A Large Anthology of Science Fiction

by Jerry

  Jerry held on to that desperately. She must be alive—if life it could be called—in a new dimension, a new existence, waiting for him to follow and resale. He permitted himself no other thought, else he would have gone mad.

  Edna Wiggins stayed discreetly out of sight. Young Egbert was shipped to an expensive private school in California—as far away as possible. Nightly, Mrs. Wiggins dreamed that the police were coming for her darling brat to drag him into durance vile, and she woke in sweaty fear. Thus it was that she signed checks for Jerry’s work with feverish haste, not stopping to argue or quibble over vouchers.

  Forbes Dakin stuck loyally by Jerry. He assisted, advised, expostulated that the hollow-eyed young man get sleep, take nourishment; subtly he tried to dissuade him from his crazy venture. To Dakin, as well as to the others, it was deliberate suicide. But Jerry was deaf to all entreaties. Kay was out there, in the infinite, calling to him, waiting with the growing fear that he would never come. It drove him on to even more tremendous labors.

  Finally, a new tourmaline sphere rested in the floor hollow within the circumscription of magnets and parabolic reflectors. Inside its clear depths hung a ham; a white mouse gibbered and squeaked; a canary ruffled its frightened feathers; a chair stood in the accustomed place; water filled a tank; bread; iron ; everything was exactly and meticulously the duplicate of that first ill-fated sphere. Jerry had tried to reproduce to the minutest detail the material equipment, the sequence of events.

  “The timing, the power we are to use, even that last quick jerk of the lever, must follow exactly what happened before,” he told Dakin, who had consented, albeit reluctantly, to set the switches and the rheostats. “With similar forces and similar masses, the chances of my finding Kay are so much more likely.”

  Dakin nodded wearily. He was frightened, now that the zero hour had come, but it was too late for him to back out. One look at Jerry’s burning eyes and grim, set face showed that.

  Dakin took his place at the panel board. Jerry stood near the magnet switch, even as Kay had done. The routine was carefully gone through. He sent the juice surging through the magnets, waited for polarization for five exact minutes.

  Then Dakin set the rheostat lever in the first notch. The blue lights glowed again in the concentric tubes; the atmosphere was filled once more with the pungency of ozone. The reflectors dazzled as the initial voltage hurtled upon the doomed sphere. When the bolometer registered two degrees Centigrade, Dakin set the lever up another notch. It had all been carefully rehearsed.

  Frost thickened on the crystalline surface; the little animals within stiffened with cold. The needle swung steadily to the left, retracing exactly what had once before occurred. Over, over, while the two men watched with bated breath. Minus two hundred and seventy-two degrees, slower, then the needle quivered and stuck. The temperature at which helium solidifies!

  For ten minutes they waited, ten long minutes that seemed eternity. It represented the interval during which Jerry had argued with Mrs. Wiggins before young Egbert had taken their destinies into his own grubby fingers.

  Jerry swung around, cowered almost against the frozen surface of the globe, even as he remembered Kay had done. Eight minutes, nine minutes, ten, while his heart pounded with suffocating thunders and his breath was a tight constriction in his throat. Suddenly he nodded. Dakin shivered, implored him with anguished eyes. It was still not too late to back out. But Jerry shook his head frantically. The precious seconds were slipping. With a groan Dakin threw the lever violently over to the last notch.

  A blinding flash, a surging roar; a million volts battered into the sphere. The ice-covered surface opened, melted into hazy nothingness. Jerry threw himself around even as Kay had done. The events of a whole lifetime rushed through his brain, like those of a drowning man, of some one falling through space. For a single, tiny moment fear overwhelmed him, fear of that dreadful unknown into which he was voluntarily casting himself. Almost he sprang backward, out of the range of those fearful, beating impulses. Then, as in a dream, he saw the features of Kay shimmering before him. He gritted his teeth, held firm.

  Then came the blast, as the air rushed into the vacuum of the halted atoms. It caught him, hurled him headlong, straight for the center of the misty globe. A great cry tore involuntarily from his throat as he swept, without a stagger, into the swirling interior.

