by Jerry
“An immortality”—he smiled sadly—“that seemed profitless and horrifying. For the universe was fast dying. It was only by the most tremendous exertions that we were able to concentrate sufficient of the feeble energy flow of almost vanished matter to keep ourselves intact, to keep our apparatus functioning. Soon that, too, would be gone. Yet ever, before our very eyes, were the visible signs that some one had discovered the secret of immuring energy in potential form. For we realized by now that you were alive, that your infinitely slow movements were the product of the infinitely slow corresponding motions of your constituent ether units.
“So we redoubled our efforts. Your spheres gradually grew to a hazy type of visibility, as our ether units slowed wearily down. If only we could break through before the moveless sea of thermal death sapped the last supply of our energies!
“The few who survived with us succumbed, one by one, fading slowly from view as their protons and electrons dissipated in a slow disintegration. We alone were left, Lika and I. Soon we, too, would fade into nothingness. Then, by a lucky accident, Lika stumbled on the solution. We staked every available source of energy on a last mighty effort. We floated in a sphere of force of our own contriving. The waveless, featureless universe nibbled sluggishly at its outer shell, contracting it slowly, but perceptibly, about us.
“With bated breath we threw the beams upon the spheres. With delight we saw them grow in clarity, saw them open along the beam path. The mighty concentrated forces, the essence of the universe, thrust aside the static unbreakability of your units, held them open long enough for us to push ourselves along the path and enter with the supplies we needed. Then the beams flickered and were spent, and the universe-resistant spheres swung back into place.”
There was almost admiration in his piercing glance. “To think that you, of an unimaginable primitiveness in time, could have discovered this principle that, in all the intervening ages, had never been rediscovered.”
Jerry started to explain, but Horgo’s thought patterns stopped him. “You need not tell me. I know everything now; the principle you employed, the method. Remember I can read every thought that passes through your mind.”
“Then no doubt you have read this, too.” Jerry found himself moving his lips in spite of himself. It was terribly difficult to think coherently without speech. “What will be our fate?” Horgo looked quizzically at him. “Fate? We shall live and have our beings within these spheres. Lika and I have the means of renewing air and food pellets indefinitely. Our time processes are slowed, yet to us they shall seem quite normal. That will give us an immortality of meditation and exchange of thoughts. For we shall teach you those secrets, also. Death shall come to us only in that vastly distant future when the infinitely slow vibrations of our ether units dissipate into the dead universe about us. By that time we shall have meditated sufficiently long to have achieved complete absorption into the final secrets of space time and beyond. Then we shall welcome death. For nothing will be left.”
VIII.
JERRY made a gesture of distaste. Such inactive contemplations were not to his fancy. At least, however, if Kay were at his side——
An irresistible longing coursed through him. Her lovely face rose before him in tantalizing detail; her warm, red lips, her merry eyes, that curve of throat——
“It is an unappetizing future you outline,” he told the man of the future quietly. “But perhaps it will be bearable should Kay Ballard, the girl I love, share it with me. You must bring the spheres together, so that the four of us, your Lika and my Kay, may join us in that endless contemplation of yours.” „
Horgo looked at him in surprise. “But why?” he queried. “Why do you require physical contact with the girl you picture as loving. I do not understand that pattern. It is an incomprehensible thought which I have never read before. You will be able to exchange your flow of ideas with her. I shall teach you how. What more do you wish?”
Jerry restrained his surging vehemence. How could he explain his primitive emotions to this highly intellectualized man of the future? Love had died out of the universe aeons before; that strange longing to be with your beloved, to breath the air she breathes.
“Nevertheless,” he answered slowly, painfully, “I must insist upon our joining each other. It is a need that you do not have, that has evidently been bred out of the race. But we are from that long-distant past, Kay and I, when life was savorless without a mate, without some one to share your joys and sorrows in the flesh as well as by the impersonal coldness of distant telepathic communication.”
Horgo shook his head in wonderment. “It was a strange time you lived in,” he declared. “But the thing is impossible. Our beams of force were exhausted in the last mighty effort to penetrate your spheres; we have no other.”
“Impossible!” Jerry echoed. “You, a man of who knows of trillionth centuries, still have that concept in your mental categories!”
The sarcasm was wasted on Horgo. These godlike beings were not given to petty, human emotions.
“Perhaps,” he meditated, “it could be done, by the use of all our supplies and the materials you have within this sphere, I could build up a new force beam in a thousand light journeys. But——”
Jerry actually grinned. “You forget,” he reminded, “that all our material is of the same order of energy. The iron bar equally with the tourmaline sphere, my body with that loaf of bread which to my primitive stomach is food.”
Horgo’s face cleared. “Naturally,” he admitted readily. “I had forgotten that. You could break the sphere, so could the girl you call Kay. But then you have destroyed the strongholds which hold us intact from the heat-death that rules without. We shall be naked, unguarded. It would require tremendous dissipations of energy to force our way through a universe that no longer exists, to join the inmates of the other sphere. Our air supply must scatter at a faster rate when not confined. Gases, even in this potential state, have necessarily more freedom of motion than solids. And for what purpose? So that you may be in the presence of this girl.”
