The Collected Stories

by Earl

  “Better that than blindness,” said the old scientist. His hands fumbled again to his sightless eyes, and Chandler caught in the gesture the ten years of utter futility in which the other had lived, lost in a dark, lightless world.

  “Call the offices of the Journal of Astrophysics,” Harper went on. “Give them a short resume of the Solar phenomenon that has just occurred. Have them contact the authorities.”

  Chandler dashed to the phone, dialed swiftly.

  A WORLD well-frightened by the menace that threatened to strike it with universal blindness heard the news the next day.

  First, the editor of the Journal of Astrophysics received a phone call that he thought must be part of a hoax. But when, several hours later, he received a check-up message from Mt. Wilson Observatory, he acted like a madman. He called Chandler on the phone and offered him fifty thousand dollars to write an article on the subject. His jaw sagged when Chandler offered to write it for nothing.

  Mt. Wilson, at the editor’s suggestion, had immediately measured the diameter of the Sun, its Solar constant of average radiation, and the intensity of the seventh octave rays. The results created pandemonium.

  The Secretary of State at Washington was contacted by Mt. Wilson authorities. An hour later a hasty conference of high officials, including the President, was called. Plans were made by these men—all red-eyed in common with the rest of the world—to equip all people with goggles.

  Wealthy manufacturers were stunned on receiving very official looking documents from Washington which commanded them to manufacture as many goggles as they could, with expensive lead-glass, and to distribute them free! Department of Justice men delivered the orders and were firmly insistent when the manufacturers remonstrated.

  The news broke for the newspapers and radio at noon. By two o’clock every conceivable type of protection for the eyes had been sold out. Factories began turning out specially designed lead-glass goggles by the carload.

  Cables hummed and European people began to appear in a few days with similar goggles. The hinterlands of the world were not so fortunate having small facilities for manufacturing goggles. They would have to wait till the industrial nations had supplied their own peoples.

  The world met its greatest emergency with its greatest effort, and. for once in its turbulent history,” all worked together, toward one goal. The tremendous industrial powers of civilization concentrated on one product and broke all records for speed. Such trivial things as cost of production, transportation expense, and retail value were forgotten.

  In less than a week all the civilized world had been equipped with glasses. It took another week for the more outlying sections of the world to be equipped, even though every nation’s air force had been volunteered for the project. Certain tribes in inaccessible parts of Africa were doomed to blindness, but brave missionaries planned trips to them, to save the sight of the unborn generations.

  The world breathed a sigh of relief. Blindness, perhaps the most dreaded of afflictions, had been averted. A world of two billion blind would have been a shambles. As it was, all animal life was doomed to blindness, but that could not be helped.

  THE world’s acclaim fell about Harper’s shoulders. He waited patiently till the furor had died away and he was left in peace again. Fame and honor meant little to him. His greatest satisfaction lay in the thought that he had once again regained his full mind. For ten years he had moved in a state of mental bewilderment. His keen mind had been cloaked in a shroud from the shell-shock of the accident that had blinded him and ended his career.

  But now he was once again the scientist, helping his son-in-law in the laboratory, discussing with him every phase of his researches, advising, assisting.

  Chandler’s researches took on new life with Harper’s assistance. He had been on the right track but advancing slowly. Atomic power lay within his grasp, though he did not know it. His approach was far different from that which Harper had used a decade before. Instead of breaking down matter, as in the processes of a younger star, he was building up matter, as in the older stars waning toward the state of entropy.

  Chandler was discussing his progress with his father-in-law.

  “In the formation of tritum—the isotope of hydrogen with atomic weight three—from hydrogen, there is a great release of energy, as the formation of helium from hydrogen,” he said. “This follows the general rule that there is emission of energy in both the breaking down and building up of atoms. But, of course, my main problem is to increase the output of energy. So far my collisions of deuterons and protons are one in a million.”

