The John Russell Fearn Science Fiction Megapack

by John Russell Fearn

  They stood watching the machine-builders for a while. The whole thing was a profound paradox—men and women, singing with childish glee, laughing with each other, as they constructed an instrument complicated enough to turn a trained engineer gray with worry… Where was the reason in that? And, now that the two came to notice it, some of the women had daisy chains around their hair; and the men argued with each other at intervals like schoolboys over a box of candies. They were childish—utterly childish!

  Baffled, the two turned at last and stared in at the door of the colossal factory. It was working at full speed. Blast fur­naces were in action; overhead belts were slapping on their flywheels—but again the vast industry of the place was pro­duced by men and women with the bodies of adults and the manner of children. They skipped everywhere, laughed and played as they worked.

  “Perhaps,” Moss said slowly, tugging at his beard, “they’ve gone simple-minded after the awful horror of the war?”

  Cassell shook his blond head. “Simple, nothing. They would have horror in their eyes, tragedy stamped indelibly in their faces—like refugees. There’s none of that. They’re happy—gloriously, beautifully happy! Nor do they seem to realize what they’re really doing. All this is so much fun to them—and yet what they do is accurate! That’s what gets me… Gosh, what a homecoming!”

  Dazed, they turned away, began to wander at random. Time and again they came across the groups of people building machinery, all of it extremely complicated and accompanied by the inevitable nearby factory. And through it all one factor stood out—the machines were definitely strange and terrible engines of war! Cassell could recognize that much with his scientific knowledge; so could Moss, to a lesser degree. Chil­dren were building engines of war, when they ought to be sickened by the very notion of the idea!

  They had their habitations too, these happy, enigmatic folks. They used roughly-constructed tents. In every direction were communities of them—but, although the people knew how to build machines, their ideas on tents were appalling. Not one of them was properly erected, and the conditions inside them were close to pandemonium.

  “But why tents when they could live in the ruins of one of these huge department stores?” Moss demanded, waving his arm to the rearing buildings around them—shattered at the tops, but still serviceable below. “They’d get much better protection from the night or the chance of storms… Maybe with it being summer, though, they’re not concerned.”

  Cassell did not answer. He was staring down over the wilderness of ramshackle dwellings reaching right down in the still harbor waters. Men and women moved in and out, cook­ing over crude wood fires. Why wood fires, with all the forces of an electric factory at their disposal?

  “Funny thing,” he said at last, “there isn’t a real child in sight! The adults are the children instead…” Again he brooded over the strange scene, glanced up at the pale sky with its faint smattering of stars; then at last he shook him­self. “I guess that for the moment we can’t do better than have some of their food—play with them, as they term it. Then we’ll hunt up a piece of glass or something and take this fungus off our faces. I feel like Santa Claus… Come on.”

  They turned, strolled through the hot afternoon sunshine, gazing around on the ruins as they went…

  CHAPTER III

  The Voice

  The people raised no objection as the two invited them­selves. They were accepted as friends without question, were given food—which analysis showed to be canned stuff evidently taken from what provisions the city still had left—and drink. Usually it was just hot water, sometimes flavored with an extract when one was lucky enough to find it.

  For several days both men made no attempt to solve the mystery. They shaved with a broken bottle, cut their hair, ex­posed themselves by longer degrees to the sunshine, made makeshift clothes. By the time they were finished, they were fairly unrecognizable, save for those grim lines of twenty im­prisoned years chiselled forever in their faces.

  The childlike manner of the people never altered. They slept too with the blissful innocence of children. Sometimes, they gambolled about as no adult ever would, then they returned in droves to their machine building.

  The more Cassell and Moss looked into the matter, the more baffled they got. There were infinite varieties of machines in all parts of the ruined city. In one quarter there were thou­sands upon thousands of small shells, obviously loaded with explosives infinitely more powerful than anything the inter­vening war had created.

