by Jerry
Outside was a strange universe, an incredible one. There were no dimensions, or if there were, Jerry’s Earth-bound senses were unable to dissociate them. It was like a gigantic cinema, where near and far flashed over the selfsame screen.
Strange, flattened shapes whirled and blurred with unimaginable rapidity. Weird distortions of startling colors blinked into view and blanked out again with abrupt finality. Orbs stretched like rubber bands to gigantic proportions and contracted with infinite speed to mere pin points of flame. A picture show, a phantasmagoria, a kaleidoscope of tumbling, constantly rearranging figures, strangely insubstantial, while all around stretched the gray luminescense of a space without height or depth or thickness, a space that was void and without form.
For a long time Jerry stared in breathless attention, his plight forgotten, everything but that weird show. Then suddenly the answers came to him. That which colored and formed a back drop for the hyperspace, the supertime into which he had been thrown, was the universe of his former being. Those shifting shadows were the projections of solid, three-dimensional suns and planets and galaxies and nebulae upon his present space and time. A magnificent peep show at which he was the sole and involuntary spectator. Somewhere in that fleeting exhibition was the Sun; somewhere among the most inconspicuous dots that flicked on and off like defective bulbs was the Earth, its nations, its endlessly striving people, its loves and sorrows and hopes and despairs.
He laughed aloud at that. It seemed so futile, so insignificant. What, for instance, was Forbes Dakin doing at this particular moment; what was Marlin, Edna Wiggins doing? Incongruously, the expression “Old buzzard!” formed on his lips. It brought a pang to him. Memories of Kay Ballard flooded him with unbearable longing.
A new fear was welling in him, a fear that would not down. The inconceivable speed with which those flattened shapes formed and re-formed, and dizzyingly blurred. What did that mean? Suddenly he knew, and with it the terrifying answer to his idle questioning.
Dakin and Marlin and Mrs. Wiggins were dead; had been dead for unimaginable ages. Perhaps the Earth itself was already a cold and lifeless ball, swinging around a crusted, darkling Sun. He was witnessing the birth and death of suns and planets and galaxies; each blanking was a death, each reappearance a blaze of new nebular matter. That accounted for the ceaseless blur. A thousand centuries of slow and ordered growth telescoped themselves into a second of breathing.
He remembered now. He was in an alien universe, a universe in which the electrons and protons and neutrons of his being had engulfed themselves upon the stoppage of their swift vibrations. Time here was adjusted to that moveless quiescence, or, what seemed more likely, the infinitely slow residual motion of mutual attractions and repulsions. This time sensation was normal to him now. The time of that other universe from which he had been thrown was now abnormal. An exhalation here meant aeons there.
Grimly he considered that. Even if he could return, even if he found, by some wild coincidence, the exact spot he had quitted, billions and trillions of years would have elapsed. The old familiar patterns had vanished into the limbo of forgotten time; he would be more an alien even than he was here. He took a deep breath, twisted slightly, and saw something that was utterly incredible.
So near he might have reached it with his hand had the crystal walls not intervened, so far away that aeons of endless flight might elapse before contact could be made, was a sphere. A tourmaline sphere, sharp and clear and transparent, moveless in the queer, flat void.
Jerry’s heart stopped, then pounded with trip-hammer blows. Within its crystal round, sitting on the chair, chin cupped in slender hand, staring with eyes that no longer danced upon the circumscribing walls, was Kay Ballard! The cage doors were opened. The white mouse, brother to one he held imprisoned, gamboled sportively about her feet; the canary nibbled with greedy beak at the bread.
VI.
“KAY!” Jerry shouted insanely. It was more than incredible; it was impossible. She had reached this hyperspace a week before him, yet she was still alive. The food had not been touched; the air was still breathable. But of course! A week of Earth time meant so minute a fraction of a second in this sluggish eternity that to all intents and purposes they had reached here simultaneously.
“Kay!” he shouted again, and beat with hammering fists upon the crystal.
She did not raise her head. How could she hear? Sound required matter through which to journey. Who knew what strange stuff made up this hyperspace? Who knew what unimaginable distances separated the two spheres?
