The Collected Stories

by Earl

  “So I told you before we left,” the savant responded. “You knew the risks you faced, but you thought we had a chance to survive, since you did not entirely believe me. We set out to probe the cosmos, and we are doing it. The very core of things is being unfurled to us. We will die, but it does not matter, for we have really lived. Isn’t it so, boys?”

  Both of the younger men swallowed hard. They said they thought so. Both had put the thrills of adventure above the promise of long lives. That was why they had accompanied Berringer.

  Berringer smirked, mockingly. He glanced at a chronometer. “In two minutes all the stars will vanish,” he predicted in the tone of a seer. “A strange, airless, bitterly cold world will appear beneath us. We will land.”

  “And then what?” Forijay questioned.

  The savant shrugged. “You will see,” he said.

  Berringer was unruffled, but not his young friends. Each second counted by the ticking of the chronometer was a lagging eternity.

  And then there was a dizzy shifting, a momentary sensation of an impossible motion. The two minutes had passed, and the stars had vanished. Close beneath was an utterly rugged terrain, illuminated only by a faint bluish glow.

  Coolly Berringer spiralled the ship to a landing. Bradley and Forijay donned space-suits.

  “You will need those out there, boys, more than you would need them on the moon,” said the scientist. “Remember what I told you about negative pressure?” Berringer grimaced knowingly.

  “Yes,” Bradley said without interest. “Aren’t you coming with us?”

  “It is part of the plan of things that I remain here,” Berringer replied. “I have seen all there is to see, and I know that I am about the die in a strange way. Besides, the radiations of my experiments have made me ill. There is no reason why I should exert myself during these last moments of existence. Good luck, boys!”

  “Good luck, Doctor,” they echoed, eagerness to see more of the unknown. making them abrupt.

  They left the ship. They had advanced across the rough ground for perhaps two hundred yards when there was a mighty flash of electrical blue behind them. When they turned about, the ship was gone, dissolved by some invisible enemy.

  Neither of them became outwardly excited. “Just like he said,” Forijay remarked, very low. “This place, his finish—everything. Uncanny, dammit. Poor Old Berringer!”

  [5]Forijay relapsed into silence, then at a. mutual nod from his companion they walked slowly and cautiously forward. It was as they walked through the midst of the hard rockery, frozen with eternal cold of absolutely empty space, that they became aware of something. Nothing tangible—just Something. A conviction of murky presences, invisible, hovering in that unbelievable temperature of absolute zero.

  How long the sensation lasted they had no idea, but presently it became so absolutely insistent that they stopped and looked back towards the spot where their space ship had been standing.

  “Somehow, even though the ship’s gone, I’d feel safer where it was,” Bradley murmured. “We’re proving Berringer too accurately for my liking. Come on!”

  He turned to move, then before he could do so, something entirely invisible smote him a tremendous blow that dropped him flat on the rocks. He looked up in dazed astonishment and beheld nothing, save his companion likewise sprawling with all the wind knocked out of him.

  They jumped to their feet again and made swift movements to tug the disintegrators from their belts, but before they could accomplish the feat the same unknown power held their arms tightly to their sides. They were whirled off their feet and propelled through the airless expanse at tremendous speed, perhaps for a distance of two miles or more. It was difficult to determine in that vast terrain—then at last they beheld that which they dreaded to behold, the very thing instanced In the Berringer Experiment a mine of gigantic dimensions, sinking into bottomless profundity in the depths of this strange world. Within it, just visible to the eyes of the two as they were borne down the vast shaft, there floated lambent blue spots of flame—the blue of electricity itself.

  As they sunk lower and lower the two hapless earth-men thought again of old Berringer; they could not help but do so. How deadly accurate his forecast had been; how he had been ridiculed for daring to say that there were no worlds or constellations in the sky at all! And that electricity experiment of his! And those strange occurrences on the way out here . . . The two earth-men now realised the vivid truth that had underlain it all.

