The Tunnel Under The World Read online

wouldn't keep the Crystal Cafe so _hot_! The newpaint job--searing reds and blinding yellows--was bad enough, butsomeone seemed to have the delusion that this was January instead ofJune; the place was a good ten degrees warmer than outside.

  He swallowed the Frosty-Flip in two gulps. It had a kind of peculiarflavor, he thought, but not bad. It certainly cooled you off, just asthe waiter had promised. He reminded himself to pick up a carton ofthem on the way home; Mary might like them. She was always interestedin something new.

  He stood up awkwardly as the girl came across the restaurant towardhim. She was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen in Tylerton.Chin-height, honey-blonde hair and a figure that--well, it was allhers. There was no doubt in the world that the dress that clung to herwas the only thing she wore. He felt as if he were blushing as shegreeted him.

  "Mr. Burckhardt." The voice was like distant tomtoms. "It's wonderfulof you to let me see you, after this morning."

  He cleared his throat. "Not at all. Won't you sit down, Miss--"

  "April Horn," she murmured, sitting down--beside him, not where he hadpointed on the other side of the table. "Call me April, won't you?"

  She was wearing some kind of perfume, Burckhardt noted with whatlittle of his mind was functioning at all. It didn't seem fair thatshe should be using perfume as well as everything else. He came towith a start and realized that the waiter was leaving with an orderfor _filets mignon_ for two.

  "Hey!" he objected.

  "Please, Mr. Burckhardt." Her shoulder was against his, her face wasturned to him, her breath was warm, her expression was tender andsolicitous. "This is all on the Feckle Corporation. Please letthem--it's the _least_ they can do."

  He felt her hand burrowing into his pocket.

  "I put the price of the meal into your pocket," she whisperedconspiratorially. "Please do that for me, won't you? I mean I'dappreciate it if you'd pay the waiter--I'm old-fashioned about thingslike that."

  She smiled meltingly, then became mock-businesslike. "But you musttake the money," she insisted. "Why, you're letting Feckle off lightlyif you do! You could sue them for every nickel they've got, disturbingyour sleep like that."

  * * * * *

  With a dizzy feeling, as though he had just seen someone make a rabbitdisappear into a top hat, he said, "Why, it really wasn't so bad, uh,April. A little noisy, maybe, but--"

  "Oh, Mr. Burckhardt!" The blue eyes were wide and admiring. "I knewyou'd understand. It's just that--well, it's such a _wonderful_freezer that some of the outside men get carried away, so to speak. Assoon as the main office found out about what happened, they sentrepresentatives around to every house on the block to apologize. Yourwife told us where we could phone you--and I'm so very pleased thatyou were willing to let me have lunch with you, so that I couldapologize, too. Because truly, Mr. Burckhardt, it is a _fine_ freezer.

  "I shouldn't tell you this, but--" the blue eyes were shylylowered--"I'd do almost anything for Feckle Freezers. It's more than ajob to me." She looked up. She was enchanting. "I bet you think I'msilly, don't you?"

  Burckhardt coughed. "Well, I--"

  "Oh, you don't want to be unkind!" She shook her head. "No, don'tpretend. You think it's silly. But really, Mr. Burckhardt, youwouldn't think so if you knew more about the Feckle. Let me show youthis little booklet--"

  Burckhardt got back from lunch a full hour late. It wasn't only thegirl who delayed him. There had been a curious interview with a littleman named Swanson, whom he barely knew, who had stopped him withdesperate urgency on the street--and then left him cold.

  But it didn't matter much. Mr. Barth, for the first time sinceBurckhardt had worked there, was out for the day--leaving Burckhardtstuck with the quarterly tax returns.

  What did matter, though, was that somehow he had signed a purchaseorder for a twelve-cubic-foot Feckle Freezer, upright model,self-defrosting, list price $625, with a ten per cent "courtesy"discount--"Because of that _horrid_ affair this morning, Mr.Burckhardt," she had said.

  And he wasn't sure how he could explain it to his wife.

