A Large Anthology of Science Fiction

by Jerry

  Kay flushed. “But he can, Mr. Marlin,” she cried out. “Look! The rheostat lever is over only part of the way. The last notch represents full power, perfect synchronization. Go on, Jerry. Show them!”

  Jerry Sloan shook his head. “No,” he stated in flat tones. “I haven’t tested that phase yet. I don’t know what might happen. Within a month I’ll know more about it.”

  “I’ll tell you now,” chuckled Marlin. “Nothing; absolutely nothing. You’ve reached the last outpost, the same as I did. Your method is new and ingenious, but it adds nothing to the sum total of knowledge.”

  Mrs. Wiggins woke with a start at that. This was something she could understand. Professor Marlin was internationally known; he had just said young Sloan’s experiment meant nothing.

  She rose wrathfully from her seat. Her voice was shrill, excited. “So this is what I spent a hundred thousand on! An experiment that means nothing. You worked on my good nature, on my generosity, with lies, lies! You’re a fraud, a cheat!”

  Jerry flushed. His hands clenched, unclenched. If only she were a man! “Now listen to me, Mrs. Wiggins,” he said miserably. “I didn’t promise miracles. I wouldn’t be a scientist if I did. But I have discovered something extremely important. It’s just that I must have time to make certain that nothing goes haywire; that——”

  The bootlegger’s widow threw her fat arms wildly toward the others. “Listen to him!” she shrilled. “He wants time. Time! Always he tells me that magic word—time! On account of that I spent a hundred thousand; on account of that he wants still more. Show me now!” she clamored. “Or I’ll take every bit of stuff out of here. I’ll sell it, get what I can to make up my losses.”

  Her make-up was streaked; her eyes glared. She was beyond reason. Jerry gritted his teeth, started for her. “You wouldn’t dare do that,” he said very low.

  “Oh, I wouldn’t!” she exclaimed, appealing to the hushed physicists. “Listen to him. A beggar that I made into a scientist. He robbed me of a hundred thousand and he tells me I don’t dare!”

  The men shuffled uneasily, embarrassed at this strange woman’s stranger outburst. They avoided each other’s eyes, avoided especially the tense figure of Jerry Sloan. Even Marlin was abashed. Dakin started to expostulate mildly, found the woman’s torrent of words too much for him, and muttered vaguely something about an important appointment he must keep. He really must be going. Really! No one heard him.

  Kay gripped the edge of the table with white-knuckled hands. “You old buzzard!” she cried. “You and your filthy money! You ought to thank God you were able to give it to Mr. Sloan for his work. That’s the only way you’ll ever be remembered.”

  The frantic woman swung her ponderous form around. “Buzzard!” she wailed. “She called me a buzzard! Me, Edna Wiggins, worth ten million cold plunks. That hussy called me——Oh! Oh!”

  Kay was angry clear through. She had cleansed her soul, made up for all the petty insults, the little tyrannies of a year’s politeness. But she was also frightened. By her outburst she had sealed Jerry’s fate irrevocably. That vindictive old woman would never forgive; would put her threat into merciless action. Kay quivered almost against the frozen surface of the sphere. The cold pierced her marrow, chilled her flesh, but she did not feel it.

  JERRY, white with rage, left the panel board, strode purposefully in the direction of the woman whose filthy money had financed him. He’d be damned if he’d let her get away with that; and he’d be triple damned if he’d be pushed into an experiment of which he had no present way of telling what the results might be.

  Mrs. Wiggins was on the verge of a spectacular faint, and the men, great scientists though they were, knew nothing of feminine tantrums. They were alarmed, crowded around her with fumbling assistance.

  So it was that no one saw Egbert Wiggins. That young scion of beer and millions was not interested in his mother’s tantrums. He had seen plenty of those before. But he had successfully ripped away all the wires he could find in the rear of the room, had had a swell time pushing buttons, swinging knife edges. Nothing had happened, though. Therein he was vaguely disappointed. Nothing spectacular, nothing that would focus attention on himself. He loved that!