  Faster and faster they were borne into the depths, on the wings of the invisible, or rather, now the intense darkness prevailed, they could discern their captors as similar beings to those of Che blue flame . . . Then there crept into the stupefying gloom a dim sense of light, of sunlight, rapidly increasing.

  Alighting at last, they beheld the source of light. Lying flat on rocks they surveyed a circular area of unguessable dimensions.

  Bradley sat up, Forijay beside him. For the first time they looked above them and from Forijay came an exclamation of profound amazement. The stars had returned! Incredibly far distant lay the greenish globe of Earth, but from this position they could distinctly see the sun, visible only by their looking over the cliff edge, was the exact center of everything, as well as being the source of light on this queer world.

  Little by little they took it all in. The stars, the Earth—a free floating body in the strange concavity that was apparently empty space—end the tiny attendant moon. The stars had returned, yes, but the planets were still missing. And, ever snore extraordinary, the stars only filled the space directly opposite to them.

  Then at last the two came to face the strange luminescent beings that surrounded them, beings that required neither air nor heat, who existed in that infinite cold of empty space upon this world . . . A world? The two earth-men pondered that, and as they did so they noticed how the light of the sun caught the myriad facets of the brightly guttering rock about them, turning them into a myriad hues of orange, green, sapphire and saffron.

  Suddenly there came through the communicator the bitter laugh of Bradley. He couldn’t help himself. The beings came closer.

  “Forijay, if ever two guys from Earth got absolute proof of an earthly scientist’s experiments, we have!” he breathed. “Everything fits in exactly, just as he said It would. The rock facets, the central sun, the floating earth, the absence of stars at the top of this Inconceivably deep shaft, and yet the presence of stars at the bottom of it! These blue beings, obviously born of electricity, existing under hardly any pressure. Berringer’s experiment to the life! And to think we laughed at what be told us! Why, damn it man, if we took off oar space suits now we’d blow asunder; existing under pressure common to Earth we’re safe enough, but otherwise . . .”

  He stopped and faced his helmeted comrade grimly. They searched each other’s eyes in the varicolored lights.

  “We’re doomed, Fo,” Bradley went on steadily. “We know that now. It’s a one way passage—and according to Berringer that works out right, too. Remember this energy-flow equations and what we saw back there in space. If only we could get back now and prove that Berringer was right.”

  “And now?” Forijay asked quietly.

  “Only this,” Bradley answered steadily, and with that tugged a sharp knife from its sheath upon his belt.

  Before the Blue Beings had the slightest chance to interfere he had made a lightning movement and slashed both the space-suits of himself and his companion down the center. Instantly, even as Bradley had theorized, they burst asunder, deprived of the vast pressures common to their own world.

  The Blue Beings surveyed the empty space where they had been, all unaware that a supreme ultimate riddle of infinity had been solved. Then they turned their back to pursue their eternal movement in their multi-colored darkness that was their home.

  The End.

  [1] Beginning of Eando Binder’s installment.

  [2] Beginning of Jack Williamson’s installment.

 
[3] Beginning of Edmond Hamilton’s installment.

  [4] Beginning of Raymond Z. Gallun’s installment.

  [5] Beginning of John Russell Fearn’s installment.

  THE TIME ENTITY

  A Thought-Variant Story

  “HERE I AM.”

  “Yes.”

  “You understand me clearly?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’ve been expecting me?”

  “Y-yes—in a way.”

  “You are not as frightened—superstitiously frightened—as formerly?”

  “No, I’m not. That is——”

  “You hesitate. You are still not sure. Do you know who I am?”

  “Yes. Wait a minute—no! I thought I might have for a moment. I thought you might be—— But it’s impossible!”

  “You do know. It’s not impossible. But I feel our contact slipping. Your mind is wavering. Don’t let—— Concentrate! Do you hear? Concentrate!”

  The clock ticked by thirty silent seconds. John Dakin, his face white and drawn, closed his eyes and shut his mind from outside influence. It was the only way he could regain contact with—with what? He did not know. He subconsciously thought of it as an unknown entity. An entity or a mind that had for days been trying to communicate with him.

