The John Russell Fearn Science Fiction Megapack

by John Russell Fearn

  Ithos gawped stupidly, stumbled over the strange theory the adviser had outlined.

  “How can it?” he blurted out.

  “Because inside of Vaspus, inside you, inside me—inside every being on this world or any other world, even inside the worlds themselves, are uni­verses. Molecules, if you prefer—uni­verses of the infinite small, but just the same—universes!”

  “That is simple science, Lothan. Do you take me for a learner?”

  “Candidly, yes.” Lothan nodded cynically. “Every scientist in this planet, even Vaspus himself, missed the main issue when this life-eternal system was promoted. Vaspus certainly couldn’t create life out of inert chemi­cals; he admitted that much. But he could stop death. That also was quite true. What he forgot was that, by al­lowing himself to be bathed in that cosmic energy he gave life to living worlds inside his own body! They were not inert chemicals, such as those we tried to stir into life. They were elec­trons, worlds in miniature, all packed within the atoms and molecules com­prising Vaspus’ body. Very well, then. When he supplied cosmic energy and allowed it to surge through his body he gave to those electrons the energy of life, spawned upon them maybe living beings, beings of the microcosm.

  “Maybe it only happened to one elec­tron, one world—maybe it happened to thousands—that we don’t know. It all depends upon the different states of the worlds concerned. What we do know is that Vaspus has probably brought life to worlds within himself, and in so do­ing has replaced his own bodily energy with cosmic energy, the full balance of which has taken some little time to show. Now it has come, it will in­evitably mean his death.”

  “Why?”

  “The people will demand it in their own interests.”

  Ithos looked puzzled. “I don’t see that, Lothan. The people will never seek the death of our ruler.”

  “No?” Lothan smiled amusedly. “You will see for yourself before very long. Another thing: keep as far away from Vaspus as you can. Better still, I’ll have the automatons erect an insu­lated screen around him. Then we had better summon the biologists and lead­ing scientists. It is essential they see Vaspus in his present condition.”

  He rose to his feet and strode pur­posefully to the vibration communica­tor on the wall.

  III

  By Martian dawn every im­portant member of the scientific coun­cil had been summoned, stood in an in­terested but puzzled group around the softly glowing ruler. But between him and them there now reposed a heavily insulated transparent screen, erected by the automatons.

  Quietly, in tones of most abject de­spair, Lothan made clear the nature of the master’s ailment, giving it purely as a theory, nor was he surprised at the storm of protest that greeted him.

  “Life within life!” cried Umyas. “I refuse to credit it, Lothan.”

  “Even though you admit that we are made up of microcosmic universes?” the adviser asked calmly.

  “Certainly! We failed to produce life in inert chemical by the cosmic en­ergy; how, then, do you allow that it happened to our ruler? Is he not inert chemical just the same? Composed of electrons which are precisely identical to those in the inert material we tried to enliven?”

  “No, Umyas, he is not. It surprises me that a biologist of your undoubted eminence should even think so. Be­tween molecules in a state of life such as those within a living being and those in an inert chemical aggregate there is an infinite difference. Pressures are different; temperatures are different, and most of all they are within a living being which of himself imparts some­thing of life to the electrons within him. When he let that cosmic energy surge through him he produced the same identical effect that happened to this universe when a similar surge must have spread through it from a supra-universal source, begetting such life as ours. Inside of himself he has repeated creation, and in the doing has lost his own life energy by replacing it with infinitely stronger cosmic energy.”

  “Then—” began Umyas dazedly, and stopped uncertainly.

  “I will endeavor to prove it to you,” Lothan remarked quickly, and turned to the ever-attentive automatons. “The robots will transport our master’s body into the laboratory within his insulated case. It is purely a precaution against possible dangerous energy emanations proceeding from him that may affect us. In the laboratory we can learn, by the use of the atomic machine he himself constructed, whether my theory is cor­rect. You agree?”