  Chandler stared moodily through thick goggles of lead-glass at his projector of subatomic “particles. “Still? when I started the rate was one in a billion. I’ve increased the efficiency a thousand times. But not till I get a percentage of one in a hundred at least will I have true atomic power.”

  “And that’s what we’ll do,” said Harper with quiet conviction. “Just give me the daily results of bombardments under slightly altered conditions. There is some theoretical mean which will determine exactly how to achieve the maximum results. Once we have this formula, it will be easy.”

  Harper used a soft, greasy pencil for his calculations, so that he could run his sensitive finger-tips over the raised figures when he needed to recapitulate. Chandler’s daily results went in as numbers and came out as condensed mathematical formulae.

  A few months later the old scientist handed Chandler a tentative result. Chandler cried out like a wild Indian when he set his apparatus according to the formulae.

  “You’ve done it, Father! Atomic energy and lots of it! And it comes out as nicely and quietly as you could want, like electricity from a battery.”

  Harper touched his eyes, thinking again of that other form of atomic energy, which had burst out like a supernal flame, and destroyed the eyes of its creator. This atomic energy came out like the current in a wire. His had come out like a lightning-bolt.

  “I’m glad, Burt,” he said simply.

  All that day Harper was preoccupied. In the evening he faced the enthused young scientist with a serious mien.

  “Burt,” he began, “aside from the commercial possibilities of your process of atomic power, it has one other great possibility. With it we can perhaps eliminate the menace of blindness from the Sun entirely, so that the human race will not be doomed to wear protective glasses through the ages.”

  “But how would you do it?” Harper’s answer was indirect. “You know, of course, that the only thing that keeps most of the Sun’s powerful ultra-violet radiation from toasting us to a crisp is the layer of ozonized air extending from about fifteen miles to twenty-five miles up. But if all the ozone itself were condensed, it would amount to no more than a sheet of tissue-paper thinness. Yet that is enough to filter out most of the ultraviolet. Now suppose there were a similar layer up there which absorbed most of the new radiation—the seventh octave rays inimical to human eyesight?”

  “I see,” nodded Chandler. “What substance will do it?”

  “Tritium!” returned Harper, working his hands together eagerly. “The same material you form in your atomic energy process. It, like ozone, is composed of a triad of atoms. Ozone is the triad of oxygen. Tritium is the triad of hydrogen. And the latter will filter out the rays of the seventh octave, as ozone filters out those of the second and third, the ultra-violet.”

  “But think of the task!” Chandler was a bit dazed. “Even a tissue-paper thinness of it spread all over Earth’s tremendous surface would amount to millions of tons of it!”

  “The beauty of atomic power,” continued the old scientist, “is that it is cheap and endless. There is a layer of hydrogen overlying the general atmosphere. It extends from the high stratosphere of fifty miles to the fringes of Earth’s atmosphere, two hundred miles out. That is our raw material. We will convert some of this vast ocean of hydrogen to tritium. Our main problem will be to get rid of energy. But that, I think, will be simple enou
gh. The atomic energy formed will radiate into space and into the lower atmosphere. The latter process will only heat it up some few degrees, temporarily.”

  Chandler was pacing the room in excitement. Then his face fell.

  “But how can it be done? We would have to install a projector of highspeed protons up there in the hydrogen layer, to start off the process. No man-made object has ever been sent that high, a hundred miles or so!”

  “Of course not,” agreed Harper. “Our projector will stay right on Earth’s surface. But its effects will be sent up to the height we want. Radio waves. You know that short radio waves are reflected by the Kennelly-Heaviside layer, which is about fifty miles up.

  “Long waves go higher and are reflected by the Appleton layer, anywhere from one hundred to two hundred and fifty miles up. If we phase our static charges that produce highspeed protons into low-frequency radio waves, we can project them to the Appleton layer. Here, in the heart of the hydrogen belt, the formation of tritium will be started. The process will stop by itself when the concentration of tritium atoms has reached a certain point, which will easily be enough to form a thoroughly protective tritium-layer to. absorb seventh octave rays.”

