Date: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00
Description: Miles J Breuer (1889-1945) was a PhD and a medical doctor who began writing sf in the 1920s, many of them in Hugo Gernsback's Amazing Stories magazine. Most of his fiction output was in the form of short stories and novelettes, but he also wrote 2 full length sf novels. This collection contains all the presently available short fiction, and is unique to MobileRead. The cover is made using a detail from the cover of Amazing, in which "The Raid from Mars" was the cover story. 1: The Raid From Mars 2: The Einstein See-Saw 3: The Man with the Strange Head 4: On Board the Martian Liner 5: The Drivi

THE RAID FROM MARS
and other stories

Miles J. Breuer

1889-1945

2020

Contents

1: The Raid From Mars

2: The Einstein See-Saw

3: The Man with the Strange Head

4: On Board the Martian Liner

5: The Driving Power

6: The Oversight

7: The Book of Worlds

8: The Strength of the Weak

9: Mars Colonizes

10: The Stone Cat

11: A Problem in Communication

12: Mechanocracy

13: Millions for Defense

14: The Gostak and the Doshes

15: The Finger of the Past

16: The Appendix and the Spectacles

_____________________

1: The Raid From Mars

Amazing Stories, March 1939

1:  The Radium Thefts

IN a corner office of the ground floor of the Department of Justice Building in Washington, D. C., a man sat bent over his desk with his forehead in his hands. He was a keen and powerful looking person, but at the present he looked utterly puzzled and helpless. He was Herbert Hawes, Chief of the Bureau of Criminal Investigation, and a famous man. Beside him on the desk, and on the floor around his chair, were arranged stack after stack of telegrams, yellow with black headings, and white with blue headings.

"Mercy Hospital reports mysterious disappearance of radium salts during night"

"Entire stock of radium disappeared last night. Two attendants found unconscious!"

"One hundred thousand dollars worth of radium disappeared from Mt. Sinai Hospital. Nurse and doctor unconscious!"

"Total radium supply stolen. Locks demolished. No clues!"

Thus ran the telegrams, all of them. They came from all of the large hospitals in the principal cities in the United States, and from numerous large University laboratories. From Bangor, Maine, to Jacksonville, Florida, from Portland, Oregon, to Los Angeles, and crisscrosswise over the country, the story was the same.

"A raid on the country's supply of radium!" the chief gasped, and sank down in his chair.

The realization of the enormity of the affair grew on him by leaps and bounds.

"What a holdup!"

Now he sat at his desk with his head on his hands. There wasn't a clue. There was nothing to go on. He could think of no way to start. He sat there and worried.

He did not know how long be had been brooding there, when he slowly became aware of an insistent irritation forcing itself into his detached brain. It dawned on him that it was the telephone. He rubbed his eyes, shook himself and grabbed the instrument.

"Hello!" he said, as quickly as he could.

"Lincoln, Nebraska, calling," came through the telephone. "Is this Chief Hawes? Chief of Police Henderson, of Lincoln, wishes to speak to you."

There was a momentary silence while the connection was made, then a gruff voice spoke.

The two chiefs identified themselves to each other.

"I suppose you are investigating the disappearance of the radium," said the Police Chief from Lincoln.

Chief Hawes grunted in a dubious sort of fashion. Chief Henderson from Lincoln continued:

Chief Hawes just now thought to look up at the clock. Three o'clock. Four hours his head had lain sunk on his desk, thinking and dozing alternately after this terrific shock had struck him.

"―the accounts in the newspapers have been most unsatisfactory, but I gather there is a serious problem on, I have what may be a clue. Do you want it?"

"Do I? Do I? Come on quick!" roared Chief Hawes, banging his desk with the other fist.

Chief Henderson continued:

"There was a young chap, just a boy, in my office yesterday, with a most fantastic tale, which now strikes me as having a possible hook-up with this thing. It was so wild, that I told him it was bosh and sent him about his business. Now that this thing has turned up, I feel that there may be something in the boy's story. We ought to look into it."

"What did he have to say?" demanded Chief Hawes.

"He had a curious tale about some inventor with heart disease communicating with Mars―; shall I send him over to you?"

"Nuts! I thought you had a clue. What d'ya want to bother me with..."

"Well," the Western Police Chief explained, "his story said just that: stealing radium by some guys from Mars."

"Nuts!"

"Shall I send him over?" queried Chief Henderson.

"Yes! No!" roared Hawes, "I'm coming over there."

IN one of the homes on a modest residence street in Lincoln, Nebraska, a sixteen-year old boy walked into the living-room, where his father was reading a newspaper, and turned off the radio. By the door, at the foot of the hat-rack, a physician's emergency bag and two canvas paper-carriers' bags showed plainly that both father and son were busy men.

"Dad," the boy inquired earnestly, "would it be a good or a bad thing for the human race if someone discovered how to make people live forever?"

"Well, well," the doctor replied. "You are being mighty serious about it. Is that for one of your debates?"

"Yes," Ronald answered eagerly; that excuse was as good as any.

"I believe," the doctor continued, "that if everlasting life were given to the human race, it would be a very bad thing. If no one died, in a population which is now stationary, it would double in one generation."

"You mean," the son reminded, "that if the birth-rate continued unchanged."

"It would," the doctor assured him. "No ifs are needed. You can fancy, after a few generations, the horrible crowding up of the earth. Think of the pressure, the competition, the lowered standard of living, worse than anything in India or China― and growing worse and no end to it."

"But supposing," suggested Ronald, "that birth-control were put into effect?"

"Don't make me laugh," his father countered. "Voluntarily or individually, people would never do anything. By public measures, perhaps in a hundred years after everybody was crazy, something might be done. No, I rather think your gift of everlasting life would be no boon to race, and of questionable benefit to the individual."

As the boy said nothing further, the doctor resumed his reading. At intervals however, be glanced over the top of his paper at his son, who sat there motionless in a stiff chair, staring straight ahead of him and saying nothing. Undoubtedly something was preying on his mind. The doctor, a practical man who knew boys well, said nothing, realizing that it would all eventually come out.

The boy maintained his puzzled posture for nearly two hours before he stirred. Then he rose, stretched himself, and remarked that he hated to go to bed.

At that moment there was a gallop of many footsteps on the porch floor, and a ring at the doorbell. In a moment the room was filled with Chiefs of Police and Government officers.

"THERE used to be a light in old man Dragstedt's window every morning at 4:30," Ronald began his explanation, "when I passed his house carrying papers. I knew he was a sickly old man who never went anywhere, and lived alone. Sometimes one of the windows went funny colors in the night, as I went by with my paper-bags. He's got a crazy chimney on his house, like a tall pipe, and shiny, like polished metal.

"Although it is against the rules of the paper, one morning I couldn't resist trying a peek in at one of his windows. I tiptoed up on the porch, but the minute I stepped on his rug, an alarm went off somewhere in the house. The door opened, and he started to roar at me, and then collapsed on the floor. He has heart disease, and gets attacks when he gets sore.

"I dragged him to the davenport and was going to call up my dad, but he begged me not to. He had some pills that he took. I got them for him and they made him better in half an hour. I stayed with him and warmed him a glass of milk. I saw nothing in the house out of the way, but in the direction of the queerly lighted windows there was a closed door.

"The next day I walked boldly up and knocked on the door. He had me in and I asked him how he was. I got to dropping in that way and found that he was grateful for a lot of little things I could do to help him. But, he never opened that door.

"I thought I would never find out what was in there, until one day when I rang his doorbell and he didn't answer. I opened up and went in, fearing that something had happened to him. I found the secret door open, and he was just about to come in through it, when he had another spell. He fell down and his face was so blue it gave me the creeps. I got him to bed, gave him his tablet, and had a look at the room.

"A lot of the stuff there was undoubtedly short-wave equipment. I've got a ham station of my own, and am up on it. The scanning elements and the big screen of a television set were also familiar. But there was an awful pile of strange stuff there that meant nothing to me.

"He came to as I was standing in the middle of the apparatus room, looking around, trying to figure out stuff. He didn't get sore; he got to know that it would give him another spell with his heart. So I just shut the door, warmed him some more milk, and never said a word and he didn't either.

"But after that he let me come in and watch him working at the apparatus. He used cw, but he had six keys instead of one; he played five of them with the fingers of his right hand like piano keys; it must have taken a lot of practice to get that way, because he really made 'em sing. Another odd thing was that his transmission wave had several tones to it― no; he must have had several transmission waves. It gave a musical effect as he sent."

"Say!" interrupted Chief Henderson, "Where is this old bird? Dragstedt you say? We'll listen to the rest of it from him."

"Well, I guess he's gone to them. Or they took him away with them. He hasn't been at his house for 24 hours. But his stuff is all right."

"What do you mean by they? Who took him away?"

The boy showed embarrassment.

"Well," he hesitated; "I know you'll think I'm crazy―"

"Suppose you are!" said the police chief, his voice rough with impatience. "Who took him away?"

"Well― the Martians. But wait till I get to 'em."

THE men settled in their chairs with a certain amount of relief. Martians! If that was all, they needn't worry. They had thought it might be some well-known crooks. The boy continued his narrative:

"Then one day, when he didn't come to the doorbell, I opened the door again and walked on in. The inner door was open. I could see him at the television apparatus. I really saw a Martian on the screen!

"I saw him plenty plain and had a long time to look at him. Dragstedt was so absorbed that he didn't know I was there for thirty minutes.

"The thing on the screen moved, and worked little pieces of a vast stack of machinery behind it. It had bright eyes, and arms and legs, and wasn't so very different from people after all. But for a person, it looked small and fragile and easy to fall to pieces. It moved with quick jerks. As it moved, little buzzes on different notes came out of Dragstedt's machine. It gestured with its hands, and then brought out papers. Or, you know, whatever they use for papers. But it looked just like papers. Some had maps and some had mathematical stuff on them.

"Then Dragstedt turned around and saw that I had been watching him. He came near having another spell. But, he's a smart guy, and he calmed down and held it off. He decided he might as well tell me about it. I understand the stuff pretty well and can give you the high spots―"

"Whatever Ronald says about radio and related subjects," his father interrupted, turning to the police officers, "you can put down as being accurate and dependable. I myself am amazed at the amount of knowledge he has on those things."

"Kids are hot on that stuff," the grizzled old D. C. I. chief mumbled to himself.

"He had been a professor of physics," Ronald went on. "But he inherited a lot of dough from a relative and got to experimenting on his own. He was interested in picking up the portion of radio waves that are reflected from the Heaviside layer. He had some odd notion about the thing and was measuring intensities. He found that the reflected portion was weaker than the transmitted portion to an extent not explained by the square of the distance equation. He tried it with direction beams, and the more nearly vertical he got his beams, the greater the loss in intensity― just opposite to what you'd expect―"

Chief Hawes grunted and mumbled something about what he would expect.

"When he finally directed a successfully controlled beam in an accurately vertical direction, he lost most of his short-wave energy. Can't you see― that he was putting a wave through the Heaviside layer?"

Chief Haves grunted again, so that Donald had to smile.

"He played with it a lot, and sent out a lot of amateur broadcasting, and cw.

"It wasn't really very long, a few weeks, till he was amazed to find that he was getting signals in return. The poor fellow must have gone nearly crazy before he figured out what those odd, broken tones were.

"For many months he worked on them, but could make no sense out of them. After quite a while, it struck him that he ought to build a television apparatus in connection. By that time his heart was getting bad; he went to a doctor and the doctor wanted to put him in a hospital. He couldn't stand that, and went back to his apparatus. After some weary months he finally saw his first Martian on the screen.

"Eventually he learned to talk to them. By means of the vision screen and his multitoned cw, he and the Martians developed a language from gestures and pointing to objects, and then gradually into words. I got on to a good deal of the stuff myself as I watched him, and it isn't so hard at that. When I got so that I could stand there and get what the cw was saying, I got quite a thrill out of it.

"Well, it turned out that these Martians lived under the ground on their planet, because it was too cold and dry on top and no air. They had it all fixed livable underground. They were an old, old race, much older than ours. They had learned among other things, the secret of preventing death, or at least of putting it off indefinitely. As their births were regulated in the laboratory merely to replace rare losses by death, the race was stable.

"However, within the recent century, a new disease had sprung up among them which they could not conquer with all their science. Deaths occurred in such numbers that the laboratories could not replace them by a sufficient number of births; their mathematicians predicted the early extinction of the race. Their physicists said that the disease was due to the complete loss of radioactive minerals, due to the old age of the planet itself. I saw some of the sick ones on the television screen, and it must have been some kind of cancer.

"What did Dragstedt do, but describe radium to them, and ask them if they knew what it was, and if they thought it would cure their stuff. Of course that is the first thing that would have occurred to me. No, all their radium had finally broken itself up into non-radioactive elements. But they grasped the idea, only too promptly.

"The gist of it is, that Dragstedt and the Martians got up a scheme, where he is to steer them to the caches of radium when they come to Earth in a space ship. In return, they will cure his heart disease and give him everlasting life. Dragstedt has been all over the country, getting the layouts of hospitals and universities, which he could easily do, for he is a well known physicist himself.

"Those birds up there on Mars even planned mechanical things to get around in, when they got to Earth, because their bodies are too flimsily built for our heavier gravitation.

"That's all I know, except that I overheard that their ship is down in the sandhills, about fifty miles southeast of Alliance; and that they are sticking around about a week to treat old Dragstedt."

2: The Martian Ship

BY the next morning, the entire Eighth Army Corps was on the move, swarming from all directions toward Alliance, Nebraska. Its airplanes, and also two squadrons of Navy hydroplanes from the Great Lakes Training Station, were at Alliance by daybreak.

Field artillery and tanks on flat-cars came in on the railroads from the East, West, and South. From four directions came tracks loaded with men and small equipment.

By noon, Alliance looked like the center of a war zone. The sky hummed with planes. Tanks clanked along the roads, and motorized artillery pointed its long, keen noses at the sky. Trim, khaki-clad detachments clicked precisely along the pavements, their rifle-barrels all neatly parallel. The entire division was mobilized. It was being strung out in a new-moon-shaped line, thickest in the center, and the points feeling outward, to surround the object as soon as it was found.

The airplanes located it early in the afternoon. It was described as an egg-shaped affair as big as an ocean liner, located in a hollow in the sand hills, practically where Ronald Worth had predicted it would be found.

The young captain in command of the airplane squadron from the Great Lakes Navy Base saluted General Barry, the Commander of the expedition, and stood in front of him waiting for orders. He could not conceal a restlessness, stepping from one foot to the other, even though trying hard to stand rigid.

The grizzled old General smiled.

"What is the Captain jittery about?" he asked.

"Begging the General's pardon," the Captain said in embarrassment, "I am awaiting orders to bomb the space ship. It is just a pippin of a target. We could smash it in thirty seconds--"

"What about the radium?" the General interrupted.

The Captain's face suddenly fell, and he stood there puzzled.

"Do you know," the General continued, "that the entire nation's supply of radium is inside that vessel. If you throw explosives down there, you will scatter several million dollars' worth of precious stuff out in the sand. It would cost as much money and take as much time to recover it, as it did to make it in the first place."

"Yes, Sir!" replied the Captain meekly. "We've got a job on hand!"

In the modest residence section of Lincoln, Nebraska, three swift cars that had just dashed across the town from the airport, drew up in front of Dragstedt's deserted little house. General Barry; his aides, and a squad of guards tramped into the house.

There, in the room of apparatus which old Dragstedt had built, sat Ronald Worth, high-school student and paper-carrier. Sleepiness showed in his eyes, and at his elbow were partly consumed bottles of milk and plates of cheese and crackers.

"Ronald Worth calling Professor Dragstedt! Ronald Worth calling Professor Dragstedt! Will you please answer! It will be to your interest to communicate with us!"

The boy's voice droned monotonously on, uninterrupted by the entry of the men into the room. Then he stopped, took a drink of milk, and put his hand on the six keys. The queer musical drone started and whined monotonously on. The military men stood silently about the room.

"You are sure that no other operator could take this over?" General Barry asked.

"I'd have to teach him. It would take time. Took me months to get on to it," the boy answered. "This is different from ordinary radios. And common radios won't tune with those of the Martians."

"You look tired," the General said.

Suddenly the boy stiffened, and took his hand away from the keys. The musical drone continued, in a different rhythm.

"He is answering. Wouldn't answer on the telephone, but bit on the cw at once." Ronald was elated.

"Tell him," said General Barry, "to tell these Martians, that if they give us back our radium, we shall treat them royally, entertain them, show them the Earth; and then let them go home unharmed, with a gift of enough radium for their purpose."

The cw transmitter hummed awhile; and there were stirs of impatience among the soldiers who filled the room. After a while, the boy spoke again.

"The best I can make out of these answers, Sir," he said, "is that the Martians refuse to recognize us as intelligent beings. They refuse to deal with us. They think we are just some sort of animals."

"You tell him, then," the General directed, "that we have got them surrounded on land and in the air. We shall not permit them to rise, and shall simply lay siege to them until they starve. Do not be alarmed when we put a small shell through the skin of their vessel; that will be to keep them from rising out into space. Advise them again, that they will be better off if they surrender."

The cw spoke again for a period; and again the boy spoke, with some excitement in his voice:

"Apparently the shell has arrived, and blown a hole in the nose of their ship. Dragstedt didn't think it did any damage. But the Martians have become very busy about something, moving jerkily about. The shell-hole seems to have interfered with their arrangements for decreased gravitation inside the vessel. He doesn't know how many there are, but over a hundred. He says they are disturbed."

"That was Grigsby of the 110th Field Artillery that disturbed them."

"SWOOP" Martin, the crack observation pilot, circled around over the scene of operations, at 30,000 feet. He had to use an oxygen helmet, fitted with binocular glasses. But he was invisible and inaudible from below.

He could see the gleaming, egg-shaped hull, nestling in the sand like some child's toy; and around it, the dotted, splotched, irregular circle formed by the Eighth Army Corps. As he watched, a puff of smoke came from one of the splotches below; in a moment a puff of smoke appeared at the smaller end of the egg; and when it cleared, a small black hole remained in the metal. He reported it all promptly to headquarters by radio.

The next thing that happened was that a square of metal opened in the side of the vessel, like a door, and an odd thing stepped out of it, and started walking out across the sand away from the ship.

In another second, a dozen airplanes, far below him, swooped down toward the thing. The faint patter of their machine guns came up to him. The mechanical thing that had come out of the vessel careened over on its side and lay still. The door in the side of the hull quickly closed.

For some minutes nothing happened, and then a row of little round ports appeared higher up off the ground. "Swoop" Martin could not see anything else happen, except that there were a dozen loud explosions, with flashes of fire in the air, and the airplanes which had fusilladed the Martian coming out of his ship, all exploded there beneath him, and only a litter of small fragments dropped on down to the ground. Then, systematically down there in that investing circle, one battery after another blew up in a flash and a cloud of smoke, huge gun barrels and artillery wheels flying high in the air mingled with the bodies of men, whirling down to be buried in a cloud of sand.

A few seconds later there were scores of explosions in the air, as distant airplanes blew up. There must have been communication from them to the ground, because some of the batteries in the second and third lines banged loudly two or three times before they finally blew up. Their marksmanship was good. Shells shrieked across the interval and huge holes were ripped in the shining side of the Martian vessel.

However, the Martians were the swifter. Before vital damage had been done to their vessel, there was not a tank, not a field gun, not an intact infantry company left. The Eighth Army Corps had been wiped out and was represented only by a few stragglers staggering in the sand.

"God!" exclaimed "Swoop" Martin, up in his plane above range of the damage. "All of that to pay for a couple of ounces of radium!"

As he circled around to head for safer regions, he could see repair proceeding rapidly in the holes in the side of the Martian vessel.

AIRPLANES from the Tenth Army Corps Area were on the spot in the morning, practically hitting their "ceiling" in order to keep out of the way of the Martians' destructive reach. They had expected to arrive and find the thing gone. But it was still there, and the shell-holes all repaired.

So, the Tenth Division moved up to fill the place of the Eighth. A few scouts first took their posts. As nothing happened, more and more men trickled in, and were slowly followed by heavy equipment. In a few days the line was again complete, among the blackened ruins of their predecessors. Their orders were:

"Surround the Martians. Keep quiet. Take no action against them unless they try to rise."

Now, those men who had filtered up to their positions at night with pounding hearts, expecting to be suddenly wiped out at any moment, were getting tired of week after week of inactivity. Army discipline, always irksome, was doubly so in the heat and the sand. There was sand in their clothes, sand in their hair, sand in their ears, sand in their food. There were hot winds, and nothing to do but wait all day and wonder what the airplanes above had to report. The enlisted personnel were not the only ones who were restless. There were constant, worried conferences in the General Headquarters tent.

"I have an idea!" exclaimed General Johnson, Commander of the Tenth Army Corps, one hot day, when weariness was at its height.

The headquarters staff deliberated long and carefully before the officers finally dispersed, each to his own sandy quarters. There was much tapping of the Royal Portable typewriter and sealing of secret orders during the next few days. There was code communication with Washington by radio.

Finally, one dark night, the men were overjoyed by orders to get up and move. A few moments later they were dismayed to find that their progress was going to be backwards. They were going away from the enemy. They pounded through the sand until they reached a paved highway, and were then whisked away by trucks. By daybreak the Division was comfortably making camp in a country that was not sandhills. Eventually it was discovered that the little city in the distance was Ravenna.

"Swoop" Martin, transferred to the Tenth Division, saluted General Johnson, as the latter stepped out of his car.

"Ready for orders, Sir," he said.

"Lieutenant Martin, there are no orders. You may do this if you care to volunteer, but you will not be ordered to do it."

"Instructions, I meant, Sir," said "Swoop" Martin.

In a few moments he was on the run for his plane, which stood ready for him.

3: The Attack on the Martians

"SWOOP" MARTIN in his monoplane made circles around over the Martian space-ship like a hawk. He swept around lower and lower. At a height of about 3,000 feet, he flew away to the distance of a half mile, and then dived steeply downward, toward the Martian vessel. A few hundred feet above it, he turned sharply upward again, making a sort of V. At the bottom of the V, a small black object left the scout plane, and described a parabola, striking the Martian vessel amidships. A ragged hole appeared, and then a dull explosion.

"Swoop" Martin was climbing fast, and thinking every moment was his last one; expecting to be blown to atoms any second. But until he was, he determined, he would go through with it. He guided his plane, watched his board, and went steeply upwards.

Finally, when he was gasping for breath, he leveled off, and put on his oxygen mask. He looked down below. Everything was the same as before. He was puzzled.

He cruised around awhile, thinking things over, and shook his head. He swiftly reported what had happened and asked for further orders. The General's message was to the effect that he did not wish to give an order of that kind; but that if Lieutenant Martin wished to volunteer to repeat his maneuver, it might be a good idea.

Down, down, the plane swooped again, toward the tiny globule nestling in the sand, and sent another bomb hurtling down from the front of its V-shaped path, and again fled upwards into the heights. Again a jagged hole was torn in the top of the space ship; again "Swoop" Martin expected the worst as he climbed his way back to the height; again he waited in vain for something to happen, and nothing happened.

Back at the camp near Ravenna, a group of men stirred. In fifteen minutes, a dozen swift cars filled with officers and men, two high-speed tanks, and two high-speed four-inch field-pieces, were headed toward the Martian ship. They covered the ground rapidly, and by noon were on the site of the previous camp from which they had besieged the Martian vessel. The field-guns were set up and trained; a dozen men climbed into the two tanks, loaded with machine guns and hand grenades. Above, a dozen airplanes droned, and made swooping circles, much like hawks.

The tanks started off, throwing up clouds of sand, and dashed at high speed, straight toward the shining side of the Martian vessel. Their crews were tense, expecting to be blotted out instantly. But nothing happened. The old General sat at the front porthole of one of the tanks, watching ahead, gazing at the narrowing space between the tank and the Martian ship. Those gleaming walls began to seem very close, and the General expected the catastrophe any moment. But they roared and clanked onward, and still nothing happened. The airplanes came lower, till the roar of their motors was heard above the noise of the tanks. Still nothing happened. Behind, the men at the cannons watched through field glasses and waited at their radios, ready to rain a shower of shells on the Martian vessel at the least suspicion. But nothing happened.

Finally, they were under the very lee of the metal hulk. It towered above them like a skyscraper, and extended in both directions like a mountain range. Still nothing happened.

"All out!" the General ordered, as the tanks stopped.

Their feet crunching in the sand, their hands full of grenades, they made their way slowly alongside the ship. One hundred yards. Two hundred yards, three hundred yards, they walked along, and still there appeared no way of getting inside. The holes that "Swoop" Martin had made were on the upper surface, and there was no way to climb.

"Try a grenade," the General ordered.

They all backed off. There was a crash of flying fragments, but no damage to the wall.

"A four-inch shell, then!"

The only communication with the gunners was now by flags. The General's order was rapidly wig-wagged to them. The General and his men hurried to shelter behind a sand hummock, now genuinely expecting complete annihilation. The gun crew placed the first shot too short and merely threw up sand. The second was a little high, tearing open the metal plates of the hull about twenty feet above the ground. The third shot ripped open a hole that they could easily walk into.

For a moment the General contemplated with interest the twisted and blackened edges of the shiny, white metal that was unknown to him. Then he recollected that they were in danger, he and his little group of men, peering into the depths of the dark opening. There was some huge machinery visible, a long corridor with a bright, flat surface at the end of it. Nothing had as yet happened to them. They were still alive.

The General pushed back one of the men who was edging into the opening. He claimed the privilege of being the first to walk into danger. The men with grenades and hand-machine guns crowded behind him. The General found himself walking down a small corridor, and the men filed behind him. The corridor soon became a bridge out in a vast void, black and filled with machinery of enormous proportions. Then again it became a corridor, and the bright surface was a wall turning at right angles.

It seemed that they spent hours walking about with pounding hearts and thumping heads, expecting every moment to be attacked in some unknown way from dark ambush. There was endless machinery, large and small, everywhere.

Finally, at the end of a climb up a long stairway, they came to an open space, at what they guessed to be about the middle of the ship. It looked as though they had found the "living quarters" at last. They were in a vestibule. In front of them was a metal door with a glass window, through which they could look into a vast, ovoid, rotunda-like room or hall.

All efforts to open the door failed. There seemed to be no lock against which to direct operations. The metal of the door was firm as a mountain against all their blows. So, they all stepped back, and a well-aimed grenade tore the door open wide enough for them to go through, their ears singing from the roar of the explosion. They went through cautiously, two experienced enlisted-men first, with their rifles at ready, then the officers with their pistols in their hands.

The lighting seemed to them rather dim, though it had the quality of daylight. Probably it corresponded to the lower intensity of illumination as found on the surface of Mars, "Crash!" went the rifle of a soldier at something that moved slightly on a couch across the room, a hundred yards away. Whatever it was that had moved, jerked as though it had been kicked, shuddered a moment, and lay still.

The group stood huddled together near the door, looked around and waited. Not a sound, not a stir in the vast room. It had all the proportions of some huge Coliseum, though none of the ponderous evidences of constructional difficulties. They had time to examine the place. About two hundred cots or couches stood around its walls. It appeared that originally they had been arranged in precise order, but now there was confusion. All of them were occupied by little, shriveled, flat-looking bodies, that looked astonishingly human. They were small and frail-looking. On closer inspection they looked especially human because the faces were so very old and sad. The skin was blue, leathery, and wrinkled.

In the middle of the place was a cluster of some kind of apparatus: a foundation-pillar, a platform, elongated, casing-like structures of metal pointing in all directions like telescopes or projectors, wheels, knobs, and levers for control. It may possibly have been the control station for running the ship. Near one end of the space into which they were looking, three or four of the mechanical contrivances in which these creatures traveled around when they were on earth, lay propped up in a heap, and a motionless body was still strapped in one of them.

"All beds occupied but one, sir!" the veteran Sergeant said; "and that must belong to him," pointing to the one in the machine. "Not one of them is stirring."

"Just the same," the wary old General said, "the four of you go around and prod everyone of them to see if there is any life left. This is no time to get shot from behind."

A keen-looking officer with a lieutenant-colonel's leaves on his shoulders, was also looking the bodies over. They were indeed all dead. He walked up to one and another, and even thumped and prodded several with professional skill and interest. The General watched him in mute inquiry.

"Well, doctor," he finally asked, "what killed them?"

"Radiation!" the medical officer replied. "As I see it, they had developed no natural protection against radiation because they live underground, and because there is so little radiation of any kind on Mars, both because of its distance from the sun and because of the scarcity of its radioactive minerals. Apparently there was no warning in their mathematics, of the terrific power of radium against their own flesh, even through the lead walls of its containers. See the deep destruction of skin and tissue on some of the older cases."

The General stood a moment, lost in thought. Then he sent two men back to the main force with orders that proper guards be brought up for the Martian ship.

"Now we'll look for the radium," he said. "It can't be far from here."

The men stuck close together as they moved here and there. It was a jittery place. The vastness and dimness of it, the two-hundred odd dead Martians, the jungles of incredibly huge machinery filling the great spaces all around them, between them and honest daylight, with God only knew what lurking in the depths, were conditions to which they were unaccustomed. They would have preferred a concrete human enemy in front of them no matter how well armed. They went to one of the doors that were let into the wall at intervals, then to another, then to several in succession.

The doors were of the same character as the first one they had encountered. There seemed no way to open them except by explosives, and this for the present they hesitated to do. The light from the rotunda penetrated the glass windows of the doors only a short distance, and was lost among the huge bulks and dizzy reaches of machinery.

Suddenly a harsh cackle sounded behind them.

They wheeled around and stood petrified, the enlisted men with their rifles automatically aimed in the direction from which the laugh had come.

"Ha! ha! ha! ha!" rasped a harsh, dry laugh. "Go ahead and have a shot at me, boys, and see how much harm it does!"

They saw Dragstedt standing there his eyes gleaming.

There was a moment's pause. The General whispered:

"He's insane."

"Who wouldn't be?" the medical officer said.

The madman's dry cackle rose again to the lofty ceiling:

"Ha! ha! So you think you can get the best of me, eh? Look what I can do to you!"

He whirled a little wheel, which slowly swung one of the long casings so that it pointed at a dead Martian on a couch. He moved his hand to something else, and an intense red ray shot across the intervening space. The Martian and his bed simply flew into pieces, and the fragments also disappeared, leaving behind them faint clouds of smoky vapor. A dull thud shook the room.

"Look! and look! and look!" the madman shouted excitedly, aiming at one after another of the Martians, blowing them into smoke with red streaks and dull thuds.

Crash! went a soldier's rifle as the ray began to swing too close to them.

The soldier dropped his rifle in one hand, and held the other to his head as though to nurse a headache.

"Swipe me! I could hit a pinhead at that distance!" he moaned.

"Fire at him again!" the General ordered. They all watched closely.

Crash! went the rifle. At the same time a small puff of smoke appeared in the thin air about a foot from Professor Dragstedt, and in line with his heart. The bullet had been caught and disintegrated by some field of force.

Again the long, cackling laugh:

"You see, I've got you!"

"Yes," said the General. "What do you want?"

"I'm sailing this ship to Mars," the Professor said. "I'm going to sell them the radium there. I'm going to be rich. I'm going to get power! I'm going to rule. I'll be the biggest―"

"But what about us?" the General interrupted.

The madman's face became crafty.

"You will come with me, and be my royal Guard," he orated. "Or―" he waited thoughtfully a moment as though a new and more interesting idea had struck him―"―or, I'll blast you into smoke. What would you rather do? Go to Mars, or get flashed into nothing?"

Someone in the group whispered:

"But the ship's got holes in it. If he goes out into space, we're all goners in a few seconds."

Another voice whispered:

"Does he really believe he can handle this ship? And get it to Mars? Looks complicated to me, and I'm―"

The old General's head probably worked faster than anyone else's.

"You go to hell!" he thundered to the mad professor. "We'll get you yet, and court-martial you and shoot you."

Professor Dragstedt gave a shrill yell.

"Whoopee! All aboard for Mars! Here we go!"

He adjusted a number of little wheels, lumbered all the casings into different positions, and took hold of a large, heavy lever.

The men looked at each other blankly. In a few seconds the cold of space would penetrate into their bone marrow, and all the air out of their bodies would be lost as an infinitesimal whiff in the limitless void. Irresistibly they turned to Dragstedt again.

With a wild grin on his face, he leaned back, and gave a long, hard pull at the heavy lever in front of him.

Suddenly they were pressed to the floor with an immense weight. The sensation was over in a second. During that second the spectacle in front of them took place. A fountain of a dozen streams of red beams played for an instant at steep angles, crisscrossing each other and forming a hyperboloid. When they subsided, the tower in the middle of the room was a molten mass, and the only trace of Professor Dragstedt was a whiff of smoky vapor, slowly dissipating itself in faint swirls.

________________

2: The Einstein See-Saw

Astounding Stories April 1932

TONY COSTELLO leaned glumly over his neat, glass-topped desk, on which a few papers lay arranged in orderly piles. Tony was very blue and discouraged. The foundations of a pleasant and profitable existence had been cut right out from under him. Gone were the days in which the big racket boss, Scarneck Ed, generously rewarded the exercise of Tony's brilliant talents as an engineer in redesigning cars to give higher speed for bootlegging purposes, in devising automatic electric apparatus for handling and concealing liquor, in designing beam-directed radios for secret communication among the gangs. Yes, mused Tony, it had been profitable.

Six months ago the Citizens' Committee had stepped in. Now the police department was reorganized; Scarneck Ed Podkowski was in jail, and his corps of trusty lieutenants were either behind the bars with him or scattered far and wide in flight. Tony, always a free spender, had nothing left but the marvelous laboratory and workshop that Scarneck Ed had built him, and his freedom. For the police could find nothing legal against Tony. They had been compelled to let him alone, though they were keeping a close watch on him. Tony's brow was as dark as the mahogany of his desk. He did not know just how to go about making an honest living.

With a hand that seemed limp with discouragement, he reached into his pocket for his cigarette-case. As he drew it out, the lackadaisical fingers failed to hold it firmly enough, and it clattered to the floor behind his chair. With the weary slowness of despondence, he dragged himself to his feet and went behind his chair to pick up the cigarette-case. But, before he bent over it, and while he was looking fully and directly at it, his desk suddenly vanished. One moment it was there, a huge ornament of mahogany and glass; the next moment there was nothing.

Tony suddenly went rigid and stared at the empty space where his desk had stood. He put his hand to his forehead, wondering if his financial troubles were affecting his reason. By that time, another desk stood in the place.

Tony ran over this strange circumstance mentally. His mental processes were active beneath, though dazed on the surface. His desk had stood there. While looking fully at it, all his senses intact, he had seen it vanish, and for a moment there had been nothing in its place. While he stared directly at the empty space from which the desk had disappeared, another desk had materialized there, like a flash. Perhaps, there had been a sort of jar, a tremor, of the floor and of the air, of everything. But the point was that his own desk, at which he had been working one moment, had suddenly vanished, and at the next moment another desk had appeared in its place.

And what a desk! The one that now stood there was smaller than his own palatial one, and shabbier. A raw, unpleasant golden-oak, much scratched and scuffed. Its top was heaped and piled full of books and papers. In the middle of it stood a photograph of a girl, framed in red leather. Irresistibly, the sunny beauty of the face, the bright eyes, the firm little chin, the tall forehead topped by a shining mass of light curly hair, drew Tony's first glance. For a few moments his eyes rested delightedly on the picture.

In a moment, however, Tony noticed that the books and papers on the desk were of a scientific character; and such is the nature of professional interest, that for the time he forgot his astonishment at how the desk had got there, in his absorption in the things heaped on top of it.

Perhaps it isn't fair to give the impression that the desk was in disorder. It was merely busy; just as though someone who had been deeply engaged in working had for the moment stepped away. There was a row of books across the back edge, and Tony leaned over eagerly to glance at the titles.

"'Theory of Parallels,' Lobatchevsky; 'Transformation of Complex Functions,' Riemann; 'Tensors and Geodesics,' Gauss," Tony read. "Hm—old stuff. But here's modern dope along the same line. 'Tensors,' by Christoffel; 'Absolute Differential Calculus,' by Ricci and Levi Civita. And Schrödinger and Eddington and D'Abro. Looks like somebody's interested in Relativity. Hm!"

He bent over, his constantly increasing interest showing in the attitude of his body; he turned over papers and opened notebooks crowded full of handwritten figures. Last of all he noted the batch of manuscript directly in front of him in the middle of the front edge of the desk. It was typewritten, with corrections and interlineations all over it in purple ink.

A title, "The Parallel Transformations of Equations for Matter, Energy, and Tensors," had been crossed out with purple ink, and "The Intimate Relation between Matter and Tensors" substituted. Tony bent over it and read. He was so fascinated that it did not even occur to him to speculate on the happy circumstance that the mysteriously appearing desk had brought its own scientific explanation with it. The title of the paper told him that its sheets would elucidate the apparently supernatural phenomenon, and all he did was to plunge breathlessly ahead in his eager reading. The article was short, about seven typewritten sheets. He took out his pencil and followed through the mathematical equations readily. Tony's mind was a brilliant, even though an erring one.

Under the first article lay a second one. One glance at the title caused Tony to stiffen. Then he picked up the typewritten script and carried it across the big room of his laboratory, as far away from the desk as he could get. He put the girl's photograph in his pocket. Then he took heaps and armfuls of papers, books and notes and carried them from the desk to a bench in the far corner. For, as soon as he had read the title, "A Preliminary Report of Experimental Work in the Physical Manipulation of Tensors," a sudden icy panic gripped his heart lest the desk and its papers suddenly disappear before he had finished reading to the end of the fascinating explanation.

We might add that it did not. For many weeks the desk remained standing in Tony's shop and laboratory, and he had the opportunity to study its contents thoroughly. But it took him only a few hours to grasp its secret, to add his own brilliant conception to it, and to form his great resolve. Once more Tony faced the world hopefully and enthusiastically.

2: Vanishing Valuables

THE POLICE understood Tony's share in the exploits of Scarneck Ed thoroughly, and, chagrined at their failure to produce proof that would hold in court, they maintained a close and constant watch on that gifted gentleman long after crime matters in the city seemed to have been cleaned up and forgotten. For one thing, they still had hopes that something would turn up to enable them to round off their work and lock him up with his former pals; for another, they did not fully trust his future behavior. Nevertheless, for three or four months it seemed as though Tony had genuinely reformed. He lived in and for his laboratory and shop. All day the scouts could see him laboring therein, and far into the night he bent over benches and machines under shaded lights. Then, some other astonishing occurrences distracted their attention from Tony to other fields.

One morning Mr. Ambrose Parakeet, private jewel broker, walked briskly out of the elevator on the fourteenth floor of the North American Building and unlocked the door of his office. He flung it open and started in, but stopped as if shot, uttered a queer, hoarse gurgle, and staggered against the door-casing. In a moment he recovered and began to shout:

"Help! Help! Robbers!"

Before long, several people had gathered. He stood there, gasping, pointing with his hand into the room. The eagerly peering onlookers could see that beside his desk stood an empty crate. It was somewhat old and weather-beaten and looked as though it might have come from a buffet or a bookcase. He stood there and pointed at it and gasped, and the gathering crowd in the corridor wondered what sort of strange mental malady he had been seized with. The elevator girl, with trained promptness had at once summoned the manager of the building, who elbowed his way through the crowd and stood beside Mr. Parakeet.

"There! There! Look! Where is it?" Mr. Parakeet was gasping slowly and gazing round in a circle. He was a little gray man of about sixty, and seemed utterly dazed and overcome.

"What's wrong, Mr. Parakeet?" asked the building manager. "I didn't know you had your safe moved out."

"But, no!" panted the bewildered old man. "I didn't. It's gone. Just gone. Last night at five o'clock I locked the office, and it was there, and everything was straight. What did you do? Who took it?"

The building manager conducted the poor old man into the office, shut the door, and asked the crowd to disperse. He sat Mr. Parakeet down into the most comfortable chair he could find, and then barked snappily into the telephone a few times. Then he sat and stared about him, stopping occasionally to reassure the old man and ask him to be patient until things could be investigated.

The building manager was an efficient man and knew his building and his tenants. He knew, as thoroughly as he knew his own office, that Mr. Parakeet had a medium-sized A. V. & L. Co.'s safe weighing about three tons, that could not be carried up the elevator when Mr. Parakeet had moved in, and had been hoisted into the window with block and tackle. He knew that it was physically impossible for the safe to go down any of the elevators, and knew that none of the operators would dare move any kind of a safe without his permission. Nevertheless, with the aid of a police-sergeant, his night-shift, and the night-watchmen of his building and adjacent ones, it was definitely established that nothing had been moved in or out of the North American Building during the preceding twenty-four hours, either by elevator or through a window to the sidewalk.

The newspapers took up the mystery with a shout. The prostrating loss suffered by Mr. Parakeet, amounting to over a hundred thousand dollars, added no little sensation to the story. A huge safe, disappearing into thin air, without a trace, and in its place an old wooden crate! What a mouthful for the scareheads! For several days newspapers kept up items about it, dwindling in size and strategic importance of position; for nothing further was ever found. Every bit of investigation, including that by scientific men from the University of Chicago, was futile; not a trace, not a suggestion did it yield.

Six days later the tall scareheads leaped out again: "Another Safe Disappears! Absolutely No Trace! Some time during the night, the six-foot steel safe of the Simonson Loan Company vanished into thin air. In the morning a dilapidated iron oil-cask was found in its place. The safe was so large and heavy that it could not have been moved without a large truck, special hoisting apparatus, a crew of men, and some hours of time. The store was brightly lighted during the entire night, and two watchmen patrolled it regularly. They report that they saw and heard nothing unusual, and were very much amazed when shown the oil-cask standing where the safe had been the night before." The accounts in the various papers were substantially the same.

Newspaper readers throughout the city and its environs were very much intrigued. Such a thing was very exciting and mystifying; but it was so far out of touch with their own lives that it did not affect them very much at any time except when they were reading the paper or discussing it in conversation. The police were the ones who were doing the real worrying. And, when the following week two more safes disappeared, insurance companies began to take an interest in the matter; and everyone who had any considerable amount of valuables in store began to feel panicky.

The circumstances surrounding the disappearance of the last of the series, the fourth, were especially amazing. This was also a jewelry safe. Canzoni's is a popular firm that rents a quarter of a floor in a big department store, and does a large volume of moderate-priced business. The receipts are stored in a heavy portable safe in a corner of the silverware section until evening, when they are carried to the large vault of the big store. One Saturday afternoon after a particularly busy day, Mr. Shipley, Canzoni's manager, was watching the hands of the clock creep toward five-thirty. He leaned on a counter and watched the clerks putting away goods for the night; he glanced idly toward the safe which he intended to open in a few minutes. The doormen had already taken their stations to keep out further customers. Then he glanced back at the safe, and it wasn't there!

Mr. Shipley drew a deep breath. The safe disappearances he had read about flashed through his mind. But he didn't believe it. It couldn't be! Yet, there was the empty corner with the birch panels forming the back of the show-windows, and no safe. In a daze, he walked over to the corner, intending to feel about with his hands and make sure the safe was really gone. Before he got there, there flashed into sight in place of the safe, a barrel of dark wood; and in a moment there was a strong odor of vinegar.

Things spun around with Mr. Shipley for a few moments. He grasped a counter and looked wildly about him. Clerks were hurrying with the covering of counters; no one seemed to have noticed anything. He stood a moment, gritted his teeth, and breathed deeply, and soon was master of himself. He stood and waited until the last customer was gone, and then called several clerks and pointed to where the safe had stood.

Within the space of a month, thirteen safes and three million dollars worth of money or property had disappeared. The police were dazed and desperate, and business was in a panic. Scientific men were appealed to, to help solve the riddle, but were helpless. Many of them agreed that though in theory such things were explainable, science was as yet far from any known means of bringing them about in actuality. Insurance companies spent fabulous sums on investigation, and, failing to get results, raised their premiums to impossible levels.

3: The Lady of the Picture

Phil Hurren, often known as "Zip" Hurren, reporter on the Examiner, felt, on the day the managing editor called him into the sanctum, that fortune could smile on him no more brightly. There wasn't anything brighter.

"You stand well with the detective bureau," his boss had said; "and you've followed this safe-disappearing stuff pretty closely. You're relieved of everything else for the time being. Get on that business, and see that the public hears from the Examiner!"

Phil knew better than to say any more, for before he recovered from his surprise, the editor had turned his back, buried himself in his work on the desk, and forgotten that Phil was there. Nor did Phil waste any real time in rejoicing. That is why he was called "Zip." When things happened, whether it was luck or system, Phil was usually there. In sixty seconds more, Phil was in a taxicab, whirling toward police headquarters.

Luck or system, he didn't know, but he struck it again. The big wagon was just starting away from the station door when he arrived, crowded inside with bluecoats and plainclothes-men. The burly, red-faced man with chevrons on his sleeve, sitting beside the driver, saw Phil jump out, and motioned with his hand. Phil leaped up on the back step of the vehicle and hung on for dear life with his fingers through the wire grating as they careened through the streets. The men on the inside grinned at him; a number of them knew him and liked him. Gradually the door was opened and he crowded in. He found Sergeant Johnson and eyed him mutely.

"How the hell do you find these things out, I'd like to know," the sergeant exclaimed. "Are you a mind-reader?"

"I don't really know anything," Phil admitted with that humility which the police like on the part of newspaper men and seldom meet with. "Do you mind?"

"No objection," grunted the sergeant. "Been watching all the old crooks since these safes have been popping. Nothin' much on any of them, except this slippery wop, Tony Costello. No, we haven't caught him at anything. Seems to be keeping close and minding his own business. Working in his laboratory. Ought to make a good living if he turned honest; clever guy, he seems. But he's been too prosperous lately. Lots of machinery delivered to his place; we traced it to the manufacturers and find it cost thousands. Big deposits in his banks. But, no trace of his having sold anything or worked at anything outside his own place. So, we're running over to surprise him and help him get the cobwebs out of his closets."

THE RAID on Tony Costello's shop and laboratory disclosed nothing whatever. They surrounded the place effectively and surprised Tony genuinely. But a thorough search of every nook and cranny revealed nothing whatever of a suspicious nature. There was merely a tremendous amount of apparatus and machinery that none of the raiding party understood anything about. Tony's person was also thoroughly searched, and the leather-framed photograph of the beautiful unknown girl was found.

"Who's this?" the sergeant demanded. "She don't look like anyone that might belong to your crowd."

"I don't know," Tony replied.

"Whad'ya mean, don't know?" The sergeant gave him a rough shake. "What'ya carryin' it for, then?"

"I had really forgotten that it was in my pocket," Tony replied calmly, at his ease. "I found it in a hotel room one day, and liked the looks of it."

"I know you're lying there," the sergeant said, "though I'm ready to believe that you don't know her. Too high up for you. Well, it looks suspicious and we'll take the picture."

"Boy!" gasped Phil. "What a girl she must be in person! Even the picture would stand out among a thousand. May I have the picture, Sergeant?"

"You can come and get a copy of it to-morrow. We'll have it copied and see if we can trace the subject of it. That might tell us something."

The following morning Phil was at Police Headquarters to pick up further information, and to get a copy of the girl's photograph. Like the police, he could not keep his mind off the idea that there was some association between the crooked engineer and the disappearance of the safes. It seemed to fit too well. The scientific nature of the phenomena, Tony Costello's well known reputation for scientific brilliance, and his recent affluence; what else could it mean? In some way, Tony was getting at these safes. But how? And how prove it? Most exhaustive searches failed to reveal any traces of the safes anywhere. If any fragment of one of them had appeared in New York or San Francisco, the news would have come at once, such was the sensation all over the country that the series of disappearances had caused. Tony's calm insolence during the raid, his attitude of waiting patiently till the police should have had their fun and have it over with so that he might be left at peace again, showed that he must be guilty, for anyone else would have protested and felt deeply injured and insulted. He seemed to be enjoying their discomfiture, and absolutely confident of his own safety.

"There's got to be some way of getting him," Phil mused; and he mused almost absent-mindedly, for he was gazing at the photograph of the girl. For many minutes he looked at it, and then put it silently into his pocket.

Five o'clock in the evening of that same day came the news of another safe disappearance. Phil got his tip over the phone, and in fifteen minutes was at the scene. It was too much like the others to go into detail about; a six-foot portable safe had suddenly disappeared right in front of the eyes of the office staff of The Epicure, a huge restaurant and cafeteria that fed five thousand people three times a day. In its place stood a ragged, rusty old Ford coupe body. He went away from there, shaking his head.

Then suddenly in the midst of his dinner, he jumped up, and ran. An idea had leaped into his head.

"Right after one of these things pops is the time to take a peek at Tony," he said to himself, and immediately he was on the way.

But how to get his peep was not so easy a problem. When he alighted from his cab a block away from Tony's building, he was hesitant about approaching it. Tony knew him, and might see him first. Phil circled the brick building, keeping under cover or far enough away; all around it was a belt of thirty feet of lawn between the building and the sidewalk. Ought he have called the police and given them his idea? Or should he wait till darkness and see what he could do alone?

Then suddenly he saw her. Across the street, standing in the shelter of a delivery truck in front of an apartment, she was observing Tony's building intently. The aristocratic chin, the brightness of the eyes, the waves of her hair, and the general sunny expression! It could not be anyone else. Post haste he ran across the street.

"Pardon me!" he cried excitedly, lifting his hat and then digging hastily into his inner pocket. "I'm sure you must be the—"

"Well, the nerve!" the young woman said icily, and pointing her chin at the opposite horizon she walked haughtily away.

By that time Phil had dug out his picture and was running after her.

"Please," he said, "just a moment!" And he held the picture out in front of her face.

"Now, where in the world—?" She looked at him in puzzled and indignant inquiry, and then burst out laughing.

"It is you, isn't it?" Phil asked. "What are you laughing at?"

"Oh, you looked so abject. I'm sure your intentions must be good. Now tell me where you got my picture."

"Let us walk this way," suggested Phil, leading away from Tony's building.

And, as they walked, he told her the story. When he got through she stood and looked at him a long time in silence.

"You look square to me," she said. "You're working on my side already. Will you help me."

"I'll do anything—anything—" Phil said, and couldn't think of any other way of expressing his willingness, for the wonderful eyes bore radiantly upon him.

"First I must tell you my story," she began. "But before I can do so, you must promise me that it is to remain an absolute secret. You're a newspaper man—"

Phil gave his promise readily.

"My father is Professor Bloomsbury at the University of Chicago. He has been experimenting in mathematical physics, and I have been assisting him. He has succeeded in proving experimentally the concept of tensors. A tensor is a mathematical expression for the fact that space is smooth and flat, in three dimensions, only at an infinite distance from matter; in the neighborhood of a particle of matter, there is a pucker or a wrinkle in space. My father has found that by suddenly removing a portion of matter from out of space, the pucker flattens out. If the matter is heavy enough and its removal sudden enough, there is a violent disturbance of space. By planning all the steps carefully my father has succeeded in swinging a section of space on a pivot through an angle of 180 degrees, and causing two portions of space to change places through hyperspace, or as you might express it popularly, through the fourth dimension."

Phil held his hands to his head.

"It is not difficult," she went on smiling. "Loan me your pocket knife and a piece of paper from your notebook. If I cut out a rectangular piece of paper from this sheet and mount it on a pivot or shaft at A B, I can rotate it through 180 degrees, just like a child's teeter-totter, so that X will be where Y originally was. That is in two dimensions. Now, simply add one dimension all the way round and you will have what daddy is doing with space. He does it by shoving fifty or a hundred pounds of lead right out of space; the sudden flattening out of the tensors causes a section of space to flop around, and two portions of space change places. The first time he tried it, his desk disappeared, and we've never seen it again. We've thought it was somewhere out in hyperspace; but this terrible story of yours about disappearing safes, and the fact that you have this picture, means that someone has got the desk."

"Surely you must have suspected that long ago, when the disappearances first began?" Phil suggested.

"I've just returned from Europe," said Miss Bloomsbury. "I was tremendously puzzled when I got my first newspapers in New York and read about the safes. Gradually I gathered all the news on the subject, and it seemed most reasonable to suspect this gangster engineer."

"Great minds and same channels," Phil smiled. "But your father. Why didn't he speak up when the safes began to pop?"

"Ha! ha!" she laughed a tinkly little laugh. "My father doesn't know what safes are for, nor who is President, nor that there has been a war. Mother and I take care of him, and he works on tensors. He has probably never heard about the safes."

"What were you going to do around here?" Phil asked, marveling at the courage of the girl who had come to look the situation over personally.

"I hadn't formed any definite plans. I just wanted to look about first."

"Well," said Phil, "as you will soon see by the papers, another safe has puffed out. It occurred to me that we might find out something by spying about here immediately after one of the disappearances. That's why I'm here. If you'll tell me where you live, or wait for me at some safe place, I'll come and report to you as soon as I find out anything."

"Oho! So that's the kind of a girl you think I am!" She laughed sunnily again. "No, Mr. Reporter. Either we reconnoiter together, or each on our own."

"Oh, together, by all means," said Phil so earnestly that she laughed again. "And since we'd better wait for darkness, let's have something to eat somewhere. I didn't finish my dinner."

Phil found Ione Bloomsbury in person to be even more wonderful than her photograph suggested. Obviously she had brains; it was apparent, too that she had breeding. Her cheerful view of the world was like a tonic for tired nerves; and withal, she had a gentle sort of courtesy in her manner that may have been old-fashioned, but it was almost too much for Phil. Before the dinner was over, he would have laid his heart at her feet. It gave him a thrill that went to his head, to have her by his side, slipping along through the darkness toward Tony's building.

This building was a one-story brick affair with a vast amount of window space. From the sidewalk they could see faint lights glowing within, but could make out no further details. They therefore selected the darkest side of the building, and made their way hurriedly across the lawn. Here, they found, they could see the crowding apparatus within the one long room fairly well. They looked into one window after another, making a circuit around the building, until Phil suddenly clutched the girl's arm.

"Look!" he whispered. "Straight ahead and a little to the left!"

At the place he indicated stood a tall safe. Across the top of its door were painted in gold letters, the words: "The Epicure."

"That's the safe that went to-night," whispered Phil. "That's all we need to know. Now, quick to a telephone!"

"Oh," said a gentle, ironic voice behind them, "not so quick!"

They whirled around and found themselves looking into two automatic pistols, and behind them in the light of the street lamps, the sardonic smile of Tony Costello.

"Charmed at your kind interest in my playthings, I'm sure," he purred. "Only it leaves me in an embarrassing position. I'm not exactly sure what to do about it. Kindly step inside while I think."

Phil made a move sidewise along the wall.

"Stop!" barked Costello sharply. "Of course," his voice was quiet again, "that might be the simplest way out. I think I am within my legal rights if I shoot people who are trying to break into my property. Yet, that would be messy—not neat. Better step in. The window swings outward."

At the point of his pistols they clambered through the window, and he came in after them. He kept on talking, as though to himself, but loud enough for them to hear.

"Yes, we want some way out that is neater than that. Hm! Violence distresses me. Never liked Ed's rough methods. Yet, this is embarrassing."

He turned to them.

"What did you really want here? I see that you are the Examiner's reporter, and that you are the lady of the photograph. What did you come here for? Ah, yes, the safe. Well, go over and look at it."

As they hesitated, he stamped his foot and shrilled crankily:

"I mean it! Go, look at the safe! Is there anything else you want to know?"

"Yes," said Phil coolly, his self-control returning, "where are the other safes?"

"Oh. Anything to oblige. Last requests are a sort of point of honor, aren't they. Ought to grant them. Stand close to that safe!"

He backed away, his guns levelled at them. He laid down the right one, keeping the left one aimed, and moved some knobs on a dial and threw over a big switch. A muffled rumbling and whirring began somewhere; and then, slowly, a block of tables and apparatus ten feet square rose upward toward the ceiling. A section of the floor on which they stood came up, supported by columns, and now formed the roof of a room that had risen out of the floor. In it were four safes.