  There was a slow nodding of scaly heads. Lothan smiled in satisfaction and stood aside as the automatons gen­tly lifted the ruler and bore his screened case from the chamber, ultimately laying him down, under the adviser’s direc­tion, directly beneath the focus of the enormous atomic projector. Once that was done, Lothan switched on the ceil­ing lights and indicated the masses of inexplicable machinery.

  “Only our beloved master and my­self know the exact process adopted with this instrument,” he announced superciliously. “That being so, forgive me if I merely explain that it is based on the principle of every atom-emitting vi­bration which can be transformed, through devious methods, into a pic­torial version of the object originally emitting the vibration. Just as our super reflectors reach out to the ends of the stellar universe and pick up the weak light vibrations of the farthest stars, pass them through transformers and reproduce by amplification a clear-cut picture of the original star, so here we do the same with atoms and the electrons within them. The result is projected onto the screen which you see immediately before you.” He nod­ded to the twelve-foot square receptor near at hand, its surface at the moment composed of a metal as black as space itself.

  The assembled scientists said nothing, but waited interestedly, trying as best they could to disguise their natural dislike for the sardonic scientist.

  The laboratory became suddenly dark again; metal shutters closed over the windows and blotted out the dawn light. The only glow in the whole great place was from the supine ruler’s body. A creaking came out of the silence as the insulated lid of his oblong coffin was slid aside by a robot; then, his scale dimly glinting as he walked, Lothan moved to the control board which he had reason to understand so well.

  A spotlight sprang into being. For a split second sparks flashed from the contact of the master switch blade; simultaneously the familiar hum of dynamos spread through the quiet. Vacuum tubes silently glowed into life; violet light sprayed from enormous condensers and transformers. Little by little the noise increased; the surgings of power were stepped up until, at last, the entire laboratory was bathed in glowing, mauve flame, leaving the still unmoving ruler as a solitary figure in the di­rect path of the projection machine. At last there stabbed from its lens a carved, ivory-white pencil of blinding, heatless brilliance, striking his supine body and passing clean through it into the floor, then down again into seemingly dimen-sionless depths.

  The Martians watched in deathly si­lence. Lothan himself stared fixedly, a strange lavender-painted figure before the switchboard, massive seven-fingered hand flashing up and down the complicated controls. There came a sudden, deeper throbbing, an even greater mad crackling of incalculable power; then the broad screen changed from its jetty neutrality to a soft and delicate salmon pink. It deepened to scarlet; then, by imperceptible degrees, merged gradually toward violet, radiating a most bewildering but indescribably lovely array of colors in the process.

  “Look!” breathed Umyas unsteadily, pointing. “Look!”

  His colleagues did not need the in­junction; they were already gazing in amazement at the portion of their mas­ter’s body revealed on the screen. Only for an instant was there visible the strange skeleton formation of his chest and ribs—a perfectly produced X-ray impression—then that changed and merged into a composite haze, as the bones themselves were penetrated, the great central breastbone becoming gradually wider until at last it filled all the screen. From that point onward the amazing penetration went through all the composition of the bone, re­vealed with a clearness never known before its actual constitution,
laid bare the phosphate, carbonate, fluoride of lime and other materials, which, in turn, passed on into a common blur in which there was nothing understandable.

  Once this point was passed the violet glow vanished and was replaced by black. For what seemed an intermina­ble length of time there was nothing visible; then, slowly, there merged into view tiny points of light, incredibly small galaxies of stars and suns, identi­cal on a small scale to those in the vast, external universe.

  “Watch!” commanded Lothan, and stepped up the amplifiers to an even greater pace.

  The laboratory became sickly in its heat; the air reeked of elec­tric discharges and hung heavy with smoky exhausts. The metal floor quaked to the vibration of the thunder­ing engines. Only the atomic mechan­ism itself remained steady, all traces of vibration overcome by Vaspus’ final ac­complishments; the light-tight repro­ducing chamber was functioning flaw­lessly.