  To-night, though—to-night it came as clear and articulate as if coming from the radio.

  Dakin, breathing deeply like a sleeper, parted his lips and murmured half aloud the words by which he again contacted the entity: “I am concentrating.”

  “Good?” came the ghostly ‘voice.’ “I feel that our en rapport is now very firm. And to continue—who do you think I am?”

  “You are a voice, and a mind, from another world than my own. You may be a being of Mars. Or you may be a mind existing on some other astral plane.” Dakin shivered slightly. “You may even be a voice from beyond the grave.”

  There was a pause before the other answered, and in that pause Dakin realized the entity was laughing. It was amused!

  “You may be a hoax, too,” added Dakin.

  The entity seemed to ignore the last part. Its disembodied tones flooded again into Dakin’s hypnotically receptive mind: “A voice from beyond the grave! You hit it close there. In fact, on second thought, you’re exactly right. If the grave is considered as merely a division between life and death, I am as much a voice beyond the grave, to you, as you are actually to me!”

  “What do you mean?” asked Dakin in his mind. He could not prevent his lips from framing the words and saying them aloud. He became a bit ironic: “Can you mean that I’m a genuine psychic, and you a spirit, and our en rapport nothing more nor less than a spiritualistic seance?”

  “Psychic? Spirit? Seance?” The entity seemed to ponder. “Oh, yes, I remember reading about them. In the ancient times it was called an oracle. In the Dark Ages it was necromantic prophecy. In your age it was spiritualism.”

  “In my age!” Dakin turned this over in his mind. The entity spoke as though from a different age, as though it existed in——

  “The future! Of course,” came the other’s mind voice. “To you, John Dakin, I exist in the future. My calendar says it is the year 2086 A.D. So you see how appropriate your expression is—‘beyond the grave.’ You are obviously that to me. And, in a manner of speaking, I am that to you. Or perhaps I am a voice from beyond the cradle!”

  “Yes, of course,” said Dakin. For a moment he rebelled against belief, told himself it was madness. His mind swam up from a fog of dreaminess, and he felt his contact with the entity stretch to the snapping point.

  Then he told himself, “Why not?” He thrust from his mind the grapples of incredulity, which had nearly pulled him away from the entity, and again established connection.

  “All right,” he said, “you’re a mind existing in the year 2086 A.D., one hundred and fifty years in the future to me.”

  “Good,” returned the entity. “I admire your ready acceptance of a fact so strange. Yet it is a fact. Furthermore, I am your direct lineal grandchild, five times removed!”

  DAKIN STARTED. Could it be possible that he was communicating with his own flesh and blood, and long after his bones must have been laid away from mortal life? “Good Lord!” he cried aloud. “If you really exist, then I’ve been dead over a century!”

  “And if you really exist then I haven’t been born, and won’t be for another hundred-odd years!” added the entity.

  “We’ll grant that,” said Dakin. “But this can somehow be explained rationally—perhaps even scientifically,” he added stubbornly.

  “Perfectly so,” agreed the entity. “The conception of time is perhaps the hardest thing for the human mind to grasp without distortion. Time is always thought of as progress in a straight line, upon which there is no returning. It is called a dimension, but the only one of four which we cannot retrace. It is also understood to be constantly and uniformly moving, or rather moving us along its dimension. And we have not the power to stop it, nor escape from it, nor track back upon it. Is that time, John Dakin?”

  “Yes, that’s about it,” replied Dakin. “Any event, once occurring, cannot be changed. It is done, forever.”

  The entity seemed to laugh, as it had once before.