  “But where the hell do they get the knowledge from?” Moss yelled at last in utter exasperation, as he and Cassell stood in the evening light gazing down on this latest revelation. “Why are they doing it anyway? They’ve no more intention of start­ing a war than a bunch of kids on a Sunday school picnic… Listen, Art, are we batty or are they? Maybe that twenty years on the island did something to us, eh?”

  “No,” Cassell answered quietly; “that twenty years did something to these people. Consider the facts— They perform these masterpieces of engineering, yet they don’t know the first thing about radio. They are children in mind, a fact which is proven by there being no genuine children. Though, phys­ically, these folks are quite capable of marrying and producing children, they don’t. And why? Because, as in children, the sexual urge isn’t there.”

  An amazed light spread over Moss’ rugged face. “Lord, you’re right! I never thought of that!”

  “Of course I’m right. We don’t know how long that war lasted, but we do know that it left behind a race of people who are childlike in the ordinary way, yet gifted with a pe­culiar detached genius. Either they are deliberately planning a war on something or somebody, or else they are being ordered to do it…”

  “Ordered? By what?”

  Cassell shrugged, his eyes perplexed. “Search me! Point is, are other countries in the world similarly affected? Are the British, the Germans, the Russians and the French all doing the same thing? How to find out? Set to work to build an air­plane, or else patch up one left from the war. Radio’s no use. We could build a receiver easily enough, but I doubt if anybody would be transmitting. So our first job is to get an airplane.”

  “Might mention in to the young chap we first spoke to,” Moss said. “Seems to have stuck to us all along. Maybe he’d like to build us one for fun,” he finished, grinning.

  But his jest met with a surprising response. The young man, when they had singled him out for questioning from the city workers, no sooner heard their suggestion than he led the way to a quarter of the city they had so far not explored. To their amazement they beheld literally square miles of oval objects glittering in the sunshine, some of them in the process of having machinery loaded into them.

  “By all the saints, space-travel!” Moss gasped. He clutched at his friend’s arm. “Space-travel, man! We certainly had not mastered that when we got shoved on the island.”

  “No.” Cassell’s blue eyes narrowed in sudden thought.

  “So, the machines we see being built everywhere are for final inclusion in these ships,” he muttered. “I suppose they are spaceships?” He glanced at the young man quickly.

  “Travel anywhere,” he answered, smiling. “Out into space, across the earth. Use atomic force recoil rockets.”

  “Atomic force too,” Cassell muttered; then aloud, “You can control these things? Make them fly?”

  “Sure. All of us can. We play games with them.”

  “We’ll skip the games. Could you take my friend and I around the world and back here?”

  The young man nodded, then glanced at the sun. “Sunset in two hours,” he mused. “We can be back by then… Come along in.” He gave another smile and led the way, whistling, to the airlock of the nearest machine.

  “Around the world in two hours?” Moss breathed, as they marched after him. “Gosh! That’s traveling, huh?”

  Cassell nodded, but made no observations. He seemed to be thinking. His frown deepened as he and Moss b
eheld the per­fect interior of the space machine. It was replete to the last detail. Every instrument was flawlessly made; the seats were perfectly fashioned. There was not a piece of bad workman­ship anywhere.

  And it had all been made by childish men and women who cooked tinned meats into stews over wood fires and lived in broken-down tents! Moss gave it up and shook his bullet head, but Cassell stroked his chin. Once he glanced through the window at the curiously pale blue sky with its sparse stars, pondered again; then finally he gave himself up to watching as the man closed the airlock and settled himself before the control-board.

  The machine answered with perfect ease, lifted with hardly any sensation of motion, curved high over the ruined metro­polis and then headed out towards the gleaming ocean. Far below, men and women waved their hands cheerily; some of them threw flowers into the air—

  Then New York was far behind as the incredibly fast ma­chine tore with smooth rhythm out over the Atlantic. In a matter of minutes, as it seemed, Atlantic Island loomed up. Moss gave a grim smile as the rock began to retreat behind them, but Cassell stared after it until it was out of sight, de­bating something deep within his mind…

  It seemed no time before England was reached. Without the necessity of landing, it was perfectly obvious that the conditions of America were being repeated here too. Men and women building. Thousands of machines; hundreds of space­ships in what had been Trafalgar Square. Tents, camp fires, waving hands… No cities; only ruins.

