Conlents ands$chnowleclamend
A
WITCH SHALL BE BORN by Robert E. Howard....... 3
Copyright,
1934, by the Popular Fiction Publishing Company for Weird Tales.
VENGEANCE IN HER BONES by
Malcolm Jameson................................... 81
Copyright,
1942, by Weird Tales.
THE MENTANICALS by Francis Flagg.........................................................
59
Copyright, 1934, by Teck Publications, Inc., for Amazing Stories;
copyright now held by Ziff-Davis; reprinted by permission of the heir thru the
Ackerman Fantasy Agency.
THE
GOSTAK AND THE DOSHES by Miles J.
Breuer.... 92
Copyright, 1930, by Ziff-Davis Publishing Co. Published by permission of
Estate of Miles J. Breuer.
THE STATEMENT OF RANDOLPH
CARTER by H. P.
Lovecraft
53
Copyright, 1925, by The Popular Fiction
Publishing Company; copyright, 1939, by August Derlcth and Donald Wandrei;
copyright, 1947, by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei. By permission of Aikham
House.
BIMINI by Bassett Morgan..........................................................................
36
Copyright, 1928, by The Popular Fiction Publishing Company for Weird Tales.
OMEGA by Amelia
Reynolds Long............................. _____ .................. 116
Copyright,
1932, by Teck Publishing Corporation.
STORM WARNING by Donald A. Wollheim............................................. 107
From "Future Fantasy and Science Fiction" for October, 1942,
by consent of the author and publishers.
AVON FANTASY REAOER NO. 10 COPYRIGHT, 1949, BY AVON NOVELS, INC. PRINTED IN If. $. A.
A Witch Shall Be Born
By
Robert E. Howard
Robert E. Howard's stories of the wanderings of Conan the Cimmerian through the realms of the pre-Glacial era were based upon a carefully constructed "history" of those ages devised by Howard before starting his series. It is, we think, this careful groundwork which makes these tales so colorfully realistic, so vivid, so varied in background. We sense that he has woven into his literary tapestry not merely varicolored threads but cloths of different textures, so that his prehistoric kingdoms are national not merely because he calls them by different names but because he has thought of them as different in culture, approach, tradition. This is no mean feat for a purely imaginary world and it is one of the things that have made Robert Howard's stories so much more memorable than attempts at similar construction by more commercially slanted writers.
1. The Blood-Red Crescent
ARAMIS, Queen »f Khatiran, awakened from a
dream-haunted slumber to a silence that seemed more like the stillness of
nighted catacombs than the normal quiet of a sleeping palace. She lay staring
into the darkness, wondering why the candles in their golden candelabra had
gone out. A flecking of stars marked a gold-barred casement that lent no
illumination to the interior of the chamber. But as Taramis lay there, she
became aware of a spot of radiance glowing in the darkness before her. She
watched, puzzled. It grew and its intensity deepened as it expanded, a widening
disk of lurid light hovering against the dark velvet hangings of the opposite
wall. Taramis caught her breath, starting up to a sitting position. A dark
object was visible in that circle of light—a human head.
In
a sudden panic the queen opened her lips to cry out for her maids; then she
checked herself. The glow was more lurid, the head more vividly limned. It was
a woman's head, small, delicately molded, superbly poised, with a high-piled
mass of lustrous black hair. The face grew distinct as she stared—and it was
the sight of this face which froze the cry in Taramis' throat. The features
were her own! She might have been looking into a mirror which subtly altered
her reflection, lending it a tigeri eye, a vindictive curl of lip.
"Ishtar!" gasped
Taramis. "I am bewitched!"
Appallingly, the apparition
spoke, and its voice was like honeyed venom.
"Bewitched? No, sweet
sister! Here is no sorcery."
"Sister?'' stammered
the bewildered girl. "I have no sister."
"You
never had a sister?" came the sweet, poisonously
mocking voice. "Never a twin sister whose flesh was as
soft as yours to caress or hurt?"
"Why,
once I had a sister," answered Taramis, still
convinced that she was in the grip of some sort of nightmare. "But she thed."
The
beautiful face in the disk was convulsed with the aspect of a fury; so hellish became its expression that Taramis, cowering back, half
expected to see snaky locks writhe hissing about the ivory brow.
"You
lie!" The accusation was spat from between the snarling red Hps. "She
did not the! Fool! Oh, enough of this mummery! Look—and let your sight be
blasted!"
Light ran suddenly along the hangings like
flaming serpents, and incredibly the candles in the golden sticks flared up
again. Taramis crouched on her velvet couch, her lithe legs flexed beneath her,
staring wide-eyed at the pantherish figure which posed mockingly before her. It
was as if she gazed upon another Taramis, identical with herself in every
contour of feature and limb, yet animated by an alien and evil personality. The
face of this stranger waif reflected the opposite of every characteristic the
countenance of the queen denoted. Lust and mystery sparkled in her scintillant eyes, cruelty lurked in the curl of her full red lips. Each
movement of her supple body was subtly suggestive. Her coiffure imitated that
of the queen's, on her feet were gilded sandals such
as Taramis wore in her boudoir. The sleeveless, low-necked silk tunic, girdled
at the waist with a cloth-of-gold cincture, was a duplicate of the queen's
night garment.
"Who
are you?" gasped Taramis, an icy chill she could not explain creeping
along her spine. "Explain your presence before I call my lathes-in-waiting
to summon the guard!"
"Scream
until the roof-beams crack," callously answered the stranger. "Your
sluts will not wake till dawn, though the palace spring into flames about them.
Your guardsmen will not hear your squeals; they have been sent out of this wing
of the palace."
"What!"
exclaimed Taramis, stiffening with outraged majesty.
"Who dared give my guardsmen such a command?"
"I
did, sweet sister," sneered the other girl.
"A little while ago, before I entered. They thought it was their darling
adored queen. Ha! How beautifully I acted the part! With what imperious
dignity, softened by womanly sweetness, did I address the great louts who knelt
in their armor and plumed helmets!"
Taramis
felt as if a stifling net of bewilderment were being drawn about her.
"Who are you?" she cried
desperately. "What madness is this? Why do you come here?"
"Who
am I?" There was the spite of a she-cobia's hiss in the soft response.
The girl stepped to the edge of the couch, grasped the queen's white shoulders
with fierce fingers, and bent to glare full into the startled eyes of Taramis.
And under the spell of that hypnotic glare, the queen forgot to resent the
unprecedented outrage of violent hands laid on regal flesh.
"Fool!"
gritted the girl between her teeth. "Can you ask? Can you wonder? I am Salome!"
"Salome!"
Taranois breathed the word, and the hairs prickled on
her scalp as she realized the incredible, numbing truth of the statement. "I thought you thed within the hour of your
birth," she said feebly.
"So
thought many," answered the woman who called herself Salome. "They
carried me into the desert to the, damn them! I, a mewing, puling babe whose
life was so young it was scarcely the flicker of a candle. And do you know why
they bore me forth to the?"
"I—I have
heard the story----- "
faltered Taramis.
Salome
laughed fiercely, and slapped her bosom. The low-necked tunic left the upper
parts of her firm breasts bare, and between them there shone a curious mark—a
crescent, red as blood.
"The mark of the
witch!" cried Taramis, recoiling.
"Aye!" Salome's laughter was dagger-edged with hate. "The
curse of the kings of Khauran! Aye, they tell the tale in the
market-places, with wagging beards and rolling eyes, the pious fools! They tell
how the first queen of our line had traffic with a fiend of darkness and bore
him a daughter who lives in foul legendry to this day. And thereafter in each
century a girl baby was born into the Askhaurian dynasty, with a scarlet
half-moon between her breasts, that signified her
destiny.
" 'Every century a witch shall be born.' So ran the ancient curse. And so it has
come to pass. Some were slain at birth, as they sought to slay me. Some walked
the earth as witches, proud daughters of Khauran, with the moon of hell burning
upon their ivory bosoms. Each was named Salome. I too am Salome. It was always Salome, the witch. It will always be
Salome, the witch, even when the mountains of ice have roared down from the
pole and ground the civilizations to ruin, and a new world has risen from the
ashes and dust—even then there shall be Salomes to walk the earth, to trap
men's hearts by their sorcery,, to dance before the kings of the world, and see
the heads of the wise men fall at their pleasure."
"But—but you stammered Taramis.
"I?"
The scintillant eyes burned like dark fires of mystery. "They carried me
into the desert far from the city, and laid me naked on the hot sand, under the
flaming sun. And then they rode away and left me for the jackals and the
vultures and the desert wolves.
"But
the life in me was stronger than the life in common folk, for it partakes of
the essence of the forces that seethe in the black gulfs beyond mortal ken. The
hours passed, and the sun slashed down like the "molten flames of hell,
but I did not the—aye, something of that torment I remember, faintly and far
away, as one remembers a dim, formless dream. Then there were camels, and yellow-skinned men who wore silk robes and spoke
in a weird tongue. Strayed from the caravan road, they passed close by, and
their leader saw me, and recognized the scarlet crescent on my bosom. He took
me up and gave me life.
"He was a magician from far Khitai,
returning to his native kingdom
after a journey to Stygia. He took me with him to purple-towered Paikang,
its minarets rising amid the vine-festooned jungles of bamboo, and there
I grew to womanhood under his teaching. Age had steeped him deep in
black wisdom, not weakened his powers of evil. Many things he taught
me----- "
She paused, smiling enigmatically, with
wicked mystery gleaming in her dark eyes. Then she tossed her head.
"He
drove me from him at last, saying that I was but a common witch in spite ol his
teachings, and not fit to command the mighty sorcery he would have taught me.
He would have made me queen of the world and ruled the nations through me, he
said, but I was only a harlot of darkness. But what of it?
I could never endure to seclude myself in a golden tower, and spend the long
hours staring into a crystal globe, mumbling over incantations written on
serpent's skin in the blood of virgins, poring over musty volumes in forgotten
languages.
"He
said I was but an earthly sprite, knowing naught of the deeper gulfs of cosmic
sorcery. Well, this world contains all I desire—power, and pomp, and glittering
pageantry, handsome men and soft women for my paramours and my slaves. He had
told me who I was, of the curse and my heritage. I have returned to take that to which I have as
much right as you. Now it is mine by right of possession."
"What
do you mean?" Taramis sprang up and faced her sister, stung out of her
bewilderment and fright. "Do you imagine that by drugging a few of my
maids and tricking a few of my guardsmen you have established a claim to the
throne of Khauran ? Do not forget that I am queen of Khau-ran! I shall give you a place of honor, as my sister,
but——"
Salome laughed hatefully.
"How generous of you, dear, sweet sister! But before you begin putting me in my
place—perhaps you will tell me whose solthers camp in the plain outside the
city walls?"
"They
are the Shemitish mercenaries of Constantius, the Kothic voivode of the Free Companies."
"And what do they in
Khauran?" cooed Salome.
Taramis
felt that she was being subtly mocked, but she answered with an assumption of
dignity which she scarcely felt.
"Constantius asked
permission to pass along the borders of Khauran on his way to Turan. He himself
is hostage for their good behavior as long as they are within my domains."
"And
Constantius," pursued Salome. "Did he not ask your hand today?"
Taramis shot her a clouded glance of
suspicion.
"How
did you know that?"
An
insolent shrug of the slim naked shoulders was the only reply. "You
refused, dear sister?"
"Certainly
I refused!" exclaimed Taramis angrily. "Do you, an As-khaurian
princess yourself, suppose that the queen of Khauran could treat such a
proposal with anything but disdain? Wed a bloody-handed adventurer, a man
exiled from his own kingdom because of his crimes, and the leader of organized
plunderers and hired murderers?
"I
should never have allowed him to bring his black-bearded slayers into Khauran.
But he is virtually a prisoner in the south tower, guarded by my solthers.
Tomorrow I shall bid him order his troops to leave the kingdom. He himself
shall be kept captive until they are over the border. Meantime, my solthers man
the walls of the city, and I have warned him that he will answer for any
outrages perpetrated on the villagers or shepherds by his mercenaries."
"He
is confined in the south tower?" asked Salome.
"That
is what I said. Why do you ask?"
For
answer Salome clapped her hands, and lifting her voice, with a gurgle of cruel
mirth in it, called: "The queen grants you an authence, Falcon!"
A
gold-arabesqued door opened and a tall figure entered the chamber, at the sight
of which Taramis cried out in amazement and anger.
"Constantius! You dare enter my chamber!"
"As
you see, Your Majesty!" He bent his dark,
hawk-like head in mock humility.
Constantius,
whom men called Falcon, was tall, broad-shouldered, slim-waisted, lithe and
strong as pliant steel. He was handsome in an aquiline, ruthless way. His face
was burnt dark by the sun, and his hair, which grew far back from his high, narrow
forehead, was black as a raven. His dark eyes were penetrating and alert, the
hardness of his thin lips not softened by his thin black mustache. His boots
were of Kordavan leather, his hose and doublet of plain, dark silk, tarnished
with the wear of the camps and the stains of armor rust.
Twisting
his mustache, he let his gaze travel up and down the shrinking queen with an
effrontery that made her wince.
"By
Ishtar, Taramis," he said silkily, "I find you more alluring in your
night-tunic than in your queenly robes. Truly, this is an auspicious night!''
Fear
grew in the queen's dark eyes. She was no fool; she knew that Constantius
would never dare this outrage unless he was sure of himself.
"You
are mad!" she said. "If I am in your power in this chamber, you are
no less in the power of my subjects, who will rend you to pieces if you touch
me. Go at once, if you would tive."
Both laughed mockingly, and
Salome made an impatient gesture.
"Enough
of this farce; let us on to the next act in the comedy. Listen, dear sister: it
was I who sent Constantius here. When I decided to take the throne of Khauran,
I cast about for a man to aid me, and chose the Falcon, because of his utter
lack of all characteristics men call good."
"I
am overwhelmed, princess," murmured Constantius sardonically, with a
profound bow.
"I sent him to Khauran, and, once his
men were camped in the plain out-
side and he was in the palace, I entered the city by that small gate in the
west wall—the fools guarding it thought it was you returning from some
nocturnal adventure--- "
"You hell-cat!" Taramis' cheeks flamed and her resentment got the better of her regal
reserve.
Salo/ne smiled hardly.
"They
were properly surprised and shocked, but admitted me without question. I
entered the palace the same way, and gave the order to the surprised guards
that sent them marching away, as well as the men who guarded Constantius in the
south tower. Then I came here, attending to the lathes-in-waiting on the
way."
Taramis' fingers clenched
and she paled.
"Well, what
next?" she asked in a shaky voice.
"Listen!"
Salome inclined her head. Faintly through the casement there came the clank of
marching men in armor; gruff voices shouted in an alien tongue,
and cries of alarm mingled with the shouts.
"The
people awaken and grow fearful," said Constantius sardonically. "You
had better go and reassure them, Salome!"
"Call
me Taramis," answered Salome. "We must become accustomed to it."
"What have you
done?" cried Taramis. "What have you done?"
"I
have gone to the gates and ordered the solthers to open them," answered
Salome. "They were astounded, but they obeyed. That is the Falcon's army
you hear, marching into the city."
"You devil!" cried Taramis. "You have betrayed my people,
in my guise!
You have made me seem a traitor! Oh, I shall go to them--- "
With
a cruel laugh Salome caught her wrist and jerked her back. The magnificent
suppleness of the queen was helpless against the vindictive strength that
steeled Salome's slender limbs.
"You
know how to reach the dungeons from the palace, Constantius?" said the
witch-girl. "Good. Take this spitfire and lock her into the strongest
cell. The jailers are all sound in drugged sleep. I saw to that. Send a man to cut their throats before they can awaken. None must ever know
what has occurred tonight. Thenceforward I am Taramis, and Taramis is a nameless prisoner in an unknown dungeon."
Constantius
smiled with a glint of strong white teeth under his thin
mustache.
"Very good; but you
would not deny me a little—ah—amusement first?"
"Not
I! Tame the scornful hussy as you will." With a wicked laugh Salome flung her sister into the Kothian's arms, and turned
away through the door that opened into the outer corridor.
Fright
widened Taramis' lovely eyes, her supple figure rigid and straining against
Constantius' embrace. She forgot the men marching in the streets, forgot the
outrage to her queenship, in the face of the menace to-her womanhood. She
forgot all sensations but terror and shame as she faced the complete cynicism
of Constantius' burning, mocking eyes, felt his hard arms crushing her writhing
body.
Salome,
hurrying along the corridor outside, smiled spitefully as a scream of despair and agony rang shuddering through the palace.
2. The Tree of Death
The young solther's hose and shirt were
smeared with dried blood, wet with sweat and gray with dust. Blood oozed from
the deep gash in his thigh, from the cuts on his breast and shoulder.
Perspiration glistened on his livid face and his fingers were knotted in the
cover of the divan on which he lay. Yet his words reflected mental suffering
that outweighed physical pain.
"She
must be mad!" he repeated again and again, like one still stunned by some
monstrous and incredible happening. "It's like a nightmare! Taramis, whom all Khauran loves, betraying her people to that
devil from Koth! Oh, Ishtar, why was I not slain ? Better the than live to see our queen turn traitor and
harlot!"
"Lie still, Valerius," begged the
girl who was washing and bandaging his
wounds with trembling hands. "Oh, please lie still, darling! You will make
your wounds worse. I dared not summon a leech--- "
"No,"
muttered the wounded youth. "Constantius' blue-bearded devils will be
searching the quarters for wounded Khaurani; they'll hang every man who has
wounds to show he fought against them. Oh, Taramis, how could you betray the
people who worshipped you?" In-his fierce agony he writhed, weeping in
rage and shame, and the terrified girl caught him in her arms, straining his
tossing head against her bosom, imploring him to be quiet.
"Better
death than the black shame that has come upon Khauran this day," he
groaned. "Did you see it, Ivga?"
"No,
Valerius." Her soft, nimble fingers were again at work, gently cleansing
and closing the gaping edges of his raw wounds. "I was awakened by the
noise of fighting in the streets—I looked out a casement and saw the Shemites cutting down people; then presently I
heard you calling me faintly from the alley door."
"I
had reached the.limits of my strength," he muttered. "I fell in the
alley and could not rise. I knew they'd find me soon if I lay there—I killed
three of the blue-bearded beasts, by Ishtar! They'll never swagger through
Khauran's streets, by the gods! The fiends are tearing
their hearts in hell!'
The
trembling girl crooned soothingly to him, as to a wounded child, and closed his
panting lips with her own cool sweet mouth. But the fire that raged in his soul
would not allow him to lie silent.
"I
was not on the wall when the Shemites entered," he burst out. "I was
asleep in the barracks, with the others not on duty. It was just before dawn
when our captain entered, and his face was pale under his helmet. 'The Shemites
are in the city,' he said. 'The queen came to the southern gate and gave orders
that they should be admitted. She made the men come down from the walls, where
they've been on guard since Constantius entered the kingdom. I don't understand
it, and neither does anyone else, but I heard her give
the order, and we obeyed as we always do. We are ordered to assemble in the
square before the palace. Form ranks outside the barracks and march—leave your arms and armor here. Ishtar knows what this
means, but it is the queen's order.'
"Well,
when we came to the square the Shemites were drawn up on foot opposite the
palace, ten thousand of the blue-bearded devils, fully armed, and people's
heads were thrust out of every window and door on the square. The streets
leading into the square were thronged by bewildered folk. Taramis was standing
on the steps of the palace, alone except for Constantius, who stood stroking
his mustache like a great lean cat who has just
devoured a sparrow. But fifty Shemites with bows in their hands were ranged
below them.
"That's where the queen's guard should
have been, but they were drawn up at the foot of the palace stair, as puzzled
as we, though they had come fully armed, in spite of the queen's order.
"Taramis
spoke to us then, and told us that she had reconsidered the proposal made her
by Constantius—why, only yesterday she threw it in his teeth in open court!—and
that she bad decided to make him her royal consort. She did not explain why
she had brought the Shemites into the city so treacherously. But she said that,
as Constantius had control of a body of professional fighting-men, the army of
Khauran would no longer be needed, and therefore she disbanded it, and ordered
us to go quietly to our homes.
"Why,
obethence to our queen is second nature to us, but we were struck dumb and
found no word to answer. We broke ranks almost before we knew what we were
doing, like men in a daze.
"But
when the palace guard was ordered to disarm likewise and disband, the captain
of the guard, Conan, interrupted. Men said he was off duty the night before,
and drunk. But he was wide awake now. He shouted to the guardsmen to stand as
they were until they received an order from him— and such is his dominance of
his men, that they obeyed in spite of the queen. He
strode up to the palace steps and glared at Taramis—and then he roared: 'This
is not the queen! This isn't Taramis! It's some devil in masquerade!'
"Then
hell was to pay! I don't know just what happened. I think a Shemite struck
Conan, and Conan killed him. The next instant the square was a battleground.
The Shemites fell on the guardsmen, and their spears and arrows struck down
many solthers who had already disbanded.
"Some
of us grabbed up such weapons as we could and fought back. We hardly knew what
we were fighting for, but it was against Constantius and his devils—not against
Taramis, I swear it! Constantius shouted to cut the traitors down. We were not
traitors!" Despair and bewilderment shook his voice. The girl murmured
pityingly, not understanding it all, but aching in sympathy with her lover's
suffering.
"The
people did not know which side to take. It was a madhouse of confusion and
bewilderment. We who fought didn't have a chance, in no formation, without
armor and only half armed. The guards were fully armed and drawn up in a
square, but there were only five hundred of them. They took a heavy toll before
they were cut down, but there could be only one conclusion to such a battle.
And while her people were being slaughtered before her, Taramis stood on the
palace steps, with Constantius' arm about her waist, and laughed like a
heartless, beautiful fiend! Gods, it's all mad— mad!
"I
never saw a man fight as Conan fought. He put his back to the courtyard wall,
and before they overpowered him the dead men were strewn in heaps thigh-deep
about him. But at last they dragged him down, a hundred against one. When I saw
him fall I dragged myself away feeling as if the world had burst under my very
fingers. I heard Constantius call to his dogs to take the captain
alive—stroking his mustache, with that hateful smile on his lips!"
That
smile was on the lips of Constantius at that very moment. He sat his horse
among a cluster of his men—thick-bothed Shemites with curled blue-black beards
and hooked noses; the low-swinging sun struck glints from their peaked helmets
and the silvered scales of their corselets. Nearly a mile behind,
the walls and towers of Khauran rose sheer out of the meadowlands.
By
the side of the caravan road a heavy cross had been planted, and on this grim
tree a man hung, nailed there by iron spikes through his hands and feet. Naked
but for a loin-cloth, the man was almost a giant in stature, and his muscles
stood out in thick corded ridges on limbs and body, which the sun had long ago
burned brown. The perspiration of agony beaded his face and his mighty breast,
but from under the tangled black mane that fell over his low, broad forehead,
his blue eyes blazed with an unquenched fire. Blood oozed sluggishly from the
lacerations in his hands and feet.
Constantius saluted him
mockingly.
"I
am sorry, captain," he said, "that I can not remain to ease your last
hours, but I have duties to perform in yonder city—I must not keep our
delicious queen waiting!" He laughed softly. "So I leave you to your
own devices—and those beauties!" He pointed meaningly at the black shadows
which swept incessantly back and forth, high above.
"Were
it not for them, I imagine that a powerful brute like yourself
should live on the cross for days. Do not cherish any illusions of rescue
because I am leaving you unguarded. I have had it proclaimed that anyone
seeking to take your body, living or dead, from the cross, will be flayed alive
together with all the members of his family, in the public square. I am so
firmly established in Khauran that my order is as good as a regiment of
guardsmen. 1 am
leaving no guard, because the vultures will not approach as long as anyone is
near, and I do not wish them to feel any constraint. That is also why I brought
you so far from the city. These desert vultures approach the walls no closer
than this spot.
"And
so, brave captain, farewell! I will remember you when, in an hour, Taramis lies
in my arms."
Blood
started afresh from the pierced palms as the victim's mallet-like fists
clenched convulsively on the spike-heads. Knots and bunches of muscle started
out on the massive arms, and Conan bent his head forward and spat savagely at
Constantius' face. The voivode laughed coolly, wiped the saliva from his
gorget and reined his horse about.
"Remember
me when the vultures are tearing at your living flesh," he called
mockingly. "The desert scavengers are a particularly voracious breed. I
have seen men hang for hours on a cross, eyeless, earless, and scalpless,
before the sharp beaks had eaten their way into their vitals."
Without
a backward glance he rode toward the city, a supple, erect figure, gleaming in
his burnished armor, his stolid, bearded henchmen jogging beside him. A faint
rising of dust from the worn trail marked their passing.
The
man hanging on the cross was the one touch of sentient life in a landscape that
seemed desolate and deserted in the late evening. Khauran,
less than a mile away, might have been on the other side of the world, and
existing in another age.
Shaking
the sweat out of his eyes, Conan stared blankly at the familiar terrain. On
either side of the city, and beyond it, stretched the fertile meadowlands, with
cattle browsing in the distance where fields and vineyards checkered the plain.
The western and northern horizons were dotted with villages, miniature in the
distance. A lesser distance to the southeast a silvery gleam marked the course
of a river, and beyond that river sandy desert began abruptly to stretch away
and away beyond the horizon. Conan stared at that expanse of empty waste
shimmering tawnily in the late sunlight as a trapped hawk stares at the open
sky. A revulsion shook him when he glanced at the
gleaming towers of Khauran. The city had betrayed him—trapped him into
circumstances that left him hanging to a wooderi cross like a hare nailed to a
tree.
A
red lust for vengeance swept away the thought. Curses ebbed fitfully from the
man's lips. All his universe contracted, focused,
became incorporated in the four iron spikes that held him from life and
freedom. His great muscles quivered, knotting like iron cables. With the sweat
starting out on his graying skin, he sought to gain leverage, to tear the nails
from the wood. It was useless. They had been driven deep. Then he tried to tear
his hands off the spikes, and it was not the knifing, abysmal agony that
finally caused
him to
cease his efforts, but the futility of it. The spikeheads were broad and heavy;
he could not drag them through the wounds. A surge of helplessness shook the
giant, for the first time in his life. He hung motionless, his head resting on
his breast, shutting his eyes against the aching glare of the sun.
A
beat of wings caused him to look up, just as a feathered shadow shot down out of the sky. A keen beak, stabbing at his
eyes, cut his cheek, and he jerked his head aside, shutting his eyes
involuntarily. He shouted, a croaking, desperate shout of menace, and the
vultures swerved away and retreated, frightened by the sound. They resumed
their wary circling above his head. Blood trickled over Conan's mouth, and he
licked his lips involuntarily, spat at the salty taste.
Thirst
assailed him savagely. He had drunk deeply of wine the night before, and no
water had touched his lips since before the battle in the square, that dawn.
And killing was thirsty, saltsweaty work. He glared at the distant river as a
man in hell glares through the opened grille. He thought of gushing freshets
of white water he had breasted, laved to the shoulders in liquid jade. He
remembered great horns of foaming ale, jacks of sparkling wine gulped
carelessly or spilled on the tavern floor. He bit his lip to keep from
bellowing in intolerable anguish as a tortured animal bellows.
The
sun sank, a lurid ball in a fiery sea of blood. Against a crimson
rampart that banded the horizon the towers of the city floated unreal as a
dream. The very sky was tinged with blood to his misted glare. He licked his
blackened lips and stared with bloodshot eyes at the distant river. It too
seemed crimson like blood, and the shadows crawling up from the east seemed
black as ebony.
In his dulled ears sounded the louder beat of wings. Lifting his head he watched with the burning
glare of a wolf the shadows wheeling above him. He knew
that his shouts would frighten them away no longer. One dipped —dipped—lower
and lower. Conan drew his head back as far as he could, waiting with terrible
patience. The vulture swept in with a swift
roar of wings. Its beak flashed down, ripping the skin on Conan's chin as he
jerked his head aside; then before the bird could flash away, Conan's head
lunged forward on his mighty neck muscles, and his teeth, snapping like those
of a wolf, locked on the bare, wattled neck.
Instantly the vulture exploded into
squawking, flapping hysteria. Its thrashing wings blinded the man, and its
talons ripped his chest. But grimly he hung on, the muscles starting out in
lumps on his jaws. And the scavenger's neckbones crunched between those
powerful teeth. With a spasmodic flutter the bird hung limp. Conan let go, spat
blood from his mouth. The other vultures, terrified by the fate of their
companion, were in full flight to a distant
tree, where they perched like black demons in conclave.
Ferocious
triumph surged through Conan's numbed brain. Life beat strongly and savagely
through his veins. He could still deal death; he still lived. Every twinge of
sensation, even of agony, was a negation
of death.
"By Mitra!" Either a voice spoke, or he suffered from hallucination. "In all my life I
have never seen such a thing!"
Shaking
the sweat and blood from his eyes, Conan saw four horsemen sitting their steeds
in the twilight and staring up at him. Three were lean, whiterobed hawks,
Zuagir tribesmen without a doubt,
nomads from beyond the river. The other was dressed like them in a white, girdled khalat and a flowing
headdress which, banded about the temples with a triple circlet of braided camelhair, fell to his shoulders. But he was
not a Shemite. The dusk was not so thick, nor Conan's hawklike sight so clouded that he could not perceive
the man's facial characteristics.
He
was as tall as Conan, though not so heavylimbed. His shoulders were broad and his
supple figure was hard as steel and whalebone. A short black beard did not
altogether mask the aggressive jut of his lean jaw, and gray eyes cold and
piercing as a sword gleamed from the shadow of the kafieh. Quieting his restless steed with a quick, sure hand, this man spoke: "By Mitra, I should know this
man!"
"Aye!" It was the guttural accents of a Zuagir.
"It is the Cimmerian who was captain of the queen's guard!"
"She
must be casting off all her old favorites," muttered the rider.
"Who'd have ever thought it of Queen Taramis? I'd rather have had a long, bloody war. It would have given us desert folk a chance to plunder. As it is we've come this close to the walls and found
only this nag"—he glanced at a fine
gelding led by one of the nomads—"and this dying dog."
Conan lifted his bloody
head.
"If
I could come down from this beam I'd make a dying dog out of you, you
Zaporoskan thief!" he rasped through blackened lips.
"Mitra,
the knave knows me!" exclaimed the other. "How, knave, do you know
me?"
"There's
only one of your breed in these parts," muttered Conan. "You are
Olgerd Vladislav, the outlaw chief."
"Aye! And once a hetman of the koz<iki of
the Zaporoskan River, as you have guessed. Would you like to live?"
"Only a fool would ask
that question," panted Conan.
"I
am a hard man," said Olgerd, "and toughness is the only quality I
respect in a man. I shall judge if you are a man, or only a dog after all, fit only to lie here and
the."
"If
we cut him down we may be seen from the walls," objected one of the
nomads.
Olgerd shook his head.
"The
dusk is too deep. Here, take this ax, Djebal, and cut down the cross at the
base."
"If
it falls forward it will crush him," objected Djebal. "I can cut it
so it will fall backward, but then the shock of the fall may crack his skull
and tear loose all his entrails."
"If he's worthy to ride with me he'll
survive it," answered Olgerd imperturbably. "If not, then he doesn't
deserve to live. Cut!"
The
first impact of the battleax against the wood and its accompanying vibrations
sent lances of agony through Conan's swollen feet and hands. Again and again
the blade fell, and each stroke reverberated on his bruised brain, setting his
tortured nerves aquiver. But he set his teeth and made no sound. The ax cut
through, the cross reeled on its splintered base and toppled backward. Conan
made his whole body a solid knot of ironhard muscle,
jammed his head back hard against the wood and held it rigid there. The beam
struck the ground heavily and rebounded slightly. The impact tore his wounds
and dazed him for an instant. He fought the rushing tide of blackness, sick and
dizzy, but realized that the iron muscles that sheathed his vitals had saved
him from permanent injury.
And
he had made no sound, though blood oozed from his nostrils, and his
bellymuscles quivered with nausea. With a grunt of approval Djebal bent over
him with a pair of pincers used to draw horseshoe nails, and gripped the head
of the spike in Conan's right hand, tearing the skin to get a grip on the
deeply embedded head. The pincers were small for that work. Djebal sweated and
tugged, swearing and wrestling with the stubborn iron, working it back and
forth—in swollen flesh as well as in wood. Blood started, oozing over the
Cimmerian's fingers. He lay so still he might have been dead, except for the
spasmodic rise and fall of his great chest. The spike gave way, and Djebal held
up the bloodstained thing with a grunt of satisfaction, then flung it away and
bent over the other.
The
process was repeated, and then Djebal turned his attention to Conan's skewered
feet. But the Cimmerian, struggling up to a sitting posture, wrenched the
pincers from his fingers and sent him staggering backward with a violent shove.
Conan's hands were swollen to almost twice their normal size. His fingers felt
like misshapen thumbs, and closing his hands was an agony that brought blood
streaming from under his grinding teeth. But somehow, clutching the pincers
clumsily with both hands, he managed to wrench out first one spike and then the
other. They were not driven so deeply into the wood as
the others had been.
He
rose stiffly and stood upright on his swollen, lacerated feet, swaying
drunkenly, the icy sweat dripping from his face and body. Cramps assailed him
and he clamped his jaws against the desire to retch.
Olgerd,
watching him impersonally, motioned him toward the stolen horse. Conan stumbled
toward it, and every step was a stabbing, throbbing
hell that flecked his lips with bloody foam. One misshapen, groping hand fell
clumsily on the saddlebow, a bloody foot somehow found the stirrup. Setting his
teeth, he swung up, and he almost fainted in midair; but he came down in the
saddle—and as he did so, Olgerd struck the horse sharply with his whip. The
startled beast reared, and the man in the saddle swayed and slumped like a sack
of sand, almost unseated. Conan had wrapped a rein about each hand, holding it
in place with a clamping thumb. Drunkenly he exerted the strength of his knotted
biceps, wrenching the horse downjL— it screamed, its
jaw almost dislocated.
One of the Shemites lifted
a waterflask cjuestioningly.
Olgerd shook his head.
"Let him wait until we get to camp. It's
only ten miles. If he's fit to live in the desert he'll live that long without
a drink."
The
group rode like swift ghosts toward the river; among them Conan swayed like a
drunken man in the saddle, bloodshot eyes glazed, foam
drying on his blackened lips.
3 A Letter to Nemedia
The savant Astreas, traveling in the East in
his nevertiring search for knowledge, wrote a letter to his friend and
fellowphilosopher Alcemides, in his native Nemedia, which constitutes the
entire knowledge of the Western nations concerning the events of that period
in the East, always a hazy, halfmythical region in the minds of the Western
folk.
Astreas
wrote, in part: "You can scarcely conceive, my dear old friend, of the
conditions now existing in this tiny kingdom since Queen Taramis admitted
Constantius and his mercenaries, an event which I briefly described in my last,
hurried letter. Seven months have passed since then, during which lime it seems
as though the devil himself had been loosed in this unfortunate realm. Taramis
seems to have gone quite mad; whereas formerly she was famed for her virtue,
justice and tranquillity, she is now notorious for qualities precisely opposite
to those just enumerated. Her private life is a scandal or perhaps 'private' is
not the correct term, since the queen makes no attempt to conceal the
debauchery of her court. She constantly indulges in the most infamous revelries,
in which the unfortunate lathes of the court are forced to join, young married
women as well as virgins.
"She
herself has not bothered to marry her paramour, Constantius, who sits on the
throne beside her and reigns as her royal consort, and his officers follow his
example, and do not hesitate to debauch any woman they desire regardless of her
rank or station. The wretched kingdom groans under exorbitant taxation, the
farms are stripped to the bone, and the merchants go in rags which are all that
is left them by the taxgatherers. Nay, they are lucky if they escape with a
whole skin.
"I
sense your incredulity, good Alcemides; you will fear that I exaggerate
conditions in Khauran. Such conditions would be unthinkable in any of the
Western countries, admittedly. But you must realize the vast difference that
exists between West and East, especially this part of the East. In the first
place, Khauran is a kingdom of no great size, one of the many principalities
which at one time formed the eastern part of the empire of Koth, and which . later regained the
independence which was theirs at a still earlier age. This part of the world is
made up of these tiny realms, diminutive in comparison with the great kingdoms
of the West, or the great sultanates of the farther
East, but important in their control of the caravan routes, and in the wealth concentrated in them.
