Collected Short Fiction, page 279
Amid the stunned shock and panic that followed, astronomers swiftly perceived that the earth had moved half around its orbit. In a split heartbeat, six months had somehow gone. The Christmas season fell, unwarned, upon a world too staggered and fearful for merriment.
For, inexplicably, the disaster had cost thousands of lives. From office and home and street, in that dazing instant, the victims had abruptly vanished. Bewildered survivors found themselves addressing empty air, or passing food to a vacant plate. The vanished left no clue.
The bodies were never recovered. Near New York, however, which had suffered most heavily, a sinister thing was found. Upon the Jersey Palisades lay a queer gray area of lifeless desolation, and near its center, where lovely Alpine Park had been, was a wide circle of strange squat earthen mounds.
The mounds were swiftly crumbling. But apprehensive explorers, venturing into the unpleasant labyrinth of burrows beneath them, found a few gruesome relics identified with the missing persons. No single human fragment, however, had been found when the tunnels caved in.
The world has had no explanation of this amazing tragedy. The astrophysicists, it is true, put their learned heads together, called up the shades of Einstein and Minkowski, and spoke sagely of a flaw in the space-time continuum. The press caught up their magic words, and the whole planet was soon informed that it was a Time Fault which had made six months seem like the winking of an eye. Neither savants nor newspapers, however, could account for the vanished thousands, or explain the grisly mounds in that queerly devastated park upon the Palisades.
I am the only surviving man who knows the actual cause of the Time Fault, who experienced all the nerve-shattering horror of those six lost months, or who met face to face the incredible menace that stopped all the world. I found courage, then, to go ahead, believing that the inherent interest of what I have to tell will make up for any lack of literary adornment.
1. The Different Doctor Harding
ON THE morning of February 10, of fateful 1960, Doctor Aston Harding came into my room at the Aero Club. I was just three days returned from that season’s very successful polar flight; clangorous New York still seemed a shining paradise, and any old acquaintance a welcoming angel. I greeted Harding like a brother—before I discovered that he wanted me to fly him back to the Antarctic, the very next week!
I put the answer to that in pretty plain words.
“We can’t do that, Harding! There’s just about six weeks of twilight left at the South Pole, before six months of winter set in. I know what it’s like—I’ve just come from there!”
I ignored the set determination on his blank face.
“I’m fed up with silence and ice and frostbitten feet. What I want is jazz bands, and my ice in a frosty glass, and feet tapping on waxed hardwood. Sorry, Doctor, but it simply can’t be done—not this season. Now, if you can wait until November——”
Harding set down the whisky soda I had mixed for him, and rose deliberately to stand over my chair. He was a tall man, his broad shoulders a little stooped but powerful; he had a ruddy skin and yellowish hair. A few years older than I, but still under forty, he was already distinguished in both philanthropy and science.
I had always liked Harding, for a quick generosity and a spirit of genuine fellowship, almost as much as I admired the girl he had married: lovely Jerry Ware. I was indebted to him, as director of the Planet Research Foundation, for substantial aid to my polar flights. He had been a good friend—and I was deeply shocked, now, to see the change in him.
His pale blue eyes fixed me with a penetration that I found disquieting, and his low voice, a new strange hardness in it, rapped:
“Yes, Dunbar, you’re going to fly us to the Pole—this season!” His eyes, always before so genially mild, w-ere suddenly sharp as gimlets. “An explorer, you want fame: you want to advance science: you want money for another expedition. You’ve got a price, Dunbar—what is it?”
A very rude reply was on my tongue. But my respect for the old Doctor Harding, my old friendship for Jerry Ware, rose up in time to check the words. And Harding stabbed at me with an almost menacing forefinger.
“We’ve got the biggest proposition you ever had a nibble at, Dunbar,” his harsh voice crackled at me. “We’re going to reclaim Antarctica. We’re going to thaw the ice cap with atomic power!”
He paused a moment to let that sink in, his keen pale eyes boring into my face.
