Collected Short Fiction, page 230
It was a machine they saw, but a machine incredibly huge. Its supporting girders towered up, against the rough black walls of the volcanic cavern, a full mile. Carried amid the girders was a maze of intricate mechanism from whose complexity the mind recoiled in dismay.
Set above them was a crown of tremendous, curved tubes, which burned with lurid, flickering hues of scarlet and green.
Flung out from those tubes was a net of rays. Flaming swords of white, unchanging opalescence, they stabbed into the black cavern roof.
“The rays, Monty!” whispered Shiela. “The rays of Tycho! They come from here, up through the surface of the moon.”
“Exactly,” said Vethlo, gravely.
“But the extreme penetration,” murmured Kane. “I don’t understand——”
“Those rays,” the thin man informed them, “represent an order of energy which my master has not allowed your scientists to investigate. They curve out beyond the moon, invisibly. Earth is caught in their impalpable net.
“Their sensitive fields serve as detectors for the harmonic analyzers, here. No act of any being on the planet, no word spoken, escapes those delicate fields. The effect of every falling leaf, every insect sound, is carried here to the moon, recorded.”
His thin, black-clad arm gestured at the crown of white rays.
“They serve also as a means of control. At any point upon the planet, the rays are so weak that men have never detected them; yet their influence is everywhere. The forces they exert are always slight: a tiny electric charge, imparted to a raindrop; a few electrons liberated, in some neurone cell in a man’s brain.
“But that slight force has been calculated by mechanisms a million times more complex than the human brain. And it shapes results as a pebble starts an avalanche.
“The machine analyzes all the elements of every situation, which are picked up by the fields of the ray. Then, again through the ray, those few tiny factors are changed, which must be changed to make the resulting events obey my master’s will.”
Shiela was still clutching Kane’s big arm, trembling.
“The machine knows—everything?” she whispered. “It has all power? Like a mechanical god?”
She shuddered.
“Come,” resumed the weary, sorrowful tones of the lean man in blade. “Words are but words. You will not feel my master’s power until you have seen.”
He led the way toward the tremendous, looming mountain of the machine. Kane and Shiela followed, silent with the pressure of numbing dread.
At last, across the strangeness of the scarlet garden, they came into the machine’s glistening bulk. Vethlo guided them along a narrow, railed walk that pierced its heart. In mute wonder, Kane gazed about him at the mass of equipment carried upon the cross-members between the soaring girders.
The individual units looked delicate and precisely made as the parts of a fine watch. Tiny spheres of white crystal, rolling slowly upon curving crystal surfaces. Silently spinning disks, sliding levers, rotating cams, styles tracing grooves in moving plates. Flashing lights, interlacing multicolored rays, curved mirrors, lenses. The only sound, from all of it, was a faint rustling whisper. It was, Kane thought, the perfect mechanism.
Into an open, circular space they came, walled with the machine’s intricacy. Looking upward, Kane saw the red-and-green flicker of the crown of tubes, visible at the top of a great shaft.
The space was paved with hard white metal. At its center was a ring-shaped table, ten yards in diameter. The surface of its curving, yard-wide top was set with a maze of gleaming instruments: levers, keys, buttons, dials, knobs. It was the control board, Kane immediately guessed.
“Here is the earth,” said the solemn voice of Vethlo.
His thin fingers played skilfully over keys and dials.
A pallid arm of silver radiance fell down the mile-deep shaft, from the crown of flaming, colossal tubes.
KANE drew in his breath sharply, staggered with surprize.
Out of the ray was born an image of the earth. No more than twenty feet in diameter, it hung within and above the ring-shaped table. Only an image, it must be, he knew, created at the focal point of the ray by some unguessed miracle of optical science. But its impression of solid, material reality was overwhelming. Every detail of continental outline, of mountain and river and forest and polar cap, stood out sharply, down to the limit of his vision.
“Why,” Shiela gasped, “why, it’s like a toy world!”
“It is,” said the thin man. “The toy of the machine.”
