The Collected Stories

by Earl

  “Yes, Dr. Randall,” said the girl.

  Danny Hogan tried to thrill himself with the thought of the scoop in his hands. But another thought buzzed in his mind, tortuously, till something clicked. Then he smiled strangely.

  When they were back in the laboratory, Danny Hogan looked from Leah Cole’s face to that of Dale Randall. “Randall,” he said, “will you do me a favor? Slip that thought headband on. I want to ask you a couple of questions, to sort of round out my newspaper article with a personal touch.”

  The young scientist complied, though a bit mystified. Danny Hogan put his hand on the audio-switch that Randall pointed out, and drew a deep breath. The flip of a switch, he told himself wryly, was like the flip of a coin—

  “Randall, do you love Leah Cole?” he asked.

  The weird instrument promptly gave its microphonic answer: “Why of course I do though I hadn’t thought about it definitely—”

  Hogan flipped off the switch. He had picked heads and flipped tails. Then he glanced at them. That look again, in both their faces. But now more glowing than it had been before even. Like they had discovered all the secrets in the universe at once.

  “Well, what are you standing here like a dummy for?” Danny Hogan told himself. “You’ve got a triple-barrel scoop to write up, so get going!”

  And he went.

  THE FLAME FROM NOWHERE

  Nothing on earth could halt the advance of the deadly fire from space. Even water burned like gasoline

  CHAPTER I

  An Unquenchable Fire

  JUST how it started, no one seemed to know. But there it was, a raging fire. It sent most of Jed Polty’s fine timber up into the flues of heaven and looked like it might take the rest of Wisconsin in its stride. Long skyscrapers of flame licked up toward the clouds, sparkling like Fourth-of-July rockets. But there wasn’t much smoke. That’s why it had taken so long to discover.

  “Forest fire! Forest fire!”

  The cry went around the countryside in a wail of terror. Men dropped whatever they were doing and hopped into cars to join the swelling procession There were other timber patches, and farms and towns threatened, depending toward the fire.

  It was a case of everyone helping for his own as well as the common good, on which way the wind blew. And which way the wind would blow from time to time while the fire kept up, no one knew. A long, dry summer just passed made everyone feel it was going to be a tough, hard struggle. Demon fire against grim, cornered humans. The battle was on.

  Jed Polty, already a ruined man, marshaled one corps of men in a fight of bitter revenge against the enemy. At the south gap, where the fire converted the last of his cedar into gaunt, black skeletons, he saw his chance. For a mile facing the fire was scrub land, not very fattening to a greedy fire.

  But if even that poor fuel were taken away . . .

  His men fell to with a will. The wind was blowing right, toward the fire. The men spread over that mile in a long line and set the scrubble aflame. It started slowly, throwing up a huge, dense smoke screen. But the sharp wind whipped it up and sent it scurrying to meet the other fire. Fighting fire with fire—it was a tried and true maxim. Then the men stood back to watch.

  “That’ll stop you!” screamed Jed Polty, hurling his first at the fire that had turned him from a potentially rich man to a pauper in an hour. He stood there, shouting a string of epithets almost as scorching as the thing they personified.

  “Somethin’ funny about that there fire,” said another man. He sent a golden stream of tobacco juice in its direction, speculatively. “It’s a-comin’ right into the teeth of the wind without slackening up any, far as I can notice.”

  It was true. They all could see that. A normal fire, changing from rich forest fuel to skimpy bush-scrub, especially against a wind, would peter out, or at least slow down. This one didn’t even slow down. Its hundred-foot flames continued to probe the sky, like searchlight beacons. The flame-streamers did not even bend noticeably with the breeze.

  The two fires met, intermingled. The watchers perked up. Now the other fire would have to stop. There was a hundred-yard stretch of seared, barren ground before it. No fire known to man could find anything left to burn in that black belt.

  As though they had been puppets jerked by one string, all the men started. A gasp came from their dry throats.

  The wall of fire did not stop!