  He was curiously light. He floated in a current of illimitable forces. Red-hot pincers seemed to tear his flesh and bones apart. Up above, all around him, lights wavered and danced. The room was a roaring haze. Through swirling currents he saw Dakin, mouth open, eyes filled with terrible fear, darting frantically for the lever, thrusting it back to zero.

  Jerry found himself suddenly smiling. The gesture was a duplication of his own former movements, and like it would be too late. But there was no doubt that poor Dakin was scared, would give anything now to undo that to which he had been an accessory.

  Suddenly a cry of surprise tore from Jerry’s lips. The tearing, ripping sensations had ceased. A sense of well-being invaded him. The crystalline sphere, the chair, the caged animals, hitherto vague, insubstantial, ghostly, were swimming back to solidity, to hard, tangible surfaces. But the great laboratory, the magnets, the pounding, flaming reflectors, the walls with their panels and shiny surfaces, Dakin himself, misted and fled from his senses like the tenuous wisps of a waking dream.

  “Dakin! Dakin!” he shouted. “What’s happening to you? Where are—” A soundless explosion scattered his amazed senses into oblivion. He knew no more——

  OUTSIDE, Forbes Dakin stared aghast at the emptiness where the tourmaline sphere had stood only a second before. It had vanished; so had its occupant. Young Jerry Sloan had catapulted into a new order of things, had commenced his tremendous journey beyond space and time itself in search of his vanished sweetheart. Or else he was dead—he and Kay Ballard—utterly, irretrievably dead, as no human beings had ever been before.

  With a sharp cry Dakin rushed out of the laboratory, ran hatless and coat-less through the long shadows of that June afternoon as if pursued by scourging furies. A white-haired, gentle man, panic in his eyes, oblivious to the curious stares of passers-by. A policeman caught at him as he fled.

  “Here, what’s the trouble?”

  But the elderly physicist babbled unmeaning words, thrust off the grip of the law with a sudden twist, and was gone on his aimless race. The policeman looked after him doubtfully, shook his head, muttered to himself about old men drinking more than they could stand, and resumed his slow, majestic circuit——

  It had been Jerry’s strict orders that the laboratory be left untouched, exactly as it was on the momentous occasion when he first started his search for Kay. Otherwise, should they ever be able to return, disaster might ensue if they materialized within the solid confines of other objects.

  These instructions were meticulously obeyed. Dakin, recovered from his senseless flight and mightily ashamed of himself, sealed the house just as it was. All doors were carefully locked but one. To that he held the key. No one else was permitted to enter.

  Every day, promptly at five in the afternoon, the elderly physicist unlocked that single door, entered the laboratory, and sat in a chair well removed from the degression in the floor, until six o’clock. Then, with a sigh, he arose, took a last, lingering look at that vacant, unmoving space, at the silent magnets and the dull reflectors, set his hat on his head, let himself out of the house, carefully locked the door with a double lock, and departed to his own bachelor quarters.

  Every day for a month Forbes Dakin repeated this undeviating ritual. He was a methodical man, and he had no family to expostulate with him. Strange feelings tugged at his withered heart. He had learned to love Jerry as a son during that frantic week of preparation. And now Jerry was gone, as was that slim and lovely girl who had been his assistant, and never again would he see either of them. Heaven knows what manner of thoughts went through the old man’s head as he sat there, an hour
each day, day in and day out, staring into that emptiness where spheres and warm flesh-and-blood humans alike, had vanished into—what?

  At the end of the month Dakin felt his hopes slipping. Not that he had really expected anything else. Other matters intervened. Work that must be done. So he cut down his visits to twice a week, then to once a week.

  A year passed. The dust silted through tightly closed windows and doors, and made a thin carpet over apparatus and undisturbed floors and furniture. On the first of every month the old man let himself in, hopelessly stared with aged eyes at the tragic area, and let himself out again softly, quietly, as if he were afraid to awaken the sleeping echoes.

