The Collected Stories

by Earl

  But the ship never landed. It burned to atomic dust in mid-air, under the deliberate beam of one of its own sister ships. It was obvious that the aliens had prearranged that never must they, or their ship’s secrets, fall into mankind’s hands. The other two disabled ships had similarly been blasted out of existence by their fellow ships.

  Thus Earth still had no idea who the aliens were, or what they looked like, nor what ran their ships and powered their weapons. The secret hopes of scientists—that they might solve the latter secret from a captured ship—were shattered.

  The enemy made no changes in its plans with this first, effective resistance. It continued its inexorable program of demolition. In the next week New York, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh joined the pyre of cities in America. Four more enemy ships were shot down. It was an exchange of casualties quite one-sided, but gave some hope that the aliens would run out of ships before Earth ran out of cities.

  It was not a pretty thing to look forward to, this battle to the finish with the ruthless aliens. With normal industry paralyzed, famine and shortages of all kinds faced the world. In places, mobs began to get out of hand.

  The bitter struggle went on, while civilization slowly crumbled——

  MANY strange scenes of the past were pictured with pristine clarity on the telescreen that was motivated by Carmichael’s subatomic eye.

  “Thanks to your diamond,” Carmichael said, “the scenes are not overlapping.” His eyes shone. “The past! Revealed to man! There is no limit to the range. It can reach back and view the great world events. The last war, the discovery of America, the building of the pyramids, the prehistoric world, the sinking of Atlantis. All things are indelibly recorded within the atom!”

  Tanya smiled wanly. “But what’s the use of it—now?” she said tonelessly. Though isolated from the world’s bedlam, she could not be wholly indifferent to it. Radio reports were scattered and infrequent, but were packed with frightful import.

  Carmichael went on as though he had not heard. “Suppose now I’m looking for a definite event. There is one chance in a hundred, or a thousand, of finding it.”

  “Is there even that much chance?” asked Tanya, appalled at the thought of examining microscopically all that had been in the immense past. “There are ages and ages——”

  “Wait a minute,” interrupted Carmichael, smiling. “It isn’t as bad as that. I’ve eliminated the worst odds. I can project my subatomic eye to the exact position within the atom at which to find any certain time period. In fact, I have the chronology of it down to the fraction of a second. Here’s how I’ve figured my chances.

  “No two events in the entire history of Earth have occurred at exactly the same time! Think of seconds and then hundredths of seconds, and then millionths and then millionths of those. You see that at the precise moment any one thing happens, it is such a small fraction of time that millions of other things can happen just before and just after—and all in the space of a second.

  “But, the full occurrence of any one thing—say of a strato-ship falling into the Atlantic—overlaps into many seconds. Therefore, the record of it is spread into millions upon millions of split seconds, in countless atoms. My formulae show that of every thousand atoms from the Atlantic, from one to ten will have some record of that fall into the ocean! Those are my chances.”

  He arose. “That is what we’ll do now—search for a specific event. A strato-liner fell into the Atlantic on June 6, 1961, at approximately 4:09 P.M. At least, at that moment the radio operator’s voice was cut off by a thunderous crash from the receiver. Tanya, you are to keep a sharp watch on the screen as I move my tuned beam from atom-group to atom-group. At the first sign of anything even remotely resembling that crash, from any viewpoint, let me know.”

  The lights flicked out. Carmichael manipulated his controls in the soft glow of pilot lights over the panel.

  Tanya smothered a hysterical laugh. “How meaningless this is, Harvey! Here we are watching for a strato-liner’s fall into the ocean thirty years ago. Outside—now—the world is——”

  “Watch!” commanded Carmichael fiercely.

  Tanya obeyed. Strange pictures ghosted into the screen, sharpened, and finally faded as Carmichael’s eye of the past probed within the atoms of seawater contained in the cup-shaped target of platinum. Pictures that in the main had little meaning. Many were simply panoramas of sky, sea or cliffs. Now and then, aircraft and ships at a distance.