“An invention of Meriden Bell’s,” his rasp went on. “You know him. This is confidential, Dunbar; I trust you. We’ve formed a syndicate. Five of us. My wife and I, Bell and Tommy Veering—and yourself.”
At last I swallowed my amazement, and:
“Thaw the ice!” I blurted. “Harding, you don’t know what you’re talking about. I’ve spent years there. Remember what Antarctica is: five million square miles, covered with ice up to a mile deep, with temperatures seventy to a hundred below! Thaw—that?”
“It can be done!” he rapped. “You talk to Bell. And there are millions in it. Billions. For all five of us. I’ve put you down for four per cent, plus expenses.” His tone became unpleasantly dictatorial. “Get ready, Dunbar, to fly us down in your Austral Queen—by the end of next week.”
“If that’s all you want, Harding——”
I bit my tongue, and held open the door. Something, some indefinable quality in his bearing, made me want desperately to hit him. It was his old friendship that held my arm, and Jerry Ware.
I WAS still hurt and puzzled by this harsh dictatorial insolence in a man who had been the most patient and generous of my friends, when the phone rang again that afternoon, and I was surprized to hear the voice of Harding’s wife.
A discord of anxious worry marred its old sweet music.
“Ron!” she cried eagerly. “How are you?”
Jerry had been, and was, perhaps the friend held closest in my lonely life. But I must make it clear, against possible misunderstanding, that I did not love her, nor she me. I had sincerely congratulated the Hardings on their marriage, believing them perfectly mated. The change in her husband distressed me deeply, for I knew what it must mean to Jerry.
Her voice was quivering, now, pleading.
“Ron, if Aston’s way provoked you, I am sorry. I must explain about him. He had an—illness, two years ago. He had been working late in his office at the Foundation—some Government research, on account of the Pacific War. And one night he—disappeared.
“I was frantic. The police couldn’t find him. I was afraid he was—dead. It was two weeks before he came to himself, stumbling along a highway out in Jersey.
“It was amnesia. Still he can’t remember what happened. There was evidence that somebody had broken into his office. The police thought an Asiatic spy might have attacked him, to get some secret. But he doesn’t know. And since——”
Her low voice caught, choked.
“Since, he seems different—sharp and impatient—sometimes cruel. And still there are lapses in his memory, details he can’t recall. I have to help him. For he’s still”—she choked again—“still dear to me. And promise me, Ron, that you’ll forgive him, bear with him.”
“I promise, Jerry,” I told her.
“Oh, thank you.” It was a glad, eager cry. “And, Ron, will you come out to dinner tonight? There’s to be a meeting of the syndicate, afterward, to discuss the expedition.”
“I’ll be there, Jerry, to see you. But I warn you, I’m not flying back to the Pole—not this season.”
Her gay little laugh ignored that last.
“Thanks, Ron,” she said. Doctor Bell will pick you up at seven.”
Meriden Bell—old “Merry” Bell! I was eager to see him, and yet dreaded the encounter. I had known him well when he worked at the Foundation, before the terrible events that shattered his career and estranged him from the world.
His genius had been a flame in him, in the old days. Radiant good spirits had sparkled in his eyes. I knew that things were different, now. I had hardly seen him for two years, but the outline of his tragedy was familiar to me: it is part of the blackest chapter in American history.
Three years before, a day came back to me when I had called on Bell in his biological laboratory at the Foundation, which then occupied a gray old building at the edge of the Jersey meadows. Harding had already hinted that Bell’s bacteriological research was the greatest of the century, but I was nevertheless surprized.
All that long-past summer afternoon came back: the air in the laboratory a little stuffy, unpleasant with a vague odor of formaldehyde; the north light gleaming on microscopes, incubators, centrifuges, and specimen jars; Bell, a tall blueeyed man, young and slender in laboratory white, eagerly busy over a spectroscope.
He came to meet me, turned to point dramatically at a test-tube that held a few drops of an amber fluid.