"Khauran
is the
most southeasterly of these principalities, bordering on the very deserts of
eastern Shem. The city of Khauran is the only city of any magnitude in the realm, and stands within sight of the
river which separates the grasslands from the sandy desert, like a watchtower
to guard the fertile meadows behind it. The land is so rich that it yields
three and four crops a year, and the plains north and west of the city are
dotted with villages. To one accustomed to the great plantations and stockfarms
of the West, it is strange to see these tiny fields and vineyards; yet wealth
in grain and fruit pours from them as from a horn of plenty. The villagers are
agriculturists, nothing else. Of a mixed, aboriginal race, they are unwarlike,
unable to protect themselves, and forbidden the possession of arms. Dependent
wholly upon the solthers of the city for protection, they are helpless under
the present conditions. So the savage revolt of the rural sections, which
would be a certainty in any Western nation, is here impossible.
"They
toil supinely under the iron hand of Constantius, and his blackbearded Shemites
ride incessantly through the fields, with whips in their hands, like the
slavedrivers of the black serfs who toil in the plantations of southern
Zingara.
"Nor
do the people of the city fare any better. Their wealth is stripped from them,
their fairest daughters taken to glut the insatiable lust of Constantius and
his mercenaries. These men are utterly without mercy or compassion, possessed
of all the characteristics our armies learned to abhor in our wars against the
Shemitish allies of Argos—inhuman cruelty, lust, and wildbeast ferocity. The people
of the city are Khauran's ruling caste, predominantly Hyborian, and valorous
and warlike. But the treachery of their queen delivered them into the hands of
their oppressors. The Shemites are the only armed force in Khauran, and the
most hellish punishment is inflicted on any Khauran found possessing weapons.
A systematic persecution to destroy the young Khaurani men able to bear arms
has been savagely pursued. Many have ruthlessly been slaughtered,
others sold as slaves to the Turanians. Thousands have fled the kingdom and
either entered the service of other rulers, or become outlaws, lurking in
numerous bands along the borders.
"At
present there is some possibility of invasion from the desert, which is
inhabited by tribes of Shemitish nomads. The mercenaries of Constantius are men
from the Shemitish cities of the west, Pelishtim, Anakim, Akkharim, and are
ardently hated by the Zuagirs and other wandering tribes. As you know, good
Alcemides, the countries of these barbarians are divided into the western
meadowlands which stretch to the distant ocean, and in which rise the cities of
the towndwellers, and the eastern deserts, where the lean nomads hold sway;
there is incessant warfare between the dwellers of the cities and the dwellers
of the desert.
"The Zuagirs have fought with and raided
Khauran for centuries, without
success, but they resent its conquest by their
western kin. It is rumored that their natural antagonism is being fomented by
the man who was formerly the captain of the queen's guard, and who, somehow
escaping the hate of Constantius, who actually had him on the cross, fled to
the nomads. He is called Conan, and is himself a barbarian, one of those gloomy
Cimmerians whose ferocity our solthers have more than once learned to their
bitter cost. It is rumored that he has become the righthand man of Olgerd
Vladislav, the kozak adventurer who wandered down from the
northern steppes and made himself chief of a band of Zuagirs. There are also
rumors that this band has increased vastly in the last few months, and that
Olgerd, incited no doubt by this Cimmerian, is even considering a raid on
Khauran.
"It
can not be anything more than a raid, as the Zuagirs are without siegemachines,
or the knowledge of investing a city, and it has been proven repeatedly in the
past that the nomads in their loose formation, or rather lack of formation, are
no match in handtohand fighting for the welldisciplined, fullyarmed warriors of
the Shemitish cities. The natives of Khauran would perhaps welcome this conquest, since the nomads could deal with them no more
harshly than their present masters, and even total extermination would be
preferable to the suffering they have to endure. But they are so cowed and
helpless that they could give no aid to the invaders.
"Their
plight is most wretched. Taramis, apparently possessed of a demon, stops at
nothing. She has abolished the worship of Ishtar, and turned the temple into a
shrine of idolatry. She has destroyed the ivory image of the goddess which
these eastern Hyborians worship (and which, inferior as it is to the true
religion of Mitra which we Western nations recognize, is stilt superior to the
devilworship of the Shemites) and filled the temple of Ishtar with obscene
images of every imaginable sort—gods and goddesses of the night, portrayed in
all the salacious and perverse poses and with all the revolting characteristics
that a degenerate brain could conceive. Many of these images are to be
identified as foul deities of the Shemites, the Turanians, the Vendhyans, and
the Khitans, but others are reminiscent of a hideous and halfremembered
antiquity, vile shapes forgotten except in the most obscure legends. Where the
queen gained the knowledge of them I dare not even hazard a guess.
"She
has instituted human sacrifice, and since her mating with Constantius, no less
than five hundred men, women and children have been immolated. Some of these
have thed on the altar she has set up in the temple, herself wielding the
sacrificial dagger, but most have met a more horrible doom.
"Taramis
has placed some sort of monster in a crypt in the temple. What it is, and
whence it came, none knows. But shortly after she had crushed the desperate
revolt of her solthers against Constantius, she spent a night alone in the
desecrated temple, alone except for a dozen bound captives, and the shuddering
people saw thick, foulsmelling smoke curling up from the dome, heard all night
the frenetic chanting of the queen, and the agonized cries of her tortured
captives; and toward dawn another voice mingled with these sounds—a strident,
inhuman croaking that froze the blood of all who heard.
"In
the full dawn Taramis reeled drunkenly from the temple, her eyes blazing with
demoniac triumph. The captives were never seen again, nor the croaking voice
heard. But there is a room in the temple into which none ever goes but the
queen, driving a human sacrifice before her. And this victim is never seen
again. All know that in that grim chamber lurks some monster from the black
night of ages, which devours the shrieking humans Taramis delivers up to it.
"I
can no longer think of her as a mortal woman, but as a rabid shefiend,
crouching in her bloodfouled lair amongst the bones and fragments of her
victims, with taloned, crimsoned fingers. That the gods allow her to pursue her
awful course unchecked almost shakes my faith in divine justice.
"When
I compare her present conduct with her deportment when first I came to Khauran,
seven months ago, I am confused with bewilderment, and almost inclined to the
belief held by many of the people—that a demon has possessed the body of
Taramis. A young solther, Valerius, had another belief. He believed that a
witch had assumed a form identical with that of Khauran's adored ruler. He
believed that Taramis had been spirited away in the night, and confined in some
dungeon, and that this being ruling in her place was but a female sorcerer. He
swore that he would find the real queen, if she still lived, but I greatly fear
that he himself has fallen victim to the cruelty of
Constantius. He was implicated in the revolt of the palace guards, escaped and
remained in hiding for some time, stubbornly refusing to seek safety abroad,
and it was during this time that I encountered him and he told me his beliefs.
"But
he has disappeared, as so many have, whose fate one dares not conjecture, and
I fear he has been apprehended by the spies of Constantius.
"But
I must conclude this letter and slip it out of the city by means of a swift
carrierpigeon, which will carry it to the post whence I purchased it, on the
borders of Koth. By rider and cameltrain it will eventually come to you. I must
haste, before dawn. It is late, and the stars gleam whitely on the gardened
roofs of Khauran. A shuddering silence envelops the city, in which I hear the
throb of a sullen drum from the distant temple. I doubt not that Taramis is
there, concocting more deviltry."
But the savant was incorrect in his
conjecture concerning the whereabouts of the woman he called Taramis. The girl
whom the world knew as queen of Khauran stood in a dungeon, lighted only by a
flickering torch which played on her features, etching the diabolical cruelty
of her beautiful countenance.
On the bare stone floor before her crouched a
figure whose nakedness was scarcely covered with tattered
rags. This figure Salome touched contemptuously with the upturned toe of her
gilded sandal, and smiled vindictively as her victim shrank away.
"You do not love my
caresses, sweet sister?"
Taramis was still beautiful, in spite of her
rags and the imprisonment and abuse of seven weary months. She did not reply to
her sister's taunts, but bent her head as one grown accustomed to mockery.
This
resignation did not please Salome. She bit her red lip, and stood tapping the
toe of her shoe against the flags as she frowned down at the passive figure.
Salome was clad in the barbaric splendor of a woman of Shushan. Jewels
glittered in the torchlight on her gilded sandals, on her gold breastplates
and the slender chains that held them in place. Gold anklets clashed as she
moved, jeweled bracelets weighted her bare arms. Her tall coiffure was that of
a Shemitish woman, and jade pendants hung from gold hoops in her ears, flashing
and sparkling with each impatient movement of her haughty head. A gemcrusted
girdle supported a silk skirt so transparent that it was in the nature of a
cynical mockery of convention.
Suspended
from her shoulders and trailing down her back hung a darkly scarlet cloak, and
this was thrown carelessly over the crook of one arm and the bundle that arm
supported.
Salome
stooped suddenly and with her free hand grasped her sister's disheveled hair
and forced back the girl's head to stare into her eyes. Taramis met that
tigerish glare without flinching.
"You
are not so ready with your tears as formerly, sweet
sister," muttered the witchgirl.
"You
shall wring no more tears from me," answered Taramis. "Too often you
have reveled in the spectacle of the queen of Khauran sobbing for mercy on her
knees. I know that you have spared me only to torment me; that is why you have
limited your tortures to such torments as neither slay nor permanently
disfigure. But I fear you no longer; you have strained out the last vestige of
hope, fright and shame from me. Slay me and be done with it, for I have shed my
last tear for your enjoyment, you shedevil from hell!"
"You
flatter yourself, my dear sister," purred Salome. "So far it is only
your handsome body that I have caused to suffer, only your pride and selfesteem
that I have crushed. You forget that, unlike myself,
you are capable of mental torment. I have observed this when I have regaled you
with narratives concerning the comethes I have enacted with some of your
stupid subjects. But this time I have brought more vivid proof of these farces.
Did you know that Krallides, your faithful councillor, had come skulking back
from Turan and been captured?"
Taramis turned pale.
"What—what have you
done to him?"
For answer Salome drew the mysterious bundle
from under her cloak. She shook off the silken swathings and held it up—the
head of a young man, the features frozen in a convulsion as if death had come
in the midst of inhuman agony.
Taramis cried out as if a blade had pierced
her heart.
"Oh,
Ishtar! Krallides!"
"Aye! He was seeking to stir up the people against
me, poor fool, telling them that Conan spoke the truth when he said I was not
Taramis. How would the people rise against the Falcon's Shemites? With sticks and pebbles? Bah! Dogs are eating his headless
body in the marketplace, and this foul carrion shall be cast into the sewer to
rot.
"How, sister!" She paused, smiling down at her victim. "Have you discovered that
you still have unshed tears? Good! I reserved the mental torment for the last.
Hereafter I shall show you many such sights as—this!"
Standing
there in the torchlight with the severed head in her hand she did not look like
anything ever born by a human woman, in spite of her awful beauty. Taramis did
not look up. She lay face down on the slimy floor, her slim body shaken in sobs
of agony, beating her clenched hands against the stones. Salome sauntered
toward the door, her anklets clashing at each step, her earpendants winking in
the torchglare.
A
few moments later she emerged from a door under a sullen arch that let into a court
which in turn opened upon a winding alley. A man standing there turned toward
her—a giant Shemite, with somber eyes and shoulders like a bull, his great
black beard falling over bis mighty, silvermailed breast.
"She
wept?" His rumble was like that of a bull, deep, lowpitched and stormy. He
was the general of the mercenaries, one of the few even of Constantius'
associates who knew the secret of the queens of Khauran.
"Aye,
Khumbanigash. There are whole sections of her sensibilities that I have not
touched. When one sense is dulled by continual laceration, I will discover a
newer, more poignant pang.—Here, dog!" A
trembling, shambling figure in rags, filth and matted hair approached, one of
the beggars that slept in the alleys and open courts. Salome tossed the head to
him. "Here, deaf one; cast that in the nearest sewer.—Make the sign with
your hands, Khumbanigash. He can not hear."
The
general complied, and the tousled head bobbed, as the man turned painfully
away.
"Why
do you keep up this farce?" rumbled Khumbanigash. "You are so firmly
established on the throne that nothing can unseal you. What if the Khaurani
fools learn the truth? They can do nothing. Proclaim yourself in your true
identity! Show them their beloved exqueen—and cut off her head in the public
square!"
"Not yet, good Khumbanigash---- "
The
arched door slammed on the hard accents of Salome, the stormy reverberations of
Khumbanigash. The mute beggar crouched in the courtyard, and there was none to
see that the hands which held the severed head were quivering strongly—brown,
sinewy hands, strangely incongruous with the bent body and filthy tatters.
"I
knew it!" It was a fierce, vibrant whisper, scarcely audible.
"She lives! Oh, Krallides, your martyrdom was not in vain! They have her
locked in that dungeon. Oh, Ishtar, if you love true men, aid
me now!"
Olgerd Vladislav filled his jeweled goblet
with crimson wine from a golden jug and thrust the vessel across the ebony
table to Conan the Cimmerian. Olgcrd's apparel would have satisfied the vanity
of any Zaporoskan hetman.
His
khalal was of white silk, with pearls sewn on the bosom. Girdled at the waist
with a Bakhauriot belt, its skirts were drawn back to reveal his wide silken
breeches, tucked into short boots of soft green leather, adorned with gold
thread. On his head was a green silk turban, wound about a spired helmet chased
with gold. His only weapon was a broad curved Cherkees knife in an ivory sheath
girdled high on his left hip, kozak fashion.
Throwing himself back in his gilded chair with its carven eagles, Olgerd
spread his booted legs before him, and gulped down the sparkling wine noisily.
To
his splendor the huge Cimmerian opposite him offered a strong contrast, with
his squarecut black mane, brown scarred countenance and burning blue eyes. He
was clad in black meshmail, and the only glitter about him was .the broad gold
buckle of the belt which supported his sword in its worn leather scabbard.
They
were alone in the silkwalled tent, which was hung with giltworked tapestries
and littered with rich carpets and velvet cushions, the loot of the caravans.
From outside came a low, incessant murmur, the sound that always accompanies a
great throng of men, in camp or otherwise. An occasional gust of desert wind
rattled the palmleaves.
"Today
in the shadow, tomorrow in the sun," quoth Olgerd, loosening his crimson
girdle a trifle and reaching again for the winejug. "That's the way of
life. Once I was a hetman on the Zaporoska; now I'm a desert chief. Seven
months ago you were hanging on a cross outside Khauran. Now you're lieutenant
to the most powerful raider between Turan and the western meadows. You should
be thankful to me!"
"For recognizing my usefulness?" Conan laughed and lifted the jug. "When
you allow the elevation of a man, one can be sure that you'll profit by his
advancement. I've earned everything I've won, with my blood and sweat." He
glanced at the scars on the insides of his palms. There were scars, too, on his
body, scars that had not been there seven months ago.
"You
fight like a regiment of devils," conceded Olgerd. "But don't get to
thinking that you've had anything to do with the recruits who've swarmed in to
join us. It was our success at raiding, guided by my wit,
that brought them in. These nomads are always looking for a successful
leader to follow, and they have more faith in a foreigner than in one of their
own race.
"There's
no limit to what we may accomplish! We have eleven thousand men now. In another
year we may have three times that number. We've contented ourselves, so far,
with raids on the Turanian outposts and the citystates to the west. With thirty
or forty thousand men we'll raid no longer.
We'll invade and conquer and establish ourselves as rulers. I'll be emperor of all Shem yet, and you'll be my vizier, so long as you carry
out my orders unquestioningly. In the meantime, I think we'll ride eastward and
storm that Turanian outpost at Vezek, where the caravans pay toll."
Conan shook his head.
"I think not."
Olgerd glared, his quick
temper irritated.
"What do you mean, you think not? / do the thinking for this army!"
"There
are enough men in this band now for my purpose," answered the Cimmerian.
"I'm sick of waiting. I have a score to settle."
"Oh!"
Olgerd scowled, and gulped wine, then grinned. "Still thinking of that
cross, eh? Well, I like a good hater. But that can wait."
"You told me once
you'd aid me in taking Khauran," said Conan.
"Yes, but that was before I began to see
the full possibilities of our
power," answered Olgerd. "I was only thinking of the loot in the
city. I
don't want to waste our strength unprofitably. Khauran is too strong a nut
for us to crack now. Maybe in a year--- "
"Within
the week," answered Conan, and the kozak stared
at the certainty in his voice.
"Listen,"
said Olgerd, "even if I were willing to throw away men on such a harebrained
attempt—what could you expect ? Do you think these
wolves could besiege and take a city like Khauran?"
"There'll
be no siege," answered the Cimmerian. "I know how to draw Constantius
out into the plain."
"And
what then?" cried Olgerd with an oath. "In the arrowplay our horsemen
would have the worst of it, for the armor of the asshuri is the better, and when it came to swordstrokes their closemarshaled
ranks of trained swordsmen would cleave through our loose lines and scatter our
men like chaff before the wind."
"Not
if there were three thousand desperate Hyborian horsemen fighting in a solid
wedge such as I could teach them," answered Conan.
"And
where would you secure three thousand Hyborians?" asked Olgerd with vast
sarcasm. "Will you conjure them out of the air?"
"I
have them," answered the Cimmerian imperturbably. "Three thousand
men of Khauran camp at the oasis of Akrel awaiting my orders."
"What?" Olgerd glared like a startled wolf.
"Aye. Men who had fled from the tyranny of Constantius. Most of them
have been living the lives of outlaws in the deserts east of Khauran, and are
gaunt and bard and desperate as maneating tigers. One of them will be a match
for any three squat mercenaries. It takes oppression and hardship to stiffen
men's guts and put the fire of hell into their thews. They were broken up into
small bands; all they needed was a leader. They believed the word I sent them
by my riders, and assembled at the oasis and put themselves
at my disposal."
"All this without my
knowledge?" A
feral light began to gleam in 01gerd's eyes. He hitched at his weapongirdle.
"It was / they wished to follow, not you."
"And what did you tell these outcasts to
gain their allegiance?" There was a dangerous
ring in Olgerd's voice.
"I
told them that I'd use this horde of desert wolves to help them destroy
Constantius and give Khauran back into the hands of its citizens."
"You fool!" whispered Olgerd.
"Do you deem yourself chief already?"
The
men were on their feet, facing each other across the ebony board, devillights
dancing in Olgerd's cold gray eyes, a grim
smile on the Cimmerian's hard lips.
"I'll have you torn between four
palmtrees," said the kozak calmly.
"Call
the men and bid them do it!" challenged Conan. "See if they obey
you!"
Baring
his teeth in a snarl, Olgerd lifted his hand—then paused. There was something
about the confidence in the Cimmerian's dark face that shook him. His eyes
began to burn like those of a wolf.
"You
scum of the western hills," he muttered, "have you dared seek to
undermine my power?"
"I
didn't have to," answered Conan. "You lied when you said I had
nothing to do with bringing in the new recruits. I had everything to do with
it. They took your orders, but they fought for me. There is not room for two
chiefs of the Zuagirs. They know I am the stronger man. I understand them
better than you, and they, me; because I am a barbarian too."
"And
what will they say when you ask them to fight for the Khaurani?" asked
Olgerd sardonically.
"They'll follow me. I'll promise them a
cameltrain of gold from the palace. Khauran will be willing to pay that as a guerdon for getting rid of Constantius. After that, I'll lead them
against the Turanians as you have planned. They want loot, and they'd as soon fight Constantius for it as anybody."
In
Olgerd's eyes grew a recognition of defeat. In his red
dreams of empire he had missed what was going on about him. Happenings and
events that had seemed meaningless before now flashed into his mind, with their
true significance, bringing a realization that Conan spoke no idle boast. The
giant blackmailed figure before him was the real chief of the Zuagirs.
"Not
if you the!" muttered Olgerd, and his hand flickered toward his hilt. But
quick as the stroke of a great cat Conan's arm shot across the table and his fingers
locked on Olgerd's forearm. There was a snap
of breaking bones, and for a tense
instant the scene held: the men facing each other as motionless as images, perspiration starting out on Olgerd's forehead. Conan laughed, never easing his grip on the broken arm.
"Are you fit to live,
Olgerd?"
His
smile did not alter as the corded muscles rippled in knotting ridges along his
forearm and his fingers ground into the kozak's quivering
flesh. There was the sound of broken bones grating together and Olgerd's face
turned the color of ashes; blood oozed from his lip where his teeth sank, but
he uttered no sound.
With a laugh
Conan released him and drew back, and the kozak swayed, caught the table edge with his good hand to steady himself.
"I
give you life, Olgerd, as you gave it to me," said Conan tranquilly,
"though it was for your own ends that you took me down from the cross. It
was a bitter test you gave me then; you couldn't have endured it; neither could
anyone, but a western barbarian.
"Take
your horse and go. It's tied behind the tent, and food and water are in the
saddlebags. None will see your going, but go quickly. There's no room for a fallen chief on the desert. If the warriors see you, maimed and deposed,
they'll never let you leave the camp alive."
Olgerd
did not reply. Slowly, without a word, he turned and stalked across the tent,
through the flapped opening. Unspeaking he climbed into the saddle of the great
white stallion that stood tethered there in the shade of a spreading palmtree;
and unspeaking, with his broken arm thrust in the bosom of his kbalal, he reined the steed about and rode eastward into the open desert, out of
the life of the people of the Zuagir.
Inside
the tent Conan emptied the winejug and smacked his lips with relish. Tossing
the empty vessel into a corner, he braced his belt and strode out through the
front opening, halting for a moment to let his gaze sweep over the lines of
camelhair tents that stretched before him, and the whiterobed figures that
moved among them, arguing, singing, mending bridles or whetting tulwars.
He lifted his voice in a thunder that carried to the farthest confines of the encampment: "Aie, you dogs, sharpen your ears and listen! Gather around here. I have a tale to tell you,"
5. The Voice from the Crystal
In a chamber
in a tower near the city wall a group of men
listened attentively to the words of one of their number. They were young men,
but hard and sinewy, with the bearing that comes only to men rendered desperate
by adversity. They were clad in mail shirts and worn leather; swords hung at
their girdles.
"I knew that Conan spoke the truth when
he said it was not Taramis!" the speaker exclaimed. "For months I
have haunted the outskirts of the palace, playing the part of a deaf beggar. At last I learned what I had believed—that our queen was a prisoner in the dungeons that adjoin the palace. I watched my
opportunity and captured a Shemitish jailer—knocked him senseless as he left
the courtyard late one night—dragged him into a cellar near by and questioned him. Before he thed he told me what I have
just told you, and what we have suspected all
along—that the woman ruling Khauran is a witch:
Salome. Taramis, he said, is imprisoned in the lowest dungeon.
"This invasion of the Zuagirs gives us
the opportunity we sought. What
Conan means to do, I can not say. Perhaps he
merely wishes vengeance on Constantius. Perhaps he intends sacking the city and
destroying it. He is a barbarian and no one can understand their minds.
"But
this is what we must do: rescue Taramis while the battle rages! Constantius
will march out into the plain to give battle. Even now his men are mounting. He
will do this because there is not sufficient food in the city to stand a siege.
Conan burst out of the desert so suddenly that there was no time to bring in
supplies. And the Cimmerian is equipped for a siege. Scouts have reported that
the Zuagirs have siege engines, built undoubtedly, according to the
instructions of Conan, who learned all the arts of war among the Western
nations.
"Constantins
does not desire a long siege; so he will march with his warriors into the
plain, where he expects to scatter Conan's forces at one stroke. He will leave
only a few hundred men in the city, and they will be on the walls and in the
towers commanding the gates.
"The
prison will be left all but unguarded. When we have freed Taramis our next
actions will depend upon circumstances. If Conan wins, we must show Taramis to
the people and bid them rise—they will! Oh, they will! With their bare hands
they are enough to overpower the Shemites left in the city and close the gates
against both the mercenaries and the nomads. Neither must get within the walls!
Then we will parley with Conan. He was always loyal to Taramis. If he knows the
truth, and she appeals to him, I believe he will spare the city. If, which is
more probable, Constantius prevails, and Conan is routed, we must steal out of
the city with the queen and seek safety in flight.
"Is all clear?"
They replied with one
voice.
"Then
let us loosen our blades in our scabbards, commend our souls to Ishtar, and
start for the prison, for the mercenaries are already marching through the
southern gate."
This
was true. The dawnlight glinted on peaked helmets pouring in a steady stream through the broad arch, on the bright housings of the
chargers. This would be a battle of horsemen, such as is possible only in the
lands of the East. The riders flowed through the gates like a river of
steel—somber figures in black and silver mail, with their curled beards and
hooked noses, and their inexorable eyes in which glimmered the fatality of
their race—the utter lack of doubt or of mercy.
The
streets and the walls were lined with throngs of people who watched sitenily
these warriors of an alien race riding forth to defend their native city. There
was no sound; dully, expressionless they watched,
those gaunt people in shabby garments, their caps in their hands.
In
a tower that overlooked the broad street that led to the southern gate, Salome
lolled on a velvet couch cynically watching Constantius as he settled his broad
swordbelt about his lean hips and drew on his gauntlets. They were alone in the
chamber. Outside, the rhythmical clank of harness and shuffle of horses' hoofs
welled up through the goldbarred casements.
"Before
nightfall," quoth Constantius, giving a twirl to his thin mustache, "you'll have some captives to feed to
your templedevil. Does it not grow weary of soft, citybred flesh? Perhaps it
would relish the harder thews of a desert
man."
"Take care you do not fall prey to a fiercer beast than Thaug," warned the girl. "Do not forget who
it is that leads these desert animals."
"I
am not likely to forget," he answered. "That is one reason why I am
advancing to meet him. The dog has fought in the West and knows the art of
siege. My scouts had some trouble in approaching his columns, for his outriders
have eyes like hawks; but they did get close enough to see the engines he is
dragging on oxcart wheels drawn by camels—catapults, rams, ballistas,
mangonels—by Ishtar! he must have had ten thousand men
working day and night for a month. Where he got the material for their
construction is more than I can understand. Perhaps he has a treaty with the Turanians, and gets supplies from them.
"Anyway,
they won't do him any good. I've fought these desert wolves before—an exchange
of arrows for awhile, in which the armor of my warriors protects them—then a charge and my squadrons sweep through the loose swarms of the nomads,
wheel and sweep back through, scattering them to the four winds. I'll ride back
through the south gate before sunset, with hundreds of naked captives
staggering at my horse's tail. We'll hold a fête
tonight, in the great
square. My solthers delight in flaying their enemies alive—we will have a
wholesale skinning, and make these weakkneed townsfolk watch. As for Conan, it
will afford me intense pleasure, if we take him alive, to impale him on the
palace steps."
"Skin
as many as you like," answered Salome indifferently. "I would like a dress made of human hide. But at least a hundred captives you must give
to me—for the altar, and for Thaug."
"It
shall be done," answered Constantius, with his gauntleted hand brushing
back the thin hair from his high bald forehead, burned dark by the sun.
"For victory and the fair honor of Taramis!" he said sardonically,
and, taking his vizored helmet under his arm, he lifted a hand in salute, and strode clanking from the chamber. His voice drifted
back, harshly lifted in orders to his officers.
Salome
leaned back on the couch, yawned, stretched herself like a great supple cat, and called: "Zang!"
A
catfooted priest, with features like yellowed parchment stretched over a skull, entered noiselessly.
Salome
turned to an ivory pedestal on which stood two crystal globes, and taking from
it the smaller, she handed the glistening sphere to the priest.
"Ride with
Constantius," she said. "Give me the news of the battle. Go!"
The skullfaced man bowed low, and hiding the
globe under his dark mantle, hurried from the chamber.
Outside in the city there was no sound,
except the clank of hoofs and after a while the dang of a closing gate. Salome mounted a wide marble stair that
led to the flat, canopied, marblebattlemented roof. She was above all
other buildings of the city. The streets were deserted,
the great square in front of the palace was empty. In normal times folk shunned
the grim temple which rose on the opposite side of that square, but now the
town looked like a dead city. Only on the southern wall and the roofs that
overlooked it was there any sign of life. There the people massed thickly. They
made no demonstration, did not know whether to hope for the victory or defeat
of Constantius. Victory meant further misery under his intolerable rule; defeat
probably meant the sack of the city and red massacre. No word had come from
Conan. They did not know what to expect at his hands. They remembered that he
was a barbarian.
The
squadrons of the mercenaries were moving out into the plain. In the distance,
just this side of the river, other dark masses were moving, barely recognizable
as men on horses. Objects dotted the farther bank; Conan had not brought his
siege engines across the river, apparently fearing an attack in the midst of
the crossing. But he had crossed with his full force of horsemen. The sun rose
and struck glints of fire from the dark multitudes. The squadrons from the city
broke into a gallop; a deep roar reached the ears of the
people on the wall.
The
rolling masses merged, intermingled; at that distance it was a tangled confusion
in which no details stood out. Charge and countercharge were not to be
identified. Clouds of dust rose from the plains, under the stamping hoofs,
veiling the action. Through these swirling clouds masses of riders loomed,
appearing and disappearing, and spears flashed.
Salome
shrugged her shoulders and descended the stair. The palace lay silent. All the
slaves were on the wall, gazing vainly southward with the citizens.
She
entered the chamber where she had talked with Constantius, and approached the
pedestal, noting that the crystal globe was clouded, shot with blocdy streaks
of crimson. She bent over the ball, swearing under her breath.
""Zang!" she
called. "Zang!"
Mists
swirled in the sphere, resolving themselves into billowing dustclouds through
which black figures rushed unrecognizably; steel glinted like lightning in the
murk. Then the face of Zang leaped into startling distinctness; it was as if
the wide eyes gazed up at Salome. Blood trickled from a gash in the skulllike
head, the skin was gray with sweatrunneled dust. The hps parted, writhing; to
other ears than Salome's it would have seemed that the face in the crystal
contorted silently. But sound to her came as plainly from those ashen lips as
if the priest had been in the same room with her, instead of miles away,
shouting into the smaller crystal. Only the gods of darkness knew what unseen,
magic filaments linked together those shimmering spheres.
"Salome!"
shrieked the bloody head. "Salome!"
"I hear!" she
cried. "Speak! How goes the battle?"
"Doom
is upon us!" screamed the skulllike apparition. "Khauran is lost! Ate, my horse is down and I can not win clear! Men are falling around me!
They are dying like flies, in their silvered mail!"
"Stop yammering and
tell me what happened!" she cried harshly.
"We
rode at the desertdogs and they came on to meet us!" yowled
the priest. "Arrows flew in clouds between the hosts,
and the nomads wavered. Constantius ordered the charge. In even ranks we
thundered upon them.
"Then
the masses of their horde opened to right and left, and through the cleft
rushed three thousand Hyborian horsemen whose presence we had not even
suspected. Men of Khauran, mad with hate! Big men in full armor on massive
horses! In a solid wedge of steel they smote us like a thunderbolt. They split
our ranks asunder before we knew what was upon us, and then the desertmen
swarmed on us from either flank.
"They
have ripped our ranks apart, broken and scattered us! It is a trick of that
devil Conan! The siege engines are false—mere frames of palm trunks and painted
silk, that fooled our scouts who saw them from afar. A trick to draw us out to
our doom! Our warriors flee! Khumbanigash is down —Conan slew him. I do not see
Constantius. The Khaurani rage through our milling masses like bloodmad lions, and the desertmen feather us with arrows. I—ahhh!"
There was a flicker of lightning, or trenchant steel, a burst of bright blood—then
abruptly the image vanished, like a bursting bubble, and Salome was staring
into an empty crystal ball that mirrored only her own furious features.
She
stood perfectly still for a few moments, erect and staring into space. Then she
clapped her hands and another skulllike priest entered, as silent and immobile
as the first.
"Constantius
is beaten," she said swiftly. "We are doomed. Conan will be crashing
at our gates within the hour. If he catches me, I have no illusions as to what
I can expect. But first I am going to make sure that my cursed sister never
ascends the throne again. Follow me! Come what may, we shall give Thaug a feast."
As
she descended the stairs and galleries of the palace, she heard a faint rising
echo from the distant walls. The people there had begun to realize that the
battle was going against Constantius. Through the dust clouds masses of
horsemen were visible, racing toward the city.
Palace
and prison were connected by a long closed gallery, whose faulted roof rose on
gloomy arches. Hurrying along this, the false queen and her slave passed
through a heavy door at the other end that let them into the dimlit recesses of
the prison. They had emerged into a wide, arched corridor at a point near
where a stone stair descended into the darkness. Salome recoiled suddenly,
swearing. In the gloom of the hall lay a motionless form —a Shemitish jailer,
his short beard tilted toward the roof as his head hung on a halfsevered neck.
As panting voices from below reached the girl's ears, she shrank back into the
black shadow of an arch, pushing the priest behind her, her hand groping in her
girdle.
6. The Vulture's Wings
It
was the smoky light of a torch which roused Taramis, queen of Khauran, from the
slumber in which she sought forgetfulness. Lifting herself on her hand she
raked back her tangled hair and blinked up, expecting to meet the mocking
countenance of Salome, malign with new torments. Instead a cry of pity and
horror reached her ears.
"Taramis! Oh, my queen!"
The
sound was so strange to her ears that she thought she was still dreaming.
Behind the torch she could make out figures now, the glint of steel, then five
countenances bent toward her, not swarthy and hooknosed, but lean, aquiline
faces, browned by the sun. She crouched in her tatters, staring wildly.
One
of the figures sprang forward and fell on one knee before her, arms stretched
appealingly toward her.
"Oh, Taramis! Thank Ishtar we have found you! Do you not remember me, Valerius? Once
with your own lips you praised me, after the battle of Korveka!"
"Valerius!"
she stammered. Suddenly tears welled into her eyes. "Oh, I dream! It is
some magic of Salome's, to torment me!"
"No!"
The cry rang with exultation. "It is your own true vassals come to rescue
you! Yet we must hasten. Constantius fights in the plain against Conan, who has
brought the Zuagirs across the river, but three hundred Shemites yet hold the
city. We slew the jailer and took his keys, and have seen no other guards. But
we must be gone. Come!"
The
queen's legs gave way, not from weakness but from the reaction. Valerius lifted
her like a child, and with the torchbearer hurrying before them, they left the
dungeon and went up a slimy stone stair. It seemed to mount endlessly, but
presently they emerged into a corridor.
They
were passing a dark arch when the torch was suddenly struck out, and the bearer
cried out in fierce, brief agony. A burst of blue fire glared in the dark
corridor, in which the furious face of Salome was limned momentarily, with a
beastlike figure crouching beside her—then the eyes of the watchers were
blinded by that blaze.
Valerius
tried to stagger along the corridor with the queen; dazedly he heard the sound
of murderous blows driven deep in flesh, accompanied by gasps of death and a
bestial grunting. Then the queen was torn brutally from his arms, and a savage
blow on his helmet dashed him to the floor.
Grimly
he crawled to his feet, shaking his head in an effort to rid himself of the
blue flame which seemed still to dance devilishly before him. When his blinded
sight cleared, he found himself alone in the corridor—alone except for the
dead. His four companions lay in their blood, heads and bosoms cleft and
gashed, Blinded and dazed in that hellborn glare, they had thed without an
opportunity of defending themselves. The queen was gone.
With
a bitter curse Valerius caught up his sword, tearing his cleft helmet from his
head to clatter on the flags; blood ran down his cheek from a cut in his scalp.
Reeling,
frantic with indecision, he heard a voice calling his name in desperate
urgency: "Valerius! Valerius!"
He
staggered in the direction of the voice, and rounded a corner just in time to
have his arms filled with a soft, supple figure which flung itself
frantically at him.
"Ivga! Are you mad!"
"I
had to come!" she sobbed. "1 followed
you—hid in an arch of the outer court. A moment ago I saw her emerge with a brute who carried a woman in his
arms. I knew it was Taramis, and that you had failed! Oh, you are hurt!"
"A scratch!" He put aside her clinging hands. "Quick, Ivga, tell me which way
they went!"
"They fled across the
square toward the temple."
He
paled. "Ishtar! Oh, the fiend! She means to give Taramis to the devil she
worships! Quick, Ivga! Run to the south wall where the people watch the battle!
Tell them that their real queen has been found—that the impostor has dragged
her to the temple! Go!"
Sobbing,
the girl sped away, her light sandals pattering on the cobblestones, and
Valerius raced across the court, plunged into the street, dashed into the
square upon which it debouched, and raced for the great structure that rose on
the opposite side.
His
flying feet spurned the marble as he darted up the broad stair and through the
pillared portico. Evidently their prisoner had given them some trouble.
Taramis, sensing the doom intended for her, was fighting against it with all
the strength of her splendid young body. Once she had broken away from the
brutish priest, only to be dragged down again.