He wagged his head. His logic was impeccable, his reasoning unanswerable. But Jerry was not content. He was ready to risk the loss of immortality if only he and Kay were together for what had once been a normal life period. But something else was dimly struggling in the recesses of his mind. He exploded in a sudden shout that was a deafening clamor to the eternally silent Horgo.
“I’m sorry,” Jerry thought shamefacedly. “But I had forgotten Something I had.” His fingers trembled as they produced the tiny mechanism from his pocket. “This,” he explained in jumbled, confused pictures, “is an instrument I had evolved when I first went in search of Kay.”
Horgo looked at it with interest. It meant nothing to him, naturally.
“It is,” Jerry proceeded, “a tiny reproduction of the parabolic reflectors on my initial machine. Inside this metal attachment is a storage battery to provide the activating currents. I had set it in advance. Its action will exactly reverse what had been done before. The push-pull of the impulses will kick the moveless atoms into long-forgotten motion. Remember, they are both of the same order now, are normal with respect to each other. It will take time, of course, much more than the original process, for I haven’t an immense voltage at my disposal, but gradually the electrons will swing farther and farther from the protons, until, under repeated impulses, they will tend toward their accustomed orbit states.”
Jerry was sending out his patterned concepts with increasing confidence. “The slightest additional impulse should then precipitate them into their ancient grooves. Atoms once more will obey their original laws of motion. They will whirl within the limits of the molecules; the frozen molecules will lunge with renewed vigor, and matter will have been reborn—normal, energy-yielding matter.”
HORGO was still puzzled. “I still don’t see what you are aiming at. Granted that you can do this, and the analysis you have offered seems logically coherent, yet you have gained nothing. More,
you have lost immensely. The universe is obliterated. Space time has died in motionless, equi-potential waves. Your load of energy-producing matter will quickly dissipate into the void of nothingness, and ourselves along with it. It is a new and decidedly effective way of anticipating death.”
“But don’t you see what will happen?” cried Jerry, unwittingly breaking into speech again. “We shall have reproduced exactly the conditions that existed at the original birth of the universe. A central body of matter in the midst of nonspace, nontime. Matter that for some reason or other possessed enormous potential energy, locked-in, self-contained, as yet untranslated into kinetic energy. Something took place. Call it my activating reflector, call it what you will, but the tremendous potential was broken down. The vast store of energy at once released in a tremendous explosion.
“It acted on the void as it expanded, wrapped it around itself in a new space and a new time. The waveless heat-deaths of a million million former universes stirred under the expansion, rippled, puckered into the little nodules we call electrons, protons, matter. These in turn reacted and interacted. The explosion spread, like ripples in water from a hurled stone, creating new matter, new energy. A universe had sprung into being.”
Horgo moved swiftly. His eyes burned into Jerry’s. “Man of the past,” he poured his thoughts, “I salute you! You have put the race that sprung from yours to shame. Always we had thought that original nexus of the expanding universe to be a mighty globe of matter. You have proved it is not necessary. The unlocking of kinetic energy in this one sphere is sufficient to re-create a new universe, a new space time. Proceed at once with the experiment.”
Jerry flicked the tiny catch. Faint sparkles played over the metallic surface. “It will take some time,” he said doubtfully.
“Time is a minor consideration,” Horgo assured him. “We are immortal. I shall render you so while we wait, so shall Lika to the girl called Kay. It is a simple operation on the interstitial glands that control the processes of growth and decay. And I shall also teach you to send your thoughts over the void, so that you may in the meantime communicate with the girl you say you love.”
The word amused him, for a smile illumined his face. Then he set to work——
Jerry awoke to find himself seemingly unchanged. The prospect of immortality somewhat appalled him, yet somehow, instinctively, he felt that the operation could not succeed. His body and Kay’s were not sufficiently evolved for that. What was far more important, however, was the surge of Kay’s eager thoughts across the void. They were heartening, though curiously unsatisfying. He grinned wryly to himself. They were primitive barbarians, after all, accustomed to the crudities of sight and sound and touch. Kay confessed she felt the same way.
It took an interminably long time. Horgo and Lika did not seem to mind. They were superior to such human frailties. Twice the stored power of the battery ran out without perceptible results. But Horgo did magical things with the iron bar, things that Jerry, in spite of attempted explanations, could not follow. As a result the battery was recharged, and the surging impulses continued to make pin points of flame over the reflector.
Jerry felt less and less secure as the hours dragged out and nothing happened. His initial confidence, his rash feeling of almost superiority to his companion, gave way to discouragement and final despair. “It won’t work,” he said dully. “I’ve been a fool.”
“It will work,” Horgo stated with confident calmness, and returned to his serene meditations. Time and again Jerry had tried to penetrate the terrific abstractions among which Horgo soared with effortless ease, only to fall back dazed, bewildered, aghast at the incomprehensibilities of that ultimate wisdom. Once more Jerry felt curiously humble.
THEN, one day, counting by ancient Earth time, Horgo raised his calm eyes and said simply: “Prepare yourself. Our universe is about to expand.”