  Same for France, Russia, Germany, vast parts of China, and numerous other countries. It was all very mysterious, strangely sinister, the visions of these shattered civilizations populated by men and women driving to perhaps a terrible end.

  At last the young man turned the flyer around and headed back the way he had come.

  “Tell me,” Cassell said thoughtfully, after a long silence, “why do you build these machines? What’s the idea?”

  “We build them to play with,” the man laughed, turning a little from his controls.

  “But damnit, man, that’s impossible! Don’t you realize that you’re toying around with incredibly complicated things? In the city I have noticed atomic force shells, heat-ray projectors, acid sprayers, energy screen devices, disrupter guns—all kinds of things for producing the most colossal havoc. And to cap it all, you are putting them inside machines that can fly through space or the air at thousands of miles an hour. Why?”

  For just a second the young man frowned. “I never thought of it like that before,” he admitted frankly; then with a beam­ing smile, “We don’t mean it, of course. We don’t want to harm anybody.”

  “I can believe that. That’s what makes it so baffling. Why do something you don’t want to do? Don’t really care about?”

  “Because we’re told to. It’s the Voice, you know. We can’t ignore the Voice…”

  Cassell gave a start. Moss leaned closer.

  “What Voice?” Cassell asked very deliberately.

  The young man shrugged. “The one that talks so often, that tells us just what to do. We’ve got to obey; we can’t help it. If we didn’t obey I suppose we’d be hurt…”

  “But where the devil does this Voice come from?” Moss demanded. “Gosh, if I could lay my hands on it I’d—”

  “Nobody knows where it comes from,” the young man broke in. “It just comes. We all hear it. We all obey. Children should obey, don’t you think?”

  “But you’re not children!” Cassell yelped; then he imme­diately regretted the sharpness of his tone.

  The man visibly winced. With obvious hesitation he said: “But—but we are children. You are too, aren’t you…? No; you are different. You’re like—like Gods. You’re not the Voice, are you?” he finished in awe.

  Cassell shook his head patiently. “No, we’ve nothing to do with that. We’re not Gods, either—but we’re not children! Nor do we hear the Voice… Tell me, how long did the war last?”

  “Fifteen years, I think. Nobody was left—not many, any­how. And besides, at the end of it, nobody wanted to fight. We all made friends and started to do what the Voice commanded. We’re still doing it. But you see, though we do what the Voice commands, we can’t do anything without it—so of course we make our own little homes and live as best we can…”

  “Suffering Cat, genius on tap!” Moss exclaimed, slamming his great fist on the chair back. “Turned on and off to make them work. When it isn’t in force they’re normal—or rather childlike. And they live that way.”

  “Yeah.” Cassell nodded, then his keen eyes turned back to the young man. “What’s your name, feller?”

  “Grant Felbury.”

  “And your age and birthplace?”

  “I don’t know my age. I was born in New York, I think.”

  Cassell made a brief note. For a long time he sat musing, then as Atlantic Island loomed up again in the setting sunshine he leaned forward quickly. “Land on that Island,” he ordered briefly. “Think you can make it?”

  Felbury nodded and brought the flyer down in an easy curve. The moment it stopped on the rocky tableland Cassell got to his feet and took down one of the several small disin­tegrating guns from the wall rack. He studied its mechanism for a moment, then turned to the surprised Moss.

  “Be back in a moment,” he said. “I’m—”

  “Don’t be long,” Felbury broke in anxiously. “At sundown the Voice usually ceases to speak and when that happens I shan’t be able to drive this anymore. It’s only while the Voice speaks in my mind that I can do it.”