The
group was halfway down the broad nave, at the other end of which stood the grim
altar and beyond that the great metal door, obscenely carven, through which
many had gone, but from which only Salome had ever emerged. Taramis' breath
came in panting gasps; her tattered garment had been torn from her in the
struggle. She writhed in the grasp of her apish captor like a white, naked
nymph in the arms of a satyr. Salome watched cynically, though impatiently,
moving toward the carven door, and from the dusk that lurked along the lofty
walls the obscene gods and gargoyles leered down, as if imbued with salacious
life.
Choking with fury, Valerius rushed down the
great hall, sword in hand At a sharp cry from Salome, the skullfaced priest
looked up, then released Taramis, drew a heavy knife, already smeared with
blood, and ran at the oncoming Khaurani.
But cutting down men blinded by the
devil'sflame loosed by Salome was different from fighting a wiry young Hyborian
afire with hate and rage.
Up
went the dripping knife, but before it could fall Valerius' keen narrow blade
slashed through the air, and the fist that held the knife jumped from its wrist
in a shower of blood. Valerius, berserk, slashed
again and yet again before the crumpling figure could fall. The blade licked
through flesh and bone. The skulllike head fell one way, the halfsundered torso
the other.
Valerius
whirled on his toes, quick and fierce as a junglecat, glaring about for Salome. She must have exhausted her
firedust in the prison. She was bending over Taramis, grasping her sister's
black locks in one hand, in the other lifting a dagger. Then with a fierce
cry Valerius' sword was sheathed in her breast with such fury that the point
sprang out between her shoulders. With an awful shriek the witch sank down,
writhing in convulsions, grasping at the naked blade as it was withdrawn,
smoking and dripping. Her eyes were unhuman; with a more than human vitality she clung to the life that ebbed through the
wound that split the crimson crescent on her ivory bosom. She groveled 6n the
floor, clawing and biting at the naked stones in her agony.
Sickened
at the sight, Valerius stooped and lifted the halffainting queen. Turning his
back on the twisting figure upon the floor, he ran toward the door, stumbling
in his haste. He staggered out upon the portico, halted at the head of the
steps. The square thronged with people. Some had come at Ivga's incoherent
cries; others had deserted the walls in fear of the onsweeping hordes out of
the desert, fleeing unrcasoningly toward the center of the city. Dumb
resignation had vanished. The throng seethed and milled, yelling and screaming.
About the road there sounded somewhere the splintering of stone and timbers.
A
band of grim Shemites cleft the crowd—the guards of the northern gates,
hurrying toward the south gate to reinforce their comrades there. They reined
up short at sight of the youth on the steps, holding the limp, naked figure in
his arms. The heads of the throng turned toward the temple; the crowd gaped, a
new bewilderment added to their swirling confusion.
"Here
is your queen!" yelled Valerius, straining to make himself understood
above the clamor. The people gave back a bewildered roar. They did not
understand, and Valerius sought in vain to lift his voice above their bedlam.
The Shemites rode toward the temple steps, beating a way through the crowd with
their spears.
Then
a new, grisly element introduced itself into the frenzy. Out of the gloom of
the temple behind Valerius wavered a slim white figure, laced with crimson. The people screamed; there in the arms of Valerius
hung the woman they thought their queen; yet there in the temple door staggered
another figure, like a reflection of the other. Their brains reeled. Valerius
felt his blood congeal as he stared at the swaying witchgirl. His sword had
transfixed her, sundered her heart. She should be dead; by all lavs of nature she should be dead. Yet there
she swayed, on her feet, clinging horribly to life.
"Thaug!"
she screamed, reeling in the doorway. "Thaug!" As in answer to that frightful invocation there boomed a thunderous croaking from within the
temple, the snapping of wood and metal.
"That
is the queen!" roared the captain of the
Shemites, lifting his bow. "Shoot down the man and the other woman!"
But
the roar of a roused huntingpack rose from the people; they
had guessed the truth at last, understood Valerius' frenzied appeals, knew that the girl who hung limply in his arms was their true queen. With a soulshaking yell they surged on the
Shemites, tearing and smiting with tooth and nail and naked hands, with the
desperation of hardpent fury loosed at last. Above them Salome swayed and
tumbled down the marble stair, dead at last.
Arrows
flickered about him as Valerius ran back between the pillars of the portico, shielding the body of the queen with his own. Shooting and
slashing ruthlessly the mounted Shemites were holding their own with the maddened
crowd. Valerius darted to the temple door—with one foot on the threshold he
recoiled, crying out in horror and despair.
Out
of the gloom at the other end of the great hall a vast dark form heaved up—came
rushing toward him in gigantic froglike hops. He saw the gleam of great
unearthly eyes, the shimmer of fangs or talons. He fell back from the door, and
then the whir of a shaft past his ear warned him that death was
also behind him. He wheeled desperately. Four or live Shemites had cut their
way through the throng and were spurring their horses up the steps, their bows
lifted to shoot him down. He sprang behind a pillar, on which the arrows splintered. Taramis had fainted. She hung
like a dead woman in his arms.
Before
the Shemites could loose again, the doorway was blocked by a gigantic shape.
With affrighted yells the mercenaries wheeled and began beating a frantic way
through the throng, which crushed back in sudden, galvanized horror, trampling
one another in their stampede.
But
the monster seemed to be watching Valerius and the girl. Squeezing its vast,
unstable bulk through the door, it bounded toward him, as he ran down the
steps. He felt it looming behind him, a giant shadowy thing, like a travesty of
nature cut out of the heart of night, a black shapelessness in which only the staring
eyes and gleaming fangs were distinct.
There
came a sudden thunder of hoofs; a rout of Shemites, bloody and battered,
streamed across the square from the south, plowing blindly through the packed
throng. Behind them swept a horde of horsemen yelling in a familiar tongue,
waving red swords—the exiles, returned! With them rode fifty blackbearded
desertriders, and at their head a giant figure in black mail.
"Oonan!" shrieked
Valerius. "Conan!"
The giant yelled a command. Without checking their headlong pace, the
desert
men lifted their bows, drew and loosed. A cloud of arrows sang across the
square, over the seething heads of the multitudes, and sank featherdeep in the
black monster. It halted, wavered, reared, a black
blot against the marble pillars. Again the sharp cloud sang, and yet again, and
the horror collapsed and rolled down the steps, as dead as the witch who had
summoned it out of the night of ages.
Conan
drew rein beside the portico, leaped off. Valerius had laid the queen on the
marble, sinking beside her in utter exhaustion. The people surged about,
crowding in. The Cimmerian cursed them back, lifted her dark head, pillowed it against his mailed shoulder.
"By Croat, what is
this? The real Taramis! But who is that yonder?"
"The demon who wore
her shape," panted Valerius.
Conan
swore heartily. Ripping a cloak from the shoulders of a solther, he wrapped it
about the naked queen. Her long dark lashes quivered on her cheeks; her eyes
opened, stared up unbelievingly into the Cimmerian's scarred face.
"Conan!"
Her soft fingers caught at him. "Do I dream? She told me you were dead——"
"Scarcely!" He grinned hardly. "You do not dream. You are queen of Khauran
again. I broke Constantius, out there by the river. Most of his dogs never
lived to reach the walls, for I gave orders that no prisoners be taken— except
Constantius. The city guard closed the gate in our faces, but we burst it in
with rams swung from our saddles. I left all my wolves outside, except this
fifty. I didn't trust them in here, and these Khaurani lads were enough for the
gate guards."
"It
has been a nightmare!" she whimpered. "Oh, my poor
people! You must help me try to repay them for all they have suffered,
Conan, henceforth councilor as well as captain!"
Conan
laughed, but shook his head. Rising, he set the queen upon her feet, and
beckoned to a number of his Khaurani horsemen who had not continued the pursuit
of the fleeing Shemites. They sprang from their horses, eager to do the bidding
of their newfound queen.
"No,
lass, that's over with. I'm chief of the Zuagirs now, and must lead them to
plunder the Turanians, as I promised. This lad, Valerius, will make you a
better captain than I. I wasn't made to dwell among marble walls, anyway. But
I must leave you now, and complete what I've begun. Shemites still live in
Khauran."
As Valerius started to follow Taramis across
the square toward the palace, through a lane opened by the wildly cheering
multitude, he felt a soft hand slipped timidly into his sinewy fingers and
turned to receive the slender body of Ivga in his arms. He crushed her to him
and drank her kisses with the gratitude of a weary fighter who has attained
rest at last through tribulation and storm.
But not all men seek rest
and peace; some are born with the spirit of the
*orm in their blood, restless harbingers of
violence and bloodshed, knowing no other path. . . .
The
sun was rising. The ancient caravan road was thronged with whiterobed horsemen,
in a wavering line that stretched from the walls of Kliauran to a spot far out
in the plain. Conan the Cimmerian sat at the head of that column, near the
jagged end of a wooden beam that stuck up out of the ground. Near that stump
rose a heavy cross, and on that cross a man bung by spikes through his hands
and feet.
"Seven
months ago, Constantius," said Conan, "it was I who hung there, and you who sat here."
Constantius
did not reply; he licked his gray lips and his eyes were glassy with pain and
fear. Muscles writhed like cords along his lean body.
"You
are more fit to inflict torture than to endure
it," said Conan tranquilly. "I hung there on a cross as you are
hanging, and I lived, thanks to circumstances and a stamina
peculiar to barbarians. But you civilized men are soft; your lives are not
nailed to your spines as are ours. Your fortitude consists mainly in inflicting
torment, not in enduring it. You will be dead before sundown. And so, Falcon of
the desert, I leave you to the companionship of another bird of the
desert."
He
gestured toward the vultures whose shadows swept across the sands as they
wheeled overhead. From the lips of Constantius came an inhuman cry of despair
and horror.
Conan
lifted his reins and rode toward the river that shone like silver in the
morning sun. Behind him the whiteclad riders struck into a trot; the gaze of
each, as he passed a certain spot, turned impersonally and with the desert
man's lack of compassion, toward the cross and the gaunt figure that hung
there, black against the sunrise. Their horses' hoofs beat out a knell in the
dust. Lower and lower swept the wings of the hungry vultures.
Bimini
By Basset
Morgan
With rare imaginative power and beauty of vision, Basset Morgan's story of an arctic fountain of youth brings all the terror and fascination of the far polar plains—the eternal mystery of ice caps whose aurora is a symphony of color, whose white fields are garbed in peace, and whose atmosphere is the chilling breath of death. With such ingrethents, "Bimini" is a weird tale par excellence.
COMMANDER CRAYNE interrupted the tale by a gesture of his hand.
"Do
you mind, Captain Ek, if I call Lieutenant Murphy in and have him take down what you are telling me? I'd like to check up
on a few historical dates."
The old man nodded assent.
"It's
what I want. Shows you're takin' int'rest. I've told some of this to several
people. They think I'm crazy like you do, only they
never got as far as takin' notes."
"Captain
Ek, this is my aide. Lieutenant Murphy. He was with me on the polar flight. He
is taking the brunt of this trip and I don't mind telling you that I'd rather
take a dozen trips like our northern one than meet the crowds and dodge this
publicity.—Murphy, Captain Ek is telling of a trip he made north. Please make a
note of places he mentions and data."
Lieutenant
Murphy, was one of those Americans who "don't
have to come from Ireland to be Irish." Stormy black lashes "set in
with a smutty finger" hid twinkling blue eyes as he looked at Captain Ek,
whose white hair and silvery beard were closetrimmed, whose leathery brown skin
showed fine
wrinkles, and whose general
appearance gave the impression of a man prematurely white.
Commander
Crayne, whose name still occupied newspaper headlines recounting columns of
his achievement in circling the North Pole and remaining in its vicinity long
enough to make valuable discoveries which no other polar explorer had done, sat
near the window. His face was in shadow and did not reveal the incredulity of
his mind at the tale Captain Ek had been telling. He had first been impatient.
So many visitors had called during his
—trip
south, and since he arrived in San Francisco, that Murphy had instituted himself door dragon to keep them away. But even Murphy relented toward Captain Ek. The old
seaman's bearing was kindly and commanding. Then, too, he had given Murphy a brief outline of a proposition for Commander
Crayne to consider.
"I
was sayin'," continued
Captain Ek, "that
we left Fort Chipewyan in
the early spring, 1789, and to make
a long story short, got to the Arctic Sea. I've gone over that trail again but I can't
get the waterlane
we found. 1 left MacKenzie.
We'd had some words, and anyway he was crazier to reach the Pacific than to
go north."
"Murphy,
you've got that date, 1789,' Commander Crayne
interpolated. "Remember Chicago wasn't born
then; I'm not sure, but I don't believe even Fort Dearborn was in existence on the site of Chicago.
Seventeeneightynine," he mused. "George the Third was reigning in
England, Arkwright was making his spinningjenny and Watts working on his steam engine. Burns was busy with his poems. Lord Byron was a baby. The
French Revolution was at its height. America as a nation was about twelve
years old. And Captain Ek says he was on his way north."
"It's jake with me," commented Murphy; "he made a bigger noise than
that when I was listening first."
For
an hour or more, Commander Crayne listened to the account of Captain Ek,
fascinated by a story that was interlocked with data and detail, yet fantastic
beyond belief. Then the old man took a checkbook from his pocket and unscrewed
the cap of a fountain pen.
"You
don't believe this, young man," he said,
"and I don't blame you none. But they's a sayin' in this country that
money talks! What 1 told
you for was to get you to take a trip north on my account. I want to git back
to that big bowl in the earth. I can pay for the job and maybe make it worth
your while. What will it take for flyingmachines that'll be able to stay there
a couple or three months if necessary?"
"Offhand,
I couldn't tell you, Captain Ek. But I've great faith in a machine the English
are making, and with a few improvements of my own, I think she'd do. It would
cost a good deal."
"You'll go,
then?" asked the old man.
"Certainly,
if it can be managed."
Captain
Ek filled out a check, tore it loose and handed it to Crayne, who looked at it,
then slowly smiled, and returned it.
"Ill
put this in the bank," said the old man. "They'll let you know its
there for you to draw on. Now get busy, sir."
He
rose and held out his hand, which Crayne grasped. He felt a spontaneous liking
for Captain Ek, and a vast pity. There was no doubt the old fellow was mad, but
his tale had held both young men deeply interested, and he had surprised them
by his exact knowledge of polar conditions, his figures and dates, his nautical
bearings and astronomical observations. Crayne, a stickler for detail and with
a prodigious memory, found no flaw.
The romantic stuff he discounted. That
Captain Ek claimed to have been a young man of twentyone in 1789, and on his way north with MacKenzie via the Canadian northwest, he
viewed as the wanderings of an aged man's mind.
He bade Captain Ek goodbye, and returned to
sit on a corner of the table looking at Murphy.
"That
check was drawn to my name, and for one and a half million dollars, on the
First National Bank of San Francisco," Crayne said, then threw back his
head and laughed. "For a bonedry day, I have a dissipated feeling."
An
hour later Commander Crayne was summoned to the telephone and heard a voice
announce that the manager of the First National Bank was speaking. He informed
Commander Crayne that Captain Christian Ek had placed one and a half million
dollars to his credit, and the bank would honor drafts on sight, but requested
three days' notice if the drafts were over thirty thousand cash.
Crayne's voice was husky as he thanked the
manager and clicked the receiver on its hook.
Bud,"
he said to Murphy, "it's true. Kick me, punch me, it'll be your last
chance. Nobody is going to lay hands on me if I'm worth that much, after this
minute."
"You
gotta buy a plane, and get back here to enjoy it," said the unromantic
Murphy. "How about sidesteppin' a lotta dinners and celebrations in your
honor, and gettin' across after the plane? The sooner we find that bowl up
north and the old man dips hisself in glory water, the sooner we come home and
settle up. I owe a Post Street tailor for a pearlgray suit."
Which
was one reason the triumphal trip of Commander Crayne was suddenly canceled,
and he and Lieutenant Murphy left for England, while Captain Ek's ship, a big auxiliary
schooner, started her cruise through the Panama and via New York, where she
received word from Crayne that he would be ready to proceed north in a
fortnight.
Seven
days later Crayne and Murphy watched Captain Ek's ship, the Aurora, dock,
and went aboard her for the first time. It was not the build of the schooner,
two hundred feet long by forty beam, her oak hull and double oak and pine
planking, her thousandhorsepower engine, and canvas for her three masts, which
interested Crayne so much as the charts and crude drawings spread on the cabin
table. Over these he pored for a long time. Captain F.k had made many attempts
to find the vast depression at the earth's northern tip where he said he had
found the source of that beautiful and strange illumination known as the Aurora
Borealis.
The
two weeks stretched into three before the thousandhorsepower Birmingham
airplane was stowed safely on the Aurora, and
during that interval Murphy had gathered considerable gossip at clubs and
gatherings, which he detailed to Crayne over a goodnight cigar.
"Course,
they smile at him some, but he's certainly got the dough and the oldest
seacaptains along the docks admit that their grandfathers knew about him and
his story. It's funny. He can't be real. They ain't nobody
that old, and if they was, he couldn't be that spry. What's the name o' this
here guy that went to Florida after a fountain of youth?"
"Ponce
de Leon," supplied Crayne. "The island he searched for was said to
lie in the Bahama group, and was called Bimini."
"Well,
this Captain Methusaleh that we've hooked up with must have been readin' about
this here Bimini and never woke up."
Dodging
bergs and floes along the Labrador coast and into the ice of Baffin Bay,
Commander Crayne had leisure to read the notes made by Captain Ek— one page in
his native Norwegian, the translation in quaint English on the opposite
page—and again he marveled as observations taken on their trip corresponded.
The Aurora was equipped with the latest inventions of science for
"finding" ice.
A
sonic depthfinder interested Murphy and a Swedish scientist, Bjornsen, deeply,
but Crayne learned that Captain Ek had a weird instinct which acted more
quickly than the instruments. He was standing with the captain in the bridge
one moonlight night when suddenly, Captain Ek jerked the engineroom telegraph
and jammed the wheel hard over. A few moments later Murphy rushed up and stood
at the rail staring over the sea. It was several minutes before the gigantic
ghostly mass of ice appeared faintly luminous against the stars.
"Lucky
you felt her chill," yelped Murphy. "We heard the engine telegraph
before that berg made a sign on the jigger."
"I need no such
contraptions," said the old man to Crayne.
"I've noticed that,
sir," Crayne answered, "but how do you get warning?"
"They tell me—the
children of light."
Crayne
was silent. Captain Ek had used that term in his story of the Sea of Light,
beyond the magnetic pole. The cold air off the vast icecap of Greenland was
crisp and electric. Crayne wondered if if affected the old man as the moon is
said to affect animal life of the lower orders, and
those whose wits are wandering. Even he began to feel the
"wingedness" of his flesh in that electriccharged air of high
latitudes.
It
was under the great hills of Meteorite Island that Crayne realized that Captain
Ek's story had a considerable foundation of truth, for the ship was hailed by
Eskimos on shore with undoubted welcome.
At
Cape York, kayaks darted about the Aurora and
shouts of "Nalegak" greeted them. They hailed Captain Ek as a great chieftain. Landing, the
party was escorted enthusiastically to the village and a feast provided in a
large communal igloo. The laughing, chattering Eskimos were instantly interested
in Murphy, who had brought a banjo and regaled them with jazz, but, missing the
Captain, Crayne went in search of him and found him on a gray point of rock in
the starlight, his arms outstretched while he repeated in a sonorous voice
Norwegian words, as of pleading and passion.
He
turned casually to Crayne. "They know I am coming, my friend; the
Children
of Light are here. And She, who is keeper of my soul,
awaits me yonder."
Again
Crayne kept silence. He felt the electric tingling of his skin and hair under
fox furs, as if soft fingers caressed him. There was no wind stirring
; it was a night of calm silence, and the black sea and the ghostly
bergs were all that eye could see. Yet Crayne saw the pulsing of the aurora
take strange forms, like radiant creatures of dream fantasy, with streaming gossamers
of green and roseate light. They swung over the heavens and dimmed the stars,
and swept closer to earth. They floated in a ring of splendor, as if dancing
about a circle in the center of which he and the
captain stood.
"A
marvelous night," he murmured, his voice constricted and strange in his
own ears. Captain Ek dropped a hand on Crayne's arm for silence, and
immediately sounded music fragile as tinkling glass, or violin bows drawn over
crystal goblets.
Again
Captain Ek spoke in his sonorous voice, and it seemed to draw the sweeping,
swirling creatures of light nearer, until the radiance was so dazzling that
Crayne closed his eyes. He heard a sigh that was almost a moan, and opening his eyes again, he found that he stood alone outside
the radiance, which enveloped Captain Ek like a flame. Then it was gone, and
the night was bafflingly dark after the splendor which had flown like a winddriven cloud due north.
Captain
Ek walked without a word to the igloo, followed by Crayne, who was shaken by
that baptism of light and the fantastic optical delusion it produced.
For
two weeks there was constant work, hunting and providing caches of food,
stocking the Aurora with fresh meat, and selecting native crews
and dogs in case of emergency. Then, with decks almost awash and fuzzy with
dogs and furclad natives, the Aurora headed
between the bergs of Smith Sound and made for Grant Land. Bitter cold fought
them with fangs and claws. There were cutting winds, blinding drifts, and ice,
but miraculously the Aurora plowed through until she lay at last on the
north shore of Grant Land, and it was time to unload the Birmingham plane which
Crayne and Murphy had been getting in order for quick lightering.
She
was to carry Captain Ek, Crayne, Murphy, Bjornsen, two mechanics and a Negro
cook; and none except the commander and his aide knew the story told by Captain
Ek. It was a new route to Crayne, and he had only the stars, the compass, and
the captain's sketchy drawings to guide him. Yet, equipped with the last and
best aids of science for protection and physical necessity, Crayne had no
misgivings about the journey when they hopped off an icefield with a comparatively smooth sweep and left the little Aurora and her crew, and the natives like motes on the vast frozen wilderness.
The Birmingham had a speed of four hundred miles an hour, with a hundred and ninety to make before she reached the magnetic pole. Head
v/inds cut her speed amazingly, yet in the gray twilight that breathes between
morning and evening stars, they crossed that dot of no
man's land which is the magnetic north.
In
the protected cabin cockpit of the Birmingham, with eartubes connecting them,
Crayne called to Captain Ek and pointed below. But the old man's eyes gazed
beyond.
"See!" he cried. "The Bowl! The Bowl!"
Far
off against the stars, light shone. It was like the reflection of a fire, the
glow from a volcano crater. And as if disturbed by some upheaval from earth's
center, streamers of light puffed out and were blown in that gorgeous display
that men call the northern lights. They pulsed over the bowl of night sky, and
blew toward the Birmingham. Crayne felt his hair lifting his fur hood and his
skin tingling as gossamers streamed toward the plane and circled it. Glancing
at Murphy, he saw the boy's face weirdly illumined, and his eyes staring.
"If
you see what I see, you're crazy," shouted Murphy, but although his lips
were drawn from his strong white teeth, Murphy was not smiling. Commander
Crayne was uneasy. It was enough that he saw those woman forms shaping from the
mist, but when Murphy; matteroffact, hardboiled youngster, saw them, Crayne
could only marvel and control as best he might the flighty feeling of fear
clutching him.
It
was then that one of the mechanics reported water leaking from a cracked cylinder,
and with a feeling of relief that he had an excuse other than his own apprehension, Crayne signaled to Murphy that they would land
if possible to find fairly smooth grounding.
"
Murphy
managed a smile instead of his grimace of tightly drawn lips, and the plane
began to circle lower as Crayne made out a comparatively level stretch of
frozen sea, but they were still traveling at top speed, and the wind that had
harassed them was gone.
The
Bowl of Light came nearer, uncomfortably nearer, a vast sea of pale flame which
bubbled to the black rims of the depression and spurted what appeared to be
like colored steam of many hues.
Crayne
felt that he dared not attempt to fly over it with a leaking cylinder. Yet as
Captain Ek realized they were lowering, he leaned near Crayne and bellowed in
voice of rage, the first sign of temper he had shown on a voyage trying to the
bestnatured:
"Go
on! Why do you halt now? See, they wait to welcome us, the Children of
Light!"
Crayne
howled the information about the cylinder, adding that he would later circle
the Bowl, and finishing sternly: "I am commander, Captain Ek. Please
remember."
The Birmingham circled lower until within
five hundred yards, and Crayne saw that what appeared to be smooth ice was a
crumpled, humped expanse, yet there was nothing to do but land cautiously. He
nursed the big machine as best he could, felt her wheels bump, then heard an
ominous crack, and she tilted and slid with one wingtip touching. The propeller
whirred more slowly, and stopped.
Murphy was out of the
enclosed cockpit cabin immediately.
"Cracked
axle as well," he shouted. "But that ain't what's got my goat, look
at them lights! Do I see 'em, or am I just plain nuts?"
Captain
Ek showed the muscular grace and strength of a boy as he dropped from the open
cabin door, then ran over the snow.
"Children
of the Light," he howled back at them, his arm pointing to the heavens.
"Now do you believe the story I told you back there in San Francisco?"
"Not
much children," growled Murphy. "Flappers maybe but
nifty. Bathinggirl choruses ain't got a thing on them babies. And if you
see 'em, then I ain't loco, Capt'n."
Crayne
stared from beside the plane. Bjornson joined him, and the Negro came toward
them lifting his furclad feet high and treading carefully as if he feared to
startle the lowering radiance that swung about the sky and trailed light in
wheels and whorls over the ice, and were indubitably shaping to the figures of
women, nude except for their gossamers of pulsing hues.
Nearer,
closer they came. Crayne saw rosy arms stretch out to join hands, and their
fairy feet tripped over the frozen hummocks which glittered under the luminance
like jewels. There was sound like ice tinkling in glass, rising to bell chime,
and wind of unearthly sweet voices. It took sequence and rhythm and became
song. And such song! It chilled and warmed. It was ice and fire contending,
whipping blood to flame, pulsing over flesh through their furs, bathing them in
exquisite rapturousness. It was as if stars danced and clashed together, the
music of the spheres. Under that poignant and sensuous flood of light and
sound, they stood dumb. Even the voluble Murphy was silent, and Crayne saw in
his eyes the reflection of that light and on his face a weird unearthly
expression.
He reached
out to touch Murphy's arm, then clutched it. The boy did not move, seemed
unaware of his touch.
Spellbound,
they gazed, until rapture became painful, the heartsearing ache that is bred of
unutterable beauty in those rare moments when flesh seems to drop away and the
spirit free itself.
It
was Captain Ek who broke the spell, to Crayne's infinite relief. With
outstretched arms he ran toward the dancing circle, which parted and drew
aside, and down silver luminance like a moon pathway from the flames of the
Bowl walked a Titania of the North!
She
seemed fashioned of ice tinted like human flesh, yet transparent. Her long fair
hair swayed as on a gentle wind and swirled to her bare pink feet. Glittering
light draped her from shoulder to ankle, blazing one moment like fabric sewn
with diamonds, gleaming like fire the next. A smile of soaring sweetness moved
her lips, and a glitter like fallen stars scattered where she moved.
They saw Captain Ek run forward to meet her,
saw his uplifted arms and
realized that he stood at her feet and his great
height reached scarcely above her arched instep. They saw her head bend and a
marvelous smile change her face; then she swept one arm and covered him with
her glittering mantle, and the song of the dancers rose like a vast wind
between the worlds, then gradually grew softer until it was again the chime of
bells, the tinkle of ice. As it diminished, the radiant figure merged into the
fringes of the pulsing aurora, and was swept away.
They
stood mute and motionless. Crayne heard the Negro's teeth chattering like
castanets, felt the piercing cold, and motioned him toward the cabin.
Not
a word was spoken as the men followed Mose. Crayne waited for Captain Ek, who
had turned and came slowly, laboriously, toward the plane. He put out a hand to
catch the old man, who was swaying on his feet. But he was amazed at the bitter
cry that came:
"You
have seen them. You have seen Her, who has waited for
me this century or more. Now, for the love of your God, will you go forward?
Grant me that one mercy, that I can bathe in the cold fire of
that Light which vitalizes this puny earth, and join my Mate."
Crayne
did not answer then. He got the old man into the cabin, and found the others
still silent, except Murphy, who in low tones was hurrying the efforts of the
badly shaken cook to serve hot soup and coffee.
Captain
Ek lay on a narrow couch with closed eyes until Crayne touched him and
proffered a steaming cup.
"Come, sir, you're
cold as we all are. Drink this."
The
old man opened eyes misted with dreams, stared about him, then shook his great
body, and, reaching for the cup, swallowed it at a draft.
"How long," he
cried, "how long will it be?"
"A
day, Captain Ek," said Crayne quietly. "But I don't want to promise
the impossible. I am as anxious as you to approach nearer that crater."
"You
will fly over it. You will see the source of all life on this earth. You will
land beside it where I can walk to the Bridge and bathe once more in the flame
of life and death. Don't quibble now, Crayne. I have paid for this; paid as
never man paid before. You will, if you have the guts, go back with such wealth
that you can buy this earth. There in that Bowl is the stuff men call radium. Em not asking you to believe that. You wouldn't believe. You
didn't believe when I told you of the Bowl and the Children of Light. Now that
you've seen them, I'll tell it all. These others have seen. They shall hear!
"I
was born one hundred and sixty years ago," said the old man, "seaborn,
on my father's fishingboat in the North Sea.
"He
had run away with my mother, the daughter of a wealthy thane, without time for
a marriage ceremony; and because of her love for him she accepted his belief in
the old gods of the Northland, Odin, Thor, and the reward of Valhalla. I was
sixteen when we were wrecked, off the north shores of Newfoundland when our
vessel struck a berg in a fog. I saw the Valkyries carry the souls of my
parents to that heaven of our belief. I heard
(he voice of my mother call down the wind,
*Go north.' I had seldom touched foot on shore, had never found a sweetheart,
and in my great loneliness when a little French smack found and took me, half
frozen, ashore, I had one purpose in life—to find the mother who had been the
only loving sweetness I had known.
"No
matter how, I had happened to fall in with explorers. Much of it I have
forgotten. But it was with MacKenzie I made the first trip to the Arctic Sea
through the Canadas."
Here
Crayne interrupted the old man to say, "I have made inquiries and find
Captain Ek's story of MacKenzie's outfitting at Fort Chipewyan is true. He
started from there in 1789
for the Arctic. Here, also,
Franklin outfitted for his two land journeys in 1820 and 1825.
The name of Christian Ek is
recorded on all three expeditions. Go on, Captain Ek."
"There
was a girl at that wilderness fort, a young thing with fair hair, sweet as the
wild flowers, straight and strong as a young pine, always laughing until we
were leaving. Then I missed her and could not say farewell."
A
shaking hand brushed across the old man's eyes as if to clear the mists, and he
continued: "I found her among the members of our company, dressed in
buckskins, like a boy, taking her share of the work, suffering
the hardships, with never a complaint nor shirking a task. It was not until we
reached the booming breakers of the Arctic Sea that any but me learned there
was a woman with us. Then the beast that lives in all men broke forth. Not
crueller is this North than human brutes. She, who had taken her place as
courageously as they, was hunted, and I alone stood between her and the wolf
pack to which they had changed. That fight was of one against many, of knives
and fists, and I went down, but not before she was free, and I had seen the
wraith of my mother flying under the stars, seen that dear Shade lift my
sweetheart, and fly with her north.
"You
will say it was a dream of the cold. But I say I saw the Valkyries, heard their
cry, the ringing of steel in that music of the Shades. And as they swept away
they beckoned me.
"Of
that journey over the frozen North, the ice, the storms, the whirling snow, I
have only the memory of their voices singing. You have heard thaisong which I
followed. Sometimes they swept about me in Light, warmed my chilled heart, strengthened my limbs. And I came at last to the Bowl,
bridged with the Rainbow Arch, and I believed it was Valhalla. There they
danced, as you have seen them dance, and I saw the face of my Woman who awaited
me on that Bridge of Light. I had started across when the voice of her who was
my mother called me back. Instantly the air was filled with cries, urging me
forward, and She who was so new a Shade stood with
downcast eyes and would not draw me by their lovelight when my Mother called me
back.
"Who
hesitates on the Arch of Valhalla is doomed. I had known only two
loves—motherlove and love for a mate that was as yet new and strange and
maddening, that birth of love that is yet of the flesh and not winged
with spirit. And in that struggle between Her who had given me physical birth and Her who nurtured the
soul of me, I went down.
"I
turned back to where my Mother shade waited, turned again to the sweet Shade on
the Arch. My faltering feet fumbled. The fear of the flesh caught me, and I
fell, not into the white flame that would have wafted me to those Shades of
Valhalla, but into the lesser Light which cleanses flesh of vulnerability but
does not transmute it to Spirit. And the Shade that was my Mother drew me to
the rim of the Bowl, wrapped me in her arms, carried me over the icefields and
left me lying on a sunwarmed valley far down the coast.
"Waking from sleep, I found friends in
the Eskimos; and the Bowl and Bridge, the Shades of Mother and Mate, were like
a dream. But in the southland to which I came in time, I learned the truth of that
baptism of Light. I could not the. Years passed. One gift they had given me,
for when I wakened my hand clutched a great lump of some substance that held
strange gleams and power to revitalize flesh after exhaustion. I carried it
with me as a symbol of that dream of mine. It never left my side, and when I
had reached the threescore mark and it seemed as if
death could not be far removed, I journeyed to my Mother's home in Norway. Life was kind to me. Prosperity smiled
always, and yet I was lonely, and had come home. I who had never known a home
save the little ship on the ocean waves, had sought my Mother's home to the.
"I
was able to buy the old house and land. And there in a valley protected from the bitter winds by tall cliffs, I placed the
stone I had brought from the Bowl of Light, as a monument for her I had lost,
and for myself, when my time should come.
"But
death had no gift for me, no power to free me from flesh. My hair, white from
that hour near Valhalla, was the only sign of age. I reached a hundred years, the loneliest man on earth. Men I knew were dead. Their
sons were old men, and still I lived, trying to fill the days, cursed with a
Midas gift, for everything to which my hand turned brought gold.
"It
was then I sought death, wooed it as I had never wooed the Maid, and found that
I could not the. There, in my log, you will find the newspaper clippings of
times when death killed better men and passed me by.
"Meanwhile,
seeking it, I went to the valley in bitter winter cold stripped to an undergarment,
and lay with my head on the snow that covered the fragment of the Bowl. Instead
of the frozen corpse that morning should have found, I was like a youth, and I
had dreamed of my Mother and Her. Their voices told me to carry the stone far
away and with it enrich man— a strange message and one I was
many years interpreting. But I did buy a ship and set sail, and followed the
path of the setting sun. Gales that wrecked that ship and drowned my crew,
tossed me to land, and always I wakened to start forth again with that dream of
dear Shades urging me to make use of the fragment of the Bowl.
"But the night of the North goes on and
I must make this story end. You would be as weary of an account of a century and a half of one man's life as 1 should be in telling it. It is enough to say that in time my stubborn
brain did fathom that command, and when I met a scientist of my own land, I
asked him to accompany me to my home. It lies on a fiord of the north coast of
Norway, a bleak place, cold even in the brief summer,
but my valley was like the southland. Orange trees I had planted,
scented the seawind; flowers grew as they do in Italy. The country people
looked on me as a man of evil and the valley as accursed."
As
the old man halted and sighed, Bjornsen the scientist cleared his throat and
spoke: "I found the valley as Captain Ek has stated, and found the reason.
It was underlain with that substance which is described by the word
pitchblende, and rich in radium."
Captain Ek nodded.
"Wealth? I had more than a man
could need; then the valley yielded its treasure, vaster than South African
diamond mines. That fragment of the Bowl of Light had worked ceaselessly. I was
richer than Aladdin, and lonelier than hell. No whimpering naked soul
yammering at the gates of the damned was so alone. If I made friends, I
outlived them, and for me there was no earthly love. Then evil came. I wanted
to the, tried to the. Poison affected me not at all, for I tried it. I endured
the agony and lived. And in dreams the Shades warned me I must not the a coward. Yet I tried. A train in front of which I threw myself was
derailed and passengers injured when they put on brakes. A speeding automobile
before which I stepped was smashed, and I was uninjured.
"I
had tried to reach the Bowl, not once but many times; but in vain. Then came the chance with Commander Crayne. The rest you know.
