The John Russell Fearn Science Fiction Megapack

by John Russell Fearn

  “Now, to begin,” Vass smiled. “Suppose we have the materialisation of a woman from empty air? Like this—” His slender hand waved quickly—but nothing happened! A slight frown crossed his face and he rapped out a sharp command. Still the stage remained empty.

  “Really, I must apologise,” he said quickly, advancing. “For some reason I seem rather unable to concentrate tonight. I cannot understand it, in view of the entire accord of my audience. I will try again.”

  He made a pass through the air and waited for something to appear. Nobody knew what. Nor did anybody learn, for nothing came into view!

  A stony silence settled on the audience. The sea of faces stared at the stage. Vass coughed a little and looked around him anxiously; then he stood erect and snapped:

  “Woman—appear! I command you to appear!” His vast forehead crinkled in a concentrative effort. It was of no avail. A low and uneasy muttering was creeping over the audience.

  Vass swung round, clearly alarmed. His face was strained and drawn, his eyes staring to left and right. Desperately he flung up his hand to quell the rising uproar.

  “Wait, I implore you!” he shouted hoarsely. “It is not always possible to produce mind creations. There are thousands of little things to take into account, and—”

  Sir Gadsby Brough got to his feet, grinning in malicious triumph.

  “We don’t want excuses, Vass, we want effects!” he shouted. “You have demonstrated before with dozens of sceptical people present. Now with everybody believing in you, you can’t possibly fail! Get on with it!”

  “Hear, hear! Come on, Vass—let’s have it!”

  “Per—perhaps a view of Egypt…” Vass stammered and frantically waved his arms at the black draperies. The view of Egypt failed to materialise. Stunned, he fell back, then stumbled round to face the shouting people.

  “Come on, man, what’s the matter with you!” came a voice from the audience.

  “Let’s get started!” called another.

  Turner glanced round on the gesticulating men and women, gently put his attaché case on his chair, and then raced up on to the platform. Fiercely he held up his hands for silence and by degrees the roar began to die away.

  “Wait!” he shouted. “Wait a minute! Hear what I’ve got to say!”

  “What do you want up here?” demanded the scientist bitterly.

  “You’ll find out quick enough.” Turner waited for complete silence, then said quietly: “I think it’s about time Abel Karton stopped play-acting and came from behind his disguise!”

  At the same instant he swung round and knocked the scientist’s false head a couple of yards away with one swing of his arm. Karton stood gulping with amazement, a mass of white hair framing his haggard, perspiring face.

  “You—you can’t mean—” he began hoarsely; then his words were drowned by the sudden uproar from the audience. Scientists, psychologists, experts in every branch, ordinary men and women, stood shoulder to shoulder and yelled out their contempt.

  “Faker! Damned faker!”

  “He isn’t a Martian at all!”

  “Abel Karton—the scientist who went to France!”

  Again Turner waved his hands, imposing a brief lull in the storm.

  “Karton is a faker, yes,” he admitted in a grave voice. “We know now that all his tricks are electrical, though so far we have no explanation for them. But we do know this much: on the occasion of his last demonstration there was an electrical leak in his apparatus, which lies directly under this theatre and stage. Quite by chance Miss Wyngate of the Clarion had some electrical accessories with her from a radio exhibition. One of them was a wavelength stopwatch, used in testing radio wavelengths and electrical frequencies. It reacted under the influence of the electric escape and I pressed the stud that caused it absolutely to identify the periodicity and wavelength of the energy being used by Karton here. The rest was simple.

  “From that basis of wavelength it was only necessary to work out an interference wave, a small amount of energy being quite sufficient to upset the balance of the electricity used by Karton. Sir Gadsby Brough worked it out, and in that attaché case on my chair is the small apparatus that did the trick—is still doing it, in fact. It stopped Karton’s electrical effects from working by issuing a heterodyning frequency, just as radio stations may be rendered unintelligible by specially arranged interference on the same wave. Outside the building no electrical escape is possible, because the walls are insulated. Even the electrical escape at that last demonstration would be undetectable outside the Temple.”

  Turner stopped and turned to Karton, who had stood listening in dazed silence.

  “You—you found that out?” he breathed. “But I—”

  He broke off in visible terror at the angry surging of the people towards him. The knowledge of his trickery was sufficient to inflame his former devotees into an ugly mood. Men and women started moving ominously towards the platform, only to swing round as the ebony doors flew open violently.

  “Police!” somebody yelled. “Police! Take it easy!”

  The swirling, angry scene became somewhat calmer as a sergeant and constables strode grimly into the theatre. With them was a young girl in flimsy Grecian attire, a coat thrown hastily over her shoulders. Behind her, firmly, held, stood half a dozen men in overalls, sullen-faced and bitter.

  “Dad!” the girl cried hoarsely, stopping in front of the stage. “What does it all mean? What’s happened?”

  “I told the police to clean up your cellar then come on here,” Turner explained quietly. “Best way to protect you, Karton,” he added, and the scientist nodded very slowly.

  “You expose me in one breath and protect me in the next,” he murmured, slowly regaining his composure. He turned to the police. “I’ll come along, gentlemen. Come, Elsie, we may as well get it over.”