"Poor old Ed!" sighed Tony. "There was a time when he had a lot of good stuff put away down there. I've got six rooms like that. Well, the good old times are over."

He threw out the switch and the whole mass sank slowly and silently downward till the floor was level and there was no further sign of it. Then he backed away to another table, across the room from them, keeping his gun levelled.

"Too bad," he said. "I don't like to do these things. But—" he sighed deeply, "self-preservation. Now I'm going to flip you out, yes, out, into a strange region. I've never been there. I don't know if there is food or drink there. I hope so, for you'll never get back here."

Phil stiffened. He determined to leap and risk a shot. But he was too late. Tony's hand came down on a switch. There was a sudden, nauseating jar. The laboratory vanished.

There was only the safe, Ione Bloomsbury and himself, and a small circle of concrete floor extending to a dim little horizon a dozen feet away. Beyond that, nothing. Not blue, as the sky is. Not black, as dark, empty spaces are. It suggested black, because there was no impression of light or color on the eyes; but it wasn't black. It was nothingness.

4: Marooned in Hyperspace

"I SUPPOSE YOU realize what he has done?" Miss Bloomsbury inquired.

"Couldn't be too sure, but it looks like plenty. What's the equation for it?" Beneath his jocularity, Phil felt a tremendous sinking within him. It looked serious, despite the fact that he did not understand it at all.

"He has swung us out into hyperspace, or into the fourth dimension, as your newspaper readers might understand it, and has let us hang there. Remember our slip of paper. Suppose X and Y were swung out of the plane of the paper and allowed to remain at an angle with it. We are at an angle with space, out in hyperspace."

There was a period of bewilderment, almost panic, in which they both felt so physically weak that they had to sit down on the concrete and stare at each other mutely. But this passed and their natural courage soon reasserted itself. Their first thought was to take stock of what information they could get on their situation; and their first step was to venture as close as possible to the queer little horizon which lay almost at their very feet. It gave them a frightened feeling, as though they were standing high up on a precipice or tower.

To their surprise, the horizon receded as they walked toward it, always remaining about a dozen feet away from them. At first they walked on concrete and then came to a crumbly edge of it and found themselves stepping on hard, sandy earth. Later there was rock, sometimes granite-like, sometimes black and shiny. But what they saw underfoot was nothing, compared with the glimpses of things they got out in the surrounding emptiness. First there was a vast space in which a soft light shone, and in which there were countless spheres of various sizes, motionlessly suspended. The spheres seemed to be made of wood, a green, sap-filled, unseasoned wood. The scene was visible for a few seconds, and vanished suddenly as they walked on. This astonished them; so they stepped back a pace or two and saw it again; and as they moved on, it disappeared again.

Then there was a great stretch of water in which the backs of huge monsters rolled and from which a hot wind blew for a few instants until they passed on and the scene vanished. There was a short walk with nothing but emptiness, and then there appeared huge, oblique, cubistic looking rows of jagged rocks in wild, dizzy formations that didn't look possible; and farther on, after another interval of emptiness, a tangle of brown, ropey vines with black-green leaves on them, an immense space filled with serpentine swinging loops and lengths of innumerable vines. Several loops projected so near them that they could have reached out and touched them had they wished.

"This is too much for me!" Phil gasped. "Have we gone crazy? Or did he kill us, and is this Purgatory?"

Ione smiled and shook her little head in which she had a goodly store of modern mathematics stored away.

"These must be glimpses of other 'spaces' besides our own space. If we could see in four dimensions we could see them all spread out before us. But we can only perceive in three dimensions; therefore, as we walk through hyperspace, past the different 'spaces' which are ranged about in it, we get a glimpse into such of them as are parallel with our own space. Can you understand that?"

"Oh, yes," groaned Phil. "It sounds just about like it looks. But, don't mind me. Go on, have your fun."

"I've been thinking about those wooden spheres," continued Ione. "I'm sure they must be sections of trees that are cut crosswise by our 'space;' they grow in three dimensions, but only two of them are our dimensions and a third is strange to us. We see only three-dimensional sections of them, which are spheres. There is more of them, that we cannot see, in another dimension."

"Yes, yes. Just as plain as the Jabberwock!"

"Look! There's a real Jabberwock!" exclaimed Ione.

On ahead of them they saw a number of creatures that seemed to be made of painted wooden balls in different colors, joined together.

"Tinkertoys!" exclaimed Phil. "Live ones! Big ones!"

The animals, though they looked for all the world as though they were made of painted wood, moved with jerky motions and clattered and snarled.

"There is probably more to them in another dimension," Ione said.

Suddenly one of the beasts approached them with a leap. There were two big eyes and two rows of teeth that came together with a snap, right on Phil's trouser-leg. He jerked himself away, sacrificing some square inches of trouser-leg, and, whirling around, kicked at the thing with all his force. It almost paralyzed his foot, for the animal seemed to be made of wood or bone. But it disappeared, and, as it did, both of them felt a queer, nauseating jolt. A few more minutes' walk brought them back to the safe without seeing any more spaces; and the sight of its black iron bulk filled them with a home-like relief, which in a moment they recognized as a mockery.

"Are we on a sphere of some sort?" Phil asked.

"Probably on an irregular mass of matter," Ione replied, "part of which is Tony's concrete floor, and part of which comes out of some other dimension. This mass of matter is at one end of a long, bar-like portion of space, the middle of which is pivoted in our world, somewhere in Chicago, and both ends of which are free in hyperspace."

"Then," suggested Phil, "why can't we walk down to the axle on which it is balanced, and step out into Chicago?"

"Because there isn't any matter for us to walk on. We are not able to move about in space, in three dimensions, you know. We can only get around in two dimensions, on the surface of matter."

"Well, let's try another exploration trip at right angles to our first one. After all, these 'spaces' are an interesting show, and I want to see some more."

They started out in the selected direction, and after a short walk got a glimpse of a vast space dotted with stars and nebulae, with two bright moons sailing overhead. A few steps farther on was a wall of solid granite, near enough to touch with their hands. Again, there was an intensely active mass of weaving bright stripes and loops and circles, seeming to consist of light only, and making them dizzy in a few seconds. Ione wondered if it might not be something like an organic molecule on a large scale. Again, odd, queer, indescribable shapes and outlines would appear and disappear, obviously three-dimensional sections of multi-dimensional things, cut by space. Once they passed a place of intense cold and terrific noise and escaped destruction or lunacy only because it took them the merest instant to get past.

They arrived back at the safe, very much fatigued from the strain, their minds woefully confused. Hunger and thirst were beginning to thrust up their little reminders; and for the first time the terrors of their position, flung out into hyperspace on a small, barren piece of matter, began to seem real.

After a rest they started out again. As Phil had touched, in kicking it, a creature from another "space," perhaps they might find water and even food somewhere. They retraced their first steps to the spot where they had at first seen water. They found it again and were able to dip their hands into it. It was warm, and too salty to drink. They came to the place with the creepers or vines, and Phil reached out and seized one of them. It was heavy, rubbery, and elastic, stretching readily as he pulled it.

"These little lurches that we feel must be the snapping back of the space-puckers as expressed by tensors," Ione remarked. "Every time matter goes in or out of space, the nature of space is altered."

"Well," observed Phil, releasing the vine, "I'd better be careful. If one of these things hauls me off here, our last bond with home is gone. I don't want to get lost in some other space."

As he released the vines they snapped back to their places, and the forest of them dimmed a little and reappeared.

They made the round again, dodging cautiously past the point where they had previously found the "Tinkertoy" animals, and succeeded in getting past their snapping teeth. But no promise of food or water did they find anywhere.

"Looks like we're sunk," observed Phil, as they dropped down on the concrete to rest, leaning their backs against the safe.

How time counted in hyperspace, neither Phil nor Ione could tell; Phil knew that his watch was running. He knew that it was ages and ages that he sat with his back against the safe, reviewing all the events of his put life, and thinking of this ignominious end to a lively career! He swore half aloud; then suddenly looked at Ione, ready to apologize. He found her weeping silently.

"I should never have let you come into the building with me," he stammered in confusion at her tears.

"Oh, what do I care what becomes of me!" she exclaimed angrily. "But who will take care of poor daddy? He doesn't even know when it's time to eat." And she burst into a fresh fit of weeping.

Phil bent his head in the dumbness of profound despair.

5: The Reversible Equation

DESPAIR, however, is a luxury. Necessity is a stimulus. With the parchings of thirst and the gnawings of hunger, the two young people ceased swearing and weeping. Phil got up and paced about and sat down again. Ione's tears stopped and dried, and she sat and thought.

In the back of her mind there had been forming a vague sort of an idea, which had signalled ahead of itself that there was hope. She sat there and desperately drove her reason to its utmost efforts, to find that idea and bring it to the surface of consciousness. Hand to hand fights with wild animals, battles between ships of the line, vicious duels between ace-aviators in the clouds are tense fights; but they cannot compare in anxious difficulty with the struggle to bring up an unformed idea out of the subconscious mind—especially when one knows that the idea is there, and that it must be found to save one's life.

"Ione!" exclaimed Phil. It was the first time he had used the name. "What is the matter? You are as tense as a—"

"Ah!" cried Ione, springing up. "Tense! Tensors! I have it!"

Phil gazed at her in alarm. She laughed; at first it was a strained laugh, but gradually it melted into her sunny one.

"No, I'm not crazy. I knew there was a way out, and I've been trying to reason it out. How simple. You remember the little jolts when you pulled at the vines and when you kicked the funny animal? Tensors. Matter and space are so closely interrelated that you can't move matter in or out of space without causing disturbance, recoils, and tremors in space. Those bits of matter were small, and produced only a slight disturbance. It takes about a hundred pounds of lead to swing this segment—"

"Oho! Got you!" exclaimed Phil. "Not so dumb! The safe!"

"Yes. The safe!" Ione cried.

"Throw it off and watch us swing, eh? What would happen?"

"I might calculate it if I knew the weight of the safe."

"No calculating when I'm around," Phil said. "It couldn't make things any worse. Try it first and calculate afterwards."

They got behind the safe and pushed, and their combined strength against it was about as effective as it would have been in moving the Peoples' Gas Building. They sat down again in despair.

"Suppose we could budge it," Ione said. "All we could do would be to push it around, this piece of matter we are on. That wouldn't help. We've got to get it out of space. We can't push it hard enough to do that. It's got to be shot out suddenly—"

"And we haven't got a gun handy," Phil remarked droopingly.

"Not exactly a gun. A sort of sling—"

Phil leaped to his feet.

"A sling. Why! To be sure! The vines!"

Without another word, both of them got up and ran. They hastened in a direction opposite to the one they had at first taken on their trip of exploration, and this brought them first past the "space" of the Tinkertoy-like animals. As they went by, several of these beasts darted at them, one of them snapping at Ione's heels. She uttered a scream, causing Phil to turn about and kick right and left among them. He drove them back and escaped from them, rejoining Ione.

"Wait," he said, when they reached the vines. "Remember those wooden balls. If I could get a few to throw at those critters—"

In a moment they were off, and finally arrived at the point from which they first saw the balls. Odd it seemed, how they hung suspended in space, thousands of them, all sizes. Phil reached out and grasped one about the size of a baseball and drew it toward himself. He felt a dizzy lurch and heard Ione scream.

"Let go!" she screamed again.

When he suddenly realized what was going on, he found himself prostrate on the ground, with Ione across him, her arms about his knees.

"Do you realize," she panted, disentangling herself, "that you were pulling yourself out of this space into that one?"

"Thanks!" said Phil. "Never say die. More careful this time, and a smaller one."

HE REACHED out and grasped a ball smaller than a golf-ball, and pulled carefully, keeping an eye upon Ione. There was resistance to his pull, but gradually the ball came. It seemed heavy. There was a crack as of breaking wood, and he fell backward, with a wave of nausea sweeping strongly over him. He gazed in amazement at a heavy wooden stick that he held in his hands. The only thing about it that suggested the ball for which he had reached was its diameter.

"Can't understand it, but appreciate it just the same," he said. He broke the stick in two, and had two excellent clubs.

"Simple," Ione replied. "The balls are cross-sections of these trees or sticks which grow in a 'space' at right angles to our own; and we only see their three-dimensional cross-sections."

"Yes," said Phil. "Cabbages and kings. I'm for you and the party."

A short walk brought them to the "space" of the vines. After testing the matter out carefully, they found that they could each pull two of them at a time. The vines stretched amazingly when they found those whose far ends were fixed firmly in the tangle, permitting them to carry their own ends along with them toward the safe. Phil wound his vines around his left arm and stuck one club through his belt. The other he got ready for the wooden animals.

He needed it. The size of the pack was doubled, and he rapped them till his hand was numb before he and Ione got by. Their vines drew out thin, but held until they were firmly tied about the safe. They went back after four more.

"I should judge," said Phil, "that by the time we get thirty or forty, the elastic pull will be strong enough to drag the safe back with them as they snap back home."

TRIP AFTER TRIP they made, fighting the wooden animals with their clubs each time. Their clothes were torn, and their legs bleeding; their throats were dry and lips cracked. The hard animals seemed to have a persistent, mechanical ferocity that was undismayed by hammering with the clubs and by repeated repulses. Phil could not seem to hurt them; he merely knocked them away. Finally, on the ninth trip, Ione collapsed when she reached the safe. As she fell, the elasticity of the vines began slowly to drag her back with them. Phil was forced to sit across her knees while he tied his own vines about the safe. Then he released her and added her vines to the great cable about the safe.

An overbold hard animal rattled up and snapped at her. Goaded to fury, Phil swung at it with his club and hurled it through the air. He could feel the lurch as it left his space and entered another. Then he pushed with his mightiest effort against the safe. It budged, and slid a few inches. He used his stick as a lever. It moved again, a little faster. Ione struggled to her feet and tried to help, but her efforts were ineffectual.

With one arm about her, Phil pried again under the safe, knowing that another trip after vines was out of question. Another animal snapped at their heels. For a while, it was kick backwards, then a shove at the safe. Each time the safe moved. The sight of its movement revived Ione, so that she was able to push also. Gradually it acquired a steady motion, pulled by the contraction of the vines; its progress soon became faster and faster. Phil was about to follow it and give it another push, when Ione drew him back.

Suddenly they experienced a sinking sensation and a fearful vertigo. The snapping animals faded. Ahead of them was the forest of vines, and they saw the safe hurled into it, crashing, plunging into the tangled mass. The whole view crumpled and moved upwards like a swirl of leaves in a wind, and then vanished with a snap.

THEY WERE SICK and dizzy, but tremendously curious to see everything. The water, the cubistic cliffs, the vast space full of balls, all curiously blurred, appeared in succession. There were blank spaces and then blurred sights of things which they did not recognize, never having seen them before. Then the dizziness and the nausea abated, and ahead of them was a vast yellow blue, a huge nebula, and in it were double-colored suns and ringed planets with swarms of moons; this glorious sight remained for many seconds, as they gazed at it in panting astonishment, half reclining on the concrete; and then it faded. Again the nausea came on; again the succession of blurred views. Eventually the myriad spheres, the water with the leviathans, the forest of vines, each succeeding scene grew more blurred. Their nausea was correspondingly increased, till they were forced to lie down on the ground from illness.

When their giddiness abated, there were blurring views again. There was an impression as though the speed of a train were decreasing as one looks out of the window. And how one view held for several seconds, a vast and wild mountain-range with glaciers and snow peaks by moonlight. When this faded gradually, the scenes began to flick by, more and more rapidly, and grew blurred. Phil and Ione were attacked by nausea until, again, they had to lie down. After that came the familiar succession: the wooden animals, the tangle of vines, the vast sea, the spheres, and more blurred scenes. Then came a pause, with the nebula and the glorious suns swinging into view once again.

"Oh, I understand!" Ione exclaimed; "We're swinging. The safe was so heavy that we swung too violently, too far, and back again—"

"And we keep going till it knocks us out, or till the old cat dies," added Phil.

HOWEVER, they found that after a number of repetitions of the same program, their giddiness was becoming less; and instead of lying down in the middle of the swing, they could look about. Then it occurred to Phil to time the interval between the nebula and the mountain-range. When the exact halfway point was determined, and after several more swings, they could see dimly the windows and machinery of Tony's laboratory flash by when they passed the middle.

"I don't mean to be a crepe-hanger, but how do you know we will stop at the right point?" Phil asked.

"I don't," replied Ione cheerfully. "But mathematics says so. A freely oscillating segment of space would naturally come to equilibrium in a position parallel to the rest of its own space, would it not?"

There came a swing when they did not reach the nebula on the one hand and the mountain-range on the other. After that, views dropped off from either end of the swing quite rapidly, and before many minutes, they looked into Tony's laboratory a large portion of the time. For many seconds the laboratory held; then it would gradually fade, and reappear again, only to fade into empty nothingness all around.

"The old cat's dead," Phil finally announced.

They sat and stared about them as the laboratory held steady and no further intervening periods of blankness intervened. They both sighed deeply and slumped over on the ground to rest.

"Bang! bang! bang!"

Some sort of hammering woke them up. They looked about them in a daze. It was broad daylight, and things looked queer in the laboratory. There was a smell of scorched rubber and hot oil. Great loops of wire sagged down from above. Several nondescript heaps stood about that might once have been machinery, but now suggested melting snow-men, all fused into heaps. At a table sprawled a queer, misshapen figure that suggested human origin. Both of its hands were burned to cinders to the elbows. Great holes were scorched into the clothes. But the face was recognizable. Tony's playthings had got him at last.

"Looks like something's happened in here!" Phil gasped, in amazement.

"I'll bet it has, too," Ione exclaimed. "This is the first time it occurred to me that our recoil from throwing the safe overboard and the oscillation of our space-segment must have created a tremendous electrical field in the tetra-ordinate apparatus. The reaction is reversible, you see. The field swings the space-segment, or the swinging of the space-segment creates the field. And the field was too much for Tony."

At this point the door fell under the blows of the police, and the raiding squad rushed into the room.

_______________________

3: The Man with the Strange Head

Amazing Stories, January 1927

A MAN in a gray hat stood halfway down the corridor, smoking a cigar and apparently interested in my knocking and waiting. I rapped again on the door of Number 216 and waited some more, but all remained silent. Finally my observer approached me.

“I don’t believe it will do any good,” he said. “I’ve just been trying it. I would like to talk to someone who is connected with Anstruther. Are you?”

“Only this.” I handed him a letter out of my pocket without comment, as one is apt to do with a thing that has caused one no little wonderment:

“Dear Doctor”: it said succinctly. “I have been under the care of Dr. Faubourg who has recently died. I would like to have you take charge of me on a contract basis, and keep me well, instead of waiting till I get sick. I can pay you enough to make you independent, but in return for that, you will have to accept an astonishing revelation concerning me, and keep it to yourself. If this seems acceptable to you, call on me at 9 o’clock, Wednesday evening. Josiah Anstruther, Room 216, Cornhusker Hotel.”

“If you have time,” said the man in the gray hat, handing me back the letter, “come with me. My name is Jerry Stoner, and I make a sort of living writing for magazines. I live in 316, just above here.”

“By some curious architectural accident,” he continued, as we reached his room, “that ventilator there enables me to hear minutely everything that goes on in the room below. I haven’t ever said anything about it during the several months that I’ve lived here, partly the man with the strange head because it does not disturb me, and partly because it has begun to pique my curiosity— a writer can confess to that, can he not? The man below is quiet and orderly, but seems to work a good deal on some sort of clockwork; I can hear it whirring and clicking quite often. But listen now!”

Standing within a couple of feet of the opening which was covered with an iron grill, I could hear footsteps. They were regular, and would decrease in intensity as the person walked away from the ventilator opening below, and increase again as he approached it; were interrupted for a moment as he probably stepped on a rug, and were shorter for two or three counts, no doubt as he turned at the end of the room. This was repeated in a regular rhythm as long as I listened. “Well?” I said.

“You perceive nothing strange about that, I suppose,” said Jerry Stoner. “But if you had listened all day long to just exactly that you would begin to wonder. That is the way he was going on when I awoke this morning; I was out from 10 to 11 this forenoon. The rest of the time I have been writing steadily, with an occasional stretch at the window, and all of the time I have heard steadily what you hear now, without interruption or change. It’s getting on my nerves.

“I have called him on the phone, and have rung it on and off for twenty minutes; I could hear his bell through the ventilator, but he pays no attention to it. So, a while ago I tried to call on him. Do you know him?”

“I know who he is,” I replied, “but do not remember ever having met him.”

“If you had ever met him you would remember. He has a queer head. I made my curiosity concerning the sounds from his room an excuse to cultivate his acquaintance. The cultivation was difficult. He is courteous, but seemed afraid of me.”

We agreed that there was not much that we could do about it. I gave up trying to keep my appointment, told Stoner that I was glad I had met him, and went home.

The next morning at seven he had me on the telephone.

“Are you still interested?” he asked, and his voice was nervous. the man with the strange head

“That bird’s been at it all night. Come and help me talk to the hotel management.”

I needed no urging.

I found Beesley, the hotel manager, with Stoner; he was from St. Louis, and looked French.

“He can do it if he wants to,” he said, shrugging his shoulders comically; “unless you complain of it as a disturbance.”

“It isn’t that,” said Stoner; “there must be something wrong with the man.”

“Some form of insanity—” I suggested; “or a compulsion neurosis.”

“That’s what I’ll be pretty soon,” Stoner said. “He is a queer gink anyway. As far as I have been able to find out, he has no close friends. There is something about his appearance that makes me shiver, his face is so wrinkled and droopy, and yet he sails about the streets with an unusually graceful and vigorous step. Loan me your pass key; I think I’m as close a friend of his as anyone.”

Beesley lent the key, but Stoner was back in a few minutes, shaking his head. Beesley was expecting that; he told us that when the hotel was built, Anstruther had the doors made of steel with special bars, at his own expense, and the windows shuttered, as though he were afraid for his life.

“His rooms would be as hard to break into as a fort,” Beesley said as he left us; “and thus far we do not have sufficient reason for wrecking the hotel.”

“Look here!” I said to Stoner; “it will take me a couple of hours to hunt up the stuff and string up a periscope; it’s an old trick I learned as a Boy Scout.”

Between us we had it up in about that time; a radio aerial mast clamped on the window sill with mirrors at the top and bottom, and a telescope at our end of it, gave us a good view of the room below us. It was a sort of living room made by throwing together two of the regular-sized hotel rooms. Anstruther was walking across it diagonally, disappearing from our field of view at the further end, and coming back again. His head hung forward on his chest with a ghastly limpness. He was a big, well-built man, with a vigorous stride. Always it was the same path. He avoided the small table in the middle each time with exactly the same sort of side step and swing. His head bumped limply as he turned near the window and started back across the room. For two hours we watched him in shivering fascination, during which he walked with the same hideous uniformity.

“That makes thirty hours of this,” said Stoner. “Wouldn’t you say that there was something wrong?”

We tried another consultation with the hotel manager. As a physician, I advised that something be done; that he be put in a hospital or something. I was met with another shrug.

“How will you get him? I still do not see sufficient cause for destroying the hotel company’s property. It will take dynamite to get at him.”

He agreed, however, to a consultation with the police, and in response to our telephone call, the great, genial Chief Peter John Smith
was soon sitting with us. He advised us against breaking in.

“A man has a right to walk that way if he wants to,” he said. “Here’s this fellow in the papers who played the piano for 49 hours, and the police didn’t stop him; and in Germany they practice making public speeches for 18 hours at a stretch. And there was this Olympic dancing fad some months ago, where a couple danced for 57 hours.”

“It doesn’t look right to me,” I said, shaking my head. “There seems to be something wrong with the man’s appearance; some uncanny disease of the nervous system— Lord knows I’ve never heard of anything that resembles it!”

We decided to keep a constant watch. I had to spend a little time on my patients, but Stoner and the Chief stayed, and agreed to call me if occasion arose. I peeped through the periscope at the walking man several times during the next twenty-four hours; and it was always exactly the same, the hanging, bumping head, the uniformity of his course, the uncanny, machine-like exactitude of his movements. I spent an hour at a time with my eye at the telescope studying his movements for some variation, but was unable to be certain of any.

That afternoon I looked up my neurology texts, but found no clues. The next day at four o’clock in the afternoon, after not less than 55 hours of it, I was there with Stoner to see the end of it; Chief Peter John Smith was out.

As we watched, we saw that he moved more and more slowly, but with otherwise identical motions. It had the effect of the slowed motion pictures of dancers or athletes; or it seemed like some curious dream; for as we watched, the sound of the steps through the ventilator also slowed and weakened. Then we saw him sway a little, and totter, as though his balance were imperfect. He swayed a few times and fell sidewise on the floor, we could see one leg in the field of our periscope moving slowly with the same movements as in walking, a slow, dizzy sort of motion. In five more minutes he was quite still.

The Chief was up in a few moments in response to our telephone call.

“Now we’ve got to break in,” he said. Beesley shrugged his shoulders and said nothing. Stoner came to the rescue of the hotel property. “A small man could go down this ventilator. This grill can be unscrewed, and the lower one can be knocked out with a hammer; it is cast-iron.”

Beesley was gone like a flash, and soon returned with one of his window-washers, who was small and wiry, and also a rope and hammer. We took off the grill and held the rope as the man crawled in. He shouted to us as he hit the bottom. The air drew strongly downwards, but the blows of his hammer on the grill came up to us. We hurried downstairs. Not a sound came through the door of 216, and we waited for some minutes. Then there was a rattle of bars and the door opened, and a gust of cold wind struck us, with a putrid odor that made us gulp. The man had evidently run to open a window before coming to the door.

Anstruther lay on his side, with one leg straight and the other extended forward as in a stride; his face was livid, sunken, hideous. Stoner gave him a glance, and then scouted around the room— looking for the machinery he had been hearing, but finding none. The Chief and I also went over the rooms, but they were just conventional rooms, rather colorless and lacking in personality. The Chief called an undertaker and also the coroner, and arranged for a post mortem examination. I received permission to notify a number of professional colleagues; I wanted some of them to share in the investigation of this unusual case with me. As I was leaving, I could not help noting the astonished gasps of the undertaker’s assistants as they lifted the body; but they were apparently too well trained to say anything.

That evening, a dozen physicians gathered around the figure covered with a white sheet on the table in the center of the undertaker’s workroom. Stoner was there; a writer may be anywhere he chooses. The coroner was preparing to draw back the sheet.

“The usual medical history is lacking in this case,” he said. “Perhaps an account by Dr. B. or his author friend, of the curious circumstances connected with the death of this man, may take its place.”

“I can tell a good deal,” said Stoner, “and I think it will bear directly on what you find when you open him up, even though it is not technical medical stuff. Do you care to hear it?”

“Tell it! Go on! Let’s have it!”

“I have lived above him in the hotel for several months,” Stoner began. “He struck me as a curious person, and as I do some writing, all mankind is my legitimate field for study. I tried to find out all I could about him.

“He has an office in the Little Building, and did a rather curious business. He dealt in vases and statuary, bookends and chimes, and things you put around in rooms to make them look artistic. He had men out buying the stuff, and others selling it, all by personal contact and on a very exclusive basis. He kept the stock in a warehouse near the Rock Island tracks where they pass the Ball Park; I do not believe that he ever saw any of it. He just sat in the office and signed papers, and the other fellows made the money; and apparently they made a lot of it, for he has swung some big financial deals in this town.

“I often met him in the lobby or the elevator. He was a big, vigorous man and walked with an unusually graceful step and an appearance of strength and vitality. His eyes seemed to light up with recognition when he saw me, but in my company he was always formal and reserved. For such a vigorous-looking man, his voice was singularly cracked and feeble, and his head gave an impression of being rather small for him, and his face old and wrinkled.

“He seemed fairly well known about the city. At the Eastridge Club they told me that he plays golf occasionally and excellently, and is a graceful dancer, though somehow not a popular partner. He was seen frequently at the Y.M.C.A. bowling alleys and played with an uncanny skill. Men loved to see him bowl for his cleverness with the balls, but wished he were not so formally courteous, and did not wear such an expression of complete happiness over his victories. Bridley, manager of Rudge & Guenzel’s book department, was the oldest friend of his that I could find, and he gave me some interesting information. They went to school together, and Anstruther was poor in health as well as in finances. Twenty-five years ago, during the hungry and miserable years after his graduation from the University, Bridley remembered him as saying:

“‘My brain needs a body to work with. If I had physical strength, I could do anything. If I find a fellow who can give it to me, I’ll make him rich!’

“Bridley also remembers that he was sensitive because girls did not like his debilitated physique. He seems to have found health later, though I can find no one who remembers how or when. About ten years ago he came back from Europe where he had been for several years, in Paris, Bridley thinks; and for several years after this, a Frenchman lived with him. The city directory of that time has him living in the big stone house at 13th and ‘G’ streets. I went up there to look around, and found it a double house, Dr. Faubourg having occupied the other half. The present caretaker has been there ever since Anstruther lived in the house, and she says that his French companion must have been some sort of an engineer, and that the two must have been working on an invention, from the sounds she heard and the materials they had about. Some three or four years ago the Frenchman and the machinery vanished, and Anstruther moved to the Cornhusker Hotel. Also at about this time, Dr. Faubourg retired from the practice of medicine. He must have been about 50 years old, the man with the strange head and too healthy and vigorous to be retiring on account of old age or ill health.

“Apparently Anstruther never married. His private life was quite obscure, but he appeared much in public. He was always very courtly and polite to the ladies. Outside his business he took a great interest in Y.M.C.A. and Boy Scout camps, in the National Guard, and in fact in everything that stood for an outdoor, physical life, and promoted health. In spite of his oddity he was quite a hero with the small boys, especially since the time of his radium hold-up. This is intimately connected with the story of his radium speculation that caused such a sensation in financial circles a couple of years ago.

“About that time, the announcement appeared of the discovery of new uses for radium; a way had been found to accelerate its splitting and to derive power from it. Its price went up, and it promised to become a scarce article on the market. Anstruther had never been known to speculate, nor to tamper with sensational things like oil and helium; but on this occasion he seemed to go into a panic. He cashed in on a lot of securities and caused a small panic in the city, as he was quite wealthy and had especially large amounts of money in the building-loan business. The newspapers told of how he had bought a hundred thousand dollars worth of radium, which was to be delivered right here in Lincoln— a curious method of speculating, the editors volunteered.

“It arrived by express one day, and Anstruther rode the express wagon with the driver to the station. I found the driver and he told the story of the hold-up at 8th and ‘P’ streets at eleven o’clock at night. A Ford car drove up beside them, from which a man pointed a pistol at them and ordered them to stop. The driver stopped.

“‘Come across with the radium!’ shouted the big black bulk in the Ford, climbing upon the express wagon. Anstruther’s fist shot out like a fl ash of lightning and struck the arm holding the pistol; and the driver states that he heard the pistol crash through the window on the second floor of the Lincoln Hotel. Anstruther pushed the express driver, who was in his way, backwards over the seat among the packages and leaped upon the hold-up man; the driver said he heard the man with the strange head Anstruther’s muscles crunch savagely, as with little apparent effort he flung the man over the Ford; he fell with a thud on the asphalt and stayed there. Anstruther then launched a kick at the man at the wheel of the Ford, who crumpled up and fell out of the opposite side of the car.

“The police found the pistol inside a room on the second floor of the Lincoln Hotel. The steering post of the Ford car was torn from its fastenings. Both of the hold-up men had ribs and collar-bones broken, and the gunman’s forearm was bent double in the middle with both bones broken. These two men agreed later with the express driver that Anstruther’s attack, for suddenness, swiftness, and terrific strength was beyond anything they had dreamed possible; he was like a thunderbolt; like some furious demon. When the two men were huddled in black heaps on the pavement, Anstruther said to the driver, quite impersonally: ‘Drive to the police station. Come on! Wake up! I’ve got to get this stuff locked up!’

“One of the hold-up men had lost all his money and the home he was building when Anstruther had foreclosed a loan in his desperate scramble for radium. He was a Greek named Poulos, and has been in  prison for two years; just last week he was released—”

Chief Peter John Smith interrupted.

“I’ve been putting two and two together, and I can shed a little light on this problem. Three days ago, the day before I was called to watch Anstruther pacing his room, we picked up this man Poulos in the alleyway between Rudge & Guenzel’s and Miller & Paine’s. He was unconscious, and must have received a terrible licking at somebody’s hands; his face was almost unrecognizable; several ribs and several fingers on his right hand were broken. He clutched a pistol fitted with a silencer, and we found that two shots had been fired from it. Here he is—”

A limp, bandaged, plastered man was pushed in between two policemen. He was sullen and apathetic, until he caught sight of Anstruther’s face from which the Chief had drawn a corner of the sheet. Terror and joy seemed to mingle in his face and in his voice. He raised his bandaged hand with an ineffectual gesture, and started the man with the strange head off on some Greek religious expression, and then turned dazedly to us, speaking painfully through his swollen face.

“Glad he dead. I try to kill him. Shoot him two time. No kill. So close— ” indicating the distance of a foot from his chest; “then he lick me. He is not man. He is devil. I not kill him, but I glad he dead!”

The Chief hurried him out, and came in with a small, dapper man with a black chin whisker. He apologized to the coroner.

“This is not a frame-up. I am just following out a hunch that I got a few minutes ago while Stoner was talking. This is Mr. Fournier. I found his address in Anstruther’s room, and dug him up. I think he will be more important to you doctors than he will in a court. Tell ’em what you told me!”

While the little Frenchman talked, the undertaker’s assistant jerked off the sheet. The undertaker’s work had had its effect in getting rid of the frightful odor, and in making Anstruther’s face presentable. The body, however, looked for all the world as though it were alive, plump, powerful, pink. In the chest, over the heart, were two bullet holes, not bloody, but clean-cut and black. The Frenchman turned to the body and worked on it with a little screw-driver as he talked.

“Mr. Anstruther came to me ten years ago, when I was a poor mechanic. He had heard of my automatic chess-player, and my famous animated show-window models; and he offered me time and money to find him a mechanical relief for his infirmity. I was an assistant at a Paris laboratory, where they had just learned to split radium and get a hundred horse-power from a pinch of powder. Anstruther was weak and thin, but ambitious.”

The Frenchman lifted off two plates from the chest and abdomen of the body, and the flanks swung outward as though on hinges. He removed a number of packages that seemed to fit carefully within, and which were on the ends of cables and chains.

“Now—” he said to the assistants, who held the feet. He put his hands into the chest cavity, and as the assistants pulled the feet away, he lifted out of the shell a small, wrinkled emaciated body; the body of an old man, which now looked quite in keeping with the well-known Anstruther head. Its chest was covered with dried blood, and there the man with the strange head were two bullet holes over the heart. The undertaker’s assistants carried it away while we crowded around to inspect the mechanism within the arms and legs of the pink and live-looking shell, headless, gaping at the chest and abdomen, but uncannily like a healthy, powerful man.

_____________________

4: On Board the Martian Liner

Amazing Stories, March 1931

“YES SIR!” said “Streak” Burgess, star reporter of the Times, into the telephone.

“And write me up a good feature article of the trip,” the editor’s voice barked into his ear. “Give me vivid, human stuff. The public is sick of these dry science articles. And remember that we’re trying to arouse people to space-mindedness. Here’s three good planets, with no end of business opportunities, and the people are asleep. Wake ’em up!”

Burgess hung up the receiver and whirled on his heel.

“Where do you have to go this time, Mr. Burgess?” inquired a youthful voice at his side.

“Oh, hello Chick!” said Burgess.

Burgess knew Chick merely as a boy of about seventeen who ran loose about the premises of the Club on his father’s membership, and who in his youthful fashion idolized the popular and successful reporter. In spite of the discrepancy in their ages, the two had become chummy, although Burgess hardly remembered Chick’s real name. Johnson, or some such common, everyday name, it was.

“I’ve got to start for Mars in four hours,” Burgess explained. “You see, to the Times managing-editor, a reporter is not a person; he’s merely a projectile.”

“Oh, Mr. Burgess, please take me with you. Please do!” implored the boy. “I’ll pay all your expenses in grand style. Please let me go with you. I’d give anything to go to Mars!”

“Well, at least you’re space-minded anyway,” the reporter laughed. “I’m sorry, kid,” he said gravely. “I couldn’t do it. It would get me into trouble with my paper. And the laws are mighty strict about anyone  under twenty-one going up in a space-liner, except under the care of a parent or guardian. But, I’ll tell you all about it when I get back.”

“I’m going to Mars some day!” the boy said desperately. “I’ll show you!”

“I haven’t the least doubt about it,” Streak Burgess laughed. “I wish I could take you along. I’d do it just to get you away from that precious gang of young toughs you are running with. I’ve got to meet your father some day and warn him that if he don’t get away from his money for a while and look after you, you’ll — you’ll get into bad company.”

“You mean The Science Club?” Chick asked.

“Sweet name, I’d call it. Remember, Chick, I’ve seen a lot of the world. Your Science Club looks like a bunch of crooks to me, who are going to use you for a tool. Your ugly president with the birthmark on his cheek is all labeled for the electric chair.”

“Oh, Pug? Pug isn’t bad. You just ought to know him better,” Chick protested with the faith of youth.

“Well, so long!” Streak Burgess went off with the speed that had earned him his nickname. Momentarily he forgot the adventure-hungry boy; and when the time came to leave the Club and betake himself to the spaceport, Chick was nowhere to be found.

The departure of a space-liner is always a thrilling spectacle. To the casual onlooker, it looks like a mad, chaotic turmoil of people and vehicles about the base of the vast, silvery bulk that looms hugely into the sky. Immense trucks backing up with the last consignments of fast freight to the platform overhung by countless cranes reaching out of the blackness of the vessel’s ports; a stream of lighter trucks carrying baggage; one aero-taxi after another depositing now a man, now a woman, now a group of several on the platform; the flashing of the brilliant uniforms of the space-fleet officers, the hoarse shouts of the crew and stevedores, the dense crowd outside the tailing, waiting for the moment when the bulging vessel would rise slowly and majestically upwards, and disappear as a brilliant speck in the sky. Who has not been thrilled again and again by the arrival or the departure of a space-ship?

The reporter was at the dock early, watching. His job as observer of  human-nature on a Martian trip had begun. Already he was making notes in his mind: the timid-looking little lady who had just stepped out of an aero-taxi and hesitated a moment, clasping her hands and drawing a deep breath before plunging into the blackness of the ship’s door, must be on her first trip. But the two swaggering men who walked nonchalantly in, puffing their cigars over some sort of an argument that was more important than the picturesqueness of the scene, must have made the trip more than once: obviously commercial traveling-men. All of a sudden he noted Pug’s purple cheek on the platform. The presence of the big bully on the spot gave Burgess an odd sense of uneasiness. But, in a moment Pug was out of sight, and Burgess saw no more of him.

Burgess waited at the edge of the platform, watching the passengers go aboard, and planning to be the last one to go on himself. Just as the edge of the platform, which was really the lowered hatch of the ship’s door, began to rise, he stepped up on it. As he did, a sudden commotion arose that nearly startled him into falling off. An aero-taxi dashed down dangerously near the heads of the crowd, and skimmed within a hair’s breadth of the rising platform. Out of it jumped and rolled and landslid a great, round hulk of a man, showing a red face now and then as he pursued his pell-mell course down the rapidly inclining platform and into the ship’s door. Three traveling bags hurtled out of the aero-taxi into the ship’s corridor.

Fat man, traveling-bags, and Burgess, all landed in a heap on the floor of the bottom-corridor, as the big hatch swung to. Burgess, still on his feet, backed away. Down the corridor to the right, was more commotion: shouts and clanking and the roar of motors. Some belated piece of freight was being forced into the other door, against the protests of the ship’s crew, who had already begun to close the hatch.

When that was over, Burgess looked at the fat man who sat on the floor among his traveling-bags, a rueful picture of melancholy despair. He tried to rise, and his face twisted into an expression of pain because of some bruise.

“Porter!” he yelled sharply. “Porter!”

The great, ungainly figure of the porter stalked down the corridor from the left. Gently it helped the fat man to his feet and picked up his traveling-bags; and the two of them departed into the gloom of the ship.

The porter was a size No. 3 televox-robot. He stood six and a half feet high, and moved with a curious croaking sound. There is a rather odd thing about the televox-robots that the General Electric has never been able to explain: although their manufacture is rigidly standardized nevertheless each machine turns out to have its individual peculiarities, and differs from all the others. It seems to have a personality of its own. Machines of this type have a square head with eyes and ears, an opening for oil, and a little diaphragm with which they can answer simple questions of a routine nature.

“When you’re through, come back and show me my room,” Burgess called after the robot.

And indeed, in a few minutes the huge figure came stalking back, its queer croak re-echoing through the metal corridor. The porter led Burgess to the elevator, which carried them off to the upper deck. In contrast to the glaring confusion outside, it was cool and quiet inside the ship. As the elevator went up, they left behind the musty odor that came from the hold, passed the smell of oil and ozone that came from the engine-room level, and stepped out into the fresh air of the passengers’ quarters, where the air-renovating apparatus had already been started. The mahogany enamel on the duralumin walls, the upholstered velvet furniture the soft green and brown carpets all looked quite pleasant and comfortable, and Burgess felt a little glow of anticipation of a few comfortable days ahead. Most people considered the trip a hardship and a nuisance, but his life was a lively one, and for him the trip would mean a rest.

The passengers’ quarters occupied the topmost level of the after portion of the ship. Ahead of them were the officers’ quarters, and forward of these, the quarters of the crew, or the forecastle. Below was the vast hold for freight, except in the center of the ship, where the machinery was located. Burgess took a look about his stateroom and then hurried to the after-gallery. Always the passengers congregate in the above place when the ship takes off; for it is entirely walled in with glass, and from it the Earth can be seen sinking downwards. Even the two traveling-men, who had already made a dozen trips, were looking eagerly down out of the window, for no one can ever become quite accustomed to that amazing spectacle. The Earth at first seems like a huge concave bowl, with a high rim all around, and a deep cavity below. The rim sinks lower and lower, and all of a sudden by some magic, it has become small and convex. Even after one has seen that change a dozen times, one never gets over the wonder of it.

There were twelve people gathered in the after-gallery: twelve people who were daring to venture across sixty million miles of space; who were to live together for six days almost as closely as a family. Five of them were women. The only one absent was the poor old, fat man who had boarded so precipitately. The sounds of the sealing of the ports had ceased, the hammering, the sizzling of air, the shouts, the grating of huge screw-levers. Then came the toot of the hoarse whistle and the roar of the reaction-motors.

In a moment the two traveling-men had turned away and were deep in argument about the cost of some commodity. They were always arguing about prices. A newly-married couple, who were making a honeymoon out of the trip, were whispering excitedly to each other. The little lady, whom Burgess had already observed coming aboard, had her face set hard; the emotion of the moment was almost too much for her. She was a Miss Waterbury, a Pittsburgh school-teacher who had been saving her pennies for years in order to make the trip to Mars. Possibly her expression was due partly to the sickening sensation which was felt for a few moments by all, as one feels a sinking when an elevator starts.

One by one the passengers trickled away from the after-gallery, down the corridor, into their staterooms or into the drawing-room at its opposite end. Burgess’ stateroom was at the middle of the corridor and just opposite that of the fat man, whom he could see sitting glumly in the corner as he went into his own room. Next to him he could hear an elderly couple fussing vehemently; later he became acquainted with them as Colonel Thayer of the Air Guard, and his wife, en route to the Colonel’s new post on Mars.

At the dinner-table, Burgess got a good look at all the passengers. Always there was in his mind the question: Why are these people taking this trip? What motives prompt them to risk their lives to get to Mars? One by one he checked them, and all of them seemed to be quite in place, except the poor, nervous, timid old fat man. Next to Burgess sat Kaufman, a keen, able-looking man, who was on his way to look into some business openings, which on that new-old world, with its degenerate inhabitants and its wealth of heavy-metal ores, looked wonderfully promising. Across from him sat the fat man, anxious, worried, thoroughly miserable. Next to him were a wealthy young society couple, utterly bored and blasé, hoping to find new thrills in a new world, because everything on Earth was tame to them. Then there was Kaufman’s secretary, a very pretty young woman who was just now in the thrills of delight because the young engineer, Harry Flynn, going out penniless to seek his fortune on Mars, had turned out to be an old home-town acquaintance of hers.

One could understand why these people were on the trip. But the red-faced fat man was the soft, comfortable type of person, who groans when he has to get up out of his chair. He looked timid. He looked as though he ought to be by the fireside in bathrobe and slippers. What did he want on the long, hard, dangerous trip to Mars?

Mystery on Board

AFTER DINNER, Burgess managed to stroll down the corridor, just behind the fat man, in the hopes of getting better acquainted with him. Several of the passengers went out on the after-gallery to contemplate the marvelous wealth of brilliant stars in their inky black setting; but the fat man headed for his room. As he stepped into his door, Burgess touched him on the shoulder, intending to start a friendly conversation. The fat man gave a violent start and whirled about; and Burgess found himself looking into the muzzle of a big forty-five automatic pistol.

The fat man was white and trembling; one could see that he was not used to handling a pistol. But that made it all the more dangerous for Burgess, at whom the thing was pointed. With a quick movement, Burgess ducked to the ground and knocked the pistol out of the man’s  hand. It fell with a crash to the floor. Hoping that no one else had heard it, Burgess swept it up, pushed himself into the stateroom, and closed the door. He sat down with the gun on his knees. The old man was backed into a corner facing him, pale as a sheet, and panting desperately. Burgess was tremendously sorry for him.

“Now what’s the trouble?” Burgess asked kindly. “I certainly wouldn’t do you any harm.”

“Who are you?” the old man panted.

Burgess flipped his coat lapel and showed his badge.

“I am a Times reporter. Tell me what you are afraid of. These little affairs are right in my line, and perhaps I can help you out.”

The fat man studied Burgess for some minutes. Finally, without a word, he reached into his pocket and handed out a letter for Burgess to read. It was written in white ink on a brilliant scarlet paper:

“Most of the recipients of the red letter have been wise enough to hand over the money promptly. Three were foolish and refused. They were Lowell, Hirsch, and Carlotti. Do you remember what happened to them? No one can save you from the same fate unless you fork over at once.

“I need another million dollars for my project. You can spare it as easily as the ordinary man can spare a quarter. Have it ready in twenty-four hours in liquid securities or banknotes. A man will call for it at your home. He does not know me nor where I stay; therefore, if you have him followed, the money will be lost, and I shall be compelled to use you as an example to the next man upon whom I call for help.

“If I do not get the money, there is no way in which you can escape me, no place where you will be safe. I’ll get you, no matter what precautions you take.”

“I got it early this morning. Do you remember Lowell, Hirsch, and Carlotti?” the fat man asked.

The reporter nodded.

“Three hideous murders of wealthy men within the past year, and unsolved to date,” he mused. “The letter seems to have been written by a man who is intelligent, but somewhat insane. That’s the most dangerous kind. Have any idea who it might be?”

The fat man shook his head.

“Now, I’m worried because of the impulse which made me rush to this ship as soon as I got the letter. I thought this the best way to escape. But, after I had thought it over, I realized that to anyone else, it would obviously be the first thing I would do. I’m afraid I bungled.”

“Why should flight on a space-liner be so obvious?” the reporter asked.

“Well, you see, I’m Johnson, the president of the company that owns this line, The Mars, Ganymede, and Callisto Transportation Company. I was so scared by the letter that I did a very simple-minded thing to come here.”

There was a rap on the door, at which Mr. Johnson started violently. It turned out to be several sailors, making the routine search of the ship for stowaways. Behind them came the Captain of the ship, and peered into the room.

“I got your letter of introduction,” he said gruffly to Burgess. Then he spied Mr. Johnson.

“Oh, how do you do, sir,” he said, all meekness and courtesy. “I’ve got to be careful,” he explained to the President, who was virtually the owner of the vessel. “There has been too much of this stowaway stuff. There’s danger in it, and the law has recently made it a capital offense. A few weeks ago, on the Aristotle, a little overcrowded ship twenty-one days on the way to Ganymede, a stowaway used up more air than had been figured on; this in turn resulted in a deeper breathing on the part of the passengers, which exhausted the oxygen supply prematurely, and the ship arrived in port with half a dozen passengers unconscious from asphyxia. If I ever find one of those rats on my ship, I’ll — ”

He strode down the hallway, finishing the threat into his whiskers.

“Unless a stowaway is discovered, your enemy, if he is on board, must be one of the passengers,” Burgess said to Mr. Johnson. “Could that be possible?”

“I don’t know any of them. And he might be anybody.” Mr. Johnson looked very much depressed. “Well, I’ll stay here with you and keep an eye open. You’re not afraid that I might be the man who is trying to kill you?”

“I don’t think so.” Mr. Johnson studied the reporter. “There is your badge, and Captain Scott knew you. I shall be glad to have you stay.”

“Or,” suggested Burgess, “perhaps it would be better yet for both of us to move into my stateroom.”

Mr. Johnson nodded in acquiescence, and started to push the button to summon the porter. Burgess stayed his hand.

“I’ll carry your things. The fewer the people that know about this move, the better.”

For eight hours of the twenty-four, the lights were turned down, and “night” prevailed on the ship. During the “evening” the wild young society couple were playing bridge with the two traveling-men. Mrs. de Palogni’s voice grated unpleasantly on Burgess’ ears; but the sight of the honeymoon couple close together on the after-gallery again served to redeem his attitude toward his fellow-men. He could imagine the thrills that the two young people got out of being all alone out in space, with nothing but stars in all directions, and the brilliant disk of the Earth below. In another corner, Miss Waterbury and Cecilie May, Kaufman’s pretty secretary, already well acquainted, were lost in wonder at the Heavens beneath them. The porter came croaking down the corridor. With a whispered “good-night,” Burgess put Mr. Johnson into the upper berth and took the lower one himself, for strategic reasons.

Sometime in the night, Burgess woke up with a start. He glanced out of the port at the brilliant stars and the dense black sky, and felt his heart pounding in some unconscious alarm. He lay still and listened. There was a faint clicking sound, which came, was silent, and came again. It issued from the door on the opposite side of the corridor.

Burgess got silently out of bed, taking his pistol in one hand. Then, suddenly he threw open the door of the stateroom. A dark figure was just opening the door of the stateroom opposite, the one that had been Mr. Johnson’s. It whirled and ran up the corridor. In an instant Burgess had snapped on the corridor light and was speeding in pursuit. The dark figure ran ahead and into the drawing-room, with Burgess in pursuit. The drawing-room was dark; Burgess went in rather cautiously, pistol in hand. He found the switch and snapped on the light. There was no one in the room. With amazed glances he searched the room, but no one was there. He hurried to the door opposite the one by which he had entered, but found it locked. It was always kept locked, for it led to the officers’ quarters. It could not have been unlocked and locked again during the second or two that it had taken him to turn on the light.

Burgess stared blankly around. The fugitive had disappeared!

The Stowaway

DOWN THE corridor, doors were opening and sleepy heads were poking out. The porter stalked up, the whirring of his gears audible in the night’s quietude.

“Do you want anything?” he asked in soft, courteous tones.

“No,” said Burgess. “I couldn’t sleep, and came to find something to read.” He had decided to say nothing for the present. Then he was assailed by a foolish little feeling: the porter could understand his “no” but nothing of the rest of the explanation. It was difficult to keep in mind that these things were only machines; one felt like treating them as conscious human beings.

The passengers retired sleepily to their respective rooms, and the porter returned to his niche; his faint croaking stopped and the night was quiet again. The hum of the ship’s reaction-motors was barely audible, for once the ship got under way, very little power was needed to maintain velocity.

Burgess was tremendously puzzled. The crew’s thorough search had found no stowaway. It must be one of the passengers. Which one could it be?

He studied them all over at the breakfast table. They were all present except Mr. Johnson and Colonel Thayer’s wife, both of whom were a little ill with space-sickness. Though the artificial gravity-fields had pretty well overcome space-sickness, some people were still susceptible to it. After breakfast he talked the matter over with Mr. Johnson, who lay in his berth, pale and nauseated.

“If anyone wants to kill me, why don’t they do it now?” he asked with grim humor at his illness.

“Here they are.” Burgess checked over the passenger list. “Kaufman is a big business man; the Colonel is a soldier; Cecilie May, Miss Waterbury, and Mrs. Thayer can be left out; they are not criminals, especially not murderers. The de Palognis are too rattle-brained; they couldn’t even think up such a scheme. That leaves the two traveling men and Flynn, the young engineer, and they’re impossible. It can’t be any of the passengers.”

Mr. Johnson called for the Captain, who appeared in the stateroom shortly. The matter was explained, but the Captain was inclined to laugh at it.

“Impossible!” he snorted. “We went over this ship with a fine-toothed comb last night.”

“Could it have been one of the crew?” Burgess asked.

“Say!” exclaimed the Captain. “Those fellows have to work. If one of them left his post for ten seconds, he’d be missed.”

It was decided to take young Flynn into their confidence. He looked to be a very honest and earnest chap with just the alert type of mind that was needed to help solve such a riddle. The plan was that either Burgess or Flynn would be constantly on guard.

By noon Mr. Johnson felt better and was up and around. In the afternoon the Captain sent word that they were passing quite near a large asteroid, and all the passengers were gathered in the after-gallery. Most of the passengers gazed in puzzled silence at the bleak and jagged surface of the huge, rocky fragment outside; only the de Palognis were trying to crack a few cheap jokes about it, comparing it to a French pleasure resort, where they had tried to amuse themselves last summer. Mr. Johnson left the group early and went back to lie down. Suddenly his cries resounded from the corridor:

“Porter! Porter! Help! Help!”

“Buzz! buzz! buzz!” came the porter’s busy-signal. It meant that he was engaged on some other job and could not come at once.

Flynn and Burgess were in the corridor in a couple of leaps. There they saw Mr. Johnson struggling and panting — alone. He was disheveled and breathless, and as they appeared, sank slowly to the floor.

“What is it? What’s the matter?” Burgess demanded.

“Something — somebody grabbed me by the throat,” Mr. Johnson gasped. “But I couldn’t see anything.”

Burgess wondered if Mr. Johnson’s illness and terror had begun to derange his mind. The porter came up and helped them carry the old man to his berth. No, the old fellow was, in spite of his nervous timidity, too shrewd and level-headed to go off that way. Something must really have happened. The passengers, remembering the scare during the night, gathered in the drawing-room and questioned each other.

In a couple of hours, Mr. Johnson felt better and was trying to be cheerful. Burgess, who had been at his side all of the time, noting that the old man was dozing, decided to let him sleep. He called the porter.

“Watch him while I walk about a little,” he directed. “If he wants anything, call me.”

As he came into the drawing-room, Burgess was assailed by a hundred questions. Mr. Johnson’s identity had become known to the passengers; and this occurrence, combined with that of the “night” before, had roused their curiosity. He was still puzzling, trying to decide how much to tell them, when a pistol shot crashed out, down the corridor. Everybody turned in that direction, to see the tall form of the porter sway in Mr. Johnson’s door, topple backwards, and fall with a great crash to the floor. There he lay still.

“Murder!”

“It’s the porter, poor fellow!”

“Someone has shot the porter!”

Cecilie May screamed, and Flynn was soothing her in a wonderfully tender tone of voice, though everyone was too tense to notice it.

“It’s only a machine,” Flynn said to her. She shrank toward him, also quite unconscious of her action, and laughed nervously. Then Mr. Johnson appeared at the door of his stateroom with a smoking pistol in his hand, looking very sheepish. The Captain came in through the dining-room, disgust showing very plainly in his expression.

“Too bad,” Mr. Johnson said to the Captain “I was half asleep and saw the robot bending over me and it rattled me. My nerves have been pretty shaky.”

