Wonder of the Worlds

by Sesh Heri

  The electrical power feeding on to the platform below was severed. The nimbus around Kel instantly disappeared. Released from his invisible electrical bonds, Kel teetered upright for an instant, and then collapsed on the platform.

  Inside Tesla’s airship, Czito exchanged fire with a group of Martian guards. I stood at the pilot’s wheel trying to catch a glimpse of one of the aeronauts. In a moment I saw Lillie West and George Ade f lying through the cavern toward us. As they approached, I could see that Ade was missing his knapsack and was clinging to Lillie. They flashed by the pilothouse windows and went f lying toward the stern of the airship. “That’s the way,” I said, “get back in here!”

  Outside the airship, Ade reached for the door to the ship’s airlock, opened it, and Lillie and he f lew inside, shutting the door behind them. I saw the airlock indicator light next to the pilot’s wheel flash on. “They’re in!” I shouted to Czito. “They made it! Now where’s Tesla?”

  Tesla was still in the domed tower. He had just finished donning his pres- sure suit, buckling on his knapsack, and screwing his helmet back into its neck ring. He switched on his antigravity machine and f lew over the balcony and down to the platform where Kel lay. Tesla floated in mid-air above the Master Crystal, and, with a pair of insulated tongs, removed the flashing crystal from the pedestal. He brought a metal cylinder out of his knapsack, and inserted the Master Crystal into it, closed the cylinder’s hinged lid, dowsing the crystal’s light, and slid the cylinder and the tongs into a side pocket of his knapsack. With all these items secured, Tesla flew out over the platform and landed on the floor near one of the doors. Tesla was about to go out the door when he heard a groan from behind. He turned and saw Kel’s arm reach up into the air. Tesla went back and looked down at Kel. The Martian King was a smoking, blackened scarecrow; the whites of his eye were blood-red. In a deep, gurgling voice, Kel croaked:

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  “You have the power now, Mr. Tesla. You have the power. But will they let you keep it?” “They?” Tesla asked. “Who are ‘they’?”

  “J.P. Morgan,” Kel replied, “and the men who pull his strings. Will they let you keep the… .” Kel’s face froze. A thin line of blood trickled from the corner of his mouth. His blood-red eyes continued to stare at the ceiling, but they saw nothing, for Kel was dead. Tesla stepped back from the platform, and then turned and went out through the door.

  Czito continued to fire at the Martian guards on the balconies of the cavern walls as I slowly piloted our airship above the underground city searching for some sign of Tesla. Lillie West and George Ade came up the stairs of the pilothouse with their helmets removed. Lillie had also removed her knapsack. “Am I glad to see you!” Ade said.

  “Likewise!” I said, shaking his hand. “Mr. Clemens!” Lillie said, hugging my neck. “My dear,” I said, patting her back. “Where’s Tesla?” “Back there,” Ade said. “Where we left him.” “And Houdini?” I asked.

  “He fell,” Ade said. “They hit him hard.” I looked at Lillie and her eyes said it all. “You did all you could,” I said, “all that anybody could.” “What do we do now?” Ade asked.

  I said, “Those varmints want a war, so let’s give them the damnedest one they’ll ever see!” Below us, a group of Martian guards stood on a massive metal deck. They were adjusting cannon directly up at us. Suddenly they fired a ball of lightning at us that struck just below the pilothouse. “They’re breaking out their heavy artillery again!” I shouted to Czito. “Give them everything you’ve got!”

  Czito fired an electric ray upon the guards with the cannon. The ray pro- duced a brilliant flash of white light, and, when it cut off, guards, cannon, and metal platform were all gone! Those guards—like the others—had been com- pletely vaporized out of existence by the electric ray!

  Tesla was now f lying above the underground city. He had seen our airship and was headed straight for it. As he passed over one of the bridges he heard a shout. “Hey! Hey! Hey, Mr. Tesla! Mr. Tesla!”