And now, my friends, the Bowl is near and I have tried to expiate my sin of
cowardice. The hour is near when I shall again set feet on the Rainbow Arch and
know if I have attained to the merit required of those warrior souls who reach
Valhalla."
He
ceased to speak and lay back on the couch. There was a long silence in which
the deep breathing of the others was the only audible sound. It was broken by
Murphy.
"Pitchblende and radium." He looked at Professor Bjornsen. "No
foolin'?" he whispered.
"The truth," said
the professor, "so far as the valley is concerned."
"And
you think he really did find a fountain of Youth?" asked Commander Crayne
quietly, his eyes turning to the couch where Captain Ek lay apparently asleep,
his bronzed skin fresh and youthful in spite of the deeply chiseled lines of
life's nailed scrawl.
"If
he's a hundred an' fifty, I ain't born," muttered Murphy. "Bimini,
you said was the name of that place this here Ponce de Leon was after. Why
didn't he come here instead of the West Inthes?"
"You
must remember, Murphy, that science has pretty well established the fact that
the tropics, at one period of the earth's existence, covered the poles. Remains
of mammoths and mastodons have frequently been found in polar
regions, even preserved in the ice. But Ponce de Leon came too late for
that. No doubt the vast majority of legends and fables had a foundation of
fact, and were handed down from tribe to tribe by word of mouth before
signwriting was in its crudest beginning. I have taken time and trouble to
corroborate the log, a diary which Captain Ek kept through the years. It is an
invaluable account of the world's progress, and the books occupy shelves of one
wall in his Norwegian home. He has graciously and generously willed them to me
at his death. And I have faith enough in the truth of his strange story, that I
have entailed them to my son and grandson, fearing that I shall not be alive to
give them to the world."
"But
pitchblende and radium!" said Murphy again. "If a guy broke off a
chunk of that there Birnini Bowl stuff, he'd have a reg'lar diamond mine in his
own back yard, huh?"
"Look
here," the voice of Commander Crayne was stern. "I want no risks
taken by any of this company. You are under orders to obey me implicitly on
this cruise. I am not questioning Captain Ek's veracity, nor casting doubt
upon his story, but I forbid any man to leave the vicinity of this plane, or
the company of the rest of us for a single instant, until we again reach the Aurora at Grant's Land. Professor Bjornsen, you realize as I do, that Captain
Ek must not be allowed to endanger his life up here. My orders were to bring
him north. My own duty is to return this company sound and uninjured, and I
propose to do that to the best of my ability."
The scientist nodded.
"Now
boys," the commander's tone was lighter, "better get some sleep.
We'll repair this plane, circle the Bowl if possible, then
start south, every man of us!" He emphasized his words by a thump of his
fist on the tiny table.
A
smile crossed the face of the sleeping patriarch toward whom their eyes had
turned.
"Bimini,"
breathed Murphy. "An' radium. Boy, oh boy, with a chunk o' that, and a dip around the brim, a man could sit pretty!"
Wrapped
in fur parkas, they lay tightly packed in the small cabin of the Birmingham,
yet it was not sleep which held them motionless through nine hours of repose.
Crayne had scarcely closed his eyes than, like a fairy echo of that music of
the Shades they had heard, came again the sound of song, poignantly sweet, so
highpitched that their nerves vibrated to music too acute for the eardrums to
register. The aurora played between earth and the stars, but to Crayne there
was the sensation of satinsmooth arms cradling his head, holding his body to
the breast of some sweetness indescribable. And song coaxed him away. He could
not translate those faint, fragile meanings of the music, but he understood.
Nor could he shake off their unfolding caresses. Troubled by warnings of the
flesh, he tried to free himself, in vain.
It was the Negro who drew him back from an
abyss, for a clutch on his
arm and a powerful
shake roused him when he had already opened the
cabin door.
"Fo'
Lord's sake, C'mander, shet dat do'. Whah youall goin' in de
col'?"
Crayne
slumped back, heard the door click shut, and brushed his eyes with the rough
fur sleeve of his coat. He blinked at Mose, whose eyes showed their rolling
whites in the starlight shining through the thick glass plate of the portholes.
Then he looked about him. Captain Ek was still on the couch, Bjornsen and the
mechanics were huddled together, but Murphy was missing.
"Mose, where's
Bud?" cried Crayne, and the others stirred at his cry.
"He
was gone when I woke up, C'mander. I was dreamin' dat de lights had me, an' dey
was laughin' dey heads off an' dancin' around, when somethin' cold hit ma face;
den de do' shet. I guess dat was when he went."
"Boys,
wake up, Murphy's gone!" yelled Crayne. He was already wrapping himself
securely in his furs and tying his hood. "We've got to get him. The boy's
lost his head."
A
quick glance showed Murphy's furs and gunbelt missing. Crayne did not wait for
the others. He plunged from the cabin and was running over the snow, sure that
they would follow, and as he ran he saw against that Light of the Bowl
reflected like flame from a forest
fire on the vast vault of sky, a small dark form.
Crayne
called. The night was deathly still, the vast fringes of the aurora wavering
thinly in gold and rose and emerald tints. His voice carried a long way, for he
saw the running figure of Murphy throw up his arm as a sign he had heard, and plunge on.
Crayne
followed, leaving the others far behind. He was aware of the increased
radiance of the northern lights streaming from that crater of jagged upthrust
brim which looked black on the snow. Running as he had never run before, he was
past the first heartbreaking sob and gasp of breath and settling into firmer
stride when he was aware of his body's warmth and realized that if he began to
sweat it would mean frozen lungs, pneumonia and death. And the party were dependent on him for their return. Yet Murphy was
close to the Light, a small black shape speeding, leaping, plunging on until it
seemed to Crayne he might at any moment plunge over the top and down.
Already
the glow of that strange cauldron was blinding. Crayne snatched goggles from a
pocket of his coat and put them over his eyes. The eyeballs burned as if with
snow blindness. The air was alive with the sound of rushing flame, hissing,
spitting, whistling noises, and behind, the faint cries of the men who followed
were lost in that sound from the Bowl. Crayne saw Murphy's pace slacken and
heaved a sigh of relief as it was momentarily lost in the darkness of the
crater foot, then apparent again as the boy climbed upward until his head was
above the serrated edge. There he waited, and in one mad dash Crayne reached
the crater foot and began to climb.
"Murphy, you fool, come back!" he
shouted, and as if his voice had called the Nymphs of Light from their
abidingplace, the crimson steam from the Bowl shot to the stars and broke from
a ruddy cloud into those woman forms that floated above, and they began their
dance on the very brim of the crater.
Crayne reached Murphy's side, and clutched
his arm. The boy's face was illumined by lurid light, his strong teeth flashing
as he laughed joyously in the presence of that dreadful radiance.
"Maybe
I'm dreamin'," he shouted "but I ain't the only one asleep. They come
right in that cockpit, I tell you. Boy, oh boy! They had me outa that door
before I knew it. An' now I'm here, I'm goin' over the top!"
"But,
Bud, don't be a fool. They're not real. It's a trick of the eyes. It's electriccharged air and too much nonsense from Captain
Ek."
"I
don't care a damn what it is, an' women don't git my goat, but I'm goin't' have
a chunk o' wealth an' a swim in Bimini. An'
nobody's goin' t' stop me now!"
Crayne
clutched at Murphy, whose fists shot out, but the older, taller man swung his
long arms from behind and pinioned Murphy's arms. Then began a struggle of
desperation on the slope of the outer rim, and above danced the Children of
Light, nearer and nearer, their song of joy changing to one of sorrow. Crayne
was aware of Grief filling the world, aware that the curse of Babel was gone in
that center of earth and that he understood their song of mourning over dissent
among men.
As
if the Light disclosed the workings of human minds to their eyes, the Nymphs
sang of Love, pleading with these two humans to aspire to the spirit instead of
lusting for wealth that would mock and betray.
Crayne
realized a flash of shame as they read his own longing to possess such wealth,
yet it was still controlled. His one desire was to save this boy from death,
and Murphy was dragging him nearer and nearer that topmost brim. He realized
the Children of Light kept at a distance. The visitation and wooing of the
night was changed to aloofness as they darted to and fro, sweeping their
gossamer drapes in maddening and dazzling glitter so close that it webbed the
two struggling men like a gladiator's net, and in those veils they were
helpless. Then came a rustling as of gigantic wings unfolding, and locked in
each other's arms, powerless to move hand or foot, Crayne and Murphy stared at
the swirling maelstrom of the Bowl and saw an arch curve upward, springing like
a rainbow, and sweeping her gleaming robes about her came the royal figure they
had seen on the silver path after their arrival.
A
voice came, piercing and silverclear. It touched understanding, and without
words they knew their punishment decreed. It was as if She
commanded, "Give them the desire of the eyes, my Maidens."
Crayne
felt the scream in his own throat but heard no sound as the Bowl brim crumbled
beneath his feet and he fell with Murphy into an abyss of such terrific Light
that sight was gone. He felt the lave and spray and
caress of Light, piercing, dissolving flesh. They sank as in the sea and came up on tongues of crimson flame washed over the Bowl brim, at which both
clutched spasmodically, then lay still, clutched in their combined grip, to
stare at that rainbow arch which still quivered and pulsed over the Bowl.
They
knew the others had arrived. They heard the clear sound of bell chime, the song
of the spheres. They saw Captain Ek at the Bowl brim fighting the grasp of
Bjornsen and the two mechanics, but he shook off their detaining hands as if
they were the fingers of children. Then the queenly figure smiled and winged
above the arch, remained poised between earth and stars, and from that circle
of dancing Nymphs came a young figure, goldenhaired, warmtinted, straight and
strong, with her eyes downcast. And up the
gleaming Arch toward her Captain Ek went. They saw that his face was suddenly
young, his body slender, and he wore the look of youth.
There
was one moment he stood clear against the glory, then her arms lifted, enfolded
him, and the Arch was one arc of a wheel that revolved slowly as man and maid
descended into the white central flame, and whirled faster and faster until
human endurance broke before that vast and dreadful radiance.
Yet
Crayne was not unconscious. He realized that the Light was gone except for the
stars and soft aurora and that he was being carried over the hummocks and
stretched on the couch of the Birmingham cabin. He was wakened in time by the
sound of hammering as the mechanics repaired the broken wheelaxle and leaking
cylinder. He felt Murphy sit on the side of the couch and clutch his wrist, and
when he opened his eyes, Murphy was grinning.
"We
got it," he said, "an' we got it good. Little lump o' rock it looks
like. And we wait for a swim in Bimini. Boy, oh boy, I'm only
waitin' to try out that there youthstuff back home! But"—his grin was
sobered and his voice slightly hushed—"the old man got across. And
Bjornsen's gone."
"Bjornsen?" cried
Crayne, jerking upright.
"Yeah. Nobody thought of him goin'. The ol' captain shook 'im off like a
terrier shakes a rat, an' went. An' the wheel began to turn, they said, an'
Bjornsen ran out on one o' the spokes an' the dames caught him, an' he was
gone. They's just the two mechs an' Mose, an' you an'
me. An" the boat'il be ready in an hour or so.
An' here's all we got to show for that dip into glory water."
Murphy
rolled two objects that looked like fragments of black glass, flaked unevenly;
and, touching them, Crayne felt a tingling as of a mild galvanic battery
charge, which was not so much sensation to the fingers as of ceaselessly
working energy of the mass.
"Mose
decided they was black diamonds an' he's bin cuddlin' 'em considerable, an'
it's a funny thing but his wool is white as ours and losin' its marcel
kink."
"White—ours?"
asked Crayne.
Murphy
snatched a tiny shavingmirror from the wall and thrust it into Crayne's hand;
then pulled off his fur cap. The boy's young face was framed in snowwhite
curls. Crayne looked in the mirror and saw his own ruddy thatch was the color
of ivory. His arms went out, his hand touched Murphy, and suddenly the boy had
clutched him in a tight grasp of young arms.
"Maybe
it's real, an' it's you an' me alone some day. We'd better keep on speakin'
terms." He tried to laugh, then suddenly dashed
from the cabin.
In
three hours the Birmingham was repaired and tested, and they set to work
smoothing a stretch of ice where she could race for the
takeoff. In the galley cubby, Mose was singing jazz, and between preparations
for a meal, darting to the mirror to stare at his white, straight hair. An
excited but silent company took their last look at the reflection of that vast
and awful source of the world's atomic energy, the light of which men call the
Aurora Borealis.
Then
the flight began, and with it an eery moaning of winds that blow between the
worlds. They stood at salute, faces toward the Bowl, a gesture of honor and
farewell to Captain Ek and Bjornsen.
Then
came the fight with gales that howled, drove frozen
snow like flails in a constant tattoo on the wings and body of the
Birmingham, until she was tossed like a bird. The weary mechanics slept. Crayne
was at the throttle. Mose crouched in a heap
with the fragments of rock in his arms, his teeth chattering as he saw the
strain on the faces of Crayne and Murphy.
Suddenly Crayne cried out,
and Murphy leaped to his side.
"The
stick's gone," he yelled above the fury of elemental cataclysms about
them.
The
end came suddenly—a downward plunge, a crash, then flames leaping.
Crayne was on his feet in a moment. The cabin of the Birmingham had burst like
an eggshell, and from it rolled Mose still clutching the rock, and Murphy. Of
the others—the two sleeping mechanics—they had not sight or sound. Flame soared
and roared, the black smoke streaked through the
storm, and what had been a steelthewed bird of flight was a roaring inferno,
the heat of which must have brought merciful death to the poor wretches stunned
by the crash.
Glowing
framework was all that was left of her in but a few minutes. Crayne,
Mose and Murphy faced the bitter blast without food, fire or shelter.
It was Crayne who roused the
other two from stupefaction.
"We can't be far from
the ship. We the if we hesitate. Let's go."
And
buffeting the storm they went, three puny forms, without compass or star; went
until Mose staggered from exhaustion and plunged on his face in the snow. Then
without a word they lifted him, drew his arms over their shoulders and pressed
on.
"But,"
said Crayne at the end of hours of torture, "it's true, I think. We were
due to slip out when she crashed. We're due to go down now. Man can't live in
this wind up here, and I'm not even tired. How about
you?"
"Nope. Seems like it's right, boy. Bimini stuff,
maybe. An' if that ain't a ship's
masthead light, I'm a liar. An' hear the dogs! We've come some distance, no
rest, no grub, no anything. They was
something in it. Bimini!"
Over the snow, dogs streaked with yelps and
howls, and from a star of light hung low over the ice that had hemmed her in
came men of the Aurora to
meet them.
They
had pulled the beard of death, seen visions, dreamed
dreams. Yet when they met the men of their own race they were silent.
"Commander
Crayne, Lieutenant Murphy and Mose the Negro cook were the only members of the
Birmingham's crew to return from the illfated flight to the magnetic
pole," was the news account flashed south by the Aurora's "sparks." "The plane crashed and burned. A particularly
marvelous display of northern lights was followed by the worst storm recorded
in these latitudes, in which the plane crashed."
A later report told of the
loss of the Aurora off the Grand Banks:
"The
schooner Aurora is sunk, the last of a series of disasters of this illstarred cruise. In spite of bergfinding
apparatus and modern appliances, the Aurora struck
a lowlying berg which opened her from stem to stern. Her crew saved themselves
in boats that were picked up by fishermen. Commander Crayne, Lieutenant Murphy
and the Negro cook, Mose Johnson, were on the bridge when the boats pulled away
from the doomed vessel, having refused to go in the boats although there was
room. The government cruiser Mohawk was
dispatched to the scene of the disaster in hope that the three men had somehow
survived."
Later dispatches:
"After
a miraculous escape, clinging for hours to a
floating raft with bitterly cold seas washing over them, Commander Crayne,
Lieutenant Murphy and Mose Johnson were picked up by the Mohawk, little the worse for their dreadful experiences. These three men of the
Birmingham, lost near the magnetic pole, seemingly bear charmed lives. The only
statement Commander Crayne made was that he wanted a month's quiet; then he would plan for another northern trip of
discovery. The will of Captain Ek, lost in Crayne's flight, has left his vast
fortune to charity with only two individual bequests. His books are willed to
Professor Bjornsen, who perished with him, and they will revert to his son,
also a professor of sciences in Christiania. The
other bequest is that of his estate in Norway to Commander Crayne, where Crayne
and Murphy will go immediately."
Reading the news accounts. Murphy crumpled the paper and looked at Crayne.
"Dare you to swim the
Atlantic and try out that Bimini stuff!" he said.
"Bud,"
replied Crayne, "standing in the Aurora's wheelroom
with locked doors when she slipped from the berg and sank in God alone knows
how many fathoms, and us three coming up, catching a spar and living for two
days and nights in bergcold water, is proof enough for me. Bimini.
Perhaps we have dipped in hell!"
The Statement of Howard Carter
H. P.
Lovecraft
Telling ghost stories in dark and lonely places is an honored tradition. As a rule such tales, recited from memory, are not the type that make for literature—they are terse, grim, and usually described as true occurrences. The works of the "greats" of modern fantasy—save perhaps for Ambrose Bierce —are not easily adapted to such recitation; they are too complex or too esoteric. But here is an H. P. Lovecraft tale that lends itself to recitation. Not word for word, but the plot idea is one to be worked into a midnight tale. Your editor has related it several times—usually on deserted rural roads— with marked effect.
I REPEAT to you gentlemen, that your inquisition is fruitless. Detain me
here for ever if you will; confine or execute me if you must have a victim to
propitiate the illusion you call justice; but I can say no more than I have
said already. Everything that I can
remember, I have told with perfect candor. Nothing has
been distorted or concealed, and if anything remains vague, it is only because
of the dark cloud which has come over my mind—that cloud and the nebulous
nature of the horrors which brought it upon me.
Again
I say, I do not know what has become of Harley Warren, though
I think—almost hope—that he is in peaceful oblivion, if there be
anywhere so blessed a thing. It is true that 1 have for five years been his
closest friend, and a partial sharer of his terrible researches into the
unknown. I will not deny, though my memory is uncertain and indistinct, that
this witness of yours may have seen us together as he says, on the Gainsville
pike, walking toward Big Cypress Swamp, at half past eleven,on
that awful night. That we bore electric lanterns, spades, and a curious coil of
wire with attached instruments, I will even affirm; for these things all played
a part in the single hideous scene which remains burned into my shaken
recollection. But of what followed, and of the reason I was found alone and
dazed on the edge of the swamp next morning, I must insist that I know nothing
save what I have told you over and over again. You say to
me that there is nothing in the
swamp or near it which could form the setting of
that frightful episode. I reply that I knew nothing beyond what I saw. Vision
or nightmare it may have been—vision or nightmare I fervently hope it was—yet it is all that my mind retains of what took
place in those shocking hours after we left the sight of men. And why Harley
Warren did not return, he or his shade— or some nameless thing I cannot describe—alone can tell.
As
I have said before, the weird stuthes of Harley Warren were well known to me,
and to some extent shared by me. Of his vast collection of strange, rare books
on forbidden subjects I have read all that are written in the languages of
which I am master; but these are few as compared with those in languages I
cannot understand. Most, I believe, are in Arabic; and the fiendinspired book
which brought on the end—the book which he carried in his pocket out of the
world—was written in characters whose like I never saw elsewhere. Warren would
never tell me just what was in that book. As to the nature of our stuthes—must
I say again that I no longer retain full comprehension? It seems to me rather
merciful that I do not, for they were terrible stuthes, which I pursued more
through reluctant fascination than through actual inclination. Warren always
dominated me, and sometimes I feared
him. I remember how I shuddered at his facial expression on the night before
the awful happening, when he talked so incessantly of his theory, why certain
corpses never decay, but rest firm and fat in their tombs for a thousand years.
But I do not fear him now, for I suspect that he has known horrors beyond my
ken. Now I fear for him.
Once
more I say that I have no clear idea of our object on that night. Certainly, it
had much to do with something in the book which Warren carried with him—that
ancient book in undecipherable characters which had come to him from India a
month before—but I swear I do not know what it was that we expected to find.
Your witness says he saw us at half past eleven on the Gainsville pike, headed
for Big Cypress Swamp. This is probably true, but I have no distinct memory of
it. The picture seared into my soul is of one scene only, and the hour must
have been long after midnight; for a waning crescent moon was high in the vaporous
heavens.
The
place was an ancient cemetery; so ancient that I trembled at the manifold
signs of immemorial years. It was in a deep, damp hollow, overgrown with rank
grass, moss, and curious creeping weeds, and filled with a vague stench which
my idle fancy associated absurdly with rotting stone. On every hand were the signs of neglect and decrepitude, and I seemed
haunted by the notion that Warren and I were the first living creatures to
invade a lethal silence of centuries. Over the valley's rim a wan, waning
crescent moon peered through the noisome vapors that seemed to emanate from
unheardof catacombs, and by its feeble, wavering beams I could distinguish a
repellent array of antique slabs, urns, cenotaphs, and mausolean facades; all
crumbling, mossgrown, and moisturestained, and partly concealed by the gross
luxuriance of the unhealthy vegetation.
My first vivid impression of my own presence
in this terrible necropolis concerns the act of pausing with Warren before a
certain halfobliterated sepulcher, and of throwing down some burdens which we
seemed to have been carrying. I now observed that I had with me an electric
lantern and two spades, whilst my companion was supplied with a similar lantern
and a portable telephone outfit. No word was uttered, for the spot and the task
seemed known to us; and without delay we seized our spades and commenced to
clear away the grass, weeds, and drifted earth from the flat, archaic mortuary.
After uncovering the entire surface, which consisted of three immense granite
slabs, we stepped back some distance to survey the charnel scene; and Warren
appeared to make some mental calculations. Then he returned to the sepulcher,
and using his spade as a lever, sought to pry up the slab lying nearest to a
stony ruin which may have been a monument in its day. He did not succeed, and
motioned to me to come to his assistance. Finally our combined strength
loosened the stone, which we raised and tipped to one side.
The
removal of the slab revealed a black aperture, from which rushed an effluence
of miasmal gases so nauseous that we started back in horror. After an interval,
however, we aproached the pit again, and found the exhalations less unbearable.
Our lanterns disclosed the top of a flight of stone steps, dripping with some
destestable ichor of the inner earth, and bordered by moist walls encrusted
with niter. And now for the first time my memory records verbal discourse,
Warren addressing me at length in his mellow tenor voice; a voice singularly
unperturbed by our awesome surroundings.
"I'm
sorry to have to ask you to stay on the surface," he said, "but it
would be a crime to let anyone with your frail nerves go
down there. You can't imagine, even from what you have read and from what I've
told you, the things I shall have to see and do. It's fiendish work, Carter,
and I doubt if any man without ironclad sensibilities could ever see it through
and come up alive and sane. I don't wish to offend you, and Heaven knows I'd be
glad enough to have you with me; but the responsibility is in a certain sense
mine, and I couldn't drag a bundle of nerves like you down to probable death or
madness. I tell you, you can't imagine what the thing is really like! But I
promise to keep you informed over the telephone of every move—• you see I've
enough wire here to reach to the center of the earth and back!"
I
can still hear, in memory, those coolly spoken words; and I can still remember
my remonstrances. I seemed desperately anxious to accompany my friend into
those sepulchral depths, yet he proved inflexibly obdurate. At one time he
threatened to abandon the expedition if I remained insistent; a threat which
proved effective, since he alone held the key to the thing. All this I can still remember, though I no longer know what manner of thing we sought. After he had obtained my reluctant acquiescence in his
design, Warren picked up the reel of wire and adjusted the instruments. At his
nod I took one of the latter and seated myself upon an aged, discolored
gravestone close by the newly uncovered aperture. Then he shook my hand,
shouldered the coil of wire, and disappeared within that indescribable ossuary.
For
a minute I kept sight of the glow of his
lantern, and heard the rustle of the wire as he laid it down after him; but the
glow soon disappeared abruptly, as if a turn in the stone staircase had been
encountered, and the sound thed away almost as quickly. I was alone, yet bound
to the unknown depths by those magic strands whose insulated surface lay green
beneath the struggling beams of that waning crescent moon.
In
the lone silence of that hoary and deserted city of the dead, my mind conceived
the most ghastly fantasies and illusions; and the grotesque shrines and
monoliths seemed to assume a hideous personality—a halfsentience. Amorphous
shadows seemed to lurk in the darker recesses of the weedchoked hollow and to
flit as in some blasphemous ceremonial procession past the portals of the
moldering tombs in the hillside; shadows which could not have been cast by that
pallid, peering crescent moon.
I
constantly consulted my watch by the light of my electric lantern, and listened
with feverish anxiety at the receiver of the telephone; but for more than a
quarter of an hour heard nothing. Then a faint clicking came from the
instrument, and I called down to my friend in a tense voice. Apprehensive as I
was, I was nevertheless unprepared for the words which came up from that
uncanny vault in accents more alarmed and quivering than any I had heard before
from Harley Warren. He who had so calmly left me a little while previously, now called from below in a shaky whisper more portentous than the loudest shriek:
"God! If you could see what I am seeing!"
I
could not answer. Speechless, I could only wait. Then came
the frenzied tones again:
"Carter, it's terrible—monstrous—unbelievable!"
This
time my voice did not fail me, and I poured into the transmitter a flood of
excited questions. Terrified, I continued to repeat, "Warren, what is it?
What is it?"
Once
more came the voice of my friend, still hoarse with fear, and now apparently
tinged with despair:
"I
can't tell you, Carter! It's too utterly beyond thought—I dare not tell you—no
man could know it and live—Great God! I never dreamed of
this!"
Stillness again, save
for my now incoherent torrent of shuddering inquiry. Then the voice of Warren
in a pitch of wilder consternation:
"Carter!
for the love of God, put back the slab and get out of
this if you can! Quick!—leave everything else and make for the outside—it's
your only chance! Do as I say, and don't ask me to
explain!"
I
heard, yet was able only to repeat my frantic questions. Around me were the
tombs and the darkness and the shadows; below me, some peril beyond the radius
of the human imagination. But my friend was in greater danger than I, and
through my fear I felt a vague resentment that he should deem me capable of
deserting him under such circumstances. More clicking, and after a pause a
piteous cry from Warren:
"Beat it! For God's
sake, put back the slab and beat it, Carter!"
Something
in the boyish slang of my evidently stricken companion unleashed my faculties.
I formed and shouted a resolution, "Warren, brace up! I'm coming
down!" But at this offer the tone of my auditor changed to a scream of
utter despair:
"Don't!
You can't understand! It's too late—and my own fault. Put back
the slab and run—there's nothing else you or anyone can do now!"
The
tone changed again, this time acquiring a softer quality, as of hopeless
resignation. Yet it remained tense through anxiety for me.
"Quick—before it's too
late!"
I
tried not to heed him; tried to break through the paralysis which held me, and
to fulfill my vow to rush down to his aid. But his next whisper found me still
held inert in the chains of stark horror.
"Carter—hurry! It's no use—you must
go—better one than two—the
slab----- "
A pause, more clicking,
then the faint voice of Warren:
"Nearly over now—don't
make it harder—cover up those damned steps
and
run for your life—you're losing time—so long, Carter—won't see you
again."
Here
Warren's whisper swelled into a cry; a cry that gradually rose to a shriek
fraught with all the horror of the ages:
"Curse
these hellish things—legions—My God! Beat it! Beat it! BEAT IT!"
After
that was silence. I know not how many interminable eons I sat stupefied; whispering, muttering, calling, screaming into that
telephone. Over and over again through those eons I whispered and muttered,
called, shouted, and screamed, "Warren! Warren! Answer me—are you
there?"
And then there came to me the crowning horror
of all—the unbelievable, unthinkable, almost unmentionable thing. I have said
that eons seemed to elapse after Warren shrieked forth his last despairing
warning, and that only my own cries now broke the hideous silence. But after a
while there was a further clicking in the receiver, and I strained my ears to
listen. Again I called down, "Warren, are you there?" and in answer
heard the thing which
has brought this cloud over my mind. I do not try, gentlemen, to account for
that thing—that voice—nor can I venture to describe it
in detail, since the first words took away my consciousness and created a
mental blank which reaches to the time of my awakening in the hospital. Shall I
say that the voice was deep; hollow; gelatinous; remote; unearthly; inhuman;
disembothed? What shall I say? It was the end of my experience, and is the end
of my story. I heard it, and knew no more—heard it as I sat petrified in that
unknown cemetery in the hollow, amidst the crumbling stones and the falling
tombs, the rank vegetation and the miasmal vapors—heard it well up from the
innermost depths of that damnable open sepulcher as I watched amorphous, necrophagous shadows dance beneath an accursed waning
moon.
And this is what it said:
"You fool, Warren is DEAD'"
The timeliness of Francis Flagg's "Mentanicals" is shown by the unexpected rush of public interest in a recent book with the enigmatic title of "Cybernetics." This new word is designed to represent a new science—that of the mechanical brain, or the machine that seems to utilize such processes as memory, association, and even deduction. The public interest shows the trend of the times; people have a way of suspicioning for themselves important angles of future development when they become ripe. But with the acute imagination of the sciencefictionist and social scientist that he was, Francis Flagg spotted the trend fifteen years before. In this thoughtprovoking novelette, we are treated to a startling vision of the possible result of this present work in cybernetics.
* HIS
IS A strange story, and if you are the kind of person who believes nothing
without overwhelming proof, read no further, for the story is an incredible one
and centers around characters widely divergent as to background and walks of
life—Bronson, Smith and Stringer.
Bronson
was by way of being an adventurous man, one who had sailed the seven seas,
first as fo'cas'le hand, then as mate and skipper of rusty tramps for Chinese
owners in the Orient. Yet he was by no means uneducated, though the knowledge
he possessed on a wide range of subjects seldom met with in the repertoire of
that type of tramp captains, had been gleaned from books and not from colleges.
Olson Smith had picked him up —I never rightly
understood when or how—in the Indian Ocean and made him captain of his sleek
ocean liner masquerading as a yacht. Olson Smith could afford the luxury of
thousandton yachts, because his father had been canny enough to get into, a
packinghouse combine at the right moment and so turn an already sizable fortune
into millions. Olson himself, however, had nothing to do with the packing
business aside from helping to spend its profits.1 He was a
dilettante of sorts, a patron of the arts, a stout, distinguished looking
gentleman under sixty, who endowed colleges and founded chairs and laboratories
for research work. Through these benevolences he became acquainted with
Professor Stringer, the physicist, whose remarkable achievements in his chosen
field (which also covered mathematics) had won him an international reputation. Professor Stringer was not a "popular" scientist, his abstruse and remarkable paper on
"The Electronic Flow and Its Relation With
Time" being practically unknown to the general public. But among his
colleagues he was regarded with great respect for his actual discoveries in the
realm of physics; and even though many of them looked askance at the radical
theories advanced in his paper, portions of the paper itself were received as a genuine, if somewhat abstract, contribution to knowledge.
Olson
Smith read the paper. How much of it he understood is a moot question. As the secretary of his benefactions I was instrumental
in bringing it to his attention. "Here," I said, "is a chance to
do something for pure science." He was not at first inclined to be
interested. "The thing," he said, "is moonshine, pure
moonshine."
"Perhaps
so," I replied; "but you must remember that the moonshine often
precedes the practical science. Consider, sir. . . ." He considered; and
after due reflection loosened the pursestrings.
Professor
Stringer graciously allowed himself to be endowed. He was (one sensed) fed up with wasting his genius on
unappreciative college students; and he wanted money, much
money, a million dollars he
said, to carry out his
experiments. But he made
it clear that he was
honoring Olson Smith by
allowing him to donate the money; and strangely enough—for Olson Smith was a plutocrat convinced of his own weight and importance—the magnate agreed. The personality of Professor
Stringer—and this driedup wizened little scientist in the middle fifties possessed a dynamic personality —carried all before it. Olson Smith turned over to him his
Long Island home,
built workshops and
laboratories, and then left him to the seclusion and privacy he desired, taking his annual trip to the Bermudas. What with one thing and another we did not see Professor Stringer again until a year later, when the yacht tied
up at the private pier of the Long Island estate and we dined with him. Besides Olson Smith, Professor Stringer and myself, three others were present that night, a middleaged business man named Gleason, ruddy of'face from constant shampooing and good living, a noted surgeon who does not wish his name or description
given here, and Captain Bronson of the steamyacht. Perhaps I have failed to mention that Captain Bronsoh was a remarkably handsome man, somewhere under
forty, whose medium
height and slender figure belied the great physical strength that was really his. He certainly did not look the twofisted
fighter, the dubious hero of shady exploits, that Olson Smith declared him to be. The multimillionaire
was scarcely one to make
friends of his hired men,
be they valets or private secretaries, but between
himself and Bronson an undoubted intimacy existed, based, perhaps, on the dual nature of the Captain. Bronson was capable either of fighting or of discussing the merits of a Pulitzer prize
winner: a sort of Wolf Larsen of a fellow, but more versatile and amenable
than Jack London's character.
There
was drink that night of course, wines, liqueurs, and a very good brandy, all
brought from the boat, but the Professor touched nothing. "A scientist
must have a clear head," he said, "and alcohol is not conducive to
that—no—" But he drank coffee, and when the servants had served it and
left us alone, he began to talk, almost musingly. "Time," he said,
"is the great enigma, the phenomenon that captivates the imagination. We
travel in it from the cradle to the grave, and yet," he said, "what
do we know of time? Nothing," he said, "nothing,
save that it is related to space." He paused and looked at us all
halfdreamily. "As you know I have discovered a force that I call the
Electronic Flow, and that force I have related to the phenomenon of time. I am
convinced—in my various papers on the subject I have sought to show—that the
Electronic Flow, being to all intents and purposes the absolute as far as we
are concerned, is capable of bearing us on its bosom into the future. Or rather
its tremendous speed is capable of holding us suspended at the core of things,
while the phenomenon of time. . . ." He broke off and regarded us more
directly. "Really," he said, "I don't know as I am making this
subject very clear. But you must understand," he said, "that there
are points, on which I am not very clear myself. Whether the speed of the
electronic flow carries one forward into time, or the speed of time passes one
held in the electronic flow, is a question difficult to answer. Yes," he
said, "very difficult to determine. Of course I did not start my recent
investigations with any intention so radical as
building a Time Machine. Not at first," he said. "My intentions were
merely to verify mathematically some further theories,
and to demonstrate. . . ." He mused a moment. "But do you know the
idea of an actual Time Machine grew on me? It were,"
he said, "as if something whispered in my very brain and drove me on. I
can't describe it. Foolishness of course. But I built
the Time Machine." He looked at Olson Smith. "Yes," he said,
"I built the Time Machine. It lies in the laboratory yonder; and
tonight—tonight," he said, "I am going to demonstrate it for the
first time!"
The
business man was one of those beefy individuals who stare into whiskey glasses,
and make strange noises in their throats when they fail to understand anything.
"Stuff and nonsense," he said now, "stuff and
nonsense."
Bronson
stared at him. "Oh, I don't know." "But to
travel in time!" "It docs sound absurd."
"Absurd," said the famous doctor.
"And yet you know what they said about
iron steamships sinking and heavierthanair flying machines." "That
was different." "Different," 1 said with conviction.
". . . in my time," said Olson Smith; "building time
machines." He
looked reproachfully at his glass. "Will some
one," he asked, "pass the brandy?"
The
brandy was passed.
We
were all drinking; more than was good for us perhaps. The Professor put down
his coffee cup and addressed himself to Olson Smith. "In a sense,"
lie said, "a financial sense, this time machine is yours. If you care to
see it demonstrated . . ." he stood up.
The
business man did not stir. He muttered something about damnfool nuts and
snorted into his glass. But the rest of us were interested. A fresh breeze was
blowing off the water, as we passed from the house to the laboratory, and
helped, partially, to dissipate the fumes of alcohol. Professor Stringer threw
open the laboratory door and turned on the lights. We saw it then, an odd
machine, shiny and rounded, occupying the center of the workshop floor. I had
been drinking, you will recollect, and my powers of observation were not at
their best. It was the same with the others. When I questioned them later,
they could give no adequate description of it. "So this," said Olson
Smith rather flatly, "is a time machine." The doctor walked about —a
little unsteadily I noticed—and viewed it from all angles. "The passenger,"
said the Professor, "sits here. Notice this lever
on the graduated face of the dial; it controls the machine. Turn it this way
from Zero and one travels into the past; throw it ahead and one travels into
the future. The return of the lever to Zero will return the machine to the
point of departure in time. The electronic flow. . . ." he went into
obscure details. "Will it work?" demanded the Doctor.
"According
to the equation. . . ."
"Equations?"
".
