Collected Short Fiction, page 215
“I didn’t tell you, Melanie, but I had known that for a long time. Yes, I told Madeline what I knew, just before we started.”
“And she came, anyhow. Does she”—the girl flinched from a little stab of pain—“does she love you, still?”
In breathless anxiety, she waited.
Thorn was still looking at her; a slow light came over his heavy face.
“I believe, Melanie, that she does. Strange, perhaps, when we had grown so far apart. But I think she does. But tell me, Melanie, what does this mean to you?”
Reluctantly she moved a little away from him. She stood leaning against the instrument ledge, her two hands gripping it.
“No,” she whispered. “No, I mustn’t.”
Thorn waited, smiling grave encouragement; suddenly she yielded.
“I had hoped, Jarvis, that she wouldn’t come. I wanted us to fly away like this, and be always—together.” She looked at him with burning eyes, but he did not move or speak, and in a moment she went on:
“I guess—I guess I’ve always loved you, Jarvis, since the day I came. It always gave me a kind of fierce joy to be in the laboratory with you, and help with your work. When you had those awful burns from the rays, it used to hurt me till I cried. And I used to have the most terrible hate for your wife, for taking your money and all the luxury you gave her, and then never coming near you, while you worked day and night in danger of your life.”
She stopped with a curious little laugh, that could not disguise a sob.
“I didn’t know,” Thorn said slowly. “Melanie, I didn’t know. I have liked and admired you, of course. I appreciated your loyalty, and knew that you were working too hard for the good of your health. But you were so much younger; I was so lost in my work——”
“Well, that’s better,” she said, with a forced briskness in her voice. “I’m just a silly little idiot.”
“No. You’re a woman, and beautiful.”
A new, eager life was in his voice. He reached out to touch her shoulder, with a half-awkward manner of instinctive admiration.
She shrugged away from him.
“No, Jarvis.” Her voice was level with decision. “I shouldn’t have told you, and we shall go on as if I hadn’t. If Madeline hadn’t come—if we had left the Earth, and her, forever—things would be different. But I’ve never wanted any cheap, hidden affair.”
She took his hand, still outstretched toward her, and squeezed it a moment before she let it go. She found a compact and dabbed at her complexion.
“Is there any dictation, Mr. Thorn?”
A gay little laugh covered her tears. Thorn gulped and came to himself, suddenly.
“Well, we might start the journal of the expedition. Begin: ‘Aboard the Infiniterra——’ ”
Over them arched the small, quartz dome. Darkness weighed upon it. Outside, the green, hissing beam burned into the little world of metal. Above and ahead yawned black infinity.
IX.
THE CUBE dropped into a square pit, and the black sky was whipped away. Rodney Trent, on the cube, looking through a port, watched the smooth, dimly-lit walls of uranium slide upward.
The cube came to rest on a platform within the strangest space he had ever visited. It was a hollow sphere, and enormous—at least six hundred feet in diameter. An almost inaudible humming vibration betrayed the tremendous energies prisoned within it. It was packed with Titanic mechanism, all of nickel-brilliant uranium, and bathed in white, shadowless light.
A confusing web of ladders, stairs, and railed cat-walks extended everywhere. Rod noticed, from their arrangement and the positions of the few men upon them, a queer thing. Down was invariably toward a monstrous diskshaped affair that shimmered strangely in the center of the sphere.
The few men he saw were dwarfed by those engines of enigma; they were insects merely, utterly insignificant. And the looming bright masses of metal were overwhelming, spiritually; they depressed Rod. It meant nothing to recall that he had once seen Thorn lift all this in one hand.
Well, size was relative.
With the rest of the passengers, Rod was guided along a railed walk to a rectangular mass of metal that proved to contain the living quarters. He sighed with relief, contemplating the appointments of his perfect room. His spirits rose as he tubbed himself luxuriously, and descended to an excellent meal served on a polished uranium plate.
