The Collected Stories

by Earl

  Kard put on added speed at a reckless rate and dived and twisted in the hope of shaking his pursuer, but always the other globe was right behind. In desperation he formed himself into a long, thin, pointed cylinder and dove down into the heavier strata of air, at a speed never matched by Man’s aircraft. But when he slowed, all but ripped apart by air-pressure, there was Hall not twenty feet away.

  “You can’t escape me,” came the professor’s deadly psychic-voice. “I’ll chase you to the ends of the universe, if need be!”

  Screaming in mortal fear, Kard drove his glove upward at a breakneck pace. Up and up he went till Earth lay as a large, blue orb and all the air was gone. Perhaps in the darkness of space he might lose his pursuer. On and on the two globes sped, attaining prodigious velocity, with only the stars watching.

  DR. KARD knew he must not stop.

  The moment he did, and allowed Professor Hall to come close, there would again be the battle of wills, and Kard knew with a terrifying certainty that his will was weaker than his companion’s. Professor Hall’s strong will-radiation, which was a strange new force fed by electronic energy, would disorganize Kard’s inner electron pattern and scatter him as unthinking electron debris.

  Dr. Kard did not want to die. He catapulted on into space, driven by this most ancient fear of Man’s.

  There was no limit to their velocity in airless space. Like ghostly rocket ships they sped on, accelerating at a rate that would have crushed their mortal bodies. Long streamers of fluorescent radiance shot backward, propelling them forward by simple, direct reaction. At times the globe of Professor Hall would relentlessly crawl closer and Dr. Kard would put on an added burst of speed, though the steady hammering of the reactive forces was already beginning to hurt in a dull way.

  Almost before they knew it, the moon loomed large.

  Kard had blindly set a course for it. Soon the Lunar whiteness filled all the firmament and Kard realized that he would crash with all the force of a solid body, because of his tremendous velocity.

  Frantically, almost forgetting his grim pursuer, Kard threw a retarding radiation from the front and side, decelerating and turning past the moon. Professor Hall, realizing the same danger, did likewise.

  Though decelerating furiously, they swept over the moon and past it. Kard now began turning the other way, inspired by an idea. If he could get down to the moon’s surface, how easy it would be to hide from Hall in some of the ultra-black shadows of the airless satellite.

  It was at this point that both of them became aware of a feeling of intense fatigue. Their globe-shapes had now shrank to smaller dimensions than they had ever been. Realization of what it meant swept all thought of mutual enmity out of their minds.

  They were in danger of being marooned in space!

  Their mad speed and the long journey to the moon had used up most of their surface-electrons. Soon they would have none left. They would have only the central core of electrons, which they could not utilize without disintegrating their very beings.

  “If we get stuck out here without surface-electrons,” radiated Professor Hall, “we’ll drift in space!”

  Promptly, obeying the instinct of self-preservation ahead of all other considerations, they used their remaining energies to decelerate their furious plunge into the yawning regions beyond the moon. The satellite’s disk back of them shrunk steadily, from their still-high velocity, hut more and more slowly. They used the last few millions of their surface-electrons for retarding, looking back anxiously.

  The disk of the moon had stopped dwindling! In fact, it began slowly enlarging in the next few minutes. Their last, desperate splurge of energy had stopped their outward motion and given them a slight impetus back toward the moon. They were saved, at least, from the terrors of isolation in the void, though Professor Hall began to wonder what they would do on the moon.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  POWER FROM THE MOON

  IT took a full week, Earth time, to get back to the moon at the slow pace that they could not increase in the slightest.

  They arrived in a state comparable to starved, parched men who had staggered over a hot desert for countless miles. They could barely see, and to telepathize was out of the question, for they had no spare surface-electrons for the purpose.

  Side by side, they landed on the peak of a tremendous jagged mountain which had no earthly name, for Earth had never seen it. It was the enigmatic Other Side of the moon, never before viewed by human eyes or mind. They felt no slightest thrill in the thought—no more than a doomed desert traveler would have over seeing an undiscovered monument.

