Collected Short Fiction, page 21
And the vision did not fade as the years went by! Still I visited the Green Girl, as I called her, in my fancy, and she replaced many of the normal childhood interests that I might have had. It is because of her that I have always been happiest when I was silent and alone, it is because of my dreams that I have been inclined to avoid the society of others.
The strange world of dreams in which I visited her was very real to me, a place of weird wonders, sometimes of alien terrors, in which the Green Girl and I wandered through interminable, astounding adventures. And I have always had an unaccountable persuasion that it was a real world, somewhere, through which my mind roamed in such delightful fancies!
It was twenty years ago, when I was just five years old, that the Green Girl first came into my dreams. Sam had rigged up, for my edification, an old fashioned radio set, with headphones. In the long, lonely silences of the warm Florida nights, when a less indulgent guardian would have had me in bed, I sat up with those old phones on my ears, exploring the ether, feeling near the infinite mystery of space. I listened with childish intentness to the odd noises of the static, eagerly dreaming of calls from other planets.
It was during one of those long still nights that I first entered that world of fancy, and found—the Green Girl! It seemed that I heard first a cry of delight in a silver voice, and then she was with me. She was but a tiny sprite, smaller than myself. She seemed to stand before me, smiling at me, tossing her dark curls, with the light of bright intelligence in her blue-violet eyes. I loved her from the first. She was very beautiful. Her skin had just a tinge of green, like a tinted photograph; it did not seem a strange color.
The vision was very real to me.
When she spoke—and I half imagined her words were really coming over the ether—there was a childish lisp in her voice, but still a ring of confidence and courage. Her words were strange, but I soon grew to sense their meaning, almost by intuition.
Night after night, when I put on the phones and tuned in on the strange noises of the ether, that vision came back. It was not long before I could speak that strange tongue as fluently as I could speak English.
With childish reserve, I told Sam nothing about my wonderful dream, until one day he heard me chattering in the language I had learned. He questioned me eagerly; and I shyly told him all about it, and even supplied material for a grammar of the language. He took a keen scientific interest in the matter, when he learned that the vision came only over the radio, and he began to formulate theories of telepathic suggestion and mind control by ether waves.
The matter was written up by a prominent psychologist to whom he reported it. The account appeared in a well known scientific magazine, with comments upon the strange language, which, oddly enough, bore not the slightest similarity to any known tongue, and appeared rather too perfect to be credited to the invention of a five-year-old. The writer mentioned Sam’s ideas, that I had established telepathic contact with another planet, or perhaps with the far-distant past or future; but theories of mind reading received little welcome in a day when science was dormant, and even the suggestion that the language, because of its simplicity, power, and labial beauty, would become the long-sought international tongue, was soon completely forgotten.
But I did not forget the Green Girl. The conviction grew upon me that she was a real living entity. To find her became my ruling passion. Under Sam’s tutelage I poured over geographical accounts, searching in vain for some clue to a hidden nation. But the fact that the language seemed to have no sister tongue on earth discouraged that. Between my tenth and fifteenth years Sam and I restlessly scoured the globe in search of a clue, but a decade before we had given it up.
I turned to dreams of interplanetary travel, with a passionate desire to explore space and venture to other worlds in search of my dream girl; but the space flier seemed as far in the future as it had done a hundred years before. To please me, however, Sam helped design and construct a model of a machine we called the Omnimobile—because it should be able to travel in all elements.
But, as the years of my early manhood passed, I slowly relinquished all hope of finding the Green Girl in fact, and resolved to content myself with her companionship in fancy. It was then, too, that I developed
my inordinate fondness for scientific romances which I devoured insatiably to feed my dreams. It was only during the first few years that I could find her only over the radio. As time went by, she became an inseparable companion of my mind.
Once, for a time, I tried to lose myself in science. I had Sam teach me chemistry, but that could not replace my dreams.
Together, the Green Girl and I went through ten thousand fantastic adventures. It was as if our two minds met in the world of dreams jointly created by both of us. Certainly it was influenced by the incidents of my life, and by the wonder tales I read. And the girl told me stories, strange and thrilling narratives they were, of mythical heroes of her race that struggled with weird terrors.
She grew up with myself, until she became a princess of incomparable beauty. Often I have wished that I were a gifted painter, that I might have tried to record her charms, but even if I had been such, her perfection would have discouraged my efforts. She was slender, erect, combining an unconscious dignity of poise with vivacious spriteliness of manner. Her hair was soft and curly and brown. Her pale green skin was very soft; her full lips very red. And her sparkling violet eyes were clear and honest—bright wells of human sympathy.
Could I believe that such a supernal being was merely a dream?
CHAPTER III
The Scarlet Pall
THE coming of the terror was slow and gradual enough—and as silent as the tomb! With all the magic of the quiet woodland beauty throbbing in my being, I was strolling up the narrow gravel walk toward the peaceful vine-covered cottage, where Sam was sitting in sleepy content. Gazing idly into the measureless infinity of the liquid azure sky, I saw the beginning come, so slowly that I scarcely marked it!
