The John Russell Fearn Science Fiction Megapack

by John Russell Fearn

  The surgeon ceased his soliloquy, smiled significantly to himself, and quietly left the bedroom… He spent the night making his preparations; he felt he could not sleep, and at nine the next morning the operation commenced in the private theatre, with only a few trusted assistants.

  They said nothing—indeed they did not understand enough—as they watched their master at work. His hands were steady; he wielded his instruments with the deft skill that had earned him his name, and when finally he washed his hands in antiseptic that same frozen smile of complacency had returned to his thin lips.

  “Simple,” he murmured; then went into the adjoining room where Downing was lying, bandaged and still unconscious. At frequent intervals thereafter he returned, discussing the nurse each time, until towards ten in the evening the inventor revealed signs of returning consciousness. The surgeon took a rapid diagnosis of his bodily functions, and found him as healthy as could be expected in the circumstances, but—Jarvis Downing was a man entirely without memory. Everything he had ever known or learned had been completely effaced—as though he were born again as an adult man. He looked at Henderson with an empty, vacant stare.

  A week later he was able to sit up, but still unable to even speak. Everything would have to be taught to him all over again. Even food had to be taken by the nurse, in pantomime, to show what was required of him…

  Dawson arrived on one of the days and compressed his lips when the result of the operation was made clear to him. Grimly, the nurse being once more dismissed, he looked across Downing’s supine body at the surgeon.

  “Well, what do you expect to gain by this?” he demanded coldly. “You have spared his life, but returned him to the state of a new-born baby. I can’t touch you now because you’ve destroyed my alibi. What’s your motive in this fiendish scheme?”

  “There is a clause in law Dawson that relegates a person of mental deficiency, to the same class as that of a deceased. Downing is dead to the law; his identity has vanished, and any lawyer on earth will support me. Vonium is my property once I have seen Downing’s lawyer, and you will be required to hand over the formula. In fact you’ve retained it unlawfully as it is; you’ve known your master’s condition for some days. Hand it to me now, and I’ll see to it that the law leaves you alone—otherwise you will be summoned for unlawful retention of my property.”

  Dawson’s urbanity vanished; a bitter smile curved his lips.

  “A clever trick, Henderson—you think I know nothing of the law, eh? I know quite as much as you do—enough to realise, anyhow, that a will only becomes operative on decease. Naturally you planned to bribe the lawyer, I suppose. It might have worked, too—men will do anything for money, as a rule. It so happens, though, that I’m leaving this safe combination just where it is—in my wallet. And, if I can prove anything against you I’m going to, and take over Vonium myself!”

  “You dare—” Henderson breathed venomously.

  “I probably will,” the manservant answered calmly, passed another glance at the silent man in the bed, and then left the room…

  For the remainder of the day after Dawson’s departure, Henderson spent the time thinking, leaving Downing in the charge of the nurse, ignoring, so far as he could, all cases that came to his surgery. In seven days, now, he had got to produce one hundred thousand dollars. Further, the determined Dawson might find a way to prove Downing’s condition to be the outcome of deliberate maltreatment.

  Why not kill Dawson? No, that would probably raise enquiry.

  The desperate surgeon knew his last card had failed. He had hoped that Dawson would have been ignorant of the law; unfortunately, he wasn’t. Presently Henderson recalled the manservant’s words to the effect that the safe combination was in his wallet. Steal it? It would be quieter than bringing in a third party to crack the safe open, anyhow. Suppose, by an accident, that Dawson did die? He—Henderson—would be eternally safe from then onwards. The recollection of the gravity-nullifying boots returned to the surgeon. At least the manservant knew nothing of these. They might be very useful.

  Finally, Henderson had a plan in mind, and the thought of expulsion from his profession, or Dawson finding proof to convict him, was undoubtedly the prime motive behind it.

  At eight o’clock he put on the gravity-boots, slipped a loaded revolver and diamond glass-cutter and suction-cup in his pocket, then with clumsy steps made his way to Downing’s room, curtly dismissing the nurse, but taking care she did not see his feet as she departed.