He moved a little around the table, to a white screen, four feet high, framed in intricate mechanism. Its surface had an odd, granular luster, as if composed of millions of microscopic, luminous cells.
“Here,” said Vethlo, “we may have a closer view.”
His hands ran over the dials and keys below the screen. Behind it, the image of the earth turned a little. It stopped with western America toward them; with the faint gray blur of San Francisco, Kane saw, at the apex of a metal cone behind the screen.
Upon the screen, sharply clear, faithful to every vivid hue of sea and land and sky, appeared the Golden Gate and the city’s familiar bay-front facade.
“It—it’s real,” whispered Shiela. “I was born there.”
“So you were,” said Vethlo.
Again he touched the controls.
The city shifted, raced toward them upon the screen.
And Kane was looking, suddenly, upon a weathered, shabby two-story house on the slope of a hill, behind a wide yard red with autumn leaves.
“Our house!” breathed Shiela, in awed recognition. “Where I was born——”
Her words halted, as the door opened and a slender girl in red-and-white street pajamas came running down the leaf-strewn walk.
“Shiela!” gasped Kane.
It was indeed the girl beside him, as she must have been at fifteen.
A heavy, smiling man in business gray, finishing a black pipe, strode briskly into the picture.
“Dad!” whispered Shiela, voiceless.
“Daddy!” her own voice echoed from behind the screen, from the lips of that Shiela of the years ago. “You’re late. Do hurry and wash for dinner. I helped Mildred fix it, today. And there’s sherbet. Do hurry——”
The clear voice faded, as Kane felt a shudder of uncanny wonder mount along his spine.
“Poor Dad,” whispered Shiela, her voice husky with remembered grief. “That was just before he took side——”
The scene shifted again. They were looking through an open window, into the shabby house. They saw the heavy man, now lying in bed, flushed, haggard, smiling up at the slender, troubled girl, who stood at the bedside with a tray. The girl was Shiela again. Her voice came from the screen, ringing with forced cheer:
“Of course you are, Dad. Buck up. You’re going to be as well as anybody.”
The screen went white again, and the weary voice of Vethlo said:
“But my master willed otherwise.”
He looked at Shiela. She was biting her full lip to keep back a sob.
“Perhaps,” he said, “you two recall the day when my master first brought you together.”
The image of the earth turned again, behind the screen. And on die screen abruptly appeared the shops and the testing-field of the Montel Foundation, at Maple Hill. A battered taxi stopped before the buildings. Shiela got out. She was four years older now, taller, trim in a business suit. She paid the driver from a thin purse. Anxiously, diffidently, she walked to the door.
Kane himself opened it for her, a powerful, black-haired giant in white overalls. His gray eyes lit at sight of her. A quick smile broke on his lean face.
“I’m looking for Mr. Montel,” said Shiela’s doubtful voice from the screen. “I’m the secretary he asked the agency to send.”
Kane repressed an inward shudder of uncanny wonder as his own voice answered cheerfully:
“Good. I’m Montel. Come in.” He made way for her. “Handle technical dictation? Getting off some factory specifications today.” He looked at her weary face, and smiled again. “Had lunch, kid? Sandwiches back here, and a jug of coffee.”
The picture faded, and Kane whispered, wonderingly:
“Three years ago.”
“Time is nothing to the machine,”-said Vethlo, “save that it has already fixed the past, while the future is fluid, still, to be molded by the machine to my master’s will.”
His thin fingers ran over the controls. The bright globe of the earth spun behind the screen.
“I must show you now,” he said, “how events are shaped.”
SAN FRANCISCO was on the screen again: Market Street. Traffic was stopped by a cordon of police. The pavement was jammed with a waiting throng. A white sea of faces looked up toward an empty balcony.
Then a man was on the balcony, speaking eloquently.
“Senator Grenfell,” whispered Kane. Martin Grenfell it was, slender, erect, immaculately clad. He was gesturing as he talked. The movements of his mobile, small-featured face, of his whole body, as always, emphasized his words.
