Collected Short Fiction, page 32
And ever the throbbing emerald column rising above the sea of ruby mist below us—the writhing serpentine bar of green that was the Lord of Flame—moved and twisted, directing its armies!
The plants battled with desperate ferocity, with incredible strength! In ones and twos and threes, the silver vessels fell, in twisted, battered wreckage—fell among the showers of sparks from the vanished creatures that had crushed them!
It was a battle of animal strength and courage, of desperate, savage energy—against deliberate, inhuman science! It was the battle of the mad, elemental beast—against silent, pitiless power!
And the plants won!
As the monsters that carried Sam and Xenora and myself swept along high above the line of battle, we saw the silver ships give way, saw them drop into the red mist, with the avenging, victorious plants following close upon them!
And then my mine went off!
A vast white cloud of smoke and shattered rock rose deliberately above the cliffs, spread into a Titanic mushroom shape, and fell in a great rain of debris into the abyss and into the lake. After many seconds the sound of it reached us—a crashing, deafening blast! The great wave of air swept up the green-winged fleet like leaves on a stormy lake!
Below the cloud of smoke, where the black cliffs had been, I saw a vast white sheet of waters—a rushing Niagara multiplied manifold—plunging over the brink in a sheer and gleaming arc!
Even as I gazed at it, in dazed wonder at the thing I had wrought, Sam was suddenly close beside me, shouting something with alarm and urgent command in his voice.
“Mel—the roof! Where is the Omnimobile? For God’s sake—”
“In a crater in the abyss, by the metal cylinder,” I cried, wondering.
Then I looked up, and saw that the flat roof was cupping up, like a vast inverted basin! The waters above were rising!
With no further word to me, Sam shouted a strange order to the monsters we rode. Their vast green wings were folded! We dropped like plummets into the crimson mist! The violet gleam appeared, and we made out the crater-pitted floor. I shouted directions, and in a few minutes we settled into the same little crater in which I had met disaster.
The Omnimobile was still lying there, just as I had left it!
The creatures that bore us dropped near the ground. Those great red tentacles set us gently down on the rocks by the machine. Sam led the way and I carried Xenora. Desperately we scrambled aboard and screwed down the manhole. Sam’s mount, Alexander, slumped into a curious attitude of dejection.
Suddenly one of the silver vessels shot into view above the crater’s rim, drifting swiftly towards us! The machine was watched! It had been left as a trap! The thing flashing beams of purple flame reached out eagerly—found the Omnimobile. The whirling spirals of thick green mist extended toward us!
Sam fumbled with the dials and made a hopeless gesture. Then I saw Alexander spring into the air and fly toward the terrible gleaming thing! With mad, desperate speed, the plant creature dashed straight into that fearful swirling mist! It charged on through it! Already glowing red with the disintegration beam, it struck the white machine with terrific force!
The argent globe paused, hung uncertainly, and then fell with swift acceleration until it crashed upon the walls of the pit, with the gleaming, wasting form of the heroic plant still clinging to it in the agony of a fearful doom!
For a long moment Sam was still. Suddenly he aroused himself as if from a daze of pain, and turned again to the instrument boards.
“The earth is not frozen!” he shouted. “The power in the ether is dead!” I thought of the havoc my cannon fire had wrought with the machines about the flaming brain.
In a moment he had the generators going, and the machine crawling to an upright position. Then he turned on the rocket tubes. The crater was filled with the roaring jets of steam, and we were hurled into the crimson sky!
I had a fleeting glimpse of the metal brain—the vast cylinder of violet—with the green beam still throbbing from it, and with the last of the silver ships battling the victorious army of plants that swarmed about it!
“The roof is lifting!” Sam cried. “The equilibrium was very delicate—the gas that kept issuing from the earth was lifting the waters to the danger point, and your explosion carried them past! The attempt to freeze the earth was probably undertaken because a roof of ice would have been more secure!”