  They lay on the hard, crystalline rock, wondering when death would come. There seemed no hope of gaining a supply of the electrons which alone could give them life. There could be no lightning storms on the dead moon to replenish them, as on Earth. They were no better off than mortal space-travellers, marooned beside a wrecked space-ship.

  “This is the end—for both of us!” telepathized Professor Hall weakly, though the few thought-words seemed to pluck energy from his very mind. “Perhaps it is better so. At least you can no longer plague Earth with—”

  He stopped, exhausted.

  “I was a fool!” said Kard earnestly.

  But, he, too, could net go on, and the two of them felt a slow, smothering cloud settle over their non-material minds. Perhaps their central patterns of electrons were slowly breaking up, under the impact of cosmic rays.

  How many long hours they lay there in a heavy stupor, looking over the weird Lunar landscape, they did not know. But finally Professor Hall stirred, Strangely, a current of strength seemed to be rising within him. It came from the lower part of his globe, which rested on the unweathered rock. His vision began clearing and he felt faintly that sensation so closely analogous to physical “eating.”

  “By the way, Hall,” came Kard’s psychic-voice suddenly, stronger than it had before, “do you feel as though—you were regaining energy?”

  “Yes! And we are!” Hall went on jubilantly. “We’re resting on matter, and all matter contains electrons. Our ‘starving’ globes have simply, and quite automatically, absorbed free electrons from the rock itself—stripped them away, probably, from the outer shells of atoms. All we have to do is move slowly over this rock surface and absorb more!”

  They tried it and found themselves gaining energy slowly but steadily. Soon, by common consent, they were rolling down the mountainside, increasing their bulk like rolling snowballs. Then they skipped over a jumbled patch of sharp rocks and again rolled themselves over the surface of a wide, smooth valley.

  On and on they went, skirting craters and rough areas, till their globes had grown to a size even greater than when leaving earth.

  Finally they stopped, wafted to the tip of a huge mountain, and prepared to take-off for Earth. They had had enough of the moon and its lifeless monotony of blinding sunlight and dense shadow.

  They swept up with powerful blasts from their newly acquired stock of surface-electrons, circled half the moon, and headed for the large, blue globe of Earth swimming among the bright stars. On the more leisurely return trip, they had a chance to admire the beauty of their home planet, and of the sun with its halo of writhing crimsons and yellows.

  But one thing was uppermost in Hall’s mind.

  “Kard,” he said firmly, “I chased you to the moon for the express purpose of killing you, for your misdeeds on Earth. Circumstances intervened. However, I’m hoping you meant what you said before.”

  “I was a fool, as I said,” returned Kard contritely. “I won’t try that sort of thing again, Hall. While I faced death back there on the moon, I suddenly saw what folly I’d done. I’m sorry for the deaths I caused, but there will be no more at my hands. I swear it!”

  Kard was serious for the time being. Yet, though neither of them mentioned it, they both knew that the main reason Kard had given up all thought of continuing his campaign for personal power, was because he knew that Professor Hall h
eld the power of life and death over him. He had not known it before, but now there was no doubt. Next time, Kard might not escape Hall’s vengeance.

  ONCE more drifting in the stratosphere of earth, Professor Hal! called a halt and spoke thoughtfully.

  “Kard, I’ve been, thinking,” he said slowly. “I’m still wondering why we weren’t killed, at the explosion.”

  “Who knows?” returned Kard, surprised at the reopening of the topic. “We’re alive, that’s all that counts.”

  “Yes, but the question is, are we alone in this state? I’ve had a subtle feeling that there are other minds existing as we do!”

  “Impossible!” exclaimed Kard. “We’re alive through the greatest freak chance of all time. Somehow, a billion volts failed to kill us, completely. But we can’t be metaphysicists and believe that the mind is always freed by the disruption of high voltages. In that case, capital punishment by the electric chair would simply have released thousands of criminal minds into this same existence—and the minds of people killed by lightning!”