At the long table he found himself placed between Ellen Cross and the tall, mannish girl he had heard called Martha Lee. Beyond them, respectively, were seated Will Starbuck and the thin student, Paul.
“It’s odd,” he told Ellen, “to realize that breakfast was a million years ago.”
She looked at him, quickly sympathetic.
“Do you mind?”
“Not much,” he said. “I left nothing in particular to think about. Funny, how few ties I did have. My rent was due, and the landlady was waiting for the money, to buy a microscope for her husband—he was an asthmatic old fellow, always pottering around with some scientific gadget. I wish I’d paid that. Funny, but I can’t think of anything else——”
“Yes,” she said, soberly. “It’s queer that it should be so easy to come away. Life seemed fearfully important as we went along, day after day. I had always felt that to leave it would be unbearable tragedy. But this was easy as getting on a train.”
Her blue eyes made a quick journey back to Will Starbuck.
“I’m glad,” she said, “that we aren’t going back.”
The girl Martha Lee, a little later, replied to a query of Rod’s with those same words of sober relief.
“Why?” Rod inquired.
She looked quickly at the slender, stooped young man, Paul.
“Well, life didn’t mean anything to us.” She read the sympathy in Rod’s face, and went on impulsively. “It’s shocking to say it—but Paul and I had planned not to go on living. We were very unhappy. But this has lifted us out of all that misery.”
A strange look of awe transfixed her face.
“We were lifted out of that petty unhappiness. We have come into the divine calm of infinity.” Her deep voice trembled with an eager, reverent joy. “Still living, we may see God.”
X.
SOME FIVE DAYS had passed, ship’s time, when Rodney Trent, at the telephone, heard Thorn’s voice:
“Trent? I promised to call you, before the crisis. Well, in one shape or the other, it’s here.”
“What’s happened?” asked Rod, breathless.
“A new factor has upset my calculations—Starbuck’s arguments seem to be getting the better of mine. We may never see the universe above; but there will be more facts for your record. If you will come to the tower elevator, it will bring you to me.”
Those five days on the Infiniterra could not have been dull, yet the suspense of awaiting some outcome of the experiment had become a trying load. Rod hastened eagerly to the elevator, feeling ready for any decisive event.
A surprise met him, when he had mounted above the throb and hum of the energy converter, and came into the little conning pit with Thorn.
Beyond the transport dome, the metal ball of the Infiniterra had been changed incredibly. Its bulk had been consumed to a shrunken fragment, whose pitted craters were wilder than the Moon. Cragged metal mountains loomed starkly terrible against the death-black sky.
Still the converter beam bored into them, ten-fold more intense. Its hiss had risen to a piercing yell. The green brilliance of the ray was eye-searing. The metal vanished under it, in a colorless, blinding flame.
Thorn did not look haggard. His big body was as quietly composed as ever, his manner calm, even detached. Only his dull eyes betrayed his need of sleep. Yet these five days, Rod knew, must have been exhausting.
“We’ve used a great deal of metal,” he commented, a little appalled by the work of the ray.
“More than it appears,” Thorn told him. “The telescoping sections of the towers have been drawn in two miles. The uranium is more than half gone.”
“It’s going to run out?” Rod asked anxiously. “That’s the trouble?”
“Yes,” said Thorn, and explained deliberately: “Now, Trent, we’re near the limits of our universe. And we’ve run into a force I hadn’t foreseen—though it is accounted for in Starbuck’s mathematics.
“A kind of repulsion, a threshold of resistance. A barrier of force that we must burst through, to come from our universe into the one above. We can do it—I still believe we can. But it will leave us very short of power, outside.”
“I think I understand,” said Rod. “We’ll still be very small, in the greater universe? And we won’t be able to grow large?”
“Exactly, Trent.” Thom smiled. “According to Starbuck’s latest work, one single atom is all of any possible ship that could reach normal size in the superuniverse.”
“One atom?”
