT IT MAY HELP!
"Tell me what time is," said Harrigan one late summer afternoon in a Madison Street bar. "I'd like to know."
"A dimension," I answered. "Everybody knows that."
"All right, granted. I know space is a dimension and you can move forward or back in space. And, of course, you keep on aging all the time."
"Elementary," I said.
"But what happens if you can move backward or forward in time? Do you age or get younger, or do you keep the status quo?"
"I'm not an authority on time, Tex. Do you know anyone who traveled in time?" ”

“ Guru had been astonished to learn that people on Earth simply died when there was no necessity of doing so; he had made the offer to rejuvenate McIlvaine himself.
McIlvaine sat down to his machine and turned the complex knobs until he was en rapport with his dark star. He waited for a long time, it seemed, before he knew his contact had been closed. Guru came through. ”

“ Harrigan went on, warming to his subject, "but things don't always work out that way. He was a plodding inventor obsessed by an idea. What inventor isn't, given a modicum of success? Perhaps he was a product of his time, for Maugham's obsession was robots." ”

“ Just what Vanderkamp went back to after I left, I don't know, but I have an idea that he gave his sister a devil of a time."
Vanderkamp stalked into the house and confronted his sister.
"You see, Julie—a reporter. Can't you learn to hold your tongue?"
She threw him a scornful glance. "What difference does it make?" she cried. "You're gone all the time." ”

“ McIlvaine told them. He visualized one of his own kind and tried to put him into words. It was difficult, since he could not rid himself of the conviction that his interlocutors might be utterly alien.
They had no conception of man and doubted man's existence on any other star. There were plant-people on Venus, ant-people on Andromeda, six-legged and four-armed beings which were equal parts mineral and vegetable on Betelguese—but nothing resembling man. "You are evidently alone of your kind in the cosmos," said his interstellar correspondent. ”

“ So he went back to the machine and Guru and the little excursions to Bixby's...."
"What's the latest word from that star of yours?" asked Leopold, when McIlvaine came in.
"They want to rejuvenate me," said McIlvaine, with a certain shy pleasure.
"What's that?" asked Alexander sourly.
"They say they can make me young again. Like them up there. They never die. They just live so long, and then they rejuvenate, they begin all over. It's some kind of a process they have." ”

“ But the image was of nothing he had ever seen before—of thousands upon thousands of miniature beings, utterly alien to man; they resembled amphibious insects, with thin, elongated heads, large eyes, and antennae set upon a scaled, four-legged body, with rudimentary beetle-like wings. Curiously, they seemed ageless; he could detect no difference among them—all appeared to be the same age.
"We are not, but we rejuvenate regularly," said the creature with whom he corresponded in this strange manner. ”

“ For instance, the house was filled with what the experts said were priceless antiques from Dutch New Amsterdam, of the period just prior to the British siege. You'd think those things would make poor Julie feel more at home, seeing as she claimed to belong in that period, but apparently they just made her homesick. And, curiously enough, all the modern gadgets were gone. All those handy little items that make the twentieth century so livable had been taken away—including the washing-machine and dryer, by the way. ”

“ He's not quite perfect yet, you see, Mr. Harrigan.'
"I saw, all right. I saw that Herman had become his inventor's obsession in a very real sense. I felt sorry for him but I had known enough inventors to understand what had happened. They work so much alone they're apt to over-emphasize the importance of their work. The same thing holds true for authors and composers, I suppose. They lose perspective—it's little more than that.
"And my friend Maugham seemed to have lost his."
Maugham was relieved at Harrigan's going. He sat for a few moments after the door had closed behind the reporter. ”

“ The resemblance to his sister Julie was uncanny.
With only the slightest hesitation, he addressed her in fluent Dutch. "Pray do not be disturbed, young lady."
"A fine way for a gentleman to call!" she exclaimed in a voice considerably more forceful than her appearance. "I suppose my father sent you. And where did you get that outlandish costume?"
"I bought it," he answered, truthfully enough.
"A likely tale," she said. "And if my father sent you, just go back and tell him I'm satisfied the way I am. No woman needs a man to manage her." ”

“ And now and then a Quintus Maugham
is a bit too successful for his own health.
What is a Derleth? The question pops up frequently in fantasy circles. The general consensus seems to be that a Derleth is a sort of human windmill that plucks finished manuscripts from the breeze while waving its arms in circles, printing and publishing same with its own machinery. In truth the Derleth output is prodigious, as it has been for many a year ... enough to keep rolling the presses of his own publishing firm (Arkham) as well as to keep other publishers well supplied. Here is top-flight Derleth. ”

“ Harrigan,' he answered, 'newspaper reporters ought to have at least elementary scientific knowledge. You don't. How in hell could even a time machine be in two places at once, I ask you? If I take that machine back three centuries, that's where it is—not here. And three centuries ago that shop wasn't standing there. So you don't go in or out; you don't move at all, remember? It's time that moves.'
"'I called the other day,' I went on. 'Your sister spoke to me. ”

