by Earl
Jack Berry snapped his fingers. “Sorry, boys, that’s my signal. It means that Laro wants to see me pronto. I’ll have to take you boys away from here; Laro has strict orders never to leave anybody not of authority in the pilot room, which is the heart of this big ship.”
l As they both undressed for bed that night, Sam noticed a preoccupied look on Bill’s face. He seemed struggling with some problem. Finally he sat on the edge of his bunk, twirling his sock absently.
“Bill,” said Sam softly, “something the matter?”
“Damn it, yes,” cried Bill as he jumped up. He began to pace the room. “Sam, I wish I hadn’t sent that story to Brown yesterday.”
Sam looked aghast. “Do you mean to tell me your conscience bothers you?—of all people. Haw, haw!” Sam burst out laughing.
“Shut up, you scatter-brained jackass. It’s not my conscience. Listen, Sam, did you ever hear of the Fu Manchu of the North?”
“Why, yes. Isn’t he the guy they called the second Fu Manchu? Played him up in the papers about five years ago; going to conquer the world; release the yellow hordes on the western world and all that rot?”
“That’s it, Sam, that’s it. Why didn’t I think of it before?” He whirled on his mystified companion. “Don’t you see? This Koor Laro is the second Fu Manchu! I’ll bet on it. He’s concocted this Pluto story to throw us off the trail. He doesn’t want the world to know about his work till he’s ready for his invasion of the white races! Gosh. . . .”
“Oh, yeah? What’s he doing mining copper?”
“Mining copper? That’s what he tells us! Have you seen the so-called copper?”
“Well, no, to tell the truth.”
“Of course not! Notice that Jack Berry didn’t offer to show it to us either this afternoon! Oh, this is big! He’s out to conquer the world. Radium. . . . that’s what it is! I’ll bet on it—to run some diabolical machine of his that will mow down the enemy like wheat!”
“Listen, Bill, listen,” thundered Sam as the excited reporter continued mumbling to himself as he paced the room with one sock off, one on, in his shirt and underwear. “Listen, you nut. If he’s the future conqueror, tell me why has he been so considerate to us? If he’s going to kill millions later, why doesn’t he kill us now and be done with it?”
“Why? Why?” Bill looked pityingly at the pilot. “Because he realizes our death would mean investigation. . . . Lord, we’ve got the whole Daily Tribune back of us. . . . and he doesn’t want that till he’s ready for his grand invasion. That’s why!”
“Do you mean to tell me you think he invented this ship and everything in it just to dig radium?” Sam’s tone was scornful.
“No, not just for that one purpose. He’s probably going to use this same ship for the invasion—spray his death-dealing weapons from it to the victims below as he sails over them. He’s a genius of the first water. . . . or come to think of it, maybe Laro isn’t the big shot himself. Fu Manchu the Second is back in North China waiting for the radium! That’s more like it.” He whirled on the perplexed Sam. “Listen, Sam, we’ve got to find out for sure if that stuff is radium ore. Come on, you know something about chemistry. How can we find out?”
“Bill, I tell you you’re as crazy as a bat!”
“Never mind that. . . . the radium, man. . . . what’s the dope?”
“Well, if you can find an electroscope, you know, two leaves of gold or aluminum in a flask, we can hold it over the ore and see if it discharges and charges like it would if it’s radium.”
“Good.” Bill began dressing like mad. “Got to get the correct dope and call Old Man Brown again and ask for a couple of, armies.”
Bill cautiously opened the door. He started back as a Plutonian held a shock-gun at his head. He slammed the door shut in rage.
“You see, Sam? They’ve got a guard out there tonight. They think we’re getting wise. Not only that, there’s a million Plut. . . . aw. . . . Mongolians out there running up and down the corridor. Must be something big doing tonight.”
Sam hadn’t even started to dress. He pulled off his shirt and crept under the covers. “Fu Manchu or no Fu Manchu, I’m going to sleep. You better go too. . . . and sleep off that hallucination.” This last was said under his breath.
