Children of the Void

by William Dexter

  Axel took Karim’s place, and the same incredible performance was gone through.

  Each time a man went to commune with the voice, the same thing happened, with only the occasional difference of slight variation in pitch from the humming loudspeaker.

  When each had stood there for a few seconds, the loudspeaker became silent.

  “But. . . why was I the only one to hear a voice?” I asked.

  Everybody spoke at once.

  “I was the only one. . .”

  “For everyone else a humming, but for me a voice . . .

  “Mais—moi-même seulement, j’ai ecouté..

  And a mournful “Inshallah! All are mad!” from Karim.

  So—we had each heard.

  And the unbelievable thing was that each had heard in his own language. Yet the spectators had heard only the eerie humming note.

  We talked for several minutes.

  Then—“We must know more about this,” said Leo.

  He took firm hold of the electrodes, and spoke.

  “We are puzzled,” he called. “We are not happy about this thing. We do not understand...”

  And from the loudspeaker now came the voice in clear, though slow, English.

  “And you wish to understand?”

  “We do. We must understand, otherwise—we may fear.”

  "You shall understand.”

  There came a pause, while the blue aura seemed to shimmer a little. Leo continued to hold firm to the electrodes.

  At last—“We have no point from which to start, you must ask us what you wish to know.”

  Leo pondered no more than a second. “Who are you?” he asked, “And. . . where are you?”

  Another pause. Then. . .

  “We are those who have been called by some, the Wise Ones. We are at this moment coincident with you in time and space, although we shall not remain so. We can prolong the point of time at which we speak — the NOW — but we cannot prolong it infinitely. Therefore we shall speak to you only at such moments as this: when your world and ours coalesce. When they have passed away from each other, as they do pass, you must await our next call.”

  “We understand,” said Leo (though I feel quite sure that this was spoken more with the desire to progress with his questioning, than from assurance).

  “We understand and will wait. Now . . . may we be told the purpose of this contact with you?”

  The voice seemed to speak now by rote, almost as though it was speaking a set piece. “We speak to you now,” it declared, “because you are ready to hear us. Yours is the last of the sentient races of the System of Sol to call us. Because you are ready, and have called us, you must now learn that which the other beings of your System have learned in the past. The moment now grows near its end. We shall come back. When we return, be ready with the things you wish to know. You may not learn all, but you will learn much. Although you were ready to hear us, and found the way to call us, you are not yet ready to learn more than a little. However, that little will be much, according to your scale of thought. We ask that you shall be ready with your questions when next we return. Be ready...”

  The voice faded, and though we waited for a full two hours it did not return.

  Leo sat with pencil and paper.

  “Eleven weeks, all but two days,” he said, “since we first heard the voice. Now it leaves us. For how long? Another eleven weeks?”

  Axel joked about it. “A lot we shall learn in five-minute lessons every eleven weeks, to be sure,” he said, with a plump smile that set the rest of us smiling.

  “Mmmm. But they may speak at irregular intervals,” reasoned Arabin. “This reference to coincidence of their world and ours: What do you make of it, Denis?”

  I thought for a while, and then told what I could remember of the old esoteric theory of duplicate universes. “There isn’t much I know about it,” I answered, “but we could look it up somewhere. Give me a couple of days to get briefed on it, and I’ll tell you all I can find out. There may be a clue in it, if nothing more.”

  “May be. But this thing seems to me to be more concrete than any abstract fancy pre-catastrophe cult There’s a certain positive factor about it. To call up this voice, we have to build this lot,” and he waved a hand at the complex apparatus around us, from the gleaming panels of Harry’s radio set-up to our clumsy stand holding the two matching minerals. “Anyway —off with you to your secret library and dig up all you can about duplicate universes.”

  “Better still, try and remember something now,” urged Karim. “The voice maybe will come back sooner. We should know as much as we can now.”

  There was not much I was able to tell them from memory. I tried to remember what I could of the school of thought that used to believe in a limitless infinity of universes, in which every possible permutation of every possible circumstance was represented. We discarded that theory as too erudite for discussion at that moment.

  “Try and think of something that fits this case,” Arabin pleaded. “A chap like you, spending your life reading and writing and educating the public”—I smiled grimly and thought of my “educational” services to the public through the Daily Mercury—“Chap like you ought to have a score of answers. Come now, Denis. Tell all.”

  So I talked to them about the theories of Yoga—what I could remember of them—of theosophy, of popular occultism, of esoteric Masonry, of Nordic Valhalla-myths (abetted in this by Axel), and of the Germanic legends of the doppel-Ganger.

  “Now there we may have something,” said Leo thoughtfully. “The doppel-Ganger is the phantom double of every living person—right? I suppose they live somewhere. Why not in a phantom double of this world?”

  But no. It just didn’t fit. Here, if we were to believe the voices, were two worlds, one concrete (to us) and the other abstract or infinitely remote (again, to us). And they coincided at intervals. What those intervals were we could not yet know. We knew that the voices we had heard were no phantom voices. We knew that they came not from some parlour medium’s astral plane or celestial sphere. We knew that they emanated from some creature, some entity, as physical in its own world as we were in ours.

