Number 87

by Harrington Hext

  “I resisted the thought, yet could not put it wholly behind me. You will perceive the terrific inducement to right some of the wrongs now crying to heaven; you will remember that I am a man who feels very deeply, that I have a passionate sense of right and wrong, as I see them; that suffering never leaves me unmoved; that I possess a morbid, faulty instinct to take into my own bosom the shafts aimed at mankind in general. These poignant emotions worked havoc with me; and to spare you and the world the narrative of my struggle and the growing sense that if I did nothing, it would soon be too late to do anything, I may relate how there came a time when I determined to take on my own shoulders the garment of my own achievement and not, indeed, proclaim it, but employ it on my own responsibility for the welfare of the world.

  “It was the garment of a giant ill-fitted to a dwarf’s shoulders, my friend. You may carry the thyrsis, as Plato says, without being possessed by the god. Yet of such fond spirits was I, in my ignorant belief, that because I had discovered the cathartic hurricane, I was also endowed to employ it. There is no man living on this earth endowed to employ it; and no man shall do so!”

  He rose and walked up and down the room for the space of five minutes, and I said nothing meanwhile but waited for him to continue. He returned to the fire and presently resumed.

  “What spiritually follows I have written, that my generation may appreciate the truth. For the moment, to you, who will be among the last on earth to hear my voice, or look upon me, it remains to detail the physical facts and explain these mysteries. I have used you ill, Granger; but you will forgive me. I have employed you as an unconscious agent to spread untruth and to create false impressions. I have suggested to you monstrous theories, that you might help to disseminate them, hoodwink humanity and hide the secret truth. Deliberately I created this impression and confusion of thought from the outset and deliberately I pretended that I was not out of harmony with the preposterous ideas that a living animal, or living animals, beyond human experience were involved in the extraordinary things that happened. There was, of course, no shadowy grain of truth in any such suggestion. I and I alone am responsible for all that has occurred. I had no agent — human, or super-human. There is no ‘Bat’; but the time has now come when you shall understand.”

  He paused, regarded me fixedly for a moment, and then proceeded.

  “Why I did the things that I have done is related in this manuscript; but how I did them I am about to relate, that you may complete the story when I have gone. Follow me now, if you are rested and strong enough to do so.”

  As we clambered to Sir Bruce’s own apartments, I spoke and told him of my adventure on the night before I had left Grimwood during the previous August.

  He stood halfway up the stairs to listen and did not interrupt me. When I had finished the story, he expressed his deep regret.

  “I feel sorry above measure that terrible experience should have overtaken you,” he said. “It was a misfortune for which I am in no sense responsible. The explanation of what you saw shall take its proper place in what I am now to tell you.”

  He opened the door of his private room and locked it after we had passed through. He then turned on the electric light, left a small bedroom and led me into a larger chamber that communicated with it. I found myself in a laboratory, and passing through this, we entered one still larger. Under the bright lamps I saw a bewildering chaos of scientific instruments and machines. The spectacle, though on a far larger scale, reminded me of the workshop of Ian Noble. At one door Sir Bruce stopped and hesitated.

  “This chamber contains my raw material,” he said, “and though the sight of it would convey no idea to you, yet for your peace of mind I will deny it to you, Granger. You will then be in a position to oppose a blank negative to the battery of questions which will be discharged upon you. My present supply is nearly exhausted, and it is not my wish that any eye shall see it. That the source of my new element will be rediscovered in years to come, none can doubt; and when that time shall arrive, may the world be educated to receive it with reverence, humility and universal love. Only so should man welcome so mighty a boon.”

  Sir Bruce walked through the scene of his secret labors and made no effort to arrest my progress, or draw my attention to the strange, silent machinery here set up.

  Once, however, he stopped and spoke.

  “It has been a source of grief to my brother, Hugh, that having acquired Grimwood from him, I made no effort to restore it in a manner worthy of so interesting a place. You see the explanation. I never designed to use it otherwise than as a laboratory, wherein secluded I might pursue my scientific work; but I did not know then how invaluable it would become in these great labors. My money has been entirely devoted to my discovery, and my time also. Acquaint the general with these facts. He re-inherits Grimwood — the site I mean — for within an hour nothing but the site will remain.”

  I ventured to beg him to reconsider this determination; but he did not so much as reply.

  “Here,” he said, gazing about him, “is the theater of my gigantic and futile achievement. Now I will furnish you with details. The place, as you see, was admirably adopted to my needs, and circumstances enabled me to slip into it so naturally that no suspicion has ever attached to my possession. Only three persons have known that my actions were extraordinary, and they have but dimly guessed at them. In any case they were faithful and loyal. They would never have divulged any of my secret movements — my goings and comings, or the manner of them. They are wholly innocent of anything but supreme devotion to me, and the truth was, of course, completely hidden from them. Take pains to make that clear, and see that the terms of my will, in so far as it touches them, are carried out. All three are provided for.”

