The Collected Stories

by Earl

  “But the cyclotron—it had a bad wheeze in it the last time we ran it. You know it has been in need of repairs for the past week. I—”

  “Enough of that!” cut in the professor sharply. “I’m still your employer. What I say goes around here!” Then his voice softened as his assistant flushed. “Sorry, Grant. I didn’t mean to be peremptory. But, lad, I’m determined to go through with it.” Grant nodded helplessly. Then his eyes lit up. Without a word he dashed to the living quarters and returned with Linda, the house cat. He placed it on the stool beside the target plate and stroked its soft fur for a moment. The cat began purring and lay down contentedly.

  “Linda is to be the guinea-pig, eh?” grinned the professor.

  “I insist,” said Grant firmly. “Why risk your life needlessly? If Linda comes through unharmed, you will be reasonably safe.”

  The cat showed no alarm up to the moment it flicked out of visibility behind the mysterious wall of stasis. Fifteen minutes later, when the cyclotron current was turned off, the cat reappeared a foot off the floor. It landed on its feet, obviously puzzled, but otherwise unharmed. It sat down and began licking its fur unconcernedly.

  “There you are,” exclaimed Arkwright. “The inside of that stasis-shell is as safe and sound as a bed.”

  Grant grunted non-committally and helped the professor arrange himself for the final experiment. After careful estimation, they tilted the projector tube so that its cathode beam would rise at a slight angle. It now focused on the target plate set in the scientist’s lap as he sat on the stool. The front of his body was protected against possible burns by heavy asbestos paper. With his legs doubled and his head bowed, there would be at least a foot clearance on all sides from the shell itself.

  “All set!” cried the professor impatiently.

  Grant tried to think of something cheerful to say, but found a bothersome lump in his throat. “Be careful!” he said at last, huskily. It was at a time like this that he realized how much he liked the old scientist for himself. Their relationship was almost that of father and son.

  “Don’t worry yourself sick, lad, while I’m in the shell,” said Arkwright sternly. “Remember that I can dissolve it at any instant by tipping the target out of focus. Au revoir, Grant. Give me the full fifteen minutes—no cheating!”

  Grant tightened his hand around the switch handle, took one last look at the professor, and jammed the knives together. The cyclotron revved to high speed and in a few seconds the projector tube glowed brightly. Grant kept his hand on the switch and watched as Arkwright’s crouched body became surrounded by the usual shimmering haze. Then suddenly he was gone and Grant’s nerves gave an answering twinge.

  IN accordance with their plan, Grant waited a full minute and then ran through the telepathy experiment. He picked off the first ten cards of the shuffled pack of ESP cards, concentrating on each in turn. At times, in their previous trials together, the professor had been able to call off five out of ten correctly.

  This done, Grant looked at the clock. Ten minutes to go! He lit a cigarette, took three puffs, and then flung it down. He turned his head carefully as the deep, steady rumble of the cyclotron seemed to change. Imagination or not? The mighty machine did need repairs and—

  He ran to examine the dials. Something was wrong! The raised voltage showed that the governor was out of order, allowing the electromagnets to spin without check.

  White-faced, Grant reached for the switch and even as he did so the whine of the machine ran to inaudible pitch. A gush of ravening energy burst from the accumulators. The projector tube flared up like a lamp, shooting a tremendously powerful beam at the target within the stasis-shell. Then it suddenly went dead, with a slight tinkling pop from its interior.

  But nothing else happened and Grant pulled the switch with a prayer of thanks that an explosion had been averted.

  The cyclotron’s throb died away, and finally stopped. Grant turned to help the professor from his stool. That was the end of that for the time being till a new tube could be made. Grant stopped short with icy chills running up and down his spine. The scientist had failed to materialize!

  Heart pounding wildly, Grant stood in a frozen attitude for perhaps a minute, waiting and hoping. But the blank space where the stool, target and professor should be was still blank. He strode to the invisible globe, feeling around it. He tried to conceive of the fact that within easy reach of his hands was the professor, though he could not see one atom of his body.