The Captain growled something and called two sailors to drag the porter away. Later on he announced that the apparatus could be repaired, but that it might take days, for the bullet had cut over a thousand wires.

“In the meanwhile,” the Captain said, “you’ll have to wait on yourselves. I can’t spare a man from the crew, and we haven’t any extra robots.”

The Colonel groaned and the two traveling-men looked worried. Flynn grinned hugely at their concern. The porter did nothing but foolish, trivial little tasks, which everyone could have done just as well for himself. But most of them felt helpless. There was much running to and fro. Burgess heard the Colonel and his wife fussing in the neighboring stateroom about the proper way to make up a bed, and Kaufman walked ostentatiously down the corridor fetching a pitcher of water.

“Be sure and let me know if you need anything,” Flynn said to Cecilie May.

Flynn sat up with Mr. Johnson until midnight, and was then relieved by Burgess.

“Why is it that we can’t radio from the ship to the Earth?” Burgess asked the engineer; “this would be a cracking good story for the Times.”

“There is a layer of charged particles about sixty miles above the Earth’s surface, and no radio wave has yet been sent through it. It would be convenient if we could keep up communication with the home folks, all right.”

Burgess sat and studied about the mystery, while up and down the corridor sounded the snores of the passengers through the dim illumination. There was something creepy about a night way off in space, millions of miles from anywhere. Something creaked down the corridor, and there was a swish and a rustle.

“Sh-h!” came a whisper from the darkness. “Mr. Burgess!”

Burgess leaped to his feet, pistol in hand.

“Don’t shoot,” came the whisper. “It’s me.”

Burgess snapped on the light and stood there

“Chick!” he gasped. “You here?”

The vicious threats of the Captain about stowaways flashed through his mind as he stood there in horror and looked at the grinning boy.

“How did you get here? How did you elude the search?” he demanded.

Chick laughed proudly at his own cleverness. “Remember the box that came aboard at the last moment? I was in that.”

“Well, hurry back there and hide. The Captain is fierce on stowaways and he’ll murder you if he finds you. I’ll bring you food and water.”

“I’ve got all the food and water I want, but I’m tired of being shut up. I want to see what space-traveling is like.”

Burgess’ jaw suddenly fell. Down the corridor came the Captain, n his nightly rounds about the ship. Burgess felt a cold perspiration break out all over him as the Captain peered into Chick’s face.

“Aha! the prowler!” exclaimed the Captain.

He grabbed Chick’s collar and blew a whistle. Two husky sailors ran up and seized the boy roughly.

“What are you going to do with him?” inquired Burgess in consternation.

“Throw him out of the air-valve with the garbage,” growled the Captain. “I’ve got enough stowaways. Besides— prowling around and causing a lot of trouble.”

The Disappearing Killer

SEVERAL PEOPLE in pajamas and bathrobes arrived on the scene. Mrs. de Palogni was gurgling with real excitement. For once her jaded senses were getting a real thrill out of something.

“Poor kid!” said Flynn, as the sailors gave Chick a shake that made his teeth rattle.

The grunts of Mr. Johnson could be heard coming from within the stateroom, as he got off his berth and came to the door.

“What’s up?” he groaned, sticking his head out of the door.

Suddenly his eyes widened, as he saw the boy in the clutches of the two sailors. He straightened up and became all at once very severe. “Charles!” he said sternly.

“How in the world did you get here?”

“Father!” exclaimed the boy, going all to pieces in a hysterical laugh. “Father! Are you on this ship? Well, don’t let them kill me.”

“Well, I should say I won’t,” the old man said, a sudden tenderness coming into his voice. He studied the situation for a few minutes while everyone else stood silent. The Captain looked from father to son. Mr. Johnson’s next words showed, however, how a meek and nervous man like himself could have succeeded in building up a gigantic corporation like the Mars, Ganymede, and Callisto Transportation Company.

He could think quickly and to the point.

“We need a porter,” said Mr. Johnson. “Charles wants a ride. All right. Charles, you’re the porter, and can work for your ride, even if you are the President’s son.”

There was a burst of cheering from the passengers at the clever way in which a difficult situation had been solved.

“Thanks, dad!” said Chick simply.

“But—” gasped Burgess. “What about the red letter? And the attempts on your life?”

“Well, it wasn’t Charles,” Mr. Johnson said with a gentle finality in his voice. He was proud of his son, but did not believe in spoiling him.

And the next morning Chick was making up beds and shining shoes. Most of the passengers protested against accepting these services from him, but the boy was a good sport, and did everything that his job required of him. During his spare time he spent every moment watching the ship’s mechanics repairing the mechanism of the televox-robot. By evening Chick and Flynn were firm friends; they were talking about reaction-motors, meteorite deflectors, three-dimensional sextants, and such things with a fondness that only the two of them felt. Also, Chick’s alert eye promptly noted Flynn’s partiality toward Cecilie May, and that young lady was the recipient of real service from the new porter. The son of a millionaire seemed happy to lift suitcases, carry pitchers of water, and brush coats. And whenever he saw Burgess, he grinned at him triumphantly, as if to say, “I told you so!”

That evening was a pleasanter one for the little group of passengers. Everyone’s space-sickness was over, and the tension of the past twenty-four hours was relaxed. A jolly party gathered in the drawing- room. Games of cards, ping-pong, and backgammon went gaily forward. Finally, the furniture was cleared away, a phonograph requisitioned, and a dance was started. The ladies, being in the minority, were very much in demand. Even the cranky Mrs. Thayer, the Colonel’s wife, smiled and flushed as one of the traveling men gallantly offered her his arm and whirled her about in the dizzy steps of the new whizzarro, while the school teacher, floating in the arms of Burgess, was positively radiant. Mrs. de Palogni was trying to split up the bridal couple and get a dance with the young husband, but he was sublimely unconscious of her existence. However, he did give the Captain a dance with his bride. Likewise, Cecilie May gave her first courtesy dance to Kaufman, her employer, who then went back to his chair and watched the group abstractedly, undoubtedly figuring the prices of pitchblende and zirconite in his mind. Chick bustled about with a tray and glasses, and even Mr. Johnson seemed to have forgotten his nervousness for the time being, and beamed happily on the group as though it were his own family enjoying a good time. However, he slipped away early from the dance, looking rather tired, and went to his stateroom.

Burgess also withdrew from the activities and stood in the corridor, watching the crowd. The little by-plays of human nature appealed to him. However, before many minutes were up, he had a feeling that somehow, somewhere, all was not well. He did not believe in premonitions, realizing that they were always explainable on the ground of some sensory stimulus that had set the subconscious mind alert, some faint sight or sound not registered in the consciousness. He therefore kept his eyes steadily on Mr. Johnson’s door; in fact, he had up to the time that he noticed the queer unrest, maintained an uninterrupted watch without thinking, ever since Mr. Johnson had stepped into his room. He had seen nothing.

Now there was some sort of a vague thumping. It seemed that he had already been hearing it for some minutes in the back of his mind. Now the thumping was growing weaker, and gradually it stopped. In sudden alarm he leaped down the corridor in big strides. A man dashed out of the door of Mr. Johnson’s stateroom, and ran swiftly down the corridor in the opposite direction, toward the dining-room. “Now we’ve got him,” thought Burgess. “He can’t get away this time.”

With a shout, the reporter dashed after the fleeing figure. In the dining-room he stopped to snap on the lights. The room was empty. He hurried on through into the after-gallery. That also was empty. It contained no furniture, and the bright lights illuminated every nook and cranny of it. There was no way out of the two rooms except the corridor by which he had come in. What had become of the man? There was a commotion behind Burgess in the corridor, exclamations and babbling of voices. He hurried back to find a crowd about Mr. Johnson’s door. As he ran up, the people stepped aside and opened up a path for him to get through. Inside the stateroom Mr. Johnson lay on the bed motionless, his face a dark purple. He was not breathing. On his throat were five black marks.

“Strangled!” exclaimed somebody in the crowd. Burgess tore open Mr. Johnson’s shirt, and detected a faint flutter of the heart. The next moment the Captain was on the scene and in charge. Cold packs were put about the throat and artificial respiration instituted. Soon their strenuous and persistent efforts were rewarded by a flutter of the eyelids, several gasps, and finally a groan. Mr. Johnson turned over and sat up, choking and gasping, trying to talk.

“Hagan,” Burgess could distinguish, though it meant nothing to him. “Wanted the money again,” came in a whisper. “I hit him but he was too much for me.”

A lump rose in Burgess’ throat. The fat, flabby, nervous old President, on the inside, was a good sport.

The reporter counted the crowd. There were ten people. The Colonel’s wife was in the drawing-room, tanning herself. The human face hides emotions, rather than displays them. Not the least suggestion of a clue could he find in the countenances of any of them. Could he but see behind the masks of astonishment and horror, would it be possible to guess which one had done it? Yet he had to admit that the probability of any of these people having done the cowardly deed was exceedingly remote. Everyone of them had been behind him, absorbed in the dance at the time when he had heard the thumping, which must have been the struggles of Mr. Johnson while he was being throttled.

The Captain came in and picked up Mr. Johnson’s pistol, which lay on the floor beside the berth. Burgess was telling him the story:

“None of these passengers could have gotten past me and I was between them and Mr. Johnson’s room. The time I spent in the dining-room and after-gallery was only a few seconds, certainly not long enough to give anyone a chance to choke a man. I chased the fellow into the dining-room, and when I got there, he wasn’t there.”

“There’s something fishy about this,” the Captain growled into his beard.

Burgess was determined to solve the puzzle, and made up his mind to work as he had never worked before. “Times reporter unravels interplanetary mystery” he could see the headlines say in his mind’s eye.

“You’re sure it couldn’t be one of the crew?” Burgess asked the Captain.

The Captain laughed.

“That shows how little you know about discipline on an interplanetary liner. I can account for the presence of every man during every minute of the time. But, we’re going to go over this ship again. One man got by our first search; there must be another. And from now on, an armed guard stands by Mr. Johnson’s door, day and night.”

The man with a rifle was already in his place. The search of the ship began at once. The searchers began in the passenger section, going through trunks, looking into corners, searching the most impossible places, far too small for a man to hide in. They proceeded systematically, beginning at the drawing-room end. The rest of the night they could be heard down below, shifting the cargo, hammering on boxes and cases. The noises began at the forward end and gradually moved aft. In the morning the Captain showed up in the dining-room, tired and cross.

“How is Mr. Johnson?” he asked.

“His condition is good;” replied Burgess, “except for his pain and discomfort. He will get over it perfectly.”

“If there had been anything on board bigger than a rabbit, we would have dug it out last night,” the Captain said. “We opened every case of freight that weighs over seventy-five pounds, unscrewed every hatch, threw light in every corner. It beats me.”

The Captain clicked his jaw shut and looked fierce. Burgess grinned.

“You think that’s a puzzle?” he said. “Well, what about this one? I chased a man down the corridor into the dining-room. He was not in the dining-room when I got there. He was not in the after-gallery. He did not pass me.

“What became of him?

“Is there any way of getting out of the dining-room or after-gallery except by the way I came in?”

The Captain stared at him.

“No. The only communications with the rest of the ship are the food service tubes which are four inches in diameter, and a hatch that it would take twenty minutes and a lot of noise to unscrew.”

The Captain stopped and thought a moment.

“How did the man get out?”

Burgess was puzzled. By the strongest kind of logic, there was a man hidden on board, and this logic was confirmed by material proof on poor Mr. Johnson’s person. Yet this man had disappeared before  Burgess’ eyes, and a thorough, systematic search of the ship had proved that he was not on board.

Technical Assistance

THE REPORTER took his turn at nursing the President, while the guard stood at the door with his rifle. Noon lunch and the dinner meal in the evening were gloomy, nervous occasions. Everyone started at the least noise. Kaufman’s brows were drawn and dark. Only the de Palognis seemed to be getting a thrill out of the situation, whereas the honeymoon couple were quite impervious to it. The young engineer carried Cecilie May’s service plate at both meals, and the two ate together, one talking enthusiastically, the other listening raptly. The girl seemed to feel safer near the young man, and was afraid to be about the ship except in his presence.

Burgess was intensely worried. The villain had almost gotten away with his nefarious scheme this time. There was still time enough before they reached Mars for many things to happen, he strolled to the after-gallery, and found himself in a secluded corner where he could think undisturbed; he stood there and looked out upon the deeps full of countless stars, and tried to marshal his ideas about the mystery. He was roused from the depths of his reverie by low voices behind him. He was conscious of having heard them for some time without having paid much attention. A sudden embarrassment made him keep silent. They did not know he had overheard, and he did not want to break up the occasion. If they never found out he was there, it would be just as well.

“I love you,” said a man very softly. It was Flynn.

“I love you, too,” Cecilie May whispered timidly.

“I’m glad I found you.”

“Isn’t it wonderful?”

There was a long period of silence.

“I’m terribly sorry,” the man’s voice said, “that it will be so long before we can get married. I haven’t a cent, and I don’t even know what I’m going to do when I get to Mars. I’m afraid— that a professional man’s start is a slow and difficult one.”

Cecilie May cheered him with soft words and kisses.

Right there was where Burgess got the idea that eventually led to the solution of the mystery. It developed slowly while he was having to keep as quiet as a mouse in order not to interrupt the lovers. Eventually the newly engaged couple wandered away, and Burgess hurried back to spend a little time at Mr. Johnson’s bedside.

The old man could whisper a little, but swallowing was still terribly painful. The guard stood motionless at the door. After he thought he had allowed plenty of time, Burgess went out to look for the young engineer, and found him getting ready for bed.

“Would you like to help solve this mystery?” Burgess asked him.

“Anything I can do—” Flynn said. “I’m not much on mysteries.”

“In two days we reach Mars,” Burgess said. “Here, in close quarters it is possible to watch Mr. Johnson carefully. When he gets to Mars the killer will have free rein, and the old man will be in greater danger. That’s still a pretty wild country, you know. We’ve got to catch him before we land.”

“I don’t see how you’re going to,” the young engineer said. “The ship’s been searched—”

“Well, I got an idea last night. I was thinking about you and about your work. You’re an engineer?”

Flynn nodded.

“You know all about scientific things?”

Flynn laughed.

“I wish I did,” he said.

“Well, this mystery needs science to solve it.”

“I’d be mighty proud if I could help any.”

They went into Burgess’ stateroom and sat and talked and figured with pencils on paper; they leaned back and planned. Finally Flynn said:

“That ought to work. Now to see the Captain. But it will take me several hours of work in the ship’s shop to get things ready.”

They put their plan before the Captain.

“It’s all right with me, as long as you don’t interfere with the guard,” the Captain said, but looked incredulous.

“We only want to move the guard ten feet up the corridor. He can stay within plain sight of the door, where he can reach it in one second; and we shall both keep our eyes on the door.”

The Captain looked dubiously from one to the other.

“Burgess has a good reputation. Flynn looks as though he knew his stuff.” This to himself— then aloud: “Go ahead. But I’ll be around, too, and keep an eye on it.”

As they came back into the corridor, they found Chick standing horrified with a piece of paper in his hand. The guard looked worried and frightened, and the Colonel was sputtering incoherently. It was a note that had been found on the floor of the sick man’s room. Yet the guard insisted that he had not taken his eyes off his charge for an instant; and he was a tried and trusted man.

“You cannot escape me,” the note read. “In spite of your precautions, I’m going to get you. Fork over the million or you won’t reach Mars alive. A check will do; leave payee line blank, and lay it on the doorsill.”

Burgess and Flynn nodded to each other and smiled.

“That confirms our idea,” Burgess said to the Captain. “Do not blame the guard; I’m sure he is right in what he says. But there is no need to pay any attention to the note.”

Flynn was busy all day in the ship’s shop. But the next morning the passengers saw Flynn and Burgess playing catch with an indoor baseball down the length of the corridor. A crash and the tinkling of glass announced an accident: the smashing of the light-bulb over the middle of the corridor. Then Flynn attempted to replace the bulb; he tried several bulbs from different parts of the ship, but none of them would work. Finally he gave it up and left a dark bulb in the socket. “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “There is plenty of light from the bulbs at the ends of the corridor.”

However, some of the passengers were worried for the dark bulb was right over Mr. Johnson’s door, leaving it the darkest portion of the corridor. Chick was dispatched into the lower regions of the ship with a suitcase, and returned dragging it as though it were immensely heavy. Burgess and Flynn spent the whole afternoon in Burgess’ room. Everyone was restless, and wandered from one thing to another, not knowing what to do. After dinner Burgess appeared among them, leading one of the traveling men by the arm.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “I have just learned that Mr.  Banks here knows a lot of astonishing tricks with cards. You are all in need of diversion at this time. Let’s get everybody together.”

They gathered in the drawing-room, and the traveling man stood up in front of them with a deck of cards in his hand. He pulled his coat-sleeves up on his forearm, and spread his cards fanwise.

“Now, ladies and gentlemen,” he began. “Will one of the ladies please step forward. I shall turn the cards face down, so that I cannot see them. Now, Miss Waterbury, you draw out a card. Be careful not to let me see it, but remember it well. Now put it back. Do you all remember what the card was—”

He pattered on, and Burgess slipped out of the room as soon as Banks had the attention of all of them. In his stateroom he and Flynn bent over a strange conglomeration of apparatus. On one end was a great quartz lens, borrowed from the ship’s bolometer. The other end looked like the receiving portion of a television apparatus, with a hood drawn over the screen.

“Is everybody busy in there?” Flynn asked.

“He’s got ’em going,” Burgess smiled.

“Then give the guard his signal.”

The guard pretended to become interested in the card tricks, and gradually edged his way up the corridor, away from Mr. Johnson’s door.

“I don’t see the Captain,” said Burgess, “but I’ll bet he’s somewhere on the job.”

“Take a look into it,” Flynn said. “I’ve hooded the screen because the light from it on our faces would reveal our presence in here. This way it is absolutely dark.

Burgess looked into the hood, at the screen.

“What about it?” he asked. “I see the corridor. It looks just the same as per naked eye.”

“Look again,” Flynn said, keeping his voice low. “Without the instrument the corridor right here is rather gloomy because the middle bulb gives no light; all the light there is comes from the bulbs at the ends of the corridor. Now look into the instrument.”

“Ah,” said Burgess. “I see. In here, the middle of the corridor is brilliantly lighted, and its ends are dark. Just the opposite. How do you work that?”

“The middle bulb is not dead. It gives infra-red light, which is not perceived by the human eye. This instrument sees by infra-red light; all visible light is screened off by a collodial-silver filter. The lens gathers the infra-red image, throws it on the infra-red sensitive photoelectric cells, which project it on the ordinary television-screen as visible to our eyes. In other words, this is a viewer for infra-red light.”

“But why—”

“Sh-h. Suppose we wait. We’ve been talking too long now. Let’s keep absolutely quiet. Tell me, after I have my face under the hood, if there is the least bit of me visible from the door? And let me have your gun.”

There was a tense, silent wait. The sounds of the party in the drawing-room came to them, exclamations, titters, sudden floods of argument, a period of silence, a burst of laughter, rustling and commotion, and the performer’s patter. However, they had not long to wait.

There was a creak down the corridor, exceedingly faint. Then a faint swish. Flynn grew tense at his instrument, his breath coming fast. The reporter exerted his utmost to maintain silence in his excitement, for he could not see a thing anywhere. The corridor was empty, search it as he might, except for the guard halfway toward the drawing-room. He breathed with his mouth wide open, for he was so excited that when he closed it, the breath shrilled loudly through his nostrils.

Unveiling the Inscrutable

SUDDENLY the engineer shouted out into the corridor: “Hands up! I’ve got you covered. Now take that cape off! I’ll count ten, and if it isn’t off by ten, I’ll shoot. Your cape won’t stop bullets.”

The next instant his shot crashed. He leaped up, knocking Burgess in the ribs with his elbow. In two jumps he was across the corridor and in Mr. Johnson’s room. Burgess dashed out after him, to see the Captain emerge from an adjoining stateroom. In another instant Chick was also on hand. The sounds of the party in the drawing-room suddenly stopped, and open-mouthed people trickled down the corridor. For there were sounds of a terrific commotion coming out of Mr. Johnson’s room.

First there was a hoarse shriek from the sick man. Then there was the spectacle of the young engineer fighting violently all around the room— with nothing! His arms were out, as though locked around somebody; he heaved and grunted and staggered— all alone. A couple of times he almost went down. The rest of them, even Burgess, were too astonished to do anything except stand there staring and paralyzed. Mr. Johnson lay in bed like a man frozen stiff. Flynn staggered back against the wall as though someone had hit him.

After what seemed like an age, though it was only a few seconds, Burgess began to grasp the situation, and stepped into the room to see how he could be of assistance. But already it was not necessary. Flynn was on his knees, six inches above the ground, as though on top of something, though there was nothing there. He was pummeling terrific blows with his fists; and then desisted and began pulling and tearing at something under him. There was a loud rip, and a swing of his arm revealed a strip of clothing and a part of a face beneath him. Another pull disclosed another strip of clothing, an arm and a leg. Flynn was pulling something off a man who lay prostrate, on the ground and who was becoming visible in long strips. In a moment Burgess and Chick were on the prostrate man and had him pinioned down. Then Chick recoiled as though he had been shot. The man on the floor was ugly as sin and had a purple birthmark on his cheek!

“Pug!” cried out the boy, deeply hurt. “You?”

Burgess chuckled.

“I’m sorry it makes you feel bad,” he said to Chick, patting him on the back. “But I’d call it a valuable piece of instruction.”

The President sat up in bed. The prisoner stood between two husky sailors, with the Captain behind him.

“So you’re the pretty fellow who wrote the red letters?” Mr. Johnson said, his sore throat wheezing in his excitement. “I’ve seen you about my place a time or two. What’ll it be, Captain?”

“You can have him put in irons and brought back to New York for an expensive and long-drawn-out criminal trial. Or, I can take him under the space-navigation laws on two counts, as a stowaway and on insubordination, and put him out of the air-valve.”

“Take him yourself. I should regret it if I took one chance too many. Brace up, Charles. We are sometimes mistaken in our friends. Your dad has learned lots of little lessons like that.” He motioned to Flynn.

“You seem to have managed this business,” he said, again displaying his innate shrewdness. “Tell me how.”

“Very simple, sir,” answered Flynn, rather confused by the limelight suddenly turned on him. “Mr. Burgess presented to me the two facts: (1) There was a crook loose on the ship, and (2) He was not one of the passengers, officers, nor crew. Therefore, in some way he must be hidden, and had eluded the searches. The question was how? The fact that Burgess saw him go into a room from which there was no egress, and yet did not find him there, rather simplified the question.

“There popped into my head an item from The Engineering Abstracts about some experimental work with a double-refractible fabric made of a cellulose base combined with silicon salts, which will refract a light-ray through itself and continue it in its original straight line. If a light-ray is bent around an object and continued in its original straight line, that object becomes invisible. Objects in the laboratory where these experiments were carried out were practically invisible. Only some rough preliminary work was described in the abstract.

“That offered a perfect explanation of the phenomena on this ship. Here the conditions are perfect. The light from these helium lamps gives a narrow wave-band and can be much more perfectly refracted than daylight. It occurred to me, in my effort to think of a way to discover this person, that if I could see by the light of a different wavelength, it would not be properly refracted, and I could detect the crook’s presence. But any attempts to use such a light would give away our plans and put us all in serious danger. Therefore I would have to see him by means of some invisible wavelength. Either the ultra-violet or the infra-red were available. But ultra-violet is difficult to generate, while the infra-red is easy: I merely blackened an old-fashioned nitrogen-filled incandescent-wire bulb. Then I rigged up an infra-red viewer and watched for him. I saw him sneak into Mr. Johnson’s room, at a moment which we had purposely prepared, so that everyone’s attention was obviously distracted elsewhere. I intended to shoot him, but he got in line with Mr. Johnson and I was afraid to take the chance, and had to jump on him.”

Cecilie May was hanging on to Flynn’s arm. Mr. Johnson fired a few rapid questions at both of them, and in the twinkle of an eye had all their intimate secrets out of them.

“I need a man to put in charge of the repair station for space-liners on Mars,” he said to Flynn. “It is an out-of-the-way place, but it has in the past been a good stepping-stone to better jobs. The position is yours. Bless you two young people.”

Kaufman raised his eyebrows.

“So, here’s where I’m left without a secretary,” he said. “But since it has happened this way, I guess I’ll take it cheerfully. Here’s a little wedding present.”

He wrote out a check and handed it to the confused and blushing Cecilie May.

A sailor stood in the door, saluted the Captain and announced the following:

“The lookout reports that Syrtis Major is visible through the front port. We ought to land in about four hours!”

________________________

5: The Driving Power

Amazing Stories, July 1930

WHEN Professor Grimm laid down his work and decided to go home, he changed into a different man:

'Seven o'clock. Time to quit. He sighed with regret at having to leave his beloved apparatus. He picked up some pieces again, fitted them into the big machine, lingered awhile, then tore himself resolutely away.

All day, while he worked in the laboratory, he was keen, alert, full of enthusiasm. His pencil drove swiftly over sheet after sheet of paper, leaving them covered with calculations too abstruse for ordinary mortals, or his eyes and fingers searched busily among the leaves of his library. But, most of the time he hovered around that vast and complex apparatus at one end of the big room.

He had as much energy as the great waterfall whose roar could just be heard through the windows, and which supplied him with inexhaustible power for his experimental work in intra=atomics. His eyes shone brightly; he never seemed to tire. It was evident that he loved the work.

Then came quitting time. A vacant, discouraged expression came into his face, and his figure drooped, as though there was nothing else in the world for him. He was like a lover driven from the side of his fair lady into the wilderness.

To look at him, as he went slowly down the street, you would think he was one of those dry, lifeless scientists who cafe for nothing, know of nothing but archaeopteryx or eclipsing variables. The careless hang of his clothes, his unshaven chin and his general air of absent-mindedness seemed to suggest that he was a man so absorbed in his work that, indeed, it was all that existed for him.

But Professor Grimm was not that dry. There was, in fact, a good deal of the adventurous and romantic in his makeup. What else could account for the wistful look that came into his, eyes, and his lagging steps, when he passed the cinema where exotic scenes from some romantic  epic were pictured on the billboards ? He almost stopped before the colourful poster depicting the hero, in doublet and hose, defending a lovely lady’s honour with flashing sword; but he pulled himself together, shrugged his shoulders, and resumed his walk homeward.

Again he forgot himself for a moment when a young man and a girl passed him, arm in arm, blissfully unconscious of everything but each other. He hesitated, too, at the window of a travel agency full of views of picturesque scenery and bathing beauties. But each time he braced himself and went on, resolutely.

He reached home dejected and weary. The house was full of bright, resplendent rooms, in one of which was a glittering dinner-table. His wife appeared, a vision of artificial glory, product of all the modern arts designed to enhance feminine beauty, and delightful to look at.

“Hurry, dear,” she said, in a voice that tinkled like a silver bell. “Our guests will be here soon.”

But, to Professor Grimm, the tinkle in her voice was cold and distant; arid the tone of it conveyed to him, if the words did not, that he was late again and that his appearance Would not be presentable to the distinguished social captures his wife expected.

SO IT was every evening, except that sometimes her impatience at his tired condition and unkempt look was scarce concealed. On occasions, he would make his appearance among the guests; on others, he would not. It did not seem to matter, either way, for he was hardly noticed as long as he did not get in the way.

The gaiety always lasted until late, and he would leave the guests and go to bed early, because he had work to do in the morning. His wife would sleep until noon, and he would never see her again until evening, dressed for another function. When they had opportunity for conversation, which was rarely, it was always dominated by her intense social ambitions and a pouting impatience at the work which kept him so occupied, and prevented her from showing him off to her guests.

“I’ll come over to the laboratory one of these days, and smash up those silly machines,” she complained. “You never seem to have any time for me.”

If he had not been a scientist, accustomed to shaping intangible ideas and putting them to practical use, he might have retorted that it was her social-climbing nonsense that kept her away from him, and that his work was of more importance. But because he dealt in nebulous things, which did not always materialise, he had to excuse himself by explaining:

“I have a rather big idea to work out, and it needs a lot of time. But, if it does work out, it will bring in a lot of money.”

That usually contented her, for money was necessary for beautiful clothes and entertaining. But Professor Grimm was far from being contented. His wife was no wife at all. He had no constant companion with whom he could share his problems, his ambitions and successes. He had only his work, to which he clung with such tenacity. His researches into the ionisation of solid bodies, and his concrete realisation of perfect high-density gases— these were his wife and love, and took the place of the romance which was missing from his life.

“Still,” he reflected, “perhaps it’s just as well. People who have all they want never give much to life. There is no incentive to further effort. If I were as happy as Puckner is with his wife, going off on one honeymoon after another. I suppose I should never have worked out my Integrator.”

What was this Integrator, which filled the Professor’s days, which occupied his thoughts at night, and at which he worked so enthusiastically? It was a truly astonishing thing, before which its own creator sometimes stood in awe, scarcely able to credit the miraculous powers it vested in him as reward for his strenuous labours.

That day, he had tested it out again, and witnessed its amazing performance. While the huge generators were starting up and the glowing platinum targets were warming, he had sat at his desk working his slide-rule and jotting down figures, his “pattern” equations. Then, with his eye on a stop-watch that showed fifths of a second, he had moved switches and pressed keys.

In the centre of the big room, the air had swirled in a spiral and become a nebulous cloud. The cloud had condensed— and there had been a brick of clay, a bar of gold, a piece of ivory, or a mass of fibre or jelly.

NEXT morning; he was practising on more complex things. He spent more time with his pencil and slide-rule, and got a blooming rose, and a wriggling worm, by substituting different values for the terms of his equation and setting his experimental quantities, according to the resulting “pattern.” A bold attempt resulted in a little monkey, which scampered chattering about the room until the Professor shut off the power, whereupon the animal melted away and vanished into thin air.

He tried another combination, and there appeared a tiny, machine of whirring Wheels and clicking levers, working away merrily; and' when he opened the switches again, it dimmed and was gone, with a rush of air through the windows and an electrification of everything remaining in the room by the dissipated charges.

To the ordinary man, such feats as these would seem to be explained only in terms of magic. But, to Professor Grimm, they were a matter of intra-atomic physics, very accurate and complicated; so highly complex, indeed, that it would spoil any pleasure which the average' reader may derive from this account if the full technical details of the process were to be included' here.

However, it will be sufficient if he is assured that certain electro-magnetic vibrations have the property of displacing electrons from the outer orbits within the atom, leaving an unsaturated atom with an intense avidity to combine; and that Professor Grimm had accomplished more in the generation of large volumes of these short-wave X-rays than any man of his time, with the aid of the power available from the great waterfall near his laboratory. So, with" his streams of short-waves, he had an unparalleled opportunity of observing the behaviour of these unsaturated atoms.

By condensing the vast numbers of ions he obtained, he turned gases into solids of differing composition. He worked with air in his early experiments, and so produced masses of marble— marble, perhaps because the cloud of loose atoms that wander about in space consists mostly of calcium. But his blocks of marble were shapeless. Could he determine before-hand what shape they would assume? Could he produce substances other than marble? Could he manufacture a complex mass of a dozen or more elements?

From those first steps to the finished Integrator is a long story. The relation between the .components of a, complex body and their evolution from' simple ions; the accurate control of the bombardment of free atoms by short-wave X-rays; the ability to separate one electron from an atom of nitrogen, or two or three— it is tedious, mathematical stuff. Curious indeed were the bodies he built up by rearranging and condensing the ions; fantastic blobs of stuff that twisted and writhed, then changed into something else.

No wonder the fascinating work absorbed him so intensely; yet he could not have endured that long, nerve-racking concentration unless he had been driven-from the distractions of the outside world by his inner despair. Still, the final achievement was worth all of the effort. He had a sense of god-like power, of limitless potency, when he thought of what those rows of short-wave tubes could accomplish at his touch.

For, now that he had worked, out the proton bases and the electron patterns, he had achieved automatic control of wavelengths and radiation densities, and was learning to make what he pleased out of his condensed ions. It was merely a matter of getting the pattern right to start with; and the object would then develop itself, providing there was a sufficient supply of energy.

THAT evening, he walked home in a daze. He did not even glance at the cinema posters; the laughing couples passed by unheeded. For, just as he had been leaving the laboratory, an idea had suddenly occurred to him; an idea so tremendous that the force of it had stunned him. It was something that the Integrator could do for him— and it was something even bigger than the Integrator itself.

When at length he came out of his daze, he looked abound at the grey world that had left him so forlorn, and' his heart leaped wildly with anticipation. Now, he could have the happiness he craved— he could make it for himself!

His wife was all ready to set out for a theatre party. Her beautiful gown and tinkling voice invited him. No; he didn't want to go. He never did want to go, and to-night he wasn’t even in the same world. So, his wife went off alone; while he, with head throbbing and heart racing with excitement, went back to the laboratory.

The Integrator, with which he was to work the miracle, stood at one end of the vast room, which otherwise was almost empty, leaving large areas of bare floor, walls and ceiling. He opened all the windows wide: he would have to draw on the atmosphere for large quantities of matter. Then he sat down at the pattern-board of the machine.

A whole hour’s calculation was necessary. His pencil, slide-rule and book of integrals were fully employed. His results  came out in milliamperes and spark-gap  lengths, and he manipulated the switches and rheostats accordingly. Then, before his eager eyes, grew his dream.

First, swirling nebulae. Then vague shapes took form in the depths of the fog. They rolled like smoke, and changed. Soon, he could see trees; soft, green grass in their shade; flowers, and a gravel path. Then there was a picturesque cottage, and through its windows, glimpses of a bright, cosy room with lamps, draperies and a divan. And last— and best— of all, a beautiful woman!

She materialised in the doorway of the cottage, in a simple gown of soft silk, a gentle smile on her lips. She seemed to be waiting for him. He made certain that the machinery would continue its smooth running, and walked towards her up the gravel path.

“Are you real ?” He could not help but ask the question, though it sounded foolish, and he did not under-estimate the capacities of the Integrator.

She held out her hands towards him. “Real— and waiting for you.”

They entered the cottage and sat down on the divan together. She was real enough. Her hands were soft, but there was a firmness in their grasp that he liked. He touched her shoulder, and her cheek. They were real. She smiled at his doubts.

“Do you believe I’m here, now?” she asked.

“What is your name?” He felt he must know.

“Amaranth.”-

“It’s a nice name. Sounds just like I feel.”

She brought him some lemonade. He began to wish he were more carefully
dressed, for she seemed interested in him; her eyes were always on him. They talked a good deal, in the process of getting acquainted. She was intelligent, and talked well; she had a good sense of humour, and her radiant cheerfulness made him fee! rested. As the evening passed, he forgot all his troubles, and the grey world without. He was happy.

“I shall see you again, of course,” they both said when he took his leave.

BEFORE he shut off the power, he checked his patterns most carefully, so that he would be sure of their accuracy when he wanted to repeat them, and that everything would be just the same again. Then he shut off the generators, gradually, one after another. There was a dimming of the scene of paradise before him ; and he had a vague, fleeting feeling that he was killing, destroying somebody, but he reassured himself with the thought that he could reproduce it all to-morrow. It faded, and was gone.

There was a momentary sense of extreme pressure in the room as the disintegrating molecules expanded, and before the open windows released the excess atmospheric density. Then the room was empty again, except for the Integrator; and the Professor went home through the night, a feeling of supreme contentment inside him.

The next day seemed endless to Professor Grimm. A blaze of bronze hair and a pair of soft, round arms would not stay out of his mind. Even when he was at his busiest, he could hear in the background the low, musical tones:

“I shall see you again, of course.”

When at last evening came, he dressed carefully, and sallied forth spruce as any young swain. Back in the laboratory, he sat before his switches and patterns. The idyllic scene materialised again at his touch: the trees, the green grass, and the country cottage, with the lovely Amaranth at the door. Everything was exactly the same as before.

As Amaranth gazed with large, blue eyes at her creator, the eager pressure of her soft, warm hand on his sleeve thrilled him through and through. She brought him a grape-fruit, this time, with some slices of sponge-cake, and a luxurious cushion to make him more comfortable on the divan. To add to his bliss, she sang a lilting air at the piano, while he feasted his eyes on her,

And so the electron patterns were repeated many times, and much power was used from the waterfall. Day after day, the Professor, after a hard day’s work, would make a brief appearance at his home, then hurry back to the laboratory and the artificial paradise which awaited him. There were long hours of sweet companionship, soft arms about his neck, and rapturous communions of perfect understanding.

Professor Grimm knew all the happiness he had ever craved, and more. He was a changed man. His friends noticed the difference in him—and so did his wife.

“Your work must be going well,” she suggested. “You seem livelier than you used to. What is it this time?”

“Oh, just a little machine,” he told her evasively. “That idea I told you about. It’s quite a success, and if I can sell it to somebody 'like Amalgamated Amusements, there, should be a few thousand dollars in it, I fancy.”

It sounded good to her. She wanted to see it for herself. He took her to the laboratory, and made flowers, gorgeous gowns and motor-cars appear out of nothingness before her startled eyes. But the wonder of it was not so impressive as  the figure it would sell for.

“It’s worth a million dollars— no less,” she decided.

WEEKS lengthened into months, and Professor Grimm was still full of happiness. But he was still without the cheque for a million dollars. His wife grew impatient.

“Haven’t you seen those people about selling that machine yet?” she asked, more than once.

“No,” he told her. “I’m still working on it. I’m not satisfied to let it go as it is. Besides, I’m thinking of offering it to somebody else— to a manufacturing firm. It’s worth more as a producing machine than it would be as a mere novelty to give amusement.”

“You’re too particular. It doesn’t
matter whom you sell it to, as long as you get a good price for it. It’s taking up more of your time than ever. I’ll come over there one evening and drag you away from it, if you don’t stay home a bit more. You’re making me jealous of your old machine!” .

The Professor felt a little guilty, after that. People thought he was working terribly hard, when all the time he wasn’t. And, really, he should be. He had an idea on solar power to tackle, and he couldn’t seem to get down to it. He was happy and satisfied. He didn’t want to work.

Some of his friends, with whom he had grown so popular now that he was such a bright and breezy fellow, began to talk. While they were delighted at the transformation in him, they were rather disappointed in the effect it seemed to have had on his work.

“He’s full of ideas about solar power, and I’ve been waiting for something big, but he doesn’t seem to be doing anything. He’s still got the same apparatus in his lab. that he’s had for months.”

So they commented; and Professor Grimm could not help hearing these complaints, by roundabout paths. He sighed, and the world seemed almost grey again.

“Obviously, progress and contentment do not go together,” he mused. “Men who are happy can’t accomplish much.”

He brooded, and' was sunk deep in melancholy for several days, during which he never touched his patterns. Then, one evening, he returned to the laboratory and started the generators. Things had gone all wrong. He was miserable, and depressed. He had to see her again...'

In her arms, in the little cottage, his tortured soul was soothed. He forgot everything but Amaranth; her bronze hair, her melting smile, her sweet devotion to him. Until, somewhere in the background, a dull pounding, hammering sound intruded. He tried to ignore it, but it persisted. Then he realised what it was. Someone was at the laboratory door, and was banging on it furiously. Had he locked it? An awful, guilty fear seized him. He didn’t want to be caught like this.

“Charles!” came a voice that, on this occasion, did not tinkle as it usually did. He leaped up, and ran to the switches; shut off all the generators in, a single sweep of his hand. Then he hurried to open the door. There was his wife and, behind her, two men, looking very business-like.

Behind him, the paradise created by the Integrator had faded; the hum of the generators was dying down. But he had shut off the power so abruptly that the big room was full of swirls and currents. A blast of air blew out of the opened door, and the windows rattled. His ear-drums clicked with the sudden pressure. Papers blew about; a stack of them went sailing off his desk, and his hat flew through the nearest window.

His wife gasped, and clung to the doorhandle for support, as the cyclone whirled about her. But, when the rush of air died down, she regained her supreme calm at once.

“Darling,” she said sweetly. “These gentlemen are Mr. Rosenthal and Mr.  Laskey, of Amalgamated Amusements. They say they never got your letters about the machine at all, but they were quite excited when I told them all about it. They have a cheque for a million dollars all ready for you. Isn’t that nice ? I know you won’t mind the interruption, will you, dear?”

The Professor stood and stared at her, blankly. There was a confused roaring in his head, and he could not speak. Sell the Integrator? Lose Amaranth? Be miserable again— for ever? Was it worth a million dollars— which his wife would spend for him? The prospect seemed appalling. Then, on the other hand, he really ought to be working on that solar power idea. Great things were expected of him; his fellows were talking, and it was only the Integrator that kept him from making a start. He groaned. He couldn’t decide.

His wife stood there gazing at him, puzzled, while the two business men waited respectfully. He passed his hand over his forehead, as though to clear his fuddled thoughts, then sat down at the Integrator. He reached for his patterns, and realised with a shock that they were not there.

He rushed to the window, through which his papers had flown On the swirling air. He leaned out, peering through the darkness. There were white-sheets floating on the river below. He sank back.

All his patterns, those careful calculations.... Then, with a sudden movement, he shrugged his shoulders and pulled himself together. He turned to the two men.

“Would you like a demonstration?” he asked quietly.

“It doesn’t matter, now. We know you. Let’s close the deal right up, and you can show us how it works to-morrow.”

Professor Grimm signed the paper, and took the cheque from the fat, red-faced man. His wife looked on, beaming. He passed the cheque to her without even looking at it. His eyes were far away.

“H-m-m,” he was saying. “Solar power... To-morrow, I must look up Langley’s stuff on the pressure of light.”

________________

6: The Oversight

Comet Stories, December 1940

JOHN C. HASTINGS, senior medical student in the Nebraska State University Medical School at Omaha, looked out of the window of the Packard sedan he was driving down the road along the top of the bluff, and out in the middle of the Missouri River he saw a Roman galley, sweeping down midstream with three tiers of huge oars. A pang of alarm shot through him. The study of medicine is a terrible grind; he had been working hard. In a recent psychiatry class they had touched upon hysterical delusions and illusions. Was his mind slipping? Or was this some sort of optical delusion? He had stolen away from Omaha with Celestine Newbury to enjoy the green and open freshness of the country like a couple of stifled city folks. Perhaps the nearest he had come to foolishness had been when the stars had looked like her eyes and he had pointed out Mars and talked of flying with her to visit that mysterious red planet.

“Do you see it too?” he gasped at Celestine.

She saw it, too, and heard the creak of oars and the thumping of a drum; there floated up to them a hoarse chant, rhythmic but not musical, broken into by rough voices that might have been cursing. It was a clumsy vessel, built of heavy timbers, with a high-beaked prow. There was a short mast and a red-and-yellow sail that bulged in the breeze. The long oars looked tremendously heavy and unwieldy, and swung in long, slow strokes, swirling up the muddy water and throwing up a yellow bow-wave. The decks were crowded with men, from whom came the gleam of metal shields, swords, and helmets.

“Some advertising scheme I suppose,” muttered John cynically.

“Or some traveling show, trying to be original,” Celestine suggested.

But the thing looked too grim and clumsy for either of these things. There was a total lack of modern touch about it. Nor was there a word or sign of advertising anywhere on it. They stopped the car and watched. As it slowly drew nearer they could see that the men were coarse, rowdy specimens; and that the straining of human muscles at the oars was too real to be any kind of play.

Then there were shots below them. Someone at the foot of the bluff was blazing away steadily at the galley. On board the latter, a commotion arose. Men fell. Then voices out on the road in front of them became more pressing than either of these things.

“A young fellow and a girl,” someone said; “big, fast car. Omaha license number. They’ll do.”

“Hey!” a voice hailed them.

In front, on the road, were a dozen men. Some were farmers, some were Indians. One or two might have been bank clerks or insurance salesmen. All were heavily armed, with shotguns, rifles, and pistols.

They looked haggard and sullen.

“Take us to Rosalie, and then beat it for Omaha and tell them what you saw,” one of the men ordered gruffly. “The newspapers and the commander at Fort Crook.”

This was strange on a peaceful country road, but John could see no other course than to comply with their request. He turned the car back to Rosalie, the Indian Reservation town, and the men were crowded within it and hung all over the outside. Even the powerful Packard found it a heavy burden. In the direction of Rosalie, the strangest sight of all awaited them.

Before they saw the town, they found a huge wall stretching across the road. Beyond it rose blunt shapes, the tops of vast low buildings. What a tremendous amount of building! the thought struck John at once. For, they had driven this way just three days before, and there had been no sign of it; only the wide green fields and the slumbering little village.

The armed men became excited and furious when they saw the wall. They broke out into exclamations which were half imprecations and half explanatory.

“They put these things down on our land. Ruined our farms. God knows what’s become of the town. Squeezed us out. Must be a good many dead. We have telephoned Lincoln and Washington, but they are slow. They can’t wake up. Maybe they don’t believe us.” There were curses.

John could see great numbers of armed men gathering from all directions. There was no order or discipline about them, except the one uniting cause of their fury against this huge thing that had so suddenly arisen. Far in the distance, countless little groups were emerging from behind trees and around bends in the road or driving up in cars; and nearby there were hundreds more arriving with every conceivable firearm. The last man in the countryside must have been aroused.

The men climbed out of John’s car and repeated their order that he drive to Omaha and tell what he saw.

A ragged skirmish line was closing in rapidly toward the big gray wall that stretched for a mile from north to south. Along the top of it, after the manner of sentries, paced little dark figures. John and Celestine were amazed to see that they, too, were Roman soldiers. The sunlight glinted from their armor; the plumes on their helmets stood out against the sky; their shield and short swords were picturesque, but, against the rifles below, out of place.

There came a shot, and another from the approaching attackers, and a figure on top of the wall toppled and fell sprawling to its foot and lay still on the ground. Hoarse shouts arose. A dense knot of Roman soldiers gathered on top of the wall. A fusillade of shots broke out from below, men running frantically to get within close range. The group on the wall melted away, many crashing down on the outside, and a heap remaining on top. The wall was completely deserted. The wind wafted a sulphurous odor to the nostrils of the two young people in the Packard.

Then followed a horrible spectacle. John, hardened to gruesome sights in the course of his medical work, came away from it trembling, wondering how Celestine would react.

A huge gate swung in the wall, and a massed army of Roman soldiers marched out. Bare thighs and bronze greaves, and strips of armor over their shoulders, plumed helmets, small, heavy shields; one company with short swords, the next with long spears; one solid company after another poured out of the gates and marched forth against their attackers.

The Farmers and Indians and other dispossessed citizens opened fire on the massed troops with deadly effect. Soldiers fell by the hundreds; huge gaps appeared in the ranks; whole companies were wiped out. But, with precise and steady discipline, others marched in their places. Blood soaked the ground and smeared the trees and shrubbery. Piles of dead were heaped up in long windrows, with twitching, and crawling places in them. New ranks climbed over them and marched into the blaze of lead, only to fall and be replaced by others. The peaceful Nebraska prairie was strewn with thousands of armed corpses.

Terror gripped the hearts of the couple in the Packard. The firing began to halt. It became scattered here and there as ammunition became scarce. As the troops poured out in unlimited numbers, men in overalls, sweaters, and collars and shirt sleeves began to retreat. The grim ranks closed upon the nearest ones. Swords rose and fell, spears thrust, clubbed rifles were borne down. There was more blood, and the bodies of American citizens littered the ground that they themselves had owned and tried to defend.

John and Celestine, paralyzed by the spectacle, came to with a jerk.

“It’s time to move,” John said.

He swung the car around just as, with a rattle and a roar, a score of chariots dashed out of the great gates and the horses came galloping down the road. The ranks of the infantry opened to permit pursuit of the retreating skirmishers. The clumsy vehicles rattled and bumped behind flying hoofs at a rapid clip, the men in them hanging on to the reins and keeping their footing by a miracle. Gay cloaks streamed backward in the wind, and gold gleamed on the horses’ harness. John bore down on the accelerator pedal, and the car leaped ahead with a roar, a scattered string of chariots swinging in behind it. He headed down the road and, once the Packard got a proper start, it left its pursuers ridiculously behind. Celestine shrieked and pointed ahead.

“Look!”

A group of Roman soldiers with drawn swords were formed on the road ahead, and more were swarming out of the shrubbery. An officer waved a sword and shouted a sharp word.

“Stop, nothing!” John said through gritted teeth, remembering
bloody overalls and sprawling limbs gripping battered rifles. He put his full weight on the accelerator pedal and the huge machine throbbed and rumbled into life, a gleaming, roaring gray streak.

“Duck down below the windshield, dear,” he said to Celestine. Never before had he used that word, though he had often felt like it. The Roman soldiers quailed as they saw the big car hurtling toward them, but they had no time to retreat. The bumper struck the mass of men with a thud and a crash of metal. Dark spatters appeared on the windshield and things crunched sickeningly. The car swerved and swung dizzily, and John’s forehead bumped against the glass ahead of him, but his hands hung to the wheel. The fenders crumpled and the wheels bumped over soft things. Just as he thought the car would overturn, he found himself flying smoothly down a clear road; in his windshield mirror a squirming mass on the road was becoming rapidly too small to see.

He laughed a hard laugh.

“They didn’t know enough to jab a sword into a tire,” he said grimly.

And there to their left, was the tiresome galley, sliding down the river. The countryside was green and peaceful; in a moment even the galley was out of sight. Except for the crumpled fenders and the leaking radiator it seemed that they had just awakened from an unpleasant dream and found that it had not been true.

They talked little on the way to Omaha; but they could not help talking some. Who were these men? Where did they come from? What did it mean, the piles of dead, the sickening river of blood?  They must hurry with the news, so that help would be sent to the stricken area.

The hum of the motor became a song that ate up miles. John worried about tires. A blowout before he reached the army post at Fort Crook might cost many lives. There was no time to waste. Just as the roof-covered hills of Omaha appeared in the distance, two motorcycles dashed forward to meet the car and signaled a stop. The khaki-clad police riders eyed the bloody radiator and nodded their heads together.

“You’ve been there?” they asked. John nodded.

“You’ve been there?” he queried in return.

“The telephone and telegraph wires are hot.”

“They need help—” John began.

“Are you good for a trip back there in a plane, to guide an observer?” the officer asked. “We’ll see the lady home.”

So John found himself dashing to the landing field on a motorcycle, and then in an Army plane, a telephone on his ears connected with the lieutenant in front of him. It was all a mad, dizzy, confused dream. He had never been up in a plane before, and the novelty and anxiety of it fought with his tense observation of the sliding landscape below. But there was the galley on the river, and three more following it in the distance. There was an army marching along the top of the bluffs down the river; a countless string of densely packed companies with horsemen and chariots swarming around. There were the huge flat buildings in the walled enclosure where Rosalie had stood. Out of the buildings and out of the enclosures, marched more and more massed troops, all heading toward Omaha.

Then they were back in the City Hall, he and the lieutenant, and facing them were the chief of police and an Army colonel. There was talk of the Governor and General Paul of the State Militia due to arrive from Lincoln any moment in an airplane; and the National Guard mobilizing all over the state, and trucks and caissons and field guns already en route from Ashland with skeletonized personnel. Secretaries dashed out with scribbled messages and in with yellow telegrams. A terrific war was brewing, and what was it all about?

The lieutenant stepped up to the colonel and saluted.

“If you please, sir, the galleys on the river—”

“Yes?” asked the worried colonel.

“They’ve got to be sunk.”

“We have no bombs,” the colonel answered. “We’re just a toy army here, in the middle of the continent.”

“No bombs!” The lieutenant was nonplussed for a moment, and hung his head in study. “Will you leave it to me, sir? Somehow—”

“Good fellow. Thank you,” said the colonel, very much relieved.

“Your orders are, then, to sink the galleys.”

“Come!” The lieutenant said to John.

“Me?” gasped John.

“Don’t you want to?” the lieutenant asked. “Men are scarce. I need help. You’re the closest. And you’ve got a level head.”

“Just give me a chance,” John said eagerly.

The lieutenant spent fifteen minutes in a telephone booth. Then they dashed in a motorcycle to the city landing field where the plane lay. They made the short hop to the Army flying field. This all took time; but when they taxied towards the Army hangars, there stood men ready to load things into the plane. A stack of kegs labeled “Dynamite” and white lengths of fuse did not look very military, and their source was indicated by the departing delivery truck of a hardware firm. The men knocked the stoppers out of the kegs and wadded the fuses into the bungholes with paper.

“Bombs!” The lieutenant spread his hands in a proud gesture. “The Q.M.G. in Washington ought to see this. Maybe he’d trust us with real ones some day.”

He turned to John.

“We’ll use a cigarette-lighter down in the cockpit, and heave them over the side.”

Out over the city they flew, and up the river. The trireme was steadily approaching, and the lieutenant flew his plane a hundred feet above the ship. They could see gaping mouths and goggling whites of eyes turned up at them. The decks were a mass of coarse-looking faces.

“Hate to do it,” remarked the lieutenant, looking down on the decks packed with living men. “But, Lord, it seems to be the game, so light up!” he ordered sharply.

As John applied the cigarette-lighter and the fuse began to fizzle, the lieutenant circled about and again flew over the creeping galley.

“Now!” He shouted, and John rolled the keg over the side. It turned over and over endwise as it fell, and left a sputtering trail of smoke in the air.

It fell on the deck and knocked over several men. The lieutenant was putting height and distance between themselves and the galley as rapidly as possible, and rightly. In another moment there was a burst of flame and black smoke. Blotches of things flew out sidewards from it, and a dull roar came up to them. For a few minutes a mangled mass of wreckage continued the galley’s course down the river. Then it slowed and drifted sidewise, and flames licked over it. Struggling figures stirred the water momentarily and sank. Not a swimmer was left; bronze armor does not float on muddy Missouri River water.

Above the second galley they were met by a flight of arrows, and the lieutenant hurriedly performed some dizzy gyrations with the plane to get out of bowshot, but not before several barbed shafts struck through the wings and thumped against the bottom. So they lit their fuse and passed low over the galley at full speed. There was less regret and more thrill as they rolled the keg with its sputtering tail over the side; the humming arrows made the game less one-sided. The high speed of the plane spoiled the aim, and the keg of dynamite plumped harmlessly into the water just ahead of the galley. The second time they figured a little more closely, and before very long, all four of the galleys were a mass of scattered, blackened wreckage.

John leaned back in the seat.

“Terrible way to squander human beings,” he said.

The lieutenant’s teeth were set.

“You haven’t seen anything yet,” he said to John. “We’ve got two more kegs of dynamite and no orders to the contrary. Let’s go back to the front lines.”

“Front lines!” exclaimed John.

The lieutenant smiled.

“You’ve studied medicine; I’ve studied war. It is two and a half hours since we left the meeting. The Roman— or whatever the blank they are— infantry has made ten miles south and west. Our troops from the Fort have easily made thirty or forty in their trucks, and started digging trenches and emplacing guns. That would mean that there must be fighting north and west of here. Isn’t that so?”

“I hadn’t thought of it,” John admitted.

“Also by this time there must be two or three regiments of State militia on trucks and bound in this direction; and the artillery and machine-guns from Ashland ought to be ready any minute. We’ve got two more kegs. Are you game?”

As if in answer, a dull boom sounded from the northwest, followed by another; and in five minutes the banging was almost continuous. John nodded his head. The lieutenant swung the plane around, and it was less than ten minutes before they saw the trenches of the Fort Crook troops spread below them; and from far into the north there poured column upon column of densely formed Roman troops, with the gleam of the afternoon sun upon the metal of their armor and swords. On the eastern end of the line the Roman infantry had reached the trenches and a sickening carnage was taking place. As they advanced steadily toward the trenches, the Roman troops were mowed down by the machine-guns of the Federal soldiers and the Omaha police, in swaths like meadow-grass laid flat by the blade of the scythe. During the period of a few minutes as they looked down they saw thousands of men fall; great heaps of twitching and bloody dead in armor and plumes were piled before the thin line of khaki.

“They don’t need us much, but here goes!”

