Collected Short Fiction, page 165
So he came at last into the generator room. With infinite effort he pulled himself up against the instrument board. There he leaned, gasping, trembling, blood trickling from his nose—straining every atom of his will to see!
The darkness at last cleared for a moment, and the roaring quieted in his head. He read the dials, and with stiff hands moved the switches. All the processes were familiar, automatic. If only he could hold himself up to carry them out!
He grasped the final lever with dead, insensate paws, and drew it down as he fell.
The old man lay gasping upon the floor, blood gushing from his nostrils in a scarlet, frothy flood—but he heard the soft whir of the generators, the shrill, rising whine of transformers.
ALL OF US were silent for a time, upon the Bellatrix, when Hume told us that Gideon Clew had gone back. We were all thinking of his cheery old face, with its red cheeks and its round, sober blue eyes. Of his faith, his optimism. And all of us were sorry we would never hear his lisping voice again.
But our minds were soon feverishly back upon more immediate things.
“After all, it’s rather a splendid way to die,” Vance told Hume. But his voice was unsteady.
They had gone back together to the bridge, and from its vitrolar panels stood watching the incandescent wonder of the nebula, the Dead Star grasped in its fiery tentacles, a growing black disk, splotched with red.
The battered, oxide-reddened hull of the station was drifting alongside at the end of her cable, her dark ellipsoid outlined against the green-tinged, flaming vortexes of the nebula. Hume looked at it.
“Perhaps,” he said, with slow deliberation. “But old Clew—— Go ing back to work with his machine, till the end——”
Vance did not reply, and they gazed out upon the supernal majesty that infolded them. The Great Nebula: angry, swirling masses of virescent fire, white curtains and streamers and sheets, greenish, dazzling, clotted condensations. Cosmic clouds of flame, shrouding a grim, lifeless sun. The Dead Star: ominous black disk against lucent glory. Its lurid crimson spots—seas of molten lava, wide enough to swallow planets—stared back like red, evil eyes.
Vance laughed hollowly, nervously. He whispered: “When?”
Hume turned, found an astro-sextant on the chart table. He put it to his eye and read the apparent diameter of the Dead Star, and busied himself with his pocket calculator.
“Five hours——”
Vance said nothing, and they watched the menacing, red-spotted blackness of the Dead Star’s face. It was minutes later that he licked his lips and added:
“The acceleration increases, of course, as we fall nearer. Just above the surface, the force upon us will be upward of a ton for every pound of our bodies. We will have no sensation of it, though, because we are falling with it, free. And we aren’t heading directly for the center of the disk. Momentum will carry us part-way around. We’ll strike on the other side——”
A long silence, and Vance spoke again.
“Old Clew’s gravity-screen! No wonder he went daft on it, looking down in the Dead Star for fifty years. And no doubt dreaming of something like this.”
He laughed, loudly, mirthlessly. Kempton gathered the nervous, bewildered passengers into the main saloon, and spoke to them.
“We are falling into the Dead Star,” he said. “Nothing in the universe can save us. Nothing short of a breach of the law of gravitation. But the end will not be painful. We will flash instantaneously into incandescent gas. I advise you to get the most you can out of the few hours left to us. The whole ship is at your disposal. I will welcome any plans for diversion.
“But if any of you should feel that you cannot endure the strain of waiting, you will find the ship’s surgeon ready in the sick bay with painless anaesthetics.”
He stopped, with a gesture to indicate that he was done. The passengers milled about, white-faced, and stared unknowingly at each other, as if they had all been strangers.
Tonia Andros was going about the decks, asking in a bewildered and fearful voice where Gideon was, and why he didn’t come back. Kempton found her and brought her with him to the bridge. Through the transparent panels she saw the Dead Star, a black, red-pocked disk, ever increasing, hung against curtains of supernal light.
She shuddered, drew back.
“It’s like a face!” she cried. “With red eyes, gloating——”
And with anxious solemnity she demanded of Hume: “Where is my Granddad?”
The mate pointed to the station—a battered, twisted mass against the flaming arms of the nebula.