“And that atom of a theoretical ship composed entirely of uranium, and operating with perfect efficiency until every atom of it, save that one, has been turned into power. We aren’t all uranium, Trent, and the Infiniterra is not completely efficient. We may never become large enough even to see the universe above.”
“Then,” asked Rod, “we should be lost, always, in this darkness?”
Thorn shook his head. “Even here, our position can’t be stable. Driving into this repulsion is like stretching a rubber band. When it breaks, it may fling us to some immediate destruction.”
“When—how soon?”
“I don’t know. Hours—or perhaps only seconds. The tension is mounting steadily. You see how much power we’re using. The uranium is wasting visibly. Our drive would fling the Earth about like a toy balloon.
“Picture it this way, Trent. Imagine an elastic shell around our universe; a sphere of force, perhaps corresponding to the field of energy about an atom. We are plunging against that shell. It resists. But our power is all but infinite. Something must give way.”
“And then?”
“And then,” Thorn said, “we may know what infinity means.”
Thorn said no more. He was watching his instruments. Waiting. Rodney looked at his face. The weight of a long fatigue was on it; but no concern was written there, nothing personal. It was smoothed with serene detachment, lit with a selfless unconcern almost divine.
Once again he glanced outside.
The green converter beam hissed forth from the tower under him. Mountainous ragged masses of uranium flared blindingly under it, and melted away. The hissing scream of the ray rang against the dead-black sky.
Rod gazed up into the darkness. It was changeless, absolete. He could not pierce it. Yet his mind saw vividly the tremendous energies driving them, and the strange, intangible barrier that held them back.
From Thorn he caught a sense, of strain. He found himself breathless, trembling with the effort of waiting. And he started unreasonably when Thorn said quietly, “Now, Trent.”
Even if Thorn had not spoken, Rod would have known this for the moment. Yet the sensation of it was queerly hard to analyze. It was as if the Infiniterra, nearly motionless in the equilibrium of vast battling forces, had lurched abruptly when one of them failed—and yet in some other than the spatial dimensions, for certainly he had felt no physical, three-dimensional movement.
That instant passed. All seemed as before—for a dozen seconds. The green ray still bit into the uranium. The darkness pressed down, unprobed. Thorn’s voice was unchanged, when he said deliberately:
“Now, Trent, we have come into the new universe.”
His voice died. And that suspended moment of disappointing quiet fell, shattered. Peace was overwhelmed under mad confusion. Colored lights flared hotly. Alarm bells unnervingly clamored. Angrily the telephone buzzed.
Outside, the green ray flamed into sinister red. Its hiss rose to a tortured, demoniac shriek. The red was snuffed out. The shriek was choked off. Silence came down like a toppling wall, and the unthinkable darkness of infinite night descended on the Infiniterra.
XI.
THORN BETRAYED no panic at what had happened, not even surprise. Ignoring the flashing, multi-colored lights and clanging alarm bells, he reached for the telephone.
Rodney Trent watched, queerly alert. Cold fear had gripped him. Fear, however, did not unnerve Rod; it always keyed him up, sharpened his perceptions, gave speed to his brain and cunning to his hands. Desperation strode upon him, now, because he could not understand the danger, and knew no action to take against it. But he restrained any display of panic, and stood waiting, painfully alert.
Thus, before Thorn had done speaking on the telephone, his heightened senses had caught the heat. The air about him was swiftly warming; his skin soon prickled feverishly.
“You, Young?” Thorn’s calm voice rose above the insistent bells. “Fuses burned out, you say? In the drive-field coils?”
As he paused, Rod felt the heat again; a wave that went through his whole body. Thorn’s heavy face went grim. The bells abruptly quit ringing, but silence brought no relief.
Still holding the receiver, Thom studied the illuminated dials.
“Young,” he said, “the reaction is behind us, now. The threshold force is reversed. And the drive-field is no longer expending power; but picking it up. What we must do, then, is to shunt the overflow into the resistance coils and——”
Heat drenched Rod’s mind. It scorched him like a fiery breath. He staggered dizzily against the instrument ledge, trying with his hands to keep the torture of it from his eyes. But that was in vain; this strange, consuming flame was born within him.