Bill tiptoed up and down the room, occasionally throwing up his head and squinting his eyes as he thought of other things that seemed to favor the idea of being in the camp of a power-mad Mongolian genius. Once more he opened the door, this time rapidly. He slammed it shut again in despair as he saw not one guard, but three guards with guns in their hands, facing him.
Finally, in exasperation, he went to bed, fully resolved to do something about it? in the morning.
l Sam was the first to awaken. He looked about in the semi-gloom and something seemed not just right. Things didn’t look right and there was a faint lingering odor that he instinctively disliked hovering about the room. He saw a patch of light on either side of him and wondered how that could be. There were no windows in their room in the gravity-ship. He jumped out of bed, as he thought, only to find he was fully dressed and on the floor.
Suddenly it dawned on him in a flash. He shook the snoring Bill, beside him on the floor also fully dressed. “Bill, wake up! Bill! We’re in our plane!” He dashed to the window of the cabin. One glance verified his sudden suspicion. He turned to the bewildered reporter.
“Bill,” he said slowly. “They’re gone!”
With a curse, Bill sprang to the window. He saw the same thing Sam had seen. The gravity-ship was gone! The camp looked desolate. The bleak wind soughed through the framework of the tripod as if lamenting the departure of the aliens and their marvelous green my. They had made one warm spot in the cold Arctic. The machinery was dead; like grey ghosts, the skeletons of framework were already covered with frost and a light snow covered the bare ground around the inanimate tripod.
“Well . . . I’ll be . . .!” was all Bill could say for the moment. Sam opened the door to get more light in the cabin. With this aid, he switched on the electric light. On the dashboard lay a white envelope. Bill grabbed it hastily and tore it open. He read aloud:
“Dear Bill and Sam. This is being written for me by Jack. Accept my pardon for thus leaving you without saying a personal good-bye, but some of my higher officers got ugly at the last moment and insisted we depart in secrecy. They t couldn’t understand your actions last night, Bill, when you attempted to get out of your room and they took it as an indication of animosity. You will never understand the workings of a Plutonian mind; your contact with me gave you no clue, because, as I have said, I am a distinct departure from the typical Plutonian.
I was powerless to resist their demands, Koor though I am, so we drugged you and carried you to your plane.
“By the time you read this we will be well on our way to Pluto, that is, if you can believe that we really are Plutonians. Jack and I bid you au revoir, for we may meet again. By the way, Jack tells me that beryllium is rare on your world and is worth hundreds of dollars a pound. There is a fortune of beryllium outside your window if you can get the rights to it. Best of luck. Your friend, Gest Laro, Koor of Ship Eleven.”
Bill stared a moment at the farewell message after finishing it. Then he turned to his companion. “Sam, are we just a couple of lunkheads, or do you really think they did come from Pluto?”
Sam threw up his hands in despair.
“Come outside, Bill,” he said a moment later.
“See that tripod?”
“Yes; what about it?” Bill was puzzled.
“Well, I happen to know there isn’t enough beryllium on earth to make one-tenth of it!”
Bill turned shining eyes on the pilot. “Sam, is it true that that metal is worth hundreds of dollars a pound?”
“You’re dam right, and if we get a share of it after the legal squabble is over, it’ll be plenty of dough in our pockets.”
Sam spent the next few hours taking pictures of what was left of the c
amp to supplement those he had snapped from time to time during their period of confinement. Inside Bill was again scribbling in his notebook, picking up the loose ends of the story and finishing it up in grand style. He felt that all future work would hardly interest him any more, because he was now writing a truth that was stranger than any fiction.
After a long, silent survey of the deserted camp from outside the ship, they went back and closed the cabin. The twin motors roared into life. They had to carry hack this plane, for it held a priceless cargo of pictures—wonders and marvels that the earthbound race of man would yet have to learn.