  AT RARE INTERVALS in the next few hours, close-ups of human figures mirrored on the screen. One scene, aboard a fishing schooner, showed a group of men frantically hauling down canvas before a storm. Since the view was from some rigid part of the ship itself—possibly the mast—the ship had probably foundered in the storm that lashed in the telescreen. For only in that way could the atoms of the mast that had recorded the scene be contained in the ocean-water.

  Tanya’s eyes grew weary and drooped. But suddenly they flew open. The scene was of a huge strato-liner overhead that faltered suddenly. “Harvey!” she gasped. He jerked his head up, leaving the controls set. Together they watched the scene fulfill itself. The great ship fluttered down like a wounded gull, smoke pouring from its engines. A moment later it had been swallowed up by the sea.

  “At last!” exclaimed Carmichael excitedly. “Evidently that was the scene recorded by an atom-group on the surface of the ocean itself. That gives me the exact time of the occurrence—that is, the exact series of split seconds which make up the total fall. Now, from that, I can set my time factor and explore different atom-groups for close-ups.”

  “Harvey, I’m tired,” said Tanya. “I can hardly keep my eyes open.”

  “Get some rest then,” said Carmichael with something of his old tenderness. “But there may be days of this, Tanya! I may have to go through a hundred, or a thousand atom-groups.”

  Tanya went to bed, oppressed by the futility of this experiment that would have meant so much before the invasion of the aliens. She could not understand Carmichael and his cold, scientific ability to continue his work with a doom hanging over his head that would cancel his results.

  In the outer world, chaos reigned. Of Earth’s many magnificent cities, none remained with stone left on stone. Still the red ships methodically kept up their work of demolition, going down the scale of cities according to size.

  Earth’s resistance gradually waned, with the more and more complete disruption of industrial civilization. The few dozen red ships brought down seemed to have made no effect on their total numbers. At the International League headquarters in Switzerland, the leaders talked of new guns, but with hopeless looks in their eyes. Earth had been caught unawares. The result had been inevitable from the first.

  Secret discussions were held as to how best to contact the enemy and surrender—if they would accept surrender. Perhaps their sole aim was to destroy mankind to the last one!

  Fighting back automatically as best it could, Earth waited for its doom——

  In Carmichael’s laboratory, the silent telescreen showed the interior of the ill-fated strato-ship, at odd angles that changed often. The passengers were sitting quietly, some reading, some staring out of the windows. Suddenly there was a jerk. The passengers sprang up in alarm, looked around wildly. Smoke drifted past the windows. The cabin dipped; passengers fell, their faces distorted in panic. Finally a wrenching of the whole scene—and then a green murkiness flooding everything.

  As though it were a motion picture, Carmichael re-ran the scene three times. Then he straightened up. “That’s what I want!” His voice held triumph, but behind that something else—thankfulness.

  TANYA’S nerves exploded. “But, Harvey, it means nothing!” she half shrieked. “Here we’ve slaved for a month to prove that your machine can pick out events in the past—and there is no future! The radio report this morning stated that the IL has been trying for three days to establish radio communication with the aliens without success. They want to surrender and stop the terrifi
c slaughter, but——”

  “They must not do that!” cried Carmichael. “Must not surrender. That would mean slavery for mankind!”

  “And what alternative is there, besides universal extinction?”

  He grabbed the girl and shook her. “Listen, Tanya! That ship we saw fall was the ship in which Henri Vorday met his death. Henri Vorday was the greatest scientific genius in history.

  He discovered atomic power; used it. But the secret died with hint.”

  Tanya tensed suddenly. “Harvey, just what are you searching for, there in the past?”

  “Can’t you guess now?” he said. “The Vorday-gun. The weapon of Henri Vorday! He died in the Atlantic. Those countless atoms of his body are dissolved—some are here in my machine, millions of them. Of those—millions again—some must have carried to their interiors the light-record of that past time—of his laboratory, his papers, his formulae!”

  Tanya gasped at the sheer audacity of it.