  The years rolled on. The tumult, the noise of the astounding disappearances had died in the world. Edna Wiggins, more mountainous than ever and mumbling toothlessly, had other worries. Egbert had been expelled from college, had forged her name to certain checks. It required all her influence to keep him out of jail.

  The very names of Kay Ballard and Jerry Sloan were forgotten. Only in Forbes Dakin’s heart were they still enshrined, and until the year of his death, he made his monthly pilgrimage to the tomblike house with religious fidelity.

  Then he died. In his will were instructions. Never was the house to be torn down, or disturbed in any way. Once a year tins of food were carefully to be replaced within the laboratory; once a year trustees were to air the place and seek for evidences of the departed. Telephone connections were to be left intact, in case——

  The instructions were carried out faithfully, albeit with many shrugs. Dakin had left ample funds for that purpose, and the trustees were well paid for their simple duties.

  The years became decades, the decades centuries. The city grew to a marvelous thing of soaring colors and brilliant facades. The telephone gave way to television. Rockets pierced the stratosphere, made their initial flights to the moon. Interplanetary communication became an established fact; mankind grew in knowledge and power. New and impossible inventions became commonplace. With one exception—the secret that Jerry Sloan had possessed, the secret that had been his doom and the doom of that ancient girl he loved.

  The house remained. A dingy, timeworn structure of indestructible stone. Generations of trustees remembered but one clause of that age-old will. The building must never be destroyed, must never be disturbed.

  That grew into a tradition more immutable than the laws of the Medes and the Persians. All else was forgotten. The house became a monument, a shrine to departed generations. It was sealed beyond all possibility of entry. Fantastic legends grew around it. Within its foul and musty interior, huge machines slowly rusted and rotted away, ready to shatter at the slightest touch. The moveless dust lay thick on everything.

  Then, three thousand years later, war flared. War between the planets. A Venusian fleet slashed out of space, dropped explosive spores upon the ancient city of Earth. There was a tremendous puff, and city and lofty towers of strange, new metals and millions of swarming mankind disintegrated into mile-high columns of flaming dust. The laboratory of Jerry Sloan was no more!

  V.

  JERRY felt curiously free and light. Just when it was that he awakened from his trancelike state he did not know. His eyes were open, and his brain functioned with a strange new headiness. When he moved, it was without effort, without that feeling of straining muscles, of resistance within the body that is so normal and taken for granted in an Earthly existence. He might have been awake for seconds only, or it might have been for unimaginable centuries; he had no manner of deciding. The time sense was curiously lacking.

  He stared around him. He was within a great, hollow sphere, whose bluish tinge made transparency a matter of definite angles of vision. Two cages hung from near-by supports. A bright-eyed mouse examined him with intense curiosity, while a canary preened itself, cocked its pert little head and trilled with carefree forgetfulness of all but the immediate present—the here-now of time and space.

  Jerry’s eyes traveled farther around the curving walls of his globe. He knew these things, recognized them for what they were, yet his brain, smoothly functioning though it was, had not yet adjusted present with past and future. There was a tank of water near by, its liquid surface smooth and rippleless. A loaf of golden, crusty bread looked hungrily inviting on a chair, and a great ham lay on the crystal floor, with a broken cord trailing from its brown rotundity.

  Jerry blinked at it, and uttered a startled cry. That homely reminder of Earth coordinated hitherto disjointed processes within him. He remembered now. The tourmaline sphere opening up before him like a mirage; the great swish of air that hurled him into the vacuum; the last, bitter sight of Dakin frantically reversing the lever; the swift blurring of the outside world, and the final blast of oblivion.

  “Kay!” The name flung itself against the confining walls, boomed hollowly in his ears. She should be here, next him, with her dancing eyes and impish smile, welcoming him to this new existence, maintaining with precious dignity that she had not been afraid, that she had known he would follow to rescue her.

  But Kay was not within the sphere. A frantic fear ‘drove him senselessly around the small confines, made him stumble into the chair and send it crashing, and the loaf of bread skittering almost into the tank of water. That brought him to a full awareness of his situation. Bread and water and ham! Who knew how infinitely precious they might prove before this insane adventure was over?