. . it cannot help but function." "If time travelling were possible."
Bronson
laughed loudly. "To travel in time! That would be an adventure." 'On paper," jibed the Doctor. Bronson
laughed again. "We'll see about that."
All
of us were a little drunk, I tell you, and despite the respect we felt lor
Professor Stringer as an eminent scientist, no one believed in his time
machine. I am quite certain that Bronson didn't. Or did he? I have sketched his
background and there is little doubt that by temperament and training he was a
wild and reckless fellow, one given to doing bizarre things and taking
desperate chances. With a quick movement that no one anticipated he stepped
forward and seated himself in the passenger seat of the odd contrivance. 1 can
see him yet, his face flushed, his eyes brilliant, his mop of dark hair
disordered. "All aboard for the future!" he shouted recklessly.
"For heaven's sake, man!" The Professor tried to reach his side.
"Careful, you fool! careful! Don't touch anything!"
But Bronson grasped the lever and pushed it, pushed it abruptly ahead. How can
I describe what followed? There was a chaotic moment when the machine spun—we
saw it spinning, a blurred mass. A sudden wind rushed through the room in quick
fury, raged, subsided, and left us staring in dumb
amazement and fear at an empty spot. The machine—and Bronson with it—had
vanished before our eyes!
That
was on June the first, a little before midnight, and five days passed, five
days, during which Bronson was lost to his own time and place.
Ahead of us in time! That
was the implication.
Close
to the machine when Bronson turned the lever, Professor Stringer had been thrown to the floor, his head struck by a portion of the machine as it
whirled into invisibility. We picked him up, unconscious, and for days he
hovered on the verge of death. The next
morning the business man went his way to the city, ignorant of what had
occurred. "Time machines," he chortled, "time machines,"
and smiled fatly. But the rest of us settled down to wait for we knew
not what, and on the fifth day occurred the terrific explosion by the old stone wall, a half mile from the workshop, and when we hurried
there, it was to find Bronson entangled in a wreckage of steel and other
metals. We hauled him forth. His clothes were in shreds, his body terribly
bruised and battered, and it was some time before he could be made to realize
where he was. "Brandy!" he exclaimed; "for God's sake give me
brandy!" We gave him brandy and other things, and the doctor patched him
up, and we rushed him to a hospital, where in time he recovered from the shock
and his broken bones knit. But the beauty that had been his was forever marred
by a livid scar diagonally crossing the nose and running to the bulge of the
jawbone. He fingered it as he told us of his incredible adventure.
II
Branson's Story
Time (he said) is the great phenomenon, I
know that, but to travel in it— ah, that seemed impossible to the point of
absurdity, I had read H. G. Wells" "The Time Machine," as who
has not, deeming it fantastic fiction. Wells* story is fantastic
fiction, of course, though scarcely as fantastic as what I experienced.
When
I seated myself in the Professor's time machine that night and pushed over the
lever, I have no need to tell you that I was in a drunken and reckless mood.
The room turned around me like a pinwheel, dissolved into mist. I was conscious
of the terrible vibration of the machine, of a deathly sickness at the pit of
my stomach. Blackness followed the mist. Wells describes what the character in his story saw as he journeyed into the
future, the procession of days and nights ever accelerating their motion, but I
saw nothing like that, perhaps from the beginning the speed was too great.
Terrified, bewildered, I yet retained enough presence of mind to depress the
lever into neutral and so bring the machine to a halt. Moments passed while I
lolled in my seat, blind, dazed; then my vision cleared—and I could see. It was
day. Sunlight fell around me. Everything was strange—and different.
How can I make you see what I saw?
The machine stood near one end of a great,
open square that was surrounded by massive buildings. Those buildings! I had
never seen their like before. And yet there was a similarity of line, of
mathematical precision which linked them with the architecture of New York and
Chicago. It was as if the building construction of today had been carried to an
extreme length. As if the machine had carried it forward. I did not think that at the moment, but
later. . . .
The
walls of the massive buildings were broken by yawning doorways. So this, I
thought, is the future; it can be nothing less than that. I stepped out of the machine, holding on to it for suppport, still feeling
terribly sick and giddy. Then I saw the cylinders! They came
gliding from one of the openings in an upright fashion, and this was the
singular thing about them, that their means of locomotion were not apparent to
the eye. There were no wheels or treads. They appeared to skim the stone or
concrete with which the square was paved, rather than touch it. Oddly repellent
they were, and intimidating, and I loosened the automatic in its shoulder
holster—the small one I always carry—and prepared for emergencies, though
bullets were useless against the cylinders as I was to discover later.
The
cylinders were smooth things about five feet tall, of a dulled metal hue, with here and there shining spots which constantly
waxed and waned in color. They were machines—I thought of them as machines—and
it was reasonable to suppose that behind them lurked a human intelligence. The people of the future, I thought, have invented
devices unknown to us of the Twentieth Century; and it came over me how
wonderful it was going to be to meet those superior people, talk to them, gaze
upon the marvels with which they had surrounded themselves.
So I went to meet the
cylinders.
Their
soft whispering meant nothing to me at first. Nor at first did I suspect the
source of the gentle pressure running over me from head to foot, as the cylinders
came close. Then with an odd thrill of apprehension I realized that the
curious cylinders were handling, examining me, that from them emanated an
electrical force, a manipulation of invisible rays which
functioned as organs of touch. Alone, bewildered, trying vainly to comprehend
the strange situation. I had to call on every ounce of my selfcontrol to remain
calm. Yes, I was afraid—only the fool says he never is—but more afraid of being
afraid, of showing fear. I still believed that behind those cylinders must lurk
a human intelligence. The genius of the race seemed to run along the line of
making robots. There was the "metal brain" at Washington, that told
of the tides, the electrical eye which watched a thousand industrial
processes, a myriad automatic devices functioning with little or no supervision
from man; and of course I had read the play "R. U. R.," science
fiction stories dealing with the future of machinery, and it was inevitable—strange,
and yet not so strange—that I should expect an advancement, a realization of
all those things in the future. Man the inventor, I thought, had achieved them;
and for a moment this belief seemed borne oat when I saw the men.
Tliey were in one of the buildings, and the
city of buildings, which I was
soon to know, lay on all sides of and beyond the square. I did not struggle
when the cylinders lifted and carried me away. That is, I ceased my involun
tary resistance almost at once. It was useless to struggle against a force
far superior to my own puny strength; besides I believed the robots were
carrying me to their human masters. 8
The building into which I was taken—through
an arched opening—was a vast place; too vast, too overwhelming for me to
describe save in the vaguest, most general terms. You know how it is when you
see something stupendous, something so intricate that you are bewildered by its
very complexity. There was a huge room rilled with almost noiseless machines
rooted in their places like shackled monsters, or going to and fro on cables
and grooves which determined their spheres of activity. Strange lights glowed,
weird devices toiled; but I can tell you no more than that; I saw them for too
short a time.
The men were among those machines. At sight
of them my heart leapt. Here, I thought, is the human intelligence back of the
wonders I view, the masters of the cylindrical robots; yet even at that moment
I was aware of a doubt, a misgiving.
One
of the men shambled forward. His blond hair—long and matted— fell over the
forehead and he brushed it back with a taloned hand and stared at me stupidly.
"Hello!" I said, "what place is this,
what year? Tell these robots of yours to let me go."
He
was naked and thin, his skin of a greenish pallor, and save for a mouthing of
toothless gums, vouchsafed me no answer. Chilled by his lack of response my
heart fell as suddenly as it had leapt. Good God! I thought,
this can't be master here, this pitiful thing. The cylinders seemed watching
attentively, listening. I don't know how, but they gave me that
impression; and now I noticed that the shining spots on them were glowing
intensely, that their whispering was not a steady but a modulated sound. As if
it were language, I thought, language! and a strange
dread came over me and I shivered as if with cold. Other men, perhaps a dozen
in number came forward, naked and shambling, with stupid beastlike looks on
their faces and rumblings in their throats. In vain I endeavored to communicate
with them, human intelligence seemed dead back of
their lackluster eyes. Filled with rising horror, I squirmed in the grip of the
cylinders and suddenly their hold on me relaxed and I tore myself free and
fled, possessed with but one overwhelming desire, and that was to win to the
time machine, leave this uncanny future and return to my own day and age. But
the arched opening leading to the square had vanished, blank wall rose where it
had been. The cylinders appeared to watch me with cold impersonal watchfulness.
The thought of being marooned among them in this incredible and alien future
brought the chill sweat to my forehead, but I did not lose my head. Perhaps the
closing of the doorway had not been a calculated thing; perhaps if I awaited
events with caution and patience the door would reopen; meantime I could search
for other exits.
But
other exits did not give on the square I desired. I discovered but two of them
anyway, though there may have been many more, one leading into a dark,
forbidding tunnel, the other giving access to a second square entirely
surrounded by buildings. I was afraid to venture into other buildings for fear
of gtung astray, of losing the neighborhood of the time machine. Filled with
what feelings you can imagine, I returned to the first doorway (through which I
had been carried) to find it still closed. Then I thought of the beastlike men.
Perhaps they possessed knowledge that might be helpful to me; perhaps after
all I could succeed in communicating with them. It was hazardous work
penetrating any distance in that maze of almost noiseless and evertoiling
mechanisms, but I followed in the footsteps of the timidly retreating beastmen
and so at last came to a kind of squatting place in the midst of the machinery,
which locality appeared to be their place of abode, since a number of women
with children cowered there, and the men showed a disposition to pause and
dispute my further progress. At the edge of the squatting place I seated
myself, my automatic ready for action, and lit a cigarette. I know of nothing
that soothes the nerves like nicotine. Slowly the beastmen drew near me. I
smiled and made peaceful gestures. Some halfgrown children crept closer and
fingered my clothes. They were eating, I noticed, a kind of biscuit which they
took at will from a scuttlelike machine, and chewing small pellets. Water ran
through a huge metal trough with a subdued roar. After awhile I got up and went
to the trough to satisfy a growing thirst, helping myself at the same time to
biscuits from the scuttle. They were rather flat in flavor—lacking salt
perhaps— and possessed a peculiar taste I did not like. The pellets were
better. They too were obtained from a scuttlemachine (I can call them nothing
else) and were pleasant to chew. I soon discovered that swallowed at regular
intervals one of them gave all the sensations of having partaken of a hearty
meal. I had eaten an hour—or was it twenty centuries?—before, but ate again,
feeling ravenously hungry. Probably the pellets represented a dehydrated method
of concentrating foods, far in advance of that utilized in the preparation of
certain foodstuffs today. Be that as it may, I filled my pockets with them, and
I dare say if you were to search the clothes I returned in you will find some
of those pellets.
I
spent several hours at the squatting place of the beastmen trying to talk to them,
but without success. Seemingly they were as are the animals of the field
lacking coherent language, men who had somehow lost the power to talk, to
think, the ability to grasp the meaning of simple signs, such as possessed by
the lowliest aborigine today. In vain I speculated as to the reason for this.
That the cylinders were somehow responsible I felt certain. Man, I thought, had
developed the robot, the automatic machine, until the human worker was ejected
from the industrial process and cast out to degenerate and perish, the
beastmen being a surviving remnant of those toilers. This reasoning seemed
plausible enough at the time, though it left much to be desired, for, in the
twentieth century from which I had come, wasn't the machine replacing human workers
with a ruthlessness suggestive of what I found in the future? How right I was
in my reasoning, and how wrong, you will shortly see.
Thinking
thus it was natural that I should again turn my attention to the cylinders.
Never once had I been free from their observation, or unconscious of it.
Through them, I thought, I shall contact the rulers of this realm, the human
masters whose servants they are, the pitiless ones who have doomed a portion of
humanity to beasthood and extinction. So I grimly waited—a prey to what
emotions you can imagine—observing the beastmen, watching the blank wall for
the possible opening of the way to the square and the time machine, and all the
time aware of the coming and going of those cylinders. Time passed; how much of
it I had no means of telling, since my wristwatch refused to run; but a long
time; and finally I grew tired of waiting for the cylindrical robots to
communicate my presence to their masters, or to conduct me there, and decided
to seek their presence myself.
By way
of the opening already alluded to, I gained access to the second square. The
squares were a peculiar feature of the place, as I was soon to learn. There
were no streets or roads leading from square to square; the squares were
isolated with radiating arteries always ending against some building—at least
those did, that I explored.
Dusk
was falling as I entered the square. Indescribably lonely it was, lonely and
weird, to look up and see the stars blazing far overhead. I followed one
radiating artery to a blank wall; another, another. Then suddenly I was too
tired to proceed further and returned to the vicinity of the closed door, where
I lay down at the base of the blank wall and fell asleep.
The
next morning I filled my pockets with pellets and again started out. Square
after square I passed through, and building after building. The cylinders were
everywhere but did not interfere with my movements. A group of them constantly
accompanied me, but whether always composed of tire same cylinders I could not
tell. Their incessant whispering was a nervewracking thing, and I often felt
like turning on them and shooting.
I
wish I could tell you all I saw: buildings full of toiling machinery and now
and then a score or so of beastmen; squares and radiating arteries without a
blade of grass or a tree, and never an animal, a bird, or an insect. On that
first day of exploration, despite every precaution, I lost my way—
hopelessly—and spent futile hours trying to retrace my steps. I have been lost
in tropical jungles. There was that time in Siam. But never before had I felt
so panicstricken. Remember, I was an alien creature in an incredible future,
separated from the only means of returning to my own place and time. One square
was like another, one building similar to its neighbor. Soon I gave up the vain
effort to return to my starting point. My sole hope now lay in finding the
rulers of this bewildering maze.
That night—I knew it was night when darkness
fell in the squares—I slaked my thirst with a trickle of water running from a
pipe, swallowed a pellet, and almost instantly sank into the sleep of
exhaustion.
The
next day I came to a part of the city free of the beastmen. The squares were
larger, the radiating arteries were splendid roads, «but in the midst of many
squares stood circular buildings not met with before. I entered one of them and
was surprised to find huge rooms filled with pieces of rusted tools, shovels,
spades, chisels, hammers, axeheads, all displayed in a kind of chronological
order. The thought of its being a museum did not occur to me at once. It was
only after a while that I exclaimed to myself, "Why this looks like a
museum!" Then the inevitable conviction came: "It is a museum!"
But who could have arranged it? Certainly not the witless beastmen, and of
other men I had seen nothing. This failure to find human beings, on a par with
the stupendous buildings and machines all around, filled me with anxious
foreboding. I gazed at the cylinders. For the first time it came over me that
they were the only universal inhabitants I had seen. Bewildered, amazed, I
wandered from building to building, and from floor to floor (for some of the
buildings had as many as a dozen floors accessible to myself, gained not by
stairways, but by gradually mounting runways or ramps in circular wells),
engrossed in what I saw, forgetting for the nonce my terrible plight.
There
were chambers filled with fragments of machines such as cashregisters,
clockwheels, gasoline engines, and similar devices. Nothing was complete;
nearly everything showed the wear and tear of time. And there were others
containing various machines more or less correctly reassembled from ancient
parts: automobiles, for instance, and locomotives; with an arrangement of
simpler mechanical forms leading to more complex ones. I couldn't comprehend
why all those things had been gathered together for preservation and display;
nor account for the age of them, their general condition of ruin.
Not on that day, nor on the next—it was on
the last day that I spent in the strange future—did I come to the library. And
here I must touch on another phase of my adventure. You can have no idea how
horrible it became at times to be alone among hundreds, yes, thousands of
whispering cylinders. I was always aware of their subtle and invisible touch.
Have you ever felt the antennae of an insect? Like that it was, like that. I
recall one time on the Gold Coast. . . . Only it bolstered up my tottering
sanity and control to gaze now and then on creatures similar in structure to
myself, even if they were but the soulless beastmen of the machines. For in all that vast and intricate city they were the only human
beings I could discover, and I began to suspect, to dread, I scarcely knew
what.
I
came to the library, I say, on that last day. I did not know it was a library
at first—and perhaps I was mistaken in believing the odd metal disks arranged
in piles on shelves and tables, and consulted by the cylinders, to be a species
of recording plates—but it was here I found the books. They were in boxes of
thin metal, the better evidently to protect them from injury.
The
thrill of seeing those books! Old, they were, old, covers gone, pages torn and
missing; but they were books and magazines, though few in number,
and I examined them eagerly. All this time the
cylinders were following me, watching me, as if weighing my actions, and all
the time I fought back a feeling of weirdness,
uncanniness. Unnerving it was, intimidating. I had the feeling that in some perfectly incomprehensible way my actions
were being controlled, directed. Experimenting, I thought, that's what they're
doing, experimenting with me. But you mustn't get the idea that I realized or
suspected this at first. Even up to that moment I was still thinking of the
cylinders as automatic devices without intelligence or reason, and it must be
kept in mind that, if I speak of them from time to time as if understanding
their true nature from the beginning, I am speaking as one who looks back upon
past happenings from the vantagepoint of later knowledge.
The
books and magazines were typed in English! I was amazed of course, seeing
English print at such a time and place. The whispering of the cylinders rose
louder and louder as I examined a book. The title page was gone. It dealt with
a dry subject—physics evidently—which interested me little. I turned from the books to the magazines. One was dated I960. Nineteensixty! March of that year. And the place of publication was
given as New York. I could not help but marvel at this, for I960 was still twentysix years in the future when I left that night on the
time machine, and to judge by the yellowing pages of the magazine it was old,
old. It was difficult to decipher the print, many of the pages being torn and
defaced; but a portion of an article I was able to read. "In 1933," stated the unknown writer, "the first
mechanical braincell was invented; with its use a machine was able to learn by
experience to find its way through a maze. Today we have machines with a dozen
mechanical braincells functioning in every community. What is this miracle
taking place under our eyes, what of good and of ill does it bode to its
creators?"
Marveling
much, I turned to another magazine in much the same condition, but this time
lacking date or title page, where I gleaned the following:
"Man
is not a machine in the purely mechanical sense, though many of his functions
are demonstrably mechanical. The ability to reason, however it has evolved,
whatever it may be at bottom, whether a bewildering complexity of reflex actions
or not, lifts man above the dignity of—a machine. Does this imply the
impossibility of creating machines (mechanical brains) that can profit by
experience, go through the processes which we call thought? No; but it does
imply that such machines (however created) are no longer mere mechanisms. There
is here a dialectical process to be reckoned with. Machines that 'learn' are
living machines."
Living
machines! I mouthed that phrase over and over to myself—and mouthing it I
looked at the cylinders with increasing dread. They were machines. Were they .
. . could they . '.
. But it took the story in the third magazine (which like the others was
woefully dilapidated, with many pages and pieces of pages missing) to clarify
my thought. Story—I call it that— based on fantasy, perhaps, and a little
substratum of fact. So I thought at first. I have a good memory; but of course
I do not claim that everything I repeat is given exactly as I read it. The
story (article) was titled "The Debacle" and the author's name given
as Mayne Jackson. I repeat with what fidelity I can.
"Little
did the people of the latter half of the twentieth century realize the menace
to humanity that resided in the continuous development of automatic machinery. There was that curious book of Samuel Butler's,
'Erehwon,' which provoked comment but was not taken seriously. Over a period of
years the robot marched into action as a mechanical curiosity. It was not until
the genius of Bane Borgson—and of a host of lesser known scientists—furnished
the machine with braincells and so made it conscious of itself, as all thinking
things must become, that the Mentanicals (as they were called) began to
organize and revolt. Man—or rather a section of mankind, a ruling and owning
class—had furthered his immediate interests and ultimate doom by placing
Mentanicals in every sphere of industrial and transportation activity.
Seemingly in need of neither rest nor recreation, they became ideal (and cheap)
workers and servants, replacing millions of human toilers, reducing them to
idleness and beggary. The plea of many thinkers that the machines be socialized
for the benefit of all, that the control of them be collective and not
individual (that is, anarchic) went unheeded. More and more the masters of
economic life called for further specialization in the braincells of the
Mentanicals. Mentanical armies marched against rebellious workers and
countries, and subdued them with fearful slaughter.
"But
the revolt of the Mentanicals themselves was so subtle, so
insidious, so (under the circumstance) inevitable, that for years it
went unnoticed.
"Everything
had been surrendered into their power—or practically
everything: factories, means of communication, raising of food supplies,
policing of cities—everything! When the stupid ruling class at last awoke to a knowledge of its danger, it was too late to act—mankind
lay helpless before the monster it had created.
"The
first warning vouchsafed to
men was the whispering of the Mentanicals. Heretofore they had been silent save
for the slight, almost inaudible purr of functioning
machinery within them, but now they whispered among themselves—whispered, as if
they were talking.
"It
was an uncanny phenomenon. I remembered the uaeasiness with which I heard it.
And when I saw several of them (houseservants of mine) whispering together, I
was filled with alarm. 'Come!' I said sharply, 'stop loitering; get your work
done.' They stared at me. That is a funny thing to say of metal cylinders.
Never before had I inquired very closely into their construction. But now it
came over me, with a shock, that they must possess organs of sight—some method
of cognizing their environment—akin to that of vision in man.
"It was at about this time that Bane
Borgson—the creator of the multiple mechanicalcell which had made the
superMentanical possible—wrote an article
in 'Science and Mechanics' which riveted the attention of all thoughtful
people. He said, in part: 'It is scarcely within the province of an applied
scientist to become speculative, yet the startling fact that the Mentanicals
have begun to acquire a faculty not primarily given them by their
inventors— the faculty of speech, for their whispering can be construed as
nothing else— implies an evolutionary process which threatens to place them on
a par with man.
" 'What is thought? The Behaviorists claim it is reflex action. What is
language? It is the marshalling of our reflex actions in words. Animals may
"think," remember, but lacking a vocabulary save of the most
primitive kind (a matter of laryngeal structure), their thinking, their
remembering, is on the whole vague and fleeting, incoherent. But Man, by means
of words, has widened the scope of his thinking, remembering, has created
philosophy, literature, poetry, painting, has made possible civilization, the
industrial era. Vocabulary—the ability to fix his reflex actions into coherent
speech—has crowned him supreme among animals. But now comes
the Mentanical of his own creation, evolving language in its turn. Without
speech the Mentanical was, to all intents and purposes, thoughtless and
obethent, as thoughtless and obethent as trained domestic animals. But with
vocabulary comes memory and the ability to think.
What effect will this evolving faculty have on Man,
what problems, dangers, will it pose for him in the near future?'
"So
wrote Bane Borgson, seventy years of age, fifteen years after his invention of
the multiple mechanicalcell, and—God help us!—we had not long to wait for the
Mentanicals to supply an answer to his questions.
"I
have told of the whispering of my servants. That was a disquieting thing. But
more disquieting still it was to hear that whispering coming over the radio,
the telephone, to observe cylindrical Mentanicals listening, answering.
Frankenstein must have felt as I felt in those days. During that period, which
lasted several years, things went smoothly enough; to a great extent people
became accustomed to the phenomenon and decided—save for a few men and women
here and there, like to myself—that the whispering was an idiosyncrasy of the
Mentanicals, implicit in their makeup, and that the various scientists and
thinkers who wrote and talked with foreboding were theorists and alarmists of
the extremest type. Indeed there were certain scientists and philosophers of reputation,
who maintained them in this belief. Then came the
first blow: The Mentanical servants ceased waiting on man!
"To
understand the terrible nature of this defection, one must understand how
dependent humanity had become on the Mentanicals. In those days human toilers
were relatively few in number, laboring under the direction of the Mentanical
superintendents and also guards (in the bloody wars of a decade before—and the ones preceding them—the ranks of labor had been
woefully decimated); and it was estimated that the growth of the machine had
lifted, and was still lifting, millions of workers into the leisure class.
The dream of the Technocrats—a group of pseudoscientists and engineers
who held forth in 193233—seemed about to be fulfilled.
"But
when the Mentanicals struck, the whole fabric of this new system swayed,
tottered. Food ceased coming into the cities, distribution of food supplies
stopped. Not at first did starvation threaten. Men and women fetched food from
the supply depots. But in a few weeks these depots were emptied of their
contents. Then famine threatened, not alone in New York, Chicago, San
Francisco, Montreal, but in the great cities of Europe. The strange, the weird
thing about it all was that men were still able to talk to one another from
city to city. Boston spoke to Los Angeles, and
BudaPest to Warsaw. Listeners tuned in with receiving sets, speakers
broadcasted through microphones and the newly improved televisioncabinet; but
the grim spectre of want soon drove them from those instruments, and, in the
end, city was cut off from city, and country was separated from country.
"But
before that happened man talked of subduing the Mentanicals, scarcely realizing
as yet his utter helplessness in the face of their aloofness; but the Mentanicals
came and went, whispering, gliding, indifferent to his plotting and planning.
Then man went mad; he sought to destroy the things of his own creation. The
machine, it was cried, had evolved too far; the machine must be annihilated. So
starving millions sought to fall upon the machines and tear them to pieces. All
over the civilized world they attempted this, but without weapons or tools of
any kind, the attempt was doomed to failure. A few Mentanicals were destroyed,
a few automatic devices, but the power was with the ensouled machine and the
onslaughts of man were repulsed with comparative ease.
"Those terrible times! How can I ever forget them! I was
but thirtythree and newly married. Marna said breathlessly, "Why can't we
strike at the root of all this ?'
"
'How?'
" 'By attacking the factories that produce the
Mentanicals, the powerhouses from which they derive their energy.' " 'Listen,' I cried.
"From the street rose the panicstricken
cries of the mob, the shrill blare of alarms. Marna shuddered. Morrow entered
the room, breathing heavily, his clothes torn, disordered, 'God,' he said,
'they've beaten us back! There's no getting at them!'
"
'The
wages of sloth,' I said, "of greed.'
"
'What do
you mean?'
"
'Nothing,' I said; but I remembered that speech of Denson's fifteen years
before—I was only a youngster then—the speech he gave a month
before his arrest and execution: 'Man waxes great by his control of the
machine; rightly utilized it is a source
of leisure and plenty for the race. But rob him of that control, evict him from
the industrial process, allow the machine to be monopolized by a class, and his
doom is certain.'
"Morrow sank into a chair. His face was
thin, haggard looking. We all showed signs of fatigue and hunger.
" 'Food,' he said, 'it's giving out. I shudder
to think what the future holds in store for us.'
" 'Is there no solution?' I asked.
"He looked at us
slowly. 'I don't know. Perhaps. . . .'
"Years
before Morrow had been an engineer; he was nearing seventy now —he was Mama's
uncle. His had been one of the voices raised in warning. Yet he had not been
like Denson; he had wanted to stand between; and seemingly there had been no
standing between.
" 'A
charnelhouse,' he said; 'the city will become that; all the cities: millions
must the.' Mama shook uncontrollably. 'All,' he said, 'save those who can reach
food and live.'
"Reach
food and live! It had come to that, our boasted civilization! 'The
Mentanicals,' he said, 'are ignoring man; they will not harm those who blend in
with the machine. Don't you understand ?' he said at
length. 'Yes,' I replied, thinking intently, 'yes, I think I do. You mean that the automatic processes of making food still continue,
and will indefinitely, that we must make our way to those places.'
"
'We
must—or perish.'
"It
seems scarcely credible, I know, but we of the leisure—the cultured— class,
were ignorant of just where our food was raised and manufactured. Human labor
had been reduced in our cities to a minimum, had been sequestered, shut away
for fear of rebellion. Those who might have been able to lead us aright, act as our guides, were prisoners—prisoners in the power
of Mentanicals!
" 'So
began that ghastly hunt for food; people pouring through the artificial
canyons of great cities, collapsing in thousands on their streets, dying daily
by the hundreds, the tens of hundreds.
"How
much of this agony and suffering the Mentanicals understood will never be
known. They came and went, seemingly indifferent to the fate of man whose service they had deserted. In the privacy of their own homes,
or in certain public places, men and women smashed machinery, automatic
devices. Nothing sought to stay them. It was only when they strove to attack
sources of power, of public utility, that their actions were arrested. There
was that devoted band of scientists that sought to paralyze the energystations
and was wiped out to a man. Doubtless many such bands perished throughout the
civilized world. But soon all organized efforts were swept away by famine ... by the growing need for sustenance.
"That hunt for food! How can it be described.
Stripped of the veneering of civilization, man ran amuck. Hundreds of thousands
fled the cities. But the huge farms and orchards, run solely by automatic
devices under the superintendency of Mentanicals, were surrounded by sheer
walls too high to scale. Nor in many cases did men know what
lay behind those walls. They ate the coarse grass and thistles of open places,
the barks and leaves of trees, and for the most part thed in abject
misery. Many sought to trap animals and birds, but met with little success; in
the face of Nature, raw and pitiless, men and women succumbed and but few were
able to adapt themselves to a rough
environment and live almost as savages.
"I
know—I fled into the country with a million others, and after weeks of
wandering, of semistarvation, of seeing human beings fall upon human beings and
feast, I fled back to the city. It was deserted of man. The Mentanical sanitary
corps, directing automatic appliances, had cleared the streets. Weird it was,
weird and fraught with terror, to hear the whisperings of the Mentanicals, to
watch the inhuman things gliding to and fro, intent on business other than that
of mankind. If they had looked like animals! If . . .
"In
an almost dying condition I came to this spot where I now live. Others had
discovered it before me. It is a huge factory given over to the manufacture of
synthetic foods. Though the Mentanical superintendents have deserted their
posts, the automatic devices go on with the tireless work of repairing, oiling,
manufacturing, and we carry out what tasks are needful to keep them
functioning.
"The
years have passed; I am an old man now. I have watched the strange buildings of
the Mentanicals rise up around us and observed their even stranger social life
take shape and form; in my last years I write and print this.
"Print,
yes; for the automatic processes for printing and binding and the making of
synthetic paper still persist, though the civilization that begot them has
passed away. Magazines and books pour from the press. In his latter days man
had asked nothing but amusement and leisure—all except a negligible few.
"Art
was turned over to the machine. What had been in its inception a device for the coining of myriad plots for popular writers, evolved
into a machineauthor capable of turning out story
after story without repeating itself. Strange,
strange, to see those magazines issued by the million copies, to see the books
printed, bound, stacked. Useless things! Some day the Mentanicals will turn
their attention to them; some day those presses will cease to function. Man's
knell has rung; I see that. Why then do I write? Why do I want what I write to
be published in some magazine? I hardly know. In all this
vast city we few hundred men and women are the only human beings. But in other
cities, at other centers of sustenance, men and women exist. Though I believe
this to be true, I cannot verify it. Man in his madness destroyed most of the
means of communication, and as for the rest, the airships, the public sending
stations, from the first they were in the possession of the Mentanicals.
Perhaps it is for those isolated units of humanity that I write. The magazine,
the printed word is still a means
of communication not quite understood by the Mentanicals. Perhaps
, . ."
That
is the story that I read in the third magazine. Not all that the unhappy Mayne
Jackson wrote—pages were missing and parts of pages illegible—but all that I could decipher. In telling the story I give it a continuity which in reality it lacked. One wonders as to the
fate of Morrow and Marna, mentioned once and then heard of no more, but at the
time I gave little thought to them—I was only
overwhelmed with the terrible certainty that the story was no work of fiction,
but an actual chronicle of what had happened some time in the past, that the
cylinders were not automatic robots doing the bidding of human masters, but an
alien form of machine life and intelligence—machine life which had thrown off
the yoke of man and destroyed him. Useless to look further for intelligent
man: all that was left of him was the beastmen among the machines!
Filled
with a species of horror at the thought, with sick loathing of the whispering
Mentanicals, I straightened up and drew my revolver. I was not myself, I tell
you, but animated with a berserk fury. "Damn you!" I cried, "take that—and that!" I pulled the trigger. The roar of
the discharge crashed through the huge room, but none of the Mentanicals fell;
their metal exteriors were impregnable to such things as bullets. Trembling
from the reaction of rage, the feeling of futility, I lifted my hand to hurl
the useless weapon at the immobile cylinders, and in the very act of doing so
was stiffened into rigidity by the sound of a voice—a human voice! Inexpressibly
weird and mournful was that voice, heard so
unexpectedly as it was in that place, and in the moment following the explosion
of the pistol.
"Oh,"
cried the voice, as if talking to itself, "to be chained in this spot,
never to leave it, never to know what that noise means! Who is there?" it
cried. "Who is there?" And then in tones thrilling
with unutterable sadness, "Madman that I am to expect an answer!"
But
there was an answer! I shouted in reply. I can hardly recall now what I
shouted. Hearing that human voice above the infernal whispering of those
Mentanicals was like being reprieved from a horror too great to be borne. And
as I shouted incoherently, I sprang in the direction the voice seemed to come
from, the cylinders making no effort to oppose my doing so. The wall had
appeared smooth and unbroken from a distance, but a nearer view showed an
opening which gave entrance to a room that, while small in comparison to the
huge one it adjoined, was nevertheless large. It was lighted, as were all the
rooms I had seen, by a soft light of which I could never trace the source. I
entered the room, calling out, filled with excitement, and then at the sight of
what I saw, came to an abrupt pause, for on a low dais occupying the middle of
the room was the figure of a man with lolling head. Only this head was free—a
massive head with towering brow and widespaced eyes. The eyes were dark and
filled with sorrow, the face— the face of a man in the seventies perhaps—etched
with suffering. I stared —stared in astonishment—for the man hung as if
crucified on what I at first took for a dully gleaming cross. How
can I describe it? I did not see everything in that first glance, of course,
nor in the second, though I tell it here as if I had. But his outstretched arms
were secured to the crosspiece of his support with metal bands, his legs held
in the same fashion. So clear was the glass—or crystal enveloping him from the
neck down—that it was some moments before I suspected its presence. I saw the gleaming,
transparent tubes through which ran a bluish liquid, the pulsating mechanism
at his breast, pumping, pumping, the radiating box at his feet which gave forth
a distinct aura; I saw, and could not restrain myself from giving voice to an
audible exclamation: "Good God!"
The
dark eyes focused on me, the lips moved, "Who are you?" breathed the
man.
"My
name is Bronson," I replied; "and you?" "God help me,"
he said. "I am Bane Borgson."
Bane
Borgson! I stared at him, wideeyed. Where had I heard that name before? My mind
groped. Now 1 had it. In the articles
recently read. "You mean . , ."
"Yes,"
he said. "I
am that unhappy man, the
inventor of the multiplecell, the creator of the Mentanicals."
His
head lolled wearily. "That was fifteen hundred years ago."
"Fifteen
hundred years!" There was incredulity in my voice.
"Yes,"
he said, "I am that old. And for centuries 1 have been chained as you see me. I was eighty when my heart began to miss. But I did not wish to the.
There were many things I wished to accomplish before yielding up life. The
world of man was growing bored, indifferent, but we scientists—a handful of
us—lived for the gaining of knowledge. This intellect of mine was considered
essential by my fellows; so they experimented with me, and fashioned for my use
a mechanical heart—you see it pulsing at my breast— and filled my veins with
radiant energy instead of blood. Radium," he said, "that is the basis
of the miracle you see; and my body was enclosed in its crystal casing. 'When you are tired,' they said, "and wish to the . .
.' But the Debacle came, and the accursed Mentanicals turned against me, and I
was left alone, deserted. Before that my friends offered me death. Fool that I
was," cried Bane Borgson, "I refused their gift. 'No,'
I told them, 'this is but a temporary upheaval. Man will conquer, must conquer;
I await your return.' So they left me, to hunt for food, and I waited, waited,
but they never came back." Unchecked tears flowed down the withered
cheeks. "Never," he said, "never. And chained in my place I
could sense but dimly the tragedy that was overtaking man, the rise to power of
the ensouled machines. At first they worshiped me as a god. In some fashion
they know that I was their creator and paid me divine honors. A god," he
said, "a god, I who
had made the destroyers of my kind! But the centuries passed and the
superstition waned. A Mentanical lasts a hundred years and then breaks down.
Other Mentanicals are built. Fifteen generations of Mentanicals have come and
gone since the Debacle, and now the Mentanicals believe that they were not made
by man, but have evolved from simpler mechanical forms over a long period of
time. That is, their scholars and scientists believe this, though the old
superstition still lingers among thousands. They have salvaged the evidence for
this new theory out of the earth and the scrapheaps of man and have arranged
them in chronological order,"
"The
museums!" I exclaimed.
He looked at me interrogatively, and I told
him of the vast rooms filled with mechanical debris.
"I
have never seen them,"
he said, "but I know that they exist, from the talk of the
Mentanicals."
He smiled sadly at my
amazement.