  ASTONISHED, frightened faces looked at one another. The hair of every man there stood on end, stiff as wire. An invisible silent wind seemed to buffet them from the direction of the undiminished fire. A strange, awful wind separate from the one that blew the air at their backs.

  “That’s the d-devil’s own fire! J-Jed, come on—”

  Jed Polty shook off a hand. He stood there and stared, thunderstruck. He was vaguely aware of men scurrying back, frightened away. Dimly he heard car motors start and roar away. A voice called to him frantically. Jed ignored it. He rubbed a gnarled hand over the three-day stubble on his chin, bewilderedly.

  Alone, Jed Polty began walking toward the fire-wall. A deep blind anger filled him. He must find that scientist chap and wring his fool neck, for undoubtedly he had started the fire. Jed should never have let him use the cabin deep in his timber. Wring his neck. Jed’s hands were doing that already. His face was twisted.

  The mysterious wind tore at him. His eyes smarted and his throat became parched. His hair stood out stiffly from his head. At each step tiny fingers of electricity played about his shoes from the ground underfoot.

  Strangest of all, however, there was little heat from the fire, as he drew close. And no smoke. It seemed almost like a phosphorescence, cool and dull. Against the sunlit sky, the tall ray-like flames were almost invisible. But they were unmistakably there, burning up from the ground, crawling forward inch by inch.

  Wring his neck, the blasted fool! Jed Polty walked into the curtain of flame. He didn’t burn up on the spot. His dazed mind took no account of that. But something did work inside of him, in his individual cells, making him feel tired and worn.

  He wandered blindly in the flame-curtain, seeking the cause of his ruination . . . Jed Polty died hours later, an old, old man.

  IN THE meantime, to the west where another patch of valuable timber was threatened, men labored like slaves to save it. Colonel Dale, owner, alternately cursed and bribed his crew. If his timber went, so would his palatial home and all his life of comfort. His wife and children would be heartbroken.

  “Ten dollars to every man here—ten dollars!” he stormed, prancing up and down the line on his great horse. “Get those trees down! You, Hank—stop leaning on that axe! Damn you for a lazy, good-for-nothing—” The rest was vituperation.

  The men toiled in the hot sun, sweaty and begrimed. For twenty feet back from the creek, every tree was felled and dragged away by teams of horses. The creek was twenty feet wide. The fire wouldn’t be able to jump that natural gap if its fuel on the other side was out of reach.

  The colonel’s head constantly jerked around to watch the advance of the fire. It was uncomfortably close, but by a narrow margin they would win.

  But every time the colonel looked, a puzzled, worried frown creased his brow. Somehow, the fire was the queerest one he’d ever seen or heard of. It made no smoke, even with its green timber fuel. No heat could be felt from it. And he noticed the peculiar electric tenseness that pulsed in the air.

  Colonel Dale was most startled when he drew out his watch and saw the radium-dial glowing like a beacon. He tried to remember what he had learned in college about such things, but that was too many years ago. But why should he worry? Water would stop it. Water always put out fires.

  Finally the timber patch had been cleared off the bank of the creek. All was set. The men lined upon along the creek, ready to beat out any small flames that might fly across and try to start on their side.

  “Good work, men!” yelled Colonel Dale. “That fire won’t get into my land.”

  He waited c
onfidently. The towering wall of fire loomed up on the opposite side. Like a fiery giant on the rampage, it laid waste the forest. Colonel Dale frowned again. Somehow, it didn’t look like burning. No ordinary burning. Trees seemed to shrink in its path, as though something were sucked out of them that went streaming off into the sky.

  And it was such a silent thing. It had none of the majestic roar and crackle of most forest fires. There was only a low, hissing drone, like a transformer. Colonel Dale thought of that simile because there was a distinct electrical quality to the fire. He had already glanced around to see everyone’s hair on end His own crackled when he tried to brush it down.

  The Niagara of flames pushed to the edge of the creek.

  “That’s as far as you get!” muttered Colonel Dale.

  Then his eyes began to pop out of their fat folds of flesh like marbles in putty. The flames simply began burning on the water! The unbroken wall advanced across the creek like a marching army, driving them back.