Time ceased to have all meaning for Jerry now. He shouted; he beat at the solid tourmaline; he flung himself along the concave surface, seeking somehow to attract the girl’s attention. But still she sat and stared into dull and dreary nothingness, while the mouse and canary played unheeded about the globe.
The distorted projections of that other universe blurred with increasing speed; they vanished and did not reappear. One by one the misty lights flickered and went out. But Jerry did not see, or seeing, paid no attention. All his mind, all his soul was concentrated on that tourmaline orb, on the seated girl within. Nothing else mattered.
Then—it might have been minutes later, it might have been hours—Kay got up, ate sparingly of the bread, fed bits to canary and mouse, drank of the water. Listlessly she moved over the crystal, until her head stiffened, and her eyes jerked full on the prone figure of Jerry. Her startled look slid along the plane of polarized light. Her arms extended in involuntary appeal.
There they were, two human beings, each enshrined in a sphere of shining crystal, separated by unimaginable barriers, alone in the vastnesses of a space time of their own contriving. It was agony to see each other, to gesture, to beckon, and approach no nearer.
Yet, gradually, a measure of comfort grew on them. Somehow they evolved a system of code signals, semaphoring with angular positions of their arms, such as were employed by armies and navies in pre-radio days. They conversed, haltingly, it was true, but with unquenchable longing.
The hours passed unheeded. The air was staling slowly, yet at first they did not notice. Then Jerry heard a faint “cheep.” The canary’s beak was wide, gasping for air. Its bright beady eyes implored the man to help it in its strange predicament. Slowly its feathers ruffled and it toppled, to lie a moveless, rumpled ball. The young man realized now what it meant. The atmosphere within the ball was foul and heavy. His eyes burned and his head ached. He signaled frantically to Kay.
“Are you all right?”
She pressed close to her prisoning glass and smiled bravely. “Quite, my dear.”
But it was obvious she was in distress. They took counsel. Movement to be reduced to a minimum, breathing to be shallowed as much as possible. But it was plain they could not survive more than an hour. And then——
“If only,” Kay signaled in anguish, “we were together, tight in each other’s arms. It would not matter so much, going out like this.”
“I know,” Jerry answered wearily. He stared with grim, desperate eyes at the iron bar. He did not intend suffering the agonies of the damned from slow, horrible strangulation. A crashing blow with that heavy bar on the tourmaline, a jagged hole, and the swift rush of foul air into the space vacuum without would bring merciful release.
He told Kay of that. The girl’s face was pale, but composed. “It’s the only way,” she agreed. She was breathing heavily now, and a blue tinge was creeping around her delicate nostrils.
Slowly, inexorably, they lifted their respective bars of iron. Slowly, like automatons, they turned to each other. Separated in life by incredible barriers, perhaps in death they might once more be united. Who knew?
“Afraid?” Jerry whispered. A mirthless smile twitched over his suffering face. She could not hear, of course.
But she must have sensed what he said, for her head shook in brave negation. Her free hand lifted, went to her lips. A kiss wafted across the hyper space time for the first time in all its unthinkable
existence.
Together they lifted the bars. Great pulses pounded in Jerry’s temples. His eyes smarted and his lungs labored like bellows. He poised for the final signal that meant release from torture. He must hurry! Soon they would be too weak to bring the iron bars crashing. His left hand upraised. A twist of the wrist to the left, and Kay would know——
He started the irrevocable movement, held it frozen half way, then reversed with frantic, pounding gesture.
Things had been happening in their universe. Things that in their absorption in each other they had not noticed, or noting, failed to understand.
One by one the phantom projections had misted and faded, and none had come to take their place. The backdrop, the flat distortions, shimmered and disappeared, as if a master showman was tiring of his show, and slowly but inexorably was turning out his lights.
The strange, luminous gray of the ultrauniverse spread, gobbled up the blurring shapes. The colored flares were few in number now, and weakly flickering. But they seemed closer. The backdrop of eternal night closed in, was moving forward, shifting to the front of the stage, before the footlights, and advancing even as it faded and became a wraith out into the orchestral pit itself.