Far back over the enemy’s lines, where the troops were massed the densest, they sailed, and dropped their black and smoking blasts and scattered several companies of bewildered soldiers. But others took their places and pressed steadily on.

“If we only had a few fighting planes and some ammunition for them— wouldn’t we clean up the place!” gloated the lieutenant. “But there isn’t a plane with a machine-gun on it in this division, and not an aerial bomb except some dummies for practice. The War Department isn’t ever so very fast, and this certainly came suddenly. However, I’m sure they must be getting busy sending things over by now. Let’s look westward.”

The line was flung a dozen miles west of the Missouri River, and gradually was crawling still further west. The artillery from Ashland had stopped ten miles southwest of the place where fighting first began, and by now had set up their pieces and gotten the range with the aid of a commandeered, tri-motored passenger plane; they were banging shells at the rate of one every three seconds into the thickest of the troops. Even at the height of three thousand feet, the sight was horrible; there were red areas against the green of the landscape, and red areas on the piled up heaps that twitched and gleamed with spots of metal; the heaps piled up and grew into hills, between the gaping holes that the shells dug into the wheat fields.

“Ha! Look!”

The lieutenant pointed near the line at the middle.

“An artillery captain is looking for prisoners.”

The barrage of one of the batteries was laying flat a wide area, but preserving a little circle intact in the middle of it. On this island, among a sea of smoky holes, stood a huddled group of Roman soldiers. One by one they fell, for flying fragments of high-explosive shell traveled far, and they did not know enough to fall flat on their faces. Then the barrage stopped and a platoon of men in khaki with rifles crept toward them.

The lieutenant looked like a man on the side-lines of a football game. He flew his plane low and gazed breathlessly at the combat below. For it was an exciting one.

The khaki-clad soldiers wanted prisoners alive. But the Roman soldiers understood nothing of the threat of the gun. Rifles and pistols were leveled, but served in no wise to stop them from making a fierce attack on the Americans with swords and spears. To save their own lives, the latter had to stop and shoot the Romans down. All but a half a dozen armored men now lay flat on the ground. These gathered together for a moment’s council, adjusted their shields, and balanced their swords and spears. They were preparing a charge. The lieutenant on the ground obviously had orders to get live prisoners. He also knew his battle psychology well.

He formed his men in line; bayonets flashed out of scabbards and in a moment a serried line of them bristled forward on the ends of the rifles. The khaki-clad line started first. The men on the flanks ran as fast as they could go and dodged through shell-holes. The Romans started slowly toward the thin-looking center of the American line. The aviation lieutenant rose in his seat and dropped the stick of the plane for a moment in his excitement. The plane veered and the fight below was lost to view for a moment. By the time he had swung the plane back, the circle of khaki had almost closed around the Romans. The latter stood back to back, spears straight out in front of them. It must have taken nerve to face that circle of advancing bayonets, outnumbering them six to one. They held, stolid as a rock wall, and John was almost beginning to think that they would fight to the death and kill a few American soldiers. But, just as the ring of bayonets was within a foot of the ends of their spears, they suddenly dropped their weapons on the ground, and held their hands in the age-old gesture, straight above their heads.

The men in khaki pushed them apart with their bayonets, and two to a prisoner, marched them back to the line; others stopping to pick up weapons. For the first time John noted that these men were all giants; even from the altered perspective of the airplane it was clear that they were six and a half to seven feet tall, and burly.

“We’ll go back and report, then get a rest,” the aviation lieutenant said, heading the plane toward the Army field. There he shook hands with John and arranged to meet in the morning for further work.

After a telephone conversation with Celestine, and a meal, John settled down in his room and turned on the radio. Program material had been crowded off all stations by the news of the war.

“The front lines are now fully equipped with portable searchlights and flares. But the Roman soldiers have quit coming. Apparently there will be no fighting during the night.”

There followed a resume of happenings with which John was already familiar, and he shut the instrument off. Just as he was beginning to doze, his telephone rang. It was the pathologist at the Medical School.

“Hello, Hastings,” he said. “You have been in on this from the start, and I thought you would be interested in our prisoners.”

John hurried over to the hospital, where in one of the wards there was a squad of soldiers with fixed bayonets, and two of the giants on the beds. One had a shoulder wound and a thigh wound from high explosive fragments. Both wounds were very slight.

“Mr. Hastings,” said the pathologist, presenting him to a man bending over one of the prisoners, “Professor Haven is from Creighton University, and is the head of the Latin Department. He is trying to talk to these men.”

Professor Haven shook his head.

“These men speak Latin but I don’t,” he sighed. “I’ve studied it a lifetime, but I can’t speak it. And they speak a very impure, corrupted Latin. But, I’m making out, somehow.”

He spoke slowly, in ponderous syllables to the prisoner. The man grumbled surlily. In the meantime, the pathologist called John away.

“One of the prisoners died,” he said, “and we are doing a post-mortem. Just a slight flesh-wound; no reason under the sun why it shouldn’t heal easily. He seemed to have no vitality, no staying power.”

The post-mortem failed to make clear what had been the cause of death; the slight bullet wound in the shoulder could not have caused it. No other abnormality was found. They went back to the ward, and found another of the prisoners dead.

“Strange,” the pathologist muttered. “They can’t resist anything. And there is some odd quality about their tissues, both anatomical and physiological, that I can’t put my finger on. But they’re different.”

“They’re certainly stupid,” the Latin professor said. “I have succeeded in making myself understood to this man. I asked him, who are they, what they wanted, why they were fighting us, where they come from. He does not know. ‘Non scio, non scio, non scio!’ That’s all I got out of either one of them, except that they are hungry and would prefer to lie on the floor rather than on the bed. They give me the impression of being feeble-minded.”

“Good fighting machines,” John remarked.

When he got back to his room, the radio was urging everybody to go to sleep and rest. There were guards detailed for necessary night work, and there was no danger. Freshness and strength would be needed tomorrow. But John was too excited following his strenuous day, and knew that sleep would be impossible. He kept on listening to the news from the radio, which was trying to solve the mystery of these Roman hordes.

“Who are they?” the announcer asked rhetorically. “Where are they from? What do they want?” His questions were asked but not answered. He reported that during the afternoon the entire world had been searched by cable and radio, and nowhere was there any trace of the departure of such vast numbers of men. Italy and Russia were especially suspected; but it was out of the question that such hundreds of thousands could have been transported without leaving some evidence. How had they reached the middle of the North American continent? No railroad knew anything about them; there had been no unusual number of airships observed in any direction. One was tempted to think that they came out of the ground. Someone proposed the idea, based on the popularity of Einstein’s recent conceptions, that these men had somehow crossed the time dimension from Julius Caesar’s time; a fold in the continuum might readily bring the period of the Roman Senate in contact with the period of radio and automobiles.

A few minutes later the announcer stated that he had received a dozen contemptuous and scornful messages about the idea from scientists and historians. If these troops had come from Caesar’s time, their sudden disappearance would certainly have caused enough sensation to be recorded; and no such record existed. If they came from such a period, they must have disappeared from the sight of the people who lived then; otherwise one must assume that they went on existing in their own time as well as the present day. The idea was rent to bits. The announcer went on with rhetorical questions: How many more men were there? What would happen tomorrow? At least there were comforting reports that in the morning the sky would be crowded with planes bearing tons of high-explosive bombs. It could not last long.

Suddenly John slapped his thigh. He went to the telephone and called up the aviation lieutenant.

“Hello!” he said. “Did I get you out of bed? Well, it looks as though neither one of us is so bright about war.”

“Now what?” the lieutenant asked.

“Those last two kegs of dynamite you dropped on Caesar’s army—”

“Yes?” the lieutenant asked.

“They ought to have been dumped on the buildings on the Indian Reservation, what?”

A faint oath came over the phone.

“Say, Hastings, I feel like resigning my commission and getting a job selling bananas. But, what do you say to correcting the oversight? At once?”

“I’m there. But wait. I’m getting positively brilliant tonight. Why not get the Latin prof to go with us and see what we can find out?”

“If I could slap you on the back by phone, I’d do it. I’m waiting for you with the ship. Hurry.”

Professor Haven was delighted at the opportunity; the wizened little fellow seemed oblivious to the dangers of the undertaking. They put rifles in the plane, and two forty-fives apiece in their belts. The walled enclosure was visible to the plane from a distance, because of a strange reddish glow that came up from it. The glow enabled the lieutenant to note that, a long, flat-roofed building offered a far better opportunity for a landing than did the ground, which was systematically spaced with guards. He shut off his motor several miles away, and managed his landing with marvelous skill and silence. Only the landing-wheels, bumping over the rough places on the roof, made any sound. They waited for thirty minutes in silence, and as no further sounds came from the camp, they crept out of the cockpit and stole along the roof.

The guards pacing about below seemed not to have noticed their landing. Ahead of them was a large, square affair like a chimney, with a red glow coming out of it. But, it was not a chimney, for no heat came from it. It might have been a ventilator; in fact as they approached they found that a strong current of air drew downward into it. They could lean over the edge and see a large, bright room immediately below them.

It was certainly no crude Roman room. It was a scientific laboratory, crowded with strange and delicate apparatus. Most of it was quite unfamiliar to John in use or nature, despite the fact that he was well posted on modern scientific matters, and could make intelligent guesses about scientific things or equipment even out of his own line. He could make nothing out of the things he saw below.

Just beneath them stood a huge Roman officer; the numerous gold insignia on his chest indicated high rank. He stood in front of a glass jar about four feet high, from which numerous cords led to a table full of intricate apparatus. Inside the jar there was something that looked like a piece of seaweed. It was hard, tough, leathery. In the bright light, it might have been a sort of a branching cactus. But it moved about within its jar. It gestured with one of its branches. It pointed at the Roman soldier, and nodded a large, head-like portion. A rapid rattle of words in a foreign tongue came up to them, and Haven, the Latin professor, craned his neck. John recognized a Latin word here and there, but could make out no meaning. Haven later translated what he had heard. The first words he distinguished were those of the big Roman general.

“We need fifty more legions of men by morning,” he said apologetically.

“Why not?” a metallic voice replied. It continued monotonously, with scant intonation. “I’ll start them at once and have them ready by daylight.” There was a quick gesture of the leathery thing in the jar. Little groups of long, red thorns scattered over it.

The general went on.

“These people are good fighters. They may conquer us. We haven’t a thousand soldiers left.”

The metallic voice that replied conveyed no emotion, but the gesture of the cactus-like thing in the jar was eloquent of deprecation.

“To our science they are but a puff of wind,” the droning voice said. “I can destroy them all by pressing a button. Do you think I have studied the Earth and its beast-like men for ages in vain? But, I want sport. I’ve been bored for too many centuries. So, to entertain me you shall have your five hundred companies of soldiers tomorrow morning. Now go. I must be alone.”

The general saluted with an arm straight forward and upward, turned about, and walked out of the field of view, muttering something dubiously under his breath. For a long time, all was silent. Then the metallic voice spoke:

“Earth men, I perceive you up on the roof about the ventilator.”

The leathery thing in the jar stirred and the machinery on the table clicked.

The group on the roof started in alarm, but the wizened little Haven regained his composure first.

“Who and what are you?” he exclaimed.

“You ask as though you had a right to demand,” the metallic voice droned. “But it pleases me to inform you, Earth men, that I am a being of the planet Mars. Tired of the monotony of life in our dull world, I decided to emigrate. I came peacefully.”

“Peacefully!” exclaimed the lieutenant, but the metallic voice went on as though he had not spoken:

“I harmed no one until your people attacked my walled enclosure and destroyed my defenders. They have suffered. I am sorry. Let me alone, and I shall not molest you. I wish you no harm.”

“But,” exclaimed Haven, “you cannot take possession of a hundred acres of land that belongs to other people, and lay waste to thousands more. That is their land. They will fight for it. How can they let you alone?”

“It is better for you not to bother me. The science of Mars is still millions of years ahead of yours—”

There arose a shouting and a clatter among the guards below. Their suspicions had been aroused by sounds on the roof. A trampling of feet toward the building increased in volume. The trio hurried to their plane, swung it about by the tail, and jumping in, took off with a roar, leaving a band of gaping legionnaires below.

John eventually found himself in his bed at about three o’clock in the morning, and even then too exhausted to sleep. Questions kept running through his mind.

The creature’s claim that it was a Martian made things more mysterious instead of less so. It was not possible to transport these hundreds of thousands of men from Mars. And the buildings and chariots and horses. It would have taken an enormous tonnage of vessels, whose arrival certainly would have been noticed. And to think that Mars was inhabited by Roman soldiers was a most preposterous and childish notion. And if the Martians were as far advanced in science as they claimed, why did they use the military methods of ancient Rome? Certainly there was still plenty about this that had not been explained.

John slept late and awoke exhausted by his previous day’s unwonted stress. But the thundering of guns would let him sleep no longer. The radio told him that fighting was going on up around Sioux City and westward toward Fremont and Norfolk. Always the reports carried the same statements of the incredible slaughter of innumerable Roman soldiers by the modern engines of war against which their swords and shields meant nothing. It was an unbelievable nightmare, creepy horrible destruction of life and a soaking of the earth with blood, and piling up of mounds of dead bodies scores of feet high on the green and peaceful prairies. The reports ended up with an optimistic note that airplanes with high-explosive bombs were due to arrive from the East at any moment.

Then his telephone rang. It was his dean calling him to a conference with the Commanding Officer of the area. The smiling aviation lieutenant was also present. They were discussing the advisability of destroying the Martian in his building, and thus stamping out the rest of the trouble.

“It might not necessarily stop all trouble, you know,” the medical dean said; “those curious men are still loose in large numbers. I think that the creature, instead of being destroyed, ought to be captured and studied.”

The dean’s view finally prevailed, and it was decided to avoid destroying the spot on which the Martian stood. The adjutant was already busy directing. Army and Navy planes were now arriving in swarms from East and West. Arrangements were made to bomb all around the Martian’s retreat, and then raid it with a small party when everything was clear.

Grimly, methodically, the Army and Navy fliers went about their tasks. They systematically covered the entire contested territory with high-explosive bombs. In three hours, a Nebraska county was a field plowed by a giant, in which persisted one little island, the long house in the walled enclosure, with its red-glowing chimney.

Airplanes landed a platoon of the National Guard on the river, and these marched to the surviving building and searched it thoroughly. With them was John and his friend the aviation lieutenant, and also the dean and the Latin professor. They found nothing anywhere, except in the room below the ventilator, where the Martian was still sealed in his glass jar.

“Earth men!” the metallic voice said suddenly, and the leathery body jerked in surprise. “Homines terrae!”

Professor Haven spoke in Latin. He was imbued with the educated person’s ideal of courtesy in the victor. “We regret to inform you that we have destroyed all of your men—”

“I have been watching you,” the metallic voice said. Its tone conveyed no feeling, but the attitude of the branched body was weary. “I am surprised I must have missed something.”

“Eh? What’s that?”

“I must have missed something in my observations. After all, your fighting machines are very simple. I could have destroyed them in a breath, only, I did not know you had such things. I cannot understand why I did not find them before.”

The men stood in silence, looking at the dry, hard looking thing, not knowing what to say. Finally the metallic speaking began again. John noted that the voice came from a metal diaphragm among the apparatus on the table, to which the cords led from the creature in the jar.

“I cannot understand it. When I planned to migrate to the Earth, I came here and remained many years, studying many men, their bodies, their language, their methods of fighting— fighting was something new to me, and I enjoyed it; we do not have fighting on Mars. I took all necessary observations so that I might prepare to live among them.

“Then I went back home and spent sufficient time in research to make everything perfect. Of course it took a long time. I devised a suit in which I could stand in your atmospheric pressure, heat, and moisture; methods of transporting the nuclei of my apparatus to the Earth and growing them into proper bulk when I arrived, so that I might carry only very little with me. I was especially interested in devising methods of growing human beings on suitable culture media. I developed men who were just a little larger and a little stronger than yours; yet not too much so, because I wanted to see good sport, though remaining sure of winning you over in the end—”

“Cultured these men!” Professor Haven exclaimed. He lagged a little in using his Latin words. “You mean you grow them like we grow bacteria in test-tubes?” He got his meaning across by many words and much effort.

“I grew these soldiers on culture media,” the metallic voice answered, and a shriveled arm gestured in a circle. “With a forced supply of air for carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen, and water for hydrogen, I can grow a man in a few hours; or as many men at once as I have culture medium and containers for. They grow by simultaneous fission of all somatic cells.”

“So they are not really human?” Haven seemed much relieved at the idea that the destruction might not have been that of human life.

“That depends on what you mean by human,” the dried-up Martian said, by means of his machine. “To me, it means nothing.”

“That accounts for the queer differences our pathologist found,” the dean observed when the fact had been translated to him that these hordes of men were cultured in a laboratory.

“Now that you have me in your power,” the Martian continued, “please explain to me how you kept all your destructive engines hidden when I was here on my preparatory observation trip.”

The dean of the Medical School touched Haven on the shoulder.

“Ask him how long ago he was here.”

“It took me,” the machine said, “just about a thousand years (our year is twice as long as yours) to work out my methods of transportation, maintenance, and culture, and to make a voice instrument with which to talk to these culture-soldiers.”

The dean turned toward the Commanding Officer.

“Two thousand years ago,” he said. “The Romans were just about at the height of their military glory. Explain that to him, and how the world and its people have changed since.”

The queer, seaweed-like creature nodded in comprehension and settled itself down in its jar in resignation.

“That is the point I overlooked. For millions of years, the Martians, at the zenith of scientific knowledge, have remained stable. The idea of human change, of progress in civilization, had slipped my mind. Our race has forgotten it. Your race progressed, and left me behind.”

A little discussion arose among them. All agreed that it would be most interesting and valuable to preserve the Martian carefully in some museum. A great deal of useful information could be obtained from him. Many benefits would accrue to humanity from his knowledge.

“Only,” reminded the Commanding Officer, “how much power  does he still have left for doing harm?”

The dean was interested, and bent close to the jar to have a better look. He put his hand on the glass.

There was a quick rush and a crash of furniture. The big Roman general leaped up from beneath a couch, where he had been concealed. With sword upraised he dashed at the dean.

“Look out!” shouted John.

The Roman general gave a hoarse cry. Fortunately it took a goodly number of seconds for him to cross the room. The Commanding Officer was tugging at his pistol holder. His automatic came out fairly quickly and banged twice. The Roman came rushing on almost to within a foot of the muzzle.

Then his sword dropped with a clatter on the floor; his helmet rolling several feet away. The case tipped. It toppled. It looked almost as though it would go over.

Then it settled back; but a crackling sound came from it. A crack appeared in the glass, and wound spirally around it. There was a sizzle of air going into the jar. Machinery clicked and sparks crackled. The creature inside jerked convulsively, and then was still. In a few minutes it began to bloat, and a red mold spread rapidly over it.

___________________

7: The Book of Worlds

Amazing Stories July 1929

TO psychiatrists, Professor Cosgrave's case is a striking study in the compensatory psychosis. He perches on the edge of his bed in a private sanitarium for mental diseases, and coos and twitters and waves a wreath of twigs in his lips. Whether he will ever recover his sanity or not is problematical. Whether anyone else will ever be able to understand and use his hyper-stereoscope is also problematical. And whether, if it were figured out, anyone would ever have the courage to use it, in the face of what happened to Professor Cosgrave, is still further remote in the realms of doubt and conjecture.

I have repeated the story for medical men so many times, that I am beginning to see a sort of logical sequence in things that at first utterly bewildered me.

As Professor Cosgrave's chief assistant, I was undoubtedly closer to him and knew more about his work and about the mechanism of his tragic fate, than anyone else. The physicists who merely went over his apparatus and equations and did not know the man, did not grasp the significance of what happened, as did I, who lived and worked with him every day and many a night.

Yes, the thing begins to look logical to me now, after it has been on my mind constantly for several months. As no one else has been able to understand exactly what happened, I ought to do my best to render a consecutive account of events.

PROFESSOR HEMINGFORD COSGRAVE was the most highly civilized man I have ever known.

If mankind is in truth becoming more civilized as time goes on, then it is following in the footsteps of such advanced and refined examples of human progress as was my late superior in the School of Physics.

He was a small, delicate-looking man, with classical Greek features; with very little physical strength but, with infinite physical endurance. To spend day and night in his laboratory for a week on end seemed to produce no deleterious effects upon him.

When I extol the rare combination of mathematical genius and experimental ability of this man, so well known, I am wasting my breath. But the world does not know so much about his other exquisitely subtle mental sensibilities. He was a poet and an artist; he saw all the beauty in Cosmos with a wondering eye. And he was as gently sympathetic as a woman. The reports of famine victims suffering in China disturbed him at his experiments. His student-assistants would conspire to guard him against the visits of the old Salvation Army Captain, who more than once lured him away from his desk, with the tale of some woman or child in distress. He was the last man in the world to be permitted to witness the horrors, that he said he saw.

A little over two years ago, he and I were planning together a demonstration for his class in Quadrics. We had considered making models of some of the solids, with whose equations the class was working; but the time and labor involved in this was almost out of question under the circumstances. I suggested that the Mathematics Department of the University of Chicago had all of these models already made. We solved the problem by my going to Chicago and photographing these models with a stereoscopic camera. The prints of the strangely shaped solids, viewed in a stereoscope, were quite as satisfactory for class purposes as would have been the models.

I had brought the pile of cards to Professor Cosgrave for approval. He had run through three or four of them, and seemed quite pleased. Suddenly he laid them down and stared at me.

"Do you know what just struck me?" he asked in a queer tone.

I shook my head.

"You know what I'm working on?" he asked.

"You mean your Expansion Equations—?"

"Popularly called the Fourth Dimension." He smiled at the thought. "And you know what I've begun to suspect about it, especially since the experiment with the gyroscope?"

"Yes, I do— though it's hard for me to grasp that there really might be another dimension. I've always considered the fourth dimension a mathematical abstraction."

"No abstraction." He said it as one might say, two and two make four. "Really something here.  Do you see the connection now?" He shook the stereoscope at me.

I shook my head. I felt helpless. His mind was always far ahead of mine. He explained:

"This instrument takes a two-dimensional figure on a flat plane and builds it up so that the brain sees it as a three-dimensional solid in space!"

He waited for me to grasp his idea, which I still failed to do. He smiled indulgently.

"If the fourth dimension is really a dimension and not a mathematical abstraction—" he smiled confidentially as he emphasized the if; "can we not build a hyper-stereoscopic instrument which will build up a three-dimensional model of a fourth-dimensional object into an image perceptible to the brain in its true four-dimensional form?"

I continued to stare blankly from him to the stereoscope and back again.

"As a matter of fact," he continued; "our three-dimensional world is merely a cross-section cut by what we know as space out of the Cosmos that exists in four or more dimensions. Our three-dimensional world bears the same relation to the true status of affairs as do these flat photographs to the models that you photographed. Surely you can grasp that from our equations?"

"Yes," I assented eagerly, glad to find familiar ground to rest my feet on; "just as the present time is a cross-section of infinity cut by a moving space-sector whose motion is irreversible; it moves in one direction only."

He beamed at me for that. Then in silence he finished looking over the geometrical stereograms and handed them to me.

He spent six months working out his idea on paper. He did not discuss his plans with me very much ; but he did give me sections of the problems to work out. For instance, he asked me to work out the equations for the projection of a tesseracoid:

c_1w^4 + c_2x^4 + c_3y^4 + c_4z^4  = k^4

from eight different directions, each opposing pair of right angles to the other three pairs. Most of the problems he gave me were projection problems; but beyond that I could not grasp the drift of his work.

Then he spent a year in experimental work. As I am a mathematician and not a laboratory man, I had less to do with the actual construction of the hyperstereoscope. But even there I helped. I worked at the refractive indices of crystals that he made in an electric furnace ; and I worked out the mathematics of a very ingenious instrument for integrating light rays from two directions into one composite beam.

Apparently the thing was a complex job. Professor Cosgrave spent three weeks in the research laboratory of the Mechanical Engineering Department. He went to Chicago and remained there for a couple of months, leaving as his address the Psychology Department of the Chicago University. One day he announced to me calmly that the hyperstereoscope was finished.

"May I look?" I asked eagerly, expecting to be able to see out into the fourth dimension.

The instrument was pointed out of the window at the campus. It had three telescopes arranged in the form of a triangular parallelepiped. One end of the room was full of apparatus, electron tubes and photo-electric cells, a scanning disk, and tangles of wire strung between boxes and cabinets faced with dials and meters. At a small table there were two oculars to look into. I put my eyes to them.

It made me dizzy. It looked like rolling vapors― dense, heavy vapors, and boiling clouds, rolling and turmoiling swiftly and dizzily. It looked vibrant with heat. Through a rift here and there I got glimpses of a glowing liquid, like the white-hot metal in a foundry coming from the ladle. There were boiling, bubbling lakes of it. I shrank away from the instrument.

"What is it?" I gasped.

"I'm not sure," returned Professor Cosgrave. "Prolonged observation and correlation of observed data will be necessary before we can explain what we see."

He was whirling dials rapidly. I looked again. There were vapors, but they were thin spirals and wisps. Mostly there were bare, smoking rocks. There was a bleak, insufferably dreary stretch of them, extending on into the infinite distance. It looked hot. It was infinitely depressing. I didn't like it.

I stood for a long time behind Professor Cosgrave, as he sat at one little table with his eyes to the oculars of the instrument and twiddled the dials. I was about to turn around and slip out of the room and leave him to play with it alone, when he sat up suddenly. A new idea had struck him.

"Beyond a doubt these places that we see are regions of some sort, not in our 'space' at all, or else infinitely far away. But, in the direction of the fourth dimension they are quite near us. Just as if you are in a window on the top story of a skyscraper office building and a dozen feet away is a man in the window of an adjacent building. To your three-dimensional vision he is quite near you. But to your body, whose motion is confined to two-dimensional surfaces, your friend is a long distance away. To your touch, instead of a dozen feet away he is a quarter of a mile away; that is how far you have to travel before you can reach him.

"Or, if I make a mark at each end of this sheet of paper and then bend the sheet double, from a three-dimensional standpoint the marks are a millimeter apart. But from a two-dimensional standpoint they are thirty centimeters apart.

"This stereoscope sees across, in the same way, to some other universe."  He shook his head.  "My analogies are poor. It is a difficult idea to express. But look !"

I went to the eye-pieces. There was water. It was endless. Just water. It swelled and rolled and pulsated. A swing of the telescopes over at the window brought into view some black rocks. Over the rocks was slime. A slime that flowed and rounded itself into worm-like forms. It was hideous. I left the gloating Professor Cosgrave and hurried away.

After that, as my recollection serves, things moved rapidly. I saw him a couple of days later at his stereoscope.

"I have it!" he said elatedly when he saw me. I hastened to look into the instrument.

"No!" he exclaimed, pulling me away. "I mean an analogy. Like points on the leaves of a book. You see?"

I nodded. He continued.

"Points on the adjacent leaves of a book are far apart, considered two-dimensionally. But, with the book closed, and to a three-dimensional perception which can see across from one page to another, the two points are very near together. You see?"

I nodded again.

"Now look!"

I saw a dense swamp, among huge trees with broad, rich green leaves. Gigantic saurians stalked about and splashed hugely.

"It is like a story of evolution," I couldn't help remarking.

He nodded in satisfaction and mused on:

"Each of these must be a separate and distinct world. I can go back and forth. among them at will. It is not a continuous story. There are steps. Definite jumps. Nothing between. I can see any one of them at any time. Like the leaves of a book!"

I looked again. The professor had not touched the setting and the scene was exactly the same. A huge saurian was devouring some living creature from the water. The water was threshed into a pink foam, and light-red blood was splashed over the green foliage. The professor was talking:

"What we see is worlds or universes arranged side by side in the fourth dimension. Like leaves in a book.

"Heavens! What an encyclopedia!"

"I see," I said slowly, not sure that I really did. "Like serial sections cut in a microtome."

"Comparable. But not really sections. Separate worlds. Three-dimensional worlds like our own. Side by side, each of them one page ahead of the preceding. Three-dimensional leaves in a four-dimensional book."

It was a little difficult to grasp. I thought a while.

"I'd like to have Carver of Purdue see this," I said. "Do you remember his article in the Scientific Monthly about your four-space equations? It was almost personal. Ill-becoming to a scientific man. I'd give my shirt to see his face when he sees this. Let's bring him down."

Professor Cosgrave shook his head.

"What object can there be in causing the man any unpleasant feeling? The world holds enough unpleasant situations without our multiplying them. I shall break the news to him pleasantly when the opportunity presents itself."

That was typical of Professor Cosgrave. That is just how considerate and sympathetic he always was. Always he was trying to spare other people unpleasantness or discomfort. The man was wasted on our present-day selfish and discourteous age. He ought to have been born into some future Utopia.

What would he do now? I wondered. There was obviously a vast number of worlds to observe. It would take a lifetime to have a good look at each one of them. Would he spend his time on satisfying his curiosity and turn his back on mathematical physics? He still had numerous important problems ahead of him in the latter field. He was barely started on his career as a mathematical physicist, yet the world was expecting great things of him. However, for the present there was apparently one phase of the purely observational pursuit for him.

"The 'leaves' in this book seem to be arranged in absolutely orderly succession," he said. "By chance I began at the end where the evolutionary development was lowest. By swinging my visual field through the unknown dimension in one direction, I can see the worlds in succession, each a little further evolved than the preceding. Now, I'm a physicist, and cannot afford to waste much time in gratifying idle curiosity. But, I must spend a few days or weeks in following out this evolutionary series before I turn it over to some biologist. This is too much of a temptation for any kind of a scientific man."

For several days I would come into the room and see him there with his eyes glued to the oculars, too absorbed even to notice my entrance. His attitude was one of tense and motionless concentration. I would steal out again, loth to disturb him. Once I came in and noted that he was trembling violently all over as he gazed into the machine. A couple of days later I found him in the same position, as though he had not moved since I had been there last. His whole body was set and rigid. I was alarmed at the way he looked. I stepped closer; his jaw was set and his breathing was shallow.

I felt concerned about him, and I made a sound to attract his attention. He started suddenly and leaped to his feet, and turned to me a face that was white with horror.

"I've been a student !" he gasped. "A scientific man. I never stopped to realize that men were like that."

He sank into a chair, his hands on his knees, his head drooped.

I looked into the stereoscope. This time there were men. An army stood drawn up, with shining helmets and fluttering pennants, extending far into the dim distance. The foreground was red and active ; everything was splattered with blood; men were swinging swords. There were rows of captives and men cutting their heads off. I watched only a second before I recoiled, but saw a dozen heads roll on the ground and fountains of blood gush over victims and executioners alike.

"You have no business looking at that!" I exclaimed.

It was incongruous. This delicately organized, unselfish, tender-hearted man to be spending his days gazing at those things.

"It's been that way from the beginning," he whispered, shuddering. "Ever since rudimentary humans appeared in the series... war, brutality, cruelty, wanton killing of people..."

But I couldn't keep him away from the thing. He called me to it and explained:

"As far as I can understand this, I am swinging the field of view through an arc in a dimension that extends at right angles to the three known dimensions. At intervals I see a world. In between there is nothing. The swing is accomplished by changing the intensity of the electrical field through crystals of this zirconium compound, which alters their refractivity.

"I am going steadily down my scale toward zero. The worlds are getting further and further advanced in the scale of evolution. I can see it clearly now."

In a moment he was back at the instrument, completely absorbed, and oblivious of me. I was worried about him. I came in daily to watch him, and many a time I came and went without his having been conscious of my presence. There was something wrong about the thing; the intense absorption of a man of his sympathetic type in scenes of inhumanity such as I had seen. One day when I opened the door, he was facing it, waiting for me.

"I am nearly at zero. Look! A world much like ours."

In the lenses I saw the buildings of a city, rather odd, but for all the world suggesting London or Paris; swarming crowds of people, hurrying vehicles. It was quite like our world, but just enough different so that I was sure it was not our world.

Professor Cosgrave was pale and agitated.

"Man's inhumanity to man!" he moaned. "It would drive me distracted, were there not one hope. Just now, in that fair city, I watched a mob drag men and women through the streets and stick their bodies up on poles on a bridge; and blood dripped into the river.

"But, step by step, there is more intellect, more material progress. There is hope that man will eventually develop intelligence enough to stop his senseless and cruel fighting, and learn cooperation and altruism. Each of these worlds seems to bring us a little nearer to that."

He called my attention as he turned his dials to zero, and looked into the instrument. He turned to me with a queer smile.

"Look!"

I applied my eye again. There was the campus and athletic field, the gravel drives and the men's dormitory. Through the stereoscope or through the window, I got the same view.

"At zero we see our own 'plane' of the unknown dimension. Our page in the book. You see?"

"Now what?" I asked.

"Now negative potential values. Now to see the pages ahead of us in the book. Worlds further evolved than ours. The future! Up to the limits of the inductance of my coils!"

His eyes glowed and his breath came fast.

"The future!" he whispered as he bent over the oculars and carefully turned his dials. "In the future lies man's hope. In intelligence and science!"

Again he sat in motionless absorption. Occasionally he touched a dial or whispered to himself. Finally, as he said not a word for a half an hour, I tiptoed out.

The next day I found him staringly expecting my arrival with wide-open eyes, like a man with exophthalmic goiter.

"I don't know what makes me go on with this!" he gasped. "Men are beasts. Hopeless. They never will be anything else. Twenty airplanes went over a city dropping bombs. Swept it away. It is burning now. In one place I saw through the smoke a small child hemmed in a courtyard by flames. A city as grand as Chicago. A sea of smoke and flame." He sat with his head bowed in his hands.

I didn't know what to say. He seemed utterly crushed; I could not rouse him. Finally I led him out of the room, got him in my car, and took him home. I pondered on how I might get him away from that machine for a while.

But the next day he was back again at the machine. I had classes until four o'clock that afternoon. Then I hurried into the laboratory. I found a changed man.

He was stern and determined. This rather relieved me; for I had been worried about his hopeless depression, and I did not realize what was taking place in the man. It seemed to me then that he had shaken off the depression and had determined to do something about the situation of war and humanity.

"Here is a world thousands of years ahead of ours," he related. "Humanity crowds it densely beyond our conception. Thank God, it is another world somewhere else, and not ours. People have not risen an inch from bestiality in millenia. No— stay away from it; I can't permit you to witness such horrors. Men and women soldiers piled up in mangled, bloody heaps as high as the Capitol Building. Each belch of that machine kills a thousand more— stay away!

"It is not our world. We can still save our world from that. We start today, Harlan, you and I, to prevent such things from happening in our world."

"We've got to stop it!" he said again. But he sat and stared into the instrument.

I was puzzled and not a little alarmed. The sudden, stern determination of the gentle little man fitted him most strangely. I would have thought him play-acting for my benefit, had he not looked most terribly grim. Anyway, I was relieved to see that terrible depression had left him, and that he had got hold of himself. That is what I thought then.

He permitted me to lead him out again, and I took him home. He kept saying with grim determination :

"Not to our human race; We won't let it happen!"

On the following day I had no classes, and I called for him at him home early in the morning. He had already left. I hurried to his laboratory. He was already there, spinning dials feverishly, and then bending over the lenses. He had an unusual, nervous air about him.

"Destructive rays !" he said to me as I came in, but without looking away from the oculars. "Wither up a thousand people like snowflakes in a chimney-blast. Terrific explosives. Deadly gases. Bombs filled with disease germs. Diabolical inventiveness."

He whirled around and faced me.

"Everything indicates that our world is part of this scheme. It is going the same way. It will be what this is. We must stop it."

He stood up in the middle of the room and talked, and I took the opportunity to peer into the lenses. I saw a dead world. Wreckage. Ashes. Explosion holes. Disintegrating bodies. Nowhere a movement. Even vegetable life had withered. There was a pile of bombs ready to fire beside a huge gun and a gunner lay dead beside them.

There was a queer declamatory quality to the speech that Professor Cosgrave was making. He said queer, silly things about Universal Peace. And yet I didn't suspect.

ONLY THE next morning when I came in, it dawned on me. He was perched on a tall stool, with a wreath of twigs in his lips. As I came in, he put the wreath around his neck, and sang in a high key :

"I am the Dove of Peace.

Listen to me : All men are brothers.

There shall be no more war.

I shall spread my wings over the world.

I am the Dove of Peace."

Tears sprang to my eyes as the truth suddenly dawned upon me. I gulped as I hurried to another room to telephone. Poor Professor Cosgrave!

Then, as they led him out, I looked into the lenses. There was a rugged stretch, smooth, gently undulating holes and hummocks as far as the eye could reach, covered with a slimy, disgusting fungus growth. Here and there the fungus covered a ragged shape suggesting the ruined wall of a building. There was no change in this scene during the four days before the machine's batteries ran down (for I did not know how to shut it off). Now, no one knows how to operate it.

Professor Cosgrave knows me. He is always glad to see me at his room at the sanitarium. But he talks to me only about Universal Brotherhood and about my duty to save mankind from strife and bloodshed. And he flaps his arms like wings and coos.

_________________

8: The Strength of the Weak

Amazing Stories, Dec 1933

AT the girl’s first shriek, Professor Worcester rushed into the main laboratory, out of the door which led from his little cubby-hole of an office. He was a short little sliver of a man, with a small bald head and large spectacles.

“Why, Marko!” he exclaimed, and his breath seemed to leave him at what he saw. “Why! You?”

Then he suddenly straightened up, and became dignified even in his tininess.

“Take your hands off my daughter! At once!”

Marko Petrescu laughed. It was absurd. He could continue to hold the beautiful and struggling Helen Louis by one hand, and brush away the Professor with the other, without any trouble. He was huge and powerful, even beside an average, well-built man.

At the laugh, Professor Worcester reached in his pocket, drew out and opened a penknife, with a thin blade, three inches long. With this he rushed at the powerful man who was crushing his struggling daughter in two big arms. Petrescu saw the blade. Swiftly he tightened the grasp of one arm on the girl’s body till she screamed, and freed the other. With the free hand he clouted the onrushing Professor on the side of the head. The poor little man of science sank to the floor with a weak groan, his spectacles sliding several feet along the smooth tiling.

Petrescu lifted the girl off the floor, bundled her under his arm, with one hand across her mouth, and hastened out of the place. He hurried across the corridor toward the back door, near which his car was parked. He grinned and chuckled to himself; all the exultation of the primeval male, drunk with violence and women’s beauty, was his. But fortune intervened.

It appeared first in the form of a ton or two of something hard and swift, that landed without warning on Petrescu’s chin. A straw hat clattered to the floor, and over it, the young, red-headed fellow, whose tan suit quite failed to conceal his football build, reached toward Helen Louise. As the black-haired, would-be captor began to sag in the knees, the newcomer picked up Helen Louise and stood her up facing him.

“Jerry!” she cried joyously, and in a moment sprang about his neck.

“Movie stuff?” asked Jerry sarcastically, prodding the big bulk on the floor with his foot. “What you up to, fellow ?”

“My father!” Helen Louise suddenly recollected. “He’s hurt!”

She drew her rescuer by the hand back into the laboratory. Professor Worcester was not hurt much. He was sitting up on the floor when they came in, with one hand to his head. As they appeared, he closed up his penknife and put it in his pocket. Slowly, with many small contortions, he rose to his feet.

“Tell us about it, Helen Louise,” he said, still staggering a little from his vertigo. “Tell us about it,” echoed Jerry.

“Well,” Helen began, “a while ago Marko Petrescu slapped his notebook shut, covered up his microscope, and put away his boxes of slides. ‘I’m done,’ he said, quietly enough, but his voice was frightening. There was a terrible turmoil under its quietness.

“I kept on working at my microtome, cutting sections of father’s neuroma. Something about him frightened me.

“‘I’ve got it !’ he said, and the exultation in his voice made the room tremble. ‘And with it will come wealth, power, whatever I want.’ ”

“What is it that he's got, so big?” Jerry inquired.

“He’s been working,” the Professor replied, “on the nature of the synapse : how does the imponderable nervous impulse jump across the empty space that separates two nerves which are known to communicate with each other? The synapse, you know, is a mystery to all physiologists. Everyone here in the White Neuropathological Foundation has had a try at it. Understanding it would mean understanding how thought moves matter; for there in the synapse is where thought, an immaterial thing, gets hold and controls our material muscles and bones.

“If Petrescu has really found that, he can do anything, all the way from devising new, more efficient and more pleasant anesthetics, to freeing mind from matter or putting new matter under the control of mind!”

“Boy!” sighed Jerry. “What a feature that would make in the Sunday issue! If I could have only got that from him before I socked him.”

Jerry, true to the reporter’s instinct, ran out into the hall. But the huge form of Petrescu had disappeared.

“Go on,” they both said to Helen Louise.

“Oh, that is all. He wanted me to marry him, and run away with him at once. He made the wildest promises of power and wealth. He's crazy.”

“And then he tried to make love to you by force, eh? And your game old dad tried to interfere? Well, good thing I just got a notion I wanted to see your sweet face about this time.”

“Wait till he comes back, to-morrow,” the Professor said.

Petrescu did not come back to-morrow, nor ever again. His private effects had evidently been previously removed from the laboratory. In a few days they gave him up and put another graduate student in his department of the research laboratory.

“From now on,” Professor Worcester said, shaking his small fist, “it will be my job in the world to teach that man a lesson. There are things in the world besides brute strength.”

Professor Worcester did not dream how true this would turn out to be some day; though it would be many years.

For things went along for several years, and nothing more was ever heard of Petrescu anywhere in the scientific world nor in the world of common men. He simply disappeared. Jerry and Helen Louise had plans to be married, but many things kept interfering with them. Professor Worcester was writing a book on tumors, and for nearly a year Helen Louise was so indispensable to him in the laboratory that she hesitated to mention to him marriage with Jerry, even though the Professor liked Jerry. Then Jerry was sent to Shanghai as special correspondent for his paper, where he remained for four months. During all this time he kept up a steady and frequent correspondence with Helen Louise, and in fact received a letter from her on the day he started back for New York.

When he arrived, he sent his baggage to his own rooms, and took a taxi to the Neuropathological Foundation. He found it in consternation. That very day, Helen Louise Worcester had disappeared!

Her father remembered hearing her go into her bedroom the night before. She did not appear in the morning, and he thought it rather strange, but went on down to the laboratory. He spent an anxious forenoon, and, when by noon there was no sign of her, he informed the police that he was suspicious, for it had been her habit for years to do as she pleased, but to inform her father of her every movement merely because she respected his anxiety about her. Jerry arrived at 4 :30 P.M., and nothing had been heard of her.

Nothing was ever heard of her. To pack all of the frantic searching of police, private detectives and newspaper reporters, the desperate offers of reward for information, the numbing, heart-rending ache of waiting, day after day, week after week, the gradual settling down to dumb, hopeless, despairing resignation, all into a sentence, is difficult. But it must be done, for that is not part of our story. The only thing about it, that concerns us, is that both Jerry and Professor Worcester were positive that Marko Petrescu’s hand had shown right through it.

After a year of searching, using all the odd sources of information available to a reporter, Jerry had found his anguish keen as ever. Perhaps people forget, thought Jerry, but he didn’t believe it. Baffled as he was, he clenched his fists every night and vowed to find her. In order that he might do this, he first of all realized that he must keep his first-class physical condition constantly up to par; and he forced himself to remain in training, like the splendid athlete he had always been. His editor, sympathizing with his sorrow, kept him as busy as possible, feeling that was the best service he could render.

Professor Worcester was different. His research lost impetus, and he would be seen going about the laboratory and talking to himself. More frequently than anything else, he would be mumbling to himself :

“It is the desire of my life to teach that scoundrel a lesson!”

Very mildly put, one might say. Yet these mild people are sometimes the most to be feared.

Then, suddenly, one day, the Professor vanished. In the morning his house-
keeper, hired after Helen Louise’s disappearance, waited for him impatiently for breakfast, went up to his room, and found that his bed had not been slept in. Telephone calls to the laboratory disclosed that he had left the previous evening as usual. The case was dumped into the lap of the police by the Foundation authorities and by the housekeeper. Only Jerry reserved to himself the right to do some digging on his own account.

“That fellow is behind all of this. No doubt of that. How to get some kind of a start at the problem—” he worried to himself.

He had serious talks with his friend the managing editor, and this shrewd man saw the hopelessness of the quest, and as a result, worked Jerry harder than ever, for Jerry’s own good.

Time did not pass rapidly for Jerry, and the few weeks seemed a hundred years before he received the strange letter. He brought it to his managing editor. It was in one of the European type of envelopes with a flowered paper lining, and had an Algerian postage stamp. It contained a small portion of kid leather, recognizable as having been cut from Helen Louise’s glove.

“If you want to see Miss Worcester,” it said succinctly, “follow the green plane from the Azores on July 9th, 4 o’clock A.M.”

“Suppose it were a trap?” the editor suggested.

“Well, supposing it is! They’ve got her, and I’m getting at the bottom of it. I’ve got a week to make the date.”

The editor said nothing but wondered if he were losing a valuable reporter.

Jerry duly awaited the coming of 4 o’clock A.M. at the Azores landing field. Precisely on the second, a plane appeared from the east, and turned out to be a bright green when it came near enough. As Jerry rose in his plane, the green plane circled and started back eastward. Jerry was a good navigator, and he started out to keep careful track of the course on which the green plane led him. Subsequently the correctness of his observations was confirmed. The green plane led him to Sarah Ann Island, the island which was on the charts of a century ago, and which no one has been able to find.

No matter how fast Jerry flew, the green plane kept ahead of him, so that he could barely keep it in sight. When they “hove to” over the island, the plane dove down, and by the time Jerry arrived, no plane was to be seen, though at the southern end, near a clump of buildings, there was an excellent landing-field.

Jerry was cautious. He did not feel like plunging down abruptly to a landing. He slowed down and circled about the island. It contained only about a dozen square miles, most of which was dense jungle. Above the middle of this, his engine went dead. No effort could start it again.

“You’re wrong,” Jerry muttered. By proper maneuvering, he could readily land on the landing- field. “I’ll be damned if I do, and you can’t make me.” Jerry was convinced that outside interference had stopped his magneto, with the idea of forcing him down.

He selected a particularly woolly portion of the jungle, and gradually settled down on it. With a great crashing of small limbs, the plane eventually caught. He jumped, after convincing himself that the damage done to the plane was largely superficial, and with patience, could be repaired.

As he clambered ponderously down the tall tree, with canteen and pistol and emergency-ration bag, he heard a crashing through the brush below, and in a moment a ring of unkempt-looking human beings had gathered clamoringly around the base of the tree. They were tattered, grimy, bearded and emaciated; and they seemed enraged at him. He caught fragments of English words.

Jerry desisted from his downward progress. Their upraised claws and shaken fists did not spell cordial welcome. No one of them looked very formidable; they looked weak and ill-fed. But there were too many for safety. Jerry clung, and pondered what to do next.

“Who are you?” Jerry shouted. “What do you want with me?”

The ragged mob suddenly broke into a new uproar of terrific clamor. Sticks and chunks of dirt flew around Jerry’s ears. But he could make nothing out of their answers.

Suddenly a cry rang out! A woman’s cry, half scream of alarm, half shout of delight.

“Jerry!” cried a little brown figure running out of the brush. It was Helen Louise in khaki and much tanned. “Let him alone! He’s my friend.”

The mob stood a moment in surprise. In another, Jerry had leaped to the ground; and as Jerry and Helen Louise stood there locked tightly in each other’s arms for minute after minute, the ragged people slunk away, one by one.

When they had held each other off at arm’s length and again hugged tightly and kissed alternately, and asked repeatedly how are you, and are you well, finally they settled down to hear each other’s stories.

“They thought you were Petrescu,” Helen Louise said. “They will not bother you any more.”

In fact, just then two of them came running up, offering Jerry a number of bananas with some incoherent words he did not understand.

“Petrescu is a demon,” she continued. “He had me shut up in his house a while— oh, no ; he treated me quite kindly. But I got away.

“Here is what he is doing. You remember, he discovered the secret of the synapse, the threshold where the intangible thought impulse is transformed into the tangible current in the material nerve-fiber. For following up his discovery, he had to come here; it involved investigation that could not be carried out in a civilized country. He tortured hundreds of people before he learned how to get a thought out as an electric current on a wire; and probably vice versa, to make thoughts by means of electric currents in wires. He showed me human brains out on the laboratory table with wires running from them, moving needles and lighting bulbs.

“He has a luxurious residence and a wonderful laboratory, and a whole town of machinery to wait on him. And all of the machines have human brains in them, to keep them running.”

Helen Louise wept softly for a moment. Jerry held her tightly and waited patiently for her to go on.

“My father,” she moaned softly. Then she braced up and went on. “He had my father laid out on the laboratory table, and promised him his liberty if— if he, Petrescu, could— could have me—  If not, he would put father’s brain in a machine.

“Now my father’s brain is in a big tower full of machinery that stands at one end of the town and it switches rails and lifts bridges and opens gates.

“His body is gone. I don’t know what he does with the bodies. I don’t know if father is dead or not. I don’t know if my father is the tower, or is a body somewhere without a brain—.

“And Petrescu gloated over my humiliation because my father is in charge of all the machinery that serves his wants. Just a sort of butler or janitor on a large scale, Petrescu said. Those brains are his slaves. They cannot work their own will; they must serve his. ‘Your father had a good brain,’ Petrescu said to me; ‘he could have done better things. But he opposed me.’ ”

“But,” Jerry said, his breath shocked out of him by the horrors he had heard from the lips of this beautiful girl, “such a sacrifice! I could not ever expect you to sacrifice your father that way, just to remain loyal to me.”

She clung to him.

“Jerry, you don’t understand yet. Petrescu is not a human being. He has made a machine of himself. Only his brain is flesh. The rest is machinery.”

“And he wants you!” Jerry clenched his fists. “A monster of iron! What— why—. But how did you get away? And who are these people?”

“They are people he has brought here and couldn’t use, or doesn’t need yet. They know he can come and get them whenever he wants them; each one expects him to come for them sometime. He does want them, one by one.

“He had me in his house, and it is a beautiful place. He tried to be good to me, but I hated and feared him. He is just an ugly bunch of machinery; he hurt and bruised me no matter how gently he tried to touch me.

“One day when he was gone, I wandered all over the house. There were several machines about with human brains in them. I could expect no help from them; they were all under the absolute control of Petrescu and carried out his wishes only. I peeped into the laboratory. A body lay on the table. I became frightened and fled anywhere my feet would carry me. I waited by a door till a machine went through, and followed, and waited by a gate till night. I waited by the bridge till it went down for some machines coming in from the jungle, and I got through in the dark. I have lived with the people here. But my every moment is filled with terror, because I know he will come and get me.”

Jerry held her quietly in his arms for long minutes, or they may have been hours.

“There are enough people here to help me repair that plane and get her away,” kept going through his brain. “Then I could bring help and rescue them.”

She went off with the women to sleep in caves. He went with men, but hardly saw them. His head was full of plans. Late into the night he lay awake figuring the details of repairing the plane.

TOWARD MORNING, some women came shrieking into the men’s area. The monster had been among them. He had crashed through the jungle, breaking down all obstacles with his iron body. His brilliant light had flashed among them, and rested upon the beautiful one. He had seized her and crashed back into the jungle with her.

Jerry was frantic. He paced about, but realized the folly of pursuit. All he could do would be to get lost in the jungle at night. Eventually he sat down and planned. He had all his directions. He knew where the group of buildings lay, on a delta-shaped island between the two mouths of a river. He started at sunrise, filling up with water, and eating bananas as he walked.

He reached the river, and saw its two bridges, one across each branch. He saw the big, rambling house of concrete, with many additions and accretions, irregular and jumbled looking. He saw the many accessory buildings, all of concrete, shops, chimneys, sheds, huge doors, all arranged on three or four streets. Huge bars shut off access to the raised bridges. At the point of the delta, between the two bridges which diverged like a “Y”, stood the tower full of machinery. In that tower, controlling it was Professor Worcester’s brain, at the beck and call of Petrescu’s every whim. Poor old Professor Worcester! The tower had a sort of wizened, melancholy look against the huge buildings behind it.

Getting across the river was a small matter for Jerry. Keeping out of sight, he fashioned a small raft to float his clothes, pistol, canteen, and food, and swam over. Scattered rocks afforded places of concealment for dressing and observation.

The big concrete residence of Petrescu looked like a medieval castle. It was surrounded by walls, within which were beautiful gardens of flowers, ornamental trees, and shrubbery. There were a dozen other concrete buildings of various sizes, but all square and unadorned, and arranged along three or four streets. Nowhere were there any people, but vehicles and various kinds of machines on wheels went back and forth. There was a bright shiny one of delicate glass and nickel and spinning things; there was a big, lumbering tub-like thing with large geared wheels. There was no one in them. They went out of one building, up the street, and into another, all apparently going about their own purposes. Of course. They had human brains in them!

For a long time Jerry lay hidden. It did not seem safe to venture out. There was no place on the bare streets for concealment ; and there seemed no particular objective for him— unless it was the big, rambling concrete house. Then he saw Petrescu. He knew at once that it was Petrescu that stalked out of the house; seven feet high, topped by some kind of a big helmet with goggle eyes and screened holes and several antennae— Jerry surmised at once that this metal skull contained accessory brains and intensified special senses. There were two natural arms coming out of the metal barrel-like torso, and two grotesque ones; one snaky, metallic, coiling like a rat’s tail, with a fine, little spidery hand at the end of it; the other a skeleton-like thing of steel rods with complicated gears at the joints, with a big, complex, jointed hand at the end. The legs were more like this last arm, powerful steel rods and gears.

This monster, which Jerry felt instinctively was the same Petrescu he had known on the Neuropathological laboratory, stopped for a moment outside the door and looked about suspiciously. Jerry sank down behind his rock.

At the next look, Jerry saw him striding down the street. He walked up to the tower and spoke to it in a harsh voice. Machinery started up in a near by building in a few moments. In another building, doors opened wide. In a third, a row of bright, blue mercury-vapor lights sprang up. The little village seemed suddenly to become active, as a result of Petrescu’s harsh command to the control tower, which housed Professor Worcester’s brain. How it must have humiliated the Professor, Jerry thought, to have absolute control over a thousand things a day, to keep the village going, and yet to be compelled to be a slave to Petrescu’s every whim, even to keeping his own daughter a prisoner!

PETRESCU strode back and entered the building in which the Cooper-Hewitt lights glowed. Jerry gave him a half hour’s time, and then slipped around behind the building and peeped in through the lower corner of a window. Within he saw the monster working at a table; in front of him were stacks of papers, glowing tubes, glasses and metal things, too many and too complicated to understand. His two natural hands were busy with small mechanical devices.

Jerry turned and ran. With the aid of a tree, he was over the wall in a moment. He ran through the gardens without giving their exotic beauty a glance. He found the door yielding to his pressure, and plunged in. He found himself in a luxurious corridor, with beautiful rooms opening off it. A queer little machine came scurrying down toward him. He was about to ignore it when it suddenly occurred to him that these things had brains. He caught one of the baby carriage wheels and looked the vehicle over. It had a flat top with an everted edge like a tray, and six flexible arms. Underneath there were some complicated things. Jerry spoke to it:

“Can you talk?”

There was no reply,

“Will you try to report me or raise an alarm?”

No sign from the machine. But down the hall there came a harsh voice:

“I’ll report you, after I lay you out.” It was a tall apparatus, erect and somewhat human, and carried a duster.

Jerry had his pistol out and in a flash had it covered.

“Stop !” he shouted.

It stopped. Obviously, it understood pistols. Obviously it feared them.

“Who are you?” the machine demanded roughly. “What do you want in here? Have you not been given to understand that no one is allowed here but the Master?”

“The girl is here!” Jerry answered and asked at the same time.

“Yes. The girl is the Master’s!”

Jerry ground his teeth. The machine started forward.