  “Well, how do we know those minds, criminal and otherwise, aren’t in this state?”

  “Rot!” stated Kard flatly. “Imagination. We are alone in this existence—”

  “Bat’s what youse t’ink!”

  This new mental voice, coming from nearby, startled them. They instinctively jerked away a few feet.

  The new voice went on: “I don’t know what kind of talk youse guys was using, but you’re wrong about being alone up here, ’cause here I am. Just happened to drift up and see you. You’re a couple of scientists, eh? What did they cook you for—Thanksgiving?”

  “Who are you?” gasped Kard. “You can’t exist! It’s—it’s impossible!”

  “Listen here, Einstein,” returned the newcomer, “I’m as good an exister as you are, so pipe down. My moniker’s Joe Stack. Call me Limpy. The laugh is, I don’t limp no more. Anyhow, the state of New Joisey put me in the hot-seat about five-ten years ago, for manslaughter. I killed a woman. I should of been fried, according to Hoyle, but I’ll be damned if I’m dead. Course, I ain’t got no body—”

  His voice had become curiously crestfallen. The two scientists now noticed his globe-shape, just like theirs, though smaller.

  “Amazing!” Professor Hall murmured. “Mr.—uh—Limpy, do you realize just what state of being you are in?”

  “Well, I’m a little bettern’ a ghost, I think. I’m just like I was before, in my mind I mean. But it ain’t funny. I see without lamps, I hear without ears, I talk without having no mug, and I move without legs. But I’m still me and nobody can tell me different. Sometimes it’s kind of spooky to think about it, but I don’t do no thinking about it. That’s the best way, take it from me, pals. You’ll get used to it and kind of get to liking it, even.”

  “Thanks,” said Hall, smiling to himself. “But what do you do to occupy yourself? Five or ten years! How have you passed the time?”

  “What is this, a cross-examination? But that’s the rub—killing time. Well, I used to go down below a lot and mosey around. Read newspapers and took in movies—all free, which ain’t bad. Then I went all over the country, sort of traveling in style, and there ain’t much in the line of scenery I ain’t seen. But I got tired of that. Lately, since I met the boys, I been spending a lot of time with them, talking over old times—”

  Kard interrupted. “There are others of you?”

  “Sure! Plenty more. Here comes my gang now, a swell bunch, all from Sing-Sing, where I did a stretch once.” His psychic-voice raised in a bellow. “Hey, you lugs! Come here a minute. I want youse to meet a couple of new puuiks from down below.”

  A moment later the two scientists were surrounded by a dozen globe-shapes like themselves. “Boys,” said Limpy, “meet—hey, what’s your names, anyway?”

  Professor Hall introduced himself and Kard, and then Limpy rattled off a series of names that ranged from Snakebite Pete to Cocaine Charley. A confused chorus of greetings came from the newcomers:

  “Howdy!”

  “Shake!”

  “Have a drink!” etc., in various degrees of sarcasm.

  Limpy again spoke when the rest had quieted down.

  “Me and the boys was heading down for a little fun. We’re going to pull off a jailbreak at San Quentin. Want to join us? Oh, I forgot you’re new up here. You see, now and then we mixes in with things down below, for the hell of it. We’ll find out the lay of things, being as we’re invisible, and plan a jailbreak for the boys, and then give ’em the info. Sometimes the boys is superstitious and won’t play ball, but generally they does, thinking it’s themselves that is so brainy. It’s always a lot of fun, especially when two-three guards get plugged. Bankrobbing is great stuff, too; we did one last week. Got thirty grand and killed two lousy coppers. That is, not us, but the guys we help; we kind of feel it’s us, you know. Want to join this jailbreak with us?”

  “No—uh, thanks,” returned Hall. “If you don’t mind, we’ll just stay here.”

  “Okay with us,” said Limpy laconically. “Be seeing ya. Come on, gang, let’s get going!”