  Cassell frowned for a moment, glanced at Moss’ astounded face, then he turned sharply and opened the airlock. Through the window he was visible approaching the forbidding metal walls of the great, deserted penitentiary. He passed through the open gates… In ten minutes he returned, carrying a piece of gray metal in his hand.

  “Aren’t things baffling enough without your slicing off chunks of metal and carting them around?” Moss demanded as he came back into the control room and closed the lock. “What’s it for, anyway? A souvenir of twenty years in hell?”

  Cassell smiled faintly. “Just a hunch,” he shrugged. He hung the gun back in its rack. “O.K., Grant—let’s go.”

  Again the machine took the air, and as the sun dipped into the calm ocean the vessel finally landed back almost in the place where it had started from.

  “Only just in time,” Grant smiled, as they climbed outside. “The Voice has ceased now… See you again. I’m going to have some fun with the others.” He turned away, laughing, and for a long time the two friends; stood looking after him as he headed towards the tents. Cassell still had his piece of metal in his hand.

  “Well, what now?” Moss demanded at length. “Where do we go from here? Hunt down the Voice and poke the eye out of the scientist who’s responsible?”

  “What a child calls a Voice may cover a vast territory,” Cassell replied pensively. “We’re a long way from the solution yet.” He turned and looked back at a massive, half-shattered store some little way behind them.

  “That’s going to be our headquarters from now on,” he said. “It’s large, and we won’t be interrupted. We’ll start in to equip it with whatever machinery or scientific tackle we may need—and from there, mingling with the people only for food or information—we’ll start in to track this mystery down. I believe I’ve got the first clue, too…” He held up the chunk of metal.

  “I think you’re screwy,” Moss said sourly.

  “Maybe I am. We’ll see. Also I want to know if there are any birth records left in the Public Statistics Building—what’s left of it. I want to know all about Grant Felbury. I want the date of his birth, and his name isn’t a common one by any means… The rest will be analysis, and finally maybe we’ll find out what the hell the Voice is… Now let’s go and look our headquarters over.”

  CHAPTER IV

  The Eternal Children

  Cassell’s methods of tracking down the mystery were utterly complex to
Moss. All he could do was equip the great ground floor of the store they had taken over with what­ever crude necessities of life he could find, and thereafter assumed the role of housekeeper while Cassell prowled around the city putting together bits and pieces of the puzzle.

  By degrees, he assembled pieces of equipment of an elec­trical nature, submitted the metal he’d brought from Atlantic Island to various tests. After that he proceeded to make notes—so many of them that at last Moss’ impulsive, restless nature could stand it no longer.

  “Say,” he demanded one evening, as Cassell sat in the shad­ows before his equipment, “what exactly have you squeezed out of all this? When do we start fighting somebody or doing something? I’m going nuts for lack of some fast action.”

  “Sorry, but you’ll stay housemaid till I’m through,” Cassell answered briefly. “I’m going to piece matters together…” He hesitated, then asked with a wry smile, “Does it surprise you to know that Grant Felbury is eighty-seven years of age?”

  Moss stared blankly. “What! That young chap who drove us around the earth? The one with the fluff on his chin?”

  “The very same. What’s more, several apparently young men and women whose names I’ve asked for and have after­wards managed to track down in the birth records, are clearly shown to be well over the age of sixty! There are younger ones, of course—thirty or thirty-five, but the great majority of these ‘young’ people should be on the verge of senility.”

  “But are you sure?” Moss demanded in amazement. “May­be you’ve got the parents, not the children.”

  “No; they’re the right people. I’ve checked up on that. And in so doing I’ve got a bit nearer the solution of the mystery… Think back on the strange behavior of the guards on Atlantic Island. Without any apparent warning they went all friendly, behaved as childishly as these folks in the city here—or those all over the world for that matter. But were the fellows who’d spent their lives in the dungeons like us at all childish? They were not! They were grim, bitter, and very much mature. In other words—normal.”