Carl stood on the trunk of a tree that leaned out horizontally over the water. He looked for signs of activity in the rapids below, but couldn't see any. Too early in the season? Perhaps. But he didn't mind not catching fish. Just to be out on the open air, alone, and away from the bustle of the office for three whole days was sufficient. The trout could wait. There would be time enough for trout when he had his annual, September, two-week vacation.
Carl smiled to himself, thinking of the prospect of cooking freshly caught Newfoundland trout--or perhaps a salmon--over an open fire with Sally hovering nearby, waiting to sample his gourmet delights; she in her Woolrich down vest, corduroy slacks, and the rubber-soled boots that he got for her at L.L. Beans' for Christmas and he in his usual unkempt, backwoods regulars of faded denims and flannel. His tent would be just behind them with its snugly inviting nest of zipped together sleeping bags. A gentle breeze coming off the water would have just enough force to keep away any errant mosquitoes. A salmon would leap up the rapids on its spawning journey upstream. A huge red sun would hang in the boughs of the trees on the far bank of the river...
Was that a trout rise? Or was it just a current swirl behind that boulder? Carl watched the water intensely for a moment, but the movement that he caught out of the corner of his eye, if indeed there actually had been any movement, did not return. However, the large boulder amid stream some fifty feet away was as good a casting target as any. Besides, it was starting to get dark, and he had only enough light to make a few more casts before returning upstream to his campsite.
Carl stripped the line from his reel, then roll-cast to get the line onto the water. He double-hauled the line to get it up into the air and, after a few false-casts, dropped his fly on he far side of the boulder. It danced on the edge of the eddy for a fraction of a second, then disappeared underwater. He gave his line a little tug to scud the fly into the pocket of calm water behind the boulder, then retrieved the line with short jerks to give the fly action. There was no strike. He tried several more casts around that boulder, but the results were the same: no trout.
Yes, it is too early in the season, but there will be plenty of time later, Carl thought as he climbed back off his perch.
It was now well into dusk. Carl would just barely have time enough to get back to camp before it became too dark to see where he was walking. The river made a large, snake-like bend between the place where he had been fishing and the spot where he had set up his camp. The forest appeared to be all of widely-spaced, hardwood trees. Carl thought that he could save some time by cutting cross-country rather than following the river back. He consulted his topographic map. His camp was near a small, unnamed stream. He questimaed that following a compass heading of 5 degees would bring him directly to his camp, and even if he was off a little bit, he would hit either the river, which he could then follow upstream to his camp, or hit the brook which would lead him directly to the camp. This seemed to him to be an excellent, time-saving maneuver.
Carl clipped the Royal Coachman from the end of his leader, put the fly in his hatband, wound the line onto the reel, disassembled his rod, and set out following a 5 degree line with his Sunnto compass.
Carl hadn't been walking for more than five minutes before he began to have the feeling that something was wrong. It seemed to him that, even though he had been religiously following the path indicated by the compass, somehow he wasn't walking in a straight line. Although he had never been a Boy Scout, he knew that trusting your compass and not your instincts was the prime rule for not getting lost.
It must be the fading light that is giving me this feeling, he thought.
"Follow the compass," he told himself.
Carl followed the compass for a few hundred yards more only to become more convinced that there was something wrong. The forest trees had become more spaced apart and park-like, and he could see quite a distance ahead of him. Most of the trees were either maple or beech, but in the distance he could see several white birches. He could see two birches which were lined up and spaced a hundred or so feet apart. They were slightly to the right of his intended path. He decided to check his compass, mostly to reassure himself of the infallibity of Finnish compasses, by sighting the trees, then walking to the first one, and resighting the furthest one.
This, he thought to himself, will demonstrate that the compass is giving a straight line and should be followed irregardless of any hunches to the contrary. When Carl got to the first birch tree, he pulled the compass out of his pocket and sighted the second tree. It had moved. Moved?
"No, that's impossible," he told himself, "it must be the compass."