  Downing looked at Henderson dully, mutely. He for his part pulled on washleather gloves, then, without uttering a word wrapped the inventor in two heavy blankets, raised him bodily in his arms, and finally managed to get the bemused man to link his arms round his—Henderson’s—neck, thereby leaving the surgeon free to use his hands.

  This done the surgeon quietly lifted the window sash and climbed on to the sill, Downing clinging tightly to him. The hand-levers clicked in their sprockets, and in a few moments Henderson was walking in the air twenty feet above the night-ridden lawn below, making allowance as he went for the inventor’s extra weight. He walked on steadily through space, over the solitary window-lighted patch of Benton’s Farm, across the intervening meadows, and finally came within sight of the inventor’s own home, dimly visible in the starlight. Ten minutes later he had reached it, and laid Downing down gently on the flat roof. The dazed man made no effort to move; indeed it was doubtful if he understood the first principles of locomotion. He merely pulled the blankets further round him and sat as still as a mummy.

  In utter silence, thanks to the emptiness in which he walked, Henderson moved along the bedroom windows until he came to the one that he knew to be Dawson’s, at a height of a sheer thirty feet from the ground. The manservant might be downstairs, of course or even out. Considering the valuable apparatus in the house the latter theory was hardly tenable… No—he was in bed, dimly visible in the starlight. Henderson could clearly see that now, for the curtains were not drawn.

  With infinite care he brought out the diamond glass-cutter and suction cup from his pocket. In the space of a few minutes he had removed a section of the window glass, felt inside for and slipped back the catch, and then, carefully operating his hand-levers, climbed into the room beyond, keeping himself a bare couple of inches from the floor to negate all sound.

  The manservant’s clothes were neatly spread at the end of the bed, and towards them the surgeon moved.

  Be it said to his credit that he did not intend to use his revolver if he could avoid it—it was only a precautionary measure that would need Downing to substantiate the motive. The precaution, however, changed abruptly to dire necessity as Dawson suddenly awoke—indeed it was doubtful if he had ever been asleep—and his revolver, which manifestly had been close to his hand, blazed through the gloomy room.

  Instantly, the manservant’s shot flying wide, Henderson swung round, whipped out his own weapon, and emptied all the chambers with ruthless deliberation into the already advancing manservant. He staggered, gave a short cry, and then fell his length to the floor.

  Carefully, still completely cool, the surgeon went through the man’s clothes, finally located the wallet and the combination for the safe within it. Chuckling to himself he slipped the wallet in his pocket, and made an investigation of the sprawling Dawson. The briefest examination revealed to his professional touch that the man was quite dead, and bleeding somewhat considerably.

  Rising again, his Vonium boots now temporarily out of action, he left the room and entered the next but one. Outside the window he found the still motionless Downing, lifted him inside, and carried him by main strength to the dead servant’s room, depositing him on the bed. Still without speaking, for he knew the inventor would never understand, he placed the expended revolver in the motionless Downing’s limp hand, taking care he still wore his gloves whilst he did so. Then, after a final glance round the room, he again departed locking the door on the outside, and went as fast as his heavy bo
ots would allow him to the laboratory safe.

  It was the work of a moment to open the heavy door and remove the gold watch. Sure enough the formula was inside it.

  Henderson grinned as he slipped the watch in his pocket.

  “Really very simple,” he murmured. “All a matter of judgment and precision.”

  He did not return upstairs to the silent inventor. He left the laboratory, once assured that everything was as he had found it, and went by various air-routes to the nearest telephone kiosk. In a few moments he was speaking to the head-warder of the local asylum.