  Men screamed. They fled in a stampede. Colonel Dale’s horse bolted, throwing him against a tree and breaking his neck. His dead body lay there as the demon of fire crawled up the bank—his bank—and reached for his timber.

  Timber that hadn’t been saved by a creek-full of water before it.

  IT WAS the same all that day, on all sides of the fire. But was it fire? Strange stories began to drift in around the countryside. Eye-witnesses swore that a newly plowed field, in which you couldn’t start a fire with a blow-torch, had burned just as though it were paper.

  Nothing could stop it, apparently. Creeks, backfires, sand-ditches—nothing. Unnameable fears haunted the area surrounding the fire, toward which the flames were spreading. What ghastly thing was happening? Why did flames that had consumed their natural materials fail to die away in fuel starvation? What incredible ultra-fire could feed itself on water, on moist ground, on sandy soil, as though they were inflammable?

  Late that evening it rained. Rained hard. A dubious prayer of thanks rose from thousands of hearts. Rain like that could always put out forest fires. But men who had gone to see came back gaunt-eyed and shaking. The terrible fire had not gone out.

  In fact, the flames had risen higher with the rain, greedily licking up the drops as though they were gasoline!

  The next morning it was in the papers, ridiculed as the Fire-That-Could-Not-Be-Put-Out. By evening, after reporters had rushed to the scene and observed, it became the nation’s number one item. Even the latest big-time murder in New York’s vice ring could not compete with it.

  But the world of science, not to be misled by common newsmongery, quietly ignored the astounding reports. Officials pigeon-holed a frantic plea from the county sheriff of that region for up-to-date fire-fighting apparatus from the great western forest reserves. The latter were too important to leave unguarded for a moment because of a puny little fire in Wisconsin.

  And all the while, the mysterious pseudo-fire continued its course, like a Juggernaut, laughing at man’s efforts to stem its inexorable spread.

  CHAPTER II

  Dan Nelson Seeks the Answer

  DAN NELSON pulled up in Tipler, Wisconsin, to find that little town in a big-town furor. Cars were leaving, packed to the gills with family belongings. Other cars were arriving with men enlisting in the fight against the fire. Typewriters clacked from the open windows of the main hotel, where newsmen rattled off their exciting stories.

  Tipler was the nearest town to the fire. It would be the first to be engulfed if they couldn’t stop it. A glow in the sky, barely two miles north, was the cynosure of worried eyes and constantly craning necks.

  Nelson hopped out of his car and took a room in the hotel, the last one available. Then he went outside and listened to the buzz of conversation among loiterers. What he heard convinced him, against his will, that the letter he had was more significant than he liked to think.

  He went up in his room to read it again. It had been mailed from Tipler a week before. Its pages were in the crabbed handwriting of Dr. Anson Berg. For the past three years, during his summer vacations from the university, Dan Nelson had been Dr. Berg’s assistant in his private researches.

  “Dear Dan,” it began. “Northern Wisconsin is God’s own country, but of course I did not come here, last year, to enjoy the climate or scenery. I came here for seclusion in my research, and secondarily to keep from blowing up half of Chicago—in case. You will see what I mean later.

  “My cosmic-ray photon collector is a wonderful success. I’m proud of it. It is, as you remember it in cruder form, a large glass bulb coated with pitch and supported in a magnetic field. The magnetic field refracts the entering radiation enough to make the photons rebound from the neutron-screen embedded in the pitch covering. I won’t go into full detail. You know most of it.

  “At any rate, my dream has come true. The cosmic-rays rain down as a veritable flood of energy from interstellar depths. I’ve been collecting cosmic-ray photons for eight months, in my glass bulb. I have close to a milligram of them. You recall, of course, that a pound of pure energy—say in the form of infra-red waves—is enough to melt thirty million tons of rock.

  “In actual terms, my milligram of cosmic-ray photons is equal to more than one billion horsepower!

