Four Astounding Novellas

by Nat Schachner

  "Three years ago he was foolish enough to come to Mars for an interlude. He drank too much. I heard him. He sobered up—but I found means to make him talk. His followers decided to enlist under my banner. It took me a year to make the trip both ways, but I was enabled to establish the first transliteration of my matured theories." He smiled thinly. "The material was inadequate—chiefly members of my band who unaccountably disappeared—but it gave me my first start. Since then, through the kindness of the system's best brains, I have considerably improved my work." The smile tightened. "You, my friend, will have the glory of adding the final touch to my masterpiece."

  Chapter 5

  WEBB STIFFENED, said nothing. There was something horrible in the offing, something related to that dazzling entity within the farther dome. He stumbled on.

  Susan Blake was at his side. Her dark head inclined to him; her eyes implored his own.

  "I—am terribly sorry, Webb Foster," she whispered swiftly. "It is all my fault. I— I allowed Ansel Pardee to infect me with his own suspicions of yourself. My father's vanishment left me frantic, eager for revenge. Pardee outlined the scheme. He thought it might work." She made a hopeless gesture. "Instead, I ruined your plans, brought you to this horrible place. Forgive me. My father—"

  "Do not blame yourself." Webb told her gently. "I knew you had come as a spy. I let you go on, thinking to find the truth between you and Ku-mer. I permitted him to catch me off guard."

  The Martian and his men herded them through a panel in the bubble dome. Webb blinked his eyes. It was almost impossible to gaze steadily into the heart of the great shining orb before him.

  "What do you make of it, Webb Foster?" Ku-mer asked ironically.

  Webb stared from under narrowed lids. It was an incredible thing. As sight grew clearer, he beheld its fine structure. It was not a single crystal, as he had first believed; it was a conglomerate of separate crystalline forms, each a perfect octahedron; and they moved in swift, circling orbits within the outer round of racing crystals that held them all within circumscribed limits. The surfaces of revolution were each distinct, like the layers of an onion, but the paths described were not haphazard. They formed an inner symmetry, obeying laws of their own, weaving an intricate, yet orderly pattern in their flight.

  Webb stared, and as he stared, the hair stirred on his head. For these were crystals such as he had never seen before. Each glowed with a strange, pulsing sheen; each moved and stirred within its depths with a warm, singing flame; each seemed a flashing eye that stared back at him and changed its hue with subtle, infinite shades of feeling. The Earthman felt strange, impalpable fingers plucking at his brain, stirring forgotten neurone paths, sending ghostly images into his innermost thoughts.

  "What do you make of it?" Ku-mer repeated.

  "Why, it seems alive!" Webb gasped.

  "Alive?" the Martian scorned. "Earthman, you are gazing at immortality—eternal power!"

  WEBB FOSTER was shaken to his depths. Those invisible fingers were still probing his mind, mercilessly, coldly, draining him. A dreadful suspicion grew upon him, vague, inchoate. But it was Susan Blake who, with the swift, mysterious intuition of womankind, discovered the incredible truth.

  Her eyes were fastened on the shining race of tiny crystals with a strange intensity; her lips were parted with panting breath; her cheeks had paled to colorless tissue. She staggered, swayed. "Father!" she cried in toneless accents. "Where are you?"

  "By the three rings of Saturn!" Webb gasped. Little shards of suspicion were fast falling into an unbelievable pattern.

  "Ah!" Ku-mer breathed. "So you are both beginning to understand. The girl by mere intuition; you, by an effort of the imagination."

  The Earthman was overwhelmed. Though his eyes smarted with pain, he could not withdraw his gaze from the shifting maze. "Good Lord! Do you mean that Jim Blake is—somehow—in that pulsing orb?"

  "Not only Jim Blake, but a hundred others as well—the scientific brains of the solar system, the men who have—er—vanished. I have made them immortal, eternal, and, in return, they are yielding up to me all their knowledge, all their thought processes."

  "But it's impossible!" Webb blurted out. His head was spinning. "How could you have transmuted them?" They had been his friends, co-workers, most of them, and now they were a single conglomerate of tinkling crystals.