  “Doctor Henderson speaking,” he announced, in his calm voice. “I operated quite recently on a patient, Jarvis Downing by name. He had brain trouble and seemed to be progressing quite Hell until tonight. Then I found he had vanished from his room at my home, taking with him my own revolver from my study. I’ve proved that fact right up to the hilt. However, I’ve traced him to his old home and he has murdered his manservant—filled the poor devil with lead. He’s clean homicidal. I think he had a grudge against his manservant, or something. Anyhow, I’ve locked him in the manservant’s room, complete with revolver. His memory seems to have gone utterly; doesn’t say anything or hear anything apparently. You’d better drop along and take him away at once. I’ll join you there. The Larches, Menison Road, is the address.”

  “We’ll be there, Doctor,” the head-warder answered firmly, and with a grin of triumph Henderson hung up the receiver and left the kiosk. Outside he ruminated for a moment, patting the gold watch in his pocket.

  “A clear twenty million for me tomorrow when I sell this formula to Federated; Dawson out of the way so he can’t prove anything against me; Holroyd paid up, and Downing no longer at liberty. Then a life of ease—and I’ve earned it. Monte-Carlo—the gaming tables… Yes—a good night’s work. I’ve just time to get home and be rid of these boots, make a substantiating tale for the nurse, and everything is settled. Splendid! I’ll be back in plenty of time for the asylum men.”

  Again smiling to himself at his work, he seized the boot-levers and moved upwards into the darkness of the night, turning towards his own home to the south…

  For some then strange reason the men from the asylum found Doctor Henderson absent when they arrived at Downing’s home. Finally, obtaining no answer, they took the law into their own hands and broke in, arriving ultimately at the locked bedroom door. This too they smashed down, to discover Downing still sitting there, completely silent, the revolver still in his hand.

  “That’s him, all right,” nodded the superintendent. “Take him away; I’ll notify the police about this body.” He looked at Downing closely. “Why don’t you say something?” he demanded curtly, and for a space tried every means he could devise to make the inventor speak, without success. Finally he waved him away.

  “O.K.—he’s our man all right. Guess Henderson got him in here pretty safe, too—couldn’t leave by the window with a thirty-foot drop below. Yet he got in by the window—see the glass is cut out. Guess he must have walked along that parapet there. Funny what a guy’ll do when he’s deranged… Queer where Henderson’s got to. Still he’ll turn up to verify things, I suppose.”

  But Doctor Henderson did not turn up. Nobody could discover what had become of him. Downing was duly removed to the asylum and placed under the care of the institution’s medical expert, who gravely pronounced that only one man could possibly cure him—and that was Doctor Henderson himself. It was accepted without question that Downing had committed the crime of murder—truly not whilst responsible for his actions. All the efforts of the inventor’s lawyer to prove otherwise—to try and prove the vanished Henderson to be the culprit, failed. The law coldly bequeathed Downing’s home and invention to his disinterested brother Walter, who, rather than give up his prosperous Australian farm, allowed his inheritance to go to rack and ruin.

  Poor Downing— He was ruined utterly—mentally, physically and financially. As week followed week he was gradually taught to do various things, but gone forever was the brilliance that had once been his.

  And Henderson? A month after Downing’s admittance to the asylum the surgeon was found—stone dead! It appeared that Oscar Benton, who owned the farm between the homes of Henderson and Downing, had returned with his family after a brief holiday in the metropolis, and the farmer had been horrified to discover Henderson lying transfixed, nearly buried in mud—which probably accounted for the failure of search-parties to discover him—with a six-foot iron spike through his abdomen. The spike was the corner support of a net-fencing for the chicken run. It had passed slantwise through Henderson’s body, even passing through a gold watch he had had in his pocket, crushing to pulp some insignificant blank white paper within. Upon his feet were peculiar boots, and in his death-frozen hands reposed queer levers.

  The world duly mourned the death of the great brain-surgeon, and Downing’s chances of recovery were simultaneously shattered. But there were many who wondered how on earth the surgeon had come to meet such a terrible yet peculiar death. How had he come to impale himself on a six-foot high spike, and with such force?