His voice was drowned in a fresh rushing, whistling burst from the rocket tubes. I carried the inert form of Xenora down to the cabin, and did my best to care for her. In a few moments we were above the haze. I took a last glimpse of the green and purple forests dropping away below us, and turned again to the unconscious girl.
Soon the fierce red glare that poured in the ports told me that we had reached the red roof. And suddenly the Omnimobile was pitching and spinning madly, with wild waters thundering against her sides. A sound reached my ears—a roar, dull, distant and slumberous at first, but rising to a crashing, deafening storm of sound! It seemed an eternity that I held the sleeping girl upon the tossing couch, while the very heavens rocked with thunder!
Abruptly, the bloody glare grew lighter, and was streaked with shafts of bright sunshine—white, precious sunlight of the upper earth! We had followed the vast bubble of gas through the roof of waters! The red mists cleared—drew up into the blue vault above—repelled into outer space!
We were flying in the cold white light, above a mad blue sea!
In fifteen minutes Sam had brought the machine down upon an ocean that was still heaving madly from the cataclysm that had drowned a world. He came into the cabin, and under his skilful ministrations Xenora was soon sleeping quietly, in a normal slumber from which she would wake herself again.
Presently Sam questioned me about my adventures. I gave him the whole account and concluded with the question that, for months, my troubled mind had striven so vainly to answer.
“Sam, how could intelligence exist in metal?”
“Why not in metal, Mel?” the old scientist replied, smiling thoughtfully. “Why not there as well as in lumps of impure carbon and water, as one of the early savants called us? But do you remember the radioactivity of the metal bar, and the little cells of helium gas in it? I think the radium had somehow set up neuronic circuits between the cells, like the circuits between the neurone cells in our brains. It is not impossible. That was a helium brain—but it was formed as naturally as yours or mine!”
On May 4, 2000 a. d., just a year after the beginning of my story, our leisurely homeward cruise was ended. The green coast of Florida rose out of the clear blue sea before us. Xenora and I stood on the deck, happy in the cool salty air and the bright sunlight. The girl was lost in vast delight at the new wonders of azure sea and sapphire sky. At last the dream of my life was come true!
The wonderful girl of my fancy was by my side, to be mine forever!
But she was the Green Girl no longer! A week of the sun and wind of the sea had erased the soft green tint of her clear skin, and replaced it with a light, smooth tan!
THE END
The Cosmic Express
HUMAN nature is unchanging and will probably not change fundamentally for countless ages in the future. We look back now to the days before the automobile and before electricity and the hundred and one other mechanical conveniences that simplify life in so many ways. Just so people of the future will in all likelihood look back on pre-television and pre-flying days and wish themselves back in the exciting days of primitive life. Our well-known author gives us here a thought-provoking bit of literature of scientific interest.
MR. ERIC STOKES-HARDING tumbled out of the rumpled bed-clothing, a striking slender figure in purple-striped pajamas. He smiled fondly across to the other of the twin beds, where Nada, his pretty bride, lay quiet beneath light silk covers. With a groan, he stood up and began a series of fantastic bending exercises. But after a few half-hearted movements, he gave it up, and walked through an open door into a small bright room, its walls covered with bookcases and also with scientific appliances that would have been strange to the man of four or five centuries before, when the Age of Aviation was beginning.
Yawning, Mr. Eric Stokes-Harding stood before the great open window, staring out. Below him was a wide, park-like space, green with emerald lawns, and bright with flowering plants. Two hundred yards across it rose an immense pyramidal building—an artistic structure, gleaming with white marble and bright metal, striped with the verdure of terraced roof-gardens, its slender peak rising to help support the gray, steel-ribbed glass roof above. Beyond, the park stretched away in illimitable vistas, broken with the graceful columned buildings that held up the great glass roof.
Above the glass, over this New York of 2432 A. D., a freezing blizzard was sweeping. But small concern was that to the lightly clad man at the window, who was inhaling deeply the fragrant air from the plants below—air kept, winter and summer, exactly at 20° C.