  Susan Blake, with a little sigh, quietly collapsed in a faint.

  The Martian's face twisted with scorn. "I am disappointed in you, Webb Foster," he said contemptuously. "Perhaps you will not prove as valuable an addition as I had thought. You still do not grasp the beauty of my work. I was not interested in these men as individuals. It was as thinking machines that I wanted them.

  "For twenty years I labored on my theories. Thought, I knew, was the lever by which life had elevated itself above the brute dance of atoms and electrons. Thought is all-powerful, a subtle, shining weapon with which to mold the universe to one's own desire. But evolution had stumbled. It had imbedded this magnificent instrument in a mold of sordid flesh, of slimy tissues and clotting blood wherein it is lost, scattered, fumbling darkly, subject to ills and pressures and pains not of its own.

  "For thousands of years the beings of the various planets bewailed this condition, but deemed it inevitable and inherent in the very structure of thought. For thought, they told each other gravely, was but an electrical disturbance, an interplay of potentials between protoplasmic tissues in the brain. Destroy the brain, and the neurones of which it is composed, and thought dies with it, vanishes into nothingness."

  "But the scientists of all the planets long ago proved that to be so," Webb protested.

  "The scientists," Ku-mer snapped, "were a pack of fools. I am the first real psychologist. You are a physicist, yet you parrot such nonsense. The fundamental base of all your work is the great law of conservation—that nothing ever vanishes. Matter may change to energy, energy to matter, and both may shift their external forms, but the sum total is always constant, always the same. You must realize that."

  "That is true," Webb admitted doubtfully. In spite of the dangerous situation in which he was, in spite of Susan's sprawled, motionless body, he was listening intently.

  "Why then," the Martian continued triumphantly, "should thought, the highest, most complicated form of all in the entire universe, be the single thing to flash into being and flash out again without a trace? Thought, I insisted, must be permanent, durable. Then it couldn't be merely a matter of evanescent potentials. I went to work. For ten years I labored in my Martian laboratory. I used innumerable animals—the aakvelds of Mars, the mice and guinea pigs of Earth, the ytors of Venus." His smile was bland. "Yes, I used more advanced subjects—men of the planets of no particular importance, men whom no one missed.

  "IT TOOK YEARS of heartbreaking toil, of innumerable initial failures. I removed the brains from the living creatures, kept them alive in saline solutions. There I subjected them to every conceivable type of stimulus. Finally, by using an electrical current of weak voltage but tremendous amperage, I found certain shining crystals oozing out of the tissues, moving to the cathodes. I purified these by fractional distillations, and tested them in a fever of anxiety. I implanted those I had obtained from Earthmen into the brains of mice, and behold, the mice spoke the language of Earth, displayed all the grades of intelligence that men of Earth possess.

  "I had isolated the pure principle of thought; I had proven it to be a crystalline structure, of an atomic weight below that of hydrogen. It is the fundamental element of the universe, the substratum underlying all things. Long ago, certain metaphysicians declared the universe to be composed of thought; I have shown their mystical conceptions to be true."

  Webb steadied himself with an effort. One part of his brain—the coldly scientific—knew this to be the greatest discovery of all time; the other part—the warmly human—realized the awful implications of what Ku-mer had done. Horror grew on him as he watched
the whirling sphere of crystals. Each crystal was elemental thought; each crystal represented the painful evolution of uncounted æons, each crystal was the life-in-death of a great scientist, of an erstwhile living, breathing human being!

  "You have done a fiendish thing, Ku-mer," he said quietly. "You have perverted a truly great achievement to devilish ends. In your lust for power you have forgotten the suffering, the torment of these men whom you have coldbloodedly dissected. You have forgotten that they had friends, families" —his glance flickered painfully to the still unconscious girl— "daughters. What can you gain to justify this horror?"

  "You disappoint me," the Martian said regretfully. "There had been a time when I, too, believed in Webb Foster's greatness. Now I see you are but a fumbler, a mouther of stale emotions and cloudy phrases. What were these men? Mere mortal beings, alive for a few futile years, then condemned to rot eternally, their thoughts a moldering, scattered part of them. I have taken their minds, purified them of all dross, given them immortality, power, splendor. What happier fate could they desire? What more blessed state could you wish?"