A quick inspection revealed no apparent damage, no bubbles in the fluid, no dents in the housing, nothing. Yet in a hundred feet the tree had moved several degrees.
But if the tree hadn't moved--surely I would have noticed the tree moving, he thought to himself--then there must be something wrong with the compass.
"Now don't panic," he told himself, "there is a logical explanation for this."
Perhaps I misread the compass that first time, he thought.
Carl chose another tree, a large beech, that was in line with his heading and set out to it in a straight-line- of-sight march. Now he had three points of reference to give him a straight line to check his compass against. Again he backsighted. Again the trees moved. Not only that, but according to the compass they shifted nearly 90 degrees. Yet he could see that they were really in a line.
Carl rapidly considered he possibilities open to him. He could go back the way he came, then follow the river to his camp, but by then it would be dark, and besides, the forest's growth was much more tangled along the river than it was here inland. He could go foward, ignoring the compass and following his instincts, but in what direction was he now heading? Was he headed towards his camp, or was he headed towards somewhere into the wild interior of Maine? Even if he were able to instinctively follow a straight line, if he headed in the wrong direction, it might mean walking fifty or one hundred miles before he came to civilization. He might even end up in Canada first.
Well, no, that's not going to happen, he thought as he checked his wrist watch, because it will be dark in twenty minutes.
"Now don't panic," he told himself again.
He didn't have to be at work until the day after tomorrow, so he actually had a whole day to get himself out of this silly situation. And he would have to get himself out of it because no one would have the vaguest idea of where to look for him should he turn up missing. Even Sally knew only that he was going to do some fishing on his long weekend.
"When in doubt, don't," he told himself.
Carl sat down at the base of a birch tree and pondered what to do next. He got out his pipe, filled it with Amphora tobacco, and lit it. He tried to figure out which direction was west, but the light coming through the budding branches seemed to come equally from all directions. He couldn't use the sunset compass to get his bearings. He couldn't hear the river either. He had no point of reference.
"Lost," he admitted.
Carl looked at the compass again and shook his head in disbelief. The trees, of course, weren't moving. Not unless he had entered into some kind of Alice's Wonderland, and he wasn't ready to believe that.
May as well find a comfortable spot to spend the night, he thought.
Carl noticed a clump of softwoods, pines and firs, off to what he thought of as being the east, but which the compass said was north. He set off in that direction, thinking that he could make himself a comfortable bed out of pine needles.
As he entered the softwoods, he could see what appeared to be a large ledge of cliff ahead of him. He knew that this area was all river bottom land, flat and some six to eight feet above water level. He couldn't exactly make out the thing's shape because of the intervening trees, but whatever it was, it wasn't a forest tree. It was too dark and massive.
Perhaps it is a large, glacial boulder that will offer shelter for the night, he thought as he made his way through the firs to it.
It wasn't a boulder.
Carl stood, leaning against the trunk of a tree, and looked up at the monolith that was before him. It was unlike anything he had ever seen before. It was unlike anything he had ever read about. It was unlike anything he had ever imagined. What he thought might have been a glacial boulder turned out to be a large cube some fifty feet to a side. It was matte black in color and starkly plain.
Is it a prehistoric relic like Stonehenge, he wondered. No, it is too smoothly finished.
Carl went up to it and tapped it with the tip of his fishing rod. It was no mirage or hallucination, for it appeared to be solid. He touched it. It was slightly cool and seemed to him to have the hard texture of glass. It was like a gigantic, opaque rock crystal. A few paces brought him to a corner. The angle was crisp, as if it had been cut off and polished smooth. The second face proved to be as featureless as the first. He continued to walk around the block, wondering how someone could build such a bizarre structure in this isolated place. Then he tripped over a branch. As he picked himself up, he noticed that the branch, a pine bough, protruded out from under the structure. He stared at it for a long, indeterminate time. The branch was under the block. The block was on top of the branch. The branch was here first. Someone put the block on top of the branch. Carl could see all this, but he didn't want to believe it. It was all too strange.