“My triumph, Ron!” Eager elation rang in his low voice. “That is my Culture V 13—the perfect bacteriophage! It is a filterable virus that will destroy any living thing, any bacterium, any malignant organism. When I have developed the control—a specific protection for the cells of the human body—it can eradicate all disease!”
“All disease!”
Awed by the might of this slender man’s genius, perhaps a little incredulous before his sudden promise of universal health, I reached out gingerly to touch the tube in its rack. Bell swiftly caught my arm, and:
“Don’t!” his tense voice warned. “If one drop touched you, Ron—or the millionth of a drop—nothing could save you! Nothing—until I have developed the specific control.”
I turned somewhat apprehensively—for those few brown drops seemed suddenly more terrible than all the blizzards of Antarctica—and came face to face with the most dreadful man I have ever seen.
2. Five Against the Ice
DREADFUL—no other word so fits that human monstrosity. Wearing a stained laboratory smock, he stood less than five feet tall. His back was horribly hunched, and his great gnarled hands slung forward like the limbs of a gorilla. Beneath sleek black hair, his face was a yellow, V-shaped mask. His eyes, set deep beneath dense, bushy dark brows that sloped to make a smaller V, were black also—and his most appalling feature.
They held me, his eyes, in a sort of shrinking fascination, because they were—hideous. One was oddly red-flecked around the contracted pupil, with an evil, glittering red. The other was strangely dilated, a fearsome inscrutable midnight orb that seemed to have no iris.
Those dark, mismated eyes were fixed on the yellow liquid in the tube with an intensity somehow terrifying. Beneath the ugly blankness of the yellow, pointed face I sensed a sinister storm of suppressed emotion: a mad black yearning, a bitter, burning hatred, a savage and triumphant gloating.
I started back, appalled as if some bottomless crevasse had abruptly snapped open before me. Bell made a hasty introduction:
“Ron, this is Doctor Kroll. Captain Dunbar, meet Doctor Mawson Kroll, who is assisting my biological research.”
The hunchback had started also, and all hint of that yearning and hatred and gloating was instantly gone from the yellow V of his face—though he couldn’t erase its stifled, searing fury from my mind. The hand he gave me was unpleasantly cold.
“Doctor Bell has made a remarkable discovery.” Kroll’s voice was oily and yet grating, unpleasant as his breath. “One the world will not forget.”
The horror to come must have been already in his twisted mind—perhaps I had seen its birth. But only afterward did I see the sardonic second meaning in his words.
The Pacific War was fought during my next polar expedition, ended before I knew of its beginning; for the censored radio carried no news.
The American air forces, supported by the fleet, had already won a swift and brilliant victory, when Bell’s “Culture V 13” fell mysteriously into the hands of the enemy. Nevertheless, by the last vengeful order of a defeated and mortally wounded commander, three surviving Asiatic planes sprayed the bacteriophage along the Pacific coast. From Seattle to San Diego, it took a million and a quarter lives, hideously.
Hideously—for every droplet that touched a human body started an incurable sore, a bleeding crater of agony that spread implacably, swiftly destroying skin and flesh and bone, until not life alone but every vestige of the corpse was consumed.
On that terrible morning, when a whole nation was stunned with horror and death, high military authorities called on Meriden Bell, at his laboratory. His skill could do nothing: the dead were dead, and Asiatic vengeance satisfied. Bell admitted that his bacteriophage must have caused the deaths, but could not account for its possession by the enemy. He was arrested, tried by court-martial, convicted of treason—then suddenly exonerated, when the guilt was pinned upon Mawson Kroll.
For Bell’s assistant had taken flight, leaving a trunk filled with Asiatic gold. In the intercepted communications of the enemy were found letters in which Kroll demanded, as payment for his treason, to be made Emperor of America.
The fugitive hunchback was arrested, two weeks later, on the Mexican border. Stupidly he denied his guilt, even his own identity. An alienist pronounced him criminally insane. Tried in a military court, he was convicted by the overwhelming weight of circumstantial evidence, shot by a firing-squad.
Bell abandoned his experiments, destroyed his records and various cultures at the Foundation, by military command. His brilliant mind, it seemed for months, had been shattered by the disaster. He was forcibly restrained from suicide, committed to an asylum.