  Quietly he left the platform and joined his daughter. Turner took Joan’s arm and made a motion to Brough. Silently, as the threatening people milled around them, they passed down the centre aisle and out through the hall to the street.

  The news had traveled fast, and people were already swarming round the Temple in their hundreds, held back by a strong cordon of police. Looking neither left nor right, Karton took his daughter’s arm and followed implicitly the directions of the stern-faced acting-sergeant as he directed him towards a waiting car.

  CHAPTER 7

  Such Powers are Dangerous

  Half an hour later the entire party was seated in the private office of Detective-Inspector Willis at New Scotland Yard. Willis, his face thrown into relief by his desk light, regarded the silent, white-haired scientist steadily.

  “You are aware, Professor Karton, that your arrest is purely based on the charge of false representation?” he asked slowly. “By that false representation you obtained money, a great fortune and hoaxed London and the world into thinking you were a visitor from another planet.”

  Karton shrugged. “I have a fancy my dear Inspector, that those charges will be very difficult to substantiate in a court of law. I have been careful never to take money without giving full value for it. I have never done anybody any harm and never intended to. My whole scheme, in fact, was a carefully built-up plan to justify myself in the eyes of the world.”

  “You mean you wish to make a confession?” the inspector inquired.

  “I should prefer to call it a statement,” Karton corrected. “In any case I had intended to reveal my actual motives before too long a time. Turner here forestalled me, so I suppose there’s nothing more to hide. Yes; I’ll explain.”

  “Right!” Willis turned aside to his clerk. “Take this down, Conroy.”

  Conroy was not the only one who prepared his notebook. Both Joan and Turner sat ready with pencils poised.

  “Some years ago,” Karton said quietly, “I tried to interest the Government, at the height of their rearmament programme, in various inventions of a scientific nature which I knew would be invaluable to this count
ry and, indeed, absolute saviours in time of emergency. I am not blaming the laudable officials behind the campaign, but I do blame the dozens of people who hindered my efforts to get at the fountain-heads, who as good as threw me out of their offices and my inventions with me. To them it appeared I was just another old fool of a scientist.”

  Karton paused, compressing his lips bitterly. Slowly, he resumed; “I could, of course, have perhaps got better treatment from a foreign power, but I happen to be a patriot. That would not do. I knew the public would want my devices if they only knew what they could do. How could I show them? The harmful way of demonstration meant a one-man war in which I would be the absolute master. That did not appeal to me. I did not want to hurt anybody. Instead, I gave a statement to the Press—to Miss Wyngate here, in fact—of the qualities of my inventions, hoping it would be seen by some powerful faction and my case taken up. Nothing happened.

  “Embittered with my own country, I then left my Littlehampton home for the Continent and for several months worked out a scheme to attract the public and demonstrate to them my inventions at the same time. Out of my plans grew the idea of Solivus Vass, the Martian magician. If I could once capture the public interest, get the whole country—the World, if need be—to listen to me, and also could prove to them so-called miracles in the interval, they would demand that my powers and inventions be used for their own safety in case of attack.

  “With that idea in mind, Elsie and I dropped from the sight of the world and returned to Sussex. We built a small isolated house with an underground laboratory on the Downs and from that point I started my scheme.”

  “One moment,” the Inspector broke in. “Do I understand that workmen built this house of yours? Were you not afraid of them giving you away?”

  Karton smiled faintly. “I laid my plans well, Inspector. Every man who ever worked for me is a fugitive from justice, as much in my hands as I was in his. You will find that my assistants from the Temple basement all have police records. It was not easy to find six wanted men, but I managed it, with patience.”

  “I see. And then?”

  “Then I made myself up as a Martian adding padding to my chest and back to produce the right effect and modelled a large head from synthetic flesh. Cellular material, the basic compounds of flesh and blood, is not difficult to create. The hard part comes when you try to make this synthetic material live! I haven’t managed that yet. Dead flesh chemically treated to prevent deterioration produced for me a perfect false head without a join. Then came the spaceship.”

  Karton smiled a little amusedly at the recollection.

  “The whole confounding point was the seamless nature of the globe,” he murmured. “It cannot fly, and never could. The interior machinery is so much bogus material, effective to look at but useless in application. Engineers could not fathom it because it was not intended to be fathomed. Its very haphazard nature made it a mystery. It was simply a straightforward bluff—and a good one! In its complete state it certainly represented a globe too heavy to be moved by ordinary methods but in fact, it was originally two hemispheres which were separately brought by night on wagons to the Downs by my assistants, from my home about three miles away. The two hemispheres were easily moveable by themselves.

  “You see, the two hemispheres were welded together by one of my scientific devices, far superior and quicker than any known welding apparatus today. Oxy-acetylene welders, for instance, fuse two metals into one another, but they leave a distinct join. My device, which generates an electro-magnetic agitation, shifts the molecular paths of the two metals concerned and flows one into the other in a flawless whole, as perfectly as water added to water leaves no trace of entry. The molecules are combined so perfectly that two separate pieces of metal flow into a smooth oneness.