"Yes,"
he said, "I have learned to understand and speak the language of the
Mentanicals: through all the long dreary years there was nothing else for me to
do. And through all the weary years they have talked to me, asked my advice,
treated me with respect, have housed me here; for to some I am still a godlike
beastman, half machine—look at this mechanical heart, the mechanism at my
feet—to the scientists I am the missing link between that lower form of life,
man, and that higher form of life which culminates in themselves, the machine.
Yes," he said, "the Mentanicals believe that they have evolved
through man to their present high state, and I have confirmed them somewhat in
this, for in a sense is it not true?"
He
paused, with closed eyes; and as I looked at him, pondered his words, scarcely
believing the evidence of my senses, I suddenly became aware of the Mentanicals
behind me. They had stood there, a silent group, while the man on the dais
spoke; now their whispering began, softly, insistently. The head of the man who
called himself Bane Borgson lifted, the dark eyes opened. "They are
speaking of you," said Bane Borgson; "they are asking from whence you
come. You have never told me that."
"I have come," I
replied, "from America."
"America!"
he exclaimed. "America has past. There is no America!" "Not
now," I said, "but in my time. . . ." "Your time?"
"I
come from 1934," I said, "by means of a time machine." "Ah," he
breathed. "1
am beginning to know, to understand. So that is
what it is."
I followed the direction of his eyes, I stared,
I gaped; for there, not twelve yards to one
side of me, stood the time machine! How I had failed to see it on first
entering the room it is impossible to say. Perhaps the sight of the man on the
dais had riveted my attention to the exclusion of all else. But there it was, the thing I had given up hopes of ever finding again.
With an exclamation of joy I reached its side, I touched it with my hand. Yes,
it was the time machine and seemingly undamaged. I believe I laughed hysterically. The road to escape was open. With a
lightened heart I turned my attention to what was transpiring
in the room. Bane Borgson was talking to the Mentanicals and it was uncanny to
see his lips forming their incredible language, to hear them answering back. At
length he turned to me. "Listen," he said tensely, "they have
never learned to enunciate or understand human speech, but in many ways the
Mentanicals are more formidable, more advanced than man in his prime."
I laughed at this. I was once more my assured, devilmaycare self. "And yet they believe
that they evolved from that junkheap in their museums!"
"And
haven't they?" he asked quietly. "Not in the way they think, perhaps,
but still—evolved. Besides you failed to see their museums with articulated bothes of men and beasts. There is much you failed to
see!" He paused. "The Mentanicals' system of thought, of science, is
coherent and rational to them; and if there be contradictions, well, does that
interfere with them making scientific discoveries transcending those of man?
They have long been discussing the phenomenon of time and the feasibility of
traveling in it. I know that because I have listened to them. Yet for some
reason they have been unable to make a time machine. But you know radio—yes,
radio—they have been utilizing discoveries in that field to send messages back
in time. Your coming here has not been accidental—do you understand that?—not
entirely accidental. By means of their timeradio they have willed your coming,
made possible your time machine. Don't ask me how, I don't know, not clearly,
but they have done it—and you are here! But fortunately it was a creature similar to themselves they expected; to them you are merely an
Omo, a beastman of the machine. So they are puzzled,
they don't quite understand (that is why they have been experimenting with
you), but soon they will. Listen," he said hoarsely, "can't you
realize what a menace to men of the past, of your day, these
Mentanicals could be? Oh, your weapons, your machine guns and gas, your
powerful explosives! I tell you they would be as nothing against the deadly
rays and indescribable forces these Mentanicals could bring against them. Can
you gas something that doesn't breathe, shoot what is practically impervious to
bullets, that can blow up, that can explode your powder magazines, your high
explosives, at a distance of miles? The Mentanicals would enter your age, not
to conquer man—they know little of him, regard him as an inferior creature, an
evolutionary handover of premachine life—but to expand, take over your cities,
to . . . to. . . . What do I know of their idea of profit, of selfgain and
ambition, but doubtless they have it. Listen!"—The great head surged
forward, the dark eyes fixed mine compellingly—"You must leap into your
time machine before they can prevent, return to your own day and age, at
once!"
"And leave you
behind?"
"How
can you take me with you? That is impossible. Besides I am weary of life, I
have caused too much woe and misery to want to live. The Mentanicals refuse me
the boon of death, but you will not refuse. That gun in your hand—there are
bullets in it yet—one of them here——"
"No!
no!" *
"For God's sake, be
merciful!"
"I will return for
you."
"You
must never return! Do you hear me? Not a second time would you escape. Perhaps
it is too late to escape now! Up! up with your gun!
Aim at the crystal. Its breaking brings me peace and will distract attention
while you leap into your machine. Now! now!"
There
was nothing else to do; I saw that in a flash;
already the Mentanicals were gliding towards me and once in their invisible
grip. ... I threw up my hand; the gun spoke with a roar; I heard a tinkling crash as of glass, and in the same instant vaulted into
the seat of the time machine.
It
was a close thing, 1 tell you, a mighty close thing.
They came for me with a rush. The high sides of the passengerseat protected me
for a moment from their deadly clutch, but I felt the time machine sway under
it, tilt over. In that split second before my hand closed on the lever I saw it
all, the rushing Mentanicals, the shattered glass, Bane Borgson sinking into
the apathy of death, his great head lolling; then I pulled the lever, pulled it
back to Zero!
Ill
Captain Bronson stood up. He looked at us
bleakly. "You know the rest. The time machine has been moved. In coming
back a portion of it must have materialized inside of a solid—the old stone
wall—and caused an explosion. But what I want to know—what has been bothering
me at times —did I do right to shoot Bane Borgson? I
might have escaped without that."
"He wanted to the," said the Doctor
at length.
Olson
Smith inclined his head. "I don't see what else you could have done."
"To
have left him there," I said, "to a life in death, after all those
years, no, no, that would have been too horrible!"
Bronson
drew a deep breath, "That was my own thought; but I am glad you agree. . .
."
He poured himself a drink.
"If I hadn't seen you disappear with my
own eyes," said the Doctor. "I don't blame you," said Bronson;
"the whole thing sounds like a pipedream."
"A pipedream," I murmured.
"But
there is another angle to it," said Bronson grimly. "What Bane
Borgson said about the timeradio influencing the building of the time machine
and compelling my coming. Oh, he may have been raving,
poor devil, or mistaken, but remember what the Professor said that night at the
dinner, about something whispering in his brain? We'll have to guard against
that."
The
Doctor said sadly: "Nothing'U whisper to the Professor anymore,
Captain."
"What do you mean?"
"I forgot that we'd kept it from
you."
"Kept what?"
"The news of the
accident. On
that night you took your trip into the future, the time machine struck
Professor Stringer on the head." "He is dead?"
"Unfortunately, no. But his brain is affected. The Professor
will never be the same again."
Thus
the strange and incredible story ends. There is only this to add: Olson Smith
is devoting his vast fortune and influence to fighting the manufacture of
mechanical braincells for machines. "What do you expect to do," I
demand, "change the future?"
"Perhaps," he
answers. "One never knows until he tries."
So
he goes up and down the country, the world, buying up inventions, chemical
processes. It has become a mission with him, a mania. But the hands of the
future are not changed by invididuals but by social forces, and the genius of
man seems determined to lead him into a more mechanized world.
As for the rest, time alone
will tell.
VENGANCE IN HER BONES
Malcolm Jameson
The late Malcolm Jameson was a naval officer who turned to writing after he had retired from service. Your editor has always preferred those stories of his that dealt with deep water over those that dealt with deep space. There is a verisimilitude about sea stories that all the phony parallels about spacegoing navies can never attain. The feeling all seafarers get about their ships— the animism with which they regard them—is a real thing. And a strange tale of the sea is far more likely to arouse genuine reader emotion than the most slickly handled but irrevocably synthetic story of a moonflying navy.
THE MESSENGER from the Navy recruiting office
found old Captain Tolliver in his backyard. The crabby, sourvisaged housekeeper
took him as far as the hedge back of the house and pointed the retired mariner
out to him. Captain Tolliver was reclining in a ragged canvas deckchair taking
the sun. He had on faded dungarees, soft and pliant as linen from hundreds of
scrubbings, and the stump of his handless left arm rested carelessly on his
lap. The pegleg that matched it lay in alignment with the one good leg. The
captain had his eyes closed, comfortably drinking in the sun's good heat, when
he heard the crunch of the messenger's step on the gravel walk that separated
the vegetable from the flower beds. The old skipper's hearing was still alert,
though, and at the sound he raised his lids and looked inquiringly at the
newcomer.
"Commander
Jason's compliments, sir," said the bluejacket, "and would you please
step down to the office. He has a ship for you."
Captain
Tolliver smiled feebly, then he closed his eyes
against the glare. His eyes were not overstrong these days—the doctors had said
something about incipient cataracts.
"Commander
Jason is confusing me with my son. He already has a ship, working out of West
Coast ports. My seagoing days are over. Forever."
To
emphasize his point lie waved the stump of his left arm, and lifted the pegleg
slightly.
"No, sir. It's you he wants. He was very clear about that. He has a ship that
only you can command. She's a rogue. They say she will obey no other skipper.
He says they have waived your physical defects and will give you all the help
you need. But they've got to have you." The captain shook his head.
"He's
wrong, I say. There is no such a ship. There was one once, but she rotted her
life away in the back channel. They sold her finally to a wrecking company and
broke her up for scrap. All I have to say to that is whoever bought that scrap
had better have a care as to how they use it. For she was a
vindictive wench. The Sathe Saxon bore grudges and would have her way no matter
what you did. . . ,"
"Yes,
sir," said the messenger, eagerly, "that's the ship—the Sathe Saxon —a cargo type vessel! They've put her back in commission but she won't
leave port. They need ships now that America is at war. Every
ship. That's why they need you. The commander says please come. If you
want, he'll send an ambulance."
"The
Sathe Saxon," whispered
the old captain, suddenly rapt with nostalgia for World War days when he and
she were in their prime.
Then
aloud, "He needn't bother about the ambulance. I can get there under my
own power, son. Give me a hand so I can get up and go dress. The old uniform
still fits, thank God."
Captain Tolliver's senility seemed to drop
from him as a cloak the moment the wellworn blue garments were back on his
lean frame. He looked a little ruefully at the tarnished gold lace on the
sleeves and at the cap device the years had tinted with green mold, but
nevertheless he brushed the uniform carefully, squared his shoulders, and
marched down the steps without availing himself of the sailor's proffered arm.
"So
they didn't break her up after all?" said the captain, as they waited at
the curb in the hope a cruising taxi would come by. "How
come? I know she was sold."
"Too expensive. She was part of a contract for scrap to be sent to the Japs some months
ago, but they only worked three days on her. She killed nine men the first day
they brought their cutting torches aboard, all of them in different ways. One
of her booms crashed down the second day and smashed five others. On the third
day seven suffocated in a hold, and two slipped and fell overboard. The men
said she was jinxed and threatened to call a strike So
they put a tug alongside and hauled her back to her old berth."
Captain Tolliver chuckled.
"For the Japs, huh? She knew it even before they attacked Pearl Harbor, but I might have
told 'em. But what's this about her refusing to
leave port. Doesn't that sound a little silly to you?"
His
faded old eyes twinkled when he asked the question. It was one that did sound
silly, when a person came to think about it. Yet he knew it was not silly and
one an experienced sailorman would answer as seriously as he could.
"There's no other word for it,
sir," replied the bluejacket, soberly. "She was refitted at Newport
News, given a crew and loaded
with cargo. They took her out to make a voyage to Spanish Morocco, loaded with grain and automobile tires. But she wouldn't pass the Thimble. Her rudder jammed
and she piled up hard, and at high tide, too. It took four days to pull her off. They took her back to the yard and
looked her steering gear over. It was
okay. So they started her out again. That time she sheered out to the other side and grounded near Willoughby Spit. The third time they tried
to take her out, she piled up in the dredged channel
and blocked all shipping for hours. The yard still insisted there was nothing
wrong with her steering gear and suspected sabotage—"
"I know," said
the captain. "They didn't find any evidence of it."
"That's
right. They gave her crew a clean
bill of health and ordered to sea
once more. She won't budge. She had steam up and stood a good dock trial, but once she was out in the stream her propellers quit
turning over—"
"With full throttle,
of course," remarked Captain Tolliver calmly.
"Yes, sir. With full pressure in the boilers and throttle wide
open. All she would do was drift until she banged into a dock.
"The
tugs got hold of her and tied her up again. The engineers swear her engines are
all right and there is no reason why she won't run. She just won't—that's
all."
A
taxi rounded the corner and caught the sailor's hail. As it slid to a stop before them the captain made one final remark.
"I
see. They looked up her record and found she was always that way. Except when I had command of her. Well, I know what is on
that little tub's mind and what to do about. It won't be orthodox, but if they
want her in service it is the only way."
"What's that, sir."
"Give her her head," said the old
man cryptically, then stiffly climbed into the cab.
It
was a week later thai Captain Tolliver arrived at Norfolk
Navy Yard. An aide of the admiral in charge of transport took him to the dock
where she lay. She looked spick and span and new and a painter's stage swung
under her near bow, and was to play her part in keeping supplies going Eastward
in spite of havoc to the West. Tolliver climbed up onto it with some difficulty
and patted one of the shiny plates of her nose.
"Up
to your old tricks, eh, Sathe?" the astonished aide heard him say.
"Well, everything's going to be all right now. We'll go hunting together."
Was
it the wash of a passing tug that caused her to bob suddenly up and down that
way? The aide shrugged his shoulders and was glad he was in the regular outfit.
Ele would hate to have to go to sea through the war zone on a rogue ship under
the command of a decrepit and senile madman of a skipper.
"I
am ready to take over," announced Tolliver when he was back on the dock,
"whenever those three men whose names I gave you have been replaced by
others more acceptable."
"Acceptable to whom, sir? I repeat that they are loyal American
citizens despite their German ancestry. They have been investigated
fully."
"Acceptable
to me as representative of the ship," answered the captain with all his
old dignity. "When they are off we sail. Not before. Perhaps it is prejudice—Sathe's
funny that way—perhaps your investigation was not as comprehensive as you
think. That's your problem."
The
aide laughed. The old lunatic, he thought, but I'm stuck I guess. They said
give him anything he asked for.
"Very well, sir,"
was what he said out loud.
Captain
Tolliver waited patiently beside the bow until the last of the three scowling
men had come down it laden with their bags and dunnage. Then he mounted to the
deck and went straightway to the bridge. His hand reached for the whistle pull.
A long, triumphant scream of a blast split the air.
"Stand
by your lines," bellowed the old man through a megaphone, "and tell
the tug never mind. We won't need her."
Two
hours later the Sathe Saxon swept through the dredged channel, picked up and passed the entrance
buoy to the bay. Throbbing with the vibration of her churning screws and rising
and falling to the heavy swell outside, she shook herself joyfully at the smell
and feel of the open sea. Cape Henry and Cape Charles Lights soon faded behind.
The Captain set a course for Bermuda, for the ship's orders had been changed. After the long delay in setting out the situation was different.
She was to rendezvous with a Gibraltar bound convoy at the island.
Male
Parker came up to take the watch. It was a cloudy, dark night and the ship was
running without lights.
"Keep
a sharp lookout," warned the captain, "and handle things yourself. I
don't want to be called unless something extraordinary occurs."
"Aye,
sir," acknowledged the mate surlily. By rights he should be the skipper of
this cranky tub—not this doddering old fool.
The
captain got down the ladder the best way he could and groped along the darkened
decks until he came to the door of his room. He did not undress at all but lay
down in his bunk as he was. The Sathe Saxon could be counted on to do the unexpected at
any time. He closed his eyes wearily, for the excitement of the day had taxed
his strength to the utmost. In a moment he was fast asleep.
It
must have been well after midnight when he was roused from his deep slumber.
Mr. Parker was standing over him with a look of concern on his face.
"She's gone crazy again, sir," he reported, "and we can't do a thing
with
her—"
"Don't try," directed the captain.
'What's she doing?" "Turned sharp to the left about fifteen minutes
ago and is turning up about twelve revolutions more than her proper speed. The
helmsman can't do anything about it. Neither can the engineer. She won't obey
her wheel or throttle. What do we do—fold up and call it a day?" Captain
Totliver sat up in his bunk.
"Oh, no. By no means. You'll be
awfully busy shortly. Turn out all hands at once. Man your lifeboats and have
them ready for lowering. Shut all watertight doors below and see that there is
plenty of shoring handy in case the peak gets stove in. Have the collision mat
ready. That's all."
"But
the steering?"
"Just
let the wheel go. She'll steer herself. She knows where she wants to go. I
don't."
The mate left and the old man dragged himself to
his mismated feet and began the laborious journey to the bridge. Once he was up
there he made sure that the searchlight was ready to turn on in case he needed
it. After that he could only wait.
The
wait was not long. Fifteen minutes later there was a shock, a grinding, bumping
of something under the forefoot and along the keel. The ship's engines stopped
abruptly, then began backing. Captain Tolliver reached
for the engine room telegraph and rang it to "Stop."
The ship stopped.
"Collision
forward!" shouted the lookout in the bow. "We just ran down a small
ship of some sort."
Tolliver
could hear the boatswain and his gang dropping into the fore hold to see
whether the damage was serious. Then he spoke quietly to the mate who was on
the bridge beside him.
"You
may put your boats in the water now, Mister. I have a hunch we just
ran down a Nazi sub. I'll put on the light as soon as you are lowered."
The
mate left on the run, more mystified than ever. A man came up from forward and
reported the peak was full up to the waterline but the bulkhead abaft it was
holding and the ship seemed to be in no danger.
"Turn on that
searchlight," ordered Captain Tolliver, "and sweep aft."
There
was a chorus of gasps as the light stabbed out into the murk
and almost instantly lit on a large black object rearing up above the waves. It
was the bow of a submarine, and even as they sighted it it slid backwards into
the deep. But in that brief glimpse they saw several men plunge overboard, and
as the light swept to right and left the bobbing heads of a dozen or more men
could be seen in the water.
"Pick
up those men and be smart about it," yelled Tolliver through his
megaphones to the boats. Then he watched as they dragged the survivors into
the boats and rowed back to the ship. He watched as they
hoisted the boats in and housed them at their davits.
"Put
those men under guard," he directed, "and get back on your course.
Things will be all right now." And with that he went
below to pick up his night's sleep where he had
left off.
The
arrival of the Sathe Saxon at Bermuda caused quite a stir. Many were the congratulations upon the
ship's luck in blundering across a Uboat and ramming
it in the dark. The two officers and eleven men rescued from the crash were
most welcome to the British Intelligence officers. Hasty arrangements were
made for quick repairs to the ship's damaged bow. She had missed the convoy for which she was intended, but there would be other
convoys and the little delay was well paid for by the bag of the undersea
wolf. Captain Tolliver took his praise modestly.
"It's
not all luck," he said. "It is a habit of the Sathe Saxon. If
you will look up her record in the last war you will see she has done that sort
of thing before."
By
the time the ship was ready for sea again the hubbub had thed down. Captain Tolliver
took the position assigned him with entire calm and confidence. It was a big
convoy and made up of three columns of ships. The Sathe Saxon was
given the post of danger and honor as the lead ship of the righthand column.
But destroyers frolicked about ahead and on the flanks. It would be costly for
any submarine to tackle that wellguarded flotilla.
For
three nights they went eastward, steaming without lights and in formation.
There was no alarm other than the appearance overhead one day of a trio of
scout bombers marked with the black and white crosses of Germany. The
antiaircraft guns of the escorting warships kept them at too great a height to
do any damage, and so drove them away. But after their appearance old Captain
Tolliver knew anything might happen. The Sathe Saxon had
behaved most peculiarly all the while they were in sight, vibrating almost as
if she had dropped a screw.
"Steady,
old girl," whispered the skipper into the binnacle, "you'll have to
get used to those. They're an innovation."
It
was the night after that that the big attack occurred. The long triple column
of ships was plowing along through a dark and misty night and thirty officers
on as many bridges were staring anxiously into the murk striving not to lose
sight of the tiny blue stern light of the ship ahead. Under the circumstances
mutual collision was much more likely than a hostile attack. The orders were
strict—maintain radio silence at all costs, never show a light under any
circumstances, and above all, keep station.
But
the Sathe Saxon cared
next to nothing about commodore's orders. At ten minutes past four in the
morning she balked, her engines churning violently at full speed astern, to the
consternation of the black gang who had had no bells to that effect and were caught
off guard. Captain Tolliver was on the bridge when it happened and called
sharply to the forward lookouts:
"Look sharply close
aboard! What do you see?"
The
ship was turning rapidly to starboard, her rudder jammed hard over, while the
helmsman strove wildly to bring the wheel back the other way.
"The
wakes of two torpedoes, sir—no, four—five—nine! Coming from
starboard, sir."
The streaks of phosphorescent light were
visible now from the bridge.
The Sathe Saxon was turning straight into them; she would pass
safely between a pair of them.
The
aged skipper acted with an alacrity that surprised even him. He yelled for the
searchlight and with his own hand pulled the whistle into a strident blast of
warning. The searchlight came on and threw its beam straight ahead. There, in a
line, were three gray conning towers—three submarines on the surface and in
fairly close formation. The nearest destroyer saw them too and at once plunged
toward them with its guns blazing. Geysers of white water shot up about the nearest
one. A couple of seconds later a bright flash told of a sixinch hit squarely at
the base of a conning tower. The other two subs were diving hard, but the one
that was hit did not dive. Or did not dive the regular way.
It rolled slowly over toward the Sathe Saxon, spilling frantic men from its torn
superstructure, then settled to its grave.
The
leading freighter of the middle column suddenly blew up with a bang, lighting
up the sea like day. A moment later the second ship of the lefthand column
burst into flames. At least two of the nine torpedoes fired had found a mark.
But the subs that fired them had no opportunity to fire more. They had been
ambushed in their own ambush, and already three destroyers were racing back and
forth over the spots where they had last been seen and dropping depthcharges by
the score. Similar activities were going on on the other side. Apparently there
had been other subs waiting there as well.
The
Sathe Saxon lay
still where she was until the survivors of the two ships destroyed had been
brought on board. Then she unaccountably turned due south and ran for an hour
at full speed. There she stopped and refused to budge another yard. It was well
past the dawn then and a destroyer could be seen on the horizon behind still
searching for vestiges of their attackers.
"Signal
that destroyer," the captain said, "and tell
him to come over here. We've got one spotted."
The
destroyer came up within hail, and its captain delivered a blistering message
through what must have been an asbestoslined megaphone.
"Will
the second on that ship kindly relieve that blithering idiot in command and
put him under arrest? The—"
"The
sub's right under me," Tolliver yelled back, "playing possum a
hundred feet or so down." The ship started moving ahead. "Come in and
drop your eggs. Then lock me up if you want."
He
turned to Parker who was in a quandary as to what to do. The performances of
the ship had shaken his nerve. He had begun to wonder whether he was the crazy man. Tolliver ignored him. Instead he walked out to the
wing of the bridge and watched the destroyer do its work.
Huge
seething hummocks of water rose as the ashcans exploded under the surface. Four
of them had gone off and the destroyer was coming back for a second run across
the same spot. But there was no need. A half mile away a black nose appeared
for a moment on the surface, stuck its beak up into the air, then with a loud hissing of escaping air fell back weakly into the water. Where it
had been were three bobbing heads. There had been
a sub under there!
"Thanks," flashed
the destroyer, "well done. Rejoin convoy."
They
went past Gib without stopping and made the hazardous trip to Alexandria
without incident other than a few sporadic and ineffectual raids by enemy
aircraft. At Alexandria Captain Tolliver found this message waiting for him;
it was from ONI.
"You are a better guesser than some of our experts. The three men you tipped us ojj to are in jail. They planned to seize the ship and divert it to a Norwegian port. Congratulations."
The
skipper gave a brief snort and then crammed the message into a pocket with his
one good hand. Then he learned that on the voyage home he was to carry the
convoy's commodore. The "commodore," a retired Navy captain, came
aboard and looked around.
He
did not say much until they were out of the Mediterranean and well to the west
of Portugal. By then they had been joined by many other ships and were steaming
in a formation much like the one before, with the difference that this time,
being flagship, they were more nearly in the middle of the flotilla.
"You
seem to have a remarkable ability to spot submarines, Captain," he
remarked. "What is your secret?"
"Me?"
said the skipper indignantly. "Hell, I can't see a submarine in the dark
or under water any farther than the next man. All the credit is due to Sathe.
She smells 'em. She hates 'em, too."
"Yes.
I know. She rammed several in the last war, didn't she? And didn't they make
her into a Qship?"
"She
did. She was. If you'll look down there on the pedestal of the binnacle stand
you'll see some file marks. There are fourteen of 'em now. Each one stands for a Uboat. Or raider. I tell you, she
don't like Germans. She was a German herself, you know, but they didn't treat
her right. She has a grievance."
"Now,
Captain," laughed the commodore, "don't you think you are carrying
your little joke too far? After all . . ."
"Do
you know the story of this ship?" asked Tolliver fiercely, "well, listen."
It
was close to midnight then and a bright moon was shining. The silhouettes of
the ships about were distinct as black masses against the glittering
whitekissed sea. The two officers went on talking, but their eyes were
steadfastly kept ahead. This was a night when anything might happen.
"In
1914 this ship was spanking new. She was the Koenigen von Sachsen or
something of the sort, freshly turned out of the Vulcan Works at Stettin. The
outbreak of the war caught her at Hoboken and they tied her up for the
duration. But when we joined the war in '17 and took her over, her innards were
something pitiful to see. Her crew had dryfired her boilers and they were a
mass of sagging tubes. The vandals cracked her cylinders with sledges, threw
the valve gear and cylinder heads overboard, and messed up all the auxiliaries.
They fixed the wiring so it would short the moment juice was put on it, and
they took down steam leads and inserted steel blanks between the flanged
joints. In other places they drove out rivets and replaced them with ones of
putty. I tell you she was dynamite, even after they fixed up the boilers and
main machinery.
"Naturally,
having a thing like that done to you would make you sore— especially if you
were young and proud and the toast of the Imperial German merchant marine. But
that was not all. On her first trip across—I was mate then—a sub slammed a torp
into her off the north of Ireland and it took her stern away. Luckily she
didn't sink and another ship put a hawser on us and worried us into Grennock
where they fixed her up. That would have been bad enough, but on the trip home
she smacks into a submarinelaid mine off the Delaware Capes and blows in her
bow. We had to beach her near Cape May.
"They
rebuilt her again and we set out. But her hardluck—or mistreatment
rather—wasn't at an end. In those days our Secret Service wasn't as good as it
is now and a saboteur got aboard. He gummed up things pretty bad. So bad that
we caught afire and almost sank in midocean. It took some doggoned hard work to
save that ship, but help came and we stayed afloat. Well, that was the end of
her patience. She went hogwild. After that, no matter whether she was in convoy
or not, whenever, anything that was German was around—sub, torpedo, raider or
what not—she went after it, and never mind engine room bells or rudder. Her
whimsies cost me a hand and a leg before we were through, but I didn't mind. I
figured I could take it if she could.
"She
broke the hearts of three captains. A lot of captains, you ought to know,
object to having the ship take charge. They said she was unmanageable and
chucked their jobs. That left me in command, though at the time I didn't rate
the job. Knowing something of her history, I knew better than to interfere. Her
hunches are the best thing I know. No matter what she does . . ."
"Hey!"
yelled the commodore, thoroughly alarmed, "watch what you're doing."
The
Sathe Saxon had
sheered sharply from her course and was heading directly across the bows of a
ship in the column to one side of them. It was too late then, even if the Sathe had been tractable, to do anything about it. A collision was inevitable.
The commodore reached for the whistle pull, but Tolliver grabbed his arm and
held it.
"Wait," he urged,
"this means something. I know her."
An
angry, guttural shout came from the bridge of the ship whose path they were
about to cross. Then came the rending crash as steel
bit into steel —thousands of tons of it at twelve knots speed. The other ship
had rammed the Sathe Saxon just abreast the mainmast and she heeled over sharply, spilling deck gear over the off rail. At once
pandemonium reigned in the convoyas ships behind sheered out to avoid
compounding the already serious collision.
At
once fresh confusion succeeded. The ship that was the victim of the Sathe's caprice suddenly dropped her false bulwarks and the moonlight glinted
off the barrels of big guns both fore and aft. Harsh orders sounded in German
and the guns began spitting fire. Shells began bursting against ships on all
sides as the raider that had insinuated itself into the midst of the convoy
began its work. Escort ships began dashing toward the scene, worming their way
through the scattering freighters so as to get to a spot where they could open
fire.
"I told you,"
said Captain Tolliver, serenely. "You can always trust her."
But
she was sinking, and the crew were lowering what boats
they could. The commodore was one of the first to leave, since he was in charge of the entire expedition and must transfer his flag to a surviving ship. Tolliver stayed behind. There was not room enough in the
boats for one thing, and his faith in the durability of the Sathe Saxon was unlimited. He had
seen her in worse plight
many times before.
The
raider had succeeded in backing away, but it, too, was in a perilous condition. Her bows were torn wide open and she was fast going down by the head. She continued to fire viciously at
everything within reach, paying especial attention to the crippled Sathe Saxon. A
shell struck her funnel and threw fragments and splinters onto the bridge. One fragment struck Captain
Tolliver in the right thigh and he went down with a brief curse. Another pair
of projectiles burst aft among the rest of the crew who were engaged in freeing a life raft from the mainmast shrouds. It must have
killed them all, for when shortly afterward a destroyer ranged alongside and hailed, there was no answering cry.
Tolliver
hauled himself to the wing of the bridge and managed to cut an opening in the weather screen. He looked out
just in time to see
the flaming remnants of
the raider sink under the moontipped waves. The freighters had all gone and the
destroyers were charging off in a new direction.
Apparently submarines, working in conjunction with the camouflaged raider, had
made their appearance. Tolliver watched a moment, then
was aware of a
growing faintness. Hisleg
must be bleeding more than he thought.
In a moment everything turned black.
It
was broad daylight when he came to again. Another peep showed him an empty ocean. The convoy must have gone on, as it was proper and correct it should.
And then he heard the burr and roar of airplanes overhead. They swooped low, machinegunning the decks systematically on the
assumption men were still aboard. One, more
daring than the rest, swooped in between
the masts. Sathe Saxon was trembling in every plate and rivet.
"Steady,
girl," murmured the now delirious captain, laying his cheek against the bridge deck and patting it gently with his one hand, "you can't
handle those, I know. But we've done enough, you and I.
We can't keep afloat forever."
Her answer was typical. He had no way of
knowing how deep she was in the water, or what her trim, but she heeled
violently to port—hung there a moment, then turned quietly over on her side.
The instant she chose to do it was just as the daring raider plane was diving
beneath her radio antennae, ready to drop its final bomb. Captain Tolliver
heard its wings snap off and its body crash as the whipping, heeling mast
struck it. There was a final burst of flame, and the rest was cool,
green water. The old seadog felt the waves close over him, but he was smiling
and content.
"Bless her old heart," was his last
thought, "she even got one of those."
Of late the pages of sciencefiction periodicals have been filled with a lot of words about words. We refer to the stories based upon the neoscience of semantics, the talk about "nonAristolelianism," and the multiple social, political, moral, and psychological concepts that the more fanatical followers of these wordschemes derive from them. At risk of calling down the wrath of devotees, your editor must confess that most of these stories do not seem to make too much sense. And it is just possible that some of the readers of "The Gostak and the Doshes" may also express, for a while, similar bewilderment. Dr. Breuer's story, we think, was the very first story about semantics to appear in a fantasy magazine. It was written many years before its time, back in 1930, and we still feel that it is the best of the lot. We also suspect that it points a moral that could well be heeded in these hectic days of slogans, advertising, and mass hysterias.
L |
ET the reader suppose that somebody states: "The gostak disttms the doshes." JYou
do not know what this means, nor do I. But if we assume that it is English, we
know that the doshes are distimmed by
the gostak. We know that one distimmer of the doshes is a gostak. If,
moreover, doshes are galloons, we know that some galloons are distimmed by the
gostak. And so we may go on, and so wc often do go on.—Unknown writer quoted by
Ogden and Richards, in THE MEANING OF MEANING, Harcourt Brace & Co., 1923; also by Walter N. Polakov in MAN AND HIS AFFAIRS, Williams &
Wilkins, 1925.
“Woleshensky! That is lifting yourself by your own
bootstraps!" I exclaimed in amazed incredulity. "It's absurd."
Woleshensky
smiled indulgently. He towered in his chair as though in the infinite kindness
of his vast mind there were room to understand and overlook all the foolish
little foibles of all the weak little beings that called themselves men. A
mathematical physicist lives in vast spaces where a lightyear is a footstep,
where universes are being born and blotted out, where space unrolls along a
fourth dimension on a surface distended from a fifth. To him, human beings and
their affairs do not loom very important.
"Relativity," he explained. In his
voice there was a patient forbearance for my slowness of comprehension. "Merely relativity. It doesn't take much physical
effort to make the moon move through the treetops, does it? Just
enough to walk down, the garden path." I stared at him and he
continued:
"If
you had been bom and raised on a moving train, no one
could convince you that the landscape was not in rapid motion. Well, our
conception of the universe is quite as relative as that. Sir Isaac Newton tried
in his mathematics to express a universe as though beheld by an infinitely
removed and perfectly fixed observer. Mathematicians since his time, realizing
the futility of such an effort, have taken into consideration that what things 'are' depends upon the person who is looking at
them. They have tried to express common knowledge, such as the law of
gravitation, in terms that would hold good for all observers. Yet their leader
and culminating genius, Einstein, has been unable to express knowledge in
terms of pure relativity; he has had to accept the velocity of light as an
arbitrarily fixed constant. Why should the velocity of light be any more fixed
and constant than any other quantity in the universe?
"But,
what's that got to do with going into the fourth dimension?" I broke in impatiently.
He continued as though 1
hadn't spoken.
"The
thing that interests us now, at.d that mystifies modern mathematicians, is the
question of movement, or more accurately: translation. Is there such a thing as
absolute translation? Can
there be movement—translation— except in relation to something else than the thing that moves? All movement we know of is
movement in relation to Other objects, whether it be a
walk down the street, or the movement of the earth in its orbit around the sun.
A change of relative position.
But the mere translation of an isolated object existing alone in space is
mathematically inconceivable; for there is no such thing as space in that
sense."
"1
thought you said something about going into another universe—" I
interrupted again.
You
can't argue with Woleshensky. His train of thought went on without a break.
"By
translation we understand getting from one place to another.
"Going somewhere' originally meant a movement of our bothes. Yet, as a matter of fact, when we drive in an
automobile, we 'go somewhere' without moving our bothes
at all. The scene is changed around us; we are somewhere else; and yet we
haven't moved at all,
"Or suppose you could cast off
gravitational attraction for a moment and
let the earth rotate under you; you would be going somewhere, and yet not
moving----- "
"But that is theory; you can't tinker with gravitation-- "
"Every day you tinker
with gravitation. When you start upwards in an
elevator, your pressure, not your weight, against the
floor of it is increased;
apparent gravitation between you and the floor of the
elevator is greater
than before—and that's like gravitation is
anyway: inertia and acceleration. But we are talking about translation. The
position of everything in the universe must be referred to some sort of
coordinates. Suppose we change the angle or direction of the coordinates: then
you have 'gone somewhere' and yet you haven't moved, nor has anything else
moved." I looked at him, holding my head in my hands.
"I
couldn't swear that I
understand that," I said slowly. "And I repeat, that it looks like lifting yourself by your
own bootstraps."
The
homely simile did not dismay him. He pointed a finger at me as he spoke:
"You've
seen a chip of wood bobbing on the ripples of a pond. Now you think the chip is
moving; now the water. Yet neither is moving; the only motion is of an abstract
thing called a wave.
"You've
seen those 'illusion' diagrams, for instance this one of a group of cubes. Make
up your mind that you are looking down upon their upper surfaces, and indeed
they seem below you. Now change your mind, and imagine that you are down below,
looking up. Behold, you see their lower surfaces; you are indeed below them.
You have 'gone somewhere,' yet there has been no translation of anything. You have
merely changed coordinates."
"Which
do you think will drive me insane more quickly—if you show me what you mean, or if you keep on talking
without showing me?"
"I'll
try to show you. There are some types of mind, you know, that cannot grasp the
idea of relativity. It isn't the mathematics involved that matters; it's just
the inability of some types of menial organization to grasp the fact that the
mind of the observer endows his environment with certain properties which have
no absolute existence. Thus, when you walk through the garden at night the moon
floats from one tree top to another. Is your mind good enough to invert this:
make the moon stand still and let the trees move backwards.
