Part 1 (1/2)

Earth Descended.

Berserker.

Fred Saberhagen.

YOUNG GIRL AT AN OPEN HALF DOOR.

That first night there was a police vehicle, what I think they call a K-9 unit, in the little employees' lot behind the Inst.i.tute. I parked my car beside it and got out. The summer moon was dull above the city's air, but floodlights glared at a small door set in the granite flank of the great building. I carried my toolbox there, pushed a b.u.t.ton, and stood waiting.

Within half a minute, a uniformed guard appeared inside the reinforced gla.s.s of the door. Before he had finished unlocking, two uniformed policemen were standing beside him, and beside them a powerful leashed dog whose ears were aimed my way.

The door opened. ”Electronic Watch,” I said, holding out my identification. The dog inspected me, while the three uniformed men peered at my symbols and were satisfied.

With a few words and nods the police admitted me to fellows.h.i.+p. In the next moment they were saying goodbye to the guard. ”It's clean here, Dan, we're gonna shove off.”

The guard agreed they might as well. He gave them a jovial farewell and locked them out, and then turned back to me, still smiling, an old and heavy man, now adopting a fatherly att.i.tude. He squinted with the effort of remembering what he had read on my identification card. ”Your name Joe?”

”Joe Ricci.”

”Well, Joe, our system's acting up.” He pointed. ”The control room's up this way.”

”I know, I helped install it.” I walked beside the guard named Dan through silent pa.s.sages and silent marble galleries, all carved by night-lights into one-third brilliance and two-thirds shadow. We pa.s.sed through new gla.s.s doors that were opened for us by photocells. Maintenance men in green uniforms were cleaning the gla.s.s; the white men among them were calling back and forth in Polish.

Dan whistled cheerfully as we went up the wide four-branched central stair, pa.s.sing under a great skylight holding out the night. From the top landing of the stair, a plain door, little noticed in the daytime, opens through cla.s.sical marble into a science-fiction room of fluorescent lights and electronic consoles. In that room are three large wall panels, marked Security, Fire, and Interior Climate. As we entered, another guard was alone in the room, seated before the huge security panel.

”Gallery two-fifteen showed again,” the seated guard said in a faintly triumphant voice, turning to us and pointing to one of the indicator lights on the panel. The little panel lights were laid out within an outline of the building's floor plan. ”You'd swear it was someone in there.”

I set down my kit and stood looking at the panel, mentally reviewing the general layout of the security circuitry. Electronic Watch has not for a long time used anything as primitive as photo-cells, which are relegated to such prosaic jobs as opening doors. After closing hours in the Inst.i.tute, when the security system is switched on, invisible electric fields permeate the s.p.a.ce of every room where there is anything of value. A cat cannot prowl the building without leaving a track of dis-turbance across the Security panel.

At the moment all its indicators were dim and quiet. I opened my kit, took out a multimeter and a set of probes, and began a preliminary check of the panel itself.

”You'd swear someone's in two-fifteen when it happens,” said the guard named Dan. Standing close and watching me, he gave a little laugh. ”And then a man starts over to investigate, and before he can get there it stops.”

Of course there was nothing nice and obvious wrong with the panel.I had not expected there would be; neat simple troubles are too much to expect from the complexities of modern electronic gear. I tapped the indicator marked 215 but its glow remained dim and steady. ”You get the signal from just the one gallery?” I asked.

”Yeah,” said the guard in the chair. ”Flas.h.i.+ng a couple times, real quick, on and off. Then it stays on steady for a while, like someone's just standing in the middle of the room over there. Then like he said, it goes off while a man's trying to get over there. We called the officers and then we called you.”

I put the things back in my kit and closed it up and lifted it. ”I'll walk over there and look around.”

”You know where two-fifteen is?” Dan had just unwrapped a sandwich. ”I can walk over with you.”

”That's all right, I can find it.” I delayed on my way out of the room, smiling back at the two guards. ”I've been here in the daytime, looking at the pictures.”

”Oh. You bring your girl here, hey?” The guards laughed, a little relieved that I had broken my air of grim intentness. I know I often struck people that way.

Walking alone through the half-lit halls, I found it pleasant to think of myself as a man who came there in two such different capacities. Electronics and art were both in my grasp. I had a good start at knowing everything of importance. Renaissance Man, I thought, of the New Renaissance of the s.p.a.ce Age.

Finding the gallery I wanted was no problem, for all of them are numbered plainly, more or less in sequence. Through rising numbers I traversed the Thirteenth Century, the Fourteenth, the Fifteenth. A mult.i.tude of Christs and virgins, saints and n.o.blemen, watched my pa.s.sage from their walls of glare and shadow.