  Harper touched his eyes, involuntarily. “It is merely the extension of our laboratory method to the great laboratory of nature!” he concluded.

  A YEAR later all their calculations and preparations had been made. Chandler had hired the necessary assistants to build the apparatus—a queer hybrid machine producing radio waves and power-charges capable of blasting out protons moving at half the speed of light. Now it was simply a matter of tuning so that the radio waves would carry the static charges to the great height necessary.

  Harper stood by nervously as Chandler manipulated the controls. There was nothing more he could do. His sharp ears detected every slightest change in the whine of the apparatus. He heard the deep hum of the powerful dynamo that was supplying power. The soft hissing of energy that leaped the gap between grid and plate in the tubes. The click of a relay.

  “All set,” breathed Chandler. “Here goes!”

  Harper held his breath. He heard the sudden crackle of titanic energies pulsing through the machine. Outside, from the aerial, must be leaping a powerful surge of long radio waves, dragging with them the key that would unlock the atomic stores of energy in the atmosphere of hydrogen more than a hundred miles up. Harper strained his eyes as if to read the dials that would indicate whether the experiment was successful or not. There was no guarantee that it would be.

  Harper listened to the subtle noises for as long as he could stand it. “Burt!” he called hoarsely at last, after an hour. “What do the meters read? Burt, tell me!”

  Harper heard a long-drawn breath from the young scientist. He felt his hand on his arm. “I think it’s working, sir!” he said, his voice trembling with strain. “The radio beam is unloading at one hundred and fifty miles height, where the Appleton layer is at present. The absorption spectroscope shows a distinct shift of intensity from the ultra-violet end toward the infrared. That means atomic energy is being born up there in the hydrogen layer. And the seventh octave rays are already dying out!”

  A while later his voice burst out triumphantly.

  “Look, sir, look! The spectroscope not a shred of seventh octave radiation is coming through! It worked! The tritium layer has been formed overhead and will spread through all the atmosphere in a few hours. The blinding rays of the seventh octave are stopped cold! Look at the spectroscope!”

  The hysterical young scientist had forgotten, in his excitement, that he was speaking to a blind man. Harper shook his head slowly, smiled. He didn’t mind, now, that he could not see. His happiness was complete.

  Perhaps a god, looking down on Earth that day, might have seen a cosmic irony in the fact that a blind scientist had saved the eyesight of all men of Earth. But it wasn’t ironical to Thaddeus Harper. He was too deliriously happy to be ironic.

  FROM THE BEGINNING

  An utterly strange tale, about a race of reasoning robots with radium brains, and the origin of the human race on Earth

  MY COMPANION in this tale, William Walker, helped me with the writing of certain episodes. I had come to his place in answer to a phone call. I sat down and looked at him quizzically, wrinkling my nose at the smell of ozone which was always in evidence in his small electrical workshop.

  “Look,” he said, leaning forward when our greetings were done. “What is it when mind speaks to mind without use of words?”

  “Telepathy.”

  He nodded and waved a hand to indicate the apparatus on the work-bench before us. To my untrained eye it was just a group of adjacent coils sleeved inside one that was two feet high. The wire had been wound around cellulose cylinders. Beyond the clear walls of the inner coil, partially hidden by the turns of wire, was a three-inch metal ball, perfectly spherical, suspended in a cradle of leather strips.

  “Well?” I raised my eyebrows.

  “I don’t know how to begin,” frowned Walker. “I’m only an amateur scientist, and as such can’t figure out at all why it works as it does. But I doubt if our science can explain at all. I do know this—when that metal ball is subjected to high-frequency energy, it releases thought-waves! It must have some inexplicable mechanism inside that does the trick.”

  “You might tell me what it is and where it came from,” I suggested, utterly mystified.