  “I didn’t want to tell you before,” Carmichael continued. “It seemed too utterly fantastic to credit myself. It was one chance in a hundred—or a thousand—but we’re close now! We can trace the record back from the strato-ship crash. I have the atom-group now that I need. It must be part of Henri Vorday himself, for none of the other passengers pictured resembled him. Do you see? I think, in fact, that it’s an atom-group from a ring on one of his fingers, judging from the angles of the scenes we saw. If so, all the better, for we can then carry the record back twenty years if we have to—if he wore the ring all that time. There are many ‘ifs’ yet——”

  Carmichael again picked up the scene in the strato-ship just before its crash. Now skilled in the operation of the subatomic eye, he reversed the direction of its tuned beam. With the queer whimsicality of a motion picture run in reverse, the scene retreated in time. To save time, he sped up the rate of penetration of his beam, till the movements within the scene were almost a blur.

  The strato-liner flew backward to Europe, landed at the airport tail first, and the passengers got out crabwise. Two legs pumped like pistons, climbed into a car. The car retreated to a railroad station, and the train wound backward into the hills of southern France. Henri Vorday was home, before he had started on his ill-fated trip.

  The next succession of scenes shewed Vorday working in his laboratory, fingers moving with the rapidity of a shuttle. Carmichael slowed the movements periodically to normal, but found no indication of research related to atomic power.

  “This is taking too long,” mused Carmichael worriedly. “Even at this speeded up rate, it would take weeks and months to explore those twenty years. I’ll have to pick likely periods. In September of 1960, just after the war, the Pacifist Congress commandeered his weapon and destroyed it. His formulae were destroyed at about that time. Perhaps——”

  He reset the dials to skip the intervening months in Henri Vorday’s life. He set the time for the beginning of September, 1960, and ran the scenes in normal, instead of reverse, sequence.

  WHEN the telescreen sprang to life, it pictured Henri Vorday having endless discussions with important-looking men. They were officials of the Pacifist Congress. A day soon materialized when Vorday marched to the center of the town and participated in ceremonies over his great weapon.

  Carmichael stared with awe at the mighty mechanism that had utilized atomic energy. After the ceremonies, men armed with sledge-hammers and torches began demolishing the famous gun. Vorday left soon, retired to his rooms and took a large, black notebook out of his safe. He looked through it leaf by leaf. An hour later he went to the living room to meet officials and handed them the notebook. In his presence, it was burned to ashes—the last record of atomic energy as utilized by Henri Vorday!

  “I think we have it!” said Carmichael hoarsely. He retuned the scene to Vorday opening the safe and set the timing of sequences for even slower than normal. In slow-motion deliberateness, Vorday took out the notebook, sat down at his desk, and began turning its pages.

  Carmichael stopped the action and sent Tanya for paper and typewriter.

  He set a table facing the telescreen and arranged two chairs. He supplied himself with paper and several sharpened pencils.

  “We’re going to copy everything we see in that book,” he said grimly. “It represents thirty years of research by a laboratory genius. It represents atomic power! And a weapon with which to fight the aliens!”

  As the scenes started again, Tanya found it hard to believe that what they were seeing was contained in the dancing atoms under the tuned beam. In a glass of ordinary sea-water! Then she bent over her typewriter as the first page of the notebook was revealed.

  It was hard work. The writing in the book was not always distinct, nor easy to decipher. At times the scene shifted crazily. At times only the back of the book could be seen. The atom’s eye view of the ring obeyed no law. But what they could make out, they recorded. Tanya knew French well enough to intuitively guess where she couldn’t decipher. And Carmichael’s mathematical brain readily interpreted the symbols and formulae his eyes saw only hazily.

  They ran over the record five times, correcting and adding, till no more could be done with that particular path into the past. They had worked without sleep thirty hours. Tanya had kept coffee warm on the electric griddle.

  “Done!” said Carmichael finally. He rose, trembling.

  “Do we have—what we need?” asked Tanya.

  “Do we!” roared Carmichael jubilantly. “We have enough here to blast the aliens into the next dimension!”

