by Pel Torro
It was theatre—but it wasn’t ‘ham’. As these thoughts raced round the sergeant’s mind he was half-dragged, half-carried along damp, echoing corridors.
“So this is the house of Anzar?” thought Joe Harding.
“What a dump!” The robot carried him for “miles” through what seemed interminable corridors, until finally he found himself in what must be the central laboratory. He eyes opened wide in horror and amazement as he saw a gigantic metal cylinder, an enormous cylinder, with a pulsating yellow fog swaying and swirling round the base of it—covering the floor. He felt terrible fear of that fog. He felt the same kind of instinctive reaction which a sheep or ox feels when it is dragged from a lorry ramp into a slaughter house. Every sinew of his being wanted to get away from that sinister, yellow mist. It looked far more deadly than anything he had ever seen … yet why he feared it in just that way, he had no idea. It was, he concluded afterwards one of those strange subconscious “feelings,” it was a ‘hunch,’ a mental allergy. He felt that the world wasn’t big enough for him and the yellow fog. And as far as he was concerned, it was the yellow fog that would have to go.… One of them would have to find some other space, some other time. He felt a strange intangible fear. A fear that sent trickles of liquid ice running up and down his spine. A fear that made his eyes open wide, that made his teeth clench like the jaws of a steel trap, a fear that made his hair stand on end, that made the nerves of his stomach and solar plexus tie up into a series of complicated knots that would have delighted a Boy Scout or sailor. A fear that clenched and unclenched his fists as though the tendons of his arms were being subjected to some strange internal, electronic influence. It was the acme of fear, the quintessence of fear. Every nerve and sinew of his body tingled and vibrated with the sheer inescapable horror of the yellow fog. At all costs he must keep out of it. He mustn’t allow himself to be involved in it. He felt as though it was completely and utterly alien to his physical structure. He didn’t want that yellow fog near him. He couldn’t stand it near him. Anything but the yellow fog. Anything at all. The robot was carrying him inexorably closer to it. He knew it was inescapable, as though his fate had been written ineradicably in the stars. As though the stars in their very course fought against him, as they had once fought against Sisera. The stars turned into robots, and the robots were holding him, and walking… And suddenly he heard a voice, a voice which he knew must belong to one man. The one man that he had entered this dreadful, derelict house to meet. The one man who was responsible for so much. The mystery man. The man who was known as a crazy, eccentric scientist, the man whom nobody had paid much attention to, until it was too late. The man whose pseudo-scientific experiments had been laughed off until humanity was about to laugh on the other side of its face. The man around whose house unexplained accidents had happened. The man whom Cameron had disappeared investigating… And now, he—Sergeant Joe Harding—had gone after Cameron—and he too had been captured. Was this what had happened to his lieutenant, he wondered? That yellow mist. He had that sheep-in-the-slaughter house feeling again. And he wondered if, in some strange intangible way, it was because the mist was tainted with Lieutenant Cameron’s blood. Had the gallant young officer ended his life and career in the hideous yellow filth? Joe Harding drew a deep breath.
The robots were obeying the orders of that voice, the voice that could only belong to Anzar—Anzar the Crazy Scientist! More thoughts darted in his brain. Maybe Anzar wasn’t crazy! Maybe Anzar was the outstanding scientific genius of the 22nd century. What strange power did the yellow mist possess? What became of the men who got caught in it?
Harding was dragged further forward as Anzar continued to bark orders. And suddenly he was in the mist. And yet, before he opened his eyes, he knew it, because of a strange tactile sensation. The feeling in his skin, in his blood, in the very corpuscles of his blood, in the plasma that flowed along his veins. He knew it, was revolted by it, and yet there was nothing he could do about it.
He felt as the unfortunate Winston Smith had felt in the classic Orwell novel ‘1984’, when he had been confronted with the rats, in room 101. He was up against the thing that he feared and hated more than anything else. The one thing that was more liable to snap his brain, destroy his sanity, to decompose and dismember his reason, than any other single thing. This was the quintessence of fear, the very distilled, refined, hyper-powerful essence of the worst kind of terror. He was like a man who had been confronted with the most fearful choice in the world. He was like a man who has been brought face to face with his most deadly fear. Like a man who had been brought slowly closer and closer to something unbelievably horrible. And now, as one who is in the grip of a nightmare, and being dragged closer and closer to what seemed to be the inevitable doom, he was still a soldier, still an IPF man, still tough. Tough as the steel of a cylinder. Stronger than any yellow mist, no matter how fearful it might be. He was in it now, they had thrown him down into the stuff. He could feel his mind twitching and swirling, his senses were reeling, trying to leave him. He was completely paralysed, dimly he could hear orders, then all sounds faded, his mind seemed isolated. His brain seemed to be three feet above his body, and watching it disinterestedly through eyes that had lost their ability to focus. Only the sense of touch remained. He could feel the floor beneath him, hard and cold, beneath the yellow mist. Was it the floor that was cold? Or was it the yellow mist that was cold? What was ‘cold’ anyway? Was cold only the absence of heat? Only a strange, negative quality? Or was it something as real, tangible and physical as heat?