“Let’s go across!” she cried, with big-eyed, wistful earnestness. “I want to find my Granddad!”
Hume shook his head. “It’s no use, Tonia. The air was leaking out. He won’t come back. He’s—gone, now.”
The mate averted his eyes, and the little girl still stared bewilderedly into the vitrolar panels.
“Look!” she cried out. “The green light! What is it? Do you see it? There! There!”
Then Hume saw a pale, virescent glow spreading swiftly over the battered red hull, like a film of oil upon water. Green luminescence streamed down the cable to the Bellatrix; in an instant it was shining upon the metal frames of the vision panels.
Then a bell clanged from the graviscope, and he ran back to it. He saw that the needle, that a moment before had been drawn to the end of its scale by the terrific pull of the Dead Star, had returned to zero. In unbelieving wonder, he stared at the instrument. Then he spun upon Kempton, eagerly.
“The old man was trying to generate an ionic screen that would reflect the radiation of gravity. That green glow is his screen—I know it is! And the graviscope shows that we have been cut out of all gravitational fields!”
“And I,” Kempton muttered, “I thought—just an old fool——”
“Don’t you see what it means?” Hume cried in sudden, feverish eagerness. “We aren’t going directly toward the Dead Star, and now it can’t curve our path any more! We’ll fly on past! We’ll have time to make repairs, or photophone for aid!”
Tonia Andros was staring at him with round, wide eyes.
“Then Granddad is still all right?” she cried. “Let’s go across and find him!”
She snatched Kempton’s hand, tugged toward the door.
“Yes, he’s all right,” he whispered. “And, yes—we’ll go——”
Terror Out of Time
Minds Are Traded, Bodies Stolen, in the Thunder of Vast Machinery
I KNOW the thing’s dangerous,” said Terry Webb. “Your father warned me of that. I went into it with my eyes open.”
Terry Webb was sitting on the front seat of the big, rather ancient sedan, beside the girl at the wheel. Terry was lean, tall, twenty-four. He had stiff red hair that refused to lie brushed in any particular direction, pink skin that tended to freckle, bright, enthusiastic blue eyes that had little dare-devil greenish glints. Terry was star reporter of the Tyburn Telegram, but on that gray afternoon he was on stranger business than news gathering.
“Maybe he did,” said Eve Audrin. “But it’s more dangerous than you know. Dad’s so wrapped up in the thing he doesn’t think of the danger. But the thing is horrid—dreadful!”
Into her soft tones had crept a husky note of fear.
“I said I’d do it,” Terry Webb insisted. “I guess I can see it through.”
He turned in the seat to look at Eve. In the gray, dying twilight, her smooth face was very white, very earnest. Her brown eyes glanced at him a moment from the road. They were warm with concern, and he saw in them the shadow of haunting dread.
With a little anxious catch in it, her soft, rich voice appealed:
“Oh, Terry, you—mustn’t!”
Eve Audrin was lovely. Infinitely desirable, infinitely precious. Her hair, fine and wavy and dark, was fragrantly close to his face. Her brown eyes, the warmth of her soft voice brought a half-painful constriction to his throat. Her white bare arm, so smoothly rounded, touched him unconsciously as she swung the big wheel.
And resolution hardened in him.
“I must, Eve!” he whispered. “I can’t give it up. It means giving you up. And I care—too much——”
Her dark eyes looked at him quickly. They had a warmth in them. A gladness. And, still, a dark shadow of dread.
“I wish——”
Her voice formed the words, and died. Her brown eyes were staring into the low hills ahead, the desolate hills that lie west of Tyburn; they were shadows of purple gloom under the blood-red sunset. She shuddered a little.
“Wish what, Eve?” he asked her.
Still staring, with dread in her eyes, at the dark hills before them, she spoke swiftly in a tone that was almost fierce.