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  Tesla looked down. He saw Houdini dressed in his red f lannel underwear running on the bridge below and waving his arms. Tesla swooped down to the bridge and grabbed hold of Houdini with his left arm, and then the two of them lifted back up into the air. Now I saw Tesla and Houdini coming toward us in mid-air. Bolts of electricity from Martian ray guns shot past them in their f light. As Tesla f lew along, he fired back to the right and left with his ray-gun. Tesla and Houdini swooped by the pilothouse windows. “Tesla’s got him!” I shouted. “He’s got the boy!”

  Lillie and Ade ran to the pilothouse windows and looked toward the stern of the airship. Tesla f lew upward to the door of the ship’s airlock. He grabbed the door handle, opened it, and swung Houdini through the door. In the next instant a ball of electricity struck Tesla, and his knapsack erupted in sparks. Tesla was enveloped in a shimmering green haze and he began to jitter up and down in mid-air. He would drop, rise, and drop again. In one of these sudden plunges, Tesla’s ray-gun slipped from his hand, f loated in mid-air for a moment, and then tumbled and fell into the cavern. Tesla had managed to get back to the door of the airship when he saw a Martian guard on one of the balconies aiming electric cannon at him.

  Tesla reached out in the green electric haze, spun his hand about, formed a ball of lightning, and threw it at the Martian guard. The ball struck the guard dead in a white explosion of electricity. Tesla’s anti-gravity machine went completely dead, and he began to fall past the open door of the airship. His hand shot out, grabbed hold of the door, and he swung himself inside the airship, slamming the door behind him. “Tesla’s in!” I shouted, seeing the airlock indicator light f lash. “And we’re getting the hell out! Czito! Get down here!” Czito came sliding down the ladder.

  I said, “Get back to the engine and turn up the juice! We’re going back through the rock right now!” Czito ran down the stairs.

  “Lillie,” I said, “Mr. Ade, you folks better brace yourselves. Czito’s turning up the power on the engines and we are going to thin out, you might say. Yes sir, we are going to get so thin that we won’t even be able to see each other. Just stand where you are and don’t move around—and don’t panic. We’ll be back to normal just as soon as we get through all this rock here.” I had steered the prow of the airship right up against the wall of rock where we had come in. Lillie and Ade looked at each other and back at me; they must have thought I had lost my mind. In a second they might have thought they had lost their own, too; for that green haze started to fill the pilothouse, and in another second or two we all started to fade from sight.

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  I said, “The electricity is making us transparent. Now I’m taking us straight through that wall of rock. Everything is going to go black while we pass through, but just stay where you are and breathe easy.” I tapped the accelerator pedal and we sunk into the wall of rock. Everything went black, just as I promised, and in another few seconds, a twilight scene broke upon us. It was the exterior of the Martian volcano and the sun had just set. “Turn down the juice!” I shouted back to Czito.

  That green haze started forming around us again and when it cleared out, everything was sure and solid again, and I saw Lillie and Ade standing there, both of them white with shock. “Now don’t be concerned,” I said. “We just got our atoms stretched out a mite so we could wiggle through the atoms of the rock. It was just a slight stretch—nothing compared to Ebner’s Sponge Syndrome.” I took us out across the f loor of the volcano, and then stopped the airship and looked back at the big door in the wall of rock. It remained closed and I did not think it would open again.

  Czito came up the stairs of the pilothouse, followed by Tesla and Houdini. Tesla was still in his air pressure suit, but he had removed his knapsack and helmet. Houdini was wearing his shirt and trousers. Lillie and Ade rushed up to Houdini. Lillie threw her arms around the boy’s neck while Ade grasped Houdini’s arm and patted his back. “All right, all right, yez wisenheimers,” Houdini said. “Did
ja think they could hold Houdini?” “Not for long,” Ade said.

  “Say,” Houdini asked, “what kind of trick was that, I’d like to know? Were we invisible or were we invisible?” “That trick was done by Mr. Czito, I believe,” Tesla said. “I remembered what you said about the circuit controller,” Czito said. “You shouldn’t have done it, Mr. Czito,” Tesla said. “Blame me,” I said. “I ordered him to do it.”

  “I’m blaming no one,” Tesla said. “You shouldn’t have done it. But if you hadn’t done it, none of us would be standing here now.” Tesla came up to me by the pilot’s wheel. “Mark,” Tesla asked, “how are you?” “Sober, sanctified, and stercoranated!” I said. “Did you get it?” “I got it.”