Was our whole concept of negative and positive qualities of matter, heat, and energy, a scientific misnomer? Was that the reason for the success of some of Anzar’s fantastic, diabolical experiments?
Joe Harding was in no state to think coherently even about the simplest things. His brain had already floated beyond consciousness to a point of no-return. He was incapable of adding even the simplest two-and-two: was incapable of logical reasoning, to such an extent that he would have fallen for the post hoc ergo propter hoc (after this, therefore because of this) the idea being that the medicine man puts on his green uniform in the spring and dances and cavorts around and sooner or later, nature puts on her spring greenery and the medicine man is quite convinced that it was because he put on his green spring robe and danced around. After this, therefore because of this. A simple fallacy that requires the intelligence of a five-year-old child to work out.…
Yet Joe Harding had already gone beyond that point. His mind was hanging together by the last dim shreds of intellect and consciousness, and even those shreds snapped and were gone and there was nothing but blackness. Blackness rolled over him in great treacly waves, each one heavier and thicker than the last. Everything was blackness. The velvet became Stygian, became so deep and dark and intense that he seemed to be drawing it into his very lungs. It was like breathing a pure black fog. It was like trying to breath in the night. It was like breathing soot, worse than soot. Thicker than soot. Then there was nothing.… As though from a hundred thousand miles away, like the faintest and vaguest of echoes of the faintest and vaguest of sounds, he heard what might have been the pale, wan ghost of a clang … a clatter. A noise that owed its birth and its origin to metal rather than to any other substance.…
Don Cameron was aware of indescribable sensations. The first of these was rather like a very high frequency electric shock, and then the frequency seemed to grow more intense. He knew that something unbelievably weird and hideous was happening to him. He wasn’t conscious of receiving any feelings in the physical sense. If he had ever been a spiritually minded man, which he never had, he would have felt as though he was a ghost flying a long on some kind of weird ethereal, spiritual plane on which the human physical body had no basis of existence. Of which it had no terms of reference. On which it was an alien intruder, but because he had never been a spiritually minded man, because metaphysics never appealed to him as a branch of investigation, these things were lost on Don
Cameron. All he could realize, the only facts that permeated through to his consciousness were the facts of movement … travel … direction. He knew that he still was, and he had an idea of speedy movement. But beyond that, nothing.…
Speedy movement, darkness, existence, and a complete severance from the physical body.
Joe Harding was experiencing very much the same thing.… He was unaware of Cameron, and Cameron was unaware of him, and yet, both were as near, and at the same time, as far, as it is possible for two men to be.
The strange, dark, hyper-space that lies between the Sirian planetary system and our own earth, is a terrible place for man to be lost in. Anzar’s robots had thrown both IPF men into the radionic matter-energy transmitter vortex—the great hatch of the cylinder had clashed shut, and the robots had fired their human cargo into the weird, pseudo-scientific hinterland that lies midway between reason and unreason; between science and metaphysics…
Strange semi-worlds in which all the known, rational laws no longer hold good, and in which it seems strange, semi-scientific, primeval forces hold sway.
Anzar had launched his IPF guinea pigs, and now he was awaiting the result of that launching.
The process was very much as Cameron had surmised. The great cylinder was nothing more nor less than a device for the transmission of a human being, or any other plant of animal or vegetable matter. Moving matter by first transforming that matter into electro-radionic, high-frequency magnetic waves—then transmitting those particles. Transform and then transmit. That was Anzar’s motto and Anzar’s method. Transform the atoms and molecules of an apparently solid living being, into pure energy—into a kind of radionic force, and then transmit that pattern across billions of miles, instantaneously, or almost instantaneously—reassemble it with a transformer at the other end, and the space ship was a thing of the past. The fourth dimension was conquered. But what of those it had transmitted? How could any words, any pen, any tongue describe an experience which the whole of a man’s body undergoes, when it is dissolved into a kind of electronic nothingness. In which every physical molecule of his being is broken down into its simplest, and yet its most highly powered form. To all really scientific intents and purposes, Don Cameron and Joe Harding were dead. They no longer had physical bodies. They no longer had mechanical existence. Yet they were aware of their existence … yet contrary to the expectations of certain primitive 20th century so-called scientists, the soul of man is an indestructible, spiritual essence. A thing which is entirely non-physical. The real id, the real mind, the real hyper-centre, the infra-centre of the personality is something which is not dependent upon the physical brain. The physical brain may be likened to the control panel of a motor car. Personality—the real person—is the driver. That is the soul, invisible, immortal, indestructible—made in the image of God. The rest of the car is the physical body. Those scientists who had argued that the fact of a leucotomy operation could alter the personality, was a proof that the physical brain contained the mind completely, that there was no separate mind, were disproved by the fact that to alter the control panel of a car would make a driver appear irrational. If for example, the clutch and brake pedals were reversed, it would be some time before the driver was able to control his mechanism sufficiently again, even if he ever did, after spending thirty years driving a car with a clutch on the left and a brake in the centre, to drive a car with an accelerator on the centre, a brake on the right, and a clutch on the left would take quite a lot of doing.