“I wish dad weren’t so set on carrying out the horrid experiment. Or, anyhow, that he hadn’t set his mind on making a martyr out of you. I promised mother, when she was dying, that I wouldn’t marry without dad’s consent. But that doesn’t give him the right to use me this way, to buy a victim——”
“Don’t put it that way!” Terry protested. “You talk as if I’d volunteered to have my head cut off!” He laughed at her. “And I’ve already promised. Of course, I did do it partly to encourage him to give us his blessing. But the thing is really very interesting, Eve! Tremendous! If we can look through the veil of time——”
He stopped, as his mind flashed back to the occasion when Doctor Audrin had first spoken of the amazing experiment. It was one evening when he was waiting in the big, shadowy old house in Tyburn for Eve to come down. With a nervous manner, Doctor Audrin called him into the gloomy old library, shut the door.
Doctor Audrin was a slight, frail little man, with a thin fringe of white hair and pale eyes that burned with a strange enthusiasm—with the dominating fire of a single great idea. His manner was restless, jerky; his voice high, eager. He was at that time the head of the department of psychology in Tyburn College.
“Mr. Webb,” he began, “did you ever wonder about the end of the world?”
“Eh?” said Terry, astonished. “Why, yes, I suppose so.”
“The future, I mean,” the little man amplified, with quick, nervous sentences. “Human history. Through the millions of years to come. The battle to exist. The final struggle with the cold. When the sun goes out. The end!”
“Yes, I’ve wondered,” admitted Terry, rather anxious to know what the little man was leading up to.
Doctor Audrin came up to him, took his arm with a thin, shaking hand, and peered very earnestly into his face with pale eyes.
“I’ve found a way, Mr. Webb,” he whispered, “to—see!”
“You don’t mean,” said Terry, incredulous, “that you’ve done it?”
“Not yet,” said the little man. “I must have a subject. And there is a certain—risk. Not great, now, I’m sure. My apparatus is improved. But, in my first trial, my subject was—injured. I’ve been wondering, Mr. Webb, if you——”
“You want me, you mean, to help?”
“Yes, Mr. Webb. That’s it.” The voice seemed relieved. “My daughter told me not to ask you. But I thought If you would offer to be my subject, Mr. Webb——”
“Wait a minute, please,” said Terry. “I’d like to know exactly what it is you’re trying to get me into.”
“You see, Mr. Webb,” the little scientist explained nervously, “I’ve discovered a current, a force—the thing is hard to state except in mathematical language—that enables me to warp space-time along the time dimension.
“That may not mean much to you. But the discovery holds vast possibilities. Tremendous possibilities, Mr. Webb! In brief, it enables me to bring the brain of my subject, in the present time, into very intimate contact with the brain of some other human being, perhaps a million years distant in time, or a hundred million! They are brought together, so to speak, by bending the time dimension.
“In such contact, Mr. Webb, the brains affect each other. Neuro-induction I call the phenomenon. Thought is transferred from one brain to the other.
“In brief, it enables my subject in the present to pick up sensations from some brain in the future. It is just as if my subject lived for a space in the body of the other being. At the termination of the experiment, he will be able to give a report of his sensations. He will have a memory of life in the far future!”
“It sounds,” whispered Terry, “marvelous—if you can do it!”
“It is a marvelous thing. Tremendous, Mr. Webb! And it can be done, if you will offer yourself. Why, you may pick up the thoughts of some historian of the future, as he writes! Or of some new Shakespeare! You may pick up the memories of some scientist who knows secrets we never dream of! You may live in the body of some Alexander or Napoleon of the future!
“Or it’s possible, Mr. Webb”—and Terry detected a note almost of fanaticism in the high voice—“that you will make contact with the brain of the last man, and witness the end of human history. Yes, that’s possible, Mr. Webb, if I use the full power of the apparatus!”
The white, shrunken hand trembled, tightened on Terry’s arm. An appeal came into the quick, high voice.
“If you should offer, Mr. Webb, to be my subject——”
SO EVE AUDRIN came upon them, slim and cool and lovely in a rose-hued evening dress.
“Dad,” her soft voice called reprovingly, “are you talking to Terry about your horrid experiment? I told you not to do it! Don’t listen to him, Terry. He’s daft about it. And he wants you for a victim.”