THE END
DAWN TO DUSK
l By this time, Mr. Binder has become one of our best authors, in the opinions of the readers, and each of his stories has been better than the one preceding. He broke all records in “The Green Cloud of Space” and went that one better in “Enslaved Brains.” We believe that you will like “Dawn to Dusk” even more.
The author’s style is distinctly different from all others, and he makes you live the stories as you read them. He is really a master at composition and knows how to keep your eyes glued to the page as few others can do.
You will find “Dawn to Dusk” gigantic in scope and—well, let the author’s prologue properly introduce you to many hours of enjoyment.
PART ONE
PROLOGUE
(By the Author)
l The following story, immense in its scope, soon brought realization to the author that words and his own conceptions were hardly able to cope with the problem it entailed of a far-distant future of civilization. Perhaps the attempt does not justify the result, but it proved fascinating along with its almost forbidding immensity of reach, beyond the power of the author to resist trying to put in words a picture of things that might come to pass—but which much more likely will not.
Nevertheless the attempt has been made, inadequate as it may be to fill out the concept, and the author asks for the whole-hearted lenience of the readers in their criticism, mental and spoken, that will as surely follow the reading—as surely as the sun will rise and set on this world tomorrow.
The author went ahead with the story—much as it seemed impossible of expression after a careful start—determined to finish what he realized could never really present a living picture of that future. However, he is consoled to remember that similar attempts have been made, very enthusiastically accepted by the broadminded scientifiction reading public, and hopes that there will be some intangible commendation for his humble trial.
Naturally, of course, and quite unavoidably, the English language had to be used as a substitute for the tongue that obtained in that period of civilization; and if at times colloquialisms, idioms, and present-day ideas abound as they most certainly should not were the story true, the author feels sure the readers will not condemn, but will rather condone, these anachronisms. For the sake of clarity, they are in the story, as otherwise it would be quite unreadable and in fact impossible of presentation, for who of us today can foretell the mode of expression of the far future?
So with this more or less apologetic introduction—apologetic not because of the story, but of the manner of presentation—the author places in your hands an idea of the remote future. He is not so much concerned in giving his own idea of that time, but more in so stimulating the minds of the readers—by the vagueness of detail—that they will themselves fill out the picture in their own minds. Much has been merely suggested and hinted at rather than stated, and it is the hope of the author that he has in some small measure led the way—with his poor dim candle of inadequate language—to a vision, however obscure, of a possible future. Imagination is the highest attainment of Intellect. Let that be the moral of the story.
CHAPTER I
A Famous Biologist
l With a low whistle of wonder, Andrew Boswell stared at the letter in his hand. Then a puzzled frown creased his young forehead. Again he looked at the signature at the end of the letter, small square letters spelling the name: “Anton Reinhardt.” It recalled to his mind only vague memories of previous acquaintanceship. More than five years before, it was, that he had last seen the man, talking over with him salient points of a lecture that had been delivered by Reinhardt on “A New Theory of Biology.” How he had come to be talking to the lecturer after it was over, was never clear to Boswell. All he knew was that while standing at the back of the hall, pensively digesting certain enigmatical statements that had been brought up in the lecture, the figure of Reinhardt had seemingly materialized out of thin air, asking kindly enough, “Well, Mr. Boswell, what do you think of it?” Of course, it wasn’t so strange that Reinhardt Should stop to talk to him, for the biologist had a remarkable gift for remembering his students to the last man, and Boswell had figured in many of his classes. But this letter—it struck chords of psychic bewilderment in his responsive mind that had not yet closed to the mysteries of life still clothed in rosy romanticism.