“The madness of war has seized upon us,” the soft magic of his voice came from the screen. “I appeal to you, my fellow human beings, to fight it like a fever. Keep your sanity. Keep your feet on the ground, your eyes on the facts.
“The war can bring no good—not to any man living. The era of war for profit has passed. Every one of you must know the horror locked up in the new weapons that other nations have ready, and that America has ready. You must have read of the new atomic bombs, that can turn the green wealth of your fertile state into lifeless, burning dust.
“The war will kill civilization—perhaps kill the human race.”
A desperate, terrible urgency had come into Martin Grenfell’s ringing tones. Kane could read the fatigue upon his face, the bitter despair hidden under his words. He realized that the little statesman was throwing his last resource of effort into a grim, hopeless battle.
“And there is no need of war,” the urgent voice went on. “This fever of war is simply mad emotion, born of blind circumstance. We must see the truth. We must recognize the war psychosis for the needless horror that it is. We must break the web of emotion, escape that psychosis.
“I had hoped that Kane Montel and Shiela Hall might help us, when they flew out to the moon, a month ago. Surely the pride of such a magnificent achievement would save the human race. Mankind could not conquer space, and then fail to conquer its own blind madness.
“But the two did not return. The Spirit of Man must have been lost in——”
As Martin Grenfell spoke from the screen, Vethlo had drawn a small instrument from a socket below. It was a small needle, set in an ebon handle. Its sharp point glowed with a sinister scarlet incandescence.
With an odd, sorrowful reluctance of manner, with pitying dread like a shadow on his long, thin face, he pressed the dark handle into Shiela’s hand.
“Touch the man Grenfell,” his low voice commanded. “It is my master’s will.”
Shiela shrank back unwillingly, trembling.
Grasping her fingers in his thin, powerful hand, Vethlo pushed them forward, so that the ominous red point of the needle touched the breast of Martin Grenfell, upon the screen.
“The will of Aru,” said Vethlo, in tones that rang with dread.
From behind the screen came the sharp, repeated crack of a pistol. The urgent, appealing voice of Martin Grenfell was abruptly cut off. His arms were flung suddenly wide, in a gesture of convulsive agony. Then his small body staggered forward, collapsed. It hung limp and lifeless over the balcony rail.
Morbid excitement stirred the horror-stricken crowd below. Sudden confusion surrounded a man struggling wildly toward the balcony, waving a revolver.
“I killed him!” he was screaming, in tones of insane emotion. “Damned pacifist! Grenfell was trying to bind America hand and foot, and betray us to the enemy. I killed him. I’m glad of it!”
And then, as the scene faded, a policeman was taking away the gun.
“One illustration of the power of the machine of destiny,” remarked Vethlo. His voice held a dull, weary regret. “Among other decisive factors in the shaping of this event, the rays influenced an unbalanced brain, by the release of a few free electrons in one neurone fiber.” He turned slowly to Kane, who was still dazed and speechless with horror.
“My master, Aru,” he said, in the same tone of lifeless, hopeless regret, “wills that you should participate in another illustration.”
HE TOUCHED the intricate controls again. San Francisco retreated, until the Golden Gate was once more visible and the green-dad hills that framed the city and the bay.
One thin finger indicated a red button, upon the curving table, which gleamed lie a malefic eye.
“Touch that,” he said. “Aru commands it.”
Voiceless with numbing, helpless dread, Kane mutely refused.
“Then allow me,” said Vethlo, bleakly. “I do it upon your behalf, at the will of my master.”
He depressed the crimson button. Above the white city, Kane’s eye caught the gray, fleeting motes of airplanes, wheeling high above the futile bursts of defending guns. He saw the little spurts of orange flame, the fountains of white dust, where bombs fell. He saw white buildings collapse and bum; he watched gray destruction consume the green upon the hills.
Dust lay where the heart of San Francisco had been. In patches of leprous ray, it shone oddly with prismatic glints too faint for the eye to analyze. It spread. Trees and buildings crumbled into it, consumed. And the last green, the last hint of life, was presently gone from the barren gray slopes above the empty bay.