Jerry had been wandering around the sphere like a caged lion. Even thought exchanges with Kay had not been able to stop the fret of such lengthy inaction. Now he jerked to a halt, startled. Was it possible? There was a queer feeling about himself, now that he thought of it. A certain trembling, a shimmering, that communicated itself to the walls of tourmaline, to Horgo, too. Everything was hazing, changing. He could not see——
He seemed to blast open. A blinding flare of insupportable light enveloped him, tore him to pieces——
A universe was being born——
Jerry was dreaming; he was sure of that. For otherwise how could his head be pillowed on the soft warmness of Kay’s breast, and her voice, unheard so long, be beating with thrilling accents at his ears.
He refused to open his eyes. “If this be a dream,” he muttered, “I don’t want ever to wake up.”
“You silly goose!” Kay laughed and cried all in one. “It’s not a dream, and unless you open your eyes and look at me at once, I’ll let you drop.”
The threat had its prompt results. After the first precious minutes of reunion, Jerry looked around. Horgo and a stranger, more subtly rounded and feminine, who must be Lika, were a little apart, smiling at them, albeit a trifle puzzled at these young primitives’ transports of happiness.
“The explosion passed us in a flash of light,” Kay declared, “but it did not even jar our sphere. We had to smash out way out with the iron bar when Horgo came.”
They were within Jerry’s sphere now. Horgo had made a passage with the bar, had taken the reflector to Kay’s still invisible globe, guided by the impacting thoughts of Lika. As they emerged, they had metamorphized into normal matter, while Jerry still lay unconscious, and the released energy of their beings had gone flashing outward to assist in the swift expansion.
“Look outside,” Kay said happily, a little catch in her throat. “Our universe, made just for us, being born before our eyes.”
Jerry swung his gaze with reluctance from her flushed face, peered through the tourmaline. The gray void had retreated. Already flaming energy had licked into primal atoms, coalesced in huge, still formless suns. Gravitation sent them swirling, made gigantic spirals. Great nebulous masses rushed past each other, tore from their blazing garments ragged shreds of flaring matter that whirled and spun around the greater bodies.
“Planets!” Jerry declared in awed tones. “Planets that in billions of years will cool and spawn new life, new men, new supermen. The endless cycle of eternity beginning all over again.”
Kay squeezed his hand. “We shan’t have to wait that long,” she said softly. “I have been communicating with Horgo and Lika. They assure me that with all this boundless energy at their disposal they can produce in short order a planet sufficient for our needs, with air and water and the raw materials of life.”
Jerry returned the squeeze with interest. Far out, the waves of expanding light illumined each new conquest of exploding forces over the timeless void. The frontiers of the universe-to-be were pushing outward with accelerating speed.
“Look!” He nudged Kay. “Horgo and Lika! I think there will have to be two planets. Something tells me we’ve set them a horrible example. These icily cold superbeings of the world’s decline have learned the meaning of a new and incomprehensible thought concept.”
In truth, the pair were sitting apart, holding each other’s hands with unaccustomed awkwardness. But there was no disputing the ardor that burned in their eyes.
LIQUID LIFE
Ralph Milne Farley
Bio-Chemical Science Discovers an Amazing Alien Being that Thinks, Talks—and Destroys!
Chapter I
The Filterable Virus
MILLIONAIRE METCALF drew his Inverness cape more tightly about his tall, spare frame and shivered slightly, although it was a warm June day.
“That’s Salt Pond, Dee!” he announced, with a wave of his hand.
His companion, a broad-shouldered blond young man, stared with interest at the little body of water flanked by pine-clad slopes.
Its dark and turbid surface seemed to absorb, rather th
an cast back, the reflection of the fleecy clouds floating lazily overhead. The water heaved and rolled slightly, though there was no perceptible breeze. Dee remembered having once seen just this sort of sluggish, undulant motion in a maggoty cistern full of liquid swill. He, too, shivered.
A grim smile spread across the lean face of his millionaire patron.
“So you feel it too, eh?” asked Metcalf. “Well, you haven’t yet seen the half of it. Not a lily pad nor a reed, you will note. The fish are all gone. There are not even any bugs on the surface.” Then, as Dee approached the water’s edge, “Careful there! Don’t let any of the spray get on you—it burns like an acid.”
Dee knelt on the beach and gingerly filled several glass-stoppered bottles with water from the pond. Then he and Metcalf walked slowly and thoughtfully down the road until they came to a pasture at the end of the pond.
“Here is the latest victim,” Metcalf announced. “It has not been disturbed.”
Lying on the grass, about fifty feet from the water, was a dead, half-eaten cow. Dee stooped down to examine it.
“See how the legs and tail taper off to a point at their upper ends, as though they had been dipped in acid,” he said. “I pulled a half-dead frog out of a snake’s mouth once, and the whole rear end of the poor frog had been dissolved to a point, just like that. You don’t suppose—”
“No,” Metcalf replied. “There is nothing in that pond large enough to eat a cow. I have had it dredged with dragnets from end to end. The nets were eaten away, and several of the men got badly burned by drops of water, but not a thing did they bring to the surface.”