  His too-sophisticated eyes swung around the room for new worlds to conquer. They lighted up suddenly. That lever now—how temptingly it rested in its notch. He made his way stealthily toward it, gloating in anticipation.

  Jerry, grim and hard of jaw, was pushing his way through the clustered scientists, toward the shrieking woman in their midst. Kay, aghast at what she had done, shrank even closer to the great sphere.

  “Now you listen to me,” Jerry commenced, biting his words sharply.

  Young Egbert pounced upon the lever with triumphant haste. His small, grubby fingers tightened, swung hard toward the right. As far as it would go. The great tubes flared into blinding blue streaks; the soft whine crescendoed to a howling roar. The reflectors blazed with crackling energy. A million volts seared and crashed into the ice-covered sphere. Within, liquid air was solid air; a tiny globule of helium became nodules of frozen gas. The ham fell with a splintering thud as the tortured cord, brittle beyond all imagining, snapped in two.

  The boy, frightened at the blaze and the noise, howled and scurried for dear life to the farthest end of the laboratory.

  Kay swung around, cried out in fear. The frosted crystal was opening, dissolving before her very eyes. Inside, mouse, canary, chair, bread, ham, water, became vague, indistinct, shifting from hard solidity to a nebulous tenuosity, behind which the machines and walls of the laboratory wavered and grew momentarily clearer.

  The girl’s desperate eyes swerved to the bolometer. The needle was tight against absolute zero. Then, suddenly, as thermo-couple misted into nothingness within the globe, the needle sprang back to twenty-five degrees Centigrade. Room temperature!

  The next instant it happened!

  Kay felt the sudden tug, heard the howling noise that enveloped her. With a great cry she threw herself backward. But it was too late——

  III.

  THE NOISE, the increased flare, the wail of Egbert, Kay’s scream hard on its heels, caught the milling group, pushed them around in gasping astonishment. Jerry, halfway through the group, pivoted, saw the incredible event just as it happened. With a snarling oath he lunged forward, bowling the physicists out of his way, fear like a great hand clutching his heart.

  The huge swoosh of air caught him as it did the others. It roared like an express train pounding along steel rails; it swirled with cyclone force; it scattered heavy instruments like chaff in its path; it knocked men right and left like ninepins; it picked Jerry off his feet, smashed him into a heavy chair, sent him stunned and bleeding to the floor.

  In that second of screaming madness he saw everything to the last startling, crazy detail. The great tourmaline sphere had opened into nothingness. The interior was a phantom, tenuous outline, a vague blur of ghostly matter. The walls of the laboratory were solid behind. Kay’s body, slender, resilient, was curved like a bow, convex toward the sphere, as if she were being pushed by irresistible forces. Terror and strain were on her face; her lips were parted in a dreadful cry.

  Then, even as Jerry smashed headlong into the chair, he saw the girl catapult toward the misty globe, pass without a stagger, without a jar, through what had been inches-thick tourmaline walls, clear into the center of the nebulosity.

  While Jerry sprawled and slithered in frantic attempt to heave himself erect against the rush of air, his horror-struck eyes held on those of the girl. There was surprise, something else within their depths. Her mouth moved as if she were shouting, but no sounds came. Then her eyes widened, and her body, exposed to the still-rushing waves of force, seemingly suspended on nothingness, began to blur. The sphere was gone, vanished; so were the objects Jerry had placed within.

  Then Kay Ballard, too, was gone, vanished, like a clap of thunder, like lightning that had blinded with dazzling flare and become ut
ter night again. The cyclone died down as suddenly as it had come; the confused cries of the men, the toneless shrieks of Mrs. Wiggins no longer faked hysteria, the halffrightened, half-gloating wailing of young Egbert, muted into hushed silence.

  Jerry was already pounding across the room, hurling the lever back to zero position. A million volts seared and died; the tubes went dark and the reflectors quenched their light. Then he whirled, dived for the place where the tourmaline sphere had been, where Kay had stood, incredibly within its closed interior.

  The wild frenzy of his rush carried him over the smooth expanse of floor; his sudden, frantic leap cleared not an instant too soon the pit in which the globe had rested. His hands extended in vain to brace himself against solidity, against a mass that must be there.