“—and hurry.” Thorn’s voice was desperately calm. “We’re falling, with this force. The expansion is generating heat. Hurry—or we’ll be vapor.”
He dropped the receiver, gasping.
Rod was sinking in a sea of flame. It seared his body. His lungs were filled with suffocating fire. A white blaze put out his agonized eyes. Time seemed extended, until tortured hours intervened between the palpitating beats of his heart. Mercifully, at last, flame faded slowly into giddy darkness.
Then he was lying on the floor of the conning pit. He was drenched with sweat. Hot clothing clung to him. The metal floor was hot under his wet hands. Trying to get up, he discovered a sick weakness.
But the heat was no longer increasing.
The blur cleared from his smarting eyes. He saw Thorn beside him, mopping at his heavy face. He, too, was struggling to rise.
Rod gasped, hopefully, “It’s over?”
“For the moment,” whispered Thorn. “But conditions outside have been reversed—and the Infiniterra isn’t reversible. If I understand our situation, all the power we spent to burst out of our universe will now be returned to us.”
“Just as if we had climbed a hill,” offered Rod, “and started down the other side?”
“Exactly. And we’ve no brakes. No way to absorb and dissipate the energy of the descent.”
“Those resistance coils?”
“They’ll burn out in no time. We’re falling, Trent, from the outside of this new universe to its center. And falling not in space alone, but also in time and in size. The heat generated will be enough to vaporize the Infiniterra and everything aboard—and heat the vapor about a billion degrees.”
Thorn was still fighting for breath, as he whispered. Now his white, sweat-beaded hands reached up and clutched the rim of the instrument ledge. He drew himself up, shuddering. Unsteadily, he picked up the dropped receiver, calling urgently:
“Put Starbuck on the line. Quick.” Rod was getting to his feet. Thorn, at the instruments, gave him a moment’s attention.
“Better take the elevator, Trent, below. More heat, when the coils burn out. The interior is less exposed.”
“But you’re staying here?”
“I must, for the sake of observation. No time to waste, anyhow, running.”
“Then I’m going,” Rod said, “to stay with you.”
His voice shook with the effort of that decision. It was an obscure personal victory. A useless gesture, merely. He hoped to be of no service, yet he felt that the choice had given him some part in the struggle.
Thorn had already forgotten him, for Starbuck had answered.
“Will,” he said, “we must find a way to use up energy.”
Rod understood that one statement. The rest of Thorn’s talk was unintelligently crammed with technicalities of the mathematical physics that had made the Infiniterra possible. He leaned against the ledge, still weak in the legs: Once he tried to look outside, and found the darkness still like a sea of ink against the quartz dome.
FOR A LONG TIME, hours perhaps, Thom was at the telephone. Besides Starbuck’s, Rod heard Young’s name, and others. He scanned Thorn’s heavy face for some hint of hope, but that serenely detached absorption wiped away all of himself, even his fatigue.
When the heat returned, Rod had a moment of panic. He was a fool—why hadn’t he gone down into shelter?
Then Thorn put down the receiver, deliberately, and looked at him. His small, comradely smile made Rod suddenly glad that he had stayed.
“Well, Trent,” Thorn announced casually, “the coils are gone. We’ll soon be burning up again.”
“Can they stop it?”
“Not with the coils. Our momentum is building up, progressively. Coils would never radiate enough heat to save us.”
“Is there—another way?”
“Starbuck may save us. Such minds as Will’s are precious things, Trent—and society has had him on starvation half his life, while old Morrie was rolling in unearned lucre.”
“What can Starbuck do?”
“You’d never believe it.” Thorn smiled a little. “He knows ten times more about energy conversion than the man who invented it. He’s going to reverse the reactions, Trent, clear through all four stages, all the way from the drive-field back to the uranium atom.
“He’s going to absorb energy with the field, and deposit new uranium with the converter beams!”