  The smallness of the microcosmic galaxies increased at a tremendous pace, leaped from mere dusty hazes to enormous agglomerations of countless suns and nebulae, rotating slowly in empty space…

  “This is but one molecule within the body of our beloved ruler,” Lothan com­mented quickly, but his voice was hardly audible above the din. “Think of it, my friends—one molecule! There­fore, inside him, there are untold mil­lions of universes, each one of which has probably been imbued with life force. One universe is enough for our purpose, however. If he has indeed created life, it will be as evident in this one as in any of the others. Let us observe.”

  More switches clicked under Lothan’s hands. In the screen there appeared a vision of a perfect solar system. Even as it swept into view the brilliant bluish-white sun changed to yellow and sank down to red. By the time the view was clear the sun had altogether ex­pired. Irritably, Lothan changed his switches again, and presently located another solar system. Here again the sun was slowly fading from white to golden yellow, but its deterioration was less swift than the preceding one.

  “Why the change?” called Umyas.

  “Time,” the adviser answered curtly. “Time in the microcosmic universe moves with infinitely greater speed than our own.” Remember that a thousand million years on an electron is but one millionth of a second on Mars. The sun in this particular system is of vast size and therefore takes longer to expire. Even now, though, it is dying. Even as we gaze, life on one of those electronic worlds has pursued its course from pre­historic days to the end of civilization. Surely on one of them there might be life—”

  He stopped, jolted with sudden amazement. The Martians moved nearer as the view steadied, and stared down on the largest of the group of seven planets. Six of them were de­serted, but on this major one there was something distinctly bright and gleam­ing spread upon the surface; the out­lines of a city couched deep within the towering mountains of a rugged, friend­less landscape. Even as they stared the city began to crumble with age.

  “Intelligent life!” breathed Umyas. “The work of thinking beings! Lothan, you were right! It proves to us—”

  He broke off, gazed blankly with his faceted eyes as there suddenly leaped upward from that strange, inexpressibly beautiful city a gleaming, silver machine, plunging outward from the slowly dying world into the depths of electronic space.

  “Space travel!” breathed Lothan. “They are escaping from their world, doomed by eternal cold. See, already time is moving so swiftly that their planet is caked in ice—and yet the space machine is becoming larger, must be covering intra-atomic space at a speed beyond compute. Larger— Larger it—”

  He stopped, dumfounded, as the ma­chine began to swallow up the entire cosmos, filled the screen with a com­mon grayness.

  Abruptly, the truth flooded in upon him; he shouted huskily.

  “They are traveling to the end of their universe—intend to burst through it into the suprauniverse. Our uni­verse!” he cried hoarsely. “Quickly! Stand back! There may be an explosion—”

  He instantly deserted the switch­board, blundered away amongst his col­leagues, went backward with them to the far wall. With startled eyes, they all watched the screen; it was an im­palpable, swirling blur of gray. The en­gines went on thundering their song of power—

  Then, abruptly, from the body of the silent ruler there was a flash of unbear­ably brilliant light; a sharp report fol­lowed, and that was all. The assem­bled scientists advanced again, cau­tiously, toward the insulated case. The master was unharmed save for a slight wound in his side from which there dripped a steady flow of brown blood.

  “Quickly! Lights!” Lothan shouted to the automatons. “Lights!”

  He went over to the control board and pulled out the switches, listened while the dynamos sang down the scale and became quiet. Even as they did so, light came into the laboratory—not from the bulbs, but from the windows, as the automatons threw back the shutters to the Martian day.

  “Look,” muttered Umyas, standing with the others around the case.

  Lothan came to his side and peered within the oblong. In the strong day­light the bluish glow from Vaspus had almost disappeared. But it was not that that concerned the adviser; his eyes were fixed on something he could scarcely believe—the sight of a micro­scopically small object of bright metal, reflecting the sunlight: a machine of in­finitesimal proportions, tapered at both ends, lying still now on the soft air bed whereon lay the obviously unconscious master.