No matter how proficient a man became with the use of the new control arrangement, there would be odd moments when the old way would flash back through the subconscious—perhaps just in a vital second of crisis—with disastrous results.
And so it was that all the apparent scientific laws were bypassed, and circumnavigated. And two men, who were not men any longer, two bodiless, floating, spiritual things which retained their personalities of Joe Harding, IPF sergeant, and Don Cameron, IPF lieutenant, were flashing at incredible speed, simultaneously one behind the other along the beam length, and yet unaware of each other’s existence. Then, although their own conceptions of time and space were no longer valid, something weird and incredible started happening. Gradually at first, and then more rapidly, Don became aware that his surroundings were changing. He didn’t feel quite so cut-off, quite so disembodied as he had done before. And with a strange feeling of anticipation and fear, he knew, instinctively and intuitively, that he was about to emerge from the cylinder vortex.…
Chapter Eight
Sirian Sunset
THE strange new feeling of reassembly which had gripped Don Cameron became more intense with every passing second. As his mind recollected itself; as the disintegrated sub-atomic particles of his being flashed back into a physical pattern, into a living human gestalt once again, he felt as though he was a long dead corpse being resurrected.
And yet during all that period he had never lost consciousness fully. That psychic ego, that something—the existence of which he had never before been prepared to recognise, had maintained throughout all this period, the ability to say ‘I am’.
Don Cameron had never believed in the immortality of man before. If he had regarded the soul or the nonphysical part of the human mind, as being a phantasmagoria, projected by deluded spiritualists, he knew now that he had been wrong and that they had been right. There was something in man which survived the physical.
Because physically he had been completely disintegrated. And now, the very same pattern, every molecule, in his body, was coming back into its previous place. He was coming together again like a hazy, three-dimensional image, being gradually focussed by an inexperienced technician. Strange, weird feelings ran through him; as piece by piece, a rather less terrifying version of Frankenstein’s monster, he was reassembled to his constituent elements and ingredients.
Although the process appeared to take some time in his own mind he was never really sure that it was so, in actual fact. Time he knew is a very relative quality and to what degree his failure to comprehend teleological movement was responsible for the apparent elongation of the feeling, he was unable to say.
Time did pass at last. Whether it had been a second or an eternity, or somewhere in between, was beyond Don Cameron’s comprehension. He just knew that the transmission was over. That he was no longer whirling and hurtling through some kind of uncanny hyper-space, in a sub-electronic form. He was a physical body again. He had feelings in his limbs, in his arms, legs, hands, feet, in his toes. Gradually he became aware of the existence of his bodily organs once more.
They were settling down into their old, accustomed places. He felt as though he had been shredded finely through a gigantic cosmic mincer, and slowly reassembled. He lay very still for a moment, wondering where he was. Gasping in great lungfuls of air, now that his mind was fully co-ordinated once more, he was rapidly putting facts together, remembering everything Anzar had said…
Everything that the mad professor, the insane scientist, the evil Sirian pioneer had said about his home world. So that was the lie of the land … this was where he must be, this Sirian planet to which Anzar owed his birth and his allegiance.
If things like Anzar were born, or spawned … whatever shape Anzar chose to assume on earth, that borrowed shape which he had copied from a literary character probably bore very little relation to his real shape.
As Don Cameron looked up he saw quite definitely that he was inside a metallic cylinder. That sent another doubt flashing across his mind. Would the air outside the cylinder prove to be as breathable as that which was inside, or had the cylinder of earth temperature, pressure, and atmosphere, been teleported by the weird radionic process in the same way that his own physical body had? If it was possible to dissolve anything as apparently solid as a human body into radionic subparticles, it must be a great deal easier to do the same thing with anything as flimsy and transient as a gas—even a mixture of gases. The IPF lieutenant switched his train of thought.
Air was the primary consideration—but it wasn’t the only one. If Anzar had teleported the gas—what else may have gone through in the machine?
It was only at that moment that Don became fully aware that his uniform still remained to him. His uniform, and above all his gun. He vaguely remembered from the moment the robot had thrown him down in that yellow mist, that he still had his gun in the holster. It had been useless there back on earth, against Anzar’s robots, and against the paralysing gas, but would it prove to be equally useless now?
It suddenly occurred to him that there must be a communication problem for these Sirians.
A communication problem which would be almost insurmountable. How could Anzar transmit messages? He could make no particular radio contact—although he had obviously been working on it. Working on some form of contact medium. But working on a project, and coming up with a successful solution of an intensely involved scientific enigma, were two vastly different propositions.…