“Stop!” roared Jerry.

"You have a human brain,” Jerry began. “Do you remember when you were human, what love was like? This girl is mine. She and I love each other. The Master has no right to her, and she loathes him.”

A harsh, cackling laugh came from the machine.

“I remember once having those silly sentiments. They are quite useless in real life. Most impractical. You ought to have the Master put your brain into a machine.”

“Is that what he wants to do with her?” Jerry gasped.

“No,” the machine grated. “He is keeping her human— for himself.”

“But—” Jerry was puzzled. “That can’t be. She is mine. Remember, you yourself once—”

“No use,” the machine said more gently. “Even if I were sorry for you, I couldn’t disobey the Master. He made all machines to serve his will. We follow only his wish. We are made that way.”

“Well, I’m sorry,” Jerry said, and shot the machine in the head. The roar of the shot, the loud clink of the bullet into the metal, the whirring of things inside, the toppling crash of the thing on the floor, made an exciting succession of sounds.

When it quieted down, Jerry heard faint shrieks coming from somewhere far within the house. He hurried on through mazes of halls and rooms, calling loudly to Helen Louise. Presently the shrieks stopped.

“Where are you?” Jerry shouted.

She came down the hall toward him, and they flew to each other’s arms.

“What are they doing to you?” Jerry asked, stroking her hair and looking down at her.

"I’m all right,” she answered pluckily.

“I wondered what the shooting and banging was about.”

“I had to shoot the butler back there.”

“That was poor old Jervis’ brain. He was once a lawyer, though not a very good one.” Helen Louise seemed to be sorry at the demise of the machine and its human brain.

“Let’s get out of here,” Jerry suggested.

Helen Louise looked doubtful. But she came along as he hurried her down corridors towards the outer door.

“Are there others in the house who might stop us?” Jerry asked.

“Oh yes. Or worse, they can let him know.”

“Then hurry.”

They found the door locked.

Jerry kicked out a window, and both landed on the lawn, breathless.

“Looks bad,” Jerry muttered. “They must be onto us, if they locked the door.”

He took her hand and they ran swiftly across the lawn toward the nearest shrubbery.

They were too late. Petrescu came striding noisily into the gate from the street. He stopped at the locked door, and saw the broken window. By this time, Jerry and Helen Louise had hidden behind thick leaves. Petrescu stood still a while, and looked around.

They could hear him cackle harshly, and his muttered words came to them:

“Well, he’s saved me the trouble of going out and getting him. I need his brain; it ought to be good.”

Jerry aimed carefully at his head, and shot. Plainly they could see the splatter of the dull lead on the shiny helmet. The second shot splattered over the shiny barrel of a body right over the heart area. But Petrescu never even minded the impact of the bullets. He started promptly toward the source of the shooting, with another harsh, inarticulate cackle.

He found them unerringly, and seized Jerry with the snaky arm.

“Run!” shouted Jerry to Helen Louise, and she unthinkingly obeyed, running swiftly away.

Jerry still had his gun in his hand, and it was instinctive for him to apply its muzzle to the twitching coil that was holding him, and pull the trigger. His shot severed it, and the distal portion fell to the ground, emitting small blue sparks. Jerry jumped, brushing past the other arms that grasped at him. His shot had surprised Petrescu sufficiently to get himself a start.

He caught up with Helen Louise, gripped her hand and dragged her along behind him. They tumbled over the wall, staggered among the rocks, gained the river’s edge, and lay panting behind the rocks. They suddenly realized that Petrescu had not followed them.

“Of course not,” Jerry said. “That is a too common and obvious thing to expect from him— to chase us. He will have more subtle ways of getting at us.”

It was not long before they heard a loud, mechanically amplified voice blaring out:

“You had best show yourselves. You can’t get away. If you do not come at once, I shall raze everything flat on this island till I find you. It will then be the last act of my existence to tear you slowly to pieces before each other’s eyes !”

“Well !” Jerry observed, almost gleefully. “The old chap’s somewhat human after all. He’s jealous!”

“He’ll do it, though,” the girl said, pale with terror. “He is capable of things like that.”

“I’ll give you ten,” the voice blared, and began to count :

"One — two — three — four―”

Helen Louise begged Jerry to give up.

“Think you’ll fare any better if we do?” Jerry asked, drawing her toward the water. “We can swim across, and stand an even chance with him in the jungle.”

"Eight — nine ”

“Here we are!”

Helen Louise had lost her nerve; she had sprung up on her feet and shrieked. “Come and take us!”

“Too late!” the voice blared. “I have counted ten. Now, I’ll destroy the island and all the brains on it. Then I’ll slowly pull an arm off the girl and then off the man. I’ll give them a few minutes, and pull a leg first off one and then the other. Then one tongue out after the other. That ought to give me two or three hours of enjoyment.”

“Come on Jerry.” Helen Louise now took turn drawing him after her. “There he is ahead of us, going the other way, not noticing us at all.”

They followed him around the corner of the wall, and down the street. He looked back and laughed as they emerged.

“I gave you a great man’s love, and your spurned it,” he bellowed back at the girl. “You fooled me once too often.”

He strode on toward the control tower.

“Stop!” shrieked Helen Louise again. “We give up.”

“I don’t want you now. It is too late. This—” sweeping one of his natural arms around— “was all for you. Now, one word to your learned father’s brain here, and the whole village will be a wreck. And then my sweet revenge.”

Petrescu walked more and more slowly, while the two lovers ran behind him. They had come quite near him, and Helen Louise’s head sank and she had no more breath left. Now he was barely across the little street from them, at the foot of the tower.

Petrescu, with the afternoon sunlight glinting on his polished metal, stood on a platform beside the tower. At this close distance, Jerry could see that the tower was but a mass of wheels and levers and moving rods and revolving parts; a busy machine. And there, just behind it, it seemed only a couple of leaps away, were the bridges, ten seconds between them and the jungle. But the heavy iron beams swung across the bridge entrances, and between them and the water was Petrescu and his steel arm.

“Well, Professor Worcester,”— the metallic voice had a sarcastic ring to it— “soon we’ll both be done with this existence, which is neither life nor death and has no purpose. But, to you and the others, this existence is pleasanter than nothing. For you, my dear Professor, I’ve saved a nice little treat. First smash the village, and then watch me amuse myself with your daughter and her lover.”

Again his harsh laugh rang out, and he continued :

“I shall count three. When I say three! set up your third, seventh and eleventh series of vibrations. They will shake everything down into small pieces, except a circle fifty feet in radius around you, which will include us. Take a last look at your buildings. Get set! One, two, three!”

Jerry and Helen Louise paled, and felt an icy pang of horror through them. They clung to each other and looked about aghast. Their eyes darted about the village in apprehension at the catastrophe.

But, nothing happened.

Petrescu was also surprised. A hoarse mumbling came from his helmet.

Then a tremor began in the machinery of the tower. There was a vibration as though an unbalanced wheel were revolving at high speed. There were gradually added, one by one, gratings, squeakings, each second becoming more hideous, as though there were a terrible conflict raging between the various parts of the machinery. The two young people's teeth were on edge from the sounds.

Their eyes were suddenly attracted to one of the huge iron bars that hung across the street, blocking the bridge. It had twitched. Now it rose swiftly as a shot, high in the air. Down it came, gathering momentum till it hummed through the air.

With terrific momentum the huge weight of iron crashed right down on Petrescu’s head! There lay the beam of steel at the foot of the tower, and the mixture of human body and metal parts that was crushed and crumpled under it, was all that was left of Petrescu, a flat, sticky mass of debris.

For a moment they could not realize that he was really gone.

Then they had to watch the tower. The machinery was much quieter.  Through it came vague sounds that seemed like attempts at an articulate  voice. It seemed like words, but they could make out nothing.

Helen Louise burst into tears.

“It is father, trying to speak !”

Jerry could think of nothing to do but to hold her quietly in his arms.

“And I cannot understand him. And it sounds like suffering.”

Suddenly a crack appeared down the middle of the tower. Fragments broke and toppled down. In an amazingly few seconds, nothing was left of the tower but a pile of crumpled dust. From the village there came a hum. All the walls seemed to tremble and melt. As they looked at it, the island became a flat surface, upon which were scattered numerous low mounds of dust; except that at one end there was a garden of lovely flowers and variegated trees.

“Poor little Professor,” Jerry said, as Helen Louise sobbed on his arm. “He did his little ‘job in the world,’ didn’t he?”

____________________

9: Mars Colonizes

Marvel Tales, Summer 1935

“MEN OF THE American Army,” said the grizzled old General Hunt into the microphone, “we are on the eve of the last desperate effort to gain back our land from the invader. Also, in all other nations, armies are crouched to leap tonight. We must destroy the invader or die; and if we die, the human race dies with us. Our home, the Earth, will belong to the Martians.”

The small bulb awakened yellow glimmers from the insignia on the General’s tall, firm figure. It revealed also the mud walls of the adobe hut which served as headquarters. His young adjutant sat on the floor on a roll of blankets. On a rough bench near him waited a calm, elderly man in civilian clothes, holding in his hand a bunch of white cards covered with notes. Outside was night, and in that night were thousands of desperate men, so well hidden that even by day, a plane flying low over the country could not discover them. In mud huts, in iron huts covered with sand, in dugouts, in caves, for twenty miles east and twenty miles west, groups of men were huddled about radio speakers, listening. They were big, tanned men, splendidly developed physically; the finest specimens of manhood that the world had seen for ages. Rocks, dirt-colored canvas, baked mud huts, heaps of New Mexico mesquite and cactus covered stacks of weapons and ammunition and countless aeroplanes. Everything was ready for an attack flight on a few moments’ notice.

The General’s message to the men gathered in their hot hiding places continued.

For a while, Lieutenant Gary, the General’s adjutant, was intent on his chief’s words. Then a far away look came into his eyes. From his pocket he took the photograph of a beautiful girl and gazed at it awhile. For a moment the general’s voice was lost to him as the bright eyes from the photograph gazed into his own. What would the morrow bring forth? Would he ever see her again? The chances looked slim in the light of what he already knew of the story that was to be told over the radio. Yet he comforted himself with the knowledge that she had a little weapon and knew how to use it; and in case these cold fragile Martians won the day, he was calmly confident that she had the courage to account for several of them before she turned it against herself.

“We have two more hours,” the general went on; “too short a time for sleep. The Staff has felt it wise, before we go over the top, for you young men to know better what we are fighting for. Once this was a happy land and we terrestrial humans owned it, lived on it, and prospered gloriously. In order that your hands may strike harder as the new day breaks tomorrow, I want you to learn the details of how the invaders took the Earth away from us, and how it comes about today that there are only a few handfuls of us left on the deserts.

“Dr. Wren, who has spent a lifetime studying the history of the Martian invasion, will talk to you until it is time for us to start, and will give you an account of how these invaders came to our Earth and took it away from us. Dr. Wren!”

The general’s voice stopped. A rustle sounded in the countless speakers scattered over the deserts and prairies. Then began a clear voice, perfectly intelligible, never loud; one could picture its speaker as a calm and learned man, for it never hesitated; it was colored just enough to avoid monotony. It never rose to excitement, never left the matter-of-fact level.

Here is the story it told:

DURING the Golden Age, just before the Dark Epoch, there was a great deal of fanciful fiction written around the possible conquest of the Earth by Martians. It consisted largely of fantastic tales of weird, pseudo-human monsters wracking terrific ravages with machines, rays, and other destructive agencies, and sweeping aside mankind with an easy gesture. When the invasion and conquest really came, it was so different from what had been imagined, that it was not recognized for several generations. Yet, it was all so simple— as one looks back one sees that it was the only possible and probable thing— so simple that it requires no scientist to imagine it. It could all have been predicted by a person of good common sense.

Early one morning, four hundred years ago, Otto Hergenrader, the pilot of a transcontinental mail plane saw beneath him from the height of 4,000 feet, what appeared to be a splash in the Amargosa Desert in Nevada, which he was then crossing. It appeared so unusual that he looped around it and passed it again at the height of three hundred feet. It was indeed a splash; but a huge one, several hundred feet across. In the middle of its depression stood a dark object which looked like a huge projectile from a cannon, cylindrical, with a cone-shaped top, and black and rusty looking. About it slowly moved a number of smaller figures.

Hergenrader, on mail schedule, could not stop; but he radioed the news promptly as he flew on his way. The first man to land on the spot was Larry O’Brien, a reporter on The Salt Lake City Tribune, who caught the message in his plane, not a score of miles from the place. O’Brien’s headlined article in the Tribune has become a historic document, though it was written in poor English and gave practically no information of any value. It described the tall, rusty-looking, shell-like mass, and the slow, pale people who came out of it. They spoke weakly, and showed him a diagram composed of black circles and dots on a white sheet. But he could make nothing of them, nor could anyone who read his article, which went on to describe the gathering of the nondescript throng about the object and its inhabitants. The arrival of troops by aeroplane and the roping off of the space from the crowd, the springing up of lunch-counters and pop-stands in the desert in a few hours, came in later paragraphs. By evening, a dozen scientific men from the Universities of four states were there. These required only a few minutes to deduce that a space vehicle from Mars had arrived. The names of these scientists and of the President who later entertained the Martians are moldering away in some hidden archives; but popular memory has preserved those of Hergenrader and O’Brien as the discoverers of the Martian vessel.

Within a few hours the scientific men had established a sort of rudimentary communication with the arrivals from Mars; and the mutual learning of each other’s language began to progress rapidly. But the President did not wait for complete understanding by the spoken word before he set up a great banquet to welcome the planetary visitors to the Earth. It was held in Washington, the second day after their arrival. Speeches were made in both languages and sketchily interpreted by both sides, and great masses of newspaper reports of the occasion exist to this day.

The general public was astonished to learn the next morning that the Martians were people just like we are. They had faces and spoke and ate. They had no pear-shaped heads nor barrel chests. About the only differences were that they were much paler than we, and moved slowly and uncomfortably. Otherwise they were as human as any of us. Many special newspaper and magazine articles appeared to explain that ours was the only possible form that intelligent beings could assume, because the same natural laws operated throughout the solar system or the universe, and on Mars these laws have the same materials to work with. Intelligence requires a large brain; this brain requires a locomotor and a nutritional apparatus to support it; these mechanisms were all developed from the same primordial slime on Mars as on Earth and went through the same steps. While theoretically other evolutionary body forms are possible, they could not be stable; while they have existed transiently, they had to make room for the more stable forms.

When the Martians started off to their planet, with a roar of discharging blasts and a hurricane of sand, after a stay of two weeks of welcoming, feasting, oratory, and scientific conferences, they carried half a dozen Earth people with them. Just whose desire this was, is not known, but as the Martians had spoken inspiringly of vast, unimaginable wonders back on their planet, there were more volunteers for the trip than there could possibly be room for. They were eager to go, in spite of the warnings of the scientific men that they could not survive long on Mars. These travellers never returned, nor were they ever heard of again. The Martians could not be blamed, for they had managed to convey to the scientific men of our race that two generations of selected individuals had been reared and trained for the expedition from Mars to Earth, under proper conditions, in order that they might survive the terrestrial environment.

Following the Martians’ departure, we can imagine people all over the Earth alert for rusty cylinders in desert places, and watching the red planet through telescopes and wondering about future visits. We can deduce that their interest finally played out and was transferred to other matters, so that, for most of them before the Martians came again, it passed out of their memories and had been replaced by the sensational things with which their news agencies constantly supplied them. Eleven years later, when a huge meteor was seen to fall in the sand-hill region of western Nebraska, no one thought of Martians. Only when Dr. Condra arrived from the State University the next morning in search of the meteor, was the whole memory of the first visit revived.

Apparently Dr. Condra, of whom little other record remains, was a man eminently fitted to greet the visitors and pilot them around through prominent places and present them to representative personages. Their white faces and slow, rhythmic steps were soon seen in the high places of business and government, and even in society; and everywhere on the movie-screen and illustrated periodical page; and that was true not only on this continent but also in Europe. Whereas, the first visitors remained two weeks, the second remained two months.

A situation developed which must have caused the Martians to consider our social and economic organization of the time a curious phenomenon. The Martians approached President Francisco of the United States, having ascertained him to be the highest personage in the nation on the soil of which they had first stepped, and offered him gifts, which consisted of some tons of rare metals, as tokens of appreciation of their fine reception and symbols of friendship. These metals such as tungsten, iridium, beryllium, etc., were expensive, and yet were in great demand in industry. Much public discussion followed in newspapers and magazines, most of which, still available today, looks very strange and illogical to us. The President could not accept the metals as a personal gift. He stated that he served his visitors only in his official capacity. Had he not taken this position, had he accepted the gifts personally, a storm of criticism would have flung him high and wide. Nor could anyone find any legal authority or precedent for his accepting the gift on behalf of any government or other public organization for the purpose of giving its benefits to all the people. The Martians insisted that the gift was to our people, and for such a thing no legal channels existed.

A brilliant thinker, whose name has now been forgotten, suggested that the benefit would best be transferred on to the people if the business concerns which needed the metals were permitted to purchase them at a low price. This idea was hailed with delight, and a lowering of prices was at once announced on fountain-pens, watches, electrical bulbs, radios, and similar commodities. The money was paid over to the Martians in various kinds of legal tender; and they accepted it with much interest and curiosity. Honorary citizenships were conferred upon them in this country, and titles of nobility, in other countries.

Shortly afterward they took their departure.

There was another Martian visit three or four years later, with much better understanding between guests and hosts and more precious “gifts” of rare metals. The guests appeared publicly in most cities, and almost every person saw them personally before they left. Within the next fifteen years, rusty cylinders and white faced, slow-moving tourists were so common that they ceased to excite more than passing attention. Many people on Earth learned the Martian tongue, a difficult feat but an exhilarating exercise for the mind. The Martians learned about buying and selling, and a trade in rare metals sprang up between the two planets. People were glad to get low prices on the commodities requiring the rare metals, the manufacturers of these commodities made money; and the Martians who sold the metals made money. Soon several of the Martians who had acquired considerable terrestrial wealth were well known, and numerous honorary citizenships had been presented to Martian people.

Considerable worry promptly arose among economists in regard to the one-sided trade, all the money leaving terrestrial hands and getting into Martian hands. A number of books on that point are still preserved. But apparently the problem did not last long, for the Martians began to spend their money. That was logical, for it was of no use to them unless they did. Many people considered it odd that their first purchases should have consisted of real-estate.

The first transfer of property into Martian hands has been traced through the deed recording offices in New York and has been reconstructed from contemporary records. When two white-faced strangers stepped into the Metropolitan Real Estate offices one June morning late in the twentieth century, the manager had not the least idea that the deal he was consummating marked the beginning of a fearful era for the world. He only felt a keen delight in the speed with which the transaction was closed, and in the excellent price in cash which he received for “Le Soleil,” his choicest and most modern apartment building facing Central Park. By this time, Martians appeared so frequently in almost all cities that they went about the streets without awaking more than a momentary glance of curiosity. So, it may be surmised that no one paid much attention when gradually, always plausibly, one tenant after another moved out of “Le Soleil” and one Martian after another moved in. This is also a deduction. No comments appear in historical sources upon the matter.

It was a good many years later, in the first decade of the twenty first century, that the episode of Jonathan Heape called attention to what was really happening, and even then the general public failed to take it seriously. The following is from Jore’s “Sources of the Martian Era.”

Jonathan Heape was a retired farmer who enjoyed living in the city. He was a hard-headed son of the soil, who thought that the old-fashioned aeroplane was good enough, and refused to ride in the newfangled passenger rockets. For some eleven years he and his wife had occupied one of a row of cottages in Cote d’Or, a new suburb of St. Louis. When a Martian approached him, offering first a generous and then a fabulous price for his cottage, Jonathan Heape first roared NO, and then told the Martian to go to hell and that he’d be damned if he’d sell his house, and finally shoved the Martian down the front steps. He stormed around vociferating against “the pesticatin’ critters, worse than vermin!”

But Heape noted that for several blocks up and down the street on both sides of his house, the inhabitants of the houses had moved out and Martians had moved in; and soon no one was seen in the street except those white-faced people.

“We’re the only white people left,” said Jonathan six weeks later.

“They’re whiter than you,” his wife objected.

“I’ll be damned if I move out!” Jonathan growled.

He found his obduracy uncomfortable. First, the sight of the “lumbering” Martians with their bleached faces taking possession of the street irritated him. Then there was the cold. The Martians had some method of refrigeration which kept the whole neighborhood at the low temperature which they seemed to prefer; and Heape had to keep his furnace going in mid-summer. Next was the twilight. How they managed to keep the whole neighborhood partly darkened all day, Heape could not imagine, but it annoyed him. Then the constant excitement that pervaded the formerly peaceful suburb, one big public occasion after another, that he never understood, going on all the time, made him indeed uncomfortable.

The Martians finally got at him legally. They incorporated the suburb and made certain “modern equipment” required in each home.

The “modern equipment” was purely Martian in nature and totally incomprehensible to Heape. But he was stubborn enough and sufficiently well off to fight them when they went after him legally. He stood up in court, fiercely pushing away the hand of his lawyer who tried to hold him down, and made a crude but impassioned speech that has remained a classic ever since.

“The people of this country ’ud better look out!” he shouted. “If you don’t wake up to what’s comin’ you’ll all be pushed off the Earth, like I’m bein’. How many of their ships have landed on the Earth in the last forty years? I’ve counted ’em up. Six thousand! Surprises you, don’t it? Surprised me. How many ships are there on Earth today? Nary a one. These guys have moved in here to stay. Aha! Surprises you, don’t it? How many of these clumsy, paper-faced vermin are there in Cote d’Or now? I’ve counted two hundred. And how many other towns are they buttin’ into? Hell only knows. You people’d better look out. Honored visitors! Bah! Honorary citizenship! Plah!” He spat on the floor in their direction.

Everyone was sorry for the poor old man, embittered by the loss of the home to which his sclerosing tissues had become unalterably accustomed. But the law was so unequivocal on the point that the jury was forced to decide against him. He received a court order to “modernize” his house or move out. He went out of the courtroom storming that he’d see them new-fangled gadgets in hell before he’d move out. The affair dragged along for several weeks more, and ended tragically.

He refused to move. The sheriff came over to remonstrate with him in person, though the sheriff’s sympathies were with Heape. Heape turned on the sheriff.

“Their money has bought you too!” he roared. “They bought the court—”

“You know that isn’t true,” the sheriff said sadly. “The judge and the jury were both sorry. They tried everything to stretch things for you. But the law was too clear; there was no hope.”

Heape grew angrier, but the sheriff had his orders. He called on his deputies and began moving out furniture. A crowd of Martians gathered about outdoors and watched. Heape got out an old shot gun and loaded it deliberately in plain sight of everyone. Then he gave them ten to get out, and began counting.

“One— two— three.” Both Earth men and Martians held their breath and remained motionless, everybody tense as a drumhead. The deputies began to move more slowly, and to edge toward the door.

“Seven — eight—”

The sheriff slowly drew his pistol.

Suddenly Heape grew limp; his gun clattered to the floor and he crumpled on top of it. When they reached him he was dead. A post mortem examination failed to clear up the question as to whether he had died from conventional heart failure, or whether the Martians had killed him by some secret, subtle method.

A glance at the newspaper files of the next hundred years shows such small struggles to have been numerous, but the public did not recognize their trend or significance. The isolated individual like Jonathan Heape recognized it because it hit him hard in his everyday life; but the general masses of people ignored it. As time went on, the conflicts increased in magnitude and violence.

For instance, in 2047, Rawlings, a garage owner, patented a device for exerting traction from an automobile motor directly upon the road, without the intervention of transmission and wheels. He had gotten the idea from the Martians, and had begun to wax wealthy in manufacturing his device. The Martians claimed it and sued him in the courts, but lost the case. They retired gracefully enough, apparently. But a year later Rawlings failed financially and committed suicide, because the Martians had put on the market a device much better and cheaper than his. This is one of the rare instances of an organized Martian group taking part in any kind of business dealings with the terrestrials. Usually they shunned business and remained aloof.

Other conflicts were more gruesome. Fights over women especially were common. The Earth women liked the Martians, who though weak, were good looking, and certainly had an effective way with the ladies. One of the earliest discoverable records comes from the “Denver Post,” because the scene created in the civic center of that city made a rare news scoop. A Mrs. Yardley, wife of a high school coach had become enamoured of a Martian, a rather no-account fellow among his own race. Yardley followed his wife one night and saw them meet. He stepped out and confronted them. The Martian carried the usual attitude of insolent superiority, and Yardley, infuriated, let go at the Martian with his fist.

The first blow split the Martian’s head wide open, but Yardley hit him three more times before he fell, and broke several bones. It was a crowded hour and a throng gathered instantly. In this crowd were two Martians, who immediately called the police and filed a complaint.

Yardley was found guilty but given a light sentence.

On one occasion in El Reno, Oklahoma, a Martian was found taking a fifteen-year-old Terrestrial girl with him. A lynch mob gathered promptly, intending to hang him, but by the time they got to the chosen tree, only a few fragments of him were left in different people’s hands. Through the agency of the Martians in the community, the “leaders” of the mob were tried and sentenced to the usual punishment.

In Boston, the Martians bought up several acres of land surrounding the Bunker Hill monument, though the site of the monument itself was beyond their reach. No one noticed what was happening until the venerated relic of the Revolutionary War was so completely surrounded by densely inhabited Martian territory, the people disliked to try to get through to visit the monument. Societies were organized for the purpose of reclaiming the monument. Whether any clear explanation was ever made to the Martians of the significance of the spot is not known, but lawsuits dragged on for years. On the day of the final unfavorable decision of the courts against the League of American Patriots, a mob gathered and marched through the Martian quarters. Many Martians who happened to be in its path were killed; buildings were fired, and there was a great deal of shooting and destruction. Suddenly the mob began to crumple. In a few short minutes, all of them were dead, blackened, scorched. This is the first record of the use by the Martians of the short-wave pistol.

Near the middle of the twenty-first century, the Martians sold the secret of this short-wave pistol to Terrestrial manufacturers. It must have been a paying proposition, for immense numbers of them were sold, and the Terrestrial manufacturers became quite wealthy. Whether or not the Martians ever considered that their weapons might be turned against them is a matter of conjecture; but this happened soon. It was again a dispute over property, this time in Minnesota. A large tract of wooded land north of Minneapolis, originally a huge French estate, was purchased by Martians. The latter began to clear off the pine woods and to drain the lakes, and to turn the country into one of the painted deserts in which they preferred to live.

The Minnesota people were indignant at the butchering of their beloved landscape, and protested. The Martians insisted upon the right which their deeds to the property gave them. Then, a clever attorney found in the abstracts of title an ancient and forgotten provision that the land could not pass out of the hands of the family in any way as long as an heir was living, except into State hands for taxes. An heir was found and the courts began to grind. They ground for several years, by which time the Martians had built a great many huge, scattered buildings upon it. The courts decided against the Martians, and ordered the property sold back to the original owner.

The Martians refused. A sheriff was empowered to remove them forcibly, and granted the aid of the Minnesota National Guard. The vindictiveness with which the “removal” was carried out was striking. The troops were outnumbered by civilian helpers, armed with all sorts of weapons, ancient and modern, but short-wave pistols predominated. A few Martians escaped from the territory; most of them were “accidentally” killed. The buildings were all dynamited. When the troops and the mob left, water was flowing back into the lakes and the soil was all turned up, ready for pine trees to grow again.

Such examples as the above illustrate the individual isolated instances of how the Martian infiltration and the Terrestrial resistance came into conflict. But it was a hundred years before the masses of the people as a whole became conscious of what was going on. It was not until the end of the second century after the first landing of the Martians, that this conflict was carried into politics and legislation. Paul Arnac, a Frenchman, was the first to make a public issue out of it. He introduced into the International Senate, a bill to restrict immigration of the Martians. His presentation speech sums up the situation fairly well as it existed at the time.

“Today,” said M. Arnac, “there are Martian ‘quarters’ in all of our large cities. These ‘quarters’ are neat, orderly, modern, yes. But they are increasingly pushing out our own people.

“Gentlemen, you may not see it as clearly as I do, but our race is going to have to fight for its existence, and my bill is the first gun.

“I have the highest respect for the individual Martian gentlemen whom I know personally. I know Martians who teach in our schools; I know Martians who have reached high positions in the medical, legal, and engineering professions; I feel that we ought to consider ourselves complimented because they have chosen to throw their lot with us and live our life. Among my best and most respected friends are the two honorable Martain Members of this august Senate, who have so won the confidence of the Earth people as to be elected to one of the highest political honors that the Earth can give.

“But such Martians are exceptions. The masses of them do not mingle with us. They keep to themselves and look down upon us as children, with a patronizing attitude. Sometimes it seems that they are too busy— God knows with what— to have time for us. What is it all about, their activity? Their building, their machinery? I’m sure I do not know.

“They consider our money system a disgrace, though they condescend to use it in dealing with us. But if one of them gets rich and puts up a country estate or manufactures racing cars or yachts or planes, he is an outcast and considered a degenerate.

“If one of them marries a terrestrial partner, he is an outcast and a pariah to be spat upon and ground under the heel. He is not permitted to associate with or live among their better classes in their own sections. The children of these bi-racial unions are the worst outcasts of all, accepted by neither race. They already form a class by themselves which presents a terrible problem. They are physically unfit for labor and are not accepted among the intellectual classes; they sink into the utmost depths of degradation. I shudder to think of them. What shall we do with them?

“The loss of life in racial clashes, the moral degradation produced among our people by the Martian Screens, the havoc wrought among our youth who learn the habits of excitement and emotional indulgence from them— all these things have been terrible enough. They are going to be worse!”

Arnac’s bill called for a complete barring of immigrants for twenty five years, and then for admitting a thousand per year thereafter for fifty years, and then the question was to be reopened. There was much excited speaking. It is rather surprising to find in the records that only a limited number of Senators saw the handwriting on the wall; most were against the bill. One even fought it on the ground that the Martians had a much higher rate of sickness and death among them than we did, and required immigrants to keep up their numbers, calling attention to the increase of our own wealth and prosperity as a result of what the Martians had brought us; and to the new views of life and the expanded horizon for the intellect and the emotions that the Martians had taught us.

Arnac’s bill was hopelessly defeated. Arnac himself spent the rest of his life collecting information and writing books upon the Martian problem. A small pamphlet which he published eight years after the defeat of his bill presents proof that forty members of that particular session of the Senate displayed a sudden and extensive increase in wealth quite promptly after the bill failed to pass the Senate. However, the hostility and resentment against the Martians gradually spread among the Earth people, for many reasons. One of them was the Screen of Life. The Martians were after money. They wanted money in order to acquire property peacefully and legally. They sold for money many of the secrets of their higher civilization, for many of which we Earth people were not far enough advanced, either physically or mentally. It seems very silly to us of the present day that our ancestors should have been victims to such a silly thing as the Screen of Life. But remember that physical existence was comfortable in those days; food and clothing were not hard to get, and men were not as hard physically nor as upright as we today. Yet the mental aspect of life was difficult. People were under severe mental strain; far more mental strain than we, scattered thinly over the desert, can realize. In their cities was strenuous competition, every man against every other; not physically, but in a subtle economic sense, which was more unmerciful and terrifying than physical combat, and the struggle had no end in life, except for the rich.

It is not surprising, if we understand how harassed they were mentally, though comfortable physically, that they should grasp at opportunities for momentary forgetfulness. The Screen of Life afforded such an escape from the realities of the present moment, for which the Terrestrial people seemed to be willing to pay all they had. It was a little apparatus, which, if supplied with special batteries produced on an opalescent screen pictures out of the past, out of what purported to be the future, or out of pure fancy. The general trend of these pictures could be controlled by the operator, but to them, the apparatus itself added a glamour of emotional, sensational surprise that thrilled the beholder beyond measure. People with well-balanced minds were upset by these things; once seen they could not be forgotten. Only a portion of the Earth people who once became accustomed to gazing at the Screen of Life, could ever break their habit, a great many of them found its attraction so strong they could not give it up. They gave all they had for the machine and for the constant supply of batteries necessary to operate it; for the Terrestrials never mastered the secret of manufacturing either. Addicts would spend hours and days watching the Screen in a sort of half-conscious trance, totally oblivious and indifferent to what was going on. The habit was worse than any drink or drug habit that the human race has ever known; able business and professional men became degenerates who stared stuperously at Screens all day, and lost all they had. They were outcasts among their own people, and were despised by the Martians. But they cared nothing about their disgrace or their starving families; they clung to the oblivion of their Screens. All legal efforts to prohibit the manufacture or sale of these Screens failed because influential people were making too much money out of it.

During all of this period, although warnings ought to have been obvious, the masses were indifferent to the Martian encroachment. The average person does not like to be disturbed in the even tenor of his everyday life, unless by something sudden and startling; it was a long succession of small details.

Inter-racial fights, some of them extensive enough to be termed wars, were numerous. It is difficult to know which to call the first war, because the conflicts began as small affairs and increased gradually. But between 2099–2101 the Martians were driven completely out of Australia by a terrific struggle that cost the lives of three millions of people and most of the Martians who lived there. For several years the Australians waited in armed and fortified terror for retaliation from the rest of the Martians on Earth. Nothing startling ever happened; but twenty-five years later there are records of Martians occupying portions of cities there.

In 2131, Castigli became famous as a humorist. So beloved were his witty remarks and his laughing sympathy with human follies and weaknesses among the masses of the people, that they were not satisfied to hear him on the radio and see him on the television screens; he had to appear personally before his devoted admirers. For three years he was kept busy traveling by aeroplane from Alaska to Buenos Aires. Off the stage, he was a timid, humble man; he never became wealthy. He was just a natural born troubadour of the twenty-second century, and audiences idolized him throughout the Western Hemisphere. The Martians arrested him one day because he had landed in a Martian restricted area and caused disorder thereby gathering a crowd. Technically he was guilty. Not being able to pay a huge fine, he was thrown into prison. Had his admirers known, they would promptly have raised millions to pay his fine; but the matter was kept quiet. His free, roaming nature could not stand prison confinement and he committed suicide. Then the news came out.

In one night, the people of the Western continents rose against the Martians. They had learned by this time how brittle the Martian bodies were, and how easy it was to kill a Martian with a blow of a fist or a stick. Martian houses were broken into, and Martians were killed at meals and in bed. Martian deaths predominated at first. But by dawn the disturbers had everywhere been surrounded by organized groups of Martians. Many of them were brought into court and hundreds punished for all crimes, from disturbing the peace to first-degree murder. Both races suffered from this terrible blundering thing, which is merely a single example of how impossible it is for two differing races to live independently side by side; and the awful losses and sufferings that occur for no reason at all when they try to do so.

While the general trend of the story is a general crowding ahead of the Martians decade after decade, each generation of Martians gaining and Terrestrials losing, yet the Terrestrials in their struggles won some brilliant victories. If the Martians keep a history, they undoubtedly give in it a position of great honor to a military leader of theirs whom our literature calls Bare Head. This name was given to him by Terrestrials because his skin was able to develop sufficient pigment to enable him to go without a hat.

This is the story of Bare Head. The Martians were later getting into the southeastern States than elsewhere, because they did not like the heat and moisture. They also fared worse there because the Southerners did not take patiently to them. They did not win impartial decisions in the courts. About 2150 there was considerable distress there; uprisings were frequent and violent, and the whole section was put under military rule from Washington. Military camps were dotted through Alabama, Georgia, Florida, and South Carolina.

There was great indignation among the terrestrial population when quietly, gradually, with no one knowing how or when, a Martian army materialized in the midst of them, in the old Oglethorpe country. The Martian Army said nothing, did nothing— merely remained quietly on the spot while the civil and military authorities attempted to restore peace. But the Earth people became suspicious, and one morning the Martians found themselves surrounded by a dense ring of troops, artillery, aeroplanes and tanks. The Martians formed a circle, and old Bare Head could be seen through the field-glasses here and there among his men, who cheered him as he went by. For some two hours the two sides faced each other without a move or sound. Then suddenly an aeroplane appeared from the north, going like a bullet at five-hundred miles per hour. Within two minutes some kind of Martian ray had brought it down, but not before it had shot a rocket bomb into the middle of the Martian camp which blew out a huge, smoking crater.

For some time the superior weapons of the Martians told. Attack after attack of the Earth soldiers was repulsed, and thousands of them were slain in a few minutes as they attempted to close in. But after several repulses, the aeroplanes closed in above and the tanks below, and while old Bare Head rushed back and forth about his camp, the bombs rained in until nothing was left of the Martian post but a plowed and smoking field. Among the few Martian bodies recognizable was that of Bare Head.

At the end of the twenty-second century there arose the first of the line of Prophets. Just as in ancient Israel, these Prophets saw; and they preached and wrote and stormed. At this more modern age, their appeal was not so much to the emotions as to the intellect, by sound argument and scientific observation. The first of these great men whose name went down to posterity was Ansel Roosenhaas, who left behind him 147 books and 3,000 magazine articles, and who traveled and lectured constantly, trying to awaken the Terrestrial race.

“There are now ten exclusively Martian cities scattered over the earth,” wrote Roosenhaas in 2197. “There, the Martians own all the real estate, having legally purchased it. Just as a restricted suburb is kept free from undesirable tenants, these Martians are excluding Terrestrials. They cannot legally forbid us from visiting their cities; but outside of casual visits, every other Terrestrial presence or activity is barred; and there are many quarters to which no Earth visitor penetrates.

“We must admit these cities are beautiful places, bright, airy, and soaring, in marked contrast to our own ponderous, dreary and, confused conglomerations. If we could only profit by them and incorporate into our own cities the openness and cleanliness, the harmony! But do we? No!

“Our people use these cities as resorts for emotional stimulation of the most dangerous type. The Martian food and drink seems like something from Heaven. They have become a goal for which our citizens neglect their business and their patriotic duty — for the sake of which they spend all their time and money in the Martian cities.

“I am positive that the Martians do not welcome our people in their cities. They do not like our intemperate way of partaking of their emotional indulgences. There is a great physiological difference between Earth men and Martians. The latter have a highly developed intellect, and their emotions are under such rigid control that they are hard to arouse. The Martian needs powerful stimuli to give his emotions sway and afford him enjoyment. (It is a curious fact that many of these visitors comment on the fact that there is a large proportion of hospitals in these cities).

“When the Earth people indulge in these stimuli: the food, the drink, the music, the Screens and the sex associations, their emotions blaze up in a fire that sweeps away all intellectual restraint. This, of course, is disastrous to the welfare of the individual, and ultimately to the welfare of the race. Once begun, our people find it impossible to stop the downward rush; they become slaves to their emotions. The only way to avoid destruction is to stay away from the initial stimulus that produces the emotional conflagration.

“Even the Martians succumb to their own emotional indulgences, and they have a relatively high proportion of illness among them, because their constitutions are less rugged than ours. The reason that the majority avoid illness is because they have sufficient self-control to know just how far to go and where to stop.

“The love relationship is specially disastrous to our people. Among Martians, love has become quite separated from reproduction, and is purely a social matter. The women of their better classes are so beautiful that a mere glance at them sweeps away the emotions of the Terrestrial beholder. The only ones among our own people who are able to see Martian women, and to behold them impersonally and retain their self-control are our artists and scientific men. The average man does foolish things when he comes near one of these lovely creatures from the other planet. Most frequently it is one-sided. These beautiful women scorn the Earth men, while the Martians are very hostile to any attention that is paid to their women.

“Marriage between Earth men and an inferior type of Martian women occurred from the earliest days of the infiltration, but received nothing but contempt from both races, and produced the class of half-breeds which now constitutes such a serious problem. Of course, there have been exceptions in these inter-racial matches, but they merely prove the rule. Such is that of Betty Benson, daughter of the Secretary of State a hundred years ago. She had an affair with an officer high up in some Martian company. She was a popular girl and the public took a great interest in the details of her life. All attempts to dissuade her from her Martian lover’s side failed; she remained devoted to him. One day they appeared together at a huge public picnic, and gradually a mob gathered about them. There was considerable danger that her Martian lover might be injured by the carelessly wrought up mob; Martian bodies stood up very poorly under mob violence. Betty Benson put him behind her against a wall and protected him with her own body until the proper officials arrived to marry them on the spot.

“Usually, when Earth men of a high type do come into contact with the highly-cultured Martian women, inter-racial affaires result which are usually illegal. The reverse occurs, though somewhat less frequently; cultured earth women in liaison with high-class Martian men. For a hundred years there have been endless complications and scandals, and even fights and killings. By this time, the Martian love technic has become pretty common knowledge among the leisure class of Terrestrials; and our psychologists and sociologists consider it one of the greatest misfortunes that has ever occurred to us.

“Martian love-making is an intense, intoxicating storm of passionate indulgence of the emotions, a fire of beauty, poetry, and spirituality that the human heart has never before known in its history. But, it is one-sided. It affects the Martians only passingly. Their cold emotional organization is barely stirred. But it is too much for our own emotional structure. In Terrestrials it changes the whole life-tenor of an individual; it renders him unfit to do the work of the world. He can never forget it, and never be at peace again. It is gradually breaking up the best business, professional, and scientific elements of our race.”

This is the end of Roosenhaas’ remarks as I quote them; though I may add that the Martians became somewhat more emotional later. Possibly the greater percentage of oxygen in our atmosphere or the greater intensity of ultraviolet radiation that reaches us, speeded up their metabolism somewhat. But the harm to our people was done.

In spite of the storming of the Prophets, the early twenty-second century saw the Martians outnumbering the original Earth inhabitants. So gradually did the increase come that our people did not realize what was happening until long after they were in the minority. By that time nothing much could be done about it, and certainly nothing was done. For nearly a century, the Terrestrials lay dormant, in a sort of stupor. History records no great names, no great  events. What people thought or did has been lost in the stream of time. We can only know that when the twenty-third century began, the Martians owned most of the Earth, having acquired it peacefully and legally. As a general rule, the Earth people had voluntarily sold out their own birthright for some sort of indulgence. We know that by this time there were numerous Universities scattered over the Earth’s surface, exclusively for Terrestrial students. The young people of the Earth’s race went there and were educated at Martian expense in all the ancient learning and modern technology of the Martians: thought reading, emotional control, associational focusing, atomic dynamics, space manipulation, transformation of matter. Some of them graduated and took their places in Martian civilization and became adopted among the Martian race. This was just the reverse of the situation two hundred years before, when we were adopting a sprinkling of Martian scientists, teachers, and professional men. The Terrestrial graduates were quite absorbed among the Martians and were lost to their own people.

The great majority of them went back to our own people; and before they reached maturity, forgot most of the things they had learned, or retained only the pernicious and undesirable portions of them. Only rare exceptions among the Terrestrial race had the constitution to live the high-strung life of the Martians. They did not like the Martian culture that they had learned. Again, among the records of these young people, we find records of comments upon the prevalence of illness among the Martians; a type of emaciation combined with feverish activity and staring eyes that was most gruesomely unpleasant to nonmedical people.

During the twenty-third century there were developed over the Earth’s surface several areas which were reserved as the exclusive right and property of the Earth people. The American Southwest (the Martians preferred colder regions), North Africa, much of the East Indies were exclusively Terrestrial and rarely visited by the Martians though they supported and maintained these regions. There was no denying the fact that the Martians were taking care of the Terrestrials in a patronizing sort of way, educating them, feeding them, paying them for anything on any kind of pretext— for land, royalties for discoveries on the land, etc., as though they felt guilty for having crowded us out of our home in the solar system. In these Terrestrial reservations, the Earth people were free to do as they wished, to cultivate the land, build cities in their own way, and to escape the intense emotional atmosphere which the Martians, unable to live the calm, deliberate Terrestrial life, had set up for themselves. These reservations were pleasant places, into which Terrestrial ideas of landscape beauty had mingled with Martian improvements in architecture and city planning. All the humans that remained on Earth at this time were well off.

What was the reason for the sudden renaissance of the twenty-fourth century? Why did the Earthly race suddenly stir, open its eyes, and awaken to its position and its danger?

“Shall we let this puny, half-sick race crowd us off the Earth?” was the slogan of the time, and it suggested the answer to both of the above questions.

For the Terrestrial race of this period was on a far different physical and mental plane from their ancestors of two centuries ago. They were tall and lithe and tan; their bodies were perfect and powerful. Their minds were keen, alert and intelligent. They were hardy and rarely sick. The transformation had been worked by the Martians, but in a most unexpected way.

The degenerating, softening influences that the Martians had shown us had proved too much for three-fourths of the human race. The laziness, the intoxication of the Screens, the fiery love play, the emasculating food and drink of the Martians had placed our people in an environment which only a relative few had survived.

A billion people had been eliminated from existence in the high strung, Martianized world; and those that were left were the fittest, hardiest worthiest specimens that the human race had ever seen. They represented the best development of which the human mind and body were capable, and everything that Earthly development had given them was reinforced by the desirable things that the advanced culture of the Martians could teach. The force of necessity had taught them to co-operate, instead of fighting among themselves. This new race was capable of saving its home, where the old one could never have done it.

And thus we come down to the organization of the Hoplites. In 2389 was born the man who thirty-five years later brought together the nucleus of the force that tonight intends to dislodge the Martians from our planet, or destroy us all in the attempt. Celsius Modry spent a quiet and contemplative youth, and eventually became Professor of Geology in the Terrestrial University in the Texas Panhandle. It was on his long, lonely expeditions studying rocks among the mountains and deserts with a student or two, that he first evolved the idea of a disciplined organization of young men, modeled after the armies that the world had ceased to need for two hundred years.

Just as the ancient Greek Hoplite represented the best in equipment, as far as arms and armor were concerned, so our Hoplite of today represents the best mental and physical equipment that can be developed by intensive effort. For many years, Modry was content with developing his little organization at his own university. He drilled his young men physically until they were perfect specimens and their organization acted as a perfect unit; he developed them mentally until they were a fair match for the Martians. Yet outwardly, the ostensible purpose of the group was not military — not hostile to the Martians. On the surface, it was a health movement.

The idea spread like the wind. Group after group took it up. Modry abandoned his teaching work and dedicated his life to perfecting and training the various organizations. He worked out a standardized procedure so that a member of a distant group could come into any other group and feel perfectly at home whenever the work started. Most of the members for the first two generations worked enthusiastically and loved the movement because of the benefit it rendered them, and without the least idea that it had any strategic value. And long after Modry was dead, his name was remembered, and his work went on, improving and increasing.

Of course, in secret, Modry had been studying and seeking for a means of waging a successful offensive against the Martians. He died without success, but he left a worthy successor in Saoti Kuwato, who also spent his life trying to bring the work to a focus. It remained for our own General Hunt to define an objective, and prepare to act. He has, as you know, been preparing you and other Hoplites all over the world for the single leap that we are to make at the Martian vital centers tonight. During all these years of planning and drill, of accumulation of stores and weapons, General Hunt has lived in anxiety lest some word betray the hiding places or hint of our plans. But the system of Modry is perfect. Not a Hoplite has proved disloyal. Not a Martian has annoyed us.

Aeroplanes and bombs are ready; men and squadrons are drilled. In South Dakota lies the key city of the Martians. In other continents are other key cities. A sudden destruction of these will disorganize the Martian system long enough to permit us to attack and destroy the panicky remainder. Tomorrow, the Earth is ours, or we are no more!

THE CALM VOICE of Dr. Wren suddenly stopped. The men in the thousands of coverts remained for a while in tense silence. Lieutenant Gary tucked his photograph firmly in a pocket and tightened his heavy belt. The General stepped to the microphone and spoke in a level tone:

“Everyone slip out quietly to your stations now. Buglers remain behind at your receiving set. In ten minutes the bugle will sound here. It will be repeated by the bugler at each post, and it will be your signal to start. Once more I ask you: shall we let this puny, half-sick race crowd us off the Earth?”

It was excitement at the importance of his mission that caused Gary’s heart to leap into his mouth when the bugler stepped up to the microphone. As the clear tones pealed forth, the Lieutenant followed the General to the aeroplane from which a covering of canvas and cactus had been removed; and in a moment they were whirring through the night. How cool and quiet after the day’s heat it seemed. Did those peaceful stars know that in a few hours bombs would be crashing and blood would be fl owing? It seemed to Lieutenant Gary that he and the General might have been in the air alone for all the sights and sounds that reached them, except for the navigator’s constant whispering into his transmitter, and the twittering of the dials in front of him. But those dials gave the Lieutenant confidence in the thousands of planes that were spreading fanwise to form a circle about the Martian clot in South Dakota.

Lieutenant Gary would have welcomed action, excitement, trouble. But to sit hour after hour in a plane, expecting every moment to hear the crack of shots from Martians below, or to see some portion of the machinery melt as the result of some invisible ray, or to feel some unknown, unexpected, terrible blow from the science of the Martians, that was unnerving. His heart pounded hard and he could hardly sit in his seat.

According to the navigator, everything was going like clockwork. Not a plane had met with any trouble. All were in correct positions in the formation. When, after the lapse of hours, daybreak finally came, the planes were gathered in a huge circle around the Martian key city. At the General’s orders, they hovered, while a few scout planes crept ahead. A deep red light shone through the morning mists from some high spot in the city; it shone for a moment and went out. Again it came and went out. Monotonously this continued; even after the day had become bright, the deep red rays were plainly visible, going on and off. The scouts came back stating that there were no troops, no weapons visible; that one of the planes had purposely exposed itself to draw attention and nothing had happened.

“A trap of some sort,” the general muttered. But he gave orders to close in swiftly and drop bombs.

Pinpoints appeared almost simultaneously from all quarters of the sky, and gradually came together until a huge circular cloud of them made a black halo over the city. Lieutenant Gary’s eyes were on the ground. Not a Martian was visible anywhere.

The General hurriedly sent out an order to drop no bombs. A hundred planes were ordered to dash across the city and retreat in the opposite directions. Lieutenant Gary saw them streak across like bullets. But not a sign from the city, except the monotonous coming and going of the red light.

“I’m going over myself,” the General said.

Lieutenant Gary eyed him in surprise. “They need you!” he exclaimed. “Suppose— please let me go.”

“I can’t understand it, and I’m going,” the General replied. “Kamil Rey will make a good commander in my place if necessary. You may come with me if you wish.”

He sent out a call for volunteers, and twenty planes followed him. At a slower speed they flew over the city and looked down. The red light, blinking on and off came from a tall tower. There were things moving. Some automatic conveyors kept up a monotonous procession. Several solar clocks rotated slowly. But nowhere was there a living being.

At a signal, the pilot dropped a small bomb in an open square. With a loud crash it scattered masonry far and wide, and all the planes fled as swiftly as they could gather acceleration. But in a moment they circled back. Not a soul appeared in response to the bomb.

“If it’s a trap, they’re good sports,” General Hunt remarked. “It begins to look suspiciously as though perhaps something else—”

“What?” asked Lieutenant Gary.

“I can’t imagine.” The General mused abruptly: “We’ll land and find out!”

As the signal went out, the twenty planes circled about, looking for a landing place. The General’s plane landed in a large, open square near the center of the city. As the General was about to step out, the Lieutenant drew him back and stepped forth ahead of him, running into the open a dozen yards from the plane. He was expecting to drop instantly in his tracks, a charred corpse. But a minute went by and nothing happened, until the General clapped him on the shoulder.

“Good of you,” he said, “but not necessary, apparently.”

Everything was silent and motionless. They stared warily up the broad, empty street. The Lieutenant ran ahead as they passed each corner or doorway or any place where danger might lurk, until finally the General smiled and ceased to protest.

“I’ll be able to tell the young lady that you’re game, anyway,” he said.

They were startled by a sudden movement and a clicking noise, but it was only some automatic machinery on a standing vehicle. Careful scrutiny showed it to be without occupants. Other groups of Hoplites were scattering in different directions. Ahead of them was a large building with a tall tower, in which the red light went on and off. It did not seem much brighter when they were right under it, than it had from the distance of ten miles. It went monotonously on and off. Just at their elbows was the door of a house

“I’m going in,” Lieutenant Gary said, half-questioningly.

“Yes. We have to find out,” the General stated.

They searched the broad rooms and found in one of them a dead Martian, woefully emaciated, with wide staring eyes. In another room, were two more, both dead, one on the floor at the foot of a chair, and one on a sofa.

They waited in front of the building of the tower until other groups arrived.

“Unquestionably the City Hall, or Administration Building,” the General remarked. As the search parties came in one by one, they all reported the same— a silent city, with very few inhabitants, and those all dead.

Within the city administration building there was almost none. One was found crouched stiff on a stairway, another, reclining in seeming luxurious comfort on a chair in front of a desk. In one room were several bodies on a cremating apparatus; the cremating had not been done, and the bodies were in an unpleasant condition. In a small room, high in the tower was the corpse of an operator still bent over a tremendously complex communication apparatus of some sort. The vast machinery was not all clear to the Terrestrials, but the microphone mouthpiece was plain, and the message in front of the operator left no possible doubt. In the simple script of the Martians, with which he was familiar, Lieutenant Gary could read the following:

“We advise sending no more colonists to the Earth. The Martian race cannot survive on this planet. There is too much ultra-violet and too much oxygen. It increases our metabolism and burns our skins. The protective measures developed on Mars last one or two generations, but eventually prove futile. Not one family of colonists has ever lasted more than three generations: only the millions shipped over in space vessels have kept up our numbers. Our scientific men have worked hard to find something to protect us, but since colonists have ceased coming our numbers have melted away. In..... (an untranslatable jumble of Martian characters standing for the city they were in), everyone is dead, and soon I shall be. I have left the distress signal on in the tower for three days but I get no reply from any of the other cities. I transmit the warning of the Scientific Council: ‘Earth is not for Martians!’”

_____________________

10: The Stone Cat

Amazing Stories,  September 1927

INVESTIGATION showed that I was the last person to see young Brian before his sudden and mysterious disappearance. I saw him on the day that my remarkable friend, Doctor Fleckinger showed the two of us the stone cat. We found the doctor working in his laboratory, a big, airy room with the sunlight gleaming brightly on the myriad things of glass and polished metal. As usual, Miss Lila was there, busy at some of the doctor's scientific tasks.

Brian had eyes only for the demure young lady in the white apron and rolled-up sleeves. As we came in, she looked up and saw him, and nodded her head to him with a smile in her deep, dark eyes. Brian wished the doctor good morning, and then went over to where she sat cutting sections on a microtome, handling the gossamer-like paraffin ribbons with a consummately delicate touch. I walked over to the other side of the room where the doctor was working with some Petri dishes and a microscope, and exchanged greetings with him.

Dr. Fleckinger went on with his work, and such was his concentration that in a few moments he had forgotten about me. He was pouring a black liquid on some lumps of flesh in the Petri dishes and watching them blacken and crinkle; and then he teased out pieces to examine under the microscope. For a while he gazed abstractedly at his notebook. Then came the uncouth thing that makes me shiver when I think of it. Suddenly he jerked up his cuff and bared his arm, and poured some of the greenish-black stuff on one spot. The effect was hideous. The flesh blackened and shriveled, and his arm shuddered. He regarded it for a while; then, seizing a scalpel, he passed it quickly through a flame, and with one sweep cut off the blackened skin and flesh. He put on a compress-dressing to stop the bleeding, and went on unconcernedly with his work, totally oblivious of me standing there and shuddering.

That was the kind of man he was. I was afraid of him. The friendship that I continued with him was one of those things that we do against the protests of our better judgment. I envied him his comfortable wealth, his astonishing intellect, and his beautiful daughter; for I had to work hard for a living with just a mediocre equipment of brains, and all I had to love and worry about was a nephew who could take better care of himself than I could. I enjoyed Dr. Fleckinger's society during his amiable intervals, and delighted in his wonderful private collection of marble and bronze statuary. But, at other times I was uncomfortable in his society. Though I was his oldest and best friend, I had a feeling that he would cut me in pieces did the conditions of an experiment demand it, with the same unfeeling precision with which he had whirled guinea-pigs in a centrifuge during our college days, to determine the effect on the circulation.