  But then, how was the world to know that, in his excitement to get home with the Vonium formula, Henderson had forgotten to look at the radiation-registers on his boots. They had registered almost zero—the Vonium had practically transformed itself back during the passing days into lifeless uranium—hence the surgeon had been in mid-air when the stuff had suddenly come to the end of its life, dropping him down—with tremendous speed owing to the weight of the heavy lead boots and equally heavy uranium—to instant death!

  THE MASTER MIND

  At the Fantasy Club he was a being enshrined because he was the one man who had written a story and then proved it—word for word!

  CHAPTER I

  The Tibetan

  It was at the Fantasy Club where the notion was born. Old Doctor Landhurst, retired professor of science, far wealthier than any one man had any right to be, shocked his fellow members one morning with a typical observation.

  “They’re all alike! Every one of them! Dress the stories up any way you please, but it boils down to the same thing… Nobody will ever convince me that you can rule a world without guns, force, and menace.”

  He slammed down the magazine he had been reading and glared round on the others. His white hair was nearly standing up with inner annoyance.

  “Here are we, gentlemen, members of a club devoted to the pursuance of all things fantastic and scientific—literature in particular—and yet what do we find? We find dozens of authors, known and unknown, still churning out the same old stuff. They suggest control of the world by kindness, logic, negotiation—control by everything except the right medium—force! One writer here even says the people of the world are a bunch of suckers who can be forced into believing anything without any resort to force and without a single ray gun. I say it is impossible. The human mind is so balanced that it only understands a loaded weapon.”

  “Doctor, you’re quite wrong, you know…”

  Landhurst glanced round, surprised. A young man with fair hair was seated in the corner, his legs crossed easily, his firm young face remarkable for its expression of bland candour.

  “Quite wrong,” he repeated. “I’m Douglas Harrigan, and I wrote the story you’re referring to. I wrote that story because I believed it!”

  “So it was you!” The scientist narrowed his eyes momentarily. “You ought to be ashamed of yourself, Harrigan!” he went on bitterly. “Where is your manhood? Where’s the manhood of any of these writers these days, that they suggest such namby-pamby methods?”

  “Force died out long ago, doctor. I maintain the world is populated by the kind of people who’ll believe anything, providing you tell it to them long enough and often enough.”

  “Propaganda, eh?” Landhurst meditated for a moment. “Come to think of it, Harrigan, I don’t know you too well. New to this club are you not?”

  “I joined last week—ju
st to get an idea what sort of views you folks have. Now I know they’re mostly wrong. Most of you are getting on in years, working on the policy of the old days when power and force were considered the chief factors for progress. We know now how mistaken that idea was: but old ideas die hard… I believe in modern ideas. I believe, as I told in my story, that a whole world can be ruled by one man without a single application to force. Ray guns, space machines, death beams, and all the rest of it, are just props. All that is needed to master a planet is ingenuity and absolute calm of manner.”

  Landhurst gave a harsh laugh. “You are very young, my friend. You would soon find out the difference if you tried to live your story in real life!”

  “I don’t agree.” Harrigan lighted a cigarette calmly and gazed back with his light blue eyes.

  “Good Lord, boy, you seriously mean—?”

  “Absolutely!”

  There was a silence among the members, the silence of stunned surprise. Anyway, nobody had ever dared to stand up to despotic Landhurst like this before. Then at last Landhurst said slowly:

  “Listen to me, Harrigan. It has long been a moot point amongst us members whether any of the fantastic stories printed today are even remotely possible in truth. I assert they are all impossible, and your theory in particular. If you could master a world within, say, six months—as you do in this story—without a single recourse to force, I’d—I’d give you a hundred thousand pounds! And willingly! Because I know you cannot possibly manage it.”

  Harrigan smiled. “A decidedly sporting offer. Doctor. I’m not a rich man, being just a magazine writer, and a hundred thousand might come in useful… I’ll take you up on that!” He sat up with sudden decision in his chair, turned to a grey-haired man on his right. “Mr. Beddows, you’re a lawyer. I want you to draw up this wager in legal terms. When I am ruling the world I don’t want any hitch… All a matter of business, Doctor Landhurst. You understand?”