A wan, orange glimmer surged over the tourmaline spheres, infolded them in a haze of swift vibration that shimmered and danced like fireflies on a night in June. Jerry cried out, dropped his bar. It drifted softly, like a feather, to the crystal. Then all else blotted out in the strange new glow, but not before he had seen Kay whirl and stare with frightened eyes out into the engulfing space.
Suddenly he, too, was staring, forgetful of foul air, of nauseous headache. Something was outside his sphere. A blur of movement that shifted and gyrated with terrific speed. Formless, whizzing, yet somehow the thought hammered in Jerry’s oxygen-starved brain that there was something strangely human about its queer vibrations. At times it seemed that a face, distorted, twisted out of all imagining, peered in at him. But the vision was so instantaneous, so utterly fleeting, that Jerry laid it to the poisoned air that clogged his veins, the close approach of delirium.
Yet he withheld that final blow. Instinct warned him to wait, even to the last gasp of suffocation. Within the echoing, semidarkened recesses of his brain he seemed to hear a voice, urging him to make no move. There were seconds when the eerie, formless blur disappeared, but it always returned. The intervals grew longer, the elongated face showed actually for split seconds of time. Certain tiny sounds tinkled in the tourmaline, as if——
VII.
JERRY LAY within the sphere, half delirious. The air was a fetid, noisome effluvium, which his lungs gulped and rejected. His throat was a fiery constriction, and darkness was filming his eyes. Perhaps that was why the orange glow seemed to become fainter and fainter, and the strange, superhuman face without steadied for seconds at a time, and the tinkling noises grew in intensity and duration.
He was drifting, drifting. The light was dying, but rocket flares exploded in his head. Death stole slowly over him. There was a sudden grinding noise, a surge of something cold and biting, and consciousness left him——
Memories of childhood struggled bewilderedly through Jerry as he opened his eyes. Surely that noble, well-proportioned being with the benignant, superhuman features who bent over him was of angelic descent. Even such had he seen depicted in the genius-intoxicated drawings of that strange madman and ecstatic visionary of the eighteenth century, William Blake.
Something spoke within Jerry. It was not sound; it was not a voice; it was a series of thoughts incredibly impacting on his brain.
“Do not be alarmed,” they soothed. “You are quite all right now. Breathe deeply.”
Jerry obeyed the inner voice. It was good to draw into his tortured lungs the clean, sweet air.
“But who are you,” he cried, “and how did you get inside the sphere?” The man smiled. It illumined and transfigured his mobile features, made him almost godlike in countenance. “Strange sounds issue from your lips, O being from another universe who yet resembles so closely our own kind. I do not understand them. They are harsh and discordant. But your thoughts impact on mine and I understand those. There is a tradition,” he mused, and the sentence pictures somehow arranged themselves in proper patterns to Jerry, “that in the misty, incredible antiquity of our own race it was necessary for primitive beings to make noises with their lips for communication.”
“Then you have mastered telepathic conversation,” Jerry said in awed tones. He still spoke; it would take him a long time to achieve the disciplined ordering of thoughts that came so easily to his mentor.
The man nodded. “For uncounted aeons now. But to answer your questions : I am Horgo, of the outpost galaxy, Andromede. A hundred thousand light journeys ago two spheres of strange design emerged with infinite slowness, out of the formless void into which we were hurtling. Our instruments detected them first, as the faintest of faint impingements of ether stresses on delicate dials. My great great ancestor, and Lika’s, too, famous scientists of that early time, discovered them.
“Yet the spheres could not be seen, for the ether particles held no vibration. A new, other-universe form of matter. They tried their mightiest forces, compounded of the last expiring gasps of stellar laboratories, to break them down, to penetrate their invisible, albeit rigidly impenetrable sheaths, without result.