  With whoops and yells, the globes moved off rapidly, heading downward.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  FORCES DIVIDED

  FOR a minute there was silence between the two globes left alone. Then Professor Hall spoke. “We’re not alone after all in this existence! You know-, I think this may account for the great prevalence of crime in the last decade. America sends criminals to death by the electric-chair where most countries hang them. Obviously hundreds, perhaps thousands of criminal minds live in this strange life and it is perhaps they who plan and instigate the many daring, bloody crimes this nation has been criticized for. Do you see. Dr. Kard?”

  “I beg your pardon,” said the other globe in a voice that was not Kard’s.

  “The Dr. Kard whom you address has gone with the group that just left.”

  “Wh—who are you?” gasped Professor Hall, bewilderedly. “And where did you come from?”

  “I was with the group, though I have nothing in common with them. Now and then I become so lonely and frightened that any sort of companionship—” He broke off, started over. “But again your pardon. I am Dr. Valmir Rumanov, late of the University of Moscow.”

  “Dr. Valmir Rumanov!” echoed Hall dazedly. “Why I—I know you. At least I met you about five years ago, during a tour of European universities. You were the foremost atom-smasher at that time. I remember you were putting the finishing touches to a great atomic-gun, which—”

  “Which, as you Americans would quaintly express it, put the finishing touches to me, a year later. You undoubtedly read of my death in the newspapers, as I read of yours. I came here to search for you, but for a time it seemed you were not on earth.”

  “I wasn’t, at that,” chuckled Hall. “I was on the moon.”

  He told the whole story. “Dr. Kard and I were quite startled,” he finished, “to find, a few minutes ago, that we are not alone in this existence. Is it possible that there are dozens, hundreds—”

  “Thousands is more correct, professor,” interposed Dr. Rumanov in a telepathic voice that had the same precise foreign accent he had had in life. “Every apparent death on earth by high-voltage electricity has produced an electronic entity such as ourselves. In the four years that I have lived in this neo-life, pondering the situation, I have seen the reason for it.

  “Life and electricity are bound together. The body processes are electrochemical in nature. Mental processes are purely electrical. Evolution in the far, far future will produce a race of creatures as we are, when nature in its slow, blundering way has eventually found the means of dispensing with the electro-chemical body altogether.”

  “We represent mankind of a million years ahead?” Hall mused.

  “Not exactly. We are accidental freaks. We cannot reproduce, for instance. The electron-creatures of the future will be able to.”

  “But perhaps we are—immortal!
” Hall suggested.

  “No again,” responded Rumanov, with a curious note of exultance. “No, we aren’t, and thank God for that. Immortality is a curse. I know there will be a death for us. I have seen others in this life die. They had lived as electronic entities at the most an earth lifetime—about sixty years. The electronic patterns of their minds are ultimately disintegrated by cosmic rays. In all the past ages, there have been many millions who were struck by lightning, and passed into this interlude between life and death. But they have long since died the true death. They account, of course, as a moment of thought will show, for most of the spiritist phenomena and tales of ghosts and such through mankind’s history.”

  “Yes, I can see that,” Hall agreed. “Any person hearing a strange telepathic voice talking to him from an almost invisible globe-shape would conclude it was a visitation from the after-death world—”

  “Which it actually is! laughed the Russian. “We have died an earthly death. But of course the mass of spirit tales are overlaid ridiculously with imaginative details.”

  “How many of our kind are there, now?”

  “I have estimated about five thousand, of which fully half are your American criminals sent to ‘death’ by the electric-chair. There are in the main just two classes—the criminals and the ordinary people struck by lightning. However, most people struck by lightning died of heart-failure from shock, and so did not enter this existence. Otherwise there would be unnumbered thousands. Over 2,000 people are annually killed by lightning, over all earth!”

  “Are there no other scientists, like ourselves?”

  “No others,” sighed the Russian. “All other scientists who have been martyrs to atom-smashing research have died in normal ways—crushed or blown apart. Only you and I, and your Dr. Kurd, were electrocuted. We are the only ones of the scientific fraternity in this strange life. Though I deplore your calamity, I welcome you to my side with great joy!”