In the first place, Anton Reinhardt was no mean figure in the world of science; his array of five degrees dovetailed into his eminence as a respected and renowned biologist. Only certain of his radical rand openly-asserted hypotheses in the field of his chosen work prevented the authoritative class of conservatives in science from hailing him as THE outstanding biologist of the time. He seemed to have a dual personality. He would appear in the scientific journals as the methodical, materialistic originator of little bits of research that would inspire his contemporaries to say earnestly, “Genius of the first order,” and then flaunt dangerously hare-brained ideas in less restricted publications that would cause those same men to shake their heads sadly.
In the second place, Andrew Boswell, then a B.S., was associated in no way with any of that “genius.” He had not even majored in the science that most concerned the famous biologist, having chosen the organic chemistry that so fascinated and intrigued his eager mind. True, he had elected to absorb from the eloquent Professor Reinhardt pearly drops of wisdom in biology as a supplement to his studies in physiological chemistry, hut never, in all the many months of the course, had he distinguished himself in any way. He had been childishly content to sit on clouds of imaginative vaporing, listening to the words of the professor as to a distant waterfall, only the meaning, and the hidden intimations, impinging on his brain, never the spoken words. Boswell could still remember how positively fascinating it had been to steadfastly watch the features of the famous biologist as he expounded and paraphrased the axioms of that science that filled his life, his face a mirror of subtle, hidden paradoxes that would shake the mind, could they have been understood.
Outside of the student-teacher relationship, Boswell had met the professor only twice, once accidentally in the halls when the former had screwed up enough courage to ask for clarification of one little point in the last lecture, and once after class hours art the professor’s request. In the empty laboratory with the long shadows of evening sweeping through, spreading a blanket of mysticism over mediocre chairs and benches, microscopes and flasks, the young chemist had found the giant reputation of the professor only a cover to his kindly, very human nature. The intimate contact failed to blossom into warm friendship, mainly due to the fact that Boswell graduated shortly after, leaving Harvard for definite ideas of mental expansion to make his M.S. at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Only once after that had they met, when the biologist asked him what he thought of the lecture, as related above.
So it was, as these episodes of the past flashed through the young chemist’s mind, that Boswell found it hard to credit the letter in his hand signed with that intriguing name, “Anton Reinhardt.” He fluttered the paper up and down, watching it with unseeing eyes, trying to conjure tip a plausible reason for it. Unable to find anything reasonable, he thrilled in the ecstasy of the awakening of that spark of intangible hunger for unethical mysticism that reposes in the best of us. Here, he told himself in voiceless glee, was the possibility of gratifyingly subtle—perhaps even weir
d—happenings that cold, emotionless science refused to credit in its inexorable march of materialism. Actually, the letter with its commonplace words and mediocre phrases offered no basis for such imaginative ruminations, but romantic youth needs little impetus to plunge into illusive fantasy that springs from the sensitive mind, and Andrew Boswell could hardly be called taciturn or cold-fact complexed.
He read the letter again to see what new combinations of delightful dreaming hecould find inspiration for.
“Dear Mr. Boswell,” it read, “this is a letter only in that it comes in an envelope and was delivered by mail. Outside of that it is a ‘call to arms.’ Let us skip over such ordinary things as my telling you about the weather here in Boston, or telling you that my head is now completely bald, and other countless trifles, and jump right head-first into the reason for this letter.
“Despite the small connection we have had in the past which was purely academic in nature, I am requesting that you pay me a visit here in my home and private laboratory, to which, as you may remember, I moved over four years ago from my former quarters in New Haven. You will find the address enclosed separately.
“All reasons, motives, and personal impulses will be explained to you in the flesh, for, beyond a doubt, you are surprised to hear from me.
“I presume that you can break away from your work this coming Sunday. If you start early enough, you can be here for dinner, and I promise to release you in time to get back to Providence for work Monday.
“Please wire me if you will come Sunday noon, and, I might add, I desire your presence greatly, more than I have intimated in these few words. Make it a point, may I urge, to comply, even at the cost of minor plans of your own for that date. Of course, it may be difficult for you to dash up here on so little notice. If absolutely impossible, I will arrange for some other date in the near future.”