Carl then thought of his compass and took it out of his pocket. The needle was pointing directly at the block. He walked around the next corner of the block, but the needle continued to point to the monolith. He wondered if the block was radioactive. Would radioactivity affect a compass needle, or was it just magnetism? He didn't know. Was he in any danger from this thing? He didn't feel anything, but he knew from his anti-nuclear protest activities that radioactivity gave no indication of its presence. He would need a geiger counter, which, of course, he didn't happen to have, it not being standard equipment for fishing trips to remote areas of Maine.
If this thing is hot, he thought, it's probably too late as it is.
Carl continued to walk around the monolith; it proved to be universally featureless. However, when he came back to his starting side for the second time, he found that there was now an opening about six feet off the ground. It was a square aperture about ten feet to a side. There was a whitish light coming from inside.
"'Curiouser and curiouser,' Alice said, and so it is," he mumbled.
He couldn't see anything of the interior, except that the opening seemed to be a square tunnel. He leaned his fishing pole against the block and hoisted himself up to the opening chin-up fashion. He pulled himself up high enough to look in. There was no evidence of a door. Could this opening have been there before, but with the light off so that he didn't notice it? It didn't seem likely. Besides, the light seemed to be coming from the interior walls themselves. Along the walls of the passageway Carl could see that there was a graduation from the dark outside to the lighted inside. The innermost part seemed to be translucent. Again, except for the smooth texture, the walls seemed featureless. He couldn't see anything beyond the passageway which was a ten-foot long corridor which lead to an open,interior space. His arms began to ache from holding himself up, so he dropped back to the ground.
"Now what?" he wondered.
It was now nearly dark, and except for the area illuminated by the glow from the opening, the forest was an indistinct mass of dark shapes. There was now no possibility that Carl could make any progress hiking through the woods, even if he had any idea about which direction to go, which he didn't. He wasn't even sure if he could find a good place to bed down. He looked up at the lighted opening.
Again Carl wondered about the possibility of radiation. If the glow was radiation, but not powerful enough to kill him, would it give him cancer? Would it render him sterile? That last though would have been even more frightening last month, before Sally announced that she was pregnant. Even if she didn't marry him--and he fully expected that she eventually would, in spite of her independent and liberated ideas--he would have that one progeny no matter what the results would be from his encounter with this strange cube.
Carl had been so busy thinking about the monolith that it took him a few minutes to notice that the sensation he was feeling was the pelting of occasional rain drops. A faint, distant lightning flash warned him that a storm was coming. Again he looked up at the illuminated opening.
Well, if anything, it might be a dry sort of cave, he thought.
Carl placed his fishing pole on the lip of the opening and hoisted himself up. It wasn't an easy task because there wasn't anything to grab. He lost his grip on the smooth surface and tumbled to the ground twice before he as able to swing a leg up and muscle his way up and in. He lay on his back for a moment, recovering his expended energy. His entrance had been, he discovered, complicated by the fact that the floor of the passageway actually angled upward, thus giving the lip of the opening an angle of greater than ninety degrees.
Carl stood and picked up his fishing pole. He then walked slowly and cautiously towards the interior. It seemed to him that not only did the walls become brighter towards the interior, they became softer. He touched the wall and found that his idea was correct. The walls were also warmer. At the end of the passageway Carl found himself standing before a huge, empty room. The ceiling must have been thirty feet high and the far wall about as far away. The light was bright, but not blinding. Excellent reading light.
This would make a great library, Carl thought as he stepped into the room.
Behind him, Carl could hear the rain and the wind. He turned and looked back at the forest. A flash of lightning gave him a brief glimpse of the storm that was just starting, but the interior of this strange cube was warm and dry. He walked to the center of the room. He noticed that he had no shadow. He had equal light from all sides.
Wouldn't Sally love this for a studio? What absolutely marvelous lighting, he thought.
Carl looked around at the walls. They were all as featureless as the outside walls. It was a minute before he realized that there was something missing. He spun around. All six interior walls were identical.
There was no passageway.