  Walker lit a cigarette. “You remember,” he began, “that I went with the French LeConte Expedition last year which surveyed for possible irrigation of the Sahara Desert by canals dug down from the Mediterranean. And out there, in the middle of nowhere, we came across a batch of fossil bones in our digging to test underlying soil.

  “Micolet, the little French fossil man, went crazy for joy. He dug up some of the precious bones and found this metal ball. We two happened to be alone at the time, and he gave it to me. It had no significance to him—only his musty bones did. I slipped it into my personal belongings, later calling it a paperweight at the customs.

  “I was intrigued with the thought of this smooth metal sphere, uncorroded and showing no sign of age, having been embedded in the same clay-matrix that held the petrified bones of an extinct reptile—so Micolet said. And he’s a pretty well-known paleontologist.

  “After my return to the States, I began wondering about the thing. At first I was more interested in what it was than how it got there among fossils. I analyzed the metal; it is a strange alloy of beryllium and tantalum, two very resistant metals. A density measurement showed it was too light to be solid all through. But what, if anything, was inside? I thought of several ways to find out—dissolving the outer shell away, X-rays, even sawing into it. But one day, quite by accident, I had it near the Tesla coil, and as I turned on the current I got the shock of my life when a soundless voice seemed to hammer into my brain!

  “Different sets of thought-waves are released when I change the frequency of my inductive field—almost as if it were a series of phonograph records that give off thought and vision instead of sound.”

  “Whose thoughts?”

  “Those of someone, or something, living in a past so remote that it precedes human history!”

  “Atlantis, maybe?”

  “Maybe. Maybe from a time before the species of homo sapiens even existed!” Walker was in grim earnest, I can tell you that.

  “YOU see,” he went on, “I shan’t A know just how old the ball is until Micolet determines the age of his fossils, which he hasn’t done yet. The thought-record itself gives no clue. If it happens to go back as far as 25,000 years——”

  “Preposterous!” was my involuntary remark. Walker, I might explain, was, and still is for that matter, a believer in psychic and supermundane things, whereas I’m from Missouri.

  Walker didn’t seem to hear me. “The thoughts released are not very coherent,” he pursued. “Either that or my mind isn’t capable of translating them. It is not a voice, but a swift se
ries of mental images combined with sound and thought, so detailed that they give every variation of what seems to be an elaborate story. But it doesn’t seem to have any coherence or logic or—perspective. So I have you here on the hunch that with both of us listening at once, the images will be clearer.”

  “Huh—why?”

  Walker smiled a little sheepishly. “Well, my theory is that two minds give perspective to thought-waves. It takes two ears to orientate sound, two eyes to judge distance, why not two minds to translate telepathized thought-imagery?”

  With a strange look on his sensitive face, Walker eagerly arranged two chairs in front of the apparatus, explaining that our heads—our brains—had to be fairly close to the metal ball to catch its radiations. He then knifed a switch from which insulated wires ran to a large high-voltage transformer in the room’s corner. A low moan arose. Then, when we had seated ourselves with the three-inch ball just in front of our noses, visible beyond the clear cellulose, Walker snapped a switch that led current through his primary.

  I had waited expectantly, hardly knowing what to expect. I jumped as a pulse seemed to beat in my brain.

  “That’s just a sort of carrier-wave,” whispered my companion. “It’s much stronger than it was when I listened alone. I think this is going to work out——”

  The pulse in my brain quickened to a drone and then—so suddenly that it drew a sharp gasp into my lungs—it became a clear-cut picture. I saw a monstrous angular shape with four legs and six tentacles, following a short line of such similar beings. Overhead a fierce blue-white sun poured down a flood of rays that reflected blazingly from the metallic figure of the Creature. The scene around was one of barren desert. Beyond, near the horizon, lay a confused heap of incredible architecture, sharply outlined against a deep azure sky.

  With this picture came sound—the smooth whirring of well-oiled machinery. And after sound came something more—an almost complete rapport with another mind. . . .