A pale rosy mist seemed suddenly to condense in the sky! A ubiquitous crimson haze was born from nowhere! Even as I stood in open-mouthed amazement—with the sudden chill of alien terror grasping my limbs and tugging at my heart—the hue of the sky ran quickly from the pure deep blue to an intense and awful scarlet! It was deeper than the crimson of sunset—it had a terrible, bloody intensity! It was as if a spray of blood from the arteries of some dying monster had abruptly encrimsoned the sky!
A fearful, blood-red twilight fell swiftly upon the tranquil beauty of the scene before me, painting it with hues of weird and gruesome horror! The once blue sea rolled in like a tide of blood, flashing a million gleams of awful crimson light, as the red sun was reflected on its waves! Familiar objects took on dreadful forms of wild foreboding, in that suddenly ghastly gloom of red!
And that was but the beginning!
The Unknown is always terrible, and if ever the earth was menaced with an unfamiliar threat, it was that scarlet pall. For a moment I was gripped fast by the surprise, and the chilling, alien fear of it. Then my reason reasserted itself, and I hurried on toward the cottage, trying to convince myself that my dread was unfounded.
I knew, of course, that red light penetrated clouds much better than other colors. I knew that the red light of a neon beacon is visible through miles of mist. I knew that the sun looks red on a murky day, because all but the red rays are absorbed by the atmosphere. I had an idea that a cloud had suddenly come between earth and sun, perhaps a haze of meteoric dust. But I failed to reassure myself.
With a glance at the sun, which was gleaming at the zenith like a great red moon, I stepped upon the veranda, still feeling a slight weakness about the knees. Sam had risen to his feet. He stood gazing silently and blankly out to the eastern horizon, where the flaming intensity of the encrimsoned sky met the glancing brilliant beams from the darkened sea. There was no surprise in his expression, and little of fear—merely pain and despair. “What is it, Sam?” I asked quickly.
He looked around slowly. “I don’t know what it is, Mel, but it means the end of the earth! I’ve known for years that it was coming, but I hoped it wouldn’t be so soon.”
“You knew that this was coming! And you didn’t tell anybody! Not even me!”
“It would have done no good. What would be the benefit to mankind to know that it was doomed to die like rats in a trap? A few more years, and I might have been ready to save the earth. As it is, there’s just a chance—a bare chance!”
“But what does it mean? It’s uncanny!”
He sat down again, wearily. There were lines of age and care on his lean face that I had never seen before. But even in the dull red light, there was still energy and determination in it.
“I’ve never told you, Mel, but ever since the radio brought you your dream of the Green Girl, I have been working—building delicate apparatus and exploring the ether. And I found a strange force at work—a force that is battling to control the ether! For fifteen years I have known that it was working to freeze the earth!”
“To freeze the earth!”
“It seems so. What it is is a mystery, whose solution has resisted all my efforts. I can hardly conceive a reason for it. But I know that something is at work to cut us off from the sun! You know that light waves of different phases and the same frequency interfere, with mutual extinction—the diffraction grating is based on that fact. And interfering waves have been setting up such a disturbance in the ether about the earth as will ultimately cut off the sun’s radiation! The principles of it are a bit abstruse. Even now, of course, the effect is only partially complete. In fact, the red and infra-red rays carry most of the sun’s heat.”
“Then there’s no immediate danger?”
“No man knows at what moment the force may be synchronized. When it is, within a short time the temperature of the earth will fall to absolute zero. And even as it is, life could not go on long under this red pall, for all life depends upon the actinic rays in the ultra-violet spectrum.”
“And you have kept a thing like this to yourself for years!”
“It would have done the world no good to know that any day might be its last. I have spared no efforts to find means of averting the catastrophe. And it has been terrible to know. Every day that I have walked among our trees, or listened to the birds, or watched the wonder of the sea, I have known that in a day it might all be frozen death!”
“But you say there is a chance? There’s something you can do to save the earth?”
“I’ve built a machine to broadcast vibrations to interfere with that other force. It will upset it—I hope!—for perhaps a few days. But think, Mel, what it means! Think of the vastness of the power that would be able to cut off the sun! Earth—mankind—would mean nothing to it! It would soon get around my interference! I must save my machine for the last emergency!”
CHAPTER IV
The Amazing Night
THE only difference between red and blue light is that the waves of the red are about twice as long as the others. There must have been a sort of screen in the ether that somehow intercepted all but a narrow band of frequencies in the red, the other wave-lengths being either canceled or converted into vibrations too long or too short to be perceptible. If there was such a screen, it was slowly altered, so that the lengths of the penetrating waves became shorter and shorter.
In other words, the color of the sky slowly ran through all the colors of the spectrum toward the blue! The sun changed from a vast round blood-ruby to a blazing yellow diamond, flooding the earth with a sodium light! To an emerald, huge and supernally bright, coloring the sea and the sky with a dim and ghastly green radiance! The green melted into a cold and awful blue! The frozen sapphire slowly turned violet! And the violet sun grew soft and dim—and dim—until it went out utterly!
The heavens were black at midday!