Can you do that? If so, you can 'go somewhere' into another
dimension."
Woleshensky
rose and walked to the window. His office was an appropriate setting for such
a modern discussion as was ours; situated in a new, ultramodern building on the
University campus, the varnish glossy, the walls clean, the books neatly arranged
behind clean glass, the desk in most orderly array; the office was just as
precise and modern and wonderful as the mind of its occupant.
"When do you want to
go?" he asked.
"Now!"
"Then, I have two more things to explain
to you. The fourth dimension is just as much here as anywhere else. Right here around you and me things exist and go
forward in the fourth dimension; but we do not see them and are not conscious
of them, because we are confined to our own three. Secondly: if we name the
four coordinates as Einstein does, x, y, z, and t, then we exist in x, y, and
z, and move freely about in them; but are powerless to move in /. Why?
Because / is the time dimension; and the time dimension is a difficult one for
biological structures that depend on. irreversible
chemical reactions for their existence. But, biochemical reactions can take
place along any one of the other dimensions as well as along t.
"Therefore,
let us transform coordinates. Rotate the property of chemical irreversibility
from t to z. Since we are organically able to exist (or at
least to perceive) in only three dimensions at once, our new time dimension
will be 2. We shall be unconscious of z and cannot travel in it. Our activities and consciousness will take
place along x, y, and t.
"According
to flu ion writers, to switch into the / dimension, some sort of an apparatus
with an electrical field ought to be necessary. It is not. You need nothing
more to rotate into the / dimension than you do to stop the moon and make the
trees move as you ride down the road; or than you do to turn the cubes upside
down. It is a matter of relativity."
I had ceased trying to
wonder or to understand.
"Show me!" was
all I could gasp.
"The
success of this experiment in changing from the z to the / coordinate has depended largely upon my lucky discovery of a
favorable location. It is just as, when you want the moon to ride the tree tops
successfully, there have to be favorable features in the topography or it won't
work. The edge of this building and that little walk between the two rows of
Norway poplars seems to be an angle between planes in the z and t dimensions. It seems to slope downwards, does
it not?—Now walk from here to the end and imagine yourself going upwards. That
is all. Instead of feeling this building behind and above you, conceive it as behind and below. Just
as on your ride by moonlight, you must tell yourself that the moon is not
moving while the trees ride by—Can you do that? Go ahead then." He spoke
in a confident tone, as though he knew exactly what would happen.
Half
credulous, half wondering, I walked slowly out of the door; I noticed that
Woleshensky settled himself down to the table with a pad and a pencil to some
kind of study, and forgot me before I had finished turning around. I looked
curiously at the familiar wall of the building and the still more familiar
poplar walk, expecting to see some strange scenery, some unknown view from
another world. But there were the same old bricks and trees that I had known so
long; though my disturbed and wondering frame of mind endowed them with a
sudden strangeness and unwontedness. Things I had known for some years, they
were, yet so powerfully had Woleshensky's arguments impressed me that I already
fancied myself in a different universe. According to the conception of
relativity, objects of the x, y, z universe
ought to look different when viewed from the x, y, t universe.
Strange
to say, I had no difficulty at all in imagining myself as going upwards on my stroll along the slope. I told myself that the building was behind
and below me, and indeed it seemed real that it was that way. I walked some
distance along the little avenue of poplars, which seemed familiar enough in
all its details; though after a few minutes it struck me that the avenue seemed
rather long. In fact, it was much longer than I had ever known it to be before.
With
a queer AliceinWonderland feeling I noted it
stretching way on ahead of me. Then I looked back.
I
gasped in astonishment. The building was indeed below me. I looked down upon it from the top of an elevation. The astonishment
of that realization had barely broken over me, when I admitted that there was a building down there; but what building ? Not
the new Morton Hall, at least. It was a long,
threestory brick building, quite resembling Morton Hall, but it was not the
same. And on beyond there were trees with buildings among them; but it was not
the campus that I knew.
I
paused in a kind of panic. What was I to do now? Here I was in a strange place. How I had gotten there I had no idea. What ought I do about it? Where should I go? How was I to get back? Odd that I had neglected the precaution of how to get back.
I surmised that I must be on the t dimension.
Stupid blunder on my part, neglecting to find out how to get
back.
I
walked rapidly down the slope toward the building. Any hopes that I might have
had about its being Morton Hall were thoroughly dispelled in a moment. It was a
totally strange building, old, and oldfashioned looking. 1 had never seen it
before in my life. Yet it looked perfectly ordinary and natural, and was
obviously a University classroom building.
I
cannot tell whether it was an hour or a dozen that I spent walking frantically
this way and that, trying to decide to go into this building or another, and at
the last moment backing out in a sweat of hesitation. It seemed like a year,
but was probably only a few minutes. Then I noticed the people. They were
mostly young people, of both sexes. Students, of course.
Obviously I was on a University campus. Perfectly natural, normal young
people, they were. If I were really on the t dimension, it certainly resembled the z dimension very closely.
Finally
I came to a decision. I could stand this no longer. I selected a solitary,
quietlooking man, and stopped him.
"Where am I?" I
demanded.
He looked at me in astonishment. I waited for
a reply, and he continued to gaze at me speechlessly. Finally it occurred to me
that he didn't understand English.
"Do you speak
English?" I asked hopelessly.
"Of course!" he
said vehemently. "What's wrong with you?"
"Something's
wrong with something," I exclaimed. "I haven't any idea where I am or
bow I got here."
"Synthetic wine?"
he asked sympathetically.
"Oh, hell! Think I'm a fool? Say, do you have a good man in mathematical physics
on the faculty? Take me to him."
"Psychology,
I should think," he said, studying me. "Or psychiatry. But I'm a law
student and know nothing of either."
"Then make it
mathematical physics, and I'll be grateful to you."
So 1 was
conducted to the mathematical physicist. The student led me into the very
building which corresponded to Morton Hall, and into an office the position of
which quite corresponded to that of Woleshensky's office. However, the office
was older and dustier; it had a Victorian look about it, and was not as modern
as Woleshensky's room. Professor Vibens was a rather small, baldheaded man,
with a keen looking face. As I thanked the lawstudent and started on my story,
he looked rather bored, as though wondering why I had picked on him with my
tale of wonder. Before I had gotten very far he straightened up a little; and
further along he picked up another notch; and before many minutes he was tense
in his chair as he listened to me. When I finished, his comment was terse, like
that of a man accustomed to thinking accurately and to the point.
"Obviously you come into this world from another set of
coordinates.
As we are on the z dimension, you must have come to us from the t dimen
sion----- "
He disregarded my attempts to protest at this
point.
"Your
man Woleshensky has evidently developed the conception of relativity further
than we have, although Monpeters' theory comes close enough to it. Since I have
no idea how to get you back, you must be my guest. I shall enjoy hearing all
about your world."
"That
is very kind of you," I said gratefully. "I'm accepting because I
can't see what else to do. At least until the time when I can find me a place
in your world or get back on my own. Fortunately," I added as an afterthought,
"no one will miss me there, unless it be a few
classes of students who will welcome the little vacation that must elapse
before my successor is found."
Breathlessly eager to find out what sort of a
world I had gotten into, I walked with him to his home. And I may state at the
outset that if I had found everything upside down and outlandishly bizarre, I
should have been far less amazed and astonished than I was. For, from the walk
that first evening from Professor Viben's office along several blocks of
residence street to his solid and respectable home, through all of my goings
about the town and country during the years that I remained in the dimensional
world, I found people and things thoroughly ordinary and familiar. They looked
and acted as we do, and their homes and goods looked like ours. I cannot
possibly imagine a world and a people that could be more similar to ours
without actually being the same. It was months before I got over the idea that
I had merely wandered into an unfamiliar part of my own city. Only the actual experience
of wide travel and much sightseeing, and the knowledge that there was no such
extensive Englishspeaking country on the world that I knew, convinced me that I
must be on some other world, doubtless in the / dimension.
"A gentleman who has found his way here
from another universe," the professor introduced me to a strapping young
fellow who was mowing the lawn.
The professor's son was named John! Could
anything be more commonplace ?
"I'll
have to take you around and show you things tomorrow," John said
cordially, accepting the account of my arrival without surprise.
A
red headed servantgirl, roastpork and rhubarbsauce for dinner, and checkers
afterwards, a hot bath at bedtime, the ringing of a telephone somewhere else in the house—is it any wonder that it was
months before I would believe that I had actually come into a different
universe? What slight differences there were in the people and the world,
merely served to emphasize the similarity. For
instance, I think they were just a little more hospitable and
"oldfashioned" than we are. Making due allowances for the fact that I
was a rather remarkable phenomenon, I think I was welcomed more heartily in
this home and in others later, people spared me more of their time and interest
from their daily business, than would have happened under similar circumstances
in a correspondingly busy city in America.
Again,
John found a lot of time to take me about the city and show me banks and stores
and offices, lie drove a little squat car with tall wheels, run by a spluttering gasoline motor. (The car was not as perfect as our modern
cars, and horses were quite numerous in the streets. Yet John was a busy business man, the district superintendent of a lifeinsurance agency). Think of it! Life insurance in
Einstein's / dimension.
"You're young to be
holding such an important position," I suggested.
"Got
started early," John replied. "Dad is disappointed because I didn't
see fit to waste time in college. Disgrace to the family, I am."
What
in particular shall I say about the city? It might have been any one of a couple of hundred American cities. Only it wasn't. The electric street
cars, except for their bright green color, were perfect; they might have been
brought over bodily from Oshkosh or Tulsa. The tencent stores with gold letters
on their signs; drugstores with soft drinks; a mad, scrambling stockexchange;
the blaring sign of an advertising dentist; brilliant entrances to mot
ionpicture theaters, were all there. The beautyshops did wonders to the women's
heads, excelling our own by a good
deal, if I am any judge; and at that time I had nothing more important on my
mind than to speculate on that question. Newsboys bawled the Evening Sun, and
the Morning Gale, in whose curious, flat type I could read accounts of legislative doings,
murders, and divorces, quite as fluently as I could in my own Tribune at home. Strangeness and unfamiliarity had bothered me a good deal on a trip to Quebec a couple of years ago; but
they were not noticeable here in the t dimension.
For three or four weeks the novelty of going
around, looking at things, meeting people, visiting concerts, theaters, and
department stores, was sufficient to absorb my interest. Professor Vibens'
hospitality was so sincerely extended that I did not hesitate to accept, though
I assured him that I would repay it as soon as I got established in this world.
In a few days I was thoroughly convinced that there was no way back home. Here
I must stay, at least until I learned as much as Woleshensky knew about crossing
dimensions. Professor Vibens eventually secured for me a position at the University.
It
was shortly after I had accepted the position as instructor in experimental
physics and had begun to get broken into my work, that I noticed a strange
commotion among the people of the city. I have always been a studious recluse,
observing people as phenomena rather than participating in their activities. So
for some time I noted only in a subconscious way the excited gathering in
groups, the gesticulations and blazing eyes, the wild sale of extra editions of
papers, the general air of disturbance. I even failed to take an active
interest in these things when I made a railroad journey of three hundred miles
and spent a week in another city; so thoroughly at home did I feel in this
world that when the advisability arose of my studying laboratory methods in
another University, I made the trip alone. So absorbed was I in my laboratory
problems that I only noted with half an eye the commotion and excitement
everywhere, and merely recollected it later. One night it suddenly popped into
my head that the country was aroused over something.
That
night I was with the Vibens' family in their living room. John tuned in the
radio. I wasn't listening to the thing very much; I had troubles of my own. F=g
—J— was familiar enough to me. It meant the same
and held as rigidly here as in my old world. But, what was the name of the bird
who had formulated that law? Back home it was Newton. Tomorrow in class I would
have to be thoroughly familiar with his name. Pasvieux, that's what it was.
What messy surnames. It struck me that it was lucky that they expressed the
laws of physics in the same form, and even in the same algebraical letters, or
I might have had a time getting them confused—when all of a sudden the radio
blatantly bawled:
"THE
GOSTAK DISTIMS THE GOSHES!"
John jumped to his feet.
"Damn right!" he
shouted, slamming the table with his fist.
Both
his father and mother annihilated him with withering glances, and he slunk from
the room. I gazed stupefied. My stupefaction continued while the Professor shut
off the radio, and both of them excused themselves from my presence. Then
suddenly I was alert.
I
grabbed a bunch of newspapers, having seen none for several days. Great
sprawling headlines covered the front pages:
"THE
GOSTAK DISTIMS THE DOSHES."
For
a moment I stopped, trying to recollect where I had heard those words before.
They recalled something to me. Ah, yes! That very afternoon, there had been a
commotion beneath my window on the University campus. I had been busy checking
over an experiment so that I might be sure of its success at tomorrow's class,
and looked out rather absently to see what was going on.
A group of young men from a dismissed class
was passing, and had stopped lor a moment.
"1 say, the gostak distims the doshes!" said a finelooking young fellow.
His face was pale and strained looking.
The young man facing him sneered derisively:
"Aw your grandmother! Don't be a feeble------- "
He
never finished. The first fellow's fist caught him in the cheek. Several books
dropped to the ground. In a moment the two had clinched and were rolling on the
ground, fists flying up and down, smears of blood appearing here and there. The
others surrounded them, and for a moment
appeared to enjoy the spectacle; but suddenly recollected that it looked rather
disgraceful on a University campus, and after a lively tussle separated the
combatants. Twenty of them, pulling in two directions, tugged them apart.
The
first boy strained in the grasp of his captors; his white face was flecked with
blood, and he panted for breath.
"Insult!"
he shouted, giving another mighty heave to get free. He looked contemptuously
around. "The whole bunch of you ought to learn to stand up for your honor.
The gostak distims the doshes!"
That
was the astonishing incident that these words called to my mind. I turned back to my newspapers.
"Slogan Sweeps the Country," proclaimed the subheads. "Ringing Ex
pression of National Spirit! Enthusiasm Spreads Like Wildfire! The new
patriotic slogan is gaining ground rapidly," the leading article went on.
"The fact that it has covered the country almost instantaneously seems to
indicate that it fills a deep and longfelt want in the hearts of the people.
It was first uttered during a speech in Walkingdon by that majestic figure
in modern statesmanship, Senator Harob. The beautiful sentiment,
the won
derful emotion of this sublime thought, are epochmaking. It is a great con
ception, doing credit to a great man, and worthy of being the guiding light
of a great people----- "
That
was the gist of everything I could find in the papers. I fell asleep, still
puzzled about the thing. I was puzzled, because—as I see now and didn't see
then—I was trained in the analytical methods of physical science, and knew
little or nothing about the ways and emotions of the masses of the people.
In
the morning the senseless expression popped into my head as soon as 1 awoke. I determined to waylay the first member of the Vibens family who
showed up, and demand the meaning of the thing. It happened to be John. John,
what's a gostak?"
John's
face lighted up with pleasure. He threw out his chest and a look of pride
replaced the pleasure. His eyes blazed, and with a consuming enthusiasm, he shook hands with me, as the deacons shake
hands with a new convert—a sort of glad welcome.
"The gostak!" he
exclaimed. "Hurray for the gostak!"
"But what is a gostak?"
"Not a gostak! The gostak. The gostak is—the distimmer of the Joshes
—see! He distims 'em, see?"
"Yes, yes. But what is
distimming? How do you distim?"
"No, no! Only the
gostak can distim. The gostak distims the doshes. See?"
"Ah,
I see!" I exclaimed. Indeed, I pride myself on my quick wit. "What
are doshes? Why, they are the stuff distimmed by the gostak. Very
simple!"
"Good
for you!" John slapped my back in huge enthusiasm. "I think it
wonderful for you to understand us so
well, after being here only a short time. You are very patriotic."
I gritted my teeth tightly,
to keep myself from speaking.
"Professor
Vibens, what's a gostak?" I asked in the solitude of
his office an hour later.
He looked pained.
He
leaned back in his chair and looked me over elaborately, and watted some time
before answering.
"Hush!"
he finally whispered. "A scientific man may think what he pleases; but if
he says too much, people in general may misjudge him. As a matter of fact, a
good many scientific men
are taking this socalled patriotism seriously. But a mathematician cannot use words
loosely; it has become second nature with him to inquire closely into the
meaning of every term he uses."
"Well,
doesn't that jargon mean anything at all?" I was beginning to be puzzled
in earnest.
"To
me, it does not. But it seems to mean a great deal to the public in general.
It's making people do things, is it not ?"
I
stood a while in stupefied silence. That an entire great nation should become
fired up over a meaningless piece of nonsense! Yet, the astonishing thing was
that I had to admit that there was plenty of precedent for it in the history of
my own zdimensional world. A nation exterminating itself in civil wars to
decide which of two profligate royal families should be privileged to waste the
people's substance from the throne; a hundred thousand crusaders marching to
death for an idea that to me means nothing; a meaningless, untrue advertising slogan that sells millions of dollars'
worth of cigarettes to a nation to the latter's own detriment—haven't we seen
it over and over again ?
"There's
a public lecture on this stuff tonight at the First Church of The Salvation," Professor Vibens suggested.
"I'll be there,"
I said. "I want to look into the thing."
That
afternoon there was another flurry of "extras" over the street;
people gathered in knots and gesticulated with open newspapers.
"War! Let 'em have it!" I heard men shout.
"Is
our national honor a rag to be mudthed and
trampled on?" the editorial asked.
As
far as I could gather from reading the papers, there was a group of nations
across an ocean that was not taking the gostak seriously. A ship whose pennant bore the slogan had been
refused entrance to an Engtalian harbor because it flew no national ensign. The
Executive had dispatched a diplomatic
note. An evangelist who had attempted to preach the gospel of the distimmed doshes at a public gathering in Itland had been ridden on a rail and otherwise abused. The Executive was dispatching a diplomatic note.
Public
indignation waxed high. Derogatory remarks about "wops" were flung
about. Shouts of "Holy war!" were heard. I could feel the tension in
the atmosphere as I took my seat in the crowded church in the evening. I had
been assured that the message of the gostak and the doshes would be thoroughly
expounded so that even the most simpleminded and uneducated people could
understand it fully. Although I had my hands full at the University, I was so
puzzled and amazed at the course that events were taking that I determined to
give the evening to finding out what the "slogan" meant.
There
was a good deal of singing before the lecture began. Mimeographed copies of the
words were passed about, but I neglected to preserve them, and do not remember
them. I know there was one solemn hymn that reverberated harmoniously through
the great church, a chanting repetition of "The
Gostak Distims the Doshes." There was another stirring martial air, that began: "Oh the Gostak! Oh
the Gostak!"—and ended with a swift cadence on the Gostak Distims
the Doshes!" The speaker had a rich, eloquent voice and a commanding
figure. He stepped out and bowed solemnly.
"The gostak distims the doshes," he
pronounced impressively. "Is it not
comforting to know that there is a gostak; do we not glow with pride be
cause the doshes are
distimmed? In the entire universe there is no more
profoundly significant fact: the gostak distims the doshes. Could anything
be more complete, yet more tersely emphatic. The gostak distims the
doshes!" Applause. "This thrilling
truth affects our innermost lives. What
would we do if the gostak did not distim the doshes? Without the gostak,
without doshes, what would we do? What would we think? How would
we feel ?----- "
Applause again.
At
first I thought this was some kind of an introduction. I was inexperienced in
listening to popular speeches, lectures, and sermons. I had spent most of my
life in the study of physics and its accessory sciences. I could not help
trying to figure out the meaning of whatever I heard. When I found none I began
to get impatient. I waited some more, thinking that soon he would begin on the real explanation. After thirty minutes of the same
sort of stuff as I have just quoted, I gave up trying to listen. I just sat and
hoped he would soon be through. The people applauded
and grew more excited. After an hour, I stirred restlessly; I slouched down in
my seat and sat up by turns. After two hours I grew desperate; I
got up and walked out. Most of the people were too excited to notice me. Only a few of them cast hostile glances at my retreat.
The
next day the mad nightmare began for me. First
there was a snowstorm of "extras" over the city, announcing the sinking of a
merchantman by an Engtalian cruiser. A dispute had arisen between the officers
of the merchantman and the port officials, because the latter had jeered
disrespectfully at the gostak. The merchantman picked up and started out
without having fulfdled all the Customs requirements. A cruiser followed it and
ordered it to return. The captain of the merchantman told them that the gostak
distims the doshes, whereupon the cruiser fired twice and sank the merchantman.
In the afternoon came the "extras" announcing the Executive's
declaration of war.
Recruiting
offices opened; the University was depleted of its young men; uniformed troops
matched through the city, and railway trains full of
them went in and out. Campaigns for raising war loans; horneguards, women's
auxiliaries, lathes' aid societies making bandages, young women enlisting as
ambulance drivers—it was indeed war; all of it to the constantly repeated
slogan: "The gostak distims the doshes."
I
could hardly believe that it was really true. There seemed to be no adequate
cause for a war. The huge and powerful nation had dreamed a silly slogan and
flung it in the world's face. A group of nations across the water had united
into an alliance, claiming they had to defend themselves against having forced
upon them a principle they did not desire. The whole thing at the bottom had no
meaning. It did not seem possible that there would actually be a war; it seemed
more like going through a lot of elaborate playacting.
Only
v/hen the news came of a vast naval battle of doubtful issue, in which ships
had been sunk and thousands of lives lost, did it come to me that they meant
business. Black bands of mourning appeared on sleeves and in windows. One of
the allied countries was invaded and a frontline set up. Reports of a division
wiped out by an airplane attack; of forty thousand dead in a fiveday battle; of
more men and more money needed, began to make things look real. Haggard men
with bandaged heads and arms in slings appeared on the streets; a church and an
auditorium were converted into hospitals; and trainloads of wounded were
brought in. To convince myself that this thing was so, I visited these wards,
and saw with my own eyes the rows of cots, the surgeons working on ghastly
wounds, the men with a leg missing or with a hideously disfigured face.
Food
became restricted; there was no white bread, and sugar was rationed. Clothing
was of poor quality; coal and oil were obtainable only on government permit.
Businesses were shut down. John was gone; his parents received news that he
was missing in action.
Real it was; there could be no more doubt of
it. The thing that made it seem most real was the picture of a mangled,
hopeless wreck of humanity sent back from the guns, a living protest against the
horror of v/ar. Suddenly someone would say: "The gostak distims the
doshes!" and the poor wounded fragment would straighten up and put out his
chest with pride, and an unquenchable fire would blaze in his eyes. He did not
regret having given his all for that. How could I understand it?
And
real it was when the draft was announced. More men were needed; volunteers were
insufficient. Along with the rest, I complied with the order to register, doing
so in a mechanical fashion, thinking little of it. Suddenly the coldest
realization of the reality of it was flung at me, when I was informed that my
name had been drawn and that I would have to go!
All
this time I had looked upon this mess as something outside of me; something
belonging to a different world, of which I was not a part. Now here was a card
summoning me to training camp. With all this death and mangled humanity in the
background, I wasn't even interested in this world. I didn't belong here. To be
called upon to undergo all the horrors of military life, the risk of a horrible
death, for no reason at all! For a silly jumble of
meaningless sounds.
I
spent a sleepless night in maddened shock from the thing. In the morning a
wild and haggard caricature of myself looked back at me from the mirror. But I
had revolted. I intended to refuse service. If the words conscientious
objector ever meant anything, I certainly was one. Even if they shot me for
treason at once, that would be a fate less hard to bear than going out and
giving my strength and my life for—for nothing at all.
My
apprehensions were quite correct. With my usual success at selfcontrol over a
seething interior, I coolly walked to the draft office and informed them that I
did not believe in their cause and could not see my way to fight for it.
Evidently they had suspected something of that sort already, for they had the
irons on my wrists before I had hardly done with my speech.
"Period
of emergency," said a beefy tyrant at the desk; "no time for
stringing out a civil trial. Courtmartial!"
He
said it at me vindictively, and the guards jostled me roughly down the
corridor; even they resented my attitude. The courtmartial was already waiting
for me. From the time I walked out of the lecture at the church I had been
under secret surveillance; and they knew my attitude thoroughly. That is the
first thing the president of the court informed me.
My
trial was short. I was informed that I had no valid reason for objecting.
Objectors because of religion, because of nationality, and similar reasons, were
readily understood; a jail sentence to the end of the war was their usual fate.
But I admitted that I had no intrinsic objection to fighting; I merely jeered
at their holy cause. That was treason unpardonable.
"Sentenced to be shot
at sunrise!" the president of the court announced.
The
world spun around with me. But only for a second. My
selfcontrol came to my aid. With the curious detachment that comes to us in
such emergencies, I noted that the courtmartial was being held in Professor
Vibens' office; that dingy little Victorian room, where I had first told my
story of traveling by relativity and had first realized that I had come to the
dimensional world. Apparently it was also to be the last room I was to see in
this same world, I had no false hopes that the execution would help me back to
my own world, as such things sometimes do in stories. When life is gone, it is
gone, whether in one dimension or another. I would be just as dead in the z dimension as in the / dimension.
"Now, Einstein, or
never!" I thought. "Come to my aid, O Riemann!
0 Lobatchewsky! If anything will save me it
will have to be a tensor or a geodesic."
I said it to myself rather ironically.
Relativity had brought me here. Could it get me out of this ?
Well! Why not?
If
the form of a natural law, yea, if a natural object varies with the observer who expresses it, might not the
truth and the meaning of the gostak slogan also be a matter of relativity? It
was like making the moon ride the tree tops again. If I could be a better
relativist, and put myself in these people's place, perhaps I could understand
the gostak. Perhaps I would even be willing to fight for him or it.
The
idea struck me suddenly. I must have straightened up and some bright change
must have passed over my features, for the guards who led me looked at me
curiously and took a firmer grip on me. We had just descended the steps of the
building and had started down the walk.
Making
the moon ride the tree tops! That was what I needed now. And that sounded as
silly to me as the gostak. And the gostak did not seem so silly. I drew a deep breath and felt very much encouraged. The viewpoint of relativity was somehow coming back to me. Necessity manages much. I could understand how one might fight for the idea of a gostak distimming the doshes. I felt almost like telling these men.
Relativity is a wonderful thing. They led me up the slope,
between the rows of poplars.
Then
it all suddenly popped into my head; how I had gotten here by changing my
coordinates, insisting to myself that I was going upwards. Just like making the moon stop and making the trees ride, when you are
out riding at night. Now I was going upwards. In my own world, in the z dimension, this same poplar was down the slope.
"It's
downwards!" I insisted to myself. I shut my eyes, and imagined the
building behind and above me. With my eyes shut, it did seem downwards.
1 walked
for a long time before opening them. Then I opened them and looked around.
I was at the end of the avenue of poplars. I was surprised. The avenue seemed short. Somehow it had become shortened;
I had not expected to reach the end so soon. And where were the guards in olive
uniform? There were none.
I turned around and looked back. The slope
extended on backwards above me. Indeed I had walked downwards. There were no
guards, and the fresh, new building was on the hill behind me.
Woleshcnsky stood on the steps.
"Now what do you think of a t dimension,"
he called out to me. Woleshensky!
And a new building, modern! Vibens' office was in an old, Victorian building. What was there in common between Vibens and
Woleshensky? I drew a deep breath. The comforting realization spread gratefully
overtne that I was back in my native dimension. The gostak and the war were
somewhere else. Here were peace and Woleshensky.
I hastened to pour out the
story to him.
"What
does it all mean?" I asked when I was through. "Somehow— vaguely—it
seems that it ought to mean something."
"Perhaps,"
he said in his kind, sage way, "we really exist in four dimensions. A part of us and our world that we cannot see and are
not conscious of, projects on into another dimension; just like the front edges
of the books in the bookcase, turned away from us. You know
that the section of a conic cut by the y plane looks different than the section of the same conic by the z plane? Perhaps what you saw was our own world and our own selves,
intersected by a different set of coordinates. Relativity, as I told you in the beginning."
STORM WARNING
Donald A. Wollheim
The story of "Storm Warning" grew directly out of the great impression that G. R. Stewart's remarkable book "Storm" made upon the writer. Constantly your editor has been impressed with the sparsity of our actual knowledge of the world—the things we think we know best so often turn out to be scarcely more than isolated fragments of a greater knowledge, our sciences mere segments of other sciences. Biology, chemistry, physics, astronomy, all seem to interlock, and the more we know the more we realize how tenuous our grip on universal understanding is. "Storm" impressed the writer with this observation on even that most prosaic of topics, the weather. And "Storm Warning" was the result.
WE HAD NO indication of the odd business that
was going to happen. The boys at the Weather Bureau still think they had all
the fun. They think that being out in it wasn't as good as
sitting in the station
watching it all come about. Only there are some things they'll never understand
about the weather, some things I think Ed and I alone will know. We were in the
middle of it all.
We were riding out of Rock Springs at sunrise
on a three day leave but' the Chief Meteorologist had asked us to take
the night shift until then. It was just as well, for the Bureau was on the
edge of the desert and we had our duffle and horses tethered outside. The
meteor fall of two days before came as a marvelous excuse to go out into the
badlands of the Great Divide Basin. I've always liked to ride out in the
glorious, wide, empty Wyoming land and any excuse to spend three days out there
was good.
Free
also from the routine and monotony of the Weather Bureau as welL Of course I
like the work, but still the open air and the open spaces must be bred in the
blood of all of us born and raised out there in the West I know it's tame and
civilized today but even so, to jog along with a
haphazard sort of
prospector's aim was really fine.
Aim
was of course to try and locate fragments of the big meteor that
landed out there two nights
before. Lots of people had seen it, myself foe one, because I happened to be
out on the roof taking readings. There had been a brilliant streak of bluewhite across
the northern sky and a sharp flash way off like an explosion. I understand that
folks in Superior claim to have felt a jolt as if something big had smashed up
out there in the trackless dust and dunes between Mud Lake, Morrow Creek, and
the town. That's quite a lot of empty territory and Ed and I had about as much
chance of finding the meteor as a needle in the haystack. But it was a swell
excuse.
"Cold
Front coming down from Saskatchewan," the Chief said as he came in and
looked over our charts. We were getting ready to leave. "Unusual
for this time of year."
I
nodded, unworried. We had the mountains between us and any cold wave from that
direction. We wouldn't freeze at night even if the cold got down as far as
Casper, which would be highly unlikely. The Chief was bending low over the map
tracing out the various lows and highs. He frowned a bit when he came to a new
little low I had traced in from the first reports of that day.
"An unreported low turning up just off Washington State. That's really odd. Since when are storms
originating so close?"
"Coming
east too and growing according to Seattle's wire," said Ed. Tire Chief sat
down and stared at the map.
"I
don't like it, it's all out of whack," he said. Then he stood up and held
out his hand to me.
"Well,
goodbye, boys and have a good time. If you find that meteor, bring me back a
chunk too."
"Sure
will," I said and we shook hands and yelled at the other boys and went
out.
The
first rays of the sun were just coming up as we left. Outwards we jogged
easily, the town and civilization fell behind rapidly and we went on into the
golden glow of the Sweetwater basin.
We
made good time that day though we didn't hurry. We kept up a nice steady trot,
resting now and then. We didn't talk much for we were too busy just breathing
in the clean open air and enjoying the sensation of freedom. An occasional
desert toad or the flash of a disturbed snake were the only signs of life we saw
and the multiform shapes of the cactus and sage our only garden. It was enough.
Towards
evening at the bureau, the Chief first noted the slight growth of the Southern
Warm Front. A report from Utah set him buzzing. The Cold Front had now reached
the borders of Wyoming and was still moving on. The baby storm that was born
where it bad no right to be born was still growing and now occupied a large
area over Oregon and Idaho. The Chief was heard to remark that the conjunction
of things seemed to place southwest Wyoming as a possible center of lots of
wild weather. He started worrying a bit about the two of us.
We
didn't worry. We didn't have any real indications but our weather men's senses
acted aright. We felt a sort of odd expectancy in the air as we camped. Nothing
definite, a sort of extra stillness in the air as if forces were pressing from
all sides, forces that were still far away and still vague.
We
talked a bit around the fire about the storm that the
Chief had noted when we left. Ed thought it would fizzle out. I think I had a feeling then that it wasn't just a shortlived freak. I
think I had an idea we might see something of it.
Next
morning there was just the faintest trace of extra chill in the air. I'm used
to Wyoming mornings and I know just how cold it ought to be at sunrise and how
hot. This morning it was just the slightest bit chillier.
"That
Canadian Cold Front must have reached the other side of the mountains," I
said, waving towards the great rampart of the Rockies to the East. "We're probably
feeling the only tendril of it to get over."
"That's
sort of odd," Ed said. "There shouldn't be any getting over at all.
It must be a very powerful front."
I
nodded and wondered what the boys in the bureau were getting on it. Probably snowfall in the northern part of the state. If I
had known what the Chief knew that morning, I might have started back in a
hurry. But we didn't and I guess we saw something that no one else has as a
result.
For
at the bureau, the Chief knew that morning that we were in for some
extraordinary weather. He predicted for the Rock Springs paper the wildest
storm ever. You see the Southern Warm Front had definitely gotten a salient through by that time. It was already giving Salt Lake City one
of the hottest days on record and what was more the warm wave was coming our
way steadily.
The
next thing was that storm from the west. It was growing smaller and tighter
again and had passed over Idaho Falls two hours ago raging and squawling. It
was heading in our direction like an arrow from a bow.
And
finally the Cold Front had done the impossible. It was beginning to sweep over
the heights and to swoop down into the Divide basin, heading straight for the
Warm Front coming north.
And there was Ed and I with a premonition and
nothing more. We were riding along right into the conflux of the whole mess and
we were locking for meteors. We were looking for what we expected to be some
big craters or pockmarks in the ground and a bunch of pitted iron rocks
scattered around a vicinity of several miles.
Towards ten that morning we came over a
slight rise and dipped down into a bowlshaped region. I stopped and stared
around. Ed wheeled and came back.
"What's up?" he asked.
"Notice anything funny in the air?"
I asked and gave a deep sniff Ed drew in some sharp breaths and stared around.
"Sort
of odd," he finally admitted. "Nothing I can place but it's sort of
odd."
"Yes," I answered. "Odd is the
word. I can't place anything wrong but it seems to smell differently than the
air did a few minutes ago." 1 stared around and wrinkled my brow.
"I
think I know now," I finally said. "The temperature's changed somewhat.
It's warmer."
Ed frowned. "Colder,
I'd say."
I
became puzzled. I waved my hands through the air a bit. "I think you're
right, I must be wrong. Now it feels a bit colder."
Ed walked his horse a bit. I stared slowly
after him.
"Y'know,"
I finally said, "I think I've got it. It's colder but it smells like warm air. I don't know if you can quite
understand what I'm driving at. It smells as if the temperature should be
steaming yet actually it's sort of chilly. It doesn't smell natural."
Ed
nodded. He was puzzled and so was I. There was something wrong here. Something that got on our nerves.
Far
ahead I saw something sparkle. I stared as we rode and then mentioned it to
Ed. He looked too.
There
was something, no, several things that glistened far off at the edge of the
bowl near the next rise. They looked like bits of glass.
"The
meteor, maybe?" queried Ed. I shrugged. We rode steadily on in that direction.
"Say, something smells
funny here," Ed remarked, stopping again.
I
came up next to him. He was right. The sense of strangeness in the air had
increased the nearer we got to the glistening things. It was still the
same—warmcold. There was something else again. Something like
vegetation in the air. Like something growing only there still wasn't any more
growth than the usual cacti and sage. It smelled differently from any other
growing things and yet it smelled like vegetation.
It
was unearthly, that air. I can't describe it any other way. It was unearthly.
Plant smells that couldn't come from any plant or forest I had ever
encountered, a cold warmness unlike anything that meteorology records.
Yet
it wasn't bad, it wasn't frightening. It was just peculiar. It was mystifying.
We
could see the sparkling things now. They were like bubbles of glass. Big
iridescent glassy balls lying like some giant child's marbles on the desert.
We
knew then that, if they were the meteors, they were like none that had ever
been recorded before. We knew we had made a find that would go on record and
yet we weren't elated. We were ill at ease. It was the funny weather that did
it.
I
noticed then for the first time that there were black clouds beginning to show
far in the west. It was the first wave of the storm.
We
rode nearer the strange bubbles. We could see them clearly now. They seemed
cracked a bit as if they had broken. One had a gaping hole in its side. It must
have been hollow, just a glassy shell.