Miss Lila and Brian were so interested in some mutual matter that they had not noticed the uncanny performance. In a quarter of an hour the doctor seemed to have come to a stopping place in his work, for he put it aside and entertained me so pleasantly that I forgot and forgave his previous abstraction. It was when Brian and I were taking our departure that he showed us the stone cat. It was on a low pillar, in a room with a lot of small sculptured figures. I did not look at it much, yet it stuck in my memory, and sticks there yet, haunting me when I try to think of pleasanter things. It was natural size, of some black stone, and was no doubt an admirable piece of sculptural art, with its arched back, straight tail, and angry appearance.

But I didn’t like it. Brian hardly noticed it, but Miss Lila stood on the stairs and shuddered. The three year old girl of Dr. Fleckinger’s housekeeper was toddling around the room after her mother who was dusting the statuary; and seeing us looking at the cat, came over to join us in her small, sociable way. Spying the cat, she stopped suddenly, looked at it a moment, and let out a wail of lamentation. She continued to weep piteously until she was carried out, crying something about her “kitty.” As I went out, I wondered why the stone figure of a cat should make me feel so creepy and cause Miss Lila to shudder, and the child to cry.

Brian and I parted at the corner of the block, and that was the last time anybody saw him. He was missed from his office and his rooms, and the places he usually frequented. His affairs hung in suspense; a case which he was to try the following day had to be put off, and in the evening an opera party with whom he and Miss Lila had engaged a box, waited for him in vain. The newspapers blazed out in big headlines about the utter and untraceable disappearance of the prominent young lawyer.

I had never taken any particular interest in him. That was to come now, for the responsibility of investigating his case would devolve on my department. One thing about him, perhaps held my attention, and that of many others: he was the successful suitor of Dr. Fleckinger’s daughter, Lila. The list of young men who had unsuccessfully aspired for this honor was large, and my own nephew, Richard, was among them. It was pretty generally known that it was the doctor himself who stood in the way; he made it so uncomfortable for the young fellows who tried to get acquainted with the girl that they desisted. Richard, who was pretty hard hit, and spent a good many despondent months after his defeat, told me that the “selfish old devil cared less about his daughter’s future than he did about his own whims.” So, when young Brian, by his persistence and his gracious ways, continued not only in the favor of the young lady, but also in the good graces of her eccentric father, there was a good deal of speculation as to why he, particularly, had been selected.

My nephew, Richard, who is a sergeant in my department of the detective bureau, came to me and asked me to assign him specially to the investigation of Brian’s disappearance. I did so gladly, for I had to admit that he was clever, even if most of the time it was difficult for me to believe that the golden-haired lad was really grown up.

“I am looking up Brian’s contacts,” he reported. “His own record is an easy job; his life is an open book. Miss Fleckinger I know pretty well myself. But, her father seems to be a sort of mystery. You know him intimately. Tell me about him.” His brows were dark with angry suspicion.

“Well,” I mused; “he and I went to school together. We were drawn together and apart from others by a common streak of intellect, a sort of analytical and investigative faculty that would give us no rest. Out of me, it made a detective, out of him a research scientist. He inherited enough money to make that possible. He keeps to himself, and does not even publish the results of very much of his work. What he is working on, is as profound a riddle to the rest of the scientific world as the secret of the Sphinx. However, I can make my surmises, if he does things like those he used to do. I remember once that he blew a steam whistle for ten days close to a rabbit’s ear, and then killed it and made microscopic sections to see the effects on the nerves of hearing.”

Richard shut his teeth with a click and said nothing. “I saw the doctor this afternoon,” I continued. “He takes a queer attitude toward this affair. His daughter is all broken up about it, but he acts as though he were relieved. He remarked something to the effect that he was glad that he wouldn’t lose his daughter after all. Then he had the nerve to ask me if I wouldn’t come in to see a new statue which had just arrived. He was all enthused about the statue, and I left in disgust.”

“He’s a smooth brute,” Richard said.

He worked hard on the case. I saw him seldom, but when I did, I noted that he was losing weight and growing haggard. He was taking it seriously, because he had not lost his old affection for Miss Lila, who was so intimately connected with the case. Perhaps his motive was to make her happy, even though he knew he had to give her up to his rival if he ever succeeded in finding Brian; or perhaps some deeper suspicion drove him on through those long, discouraging weeks. A number of other good men on the force spent a great deal of effort in going over the problem; but no light was shed on Brian’s disappearance.

Then one day a young Frenchman was admitted to my office.

“I would wish that you speak French,” he said politely.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “What can I do for you?”

“You desire to know where is the Monsieur Brian?” he asked, speaking slowly, and finding each word with evident effort.

“There’s a big reward out, and it’s yours if you tell us,” I said shortly.

“I have hopes, uncle, old dear,” he said, with an astonishing change in voice and manner, breaking out into Richard’s well known grin. With a hat on and a change in expression, it was really Richard.

“You old rascal!” I shouted. “You certainly fooled me!”

“It wasn’t easy, uncle, I dye the hair and mustache twice a week, and practice French all night. But, it has fooled all my friends.

Well, I need it. I am Dr. Fleckinger’s laboratory assistant now, and we talk French most of the time. You can see that I’ve learned something about him, because you all thought he was German. Now I am cataloguing his collection of sculptures, too.”

“You’re actually in that house?” I demanded in alarm. Some nameless fear for the boy’s safety possessed me. Yet, my reason could not tell me what I feared.

“I’m learning all the time,” he replied jocularly. Then he gritted his teeth and his face took on a grim look. “Uncle, someone’s got to take Lila out of that devil’s clutches. Of course he’s her father, but—”

“What’s the matter?”

“She’s wasting away under my very eyes. Every day she is thinner. She goes about and trembles at every shadow; and every now and then bursts into a fit of weeping without any provocation. Something is driving her distracted, and I can see the terrible effort she makes to conceal it. It isn’t sorrow that I see in her face; it’s horror!”

“What has that to do with Brian’s disappearance?”

“I don’t know. In order to find out, I’ve been trying to learn from Lila and the servants what his motive is for refusing to let her have suitors. Apparently there is no real reason for it; it is rather a monomania, a form of insanity on his part.”

“One would think you suspected him of having made away with Brian,” I hinted.

“Easy to conjecture, hard to prove,” he answered enigmatically. “But if you want to see the wind-up, wait until I run a couple of errands, and I’ll take you along with me. I think I’ve figured the thing out.”

You could have knocked me over with a feather. Here was a man’s job worked out by this boy who still seemed a child to me. He came for me at seven o’clock, carrying some packages. Unwrapping them, he slipped a photograph into an inside pocket, and a couple of live frogs into the pocket of his coat. I stared in astonishment.

“Take your thirty-two automatic along,” he suggested. I patted the pocket where it reposed.

We drove to Fleckinger’s house in a car with three officers from the station, and stopped at some distance from the house. We walked separately into the yard, and Richard signalled to the officers to wait outside. I was surprised to see him pull out a latchkey and open the door, until I remembered that he was a member of the household.

On the stair-landing in the lower hall stood a statue. Richard pointed to it.

“The one you were invited to see and refused,” he commented. “Oh, he’s a cool customer!”

He switched on the light in front of it, and asked me to regard it closely. It was of some dull, black, rough material, and represented a young man, almost nude, seated, with his chin leaning against one hand in deep meditation. The face was suggestive of profound concentration like that of a hypnotized man. The statue looked a little larger than life-size. It was set back in a niche so that the light fell on it obliquely, heightening the furrowed effect of the face. There was something about the appearance of it that I did not like, as it stood there with the shadows of the balusters falling on it. It gave me the same sort of creeps that the stone cat had imparted.

“It is really exactly life-size,” Richard informed me. “I have measured it.”

I gave him an impatient glare, for I did not see what that had to do with Brian’s disappearance. “Then,” he continued, “look at the features closely!” And he jerked the photograph out of his pocket and held it before me. It was a portrait of Brian, done very dark by the photographer; a duplicate of which I had at the office.

I looked from the picture to the face of the statue and back again, and an icy chill shot through me. But, Richard started suddenly, for the bobbing figure of Doctor Fleckinger appeared at the head of the stairs above us. Obviously that was not on the program.

“Put it away,” he whispered. Then he went on slowly and loudly: “He is in the laboratoire. I am certain it will make him much pleasure if you come above— ah, there is Monsieur the doctor now.”

Doctor Fleckinger came down and greeted me pleasantly, and shook my hand. My head hummed and whirled; I could scarcely gather my senses enough to answer the platitudes addressed to me as we walked upstairs at the doctor’s invitation to the laboratory, where he usually received me.

Up in the laboratory we began a rather lame conversation, and the incongruity of the situation jarred my nerves. The doctor knew that something suspicious was up, and did not trust me. I knew that his cordiality was feigned, and yet I was cordial in response. If I had known Richard’s plans, I might have known what to do. The electric light was reflected in a million spots from the glass and polished metal; pieces of apparatus assumed strange shapes, and grotesque shadows stretched dizzily off into corners and dark places.

At the far end of the room, the black depths of a recess yawned at us, with a curtain stretched partly across it. Near it, Richard was busy at a sink in the corner. He paused and stood in front of a window to light a cigarette, and the action had all the appearance of being a preconcerted signal to the policemen below. His face was set, and I knew he was thinking hard. Apparently his plans had been somewhat interfered with by the doctor's unexpected presence.

I also thought hard, as I talked with the doctor, wondering how I could help Richard. Finally, it occurred to me that his inviting me along must have been an afterthought. Evidently he had planned things to carry out alone. Therefore, if I left he would have a clear field. I dreaded to do so, for now I was sure that some danger lurked in wait for him. But, duty is duty. I suggested that I had dropped in for a moment, and had to be moving on. I read approval in Richard's eyes.

As Doctor Fleckinger turned his back for a moment to go to the door with me, Richard darted to the curtain across the black recess and dipped out a ladleful of something from behind it. I could see him fish a frog out of his pocket and drop it into the ladle. Then he set the whole into the sink, at the same time that I walked out into the hall. I did not go away, however; I dodged behind the door, and watched through the crack.

The doctor whirled suddenly about and walked with a queer, tense swiftness toward the curtained recess. He crossed the room and reached it before I realized what he was about; and with the suddenness of a wildcat he leaped upon Richard, caught him around the body, and lifted him off his feet. He began to shove the body into the darkness of the recess.

What fiendish fate awaited him there, I could only gather from the scream of dismay that broke from Richard's throat. The lad had been taken completely by surprise, and was helpless. His face was ghastly white, and paralyzed with terror. I stood rooted to the spot for a valuable moment, trying to realize what was happening, and then started toward them.

Suddenly, a piercing scream broke upon my ears, and turning around, I saw Miss Lila's pale figure for an instant in the doorway. Then she fell backwards in a faint. This startled the doctor only a little, but enough to enable Richard to get a hold and make the game a little less one-sided. For another moment I watched, and then my mind was at rest concerning the outcome, for the doctor's sedentary muscles were no match for Richard's splendid training. While I stood there, with Miss Lila's unconscious form lying in the doorway, and the two men locked in reeling, swaying embrace at the end of the room, there was a hurried trampling on the stairs, and the officers who had been waiting below, swarmed into the room.

They stopped an instant in surprise. Then, as one of them picked up Miss Lila and carried her to a sofa, the others hurried toward the combatants in front of the curtained recess. For a moment my heart jumped into my mouth, and I thought they would be too late. In some way the doctor had gained an advantage and was pushing Richard behind the curtain. Again a cry broke from Richard's throat, something between a gulp and a shout of "Help!" Then Richard made a mighty effort and with a clever twist, had hurled the doctor bodily into the shadow behind the curtain. As the doctor's wriggling body suddenly grew limp. Richard jumped quickly backwards, and as I approached on the run, I heard a splash, and saw drops of a thick, foul-smelling liquid spatter out from the gloom. Richard looked hurriedly at us and himself, to see if anyone had been touched.

He was trembling as though from the ague, and his breath came in gasps.

"It was a barbarous thing to do," he panted. "But I had to do it, or I would be there myself— where Brian is now."

We approached the curtain. "Stay away from the vat!" Richard commanded anxiously. "The stuff may do you harm. I don't know just how to handle it. If you want to know what has happened, look here!"

He stepped to the sink and poured out the ladleful of black, heavy liquid. The frog tumbled out into the sink, and Richard pushed it under a stream of water from the tap. Washing it thoroughly, he handed it to me.

"You saw me put it in— alive?" he asked significantly.

Now it was hard as stone, and heavy— petrified.

It looked for all the world like the little stone frogs in the Pompeiian collection at the Metropolitan Museum.

Richard explained.

"The first thing that struck my attention," he began, "was the sorrow of the housekeeper's child for her missing cat. The baby recognized the figure on the pedestal, where our acquired conventional associations of statuary put us off the track. Then, gradually, the fearful resemblance of the statue in the lower hall to the missing lawyer, broke upon me."

His face took on a hard look as he turned toward the vat behind the curtain.

"He ought to be set up in some museum," he said grimly. "But, for God's sake, don't make it too sudden for Lila!"

___________________

11: A Problem in Communication

Astounding Stories, Sep 1930

Part I. The Science Community

(This part is related by Peter Hagstrom, Ph.D.)

“THE ABILITY to communicate ideas from one individual to another, said a professor of sociology to his class, “is the principal distinction between human beings and their brute forbears. The increase and refinement of this ability to communicate is an index of the degree of civilization of a people. The more civilized a people, the more perfect their ability to communicate, especially under difficulties and in emergencies.”

As usual, the observation burst harmlessly over the heads of most of the students in the class, who were preoccupied with more immediate things — with the evening’s movies and the weekend’s dance. But upon two young men in the class, it made a powerful impression. It crystallized within them certain vague conceptions and brought them to a conscious focus, enabling the young men to turn formless dreams into concrete acts. That is why I take the position that the above enthusiastic words of this sociology professor, whose very name I have forgotten, were the prime moving influence which many years later succeeded in saving Occidental civilization from a catastrophe which would have been worse than death and destruction. One of these young men was myself, and the other was my lifelong friend and chum, Carl Benda, who saved his country by solving a tremendously difficult scientific puzzle in a simple way, by sheer reasoning power, and without apparatus. The sociology professor struck a responsive chord in us; for since our earliest years we had wigwagged to each other as Boy Scouts, learned the finger alphabet of the deaf and dumb so that we might maintain communication during school hours, strung a telegraph wire between our two homes, admired Poe’s “Gold Bug” together and devised boyish cipher codes in which to send each other postcards when chance separated us. But we had always felt a little foolish about what we considered our childish hobbies, until the professor’s words suddenly roused us to the realization that we were a highly civilized pair of youngsters.

Not only did we then and there cease feeling guilty about our secret ciphers and our dots and dashes, but the determination was born within us to make of communication our life’s work. It turned out that both of us actually did devote our lives to the cause of communication; but the passing years saw us engaged in widely and curiously divergent phases of the work. Thirty years later, I was Professor of the Psychology of Language at Columbia University, and Benda was Maintenance Engineer of the Bell Telephone Company of New York City; and on his knowledge and skill depended the continuity and stability of that stupendously complex traffic, the telephone communication of Greater New York.

Since our ambitious cravings were satisfied in our everyday work, and since now ordinarily available methods of communication sufficed our needs, we no longer felt impelled to signal across housetops with semaphores nor to devise ciphers that would defy solution. But we still kept our intimate friendship and our intense interest in our beloved subject. We were just as close chums at the age of fifty as we had been at ten, and just as thrilled at new advances in communication: at television, at the international language, at the supposed signals from Mars.

That was the stage of affairs between us up to a year ago. At about that time Benda resigned his position with the New York Bell Telephone Company to accept a place as the Director of Communication in the Science Community. This, for many reasons, was a most amazing piece of news to myself and to anyone who knew Benda. Of course, it was commonly known that Benda was being sought by  Universities and corporations; I know personally of several tempting offers he had received. But the New York Bell is a wealthy corporation and had thus far managed to hold Benda, both by the munificence of its salary and by the attractiveness of the work it offered him. That the Science Community would want Benda was easy to understand; but, that it could outbid the New York Bell, was, to say the least, a surprise.

Furthermore, that a man like Benda would want anything at all to do with the Science Community seemed strange enough in itself. He had the most practical common sense— well-balanced habits of thinking and living, supported by an intellect so clear and so keen that I knew of none to excel it. What the Science Community was, no one knew exactly; but that there was something abnormal, fanatical, about it, no one doubted.

The Science Community, situated in Virginia, in the foothills of the Blue Ridge, had first been heard of many years ago, when it was already a going concern. At the time of which I now speak the novelty had worn off, and no one paid any more attention to it than they do to Zion City or the Dunkards. By this time, the Science Community was a city of a million inhabitants, with a vast outlying area of firms and gardens. It was modern to the highest degree in construction and operation; there was very little manual labor there; no poverty; every person had all the benefits of modern developments in power, transportation, and communication, and of all other resources provided by scientific progress.

So much, visitors and reporters were able to say.

The rumors that it was a vast socialistic organization, without private property, with equal sharing of all privileges, were never confirmed. It is a curious observation that it was possible, in this country of ours, for a city to exist about which we knew so little. However, it seemed evident from the vast number and elaboration of public buildings, the perfection of community utilities such as transportation, streets, lighting, and communication, from the absence of individual homes and the housing of people in huge dormitories, that some different, less individualistic type of social organization than ours was involved. It was obvious that as an organization, the Science Community must also be wealthy. If any of its individual citizens were wealthy, no one knew it.

I knew Benda as well as I knew myself, and if I was sure of anything in my life, it was that he was not the type of man to leave a fifty thousand dollar job and join a communist city on an equal footing with the clerks in the stores. As it happens, I was also intimately acquainted with John Edgewater Smith, recently Power Commissioner of New York City and the most capable power engineer in North America, who, following Benda by two or three months, resigned his position and accepted what his letter termed the place of Director of Power in the Science Community. I was personally in a position to state that neither of these men could be lightly persuaded into such a step, and that neither of them would work for a small salary. Benda’s first letter to me stated that he was at the Science Community on a visit. He had heard of the place; and while at Washington on business had taken advantage of the opportunity to drive out and see it. Fascinated by the equipment he saw there, he had decided to stay a few days and study it. The next letter announced his acceptance of the position. I would give a month’s salary to get a look at those letters now; but I neglected to preserve them. I should like to see them because I am curious as to whether they exhibit the characteristics of the subsequent letters, some of which I now have.

As I have stated, Benda and I had been on the most intimate terms for forty years. His letters had always been crisp and direct, and thoroughly familiar and confidential. I do not know just how many letters I received from him from the Science Community before I noted the difference, but I have one from the third month of his stay there (he wrote every two or three weeks), characterized by a verbosity that sounded strange for him. He seemed to be writing merely to cover the sheet, trifles such as he had never previously considered worth writing letters about. Four pages of letter conveyed not a single idea. Yet Benda was, if anything, a man of ideas.

There followed several months of letters like that: a lot of words, evasion of coming to the point about anything; just conventional letters. Benda was the last man to write a conventional letter. Yet, it was Benda writing them; gruff little expressions of his, clear ways of looking at even veriest trifles, little allusion to our common past: these things could neither have been written by anyone else, nor written under compulsion from without. Something had changed Benda. I pondered on it a good deal, and could think of no hypothesis to account for it. In the meanwhile, New York City lost a third technical man to the Science Community. Donald Francisco, Commissioner of the Water Supply, a sanitary engineer of international standing, accepted a position in the Science Community as Water Director. I did not know whether to laugh and compare it to the National Baseball League’s trafficking in “big names,” or to hunt for some sinister danger sign in it. But, as a result of my ponderings, I decided to visit Benda at the Science Community.

I wrote him to that effect, and almost decided to change my mind about the visit because of the cold evasiveness of the reply I received from him. My first impulse on reading his indifferent, lackadaisical comment on my proposed visit was to feel offended and determine to let him alone and never see him again. The average man would have done that, but my long years of training in psychological interpretation told me that a character and a friendship built during forty years does not change in six months, and that there must be some other explanation for this. I wrote him that I was coming. I found that the best way to reach the Science Community was to take a bus out from Washington. It involved a drive of about fifty miles northwest, through a picturesque section of the country. The latter part of the drive took me past settlements that looked as though they might be in about the same stage of progress as they had been during the American Revolution. The city of my destination was back in the hills, and very much isolated. During the last ten miles we met no traffic at all, and I was the only passenger left in the bus. Suddenly the vehicle stopped.

“Far as we go!” the driver shouted.

I looked about in consternation. All around were low, wild-looking hills. The road went on ahead through a narrow pass.

“They’ll pick you up in a little bit,” the driver said as he turned around and drove off, leaving me standing there with my bag, very much astonished at it all.

He was right. A small, neat-looking bus drove through the pass and stopped for me. As I got in, the driver mechanically turned around and drove into the hills again.

“They took up my ticket on the other bus,” I said to the driver. “What do I owe you?”

“Nothing,” he said curtly. “Fill that out.” He handed me a card.

An impertinent thing, that card was. Besides asking for my name, address, nationality, vocation, and position, it requested that I state with whom I was visiting in the Science Community, the purpose of my visit, the nature of my business, how long I intended to stay; did I have a place to stay arranged for, and if so, where and through whom. It looked for all the world as though they had something to conceal; Czarist Russia couldn’t beat that for keeping track of people and prying into their business. Sign here, the card said.

It annoyed me, but I filled it out, and, by the time I was through, the bus was out of the hills, traveling up the valley of a small river; I am not familiar enough with northern Virginia to say which river it was. There was much machinery and a few people in the broad fields. In the distance ahead was a mass of chimneys and the cupolas of iron-works, but no smoke.

There were power-line towers with high-tension insulators and, far ahead, the masses of huge elevators and big, square buildings. Soon I came in sight of a veritable forest of huge windmills.

In a few moments, the huge buildings loomed up over me; the bus entered a street of the city abruptly from the country. One moment on a country road, the next moment among towering buildings. We sped along swiftly through a busy metropolis, bright, airy, efficient looking. The traffic was dense but quiet, and I was confident that most of the vehicles were electric; for there was no noise nor gasoline odor. Nor was there any smoke. Things looked airy, comfortable, efficient; but rather monotonous, dull. There was a total lack of architectural interest. The buildings were just square blocks, like neat rows of neat boxes. But, it all moved smoothly, quietly, with wonderful efficiency.

My first thought was to look closely at the people who swarmed the streets of this strange city. Their faces were solemn, and their clothes were solemn. All seemed intently busy, going somewhere, or doing something; there was no standing about, no idle sauntering. And look whichever way I might, everywhere there was the same blue serge, on men and women alike, in all directions, as far as I could see. The bus stopped before a neat, square building of rather smaller size, and the next thing I knew, Benda was running down the steps to meet me. He was his old gruff, enthusiastic self.

“Glad to see you, Hagstrom, old socks!” he shouted, and gripped my hand with two of his. “I’ve arranged for a room for you, and we’ll have a good old visit, and I’ll show you around this town.”

I looked at him closely. He looked healthy and well cared-for, all except for a couple of new lines of worry on his face. Undoubtedly that worn look meant some sort of trouble.

Part II. The New Religion

(This part is interpolated by the author into Dr. Hagstrom’s narrative.)

Every great religion has as its psychological reason for existence the mission of compensating for some crying, unsatisfied human need. Christianity spread and grew among people who were, at the time, persecuted subjects or slaves of Rome; and it flourished through the Middle Ages at a time when life held for the individual chiefly pain, uncertainty, and bereavement. Christianity kept the common man consoled and mentally balanced by minimizing the importance of life on earth and offering compensation afterwards and elsewhere. A feeble nation of idle dreamers, torn by a chaos of intertribal feuds within, menaced by powerful, conquest-lusting nations from without, Arabia was enabled by Islam, the religion of her prophet Mohammed, to unite all her sons into an intense loyalty to one cause, and to turn her dream-stuff into reality by carrying her national pride and honor beyond her boundaries and spreading it over half the known world. The ancient Greeks, in despair over the frailties of human emotion and the unbecomingness of worldly conduct, which their brilliant minds enabled them to recognize clearly but which they found themselves powerless to subdue, endowed the gods, whom they worshipped, with all of their own passions and weaknesses, and thus the foolish behavior of the gods consoled them for their own obvious shortcomings. So it goes throughout all of the world’s religions. In the middle of the twentieth century there were in the civilized world, millions of people in whose lives Christianity had ceased to play any part. Yet, psychically — remember, “psyche” means “soul”— they were just as sick and unbalanced, just as much in need of some compensation as were the subjects of the early Roman empire, or the Arabs in the Middle Ages. They were forced to work at the strained and monotonous pace of machines; they were the slaves, body and soul, of machines; they lived with machines and lived like machines— they were expected to be machines. A mechanized mode of life set a relentless pace for them, while, just as in all the past ages, life and love, the breezes and the blue sky called to them: but they could not respond. They had to drive machines so that machines could serve them. Minds were cramped and emotions were starved, but hands must go on guiding levers and keeping machines in operation. Lives were reduced to such a mechanical routine that men wondered how long human minds and human bodies could stand the restraint. There is a good deal in the writings of the times to show that life was becoming almost unbearable for three-fourths of humanity.

It is only natural, therefore, that Rohan, the prophet of the new religion, found followers more rapidly than he could organize them. About ten years before the visit of Dr. Hagstrom to his friend Benda, Rohan and his new religion had been much in the newspapers. Rohan was a Slovak, apparently well educated in Europe. When he first attracted attention to himself, he was foreman in a steel plant at Birmingham, Alabama. He was popular as an orator, and drew unheard-of crowds to his lectures.

He preached of Science as God, an all-pervading, inexorably systematic Being, the true Center and Motive-Power of the Universe; a Being who saw men and pitied them because they could not help committing inaccuracies. The Science God was helping man become more perfect. Even now, men were much more accurate and systematic than they had been a hundred years ago; men’s lives were ordered and rhythmic, like natural laws, not like the chaotic emotions of beasts and savages.

Somehow, he soon dropped out of the attention of the great mass of the public. Of course, he did so intentionally when his ideas began to crystallize and his plans for his future organization began to form. At first he had a sort of church in Birmingham called The Church of the Scientific God. There never was anything cheap nor blatant about him. When he moved his church from Birmingham to the Lovett Branch Valley in northern Virginia, he was hardly noticed. But with him went seven thousand people, to form the nucleus of the Science Community.

Since then, some feature writer for a metropolitan Sunday paper has occasionally written up the Science Community, both from its physical and its human aspects. From these reports, the outstanding bit of evidence is that Rohan believed intensely in his own religion, and that his followers are all loyal worshippers of the Science God. They conceive the earth to be a workshop in which men serve Science, their God, serving a sort of apprenticeship during which He perfects them to the state of ideal machines. To be a perfect machine, always accurate, with no distracting emotions, no getting off the track— that was the ideal which the Great God Science required of his worshippers. To be a perfect machine, or a perfect cog in a machine, to get rid of all individuality all disturbing sentiment, that was their idea of supreme happiness. Despite the obvious narrowness it involved, there was something sublime in the conception of this religion. It certainly had  nothing in common with the “Christian Science” that was in vogue during the early years of the twentieth century: it towered with noble grandeur above that feeble little sham.

The Science Community was organized like a machine; and all men played their parts, in government, in labor, in administration, in production, like perfect cogs and accurate wheels, and the machine functioned perfectly. The devotees were described as fanatical, but happy. They certainly were well trained and efficient. The Science Community grew. In ten years it had a million people, and was a worldwide wonder of civic planning and organization; it contained so many astonishing developments in mechanical service to human welfare and comfort that it was considered as a sort of model of the future city. The common man there was provided with science-produced luxuries, in his daily life, that were in the rest of the world the privilege of the wealthy few— but he used his increased energy and leisure in serving the more devotedly his God, Science, who had made machines. There was a great temple in the city, the shape of a huge dynamo-generator, whose interior was worked out in a scheme of mechanical devices, and with music, lights, and odors to help in the worship.

What the world knew the least about was that this religion was becoming militant. Its followers spoke of the heathen without, and were horrified at the prevalence of the sin of individualism. They were inspired with the mission that the message of God— scientific perfection— must be carried to the whole world. But, knowing that vested interests, governments, invested capital, and established religions would oppose them and render any real progress impossible, they waited. They studied the question, looking for some opportunity to spread the gospel of their beliefs, prepared to do so by force, finding their justification in their belief that millions of sufferers needed the comforts that their religion had given them. Meanwhile, their numbers grew.

Rohan was Chief Engineer, which position was equal in honor and dignity to that of Prophet or High Priest. He was a busy, hard-worked man, black haired and gaunt, small of stature and fiery eyed: he looked rather like an overworked department-store manager rather than like a prophet. He was finding his hands more full every day,  both because of the extraordinary fertility of his own plans and ideas, and because the Science Community was growing so rapidly. Among this heterogeneous mass of proselyte strangers that poured into the city and was efficiently absorbed into the machine, it was yet difficult to find executives, leaders, men to put in charge of big things. And he needed constantly more and more of such men.

That was why Rohan went to Benda, and subsequently to others like Benda. Rohan had a deep knowledge of human nature. He did not approach Benda with the offer of a magnanimous salary, but came into Benda’s office asking for a consultation on some of the puzzling communication problems of the Science Community. Benda became interested, and on his own initiative offered to visit the Science Community, saying that he had to be in Washington anyway in a few days. When he saw what the conditions were in the Science Community, he became fascinated by its advantages over New York; a new system to plan from the ground up; no obsolete installation to wrestle with; an absolutely free hand for the engineer in charge; no politics to play; no concessions to antiquated city construction nor to feeble-minded city administration— just a dream of an opportunity. He almost asked for the job himself, but Rohan was tactful enough to offer it, and the salary, though princely, was hardly given a thought.

For many weeks, Benda was absorbed in his job, to the exclusion of all else. He sent his money to his New York bank and had his family move in to live with him. He was happy in his communication problems.

“Give me a problem in communication and you make me happy,” he wrote to Hagstrom in one of his early letters. He had completed a certain division of his work on the Science Community’s communication system, and it occurred to him that a few days’ relaxation would do him good. A run up to New York would be just the thing. To his amazement, he was not permitted to board the outbound bus.

“You’ll need orders from the Chief Engineer’s office,” the driver said.

Benda went to Rohan.

“Am I a prisoner?” he demanded, with his characteristic directness.

“An embarrassing situation,” the suave Rohan admitted, very calmly and at his ease. “You see, I’m nothing like a dictator here. I have no arbitrary power. Everything runs by system, and you’re a sort of exception. No one knows exactly how to classify you. Neither do I. But, I can’t break a rule. That is sin.”

“What rule? I want to go to New York.”

“Only those of the Faith who have reached the third degree can come and go. No one can get that in less than three years.”

“Then you got me in here by fraud?” Benda asked bluntly.

Rohan side-stepped gracefully.

“You know our innermost secrets now,” he explained. “Do you suppose there is any hope of your embracing the Faith?”

Benda whirled on his heel and walked out.

“I’ll think about it!” he said, his voice snapping with sarcasm.

Benda went back to his work in order to get his mind off the matter.

He was a well-balanced man if he was anything; and he knew that nothing could be accomplished by rash words or incautious moves against Rohan and his organization. And on that day he met John Edgewater Smith.

“You here?” Benda gasped. He lost his equilibrium for a moment in consternation at the sight of his fellow-engineer.

Smith was too elated to notice Benda’s mood.

“I’ve been here a week. This is certainly an ideal opportunity in my line of work. Even in Heaven I never expected to find such a chance.”

By this time Benda had regained control of himself. He decided to say nothing to Smith for the time being.

They did not meet again for several weeks. In the meantime Benda discovered that his mail was being censored. At first he did not know that his letters, always typewritten, were copied and objectionable matter omitted, and his signature reproduced by the photo-engraving process, separately each time. But before long, several letters came back to him rubber-stamped: “Not passable. Please revise.”

It took Benda two days to cool down and rewrite the first letter. But outwardly no one would have ever known that there was anything amiss with him.

However, he took to leaving his work for an hour or two a day and walking in the park, to think out the matter. He didn’t like it. This was about the time that it began to be a real issue as to who was the bigger man of the two, Rohan or Benda. But no signs of the issue appeared externally for many months.

John Edgewater Smith realized sooner than Benda that he couldn’t get out, because, not sticking to work so closely, he had made the attempt sooner. He looked very much worried when Benda next saw him.

“What’s this? Do you know about it?” he shouted as soon as he had come within hearing distance of Benda.

“What’s the difference?” Benda replied casually. “Aren’t you satisfied?”

Smith’s face went blank.

Benda came close to him, linked arms, and led him to a broad vacant lawn in the park.

“Listen!” he said softly in Smith’s ear. “Don’t you suppose these people who lock us in and censor our mail aren’t smart enough to spy on what we say to each other?”

“Our only hope,” Benda continued, “is to learn all we can of what is going on here. Keep your eyes and ears open and meet me here in a week. And now come on; we’ve been whispering here long enough.”

Oddly enough, the first clue to the puzzle they were trying to solve was supplied by Francisco, New York’s former Water Commissioner. Why were they being kept prisoners in the city? There must be more reason for holding them there than the fear that information would be carried out, for none of the three engineers knew anything about the Science Community that could be of any possible consequence to outsiders. They had all stuck rigidly to their own jobs.

They met Francisco, very blue and dejected, walking in the park a couple of months later. They had been having weekly meetings, feeling that more frequent rendezvous might excite suspicion. Francisco was overjoyed to see them.

“Been trying to figure out why they want us,” he said. “There is something deeper than the excuse they have made; that rot about a perfect system and no breaking of rules may be true, but it has nothing to do with us. Now, here are three of us, widely admitted as having good heads on us. We’ve got to solve this.”

“The first fact to work on,” he continued, “is that there is no real job for me here. This city has no water problem that cannot be worked out by an engineer’s office clerk. Why are they holding me here, paying me a profligate salary, for a job that is a joke for a grown-up man? There’s something behind it that is not apparent on the surface.”

The weekly meetings of the three engineers became an established institution. Mindful that their conversation was doubtless the object of attention on the part of the ruling powers of the city through spies and concealed microphones, they were careful to discuss trivial matters most of the time, and mentioned their problem only when alone in the open spaces of the park.

After weeks of effort had produced no results, they arrived at the conclusion that they would have to do some spying themselves. The great temple, shaped like a dynamo-generator attracted their attention as the first possibility for obtaining information. Benda, during his work with telephone and television installation, found that the office of some sort of ruling council or board of directors was located there. Later he found that it was called the Science Staff. He managed to slip in several concealed microphone detectors and wire them to a private receiver on his desk, doing all the work with his own hands under the pretense of hunting for a cleverly contrived short-circuit that his subordinates had failed to find.

“They open their meeting,” he said, reporting several days of listening to his comrades, “with a lot of religious stuff. They really believe they are chosen by God to perfect the earth. Their fanaticism has the Mohammedans beat forty ways. As I get it from listening in, this city is just a preliminary base from which to carry, forcibly, the gospel of Scientific Efficiency to the whole world. They have been divinely appointed to organize the earth.

“The first thing on the program is the seizure of New York City. And, it won’t be long; I’ve heard the details of a cut-and-dried plan. When they have New York, the rest of America can be easily captured, for cities aren’t as independent of each other as they used to be. Getting the rest of the world into their hands will then be merely a matter of routine; just a little time, and it will be done. Mohammed’s wars weren’t in it with this!”

Francisco and Smith stared at him aghast. These dull-faced, blue serge-clad people did not look capable of it; unless possibly one noted the fiery glint in their eyes. A world-wide Crusade on a scientific basis!

The idea left them weak and trembling.

“Got to learn more details before we can do anything,” Benda said.

“Come on; we’ve been whispering here long enough; they’ll get suspicious.”

Benda’s brain was now definitely pitted against this marvelous organization.

“I’ve got it!” Benda reported at a later meeting, “I pieced it together from a few hours’ listening. Devilish scheme!”

“Can you imagine what would happen in New York in case of a breakdown in water-supply, electric power, and communication? In an hour there would be a panic; in a day, the city would be a hideous shambles of suffering, starvation, disease, and trampling maniacs. Dante’s Inferno would be a lovely little pleasure-resort in comparison.

“Also, have you ever stopped to think how few people there are in the world who understand the handling of these vital elements of our modern civilized organization sufficiently to keep them in operation? There you have the scheme. Because they do not want to destroy the city, but merely to threaten it, they are holding the three of us. A little skilful management will eliminate all other possible men who could operate the city’s machinery, except ourselves. We three will be placed in charge. A threat, perhaps a demonstration in some limited section of what horrors are possible. The city is at their mercy, and promptly surrenders.

“An alternative plan was discussed: just a little quiet violence could eliminate those who are now in charge of the city’s works, and the panic and horrors would commence. But, within an hour of the city’s capitulation, the three of us could have things running smoothly again. And there would be no New York; in its place would be Science Community Number Two. From it they could step on to the next city.”

The other two stared at him. There was only one comment.

“They seem to be sure that they could depend on us,” Smith said.

“They may be correct,” Benda replied. “Would you stand by and see people perish if a turn of your hand could save them? You would, for the moment, forget the issue between the old order and the new religion.”

They separated, horrified by the ghastly simplicity of the plan.

Just following this, Benda received the telegram announcing the prospective visit of his lifelong friend, Dr. Hagstrom. He took it at once to Rohan.

“Will my friend be permitted to depart again, if he once gets in here?” he demanded with his customary directness.

“It depends on you,” Rohan replied blandly. “We want your friend to see our Community, and to go away and carry with him the nicest possible reports and description of it to the world. I wonder, do I make myself clear?”

“That means I’ve got to feed him taffy while he’s here?” Benda asked gruffly.

“You choose to put it indelicately. He is to see and hear only such things about the Science Community as will please the world and impress it favorably. I am sure you will understand that under no other circumstances will he be permitted to leave here.”

Benda turned around abruptly and walked out without a word.

“Just a moment,” Rohan called after him. “I am sure you appreciate the fact that every precaution will be taken to hear the least word that you say to him during his stay here? You are watched only perfunctorily now. While he is here you will be kept track of carefully, and there will be three methods of checking everything you do or say. I am sure you do not underestimate our caution in this matter.”

Benda spent the days intervening between then and the arrival of his friend Hagstrom, closed up in his office, in intense study. He figured things on pieces of paper, committed them to memory, and scrupulously burned the paper. Then he wandered about the park and plucked at leaves and twigs.

Part III. The Cipher Message

(Related by Peter Hagstrom, Ph.D.)

Benda conducted me personally to a room very much like an ordinary hotel room. He was glad to see me. I could tell that from his grip of welcome, from his pleased face, from the warmth in his voice, from the eager way in which he hovered around me. I sat down on a bed and he on a chair.

“Now tell me all about it,” I said.

The room was very still, and in its privacy, following Benda’s demonstrative welcome, I expected some confidential revelations.

Therefore I was astonished.

“There isn’t much to tell,” he said gaily. “My work is congenial, fascinating, and there’s enough of it to keep me out of mischief. The pay is good, and the life pleasant and easy.”

I didn’t know what to say for a moment. I had come there with my mind made up that there was something suspicious afoot. But he seemed thoroughly happy and satisfied.

“I’ll admit that I treated you a little shabbily in this matter of letters,” he continued. “I suppose it is because I’ve had a lot of new and interesting problems on my mind, and it’s been hard to get my mind down to writing letters. But I’ve got a good start on my job, and I’ll promise to reform.”

I was at a loss to pursue that subject any further.

“Have you seen Smith and Francisco?” I asked.

He nodded.

“How do they like it?”

“Both are enthusiastic about the wonderful opportunities in their respective fields. It’s a fact: no engineer before had such resources to work with, on such a vast scale, and with such a free hand. We’re laying the framework for a city of ten millions, all thoroughly systematized and efficient. There is no city in the world like it; it’s an engineer’s dream of Utopia.”

I was almost convinced. There was only the tiniest of lurking suspicions that all was not well, but it was not powerful enough to stimulate me to say anything. But I did determine to keep my eyes open. I might as well admit in advance that from that moment to the time when I left the Science Community four days later, I saw nothing to confirm my suspicions. I met Smith and Francisco at dinner and the four of us occupied a table to ourselves in a vast dining hall, and no one paid for the meal nor for subsequent ones. They also seemed content, and talked enthusiastically of their work.

I was shown over the city, through its neat, efficient streets, through its comfortable dormitories each housing hundreds of families as luxuriously as  any modern hotel, through its marvelous factories where production had passed the stage of labor and had assumed the condition of a devoted act of worship. These factory workers were not toiling; they were worshipping their God, of Whom each machine was a part. Touching their machine was touching their God. This machinery, while involving no new principles, was developed and coordinated to a degree that exceeded anything I had ever seen anywhere else. I saw the famous Science Temple in the shape of a huge dynamogenerator, with its interior decorations, paintings, carvings, frescoes, and pillars, all worked out on the motive of machinery; with its constant streams of worshippers in blue serge, performing their conventional rites and saying their prayer formulas at altars in the forms of lathes, microscopes, motors, and electron-tubes.

“You haven’t become a Science Communist yourself?” I bantered Benda.

There was a metallic ring in the laugh he gave. “They’d like to have me!” was all he said.

I was rather surprised at the emptiness of the large and well-kept park to which Benda took me. It was beautifully landscaped, but only a few scattering people were there, lost in its vast reaches.

“These people seem to have no need of recreation,” Benda said. “They do not come here much. But I confess that I need air and relaxation, even if only for short snatches. I’ve been too busy to get away for long at a time, but this park has helped me keep my balance— I’m here every day for at least a few minutes.”

“Beautiful place,” I remarked. “A lot of strange trees and plants I never saw before—”

“Oh, mostly tropical forms, common enough in their own habitats. They have steam pipes under the ground to grow them. I’ve been trying to learn something about them. Fancy me studying natural history! I’ve never cared for it, but here, where there is no such thing as recreation, I have become intensely interested in it as a hobby. I find it very much of a rest to study these plants and bugs.”

“Why don’t you run up to New York for a few days?”

“Oh, the time will come for that. In the meanwhile, I’ve got an idea all of a sudden. Speaking of New York, will you do me a little service? Even though you might think it silly?”

“I’ll do anything I can,” I began, eager to be of help to him.

“It has been somewhat of a torture to me,” Benda continued, “to find so many of these forms which I am unable to identify. I like to be scientific, even in my play, and reference books on plants and insects are scarce here. Now, if you would carry back a few specimens for me, and ask some of the botany and zoology people to send me their names―”

“Fine!” I exclaimed. “I’ve got a good-sized pocket notebook I can carry them in.”

“Well then, please put them in the order in which I hand them to you, and send me the names by number. I am pretty thoroughly familiar with them, and if you will keep them in order, there is no need for me to keep a list. The first is a blade of this queer grass.”

I filed the grass blade between the pages of my book.

“The next is this unusual-looking pinnate leaf.” He tore off a dry leaflet and handed me a stem with three leaflets irregularly disposed of it.

“Now leave a blank page in your book. That will help me remember the order in which they come.”

Next came a flat insect, which, strangely enough, had two legs missing on one side. However, Benda was moving so fast that I had to put it away without comment. He kept darting about and handing me twigs of leaves, little sticks, pieces of bark, insects, not seeming to care much whether they were complete or not; grass-blades, several dagger-shaped locust thorns, cross-sections of curious fruits, moving so rapidly that in a few moments my notebook bulged widely, and I had to warn him that its hundred leaves were almost filled.

“Well, that ought to be enough,” he said with a sigh after his lively exertion. “You don’t know how I’ll appreciate your indulging my foolish little whim.”

“Say!” I exclaimed. “Ask something of me. This is nothing. I’ll take it right over to the Botany Department, and in a few days you ought to have a list of names fit for a Bolshevik.”

“One important caution,” he said. “If you disturb their order in the book, or even the position on the page, the names you send me will mean nothing to me. Not that it will be any great loss,” he added whimsically. “I suppose I’ve become a sort of fan on this, like the business men who claim that their office work interferes with their golf.”

We walked leisurely back toward the big dormitory. It was while we were crossing a street that Benda stumbled, and, to dodge a passing truck, had to catch my arm, and fell against me. I heard his soft voice whisper in my ear:

“Get out of this town as soon as you can!”

I looked at him in startled amazement, but he was walking along, shaking himself from his stumble, and looking up and down the street for passing trucks.

“As I was saying,” he said in a matter-of-fact voice, “we expect to reach the one-and-one-quarter million mark this month. I never saw a place grow so fast.”

I felt a great leap of sudden understanding. For a moment my muscles tightened, but I took my cue.

“Remarkable place,” I said calmly; “one reads a lot of half-truths about it. Too bad I can’t stay any longer.”

“Sorry you have to leave,” he said, in exactly the right tone of voice. “But you can come again.”

How thankful I was for the forty years of playing and working together that had accustomed us to that sort of team-work! Unconsciously we responded to one another’s cues. Once our ability to “play together” had saved my life. It was when we were in college and were out on a cross-country hike together; Benda suddenly caught my hand and swung it upward. I recognized the gesture; we were cheerleaders and worked together at football games, and we had one stunt in which we swung our hands over our heads, jumped about three feet, and let out a whoop. This was the “stunt” that he started out there in the country, where we were by ourselves. Automatically, without thinking, I swung my arms and leaped with him and yelled. Only later did I notice the rattlesnake over which I had jumped. I had not seen that I was about to walk right into it, and he had noticed it too late to explain. A flash of genius suggested the cheering stunt to him.

“Communication is a science!” he had said, and that was all the comment there was on the incident.

So now, I followed my cue, without knowing why, nor what it was all about, but confident that I should soon find out. By noon I was on the bus, on my way through the pass, to meet the vehicle from Washington. As the bus swung along, a number of things kept jumbling through my mind: Benda’s effusive glee at seeing me, and his sudden, turning and bundling me off in a nervous hurry without a word of explanation; his lined and worried face and yet his insistence on the joys of his work in the Science Community; his obvious desire to be hospitable and play the good host, and yet his evasiveness and unwillingness to chat intimately and discuss important things as he used to. Finally, that notebook full of odd specimens bulging in my pocket. And the memory of his words as he shook hands with me when I was stepping into the bus:

“Long live the science of communication!” he had said. Otherwise, he was rather glum and silent.

I took out the book of specimens and looked at it. His caution not to disturb the order and position of things rang in my ears. The Science of Communication! Two and two were beginning to make four in my mind. All the way on the train from Washington to New York I could hardly keep my hands off the book. I had definitely abandoned the idea of hunting up botanists and zoologists at Columbia. Benda was not interested in the names of these things. That book meant something else. Some message. The Science of Communication!

That suddenly explained all the contradictions in his behavior. He was being closely watched. Any attempt to tell me the things he wanted to say would be promptly recognized. He had succeeded brilliantly in getting a message to me. Now, my part was to read it! I felt a sudden sinking within me. That book full of leaves, bugs, and sticks? How could I make anything out of it?

“There’s the Secret Service,” I thought. “They are skilled in reading hidden messages. It must be an important one, worthy of the efforts of the Secret Service, or he would not have been at such pains to get it to me.

“But no. The Secret Service is skilled at reading hidden messages, but not as skilled as I am in reading my friend’s mind. Knowing Benda, his clear intellect, his logical methods, will be of more service in solving this than all the experts of the Secret Service.”

I barely stopped to eat dinner when I reached home. I hurried to the laboratory building, and laid out the specimens on white sheets of paper, meticulously preserving order, position, and spacing. To be on the safe side I had them photographed, asking the photographer to vary the scale of his pictures so that all of the final figures would be approximately the same size, Plate I shows what I had.

I was all a-tremble when the mounted photographs were handed to me. The first thing I did was to number the specimens, giving each blank space also its consecutive number.

Certainly no one could imagine a more meaningless jumble of twigs, leaves, berries, and bugs. How could I read any message out of that?

Yet I had no doubt that the message concerned something of far more importance than Benda’s own safety. He had moved in this matter with astonishing skill and breathless caution; yet I knew him to be reckless to the extreme where only his own skill was concerned. I couldn’t even imagine his going to this elaborate risk merely on account of Smith and Francisco. Something bigger must be involved. I stared at the rows of specimens.

“Communication is a science!” Benda had said, and it came back to me as I studied the bent worms and the beetles with two legs missing. I was confident that the solution would be simple. Once the key idea occurred to me I knew I should find the whole thing astonishingly direct and systematic. For a moment I tried to attach some sort of hieroglyphic significance to the specimen forms; in the writing of the American Indians, a wavy line meant water, an inverted V meant a wigwam. But, I discarded that idea in a moment. Benda’s mind did not work along the paths of symbolism. It would have to be something mathematical, rigidly logical, leaving no room for guesswork.

No sooner had the key-idea occurred to me than the basic conception underlying all these rows of twigs and bugs suddenly flashed into clear meaning before me. The simplicity of it took my breath away.

“I knew it!” I said aloud, though I was alone. “Very simple.”

I was prepared for the fact that each one of the specimens represented a letter of the alphabet. If nothing else, their number indicated that. Now I could see, so clearly that the photographs shouted at me, that each specimen consisted of an upright stem, and from this  middle stem projected side-arms to the right and to the left, and in various vertical locations on each side.

The middle upright stem contained these side-arms in various numbers and combinations. In five minutes I had a copy of the message, translated into its fundamental characters, as shown on Plate II.

The first grass-blade was the simple, upright stem; the second, three leaflets on their stem, represented the upright portion with two arms to the left at the top and middle, and one arm to the right at the top; and so on.

That brought the message down to the simple and straightforward matter of a substitution cipher. I was confident that Benda had no object in introducing any complications that could be avoided, as his sole purpose was to get to me the most readable message without getting caught at it. I recollected now how cautious he had been to hand me no paper, and how openly and obviously he had dropped each specimen into my book; because he knew someone was watching him and expecting him to slip in a message. He had, as I could see now in the retrospect, been conspicuously careful that nothing suspicious should pass from his hands to mine.

Substitution ciphers are easy to solve, especially for those having some experience. The method can be found in Edgar Allan Poe’s “Gold Bug” and in a host of its imitators. A Secret Service cipher man could have read it in an hour. But I knew my friend’s mind well enough to find a short-cut. I knew just how he would go about devising such a cipher, in fact, how ninety-nine persons out of a hundred with a scientific education would do it.

If we begin adding horizontal arms to the middle stem, from top to bottom and from left to right, the possible characters can be worked out by the system shown on Plate III.

It is most logical to suppose that Benda would begin with the first sign and substitute the letters of the alphabet in order. That would give us the cipher code shown on Plate IV.

It was all very quick work, just as I had anticipated, once the key idea had occurred to me. The ease and speed of my method far exceeded that of Poe’s method, but, of course, was applicable only to this particular case. Substituting letters for signs out of my diagram, I got the following message:

am prisoner r plans capture of n y by seizing power water and phones then world conquest s o s

Part IV. L’Envoi

(By Peter Hagstrom, Ph.D.)

MY SOLUTION of the message practically ends the story. Events followed each other from then on like bullets from a machine-gun. A wild drive in a taxicab brought me to the door of Mayor Anderson at ten o’clock that night. I told him the story and showed him my photographs.

Following that I spent many hours telling my story to and consulting with officers in the War Department. Next afternoon, photographic maps of the Science Community and its environs, brought by airplanes during the forenoon, were spread on desks before us. A colonel of marines and a colonel of aviation sketched plans in notebooks. After dark I sat in a transport plane with muffled exhaust and propellers, slipping through the air as silently as a hawk. About us were a dozen bombing planes, and about fifty transports, carrying a battalion of marines.

I am not an adventure-loving man. Though a cordon of husky marines about me was a protection against any possible danger, yet, stealing along through that wild valley in the Virginia mountains toward the dark masses of that fanatic city, the silent progress of the long, dark line through the night, their mysterious disappearance, one by one, as we neared the city, the creepy, hair-raising journey through the dark streets— I shall never forget for the rest of my life the sinking feeling in my abdomen and the throbbing in my head. But I wanted to be there, for Benda was my lifelong friend.

I guided them to Rohan’s rooms, and saw a dozen dark forms slip in, one by one. Then we went on to the dormitory where Benda lived. Benda answered our hammering at his door in his pajamas. He took in the Captain’s automatic, and the bayonets behind me, at a glance.

“Good boy, Hagstrom!” he said. “I knew you’d do it. There wasn’t much time left. I got my instructions about handling the New York telephone system to-day.”

As we came out into the street, I saw Rohan handcuffed to two big marines, and rows of bayonets gleaming in the darkness down the streets. Every few moments a bright flare shot out from the planes in the sky, until a squad located the power-house and turned on all the lights they could find.

____________________

12: Mechanocracy

Amazing Stories, April 1932

“QUENTIN Smith Lakeman, the Government regrets your personal feelings and sympathizes with your relatives, but finds it necessary to condemn you at once to euthanasia.”

As the mechanical voice that came from the orifice of the speaker ceased, Quentin Smith Lakeman turned pale and an icy pang shot through him. Through the dazzling lights that danced in his brain, he could see his three companions standing there gasping as a result of the sudden, crushing sentence.

He had expected some kind of a reward for his year of hard work, danger, and hardship spent in the service of the Government. Not that he expected machinery to have any gratitude; but above all, the machine is logical and just, and there were rules for rewarding special effort such as his.

“Democratia must be promptly and completely destroyed,” the metallic voice of the speaker continued. “From your report of your investigations in that country, it is clear that its people will never consent to standardize themselves, and that they therefore constitute a menace to our standardized World Government.”

Quentin— to call him by his “intimate” name, for in the twenty-sixth century everyone had an intimate name, a family name, and a public name— was flung down and crushed again by the announcement of the fate of that gallant country in which he had just spent a year. It seemed that his heart would stop beating then and there, for Democratia held Martha, who in that one short year had become more precious than all else in the world. He looked beside him at Jack, her stalwart eighteen-year-old brother, who had journeyed back with him as a guest to Washington, the Capital of the World.

“The Government appreciates the very efficient efforts of Quentin Smith Lakeman,” the voice went on. Quentin knew it for the empty formula that the machine adopted in order to appeal to the emotions of human beings with whom it dealt. “It understands that this decision is emotionally difficult for living beings to bear. But, you have spent months in Democratia, and acquired a considerable tinge of individualistic ideas and customs. It would be dangerous to our institutions to turn you loose among the people now. And, as Democratia will soon cease to exist, prompt euthanasia is the only solution.”

Utter silence followed. Even the faint crackling of the speaker ceased, showing that the connection was off. Quentin turned to Jack, whose burly form towered above the rest of them, and whose countenance showed a bewildered inability to grasp what it all meant.

Just then the door opened and a police captain came in, followed by a squad of men in blue uniform. Quentin recognized the captain as Guy Sherman Sentier, an old and close friend. Sentier stopped short and turned pale.

“You?” he gasped as he saw Quentin. “My orders are to take four people out of this office to the Euthanasia Chambers! What have you done?”

“Nothing!” said Quentin, calm by this time. “Go ahead. It’s your duty. All I’ve done was to do mine.”

“Terribly sorry,” said Sentier faintly. He motioned to his men, and turned his head away.

The policemen came up, one of them grasping Jack by the arm. Jack whirled around and knocked the fellow across the room as easily as shaking off a rat. Then he leaped away from the group that had come in through an outer door, and in a moment had disappeared through a door leading into the interior of the building. The clatter of  his swift footsteps died rapidly away into the muffled distance. For a moment the policemen stood aghast. They did not know quite how to behave, for never in their experience had a prisoner made so bold as to try to escape. With the world rigidly standardized and moving as one unit, what hope could there be of escape?

At a shout from the captain, they became active and scattered through doors and windows in pursuit, each with his thin black rod. The three remaining captives were handcuffed and a man left in charge.