And she insisted that Terry come away, before her father could say more. But on other occasions the eager little man talked again of his tremendous idea, until Terry was infected with some reflection of his enthusiasm to look into the future.
Eve protested strongly. She inspired Terry with a fear of the thing that cooled his enthusiasm. The first trial had been strangely disastrous. But at last, when he realized that he must do it to keep in the good graces of the little scientist, he had promised.
Eve was driving Terry now to the secret laboratory in the hills, fitted up inside an unused barn on an abandoned farmstead, where Doctor Audrin was waiting to begin the experiment with time.
“I’m afraid, Terry,” the girl whispered again. “Afraid! You and dad make it sound so innocent and harmless. But it isn’t!”
“Why not?” And Terry looked at her white, fear-haunted face.
“Dad lays you on a glass slab,” she said. “He turns his ray on you. It tears out your mind—your soul—and sends it forward into time. Dad puts it into different words, with all his mathematics and psychology. But that’s what happens. Your mind is torn out and sent into another body, in the future. And your body is left on the slab, vacant—well, just the same as dead!”
She shuddered a little, then asked him:
“You know what really happened to the other subject?”
“There was some injury to the brain, your father said.”
“I know. That’s what he makes himself believe. Because what really happened is too—terrible!”
“Well, what did happen?”
“The man was a mechanic. Carl Jensen was his name. His mind was torn out with the magnetic current and sent forward into time. And it never came back!”
“What do you mean?” He was startled, a little terrified.
“His mind didn’t come back,” the girl repeated. “His body lay vacant on the slab. And something else came into it, out of time. A—a horrible thing! It took his vacant body, while he was out of it!”
“How do you know, Eve?” Terry asked her apprehensively.
“When he woke on the slab, he wasn’t himself!” She shuddered. “He was a—a monster! He glared around him, mouthing strange sounds, like—like an unknown language. And he tried to attack me!” Terry Webb was silent, quivering to a little thrill of dread.
“He’s still in the asylum,” the girl whispered. “They keep him in a padded cell. Dad and I saw him. It was—fearful. He glared at us, and screamed sounds that were like words of a strange language! The regents heard something about it.
That was why they told dad to abandon the experiment. And I wish he had!”
She drove a little while in silence toward the lonely laboratory in the low, dark hills ahead. In the gray light, her lovely face was very sober, very pale, drawn with haunting, terrible dread.
“So you see, Terry,” she breathed at last, “why you mustn’t!”
“But I’m going to,” said Terry. “I love you so much, Eve, that I’ve simply got to!”
He smiled at her, and the little, reckless, greenish glints were brighter in his blue eyes.
“Oh, Terry!” she whispered. Her voice stopped with a little choke. He saw that she was biting her lip to keep from sobbing. Tears came in her brown eyes; she shook them out angrily and drove faster.
She stopped the car presently with the headlights shining on the dark wall of the old barn, a vast, gloomy structure, leaning a little. She stopped the engine, and the silence of the lonely, long-deserted valley closed about them like a mantle of death.
Doctor Audrin was waiting for them at the door of the barn. A slight, thin man, nervous, consumed with eagerness.
“Just come in, Mr. Webb,” his high voice greeted them. “I’ve everything ready.”
All the partitions had been removed from the barn; it was an enormous, oblong box, twenty feet high. The glare of naked lights failed to drive the gloom from the corners. In one end of the room a little gasoline engine was throbbing, driving the dynamo that fed the lights and the strangely looming apparatus.
Doctor Audrin removed a heavy blue cover from an oblong, coffinlike object. It proved to be a massive slab of heavy glass, three feet by eight. Strange brass mechanisms glistened about it. Above was a great silvery reflector, holding an odd, strangely twisted tube.
“Please strip to the waist,” requested the little scientist, “and lie with your head just here, between these coils.”
Terry obeyed deliberately, as Eve Audrin made her final plea:
“Don’t you realize, dad, that it’s dangerous? Something, some horrid thing, may steal his body while he’s gone into time!”