  “To put it a little poetically, I’ve tapped the power reservoir of the universe. It was Auguste Piccard who said, ‘I advise all of you who own shares in coal mines to sell your shares in them the day before the liberated energy from cosmic-rays is harnessed.’ That’s good advice, Dan! I really believe this can develop into a commercial process antedating Niagara and Boulder Dam, etc.

  “I had a graphic example of the amount of power in my hands, a week ago. I drew off a mere trifle of my milligram of photons and sealed it into a small capsule. My idea was to convert it into electricity. I left the capsule on the table in the shed while I went back for something in the cabin. It probably rolled off—an explosion blew one side of the shed out and turned my table into kindling wood. I never found a piece of the Gieger-Muller apparatus I’d been using.

  “Sometimes I stare uncomfortably at that glass bulb. It holds a dozen Boulder Dams and Niagaras in its dark interior. I have the terrible sensation of sitting on top of a volcano. Perhaps I’ve let my enthusiasm run away with me. I collected and hoarded the energy like a miser with his gold.

  “I think tomorrow I’ll drain most of that energy out of the bulb. I don’t need so much for further tests. I can ground the power.

  “But anyway, it’s been a success. As soon as I find a way to convert that raw energy into electricity, I’ll patent the process and see what comes of it.

  “Au revoir, Danny. I’ll expect you here next month.”

  DAN NELSON looked up from the letter, his face awed.

  “One billion horsepower of raw energy!” he said aloud. “Like a mountain of TNT in a hat. It must have exploded, or escaped, setting fire to the cabin and forest—yes, but what kind of fire?”

  He dashed out and leaped into his car. A half hour later he had reached the nearest wall of the fire, where it was ferociously eating its way across a boulder-strewn, sandy stretch of poor land. Fantastic, supernal flame reared over his head, feeding on nothing that ordinary fire would have touched. No heat, no smoke, no light, and it gave off electrons which were making his hair stand on end.

  Nelson stared, puzzled, trying to figure it out. Suddenly an abysmal fright squeezed his heart. He thumped the side of his head.

  That ground wasn’t burning—it was disintegrating!

  Nelson’s mind reeled.

  Dr. Berg had been a fool for playing around with cosmic-rays without due precautions. He should have foreseen! Cosmic-rays had always been streaming down on earth, disintegrating atoms, but only in a minor degree. Earth could withstand that mild bombardment for countless ages. But Berg’s concentrated charge of cosmic-ray photons had started off a true holocaust. It was like the difference between the slow rotting of wood and its rapid burning, w
hich were the same process actually. This fire from the stars would destroy earth long before its time!

  “What have you done?” Nelson whispered, as though accusing the ghost of the dead scientist. “God—you’ve destroyed the world!”

  Nelson’s thoughts horrified him, as they charged on. It was like a nightmare that he couldn’t awake from.

  The circle of atom-fire would spread, consuming all in its path. Mountains, trees, rivers—even the oceans would burn, for they were its fuel too. Cities would crumble, vanish—all life would be destroyed. But the atom-fire would continue greedily, sucking down the air to burn it.’ Then it would eat inward, like a cancer, to the center of earth, till the world he knew was nothing but a cinder. No not even a cinder—there would be nothing left—nothing—“Hey, are you deef?”

  A tall, lanky figure grasped Nelson’s arm, startling him.

  “I’m Sheriff Mack. I don’t know who you are but I’m conscripting every man I see. Come along. We’re going to try to save Tipler.”

  Nelson laughed bitterly in the bedraggled, sweaty face.

  “The town? Is that all you’re worried about?” he asked. “Given enough time, this atom-fire is going to engulf the entire world!”

  “WHAT?”

  The sheriff peered closely at Nelson, visibly impressed by his manner and appearance.

  “Atom-fire? What do you mean?” Nelson tried to explain.

  “This is a disintegration process, set off by cosmic-ray photons, like a spark sets off gasoline. Matter has an ignition-point, that starts its disintegration, just as combustible fuels have. And once started, that atomic-fire continues, for all the world, and everything in it, is its fuel! Anything made of atoms and molecules. And that includes anything you can name on earth. This isn’t a local matter any more. This is a menace to the whole world!”