From several rooms away I saw the girl, through a real doorway framing the painted one she stands in.

My steps slowed as I entered gallery two-fifteen. About twenty other paintings hang there, but for me it was empty of any presence but hers.

That night I had not thought of her until I saw her, which struck me then as odd, because on my occasional daytime visits I had always stopped before her door. I had no girl of the kind to take to an art gallery, whatever guards might surmise.

The painter's light is full only on her face, and on her left hand, which rests on the closed bottom panel of a divided door. She is leaning very slightly out through the half-open doorway, her head of auburn curls turned just an inch to her left but her eyes looking the other way. She watches and listens, that much is certain. To me it has always seemed that she is expecting someone. Her full vital body is chaste in a plain dark dress. Consider her att.i.tude, her face, and wonder that so much is made of the smile of Mona Lisa.

The card on the wall beside the painting reads: REMBRANDT VAN RUN.

DUTCH 1606-1669 dated 1645 YOUNG GIRL AT AN OPEN HALF-DOOR.

She might have been seventeen when Rem-brandt saw her, and seventeen she has remained, while the faces pa.s.sing her doorway have grown up and grown old and disappeared, wave after wave of them.

She waits.

I broke out of my reverie, at last, with an effort. My eye was caught by the next painting, Saftleven's Witches' Sabbath, which once in the daylight had struck me as amusing. When I had freed my eyes from that I looked into the adjoining galleries, trying to put down the sudden feeling of being watched. I squinted up at the skylight ceiling of gallery two-fifteen, through which a single glaring spotlight shone.

Holding firmly to thoughts of electronics, I peered in corners and under benches, where a for-gotten transistor radio might lurk to interfere, conceivably, with the electric field of the alarm. There was none.

From my kit I took a small field-strength meter, and like a priest swinging a censer I moved it gently through the air around me. The needle swayed, as it should have, with the invisible presence of the field.

There was a light gasp, as of surprise. A sighing momentary movement in the air, something nearby come and gone in a moment, and in that moment the meter needle jumped over violently, pegging so that with a technician's reflex my hand flew to switch it to a less sensitive scale.

I waited there alone for ten more minutes, but nothing further happened.

”It's working now, I could follow you every-where you moved,” said the guard in the chair, turning with a.s.surance to speak to me just as I re-entered the science-fiction room. Dan and his sandwich were gone.

”Something's causing interference,” I said, in my voice the false authority of the expert at a loss. ”So. You never have any trouble with any other gallery, hey?”

”No, least I've never seen any-well, look at that now. Make a liar out of me.” The guard chuckled without humor. ”Something showing in two-twenty-seven now. That's Modern Art.”

Half an hour later I was creeping on a catwalk through a clean crawl s.p.a.ce above gallery two-twenty-seven, tracing a perfectly healthy micro-wave system. The reflected glare of nightlights below filtered up into the crawl s.p.a.ce, through a million holes in acoustical ceiling panels.

A small bright auburn movement, almost directly below me, caught my eye. I crouched lower on the catwalk, putting my eyes close to the holes in one thin panel, bringing into my view almost the whole of the enormous room under the false ceiling.

The auburn was in a girl's hair. It came near matching the hair of the girl in the painting, but that could only have been coincidence, if such a thing exists. The girl below me was alive in the same sense I was, solid and fleshly and three-dimensional. She wore a kind of stretch suit, of a green shade that set off her hair, and she held a s.h.i.+ny object raised like a camera in her hands.

From my position almost directly above her I could not see her face, only the curved grace of her body as she took a step forward, holding the s.h.i.+ny thing high. Then she began another step, and half-way through it she was gone, vanished in an instant from the center of an open floor.

Some time pa.s.sed before I eased up from the strain of my bent position. All the world was silent and ordinary, so that alarm and astonishment would have seemed out of place. I inched back through the crawl s.p.a.ce to my borrowed ladder, climbed down, walked along a corridor and turned a corner into the vast shadow-and-glare of gallery two-two-seven.

Standing in the bright-lit spot where I had seen the girl, I realized she had been raising her camera at a sculpture-a huge, flowing ma.s.s of bronze blobs and curved holes, on the topmost blob a face that looked like something scratched there by a child. I went up to it and thumped my knuckles on the nearest bulge of bronze, and the great thing sounded hollowly. Looking at the card on its marble base I had begun to read- RECLINING FIGURE, 1957.

-when a sound behind me made me spin round.