Quentin waited in patient resignation, for he knew it could not last long. Can one escape the lion in his own den? The very walls of the building would combine to hunt down the fugitive.

But the boy must have been swift and clever. Minutes lengthened into an hour; the guard stood stiff, mechanical, embarrassed. The huge building was silent save for vague mechanical sounds. Then a faint shout came across a courtyard through a window, and Quentin could see Jack climbing down a drain pipe from the roof. Two figures appeared on the roof above him, and others ran out of a door nearby and waited for him on the ground. As Jack came down within reach, one of the guards touched him with the end of his slender, three-foot rod. Jack dropped to the ground, limp and paralyzed. In a few moments he was wheeled into the office on a small cart, one of the policemen holding the rod in contact with Jack’s arm. The boy lay helpless, his eyes gazing mute inquiry into Quentin’s.

“No use, Jack,” Quentin said to him. “You’re among civilized people now, you know. You’re no good against police equipment. Promise them you’ll go quietly and they’ll let you up.”

The policeman lifted the rod an instant, giving Jack power to nod his head in promise. Thereupon the policeman put his rod away, and Jack stood up and looked about abashed. As the police led their captives out, Sentier called after Quentin:

“You don’t hold this against me personally? May I visit you?”

“Come. I shall be glad to see you,” Quentin answered philosophically. “Why should I blame you? You’re a tiny cog in a huge machine.”

As the captives were led into a barred and guarded plane, Quentin put his arm about Jack’s big shoulders in sympathy. He looked young to die; and it seemed like a betrayal, to be brought from that wild country to see the wonders of the civilized world, and find this. As the plane rose and headed for New York, where the euthanasia facilities were located, Jack seemed more absorbed in looking down at the Government Buildings which comprised the whole city of Washington, than in the thought of impending death. He looked at Quentin with bewilderment in his face.

“That square massive building just below us is the one we were in? And you say that is the center, the brain, the key of the whole World Government?”

“That is the Government,” Quentin replied. “Just as your brain is you. These other countless acres of buildings are merely its arms and fingers and eyes and ears. Without this building they could not function, and the world would be chaos.”

Jack stared down fascinatedly.

“And yet,” he breathed in amazement, “I ran through miles of corridors, passed hundreds of rooms full of apparatus and instruments, and not a soul did I see.”

Quentin nodded in confirmation.

“For an hour I ran, and by the end of it I was caring less about being caught than about finding some people about in these buildings. Is there no one?”

“No one,” Quentin replied.

“And yet you say it’s the Government!” The boy seemed dumbfounded.

“After all my explaining,” Quentin said, “haven’t you realized that the Government is merely a huge machine, made of metal and rubber and glass and run by electricity and light and heat?”

“But — but how can machinery govern the world?”

“Better than human beings can. Even your business men in Democratia use machines to help them run their businesses; their offices are full of automatic machines for managing a business, time clocks, adding-machines, bookkeeping machines, cash-registers, Dictaphones— no end of them. The Government Machine is not essentially different. Merely a little more automatic and a little more complex.”

“And are all the people willing to be governed by a machine?” It was all amazingly strange to Jack.

“They cannot conceive of anything else,” Quentin explained. “For three hundred years they have grown up in it. They are intensely loyal to it, because it not merely governs them as you understand the word govern; it takes care of them as a mother takes care of children.”

“They seem to be happy,” Jack observed.

Quentin nodded down toward the beautiful countryside over which they were flying at a swift rate. The green fields were intersected by
broad roads and huge power lines, and the blue bulk of a city loomed on the horizon.

“The world is more prosperous than it has ever been before,” he replied. “Life is thoroughly comfortable, absolutely safe and certain. But you would call it monotonous. Everybody does everything by rule and schedule, all alike, the world over. Standardized. You wouldn’t like it.”

“I couldn’t stand it!” Jack exclaimed.

“Your country, Democratia,” continued Quentin, “is made up of the descendants of people who couldn’t stand it. During the development period of machine government standardization, the democratic-minded people, who could not fit into it, were having a hard time. They were persecuted and driven from one place to another.”

“That’s unjust!” Jack was thoroughly democratic.

“They were a small minority. The rest of the world was in earnest; it was afraid of annihilation by war. So it built cities on a standard plan, streets and buildings all alike. From New York to Hong-Kong people live on the same schedule and think by the same rules. That is easier to manage by machinery. Safer. More comfortable.”

Jack gazed for a while at the swiftly receding landscape below. “Then why is the Government picking on Democratia now?” he asked.

“It had to come. For some centuries your country in Central Tibet was left in peace because its founders sought the remotest possible isolation. Our Government had its own problems. But, step by step it is striving constantly to perfect the world. Apparently the step has arrived in the process when it is time to remove the only exception to world rule.”

“And it sent you over there?” Jack shook his head, puzzled.

“Remember that the Government has no emotions nor prejudices. It works absolutely by logic. It is always perfect in its fairness. A decision on Democratia needed all possible informational data. As communication channels do not extend into Democratia, men had to be sent in.”

“And when you do a good job, you get killed for it.”

“Logical, though, is it not?” Quentin could be impersonal when discussing the Government Machine. “Now I see why it warned me so emphatically that I was risking my life and gave me repeated opportunities to decline the assignment if I wished to.”

“Risking your life? In Democratia?” Jack exclaimed.

“Not at all, although that is the way I understood it at first. The Government needed a resourceful man for the job, and resourceful men are rare in our civilization. I was the best bet— don’t laugh at me; I know how helpless and clumsy you think I am— I took my risk and lost it. For, this world cannot permit a resourceful man to live in it.”

Jack hardly heard the conclusion. He was gazing in open-mouthed wonder at the huge, solid mass of New York City that loomed ahead, the cliffs of buildings, the surging masses of people and machinery. The plane glided swiftly up above the dull, drab roofs, and landed on the top of a building, guided by a long black streamer at the top of a tall flagpole. Surrounded by guards, the four men were led to an elevator, descended a score of floors, and entered the Euthanasia Chambers.

The furnishings and appointments here were the last word in beauty and luxury. The soft carpets, the rich hangings, the luxurious furniture, the flowers and scents and colors, the foods and wines within reach, all had a tendency to lull the occupants into a sense of peace and drowsy comfort. Each of the party was led to a room where he was to be given twenty-four hours for receiving last visits from friends and relatives. Jack and Quentin elected to remain together in one room.

“Lovely, isn’t it,” said Quentin ironically. “A year ago its beauty would have stirred my emotions. But your rugged land has cured me. Now I can see the steel and concrete through the velvet, and see it just as an undertaking establishment which you enter alive and leave dead.”

Sentier arrived presently. Without his squad of policemen he was not a very impressive man. He almost wept as he greeted Quentin. It looked almost as though he were the one sentenced to death.

“One’s duty demands cruel things,” he moaned. “Arrest your best friend!”

“I wouldn’t do it, that’s all,” Jack exclaimed.

Quentin patted the boy’s back.

“Yes you would,” he reminded, “if you and a dozen generations of you had been raised like machines to obey the Government Machine and be loyal to it above all.”

Noting Sentier’s depressed looks, Quentin offered to relate his adventures in Democratia, and Sentier eagerly grasped at the opportunity to relieve the tension.

“Get a permit to broadcast as much as possible of it,” Quentin suggested. “It is a beautiful land and a wonderful people that are about to be destroyed. But, suppose I tell you? What if you sympathize? That will be treason, and you will be— eliminated.”

Sentier smiled.

“No danger,” he said. “That is why you were sent out and I am a police captain. If I can arrest my best friend in cold blood, how can I sympathize with a distant land and a strange people?”

“In other words,” Quentin mused again, “the Government picked me out to die when it selected me for the job?”

“That, of course, depended on what you would find there.”

Jack clenched his fists. A frown gathered on his forehead. He glared at the policeman, who was an embodiment of the Government that killed an efficient man for doing his duty, and to whom machines were more important than men. Quentin watched the boy as he talked. Vague possibilities stirred his imagination. What if he might see Martha again? He, Quentin, had the brains for a daring attempt, but not the physical courage. Jack had boldness enough for anything. Quentin worded his story quite as much for its effect on Jack, as for Sentier’s benefit.

ii

“JUST a year ago,” Quentin began his story to Sentier, “I was called into that same office in Washington and given my instructions. I was offered the chance to refuse without stigma. That I thought ridiculous, for it seemed a wonderful opportunity. I am cursed with a love of adventure, which is a terrible affliction in this monotonous age. I was to spend a year in Democratia, and then come back and give a full report on the life and customs of the country.

“I was so excited that I came within a hair of giving away a secret, and probably with it, my life or liberty. This love of adventure had boiled up within me from youth. For years I had planned some sort of a wild deed. Bit by bit I had secretly assembled an airplane in an obscure cellar on Long Island. It lay there at the moment, with fuel and provisions ready to start, equipped for a rough, uncertain trip, instead of for the scheduled routes which have been carefully standardized. I had an impulse to take this plane for the trip, but a fl ash of judgment told me that it would be dangerous to reveal my secret.

“I was ordered to take my official planes, which I owned according to my rank and standing. I was not permitted to take my own mechanic; Binder and Steele were assigned as mechanics and Neatman as Secretary. It was all very simple. The three men arrived at my home early one morning; we taxied out of my garage, flew across the city, and out over the Atlantic. Because of the rigid standardization of men, methods, and machines, the mechanics had no need of seeing either me or the plane before the moment of starting.

“We made a quick trip, and I paid little attention to my surroundings during the most of it. The cities look the same and the people act the same everywhere as in New York. Only when we reached the Himalayas I began to feel my first thrill. Those vast stretches, without a city for hundreds of miles, are romantic. We located the Tagnapo River and the ruins of Llhasa, once a large and powerful city; and struck due North into a wild desert where no one ever goes. After some hours of searching, we located the green valley completely shut in by vast mountains and saw the cities of Democratia.

“There were three large, fine ones and a dozen smaller towns, and a sprinkling over the whole land of what must have been villages. Think of it, Sentier, they live in villages! Little collections of a few tiny buildings. Most of the world used to do that a thousand years ago. And even the three great cities of Democratia were not modern as our cities are. They were not built in units. Each building was of different height and size, and they had open streets in single layers. But it was a wonderful-looking land. Think of it, lying hidden away there and the world knowing nothing about it; its bold, resourceful men, its sturdy and beautiful women. When it is puffed out, no one will feel a pang of sympathy for it.

“There were no diplomatic relations between the two governments. Credentials were of no use to them and I received none, nor did I receive any sign of the usual string of rules, instructions, and minutiae. The whole thing was left up to me; and during the whole of the trip over, I pondered on some way of approaching the people of Democratia. I pondered in vain. I knew nothing about the people and their country, and could form no plan. So, I first took a good look at the country from an altitude too great for them to see me. Then I decided to land in some uninhabited spot and spend a night resting and planning. I chose a flat place low down between two tall peaks, near the northern rim of the mountain-surrounded country. A hundred miles away was one of their largest cities.

“We alighted on grass and the air was cold. But we had warm clothing and the cabin of the plane was heated. The beauty of the prospect as worth the cold. The vast, grassy plain, the woods half a mile away, the huge, snow-patched mountains in the opposite direction— we live too much cooped up in cities, Sentier— it took my breath. The others were also impressed, and we had to expend our emotions in a walk toward the woods.

“I ought to have known better. City men have no business in the wilderness. Oh, yes, we took our shock-rods along, and I took an old-fashioned projectile pistol. Half way to the trees we heard a tramping behind us, and turning, beheld a huge goat with winding horns charging for us at full speed. The animal raced swiftly toward us as we stood paralyzed by fear. It seemed to have picked out Steele, and tore right at him. Steele took it coolly enough, and faced the charge with his shock-rod. It paralyzed the goat on contact all right, but it could not stop the momentum of the great, charging body, which rolled crashing on, crushed Steele under it, and nearly got me. I got a bullet in the goat’s head before it could get up, astonishing my companions with the noise of the shot. Steele was dead, smashed, when we reached him.

“The sound of galloping hoofs reached us. More goats were coming. We ran for the woods because they were nearer than our plane. Later I got used to the looks of these goats. They are not particularly dangerous. But to us, just then, they were huge, frightful, monsters. We’re not used to seeing large, live, free animals. Our frantic fear made us act foolishly.

“At intervals I turned around and shot bullets at the goats. Just now that is laughable. I had no skill with the weapon. My shots went wild. But it helped a little, for the noise confused the goats and retarded their speed somewhat. We reached the trees and hurried far into their depths. The goats did not follow because their horns got tangled in the growth.

“Then, when we had gotten our breath after such unaccustomed exertion, and had waited long enough to give the goats time to wander off, we started back. We walked on through the trees toward the plain, but came to no end of them. We were lost!

“The terrors of that night will be stamped on my memory forever— well, that won’t be long. First of all it was cold. We huddled together. Some of us thought of a fire. None of us had ever seen an open fire; but we had read of ancient savages making fires by rubbing sticks. We rubbed sticks till we were exhausted. Of course it was silly for we didn’t even know the difference between green and dry wood. We therefore crowded together on the ground, shivering as much with terror as with cold. There was no sleep for us. The noises of the woods, from clicks and crackles to roars and yells, sent grip after grip of fear through our hearts. Sentier, these tales you read of people dying from pure terror are not true. If such a thing were possible, we would all have died the first quarter of the night. Yet, these Democratians spend night after night in the woods and enjoy it. We are just too much pampered by our machines.

“A party of them had camped, not half a mile from us, that night, just too far for us to see their fire. They wrap themselves in blankets and leave one person on guard, and sleep soundly all night. They found us in the morning, numb with cold and dumb with fear. The first I knew of them was a musical voice calling:

“‘Quick, Jack!’ with a little Oh-like intake of the breath. ‘Someone in distress!’

“I looked up. Approaching was a girl in corduroy breeches and high-laced boots— antiquated, romantic. A knapsack. An old-fashioned rifle for shooting bullets. But there was a glow of health in her cheeks that made the chemical beauty of our girls seem ridiculous. To me, that moment, shivering in hungry, hopeless despair, she was the most beautiful, radiant being I had ever seen or imagined. She was the sister of Jack here. He was with her.”

Quentin looked about the velvet draperies that concealed their prison walls, as though it were hard to believe that it all hung together somehow. He sank his face in his hands for an instant. Sentier was embarrassed. Sentier could sympathize with the love affair. Men of his day were experts in those. Quentin did not even look at Jack, and in a moment had thrown off the mood, and continued:

“They had us comfortable in a few minutes. Jack and his father came up very soon. Before our eyes they made a fire. Sentier, you ought to see a fire before you die. They boiled coffee and eggs. Did you ever eat an egg, Sentier? The delicious odors, the warmth of the fire, the beauty of the girl who was on an equal with the men in strength and efficiency, and had no simpering feminine wiles about her— I was sold on Democratia from then on.

“‘Who are you, and whence are you?’ was their first question.

“‘Just on a pleasure cruise,’ I put in quickly before any of the rest
of our party could speak. ‘Bound nowhere in particular. We liked this spot and wanted to look at it more closely, and got lost. We spent all night in the woods.’

“‘Unarmed? Without fire?’ The girl looked worlds of sympathy at us.

“‘We’re city folks, not used to being out,’ I said.

“‘So are we city folks—’ Jack began, but his father silenced him with a look.

“They persuaded us to come to their camp, and promised to find our plane. After some sleep and rest I began to notice things. There were a dozen people in a tiny house of logs on the mountain. They were living there for a month. They had no heating system, no lighting system— depended on open fires. No kinephone service. No tube delivery. Not even properly prepared food. They ate just animals and plants boiled over a fire. No transportation; they walked everywhere. Yet they were enjoying it. Doing it for pleasure! Can you imagine it?

“And can you imagine me enjoying it? I got interested early. I learned to build a fire. Too bad there’s no place around here to build a fire. I learned to shoot a rifle. Much more thrilling than a shock-rod. At the end of the month I could walk ten miles and enjoy it. I could sleep out all night and make my own breakfast. Compared with these people, though, Sentier, I was helpless. Compared with them, all of us are helpless. Little helpless larvae, such as ants carry around.

“We depend for everything on machinery and on our Government. The Government gives us food and water and amusement and its machines work for us and take care of us. Without its care we would die in a few days. “These people haven’t much government: a ridiculous meeting of so-called representatives once a year, which spends most of its time arguing and never gets anywhere. They have ‘laws’ which they obey when it’s convenient and possible.

“But they don’t need a government. We do. They can take care of themselves. With their own individual hands they can grapple with Nature, and wrest life and comfort from her trees and rocks and beasts. Jack here is only eighteen, but he could probably take you and break you up in short pieces. Don’t grab your rod. He knows it won’t get him anywhere. He could probably go several days without much food or sleep. Ever tried that, Sentier?

“We may have a wonderful civilization, Sentier, but as individuals, we’re feeble sprouts. What’s the good of all these millions of us, all alike? Humanity by mass production. What would be the loss if they all died today?

“We were taken to the largest of their cities, a primitive sort of place with individual buildings and individual cars running about. Jack’s father was a high government official and had been vacationing in the mountains. He was a rugged and kindly man, very much concerned about the welfare of the people over whom his authority extended. He took us to his home and shared its comforts with us. Imagine that, Sentier! Taking a total stranger into your home, having him eat with you, sleep in your rooms!

“It wasn’t long before I found myself in an uncomfortable pickle. These people were kind to us, doing all they could to make us feel at home. Friendly. Couldn’t help loving them. And here I was spying. Preparing to betray their kindness to me. For, much as I liked their country and their ways, I knew that the Government Machine would not. I spent several weeks of torture.

“Furthermore, I was supposed to stay there a year. It was not plausible that even idle tourists would tarry for a year by the wayside. They would wonder, why didn’t I go on?

“The father of Jack and Martha noted my worry and depression. He asked me about it, with blunt primitive directness.

“‘There is something about your situation here that worries you,’ he said. ‘Tell me what it is, and I can help you.’ See? None of the roundabout diplomacy that we’re used to. He got the whole story out of me.

“The deep lines in his face, with its little fringe of beard, made him look very wise and very kind. You’ve never seen a man with a beard, have you, Sentier? It adds dignity.

“‘The only thing for you to do,’ he said, ‘is to stay and do your duty. We’ll be friends, because we like you and know you can’t help it. Go back when the time comes. If you don’t, they will send others, who may be more dangerous to us than you are.’

“Then I was more at peace until the time approached to go. I kept my Secretary busy writing up notes, and the mechanics keeping the plane in condition. I went around doing my best to study the country. I learned about money and buying and political parties, about poor people and unemployment. I learned to drive one of their little cars. I actually held a ‘job’ and made my own living for a few weeks, though I think my employer was glad to get rid of me. But most of the time I was a ‘guest,’ an exception to the prevailing conditions in which everyone had to hammer out his living with his own hands or starve.

“I took long trips through their country in great steel carriages that run on rails. Martha accompanied me almost everywhere. She had been charming that first day in her rough hunting suit when she found us nearly dead; she was charming later in a thousand ways, in soft and long gowns, dancing to spirited music; in athletic white, vigorously playing a very active game called tennis; she knew her people and her country thoroughly, and was my guide and teacher in my studies.

“At our first meeting I was weak and helpless and half dead; she was sturdy and resourceful; I looked up to her on dizzy heights above me with a hopeless, sorrowful feeling. Ten months later, physically fit to look after her safety, I took her on a glacier-climb, paying all the expenses with ‘money’ I had ‘earned’ myself. There’s a pride in earning money, Sentier; too bad you can’t try it.

“We have practically eliminated wild animals from the rest of the world, but these people preserve them and limit their destruction for the sport of hunting them. It is a dangerous sport. Martha and I never suspected any danger, when we were climbing up the easy ice-slopes in a frolicking fashion. She was ahead, around a point of ice and out of sight, when I heard her screams.

“I hurried up. Two white bears had attacked her. One had her rifle in its mouth and was pawing and crunching at it. The other had her down and was rolling her back and forth with its front paws, and tearing playfully at her clothes with its teeth.

“Then they saw me. Both snarled. The one with the rifle dropped it and came at me. These creatures looked clumsy, but they can move. The thing was on me before I could unsling my rifle, and I went down under it. As the beast pummeled me, I scrambled for the long hunting-knife which I had learned to wear at my belt as do all of these people out in the open. I plunged the knife into his ribs a dozen times before he finally dropped and slid down the icy slope. I was completely soaked in his blood.

“By this time Martha was also jabbing with her knife and was bloody from head to foot, but the bear was still going strong. She was cool enough, but concerned about her face. She held up her arm to protect it from the animal’s long claws, and this interfered with her knife thrusts. I finished him with three jabs and he crashed down on her. When I dragged him off, she did not get up, but lay there moaning.

“She had a broken leg. I— a product of this effete civilization, pampered by the Government Machine, raised like a lily in a hothouse— I splinted her leg with the scabbards of the long hunting knives and hoisted her across my shoulders there on the slippery ice. I toiled back with her and it was night before I reached the car, and toward morning before I drove into a village and secured medical help. What would you do, Sentier— police are huskier than the average— with two bears and only a knife; and a girl you loved, with a broken leg, a hundred miles away from the nearest habitation? No buttons to push, no lever to set, no machinery to wait on you.

“I spent delightful weeks in Martha’s company while she was confined with her fracture. Before they were over, she was pledged to be my wife. Why an able and beautiful girl like that should want to marry a clumsy and incompetent lubber like myself, I could not understand.

“‘I don’t want to go back to Washington,’ I said.

“‘Let us settle down right away, and forget about Civilization.’

“‘I should like it, of course,’ she smiled.

“‘Let the old Government Machine find someone else to do its dirty work!’ I exclaimed. ‘I’m happy here. Never again could I be happy in those roaring hives back there!’

“We planned our home, and counted on a teaching position which had been offered me in one of their universities, and I was happy about my future with her, and with these delightful people. I hesitated about informing the Secretary and the Mechanic. They were not quite as much delighted with the country of Democratia as I was, and were eagerly looking forward to the end of the year, when they might go back to the brilliant lights and the gay entertainment of Broadway. It was difficult for me to force myself to tell them.

“Finally, when our preparations began to be outwardly apparent, Martha’s father took us in to talk to him.

“‘Do you think this wise?’ he asked me. ‘From what I gather, your Government Machine does not lose track of details, and does not forgive failures.’

“‘How could it find me here?’ I asked, but rather hesitatingly.

“‘Another phase of the matter is this. You sympathize with us and our country. We would much rather have you make the report. Suppose they send another man, less friendly? What would happen to us?’

“So, I started back for Washington, with a heavy heart because I must leave behind a girl, who, in beauty, in force of character, in real ability, mental and physical, is worth, all the women in this feeble and degenerate civilization.”

He had been talking with his head bowed toward his knees. When he ceased, there was silence. It was a queer silence, lacking things that ought to have been there. He looked up. Sentier was also bowed over. Slumped over, in fact. Jack stood behind him; and as Quentin looked up, Jack straightened up and shook his hands from the wrists as though to limber them up. As Quentin stared amazed, Jack gave Sentier a shove; the latter rolled down on the floor and flopped over on his back in a loose, sickening sort of way. His face was purple, his black tongue protruded, and there were black marks on his neck.

“Neat job,” Jack said, “if you’re really as surprised as you look. You went too far, reminding me of Sis and home.”

iii

Quentin looked down at the dead man, and up at Jack’s stalwart figure.

“Democracy versus mechanocracy,” he said. “That is the way it goes between individuals. Between the organized groups, it would come out exactly the opposite.

“The machine wins, though its subject people are weaklings. Wouldn’t it be better for the race to destroy the machine?

“But I couldn’t do it. Every fiber of my nature has been brought up to consider the Government Machine as a sacred mother—

“But, I’ll bet Jack would have the nerve in a minute—”

“Come,” whispered Jack shrilly, “let’s get out!”

He was already stripping off the dead man’s uniform. He held it up and surveyed it ruefully against his own strapping bulk.

“I’ll put it on,” Quentin said. “I can act the part where you cannot. It’ll be your turn when the rough-house begins.”

Quentin’s clothes were put on the dead man, and the latter’s keys were used to open the door. They walked past the sentry at the door, receiving his salute without the fl utter of an eyelid, and marched down the hallway, Jack in front with the handcuffs on, but not locked. Quentin came behind him in the captain’s uniform, bearing the shock-rod. They had no plan, except that Quentin suddenly thought of his secret airplane, and determined to get to it.

But how? It was out on Long Island. They were in the middle of a huge city, one solid structure honeycombed with mazes and labyrinths of streets and passages horizontal and vertical. The end of it was three or four miles away, three or four miles of endless, buzzing, swarming, whirling machinery and humanity between them and open country.

“Our best bet,” Quentin said, “is to get down to the lowest level. There we ought to find some sort of a burrow to crawl out of. To the elevator.”

They reached the elevator and pushed its button. Its door opened and they stepped in, setting the button on the “eight-below” level, the lowest of them all. The car started down.

A gong clanged and kept on clanging somewhere in the depths of
the building. A loud speaker began to bellow hoarsely on the floor
they were passing; its roar died down as they left the floor behind, but
was taken up by another on the floor below.

“The guard has found Sentier,” whispered Quentin, “and has turned in the alarm. Well, let’s show ’em a scrap!”

A new voice began in the speaker. It was crisp and gave orders.

“—all doors,” they heard as they shot past a floor.

“—shut off the Power and search all elevators—” on another,

“Hm!” said Quentin as the elevator slowed down and they saw through the bars a group of blue uniforms approaching. Jack was tense for a fight.

“Not yet!” Quentin warned him. “Remember we can’t fight the organization.”

“All right!” he shouted to the approaching policemen. “I’ve got one of them. One of you come along. And get the power back on quick and the elevator moving, so that I can hustle him back where he belongs.”

The policemen saluted Quentin. One of them stepped in and glared at Jack. The elevator door closed. In a few moments the car shot upward again.

Quentin touched the policeman with the shock-rod, and as he lay limp, Jack put the handcuffs on him, tied his feet with a strap from the policeman’s own puttees, and gagged him with a handkerchief. The policeman, unaccustomed to such rough handling, winced and shrank away, groaning. The elevator shot upward swiftly, passing floors by dozens and scores. The Euthanasia Chambers were left far below. On each floor were crowding people, clanging gongs, and bellowing speakers. Eventually they stopped. Outside was huge machinery, wheels, pulleys, motors. Above was the sky of wavy glass. Somewhere, far away below, were footsteps pounding up metal stairs. They were just under the roof, a thousand feet above the ground.

“Up on my shoulders!” said Jack, glancing up at the skylight.

Quentin unhooked the skylight, climbed out, and helped Jack up after him. All about them was a sea of roofs, miles and miles of them, flat dirty, with little cubicles and penthouses scattered by the hundreds and ventilators by the thousands. Above them on its tall flagpole waved the black streamer, which undoubtedly marked the location of the Euthanasia Chambers as a guide for aircraft. There were other flagpoles and other streamers, but no more black ones. They ran. They ran at random, not knowing whither.

They ran till their breath was all gone, and then sank down and lay flat. Jack still trembled at the sensation of having crossed a bridge way between two buildings and glimpsed a street a thousand feet below, a faint stream of blended, moving masses. Just now there was no one in sight. The scene was no different than when they had started. Only the absence of the black streamer made him sure that they were in a different place.

“Bad fix,” Quentin said. “We’ll starve up here.”

“Oh, no,” Jack replied easily. “We’ll depend on the sun for direction, and keep going till we find an end or edge. We’ll find some way of getting to the ground and getting away.”

“Well, you’ve got nerve, anyway. And it’s better to die trying than to sit here.”

Then they noted airplanes searching round and round above them. They crouched down in the shadows between the pipes and cubicles. The planes came lower and closer together.

“They got the planes out quick,” Jack observed.

“It did, you mean. It’s all automatic. The men are just tools. The whole city is an electrical brain, and is just a subsidiary of the Washington brain; a sort of inferior ganglion. The men could never think nor work that fast. The planes are now coming straight at us; evidently they have located us by some such methods as the refractograph, which by the refraction of light detects the column of carbon dioxide rising from our lungs, the telaud which can hear us whisper or our hearts beat, or the bolograph which locates us by the heat of our bodies.”

A plane landed on a level place a hundred yards away. Another and another alighted beside it. Figures poured out and began to close in on the two fugitives. Ahead of them was the edge of the building, with a sheer vertical drop of a thousand feet. There was no bridgeway, no door.

“Ha!” Quentin pointed to a flagpole from which floated a long silver streamer. It was some sort of a commercial signal to aircraft. The halliards on which the flag hung extended down over the edge of the roof. “Those ropes run into a window below.”

Figures in blue were running toward them. Jack slid down the rope first and disappeared. Quentin waited for the rope to loosen as Jack got off, uncertain as to whether it would hold their combined weight. But he found a policeman sliding down the rope after him. The policeman hung on tightly and moved gingerly; Quentin looked up and saw his face ashy pale as it looked down at him. For the two of them swung out in space over a canyon a thousand feet deep, at the bottom of which moved slow streams of men and machines. A blended murmur came up to the two tiny men dangling high up there on a rope.

The policeman was poking downward toward Quentin with his shock-rod. Other faces were looking down over the edge of the roof, tense and distorted. Jack shouted from below, some incoherent, encouraging thing. The policeman slid down faster to catch Quentin. Quentin jabbed viciously upwards with his shock-rod and felt it touch. The policeman went limp and seemed to float out into space. His blue body sprawled out and turned over and over as it fell. With deadly rapidity it grew smaller and contracted to a dot far down in the gloom below. Quentin felt himself drawn into the window and trembled as he sat down for an instant on the floor.

Jack was dragging him toward a door. He could see the flag halliards tightening as another man started down. Out in the corridor they found gongs ringing and speakers bellowing, but no people. On all sides there was a roar and clatter of machinery behind closed doors. They opened one and dashed into a huge room full of big machines in rows; steam sizzled and white linen flashed by. At the far end, from every machine in a long row came baskets piled high with clean laundry, and scudded along roller conveyors into openings in the wall. People were visible. The baskets of laundry disappearing into dark openings gave Quentin an idea.

“Come on!” shouted Quentin.

They ran across the room. Each seized one of the baskets, dumped the linen on the floor, set the basket back on the roller conveyor, and got into it.

The darkness of the pit closed upon them. Machinery clattered and steam hissed. They bent low, not knowing what was above them. They felt themselves sink rapidly and again tipped level; there were gears grinding as they rounded corners. There seemed no end of sinking down and down in the blackness.

Finally, after a clatter of paper there came a burst of light. They saw clothes dumped out of baskets, wrapped in paper, and shot into tubes, all by machinery. They leaped out on the floor. Again there were no people. No bawling speakers. No gongs. Only the open mouths of pneumatic tubes, an endless row of them, each marked with its destination.

Quentin eagerly looked for Brooklyn. It took but a moment to find it.

“All aboard for Long Island!” he shouted in glee.

As a wrapped package came down the conveyor toward the Brooklyn tube, he rolled it off and they took its place. The lid popped shut on the tube, nearly rupturing their ear-drums, and they were plunged in darkness. After the first rush and swirl and roar, all was quiet for minutes.

Again there was a roar and a crash and a burst of daylight. The two fugitives jumped up and ran, knocking over several astonished people who were waiting for packages; their destination was an open door with daylight beyond. Out there was a row of trucks with laundry packages dropping into them from overhead chutes. They were automatic trucks such as are used for making deliveries beyond the pneumatic-tube zone.

They leaped into the foremost truck. Quentin set the switches on impulse for Bay Shore, because that was not where he wanted to go, and they both rolled back into the closed portion of the vehicle. The truck started slowly, gathered momentum, and automatically made its way out of the city.

After fifteen minutes of eternity, they looked out. The truck was moving swiftly along a country road. Twilight was gathering rapidly.

“We’d better jump out and let it go on,” Quentin suggested. “It’s clever and powerful.”

“What is?” asked Jack, “the Police Department?”

“The Machine. The Government Machine in Washington and its subsidiary portion in New York. It’s a big brain. The police are dumb tools.”

They waited for the truck to slow up around a curve, and jumped out. They alighted on grass. Jack rolled over and jumped up. Quentin found his breath gone and his head dizzy. He crawled unsteadily into the shelter of some shrubbery. In a few minutes a half-dozen speedcycles on the road and planes in the air whizzed by, in pursuit of the laundry car.

“See how quickly it works,” Quentin said.

“It’s uncanny to hear you talk about it!” Jack exclaimed. “It’s inhuman!”

“Next it will be flares and spotlights,” Quentin warned.

Quentin found walking difficult and felt a terrific headache. He must have gotten a crack on the head when he fell out of the truck. Jack supported him and they staggered on. Ten miles ahead was their destination, his little country bungalow with its secret cellar. This was familiar terrain for Quentin, but ten miles cross-country in the darkness was none the less difficult. Even crossing a road would be dangerous. As they stumbled across field and through brush and timber, Quentin felt himself growing weaker.

It was not long before the lights appeared. Ahead of them, to the right, the country was lighted as bright as day.

“They’re headed wrong,” Quentin chuckled as he staggered desperately along. “We’re going to the left at right angles to them.”

Quentin did not recollect the rest of the night very clearly. Jack’s strong shoulders were a comfort without which he could not have gone a mile. His head cleared up now and then in flashes to answer Jack’s questions, and again he would relapse into a half-comatose state in which he walked. The guiding of the way depended on him.

“No rest from the Machine,” went round and round in his head. “On all sides of us, thousands, millions of tentacles are squirming to close in on us, day and night. Soon my buzzing brain will give out. Then the Machine will reach out and pick us up. The Machine ought to be destroyed—!

“But that is treason,” leaped through his brain in a sudden shock. “How do I dare even think such treason? Because my head sings from the bump it got, I suppose. But suppose Jack thought that. That would not be treason. And Jack has physical courage to do things, even to destroy the Machine. It would be easy to do just that one square building. Wreck that, and the Government Machine is dead. Jack would dare it if I told him.

“But I can’t make myself tell him. It is treason. Even to think it is treason. Why can’t he see it himself? I keep giving him hints—”

Jack kept continuously interrupting him with questions.

“How can they make it so much like daylight over there?”

Quentin hoped in a dazed way that his explanation of the thousand-foot flare circles that eliminated shadows, was correct. Then again he trudged on in his sleep, till he was roused by Jack.

“How do we get across?”

He came wide awake for a moment. In front was a twenty-foot wall.

“The Long Island Transformer Depot. We’ll have to go around. To the left. That was a bad crack on my head. I’ve got to rest.”

Jack had to lift him and drag him a few feet before his legs got to swinging again. Then again came Jack’s demand for a key.

“Got to move,” Jack said. “The lights are starting this way.”

“Here we are!” Quentin shouted as he came to again. He unlocked the door to the little bungalow. They found themselves in a small hallway from which steps led down to the spacious underground shop. Jack gasped in amazement at it.

“I understood you to say,” he exclaimed, “that you did this secretly and alone. Why, digging this cave would take years of time.”

Quentin was nodding drowsily again.

“Power is cheap,” he said. “See there.”

There was a heap of cartridge-like things.

“I dug out this place with those. Screw a red one to a blue one and drop them. It is a slow explosion. No noise. But in a few moments everything, iron, rock, everything is a loose, fluffy powder. I swept it out. And now I’ve got to sleep. My head hurts.”

iv

QUENTIN awoke to the humming of smooth, well-adjusted machinery. Bright sunlight shone full upon him. He lay and rested, and was conscious of a headache. There was a painful lump on his occiput. He studied the strange place about him.

Finally he realized that it was the cabin of his own secret plane. He sat up. Down below was blue water, and to the left a beautiful lacy shore and blue mountains. In front of him was Jack, peering ahead. As Jack heard a stir behind him, he sat up; his face lighted up to see Quentin awake.

“Where are we?” Quentin asked.

“I’m no geographer,” Jack said, “but it must be the Mediterranean.”

“See!” continued the boy. “We got away from ’em? Or from It, as you say.” He grinned as though on a schoolboy lark.

Quentin shook his head gloomily.

“We’re not out of it yet. Sooner or later it will get us— anywhere on this earth. My big hope is that I might see Martha first.”

He sat, sunk in gloomy thoughts. Jack grinned happily. He seemed to be a creature that responded to the happy stimuli of the present, and forgot that there was a future.

“You need some breakfast, sir,” he said. “Then you’ll feel better.”

Quentin ate and then lay down and slept again. After he awoke, he spent many hours searching the sky around him and the fleeting ground below. It was acute torture to feel that every moment a swarm of planes would swoop down on them. Every dot in the blue caused him to peer intently and with beating heart and clutching hands, until it was passed by safely. But it began to look hopeful as they passed over Asia Minor and into India, without any sign of pursuit or interference. He permitted pleasant thoughts of Martha to flow through his mind.

Above northern India he became alert. Eagerly he watched the Himalayas fall behind. The machine needed only an occasional touch for guidance. A shout from Jack called his attention to the green levels of Democratia. Slowly its woods and mountains separated themselves from the blue haze. Then they crossed its edge. They headed toward the capital.

Quentin’s heart pounded. He was now confident that no matter what happened eventually, he would see Martha first. Up to the present time he had been racked with uncertainty. Her image rose up before his eyes, and his veins tingled and his breath came short with anticipation.

The radio of Quentin’s plane could not tune in with the inferior ones of Democratia; none of his messages got through. Therefore, no one awaited them at the landing-field. But, after telephoning and driving in a car, they were eventually at the house of Jack’s father, and Quentin and Martha were in each other’s arms. And after that, the four of them were gravely discussing the future.

“There is no hope,” Quentin said. “The Government considers that it owns the Earth. It has pronounced sentence and nothing on earth can prevent its being carried out.”

“How do you suppose they will do it?” asked Quentin’s host; “Explosives?”

“Hardly explosives,” considered Quentin. “Gas probably. Gas bombs from planes. Electric charges and disease bacilli are possible, but the one is unnecessarily expensive and the other unnecessarily brutal. The Government Machine is inexorable; but it will do nothing unnecessary. It is hard for you to realize the absolutely perfect, impersonal logic of the Machine. My guess is gas, some swift, painless gas.”

“Perhaps,” Jack said, “they will shout us to death with those shriekers they had on all their floors.”

“Now, Jack!” Martha protested, in tears. She clung to Quentin. “But it’s just like you, being silly, even in the face of death.”

“What I ought to do,” Jack bantered, swelling up his biceps, “is to punch the face of death right in the nose.” Jack loved his sister and was doing his best to cheer her up in his clumsy way.

Then they discussed whether or not an alarm ought to be spread among the people of Democratia. Quentin’s host was in a responsible government position and had authority to decide.

“What would be the use?” Quentin asked. “No defense is possible. No escape is possible. There would only be panic and riots and needless suffering. It is most merciful to let it come as a complete surprise.”

“We’ll carry the burden, then.”

Quentin and Martha spent most of the day clinging close together. There was no sleep for them nor for her father that night.

“Isn’t it terrible!” Martha exclaimed, “to see that young animal, Jack, sleep soundly in spite of all this? Hasn’t he any feelings? We may never see the morning light again.”

But morning dawned bright and clear upon the smiling land. It was torture to the three people who anxiously scanned the sky. Jack went out to play golf and the rest of the nation went about its business. In the middle of the forenoon four planes appeared in the southern sky. Shortly afterwards Jack came in, much interested in them, but showing no fear. He was certainly a primitive creature.

The planes came straight toward the city, and the three watchers prepared to die; and bade goodbye to each other and to Jack, who by this time had grown serious and looked worried.

Quentin was almost breathless when the planes settled hesitatingly on the landing-field. An emergency car hurried him and his companion out there. There, in a circle between the four planes, were a dozen people, most of whom Quentin recognized as prominent figures in New York life. But they looked pale and crushed; they looked about furtively and helplessly. Despair showed in their attitudes and in their silence. They livened up a little when they saw Quentin approaching. He looked at them in amazement and waited for them to speak.

“We’ve come to ask for help,” one of them said. “Will you help us?”

Again Quentin could not find words.

“The world is in chaos,” the man said. “Disorder. Starvation. Disease. People are dying by millions. Trampling, exposure, suicide— no one knows what to do.”

“What in the world has happened?” Quentin managed to gasp.

“An explosion,” the man answered. “The key parts of the Government Machine are totally destroyed. No one knows how to repair it. The world is disorganized.”

Quentin stared blankly.

“We thought perhaps you had done it,” the man continued. “We knew of your daring escape—”

Quentin silently shook his head. Then he got a sudden idea.

“Jack!” he said sharply, turning toward that young man. “You rascal—”

Jack sheepishly came out from behind his sister.

“What do you know about this?” Quentin demanded.

“Well,” Jack stammered. “You were so positive that inhuman thing would catch us sooner or later— I didn’t want to take any chances. It wanted to kill all of our people. And you were knocked out with a bump on your head—

“The red and blue cartridges looked interesting. I tried a pair out on a couple of police cycles that were snooping around outside the house. It wiped them out.

“So I rolled you into the plane, blew the doors open, shoveled in the cartridges, and headed for Washington. I spent that trip screwing together as many as I could. Then I spilled a couple of hatfuls on the Government Building, and waited only long enough to see the corners begin to crumple. Then I lit out, straight up in the air. There were too many planes around—”

The rest was smothered in his sister’s hug. His father had an arm about his shoulders. Quentin slapped him on the back.

The spokesman again approached Quentin. “Will you and these people help us?”

“We will,” Martha’s father said.

“We’ll reorganize the world.” said Quentin.

“As a democracy.” Jack added.

“And you, Jack,” Quentin said, “will do a whale of a big share of the job. We need guys like you.”

_______________________

13: Millions for Defense

Amazing Stories, March 1935

“IT’S about time you quit fooling around and got down to some real work. You’ve been tinkering long enough.”

The coarse, red face of Jake Bloor spread into an unsympathetic leer and he grunted contemptuously.

“I promised your mother I’d put you through school,” he continued. “Now I’m through with that, and a big bunch of boloney I call it.”

That was the welcome that awaited John Stengel after graduation from college, upon his arrival at the only home he had, that of his uncle, who was a banker in the small country village of Centerville. “Yes, sir,” replied John, biting his lips.

His uncle screwed his lips into ugly rolls around his cigar, and then took it out and spat on the floor.

“This job I’m giving you in my bank,” he went on, “is not a part of my promise to your mother. That comes out of the kindness of my heart.”

That mind can and does triumph over matter was demonstrated again by the fact that John did not turn on his heel and walk out of the house, never to return. John Stengel, known to his fellow-students for four years as Steinmetz Stengel, stood five burly inches above his stocky uncle; his blue eyes blazed a resentment that was everywhere else concealed by his quiet and respectful bearing. The powerful arm that bent to run his big hand through his yellow hair could have knocked his corpulent uncle off his feet, but it dropped quietly at his side, and he again said:

“Yes, sir!”

For, graduation is a bewildering experience. The world is wide, and one is not sure just which way to turn. A fifteen-dollar a week job as a clerk in a country bank was nevertheless a discouraging job to the rosy aspirations that flowered at this time of the year, quite as brilliantly as did the roses; for behind him were four splendid years of distinguished achievement as a scientific student.

However, just now there seemed no way around it. The offer of this job from his uncle had come several weeks before. Jake Bloor had not presented it kindly nor gracefully; he had rubbed it in with patriarchal magnanimity, and with conspicuous contempt for John’s scientific training, which he had permitted only because of his promise to his dead sister, when she had placed John in his hands. During the weeks between his uncle’s offer and the date of graduation, John had thought hard and tried everything. Especially he had discussed the problem with his fellow-students and his instructors. He had nothing else to fall back on. His parents had died when he was a child and left him nothing but the ill-natured promise of a grumpy uncle. He had tried in vain to get a position of any sort; but the country was in the grip of the most severe financial depression of the century. No positions were available anywhere. His failure to locate anything in the way of a livelihood, after several months of correspondence during his last year of school, was not surprising, with ten millions of unemployed in the nation. The bank-clerk job, even though it was offered largely as an insult to John’s scientific training, seemed like a straw to a drowning man. It had occurred to John that Jake Bloor was prosperous even while other country banks were failing. “Your uncle seems to be a good business man, and it will do you no harm to learn something about business,” one of his student friends said to him.

“Keep up some scientific reading,” the Dean of the Engineering Department said to him, “but by all means take the job. Keep your laboratory hand in practice somehow.”

The Dean was much interested in John’s future, and consulted with John at length about the matter.

“You will get there in the long run,” the Dean said; “but do not permit yourself to become stagnant.”

The suggestion of John’s roommate, who was as brilliant and clever an engineer as John himself, seemed to offer the most promise of interest.

“These country banks simply invite robbery,” Bates had said. “Perfectly simple to walk in and help yourself—”

“You mean that I ought to rig up some stuff to protect the shack in case of robbery? Good idea!” John was interested.

“Easy enough, wouldn’t it be? And a good way to amuse yourself.”

“And Hansie, dear,” Dorothy had said to him, “I know you can do something great no matter where you go. This is only temporary, and we’ll be patient, and some day we shall have that home together.”

Dorothy was at the same time the Light of the World, and the hardest problem of John’s life. They had decided that they could not live without each other; and yet here they were, finding it impossible to live together. But, as Dorothy held on to his arm, walking with him across the campus in the moonlight, and held her soft, brown head close to his and gazed at him with limpid, sympathetic eyes, John felt that he could and must accomplish anything in the world for this wonderful girl that a kind Providence had given him.

Centerville was certainly a drab and dismal place, after the glitter of life on the campus, whose great, picturesque buildings had thrilling things going on in them. Here there were half a dozen tiny business buildings strung out along two sides of the dusty highway, and a score or so of cottage residences scattered about, and beyond those, monotonous prairie in all directions. There were two general stores; t he one in the brick building was carelessly run and had a poor stock; the other was better arranged and more ambitious, but its wooden, gable-roofed shack looked almost ready to collapse in upon it. The garage was the busiest and most systematic-looking place in the neighborhood. Two “cafes” (in reality soft-drink parlors), one ragged and catering to coarsely dressed men, one somewhat cleaner and filled at noon with high-school students; a hardware store with dirty windows and a heap of nondescript junk within them covered with the undisturbed dust of years; a drug-store with its window full of patent-medicine and cosmetic posters mottled by fading, all gave John an indescribably dreary feeling of lostness and futility. The traffic that slipped down the highway all day, and the color and activity of the two filling stations, Standard Oil at one end and Conoco at the other, did but little to relieve him.

The bank itself made John think of the little toy banks that children play with; and when he first set eyes on it he was sure that it must have a slot in the top to drop nickels in. It was square, somewhat larger than a garage, with white-painted drop-siding and a fl at roof. Within, it had iron bars across the windows, a single room divided in two by a counter with a rusty iron grill, a big iron safe set on wheels. The floor was unpainted and splintery; the ink in the bottle on the sloping-topped table at the door, was dry and caked, and the pad of deposit slips upon it was yellow and curled with age. Hardly anyone passed along the little street all day, and only rarely stepped into the bank itself. Between two and three in the afternoon there were a few merchants; Saturday evenings there might be three or four farmers in the bank all at once.

John smiled when he first saw the place. Providing there were anything to take, it would be the simplest and easiest of tasks for the modern bank-robber to clean the place out and get away. It certainly looked as though there might be something to take. His uncle Jake Bloor’s huge, sprawling, white house brooded over the village like some coarse temple; and his big, throbbing cars glittered back and forth from the city, boasting insolently of money. It seemed especially insolent to John; because he knew there were countless unemployed who did not know where their next meal was coming from, and countless others who were ground almost flat to the earth by debts and losses at this particular time, while his uncle lorded it about without a care in the world nor a thought for others. It did not seem fair that this crude, heartless man, who had never done the world any material service, but had only selfishly pinched off for himself generous portions of the world’s money which he had handled, should be rolling in safety and luxury, at a time when men who had invented and built and taught and organized were being faced with grim want. Things weren’t right in the world.

John was young and human. We cannot blame him, therefore, for the fact that when he did eventually get to work to devise some scientific means for preventing a robbery of the bank, that his motive did not consist of any overwhelming loyalty to his uncle’s bank. He did it merely because he took pleasure in the creation of something that would operate. The abstract idea in the mind, when the concrete working out of it does things that can be seen and felt— that is the thrill of the creative spirit. John loved his figures and his drawings; he loved the coils and the storage batteries, the clicking little gears and the quick little switches that tickled and made swift little movements of their own accord, as though they were living and intelligent things.

For many long, luxurious weeks he did nothing; it was a delight to be merely a sort of vegetable; to rest from the rush of the last weeks in school; to shed completely, if temporarily, the strain of looking into the future. His mind hibernated during that time, and lay fallow; for it required no effort to discharge his simple duties as clerk at the bank; and life in Centerville was an excellent anesthetic. His body made up what it had missed in exercise by long walks down the highway and along the railroad tracks. Long letters to and from Dorothy, punctuated the soothing monotony, and the thrill they gave him was all the excitement he wanted. They must have been good letters, as we might have judged could we have but seen him slip off into solitude on the first opportunity after their arrival, his face breaking out in delightful smiles— only no one saw him.

Finally, one day in the fall, after the heat of the summer was out of his bones, he began to get ambitious. First he put a coat of bronze paint on the rusty window-bars and on the grill-work of the counter.

“Looks like a new place in here,” said old Larson the town constable, who was the first one to come in and see it. John smiled.

“I believe my sixty cents’ worth of paint will boost the confidence of the bank’s depositors thousands of dollars,” he bantered.

Jake Bloor guffawed when he came in and saw it.

“All right!” he sneered. “If you want to waste your pennies that way in this dump. But I think you’re a damned fool!”

This was not very encouraging, thought John, for broaching the idea of installing some equipment for protection against robbery. He decided to say nothing about it for the present, and await a better chance.

A week dragged out its length after that, and John began to get restless. The autumn coolness was beginning to be stimulating and after his most excellent rest, John wanted to be up and doing something, using his hands and his brain. The matter of devising some protection against robbery in the bank was constantly on his mind. He turned over in his head various projects. He watched his uncle, constantly hoping for a chance to mention the matter.

Then one morning the city daily came in with two-column heads about the robbing of the bank at Athens, forty miles away. Three masked men had walked into the bank in the middle of the afternoon; one had forced the clerk to hold up his hands at the muzzle of a pistol, while the others had cleaned out the safe, gotten into a car, and disappeared. Eighty thousand dollars worth of cash and negotiable securities had vanished. No trace of any kind could be found of the robbers.

“I could rig up some stuff to prevent that sort of thing in your bank,” John said, forcing his voice into a casual tone over his pancakes:

“Prevent what?” growled his uncle.

“Your bank being robbed, like the one at Athens,” John said.

“Oh!” and a couple of grunts from the uncle.

“Doesn’t it worry you? It might happen to us, you know.” John was showing anxiety in his voice— whether for the fate of his uncle’s bank or in his eagerness to be at some technical work, again, he could not tell.

“Oh, I suppose.” And Jake Bloor went on reading.

“Do you mind if I fix up some apparatus to protect you?”

“All a bunch of humbug!” Jake Bloor exclaimed impatiently, gnawing at his cigar. “The swindlers are always after me with the stuff. They want to sell something, that’s all.”

“No. I don’t mean for you to buy anything,” John urged. “I’ll make it myself.”

His uncle roared derisively. “That would cost more than ever!”

“It wouldn’t cost you a cent!” John explained, holding down his anger with difficulty. After a moment’s silence he regained his control. “If you don’t mind,” he continued, “I’ll fix it up for you at no expense to yourself.”

“You’re a damn fool!” Jake Bloor sneered; “But go ahead and have your fun. Only look out and don’t do any damage. That’s all I care about.”

He got up and walked out of the house. In the door he stopped and snorted back at John:

“And don’t kid yourself too much. Those fellahs are on to these tricks. Before you could kick off your alarm they would have you shot. Better take care of your hide.”

John thought it over as he walked to the bank that morning.

“If he invites robbery, I ought to let him be robbed,” he thought. “But, if he should be robbed, as it is probable that he will be, his bank being the richest as well as the most rickety for a long distance around, where would my job be? And, as four months writing of applications all over the country hasn’t got me an answer, where would I be without a job? Seems that it is up to me to protect the bank whether he wants it or not.”

Then his mind turned to the technical parts of the problem and began to run quickly about among them.

“I believe he is right, too,” he thought, “about kicking off an alarm under the counter. That is an old dodge, and the robbers are probably ready for it. There must be a way around that.”

For a solid month John was happy. He was the same old Steinmetz Stengel, whom his fellow-students gibed at, and at the same time loved so well, going about in an abstracted gaze, studying some complex problem in his head, or spending every spare moment of the day and many hours at night with the slide-rule and drawing-instruments, and with tools and materials, giving some astonishing child of his brain the outward concrete form that was necessary to make it a visible and functioning thing among men. Packages in corrugated paper and wooden boxes arrived for him at the little railway station; and there were a few automobile trips to the city.

When the thing was finished it differed vastly from the usual burglary protection equipment. Nevertheless it was quite simple. The keynote of it was a row of photo-electric cells just above his head, which received daylight from the window behind him, and permitted a steady flow of current from a storage battery, whose charge was maintained by a trickle charger from the lighting current. This storage-battery current held down a relay armature. Anything that cut off the light from the photo-electric cells would shut off the storage-battery current, release the relay, and set off the works.

When he had gotten it made thus far, he tried it out several times by raising his hands above his head while he stood at his window, as though he were facing a bank’s customer.

“Hands up!” his imagination supplied the robber’s command. His hands went up; there was a click, and the three one-quarter-horse-power motors began to whirr.

The usual device in the country bank is a big alarm bell on the outside of the building. This had been a conspicuous failure in a number of recent robberies in the neighborhood. Those who were summoned by the alarm came too late or did not have nerve enough to interfere. In one case the accomplices on the outside had found it a convenient warning to help them get away, and in another they had held all the arrivals at bay, and made a good getaway with the booty. John discarded the idea of the alarm bell to awaken the village, and looked for an improvement on it.

A drum of tear-gas supplied the solution. One of the motors operated by the relay was so arranged as to shoot a blast of tear-gas right across the public side of the bank room, just where the hold-up men would be standing. A telephone-pair to the city fourteen miles away, rented at two dollars a month, comprised the next step; over these wires he arranged for an automatic signal in the sheriff’s office, which would announce that the bank was being robbed, just as soon as the storage-battery current was cut off by the raised hands in front of the photo-electric cells.

A second motor set off by the relay, located in a box under the building, closed the outside door and shot an iron bar across it to keep it closed. John also reinforced this street door by screwing to it a latticework of iron straps and painting them neatly.

He felt highly thrilled the evening that he gave the apparatus its first trial. He tried it after dark, and therefore had to put a strong electric-light bulb into the street window to replace daylight, and instead of tear-gas he used a drum of compressed air. He rehearsed the whole scene in his mind: the door burst open by masked men, the pistol stuck in his face, and demand: “Hands up!” He put his hands up in as natural a manner as possible, and his delight knew no bounds to hear the relay click, so softly that no one not looking for it could possibly have caught it; he was even moderately startled at the sudden loud hiss of escaping air, and the street door slammed shut in a ghostly manner. He walked around in front of his window in the latticework on the counter, and felt the compressed air from the tank still blowing right across the place where the imagined robber was standing.

That ought to have been enough. It was amply sufficient to take care of any robbery that might have been staged. But John had a third motor at hand and some vague idea in his head. There was still something lacking, though he could not quite put his finger on the lack. For several days he was uneasy with the half-emerging thought that there was still something that he ought to add to this. But, try as he might, nothing further occurred to him. The arrangement, as he had it, seemed to be enough, and that was all he could think of.

He therefore demonstrated it to his uncle one evening. Jake Bloor said nothing, which was unusual for him. He was rarely silent. It may have meant that he was impressed; it may not. He did manage to keep the contemptuous look on his heavy red face. But he walked out without having said a word. The next morning he threw the newspaper sneeringly across the table at John, who was eating with his head bent down, thinking of Dorothy. John glanced at the captions, announcing that another bank had been robbed, and that the bank clerk, who had been in league with the robbers, had handed out the booty and was also under arrest.