  But where was that world? And how came it coincide with ours from time to time?

  Karim had the most helpful advice. “Should maybe ask the voices to tell us,” he murmured modestly.

  And so we resolved.

  We left the tower in deep thought. Next day, after a long night’s planning, we started to frame our questions for the voice.

  We called all our people together, and we detailed every word, as far as we could remember, that we had heard from the voices. We asked for theories, we asked for intelligent guesses, but most of all, we asked for questions.

  And finally, so confused and so varied were the questions our colony wished to ask, we established a panel to decide on which questions should be asked.

  So far, the voices had only spoken to us for an aggregate of a few minutes. We had no means of knowing whether their time for speaking to us in the future might be even shorter than that. So we wanted to be sure that the questions we asked should be key questions. Thus, should the intervals between the coincidence of the two worlds be too long for one generation to make use of them, the questions would at last provide us with some answer to what we wanted to know.

  And how those problems of ours varied between one individual and another.

  Axel was for asking the voice how to ensure perfect health and longevity.

  My wife (and how I have overlooked mentioning her in this record!) wanted to ask whether we could now expect to live in peace and found a new race of mankind.

  Leo wished to know whether there could ever be more physical, more concrete communication with the entities to whom the voices belonged.

  The homely Senora Lopez merely wanted to know—with a patient sigh—whether it would be twins again.

  For each of us had come to look on the voices as infallible, as sources of all knowledge.r />
  As for myself—I confess that I was consumed with a burning desire to know who—or what—owned the voices, and where they spoke from. I wanted to know how they came to speak our own languages. I wanted to know about these other beings in our Solar System who were already in communication with the voices.

  I was curious, rather than constructive. And I am glad of it.

  For mine was the distinction, after a ballot, of being chosen to put the first questions when next the voices came through to us.

  XX

  Having heard the voices on only two occasions, we could not yet build points of reference. We looked forward to their third coming so that we might at least form some idea of their future regularity. We were surprised, therefore, when the next signal came to us less than a week after the second hearing. For the second time in my life I met a time-scale that was incomprehensible to human thought. The voice that spoke to us that third time assured us that equal intervals—in its own timespere—lay between each of its contacts with us and the next. Yet to us, those intervals measured eleven weeks and six days respectively.

  Not being able to guess how long the voice would stay with us this time, we had prepared a long list of questions to put to it. But in the one hour of communication that we held on this third occasion, we got little farther than my two questions.

  To my demand for identification of the owner of the voice I had an answer—an answer that shook our credulity to its foundations. But it was an answer that we had to accept.

  “Are you sure that you wish to know exactly who we are?” the voice asked. Then it paused, and there seemed to be a regretful note when it spoke again. “Surely, there are so many, many other questions, infinitely more necessary of answering. . .

  We waited.

  “The one who now speaks to you,” the voice slowly declared “is far remote from yourselves, although he is of your stock. He is of the Eighth Race of Man . . . You are of the Third Race.”

  “That means little to you? Of course. You do not yet know of the First Race of Man. You know, as yet, only of the Second Race, who are now gone. They were your immediate predecessors. You knew them, lived among them, but are not now of them. And before them was another Race—the First —who were wiser than many of those who followed them. They vanished, too. Your Second Race’s early records contain some garbled accounts of them. There are learned books available to you now that could tell you of a First Race—but only as a legend, not as history. There is some record, too, of those who will follow you.

  “You are wondering how that could be? You shall know. But first you must learn to accept us. Then, and only then, you will accept the fact that we speak to you from what you would call... the future.”

  I heard Arabin draw a hissing breath through his teeth. The voice was silent for a few seconds, no doubt to allow us to grasp something of the tremendous impact of its message.

  Then it went on.

  “There have been men of the Second Race who have known about us. They'have written down, sometimes, the things they have believed about us. But they have not always been right . . .”

  With more boldness than I felt, I said: “We find it difficult to accept this situation. Can we know—is it possible for us to understand—how you are able to speak to us from the future?”

  The answer was patiently given, and at great length. Even so, I am still not sure whether we understood more than the elements of it.

  The man of the Eighth Race told us of the webs of Space and Time, and of their inextricable intermingling. He reminded us that in the unthinkable gigantic scheme of the Cosmos, Space curved, and with it, Time. (“Einstein tried to tell us that,” whispered Arabin.)

  The Eighth Race, the speaker continued, had learned how to “tighten” that curve of Space-Time. (I had a brief mental picture, perhaps implanted by the man of the Eighth Race, of a bow being drawn by an archer.) By so bending the curve they could, within limits, change the Space-Time parabola into something resembling an ellipse, turning the Cosmic curve round and towards its starting point. Thus they were able to experience a consciousness of the past. A consciousness? The voice assured us that the Eighth Race’s experience of the past was far more actual, even if less physical, than our experience of the present.