  We had reached a shallow flight of wooden steps as he spoke, and in a moment I was standing beside him on the roof of Grimwood. Here, within the battlements and at a point invisible from the ground, stretched a large and level space of asphalt, and at one end was a low shed. It reminded me of the roof at Sir Bruce’s bungalow in Chislehurst.

  He bade me stand still, then proceeded to the little building and drew from it, as we might bring a horse by its bridle from a stable, ‘the Bat.’ By one hand on its neck he led it, and it seemed to glide after him. For a moment the horrible sense that I still faced a living animal possessed me; but I stood firm and swiftly perceived that I confronted nothing but an exquisite engine built in the natural lines of an aërial animal — bird rather than bat.

  It was long and spare, created obviously for speed and modelled, as to its exterior, half a brute and half a bird. Sir Bruce touched a lever and the machine’s saucer eyes were illuminated; at a touch again it unfurled its great, taut wings.

  “The speed is not in them,” he explained. “They steer me, no more. This is not an airplane, but a projectile.”

  He showed me his seat in the body of the creature, and the place of the power, emitted from the region of the vent. It was clear that the engine, or whatever it might be, occupied but little space, and the entire machine, so Sir Bruce informed me, weighed no more than two hundred and fifty pounds.

  “It might be much lighter save for the necessity of great speeds,” he explained, and then, while I examined the thing, he continued.

  “Having determined to apply my power to the world’s gain, as I believed, there rose the question of how to do so. Were my time to come over again, I should proceed on different lines and start with the assumption that human life is sacred; but the gods seldom give a man a second opportunity. In my original design, the death of enemies to the human race formed the salient feature. It was necessary, therefore, to do two things and employ my energy, not only as a means of destruction for my enemies, but a means of salvation and security for myself. So I built this engine with a double object and speedily found that it would meet every requirement, make me independent of time and space and secure my complete personal safety. It is made of aluminium treated with my new element itself. It
has ceased to be aluminium, therefore, and become transmuted to another mineral under the radio-active energy applied to it. Thus you have something even lighter than aluminium and a thousand times more stable. No known amalgam would be able to support the air pressures to which this machine has been subjected. It is impossible to describe them in terms of our knowledge, or suggest the speeds attained. But they are nothing to what greater engines, with increased facilities for outpouring the driving force, might attain.”

  He showed me the machine from its beak and electrically lighted eyes, to the wings — constructed of a metal so thin that it appeared almost translucent. He displayed the tripods, fashioned like huge birds’ claws, that supported it and a hundred other minor details all more or less suggestive of a living thing. Apart from its powers, the machine was an extraordinary work of art. He then broke the thread of his explanation and dwelt upon a subordinate point, which interested him more than it interested me.

  “We will return a moment to the question of speed, which is closely connected with gravitation. Einstein does not hold gravitation a force, but merely a distortion, or crumpling up, both of time and space before matter. This I have effectively established to be true with the help of my engine. Time ceases to have any significance for me when I am in space, and my element, No. 87 of the Periodic Table, might be so employed that we could create a rate of progress and a range of speeds to take us far beyond our own atmosphere and drive us back into it again if we desired to return. Gravitation, in fact, becomes a word only to be accepted in Einstein’s sense.

  “I have used but a pinch of my power. I have never taken this thing out of our atmosphere, though tonight I shall do so and for myself annihilate time and space alike. Let me remind you, Granger, of the calculations of M. Esnault-Peltaire, who maintains that a thousand pounds of radium would suffice to carry a man to Venus in thirty-five hours, were such a vehicle as this I have invented available for the journey. Have you examined that assertion? If not, I will show you what it means. Venus, at inferior conjunction, which is the period no doubt calculated for, is only twenty-six millions of miles from earth. Save the moon, she is our nearest neighbor in space, and nothing except an occasional comet or meteor has ever approached us so closely. To reach Venus in thirty-five hours, we should need a speed of about seven hundred and forty-three thousand miles an hour; and when I tell you that I have attained to a quarter of that rate of progress, or more than one hundred and eighty thousand miles an hour, in our atmosphere, you will, perhaps, form some idea of what my element means. At such a speed day and night follow upon each other like sunshine and flying cloud shadow. Thus time and space are crumpled, as we take a sheet of paper and turn it into a ball. The wings of the engine are, of course, only used for starting from and descending to earth. When I am moving, the pace would tear them from the hull in an instant. This is, in fact, as I have already told you, not an airplane but a bullet, or rather a rocket, that carries its own propelling force along with it.”

  He then returned to himself.

  “I erected this thing for my own security first, and secondly that I might be independent of space and time; I then invented the engine to liberate my energy upon earth, so that I can fertilize a field, or throw down a city at will; and, lastly, I invented the weapon with which I destroy men.”

  He took something from the inside of the machine and showed it to me by the light of its eyes. It looked like a long, steel knitting needle set in a small pistol handle. But the needle was hollow. He then put some objects a little larger than pins into my hand.