“ And, sure enough, when Leopold talked to me and persuaded me to go around with him to McIlvaine's lawyer, we found that the old fellow had made a will and left everything to his nephew, a namesake. The stipulations were clear enough; among them was the express wish that if anything happened to him, the elder Thaddeus McIlvaine, of no matter what nature, but particularly something allowing a reasonable doubt of his death, the nephew was still to be permitted to take immediate possession of the property and effects. ”

“ Harrigan shrugged aside my question. "That was the thing I couldn't get out of Vanderkamp, either. He presumed to know everything else."
"Vanderkamp?"
"He was another of those strange people a reporter always runs into. Lived in New York—downtown, near the Bowery. Man of about forty, I'd say, but a little on the old-fashioned side. Dutch background, and hipped on the subject of New Amsterdam, which, in case you don't know, was the original name of New York City."
"Don't mind my interrupting," I cut in. "But I'm not quite straight on what Vanderkamp has to do with time as dimension." ”

“ But there was just nothing to be found, and they couldn't manufacture evidence when there was nothing to show that McIlvaine ever knew that Richardson planned to have a little fun with him.
"And no one had seen Richardson there. There was nothing but McIlvaine's word that he had heard what he said he heard. He needn't have volunteered that, but he did. After the police had finished with him, they wrote him off as a harmless nut. But the question of what happened to Richardson wasn't solved from that day to this."
"People have been known to walk out of their lives," I said. ”

“ I figured that he couldn't have got such a large machine away without his sister's seeing him; so I locked the place up and went back to the house.
"But she was immovable; she hadn't seen a thing. If he had taken anything larger than pocket-size out of that shop of his, she had missed it. I could hardly doubt her sincerity. There was nothing to be had from that source; so I had no alternative but to wait for him another time."
Anna Van Tromp, considerably chastened, watched her strange suitor—she looked upon all men as suitors, without exception ”

“ You get used to situations like that involving inventive or creative people of course. You think nothing of it. I didn't, I know, though I was possessed of some curiosity about Herman. But out in his neighborhood, where people knew nothing about Herman, certain rumors began to circulate—that Maugham had hired an assistant, and that the assistant now did all Maugham's errands for him. ”

“ McIlvaine only smiled. "It's a dark star," he said presently. "It doesn't have light." He spoke almost apologetically, as if somehow he had disappointed his friends. "I'm going to try and communicate with it."
"That's the ticket," said Alexander.
"Cut for deal," said Leopold.
That was how the news about McIlvaine's Star was received by his cronies. Afterward, after McIlvaine had dutifully played several games of euchre, Richardson conceived the idea of telephoning the Globe to announce McIlvaine's discovery.
"The old fellow took himself seriously," Harrigan went on. ”

“ Oh, God, why didn't I marry when I had the chance, instead of throwing away my life on a worthless brother!"
"Why don't you? It's not too late," he sighed wearily.
"How can you say that?" she snapped bitterly. "Here I am thirty nearly, and worn out from working for you. ”

“ I said, pouring more sherry into his glass.
"Herman was his robot. A neat well-oiled scrupulously-clean mechanical man in the process of being born. He was run by electrical impulses and was a good deal more self-sufficient than the traditional pushbutton robot of an earlier day. ”

“ I asked.
"Like a rocket," said Harrigan. "Queerest thing was that there wasn't a trace of him. The machine was gone, too—the same way as the last time, without a disturbance in the shop. He and his machine had simply vanished off the face of the earth and were never heard from again.
"Matter of fact, though," Harrigan went on thoughtfully, "Vanderkamp's disappearance wasn't the really queer angle on the pitch. The other thing broke in the papers the week after he left. The neighbors got pretty worked up about it. ”

“ Quite a lot of us investigated. The police might have done better. There was a gang war on in Chicago just at that time, and Richardson was nobody with any connections. His nearest relatives weren't anxious about anything but what they might inherit; to tell the truth, his cronies at Bixby's were the only people who worried about him. McIlvaine as much as the rest of them. ”

“ I suppose Herman could have been taken apart and shipped on ahead. Then he could have been reassembled and set to working again."
"But how do you know Herman went along to Nevada?" I asked, pouring Harrigan yet another drink.
"By one of those ridiculous mistakes the newspapers sometimes make. Maugham hadn't been out west two months before a flash flood tore through the village in which he'd set up housekeeping and inventing. Maugham was one of the victims. The paper nearest there carried a picture of Maugham and his robot, which by that time was public property out there. ”

“ He had taken hold of my arm and I could feel his hand trembling.
"'I'd like to know,' I answered, 'but it's not that important. Forget it. I'm a little dubious about the scientists anyway. Whether you worship Science or God sometimes gets to seem like six of one and a half-dozen of the other. ”