  “Then let’s git!”

  I hit the accelerator pedal and we went straight up and pierced the clouds. I steered us around to the west and put on some speed. In a second, the sun peeked out over the horizon. I kept going west until we got well into daylight and then I took us straight up through the blue and then into the night of space with all its stars.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  The Rip Van Winkle Wrinkle

  Now you begin to see, don’t you, that distance ain’t the thing to judge by at all; it’s the time it takes to go the distance in that counts, ain’t it?

  — Tom, Tom Sawyer Abroad

  There is a kind of satisfaction that comes over a body when he has set out to do a deed and has done it and done it well; it is a sort of comfortable, self-important, self-satisfied feeling that settles on the legs and leaves the shoul- ders and arms feeling light, free, and easy. None of us in the airship had that feeling. We should have been rejoicing and praising God, but we did not feel so inclined. All of us had killed, all of us except me, and considering that I had directed a lot of the killing, it had to be concluded that I was responsible for the killing too. Yes, we had been provoked. Yes, we had been shot at. Yes, we had killed in defense. Yes, we had killed as soldiers kill, under sanction of their government. But still we had killed. And that is not a light and simple matter, not simple at all until you do it. No one with any conscience at all can be indifferent to the matter of killing. The knowledge that you have killed weighs upon you; it does not settle in your legs, but in your neck and shoulders, and it is a taste in your mouth—bitter and acidic and dry. And so for quite a while none of us said a word. We all stood in the pilothouse together. We had survived. We had succeeded and gained possession of the crystal. But we had killed. I piloted the airship beyond Mars. With Tesla’s instructions, I got the prow of our ship pointed toward Earth. We could see our planet shining in the black void as a little blue star, a mere point of light which held the infinite spaces of human thought and feeling. All that had ever happened to mankind had

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  happened on that one point ; the rise of the Atlantean civilizations and their fall; the re-emergence of civilization in Sumer and Egypt; its develop- ment in Greece, Rome, and Europe; and now the birth of our industrial world. Millions upon millions of human lives lived on that blue point in brief joy and long suffering to be vanished and replaced with millions upon millions more. As my daughter Susy had once asked long ago when she was a small child: “What’s it all for?” I did not have an answer for her then. As I piloted our airship toward the blue star that was Earth, I still did not have an answer.

  Tesla gave Czito the metal cylinder containing the Master Crystal, and said, “Secure the crystal, Mr. Czito.” Czito took the cylinder and started down the steps of the pilothouse. Houdini followed behind him. “I guess I’ll get out of this contraption,” Ade said, and he turned and fol- lowed Czito and Houdini down the steps. Lillie was facing me. I looked over at her. She asked, “Do you still hate persistence in a woman, Mr. Clemens?” “Now did I say that? I’m always uttering one sort of foolishness or another. It’s one of the pitfalls of being a humorist. You know what my mother always said about me? She said, ‘Discount everything he says fifty percent. The rest is pure gold.’ Anyway, I found out something about you. You’re not just a woman. You are a lady. And a lady is nothing if not persistent.” “Miss West,” Tesla asked, “are you all right?” “I’m fine, Mr. Tesla,” Lillie said. “Now.” “I’ve been thinking about what you said.” “Mr. Tesla—”

  “You were right, of course. The people of Earth have a right to know about the existence of the Martians. But there are powerful men who are determined to keep the people from knowing the truth. Will you help me in a plan? A gradual release of the truth?” “How?”

  “I will start by giving a series of interviews in which I discuss Mars and the intelligent electric signals I have detected coming from there. Perhaps we can get such statements published in Newspapers such as yours—despite whatever pressures may be brought to bear on the papers’ editors.” “I’ll be glad to help.”

  “Thank you. For everything.”

  Tesla started to turn away, but Lillie stopped him. “Mr. Tesla, what I said about you being a shoddy lightning rod—”

  Tesla smiled down at Lillie, and said, “Do not concern yourself, Miss West, I have been known in my time to bend, but never to break.”