His tortured brain had assumed the guilt of a million murders. The psychiatrists, if they failed to unburden him altogether of Kroll’s crime, at least convinced him that he might best make atonement by living. He had come back to the Foundation before my last expedition, to begin research in a newly opened field of sub-atomic physics.
NOW, when Bell came to meet me in the winter gloom that filled the halls of the Aero Club, I saw that he had never escaped the shadow of that tragedy. He was frail and thin, his blue eyes dark with brooding. His white pinched face looked as if it never smiled. The eagerness of his greeting, however, was almost pathetic.
“Good old Ron,” he whispered, and felt the muscle of my shoulder with his pale fingers as if we were schoolboys again. “You must thrive on cold—you’re looking like a red-headed Hercules.”
“But I’ve had enough of winter for this season, Merry,” I told him. “What I’m looking for is warmth and women and laughter.” And I asked hopefully, “Harding wasn’t possibly joking, about this project to thaw the ice cap?”
“No, Ron.” Bell’s pale thin face was abruptly serious, almost grimly resolute. “We’re going to do it, all right. The equipment will be ready in a week. And you are the only man with experience enough to take us where we want to go, at this season. We’re going to the Stapledon Basin——”
“The Stapledon Basin—right across the Pole!” That got me. “Surely, Merry, you haven’t considered how difficult—or impossible—it would be to thaw a continent of ice!”
His dark eyes came gravely to my face, and in them was some commanding power, some deep reflection of his old supernal genius, that silenced my protests.
“But I have considered, Ron,” he said quietly. “And I have solved every problem. I have developed an atomic battery that will supply ample power—it is still secret; what I tell you is confidential.”
“Atomic power?”
He nodded.
“It is a hydro-helium vacuum cell. We call it the Atom-Builder. It builds hydrogen atoms into helium. Four hundred grams of hydrogen gives you three ninety-nine of helium, plus one of pure energy-. A gram of energy is a great deal, Ron. A few tons of water will be all the fuel we need. We shall bum ice to thaw-Antarctica!”
I was speechless to that. Merry went on gravely:
“Your plane will carry all the equipment we need. I have designed a heat-beam radiator, transformers, tower—everything. Harding has formed a syndicate to put up the money. We are all meeting tonight——”
“Listen, Merry,” I started to object. “Harding is taking just a little too much for granted. So far as I’m concerned——”
His white fingers caught my arm.
“But, Ron, old man, you don’t understand.” His voice was hoarse, quivering. “This is the chance for me to make up for what I have done. One discovery of mine took a million lives. If another could open up a new continent, where millions could live, it would help settle the score.”
He gulped. His tortured eyes searched my face.
“That’s all I’ve been working for, Ron, since I—came back. You won’t stop me—will you?”
No resisting that. “All right, Merry,” I told him.
His thin hand wrung mine.
“Thanks, old man!” He was almost sobbing. “We’ll be ready to fly by the eighteenth. You can have the Austral Queen in shape? There will be five of us going, and no others.”
“But Jerry Harding!” I protested. “She isn’t going—not into such hardship and danger. Some of my men might be persuaded to return——”
“No others!” An old bitterness was hard in Bell’s voice. “This thing is secret—there won’t be another Mawson Kroll!” His dark eyes stared at me, so terrible that I looked away. “And Jerry will hear of nothing else but going,” he went on. “There’ll be just the five of us, against the ice.”
3. The Dweller in the Pylon
WE found the Hardings at their uptown apartment, and Tommy Veering. Jerry Harding was her old self: slender, gray-eyed, charming; yet I could see her deep concern for her husband. She hovered anxiously near him, twice came swiftly to his aid when his memory seemed to stumble upon a momentary blank.
Veering was a slim, slick-haired young chap, whose smiling brown eyes held a diffident appeal. A new protege of Harding’s, he had been with the Foundation since his graduation. For all his youth, he was already distinguished in electronic engineering.