  What had happened? Grant tried to reason out this strange development. The last reading of the cyclotron’s output showed close to fifteen million electron-volts. Had this frightfully powerful surge of energy in some way destroyed the target? But then why hadn’t the shell dissolved, as it had the other times when the polarized beam no longer impinged on the sensitized selenium?

  Up till this point, panic had not assailed Grant. He could not quite believe that some ghastly catastrophe had occurred. He expected each second that the stasis-shell would vanish, as it should, and Professor Arkwright would step out.

  But now the thought forced itself home that the shell was not going to dissolve. Some unknowable, unpredictable thing had happened when the excessively strong energy had shot through the system. As a result, the stasis-shell had permanently solidified! And within it was a living man, cut off from the normal universe as though he were buried in deepest space!

  Grant clenched a trembling hand and rapped sharply with his knuckles on the invisible shell.

  “Arkwright!” he called chokingly. “Arkwright, are you all right? For God’s sake, answer me!”

  He raised his two fists and pounded at the adamant shell insanely, screaming and yelling. When his hands were bruised, he kicked with his shoes till the leather cracked. There was no indication from within the globe that the imprisoned scientist heard or could hear.

  Sometime later Grant slid to the floor beside the shell, exhausted, confused of mind. He cursed himself aloud, bitterly. Why had he been fool enough to let the professor go on with his insane plan? And knowing all the while that the cyclotron was badly in need of overhauling and could not be trusted to deliver a dependable charge?

  But these recriminations were quickly crowded out by the bursting thought of what this meant. Professor Arkwright was imprisoned in an inescapable shell without food or water and with only enough air to feed his lungs for an hour or so. In that short time he would be dead! The stasis-shell would be his tomb! And a more perfect tomb had never been conceived in the mind of man—lightless, heatless, soundless, impenetrable to the last degree!

  His tomb!

  “No! No!” screamed Grant, springing to his feet as though jerked up by wires. “I must get him out! I must!”

  In a blind fury he attacked the shell with anything he could lay his hands on. He smashed at it with chairs, tripods, heavy tongs. When he again sank exhausted to the floor beside the invisible shell, he saw that the hands of the clock had moved inexorably. It was now close to an hour that the scientist had been in the globe.

  Grant put his hands to his eyes and tried to shut out the mental picture of Arkwright gasping for air, dying by inches, within that damnable globe. Yet he knew that was only half the picture. For if his mental state was agonizing, what of the mental tortures the professor must be going through? There could be nothing more horrible than being buried alive, and that was the fate in store for Arkwright.

  “I’ll go mad!” moaned Grant, holding his head and rocking his body.

  He jerked his head up suddenly. “I must be mad already!” he told himself almost calmly. “I seem to hear a voice—Arkwright’s voice!”

  He remained quiet and listened. It was all confused and impossible, but the voice seemed to be telling him something. It was not in words, nor in pictures, nor in any normal way. It seemed to be a mental voice—telepathy!

  GRANT almost stopped breathing.

  Before he had gone into the belief that thought would penetrate shell, Arkwright h
ad intimated a belief that thought would penetrate the stasis-shell. Grant concentrated his mind on catching the message. It was not articulated, or in any way spoken, but Grant’s mind unconsciously translated the meaning into words.

  “Grant, I hope you can hear me,” the telepathic “voice” said. “I’ve been catching your mental radiations from the first moment the globe surrounded me, cutting off the rest of the universe. Thought, and that alone, penetrates the stasis-shell. Therefore, thought is not a vibration. It is an incomprehensible direct form of motion through the ether. So much for that.

  “I know practically all that has occurred, Grant, for I’ve been reading your thoughts as easily as reading a book. Somehow, the total supreme isolation in which I am so sharpens the powers of my mind that it can pick up thought-messages without effort. Not only yours, but those of all the world, or all the universe! In the past hour I’ve tuned in or heard—call it what you will—the mental emanations of minds half-way around the world. Also the telepathic messages of a strange being somewhere out in the void. But that is beside the point right now.