  Webb knew what he meant. For a fleeting moment he shrank, appalled, from the idea that he, too, was destined to be but an endlessly circling swarm of crystals within the shining sphere. Then he stiffened. "Thought," he answered quietly, "divorced from its human concomitants, emotions, desires, fumblings if you will, must prove a terrible instrument. Eventually, it must destroy its possessor."

  "You speak nonsense," Ku-mer cried angrily. "I have found the means to control it, to force it to my will. See!" He darted to an instrument set in the curving wall of the dome. It consisted of a tessellated pattern, a gigantic checkerboard, each square of which was a vacuum tube. From it, wires trailed to the turntable on which the sphere of crystallized thought spun and whirled. Above the pattern bulged a complex of grids and transformers terminating in a mesh-type speaker. To one side, a delicate microphone was set into the apparatus.

  THE MARTIAN stood before the microphone. "This," he stated, "is my control board, my method of communication with the fused pure thought of a hundred great minds. Already, through them, I have achieved a power plant which taps the stresses and strains of space itself for unlimited energy; I have bent light waves in complete circles around this planet, myself and my space ship, and utilized the resultant invisibility to capture more of the brains that I required.

  "Had it not been for the extra-sensory equipment of your Titan, I would have seized both you and your space laboratory without the deception to which I was forced to stoop. Through the combined intensity of these minds, and yours, I shall gain the power I require to force all the solar system to my will. I shall become its sole ruler, its giver of laws. I shall be supreme!"

  "Nevertheless, I still say," Webb declared stubbornly, "that the thought you have removed from its natural context will eventually destroy you."

  Ku-mer laughed without mirth. "You are wrong, my friend. Watch, and I shall show you how it works." He spoke quietly into the microphone. "Give me the fundamental equation that expresses the universe entire."

  Webb started, jerked against his bonds. This had been the problem on which all his energies had been concentrated at the beginning of this strange adventure.

  Little wheels commenced turning within the apparatus. Lights flashed on and off. The sphere of crystallized thought took on a deeper hue. Its speed of inner rotation increased. The singing sound grew in volume. It became a chant, a mighty melody that filled the dome and fled beyond the phosphorescent air. It beat against the black, dismal cliffs; it lashed over the turbulent, monster-haunted flood of Gar-Mando; it sent the hideous creatures scuttling into the depths. The whizzing crystals spun on individual axes; they pulsed and glowed with a myriad rainbow hues, flashed with unbearable flame.

  The distilled thoughts of the hundred mightiest minds in the universe were concentrating on the problem proposed.

  Ku-mer's voice cut through the din. He was smiling a self-satisfied smile. "I have asked them the final question, the most difficult of all. Yet I know they will solve it. With this equation, all things will become self-evident. The universe will be an open book. Travel to the distant stars, entry into super-dimensions, control of elemental forces, the secrets of time and space themselves will be within my grasp. I shall become a superman, a god!" The feeble Martian body shook with the passion of his desire. His eyes glittered with devouring anticipation.

  The shimmering sphere increased its pace. It rolled itself in a fury of concentration. Then there was a soundless burst of flame; the colors ebbed and faded; the tremendous speed slackened. Ku-mer rubbed his hands in an ecstasy of impatience. "Now I shall know—the ultimate!" he whispered.

  A voice issued from the speaker. It was passionless, unhuman, the transformation of vibratory thought through the tessellated tubes into mechanical sound. In spite of himself, Webb strained to listen.

  "We have merged our entities in the solution of this problem; we have concentrated our energies as never before. We do not know the answer."

  KU-MER breathed convulsively. His red-veined fingers were clenched. "You—essences of pure intellect—the product of a hundred mighty minds—cannot solve the problem?"

  "We cannot."

  Ku-mer made a gesture of despair. "Is it then impossible of solution?"

  "No. There is an answer."

  Ku-mer's voice was choked. Webb Foster, in spite of himself, was a taut bowstring, waiting. "Where may I find it?" the Martian asked hoarsely.