  Down on the lower deck, Czito removed the Master Crystal from the canister with a pair of tongs. He placed the crystal on an insulated pedestal, and then stood watching the crystal pulsing with a rainbow of light. Houdini came up beside Czito, and said, “So that’s it.” “That’s it,” Czito said. “It sure is a beaut,” Houdini said. “Does it always flash like that?” “Always,” Czito said.

  Lillie had gone below to the lower deck, and now only Tesla and I stood in the pilothouse. Tesla had removed his air pressure suit and had stowed it in the closet aft of the pilothouse. We were humming along at a steady rate of acceleration. Every once in a while, Tesla would go back to the control board to make sure everything was running as it should. I glanced aft through the pilothouse windows and saw that Mars hung behind us as a big, ruddy globe. Never before or since have I felt such relief to be out of a place as I felt to be out of that red planet. I had seen it once and once was far too much. I have no doubt everyone else on board felt the same way. In a few more hours we would all be back on Earth and our lives could return to normal, that is, if we could remember at all what normal was.

  At the stern of the airship, Ade stood looking through the windows of the library, watching Mars shrink and recede in space. He had changed back into his clothes, and now the events that had transpired back on Mars seemed to him to be only a strange dream. Lillie came into the library and stepped inside the threshold of the door. “I wondered what I would do if you didn’t come back,” Lillie said. Ade turned around and saw that Lillie had changed back into her dress. “And what did you decide?” Ade asked.

  “I decided that if you didn’t come back, I didn’t want to come back, either.” Ade stood looking at Lillie. The masked expression he always wore to protect himself from the world was gone.

  “Well,” Ade said, “I’m here. I’ve come back. What are you going to do now?” “I’m coming back, too,” Lillie said. “Well,” Ade said, “come on, if you’re coming,” and he held his arms out. Lillie ran to him; their arms encircled each other, and they kissed.

  Down below on the lower deck, Czito continued to watch the crystal. The relief and safety Czito had been feeling was suddenly interrupted with a stab of panicked uncertainty. It seemed to him that the intervals between the crystal’s

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  f lashes of light were too brief. He took out his pocket watch and began timing both the duration of the flashes of light and the dark intervals between them. “What’s wrong?” Houdini asked. “Sh!” Czito hissed sharply. Czito held his watch up in front of him and counted off the seconds. Before two minutes had passed, Czito gasped, “Oh, no! The crystal!” “What?” Houdini asked. “What’s wrong?” Czito said nothing, but removed the crystal from the pedestal with the pair of insulated tongs and shot up the ladder, with Houdini following up behind at Czito’s heels
.

  Czito and Houdini rushed into the pilothouse, with Czito shouting, “Mr. Tesla! Mr. Tesla!” “Czito!” Tesla snapped, turning about. “What is it?” “The crystal,” Czito gasped, “it’s pulsing irregularly!”

  “Let me see it,” Tesla said, and he took the crystal in its tongs from Czito. In his other hand he brought out a jeweler’s loop and looked at the crystal through it. Tesla said, “The Martians have tampered with it. They’ve electrically al- tered the geometry of its lattice. It’s drawing too much power.” Tesla looked up, and said, “It’s going to explode. Czito! Open the jettison tube! Mark! Get ready to f loor the accelerator pedal on my command!”

  Czito opened the jettison tube. Tesla approached and inserted the Master Crystal into the tube, closed the tube’s door, and pushed a button. There was a sudden sound of air rushing out. “Now, Mark!” Tesla shouted. “Floor the pedal!”

  I pressed my foot down on the accelerator. Immediately the field of stars in front of me began to move off to the right and left. “Faster, Mr. Clemens!” Czito said. “Faster! We must attain light speed! Faster than light speed!” “Hold on to your britches,” I said. “We’ll be going so fast, we’ll get to where we’re going before we get to where we got!” I closed the light speed switch and slammed the accelerator pedal all the way to the f loor. The field of stars in front of us began to distort and pucker together into a ring. I looked aft through the pilothouse windows and could see a pulsating source of rainbow colored light. We were rushing away from that light source, but instead of it growing smaller, it was growing bigger. In another instant, I could see that it was the crystal, growing bigger by the second. With each pulse of the light it expanded—now it was a spinning tetra- hedron—now an octagon—now a giant faceted sphere the size of a moon.