  “Through your mind, I read the dial of the cyclotron when it temporarily went wild and ran up to fifteen million electron volts. The result, Grant, was to make a stasis-shell so strong that it made a permanent warp in the ether. That is why it did not dissolve, and that is why it will never dissolve again!”

  Grant moaned and shuddered.

  “Your thoughts are coming to me,” went on the psychic-voice, “incoherent with agony at my fate. It shocked me no little at first, too, but I’ve made up my mind to take my fate as stoically as I can. Don’t blame yourself, Grant. Not much more of life is left me, now. Already my lungs are gasping for fresh oxygen in this terrible coffin. I shall spend my last moments tuning in the thoughts of scientists around the world. Thus I will die as I wish—”

  The mental message from within the globe ended abruptly. Peter Grant continued to sit there beside the invisible tomb that contained the slowly dying body of Professor Arkwright. Dazed, hardly knowing whether it had been hallucination or not, Grant watched the swift seconds tick by, marking off the minutes of the entombed scientist’s life.

  Grant strangely lost his fear of going insane in the next hour. Somehow those words had been comforting, saving to his mind. But suddenly the same terrible fear stabbed through him, for he again heard the voice of Professor Arkwright!

  How could it be? Two hours had gone by!

  “Grant! Grant!” the mental voice seemed to call. “God have pity on me, but I did not die! My body has simply gone into a comatose state and my mind is as active as ever. I cannot die!

  “The forces of life are vibratory in nature. And nothing vibratory can pass through the shell. Do you see? My life-essence cannot escape the globe! I am doomed to live on—forever and ever! Through all eternity I will be imprisoned in this narrow universe—without hope of death!”

  Peter Grant laughed, gibberingly. Then he fainted and his mind was cognizant of no more.

  But the mind of Professor Arkwright—

  ADAM LINK IN THE PAST

  Adam Link was convinced that Thor, the Norse god, was a robot like himself. So he built a time-ship and hurled Eve and himself into the past to find him.

  I STARTED out of a deep revery. Eve had just spoken sharply.

  “You must snap out of it, Adam,” she said. “Another month of this brooding and you’ll go insane!”

  “A robot can’t go insane—” I began.

  But I knew I was wrong. Any mind—human or metal—crumbles before what seems an insurmountable problem.

  My insurmountable problem was that of introducing intelligent robots into human society. Citizenship was out of the question, or robots would one day outvote humans. Secondly, patent rights on my iridium-sponge brain would be dangerous to file, especially during a period of great human conflicts.

  I had come back from the California episode heartily sick of the whole business. I had created thirty new robots, to prove their usefulness in industry. Instead, they had proved their usefulness in warfare. I was completely disillusioned, gloomy, morbid.

  I had tried to get my mind off the entire matter. Eve had read to me, like a dutiful wife to a sick husband. We had retired to our laboratory-home hidden in the Ozarks. But only half my mind listened to her voice. The other half wrestled with the crushing thought that perhaps robots could never have a place on Earth.

  “Adam Link,” I said for the hundredth time, “the first of metal men, might also be the last!”

  Eve glanced at me anxiously, and resumed her reading.

  “Thor, the thunder-god, had an iron chariot. He never crossed the Bifrost Bridge because the other gods feared his heavy tread and mighty frame would make it crash. When Thor walked, lightnings sparkled from him. He had a mighty hammer which no man on Earth could cast as far as he. He was the strongest and mightiest of the gods, and their protector from the Frost Giants—”

  I interrupted harshly.

  “Stop reading that utter drivel! Can’t you find anything else?”

  “But Adam,” Eve said patiently, “I’ve just about read you all the human literature that exists. Before this, you read every technical work known. There’s nothing left but mythology!”

  Eve’s mechanical voice, when reading, is a blur of rapid syllables, indistinguishable to your human ears. She reads, and I listen, ten times faster than a human. We had exhausted the libraries of Earth, in our brief three years of life.