The sky was an empty, illimitable chasm of darkness! The night was almost tangible—it seemed to have an oppressive weight. It was blacker than any photographer’s darkroom. Trees, cottage, sounding sea, had vanished! It made no difference to close my eyes, or to put my hand before them. A great dizziness came over me. and I groped blindly for the post of the veranda, and clung to it helplessly when I found it.
The sounds that came to me were oddly reassuring. The rustle of the wind in the palms, and the plaintive chirp of a few birds in the unseen trees, and the dull, ceaseless rumble of the waves. Then I heard a heavy sigh from Sam, and the scraping of his shoe on the floor. Then a match scratched, and a pitiful little yellow flame lit the veranda, showing Sam’s lean, earnest face very clearly against the wall of night.
“Thank God we can see it burn!” he muttered. “If they had exhausted the ether here, the jig would have been up with my electrical machinery.”
“They! Lord! Do you think somebody—”
He looked toward me, holding up the blazing splinter. “There is the possibility—even a probability—that we have to deal with a force directed by intelligence!”
“Who do you think—”
“I didn’t say human intelligence.”
“You mean Mars or—”
He grinned in the feeble light. “No. Nothing out of your stories. The human imagination is limited by human experience. And there are plenty of things possible that human beings have never experienced!”
“What do you mean, Sam?” I gasped in utter bewilderment.
“I don’t know what it is that is attacking the earth. Possibly it is something so strange, so alien to my purely human experience that it would wreck my mind to know!” Abruptly he turned toward the door. “I must go in and get to work on the machine.”
The match had burned out, and the utter blackness had fallen again. I heard the old scientist get briskly to his feet and walk into the house. He reached the light button, and the hall was flooded with cold white radiance. The bright, slender beam thrown out across the veranda comforted me immensely; but I still stood against the post, trying vainly to think out what Sam had said.
The breeze grew cooler. In ten minutes a thin cold wind sprang up from the north. I drew my light garments close about my body and shivered a little. For a while I did not go in. Presently I felt a cold mist on the wind. Suddenly a snowflake splashed chillingly against my face—an omen of the frigid doom that lay before the earth! I got up and stepped inside the door, to escape the icy wind. In a few minutes it began to rain, because, of course, of the chilling of the air and condensation of the moisture.
Suddenly curious about how the world was taking the weird catastrophe, and about what was happening elsewhere, I went to the radiophone in the living room, and switched it on. Not a sound came from it! Not even a hint of static! The ether was utterly dead! That meant that the strange force had already cut our civilization up into a thousand helplessly isolated units!
Then from the rear of the building I heard the peculiar rhythmic throbbing beat of a hydrodyne power generator. Sam was already at work in the little room he had always kept locked, even against me. I walked back to the door and knocked, asking to be allowed to come in.
Sam called out for me to enter, and I stepped inside. I stopped at the door in amazement. The little space was crowded with intricate electrical apparatus of modern design—in fact, much of it was new and unfamiliar to me. There were intra-atomic power generators, huge electron tubes, coils, switches, loop antennae, and a wealth of other material that was strange to me. I saw at once that the laboratory before me must have represented vast sums of money and years of toil.
Sam, clad in a pair of greasy overalls, with a great smudge of grease already over half his lean face, was working intently over a huge complex device in the center of the room. Evidently it had been recently and hastily assembled from the materials at hand, and was not yet quite finished. In fact, a desk by the wall was still littered with the plans and calculations from which it had been set up.
It was evidently founded on an adaptation of Sam’s great invention of forty years before, the hydrodyne sub-atomic engine. The hydrodyne is based in principle on the catacytic disruption, by means of a radioactive salt, of water, the products being hydrogen and oxygen gases, which are burned in the cylinders, the steam formed being condensed and pumped back into the coils, The actual energy comes from the disintegration of hydrogen atoms, and the efficiency of the device is shown by the fact that the great generators on the transoceanic aerial liners require only a half pint of water as fuel per trip.
At one end of Sam’s new machine was the hydrodyne unit. From the size of the catalyzer coil, it must have been of vast capacity. The conduits led to the transformer coils, and above the coils were the giant electron tubes, six feet high, of a novel, horseshoe shape. Sam was working with deft fingers at the connections.
“It will be hours, yet,” he said absently, without looking up.
For a long time I stood looking at him, as he worked with utter absorption and feverish haste. There was nothing I could do to help him—I could hardly understand what he was about. How strange it was to stand there in a freezing world and watch one lone man struggling to save it!
The cold rain was drumming heavily on the roof, and the roar of the sea had risen. The wind was blowing a gale, but there was no lightning in the storm that night. The out-of-doors was as dark as Erebus. Presently it grew cold in the room. I went out and shut the doors, and turned on the resistance heaters. Then I made a cup of coffee and brought it to Sam. He gulped it down absently, and went on without a word. I went back to my chair by the wall, and I think I must have fallen asleep.
CHAPTER V
The Etheric Storm
THE next thing I knew, Sam was shaking my shoulder. I sat up, rubbing my eyes, a bit dazed at first, and uncertain whether I could credit what I remembered to be a vivid nightmare. But when I looked at the utter fatigue and the intense anxiety on the old scientist’s face, I knew that it was not a dream.