  “What—what is it?” demanded Ithos blankly, staring over Lothan’s shoulder.

  “A machine of the microcosm,” the adviser muttered back. “Those beings we saw left their world, but instead of seeking another one in their own universe they took a far greater chance—decided to burst the bounds of their uni­verse and gain the supra one—ours—beyond. They succeeded. It has done little to the master, save create a wound which can rapidly be healed, but it has brought to us life from a world within him, a life originally created by his cos­mic-energy experiment. Now, my friends”—-he looked up with a trium­phant sneer—“perhaps you believe my theory?”

  The assembly nodded quickly.

  “Will not others come?” questioned Umyas. “Of all the teeming universes within the master there is surely the possibility—”

  “Certainly there is, but for the time being we will be satisfied with what we have.”

  “If there are beings inside that ma­chine, why don’t they appear?”

  “We’ll soon find out,” Lothan an­swered, and, turning to the robots, he is­sued instructions.

  Gently, they lifted the machine out of the case and placed it on a nearby bench. With further quick movements they applied healing ointments to the ruler’s wound, cured it instantly, then slid the case lid back into position.

  “The growth enlarger will settle our difficulty, I think,” Lothan commented. Accordingly, the minute vessel was moved into an adjoining section of the laboratory, placed in the center of the floor and there flooded with radiations which rapidly widened the electronic or­bits of the ship and its contents, until it stood nearly one hundred feet high and three hundred feet long. Only then did Lothan switch off the machinery and wait expectantly.

  Almost immediately the massive airlock of the vessel was mechanically un­screwed from within, swung aside in the grip of some form of magnetism. Through the opening there appeared men and women, so strange and bizarre that the Martians stared incredulously.

  White-skinned people without scales! Possessing two legs each and two arms, these latter ending in five-fingered hands! For some reason that the Mar­tians could not fathom the heads of these beings were not bald, but covered with peculiar fluffy substance, dark in some cases and fair in others—some long, some short. The eyes were the most re­markable, of various colors from black to blue or gray, and entirely without facets.

  In absolute silence, Lo­than and his contemporaries watched the people file out into the great labora­tory. Mentally, Lothan counted a full three hundred of them of all shapes and sizes, some clearly femal
e, if their lesser size and more rounded development was any guide. Nor were any of them naked; instead they had on strange sub­stances—one-piece white garments with a brightly gleaming belt about the mid­dle. In size they were diminutive. Not one of them was more than six feet high. Lothan drew himself up, proud of his eight feet of height. He towered over the high-foreheaded little being who was obviously the leader of the party.

  “Who are you?” he demanded curtly in his own language.

  The little man shook his head, replied in an unknown tongue. The Martian frowned and glanced at his colleagues.

  “Obviously language difficulty,” he grunted, and motioned the strangers back into the main laboratory. Once there he prepared to place them all in the range of a brain-tutoring machine, when, to his surprise, the leader spoke fluently in the Martian tongue. In dazed amazement Lothan turned to gaze at him, met the leader’s inscrutable, calm black eyes.

  “I am sorry, my friend, that I did not answer you immediately,” he apologized quietly. “It took us some little time to assemble your particular language into understandable form. I am Razak, former master of the planet Disep. But I see you know already of the fate that threatened our home world. We knew that ultimately our planet would die and, knowing also that no other worlds in our universe were exactly suitable for our purpose, we decided to come from the microcosm to here.

  “By some chance, it appears, our world was within your ruler Vaspus. I trust, my friend, that we have your hos­pitality? Here are my people and chil­dren, a chosen few—indeed the only ones who were willing to take the chance of breaking into the suprauniverse.”

  He indicated the men and women about him, and the wide-eyed children peeping nervously round their parents. Lothan stared at them blankly, turned back again to take in the details of the speaker—his high-domed forehead and, most particularly, those strange, un-faceted eyes, deep and unfathomable black pools that held within their depths a clear evidence of tremendous intel­lectual attainments.