One day, during a brief respite in the advance of Patton’s forces, Paul had looked through the ruins of a small museum in a German town he’d helped clean out. He found a curious object, a crescent of some silvery metal. It was so hard that a hammer couldn’t dent it or an acetylene torch melt it. He added it to his souvenirs.
Discharged from the Army, he returned to Terre Haute, where he didn’t plan to stay long. A few days later, he was called into the office of his lawyer. To his surprise, Mr. Tubb handed him a check for ten thousand dollars.
“It’s from your father,” the lawyer said.
“My father? He didn’t have a pot to pee in. You know that,” Paul had said.
“Not the man who adopted you,” Mr. lubb had said. “It’s from your real father.”
“Where is he?” Paul had said. “I’ll kill him.”
“You wouldn’t want to go where he is,” fat old Tubb said. “He’s six feet under. Buried in a church cemetery in Oregon. He got religion years ago and became a fire-eating brimstone-drinking hallelujah-shouting revivalist. But the old bastard must’ve had some conscience left. He willed all his estate to you.”
For a minute, Paul thought about tearing up the check. Then he told himself that old Park Finnegan owed him. Much more than this, true. But it was enough to enable him to get his Ph.D.
“I’ll take it,” he said. “Will the bank cash it if there’s spit on it?”
“According to the law, the bank must accept it even if you crapped on it. Have a snort of bourbon, son.”
Paul had entered the University of Indiana and rented a small but comfortable apartment off-campus. Paul told a friend of his, a newspaper reporter, about the mysterious crescent he’d found in Germany. The story was in the Bloomington paper and picked up by a syndicate which printed the story nationally. The university physicists, however, didn’t seem interested in it.
Three days after the story appeared, a man calling himself Mr. Vannax appeared at Paul’s apartment. He spoke English fluently but with a slight foreign accent. He asked to see the crescent; Paul obliged. Vannax became very excited, and he offered ten thousand dollars for the crescent. Paul became suspicious. He pumped the sum up to one hundred thousand dollars. Though Vannax was angry, he said he’d come back in twenty-four hours. Paul knew he had something, but he didn’t know what.
“Make it three hundred thousand dollars, and it’s yours,” Paul said. “Since that’s such a big sum, I’ll give you an additional twenty-four hours to round up the money.
“But first, you have to tell me what this is all about.”
Vannax became so troublesome that Paul forced him to leave. About two in the morning, he caught Vannax in his apartment. His crescent was lying on the floor, and so was another.
Vannax had placed the two so that their ends met, forming a circle. He was about to step into the circle.
Paul forced him away by firing a pistol over his head. Vannax backed away, babbling, offering Paul half a million dollars for his crescent.
Following him across the room, Paul stepped into the circle. As he did so, Vannax cried out in panic for him to stay away from the crescents. Too late. The apartment and Vannax disappeared, and Paul found himself in another world.
He was standing in a circle formed by crescents just like those he’d left. But he was in a tremendous palace, as splendid as anything out of the Arabian Nights. This was, literally, on top of the new world to which Paul had been transported. It was the castle of the Lord who’d made the universe of the world of tiers.
Paul figured out that the crescents formed some sort of “gate,” a temporary opening through what he called the “fourth dimension” for lack of a better term. Vannax, he was to discover, was a Lord who’d been stranded in Earth’s universe. He’d had one crescent but needed another to make a gate so he could get into a pocket universe.
Paul soon found himself not alone. Creatures called gworls came through a gate. They’d been sent by a Lord of another world to steal the Horn of Shambarimen. This was a device made ten millenia ago, when the pocket universes were just beginning to be created. Using it as a sort of sonic-skeleton key, a person could unlock any gate.