  He crashed through thin air, went staggering with the momentum of his body toward the huddled group of men. Edna Wiggins had fainted in earnest, but no one paid her any attention. Young Egbert thought it time for him to be going. He quietly eased himself out of the room, raced for the waiting limousine, and stampeded the highly uniformed chauffeur into instant flight for the Park Avenue penthouse that was more Renaissance palace than home.

  “My Lord!” said Dakin over and over again. It was incredible, impossible! Not a minute before there had been a solid, substantial globe, a girl of extraordinary charm and beauty; and now—there was only the stark emptiness of the floor, the huge magnets thrusting at nothingness, the gigantic reflectors enringing a sphere from which all substance had fled.

  Clamor rose again; shoutings, confused questions bordering close on panic.

  “For Heaven’s sake, man,” screamed Marlin, “what have you done?”

  But Jerry was beyond hearing. Grimfaced, desperately, he was swinging from machine to machine, reversing levers, shifting processes, slamming waves of heat into the silent space, trying with every resource known to science to undo that which had been unwittingly done. The sweat poured in little streams from his body; the temperature of the room grew to furnace-heat, but nothing happened. Both tourmaline sphere and Kay Ballard were irretrievably gone!

  IT WAS DAKIN, kindly and spare of build, who forced him to quit his frantic efforts. He led Jerry gently to a chair, saying: “Don’t take on so, Sloan. It wasn’t your fault. You had refused to be stampeded into an experiment which you hadn’t checked in advance. It was that young imp of Mrs. Wiggins’ who was responsible for the tragedy. Pull yourself together, man. We’ll have to think this thing out clearly.”

  Jerry stared with haggard, hopeless eyes at the mocking sphere of vacancy. “I should have known,” he cried fiercely. “I should have been prepared. Kay! Kay!”

  There was danger of madness in the terrible agony of this young man, thought Dakin. Evidently he had been deeply in love with his very personable young assistant. Poor girl! What a dreadful fate! To disintegrate and vanish like a puff of smoke before their very eyes. Dakin shuddered, pulled himself together. And, being wise in the ways of human nature, he adroitly turned the subject.

  “But, my dear Sloan,” he protested, “what did actually happen?”

  Jerry swung on them all, taut, bitter. “Don’t you see?” he cried. “I should have known; all of you should have sensed what was coming. I succeeded, only too well. I stopped the swiftly moving molecules in their tracks.

  I stopped the swifter atoms themselves, the very electrons, in their orbits. Motion died, and absolute zero of temperature was a reality, perhaps for the first time in the history of the material universe.”

  “But why,” submitted Marlin in hushed bewilderment, “did everything—uh—vanish?” He had lost his arrogance completely.

  “A very elementary proposition,” Jerry said with fierce contempt. “When motion ceases, matter—visible matter—must die with it. What are the solid-seeming substances we see? An extension of extremely rapid movement. Nothing else. The diameter of the average molecule is two one-hundred-millionths of an inch. Tremendously below our range of vision. We see them in the mass only by the extension of their speeds. And the electrons themselves within the atoms have also stopped. Their diameters are 4x10-13 centimeters. Inconceivably tiny. Stop their motion and matter, as we know it, vanishes. The interior volume of an atom is a vast globe of emptiness. Jeans has represented it as several wasps buzzing around in the tremendous void of a Waterloo Railroad Station in London. You see the wasps while they fly. Search for them when they hang motionless on walls or ceiling, and the task is futile.”

  His eyes clung desperately, hopelessly, to that void within the circumscription of the reflectors. “She is in there,” he said, pointing, “even now. Yet for all we can do, she might just as well be outside the universe, in another space, another time.”

  Bellew, a small, dapper man, whose specialty was thermodynamics, spoke up. “You applied heat to the area. The energizing waves should have been absorbed by the moveless electrons, kicked them back into vibration. In other words, we should have seen the—ah—vanished substances, even though”—a faint tremor passed over him—“they might not be—ah—exactly in the same form in which they vanished.”