“Good idea!” drawled Jake through his nose. “Combine that with your plan. Load up the robbers nicely and then turn on your tricks. With a gas mask you can take the swag off them and hide it before the police come—”

John heard no more. His mind was busy again. He saw the danger to himself. And, as never before, he observed the paltry meanness of his uncle’s character. There was some deep subtlety in Jake Bloor’s sarcastic persecution of the earnest, ambitious boy, which John could not comprehend. That Jake hated John seemed to be clear. But why? And why had he gotten him there apparently at his mercy for the purpose of getting him into trouble? The only thing that John had to go on was that his Uncle’s old, patriarchal conception of the “honor” of the family had been hurt when John’s mother had run off and married a poor but clever mechanic. That was in the eyes of all her relatives, a mortal sin, not even possible of explanation by her unoffending son.

But, John’s mind ran more to mechanisms than to the tangled personal relationships of the family. A few days of hard thinking convinced him that there was only one way to protect himself, and that was to include himself in the field of the tear-gas. He would have to take his medicine at the same instant as did the rest of them. One October afternoon, out on one of his walks, he strode down the highway into the dusty sunset, and ahead of him a farmer was raising a tremendous dust in a field, getting together, with a horse hay rake, a lot of old weeds for burning. As the farmer moved his lever and pulled his lines, the row of curved steel tines beneath him poised and waited, and then pounced upon their prey, and John got an idea. He thought of a use for his third motor.

He was soon busy again in his improvised workshop, putting together two affairs that resembled big hay rakes, each as tall as a man; but the tines were of rigid steel, and when they closed toward each other, they could grip a man as tightly as a huge steel claw, and hold him immovable. He installed these, one on each side of his teller’s window at the counter, with the motor under the floor so arranged that it could rotate them against each other and slip them past a catch which would lock them firmly together. When the photo-electric relay went off, anyone standing in front of the window would be raked in, clutched, and held in a steel fist, six feet tall. Yet, when these claws were turned back out of the way, painted with bronze paint, they mingled with the bronzed grillwork of the counter, and were hardly noticeable.

For some time Jake Bloor had been talking of taking a trip West for a several weeks’ stay. There was no mention of the purpose of the trip, and it was discussed in a sort of secretive way, causing John to half suspect that his uncle might be bound on a bootlegging expedition. But he cast it out of his mind, considering that it was none of his business. He was too worried anyway, to think of that, by Jake’s stern admonitions about bank affairs.

John was thoroughly frightened for Jake Bloor held him closely responsible for the veriest trifles as well as for the largest affairs, and yet had not properly inducted him into an adequate knowledge of the bank’s affairs. It was an unfair position for John, and he felt like a blindfolded man walking a tightrope across a chasm; he was just trusting to luck that nothing went wrong before his uncle returned.

“Don’t pass up any good loans,” his uncle growled at the breakfast table on the day of his departure. “But, if I find any rotten paper in the vault when I get back, I’ll wring your neck.”

John said nothing, but was determined in his mind to loan nothing, and sit tight waiting for his uncle’s return; for he could not tell good paper from bad. His business was engineering.

“I’ll stop at the bank yet before I leave,” Jake said, with an air of thrusting a disgusting morsel down an unwilling throat.

ABOUT the middle of the forenoon, the loneliest time of the day, John heard his uncle’s car drive up in front of the bank. He could see suitcases strapped to the rear of it. Two men walked into the bank along with Jake, one of them carrying a large suitcase. Jake Bloor drew a big pistol and leveled it at John with a sneer.

“Well, let’s see how your plaything works,” he said in a hard, ironic voice.

John protested vigorously.

“Tear gas is no fun—”

“Do you suppose I really want a dose of it?” his uncle roared. “Don’t you dare put up your hands. Keep them on the table where I can see them. No kid tricks, either!”

His grim harshness now alarmed John.

“I’m more afraid of that big pistol than of the gas,” John protested again. His voice stuck in his throat, and lights danced before his eyes; the whole business was such a shock that he could not puzzle it out, though his brain roared like a racing motor in the effort to make head or tail of it. “That thing might go off and hurt somebody.”

“Damn right it might!” his uncle growled. “That’s why you had better be careful and not play anything on me. Keep your pretty hands still, or I’ll ruin them with a bullet. Now, turn around, march over to the vault, and bring me the tin boxes with the cash and the bonds.— Go on, damn it! I mean it!”

Jake snapped the hammer of the revolver, and John turned with considerable alacrity and went after the tin boxes of valuables in the safe. His face was pale and his hands trembled. The weakness of his ingenious plan was being shown up unmercifully. His uncle had no learning, but was diabolically clever in a practical way. John now expected to be the butt of his cruel sneering for weeks to come.

“I guess you win,” he laughed nervously at Jake. “I give up. My apparatus was no good, and the laugh is on me.”

Jake stamped violently on the floor.

“By, God I told you to get those boxes of bonds and cash. If you think I’m fooling, you’re due to learn something in about ten seconds. This bank is through, do you know it?”

John reasoned rapidly. The only thing to do was to go ahead. If it was a joke, it would be interesting to see how far it would be carried. If it was not a joke, what else was there to do anyway? After all, life on nothing with no prospects was still considerably better than a bullet through his vitals.

“And don’t touch anything, and keep your hands down low,” Jake reminded him with a thin ironic leer in his voice. “If you don’t believe I’ll shoot, just try something.”

Like a magician on the stage, anxious to show that he has nothing up his sleeve, John avoided touching anything but essentials, and touched these clearly and gingerly. He handed over some $200,000 worth of negotiable valuables from the safe, truly a princely sum for such a tiny bank. The idea occurred to him when it was too late, that he ought to have had some sort of trip or switch or button in the safe itself. That is, if it were really too late. Perhaps this was just a good chance to discover the defects of his apparatus and elaborate upon it. If this were only a test, he was certainly learning rapidly. His head was already full of improvements, and he was willing to forgive the grimness of the joke for the help it afforded.

The two other men held John covered with pistols while Jake Bloor
stowed away the tin boxes in the suitcase.

“Now,” Jake said again in that offensive, thick-lipped sneer, “I suppose you have been wondering how I am going to get out of here and keep you from pulling something. Well, it’s like taking candy from a baby.”

He approached the window again.

“Keep your hands down on that desk!” he commanded.

Jake Bloor took out his pocket knife and went for the wire that was concealed on the outside of the cage.

“Lookout! Don’t—” cried John in alarm.

“Ha! ha!” Jake thoroughly enjoyed his big laugh. “You thought I was too dumb to notice that this was your main feed wire from your battery under the floor, to your little light bulbs. Ha! ha! ho! ho! Your old uncle’s not so dumb!”

“But—” John tried to protest again.

He was too late.

“Shut up” his uncle barked sharply, “and keep your hands down.”

“O.K., joke or no joke,” thought John. “It’s on his head.”

He shut his eyes tightly and took a deep breath.

Jake cut the wire and yanked out a big length of it, which he started to put in his pocket. But he did not get that far with it. John heard the faint, comforting little click. There was a harsh hiss of gas. The door slammed ponderously shut and its bar clanged to. In front of the teller’s window there was a whirr and a clash. Loud screams rent the air.

John could not resist opening his eyes, in spite of his knowledge of what the gas would do to them. Just for an instant, before a searing pain cut fairly into them, he saw kicking, struggling, writhing, screaming figures rolling on the floor, and just in front of his teller’s window, his uncle was squeezed flat in a cage of bronzed bars, unable to move but only to give general twitching. Then John got down slowly and lay on the floor, because of the stinging in his eyes, nose and throat.

A thousand swords burned into his eyes; he sneezed and coughed and felt so miserable that he could neither remain on the floor nor stand up; he kept squirming and writhing about.

He could hear the others groaning and writhing about and kicking the floor, and the loudest lamentations came from his uncle, hung up between the steel rakes. But no attempt that he could put forth was able to get his eyes open, which, in spite of his pain, he regretted. At that moment he would have given years off his life for a sight of Jake Bloor pinned up against the counter and gassed with tear gas, holding on to his suitcase full of money.

It seemed a hundred years of flashing, stabbing misery before relief came. Actually it was twenty minutes after the breaking of the wire when the sheriff from the city arrived with a car full of armed men. During this period, no one in Centerville had awakened to the fact that anything was wrong at the bank. John felt the breath of cool, fresh air, and strong hands lifting him. He was too dazed to pay attention to what was going on, and submitted when medicine was put down his throat.

He was in bed for two days before he could get about properly. On the morning of the third day his uncle came into the room. A burly man walked on each side of him. In fact, his uncle hardly walked; he was principally supported and pushed forward. Behind them came Dorothy; darting around in front of them, she had hold of John’s hands.

“Johnny-on-the-spot!” she laughed, and kissed him in front of all the others, thereby embarrassing him tremendously.

But John had not missed the look of anxious concern on her face for an instant when she first came into the room, and before a quick glance told her that he was in good shape. He was grateful to Providence for her.

His uncle shuffled up to the bed.

“You’re fired!” he attempted his quondam roar, rather anticlimactically. He looked very much used up.

“Tush! tush!” one of the big men said. “We can’t fire that boy. We still need him.” He was softly sarcastic about it.

John looked at them closely. They were certainly not the furtive creatures who had come into the bank that forenoon with Jake Bloor. In fact, he could see the edges of shiny badges peeping out from under their coats. It was only too obvious that Jake Bloor was under heavy arrest.

“But what I want to know,” one of these big, official-looking men was saying, “is how you set off your stuff? This guy says he had you covered and that he cut your wires and pulled a section out of it.”

John laughed heartily and long. “My uncle is clever,” he said, when he could finally speak; “but he missed a slight, though important fact. That wire supplied a current from a storage battery, and as long as that current kept running, everything was peaceful. It was the breaking of the current, either by shutting off the light to the photoelectric cells by hands up, or merely by cutting the wire, that set off the relay and turned on the tricks.”

“Oh-h-h!” said Jake Bloor faintly.

“I tried to tell you—” John began.

“Never mind,” one of the big men said. “We’ll tell him. But now we want you to come to the bank.”

John dressed and went to the bank, where he again found his uncle and the two men. These two showed a persistent fondness for close proximity to his uncle; they would never permit him to move more than a few inches from their sight. There were also two smaller men going over the books.

“As I thought,” said one of the latter. “Flat failure!”

One of the big men shook Jake.

“So you had the balloon punctured, and were ready to skip,” he said quietly. “That won’t sound good to the judge. Well, anyway, there’s enough cash in your bag to pay off your depositors with— unless we have to divide it among those of the other banks he has robbed around here.”

“Robbery and embezzlement both,” said the other deputy. “That’ll be about a hundred years at Leavenworth.”

He turned to John.

“You will be required for a witness, so stay where we can reach you. I understand that the loss of this job is tough luck for you. Well, here’s hoping you have no trouble finding another.”

They all went out, bundling Jake Bloor with them. John and Dorothy were left alone in the bank.

With startling suddenness, the telephone rang shrilly. It was long distance calling from the city.

“Are you the young man who devised the apparatus that caught the robbers in this bank? This is the Palisade Insurance Company, and we need somebody like you on our staff. Can you come into the office and discuss the details of your position? Thank you.”

John and Dorothy looked into each other’s eyes. That home of dreams was becoming a reality at last.

______________________

14: The Gostak and the Doshes

Let the reader suppose that somebody states: “The gostak distims the doshes.” You 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 we 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.

“WHY! 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 light-year 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 born 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 I hadn’t spoken.

“The thing that interests us now, and 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.”

“I 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 bodies. Yet, as a matter of fact, when we drive in an automobile we ‘go somewhere’ without moving our bodies 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 upward 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 mental 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 treetop to another. Is your mind good enough to invert this: make the moon stand still and let the trees move backward? 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 t: Why? Because t 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 z. 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 fiction writers, to switch into the t dimension, some sort of apparatus with an electrical field ought to be necessary. It is not. You need nothing more to rotate into the t 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 t coordinate has depended largely upon my lucky discovery of a favorable location. It is just as, when you want the moon to ride the treetops 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 downward, does it not?— Now walk from here to the end and imagine yourself going upward. 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 upward 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 Alice-in-Wonderland 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 any rate. It was a long, three-story 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 old-fashioned looking. I 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, quiet-looking 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 how 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 I was conducted to the mathematical physicist. The student led me into the very building that 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, bald-headed man with a keen looking face. As I thanked the law student 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 farther along he pricked 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 dimension—”

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’s 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 myself a place in your world or get back to 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 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 Vibens’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 t-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 sight-seeing, and the knowledge that there was no such extensive English-speaking country in the world that I knew, convinced me that I must be on some other world, doubtless in the t 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 redheaded servant girl, roast pork and rhubarb sauce for dinner, and checkers afterward, 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 “old-fashioned” 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. He 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 businessman, the district superintendent of a life-insurance agency.) Think of it! Life insurance in Einstein’s t 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 streetcars, except for their bright green color, were perfect; they might have been brought over bodily from Oshkosh or Tulsa. The ten-cent stores with gold letters on their signs; drugstores with soft drinks; a mad, scrambling stock exchange; the blaring sign of an advertising dentist; brilliant entrances to motion-picture theaters were all there. The beauty shops 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, fl at 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 before; 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’s 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 m1 m2 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 algebraic letters, or I might have had a time getting them confused— when all of a sudden the radio blatantly bawled: “the gostak distims the doshes!”

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 for a moment.

“I say, the gostak distims the doshes!” said a fine-looking young fellow. His face was pale and strained.

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 Expression 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 long-felt 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 wonderful emotion of this sublime thought, are epoch-making. It is a great conception, 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 I 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 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 doshes — 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 waited 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 so-called 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 there was plenty of precedent for it in the history of my own z-dimensional 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 muddied and trampled on?” the editorials 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 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 because 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 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 fulfilled 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 marched through the city, and railway trains
full of them went in and out. Campaigns for raising war loans; home guards,  women’s auxiliaries, ladies’ 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 play-acting. Only when 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 front line set up. Reports of a division wiped out by an airplane attack; of forty thousand dead in a five-day 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 war. 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 self-control 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 the 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. Court-martial!”

He said it to me vindictively, and the guards jostled me roughly down the corridor; even they resented my attitude. The court-martial 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 self-control came to my aid. With the curious detachment that comes to us in such emergencies, I noted that the court-martial was being held in Professor Vibens’s 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 t-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 t dimension.

“Now, Einstein, or never!” I thought. “Come to my aid, O Riemann! O Lobachevski! 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 treetops again. If I could be a better relativist and put myself in these people’s places, 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 treetops! 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 upward. Just like making the moon stop and making the trees ride when you are out riding at night. Now I was going upward. In my own world, in the z dimension, this same poplar was down the slope.

“It’s downward!” I insisted to myself. I shut my eyes and imagined the building behind and above me. With my eyes shut, it did seem downward. I 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 uniforms? There were none.

I turned around and looked back. The slope extended on backward above me. I had indeed walked downward. There were no guards, and the fresh, new building was on the hill behind me.

Woleshensky 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’s 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 over me 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 from the section of the same conic cut 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.”

_________________

15: The Finger of the Past

Amazing Stories, November 1932

WALDO SWIFT, dapper young salesman of “Palaeoscopes, Inc.,” shifted his necktie infinitesimally into the position of utmost nicety, squared back his shoulders, and then picked up his little black case from beside the elevator door and stepped briskly and energetically toward Herodias Buffum’s office. And indeed, the prospect upon whom he was about to call was regarded among salesmen as a tough nut to crack. He had been known to eject salesmen physically into the outer corridor. Therefore, Waldo Swift, in spite of the confidence he had in the appeal of the marvelous and astonishing invention he was “distributing,” gathered together all the courage he had before he opened the door. He found himself in the luxuriously furnished reception-room belonging to the executive offices of The Radionic Remedies Company, located on the 127th floor of The Manufacturers’ Building. There were two other doors in addition to the one by which he had entered. Beyond one of them was the faint hum of typewriting machines, while the other, which bore the name of “Herodias Buffum, President,” was slightly ajar. As Swift let his eyes rove about the room taking in first one elegant object and then another, he could not help hearing clearly the sounds that came from Buffum’s office.

A distant door closed faintly, and a tinkling voice said: “Good morning, sir!”

It was Miss Peacheline Fairchild, the stenographer, who glided efficiently into the room, even before Buffum had ceased jabbing the button on his desk.

“We’ve got a lot of work today,” Buffum said deep down in his throat. “Starting on something new.”

Miss Fairchild was already sitting with notebook ready and pencil poised. Buffum was walking about the room, hands clasped behind his back, his eyes on the ceiling.

“Whew!” he exclaimed. “A quarter of a million dollars to a country doctor for a prescription on a little card. What do you think of that, Miss Fairchild?”

“Yes sir,” replied Miss Fairchild respectfully, with downcast eyes.

“Well,” continued Buffum, “it was worth it. That little card is going to save our business. Did you know that The Radionic Remedies was just about on the rocks?”

By way of reply, Miss Fairchild gazed at him with large, sympathetic eyes. Buffum continued:

“The patent-medicine business is getting difficult. People don’t fall for stuff like they used to. Our rejuvenation idea has gone stale in spite of our wonderful publicity department, and we’re going into the hole. I’ve about worried myself nuts for a new idea.”

Miss Fairchild was studying him carefully, trying to decide whether or not he was dictating, and whether or not she ought to be putting this all down. Finally she decided that it was not dictation, and nodded sympathetically. Buffum went on:

“Then comes along old Doc Cranbury with his prescription for a thought-stimulating tincture— God knows everybody needs it nowadays. Let’s see: Buffum’s Brain Builder! No. That’s weak. Well, we’ll get a name. The first thing is to get the whole organization to work on it. Take this, Miss Fairchild: Ahem! Ah-hrrr!— Wait. Let’s have a look at the prescription first.”

He started toward the wall, into which a heavy safe-door was let, when a mellow bell pealed softly. For just then, in the outer office, Waldo Swift had discovered the button marked: “Visitors Please Ring.”

“Hell!” said Buffum. He turned to Miss Fairchild: “Bring him in and we’ll have it over before we begin.”

He eyed Swift’s black case, as the latter entered the private office, while Swift’s eye traveled about the still more luxuriously furnished room. It was certainly modern with its television screen, its photophonic beam projector, the huge keyboard for controlling the distant factory from the downtown office, the helicopter landing-stage outside the window sill. There were luxurious rugs and richly finished furniture; and amidst it, Buffum glowered at the square black case in Waldo Swift’s hand.

“What the hell do you want?” he demanded.

Waldo Swift had a pleasant, cheery tone of voice. “This remarkable machine will astonish you. Tremendous value in your business, entertaining in your sure hours— ”

“I can’t be bothered now,” growled Buffum.

“Just go right on working, sir,” Waldo Swift said deferentially “I shall not interrupt.”

He set his case on the floor, opened it, took out a complicated and delicate-looking piece of mechanism, and began setting it up.

“Just pay no attention to me for the moment,” he said to Buffum. “As soon as I am ready I shall ask you to look at the screen for a couple of seconds.”

But Buffum could not keep his eyes off the shiny, clicking little mechanism.

“What is the damned thing?” he asked.

Waldo Swift, working deftly with the apparatus, replied:

“This is the famous Palaeoscope. You can connect it with any person, scene, or object, and it will project a true and faithful animated picture of what happened to that person or at that place, at any past time that you may designate.”

Buffum snorted.

“A bunch of boloney. You’re wasting my time. I’m busy.”

Swift never even noticed the discourtesy.

“I’m connecting it with your desk. What time shall we choose? Say this time yesterday. All right. Here goes!”

At first Buffum started suddenly, half rose out of his chair, and a few inarticulate gurgles escaped him. However, in an instant, Swift had moved a lever on the machine. It whirred and flickered, and on the screen appeared Buffum’s desk, at which was seated Buffum together with an old, gray-whiskered man. The latter gravely handed over to Buffum a small card in exchange for an elaborately executed check. Buffum was then seen to walk over to the safe and elaborately put away and lock up in it the newly acquired card.

“That’s far enough!” Buffum said sharply. He was evidently nervous. “Stop the thing.”

Swift shut off the machine at once.

“Now,” he said, “I shall be pleased to leave this model here with you for you to try out. I’ll see you again this afternoon.”

“I’ll look it over,” growled Buffum. “I might get one for the office boy’s Christmas present.”

“After you’ve seen what it will do, sir,” Swift said briskly, “you will want to order a hundred machines for your advertising department.”

“Arrh!” snorted Buffum. “Quit blowing smoke-rings. You’re wasting my time. I’m busy. All right, Miss Fairchild. Ready? Take this.”

“Good day, sir,” said Swift in the exit door. “I’ll see you later.”

“Hrrrumph! Damn nuisance,” growled Buffum. “All right. Let’s see, where was I? Oh, yes. We need the prescription of old Doc Cranbury’s brain-tickler.”

He got up out of his chair and walked to the safe again. Twirling the knobs, he swung open the door and reached in. His face became blank. He leaned in and searched frantically around. He became rigid. He tossed things back and forth in the safe.

“It’s gone!” he screamed. “Help! Police! It’s stolen!”

After a moment he quieted down, and walked about and groaned.

“I’m ruined!” he gasped, dropping into a chair. “The prescription is gone. The business is a wreck. Miss Fairchild, call the police.”

Suddenly his eyes alighted on the Palaeoscope standing on a little table.

“Aha!” he cried. “If that pesticating contraption is any good, we’ll find out what has become of that prescription. Never mind the police, Miss Fairchild.”

Miss Fairchild dropped the telephone suddenly. She seemed unusually agitated. Buffum fumbled around the delicate mechanism for some time before he found the proper way to set and start it; but fortunately his hurried and clumsy efforts did it no harm. After several false starts it began to flicker and whirr smoothly and steadily. On the screen appeared a picture of the safe in the wall, darkened as though it were night. A young man entered by the door that led from the main office, twirled the knobs, and opened the doors of the safe. Buffum watched him in the picture in breathless fascination.

“Ho! ho!” he cried suddenly as the face of the young man on the screen turned fully around for a front view.

“So it’s Oliver! My precious nephew! The police, Miss Fairchild.”

Miss Fairchild scurried to the telephone and began dialing a number, while Buffum viciously jabbed the button on his desk, and then paced up and down the room snarling to himself. In a moment the door opened and a young man walked in. He seemed to be possessed of no particular personality nor distinctive appearance. He was just a nice young man, like thousands we see constantly on the street, neat, well-mannered, well-groomed, clever-looking.

“Now,” said Buffum icily, standing and regarding the young man with a cold eye. “Hand over the prescription. I can prove that you’ve got it; so come on and quit acting innocent.”

“Whassa big idea, guvnor?” the young man said calmly, evidently thoroughly accustomed to Buffum’s eccentric outbursts. “Are you having a movie made?”

“Give me that prescription at once!” Buffum snarled angrily. “Or you go to jail. In fact, you’ll probably go anyhow.”

“Prescription for what?” asked Oliver with youthful sarcasm.

“Keeping your temper and making your meaning clear? All right, I’ll sit down and write you out a good one.”

He took out his fountain-pen and began unscrewing the cap. Buffum became all the more enraged at this.

“Damn you, you’re making me sore!” he shouted. “I can prove that you came in here last night, opened the safe, and took a prescription out. Now deny it.”

Oliver shrugged his shoulders.

“I came in last night,” he said, “and put away some important papers. But your twitter about a prescription leaves me cold.”

The outer door slammed and there was a trample of feet in the reception-room. As the bell sounded, Miss Fairchild opened the door, and three policemen entered, looking around in bewilderment. Buffum stalked up to them.

“I charge this man,” he shouted, swinging his arm toward Oliver,

“with having opened my safe and taken a valuable document.”

“Hm,” said one of the policemen, with chevrons on his arm; “that’s Mr. Mayflower, your nephew, isn’t it?”

“What difference does that make?” roared Buffum. “Take him away and lock him up. I’ll appear to charge him formally.”

The policemen acceded deferentially to the demands of so powerful and wealthy a man as Buffum. Yet they were sorry for Oliver, and handled him as gently as possible. Oliver had a half-amused, half-cynical expression on his face, and said not a word. He only looked inquiringly at Miss Fairchild, and when he had gotten her eye, glanced toward Buffum and tapped his forehead. Miss Fairchild’s face remained set and immovable; nothing could be read from it.

“The ungrateful whelp,” Buffum continued to growl after the policemen had led Oliver out. “After I’d set him up in life! Miss Fairchild, we’ve got to get the prescription from him somehow, or the business is ruined. It can’t be — a big firm like the Radionic— ruined! Miss Fairchild, we’ve got to get that prescription from him.”

Miss Fairchild shrank into a corner and nodded dumbly; she wrung her hands as Buffum raved on.

“We’ll have him searched at the station; then we’ll go through his room. But I’m afraid. I’m afraid that the rapscallion has hidden that little card pretty thoroughly. Oh, what shall we do, Miss Fairchild? We can’t let this business go on the rocks, and I’ve worried myself sick for months trying to think of something original. Oh, the young scoundrel! A quarter of a million dollars! I could choke him with my bare hands!”

Miss Fairchild shivered, probably at the thought of Oliver being choked with Buffum’s bare hands. At this moment, the outer door was flung open as though some powerful force had burst it in, and a regal looking lady entered. Through a scornful lorgnette, and from behind the magnificence of a heap of furs, Mrs. Regina Mayflower regarded her brother sternly.

“Herodias!” she said in a voice such as one uses to call a child to account. “What’s this I hear about Oliver?”

“The young rascal!” Buffum spluttered. “The scamp! Stole my prescription. Whole business depends on it. Won’t give it back.”

“Stole it!” Disdain, supreme disdain radiated from her words and from her whole attitude. The Mayflowers didn’t steal, and she knew it.

“Sneaked in at night, and took it out of the safe,” Buffum stormed.

“Yes?” Mrs. Mayflower intoned contemptuously.

“I can prove it,” Buffum defended himself desperately.

“Ha! ha!” tinkled Mrs. Mayflower’s laugh. “He can prove it!”

Buffum, still growling: “The scamp! The wretch!” He went to the Palaeoscope, took a good preliminary look at it, and began to fumble with it. In a moment it began to click, and suggestive shapes flickered across the screen, and disappeared tantalizingly. Buffum growled something to himself and continued to fumble with the apparatus. Mrs. Mayflower had noted something suspicious about the figures that had swiftly misted over the scene.

“Herodias!” she demanded. “What was that?”

“Hrrrrumph!” said Buffum. “What was what?”

“Put that picture on again!” ordered Mrs. Mayflower sternly. “What were you and that stenographer doing on that picture?”

Suddenly, as Buffum kept trying levers and buttons on the machine, the mechanism began to run smoothly, and the screen lit up brightly. Again it showed the safe, this time partly darkened, as though at twilight. Miss Peacheline Fairchild slipped stealthily into the room, her dim figure quite recognizable on the screen. She looked about her carefully, and then went to the safe, opened it, searched about; and took out a card that was plainly recognizable in the picture as Dr. Cranbury’s prescription. This she put carefully into her handbag, closed the safe, and hurried out.

Buffum’s mouth worked up and down in silence, like that of a fish out of the water. Then he began to splutter and choke with rage.

“You— you— you—” he turned to Miss Fairchild, but could get nothing more coherent out of himself. He seized the terrified girl by the arm and shook her. Finally, his wits and words came back.

“Regina! Quick!” he exclaimed. “Call back those policemen with Oliver. No! Not the telephone. The photophonic projector. You can pick them up as they go down the street.”

Mrs. Mayflower responded with alacrity. She sent the powerful beam of light out of the window with the photophonic projector. Through the telescopic sights on the instrument she picked up the policemen leading Oliver, far down in the depths of the street. She swung it about until the spot of light enveloped them, and then spoke into the mouthpiece.

“Just a moment!” she cried. “Mr. Buffum wants you back up in his office. He now has evidence that Oliver did not take the prescription, and he has the real thief here.”

She watched as the tiny group far down below swung about and started back. Then she shut off the instrument and swept haughtily back into the room. She disdained even to look at Miss Fairchild, but sat down in Buffum’s luxurious armchair. Miss Fairchild fidgeted in an embarrassed way at a corner of the desk, while Buffum paced up and down.

“Where is it?” he spluttered when he had regained his composure a little. “Give it to me! I’ll strangle you!”

Miss Fairchild, however, maintained a stubborn silence, and Buffum decided that it would be best to await the arrival of the police. It was not long before their steps were heard down the hall, and, together with Oliver, they entered. Oliver nodded and smiled as he glanced about the room, taking in the various elements of the scene and comprehending their significance. Then he bowed to his mother in playful deference.

“Officers!” said Buffum pompously, “I’ve found the real thief. I was mistaken about Mr. Mayflower. Release him and arrest this— this— this— young woman. I’ll fix up all the formalities later. Now, Miss Fairchild, will you give up that prescription?”

Miss Fairchild only smiled at Buffum and shook her head. She went up to Buffum and whispered something in his ear. His face went blank; he opened his mouth as though to say something; then suddenly caught himself and stopped, and looked belligerently about the room. He clenched his fists and crooked his elbows.

“Now, Herodias!” demanded Mrs. Mayflower. “What is all of this?

What did that hussy say to you? Tell me at once!”

“Damn foolishness!” muttered Buffum under his breath.

“Shall I tell?” asked Miss Fairchild, smiling archly at Buffum.

“You’d better!” said Mrs. Mayflower, “if you know what’s good for you.” Sternness filled the atmosphere about her.

“Give up that prescription!” repeated Buffum desperately.

Miss Fairchild stepped in front of him.

“You’ve promised me a new fur coat,” she said, “and you’ve been putting me off—”

“What’s that?” exclaimed Mrs. Mayflower horrified.

In the meanwhile, Oliver had been attracted by the fascinating complicatedness of the Palaeoscope, and was tinkering with its buttons and levers. Suddenly it began to flicker and then went on clicking steadily. The screen cleared, and on it appeared a picture of Buffum holding Miss Fairchild on his lap and chucking her under the chin. Mrs. Mayflower was petrified with astonishment, and Buffum was for the moment paralyzed. Miss Fairchild giggled hysterically.

Suddenly a crash resounded through the room, and the picture suddenly went out. Buffum had kicked the machine across the room. It lay in a far corner, a mangled wreck, and from it came little sparks and lights and clicks and whirrs, which finally died down to silence.

“Search her handbag!” Buffum commanded the policemen, following it up with a lot of incoherent growlings.

A policeman stepped over to reach for Miss Fairchild’s handbag; but she was the quicker of the two. She opened her handbag, took out the prescription, and held it up so that Buffum could see it.

“Here it is!” she exclaimed.

Then she suddenly crumpled it up, put it in her mouth, chewed it up and swallowed it. She laughed out in triumph; but in the middle her laugh broke, and she burst into tears. Two policemen seized her, one from each side.

Buffum turned pale, and sank into a chair with a groan, his head down in his hands. He dropped there for a moment, and then got up and walked swiftly about, with incoherent growlings. He shook his fists and clutched his hands in the direction of Miss Fairchild. Miss Fairchild broke away from the two policemen; ran up to Buffum, and threw her arms about his neck. Mrs. Mayflower shrieked and gasped.

“You used to be so nice to me!” Miss Fairchild wept on Buffum’s shoulder. “I can’t stand this.”

Buffum kept backing away, while Miss Fairchild continued to cling to him. Everyone else in the room was tremendously embarrassed except Oliver. Suddenly, all eyes turned toward the window, whence a loud whirr proceeded. A little flivver helicopter slowly descended on the landing-stage. Out of it climbed the dapper Waldo Swift and stepped into the room through the window, carrying a little black case. He looked about him at the group in mild surprise, as though it were after all a part of his day’s work.

“How do you do, ladies and gentlemen?” he said briskly.

Buffum turned on him angrily.

“This is all your fault!” he roared.

“Yes sir!” said Swift. “Anything is possible sir.”

He looked over the occupants of the room, and turned to Oliver, who looked to him the most hopeful.

“The little lady here,” volunteered Oliver, “er— ah— destroyed a very valuable document. The continued prosperity of this firm depends upon that document. The company is therefore ruined. Swallowed it, see?”

Swift smiled in sudden comprehension.

“Ah!” he said. “And you need the document. So very simple.”

He looked about the room, noted the wreck of the Palaeoscope in the corner without the least quiver in his composure, and opened his  lack case. He took out an exact duplicate of the first machine, and for a few minutes was busied in setting it up.

“We’ll set the time back to the same hour as before,” he observed as he worked, “with you and the old doctor at the desk.”

In a moment Buffum and Dr. Cranbury appeared on the screen, bending over the prescription. Swift manipulated things on the machine, and the view appeared to come closer and grow larger, until it became a close-up of the prescription only, with every letter clear and plain. Swift had out his notebook and was rapidly copying down the prescription. As Buffum in the picture put the prescription into the safe, Swift shut off the machine. Then he tore the page out of his notebook on which the prescription was copied, and handed it to Buffum with a flourishing bow.

“There you are sir,” he said. “Your prescription. This is just a trifling example of the service which the Palaeoscope can render you in your business and everyday life. May I put you down for a hundred machines?” he concluded, taking out his order book.

Buffum grasped eagerly at the copy of the prescription, and put it in his wallet with a sigh of relief.

“Make out an order for 500 machines,” he said, “250 for our research department, and 250 for our publicity department. Come back in six weeks for another order.”

He went over to his desk and bustled busily among a lot of papers; obviously to hide his confusion at the fact that Miss Fairchild was weeping convulsively in one corner. Oliver did the gentlemanly thing, and went over and patted her shoulder in sympathy. He bent over and spoke something low and soft in the effort to console her. As soon as Buffum saw this, he leaped up and whirled around; he hurried over to Miss Fairchild, brushed Oliver aside, and motioned the policemen away.

“Now Miss—” he began; “now Peacheline, you go over to Kirsch and Baum’s and pick you out any kind of a fur coat you want. And, would you like to— would you like to go to Peacock’s and pick you out a ring, an engagement ring?”

By way of reply, she threw her arms about Buffum’s neck and buried her face in his shoulder. In order to address Oliver, Buffum had to bury his neck and chin in her tousled hair.

“Oliver!” he said. “Ah-hrrr! You young scamp, from now on you are manager of the publicity department. Do you hear? And Regina, I can see business coming in again; so you may have that new airplane you’ve been wanting so long.”

________________

16: The Appendix and the Spectacles

Amazing Stories, December 1928

OLD CLADGETT, President of the First National Bank of Collegeburg, scowled across the mahogany table at the miserable young man. He was all hunched up into great rolls and hanging pouches, and he scowled till the room grew gloomy and the ceiling seemed to lower. “I’m running a bank, not a charity club,” he growled, planting his fist on the table.

Bookstrom winced, and then controlled himself with a little shiver.

“But sir,” he protested, “all I ask for is an extension of time on this note. I could easily pay it out in three or four years. If you force me to pay it now, I shall have to give up my medical course.”

Harsh, inchoate, guttural noises issued from Cladgett’s throat.

“This bank isn’t looking after little boys and their dreams,” he snarled. “This note is due and you pay it. You’re able-bodied and can work.”

Mechanically, as in a daze, Bookstrom took out a wallet and counted out the money. When the sum was complete, he had ten dollars left. The hope that had spurred him on through several years of hardship and difficulty, the hope of graduating as a physician and having a practice of his own, now was gone. He was at the end of his resources. Once the medical course was interrupted, he knew there was no hope of getting back to it. Nowadays the study of medicine is too strenuous; there is no dallying on the path to an M.D. degree.

He went straight over to the University to apply for an instructorship in Applied Mathematics that had recently been offered to him. In the movies and in the novels, an ogre like Cladgett usually meets with some kind of retribution before long. The Black Hand gets him or a wronged debtor poisons him, or a brick house collapses on his head. But Cladgett lived along in Collegeburg, growing more and more prosperous. He was bound to grow wealthy, because he took all he could get from everybody and never gave anybody anything. He kept growing a little grayer and a little fatter, and seemed to derive more and more pleasure and happiness from preying financially on his fellow-beings. And he seemed as safe as the Rock of Gibraltar.

Then, after fifteen years, a sudden attack of acute appendicitis got him. That morning he had sat at his desk and dictated letters to his directors commanding them to be present at a meeting four days hence without fail. The bank was taking over a big estate as trustee, and unless each director signed the contract personally, the deal was lost and with it a fat fee. In the afternoon he was in bed groaning with pain and cursing the doctor for not curing him at once.

“Appendicitis!” he shrieked. “Impossible!”

Dr. Banza bowed and said nothing. With delicate fingertips he felt of the muscles in the right lower quadrant of the abdomen. He shook his head over the thermometer that he took out of the sick man’s mouth. He withdrew a drop of blood from the patient’s finger-tip into a tiny pipette and took it away with him.

He was back in an hour, and Cladgett read the verdict in his face.

“Operation!” he yowled like a whipped boy. “I can’t have an operation! I’ll die!”

He seemed to consider it the doctor’s fault that he had appendicitis and would have to have an operation. “Say,” he said more rationally, as an idea occurred to him. “Do you realize that I’ve got an important directors’ meeting in three days? I can’t miss that for any operation. Now listen; be sensible. I’ll give you a thousand dollars if you get me to that meeting in good shape.”

Dr. Banza shrugged his shoulders.

“I’m going to dinner now,” he said in the voice that one uses to a peevish child. “You have two or three hours in which to think it over. By that time I’m afraid you will be an emergency.”

Dr. Banza sauntered thoughtfully over to the College Tavern, and walking in, looked around for a table at which to eat his dinner. He felt his shoulder touched.

“Sit down and eat with me,” invited his unnoticed friend.

“Why, hello Bookstrom!” he cried warmly, as he perceived who it was.

“Hello yourself,” returned Bookstrom, now portly and cheerful enough, with a little twinkle in each eye.

“But what’s the matter? You look dark and discouraged.”

So, over the dinner, Banza told his friend about the annoying dilemma with the obdurate and irascible Cladgett, who threatened certain ruin to his career.

“I feel like telling him to go to hell,” Dr. Banza concluded.

Bookstrom sat a long time in silent thought, his elbows leaned on the table, sizzling a little tune through his cupped hands.

“Just the thing I’ve been looking for,” he said at last slowly, as though he had come to a difficult decision. “Do you want to listen to a little lecture, Banza? Then you can decide whether I can help you or not?”

“If you can help me, you’re some medicine-man. Shoot the lecture, though.” Dr. Banza leaned back and waited, with much outward show of patience.

“You remember,” opened Bookstrom, “that I had a couple of years of medical college work, and had to quit. That accounts for my having gotten this idea so suddenly just now.

“My present title of Professor of Applied Mathematics is not an empty one. I’ve applied some mathematics this time, I’ll tell the world.

“You hear a lot about the Fourth Dimension nowadays. Most people snort when you mention it. Some point a finger at you or grab your coat lapel, and ask you what it is. I don’t know what it is! Don’t get to imagining that I’ve discovered what the fourth dimension is. But, I don’t know what light is, or what gravitation is, except in a ‘pure mathematics’ sense. Yet, I utilize light and gravitation in a practical way every day, do I not?

“Well, I’ve learned how to utilize the fourth dimension without knowing what it is. And here’s how we can apply it to your Cladgett. Only, I’ve got an ancient grudge against that bird, and he’s got to pay me back in real money for it, right now. You take your thousand and get a thousand for me—.

“Now, how can we use the fourth dimension to help him? In order to explain it, I’ll have to illustrate with an example from a two-dimensional plane of existence. Suppose you and Cladgett were two-dimensional beings confined to the plane of this sheet of paper. You could move about in any direction upon the paper, but you could not get upwards off of it. Here is Cladgett. You can go all around him, but you can’t jump over him, any more than you can turn yourself inside out.

“The only way that you, a two-dimensional surgeon can remove an appendix from this two-dimensional wretch, is to make a hole somewhere in his circumference, reach in, separate the doojigger from its attachments and pull it out, all limited to the surface of the paper. Is that plain so far?”

Banza nodded without interrupting.

“But, suppose some Professor of Applied Mathematics arranges it so that you can rise slightly, infinitely slightly above the plane of the paper. Then you can get Cladgett’s appendix out without making any break in his circumference. All you do is to get up above him, locate your appendix, and reach down or lower yourself down to the original plane, and whisk out the appendix.

“He, being confined to the two-dimensional plane of the paper, cannot see how you do it, or comprehend how. But here you are, back down to the plane of the paper again beside Cladgett, with the appendix in your hand, and he marvels how you did it.”

“Brilliant reasoning,” Dr. Banza admitted. “But unfortunately for its value in this emergency, Cladgett is a three-dimensional old hulk and so am I.”

“To proceed,” Bookstrom made a show of ignoring the interruption, “suppose I had constructed an elevator that could lift you a little, ever so little along the fourth dimension, at right angles to the other three. Then you could reach over and hook out Cladgett’s appendix without making any abdominal wound.”

Bookstrom stopped and smiled. Banza jumped to his feet.

“Well, dammit, have you?” he demanded. People in the Tavern were turning around and looking at them.

“Come and see!”

They hooked arms and went up to Bookstrom’s laboratory. Apparently Banza was satisfied with what he saw, for in five minutes he came racing out of the door, and called a taxi and had himself whirled to Cladgett’s house.

There he had some trouble about the two thousand dollars in advance. It was an unethical thing to demand, but he was a clever enough psychologist to sense and respect Bookstrom’s reasons.

“I’ve found a specialist,” he announced, “and am personally convinced that he can do what you want. With the next two days quiet in bed and subsequent care in diet, you can get to the meeting.”

“Go ahead then,” moaned Cladgett.

“But this man wants a thousand dollars, and insists that his thousand and mine must both be paid in advance,” said Banza meekly.

Cladgett rose up in bed.

“Oh, you doctors are a bunch of robbers!” he shouted. Then he groaned and fell back again. The appendicitis was too much for him. A pain as sustained and long-enduring as that of an acute appendicitis will compel anyone to do anything. Soon Cladgett and a nurse were in an ambulance speeding toward the University, and Banza had two checks in his pocket.

Bookstrom was all ready. A half dozen simple surgical instruments to suffice for actually detaching the appendix, were sterilized and covered. He put Cladgett on a long wooden table and asked the nurse to sit at his head with a chloroform mask, with orders to use it if he complained. He directed Banza to scrub his hands. Beside Cladgett was the “elevator.”

There wasn’t much to the machine. All great things are simple, I suppose. There were three trussed beams of aluminum at right angles to each other, each with a cylinder and plunger, and from them, toggles coming together at a point where there was a sort of “universal joint” topped by a mat of thick rubber. That was all.

“You mean for me to get on that thing and be shoved somewhere into nowhere—?” Banza looked worried.

“I won’t insist,” Bookstrom smiled.

“No thanks,” Banza backed away with alacrity. “I’ll give him whatever anesthetic he needs.” Banza was no doubt uncomfortable with responsibility, for the patient was seriously ill.

“Fine!” Bookstrom seemed to be enjoying the situation thoroughly. “I still know how to whack off an appendix. That’s elementary surgery, amateur stuff.”

A storm of protest broke from Cladgett.

“I don’t want to be operated. You promised—”; he wrung his hands and beat his heels upon the table.

“We promised,” said Bookstrom sweetly, “that we would not open you up. You’ll never find a scratch on yourself.”

Cladgett quieted down. Bookstrom scrubbed his hands, and wrapped his right one in a sterile towel in order to manipulate the machine. He stepped on the rubber mat, and in a moment, Dr. Banza and the nurse were amazed to see him click suddenly out of sight.

Click! and he was not there! Before they recovered from their astonishment, Cladgett began to complain. Dr. Banza had to start giving chloroform. He gave it slowly and cautiously, while Cladgett groaned and cursed and threshed himself about.

“Lie still, you fool!” shouted Bookstrom’s voice in a preoccupied way, just beside them. It made their flesh creep, for he was not there. Gradually the patient quieted down and breathed deeply and the doctor and the nurse took a breath of relief, and had time to wonder about everything. There was another click! and there stood Bookstrom with a tray of bloody instruments in his hand.

“Pippin!” he exclaimed enthusiastically, pointing to the appendix.

It was swollen to the size of a thumb, with purple blotches of congestion, black areas of gangrene, and yellow patches of fibrin. “You’re not such a bad diagnostician, Banza!”

“Put it in formalin— to show him how sick he was,” suggested Banza.

“You’ll have a fat time proving to anybody that that was taken out of him. Forget it, and deposit your check. Some day when you get up your nerve, let me show you how it feels to see the inside of a man, all at once, everything working.”

Cladgett was much better the next day. His pain was all gone and he did not feel the terrible, prostrating sickness of the day before. As soon as he awoke he felt himself all over for an operation wound, and finding none, mumbled to himself surlily for a while. The second day his fever was gone and he was ravenously hungry. On the third day he was merely tired. On the fourth day he went to the directors’ meeting in his own car, grumbling that he had never had any appendicitis anyhow, and that the doctors had defrauded him of two thousand dollars.

“Got a notion to sue you for damages. May do it yet!” he snarled at Dr. Banza. “I’ll include the value of my spectacles. You smashed them for me somewhere. Damn carelessness.”

Dr. Banza bowed himself out.

“The next time he needs a doctor,” he said to himself, “he can call one from Madagascar before I’ll go to see him.”

But Dr. Banza was no different from any other good physician. It wasn’t two weeks before Cladgett called him, and again he was “fool enough to go,” as he himself expressed it.

This time Cladgett was not in bed. He was nursing his hemispherical abdomen in an arm-chair.

“Thought you said you’d cure me of this appendicitis!” he wheezed antagonistically.

“Aha, so you did have appendicitis?” thought the doctor to himself.

Aloud, he asked Cladgett to describe his symptoms, which Cladgett did in the popular way.

“I think it’s adhesions!” he snapped.

“Adhesions exist chiefly in the brains of the laity, and in the conversation of doctors too lazy to make a diagnosis.” Dr. Banza’s courteous patience was deserting him.

He temperatured and pulsed his patient, gently palpated the abdominal muscles, and counted the leucocytes in a drop of blood.

“You do have a tender spot,” he mused; “and possibly a slight palpable mass. But no signs of any infectious process. No muscle rigidity. Is it getting worse?”

“Getting worse every day!” he groaned histrionically. “What is it, doc?”

Dr. Banza resisted heroically the temptation to tell him that he had carcinoma of the ovary, and said instead with studied care: “I can’t be quite sure till we have an X-ray. Can you come down to the office?”

With much grunting and wheezing, Cladgett got up to the office and up on the radiographic table. Dr. Banza made a trial exposure and then several other films. He remained in the developing room for an interminable length of time, and then came out with a red face.

“Well! What?” yapped Cladgett.

“Oh, just a trifling matter of no importance. Come, get into the car with me. We’ll drive over to Professor Bookstrom’s laboratory, and in a moment we’ll have you permanently relieved and feeling good.”

“I’ll not go to that charlatan again!” roared Cladgett. “And you doctors are always trying to talk all around the bush and refusing to tell people the truth. You can’t work that gag on me! I want to know exactly!”

He shook both arms at Banza.

“Why, really!” Dr. Banza acted very much embarrassed. “It’s nothing that cannot be corrected in a few seconds—”

“Dammit!” shrieked Cladgett. “Gimme that X-ray picture, or I’ll smash up your place!”

Dr. Banza went in and got the wet film clipped in its frame. He led the way to the outside door. Cladgett angrily followed him thither and there received the film. Banza backed away, while Cladgett held the negative up to the light. There, very plainly visible in the right lower quadrant of the abdomen was a pair of old-fashioned pince-nez spectacles!

Strange heavings and tremors seemed to traverse Cladgett’s bulk, showing through his clothes. He shook and undulated and heaved suddenly in spots. His face turned alternately white and purple; his jaw worked up and down, and his mouth opened and shut convulsively, though no sound came forth. Suddenly he turned and stamped out of the building, carrying the wet film with him.

The old man was a pretty good judge of character, or he never would have made the money he did. In some subconscious way he had realized that Bookstrom must be the man to see about this thing. Banza telephoned Bookstrom at once and told him the details.

“How unfortunate!” Bookstrom exclaimed. There was a suspicious note in his voice. That solicitude for Cladgett could hardly have been genuine.

“He’s coming over there!” warned Banza.

“I shall be proud to receive such a distinguished guest.”

That was all Banza was able to accomplish. He was sick with consternation and anxiety.

Bookstrom could hear Cladgett’s thunderous approach down the hall. Then the door burst open and a chair went down, followed by a rack of charts and a tall case full of models. Cladgett seemed to derive some satisfaction from the havoc, this time little dreaming that Bookstrom was quite capable of setting the stage for just such a show.

“You— you—” sputtered Cladgett, still unable to speak coherently.

“Too bad; too bad,” consoled Bookstrom kindly. “Let’s see your roentgenogram.”

“Ah, how interesting!” Bookstrom could put vast enthusiasm into his voice. “The question is, I suppose, how they got in there?” He looked back and forth from Cladgett’s protruding hemisphere to the spectacles on the X-ray film, as if to imply that in such an immense vault there surely ought to be room for such a trifling thing as a pair of spectacles.

“You put them there, you crook, you scoundrel, you robber, you dirty thief!” The “dirty thief” came out in a high falsetto shriek.

“You do me much honor,” Bookstrom bowed. “That would be a ‘stunt’ I might say, to be proud of.”

“You don’t deny it, do you?” Cladgett suddenly calmed down and spoke in acidly triumphant tones.

“It strikes me,” Bookstrom mused, “that this is something that would be difficult either to prove or to deny.”

“I’ve got the goods on you.” Cladgett spoke coldly, just as he had on that occasion fifteen years before. “You either pay me fifty thousand dollars damages, or this goes to court at once.”

“My dear Sir!” Bookstrom bowed gravely. “You or anyone else have a standing invitation to go through my effects, and if you find more than a hundred dollars, you are welcome to half of it, if you give me the other half.”

Cladgett did not know how to reply to this.

“I’m suing you for damages at once!” His words came like blows from a pile-driver.

Bookstrom bowed him out with a smile.

THE DAMAGE SUIT created considerable flare in the headlines. A pair of spectacles left in a patient’s abdomen at operation! That was a morsel such as the public had not had to scandalize over for some time! Newspapers dug up the details, even to the history of the forced payment on the note fifteen years before and the disappointed medical student; and the fact that the operation had been performed in secret and at night, in the laboratory of a man who was not a licensed medical practitioner, for Bookstrom’s title of “doctor” was a philosophical, not a medical one. The public gloated and licked its chops in anticipation of more morsels at the trial.

But no such treat ever came off. Immediately after the suit was filed Bookstrom’s counsel requested permission to examine thoroughly the person of the plaintiff. This was granted. The counsel then quietly and privately called the judge’s attention to the fact that the plaintiff’s body contained no scars or marks of operation of any kind; therefore, it was evident that he had never been operated upon and, therefore, nothing could have been left in his abdomen. The judge held an informal preliminary hearing and threw the case out of court. He admitted that there were curious phases to it, but he was busy and tired, and his docket was so full that it made him nervous; he was glad to forget anything that was technically settled.

Cladgett continued to grow sicker. The pain and the lump in his side increased. In another two weeks he was a miserable man. He still managed to be up and about a little, but his face was drawn from suffering (and rage), and pains racked him constantly. He had lost twenty-five pounds in weight, and looked like a wretched shadow of his former self.

One day he thrust himself into Bookstrom’s office. Bookstrom dismissed the stenographer and the two student-assistants, and faced Cladgett blandly.

“Banza says you can fix this up somehow,” he said, and it sounded like “gr-r-rump, gr-r-r-ump, r-r-rump!” “I’ve decided to let you go ahead.”

“Very kind of you,” Bookstrom purred. “I ought to feel humbly grateful for as big a favor as that. As a matter of fact, I’ve decided to let the Sultan of Sulu go jump in the lake. But I’ve a lurking suspicion that he isn’t going to do it.”

Cladgett sat and stared at him awhile, and then picked himself up and stumped out, grumbling and groaning.

The next day Dr. Banza brought him into Dr. Bookstrom’s laboratory.

He eased himself down into a chair before saying anything.

“I’m convinced that Banza’s right and that you can help me. Now what’s your robber’s price?”

“It’s a highway robber’s price, with the accent on the high,” murmured Bookstrom deprecatingly.

“Well, out with it, you—” there Cladgett wisely checked himself.

“I ask nothing whatever for myself,” said Bookstrom, suddenly becoming serious. “But if you want me to get those spectacles out of you, right here and now you settle a sum to found a Students’ Fund to loan money to worthy and needy scientific students, which they may pay back when they are established and earning money. I think when you spoke to me about a damage suit you mentioned the sum of fifty thousand dollars. Let’s call it that.”

“Fifty thousand dollars!” screamed Cladgett in a high falsetto. He was weak and unstable. “That’s preposterous! That’s criminal extortion.”

“This transaction is not of my seeking,” Bookstrom suggested.

“You’ve fixed it all up on me,” Cladgett wailed, but his voice sank toward the end.

“Tell that to the judge. Or, go to a surgeon and have him open you up and take them out. That would come cheaper.”

“Operation!” shrieked Cladgett. “I can’t stand an operation.”

He looked desperately at Banza, but there was no hope there.

“This seems to me a wonderful opportunity,” Banza said, “for you to do a public service and distinguish yourself in the community. I’m sure that amount of money will not affect you seriously.”

Cladgett started for the door, and then groaned and fell back heavily into his chair. He sat groaning for awhile, his suffering being mental as well as physical; finally he reached into his pocket for his pen and his checkbook. He kept on groaning as he wrote out a check and flung it on the table.

“Now, damn you, help me!” he yelped.

They put him on the table.

“Banza, you scrub. You deserve to see this,” directed Bookstrom.

So Banza stepped on the rubber mat and Bookstrom instructed him.

“Move this switch one button at a time. That will always raise you a notch. Look around each time until you get it just right.”

With the first click Banza disappeared, just as people vanish suddenly in the movies. Cladgett groaned and squirmed and then was quiet. With another click Banza appeared, and in his hand was a pair of old-fashioned pince-nez spectacles, moist and covered with a grayish film. He held them toward Cladgett, who grabbed them and mumbled something.

“Can you imagine!” breathed Banza, “standing in the center of a sphere and seeing all the abdominal organs around you at once? Something like that, it seemed; not exactly either. There above my head were the coils of the small intestine. To the right was the cecum with the spectacles beside it; to my left the sigmoid and the muscles; attached to the ilium, and beneath my feet the peritoneum of the anterior abdominal wall. But, I was terribly dizzy for some reason; I could not stand it very long, much as I should have liked to remain inside of him for awhile—”

“But, you weren’t inside of him,” corrected Bookstrom.

Banza stared blankly.

“But, I’ve just told you. There I was inside of him, with his viscera all around me, stomach and diaphragm in front, bladder behind— I was inside of him.”

“Yes, it looked that way to you,” nodded Bookstrom. “That is the way your brain, accustomed to three-dimensional space, interpreted it. But look. If I draw a circle on this sheet of paper, I can see all points on the inside of it, can I not? Yet, if you were a two-dimensional being, I would have a hard time convincing you that I am not inside the circle.”

End

Table of Contents

- 1: The Raid From Mars
- 2: The Einstein See-Saw
- 3: The Man with the Strange Head
- 4: On Board the Martian Liner
- 5: The Driving Power
- 6: The Oversight
- 7: The Book of Worlds
- 8: The Strength of the Weak
- 9: Mars Colonizes
- 10: The Stone Cat
- 11: A Problem in Communication
- 12: Mechanocracy
- 13: Millions for Defense
- 14: The Gostak and the Doshes
- 15: The Finger of the Past
- 16: The Appendix and the Spectacles