  “Once one hemisphere had been brought to the appointed spot the wagon returned for the so-called driving mechanisms. They were placed inside the hemisphere, the other half was welded on in perhaps half an hour, and there it was…a perfect globe.”

  “And you were not afraid of being caught in the act?” asked Turner, looking up from his notes.

  “There are very few people on the Downs at two-thirty in the morning,” Karton answered dryly. “Of course, we removed all traces made by my lorries on the ground, and returned them to the private underground garage adjoining my home.”

  “And the Indian rope trick?” Willis asked pensively.

  “That involved technical science of a higher order,” Karton replied. “However, I’ll try and make it clear. I have, in truth, discovered the secret of invisibility, a first-class secret which the Government refused to credit. You may be aware that all perception is based on light waves. Reflection, that is. For instance, I see you, Inspector, because you are reflecting light waves to me: in truth you are a collection of molecules, so arranged that the light waves falling upon you produce what is called a man. So it is with everything, from cabbages to kings.

  “Now, light waves travel in straight lines. They can be refracted by water, can be completely stopped by an opaque body, and can be polarised by tourmaline crystals, crystalline quartz, and other substances that came under the technical heading of stereoisomers, of which the well-known Nicol prism is one of the best examples.

  “I have studied all fields of light, and arrived at the conclusion now accepted by most scientists that light is only a comparatively narrow band in the middle portion of the great range of electric waves stretching from those used in radio—which may have a wavelength of several miles—or to X-rays with waves of only a hundredth millionth of an inch. Light is purely electrical and, as Faraday showed, the plane of polarized light may be rotated by passage through a block of glass placed in a magnetic field, the rotation being reversed when the field is reversed. So, then, light is actually as easy to control as all other electrical fields once the right proportion of counteractive frequency is discovered. By counteractive, I mean a magnetism reacting directly on the basic electricity of light, able to move its waves at will as an ordinary magnet moves a piece of steel… You understand?”

  “Go on,” muttered Willis, his brows down.

  “By means of this counteractive magnetism the light from any object can be diverted completely. And light definitely has mass that can be turned aside—the fact is plainly evident in the stress fields existing around the sun, wherein the light of the stars is visibly bent and diverted by his enormous gravity. On a tiny scale my idea is similar. My first test with heavy apparatus revealed that any object in the range of my magnetism could be made instantly or gradually invisible, the power being graded to encompass either near or far objects. In my rope trick, of course, I took good care to limit the range to myself only.

  “Finally, I got my apparatus into small and compact form, and devised a battery system which fitted inside the humps on my back and chest, the control wires passing down inside my sleeves and the switches being concealed under a synthetic flesh cap in my palms. These batteries, given power, discharged their particular output around my body, and at will rendered me gradually invisible how and when I desired it. The charge lasts for perhaps fourteen hours at a stretch.

  “My rope trick was slightly involved, but effective. I needed an assistant invisible like myself. The rest of the explanation lay in Nelson’s column. My assistant—Benson, the commissionaire at the Temple—using a similar apparatus to mine, came to London from the Sussex laboratory early in the morning. Naturally, because he was invisible and because there are few people around the Square at that hour of morning, he had little difficulty in climbing to the summit of Nelson’s Column the night before I was to demonstrate. A piece of rope looped round the Column, a backwards angle of the body, and spiked boots were all he needed to reach the summit of the Column. Down below—and this explains the need for a quiet period—he had left a long length of steel cable and a stout, small steel girder. These he hauled after him to the summit of the Column.

  “Naturally, the girder and cable w
ere supplied with batteries and rendered invisible also, as the current passed perfectly through the metal. Benson had simply to secure the girder—just light enough for a strong man to handle with ease—to the top of the Column—the statue itself, in fact—and allow the cable with its hook on the end to hang down into the Square about eighteen feet from the ground and thrust some four feet or so from the Column itself by the girder’s length. In this way nobody could possibly run into anything, the invisible hook being far above their heads. Benson, of course, remained at the Column summit entirely invisible.

  “I appeared in the Square invisibly and made myself suddenly visible, to the great amazement of Turner and several others. I tossed my rope experimentally in the air, to find the hook—knowing, of course, its approximate position. The sharp spike of the hook caught the loop of my silk rope and held it securely.

  I climbed up, made myself gradually invisible as I seized the unseen cable, and hauled myself out of sight. Then, as I whipped the rope up into my hand, it naturally came under the influence of the power around me and vanished from sight.

  “I clung to the cable until there was a clear space below me, then lowered myself to the ground and ran out of the Square. Another assistant had a car awaiting me. He rushed me to Victoria Station at top speed, though the crowd delayed me somewhat. Still invisible and dodging everybody possible—for of course I was solid enough had anybody run into me—I got on to the roof of Victoria Station entrance and made myself visible. Then I faded out again and returned home to Sussex to await results. Benson, of course, returned the moment it was safe for him to do so.”

  “Well, I’m damned!” breathed Willis blankly. “You mean to tell me you have things like this and the Government won’t listen to you?”

  “They probably will when this report is published,” Karton murmured speculatively; then he pondered for a moment.