  Jerry shook his head tragically. “Millions of volts went into stopping them, into locking up their energy of motion. Each electron, each proton, is a closed cycle of potential energy. I tried reversing the process. I increased the voltage. The impulses should have done what you say. But they haven’t. Either the closed cycle is a stable state which no power we possess can change, just like a spring-lock door which requires only a slight shove to close, but once closed cannot be opened again without huge exertions of force—or else——”

  He sprang violently from his chair; it went crashing. His eyes flamed. “By Heavens, I think I’ve got it. What I had said before at random. Our space time is an attribute of matter. Without matter our universe fades and becomes insubstantial. But matter is also an attribute of energy, which is motion. The electrons, protons, what not, lost their kinetic energy. They no longer exist. OV rather, the space time in which they were wrapped, the space time with which we are familiar, has ceased to exist with relation to the tourmaline sphere, and—and—” He bogged at the mention of Kay’s name. It stuck in his throat. The others carefully averted their eyes at his grief. With an effort he stumbled on:

  “Perhaps they—she—are in an entirely different order of space time, a new universe, occupying that space, yet infinitely remote. Perhaps, even, they exist in that strange dimension, live, move and have their being, just as——”

  His lean jaw tightened into hard knots; his face grew grim with an intense resolve. He was speaking to himself now, softly, as if the hushed men in the room did not exist.

  Edna Wiggins was coming to, making huge moans, but no one even flicked an eyelid in her direction. All eyes were fixed with unbearable intensity on the young physicist whose loved one had vanished into thin air.

  “Of course,” Jerry whispered to himself, “they are a vacuum in our universe. That was why the air rushed in with such force. She is still there, and I—I am going after her.”

  Dakin put his hand timidly on the young man’s shoulder. “You don’t know what you’re saying. Perhaps a little sleep——”

  Jerry laughed harshly. “I am not crazy, if that’s what you mean.”

  “But how——”

  “The same way Kay went,” he answered promptly. “I’ll build another sphere, repeat exactly what has happened by accident to-day. I—I think I can bring both of us back to this spacetime existence. If not—” He shrugged, and fell silent.

  They stared at him in awe, these scientists, practical, efficient men, not given to sentiment or display of emotion. “Greater love hath no man than this that——”

  Bellew broke the insupportable silence with a matter-of-fact objection. “Granting even your theory, Sloan, granting even you can find the sphere in that other universe, Miss Ballard is dead, irretrievably so. No human body, no life as we know it, could survive the intense cold to which she has been
subjected. A man frozen to death remains dead, no matter what is done to restore the energy of his component molecules.”

  “That is only because the process of freezing was long continued,” Jerry responded. “The organic molecules had time to change chemically into other forms, shift their mutual positions. That is not the case here. The whole damnable affair took only a second. Every molecule, every atom, every electron, was stopped in its tracks. There could not have been any relative change of position, of form.”

  They argued it out until voices were hoarse, and tempers exacerbated, but nothing could be done with Jerry. It was suicide; it was worse, they said, until finally they had to give in to his dogged, stubborn determination.

  Mrs. Wiggins, wide awake now, and thoroughly cowed at the disaster her darling child had brought upon them all, hysterically agreed to furnish the sums necessary to repeat the experiment. Provided, of course, there would be no prosecution of her precious brat, no damage suits, to which Jerry agreed. As if, he raged, all the money in the world could compensate for Kay Ballard.

  IV.

  A WEEK passed. A week of driving furious energy. Jerry Sloan was already a man wrapped away from the world, of things as they are. He neither slept nor ate nor seemingly tired. Workmen scurried with frightened celerity at the harsh whiplash of his voice; the laboratory seethed like a spouting volcano. Jerry was a monomaniac, a man possessed of a single, driving idea. Faster, faster, forging on with insane energy. His cheeks hollowed ; his eyes fixed on far-off things.

  The image of Kay Ballard never left his haunted vision—that last terrible scene as, with outthrust, imploring arms and look of startled surprise, she faded from the universe of familiar things.