  Dakin squirmed mentally. He saw at once the paradox before his eyes. He was speaking to a mind that had no existence—had not occurred—in the year 1936. Conversely, he himself was dead in the year 2086. It could not be explained by thinking of his, Dakin’s, mind freed of its dead body, for, obviously enough, he wasn’t dead. Yet——

  “Don’t rack your brain with those paradoxes,” came the entity’s calm voice. “You can’t look at time as a straight one-way path and explain even such a simple thing as instinct. Think of instinct once—the patterned reactions to definite stimuli. By what magical process does the duckling take to water, the kitten spit at the dog, the male seek the female? Is it in the blood? If so, what is it? Is it a submerged, ancestral memory? If so, science admits the supernatural, for no chemistry can explain ancestral memory transmitted through one egg cell. Is it imitation of elders? If so, a boy and girl, both of virgin innocence, isolated on an island, would never discover sex.

  “No—instinct can never be explained in these indirect ways. The direct way to account for it is to say that it is repetition; because it can’t be anything else—because time loops back on itself! Because, in occurring the second and third times, any event has occurred the first time. And therefore has never occurred more than once! And——”

  At the sound of a slamming door, the entity’s voice became dim and faded away. Dakin’s mind swirled up from its state of half coma. His staring eyes seemed gradually to make out, the vague outline of his study room—the book shelves, the furniture, the shaded lamp. He stared hard at the radio, realizing suddenly that it had been on, but not tuned to any station, all during the time he had been en rapport with the entity.

  DAKIN stepped to it, snapped it off, then turned to his visitor. Young Dakin, Jr., had entered stormily, slammed the door, and growled a greeting to his father. His face was darkly angry.

  “Did you knock?” asked Dakin. “Sorry I didn’t hear you.”

  “No, dad, I didn’t. I was too mad clear through to think of it. And I’m still mad. Lois just threw me over. Here’s her engagement ring.”

  “Let’s see—that makes the fourth girl with whom you’ve broken an engagement.”

  “Oh, don’t rub it in, dad.”

  Dakin grasped his son by the shoulders. “When in the name of Heaven,” he asked earnestly, “are you going to really get married? You’re twenty-four now. Next spring you’ll have your M. S. and be ready to settle down to work and marriage. That gives you just about time to pick out the bride.”

  The son drew himself up with a determined look. “Dad,” he said solemnly, “I’m never going to get married! I’ve seen just enough of women to know you can’t trust them, married or not.”

  He strode to the door while his fat
her burst into laughter. At the door young Dakin turned. “Dad,” he said half petulantly, “I can’t understand you to-night. Any other time you would at least have been sympathetic. Incidentally, I’m taking that motor trip over the week-end with Sam. See you Monday, and I hope you’ll have stopped laughing by then.”

  But Dakin could not stop for a while, even after his son had left.

  “The whole point of the joke,” Dakin explained to himself, “is that Jack, in saying he would never get married, contradicted himself without knowing it. For the entity is my, and therefore Jack’s direct lineal descendant. Obviously then, my son has to get married, for I have no other children to carry down my line to that grandchild removed five times!”

  THE NEXT EVENING Dakin again established contact with the entity. He closed the windows against outside noises, settled himself comfortably in his cushioned chair, and turned out the lights altogether. It was almost like making preparations for a necromantic rite that had to be done in a prescribed way, and in no other. He had even turned on the radio, without tuning it to a station, on the chance that it was part of the last evening’s episode.

  The entity was there immediately, as though waiting, as soon as he had relaxed. “I am here,” was its opening announcement.

  “Yes, and we can begin where we left off,” returned Dakin. “You were explaining to me your way of looking at time.”

  There was a short pause before Dakin again heard the entity’s voice: “Before I begin, I ask that you throw aside all your previous conceptions of—everything! Free your mind of any prejudice. Listen to what I have to say as though your brain were an empty well into which I was pouring fresh water. Try only to grasp the large essentials, rather than small points. Ready now?”

  The voice went on after Dakin had signified assent: “I mentioned last time that instinct is repetition simply because time is a looped repetition. Memory is another abstract quality hard to define, unless one thinks of reliving every instant over and over as often as the time loop curls back on itself. Why do we remember some things in our childhood vividly, and forget other events completely a week after happening? Simply—yet not so simply—because the successive loops of time are overlapping in places, far apart in others.