Gray dust swirled and shimmered, down to the water’s edge.
“That is six months in the future,” said Vethlo. “The war, of course, follows the death of Martin Grenfell. The special factors eventuating in the destruction of San Francisco involve an electronic disturbance in the brain of an American general, and a consequent forgotten command which results in the annihilation of the Pacific fleet.”
Kane and Shiela did not speak. Clutching hands, they looked each at the other, seeking mutual strength to sustain them against overwhelming horror.
“Now,” the thin man asked them, “are you convinced of the power of Aru, through his machine?”
Numbed, shuddering, the two mutely shook their heads. A deep inner conviction told Kane that the horror of that last scene had been no trickery, no illusion, but dreadful truth. The omnipotence of the machine overwhelmed him.
“Then we shall go to the dwelling of Aru,” Vethlo announced. “From his own lips you will learn the fate he has designed for you.”
His dark eyes rested upon Shiela’s white beauty, somberly dreadful with a leering, half-hidden speculation.
6. The Lord of Destiny
“DESCEND,” said Vethlo.
He paused above a railed opening at the edge of the circular floor.
With Shiela beside him, Kane went down a short flight of steps, into a small, box-like chamber of white metal. Following, Vethlo motioned them to seats. He touched a knob on the wall. Kane swayed to sudden motion.
“Sort of subway,” he commented.
The motion stopped. Vethlo rose.
“Follow me,” he said. “Above is my master’s dwelling.”
At the top of the steps, Kane and Shiela came into a singular room. It took up, evidently, all the interior of one of the blue cones which they had seen burning against the dark remoteness of the cavern. Its curving, overhanging walls shone with a deep and eldritch blue.
The circular floor was vast and largely vacant.
In its center was a ring-shaped table, studded with intricate mechanism—the duplicate of the one they had just left. Within and about it, sharply focused, hung another image of the earth, a miniature planet, vividly real.
“A second control-board,” murmured Kane.
Vethlo deliberately led them across the wide floor, and around the circular table, and so brought them face to face with the huge room’s one occupant.
“Master,” said Vethlo, in a humble, half-fearful tone, “these are the two adventurers from Earth.”
Before the control-board, the man was reclining upon a long, luxurious divan. He was inordinately fat, and the white, bulging rolls of his flesh were swathed in sheer fabric of fine-spun silver, woven with strands of scarlet. His hair was straw-colored, and fine as a woman’s, and braided in an elaborate jeweled coiffure which capped the huge sphere of his head.
His features were all but lost between the pink-white masses of his cheeks. His small, half-concealed eyes were a light, hard blue-green. They twinkled maliciously. They were cunning, cruel eyes. And they were veiled with a baffling inhumanity that made them strange, unreadable, as the eyes of some animal.
He looked at Kane and Shiela, indolently, without moving to rise. He began to laugh. The heavy white masses of his flesh, beneath the silver-and-scarlet gown, quivered like jelly. His tiny, red-lipped mouth opened to a perfect round, and his gasping breath hissed through it.
The uncontrolled laughter went on, until Kane’s ragged nerves drove him forward.
“Aru?” he questioned grimly. “Gill yourself Lord of Destiny?”
The laughter subsided a little. The bright, hard eyes were uncovered again. They stared at Kane. Then they leered across at Shiela, with a brutish obscenity in them that rocked Kane forward on his toes. His heart drummed in his big chest, and a white wrath urged him to sink his fingers in this soft flesh and rend the lecherous life from it.
“Recall yourself,” spoke the low, weary voice of Vethlo.
Glancing at him, Kane saw that he gripped a small sphere, from which a thin golden needle projected menacingly.
Still quivering with rage, Kane restrained his hot lust to slay.
Harshly, he demanded of the inert man: “What do you want of us?”
Aru spoke. His voice was soft as his body, high-pitched as a woman’s, cruelly caressing.