  "From one who is still alive—still cloaked in encompassing flesh."

  "Give me his name."

  There was a moment's hesitation. The sphere flared up, died down again.

  "His name," it said, "is Webb Foster."

  The Martian whirled with a strangled cry. His blaster snouted at his captive. "You? Webb Foster?" he cried. "You know the equation? Tell it to me—at once."

  The Earthman grinned mockingly. No trace of his inner bewilderment showed on his face. Already Susan was stirring, the color mantling in her cheeks. "So that's the way the wind blows," he jeered. "Ku-mer, mightiest brain of the system—according to himself—and aided by the triple-distilled minds of a hundred notable scientists, must come to me for the underlying equation of the universe! There is infinite irony in that."

  "Give it to me," shouted Ku-mer hoarsely. Gone was his Martian suavity, gone his poise and impassiveness. His hand shook; the veins swelled on his ocher forehead. At last the secret, by means of which infinity was his, lay in his grasp.

  He did not know that the Earthman was thoroughly befuddled, aghast at his revelation of the whirling sphere. Webb knew quite well that he didn't know the answer, that he had only fumbled at the hem of the tremendous equation. Yet the crystals of thought had said that he knew. Why? Were they in truth but finite in their knowledge, even as the beings from whom they had been extracted, or was there something deeper in their passionless accusation?

  His jeering was but a cloak, a stalling for time. He wanted opportunity to think it out, to seek a way to turn the sudden trend of affairs to advantage. But Ku-mer pressed relentlessly. "Give me the equation," he reiterated with an access of deadly calm.

  Webb shook his head. "Not yet. We must come to terms first," he said.

  For a timeless moment Ku-mer's thin finger was on the trigger. Susan opened her eyes, tottered to her feet with a scream. Then the Martian relaxed, smiled.

  "I am a fool," he spoke of himself, dispassionately. "I must purge myself of these silly emotions. I almost killed you, Webb Foster. That is over. You shall reveal the secret to me. Your isolated thought essence will join its fellows, will add the capping stone to my power."

  He whistled shrilly. In seconds the dome swarmed with his men, alike only in their outlawry from the system. They seized the bound Earthman, the girl, carried them struggling and straining out into the weird phosphorescence of Gar-Mando, thrust them roughly into the laboratory of Ku-mer.<
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  Chapter 6

  PANTING, heaving, Webb found himself stretched flat upon a dissecting table. Overhead, suspended from a crane, geared with an intricate web of meshing wheels, glittered curving electro-knives. Bound, helpless, Webb strained with all his might. A cold sweat burst out in great globules on his forehead. He knew what that maze of shining instruments portended.

  It was an electric trepanner, with refinements. On the pressure of a button, the mechanism dipped smoothly into place, the knives cut with circular motion; the trepanned section of skull lifted into a special container, which whizzed swiftly out of the way. Then a second circlet of knives, broad of base, wafer-thin, dipped, inserted themselves with delicate precision between skull and gray tissue, scooped out the quivering brain whole, intact. Next to his table was a glassite bowl, half full of a cloudy solution. Webb closed his eyes spasmodically. He knew what was to go into that saline broth.

  Ku-mer was at his side, observing his frantic efforts with a scientific, detached interest. "You are a strange man, Webb Foster," he said. "I am granting you the sublimation of your mind, and you shriek out against it. Tsk—tsk! You must not struggle so."

  "Damn you!" Webb gritted through locked teeth. "I am going to disappoint you even more than you think. I do not know the equation you desire. The crystals lied to you, or merely mocked."

  Ku-mer staggered, then laughed. "They never lie, and being unhuman, do not mock. It is you who are lying now, Webb Foster, seeking to save your fleshy life. Your stratagem is childish." His arm raised; he pressed a button.

  The current flowed into the trepanner; the gears started to turn. From somewhere, far off it seemed, a girl screamed. It was Susan, beating with vain fists against the close-crowding men. They laughed at her puny efforts. A shaggy Europan clubbed her brutally. She went crashing against the farther wall of the laboratory. Her body lay limp, motionless. She was silent.