  “The first of intelligent robots,” I said despairingly again. “And perhaps the la—”

  I stopped. My ceaseless pacing up and down the room stopped. My brain spun a little, as it absorbed what I had just heard.

  “Iron chariot—heavy tread—mighty frame—lightnings and thunders—mighty hammer which he threw further than men!”

  I was suddenly clutching the book out of Eve’s hands.

  “Eve, what does that sound like?” I demanded, rapidly thumbing the pages and reading them at a glance. “For instance, this. ‘Thor always wore iron gloves to throw Mojilnar, his great hammer. He slew the Frost Giants with ease, for no one could stand against him. When he walked, the ground trembled and the men of Midgard cowered in fear at his awesome appearance. “What does that sound like, Eve?”

  “A fable such as humans devised in less enlightened times,” Eve returned.

  I read another line.

  “ ‘Thor’s voice pealed like thunder!’ ”

  My electrical larynx issued the last word with all the volume that the word implied.

  Eve started violently. She stared at me. “What do you mean, Adam?”

  My voice sank to a whisper.

  “I mean this, Eve: If there is any kernel of fact in legends at all, Thor was a robot!”

  After a moment I said decisively: “I’m going to build a time-machine, Eve. We’re going into the past.”

  EVE was not astounded at my second statement, as at my first. Any human would have gasped at the blithe announcement of constructing a time-ship. Eve merely accepted it for what it was—a task within range of our abilities.

  I finished the time-machine within six months.

  It is simple to say that. But harder to explain how I did it. In six months, in my laboratory, I had solved the “secret” of time. It is no secret. Time is not a road or “dimension” down which you travel in one irretraceable direction. It is a haphazard zig-zagging through the entropy-zones of space. Once you track this winding path, and understand its twists, you are able to forge a new track—ahead or back.

  I did not want to go ahead. I wanted to go back. Back to a dim age when “gods” lived in a north land. When deeds were performed that have rung down in history as greatly exaggerated legends. When a robot walked the Earth, and was called Thor.

  “Just think, Eve!” I said excitedly. “Perhaps I’m not the first of intelligent robots. And if a robot—or robots—once before existed in human history, why didn’t they survive? Did they meet
so many obstacles—like myself,—that they lost out? Who built that first robot? I’ve got to know the answers, Eve. This may be the solution to my own problem.”

  Eve nodded. She was happy that I had completely emerged from my previous fog of mental inertia.

  We stepped into the time-ship.

  Briefly, it was a globular vehicle of light alloy, with a dozen windows of quartz for vision. The controls were simply two levers, for orientation in space and time. Three dials read off watts, miles and years. For motive power I had devised a heavy-duty battery which constantly recharged itself through the absorption of cosmic-rays.

  Yes, they are all advanced scientific principles. Yet they lie before the noses of you human scientists. I take no credit except that my mind works with the rapidity and clarity of a thinking machine. I went through research that might ordinarily take years or decades.

  The interior of the globe was mainly empty. Eve and I needed no food supplies, or water, or tanked air, or clothing, or chairs, or beds. There was only a cupboard stocked with a dozen replacement batteries, and a selection of spare parts for our mechanical bodies.

  I grasped the time-lever. As a test, I set the time-dial three years back, to the day I was created. I pulled.

  There was just a blinking sensation, as if a light had been turned off and on. But the laboratory vanished. It hadn’t existed three years before. The Ozarks around us were the same, however.

  Only here and there the shrubbery had changed somewhat.

  I moved the spatial control.

  Its method of moving my ship physically was a by-product of the timewarping engine. By slipping the ship a few minutes or hours back in time—in relation to the daily clock—I moved westward. In effect, the Earth rotated under me. To move in latitude—north or south—I set the time-dial toward summer or winter. Because of Earth’s axis-tilt, any new position in its orbit means a progressive movement from one pole to the other.

  Perhaps this seems confusing. To me it is as starkly simple as turning the steering wheel of a car to take a curve. By the manipulation of these time factors, anyway, I moved quite certainly both in space and time.