With another yawn, Mr. Eric Stokes-Harding turned back to the room, which was bright with the rich golden light that poured in from the suspended globes of the cold ato-light that illuminated the snow-covered city. With a distasteful grimace, he seated himself before a broad, paper-littered desk, sat a few minutes leaning back, with his hands clasped behind his head. At last he straightened reluctantly, slid a small typewriter out of its drawer, and began pecking at it impatiently.
For Mr. Eric Stokes-Harding was an author. There was a whole shelf of his books on the wall, in bright jackets, red and blue and green, that brought a thrill of pleasure to the young novelist’s heart when he looked up from his clattering machine.
He wrote “thrilling action romances,” as his enthusiastic publishers and television directors said, “of ages past, when men were men. Red-blooded heroes responding vigorously to the stirring passions of primordial life!”
He was impartial as to the source of his thrills—provided they were distant enough from modern civilization. His hero was likely to be an ape-man roaring through the jungle, with a bloody rock in one hand and a beautiful girl in the other. Or a cowboy, “hard-riding, hard-shooting,” the vanishing hero of the ancient ranches. Or a man marooned with a lovely woman on a desert South Sea island. His heroes were invariably strong, fearless, resourceful fellows, who could handle a club on equal terms with a cave-man, or call science to aid them in defending a beautiful mate from the terrors of a desolate wilderness.
And a hundred million read Eric’s novels, and watched the dramatization of them on the television screens. They thrilled at the simple, romantic lives his heroes led, paid him handsome royalties, and subconsciously shared his opinion that civilization had taken all the best from the life of man.
Eric had settled down to the artistic satisfaction of describing the sensuous delight of his hero in the roasted marrow-bones of a dead mammoth, when the pretty woman in the other room stirred, and presently came tripping into the study, gay and vivacious, and—as her husband of a few months most justly thought—altogether beautiful in a bright silk dressing gown.
Recklessly, he slammed the machine back into its place, and resolved to forget that his next “red-blooded action thriller” was due in the publisher’s office at the end of the month. He sprang up to kiss his wife, held her embraced for a long happy moment. And then they went hand in hand, to the side of the room and punched a series of buttons on a panel—a simple way of ordering breakfast sent up the automatic shaft from the kitchens below.
Nada Stokes-Harding was also an author. She wrote poems—“back to nature stuff”—simple lyrics of the sea, of sunsets, of bird songs, of bright flowers and warm winds, of thrilling communion with Nature, and growing things. Men read her poems and called her a genius. Even though the whole world had grown up into a city, the birds were extinct, there were no wild flowers, and no one had time to bother about sunsets.
“Eric, darling,” she said, “isn’t it terrible to be cooped up here in this little flat, away from the things we both love?”
“Yes, dear. Civilization has ruined the world. If we could only have lived a thousand years ago, when life was simple and natural, when men hunted and killed their meat, instead of drinking synthetic stuff, when men still had the joys of conflict, instead of living under glass, like hot-house flowers.”
“If we could only go somewhere——”
“There isn’t anywhere to go. I write about the West, Africa, South Sea Islands. But they were all filled up two hundred years ago. Pleasure resorts, sanatoriums, cities, factories.”
“If only we lived on Venus! I was listening to a lecture on the television, last night. The speaker said that the Planet Venus is younger than the Earth, that it has not cooled so much. It has a thick, cloudy atmosphere, and low, rainy forests. There’s simple, elemental life there—like Earth had before civilization ruined it.”
“Yes, Kinsley, with his new infra-red ray telescope, that penetrates the cloud layers of the planet, proved that Venus rotates in about the same period as Earth; and it must be much like Earth was a million years ago.”