  He rescued the loaf of bread, and sat down to consider the situation carefully. Something had gone singularly astray with his calculations. Up to a certain point they had been perfect. The globe and all its contents, including himself, had materialized in this strange new universe, even as he had suspected. Matter carried its own space time along. When motion died, the universe changed; the old wrappers disappeared and the new ones took their place. Life evidently continued, different no doubt, though as yet he had no means of detecting any particular changes.

  But something else had happened. By placing the second sphere exactly in the situs of the vanished one, by reproducing with painful fidelity every detail of the initial catastrophe, he had hoped and expected that they would materialize in the new space time simultaneously and co-existently. In which case the two spheres would have coalesced and he, Jerry Sloan, would have found Kay at his side.

  Yet Kay was not here. That was a self-evident fact. It was that cursed time intervals of a week on Earth. He had not dreamed it would matter here, but it did. Either that, or there was movement in this universe, a movement that had carried the other globe far out of his reach. He arose excitedly. What a fool he had been! Of course there had been movement. He had forgotten completely that he had not, could never, in the nature of things, have reproduced what had once taken place. That week of Earth time had been fatal. A second would have been as bad.

  For the Earth was not still. It rotated on its axis; it whirled around the Sun; it was carried in the sweep of the solar system across the galactic Milky Way; it partook of the unimaginable speed of the expanding universe. And they were no longer subject to Earth laws, to gravitational pulls. A week apart! He laughed harshly. Millions of miles in the space of the old! What incomprehensible infinities in the space of the new!

  Very slowly he drew from his pocket a tiny mechanism. It glittered mockingly in his hand. On that he had pinned his hopes of releasing the stored potential energy, of vibrating themselves back again into the universe of material things. Now it was a worse than useless thing.

  Kay was goodness knows where, and even if she were at his side, they would never dare return. Rematerialization might find them in the frightening void between the planets; it might catapult them into the blazing maw of the Sun itself; or even, for all he knew, on the ragged edges of some extra-galactic nebula.

  JERRY lifted his hand in impotent fury to dash the mockery of that mechanism to the shattering hardness of the tourmaline. A sudden access of sanity held his arm, and he replaced it carefully in his pocket. He sat do
wn again, watching the unthinking animals. He envied them their timeless complacence. Life just now was pleasant; what mattered the future? For himself, he saw it all too clearly.

  He had food and drink enough, with stringent rationing, for a week, or even two, of Earth time. But the air supply! That was vital! If he breathed as deeply and as rapidly as he had on Earth, a hasty calculation showed that he had not sufficient for twenty-four hours. His eyes clung speculatively to the animals. They were using up his precious supply. Now if—He shook his head determinedly. He would not do it. It was not their fault they were here. Besides, what difference did it make? An hour more or less. Eternity would last just as long.

  Suppose he sat quite still, conserving his energy! That would give added minutes. With a muttered oath Jerry was on his feet. He would not cling to life like that. He stared at the enveloping crystal for the hundredth time. And for the hundredth time a bluish-gray blankness met his eye. Impenetrable, soft, with a curious luminescense of its own that shed a concentrated light within the sphere.

  Without quite knowing why he did it, Jerry flung himself flat along the concave of the globe. There was a kind of gravitational force inside the sphere. But there was no up or down. He could walk indifferently on what might be considered ceiling and what might be floor. Movable articles drifted steadily, inexorably, toward each other, requiring force to separate. As if, Jerry thought with a shiver, the globe represented a closed gravitational system, a solitary blob of matter in a universe of emptiness.

  Sprawled out, face pressed close to the polarizing crystal, he squinted sharply through the shifting transparency. Nothing! With a groan of despair he turned his face as he lifted. His gaze made an acute angle of incidence with the tourmaline. His body stiffened; an exclamation ripped from his lips. He had seen something.

  Unwittingly he had glanced along the particular plane through which the polarized light traveled unobstructed.