  * * * * *

  He needn't have worried. As he walked in the front door, his wife saidalmost immediately, "I wonder if we can't afford a new freezer, dear.There was a man here to apologize about that noise and--well, we gotto talking and--"

  She had signed a purchase order, too.

  It had been the damnedest day, Burckhardt thought later, on his way upto bed. But the day wasn't done with him yet. At the head of thestairs, the weakened spring in the electric light switch refused toclick at all. He snapped it back and forth angrily and, of course,succeeded in jarring the tumbler out of its pins. The wires shortedand every light in the house went out.

  "Damn!" said Guy Burckhardt.

  "Fuse?" His wife shrugged sleepily. "Let it go till the morning,dear."

  Burckhardt shook his head. "You go back to bed. I'll be right along."

  It wasn't so much that he cared about fixing the fuse, but he was toorestless for sleep. He disconnected the bad switch with a screwdriver,stumbled down into the black kitchen, found the flashlight and climbedgingerly down the cellar stairs. He located a spare fuse, pushed anempty trunk over to the fuse box to stand on and twisted out the oldfuse.

  When the new one was in, he heard the starting click and steady droneof the refrigerator in the kitchen overhead.

  He headed back to the steps, and stopped.

  Where the old trunk had been, the cellar floor gleamed oddly bright.He inspected it in the flashlight beam. It was metal!

  "Son of a gun," said Guy Burckhardt. He shook his head unbelievingly.He peered closer, rubbed the edges of the metallic patch with histhumb and acquired an annoying cut--the edges were _sharp_.

  The stained cement floor of the cellar was a thin shell. He found ahammer and cracked it off in a dozen spots--everywhere was metal.

  The whole cellar was a copper box. Even the cement-brick walls werefalse fronts over a metal sheath!

  * * * * *

  Baffled, he attacked one of the foundation beams. That, at least, wasreal wood. The glass in the cellar windows was real glass.

  He sucked his bleeding thumb and tried the base of the cellar stairs.Real wood. He chipped at the bricks under the oil burner. Real bricks.The retaining walls, the floor--they were faked.

  It was as though someone had shored up the house with a frame of metaland then laboriously concealed the evidence.

  The biggest surprise was the upside-down boat hull that blocked therear half of the cellar, relic of a brief home workshop period thatBurckhardt had gone through a couple of years before. From above, itlooked perfectly normal. Inside, though, where there should have beenthwarts and seats and lockers, there was a mere tangle of braces,rough and unfinished.

  "But I _built_ that!" Burckhardt exclaimed, forgetting his thumb. Heleaned against the hull dizzily, trying to think this thing through.For reasons beyond his comprehension, someone had taken his boat andhis cellar away, maybe his whole house, and replaced them with aclever mock-up of the real thing.

  "That's crazy," he said to the empty cellar. He stared around in thelight of the flash. He whispered, "What in the name of Heaven wouldanybody do that for?"

  Reason refused an answer; there wasn't any reasonable answer. For longminutes, Burckhardt contemplated the uncertain picture of his ownsanity.

  He peered under the boat again, hoping to reassure himself that it wasa mistake, just his imagination. But the sloppy, unfinished bracingwas unchanged. He crawled under for a better look, feeling the roughwood incredulously. Utterly impossible!

  He switched off the flashlight and started to wriggle out. But hedidn't make it. In the moment between the command to his legs to moveand the crawling out, he felt a sudden draining weariness floodingthrough him.

  Consciousness went--not easily, but as though it were being takenaway, and Guy Burckhardt was asleep.

  III


  On the morning of June 16th, Guy Burckhardt woke up in a crampedposition huddled under the hull of the boat in his basement--and racedupstairs to find it was June 15th.

  The first thing he had done was to make a frantic, hasty inspection ofthe boat hull, the faked cellar floor, the imitation stone. They wereall as he had remembered them--all completely unbelievable.

  The kitchen was its placid, unexciting self. The electric clock waspurring soberly around the dial. Almost six o'clock, it said. His wifewould be waking at any moment.

  Burckhardt flung open the front door and stared out into the quietstreet. The morning paper was tossed carelessly against the steps--andas he retrieved it, he noticed that this was the 15th day of