  “You may liken this thing to a revolver and these to the cartridges with which I load it,” he explained. “These objects contain, first the charge of No. 87 that speeds them on their way at the tremendous pressure necessary to drive so small a thing, and secondly an explosive fragment of the same material in the tiny shell, which operates after the victim has been struck. The difficulty was to correct the charges for both purposes. Experiments on big game in central Africa enabled me to reach the correct values.”

  He dwelt upon these technical details and also explained the material of the receptacles of the energy, which, like ‘the Bat,’ were only created with the help of the energy itself. Without it, I gathered that the power of using it would never have been possible, and here the inventor’s difficulties had been enormous, his results extraordinary. He had made a new synthesis of minerals and achieved what were, for practical purposes, new metals with a resisting power beyond all experience.

  “Come,” he said. “You have now seen what is necessary and can retain the recollection until you have leisure to set it down. We will go back, and I shall tell you how I did what I have done and then read my measured statement — my apologia and farewell.”

  We descended and he continued his description in detail.

  “I knew that Alexander Skeat lived at Queen Anne’s Mansions and understood that it was his custom to return home on foot after a lecture, or evening entertainment. I learned his movements therefore, and leaving my bungalow at Chislehurst, where my engine was concealed on the flat roof, descended in St. James’s Park a minute later, flung a covering over the machine, which rendered it practically invisible by night, and waited for Skeat, who would almost certainly return home by way of the Suspension Bridge. He came across the park and I shot him at close range. I remembered him well enough and destroyed him instantly. I had only time to return to my vehicle and spread wing before Skeat’s cry won a response. I was seen to depart, and my original idea — to build a machine that should resemble a flying animal, and thus confuse human opinion and create an element of fear — proved entirely successful from the first. The animal stench liberated was, of course, a gas manufactured in the laboratory for that purpose.

  “The Albert Memorial may be said to have been little more than an experiment. I understood from experts that the mass was worthless as art, and I rained my electrons from above, regulating the discharge with absolute accuracy and convincing myself that the energy could be used with infinite delicacy and exactitude. Indeed I had already done so upon unknown tombs in the central Sahara. My energy is not explosive; it drives downward only thus applied. A watering pot is a clumsy tool by comparison and far less capable of the perfect accuracy I attained before employing the power in cities. On that occasion I left Chislehurst at half past two in the morning, poured my energy a minute later, after attaining perfect equilibrium above the memorial, and returned to my bungalow with the rapidity of light.

  “The story of Joseph Ashlar is but a repetition of what I have told you in the case of Skeat. His habits were common knowledge and gave him easily into my hand. Incidentally I was seen again, and again the suggestion of some fabulous animal won ground in the common mind.

  “Lorenzo Poglaici’s death in mid air furnished a scene worthy of a poet’s pen. Twice I had flown over the sleeping city of Fiume without adventure and also returned; but on the third night, this picturesque pirate also flew, according to his custom, and I met him and shot him in mid air. He attempted to fight and fired his revolver fruitlessly. The mark of a bullet may still be seen upon the body of my machine, but it could not penetrate.

  “Of Bronstein, Clos and Paravicini, it was the second whom I went to Italy to destroy. I concealed my vehicle in the Campagna, took train from a little station to Rome next morning and discovering the lodging of Gerard Clos perceived his route and engaged a couple of rooms in the Piazza di Spagna overlooking it. I shot him and his accomplices in crime from a window at a range of thirty yards, left my apartments on the following day, regained my machine and returned by night. It took me far longer to walk from the little station to the thicket of concealment, than to return from Italy to England. In America, I could have destroyed the churches in New York within a minute of the time when Greenleaf Stubbs fell, but to do so by day must have meant the destruction of many innocent beings. I waited for darkness therefore, at an elevation above human sight. From the moment when I finally left New
York to the hour I alighted on this roof, might have been less than a minute; but again I was delayed by the difference of time and the necessity to return after dark. All that happened in China and Russia is but an echo of what you know.

  “Paul Strossmayer and Ian Noble were too easily slain. Concerning that tragedy I will read to you in a moment. From what I have told you, you will understand that it was a very simple matter to destroy them. And when afterwards I heard the truth concerning Noble, I would have given my life a thousand times to undo what I had done. But I erred out of ignorance, not jealousy, alike in murdering the man and destroying his handiwork. He was, as I believed, only Strossmayer’s creature, and what I heard from the Jugo-Slav on the night before his death led me to suppose that the secret of No. 87 was already in his hands for terrible purposes.

  “As for Owen, last night when you had retired, I went to Chislehurst and left my machine as usual in its hiding place upon my bungalow roof. Later I mixed with the people, stood near Downing Street at the hour of the minister’s departure for the House, and fired through the back of his motor car, using a charge specially prepared for that purpose. I started for Chislehurst after learning that I had not failed, and my intention was to be at Grimwood immediately after dark; but a delay of fog retarded my train on its way back to Chislehurst. The lights you observed burning in my rooms were never extinguished when I left at an early hour this morning. Therefore, on the return of darkness, you observed them.”

  He stopped weary enough of his own voice; but I could say nothing. I was only concerned to commit to memory all that he had told me.