  “If it isn’t too late!” Tanya murmured. She snapped on the radio, tuned for news. But there wasn’t any news, nor any sound in the ether. A blanket of silence lay over Earth. The last threads of official communication had been broken!

  Carmichael went swiftly to the shortwave set in the corner, sent power into its tubes, and tuned for the IL’s private wave-band.

  “Harvey Carmichael calling Bartel Manson, International League!” he barked over and over, till he was hoarse. Finally he turned away, baffled. He ran to his shelves, swept supplies into his arms and dumped them on the worktable. Working frantically, he assembled a power unit to strengthen his set. It was not a pretty job, nor efficient, but would last for a while. In an hour he was done.

  HE RAN to his Diesel generator in the rear, thanked the gods for its ample oil supply, and started it. Then he was back at his set, shoving the new supply of power across the ether. He bent his lips close to the microphone, to offset the rumble of the Diesel.

  “Carmichael calling Bartel Manson, International League!”

  At last a voice came out of the ether, faint and toneless. “To Harvey Carmichael, who is calling Bartel Manson of the International League. For Heaven’s sake, man, give up! The International League, its headquarters and all its laboratories were destroyed by the aliens this morning! If you have anything to say, it’s too late now. Earth is doomed!”

  “Who are you?” demanded Carmichael.

  “Chief radio operator of the IL’s secondary station in the Alps. My staff is broadcasting orders to all Earth people, in every language, to abandon all cities and take to mountainous and wild country. It was Bartel Manson’s last order. The aliens will not be able to kill off all mankind. Perhaps, sometime in the future, mankind may strike back—somehow.”

  “How much power have you?” barked Carmichael.

  “Two million watts, enough to reach all Earth.”

  “Good! Now listen to me and listen carefully.” Carmichael’s voice boomed commandingly into the microphone. “Stop your present broadcasting program immediately. We are going to strike back, not in the dim future, but now! I have the plans for Henri Vorday’s gun, and the atomic power with which to run it. I’m going to transmit the detailed plans and formulaae to you and you’ll rebroadcast them to all Earth. Wherever there are a group of scientists and engineers and a factory, this weapon must be turned out. Do you hear me?”

  “Good Lord, Carmicha
el, are you sure——”

  “Of course, you fool! Don’t waste time!”

  “All right, Carmichael!” returned the voice, with a half-skeptical hope in it. “It can’t do any harm.”

  Carmichael gathered all the typewritten sheets and penciled formulae before him. “Here goes!” he yelled. “The fifth energy level of the atom is reached by this formula——”

  On and on his voice droned, hour after hour. Tanya brought him water and coffee and encouraged him with her eyes. Carmichael’s voice vibrated in the sensitive tubes of the Alp station, and from thence radiated to every corner of Earth. Many a dazed mind and dulled eye, waiting for an inexorable doom, snapped to clarity, hearing his message.

  “Bend your every effort to this,” rasped Carmichael’s rag of voice toward the end. “Mount these small projectors on any and all aircraft available—on anything that flies!—and soar out to meet the enemy. You have a weapon at least as powerful as theirs. Many of you will be destroyed, but others of you will succeed. The red ships will fall to the last one——”

  Five red ships appeared over a city somewhere on Earth and began razing it to the ground with their all-consuming purple beams. They were carrying on a program that had already wiped out the largest cities, and would eventually destroy the smallest. Something appeared over the horizon—a fleet of Earth craft. The red ships took no notice.

  Suddenly a bright violet beam stabbed from among the approaching fleet. One of the red ships sagged in the middle, broke into two parts, and crashed into the ground. The other four ships swung their purple beams upward into the swarming attackers.

  Scores of Earth craft fell. But another red ship crumpled. Then another and another. The remaining crimson ships sought escape, dashed for the clouds. But more Earth ships, like angry hornets, waited for Tray hem there. The last red ship fell——

  “—and Earth will he free of its doom!”

  “O.K., Carmichael, O.K.!” came the voice from the Alps. “We have made an electro-recording of your message and will broadcast it continuously, over and over. I hope this is the thing we need to give those——”