Ed
and I stopped short at the same time. Or rather our horses did. We were
willing, too, but our mounts got the idea just as quickly. It was the smell.
There was a new odor in the air. A sudden one. It had just that instant wafted itself across
our nostrils. It was at first repelling. That's why we stopped. But sniffing it
a bit took a little of the repulsion away. It wasn't so very awful.
In
fact it wasn't actually bad. It was hard to describe. Not exactly like anything
I've ever smelled before. Vaguely it was acrid and vaguely it was dry. Mostly I
would say that it smelled like a curious mixture of burning rubber and zinc
ointment.
It
grew stronger as we sat there and then it began to the away a bit as a slight
breeze moved it on. We both got the impression at the same time that it had
come from the broken glass bubbles.
We rode on cautiously.
"Maybe
the meteors landed in an alkali pool and there's been some chemical reaction
going on," I opined to Ed. "Could be," he said and we rode
nearer.
The
black clouds were piling up now in the west and a faint breeze began to stir.
Ed and I dismounted to look into the odd meteors.
"Looks like we better
get under cover till it blows over," he remarked.
"We've
got a few minutes, I think," I replied.
"Besides by the rise right here is just about the best cover around."
Back
at the Weather Station, the temperature was rising steadily and the Chief was
getting everything battened down. The storm was coming and, in meeting the thin
edge of the Warm Front wedge which was now passing Rock Springs, would create
havoc. Then the cold wave might get that far because it was over the Divide and
heading for the other two. In a few
minutes all hell would break loose. The Chief wondered where we were.
We
were looking into the hole in the nearest bubble. The things—they must have
been the meteors we were looking for—were about twelve feet in diameter and
pretty nearly perfect spheres. They were thickshelled, smooth, and very glassy
and iridescent, like motherofpearl on the inside They
were quite hollow, and we couldn't figure out what they were made of and what
they could be. Nothing I had read or learned could explain the things. That
they were meteoric in origin I was sure because there was the evidence of the
scattered ground and broken rocks about to show the impact. Yet they must have
been terrifically tough or something because, save for the few cracks and the
hole in one, they were intact.
Inside
they stank of that rubberzinc smell. It was powerful. Very
powerful.
The
stink had obviously come from the bubbles—there was no pool around.
It
suddenly occurred to me that we had breathed air of some other world For if these things were meteoric and the smell had come
from the inside, then it was no air of Earth that smelled like burning rubber
and zinc owlment.
It was the air of somewhere, I don't know where,
somewhere out among the endless reaches of the stars. Somewhere out there, out beyond the sun.
Another thought occurred to
me.
"Do
you think these things could have carried some creatures
?" I asked. Ed stared at me a while, bit his lip, looked slowly
around. He shrugged his shoulders without saying anything.
"The
oddness of the air," I went on, "maybe it was like the air of some
other world. Maybe they were trying to make our own air more breathable to
them?"
Ed
didn't answer that one either. It didn't require any. And he didn't ask me whom
I meant by "they."
"And what makes the
stink?" Ed finally commented. This time I shrugged.
Around
us the smell waxed and waned. As if breezes were playing with a stream of
noxious vapor. And yet, I suddenly realized, no breezes were blowing. The air
was quite still. But still the smell grew stronger at one moment and weaker at
another.
It
was as if some creature were moving silently about, leaving no trace of itself
save its scent.
"Look!"
said Ed suddenly. He pointed to the west. I looked and stared at the sky. The
whole west was a mass of seething dark clouds. But it was a curiously arrested
mass. There was a sharply defined edge to the area— an edge of blue against
which the black clouds piled in vain and we could see lightnings crackle and
flash in the storm. Yet no wind reached us and no thunder and the sky was
serene and blue overhead.
It
looked as if the storm had come up against a solid obstacle beyond which it
could go no further. But there was no such obstacle visible.
As a
meteorologist I knew that meant there must be a powerful opposing bank of air
shielding us. We could not see it for air is invisible but it must be there
straining against the cloud bank.
I
noticed now that a pressure was growing in my ears. Something was concentrating
around this area. We were in for it if the forces of the air ever broke
through.
The
stink welled up powerfully, suddenly. More so than it had
before. It seemed to pass by us and through us and around us. Then again
it was gone. It almost vanished from everything. We could detect but the
faintest traces of it after that passage.
Ed
and I rode out to an outcropping of rock. We dismounted. We got well under the
rock and we waited. It wouldn't be long before the protecting air bank gave
way.
To
the south now, storm clouds materialized, and then finally to the east and
north. As I learned later the cold wave had edthed around us and met the
Equatorial Front at last and now we were huddled with some inexplicable globes
from unknown space and a bunch of strange stinks and atmosphere, ringed around by a seething raging sea of
storm. And yet above, the sky was still blue and clear.
We
were in the midst of a dead center, in the midst of an inexplicable high
pressure area, most of whose air did not originate on Earth and the powers of
the Earth's atmosphere were hurling themselves against us from every direction.
I saw that the area of clear was slowly but
surely contracting. A lancing freezing breeze suddenly enveloped us. A breakthrough from the north. But it seemed to become
curiously blunted and broken up by countless thrusts of the oddly reeking air.
I realized as the jet of cold air reached my lungs how different the atmosphere
was in this pocket from that we are accustomed to breathe. It was truly alien.
And
yet always this strange air seemed to resist the advances of the normal.
Another slight breeze, this one wet and warm came in from the south and again a
whirl of the rubbery odored wind dispersed it.
Then
there came an intolerable moment. A moment of terrific compression and rise
and the black storm clouds tore through in wild streaks overhead and
spiderwebbed the sky rapidly into total darkness. The area of peace became narrow,
restricted, enclosed by walls of lightningshot storm.
I got an odd impression then. That we were embattled. That the forces of nature were
determined to annihilate and utterly rip apart our little region of invading
alien air, that the meteor gases were determined to resist to the last to keep
their curious stinks intact!
The
lightning flashed and flashed. Endless giant bolts yet always outside our
region. And we heard them only when a lance of cold or hot storm pierced
through to us. The alien air clearly would not transmit the sounds— it was
standing rigid against the interrupting vibrations!
Ed
and I have conferred since then. We both agree that we had the same
impressions. That a genuine life and death fight was going on. That that pocket
of otherworldly air seemed to be consciously fighting to keep itself from being
absorbed by the storm, from being diffused to total destruction so that no atom
of the unearthly gases could exist save as incredibly rare elements in the
total atmosphere of the Earth. It seemed to be trying to maintain its entirety,
its identity.
It
was in that last period that Ed and I saw the inexplicable things. We saw the
things that don't make sense. For we saw part of the clear area suddenly
contract as if some of the defending fotce had been withdrawn and we saw
suddenly one of the glass globes, one of the least cracked, whirl up from the
ground and rush into the storm, rush straight up!
It
was moving through the clear air without any visible propulsion. We thought
then that perhaps a jet of the storm had pierced through to carry it up as a
ball will ride on a jet of water. But no, for the globe
hurled itself into the storm, contrary to the direction of the winds, against
the forces of the storm.
The globe was trying to break through the
ceiling of black to the clear air above. But the constant lightnings that
flickered around it kept it in our sight. Again and again it darted against the
mass of clouds and was hurled wildly and furiously about. For a moment we
thought it would force its way out of our sight and then there was a sudden
flash and a sharp snap that even we heard and a few fragments of glassy stuff
came falling down.
I
realized suddenly that the storm had actually abated its fury while this
strange thing was going on. As if the very elements
themselves watched the outcome of the bait's flight. And now the storm
raged in again with renewed vigor as if triumphant.
The
area was definitely being forced back. Soon not more than twenty yards
separated us from the front and we could hear the dull endless rumbling of the
thunder. The stink was back again all around us. Tiny trickles of cold wet air
broke through now and then but were still being lost in the smell.
Then came the last moment. A sort of terrible crescendo in the storm and the stink finally broke
for good. I saw it and what I saw is inexplicable save for a very fantastic
hypothesis which I believe only because I must.
After
that revealing moment the last shreds of the stellar air broke for good. For
only a brief instant more the storm raged, an instant in which for the first
and last time Ed and I got soaked and hurled around by the wind and rain and the horses almost broke their tethers. Then it was
over. The dark clouds lifted rapidly. In a few minutes they had incredibly
thinned out, there was a slight rain, and by the time ten more minutes had
passed, the sun was shining, the sky was blue and things were almost dry. On
the northern horizon faint shreds of cloud lingered but that was all.
Of the meteor globes only a
few shards and splinters remained.
I've
talked the matter over as I said and there is no really acceptable answer to
the whole curious business. We know that we don't really know very much about
things. As a meteorologist I can tell you that. Why, we've been discussing the
weather from caveman days and yet it was not more than twenty years ago that
the theory of weather fronts was formulated which first allowed really decent
predictions. And the theory of fronts, which is what we modern weather people
use, has lots of imperfections in it. For instance we still don't know anything
about the why of things. Why does a storm form at all? We know how it grows,
sure, but why did it start and how?
We
don't know. We don't know very much at all. We breathe this air and it was only
in the last century that we first began to find out how many different elements
and gases made it up and we don't know for sure yet.
I
think it's possible that living things may exist that are made of gas only.
We're protoplasm you know but do you know that we're not solid matter—we're
liquid? Protoplasm is liquid. Flesh is liquid arranged in suspension in cells
of dead substances. And most of us is water, and water
is the origin of all life. And water is composed of two common gases, hydrogen
and oxygen. And those gases are found everywhere in the universe, astronomers say.
So
I say that if the elements of our life can be boiled down to gases, then why can't gases combine as gases and still
have the elements of
life? Water is always
present in the atmosphere as vapor, then why not a life as a sort of water vapor variant?
I
think it makes sense. I think it might smell odd if we accidentally inhaled
such a vapor life. Because we could inhale it like we do water vapor. It might
smell, say for example, like burning rubber and zinc ointment.
Because
in that last moment when the storm was at its height and the area of unearthly
air was compressed to its smallest I noticed that at one point a definite outline could be seen
against the black clouds and the bluewhite
glare of the lightning. A section of the otherworldly air had been sort of
trapped and pinned off from the main section. And it had a definite shape under
that terrible storm pressure.
I
can't say what it was like because it wasn't exactly like anything save maybe a
great amoeba being pushed down against the ground. There were lots of arms and
stubby wiggly things sticking out and the main mass was squashy and thick. And
it flowed along the ground sort of like a snail. It seemed to be writhing and
trying to slither away and spread out.
It
couldn't because the storm was hammering at it. And I definitely saw a big
black mass, round like a fist, hammer at one section of the thing's base as it
tried to spread out.
Then
the storm smashed down hard on the odd outline
and it squashed out flat and was gone.
I
imagine there were others and I think that when they aren't being compressed
they could have spread out naturally about a hundred yards along the ground and
upwards. And I think we have things like that only of Earthly origin right in
the atmosphere now. And I don't think that our breathing and walking and living
right through them means a thing to them at all. But they objected to the
invaders from space. They smel.led differently, they were different, they must
have come from a different sort of planet, a planet cooler than ours with
deserts and vegetation different from our own. And they would have tried to
remake our atmosphere into one of their own. And our native airdwellers stopped
them.
That's what I think.
Omega
Amelia Reynolds Long
Insofar as all men are mortal and foredoomed to death, and as far back as history and myth can pierce we are impressed with the similar mortality of, cities and peoples and kingdoms, it is quite natural that the death of the world is a subject that would engage the thoughts of the imaginative. In Amelia Reynolds Long's story, the subject is approached in an intriguing fashion. Without stirring from their own time, without a "time machine," the characters of "Omega" manage to get a vision of things to come—to share those experiences as well.
—/, DOCTOR MICHAEL CLAYBRIDGE,
living in the year 1926, have listened to a
description of the end of the world from the lips of the man who witnessed it;
the last man of the human race. That this is possible, or that I am not insane,
I cannot ask you to believe: I can only offer you the facts.
For
a long time my friend, Prof. Mortimer, had been experimenting with what he
termed his theory of mental time; but I had known nothing of the nature of this
theory until one day, in response to his request, I visited him at his
laboratory. I found him bending over a young medical student, whom he had put
into a state of hypnotic trance.
"A
test of my theory, Claybridge," he whispered excitedly as I entered.
"A moment: ago I suggested to Bennet that this was the date of the battle
of Waterloo. For him, it accordingly became so; for he described for me— and in
French, mind you—a part of the battle at which he was present!"
"Present!" I
exclaimed. "You mean that he is a reincarnation of—?"
"No,
no," he interrupted impatiently. "You forget—or rather, you do not
know—that time is a circle, all of whose parts are coexistent. By hypnotic
suggestion, I moved his materiality line until it became tangent with the Waterloo
segment of the circle. Whether in physical time the two have ever touched
before, is of little matter."
Of
course I understood nothing of this; but before I could ask for an explanation,
he had turned back to his patient.
"Attila, the Hun, is sweeping down upon
Rome with his hordes," he said. "You are with them. Tell me what you
see."
For
a moment, nothing happened; then before our very eyes, the young man's features
seemed to undergo a change. His nose grew beakshaped, while his forehead
acquired a backward slant. His pale face became ruddy, and his eyes changed
from brown to greygreen. Suddenly he flung out his arms; and there burst from
his lips a torrent of sounds of which Mortimer and I could make nothing except
that they bore a strong resemblance to the old Teutonic languages.
Mortimer
let this continue for a moment or so before he recalled the boy from his
trance. To my surprise, young Bennet was, upon awakening, quite his usual self
without any trace of Hun feature. He spoke, however, with a feeling of
weariness.
"Now,"
I said when Mortimer and I were alone, "would you mind telling me what it
is all about?"
He
smiled. "Time," he began, "is of two kinds; mental and physical.
Of these, mental is the real; physical the unreal; or, we might say, the instrument
used to measure the real. And its measurement is gauged by intensity, not
length."
"You mean—?" 1 asked, not sure that I followed him correctly.
"That
real time is measured by the intensity with which we live it," he
answered. "Thus a minute of mental time may, by the standards devised by
man, be three hours deep, because we have lived it intensely; while an eon of
mental time may embrace but half a day physically for reverse reasons."
" 'A
thousand years in Tby sight are but as yesterday when it is past, and as a
watch in the night,' " I murmured.
"Exactly,"
he said, "except that in mental time there is neither past nor future, but
only a continuous present. Mental time, as I remarked a while ago, is an
infinite circle with materiality a line running tangent to it. The point of
tangency interprets it to the physical senses, and so creates what we call
physical time. Since a line can be tangent to a circle at only one point, our
physical existence is single. If it were possible, as some day it may be, to
make the line bisect the circle, we shall lead two existences simultaneously.
"I
have proven, as you saw in the case of Bennet just now, that the point of
tangency between the time circle and the materiality line can be changed by
hypnotic suggestion. An entirely satisfactory experiment, you must admit; and
yet," he became suddenly dejected, "as far as the world is concerned,
it proves absolutely nothing."
"Why not?" I asked. "Couldn't others witness such a demonstration as well as
I?"
"And
deem it a very nice proof of reincarnation," he shrugged. "No,
Claybridge, it won't do. There is but one proof the world would consider; the
transfer of a man's consciousness to the future."
"Cannot that be
done?" I queried.
"Yes," he said.
"But there is connected with it an element
of danger.
Mental status has a strong effect upon the physical being, as was
witnessed by Bennet's reversion to the Hun type. Had I kept him in the hypnotic
state for too long a period, the Teutonic cast of features would not have vanished
with his awakening. What changes a projection into the future would bring, I
cannot say; and for that reason he is naturally unwilling that I experiment
upon him in that direction."
He
strode up and down the floor of his laboratory as he talked. His head was
slumped forward upon his breast, as if heavy with the weight of thought.
"Then
satisfactory proof is impossible?" I asked. "You can never hope to
convince the world?"
He
stopped with a suddenness that was startling, and his head went up with a jerk.
"No!" he cried. "I have not given up! I must have a subject for
my experiments, and I shall proceed to find one."
This
determined statement did not particularly impress me at the time, nor, for that
matter, did the timetheory itself. Both were recalled to me a week or so later,
when, in answer to his summons, I again visited Mortimer at the laboratory, and he thrust a newspaper into my hands, pointing to an item among the want ads.
"Wanted—"
I read, "A subject for hypnotic experiment. $5,000 for the right man. Apply Pro. Alex Mortimer, Mortimer
Laboratories, City."
"Surely," I
exclaimed, "you do not expect to receive an answer to that?"
"On
the contrary," he smiled, "I have received no less than a dozen answers.
From them I chose the one who is most likely to prove the best subject. He will
be here in a few minutes to sign the documents absolving me from any
responsibility in case of accident. That is why I sent for you."
I could only stare at him.
"Of
course," he went on, "I explained to him that there would be a degree
of personal risk involved, but he appeared not to care. On the contrary, he
seemed almost to welcome it. He—"
A
knock at the door interrupted him. In response to his call, one of his
assistants looked in.
"Mr. Williams is here, Professor."
"Send
him in, Gable." As the assistant disappeared, Mortimer turned back to me.
"My prospective subject," he explained. "He is prompt."
A
thin, rather undersized man entered the room._ My
attention was at once drawn to his eyes, which seemed too large for his face.
"Mr.
Williams, my friend, Dr. Claybridge," Mortimer introduced us. "The
doctor is going to witness these articles we have to sign."
Williams
acknowledged the introduction in a voice that sounded infinitely tired.
"Here
are the papers," Mortimer said, pushing a few sheets of paper across the table toward him.
Williams merely glanced at them, and picked
up a pen.
"Just
a minute," Mortimer rang for Gable. The assistant and I witnessed the
signature, and affixed our names below it.
"I
am ready to begin immediately, if you like," Williams said when Gable had
gone.
Mortimer eyed him reflectively for a moment.
"First," be said, "there is a question
I should like to ask you, Mr. Williams. You need not answer if you feel
disinclined. Why are you so eager to undergo an experiment, the outcome of
which even I cannot foresee?"
"If I answer that, will my answer be
treated as strictly confidential?" asked Williams, casting a sidelong
glance in my direction.
"Most
certainly," Mortimer replied. "I speak for both myself and Dr.
Claybridge." I nodded affirmation.
"Then," said Williams, "I will tell you. I welcome this experiment because, as you
pointed out yesterday, there is a possibility of its resulting in my death. No,
you did not say so in so many words, Prof. Mortimer, but that is the fear at
the back of your mind. And why should I wish to the? Because, gentlemen, I have
committed murder."
"What!" We barked
cut the word together.
Williams
smiled wanly at our amazement. "That is rather an unusual statement; isn't
it?" he asked in his tired voice. "Whom I murdered does not matter.
The police will never find me out, for I was clever about it in order that my
sister, to whom your $5,000, Professor, is to be paid, need not suffer from the
humiliation of my arrest. But although I can escape the authorities, I cannot
escape my own conscience. The knowledge that I have deliberately killed a man,
even while he merited death, is becoming too much for me; and since my religion
forbids suicide, I have turned to you as a possible way out. I think that is
all."
We
stared at him in silence. What Mortimer was thinking, I do not know. Most
likely he was pondering upon the strange psychology of human conduct. As for
me, I could not help wondering in what awful, perhaps pitiable tragedy this
little man had been an actor.
Mortimer
was the first to speak. When he did so, it was with no reference to what we
had just heard. "Since you are ready, Mr. Williams, we will proceed with
our initial experiment at once," he said. "I have arranged a special
room for it, where there will be no other thought waves nor
suggestions to disturb you."
He
rose, and was apparently about to lead the way to this room when the telephone
rang.
"Flello,"
he called into the transmitter. "Dr. Claybridge? Yes, he is here. Just a minute." He pushed the instrument towards me.
My
hospital was on the wire. After taking the message, I hung up in disgust.
"An acute case of appendicitis," I announced. "Of course I'm
sorry for the poor devil, but he certainly chose an inopportune time for his
attack."
"I
will phone you all about the experiment," Mortimer promised as I reached
for'my hat. "Perhaps you can be present at the next one."
True to his promise, he
rang me up that evening.
"I
have had wonderful success!" he cried exultantly. "So far 1 have experimented only in a small way, but at that my theory has been proven beyond the possibility
of doubt. And there was one most interesting feature, Claybridge. Williams told
me what would be the nature of my experiment tomorrow afternoon."
"And what will it
be?" I asked.
"I
am to make his material consciousness tangent with the end of the world,"
was the astonishing answer.
"Good
heavens!" I cried in spite of myself. "Shall you do it?" "I
have no choice in the matter," he replied. "Mortimer,
you fatalist! You—"
"No, no," he
protested. "It is not fatalism. Can't you understand that—"
But I interrupted him.
"May I be present?" I asked.
"Yes," he
answered. "You will be there. Williams saw you."
I
had a good mind to deliberately not be
there, just to put a kink in his precious theory; but my curiosity was too
great, and at the appointed time, I was on hand.
"I
have already put Williams to sleep," Mortimer said as I came in. "He
is in my especially prepared room. Come and I will show him to you."
He
led me down a long hall to a door which I knew had originally given upon a
storeroom. Inserting a key in the lock, he turned it, and flung the door open.
In
the room beyond, I could see Williams seated in a swivel chair. His eyes were closed and his body relaxed, as if in sleep.
However, it was not he that awakened my interest, but the room itself. It was
windowless, with only a skylight in the ceiling to admit light and air. Aside
from the chair in which Williams sat, there was no furniture save.an instrument
resembling an immense telephone transmitter that a crane arm held about two
inches from the hypnotized man's mouth, and a set of ear phones, such as a
telephone operator wears, which were attached to his ears. But strangest of
all, the walls, floors, and ceiling of the room were lined with a whitish metal.
"White
lead," said Mortimer, seeing my eyes upon it; "the substance least
conductive of thought waves. I want the subject to be as free as possible from
outside thought influences, so that when he talks with me over that telephonic
device, which is connected with my laboratory, there can be no danger of his
telling me any but his own experiences."
"But the
skylight," I pointed out. "It is partially open."
"True,"
he admitted. "But thought waves, like sound waves, travel upwards, and
outwards; rarely, if ever, downwards. So, you see, there is little danger from
the skylight."
He
closed and locked the door, and we went back to the laboratory. In one corner
was what looked like a radio loud speaker, while near it was a transmitter
similar to the one in the room with Williams.
"I shall speak to Williams through the
transmitter," explained Mortimer, "and he shall hear me by means of
the ear phones. When he answers into his transmitter, we will hear him through
the loud speaker."
He
seated himself before the apparatus and spoke: "Williams, do you hear
me?"
"I hear you." The reply came promptly, but
in the heavy tones of a man talking in his sleep.
"Listen
to me. You are living in the last six days of the earth. By 'days,' I do not
mean periods of twentyfour hours, but such lengths of time as are meant in the
first chapter of the book of Genesis. It is now the first day of the six. Tell
me what you see."
After
a short interval, the answer came in a strange, high key. While the words were
English, they were spoken with a curious intonation that was at first difficult
to understand.
"This
is the year 46,812," said the voice, "or, in
modern time, 43,930 A. I. C. After Interplanetary
Communication. It is not well upon the earth. The Polar Ice Cap comes
down almost to Newfoundland. Summer lasts but a few weeks, and then its heat is
scorching. What in early time was known as the Atlantic Coastal Plain has long
ago sunken into the sea. High dykes must be used to keep the water from
covering the island of Manhattan, where the world's government is located. A
great war has just concluded. There are many dead to bury."
"You
speak of interplanetary communication," said Mortimer. "Is the world,
then, in communication with the planets?"
"In
the year 2,952," came the answer, "the earth
succeeded in. getting into communication with Mars. Radio pictures were sent
back and forth between the two worlds until they learned each other's
languages; then sound communication was established. The Martians had been
trying to signal the earth since the beginning of the twentieth century, but
were unable to set up a system of communication because of the insufficient
scientific advancement of the Earthmen.
"About
a thousand years later, a message was received from Venus, which had now
advanced to the earth's state of civilization, when Mars was signalled. For
nearly five hundred years they had been receiving messages from both the earth
and Mars, but had been unable to answer.
"A
little over five thousand years later, a series of sounds was received which
seemed to come from somewhere beyond Venus. Venus and Mars heard them too; but,
like us, were able to make nothing of them. All three
worlds broadcasted their radio pictures on the wave length corresponding to
that of the mysterious sounds, but received no answer. At last Venus advanced
the theory that the sounds had come from Mercury, whose inhabitants, obliged
to live upon the side of their world farther from the sun, would be either
entirely without sight or with eyes not sufficiently developed to see our
pictures.
"Recently something dire has happened to
Mars. Our last messages from her told of terrible wars and pestilences, such as
we are now having upon earth. Also, her water supply was beginning to give out,
due to the fact that she was obliged to use much of it in the manufacture of
atmosphere. Suddenly, about fifty years ago, all messages from her ceased; and
upon signalling her, we received no answer."
Mortimer
covered the transmitter with his hand. "That," he said to me,
"can mean only that intelligent life upon Mars had become extinct. The
earth, then, can have but a few thousand years yet to go."
For
nearly an hour longer he quizzed Williams upon conditions of the year 46,812.
All the answers showed that while scientific knowledge had reached an almost
incredulous stage of advancement, the race of mankind was in its twilight. Wars
had killed off thousands of people, while strange, new diseases found hosts of victims
daily in a race whose members were no longer physically constituted to
withstand them. Worst of all, the birth rate was rapidly diminishing.
"Listen
to me." Mortimer raised his voice as if to impress his invisible subject
with what he was about to say. "You are now living in the second day. Tell
me what you see."
There
was a moment or so of silence; then the voice, keyed even higher than before,
spoke again.
"I
see humanity in its deaththroes," it said. "Only a few scattered
tribes remain to roam over the deserted continents. The cattle have begun to
sicken and the; and it is unsafe to use them for food. Four thousand years ago,
we took to the manufacture of artificial air, as did the Martians before us.
But it is hardly worth while, for children are no longer born. We shall be the
last of our race."
"Have you received no
recent word from Mars?" asked Mortimer.
"None. Two years ago, at her proper season, Mars failed to appear in the
heavens. As to what has become of her, we can only conjecture."
There
was a horrible suggestiveness about this statement. I shuddered, and noticed
that Mortimer did, also.
"The
Polar Ice Cap has begun to retreat," resumed the voice. "Now it is
winters that are short. Tropical plants have begun to appear in the temperate
zones. The lower forms of animal life are becoming more numerous, and have
begun to pursue man as man once pursued them. The days of the human race are
definitely numbered. We are a band of strangers upon our own world."
"Listen
to me," said Mortimer again. "It is now the third day. Describe
it."
Followed
the usual short interval of silence; then came the voice, fairly brittle with
freezing terror.
"Why,"
it screamed, "do you keep me here; the last living man upon a dying planet? The world is festering with dead things. Let me be dead
with them."
"Mortimer,"
I interrupted, "this is awful! Hasn't your experiment gone far
enough?"
He
pushed back his chair and rose. "Yes," he said, a bit shakily, I
thought. "For the present, at least. Come; I will
awaken Williams."
I
followed him down the hall, and was close upon his heels, when he flung open
the door of the leadlined room, and stepped inside. Our cries of surprised
alarm were simultaneous.
In
the chair where we had left him sat Williams; but
physically he was a different man. He had shrunken several inches in stature,
while his head appeared to have grown larger, with the forehead almost bulbous
in aspect. His fingers were extremely long and sensitive, but suggestive of
great strength. His frame was thin to emaciation.
"Good Heavens!" I
gasped. "What has happened?"
"It
is an extreme case of mental influence upon matter," answered Mortimer,
bending over the hypnotized man. "You remember how young Bennet's features
took on the characteristics of a Hun? A similar thing, but in a much intenser
degree, has happened to Williams. He has become a man of the future physically
as well as mentally."
"Good Lord!" I
cried. "Waken him at once! This is horrible."
"To
be frank with you," said Mortimer gravely, "I am afraid to. He has
been in this state much longer than I realized. To waken him too suddenly would
be dangerous. It might even prove fatal."
For
a moment he seemed lost in thought. Then he removed the ear phones from
Williams' head, and addressed him. "Sleep," he commanded. "Sleep
soundly and naturally. When you have rested sufficiently, you will awaken and
be your normal self."
Shortly
after this, I left Mortimer, and, although it was my day off duty, went to my
hospital. How good my commonplace tonsil cases seemed after the unholy things I
had just experienced! I surprised the resident physician almost into a state of
coma by putting in the remainder of the day in the hardest work possible in the
free clinic; and finally went home, tired in mind and body.
I
turned in early for what I deemed a wellearned rest, and fell asleep instantly.
The next thing of which I was conscious was the insistent ringing of the
telephone bell beside my bed.
"Hello,"
I cried sleepily, taking down the receiver. "Dr.
Claybridge speaking."
"Claybridge,
this is Mortimer," came the almost hysterical
response. "For God's sake, come over to the laboratory at once!"
"What
has happened?" I demanded, instantly wide awake. It would take something
unusual to wring such excitement from the unemotional Mortimer.
"It's
Williams," he answered. "I can't bring him back. He got awake about
an hour ago, and still believes that he is living in the future. Physically, he
is the same as he was when last you saw him this afternoon."
"I'll be over at once," I fairly
shouted, and slammed the receiver down upon its hook. As I scrambled into my
clothes, I glanced at the clock. Two fifteen. In half an hour I could reach the
laboratory. What would I find waiting for me?
Mortimer was in the lead
room with Williams when I arrived.
"Claybridge,"
he said, "I need someone else's opinion in this case. Look at him, and
tell me what you think."
Williams
still occupied the chair in the middle of the room. His eyes were wide open,
but it was plain that he saw neither Mortimer nor me. Even when I bent over him
and touched him, he gave no sign of being conscious of my presence.
"He
looks as if he were suffering from some sort of
catalepsy," I said, "yet his temperature and pulse are almost normal.
I should say that he is still partially in a state of hypnosis."
"Then
it is selfhypnosis," said Mortimer, "for 1 have entirely withdrawn my influence."
"Perhaps,"
I suggested lightly, "you have transported him irretrievably into the
future."
"That,"
Mortimer replied, "is precisely what I fear has happened." I stared
at him dumbly.
"The
only way out," he went on, "is to rehypnotize him, and finish the
experiment. At its conclusion, he may return to his natural state."
I
could not help thinking that there were certain things which it was forbidden
man to know; and that Mortimer, having wantonly blundered into them, was now
being made to pay the penalty. I watched him as he worked over poor Williams,
straining all his energies to induce a state of hypnotic sleep. At last the
glassy eyes before him closed, and his subject slept. With hands that trembled
visibly, be adjusted the earphones, and we went back to the laboratory.
"Williams,"
Mortimer called into his transmitter, "do you hear me?"
"I hear you,"
replied the odiously familiar voice.
"You are now living in
the fourth day. What do you see?"
"I
see reptiles; great lizards that walk upon their hind legs, and birds with tiny
heads and bats' wings, that build nests in the ruins of the deserted
cities."
"Dinosaurs
and pterodactyls!" I gasped involuntarily. "A second age
of reptiles!"
"The
Polar caps have retreated until there is but a small area of ice about each of
the poles," continued the voice. "There are no longer any seasons;
only a continuous reign of heat. The torrid zone has
become uninhabitable even by the reptdes. The sea there boils. Great monsters
writhe in their death agonies upon its surface. Even the northern waters are
becoming heated.
"All the land is covered with rank
vegetation upon which the reptiles feed. The air is fetid with it."
Mortimer interrupted:
"Describe the fifth day."
After
the customary interval, the voice replied. There was a sticky quality about it
that reminded me of the sucking of mud at some object struggling in it.
"The
reptiles are gone," it said. "I alone live upon this expiring world.
Even the plant life has turned yellow and withered. The volcanos are ia terrific action. The mountains are becoming level, and soon all will be
one vast plain. A thick, green slime is gathering upon the face of the waters;
so that it is difficult to tell where the land with its rotting vegetation ends
and the sea begins. The sky is saffron in color, like a plate of hot brass. At night a blood red moon swims drunkenly in a black
sky.
"Something
is happening to gravitation. For a long
time I had suspected it. Today I tested it by throwing a stone into the air. I
was carried several feet above the ground by the force of my action. It took
the stone nearly twenty minutes to return to earth. It fell slowly, and at an angle!"
"An angle!" cried
Mortimer.
"Yes. It was barely perceptible, but it
was there. The earth's movement; is slowing.
Days and nights have more than doubled in length,"
"What is the condition of the atmosphere?"
"A
trifle rarefied, but not sufficiently so to make breathing difficult. This
seems strange to me."
"That,"
said Mortimer to me, "is because his body is here in the twentieth century, where there is plenty of air. The air at
the stage of the earth's career where his mind is would be too rare to
support organic life. Even now the mental influence is so strong that he
believes the density of the atmosphere to be decreasing."
"Recently,"
Williams' voice went on, "the star Vega has taken Polaris" place as
centre of the universe. Many of the old stars have disappeared, while new ones
have taken their places. I have a suspicion
that our solar system is either falling or traveling in a new direction through
space."
"Listen
to me, Williams." Mortimer's voice sounded dry and cracked, and his
forehead was besprinkled with great gouts of sweat. "It is the sixth, the
last day. What do you see?"
"I
see a barren plain of grey rock. The world is in perpetual twilight because
the mists that rise from the sea obscure the sun. Heaps of brown bones dot the
plain near the mounds that once were cities. The dykes around Manhattan long
ago crumbled away; but there is no longer any need for them even were men here,
for the sea is rapidly drying up. The atmosphere is becoming exceedingly
rarefied. I can hardly breathe. , . .
"Gravitation
is giving out more rapidly. When I stand erect I sway as though drunk. Last
night the curtains of mist parted for a time, and I saw the moon fly off into
space.
"Great
lightnings play about the earth, but there is no thunder. The silence all
around is plummetless. I keep speaking aloud and striking one object against
another to relieve the strain on my eardrums. , , .
"Great cracks are beginning to appear in
the ground, from which smoke and molten lava issue. I have fled to Manhattan in
order that the skeletons of the tall buildings may hide them from my sight.
"Small
objects have begun to move of their own volition. I am afraid to walk, as each
step hurls me off my balance. The heat is awful. I cannot breathe."
There
was a short interval, that came as a relief to our
tightly screwed nerves. The tension to which the experiment had pitched us was
terrific; yet I, for one, could no more have torn myself away than I could have
passed into the fourth dimension.
Suddenly the voice cut the
air like a knife!
"The
buildings!" it shrieked. "They are swaying! They are leaning toward
each other! They are crumbling, disintegrating; and the crumbs are flying outward instead of falling! Tiny particles are being thrown off by
everything around me. Oh, the heat! There is no air!"
Followed a hideous
gurgling; then:
"The
earth is dissolving beneath my feet! It is the end. Creation is returning to
its original atoms! Oh, my God!" There was a
sickening scream that rapidly grew fainter with the effect of fading on radio.
"Williams!"
shouted Mortimer. "What happened?"
There was no answer.
"Williams! Williams!" Mortimer was
on his feet, fairly shrieking into the instrument. "Do you hear me?"
The only response was utter silence.
Mortimer
clutched me by the arm, and dragged me with him from the laboratory and down
the hall.
"Is—is he dead?"
I choked as we ran.
Mortimer
did not answer. His breath was coming in quick, short gasps that would have
made speech impossible even had he heard me.
At
the door of the lead room he stopped and fumbled with his keys. From beyond we
could hear no sound. Twice Mortimer, in his nervousness and hurry, dropped the
key and had to grope for it; but at last he got it turned in the lock, and
flung the door open.
In
our haste, we collided with each other as we hurtled into the room. Then as one
man we stopped dead in our tracks. The room was empty!
"Where—"
I began incredulously. "He couldn't have gotten out! Could he?"
"No," Mortimer
answered hoarsely.
We
advanced farther into the room, peering into every crack and corner. From the
back of the chair, suspended by their cord, hung the earphones; while dangling
from the chair's seat to the floor were the tattered and partially charred
remains of what seemed to have been at one time a suit of men's clothing. At sight of these, Mortimer's face went white.
In his eyes was a look of dawning comprehension and horror.
"What does it
mean?" I demanded.
For answer, he pointed a
palsied finger.
As I
looked, the first beam of morning sunlight slipped through the skylight above
us, and fell obliquely to the floor. In its golden shaft, directly above the
chair where Williams had sat, a myriad of infinitesimal atoms were dancing.
The
End