Collected Short Fiction, page 132
He paused, then laid the little instrument bade on the table.
“Verne, I suppose you’ve heard about the Hindoo fakirs who plant a seed in barren soil, wave their hands above it, and raise a tree before the eyes of their spectators. And perform similar impossible feats?”
“I think so. What of it?”
“You don’t seem to take the matter very seriously. But plenty of credible travelers have reported such apparent miracles.”
“Just hypnosis, isn’t it?”
“That’s the commonly accepted explanation. It is certain that the fakirs accomplish their wonders through their powers of intense concentration, gained by long practise. But I have a new theory as to what their method really is. And I have devised this instrument to amplify the comparatively weak and uncertain mental emissions that I believe they.
“You mean to tell me you are going in for parlor magic?” I burst out. And I could hardly repress a laugh at the picture of my grave, sedate brother as a magician in a black top-hat.
“Hardly,” he said. “But I have stumbled on something rather big. The principle, I suspect, has been known in the East for centuries. But it was left for me to apply to it modern electronics. As far as that goes, I can already perform a few tricks that would be rather baffling, I think, to the unscientific magician.”
“Let’s see them?” I challenged.
The idea of my conservative brother engaged in any sensational research was rather startling. But I was unable to doubt his words; I knew that he was no practical joker.
“Name your trick,” he said, smiling. “Well—” I hesitated. “Can you grow a tree out of the floor? That would be quite satisfactory.”
To my considerable surprize, he nodded calmly, and inquired, “What sort of tree?”
“An orange tree would do nicely,” I said, determined to keep even, if it were only a joke, after all. “Have it full of blooms and ripe oranges. You might add a few big red apples, for good measure.”
“Very well,” he said, and reached for his head-piece again. But he paused, and looked back at me. “Perhaps I had better explain it a little, first. I don’t want to startle you too much.”
“You can’t get out, that way!” I said. “But then—if you think you can tell me how to grow oranges out of the floor, go ahead.”
That seemed to touch him, slightly. He turned back to his table of apparatus, and adjusted the head-set so that its black disks were against his temples, which, I now noticed, were shaven. With a slow, confident, almost tantalizing smile, he looked up at me and said:
“Don’t forget you asked for it.”
HE TURNED the dial of a rheostat on the table, and the long row of queer electron tubes lit dimly. Then he leaned back in his chair, with his eyes closed. I stood watching him, a little anxiously I admit, despite my skepticism.
For a few seconds his brow was furrowed with intense concentration. Then he looked up at me again, with that slow, quizzical smile on his thin face. Deliberately he slipped off the head-set, and laid it back on the table.
“I suppose I’m to laugh, now?” I inquired, a little acidly.
He replied, in his maddeningly slow voice, “Verne, you might look behind you.”
I spun around. And I suppose I cried out with amazement.
A small orange tree stood there, apparently rooted in the floor. Masses of white blossoms shone against the dark, rich green of its foliage. It was laden with bright, golden fruit. And on one branch was a cluster of red apples!
I stood gaping at it, fatuously.
“Would you care to gather some of the fruit?” the slow, amused voice of my brother penetrated my daze.
Weakly, wondering what trick he was playing upon my senses, I walked toward it. I half expected it to vanish before me, but it remained apparently substantial. I reached out a cautious hand, and touched one of the apples.
It felt firm, cool, slick-skinned, in all respects like a natural fruit. I pulled it.
The stem snapped with an audible sound. The quivering bough rustled, and an orange fell to the floor with a soft thud.
“Step back, and I’ll turn off the power,” Paul said.
I moved hastily away from the amazing tree. A faint click came from Paul’s instruments. And the tree was suddenly gone. There was a flash of bluish light, a snapping crackle of electricity in the air. The apple had vanished from my hand, my arm jerked to a strong shock.
“Now,” my brother suggested, smiling at my amazement, “perhaps you will be more willing to listen to my explanation.”
I walked uncertainly to a chair, and sat down, incredulity struggling with the evidence my senses had received.
“You can see this table, can’t you?” he began.
“Why, yes.”
“And when you look away from it, you can still see an image of it, when I say table?”
“Of course, but what——”
“What is the difference between the table and your mental image of it?”
“The table is real, it is matter. And the image is—well, just an image. But I don’t see——”
Paul was smiling at me, fingering the black disks of his head-set.
“The difference is purely one of energy,” he said. “The image in your mind is a phenomenon of mental energy. And any student of physics could tell you that the table is composed merely of ‘arrested energy.’ Every atom in it is simply a set of balanced charges of positive and negative electricity. It isn’t really solid, as it looks; no matter is. It is merely a ‘space-lattice’ of vibrating energy. Relatively speaking, it is about as empty as cosmic space with a few stars and planets scattered through it. Any bit of what we call matter is merely a ‘frame’ composed of vibrating electrons. And the electrons, the vibrating charges of electricity, are so far apart that all those that make up the earth, packed close together, would form a sphere less than a mile in diameter.”
I stopped him. “What has all that to do with growing trees out of the floor?”