  The minds of the Eighth Race were largely confined to the study of a past that lay aeons behind them, for their powers to divert the Space-Time curve were but slight, and to experience their recent past would demand too sharp a retrogression of the curve.

  However, it was the remote past with which they were concerned, the voice explained, for their methods of preserving their own immediate past in physical form by stereoscopic recording devices and matter-transmission were perfect enough for their needs. They knew their own recent past—far better than we knew ours—and were more content to explore their remote past

  So they had explored the history of Man from his first appearance on Earth, through four eclipses of his kind, to the Fifth Race. Nearer to their own time they could not go. And their knowledge of the Third, Fourth and Fifth Races was so slight that they had not been sure when—in their own time-scale—we of what they called the Third Race would be calling them.

  We surmised, and received the voice’s confirmation, that the “call” had been made by the juxta-positioning of critical masses of the two elements we now had before us—the thorium from Earth, and the strange, unnamed element from Varang-Varang.

  We could understand this more readily than much of what followed, for had we not, in our own earlier days, accepted as everyday matters the conveyance of sound and sight—radio and television—over vast distances? And had these phenomena not been achieved by an intricate mechanism of mineral substances maintained at certain temperatures? The thermionic radio valve, the germanium transistor—what were they but combinations of critical masses of selected minerals?

  But to continue: the voice from the Eighth Race went on to tell us that his people had studied the long and bloodied career of the bat-race, as well as the milder, but no less bloody, career of mankind on Earth. The Eighth Race had perceived in the career of the bat-men the opportunity they sought— the chance to link up with our own race.

  They had been unable to influence happenings in the past, the voice said, with some caution, but had only been able to observe and remark. Nevertheless, I sincerely believe that their researches must have had some deep influence upon the survivors of the bat-race and ourselves. What, otherwise, would have driven us to seek so diligently and patiently for the complementary element to the mineral from Varang-Varang? What would have pressed the bat-men so urgently in their quest for the needed element?

  It may be that the combined thought-processes of the Eighth Race, at vital times in the history of a race, could influence other minds. It may be that a sort of telepathy, extending through time as well as space, could convey to others the urgency of such a move or such a policy. It may be. I do not know, for I am no psychologist. I only suggest these as possible tenable theories to account for our otherwise unaccountable efforts to aid the repulsive inhabitants of Varang-Varang. Others who follow us in the future may be able to answer these questions, but for now they must go unanswered.

  The point on the long, long curve of Space-Time occupied by the civilisation of Varang-Varang, the voice told us, had been more readily accessible to the Eighth Race than had ours. We learned that they had observed the ill-fated Varang-Varang throughout its long history, finally breaking off when it became plain that the bat-race were doomed.

  They had never been seen by the bat-men, these men of the Eighth Race, for the simple reason that they were unseeable through the bat-men’s eyes. The range of vision of the bat-race extended further in one direction than does human vision, but not as far into the infra-red end of the scale.

  The men of the Eighth Race, despite their invisibility, had communed with the creatures of Varang-Varang more freely than they could with us. This, undoubtedly, was due to the amazing mental dev
elopment and receptive powers of the batmen. The Eighth Race had also been able—again in a limited way—to project themselves to the focus in Time and Space occupied by Varang-Varang.

  At once, when we heard this, we realised that what we had believed to be space-craft sighted on our Discs’ scanning screens must have been visible evidence of the departure of the Eighth Race from Varang-Varang.

  Here followed a long, patient attempt to enlighten us as to methods of matter-projection, but I must admit that the concept was so completely foreign to us that we could not grasp it. Matter-projection: even now, after all our strange experiences, I find it hard to accept the existence of such a phenomenon. Perhaps, though, some quirk of misunderstanding or mishearing deceived us on this subject.

  We suggested that perhaps we had observed the men of the Eighth Race, by way of our scanning screens. We told of the alarm that had sent us chasing the runaway planet, and of the sight of what we had believed to be space-craft.

  “Yes,” answered the voice gravely, “you may have seen us. But the points of light you saw were not space-craft (we have no need of such things) but ourselves. Men have seen us in the past, but only rarely. It has not been the result we have desired. Men have not been ready to see us as we are. If you should chance to see one of us now, you would find us difficult to accept, even though our form might be— must be—familiar to you. We are . . . like you, but there are vast differences. You would possibly be shocked, frightened, terrified, if you were to see us as we are. Remember: in the millions of years (by your own counting system) in which we have developed, there have been many, many changes from the Mankind you know now.

  “We see you from time to time, but not as often as we would wish. That is because our science of projection into the past is not yet perfected. But although we do not always see you clearly and consistently we know what you are like. We have had many centuries (by your reckoning of time) in which to study you and your customs and languages. Some of the tongues in which we have addressed you were not familiar to you. They may well have been tongues that have been vanished from the Earth many years before your time. We have no way of knowing for certain. Languages of the Second Race, we find, are unpredictable; some linger on in one form or another for many ages—others die almost as soon as they are conceived.