“My ancestor was a great scientist, I have said, far in advance of his time. Even then the universe was dying. The expanding effect of that first great explosion of primal central matter was losing momentum, in accordance with the inexorable laws of thermodynamics. Matter was dissipating into waves of energy; waves of energy were spreading and thinning out as the universe expanded and created new space-time units on its far-flung outposts. Already the more central galaxies were dark and slowly vanishing. A moveless heat-death was holding them in thrall. Already the race of man had moved from the tiny galaxy it had inhabited since the farthermost reaches of time to the island universe of Oria. Then that, too, faded into the matterless, waveless uniformity of the heat-death.”
Horgo stared out of the crystalline sphere at the gray waste with sad, weary eyes. The orange glow had gone; the flickering distortions were gone, nothing remained but gray, motionless nothingness. His thought processes slid into Jerry’s brain again.
“From galaxy to galaxy we pushed, ever outward, until we reached Andromede, the last outpost. Here the race was forced to halt. Beyond was neither space nor time. Yet, still the primal energy was strongest here, the universe still expanding, and creating new units of space and time as it rushed outward. But this could not keep up forever. My ancestor realized that. His instruments showed the slowing up, the enormous dissipation of energy into rippleless waves. With a flash of genius he realized that these spheres, impenetrable to all their science, held perhaps the secret of a conservation of energy, of a self-contained system, that contradicted or defied the laws of thermodynamics.”
JERRY had been hearkening to those inner thought patterns with growing amazement. Oria! Andromede! Good night! Those were the nebular galaxies he had known as Orion and Andromeda. Then he was back in his own universe, and Horgo, this superhuman, was perhaps the last mighty representative of his own race, left far behind in the dim reaches of Earth. His brain whirled. They had returned, been swallowed by the ceaseless expansion, but unimaginable billions of years into the future, when the universe had degraded into that moveless heat-death bath of which even in his primitive day certain scientists had spoken.
Horgo’s face lighted. He had read Jerry’s spinning thoughts. “Yes,” he sent his patterns across, “we must be members of the same race. The extremities of time have met. The first primitive form and the very last. For nowhere else in the universe did we men who first had sprung from the tiny speck called Erd ever find life like ours. But to continue:
“My ancestor was short-lived. In those days lives did not extend beyond a thousand light journeys. Nor were his instruments as adva
nced as they were later to become. He labored mightily to break through those invisible spheres of locked-in energy. He did not succeed. His sons took up the task. They failed, too, but they managed to invent an infra-camera which photographed by a negative process. The lacunae in the ceaseless flow of wave impulses that permeate the entire universe registered on the disks by their very lack of energy.
“So it was that you and your sister sphere first became visible. Judge of their surprise to find two beings in their hollow shells, rudimentary, it is true, but nevertheless somewhat similar to themselves. Unfortunately the pair seemed dead. They neither moved nor budged from their unnatural, rigid positions. A state of death or cataleptic trance at best. A lifetime of observation showed no change. But they did not give up their task, and took thousands on thousands of negative photographs of the spheres.”
Jerry shivered as he considered what that meant. Thousands of time units of the order of light years had flashed by in the outer universe while he, inside the sphere, had not yet completed the simplest gesture. And Kay! The memory of her jerked him into awareness. He caught Horgo’s arm in a grip of steel. His voice clanged harshly. “The girl in the other crystal globe! She is dying while we are doing nothing. You must rescue her at once.” Horgo winced at the crude concus-. sions of sound. It was evident that uncouth noises had been obliterated from the dying universe along with speech. “You need not blast at me with frightful clamor,” he observed mildly. “Think the thoughts you wish and I shall understand. But have no fear for the girl. Lika has entered her orb and even now is ministering to her wants. Her thoughts are a steady flow in my brain.” Jerry dropped Horgo’s hand. Joy tingled in his veins. As long as Kay was alive——
“Thank you,” he started to say, caught himself, and thought it.
Horgo smiled approvingly. “That is better. To return to my narrative: It was in the next generation that the accumulated photographs showed that you were not dead. Your positions had changed, though to no great extent. That heartened the workers. They had discovered the secret of lengthening their lives to fifty thousand light journeys, though it was left to Lika and myself to find the true secret of immortality.