“These things you mistook for telephones,” he said, “are coils that pick up mental energy—though largely chemical, the activity of the brain gives rise to subtle electrical emanations. And the rest of the apparatus serves simply to amplify the picked-up energy a few billion times, and to project it, through the application of a new trick of wave-propagation I have come across, to become fixed in a space-frame of vibration that might be termed temporary matter. In other words, I can amplify my thoughts or mental images, until they are powerful enough to be fixated, for the time being, in what amounts to real matter.”
“That’s unreasonable,” I protested.
“Rather astonishing, I suppose,” he said. “But you have seen it done.”
“You mean that tree was real?”
“It was as real, while it lasted, as any matter. The fixation was only temporary. I haven’t power enough, here, to build up a permanent space-frame. But may I create something else for you?”
“Create!” The word struck me like a blow.
“Certainly. What else would you call it? Verne, this apparatus is a wand of creation!”
“You can—can create other things?” I stammered.
“Of course. Anything that I can imagine. I can materialize all my dreams into realities. I have only to form a clear mental image; the mental energy is picked up, amplified, fixated in the form of matter.
“There are just two limitations. Because I have so little power available, the space-frames are unstable, and collapse as soon as the power is shut off. And I haven’t yet been able to create anything really alive. The forms of animals are easy enough, but they are always motionless, lifeless.
“With greater power, I think, I can overcome both difficulties.”
“You want to create life?” Something in me was outraged.
“Naturally. I am going to follow the experiment to its logical end—try the full power of my wand of science.”
A surge of something akin to horror rose in me. I am not religious. As the son of a biologist, I came naturally to accept the theory of creative evolution. But it seemed to me, none the less, a sacrilege to tamper with the power of creation.
“Better leave the creation of life to Nature,” I said. “I’m afraid, Paul, you’re playing with fire.”
He laughed at me, amusedly, held out the odd head-set.
“Want to try it, Verne?”
I started bade, instinctively. “I’ll have nothing to do with it!” I cried. “Paul, you are mad to aspire to creation! It’s not only dangerous, but somehow—well, wicked!”
He laughed again, tolerantly, and slipped the little blade disks back over his temples.
“Forget your conventional prejudices, Verne. My wand of science is destined to make over the world!”
I was startled, horrified, by the insane daring of his plan. But he had spared me knowledge of the full extent of his fatal ambition. I did not know that he hoped not only to create life but to recreate the dead. That he hoped to resurrect the fair girl that death had taken from him. That he aspired to cheat the grave!
6. The Lonely Laboratory
IN THE course of a few days I became familiar with the wonders of my brother’s amazing invention, and the instinctive horror with which I had at first regarded its use was almost forgotten. I became able to watch the startling creations of his “wand of science” without much emotion, though I was still unable to bring myself to use the instrument.
He refused to yield to my arguments against the use of the agency for the creation of life. But I think my opinions were largely responsible for his decision to move his apparatus to some isolated spot, where he could try his experiments on a larger scale, in secrecy and without fear of interference.
We decided upon some spot in the wooded swamps along Chicot Bayou. There we could be completely secluded, yet not far from civilization. I had some knowledge of the country, from fishing and hunting trips, and we employed a Cajun, Henri Dubois, who had once been my guide, to help find a location where the ground was firm enough to support heavy apparatus, and which would be sufficiently accessible.
Much as I opposed Paul’s plan, it never occurred to me not to help carry it out. Despite his strange scientific enthusiasm, my brother was still the quiet, cultured gentleman for whom I held such affection. As always, he remained dependent on me to care for his practical affairs. I could not desert him merely because of disagreement with his scientific aims.
Too, his long hours of labor over the details of his invention brought increasingly frequent recurrence of those hideous nightmares that always came upon him as a result of illness or fatigue. Almost nightly I had to wake him from a rigid paralysis of terror, in which he lay trembling, covered with sudden chill sweat, gasping for breath and making little strangled cries.
Sometimes he told me of his dreadful dreams. They were all of gigantic spiders. Sometimes huge blade tarantulas appeared from nowhere, he said, in endless swarms, and pursued him relentlessly over dark, illimitable plains, until he was seized with the rigid paralysis, unable to escape them.
Or more often, he said, a harmless object, or even a familiar person, would change, by slow and hideous degrees, into a colossal spider, while he watched, frozen in stark and helpless fear.
These nightmares, of a type familiar enough to psychiatrists, were a natural result, of course, of that scar left upon his mind by his unfortunate childhood experience—but none the less torturing.
I could not leave him, of course, to endure such mental agony without the aid and comfort I could give.
In New Orleans we purchased equipment for assembling a far larger and more powerful installation than any with which he had experimented. Reaching the chosen site by water, we laid down a large concrete floor, and mounted upon it our large dynamo, with the powerful motor that was to drive it, and the other apparatus.
To my considerable surprize, Paul made no provision for a roof to shelter the equipment, nor for any lodgings for ourselves, though he had a supply of food left for us.
When the installation was at last completed, after several days of work, the Cajuns we had employed departed through the swamp, leaving the two of us alone with the apparatus.