“Eric, I wonder if we could go there! It would be so thrilling to begin life like the characters in your stories, to get away from this hateful civilization, and live natural lives. Maybe a rocket——”
The young author’s eyes were glowing. He skipped across the floor, seized Nada, kissed her ecstatically. “Splendid! Think of hunting in the virgin forest, and bringing the game home to you! But I’m afraid there is no way—Wait! The Cosmic Express.”
“The Cosmic Express?”
“A new invention. Just perfected a few weeks ago, I understand. By Ludwig Von der Valls, the German physicist.”
“I’ve quit bothering about science. It has ruined nature, filled the world with silly, artificial people, doing silly, artificial things.”
“But this is quite remarkable, dear. A new way to travel—by ether!”
“By ether!”
“Yes. You know of course that energy and matter are interchangeable terms; both are simply etheric vibration, of different sorts.”
“Of course. That’s elementary.” She smiled proudly. “I can give you examples, even of the change. The disintegration of the radium atom, making helium and lead and energy. And Millikan’s old proof that his Cosmic Ray is generated when particles of electricity are united to form an atom.”
“Fine! I thought you said you weren’t a scientist.” He glowed with pride. “But the method, in the new Cosmic Express, is simply to convert the matter to be carried into power, send it out as a radiant beam and focus the beam to convert it back into atoms at the destination.”
“But the amount of energy must be terrific——”
“It is. You know short waves carry more energy than long ones. The Express Ray is an electromagnetic vibration of frequency far higher than that of even the Cosmic Ray, and correspondingly more powerful and more penetrating.”
The girl frowned, running slim fingers through golden-brown hair. “But I don’t see how they get any recognizable object, not even how they get the radiation turned back into matter.”
“The beam is focused, just like the light that passes through a camera lens. The photographic lens, using light rays, picks up a picture and reproduces it again on the plate—just the same as the Express Ray picks up an object and sets it down on the other side of the world.
“An analogy from television might help. You know that by means of the scanning disc, the picture is transformed into mere rapid fluctuations in the brightness of a beam of light. In a parallel manner, the focal plane of the Express Ray moves slowly through the object, progressively, dissolving layers of the thickness of a single atom, which are accurately reproduced at the other focus of the instrument—which might be in Venus!
“But the analogy of the lens is the better of the two. For no receiving instrument is required, as in television. The object is built up of an infinite series of plane layers, at the focus of the ray, no matter where that may be. Such a thing would be impossible with radio apparatus because even with the best beam transmission, all but a tiny fraction of the power is lost, and power is required to rebuild the atoms. Do you understand, dear?”
“Not altogether. But I should worry! Here comes breakfast. Let me butter your toast.”
A bell had rung at the shaft. She ran to it, and returned with a great silver tray, laden with dainty dishes, which she set on a little side table. They sat down opposite each other, and ate, getting as much satisfaction from contemplation of each other’s faces as from the excellent food. When they had finished, she carried the tray to the shaft, slid it in a slot, and touched a button—thus disposing of the culinary cares of the morning.
She ran back to Eric, who was once more staring distastefully at his typewriter.
“Oh, darling! I’m thrilled to death about the Cosmic Express! If we could go to Venus, to a new life on a new world, and get away from all this hateful conventional society——”
“We can go to their office—it’s only five minutes. The chap that operates the machine for the company is a pal of mine. He’s not supposed to take passengers except between the offices they have scattered about the world. But I know his weak point——”
Eric laughed, fumbled with a hidden spring under his desk. A small polished object, gleaming silvery, slid down into his hand.
“Old friendship, plus this, would make him—like spinach.”
FIVE minutes later Mr. Eric Stokes-Harding and his pretty wife were in street clothes, light silk tunics of loose, flowing lines—little clothing being required in the artificially warmed city. They entered an elevator and dropped thirty stories to the ground floor of the great building.
There they entered a cylindrical car, with rows of seats down the sides. Not greatly different from an ancient subway car, except that it was air-tight, and was hurled by magnetic attraction and repulsion through a tube exhausted of air, at a speed that would have made an old subway rider gasp with amazement.