The eeriness of it all almost overcame me, as I gazed from the edge of the newly-laid platform down the trail, where the backs of the laborers were vanishing in the tawny forest gloom. The hoarse and interminable croaking of frogs rose in the distance, sounding through the twisted, moss-tufted trees, weirdly ventriloquial, infinitely depressing.
We were alone in the midst of primordial nature—its swarthy and implacable solitude might have been pre-human. The heavy vapors of the swamp wrapped dank fingers about me as I stood there, and I felt chill forebodings that my reason could not shake away.
My brother, however, appeared unconscious of the hostile and resistless spirit of the swamp. Having started the motor and the dynamo, he called me to him, and gave me brief directions for tending them.
Then he turned to his more delicate apparatus, which was set up on a long bench beside the dynamo. Closing his circuits to light the banks of huge, oddly formed tubes, he fitted in place the twin black disks of the head-set, closed his eyes, and assumed an expression of intense, concentrated effort.
At the moment, I was filled with a wild, almost uncontrollable impulse to stop the motor and smash the banks of weirdly glowing tubes—and what unspeakable horror might have been averted had I done so!
7. The Shining House
I WAS witness, that night, to the most astounding miracle that science had ever wrought. In the passing days I had lost part of the bewildered anxiety inspired by the first exhibition of the new instrumentality. I could understand that the process of “fixation,” as Paul termed it, was a logical application of relatively simple natural laws. But, despite myself, I still regarded the “wand of science” with an awe not free from haunting dread.
My brother stood before his bank of instruments, with the black disks upon his temples, his quiet dark face rigid in concentration. The quiet humming of the dynamo changed a little, as the load came upon it, and the powerful motor labored.
Walls came into being around us, upon the floor of concrete, shutting out the dank breath of the darkening swamp—walls erected silently, as if by swift, invisible elfin hands.
They seemed to be of some polished, translucent stone, whose depths were filled with pale, roseate opalescence. They gleamed softly, like rose quartz held against the light. In a few seconds we, with the apparatus, were enclosed in a long room, walled with rose-hued stone, and roofed with the sullen sky of dusk.
In one end was a broad, arched doorway, hung with shimmering white curtains bright as woven wire of silver, adorned with a fantastically conceived design in scarlet and black. Even in my amazement, I was conscious of a sudden strong desire to part the argent hangings, to see what mysteries might lie beyond.
Then a roof sprang over the room—a lofty vault of dark green crystal, seeming luminous with an inner light deep as the shadowed green of forest gloom.
A little anxiously, Paul put the headset from him, and shut off the power from the dynamo. I expected the amazing room about us to vanish in a blaze of released electricity, as his other “fixations” had always done. But rosy walls and emerald vault remained apparently substantial.
“You see that I was right, Verne,” he said softly. “With the additional power, the space-frames are more permanent.”
“You mean these walls will last like real matter?”
“They are real matter,” he said; “that is, arrested energy. But I haven’t been able to fixate as much energy in them as ordinary matter contains. They are unstable—the light they radiate is proof enough that they are disintegrating. They probably will be broken down completely in a few days—if we don’t turn on the power again, occasionally, and build them back.”
I left the dynamo, and came to him. “Paul,” I pleaded, “let’s give it up, and go back to New Orleans.”
He looked at me with a kindly smile. “Homesick for your wine, women, and song, eh?” he said. “Well, Verne, with the wand of science I can soon provide them all for you, right here.”
“No,” I said anxiously, “it isn’t that! I simply can’t help feeling that we are usurping forbidden powers. I know, if we keep on, something terrible is going to happen!” I could not help flushing at the mild, amused sarcasm in his brown eyes. “Call it what you will,” I finished desperately, “premonition, hunch—I know that trouble will come, if we keep on!”
“Sorry you feel that way, Verne,” he said. “But we haven’t touched the possibilities of it, yet. I’d be insane to give up now. But you may go back, if you like, and I’ll stay on alone.”
“You know I couldn’t leave you here by yourself!”
Impulsively he came over to me and took my hand. But he was stedfast in his refusal to abandon the experiment.
THROUGH all the night Paul remained at his instruments, seeming lost in a sort of artistic frenzy. Strange light of exultant power burned in his dark eyes; for hours on end he remained silent, rigid, engrossed in his labor of creation.
At dawn he wearily turned from the long bench, and stopped the humming generator. He lifted the curtain of shimmering white, in the end of the rose-walled room, and we went out to inspect the edifice he had created, or to use his own term, “fixated.”
To understand that building, castle, palace—I hardly know what to call it—it is necessary to understand something of my brother’s gloomy and imaginative nature. For it was a work of imagination, made manifest without the limitations of ordinary art or architecture.
The same weird and melancholy fancy was evident in its crimson-windowed walls and many-towered roof that Paul had always displayed in the haunting minors of his compositions for the violin, in the macabre and startling grotesqueries of his partings.
The building was not remarkably large. It covered merely the concrete foundation we had prepared, which was approximately one hundred feet square. Its four floors communicated through a spiral stair in the great central tower which lifted its ebon height above the crenelated parapets of the roof.
